by Wren, M. K.
“Damn it,” Ben interjected, “you have no reason to assume they’re dead.”
“Ben. don’t bother,” Erica put in. “We may as well get to the real purpose of this meeting.”
Ussher eyed her suspiciously, then nodded. “Yes, you’re quite right, Dr. Radek. It’s been fifteen days since Dr. Riis’s arrest, and the Phoenix and the Council have been without a—a director. In the interests of—”
“In the interests of saving time,” Erica said, “I’ll make the nomination and we can get that formality out of the way without further explanation or rhetoric.”
That elicited responses ranging from surprise to chagrin among the other councilors, and Ussher’s face went red.
“Doctor Radek—”
“Predis, you’ve already assumed Andreas’s chair and prerogatives. If you want to make it official by a vote, well and good, but I have work to do, and I see no reason to waste time satisfying your ego. For the record, I nominate Predis Ussher as chairman of the Council.” She paused, then added, “Interim chairman, of course, until Andreas returns.”
He glared at her, then said caustically, “Thank you, Dr. Radek. A nomination for chairman of the Council—”
“Interim chairman,” Erica reminded him.
“Interim chairman,” he amended, sending her a scathing glance, “has been made. Are there any other nominations?” Silence answered that, and he went on, “Very well, we will now hear the votes.”
Erica leaned back, and Ben caught her eye, a hint of a smile curving his lips. She waited her turn as the votes were cast. Ussher would have a majority, but it wouldn’t be unanimous. The fact that she’d nominated him didn’t obligate her to vote for him.
The final count was five in favor, two opposed.
When the last vote was tallied, Ussher looked at her, and his message needed no words. Her time would come. He didn’t yet have enough support among the members to risk an open confrontation, but the day would come when he’d be strong enough to dispose of her and Ben, and anyone loyal to them or to Andreas and Alex, without a qualm.
Not yet, she reminded herself. That day hadn’t come yet.
8.
It was the coughing that wakened him again. He came out of a dream of a place with trees whose long, narrow leaves rustled in a cold wind. He wondered if it were a place he’d ever seen.
He turned on the bare ledge that served as a bed, his body heaving. Sometimes the coughing ended in unconsciousness lately, but it didn’t come now. The spasms subsided, and he pulled himself up into a sitting position, curling in the corner where the bed-ledge met the walls. The loose shirt and trousers were soaked with the sweat of his fever and added to the chill that set his teeth chattering.
The cell was probably cold; they kept it cold. He knew that, just as he knew they were letting him die, and he wondered how he knew, how he knew so many things about this place, and yet there were so many things he didn’t know.
He didn’t know his own name.
He didn’t know what he looked like, how old he was, where he had lived, if he’d had family or wife or children. He didn’t even know if he were guilty of the things they accused him of: subversive activities, destruction of Concord property, homicide, piracy, treason.
It might be true. But he didn’t know. He wouldn’t recognize his own face in a mirror.
He felt the passage of every breath as a searing ache. If he didn’t breathe deeply, there was less pain. He had learned to take slow, shallow breaths, learned to keep his body still so it wouldn’t demand more air.
The food-tray slot by the door was empty. He noted that only because it was a vague measure of time; the food was of no interest to him. He knew, in the intuitive manner in which he understood anything here, that the food trays didn’t appear at regular intervals. Prisoners were denied a measure of time that precise; it was part of the reduction process. But when he’d last fallen asleep a full tray had been in the slot. He knew some span of time beyond twenty to thirty minutes had passed. It took that long for the tray and utensils to disintegrate into a fine powder to be sucked up into the slot with any food remains. But even that time span was an estimate. All time was an estimate here.
He stared up at the glowing white ceiling. The light never faded, never changed. The whole cubicle was white; no breaks in the walls, no fixtures that weren’t necessary. He wondered sometimes if he’d been born into this cell.
His pulse quickened. A sound. The beat of booted feet and the soft slap of naked ones.
