Some two hundred men and women, Kael estimated, had managed to break through into defended territory and now clustered noisily twenty meters from the hastily reactivated barrier.
To their left the Teleport lobby lay exposed, protected only by a thin line of police. Van and riot skites were drawn up at the top end of the corral; others hovered overhead, hard-edged clouds of death.
A tight-lipped man in civilian clothes up ahead quickly assembled a detachment to contain and expel the infiltrators, slapping all the while a pair of leather gloves, monotonously, into the palm of one hand.
A voice cried hoarsely: “Forward to the Teleport!”
No one moved.
The closing semi-circle of police encountered the infiltrators. Commandos were being held in reserve. A few people lay down. A cop trod on one outstretched hand. Voices yelped in outrage, and whistles blew.
A scuffle broke out at the edge; half a dozen conscript cops plunged in, dragging a child of Con’s age into the open. The boy struggled like a newly landed fish, twisting and kicking in the net of black arms. His jacket rode up over his head, and ripped. The white skin of his back and midriff increased his resemblance to a struggling fish. A police van skimmed quickly towards the tussle. From behind the force-fields, the main group’s angry jeers filled the square.
“Murderers!”
“Cretinous slaves!”
“Pick on someone your own size, why don’t yer?”
The cops tried to stuff the boy into the open hold of the van; he caught hold of the roof and held himself out. A commando stepped forward and delicately laid the edge of his goose on the boy’s wrist. The boy let go with a jerk and crashed into the van. First arrest of the night.
Kael listened to the hoots of the crowd on the far side of the barrier. The infiltrators remained silent, watching the circle of police. Kael looked at the cops’ faces: the hate and joy of body-to-body violence was starting to bring out a nervous arrogance. He looked at his companions: alight with the holy flame of battle. He felt the utter weariness of the prophet in his stomach.
On the vulnerable edge of the herded group, Theri was confronting a solid wall of advancing force-fields. She stood firm, obstinate. The field tumbled her, fragmented into whipping web, and Theri was snatched from the increasing anger of the crowd.
Lasers swung onto the scene and Kael watched his woman being levitated to a waiting van, her face—white in the blazing column of light—mouthing unheard words of scorn. Second arrest of the night.
Why are they letting it go on like this? The bastards could tie us all up in tanglefields any time they feel like it.
Kael turned and with deliberate steps crossed the space between the infiltrators and the energy walls, confronting the line of cops.
“I want to pass through.”
“That’s what you think.”
Kael wondered if the cop were as old as some of the kids in pre-graduate. An apprentice from a Cop Clan by the look of him, nervous and very pale. The blinding monochrome from the hotel smashed over Kael’s shoulders, making the cop blink. Am auditory bug fell from the darkness like an inquisitive bird and hovered above their heads, deploying its sensors.
“You realize we are now on realtime holovision?”
An older cop took charge:
“What’s yer code?”
Kael regarded him politely.
“Are you arresting me for a specific offence? Peaceful assembly is not a crime, and you have not seen me act violently, I think.”
“Give me yer library I said.”
The bug spun in the shocking light: not a bird, a small spider hanging from an invisible thread. Kael shrugged and handed over his library. The senior cop pulsed his code to a van library and handed it back.
“Let him through.”
Kael passed through the line of police and the dull red bars of the field went off for an instant as he crossed the barricade. The shaft of light swung away to a more dynamic confrontation somewhere else in the field of play. Something brutal struck Kael in the back, spun him on his knees in the crowd.
After a dazed interval he got back to his feet; his hands were slimy. A head was outlined against the police van’s translucent shield, but glare and distance made it impossible to tell if it were Theri or the young boy. The expeditionary force was being driven back at a steady rate toward the place he’d just crossed. Cyborg quirts added a measure of agony to the pushing control fields.
Two more arrests were made. No nauseating aerosols, sonics, broadband sensory disrupters, certainly no lethal lasers. This was nonchalant terror. Infants getting a touch of approved negative reinforcement.
