The borshite plant resembles an artichoke in appearance: tall, spiky leaves rising from a central crown, with one flowerbearing stalk jutting upward to a height of a meter and a half. It is propagated by bulbs; in spring the previous year's crop is dug up and the delicate bulbs carefully separated, then each replanted. Weeds grow in abundance and must be pulled out by hand. The jungle constantly grows inward to reclaim the high ground that men cultivate. Herbivores eat the crops unless the fields are patrolled.
Mark learned that and more within a week. The work was difficult and the weather was hot, but neither was unbearable. The rumors were true: compared to most places you could be sent, Ewigfeuer's plantation was a country club. Convicts schemed to get there. Ewigfeuer demanded hard work, but he was fair.
That made it all the more depressing for Mark. If this was the easy way to do time, what horrors waited if he made a mistake? Ewigfeuer held transfer as his ultimate threat, and Mark found himself looking for ways to keep his master pleased. He disgusted himself—but there was nothing else to do.
He had never been more alone. He had nothing in common with the other men. His jokes were never funny. He had no interest in their stories. He learned to play poker so well that he was resented when he played. They didn't want a tight player who could take their money. Once he was accused of cheating and although everyone knew he hadn't, he was beaten and his winnings taken. After that he avoided the games.
The work occupied only his hands, not his mind. There were no veedisk readers in the barracks. A few convicts had small radios but the only station they could tune in played nothing but sad country western music. Mark shuddered at the thought of getting to like it.
There was little to do but brood. I wanted power, he thought. We were playing at it. A game. But the police weren't playing, and now I've become a slave. When I get back, I'll know more of how this game is played. I'll show them.
But he knew he wouldn't, not really. He was learning nothing here.
Some of the convicts spent their entire days and nights stoned into tranquility. Borshite plants were the source of borloi, and half the Citizens of the United States depended on borloi to get through each day; the government supplied it to them, and any government that failed in the shipments would not last long. It worked as well on Tanith, and Herr Ewigfeuer was generous with both pipes and borloi. You could be stoned for half a credit a day. Mark tried that route, but he did not like what it did to him. They were stealing three years of his life, but he wouldn't cooperate and make it easier.
His college friends had talked a lot about the dignity of labor. Mark didn't find it dignified at all. Why not get stoned and stay that way? What am I doing that's important? Why not go out of being and get it over? Let the routine wash over me, drown in it—
There were frequent fights. They had rules. If a man got hurt so that he couldn't work, both he and the man he fought with had to make up the lost work time. It tended to keep the injuries down and discouraged broken bones. Whenever there was a fight, everyone turned out to watch.
It gave Mark time to himself. He didn't like being alone, but he didn't like watching fights, especially since he might be drawn into one himself—
The men shouted encouragement to the fighters. Mark lay on his bunk. He had liquor but didn't want to drink. He kept thinking about taking a drink, just one, it will help me get to sleep—and you know what you're doing to yourself—and why not?
The man was small and elderly. Mark knew he lived in quarters near the big house. He came into the bunkie and glanced around. The lights had not been turned on, and he failed to see Mark. He looked furtively about again, then stooped to try locker lids, looking for one that was open. He reached Mark's locker, opened it, and felt inside. His hand found cigarettes and the bottle—
He felt or heard Mark and looked up. "Uh, good evening."
"Good evening." The man seemed cool enough, although he risked the usual punishments men mete out to thieves in barracks.
"Are you bent on calling your mates?" The watery eyes darted around looking for an escape. "I don't seem to have any defense."
"If you did have one, what would it be?"
"When you are as old as I am and in for life, you take what you can. I am an alcoholic, and I steal to buy drink."
"Why not smoke borloi?"
"It does little for me." The old man's hands were shaking. He looked lovingly at the bottle of gin that he'd taken from Mark's locker.
"Oh, hell, have a drink," Mark said.
"Thank you." He drank eagerly, in gulps.
Mark retrieved his bottle. "I don't see you in the fields."
"No. I work with the accounts. Herr Ewigfeuer has been kind enough to keep me, but not so kind as to pay enough to—"
"If you will keep the work records, you could sell favors."
"Certainly. For a time. Until I was caught. And then what? It is not much of a life that I have, but I want to keep it." He stood for a moment. "Surprising, isn't it? But I do."
"You talk rather strangely," Mark said.
"The stigmata of education. You see Richard Henry Tappinger, Ph.D., generally called Taps. Formerly holder of the Bates Chair of History and Sociology at Yale University."
"And why are you on Tanith?" Prisoners do not ask that question, but Mark could do as he liked. He held the man's life in his hands: a word, a call, and the others would amuse themselves with Tappinger. And why don't I call them? Mark shuddered at the notion, but it didn't quite leave his consciousness.