His gaze shifted down, blurred and unfocused, until he was looking straight ahead to the open door, the door that seemed open. The faint shimmer of a shock screen made that empty space as impenetrable as tensteel.
The booted cadence induced a sudden tension in every muscle and a demand for oxygen. He closed his eyes, pulling for air, listening to the footsteps fading. They weren’t coming for him; the slap of those bare feet told him that. They already had their victim.
There was little sound here; they left almost nothing for the senses to fix on. But they left the sound of boots, and every time he heard it, he cringed inwardly. That was also part of the reduction process.
He’d learned to listen for the sound of boots after the first interrogation. The lesson was quickly learned. And if they stopped outside his door, those black-uniformed, faceless, shadow-men, the terror began in earnest. It was a ritual, and that was purposeful, too. The victim knew exactly what to dread.
There were always two of them, and all these men were so nearly alike in physical conformation that, with the face-screens and uniforms, it was impossible to differentiate them except by voice. And they spoke few words.
They gave the order to stand and strip. Two words. Initially, it had taken more, but their charged lashes and gloves were compelling. Resistance was inevitably agonizing and futile. Even unconsciousness only delayed the ritual; it never stopped it. Finally, obedience became reflexive.
Everything in the ritual had its purpose. Nakedness added to vulnerability, and cold added to muscular tension, and both made the pulsed electrodes more effective. And the long walks down the white, bleached corridors served to heighten dread and in their labyrinthine windings to disorient the victim spatially. The goal of those passages was always the same: the interrogation room. There were many of them. That was something he knew. But they were all identical; for the prisoner, there was only one.
An empty dome; a hemisphere of satiny metal with no seam, no slightest imperfection for the eye to focus on. Voices echoed, space became equivocal, and the metal was always cold.
There was ritual here, too. It began when the guards delivered the victim into the hands of the men uniformed in white; all white, even to their boots and gloves. Except for the dark shadows of their face-screens. The psychocontrollers. Their part in the ritual began with the preparation of the victim for the inquisition.
The victim might struggle at this point, but again it was futile. He was usually laid on his back, flat on the chill floor, limbs spread; the vulnerability quotient was enhanced by the position. The shock cuffs next on wrists and ankles. Sensitive mechanisms; the flexing of a muscle would activate them. Then the electrodes were attached to his body with purposeful deliberation to allow him time to anticipate the pain each would inflict. They could be activated individually or in combination. The victim could not anticipate the amount or source of pain at any given time once the interrogation began.
But not yet. The preparatory ritual continued with the insertion of needles trailing fine tubes—he never saw the other end of the tubes or knew where they came from—into the veins inside his elbows, his thighs, sometimes even into the jugular. Each was strapped in place ready to mete out inhibition-reducing or hallucinogenic drugs on remote-controlled command.
Then the sensitizing injection, always administered with such skill t
hat he never felt the injection itself, only a few seconds later the quivering sensation of having been flayed, every nerve exposed and raw to the slightest stimulus. It was at this point that the white-garbed acolytes left him, and the door closed behind them with a reverberating clang, leaving no hint of a seam in the flawless dome, nothing to suggest it had ever existed. The sound had the finality of the closing seal of a tomb.
They left him alone, splayed on the cold floor, the electronic leeches and the needle-fanged vipers poised on his shivering flesh; left him alone to stare up into the dimensionless dome, waiting. The controls, the controllers, even the questioners were outside. The victim was denied any focus for resentment and hatred; such emotions tended to reinforce resistance.
Then the interrogation began. The questions echoed, sourceless, emotionless, incessant, interminable. The electrodes came into play now in constantly varying combinations and intensities, with the drugs to add mental agonies to the physical agonies. It was a calculated assault on the mind designed to reduce the victim to total malleability, to something less than human. There was no hint of sadism. The questioning voices never displayed anger, impatience, or contempt, and that was the ultimate contempt. He existed in a limbo of pain and terror where there was no point of reference.