The retreating anarchists and their sympathizers reached the barriers. Red bars faded to let them through. The crowd around Kael surged forward involuntarily into the gap and met greater pressure from the herded, exiting infiltrators.
A man’s body, floppy in unconsciousness, was forced into the air like driftwood. There was blood on the face of a girl. All cyborgs had their gooses out: skinny egg-plants, pain, for the infliction of.
Kael allowed himself to be pushed around in the crowd until the last radical was expelled from the cops’ chosen territory.
Mocking lights came on in the Teleport lobby, and blobby faces peered out into the pouring night. The pressures of the crowd eased and Kael watched passively while the van containing Theri and the others rose into the air. Its lift-coil pulsed obscenely.
§
Ben wandered aimlessly through the milling crowd. Two children passed him, walking away hand in hand from the contained riot. The boy bent down and picked up a sodden Chomsky flag which he hung reverently over his shoulder.
A cruising police skite dropped in front of the couple, blocking their path. Three cops got out, ripped the flag from the boy, kneed him in the balls, threw his doubled-up figure into the skite, and got back in. They appeared to be interviewing him in the back with many gesticulations.
The girl stood amid the thinning crowd in an attitude of hysterical amazement. Intensified rain hissed over her in fine, curving sheets. She continued shakily across the square, pawing helplessly at her face.
Ben opened his throat and screamed in rage, running at the slowly levitating cop skite. His boots clanged on metal and plast as he found leverage and hauled himself to its dripping roof.
The square tilted and fell away dizzingly; he grappled himself to the roof sensors and began kicking the skite’s glo-panels into fluorescent shards. Pieces fell into the night like lonely fireflies.
From the media emplacements a shaft of dazzling laser light swept his jerking, spread-eagled form as the skite dropped again toward the sodden earth.
§
A man’s hand fell on Anla’s arm. She crouched and spun swiftly:
“Oh shit, Jard, I thought you were the fuzz. I’m surprised to see you here. Come to make a parliamentary petition?”
“They’ve saturated the holly with this thing. I’m an observer for the Committee on Violations of Citizen Rights.”
“Observed any juicy violations?”
“Very funny, Anla, it’s impossible.”
“Really? What a shame the cops don’t wear luminous placards with their codes in big Eezy-Reed numerals.”
“They’ve jammed my library and smashed two of our pickups.”
“It’s a nasty scene, Jard.”
“It’s not only the cops either.”
“No discipline in the ranks?”
“Half these people are just babies, they’ve never been Millioned to a frontier world, never known anything but urban affluence. Class analysis, Anla. It’s easy to yell at the cops, but the police and the militia are the ones who are most likely to be sent off to die if our masters decide to double the troops on Kurd, say. This lot haven’t a clue who the real enemy is.”
“But it was different when the cops attacked the anarchists on Trantor?”
“That was a structured revolution, not an emotional outburst.”
“A really
good point, Jard; let’s just give thanks that this sort of miscalculation won’t happen on Chomsky, at any rate.”
Jard started to reply, but the crowd gave a sudden surge and the two clones were pushed clumsily backwards.
A man darted through the crowd, keeping his head down and ducking from side to side, almost swimming. It was futile: the side of his face glowed where a cop had printed him with a signal emitter. He passed quickly between Anla and Jard and disappeared, if only from sight, into the closing ranks. Two commandos shouldered their way inexorably after him, barging through the obstructing mass of people. A woman stood insanely obstinate in their path, turning her back against their onslaught. One of the cyborgs stopped and arrested her. He dragged her off backwards while his colleague continued his juggernaut pursuit.
The woman struggled, kicking out with her feet; the crowd booed; Jard began to follow them as rapidly as the crowd would allow. The augmented trooper vaulted the main crush and dragged the woman across a relatively open space to a waiting van.
Jard caught up and started to speak to him. There was no response. Jard put a hesitant, restraining hand on the massive steel arm. The commando whirled, swearing, and lashed out with one powered arm, striking Jard on the chest.
