Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  “Yes.”

  “I feel it! I feel it too!” Lou made a good show of doing so. “It’s not the people themselves, but what they are that we have to hold onto. Remember, Rich, this is just a program of containment. What we get here are the worst, Rich, the very worst—the sex criminals, the transsexuals, the media freaks. So what you have to ask yourself, Rich, is this: what was Royce doing on that train?”

  “Same thing I was. He got pulled in by mistake.”

  Lou looked at me with a kind of blank pity. Then he looked down at the ground. “There are no mistakes, Rich. They’ve got the police files.”

  “Then what was I doing on the train?”

  Lou looked back up at me and sighed. “I think you probably got some of the women very angry with you. There’s a lot of infighting, particularly where gay men fit in. I don’t like it. It’s why I got you out. It may be something similar with Royce.”

  “On the train because I disagreed with them?” Everything felt weak, my knees, my stomach.

  “It’s possible, only possible. This is a revolution, Rich. Things are pretty fluid.”

  “Oh God, Lou, what’s happening?”

  “You see why we have to be careful? People have been burned in this station, Rich. Not lately, because I’ve been in charge. And I intend to stay in charge. Look.”

  Lou took me in his arms. “This must be really terrible for you, I know. All of us were really happy for you, when you and Royce started. But we have to protect ourselves. Now let’s just go back in, and ask Royce who and what he is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just ask him. In front of the others. What he was. And not take no for an answer.” He was stroking my hair.

  “He’ll hate me if I do that!” I tried to push him away. He grabbed hold of my hair, and pulled it, smiling, almost as if he were still being sexy and affectionate.

  “Then he’ll just have to get over that kind of mentality. What has he got to hide if he needs privacy? Come on, Rich. Let’s just get it over with.” He pulled me back, into the waiting room.

  Royce took one look at us together as we came in, and his face went still, as if to say, “Uh-huh. This is coming now, is it?” His eyes looked hard into mine, and said, “Are you going to put up with it?” I was ashamed. I was powerless.

  “Rich has a confession to make,” said Lou, a friendly hand still on the back of my neck. “Don’t you, Rich?”

  They all seemed to sit up and close in, an inquisition, and I stood there thinking, Dear God, what do I do? What do I do?

  “Rich,” Lou reminded me. “We have to go through this. We need to talk this through.”

  Royce sat there, on our bed, reclining, waiting.

  Well, I had lied. “I don’t really know who Royce is. We weren’t lovers before. We are lovers now.”

  “But you don’t know what he was doing, or who he was, do you, Rich?”

  I just shook my head.

  “Don’t you want to know that, Rich? Don’t you want to know who your lover was? Doesn’t it seem strange to you that he’s never told you?”

  “No,” I replied. “We all did what we had to do before the revolution. What we did back then is not who we are.” See, I wanted to say to Royce, I’m fighting, see I’m fighting.

  “But there are different ways of knuckling under, aren’t there, Rich? You taught history. You showed people where the old system had gone wrong. You were a good, gay man.”

  Royce stood up, abruptly, and said, “I was a prison guard.”

  The room went cold and Lou’s eyes gleamed.

  “And there are different ways of being a prison guard. It was a detention center for juveniles, young guys who might have had a chance. Not surprisingly, most of them were black. I don’t suppose you know what happens to black juvenile prisoners now, do you? I’d like to know.”

  “Their records are looked at,” said Lou. “So. You were a gay prison guard in charge of young men.”

  “Is that so impossible?”

  “So, you were a closet case for a start.”

  “No. I told my immediate superior.”

  “Immediate superior. You went along with the hierarchy. Patriarchy, I should say. Did you have a good time with the boys?”

  “This camp is a hierarchy, in case you hadn’t noticed. And no, I kept my hands off the boys. I was there to help them, not make things worse.”

  “Helping them to be gay would be worse?” Every word was a trap door that could fall open. The latch was hatred. “Did you ever beat one of the boys up? Did you deal dope on the side?”

