Through The Heart by Richard Grant

Author:Richard Grant [Grant, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Awardee, Science Fiction
ISBN: 0-553-29320-6
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1992-01-14T17:00:00+00:00

It was all too easy.

Kem studied the piece of paper that the woman had given him, a description of services available to runaways, migrants, and other newcomers to this remarkable place, and then he went up to a passerby and asked directions to the first address on the list. It was nearby and when he got there he found a large building like a warehouse. He hesitated; from the outside the place looked empty and it sat on a street with few trees, shabby and desolate. But he went in anyway and told a man inside why he had come. He didn’t say much, only that he was new in town, but the man didn’t seem to care; he nodded and gave Kem a form to fill out and a chewed-down pencil, then he disappeared up an aisle. The place was like one of the storage bays of the Oasis, high-ceilinged and cluttered, full of huge bales and crates. The man came back carrying a bundle of some­thing secured with twine. He turned away and Kem fig­ured that was the end of it.

Outside, the bundle turned out to be two sets of clothes. They were not new and they did not exactly fit him, but they were clean and in the middle of them, all wrapped up, was a package of dried fruit and jerky and a bit of paper money.

That’s when Kem began to think it was all too easy. It was hard to believe that you could just come here and they would give you things like this. And yet that is what had happened. He wondered if they had known, back at the Oasis, that it was going to fall out like this. He tried to remember what the guy from Recruiting had said, or rather how he had said it. Had he said “Go buy some new clothes” or just “Go pick some new clothes up”? It seemed to Kem that it had been the latter, that the guy had known how Riley County operated and how easy it was going to be.

In that case, Kem thought, maybe the rest of it would be easy too. Maybe they did this—picked out somebody like Kem and gave him instructions and sent him into town—every year, every time the Oasis came to Riley County in its annual roll around the Grind. That was an odd thought, that this might have happened before, might have happened again and again for who knew how long. The Oasis was old and from the look of things the town of Manhattan had been here for a while itself. Kem began to get an eerie feeling, which he quelled by stepping behind a locust tree, barely hidden from the street but nobody seemed to be around, and took off his uniform.

For a moment, standing there in the shade of the tree with his clothes off, Kem felt as though he had been unshackled. He felt that he had gotten very far away from

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