Anla saw death in Jard’s white face as he fell back, his hand spread against his neat bureaucrat-style coat. He started to sink to his knees.
Desperate and efficient, Anla parted the crowd with her shoulders, the breath pent in her lungs.
Three cops from the waiting van beat her to him: two took an arm apiece while the third brought up the rear, a hand clutching Jard’s ruff. He was loaded quickly into the hold of the van, his head turning as the locking fields caught him. The blood was draining back into his face. He was still trying to say something calm and rational to the arresting cops.
Anla stopped. She took a number of deep breaths and watched the van lift away. Somewhere a siren was wailing.
§
Catsize the Red Guard stood in the icy streets of St Petersburg.
Behind the bright windows of the Winter Palace the besieged provisional government sat and doodled, dispatching vain telegraph messages into the rising fury. Kerensky gone, the day of the counterrevolutionary was all but spent. All power to the Soviets!
The workers and poor peasants were on the march. From the endless steppes of East Bolte, from the frozen rivers of Bjelke, from the wolf-haunted forests of El Cheapo Street on Newstralia, from the dark factories and mills of a billion worlds, the downtrodden, oppressed and starving masses were rising.
Behind his back the yunkers and Cossacks tore at the people, arrogant and superseded by history, the light taking their bloody sabers.
A Cossack thrust into the crowd, knocking a buxom peasant girl to the ground. The masses redoubled their struggles, anger in their rough proletarian cries. An extraordinarily thin woman fell against the Red Guard, distraught and choking with dialectical fervor. The chatter of machine-gun fire split the air and mingled the fumes of spent powder with the snow-laden air.
The gaunt woman clutched at the sturdy Red Guard beside her, rain running down her face, strands of gray hair lying limp across the lines of her forehead. Catsize felt his heart lurch. She was old, physiologically old.
“It is happening all over...they took away our ruth and locked us in and let us die...forty years, eating from our own filth...plantation-overseers with the dogs—”
“Huh? Madam, you’re on the wrong set.”
The anti-personnel whine of a police skite sounded briefly some distance overhead. Even at that remove Catsize felt his brain cringe in his skull. The whine cut off abruptly. Wrong switch.
A youth nursing a dangling arm made his way gingerly through the crowd toward the empty spaces of the public dropspace. The woman muttered to herself in a language Catsize could not understand. She turned to him again:
“The wire and the sky...slavemasters...my husbands and my children...they took the children separately...all over again.”
Christ on crutches, this woman must be nearly as old as me. Outright slavery was abolished in the twenty-third century.
Catsize put a soaking arm around the woman’s shoulders; she was exactly his height. He led her trembling away, picking the shortest possible route through the fragmented groups. Her shoulders were incredibly thin under his arm.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s not happening again. There aren’t any plantations now. This is Victoria. It’s just a lot of kids having a night out. Worse things happen at the football. It can’t happen here.”
Catsize took his charge away from the melee, into the black reaches of the night. The woman became quieter, but she shivered every few seconds and continued to mutter to herself.
“Where do you live?”
The woman moaned.
“Hey! Where do you live?”
“In the slaves’ dome, by the north gate.”
“Now, mother. Where do you live now?”
The woman shook her head, muttering again.
He sized her up. “Do you live in Gandhi?”
The name registered:
“Yes, it is in the Gandhi ziggurat that I live.”
“Good, it’s not far, we can walk if we have to but I’ll try for a hitch.”
He freed one hand and pulled out his library. No, commuter corridors would have been diverted—try a public cab. He held her tight against him, waiting patiently.
Eventually, one of the bright bubbles fell and hovered beside them. The autonomics were none too happy at having the cab’s seats dripped on, but grudgingly took them away.
§
Anla emerged from the masses, water streaming down her face.
“The whole bloody thing’s turned to chaos, there’s not a hope of getting to the Teleport now. They’ve forgotten Chomsky, it’s just turned into an anti-cop festival.”