Tappinger didn't seem annoyed. "Liquor, young girls, their lovers, and an old fool are an explosive combination. You don't mind if I am more specific? I spend a good part of my life being ashamed of myself. Could I have another drink?"
"I suppose."
"You have the stigmata about you as well. You were a student?"
"Not for long."
"But worthy of education. And generous as well. Your name is Fuller. I have the records, and I recall your case."
The fight outside ground to a close, and the men came back into the barracks. Lewis was carrying an unconscious man to the showers. He handed him over to others when he saw Tappinger.
"You sneaky bastard, I told you what'd happen if I found you in my bunkie! What'd he steal, Fuller?"
"Nothing. I gave him a drink."
"Yeah? Well, keep him out of here. You want to talk to him, you do it outside."
"Right." Mark took his bottle and followed Tappinger out. It was hot inside and the men were talking about the fight. Mark followed Tappinger across the quad. They stayed away from the women's barracks. Mark had no friends in there and couldn't afford any other kind of visit—at least not very often, and he was always disturbed afterwards. None of the women seemed attractive or to care about themselves.
"So. The two outcasts gather together," Tappinger said. "Two pink monkeys among the browns."
"Maybe I should resent that."
"Why? Do you have much in common with them? Or do you resent the implication that you have more in common with me?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything. I'm just passing time. Waiting until this is over."
"And what will you do then?"
They found a place to sit. The local insects didn't bother them; the taste was wrong. There was a faint breeze from the west. The jungle noises came with it, snorts and grunts and weird calls.
"What can I do?" Mark asked. "Get back to Earth and—"
"You will never get back to Earth," Tappinger said. "Or if you do, you will be one of the first ever. Unless you have someone to buy your passage?"
"That's expensive."
"Precisely."
"But they're supposed to take us back!" Mark felt all his carefully built defenses begin to crumble. He lived for the end of the three years—and now—
"The regulations say so, and the convicts talk about going home, but it does not happen. Earth does not want rebels. It would disturb the comfortable life most have. No, you are unlikely to leave here, and if you do ship out, it will be to another colony. Unless you are very rich."
So I am here forever. "So what else is there? What do ex-cons do here?"
Tappinger shrugged. "Sign up as laborers. Start their own plantations. Go into government service. Start a small business. You see Tanith as a slave world, which it is, but it will not always be that. Some of you, people like you, will build it into something else, something better or worse, but certainly different."
"Yeah. Sure. The Junior Pioneers have arrived."
"What do you think happens to involuntary colonists?" Tappinger asked. "Or did you never think of them? Most people on Earth don't look very hard at the price of keeping their wealth and their clean air and clean oceans. But the only difference between you and someone shipped by BuRelock is that you came in a slightly more comfortable ship, and you will put in three years here before they turn you out to fend for yourself. Yes, I definitely suggest the government services for you. You could rise quite high."
"Work for those slaving bastards? I'd rather starve!"
"No, you wouldn't. Nor would many others. It is easier to say that than to do it."
Mark stared into the darkness.
"Why so grim? There are opportunities here. The new governor is trying to reform some of the abuses. Of course he is caught in the system just as we are. He must export his quota of borloi and miracle drugs, and pay the taxes demanded of him. He must keep up production. The Navy demands it."
"The Navy?"
Tappinger smiled in the dark. "You would be surprised at just how much of the CD Navy's operations are paid for by the profits from the Tanith drug trade."
"It doesn't surprise me at all. Thieves. Bastards. But it's stupid. A treadmill, with prisons to pay for themselves and the damned fleet—"
"Neither stupid nor new. The Soviets have done it for nearly two hundred years, with the proceeds of labor camps paying for the secret police. And our tax farming scheme is even older. It dates back to old Rome. Profits from other planets support BuRelock. Tanith supports the Navy."
"Damn the Navy."
"Ah, no, don't do that. Bless it instead. Without the CD Fleet, the Earth governments would be at each other's throats in a moment. They very nearly are now. And since they won't pay for the Navy, and the Navy is very much needed to keep peace on Earth, why, we must continue to work. See what a noble task we perform as we weed the borloi fields?"
Unbearably hot spring became intolerably hot summer, and the work decreased steadily. The borshite plants were nearly as high as a man's waist and were able to defend themselves against most weeds and predators. The fields needed watching but little else.
To compensate for the easier work, the weather was sticky hot, with warm fog rolling in from the coast. The skies turned from orange to dull gray. Twice the plantations and fields were lashed by hurricanes. The borshite plants lay flattened, but soon recovered; and after each hurricane came a few brief hours of clear skies when Mark could see the stars.
With summer came easy sex. Men and women could visit in the evenings, and with suitable financial arrangements with bunkie leaders, all night. The pressures of the barracks eased. Mark found the easier work more attractive than the women. When he couldn't stand it any longer, he'd pay for a few minutes of frantic relief, then try not to think about sex for as long as he could.
