Life Sentence

by Bertil Falk

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

It was a magnified specimen of the legendary Nessie and it dawned on her that the lake was another wall in her prison. With that ugly head hovering above her she waded as fast as she could ashore. And then she ran naked to the house.

The rest of that day she stayed in bed. So many thoughts crossed her mind. The monster was meat, wasn’t it? The most delicious meat in the universe besides human flesh was that of the crocodile. It was as soft as chicken but much tastier. Wasn’t a monster like that a relative of the crocodile? But the more she thought, the more she knew that she had no chance to kill that bug-eyed terror.

After a couple of days she made a new effort to broaden her sphere of activities. She walked a whole day and reached a mountain, where she pitched a camp under the branches of a big tree, where she unfolded bedclothes she had carried on her back. She had saved bread for a couple of days and that was her supper.

The next day she took the remaining slices of bread as her breakfast and continued her walk. The ground changed. The trees along the lane were replaced. Instead there were mountainsides. The further she walked, the more the mountainsides closed in on her until the road became a tunnel. She hesitated. She was hungry and if she continued now, she would have to return on an empty stomach. She sat down and stared into the darkness of the tunnel.

There was only one thing to do. She returned, slept on the same place as she had slept the first night and arrived home the next day in a state of inanition. A few moments after her arrival, there was food on the table in the dining room. This time, she saved enough hard-boiled eggs, rye crisp and carrots to last for at least four days, before she resumed her try to widen her field of action.

She didn’t see the monster any more, but she was sure that if she went swimming, it would come back. This time she had satisfied her hunger when she arrived at the tunnel. She still had food in her homemade knapsack. She took her courage in both hands and entered. Soon the light in the beginning of the tunnel was behind her and ahead of her was pitch-black darkness.

She walked and walked. She had no idea of time or of space for that matter. It was like walking in some kind of nothing. It was only when she with her hands touched the walls that she knew that she was actually walking through a tunnel.

She got very tired, sat down and fell asleep. She dreamed that she was a hunter in a jungle filled with bug-eyed Loch Ness monsters. She threw her serrated boomerang, hitting one of the eyes and killing the heavy beast, whose head rose above the treetops.

She woke up with a sense of satisfaction that immediately was dispersed as she realized where she was. She ate her breakfast and she still had a lot of food left. But she faced a somewhat unexpected problem. She did not know in what direction to walk, not until she remembered that she had placed her knapsack in front of her in the direction she had been walking. Understanding that, she set out again.

And she walked and walked and walked. She sat down for a little rest and then she walked and walked. Exhausted, she fell asleep again only to recommence walking when she woke up. Now her food supply was running low.

She felt joy as she saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It was a strange light, changing from red to green, from green to blue to emerald to violet to yellow.

She hurried up and reached the exit.

It led to a projecting rock. She looked out across a grass covered scenery stretching as far as she could see. A multi-colored sun spread its red, green, blue, emerald, violet and yellow beams across the prairie. And down there, far below her, was a house, very similar to the house she had left. She could not discern any sign of life, but a house it was.

She found a path. It wound down the hillside in slow turns. It took her almost an hour to descend it. Eager as she was, she rushed towards the house. And there, she hardly believed her eyes. The house was an exact replica of the house she had lived in since she had awoken in her prison. And not only that. All the rooms were the same. And on the bed some of her clothes were thrown all in a heap exactly as she had left them. It was as if, no, it was the same house. She was back, but in another surrounding.

Oh, my God, she thought. This is really punishment if ever there was punishment. She sat down on the bed and began to cry and she cried till she fell asleep.

She woke up without remembering if she had dreamt anything or not. And she was in a better shape. She was rebellious. Did she really deserve this kind of punishment? Would the Universal Congress accept this kind of treatment? Wasn’t it inhuman? She knew the answers. If you don’t behave as a human being, how can you demand a human treatment?

She had her breakfast and went out on the veranda. Grass all around here. Everywhere there was grass, but no one grazing it. No cow, no sheep. How did they keep the grass down? She spent her days eating and thinking and aimlessly walking around in the vicinity.

One morning she woke up in a very bad condition. She had fever and headache. She was hardly able to eat. Was this the end of it? Was this how she would die? Hit by some illness? She went back to bed.

Next time she woke up she felt better. She found an adhesive plaster in the bend of her right arm. Someone had carried out a sedimentation test on her while she was unconscious. So they were keeping her under observation. They were not going to let her die as easy as that. They would see to it that her agony of being completely alone was stretched from here to eternity. She was twenty-three years old! She could live another eighty years in this condition.

She had since long lost track of time, but she had probably been there for more than a year when she found what seemed to be a crack in her confinement. She dropped her skirt on the floor and when she picked it up she saw the joint under the bed. Otherwise, she had seen no joint anywhere. She pushed her bed aside.

And lo!

There was a crack in the floor. She tried to put her fingers into it and succeeded. She began prizing and a brick got loose. She put back the bed over the spot and from then on she continually went under the bed and worked. She succeeded in prying open a hole, and there she found a cavity. She went into it and found a door that led to a narrow shaft with a ladder leading down.

Her heart was pounding, but she had to calm down. There was no reason to rush. She must plan, and plan she did. The next morning she walked past the lake on the lane for about a mile. Then she sat down and waited. In the dusk of the evening, she slowly went back to the house, went inside without turning on the lights, went into the cavity and down on the stepladder. It led to a broom closet.

The door was not locked. She opened it. Outside was a long corridor. She walked till she came to a lobby where people were coming and going. And now she knew were she was.

This was the lobby of Hotel Proxima Centauri, just a few blocks away from the law court where she had been sentenced. She was still on Minotaur XI.

But she had no intention of staying there. She had to leave as fast as possible. Soon, they would know she had escaped. A young woman walked across the lobby and the sight of her made her mouth water. But she had more important things to do even though the temptation was overwhelming after such a long time on vegetarian junk food.

She walked with soft steps out of the lobby and down the street over to the residential building, took the elevator up to the seventh floor and tried the combination. What if it didn’t work? It did. John had not changed the combination of his place. She worked fast. Found that her clothes with her credit cards were still in his closet. She took a bunch of universal notes from a drawer in his desk and left as quickly as she had come. She met a lot of people on the street, but nobody looked at her.

She felt elated and took the subway to the spaceport. After three hours as a free human being she was on her way to a solar system where she had no friends at all. Twenty-five minutes later, a mutilated and partly eaten woman was found in a public rest room at the airport of Minotaur XI.

She soon made herself at home on Seraphita, one of the more exclusive planets in the Rule Britannia system. She went to bars. She danced. She absolutely gorged on handsome men and guzzled down pretty women. In a nostalgic feeling of back to basics she dressed as the flipper did on Earth way back in another century. She had never before lived such a rewarding high life and she enjoyed every bit of it.

When an appetizing gentleman in tuxedo asked her for a dance, she immediately leaped to her feet and shook her body so that the spangles of her transparent Charleston dress vibrated. It was not until she looked into the eyes of the public prosecutor, the very man who once had convicted her, that she knew that everything was in vain.

She woke up with a start. The room was as usual. She looked under the bed. There was no crack on the floor. She swore aloud. It had been a dream. Before she went to the dining room for her breakfast, she opened her wardrobe. Stunned, she stared at the flapper-dress that had never been hanging there before.

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