“What did you expect, Anla, a full-scale autonomist uprising?”
“Don’t be dull, Kael. Where’s Theri?”
“Arrested.”
“So’s Ben. Silly bugger went for a ride on the roof of a cop skite. They’ve got Jard too.”
“I know.” Kael looked up from the screen of his library. “I’ve got a list of those arrested, but it doesn’t show the charges. And I can’t raise Theri.”
“Of course you can’t, the first thing they do is take your library away. I wonder what they’ll charge Jard with.”
“Assault and battery probably.”
“That’ll fix the old loon—he came here asking to be violated. Let’s go, the rain’s getting worse and the action boring.”
“Where to?”
“Home, of course, unless you can think of anywhere better.”
Kael followed, as Anla walked quickly through the crowd, wishing he shared her unconcern. They cleared the last tatters of the exhausted riot; Anla lifted an authoritative arm, bleep in hand, commanding one of a bunch of low-hovering public cabs to stop. One did, immediately.
§
In the steamed-up cabin, Kael punched the codes of a dozen police stations. None of the autonomic reply circuits offered any additional information. The pointlessness of the exercise irritated Anla, it was like a nervous tic.
“Will you put that thing away?”
“There must be something we can do.”
“Look, Kael, your sweet little Theri has got herself arrested along with ten dozen others. A night in the cells, that’s all, won’t do her any harm, and even if we did find out precisely where they’re being held their cases probably won’t be heard till three in the morning. And if it’s any consolation to you, they’re supposed to be allowed one call, so she’ll reach you wherever you are. Stop clucking like an anxious parent.”
To her exasperation, he just slumped in the corner of the cab. Anla roughly took his hand. They flew, unspeaking, through the dreary, rain-filled night to the Griffith dwelling. Looking sideways at Kael she felt a strong desire to hit him over the head with someth
ing solid, but found him sexy, even in the depths of his doleful undramatic depression—like a half-drowned Greek god playing Hamlet.
§
Toasting his bare toes, Kael gloomily watched the spot-heater’s glowing plasma. Anla brought him coffee laced with buzz-dust.
She had changed, he saw, into a forest green jump-suit with a silver belt. She sat on the hand-woven rug beside him and started to dry her hair, leaning forward and letting it hang in a heavy black veil over her face. Drops of water from her brush hissed into the magnetic field.
“Look, a night of detention will do her nothing but good.”
“She’s probably being roughed up by a lot of thuggy fuzz.”
“Balls. She’s probably singing jolly songs of sedition with her cell-mates.” After a moment Anla added, “Anyway, it’s what she wanted. If she hadn’t wanted to get arrested she needn’t have, and if you’d wanted to be with her you could have got yourself arrested as well.”
“Not out here in the dominions, Anla, they segregate the sexes.”
Anla put her hand to Kael’s face, her long, cool fingers blotting out the plasma glare. He held her to himself, his hands stroking her back and neck, the drying mass of her hair against his cheek. Oh hold me, Anla petal. Anla laughed, the warmth of her body hard against Kael. She kissed him with a firm insistent mouth, seeking his tongue with hers. Anla, Anla, I can’t fuck you now, not with any joy or love, don’t try and make me. Unhurried and well-versed, Anla found his prick. She held her head back, her eyes on his with a mocking need. Kael resisted.
“Charioteers, Kael, you’re not being all faithful to Theri, are you?”
“Yes, in a way, and to Ben.”
“Bloody hell.”
“He’s my friend and it hurts him when you screw around.”
“Your trouble, Sir Pureheart, is that basically you’re scared, scared as a general policy. Where’s your autonomist affirmation?”
“Rhubarb to you, kid.”
“Well yes, Socrates, deep inside I’ve no doubt you’re more aggressive than the lot of us, you just repress it more effectively. What sort of fantasies do you have, Kael?”
“I trust this excellent bit of therapy is charged to Medbank.”
Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel Page 19