THE ABANDONED OF YAN
BY DONALD F. DALEY
The Abandoned have neither rights
nor hopes. They only have revenge!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
After her husband left her, Marigold filed a protection-request formand an availability form.
She did not do this immediately. She stayed up for the better part ofthe night, hoping that he would come back. She could not bring herselfto believe that he would really walk out on her and leave her availablefor confiscation, or for the slavery pool. She also thought for quite awhile about the possibility of somehow getting back to Earth, where shewould not be available for either.
She even went to the fantastic expense of televiewing there to talkwith her father and mother. They had been shocked and unfriendly. Theyhad said good-by with a finality which left little room for doubt asto what they thought of an Abandoned. They had never had one in theirfamily, they had pointed out, neither of them, and they did not intendto have one in their family now. They had warned her that they intendedto report the call to the Beta III Protection People.
This did not worry her much. The call almost certainly had beenmonitored anyway. If they wanted to go to the considerable extraexpense of reporting it, in order to impress the Protection People withtheir loyalty, that was their own lookout. She understood that, now,she had no family. She thought for a moment of going up-ramp to saygood-by to the children, but she knew that this would not help.
Besides, it was illegal. They were no longer hers. She was an Abandoned.
She had never known what a tremendously harrowing experiencefilling out an availability form could be. Name, age, Sector, race,size-classification, beauty-index, fertility tests, personality scores,aptitudes, psyche-rating and so on, and so on and so on. It was likeundressing for an auction. The protection-request form was muchsimpler, except for that one question: STATUS? Her hand shook almostuncontrollably as she wrote. Abandoned.
After that she did not know what to do. She had stood for nearly twentyminutes before the document file, listening, thinking desperately thathe would come back; that if she only waited a few minutes more he wouldcome back. She had made herself refreshment. She had sat with thefilled-out documents on her lap looking, from time to time, longinglyat the entrance-ramp. But he had not come back. Finally, with a lowmoaning sound, she had pushed the papers through the document fileslot. She made the deadline by a scant three minutes.
Now she knew that whatever else happened, the Protection People wouldbe there in the morning to pick up the children. She knew that it couldshow in her favor if she were to get together the things they wouldneed to take with them. She could do this without seeing them andwithout talking to them, which was forbidden, but she could not bringherself to move.
The red light on the atmosphere control blinked warningly. Soon itwould let out a piercing scream. She was tempted to just let it.Another of Clytia's suns must have set. She found that she had no senseof time. She had only the conviction that this would be her last night.The last night that mattered to her at all. She wanted it to be a longone. She had adjusted the atmoset. She had done this every night forthe seven years of their marriage. She beg