Skip wanted to get out. They promised he would. She wondered. Would they really let him out of their clutches? His bandages were off now and his hair was beginning to grow back. He walked around the ward, helping the attendants. He was playing the game. It was still a game, she sensed that; there was a remnant of strong will gone cold at the core pushing him. She had tried to escape in her way, he was trying in his way, with something gutted in him. Something beautiful and quick was burned out. It hurt her to watch him. Because he was too beautiful and tempted them, they had fixed him. He moved differently: clumsily. It was as if he had finally agreed to imitate the doctors’ coarse, clumsy masculinity for a time, but it was mastery with them and humility with him. He moved like a robot not expertly welded. Yet he was no robot, whatever they thought they had done. She could feel the will burning in him, a will to burst free.

“You’re playing them along, aren’t you?” She came up beside him as he was mopping the day room.

“Why not?” he asked her. He had become friendly again, but he no longer flirted or told her wild stories. He was numb, stripped to a wire of will she could feel. They had not burned out or cut out as much as they thought, she hoped. Something of Skip survived.

FOURTEEN

Jackrabbit went on defense. For a week Luciente sank into a low energy state that made it hard for them to connect. Then she took a day’s retreat at Treefrog and seemed herself to Connie.

Lunch at Mattapoisett was yellow soup thickened with tidbits of shrimp, crab, clam, and fish. Hawk was eating with them again, after several weeks with her friend Thunderbolt’s family.

“It got dull, sitting at the table with mems I can’t talk to. Now the taboo’s off, I’m back. I think I’d warm to stay in our family. See, today I brought a guest for lunch.”

Connie had often seen visitors besides herself, mostly people from nearby villages or others on their way through, traveling on some piece of business. Sometimes a whole troupe of players or musicians stopped for a week. Old friends or former mems came visiting. Then there were the people without village called politely drifters and impolitely puffs. Once she had seen a man with a small tattoo on his palm, which Luciente told her marked a crime of violence. Unlike the other guests, drifters often sat apart. People seemed uncomfortable with them. Sometimes they seemed to know each other, and when Connie passed near them, she heard a slang she did not recognize.

Why did Hawk bring this guest to the table? Connie saw on his palm that same tattoo, that warning mark. He was a big‑boned oversized man with little flesh on him, perhaps in his late thirties.

“Waclaw just got done studying with the Cree!” Hawk bubbled.

“On the Attawapiskat. That flows into James Bay from the west.” He spoke in a hesitant voice from deep in his barrel chest.

“How long did you have to wait to study there?” Hawk asked. “Did you have to wait long?”

“Six years,” Waclaw said. “I was lucky they took me at all.”

“Six years!” Hawk’s face sagged. “That’s bottoming!”

“If they let everyone come who wants to study with them, they’d be swamped,” Waclaw said reasonably. “Most people won’t wait and so they don’t have to say no.”

“Was it worth it, waiting so long?” Hawk asked, still whining with disappointment.

Waclaw nodded. “It firmed me. I almost stayed. I am going to see my old village and decide. They say I can come back if I choose, to the Attawapiskat.”

As soon as lunch was over, Connie asked Luciente, “He’s a criminal, isn’t he? I saw a tattoo.”

“Not anymore. Person atoned. Has been studying up north.”

“The Cree, he said? Like Indians. You still have real Indians?”

Luciente nodded. “Those lands are strongly protected, under their control. Only hunting, gathering, and some scientific activities go on … . The Cree have a mixed way of living. They hunt and fish, they’ve created some Far North agriculture, some handicraft, limited manufacture. They have to take care, for the land is fragile.”

“What’s to study there?”

“A discipline, a sense of wholeness. Something ancient. They are often part‑time hunters or gatherers, part time shamans, part‑time scientists.”

“But was that his atoning? Going up north and living that way?”

“Never!” Luciente laughed from the belly. “That’s a great privilege. That’s why Waclaw had to wait six years. Don’t know what person did to atone. Ask, if you must, but we usually don’t. We feel it’s closed–healed. Forget!”

Connie followed at Luciente’s heels into the experimental fields where Luciente was recording comments on performance. “This chews it up. I think we found some good strains to work on next year.”

“How come you leave so much woods?” Connie asked. “Like that argument at the council. All over Mouth‑of‑Mattapoisett I see patches of woods, meadows, swamps, marshes. You could clear a lot more land.”

“We have far more land growing food than you did. But, Connie, aside from the water table, think of every patch of woods as a bank of wild genes. In your time thousands of species were disappearing. We need that wild genetic material to breed with … . That’s only the answer from the narrow viewpoint of my own science.”

Bee waved to them, leading a group of kids through the fields on a combination bug survey and lesson in insect life. “Good luck in Oldtown!” he shouted. “Push us over!”

Connie looked after his broad glistening back, the shirt peeled off and tied around his waist. “What’s he talking about?”

“I have to fall by Oldtown later and present our new recks.”

“Wrecks?”

“Half word, half rib. Grasp, it’s a request but we wish it was a requisition. For what we want to do scientifically this winter.”

Connie made a face. She let Luciente burble on awhile about the Shaping controversy, but finally she burst out, “It’s so hard for me to think of you as a scientist!”

“How not? I don’t comprend.”

“I mean the only scientist I know is Dr. Redding … . I guess we’re his experiments. But I’d hardly ever meet a scientist, I mean, like in East Harlem. Not that I’d want to …”

“What’s different about meeting a scientist and meeting a shelf diver?”

“Like my sister Inez, she lives in New Mexico. Her husband drinks, she has seven kids. After the sixth, she went to the clinic for the pill. You know–No, you can’t! It’s so hard for a woman like her–a real Catholic, not lapsed like me, under his thumb too and him filling her with babies one right after the other–so hard for her to say, Basta ya! And go for the pill. See, she thought she went to a doctor. But he had his scientist cap on and he was experimenting. She thought it was good she got the pill free. But they gave her a sugar pill instead. This doctor, he didn’t say what he was doing. So she got heavy again with the seventh child. It was born with something wrong. She’s tired and worn out with making babies. You know you have too many and the babies aren’t so strong anymore. They’re dear to you but a little something wrong. So this one, Richard, he was born dim in the head. Now they have all that worry and money troubles. They’re supposed to give him pills and send him to a special school, but it costs. All because Inez thought she had a doctor, but she got a scientist.”

“All this is really so?” Luciente stared from black eyes hard with wonder.

She looked away to the river, just a stream here with coffee‑brown waters. They were heading back toward Mattapoisett now, passing as always older people, children, young people working here and there, weeding and feeding, picking off beetles, setting out new plants, arguing earnestly with scowls and gestures, hurrying by carrying a load of something shiny balanced in a basket on the head or in a knapsack or basket on the back, baby under arm or on hip or back. “They like to try out medicine on poor people. Especially brown people and black people. Inmates in prisons too. So … you must test drugs on people too? You have to.”