Finally, his only hold on sanity was to assign himself a task, or rather a challenge. And he wondered why he did it. What made him resist, made him want to hold on to his sanity?
But he set the challenge for himself every time. It was a grim game he played against an opponent as nameless and insubstantial as himself. The object of the game was to endure an entire interrogation session without screaming.
He never won the game.
And the sardonic irony in the whole ritual was that he didn’t know the answers to the questions. If he did, he had no doubt that sooner or later they’d have them from him. But he didn’t know the answers.
His eyes came open and he shuddered, staring at the white walls. Then his breath came out in a long, rattling sigh. He’d been dreaming.
He was hot again, pulse pounding under his burning skin. His head rolled back against the wall, his eyes closed. Sleep had been impossible when he first came here, but with the illness he moved in and out of it easily. Not a restful sleep, but better than wakefulness, except when he was assaulted by those terrifying, meaningless nightmares. He wondered if they were born in the drug-induced horrors of the interrogations or out of real memories. Sometimes he woke with the smell of smoke in his nostrils.
His body was that of a young man, and his physical condition was good—at least, it had been when he came here—but there was no comfort in that. It only meant it would take that much longer to die.
And that was the only way out of this place.
PHOENIX MEMFILES: DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES:
BASIC SCHOOL (HS/BS)
SUBFILE: LECTURE, BASIC SCHOOL 7 FEBUAR 3252
GUEST LECTURER: RICHARD LAMB
SUBJECT: POST-DISASTERS HISTORY:
WARS OF CONFEDERATION (2876–2903)
DOC LOC #819/219–1253/1812–1648–723252
Throughout the twenty-seven years of the Wars of Confederation, Lord Patric Eyre Ballarat devoted most of his scant free time to a document he called “The Articles of the PanTerran Empire.” This is the first use of the term “PanTerran,” or of “Terra” instead of “Earth,” but although the “PanTerran” was retained, the planet was generally called by its old name until the extraterrestrial colonization phase in the thirty-first and thirty-second centuries.
Ballarat’s Articles codified minutely the centralized, imperial government so pivotal to his ambitions. At the apex of his power hierarchy was an hereditary emperor, the first of whom was to be elected by a “senate” of Lords, and no doubt he expected to be the one so favored. If it had been put to a vote of all the citizens of the Holy Confederation immediately after Tsane Valstaad’s surrender, Ballarat probably would have been made an emperor, but it’s unlikely the concept of a popular election occurred to him; that was a concept even he would have called radical.
In the wake of Tsane’s surrender, Ballarat returned to Conta Austrail and a hero’s welcome. The celebration of the successful end of the long campaign lasted a full week, and Ballarat obligingly spent it traveling from one city to another to accept personally the public acclaim and answer it with eloquent addresses expressing his gratitude and optimism. Perhaps he forgot that it was the Bonds and Fesh who were doing all the cheering, not the Lords. No doubt they also considered him a hero, and certainly they had ample reason to be grateful to him; he had made them Lords of an entire planet. But it soon became apparent that their gratitude and esteem were not strong enough to induce them to make him their emperor.
Ballarat in his Autobiography displays a poignant surprise at that, which later turned to bitterness. His error, he asserts, was in waiting until after the victory celebrations to assemble the Council and Directorate in order to present his Articles of Empire. He should have done it immediately upon his return to Conta Austrail before the “reactionary” Lords had a chance to rally against him. In actuality, the Lords were rallied long before Tsane’s surrender, and Ballarat’s empire was doomed from the beginning to be rejected by a senate composed of the Holy Confederation’s Lords. He underestimated the inertia of power, the tendency of those in possession of it to retain it. Power can only be wrested from the powerful by the application of greater power, and in that feudal society, virtually all power was concentrated in the hands of the Lords. Ballarat had only one option open to him for the needed greater power—a military coup.
