“Let me go, dammit!”
Now the military man was standing up. “No one gets out of here alive. You’re guilty of something or you wouldn’t be in here.”
“Tell me what country I’m in! Please! They drugged me on the way here.”
“You’re in the shit. Shit Country.” He stamped out, followed by his lackey.
One of the guards clouted Prisoner B over the head again for good measure. Then they frog-marched him out of the room, down the broad corridor, to a room into which they kicked him.
As they turned to leave, he saw the inscription in yellow lettering on the back of their bomber jackets. It read: HOSTILE ACTIVITIES RESEARCH MINISTRY. The words confirmed all his worst fears. Was the kind of brutality to which he was being subjected now incorporated in official government policy? HARM? HARM? Had it really come to this?
Curiously, he tried to exonerate his tormentors. He told himself that it was the so-called terrorists, the Muslim suicide bombers—and their tacit support from the silent Muslim community—which had brought this disgrace on Britain…
A curtain of fear had been drawn over the once moderate and modest island.
He heard a key turn in the lock.
His skull was ringing with pain. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and held his head in his hands.
The ringing continued.
THE BELL HAD RECENTLY been cast. It was supported on the roof of the government Center. It seemed as if everyone on Stygia was making their way to the central square. He, too, was there, going under the name of Fremant. He was weary and broken and the city he came to was gray.
Everyone was mustering in the square, looking expectantly toward the building. A large, bulky man appeared on the balcony and raised his right arm in salute. The crowd roared its acclamation for their leader, Astaroth.
Then spake he. “We were reconstituted before we arrived on Stygia. You know how many light-years we traveled. You know how we travelers became divided into rival sects once we were reconstituted. Those divisions will cease now. This stern planet welcomed us. Indeed, we hope to remain here peacefully, to built a great new civilization, with the support of WAA. But we found the planet overrun by a primitive race, the strange pack of Doglovers.
“Doglovers were the most primitive of any two-legged kind. They built no great buildings, such as this building in which I stand. They built no roads. They had no electronic devices, no mechanical articles, no nothing. They were little better than the hounds that led them about, as the blind are led by guide dogs.
“Who knows what diseases these aliens harbored, unknown to us? With the support and goodwill of distant Earth, of WAA, the Western Armed Alliance, we set about wiping out the Doglovers.
“You were—all of you, of whatever sect—part of that task. One by one our planes and probes were brought down and crashed. We couldn’t replace them. We have reason to believe that hordes of locust-like insects choked their jets. Still we fought on. Today, on this great Day of Victory, I am proud to declare that the Doglovers are destroyed, every one of them.”
The audience raised a cheer.
“Stygia is a human-owned planet at last, despite the teeming insect world.
“This time is a time of austerity. Tomorrow we must set to work to fill the empty spaces with our own kind, to build farms and houses and roads. But today at least let us celebrate our victory. I do not drink. I abjured alcohol long ago. I am a strict WAAbee. But let this day be an exception. There is free drink for you all.”
He raised a clenched fist above his head.
“Drink deep! Be briefly happy! The Doglovers are dead! We humans have crossed the gulfs of space to own, to rule, this Stygian world. We must live austere lives. Austerity must become our faith.”
He ceased speaking, and from a thousand throats a cry of triumph rose into the air.
Later, people were reeling about from the drink, eager for the escape to oblivion it provided. Several fell flat on their faces. So Prisoner B found himself, pinned to the ground.
And his consciousness was drawn back to the squalid floor on which he lay, spread like a starfish, facedown, with the chill, dark, old room imprisoning him, throwing back his gasps like malicious whispering. It was as if Stygia never existed; the roars of triumph had turned into the thudding pulse in his head.
At some time in the day or night, a bread roll and more cabbage soup was passed into his prison box. He ate the soup and faded out.
