Mommies and Daddies

by Leigh Brackett

The ward was never entirely quiet. Some of the kids talked in their sleep, or cried or groaned or tossed around. This night, the night Deke had been waiting for, thunder drowned out the smaller sounds. He slid out of bed, pulled on shirt and shorts, and fished underneath for his sandals. Holding them in his hand, he crept barefoot between the flashes of lightning, past the cubicle where Matron slept, down the stairs and out the door, into the wind and the hissing rain. Then he put on his sandals and ran.

The tree was thrashing its branches angrily, but Deke didn't let that stop him. He only hung tighter to the wet bark as he climbed. The big limb took him over the top of the wall like a bridge.

He dropped unhurt into the soggy weeds on the other side. There was an area all around the Institute, which had been cleared by the demolition crews. He had to cross that, and he did so crouched over, with his heart beating up into his throat. There were no lights or voices from the wall, calling him back. It was common talk around the Institute that they were glad to have you go if you could make it. They always needed room. Nevertheless, when he got into the tangle of ragged streets with no alarm being raised, he felt like yelling for sheer joy.

He didn't. He kept very quiet, loitering in the shadows. And now he began to be afraid. For the first time in his short life he was alone, out of the Institute, away from Matron, the doctors, Mr. Timmins the teacher; away from neat lawns and playgrounds, the rows of clean white beds and the smell of yellow soap. He had never seen the city before. It was one thing to talk and dream about it. It was another thing entirely to be in it.

He shivered, cold in the beating rain. The thunder shook him. When the lightning flashed he could see broken pavement, shining with wet, and black buildings leaning up into the sky. Things creaked and banged, lonely noises in the wind. He would have liked to get inside somewhere, into shelter, but the doorless holes in the walls did not invite him. They were like mouths to catch him and chew him up.

He moved on, stepping furtively, with the water running over his feet.

He wished he had a pill. But it wasn't time for that yet.

All his senses seemed to be painfully alert. Underneath the rain-smell he could distinguish an old sour mustiness, unpleasant and sad. And underneath the thunder and the wind-born creakings he could hear the silence. The black buildings were dead. Life had gone away from them. They were corpses with empty hearts.

He began to go more quickly, a small denim-clad figure stuttering through the summer storm. Every so often one of the kids who had made it out was forced to come back to the Institute for treatment, and they talked a lot. All the real information about the city came from them. So Deke knew where he had to go. He just didn't know how to get there.

The storm passed over. The rain stopped. The water stayed in the low places because the old drains were choked up. Sometimes Deke was over his knees in it. The damp air began to thicken into a clammy mist. He came into an area of wider streets. The buildings here were very tall and wide, but a lot of them had been burned out. There was an open space ahead that had once been a park. And all of a sudden Deke stopped, then darted aside into a tumble of ruins. He hunkered down and stared.

There were fires in the park. They made big flickery patches of red in the mist. Shadows moved around them. There were voices, and dim sounds that he could not identify. The hairs at the back of his neck lifted, and something happened inside his middle that almost made him be sick.

There they were, the Free People. In the living flesh. "They'll roast you in one of those fires if they catch you," said a quiet voice behind him.

Deke whirled around. The children had come up on him without a sound. There were four or five of them, he thought, and mostly taller than he.

"Don't try to run," said the voice. "And don't make any noise. Come on."

He did as he was told. They led him through the dark streets, keeping close together, moving at a trot. Deke noticed that there was a very big fire burning now over on the east side of the city. Lightning must have struck somewhere. His companions paid no attention, and he supposed there was nothing unusual about it, so he didn't mention it either. From time to time penned dogs barked and voices hailed them, and the leader answered with some sort of password.

It seemed to Deke that they did a lot of unnecessary jinking and jogging, turning aside from the direction in which they were going only to return to it again a few blocks farther on. The leader, speaking from great heights, enlightened him.

"Some streets are neutral. Anybody can use them. But if you tread on somebody else's turf without permission, you get clobbered. Remember that."

"I will."

"Unless you're hunting," the leader added. "If you're wearing the green cockade, you can pass anywhere, as long as you don't stop."

A horrid, delicious thrill contracted Deke's innards. Hunting.

Yes.

That's what he was here for.

The buildings along the way, those that were left, were as dark as all the others from the outside, but Deke began to sense a difference. They weren't dead. Things lived and moved and breathed in them.

There was another open space, another park. "This one belongs to us," said the leader. "It's safe, as much as anything is in the city, but don't trust it. The Freebies raid us sometimes."

They pattered around the perimeter of the misty open, which seemed quite empty, with no fires showing, yet Deke was certain there were watchers there. The air smelled a little of barnyard. He knew that one. The Institute was self-supporting. It had to be, because you never knew when the supply trucks were going to be held up. Drugs, of course, were another thing, and sometimes that got pretty hairy, but they tried to keep an oversupply on hand at all times.

