The Green Gene

by Peter Dickinson

  One of the men dragged the cloth mask off. The craggy face stared forth, contemptuous.

  “Sure, I bombed Glister,” said Mr. Leary. “He was boss of R5.”

  “And why did you try to shoot this brown feller?” said the leader.

  “Balls,” said Mr. Leary.

  The leader kicked him on the knee-cap, hard, without causing any flicker of pain to cross his face.

  “We’ll have that shirt off,” said the leader.

  The muscled torso looked strangely raw in the raw, pale light. Heads craned at the symbols.

  “H. R.” said somebody. “That’s the old Hieland Railway.”

  “No, no,” called Humayan anxiously. “Look at it the other way up. That little cross doubles the R.”

  “Could be,” said the leader. “Any of you fellers seen anything like this?”

  “There was a group in Liverpool, you see, used to brand people. I remember my own Dad arguing it was more moral than shooting.”

  “OK,” said the leader. “We’ll shoot the both of them, then.”

  “I appeal to the Council,” said Mr. Leary. “I have their orders for everything I have done.”

  “He’d be saying that anyway,” said one of the women. The leader’s hand rubbed his stockinged chin.

  “I’m not risking it,” he said after a pause. “But I’ll see you die untidy, mister, if you’ve been lying to me. We’ll just shoot the brown feller, then.”

  “No, no!” screamed Humayan. “The Council will need me as a witness.”

  Somebody laughed.

  “The witness system is a crypto-bourgeois obstacle in the machinery of the people’s justice,” explained one of the women.

  “Firing party,” said the leader.

  “No, no! There is much more I can tell you. I can tell you about Mr. Mann. I can give useful information about the functioning of the RRB. I can …”

  “Hell!” said the leader. “It’s not my morning for shooting people. You five, there, take ’em away. Fetch this ambassador out and we’ll shoot him. We can’t waste any more time.”

  “We have already tried him,” fluted the intellectual woman. “He has pleaded guilty in absentia.”

  “That’s something,” grunted the leader. “Lock the big one up in a place of his own, and two of you guard him. Put the brown boy back where you found him.”

  VIII

  And when all is prepared let the new initiates be brought in, naked, to stand before the Chief of the Sept. And let him say, “For what come ye, my brothers?” And let them say, “For vengeance we come.” Then shall the Chief mark the brow of each initiate with the dung of a man and say, “On whom seek ye vengeance? For what crime?” And let each answer, “We seek vengeance on the Saxon who has made us as dung.” Then let the Chief dip a cloth in the blood of sacrifice and touch with it the dung upon each brow, saying, “How shall this dirt be cleansed?” And let each answer, “With the blood of the Saxon. With the blood of the Celt. If I slay not, may I be slain.” Then shall the Sergeant lead them …

  Humayan sat on his bed, shuddering with shock and horror. In his ears still rang Mr. Zass’s last inebriated bellow: “I’ll do it, Pete! I’ll do it!

  Though the shudders would not lessen he began in a despairing way to wonder what he could tell these murderous apes that they could actually understand would be useful to them. What could he buy his life with, having sold Mr. Zass’s? But Mr. Zass would have been shot in the end, anyway. You do not have to be a statistician to calculate that if you have a chance to save one life out of two you should take it, even if that life is your own.

  At last the doors rattled and he heard the shuffling of several feet. A group of masked men carried Mr. Zass’s body into the other cellar and laid it on the bed. Mr. Zass groaned.

  “What happened? What happened?” whispered Humayan, cringing by the archway.

  “Broke his ankle,” said somebody with a laugh. “Kicked Pat in the crotch and broke his ankle. You can’t shoot a feller with a broken ankle, not if you’re going to leave his body in Grosvenor Square to greet his new nibs. People might think we’d been beating him up. We’ve got our image to think of.”

  “I wouldn’t like to do Pat’s peeing for a week,” said someone else. They were all laughing as they left, a jovial team.

  “Pete,” groaned Mr. Zass. “Come here, Pete.” Humayan crept across, wondering how he could defend his betrayal.