HE WORKS FOR ASTAROTH. He is a guard. He is one of four men responsible for the great leader’s safety. He is specifically delegated, in addition, to keep watch on Aster, the leader’s woman. It is dark at the center. Aster is melancholy. She does not eat. The circumference of her waist is one-half that of her lord and master, Astaroth. Prisoner B, whose name on Stygia is Fremant, she hates because he serves Astaroth.
Astaroth is a harsh ruler. Many of his eccentricities leave their mark like scars on the city. He creates a currency with notes of four denominations: three stigs, seven stigs, thirteen stigs, and twenty-five stigs. He eats only on odd days. He drinks only water. He banishes all electronic equipment, save only that in the old rusting starship, where research is taking place. He hangs captives, not by the neck, but by an ankle, until they cease struggling and expire.
Astaroth dresses always in black. He is continually meditating. He is a manic-depressive. In starving himself, he starves others.
Fremant is sometimes on duty when Astaroth calls his council together. These arid men, the WAAbees—now the Waabees—have an arid form of belief. The regulations by which the Waabees live include total commitment to the organization; also important are the edicts that there should be no sex before marriage, no private ownership, no fun, no reading, no singing, no bourgeois indulgences such as “kindness” or “understanding”; no affection toward others, including wives. The council was currently debating whether to ban vegetables. Fremant hears but does not hear, for he is just a guard.
Yet sometimes the words of the council get through to him as he stands there, unmoving as a statue. He heard Astaroth declare, “We must be austere on this alien planet or we shall lose our humanity, we shall revert to wild animals. The soil here is poor. Agriculture has yet to prove itself dependable, so we will eat only once a day, at sunset—and then sparingly. We’re human, to be sure, in this world riddled with insects. We brought that quality of humanity from the planet Earth, from which we were reconstituted on shipboard. What we did not bring were all the hard-won organizations, the web of relationships between groups of people and nations. Those organizations we must rebuild, even if we kill people in doing so.”
WHEN ON DUTY, Fremant sleeps at night on a palliasse spread out before the door to Astaroth’s quarters, where Aster also lives. The door is black. Fremant is given a guard’s ration, two meals a day, one meal of fish just before dawn, one meal of meat at sunset. The meat is insect “meat” from the dacoim; the fish has been caught within the hour from the great encompassing sea.
Every day at sunup, Fremant exercises, fighting a comrade or else climbing down a cliff and back up again. He is given one free evening per week. At midday every day, he comes before Astaroth and swears his allegiance—unless it is one of those days when the leader’s mood is so black he shuts himself in an inner room and will see no one.
“He’s not a bad sort of feller. He suffers like the rest of us come off that ship,” said Bellamia, brushing back her unruly locks. “We all got somming wrong with us. It’s how we were made, I reckon…”
Fremant rented a room in Bellamia’s house. Whenever Bellamia spoke, a strange aroma issued from her mouth. She grew the herb salack in a patch by her door and chewed it continually. Her two-room house offered little in the way of comfort. It was situated in Caskeg Square, in the shadow of the Center. Almost everyone who lived on the street worked in the Center.
“It’s the air, the air’s different somehow,” Bellamia complained. “Your lungs feel different.”
“I don’t notice it,” he said, unwilling to enter into conversation with the woman. Bellamia was a well-built woman—and, he realized, not as old as he had at first thought her—but wrapped around with a feeling of isolation.
“Then it’s me,” she said. “I was not properly made. I feel it. Somehow, I feel I am hardly human.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said, not unkindly. After all, she was charging him only half a stig per day for the lodging.
It was generally understood that there was 3 percent more oxygen in the atmosphere than had been the case on distant Earth.
Bellamia kept a green parrot in a cage. When Fremant looked more closely at the creature, it scarcely resembled a bird. It had the compound eyes of an insect, and maxillae instead of a beak. But Bellamia was fond of it in a careless way.
Watching it, he saw the “parrot” did not sing so much as stridulate, rubbing its rear legs briskly together, producing a continuous deep noise, a song much like a cicada’s. Bellamia would hum her own tune to this gentle noise.