  Royce was still for a moment, his eyes narrow. Then he spoke.

  “About four years ago, me and the kids put on a show. We put on a show for the girls’ center. The girls came in a bus, and they’d all put their hair in ringlets, and they walked into the gym with too much make-up on, holding each other’s hands, clutching each other’s forearms, like this, because they were so nervous. And the kids, the boys, they’d been rehearsing, oh, for weeks. They’d built and painted a set. It was a street, with lights in the windows, and a big yellow moon. There was this one kid, Jonesy. Jonesy kept sticking his head through the curtain before we started. ‘Hey everybody! I’m a star!’”

  Royce said it again, softly. “Hey everybody, I’m a star. And I had to yell at him, Jonesy, get your ass off that stage. The girls sat on one side of the gym, and the boys on the other, and they smiled and waved and threw things at each other, like gum wrappers. It was all they had.”

  Royce started to cry. He glared at Lou and let the tears slide down his face. “They didn’t have anything else to give each other. The show started and one of the kids did his announcing routine. He’d made a bow tie out of a white paper napkin, and it looked so sharp. And then the music came up and one of the girls just shouted. ‘Oh, they’re going to dance!’ And those girls screamed. They just screamed. The boys did their dance on the stage, no mistaking what those moves meant. The record was ‘It’s a Shame.’”

  His face contorted suddenly, perhaps with anger. “And I had to keep this god-damned aisle between them, the whole time.”

  “So?” said Lou, unmoved.

  “So,” said Royce, and gathered himself in. He wiped the moisture from his face. “So I know a lot about prisons. So, some of those kids are dead now. The boys and the girls wanted each other. That must be an ideological quandary for you, Lou. Here’s a big bad guard stopping people doing what they want, but what they want to do is het-ero-sex-u-ality.” He turned it into a mock dirty word, his eyes round.

  “No problem,” said Lou. “All women are really lesbians.”

  Royce stared at him for a moment. Then he began to laugh.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But the first experience of physical tenderness that any woman has is with her mother.”

  “Gee, I’m sure glad my old aunt Hortensia didn’t know that. She would be surprised. Hey, Alice. Are you a dyke?”

  Lou went pale, and lines of shadow encircled his mouth.

  “Yes,” said Alice, the camera.

  “Well, I’m a faggot, but it doesn’t mean everyone else is.”

  Lou launched himself from the bed, in a fury. He was on his feet, and shouting, flecks of spit propelled from his mouth. “You do not use demeaning language here!” His voice cracked.

  Alice had been working nine hours, and now she was alone, on the night shift. She had been watching, silently, for nine hours. Now, she wanted to talk.

  “I had a girlfriend once who was straight,” she said. “No matter how hard she tried, women just didn’t bring her off. Mind you, that’s better than those lust lesbians. They just want your body. Me, I’m totally dedicated to women, but it’s a political commitment. It’s something I decided. I don’t let my body make my decisions for me.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Royce. “It’s these lust faggots, I can’t stand.” He cast his eyes about him at the Boys, and they chuckled.

  “We
do not use the word ‘dyke’ in this station,” said Lou.

  Royce looked rather sad and affectionate, and shook his head. “Lou. You are such a prig. Not only are you a prig. You are a dumb prig.”

  The floor seemed to open up under my feet with admiration. Only Royce could have said that to Lou. I loved him, even though I did not love myself. The Boys chuckled again, because it was funny, and because it was true, and because it was a little bit of a shock.

  “Alice,” said Lou. “He has just insulted women.”

  “Funny,” said Alice. “I thought he’d just insulted you.”

  Lou looked like he was in the middle of a nightmare; you could see it in his face. “Alice is being very tolerant, Royce. But from now on, you talk to and about the women with respect. If you want to live here with us, there are a few ground rules.”

  “Like what?”

  “No more jokes.”

  Royce was leaning against the bar at the foot of our bed, and he was calm, and his ankles were crossed. He closed his eyes, and smiled. “No more jokes?” he asked, amused.