  “Pete, I know what you tried to do for me, and I want you to know I think you’re the greatest guy who ever lived. Greater love hath no man than this, Pete …”

  Mr. Zass fainted.

  Humayan was attempting to change him out of his court clothes into his old pyjamas when more men came, including a silent, competent Scot who set the ankle without anaesthetics and secured it with splints. Humayan asked timidly for food, and quite soon it arrived, less hygienically wrapped than Megan’s but no more appetising. When he had eaten he went to his bed and slept the enormous sleep of shock and exhaustion.

  The new gaolers did not leave a permanent guard, nor did they turn off the lights at night; on the other hand the impression they gave was of being rougher, less amateur, less affable. They brought meals more regularly than the previous gaolers, which made it possible to estimate the passage of time, and to treat the longer interval between tea and breakfast as night. On the third morning they brought a mattress and threw it down in the corner of the vault where Mr. Zass lay, and then carried in the unconscious body of Mr. Leary and laid it on the mattress.

  “You can take care of him, mister,” they said to Humayan. “It won’t be long. We’re shooting him as soon as he can stand.”

  “We’re not the sort to shoot a sitting canary,” said the smallest of them; when they left he was still expounding to the others the pungent wit of the phrase that had been vouchsafed his lips.

  “Who the hell’s the new guy,” said Mr. Zass. In his voice was the slight resentment of any sick patient when a yet sicker one is brought into the ward.

  “His name is Francis Leary. I think he was some sort of spy or informer for both sides. I think they have tortured him.”

  Humayan had no experience of merely physical brutality, one man deliberately hurting another as much as possible. The big brutalities of disease and starvation he knew like old cousins, but this was different. There was a blotched and bruised look about Mr. Leary’s face, and dried blood by his purple mouth; his left hand was a tangle of blood, and when Humayan knelt to make him more comfortable he found that the body below the rough blanket was naked, and pocked all round the nipples with small circular burns. Humayan sponged the face and dribbled a little water between the puffy lips.

  Three men brought lunch. One of them lounged over to the inert figure on the floor and kicked it in the ribs. It responded no more than if it had been dead. The kick was poised again when Humayan screamed.

  “Animal! Animal!”

  “What’s into you?” said the man, turning and forgetting to kick.

  “You are making yourself an animal,” said Humayan in a shaking voice. “Kicking a man who cannot even feel your kick. You are diminishing your soul.”

  “The swine’s a fucking traitor,” said the man. “It’s him’s the animal.”

  “I will not stand for it!” said Humayan. “I will not.”

  There was terror in his voice at the things his tongue had been saying to this armed brute, and he cringed as the brute lounged back to him, reached out, tweaked his ear, laughed and strolled away with the others. The bolts of the main door rattled dully home.

  “Thanks, Pete,” whispered a voice from the floor.

  “You tried to shoot me, to kill me,” said Humayan furiously.

  “You can see why now. Forget it.”

  Humayan’s fury ebbed into mere crossness as he ate the tepid canned stew, the fla
vourless stale bread, and the soapy cheese. It was too bad that he should be forced to entertain humanitarian feelings for this man who had tried to assassinate him in order to pervert even the rough justice of the guerrillas. Mr. Zass’s ankle was hurting him, so he spoke little. Humayan chewed and brooded on the unfairness of his fate. The stew was too unpleasant to finish, so he took the plate across and knelt by the mattress.

  “Can you eat?” he asked coldly.

  “They left me a tooth or two, yeah. Little, soft bits.”

  It was a slow process, insinuating the chilling shreds between those lips, and he was still at it when the guards came back for the plates.

  “Jesus!” said the man who had done the kicking. “That’s a bloody waste of protein. If he’s well enough to eat he’s well enough to be shot.”

  “I must have some disinfectant cream,” said Humayan.

  “For that trash!” scoffed the man. “Jesus, the bacteria won’t have time to get going.”

  “Animal,” said Humayan without turning round or raising his voice.

