A Thousand Deaths by George Alec Effinger Page A

lot of sense."
    The red light on the tect lit and blinked furiously. Everyone in the group watched it for a few seconds.
    "Oops," said Courane. He saw a brief look of triumph cross Fletcher's handsome face.
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    "Why am I here?" asked Nneka. This was the day after she came to Home, during a fierce Otho blizzard.
    "I don't know," said Courane. "I could find out from TECT, but don't you know why?"
    "Oh," said the young girl, "I know the reason I was separated from my family. I was taking care of a bird, a beautiful bird with a long tail of blue and white feathers. It was hurt and I was taking care of it. You're not supposed to have birds or animals like that in your house. They belong to the Representative, of course. Or to TECT in the name of the Representative."
    "Of course," said Courane.
    "Then one day last week, a woman from my village told me that I should be careful. The bird could get me in trouble. I told her that I was just taking care of it until it could fly again. She didn't like me, she never did. I think she thought I was having her husband. Then two days ago, the tect in the school building told me I had to report to the Paris Substation, that I was coming here. That was my crime. But why did they punish me this way?"
    "I can't tell," said Courane.
    Nneka was tall for her age but slender, with very long, delicate fingers and a natural and unrehearsed grace about all her movements. Her eyes were of a deep and liquid brown that captured attention, even drawing it away from her other striking features. She had high, prominent cheekbones and a mouth that smiled readily. She wore plastic ornaments in her ears and around her neck, the same kind of inexpensive jewelry that was worn in Moscow and Chicago and Manila. The only people who wore traditional African styles and designs were TECT's employees, those who were hired to represent a vanished black culture, between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. It was impossible to find anyone wearing ivory necklaces or brightly printed dashikis on the weekend. Molly had learned the penalty for doing that kind of thing.
    "What will it be like for me here?" Nneka asked in a frightened voice.
    "It may be very nice," said Courane. "You'll miss your family and friends, but you can take care of all the birds you want. Just don't break any of TECT's rules for living in a colony."
    "What are they?" she asked.
    "We're not sure yet," he said regretfully. And he thought, That's just part of TECT's cruel and usual punishment.
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    Daan had meant what he said. He gave Courane several sheets of paper covered with his dense, cramped handwriting. "This is every bit of information I've been able to get out of TECT," he said, "plus everything I've observed myself. It isn't very much, but it's a start. You might be able to add something important. Maybe in a few years or a hundred years, we'll be able to tell Earth how to deal with this disease, and then TECT won't send any more people here."
    Courane glanced through the pages and decided that it might be a lot easier to find a cure for D syndrome than decipher Daan's notes. "I don't understand why there hasn't been more progress," he said. "The colony has been here for a long time. It can't be that you and I are the first people to wonder about this sickness."
    Daan frowned. "We're not, of course we're not. The trouble has been that the people in the past who've tried to work on it have been patients themselves, not prisoners. So they get a little foothold and make a few observations and then they begin forgetting everything. All their work goes for nothing. There may have been a dozen others ahead of us, but they've provided no documentation. If they did write anything down, it was discarded by others in the colony who didn't know its importance."
    "And now you're passing it on to me. Daan, I want you to know that I'm absolutely the wrong person. I don't understand a thing about any of this."
    "I didn't