There was a big tall building with a lot of balconies sticking out. There was a bricked-up, boarded-up en-trance with stuff piled in front so you had to come in one at a time, and Deke could see wicked-pointed sticks poking at him from loopholes. But the words were right and the sticks didn't do anything. They went inside, with what seemed like a thousand dogs yammering at them.

It was like being in a huge dark cave. In the middle of a concrete floor a fire burned on a round hearth of stones. The smoke went up and got lost in whatever space was up there. Deke couldn't see, but it felt high. There were lots of echoes.

His captors pushed him over to the hearth. He stood shivering, sucking in the heat through every pore. Now in the firelight he could see that the leader of the group was a girl, a tall girl almost at the age when she was going to have to stop being a hunter and go away into the country. He felt sorry for her. She had a short-cropped mane of reddish-brown hair as rough as a terrier's coat, and a lean face with sharp cheekbones. Her nondescript rags left her muscular legs and arms free for running and throwing things. She had an assortment of weapons stuck in around her waist. The other four graded down in size, two boys and two girls, all thin and bright-eyed.

Kids began to come out of the shadows beyond the firelight. They stood in a ring and looked at Deke in his blue denims.

"Another one fresh from the Institute," said the tall girl. "They grow 'em smaller every year."

"That's because they're junkies," somebody said. They all began to shout, "Junky! Junky!" leaping up and down and jeering at him.

"It's not my fault I'm a junky," Deke said equably. "Any more than it's your fault you're all bastards." "Aren't you a bastard too?" asked the tall girl.

24 Crisis "Mommies and Daddies" 25

Deke shrugged. "Who isn't?"

She leaned over him. "Where were you found?"

"In a garbage dump," said Deke. Actually he had been taken away from his mother at a perfectly ordinary mobile clinic where her friends had brought her, suffering from an overdose of heroin, and where she just incidentally happened to have a baby, which started screaming with withdrawal symptoms shortly after birth and so was sent at once to the Institute for Congenital Addiction. But he wasn't going to admit that. "Where were you found?"

"In a ditch. In the snow. I was almost dead."

"I was found in the river!" a little voice shrilled. ". . . in a junkyard."

". . . an abandoned bus."

". . . a doorway."

". . . wrapped in a brown paper bag."

". . . a shoe box."

". . . a lavatory."

They chanted their brags at him. After a while he said, "I know who you are. You're all from the Foundling Home. You're not the real Wild Ones." Those were the little healthies who had never been institutionalized at all. A lot of loose kids had stayed behind, gradually inheriting the city as the people left it in search of a more decent life. They ran a kind of foundling service of their own, and it was generally accepted that because of this they had begun the practice of hunting.

"Yah," said the tall girl scornfully. "They don't know anything. They've never been taught." She turned abruptly and called out, "Somebody throw him a scrap to lie on." With a certain rough kindliness she said to Deke, "You can sleep by the fire, it's warmer. In themorning I'll show you where to go." A boy came with a piece of old red carpet and flung it down. "You hungry?"

Deke shook his head. He was tired, with all the excitement and exertion, and he was beginning to feel rotten. He wanted to curl up and be alone.

When they had all gone away, back to their pads, and he thought nobody was looking, he dug the stoppered vial out of his pocket and took one of his pills. After that he slept.

It was still dark in the big room when the girl shook him awake, but it was daylight outside. From somewhere else in the building, kids were driving animals into the park, which was getting quite busy now under the warm sun. There were a lot of garden plots. Deke and the others at the Institute had been taught to help with the farm work, and he supposed the Foundlings had been taught as well.

The girl—her name was Stella—led him into the park, between the gardens where everything was fresh and green from the night's rain. And he asked her a question.

"When can I go hunting?"

"You have to learn all the rules first. You have to learn how to survive yourself, and how not to get your mates in trouble, and you have to earn your place here. That means work. We don't have any dropouts."

"I'll work," Deke said. "I'll learn."

"Good." Stella caught him and whirled him around to face her. She towered over him with a dreadful ferocity. "And never you forget," she said, "we're the lucky ones. Even you. We hunt for all of them—the murdered, the diseased, the LSD babies. You remember that."

"I'll remember."

They went on again, past little flocks of goats and grazing cows, taking a shortcut across the top of the park. There was a building there, with an entrance much like the other one, boarded and heaped against intruders. Some kids were cooking over a fire out in front. Deke recognized Tell and John and Sara and a couple of others who had left the Institute before him.

"This is Junkyville," said Stella. "So long."

She left him. Tell walked over and said, "Hello, Deke. Come and eat."