  The man laughed and tweaked his ear again. Leary refused more food, so Humayan retired to his bed and lay in the dark, trying to wring more secrets out of the RRB computer. Liking to know, that was one thing. Needing to know, to save your skin, that was another.

  The men who brought the last meal of the day also brought a tube of antiseptic cream. They called Humayan the Lady with the Lamp and tweaked his ear abominably, as if trying to prove that this moment of mercy was an aberration. Mr. Zass was of the same mind.

  “Pete,” he said, “I know you tried to save my life, so you may be some kind of saint, but you’re wasting your time trying to help that scum on the floor. He deserves what he got. And what he’s going to get.”

  “I do not like him,” said Humayan. “He tried to kill me. He is no business of mine, but I cannot think while he is lying there like that. Perhaps this is because I am a healer. It says in my horoscope that I am a healer, and I have not healed anybody yet.”

  “Mrs. Zass reads the astrology columns pretty assiduous, but I’ve never been able to swallow any of that stuff.”

  “My horoscope is just as true as most of the idiocies you Westerners believe,” snapped Humayan as he settled to his abominable meal. Fastidiously he sorted out the edible bits and ate them slowly, as if the action were some ritual of purification. Then he made Mr. Zass comfortable and finally settled down to anoint the tortured body on the floor. It was a sickening task, and became more sickening the more of it was revealed. The genitals were hardly recognisable as any such organs. But the cream must have had mildly analgesic properties, for Mr. Leary kept muttering, “That’s better. Ah, that’s better.” And when the job was over he lay on his back staring up at the vault with sane, wide-awake eyes.

  “I’m better than those other sods,” he said. “All those other sods.”

  “Why did you do it?” said Humayan shrilly. “Why did you do it?”

  “Me? I made a trap and walked into it. I’m a journalist—I wanted to know. I got recruited. An agent knows more than an innocent, and a double agent knows more than a straight agent. You’re safe while you keep your balance, because then you’re too useful to both sides for them to smash you. I’ve fallen off before—this is the third time I’ve been through the grinder, but no one’s broken me yet. You don’t fall off unless you choose—you remember we walked round that Zone, Pete? Those fellers standing about, just standing about, empty as beer cans—that lad with the broken nose—’tis nae coward blude—they pushed me off. They made me take sides again.”

  “Moirag pushed you off,” said Humayan coldly.

  “She was a stupid greedy bag.”

  “And the Glisters? Kate? What had she done to you except loved you?”

  “You think she was innocent? She only had to open her mind a crack to find out what her Dad was up to, but she wouldn’t. That’s not innocent. How did you find out he was R5?”

  “Various ways,” said Humayan. He had no wish to converse more than he need with this wounded but still dangerous beast—but somehow he still desired that the beast should admire him and could not forebear to add a sliver of evidence of his own new perceptiveness.

  “A man called Tarquin ffoster is the new editor of Prism,” he said.

  “Yeah,” sighed Mr. Leary. “Dick Mann was always trying to suck R5 in to his bit of the organisation. You get an outfit like that and they spend as much time trying to carve each other up as they do on their real job.”

  “Your people don’t seem much different,” said Mr. Zass. “What are this new lot? What happened to Dave and the rest?”

  “There was a shoot-out,” sighed Leary. “That other lot were Celtic Independent Socialists, and we’re Independent Socialist Celts. You’d need a year’s schooling to understand the ideological difference, but the real difference is that they were soft and we’re hard. When I finished at Horseman’s Yard I decided I’d gang up with the hardest lot I could find, and they’re it.”

  This was depressing knowledge. The three of them absorbed it in silence.

  “If there was a way out of this hole you wouldn’t be here,” said Mr. Leary suddenly.

  Humayan looked at him without answering, but his face must have betrayed him. A light glowed in the mean eyes.

  “Tunnelling?” sneered Mr. Leary.

