In the middle of Malee’s courtyard, a single thin vine grew out of a scuffed black boot, an Old Time antique, the sort of suspect object that other people would have sent for destruction. The plant, neither sick nor thriving, had produced a single blue tomato, too small, too hard to bother picking yet.
Malee crouched down and took a vial of water, broke the seal, and dripped the water into the dirt inside the boot. She put the vial to her lips and sucked the last couple of drops of water. It tasted so sweet. So free. She sat on the ground and admired the plant, admired its fruit, admired her achievement in keeping it alive. Small steps: that was her way.
Suddenly, hooded figures came over the walls from all three sides, into the courtyard. Even in her panic, Malee recognised the dark-purple uniforms of Walker’s military police. She turned to run, but a policeman stood in the doorway, barring her only escape route.
‘But that’s … you’re in my house,’ Malee said. Before she could complain further, an officer placed a gag over her mouth.
‘I do apologise for the intrusion,’ the officer told her, ‘but it’s unavoidable under the circumstances. Let’s not make a fuss or worry your neighbours.’
Malee pulled the gag free. ‘You’re worried about my neighbours? You’re the one who just jumped in through their yards,’ she said.
‘We’re not here to hurt you. We wouldn’t dream of it. But I do respectfully request that you do what we ask you to do.’
With a nod, Malee repositioned the gag over her mouth herself. Although she liked to dream dissenter dreams in her wilder moments of fancy, deep down she believed in Walker’s mantra: politeness, always politeness; mutual respect; a keen awareness that anyone around you could be experiencing a moment of memory-grief; and transparency. If she could have, she would have made her skin see-through: here I am. She only hoped that Walker and his purple police really and truly believed in these things too.
The officer clipped one end of a plastic chain to his belt and the other around Malee’s wrist. Together they went up and over the back wall. Malee found the sensation of momentarily losing her stomach quite fun. But she wondered why they couldn’t have left through the front door, given that some of the officers had apparently come in that way. She hoped one of them had thought to close the front door behind them. Crime was almost non-existent in Rise, but she didn’t want her little house exposed to every passer-by. As she and her captor went over the wall, just before they dropped into the alley and the waiting windowless white van, Malee let the empty water vial slip from her fingers and drop to the ground.
Another purple officer grabbed the plant, boot and all. And then, as if they’d never been there at all, the courtyard stood empty. Peaceful. After a moment, though, a single hooded purple figure vaulted back over the wall, grabbed the empty water vial, and disappeared again.
None of Malee’s entourage spoke, either to her or to each other, as they sped towards the far edge of Rise. Their destination was as close as they could get to the Grand Lake area without actually leaving the city. At the entrance to a large property — a sign that read ‘SPARE PARTS’ stood adjacent to imposing gates — the van entered a tunnel and came up in a vast compound, an anonymous prison hidden in plain view.
A man dressed in grey pants and a grey shirt took ownership of Malee. He was too tall for his own good, she thought. And unpleasantly handsome. He nodded a welcome but said nothing. She chose to match his silence as he scanned her eyes into the system, removed her wearable, and slipped a tracking device into the soft skin behind her ear, nudged up against a gland.
The door opened. A woman entered.
‘Thank you, Leech, that’ll be all for now.’
The man nodded to the woman and then to Malee, then left.
‘Don’t mind him,’ the woman said. ‘He’s very shy. Especially around women. I tell him it’s rude, but he’s working on it. He’s doing his best. Welcome to Spare Parts. My name is Gaite. I suppose you’d say I’m in charge around here. I wanted to apologise in person for any heavy-handedness. We aim to keep things simple. And quick. And pain-free. By the way, could I ask you to take your clothes off and put these on?’
She handed Malee a pair of grey-purple overalls. Malee undressed and dressed quickly. The prison garb was loose-fitting, soft, and surprisingly comfortable.
‘Good,’ Gaite said. ‘Rest assured, we will treat you well. We are all friends here. I insist on it. Do you have any questions? You are free to speak, now or at any time.’
Malee really wanted to know what was going to happen to her clothes — especially her faded blue shirt, which she always wore when tending her plant — but she chose to stay silent. She wasn’t scared. She’d always assumed this moment would come: Walker was benevolent, but he wasn’t complacent. And he had eyes everywhere, human and robotic. She could have done without the gag in her mouth and all the flying about on ropes — they could have just knocked on her front door and she would have gone with them without a word of complaint — but she had no reason to doubt Gaite’s promise that they would treat her well.
‘Nothing to say?’ Gaite asked. ‘No questions? No complaints?’
Malee shook her head.
‘But you’re okay? Your wellbeing is most important to us. You’ll tell us if something is troubling you?’