His duties were simple. Crownears, muskrat-sized animals that resembled large shrews, would eat unprotected borshite plants. They had to be driven away. They were stupid animals, and ravenous, but not very dangerous unless a swarm of them could catch a man mired down in the mud. A man with a spear could keep them out of the crops.
There were other animals to watch for. Weem's Beast, named for the first man to survive a meeting with one, was the worst. The crownears were its natural prey, but it would attack almost anything that moved. Weem's Beast looked like a mole but was over a meter long. Instead of a prehensile snout, it had a fully articulated grasping member with talons and pseudo-eyes. Man approached holes very carefully on Tanith; the Beast was fond of lying just below the surface and came out with astonishing speed.
It wouldn't usually leave the jungle to attack a man on high ground.
Mark patrolled the fields, and Curt Morgan made rounds on horseback. In the afternoons Morgan would sit with Mark and share his beer ration, and the cold beer and lack of work was almost enough to make life worth living again.
Sometimes there was a break in the weather, and a cooler breeze would blow across the fields. Mark sat with his back to a tree, enjoying the comparatively cool day, drinking his beer ration. Morgan sat next to him.
"Curt, what will you do when you finish your sentence?" Mark asked.
"Finished two years ago. Two Tanith, three Earth."
"Then why are you still here?"
Morgan shrugged. "What else do I know how to do? I'm saving some money; one day I'll have a place of my own." He shifted his position and fired his carbine toward the jungle. "I swear them things get more nerve every summer. This is all I know. I can't save enough to buy into the tax farm syndicate."
"Could you squeeze people that way?"
"If I had to. Them or me. Tax collectors get rich."
"Sure. Jesus, there's no goddamn hope for anything, is there? The whole deck's stacked." Mark finished his beer.
"Where isn't it?" Morgan demanded. "You think it's tough now, you ought to have been here before the new governor came. Place they stuck me—my sweet lord, they worked us! Charged for everything we ate or wore, and you open your mouth, it's another month on your sentence. Enough to drive a man into the green."
"Uh—Curt—are there—"
"Don't get ideas. I'd hate to take the dogs and come find you. Find your corpse, more likely. Yeah, there's men out in the green. Live like rats. I'd rather be under sentence again than live like the Free Staters."
The thought excited Mark. A Free State! It would have to be like the places Shirley and her friends had talked about, with equality, and there'd be no tax farmers in a free society. He thought of the needs of free men. They would live hard and be poor because they were fugitives, but they would be free! He built the Free State in his imagination until it was more real than Ewigfeuer's plantation.
The next day the crownears were very active, and Curt Morgan brought another worker to Mark's field. They rode up together on the big Percheron horses brought as frozen embryos from Earth and repeatedly bred for even wider feet to keep them above the eternal mud. The newcomer was a girl. Mark had seen her before, but never met her.
"Brought you a treat," Curt said. "This is Juanita. Juanny, if this clown gives you trouble, I'll break him in half. Be back in an hour. Got your trumpet?"
Mark indicated the instrument.
"Keep it handy. Them things are restless out there. I think there's a croc around. And porkers. Keep your eyes open." Curt rode off toward the next field.
Mark stood in embarrassed silence. The girl was younger than Mark, and sweaty. Her hair hung down in loose blonde strings. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her face was dirty. She was built more like a wiry boy than a girl. She was also the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen.
"Hi," Mark said. He cursed himself. Shyness went with civilization, not a prison!
"Hi yourself. You're in Lewis's bunkie."
"Yes. I haven't seen you before. Except at Mass." Each month a priest of the Ecumenical Church came to the plantation. Mark had never attended services, but he'd watched idly from a distance.
"Usually work in the big house. Sure hot, isn't it?"
He agreed it was hot and was lost again. What should I say? "You're lovely" is obvious, even if I do think it's true. "Let's go talk to your bunkie leader" isn't too good an idea even if it's what I want to say. Besides, if she lives in the big house, she won't have one. "How long do you have?"
"Another two. Until I'm nineteen. They still run sentences on Earth time. I'm eleven, really." There was more silence. "You don't talk much, do you?"
"I don't know what to say. I'm sorry—"
"It's okay. Most of the men jabber away like porshons. Trying to talk me into something, you know?"
"Oh."
"Yeah. But I never have. I'm a member of the Church. Confirmed and everything." She looked at him and grinned impishly. "So that makes me a dumb hymn singer, and what's left to talk about?"
"I remember wishing I was you," Mark said. He laughed. "Not quite what I meant to say. I mean, I watched you at Masses. You looked happy. Like you had something to live for."
"Well, of course. We all have something to live for. Must have, people sure try hard to stay alive. When I get out of here, I'm going to ask the padre to let me help him. Be a nun, maybe."
"Don't you want to marry?"
