World In Review
Sunday, August 15, 1977
TRANSIT STATION SEVENTEEN
MASAHD, PROVINCE OF HYRCAMIADOMINATION OF THE DRAKAJANUARY 23, 1976
Marya Lefarge looked up. The train was slowing, and there was a stirring in the cramped darkness. It had been three days on the train. That was the first thing she had been aware of since the drug-haze lifted: being pushed off the truck and onto the train in Kabul. West and north since then; smooth steady hum of wheels on welded rail. Cold, but not freezing, and they all had thick rough overalls. Ration bars, water enough for drinking, and a chemical toilet. The forty prisoners were a mixed bag from all over India, city-folk mostly, with a fair sprinkling of military. None past middle age or younger than their teens.
The smell was not too bad, now that the dociline had worn off the last cases, enough that they could clean themselves and use the toilet; natural leaders had taken charge, gotten the car organized and arranged rosters to look after the incapable. Sleep had been difficult; the metal floor was hard and many screamed in their sleep. And the nightmares were bad— Forget that. Watch and wait, opportunity would come. She put her eye to a crack along the doorframe. The railcar was well-made but old, much-repaired. Nobody challenged her post by this drafty spot. Obviously the car had been made for its present purpose; impossible to break out of without cutting tools… There had been mountains outside, for a while, then flat desert. Now it was afternoon, and they were traveling along a river valley. Wide flat fields, wheat and alfalfa stubble, or cornstalks, thinly drifted with snow; boundaries were poplar trees, and she could see occasional piles of irrigation pipe by a crossroads.
A road ran by the right-of-way, plain black asphalt; steamtrucks passed now and then, sometimes a private car. The traffic was thickening, and now they were passing through a belt of open parkland. Other rail tracks converged, until they were in a broad field of them. Other trains, too; freight cars, flatbeds with standard-sized cargo containers. A set of double-decker cattle cars, loud and odorous with their bawling freight. Like us, she thought, and smiled savagely, pulling the handcuffs taut between her wrists. Military traffic, logistics trucks and armored personnel carriers chained down to flats, moving east; reinforcements for India, probably. The open fields beyond the rail gave way to buildings, low-slung factory types, gray concrete with skylights; she might almost have been in a textile town somewhere in Ohio.
Darkness; they were in a covered station-building. Marya worked her way back into the crowd. A rattle outside, and they all blinked at the harsh fluorescent lights. There was a blast of slightly warmer air.
"Out, out, everybody out," an amplified voice shouted. Marya could see the plank barricades on either side of the door; the rest of the train was invisible noise.
Hands reached in and dragged the nearest through; the rest crowded to follow. Marya kept to the center of the mass, head slightly down so as not to attract attention, eyes flickering to collect data. Study everything. Knowledge is survival. They were being herded down wide bleak-lit corridors of concrete block, between lines of guards. Not armed, not police; serfs in boots and gray wool overalls, swinging hard rubber truncheons.
"Stop!" The end of the corridors, a gate.
Collisions, cursing, blows directed at random. Through a stamped-steel door into a room with multiple exits, and a green-uniformed Orpo guard running a reader over the bar-coded plastic labels stapled to the breasts of their overalls. More greencoats along the wall behind him, and these had machine-pistols and shockrods in their hands.
"Left," the man said, and gave her a shove; she staggered into another prisoner. A gateway there, with an observation camera and some cryptic letter-number code above, stenciled on the bare concrete. In front of her a young man turned, tried to run back; one of the Orpos stepped forward and slashed at him with the shockrod. He shrieked and convulsed, falling face-first to the floor.
"Pick him up, freshmeats," the guard snarled at the two prisoners nearest. "Or yaz get fuckin' same!" The Orpo was a short wide-shouldered man heavy with muscle, a flat snub-nosed Slavic face and shaven skull that gleamed in the bright lights. Marya darted forward and bent to help the fallen man; someone else took the other arm, and they carried him, dazed, into the next room. Blood was running down his face from the broken nose, but after a dozen paces he was able to walk.
"That's it." Another bellow and the steel grille slammed shut behind them. "Line them up."