Malee nodded.
They put her in a cell by herself: tasteful pale-grey plastic tiles for walls, a thin but comfortable mattress protruding from one wall, a desk, a decent chair. An autoscreen listed the books she could call up. It was okay. She’d seen worse. She could live with it. She could live in it, for as long as she had to. That’s what she told herself.
She’d been sitting there a couple of hours, not doing anything but feeling her way into the room, turning it into her space, when a voice — Malee recognised it as belonging to Gaite — crackled through speakers she couldn’t see.
‘Dinnertime, ladies and gents. Enjoy.’
A battle scene appeared on the autoscreen. Malee walked from the chair to the mattress. She lay down, face down, her hands covering her ears, but she couldn’t block out the sounds of the battle scene. As her mattress vibrated to the sound of gunfire, she ate, and ate well. Oh well, she thought: it wasn’t as if she had been planning a hunger strike. Death was not on her agenda, and neither, really, was a futile display of dissent. Except that, then and there in her cell, when the battle scene finished and the credits rolled, she found a use for her voice.
‘Try a little patience,’ she sang, as loudly as she could manage while staying in tune (she respected the song, after all). ‘Try a little hope. Try a little light relief. Try a little belief. Try a little longing. Try a little tenderness.’
Gaite’s voice came over her speaker, adding pleasing harmonies … or trying to drown her out.
‘Let’s be TENDER. Let’s be TENDER. Try a little TENDERNESS,’ Malee and Gaite sang together. In the silence that followed, Malee sang it again to herself, in the privacy of her own head. This will be my song, she told herself.
***
Walker staggered to his bed and collapsed, half on it, half on the ground. Excruciatingly, he pulled himself fully up onto the bed and unzipped himself, freeing his belly. Almost immediately, he fell into a painful, fitful sleep: but he couldn’t keep it up. In the middle of the night, he called for Curtin, who rubbed his arms and legs and belly, sprayed powder on the worst of the sores, and, despite Walker’s groans of protest, ran a highlights reel of war footage on a loop, the autoscreen positioned at the tip of his nose. She sat with him until the robot parrot announced the day.
***
Sala gazed at herself in a mirror a moment longer before she walked out of the apartment, down the elevator, and into the bustling city street. After her decommissioning, which meant she’d also had to leave her Grand Lake outpost, she’d chosen to live in the very centre of Rise, towards the top of a tall
building, surrounded by the din of humanity.
She walked slowly through the crowd, head held high. People stared, but most of them averted their gaze quickly, making a show of looking away, not out of embarrassment, not out of rudeness, but as a laboured mark of respect for her and the space around her. She felt herself moving within a bubble, even when bodies pressed close to her. She wondered if the bubble would always remain. She wondered if this was how Walker moved through the world. There was something odd about him — other than his fame. Not unpleasant. Not rank. But odd.
Sala entered the Grand Lake Bar, flicking her wearable at the door as payment, and sat on a stool. She called up that day’s Rise Times on an autoscreen. It was full of news about the coming peace talks: fluff, she knew, as surely everyone knew. Usually she chose the written version of the Rise Times, but today she turned the speaking version on, letting Ajok’s face, her prodigious smile, her trustworthy because familiar tone, invade her space. Around her, the bar’s multiple screens, some public, some positioned for the benefit of specific patrons, ran a selection of muted battle scenes, new and old. Although she paid the screens little heed, she found the presence of the battles around her comforting. Warming.
But then, directly in her line of sight, her own image appeared on a screen, crouching behind that rock. The barman caught her eye and shrugged an apology. She rewarded him with a misshapen smile and could see that he was touched. Just for a moment, she felt the membrane of her bubble of isolation stretch thin. If she wanted this bar to be her local, and she was pretty sure she did, then she knew she’d have to put up with seeing herself on a screen from time to time. So long as they kept the sound down, so long as they steered well clear of close-ups, she had no complaints. She thought of the legendary Cleave, who, or so the story went, couldn’t bear to be around other people. Sala understood the compulsion. But in the end, she didn’t want to be isolated.
By now ‘The Battle of Sergeant Sala’ was showing on three different screens, and she had the whole room’s rapt attention. Nobody approached her until eventually a bloke hitched up his pants and walked over.
‘May I join you?’ the man asked.
Sala sized him up: well-dressed, handsome in a look-at-me sort of way, tall if you included his pumped-up hair.
‘Sure. Whatever,’ she said.
‘My name’s Fry.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And you are? … Well, never mind, I know who you are.’
‘Right.’
‘So … um …’ He strained for something to say, the moment altogether too momentous for him. ‘Seen any good films lately?’