It was good seeing his friends again. He was ravenously hungry. The sun burned pleasantly on his back. They shared the stories of their escape around the fire. He felt great. The thing was done now, the big move made, and he was here and safe, with a new life ahead of him. Then Tell stood up. He put a digging-stick into Deke's hands and led him to a garden plot where the potato plants were beginning to blossom.

"No weeds," said Tell, "and no potato bugs. For every one you leave behind, you get a belting from me."

"Okay," said Deke and grinned, and got to work.

There was a lot to learn. The social scale, for one thing. The Junkies were right at the bottom. The Foundling gangs were in the middle, and the Wild Ones at the top. Only it was more complicated than that. The Junkies and the Foundlings felt superior to the Wild Ones because they had some learning and some technical skills. The Wild Ones felt superior because they didn't have any learning, and because they were first.

"They are the best hunters," Tell said. "You have to give them that. If you can get one of their gangs to let you hunt with them, you've got it made."

Deke did not suppose that that would ever happen to him.

In the meantime he weeded and hoed, and acted as herd boy, and did his share of policing the common room in the building. That was another law. Only the Free People lived in filth. The children were clean and shorn, and it was the ultimate shame to be found lousy. The condition of the common room would no doubt have given Matron fits, but it was swept and the sleeping pallets were neat. The stable quarters were kept mucked out, and fly-catching was a perpetual sport.

Nobody knew exactly what the building had been originally. Everything portable had been stripped, either by its departing tenants or the looters and scroungers who came after them. Bare concrete floors and boarded windows made for spartan living, but they only used the place at night, really, and it wasn't bad at all around the fire, when you had the animals penned in the next room and the barricades were up and you felt safe against the dark.

Up the many stairs there were the many rooms, all empty and quiet, and if you wanted you could have a lair to yourself in one of them. Deke fixed himself up a pad in one that had a balcony overlooking the park, where he could sleep on hot nights and take his turn at sentry duty. Often he sat there alone, looking out from his high perch at the black sprawl of the city, with no sound in it except the occasional bark of a dog or a cat-yowl or the call of a night bird, and he would try to imagine what it must have been like in the days before he was born, crammed with people and machines and lights and noise.

Mr. Timmins had taught them about Hellerism and what had come of it. Somebody named Heller a long time back had preached the doctrine that small towns had become useless anachronisms and must go, and everybody must live in the cities, where people could be better managed. Apparently nearly everybody had tried to do that, and after a while the cities died of their own weight and foulness and the madness of people overcrowded into a faceless limbo where everything was hard and loud and artificial. There were lots of old films left, showing how it had been, and Deke had seen them as part of his education; but somehow the reality wouldn't come away from the remembered screen, and the film image was superimposed on the actual streets below him.

Daytimes you could hear the demolition crews working, gnawing away at the edges of the city, freeing the land of its stifling burden so that it could live and breathe again. Some day, Deke knew, they would reach the inner city and this would all be gone. But that was too far ahead to worry him. He'd be gone, too, by then, out among the old villages and the new road towns where the scattered-site industrial plazas were. He thought he would probably work on a farm, but there was no need to worry about that yet, either. This was the good time, the young time.

The hunting time.

The reason the Junkies were at the bottom of the social heap was because they dealt with the pushers for meth pills. They had to, and everybody knew that. It wasn't held against them in itself. But the pushers, who came and went usually in armed convoys and by night, did their main business with the Freebies, and it was almost like consorting with the enemy. The Junkies were forbidden to barter away any food, which was communal property, so they were always on the lookout for treasures among the ruins. It had been impossible, even for determined thieves, to clean out an entire city. The Free People kept themselves going by scrounging in between hijacking the supply trucks meant for the Institutes. It didn't bother them that they were robbing their own children. Why should it?

When Deke had memorized all the free streets and the different turfs, Tell allowed him to go out on patrol. Deke liked that. It was scary and exciting. Sometimes by day, sometimes by night, they would slip through the derelict streets and spy on that other park across town, lurking like small rats among the abandoned buildings. On clinic days you could see the big semis roll up, built like armored cars and accompanied by guards with guns. Permanent clinics were impossible, the Freebies knocked them over too often looking for drugs. In one of these mobile clinics, perhaps the very one he was looking at, Deke had been born.

He finally got so that the smell from the park no longer turned his stomach. It only made him more eager, and whenever he saw a girl with a big belly he had to hold himself very hard.

Sometimes they would find a live baby. The law was that you turned babies over to the Wild Ones, who kept them to raise if they were healthy, or passed them on to the appropriate Institute if they were not. There were other, and worse, Institutes for congenital affliction than the one Deke had come from. The child population of the city was growing. The park population stayed about the same. The number of dropouts who couldn't hack it in Squaresville and came looking for a different life-style just about balanced the number of Freebies who cashed out.