Everyone appeared poor in Stygia City. The men lived in threadbare, patched clothes. The poverty extended to their speech patterns. Fremant gradually became aware of how impoverished was their vocabulary. The disintegration on the long space journey had attenuated speech; and the sparse environment of Stygia encouraged no replenishment of words.
“How old is Astaroth?” Fremant asked his landlady.
“He’d be about sixty, give or take a year or two.” She breathed out her aroma.
Fremant was surprised. He had yet to adjust to the Stygian year, which was only 291 Earth days long, and thus only four-fifths of a terrestrial year.
“His old wife, Ameethira, must be seventy, but you never see her about,” said Bellamia. She went tsk tsk, and shook her head gloomily.
At noon, the shadow of a brewery where buskade was brewed passed across Bellamia’s house. Opposite the brewery stood a church, the Church of Cosmonauts. Its doleful bell rang every seventh day. Many penitents met there, to complain and condole.
STYGIA CITY WAS in the temperate zone of the planet. The people who lived under Astaroth’s rule, whose components had traveled from Earth in refrigerated vats, lived in humble dwellings clustered around squares. In these squares, life of a sort continued. At food shops here, music of a sort was heard, issuing from a single instrument; people could eat in the open air. Wandering through one square, in his free evening, Fremant met a woman he greatly liked.
This woman, like all Stygia’s women except for old crones, went hooded and masked when outside her home. Fremant never saw her face. She told him her name was Duskshine. They held hands and he gazed at her fingers, since he could not see her eyes. The fingers were slender, the nails pale and pointed.
Duskshine was slightly built. He was amused by the way she gestured as she spoke, her frail hands fluttering before her as if with a suppressed eloquence of their own. He found it an attractive characteristic.
The courtship went slowly. Fremant was able to spend so little time with Duskshine. The protocol was against love and lovemaking. Also, there were periods when Stygia underwent Dimoffs, as they were called, when a “shawl” of dark matter came between the planet and its sun. This Shawl spread across the sky in hundreds of small rocky fragments, black and forbidding, cutting off light and heat, so that people kept within their homes and said nothing, lying about and waiting for goodness to return to the world.
Following the fashion, Fremant flung himself down on his rug and attempted to sleep. Nightmare filled his sleeping mind. At one moment he seemed to be tramping for hours across a desert. Then he was trying to lick the flesh of a woman who stank from a septic fistula. A gigantic man was attempting to pull him away.
Half-waking, Fremant found himself again dragged to his feet. A hood was tied over his head and he was taken before another interrogator. To be totally deprived of sight was a terror in itself.
“You lived with a whore?” he was asked.
“No.” He was led to a backless chair, terrified. “For Allah’s sake, tell me where I am!”
A kind of chuckle from the interrogator. “You’re far from home, prisoner. You’re in Uzbekistan, well away from EU law…”
“Not Syria?”
“You heard what I said.”
“Spare me. Have pity on me! Please tell me the date and where we are. I—I’m lost. Please! I have personality problems.”
He produced a much-folded letter from a psychiatrist he had visited at the Maudesley Institute which suggested that his sense of isolation, of not knowing where he was, or when, reinforced a dissociative disorder, causing alternative personalities to emerge. A course of treatment was recommended.
The interrogator glanced at the letter, then refolded it and tore it to pieces. He tapped a note into his laptop.
“You’re having a stay in Hotel California, and it’s fucking Christmas!” The questioner then repeated his question. “You lived with a whore?”
“I live with my wife. She is a good woman, not at all a whore.”
“She is a white woman. To marry you, she must be a whore.”
The interrogation chamber held an evil stink, a cocktail of fear, blood, sweat, and malice. There were no windows to open for fresh air. Fresh air represented freedom.
He was struck in the ribs by a club and gave a cry of pain.
“Tell me her name.”
“You must know her name.”
Again a blow to his ribs.
“Name, you bastard.”
“Doris.”
“She was your cover while you planned the destruction of the state.”
“She is my wife, whom I love. I planned no destruction. I lived the life of an ordinary Englishman, except I was Muslim.”