  Indifference was impossible. Humayan feared and detested this man, but even so was compelled by the sheer energy of life in the tormented flesh. Mr. Leary was vermin, trapped and maimed but still snarling. If he had complained, or even asked to be forgiven, Humayan would have found it possible to be merciless; as it was the emotional dilemma gusted him about. If he freed the vermin from the trap he would infuriate the trappers. He sucked his lips in and out, trying to think.

  “Who are this Council you appealed to?” he said at last. “Where are they? How can I talk to them?”

  “You? They don’t know you exist. They’re in the house, sorting themselves out after seeing that CIS lot off, but they won’t have time for you.”

  Humayan thought again.

  “Suppose you were to get free,” he said at last. “What would your plans be? Would you contact Mr. Mann?”

  “Christ, no. He’d pull me to bits. I’m no use to him now, and I know things that aren’t good for him. I’ll shack up in the Zone, lie low for a few months, get abroad.”

  There was a sudden weariness in Mr. Leary’s voice. It was as if a traveller, plodding bravely along an apparently endless track, had suddenly seen far off a possible end to his journey, and only then discovered that he might be too exhausted to reach it.

  “All right,” said Humayan. “I will help you escape, but I will not come with you. You must rest now.”

  “I’ll need some clothes. The ambassador won’t be wanting that clobber for a bit, will he?”

  Mr. Zass woke from what must have been feigned sleep.

  “Pete,” he said, “if you let that no-good scum take my uniform, I’ll never forgive you. Nor will Mrs. Zass either.”

  “Please, Zack,” said Humayan. “I wish him to go. I have a plan for our release, without danger. But first he must go. Please will you trust me?”

  “OK, OK,” said Mr. Zass. “I’m not entitled to wear it any more, I guess.”

  Mr. Leary slept like an athlete after a race, as though there were no more problems in the world. Humayan woke him at what he guessed to be midnight, and anointed him again with the soothing cream. Then he helped to dress this murderer in knee-breeches, ruffled shirt, cutaway coat and stockings. Even the buckled shoes fitted fairly well. It must have been painful, but the only sign Mr. Leary gave was that his once ruddy face became so pale that in the end he looked like the ghost of some dissolute earl, returned to haunt the cellars of his mansion. Mr. Zass, mourning his finery, said no word. Mr. Leary leaned hard on Humayan’s sho
ulder as he staggered along to the coal-cellars.

  While he was resting Humayan went and scrabbled in the pile of coal-dust. Suppose their gaolers searched it was important that they should not find the gouging tool, or it might seem that Mr. Leary had not made his escape without help.

  “You will need a weapon,” he whispered.

  Mr. Leary grunted softly and took the hook. He felt the sharpened point and grunted again. Humayan switched off the light and lifted the bolt free. He swung the door open and there were the stars again.

  The guards came early and angry. Humayan was hauled from his bed and stood in his shirt against the wall, shivering with fear that they would notice how bruised and scraped he was from the struggle to heave Mr. Leary up the coal-chute. He was fearful too lest by daylight they would find traces of his mortar in the gouge-marks, though he had done his best to clean it all out, and so would deduce that the bolt had been cut free some time before. But they were too busy cursing to look for cities. One of them kept saying, “Cut Dai’s throat out, and I wouldna ha thought he could crawl.” Dai appeared to have been the man who had stood sentry over the guerrillas’ cars.

  A gross man, hunched with menace, came and stood two feet in front of Humayan. He just stood there, silent and faceless.

  “Ye helpit him!” he shouted.

  “No, no!” quavered Humayan. “He had a sharp hook and he held it to my throat, but I would not help him. He wanted me to go with him, but I would not. I must see the Council.”

  “Must ye just?”

  “Yes, indeed. I can tell them Mr. Leary’s plans. I can tell them whether they need move.”

  “I dinna want to move,” said another man in a worried voice, like a clerk fretting about some little adjustment in office routine. The big man swung towards him, then swung back to Humayan with a movement that showed how his fist lusted for the smash of flesh. Faceless though he was, anybody, even Humayan, would have known him for a slow thinker.

  “Och, ye’d better be seeing the Council,” he said, as though this were his own wholly new notion.