This time they were in a rectangular room a hundred meters by twenty. There was no immediate roof; instead the walls ran up three times a man's height and ended in steel walkways with guards pacing along them. Far overhead were girders and panels, like a warehouse, with arc-lights glaring down. Squinting, she could make out more cameras, and what might be automatic guns. Certainly gas dispensers. Hands shoved at her, and she returned her attention to the ground level. There were twenty turntable-mounted chairs along the opposite wall, like dentist's chairs without padding, each surrounded by instruments swung out on jointed booms from the chairs. A serf technician waited by each—neatly dressed serfs this time, without the bruiser-muscular look of the others she had seen since the train.
The guards were forming them up in lines of five in front of each chair, between painted white marks; there was a fair amount of shoving and shouting, but with two greencoats for each line it went quickly. For the first time she had time to notice the smell of the place, a combination of locker room and factory and slum police station, cheap soap and disinfectant and fear. And old concrete and metal; this place had been here for a long time, generations. She could see discolorations in the floor, places where partitions and wiring had been changed.
"Shuck to the waist," a guard shouted. The guards demonstrated on those first in line; overall unzipped and allowed to fall back. Marya complied, feeling her skin roughen in the dry chill. A few resisted, and there was the sharp frying-bacon sound of shockrods in action, choked moans from throats clamped tight. Echoes from above, off the roofing; this whole vast building must be divided into chambers like this.
"First rank, to the chairs." Marya swallowed dryly and looked away, realizing what this must be. There were unidentifiable machine sounds… Some of those waiting stared at the process before them, others at the ground or their feet or the walkways above. Few would meet her eyes.
"Next!"
She walked forward, feeling detached, feeling the pulse beating in her throat and ears. Maman never had her number removed, she remembered. She could live with it. So can I.
The chair was more cold plastic. Bands fastened around her, and a helmet-like arrangement came down over her eyes. The technician fiddled with a screen and keyboard fixed to the rear of the chair as it tilted back.
"Keep y' eyes open," he said. A singsong accent under the Draka slur, probably local. Something flickered at her eyes; retina scan. Marya felt a tug at the loose fabric bunched around her waist; that must be the serf feeding the bar-coded tag into his machine. "Blood sample next," he said; she could hear a yawn through it. Something sharp stabbed her in the forearm, then a cold medicinal-smelling spray. "Spread y' hands on th' grips." A hum; finger and palm prints.
A metallic sound, and a cold bar of metal touched her neck below the right ear. "This hurts," the bored serfs voice continued. More clamps immobilized her head.
"Ssss!" That forced out of her before she could clench her lips together.
More cries of pain along the line of seats, someone wailing. Cold stabbing along the bar pressed to her skin, then the bar of metal swung away, and another medicinal spray; this time it stung sharply, with a sensation that did not go away. The hood swung up, and she squinted at the lights. The technician was rummaging in a bin by his keyboard, full of dull-metal bracelets. They were jointed; he put two around her wrist before grunting satisfaction and snapping one closed. It was about half an inch thick and two broad, featureless except for a small jack-receptor hole on the upper edge. He plugged a lead into that, and she could hear him keying
behind her; then the jack was removed, replaced with a threaded plug. The auto-tattooing machine hummed and extruded a piece of paper. The technician peeled off its backing and slapped it adhesive-down on her arm.
She looked down. marya-I33M286.
The guard overseeing the room put the megaphone back to his mouth, as the bands released her. "Up!" he barked, and she stood beside the chair. "Dress." The twenty newly neck-numbered serfs zipped their overalls. "Yaz numbers is onna tag. Learn 'em quick." A cage door on the opposite side of the long room opened. "Out through there, move, move, move." Marya forced her hands down, not to touch the patch of rawness on her neck.
About three hundred of us, Marya estimated. It had taken an hour for the big room to fill; this one was square, under the same warehouse roof. Absolutely blank, except for a waist-high dais and comp terminal at one end. Four of the big steel-mesh doors, one in each wall. No chairs, of course. No talking allowed; one prisoner had persisted, and the guards had picked her up and thrown her into the wall, just hard enough to stun, and the shockrods were always there. There was another white line around them on the floor; the prisoners had learned enough to treat it like a minefield. Marya had worked her way to the second line from front with slow, careful movements. They're going to give us some sort of information, she decided. I'll get it all, and make my own use of it.