“You shit, you married a decent Englishwoman under false pretenses. Admit it…Fucking admit it!”
“No, no, it’s not true. Doris and I love—arrrhh! Oh!”
The blow landed across his spine. One of the guards brought up his club and, jerking Prisoner B’s head back, pressed the club against his windpipe, so that he could scarcely breathe. Blood surged before his eyes in the darkness of his hood. He scarcely heard what the interrogator was saying.
“You made the bitch turn Muslim, didn’t you?”
“It was”—he could hardly speak—“voluntary.”
“Your whore hates you. She says you met with members of Hamas when you were in the mosque at Qem.”
“No, no, not true…”
“Oh yes, it fucking well is true. Listen!”
The interrogator was playing back a recording. Prisoner B heard his wife’s cries of pain. She begged them not to apply the burning electric currents again, not there… Then she screamed again. In a faint voice, she said the words, I hate Paul. She was prompted, “And he met with members of Hamas?”…Oh, yes, yes, she said. She was in tears now. He met with members of Hamas. “Where did this take place? It was in the mosque at Qem and elsewhere.”…Oh, all right, it was in the mosque at Qem. “And elsewhere, you cow!” Yes, okay, and elsewhere. Oh, Paul, I’m so sorry…Owwww…Not again, please…
Her cries of pain were switched off. Amid his dismay he thought, She could not help betraying me. The pain was too much for her. I understand, Doris, poor sweet darling. I do understand. He tried to believe the recording was a fake. He did not think the voice was his wife’s. All was uncertain.
“You can stay here and think about it, you little fucker.”
The guards strapped him to the chair, with ties around his ankles and chest, securing him tightly until every breath was a labor. He heard the interrogator walk off. The guards remained. Although they were silent, he felt their presence. One of them rubbed the stubble on his cheek, the other scratched his balls.
Prisoner B waited, trembling with fear in anticipation of the next punishment, although little could be worse than listening to his wife in pain. The knowledge that they were torturing Doris as well as him was unbearable, a po
ison to the system. He thought what a little worm he was. Time passed. He could not estimate how much.
His grip on himself had loosened. He had entered a new region, where things were probably not what they seemed, where distinctions between day and night had been lost. No longer were there normal patterns of meals. Wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, all had been terminally disheveled.
His head throbbed noisily. Gradually, pressure in his bladder increased. He tried to deflect all thought of the need to urinate. Perhaps they intended that he should piss himself, thus adding to his degradation.
Blackness inside the hood was complete. It was hard to breathe. He feared a heart attack.
It was a relief when a guard grabbed his arm, saying, “All right, get up.”
As the straps were released and he struggled to his feet, he gasped, “I need the toilet, please.”
He knew it was a mistake. Something like a chuckle in the man’s voice sounded as he said, “You’ll have to wait a bit…”
They stood him against a wall. He was still in the interrogation room. His hood was removed. He gasped in the fresher air, feeling his face drip sweat. The faces of the guards were familiar. One, the taller of the two, with odd, reddened cheeks standing out like buns and a nose little more than a blob; the other, younger, with a long, dim, sallow face, expressionless, with narrow dark eyes.
Prisoner B felt that the older of the two was not sadistic, merely doing his job within the cruel machine of interrogation and the dictates of the old CIA “Kubark Manual.” He supposed this man was English. With the other, it was hard to tell.
He addressed the older man, as possibly the less cruel of the two.
“Oh, please, the toilet. I’m bursting.”
“Hang on.”
“I’m bursting. Is this Guantánamo? Are we in Guantánamo?”
The younger guard, the one with the sallow face, punched him in the stomach.
“Don’ ask questions.”
They led him into the corridor. Such was his agony, he could not stop himself. Rather than wet himself, he wrenched out his penis and urinated in a burst against the wall. The liquid poured from him, splashing the guards. The relief was so immense, he scarcely felt their blows, until a fist, catching him behind the ear, sent him reeling.
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