Life Sentence by James V. McConnell
Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Life Sentence
By JAMES McCONNELL
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
_"Happy New Year!" she cried. But how often should one hear it said in a single lifetime?_
Outside, bells were ringing. "Happy New Year!"
The mad sound of people crazed for the moment, shouting, echoed thebells.
"Happy New Year!"
A sound of music, waxing, waning, now joined in wild symphony by thevoices, now left alone to counterpoint the noise of humancelebration....
For a while, Oliver Symmes heard the raucous music of the crowd. Itbecame a part of him, seemed to come from somewhere inside him, gave himlife. And then, as always, it passed on, leaving him empty.
Shadows....
The door to his room opened and a young-looking woman, dressed in apleasant green uniform, came in and turned up the light. On her sleeveshe wore the badge of geriatrician, with the motto, "To Care for theAged."
"Happy New Year, Mr. Symmes," she said, and went over to stand by thewindow. In the mild light, the sheen of her hair attracted attentionaway from the slight imperfections of her face.
She watched the crowd outside, wishing she could be a part of it. Thereseemed so little life inside the prison where the only function ofliving was the awaiting of death. "To Care for the Aged." That meant tolike and love them as well as to take physical care of them. Only,somehow, it seemed so hard to _really_ love them.
She sighed and turned away from the window to look at one of the reasonsshe could not be with the rest of the world that night.
* * * * *
He sat bunched up in his chair like a vegetable. She could have closedone of her hands around both his arms together. Or his legs. Bones andskin and a few little muscles left, and that was all. Skin tight,drumlike, against the skull. Cheeks shrunk, lips slightly parted by thecontraction of the skin. Even the wrinkles he should have had wereerased by the shrinkage of the epidermis. Even in a strong light, thefaint wrinkle lines were barely visible.
After a moment of looking at him, she put a smile back on her face andrepeated her greeting.
"I said, 'Happy New Year,' Mr. Symmes."
He raised his eyes to her for a moment, then slowly lowered them,uncomprehendingly.
"He looks just a little bit like a caricature," she said to herself,feeling a little more tenderness toward him. "A cute little stick manmade of leaves and twigs and old bark and ..."
* * * * *
_Shadows._ For so long there had been shadows. And for a time thefleeting passage of dreams and past memories had been a solace. But nowthe shadows were withered and old, debilitated and desiccated. They hadbeen sucked dry of interest long ago.
But still they flitted through his mind on crippled wings, flappingabout briefly in the now-narrowed shell of his consciousness, thenfading back among the cobwebs. Every once in a while, one of them wouldreturn to exercise its wings.
"Did she say, 'Happy New Year?'" he wondered. "New Year's?"
And, at the thought of it, there came shadows out of the past....
* * * * *
Young Oliver Symmes laughed. The girl laughed, too. She was good to holdin one's arms, soft like a furry animal, yielding and plush of mouth.
"I love you, Ollie," she said; the warmness of her body close againsthis.
He laughed again and wrapped her in his arms. He owned her now, ownedher smile, her love for him, her mind and her wonderful body. Shebelonged to him, and the thrill of ownership was strong and exciting.
"I'll always love you, Ollie. I'll love only you." She ran her fingersin and out of his hair, caressing each strand as it went through herfingers. "I love the strength of your arms, the firmness of your body."
Again he laughed, surrendering all his consciousness to the warm magicof her spell.
"I love the shading of your hair and eyes, the smooth angularity of yourtallness, the red ecstasy of your mind." Her fingers slipped down theback of his neck, playing little games with his flesh and hair. "I'llalways love you, Ollie."
He kissed her savagely.
During the daytime, there was his work at the anthropologicallaboratories, the joy of poking among the cultures of the past. And atnight there was the joy of living with her, of sharing the tantalizingstimulations of the culture of the present, the infinite varieties oflove mingling with passions.
For months there was this happiness of the closeness of her. And thenshe was gone from him, for the moment. He still owned her, but they werephysically apart and there was the hunger of loneliness in him. Themonths his work kept them apart seemed like centuries, until, finally,he could return.
* * * * *
He was walking through a happy, shouting crowd, walking back to her. Itwas the eve of the new year, a time for beginnings, a time for lookingfrom the pleasures of the past to those waiting in the future. There wasa happy outcry inside him that matched the mood of the crowd.
"Happy New Year!"
Women stopped him on the street, asking for his affection. But he passedthem by, for she was waiting for him and he was hungry for thepossessive love of his slave.
He went eagerly into the building where they lived.
* * * * *
The crowd was gone. A door was opening. The voice of his love, sudden,full of naked surprise, bleated at him. And another voice, that of a manstanding behind her, croaked with hasty excuses and fear.
A change of hungers--it seemed no more complex than that.
He put his hand to his side and took out a piece of shaped metal,pointing it at the man. A blast of light and the man was dead. He putthe weapon aside.
Young Oliver Symmes walked toward the girl. She backed away from him,pleading with words, eyes, body. He noticed for the first time the manysmall imperfections of her face and figure.
Cornered, she raised her arms to embrace him. He raised his arms toanswer the embrace, but his hands stopped and felt their way around thewhiteness of her neck. He pressed his hands together, thumbs tightagainst each other.
Minutes later, he dropped her to the floor and stood looking at her. Hehad owned her and then destroyed her when his ownership was in dispute.
He bent to kiss the lax lips.
* * * * *
Shadows. As a man grows older, the weight and size of his braindecrease, leaving cavities in his mind. The years that pass are adigger, a giant excavator, scooping the mass of past experience up inthe maw of dissipation. The slow, sure evacuation of the passing decadesleaves wing-room in a man's head for stirring memories.
The withered man looked up again. The woman in the green uniform wassmiling at him through parted, almost twisted lips.
"I suppose that this time of year is the worst for you, isn't it?" sheasked sympathetically. The first requirement of a good geriatrician wassympathy and understanding. She determined to try harder to understand.
The old man made no answer, only staring at her face. But his eyes wereblank--seeing, yet blind to all around him. She frowned for a moment asshe looked at him. The unnatural hairlessness of his body puzzled her,making it difficult for her to understand him while the thought was inher mind--that and the trouble she had getting through to him.
She stared at him as if to pierce the blankness of his gaze. Behind hiseyes lay the emptiness of age, the open wound of stifled years.
"I'll move you over to the window, Mr. Symmes," she told him in soothingtones, her smile reappearing. "Then you can look out and see all thepeople. Won't that be fun?"
Picking up a box from the table, she adjusted a dial. The chair in whichhe was sitting rose slightly from the floor and positioned itself infront of the window. The woman walked to the wall beside him andcorrected the visual index of the glass to match the weakness of the oldman's eyes.
"See, down there? Just look at them pushing about."
A rabble of faces swam on the glass in front of him, faces of unfamiliarpeople, all of them unknown and unknowable to him.
Inside him the whisper of the wings mounted in pitch with a whining,leathery sound. The images of dead faces came flying up, careeningacross his mind, mingling and merging with the faces of the living. Theglass became an anomalous torrent of faces.
Dead faces....
* * * * *
Four walls around him, bare to the point of boredom. Through the barredwindow, the throbbing throat of the crowd talked to him. His young bodytook it in, his young mind accepted it, catalogued it and