And that would have been entirely feasible. His troops remained solidly loyal to him despite the rigors and heavy casualties of the Sudafrikan campaign, but at this point Ballarat paid for his neglect of the Directorate and particularly of his brother Hugh, who still held the title of VisChairman of the Directorate. At the urging of a coalition of influential conservative Lords, Hugh, on the fifth day after Ballarat’s return to Conta Austrail, ordered the decommissioning of all conscript troops, which constituted nearly half the Holy Confederation’s armed forces. The order could only be overridden by a Directorate majority, and even if Ballarat could have managed that, by the time he learned of the order—he was in Perthhold in the midst of his victory tour—it was too late to attempt it. The conscript soldiers, of course, were all too happy to throw off their uniforms and return to their homes and families, and those stationed in Conta Austrail did so immediately, while garrisons in occupied territories struggled with the problem of manning their posts adequately while the conscripts crowded into every available vessel and airship in a jubilant exodus. Some of the remaining volunteer troops and officers might have been willing to attempt a coup in Ballarat’s behalf, but their numbers were too small, and the decommissioning order created chaos in the ranks of Ballarat’s vaunted military machine.
The crucial moment passed and left Ballarat standing by helplessly. His Articles of Empire were never presented to the Council or Directorate. He wasn’t given an opportunity for that, even if he’d been naive enough at that point to try. He sent Hugh packing to the Home Estate and exercised his prerogatives as Chairman to call the Directorate into session, but at their first meeting he was unanimously voted into the newly created position of Chairman of the Dominions (that is, the conquered territories) Council, and voted out of the Chairmanship of the Directorate.
His successor was the Lord Paul Adalay, once one of his staunchest supporters, and apparently Adalay was chosen as a compromise candidate; Ballarat still had adherents among the Lords. The Directors could have done far worse, and although Ballarat retired to embittered isolation in the House’s Tasman estate and never came to terms with Adalay—or his own brothers, or even his wife and children—Adalay proved a far wiser Chairman than Ballarat ever gave him credit for.
It was Paul Adalay who drafted the Articles
of the PanTerran Confederation (the appellation “Holy” was dropped with its acceptance), which retained many of the centralizing measures in Ballarat’s Articles of Union. The division of power between Houses and Confederation was precisely delineated, and the Houses retained unchallenged authority over their internal affairs, but the Confederation retained the rights of taxation and conscription based on House revenues, and the right to maintain armed forces as well as a civil police. The University system was taken out of the hands of the Church and made a part of the Confederation administration, with a separate medical research and practice division that later developed into Conmed. The Directorate was retained as the governing body of the Confederation, its members elected by a majority of the Council of Lords or—and that ultimately became a fateful alternative—by the Lords of the Directorate itself.
In comparison to the pre-Ballarat Holy Confederation, the PanTerran was highly centralized and a far more stable structure. That stability, as well as its new prosperity and the wider geographical and intellectual horizons opened to it, was a product of Ballarat’s twenty-seven-year campaign, and made possible the further technological advances that opened humankind’s way to the stars.
But Ballarat remained unimpressed. His lifespan of eighty-one years was too short for him to see a man set foot on Luna again after an interregnum of more than a thousand years. He only knew that Patric Eyre Ballarat had conquered a world only to end his years in impotent self-exile, his imperial vision smashed by what he called the “stubborn myopia of niggardly men who hoard personal power at the expense of the future of civilization.”
One wonders what the future of civilization would have been if Ballarat’s vision had been realized, and I can’t share his faith in it. On the other hand, I can share his antipathy for those shortsighted and “niggardly” men. Such men are always with us, of course, and conservatism serves a meaningful purpose in social equations. It’s a stabilizing factor, a check on uncontrolled change. But, like so many things, it can be regarded as “good” only in moderation. It’s unfortunate that conservative factors have throughout our history since Pilgram seemed to outweigh the innovative factors that admittedly can be dangerous, but that—also in moderation—are so necessary to social evolution.