  “You mess around with the women, you put us all in danger. You keep putting us in danger, you got to go.”

  “Lou,” said Alice. “Can I remind you of something? You don’t decide who goes on the trains. We do.”

  “I understand that, Alice.” He slumped from the shoulders and his breath seeped out of him. He seemed to shrink.

  “Lou,” said Royce. “I think you and I are on the same side?” It was a question.

  “We’d better be,” said Lou.

  “Then you do know why I talk to the women.”

  “Yeah,” said Lou. “You want to show off. You want to be the center of attention. You don’t want to take responsibility for anything.”

  He didn’t understand. Lou was dangerous because he was stupid.

  “I’ve been a prison guard,” said Royce, carefully. “I know what it’s like. You’re trapped, even worse than the prisoners.”

  “So?” He was going to make Royce say it, in front of a camera. He was going to make him say that he was talking to the Grils so that they would find it hard to kill us when the time came.

  “I’m talking to the women, so that they’ll get to know us,” said Royce, “and see that there is a place for gay men within the revolution. They can’t know that unless we talk to them. Can they?”

  Bull’s-eye again. That was the only formulation Lou was ever likely to accept.

  “I mean, can they, Lou? I think we’re working with the women on this thing together. There’s no need for silence between us, not if we’re on the same side. OK, so maybe I do it wrong. I don’t want to be the only one who does all the talking. We all should talk to them, Lou, you, me, all of us. And the women should feel that they can talk with us as well.”

  “Oh yeah, I am so bored keeping schtum,” said Alice.

  Lou went still, and he drew in a deep breath. “OK,” he said. “We can proceed on that basis. We all communicate, with each other and with the cameras. But Royce. That means no more withdrawing. No more going off in a corner. No more little heart to hearts on the mound.”

  “I didn’t know that was a problem, Lou. There will be no more of those.”

  “OK, then,” said Lou, murmurous in defeat. Royce strode toward him, both hands outstretched, and took Lou’s hand in both of his.

  “This is really good, Lou. I’m really glad we talked.”

  Lou looked back at him, looking worn and heavy, but he was touched. Big Lou was moved, as well, and he gave a slightly forlorn flicker of a smile.

  So Royce became head of the Station.

  He gave me a friendly little nod, and moved his things away from our bed. He slept in Tom’s; Tom never did. It didn’t matter, because I still had my little corner of goodness, even if we didn’t talk. Royce was still there, telling jokes. I was happy with that because I knew that I had deserted him before he had deserted me; and I understood that I was to be the visible victory he gave to Lou. None of that mattered. Royce had survived. I didn’t cry the first night alone; I stopped myself. I didn’t want the Boys to hear.

  Things started to change. The cameras stopped looking at us on the john. We could see them turn and look away. Then one morning, they were just hanging, dead.

  “Hey, Rich!” Harry called me. It was me and Harry, unloading the food cart, as winter finally came. Harry was hopping up and down in front of the camera. He leapt up and tapped it, and the warm-up light did not even go on.

  “They’ve turned it off, Rich! The camera’s off. It’s dead!”

  He grabbed my arms, and spun me around, and started doing a little dance, and I started to hoot with laughter along with him. It was like someone had handed you back part of your pride. It was like we were human enough to be accorded that again.

  “Hey Royce, the camera in the john’s off!” shouted Harry, as we burst through the canteen doors with the trolley.

  “Maybe they’re just broken,” said Gary, who was still loyal to Lou.

  “Naw, man, they’d be telling us to fix it by now. They’ve turned it off!”

  “That so, Alice?” Royce asked the camera in the canteen.

  “Oh. Yeah,” said Alice. Odd how a mechanical voice could sound so much more personal than a real one, closer somehow, as if in the middle of your ear.

  “Thanks, Alice.”

  “’S OK,” said Alice, embarrassed. “We explained it to the Wigs. We told them it was like pornography, you know, demeaning to us. They bought it. Believe me, you guys are not a lovely sight first thing in the morning.”

