"He did try to strangle me."

"So you said. You also said you wanted him to come home with you. Is that really consistent?"

"I want you to cure him and send him home. Since his father died, whom else have I had to love?"

Yourself, Holt refrained from saying. My, but I'm getting judgmental.

The buzzer sounded and, relieved at the interruption, Holt pressed the pad that freed the door. It was Gram, the head nurse. He looked upset.

"It was time for Linkeree's toilet," he said, beginning, as usual, in the middle, "and he wasn't there. We've looked everywhere. He's not in the building."

Mrs. Danol gasped. "Not in the building!"

Holt said, "She's his mother," and Gram went on. "He climbed through the ceiling tiles and out the air conditioning system. We had no idea he was that strong."

"Oh, what a fine hospital!"

Holt was irritated. "Mrs. Danol, the quality of this hospital as a hospital is indisputably excellent. The quality of this hospital as a prison is woefully deficient. Take it up with the government." Defensive again, dammit. And the bitch is still throwing her chest at me. I'm beginning to understand Linkeree, I think. "Mrs. Danol, please wait here."

"No."

"Then go home. But I assure you you'll be entirely in the way while we search for your son."

She glared at him and stood her ground.

He merely nodded. "As you will," he said, and picked up the door control from the desk, carried it with him out of the room, and slid the door shut in Mrs. Danol's face as she tried to follow lit got an altogether unhealthy feeling of satisfaction at having done so.

"Wouldn't mind strangling her myself," he said to Gram, who missed the point and looked a bit worried. "A joke, Gram. I'm not getting homicidal. Where did the fellow go?"

Gram had no answer, and so they went outside to see.

Linkeree huddled against the fence of the government compound, the miles of heavy metal fencing that separated civilization from the rest of the world. The evening wind was already blowing in from the thick grass and rolling hills of the plain that gave the planet its name, Pampas. The sun was still two fingers off the horizon, however, and Linkeree knew that he was plainly visible from miles away. Visible both to the government people who would surely be looking for him; but also visible to the Vaqs, who he knew waited just over the hill, waiting for a child like him to wander out to be eaten.

No, he thought. I'm not a child.

He looked at his hands. They were large, strong-- and yet unweathered, as sensitive and delicate as an artist's hands.

"You should be an artist," he heard Zad saying.

"Me?" Link answered, softly, a little amused at the suggestion.

"Yes, you," she said. "Look at this," and her hand swept around the room, and because he could not avoid following her hand, he also saw: Tapestries on tapestries on one wall, waiting to be sold. Another wall devoted to thick rugs and the huge loom that Zad used for her work. And another wall windowed ceiling to floor (glass is cheap, someone told the government architect), showing the shabbily identical government housing project in which most of the capital's people lived, and beyond them the Government Office Building from which the lives of thousands of people were run. Millions, if you counted the Vaqs. But no one counted them.

"No," Zad said, smiling. "Sweet, darling Link, look there. That wall."

And he looked and saw the drawings in pencil, the drawings in crayon, the drawings in chalk.

"You can do that."

"I'm all thumbs." Oh, you're all thumbs, he remembered his mother saying.

Zad took his hands and put them around her waist. "Not all thumbs," she said, giggling.

And so he had reached out, held the charcoal, and with her hand guiding his at first, had sketched a tree.

"Wonderful," she said.

He looked at the ground and saw that he had drawn a tree in the ground. He looked up and saw the fence. They're chasing me, he thought.

"I won't let them catch you," he remembered Zad saying. He was ashamed at having lied to her and told her he was a criminal. But how would she have treated him if she'd known he was only the reclusive son of Mrs. Donal, who owned most of Pampas that could be owned? Then she would have been shy of him. Instead, he was shy of her. She had taken him from the street where he was wandering that night, already having been mugged and beaten up-- the mugging by one man, the beating by two others who had found his hipbag empty.

"What, are you crazy?"

He had shaken his head, but now he knew better. After all, hadn't he murdered his mother?

A siren went off in the mental hospital. With a wrenching sense of despair Linkeree curled up tighter in a ball, wishing that he could turn into a bush. But that wouldn't help, would it? This is a defoliated area.

"What have you drawn?" he remembered Zad asking, and he wept.

A stinger stung him, and he flicked the insect from his hand. The pain brought him up short. What was he doing?

"What am I doing?" he thought. Then he remembered the escape from the mental hospital, the run through the maze of buildings to the perimeter-- the perimeter, because it was safety, the only hope. He vaguely recalled his childhood fear of the open plain-- his mother's horrified stories of how the Vaqs would get you if you weren't good and didn't eat your supper.

"Don't disobey me again, or I'll let the Vaqs at you. And you know what part of little boys they like to eat first."

What a sick lady, Linkeree thought for the millionth time. At least it isn't hereditary.

But it is, isn't it? Aren't I escaping from a mental hospital?

He was confused. But he knew that over the fence was safety, Vaqs or no Vaqs; he couldn't stay at the hospital. Hadn't he killed his mother? Hadn't he told them he was glad of it? And when they realized he wasn't insane at all, that he really, seriously, in cold blood strangled his mother on the public streets of Pampas City, without benefit of madness-- well, they'd kill him.

I will not die at their hands.

The barbed wire scratched him unmercifully, and the electric shock from the top wire would have stunned a cow, he thought. But grimly he hung on, his body shuddering in the force of the voltage; climbed over; dangled a moment on the barbs until his shirt ripped apart and let him drop; then lay, stunned, on the ground as another alarm went off, this time nearby.

I've told them were I am, he thought. What an ass.

So he stood, his body still trembling from the electricity, and staggered stupidly off into the high grass that began crisply a hundred metets from the fence.

The sun was touching the horizon.

The grass was harsh and sharp.

The wind was bitterly cold.

He had no shirt.

I will freeze to death out here tonight. I will die of exposure. And the part of him that always gloated sneered, "You deserve it, matricide. You deserve it, Oedipus."

No, you've got it all wrong, it's the father you're supposed to kill, right?

"Why, it's a painting of me; isn't it?" asked Zad, seeing what he had, done with the watercolors. "It's excellent, except that I'm not blond, you know."

And he looked at her and wondered, for a moment, why he had thought she was.

He was snapped out of his memory by a sound. He could not identify it, nor even, for sure, the direction from which it had come. He stopped, stood still, listening. Now, aware of where he was, he realized that his arms and hands and stomach and back were scratched and slightly bloody from the rasping grass. The suckers were clinging to his bare body; he brushed them away with a shudder of revulsion. Bloated, they dropped-- one of the curses of the planet, since they left no itch or other pain, and a man could bleed to death without knowing he was even being sucked.