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Crumb lay limp with the terrible stillness of a corpse. Aym crawled, feeling around for her pet.
“Fuck me!” Prapa shouted, looking down at his foot. His work boot had a hole in the arch and a fragment of bullet. “That burns. Look what your damn cat did, you tin cunt.”
“All he wanted was a tickle,” Aym said, her broken voice sounding as though it had a tough fight in exiting her body.
• • •
To this day, I wonder what would have happened had I relieved Prapa of his revolver and left him lying on the floor as still as the dead cat. With the five remaining shots I could have easily procured transport and left Number Four. Would I have made it halfway to Kentucky before the dogs were
upon me? The excitement of an escape (and probably the return of one big furred corpse) would have short-circuited the anger brewing at Number Four. It might have saved many lives.
It was a decision point that passed before I had time to think. Prapa moved on to the shift office down the tunnel, and I helped Aym put her cat in a tinfoil tray. She decided to bury Crumb outside, as there was nowhere to bury him in the tunnel near her trailer.
Prapa’s foul mood was not dispelled by killing the cat. He put everyone on overtime (without wages, the only compensation was food and drink and wash water brought down by wheelbarrow).
The purge would begin on Friday of that week, though it was officially called a “review.” It would be conducted by a triumvirate of the New Universal Church, a Maynes representative, and one of the shift foremen, randomly selected by a name draw.
“Review,” in the parlance of the mines, was an inspection of the mine, a health examination of the workers, and sometimes interviews. But everyone knew what would happen to men deemed surplus to requirements. There was nowhere to go after Number Four.
Word passed unofficially even before the notices went up in the shaft lift. The miners didn’t need to worry about physical fitness—the vigor of their jobs kept their muscles like suspension cable—but some of them broke out their New Universal Church Guidons and familiarized themselves with old maxims and the latest offerings from the Church.
“Think as a species; work as an individual. You are your contribution to the future,” one miner mumbled over and over. I felt for him. Much of the language in a Guidon could be shuffled around without losing much meaning, for it had little to start. “Work as a species; think for the future.” “Your individual contribution is you” is in the same spirit as “Contribute as an individual; work for the future; you are your species.” They’re all much of a muchness, as your writer Carroll said.
Others, some of whom couldn’t read beyond simple everyday signs that they recognized the same way a reader today would see a creation mark, were refreshing their memory of what had been discussed in services.
“What was in church Sunday?”
“The homily was about pre–Kurian Organized Deprivation. You know, starving the world so a few could live fat.”
“They might shut the whole mine down. We’re goners then.”
“Nah, they’d just send us around the other mines.”
• • •
They worked the next shifts so hard, half of the miners were ready to be thrown into a collection van just so they could sleep for a couple of hours before the last dance with the Reaper. As bad as the exhaustion was, the dirt was worse. I began to feel I would never get the grit out of my fur, and I began to itch as though infested with hellpit mites.
“Yeah, every couple of years we go through this,” an old hand named Barnesworth told me. He usually worked a different shift, but he had put in for overtime this week just to show that he could still produce at a double-shift rate. He had an extraordinary physique for a man who had just turned sixty; if he was wearing a hat and you saw him from behind, you would take an oath that he was a man in his midtwenties.
I paced myself as best as I could, but I soon came up hard against my limits. I had taken over for two others, and I let them sleep while I extracted coal. As long as our shift’s quota was met, who cares how we managed it (too often by shoveling more slag into the conveyor, but mistakes will be made when you drive men in this manner).
They started calling me John Henry, who, I understand, is a folk hero. I was happy to earn their respect, but it is easier for a “Grog” to apply strength in such a stooped-over fashion.
My own examination was simple enough. The doctor, after startling at my entrance, said, “I don’t know enough about this kind of Grog to even tell how old he is. He looks fit enough.”
He had me kneel. He looked into my eyes, ears, and at my tongue. If you ever want to look as though you know a good deal about Golden Ones, my reader, examine their knuckles. A sick one of my kind will spend more time going about on all fours, which will be indicated if there are fresh calluses and a rubbed-raw look.
And as we age, we go white above the eyes, a washed-out, almost clear white very different from that on the face or belly.
My file for my mine work consisted of two sheets of paper and a big blue tag—which I suppose referenced my work as Maynes’s bodyguard.
“He hasn’t been here long, but he’s a strong worker. Never causes trouble. Stubborn, though.” He looked up at me. “You stubborn?”
“Stub-burn?” I asked. “Not know stub-burn.”
“Stiff-necked,” the doc said, pointing to his neck.
“I don’t think pantomime is needed with this one. Says he’s unusually smart, almost as smart as a man.”