  I could see Royce go all alert at that word “Wig,” like an animal raising its ears. He didn’t mention the Wigs again until later that afternoon.

  “Alice, is our talking ever a problem for you?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Well, if one of the Wigs walked in…”

  Alice kind of laughed. “Huh. They don’t get down this far. What do you know about them, anyhow?”

  “Nothing. Who are they?”

  “Mind your own business. The people who run things.”

  “Well if someone does show up and you want us to shut up, just sneeze, and we’ll stop talking.”

  “Sneeze?”

  “Well, you could always come right out and say cool it guys, there’s someone here.”

  “Hey Scarlett,” said Alice. “Can you sneeze?”

  “Ach-ooo,” said Miss Scarlett, delicately.

  “Just testing, guys,” said Alice.

  Big Lou hung around, trying to smile, trying to look like somehow all this was going on under his auspices. Nobody was paying attention.

  The next day, the train didn’t show.

  It was very cold, and we stood on the platform, thumping our feet, as the day grew more sparkling, and the shadows shorter.

  “Hey, Butch, what’s up?” Royce asked.

  “I’ll check, OK?” said the camera. There was a long silence.

  “The train’s broken down. It’s in a siding. It’ll be a while yet. You might as well go back in, have the day off.”

  That’s how it would begin, of course. No train today, fellas, sorry. No need for you, fellas, not today, not ever, and with what you know, can you blame us? What are ten more bodies to us?

  Trains did break down, of course. It had happened before. We’d had a holiday then, too, and the long drunken afternoon became a long drunken day.

  “Well let’s have some fun for a change,” said Lou. “Charlie, you got any stuff ready? Let’s have a blow-out, man.”

  “Lou,” said Royce, “I was kind of thinking we could get to work on the hot water tank.”

  “Hot water tank?” said Lou. “Are we going to need it, Royce?” There was a horrified silence. “So much for talking. Go on, Charlie, get your booze.”

  Then Lou came for me. “How about a little sex and romance, Rich?” Hand on neck again.

  “No thanks, Lou.”

  “You won’t get it
from him, you know.”

  “That’s my problem. Lou, lay off.”

  “At least I can do it.” Grin.

  “Surprise, surprise,” I said. His face and body were right up against mine, and I turned away. “You can’t get at him through me, you know, Lou. You just can’t do it.”

  Lou relented. He pulled back, but he was still smiling. “You’re right,” he said. “For that, he’d have to like you. Sucker.” He flicked the tip of my nose with his fingers, and walked away.

  I went and sat down beside Royce. I needed him to make everything seem normal and ordinary. He was leaning on his elbows, plucking at the grass. “Hi,” I said. It was the first time we’d spoken since the inquisition.

  “Hi,” he said, affectionate and distant.

  “Royce, what do you think’s going to happen?”

  “The train will come in tomorrow,” he said.

  “I hate it when it comes in,” I said, my breath rattling out of me in a kind of chuckle, “and I hate it when it doesn’t. I just hate it. Royce, do you think we could go to work on the tank?”

  He considered the implications. “OK,” he said. “Charlie? Want to come work with us on the tank?”

  Charlie was plump with a gray beard, and had a degree in engineering, a coffee tin and a copper coil. He was a sort of Santa Claus of the booze. “Not today,” he said, cheerily. “I made all of this, I might as well get to drink some of it myself.” It was clear and greasy-looking and came in white plastic screw-top bottles.

  Charlie had sacrificed one of the showers to plumb in a hot water tank. We’d hammered the tank together out of an old train door. It was more like a basin, really, balanced in the loft of the Station. There were cameras there, too.

  Royce sat looking helplessly at an electric hot plate purloined from the kitchen stove. We’d pushed wiring through from the floor below. “Charlie should be here,” he said.

  “I really love you, Royce.”

  He went very still for a moment. “I know,” he said. “Rich, don’t be scared. You’re afraid all the time.”

  “I know,” I said, and felt my hand tremble as I ran it across my forehead.