"Who? A Con? That's what my mother did, and look. I got 'apprenticed' until I was nineteen Earth years old because I was born to convicts. No kids of mine'll have that happen to 'em!"
"You could marry a free man."
"They're all pretty old by the time they finish. And not worth much. To themselves or anybody else. You proposin' to me?"
He laughed and she laughed with him, and the afternoon was more pleasant than any he could remember since leaving Earth.
"I was lucky," she told him. "Old man Ewigfeuer traded for me. Place I was born on, the planter'd be selling tickets for me now." She stared at the dirt. "I've seen girls they did that with. They don't like themselves much after a while."
They heard the shrill trumpets in other fields. Mark scanned the jungle in front of him. Nothing moved. Juanita continued to talk. She asked him about Earth. "It's hard to think about that place," she said. "I hear people live all bunched up."
He told her about cities. "There are twenty million people in the city I come from." He told her of the concrete Welfare Islands at the edges of the cities.
She shuddered. "I'd rather live on Tanith than like that. It's a wonder all the people on Earth don't burn it down and live in the swamps."
Evening came sooner than he expected. After supper he fell into an introspective mood. He hadn't wanted a day to last for a long time. It's silly to think this way, he told himself.
But he was twenty years old, she was nearly seventeen, and there wasn't anyone else to think about. That night he dreamed about her.
He saw her often as the summer wore on. She had no education, and Mark began teaching her to read. He scratched letters in the ground and used some of his money to buy lurid adventure stories. He had no access to veedisk screens, and the only printed works available in the barracks were sex magazines and adventure novels printed on paper so cheap that it soon went limp in the damp Tanith heat.
Juanita learned quickly. She seemed to enjoy Mark's company and often arranged to be assigned to the same field that he was. They talked about everything: Earth, and how it wasn't covered with swamps. He told her of personal fliers in blue skies, and sailing on the Pacific, and the island coves he'd explored. She thought he was making most of it up.
Their only quarrels came when he complained of how unfair life was. She laughed at him. "I was born with a sentence," she told him. "You lived in a fine house and had your own 'copter and a boat, and you went to school. If I'm not whining, why should you, Mr. Taxpayer?"
He wanted to tell her she was unfair too, but stopped himself. Instead he told her of smog and polluted waters, and sprawling cities. "They've got the pollution licked, though," he said. "And the population's going down. What with the licensing, and BuRelock—"
She said nothing, and Mark couldn't finish the sentence. Juanita stared at the empty jungles. "Wish I could see a blue sky some day. I can't even imagine that, so you must be tellin' the truth."
He did not often see her in the evenings. She kept to herself or worked in the big house. Sometimes, though, she would walk with Curt Morgan or sit with him on the porch of the big house, and when she did, Mark would buy a bottle of gin and find Tappinger. It was no good being alone then.
The old man would deliver long lectures in a dry monotone that nearly put Mark to sleep, but then he'd ask questions that upset any view of the universe that Mark had ever had.
"You might make a passable sociologist some day," Tappinger said. "Ah, well, they say the best university is a log with a student at one end and a professor at the other. I doubt they had me in mind, but we have that, anyway."
"All I seem to learn is that things are rotten. Everything's set up wrong," Mark said.
Tappinger shook his head. "There has never been a society in which someone did not think there had to be a better deal—for himself. The trick is to see that those who want a better way enough to do something about it can either rise within the system or are rendered harmless by it. Which, of course, Earth does—warriors join the Navy. Malcontents are shipped to the colonies. The cycle is closed. Drugs for the Citizens, privileges for the taxpayers, peace for all thanks to the Fleet—and slavery for malcontents. Or death. The colonies use up people."
"I guess it's stable, then."
"Hardly. If Earth does not destroy herself—and from the rumors I hear, the nations are at each other's throats despite all the Navy can do—why, they have built a pressure cooker out here that will one day destroy the old home world. Look at what we have. Fortune hunters, adventurers, criminals, rebels—and all selected for survival abilities. The lid cannot stay on."
They saw Juanita and Curt Morgan walking around the big house, and Mark winced. Juanita had grown during the summer. Now, with her hair combed and in clean clothes, she was so lovely that it hurt to look at her. Taps smiled. "I see my star pupil has found another interest. Cheer up, lad, when you finish here, you will find employment. You can have your pick of convict girls. Rent them, or buy one outright."
"I hate slavery!"
Taps shrugged. "As you should. Although you might be surprised what men who say that will do when given the chance. But calm yourself, I meant buy a wife, not a whore."
"But damn it, you don't buy wives! Women aren't things!"
Tappinger smiled softly. "I tend to forget just what a blow it is to you young people. You expect everything to be as it was on Earth. Yet you are here because you were not satisfied with your world."
"It was rotten."
"Possibly. But you had to search for the rot. Here you cannot avoid it."
On such nights it took Mark a long time to get to sleep.