A Thousand Deaths by George Alec Effinger Read Free Book Online

puzzled look on her face. "Iola?" said Sheldon softly.
    She turned her face toward Courane and opened her mouth. She said nothing, but her mouth stayed open. A bright line of saliva spilled down her chin.
    "Iola, how are you today?" asked Sheldon. "Are you hungry?"
    Slowly she turned her head from Courane to Sheldon. She said nothing.
    "Do you hurt anywhere, Iola?"
    The two men waited a moment, but there was no response. "What is she suffering from?" asked Courane.
    Sheldon gave a quick, wry smile. "TECT calls it 'D syndrome.' That doesn't tell us much. There's no treatment for it, unfortunately."
    "Then she's dying, too?"  
    "Yes."
    Courane began to realize that there was a complete lack of compassion in TECT, if the machine could not be made to relent even in the case of imminent death. These three people may not have been curable, even with the facilities on Earth, but their families would have had the consolation of being with them at the end, and the patients would have been given the courtesy of dying at home. That sort of kindness and consideration was what had been lost when the last human Representative abdicated in favor of the electronic thinking system.
    "And that boy?" Courane indicated a fourth patient.
    "Markie," said the boy.
    "Markie's nine years old," said Sheldon. "His birthday was just last week. Do you remember, Markie?"
    "Markie," said the boy.
    Courane looked at Sheldon.
    "Markie." This time the boy's voice sounded just a bit hesitant.
    "Let's go back downstairs. You'll want to rest before dinner. If Zofia starts to slip, someone on duty here will call us in time."
    Courane didn't know what to say. "Oh, good," he said. He felt terrible.
    Â 
    "I can do it," murmured Courane as he trudged across the stones. The woman's body was heavy, but he never thought of abandoning it. He would make it back to the house with her corpse, or they would both spend eternity in the desert, lost forever beneath the alien stars. "I can do it." In his mind, Courane faced the tect unit—a tect unit, an unspecified tect unit. Perhaps it was the tect in his parents' home, the tect at the factory in Tokyo, the tect at the University of Pilessio, the tect in the farmhouse beside the river on Planet D. All these voices of TECT had commanded him, and Courane had always accepted TECT's directions in the same spirit. He was willing to accept TECT's judgments because he himself had forced them. Courane had made TECT's orders inevitable with his failures. Whatever happened to him was only in keeping with the justice of TECT's brutal reasoning.
    Movement startled Courane. He stopped and put the corpse down on the stones. It wasn't his habit to take frequent rest stops during the day's march, but he was disturbed in the midst of his reverie. A shadow flickered across the ground, and Courane looked up into the hazy sky. He saw a bird circling not very high above him. He couldn't tell what kind of bird it was. On Earth he might have thought of a buzzard, but as far as he knew there weren't any carrion birds of that type in the desert. There was too little for them to eat. But then, Courane admitted, he could hardly be called an expert on this world's wildlife. He had lived on the planet for little more than twenty months, a year and a third by the colony's reckoning. No one had done much study in the local natural history; only the plants and animals immediately essential to the colonists had been closely examined. Perhaps there were large scavengers living near the desert, alien buzzards waiting for Courane to die before swooping down. Courane laughed with cracked lips. Those buzzards would be surprised when they lighted by the man's body. He wondered how the birds would find the meal. Courane watched the black shape making circles overhead, like ghostly haloes traced by a ravenous angel. "I can do it, Mom, don't be sad," he murmured. "It's my decision and I'm happy." He sat down beside the corpse because he had already forgotten