The thing Deke liked best of all was the games.

Each gang had a different time assigned so they didn't step on each other, and you could range the whole park, learning to go cat-foot through rank grasses, holding the killing-stick just so to stop its catching in brambles and hanging vines. When the weather was hot and dry, the grass smelled wonderful of warm dusty sweetness, and there was a jungle of honeysuckle run wild where the bees made droning music all day long. At night, by moonlight or starlight, you learned to drift between the trees, letting your bare feet sense for themselves where to come down. You learned not to cry out if you trod on something painful. You learned to breathe quietly, to keep track of where you were . . . not just the single spot where you happened to be, but that spot in relation to the whole city and its escape routes . . . and you learned to stay with your gang, always. Because you were too little to hunt alone, and if you got separated you could only run.

You learned the killing-chant, which was simple enough, but you never used it. Like the green cockade, that was only for the real thing.

It was during game time that Deke met the chief of the Wild Ones. His name was Chad, and he was tough and undersized like most of them, with a small, fierce face and muscles that showed like knotted strings under his sun-blackened skin. His hair was bleached almost as white as one of Matron's sheets, cut short and ragged, and it grew down the back of his neck and right down between his shoulder blades. He used to join the game now and then, letting the other kids know what ham-footed blunderers they were, pouncing and mock-stabbing and vanishing again before they hardly saw him. He would laugh then, and give them a lesson in weaponry. He had a real knife. A lot of the Wild Ones did, and some of the others. But most had to make out with sticks, and he would take one and show them the best way to use it, the sharp end for cutting, the heavy end for clubbing.

"Mommies and Daddies" 31

He began to watch Deke, who was small and neatly made and could move well.

"It isn't only that, though," Chad said to him one day. "A lot of you can do as much. But you're a real good hater, aren't you?"

Deke nodded. Something in Chad's little tough face matched something he felt within himself. A great shining, burning, glorious hate.

"Would you like to hunt with me?"

Deke was speechless. Finally he managed to say, "When?"

"Learn," said Chad. "I'll let you know."

Deke learned.

And one evening a hard brown girl-child trotted up and stood by the cooking fire. "Chad says come."

Deke got his stick. He put on the headband for the first time, and pulled green leaves to thrust into it. His hands trembled, and the others watched him with silent envy, and respect. He went away with the girl-child.

Chad's hunters with their green cockades were ready. Chad nodded to Deke. There was no need for any talk. They set off through the streets, passing where they would, and no one stopped them, and the darkness came down on them and hid them. Deke felt light and strong, and inside him there was a lovely fire.

Chad took them a long curve around and into the park through a dense thicket of brambles. There was a run like a rabbit run cut through the thicket. Deke went on his hands and knees with the others, and at the end of the run there was a ledge of rock where you could crouch in the night and look down.

"Quiet," Chad whispered. "Something going on."

There was a fire in a hollow not too far away below, with a dozen or so of the Free People around it. Much farther away there was a sound of howling, and a thumping and a twanging, all coming closer. The Freebies around the fire got to their feet, except for three or four who were already out of the world, and went straggling off toward the noise. Presently Deke saw a crowd of people, moving slowly, carrying something.

"Funeral," said Chad. "Good. We wait."

You could smell the mourners. You couldn't see any faces. The corpse was male and naked. Its bones stuck out, and Deke thought it wouldn't look much different a year from now. Its mouth hung open, making a slack hole in the middle of its beard, and its skinny ulcerated arms dangled. And, Deke thought, for all I know, that could be my father.

The mourners banged and twanged, and sang in their high-pitched nasal voices a lament for the sadness of dead youth.

He's left us, our brother the world couldn't keep,

The world made him suffer, the world made him weep.

He was young, he was lost, he was searchin' for love, Reachin' out, reachin' out, searchin' for love. . . .

The procession passed on out of sight behind a grove of trees. Somewhere beyond it the body would be shoveled under in a shallow grave, shrouded in its own hair.

Deke's thigh muscles were jumping and he put his hands on them to steady them down.

The Freebies came back to the fire. They were excited and restless, upset by the presence of death. They talked and moved about. Some kind of a vial passed from hand to hand. Their voices rose, becoming shrill and loud. They began to make music, working themselves up, jerking and stamping and shouting. Finally, when they had done all the preliminary things, the men and women began tumbling each other on the ground.

"Now," said Chad, and the hunters went down off the ledge.

They went cat-foot on their small bare feet, through the long grass and the weeds, toward the hollow where the men and women were. And Deke thought, This is how I . . . how all of us were made.

Chad started the hunting chant and Deke joined in, speaking the words for the first time in his life. "Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy!"

The children rushed in among the couples and the killing-sticks flashed in the firelight, up and down.