This place had the depressing regularity of a factory; it was designed to make you feel like sausage-meat. That is information, too. The door behind the dais opened, and two more Orpos stepped up on it, one going to the terminal; she laid a hand on the screen, then made a few keystrokes. A tall woman, hard to tell age with the shaven head. The uniform was a little more elaborate, with a sidearm and complicated equippment on a webbing belt; she had the traditional metal gorget around her neck on a chain. Chain-dog, Marya remembered. That's what the serfs call the Order Police. Appropriate.
"All of them supposed to understand talk," Marya heard her say to her companion. Talk must mean English. She filed the datum away.
"Right." The voice boomed out over the huddled crowd, amplified now. "Listen up, cattle." The face scanned them; tight skin stretched over bone, a white smile. "Y'all are serfs. I'm a serf. There are serfs and serfs; y'all are cattle, I'm yo' god, understand?" An uneasy silence. "Yaz all from India. Yaz here because our noble mastahs," Marya's ears pricked; was that a note of sarcasm? Listen. Wait.—"are souvenir hunters. That what yaz are. Trinkets. We shippin' yaz fo' that. Sometimes, trinkets get broke."
The Orpo jerked a thumb towards one of the crowd. Marya recognized the young man she had helped earlier, with dried blood caked on his lower face and the nose swollen. A Bengali, slight and dark and with a nervous handsomeness apart from the injury, about twenty. A junior officer in the Indian ground forces, from his mannerisms. The crowd parted to leave him in a bubble of space as the guards closed in, shoved him roughly to the edge of the dais. The Orpo noncom had lit a cigarette; now she flicked ash off the end and looked down at the Indian.
"Just in case yaz thinkin' y'all too valuable to hurt," she said, and nodded.
The guards moved in; Marya could see their elbows moving, hear the heavy thuds of fists striking flesh. A moment, and the young man was hunched over when they parted, dazed. The Orpo with the cigarette nodded again, and her companion on the dais stepped forward, pulled a wire loop from his belt and bent to throw it around the man's neck. Marya drove her teeth into her lower lip and made herself watch.
The greencoat grunted and lifted the slight Bengali youth without perceptible effort, holding the toggles of the strangling wire out with elbows slightly bent. The youth bucked, heels drumming against the dais, made sounds. His face purpled under the brown, tongue and eyes bulging, sounds coming from him. From behind her, too, she could hear vomiting. A stain spread down the front of the Bengali's overall, and she could smell the hard shit-stink as his sphincter released; see the thin smile on the executioner's face as he jerked the wire free of the man's neck and cleaned it lovingly with a handkerchief. Blood trickled down Marya's chin.
I will remember you, too, my friend, she thought grimly.
"Yaz nothin'," the amplified voice continued. Gray-suited attendants came in, threw the corpse on a wheeled dolly and took it away. The door slid shut behind them with an echoing clang. "Y'all barely worth the trouble of keepin' alive. Yaz cattle, meat, dogshit. Understand?"
The man who had used the wire noose bellowed: "That's Yes, thank yo', ma'am, apeturds!"
Marya opened her mouth and shouted with the others. Words are nothing, she told herself.
"One lesson, an' it all yaz need. Do what y' told. Anything y' told, anythin' at all. Right now yaz total worthless; with hard work an' tryin', mebbeso yaz work up to just worthless. Understand?"
"YES, THANK YOU, MA'AM!" the prisoners screamed. Someone behind Marya was crying again, slow racking sobs.
"Oh, one mo' thing." The Orpo noncom pulled a flat crackle-finished box from a pouch at her waist; it was roughly the size of a pocketnovel, and a miniature keyboard showed when she opened it. "Them pretty-pretty bracelets. They new. Space research, monitors. Traze yaz anywheres, identify yaz to the comps. Take readin's, heartbeat. And a little nerve hookup, inductor. Right to a center in yaz brains, if y' got any." Her lingers stabbed down on the controller.
