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far long lost and gone now. It was time for final moments. His finger
tightened on the trigger.
The moment of light lengthened.
The light grew stronger.
He could not see the studio. The glare of the golden light blotted everything.
He blinked, came out from behind the squirt gun and realized the golden light
was there with him, inside the duct, surrounding him, heating him, glowing and
growing. He tried to breathe and found he could not. His head began to throb,
the pressure building in his temples. He had a fleeting thought--it was one of
the doggies: he'd been sniffed out and this was some new kind of mist, or a
heat-ray, or something new he hadn't known about.
Then everything blurred out in a burst of golden brightness brighter than
anything he had ever seen. Even lying on his back as a child, in a field of
winter wheat, staring up with wide eyes at the sun, seeing how long he could
endure. Why was it he had wanted to endure pain, to show whom? Even brighter
than that.
Who am I and where am I going?
Who he was : uncounted billions of atoms, pulled apart and whirled away from
there, down a golden tunnel bored in saffron space and ochre time.
Where he was going:
Joe Bob Hickey awoke and the first sensation of many that cascaded in on him
was one of swaying. On a tideless tide, in air, perhaps water, swinging, back
and forth, a pendulum movement that made him feel nauseous. Golden light
filtered in behind his closed lids. And sounds. High musical sounds that
seemed to cut off before he had heard them fully to the last vibrating
tremolo. He opened his eyes and he was lying on his back, on a soft surface
that conformed to the shape of his body. He turned his head and saw the
bullhorn and rucksack lying nearby. The squirt gun was gone. Then he turned
his bead back, and looked straight up. He had seen bars. Golden bars reaching
in arcs toward a joining overhead. A cathedral effect, above him.
Slowly, he got to his knees, rolling tides of nausea moving in him. They were
bars.
He stood up and felt the swaying more distinctly. He took three steps and
found himself at the edge of the soft place. Set flush into the floor, it was
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a gray-toned surface, a huge circular shape. He stepped off, onto the solid
floor of the...of the cage.
It was a cage.
He walked to the bars and looked out.
Fifty feet below was a street. A golden street on which great bulb-bodied
creatures moved, driving before them smaller periwinkle blue humans, whipping
them to push-and-pull the sitting carts on which the golden bulb creatures
rode. He stood watching for a long time.
Then Joe Bob Hickey went back to the circular mattress and lay down. He closed
his eyes, and tried to sleep.
In the days that followed, he was fed well, and learned that the weather was
controlled. If it rained, an energy bubble-he didn't understand, but it was
invisible-would cover his cage. The heat was never too great, nor was he ever
cold in the night. His clothes were taken away and brought back very
quickly...
changed. After that, they were always fresh and clean.
H e was someplace else. They let him know that much. The golden bulb-creatures
were the ruling
class, and the smaller blue people-sorts were their workers. He was very
someplace else.
Joe Bob Hickey watched the streets from his great swaying cage, suspended
fifty feet above the moving streets. In his cage he could see it all. He could
see the golden bulb rulers as they drove the pitiful blue servants and he
never saw the face of one of the smaller folk, for their eyes were constantly
turned toward their feet.
He had no idea why he was there.
And he was certain he would stay there forever.
Whatever purpose they had borne in mind, to pluck him away from his time and
place, they felt no need to impart to him. He was a thing in a cage, swinging
free, in prison, high above a golden street.
Soon after he realized this was where he would spend the remainder of his
life, he was bathed in a deep yellow light. It washed over him and warmed him,
and he fell asleep for a while. When he awoke, he felt better than he had in
years. The sharp pains the shrapnel wound had given him regularly, had ceased.
The wound had healed over completely. Though he ate the strange, simple foods
he found in his cage, he never felt the need to urinate or void his bowels. He
lived quietly, wanting for nothing, because he wanted nothing.
Get up, for God's sake. Look at yourself.
I'm just fine. I'm tired, let me alone.
He stood and walked to the bars. Down in the street, a golden bulb-creature's
rolling cart had stopped, almost directly under the cage. He watched as the
blue people fell in the traces, and he watched as the golden bulb thing beat
them. For the first time, somehow, he saw it as he had seen things before he
had been brought to this place. He felt anger at the injustice of it; he felt
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the blood hammering in his neck; he began screaming. The golden creature did
not stop. Joe Bob looked for something to hurl. He grabbed the bullhorn and
turned it on and began screaming, cursing, threatening the monster with the
whip. The creature looked up and its many silver eyes fastened on Joe Bob
Hickey.
Tyrant, killer, filth!
he screamed.
He could not stop. He screamed all the things he had screamed for years. And
the creature stopped whipping the little blue people, and they slowly got to
their feet and pulled the cart away, the creature following. When they were
well away, the creature rolled once more onto the platform of the cart, and
whipped them away.
Rise up, you toadstools! Strike a blow for freedom!
He screamed all that day, the bullhorn throwing his voice away to shatter
against the sides of the windowless golden buildings.
Grab their whips away from them! Is this what you deserve?! There's still
time! As long as one of you isn't all the way beaten, there's a chance.
You are not alone!
We are a large, organized resistance movement...
They aren't listening.
They'll hear.
Never. They don't care.
Yes! Yes, they do. Look! See?
And he was right. Down in the street, carts were pulling up and as they came
within the sounds of his voice the golden bulb creatures began wailing in
terrible strident bug voices, and they beat themselves with the whips...and
the carts started up again, pulled away...and the creatures beat their blue
servants out of sight.
In front of him, they wailed and beat themselves, trying to atone for their
cruelty. Beyond him, they resumed their lives.
It did not take him long to understand.
I'm their conscience.
You were the last they could find, and they took you, and now you hang up here
and pillory them and they beat their breasts and wail mea culpa, mea maxima
culpa, and they purge themselves; then they go on as before.
Ineffectual.
Totem.
Clown, I'm a clown.
But they had selected well. He could do no other.
As he had always been a silent voice, screaming words that needed to be
screamed, but never heard, so he was still a silent voice. Day after day they
came below him, and wailed their guilt; and having done it, were free to go
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on.
The deep yellow light, do you know what it did to you?
Yes.
Do you know how long you'll live, how long you'll tell them what filth they
are, how long you'll sway here in this cage?
Yes.
But you'll still do it.
Yes.
Why? Do you like being pointless?
It isn't pointless.
Why not, you said it was. Why?
Because if I do it forever, maybe at the end of forever they'll let me die.
(The Black-headed Gonolek is the most predatory of the African bush shrikes.
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