PAIN. Marya fell limp and boneless to the floor and her head cracked on the concrete and the skin splitting was wonderful because for a single fractional second it blocked the PAIN but then there was nothing but the PAIN and there had never been anything but PAIN and her heart and lungs were frozen and death would be wonderful but there was no death only PAIN onandonandonandonandon—
It stopped. Marya drew breath, screamed, blood and tears and mucus covering her face, and then she curled around herself and hugged the hand with the controller bracelet and laughed because it stopped and the bleeding from her cheek was heaven and the stabbing behind her eyes was better than orgasm and the sensual delight-that it had stopped and she knew she could never feel pain again because that had been pain not the pain of anything not surgery without anesthetic not grief not longing not fear, it had been everything and nothing and pure, purest simple pain.
"Up and quiet, or I give yaz anothah five seconds. Now, wasn't that wonderful!" A shriek. "Understand?"
"YES, THANK YOU, MA'AM!"
They were all up, quiveringly silent. All except for one woman who lay motionless while the serfs with the dolly came and removed the body, and some of the others looked at it with envy.
"Most places, it's bettah to live than to die. Here, we can make it bettah to die than to live. Remembah that, cattle."
The van doors opened. "Out," the serf guard said. Marya slid forward and looked around; they were in the Citizen section of Mashad. Startling after five days in the blank steel and concrete of the Transit station. The guard pushed her ahead, through a revolving door into a hotel lobby. Warm. The first real warmth since Kabul, and a fear worse than the gnawing anxiety of the cell came with it. Across the ornate marble-and-tile splendors of the lobby; the walls were sections from the mosques that had once made this city a wonder of Islamic architecture. An elevator, bronze rails and fretwork, that took them up five stories. Down a corridor, past through a teakwood door. Her mouth was paper-dry again; she called up strength from the reservoir within.
But what do I do when it's empty? she thought for a moment. Then: Never.
A serf came to meet them in the vestibule, a room of pale glossy stone walls and floors covered in rugs of incredible colors. She was odd enough to snap Marya's attention aside for a moment; a black woman with yellow eyes and a flamboyant mane of butter-blond hair, in a white robe. There was pity in the brass-colored eyes, and in her soft voice.
"I'm sorry," she said, after signing the invoice the driver presented. "I'm really sorry. I… tried."
More corridors, then out into a double-storied lounging room, massive inlaid furniture and a glass wall looking out over a cityscape coming
alive with evening lights, reflected on the falling snow. A Draka waiting in a reclining chair, smoking a water-pipe, dressed in a striped djellaba with the hood thrown back. The face from Chandragupta Base. Thinner, with dark circles under the huge mad gray eyes; Marya lowered her own to hide the sudden stab of fury she felt.Looks older. Marya knew the lines that grief drew. Good.
"Stop," the Draka said. "Look at me, serf." Marya looked up. "I'm Yolande Ingolfsson. Remember me?"
"Yes, Mistis," Marya said with equal softness. A smile twitched at the Draka's lips. The American swallowed a sour bubble at the back of her throat.
The black serf spoke, hesitantly. "Mistis—"
"Jolene," Yolande said, "I heard yo' out. I said no. Now if yo' don't want to watch, get out. I'm not angry with yo'. Yet."
The African bowed silently and left; Marya could hear her steps quickening to a run.
"Take off the overall, and stand ovah there," Yolande continued. Marya moved to obey, found herself in the middle of a three-meter rectangle of clear plastic sheeting; the rug scratched underneath it, feeling bristly-soft to her bare feet. "Oh, it's good to see yo' again. Took a while, gettin' leave, and I don't have long until I have to report to the Astronautical, but it's good to see yo', Yank. Yo' fault, it is."
"Now," the Draka continued. "There's somethin' I want from yo'. Guess?"
Marya looked up sharply. The other's eyes were fixed on her with a curiously impersonal avidness.
"Are you… going to abuse me again, Mistis?" she asked flatly. There was no sign of a drug injector.
Yolande chuckled; it had a grating sound. "Oh, not that way. That was a special occasion… No, there's something else I want yo' to do fo' me. It was yo' fault, aftah all."
Her free hand pulled something out of a pocket in her robe. Crackle-finished in black, the size of a small book. Opened it. Marya felt herself begin to tremble, heard a moan. Knew that in a moment she would beg, and felt a brief stab of shame that she felt no shame, because nothing was worse than that.