After a long pause, during which Sala stared straight ahead and the man had the decency to look appalled as he looked past her to the footage of her face exploding, she burst out laughing. Fry was encouraged.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’ he asked.
‘I believe I do.’
Sala stood to leave. Fry pushed back his chair, but she extended her hand, making a stop sign.
‘Yeah, fair enough,’ he said, as he sank back onto his stool. At the door, Sala paused to flick her wearable over the reader.
‘No, it’s on the house,’ the barman called. ‘You’re welcome here any time.’
She nodded. His appreciation was without motive, she could see. That’s what she’d signed up for when she joined the army: to serve the people in exactly this way. As Sala left, Fry belched, quietly and not too unpleasantly, and wandered back to his bar stool.
‘You’re an idiot,’ the bartender said, slapping him across the head in a friendly sort of way.
‘Put her back on, will you,’ Fry said. ‘The whole thing. From the start. Every screen.’
‘Four screens maximum. You know the rules.’
‘Any chance of a close-up?’
‘Hey! We’ll have none of that sort of behaviour in here. Keep it clean or piss off.’
‘Fine. Fine.’
Everyone in the bar switched their attention to ‘The Battle of Sergeant Sala’, prepared for her to feed them all over again.
***
Midmorning, later that week, Walker sat stiff in an armchair in a room in Walker Compound, so bored that he was willing to expose his belly and faint in plain sight if it delivered him from President Heelton, who sat opposite him, talking talking talking, on a straight-backed chair. A perfectly useless low table — what someone from the Old Time would have called a coffee table — sat between them, giving Walker a modicum of distance and protection from his chief talking head. Hail sat in the corner, observing through gritted teeth but not participating, just the way he liked it. Curtin paced near the door. Walker had complained that Hail and Curtin were making themselves too conspicuous, following him everywhere like he was a toddler. Even Cleave had commented on it, from her isolation. But Curtin was adamant: no chaperones meant no public appearances.
She was tired and worried: she’d worked all through the night, yet again, and when Walker had roused himself after a terrible few hours — when that damned mechanical bird he loved so much had started flying about, causing mischief — she’d been pleased but aggrieved that he seemed in such good spirits. As Heelton droned on, she leant on the plastic wall and closed her eyes, just for a moment. She had so much work to do. The eating illness was moving quickly from aberration, frightening but isolated, to a fully fledged emergency. But she expected Walker to crash at some stage before the day was out, and maybe crash hard.
For now, Walker was getting on with business. ‘I must confess, President Heelton,’ he said, ‘and I mean this with all due respect, I still don’t know what you’re asking of me.’
‘Can I put it like this —’ Heelton said.
‘Put it however you like. But coherently, preferably. And in the fewest number of words possible.’
‘In the great, big scheme of life, and taking into account all you’ve achieved, five deaths is only five deaths. Sure, I get that. I do. Don’t think me an idiot. Don’t think me —’
‘Perish the thought,’ Walker said.
‘Don’t patronise me. Please. Don’t devalue me. Five deaths: sure, it’s a glitch, nothing more than a grain of sand in the bigger scheme of survival. But what if this sand comes from the badlands, and what if it glows green in the dark, and what if we inhale it, or it sears our skin, and what if —’
‘Green sand? From the badlands? Oh my.’
‘— and what if it goes down our nostrils, our throats, works its way into our bloodstream, crawls about our insides like a, like a, like a —’
‘All right, now.’ Walker dared to glance at Hail, who was making every effort not to laugh. Curtin had her back to him, staring at a wall. Walker suspected she was listening to an audio report.
‘I’m starting to wonder,’ President Heelton said, gazing at Curtin’s back, ‘if you and your people — don’t worry, I know I’m not one of your people, your inner circle, never have been, never will be — I’m wondering if your people are fully awake and paying attention. Are they?’ he said, casting his wide eyes around the room as if addressing Hail and Curtin directly. Neither of them replied.
‘Because if they’re not, that’s okay — well, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not okay — but if your inner circle is losing its edge, or just plain losing it, and if there’s anything you need to tell me, now’s the time to … tell me. Please, is there anything you need to tell me? Is there? Is there? Is there? Because, and I feel it’s my patriotic duty to warn you about this, the people on the streets are talking about the five dead soldiers. Five in a month.’
‘We haven’t made an official announcement. We probably won’t.’
‘Well, exactly. I’m the poor sucker who has to pretend it’s business as usual.’
‘It is business as usual, so far as you are concerned,’ Hail muttered from his corner.
‘Thank yo
u, Hail. I believe you are “observer only” at this meeting,’ Walker said. ‘The people are right to be concerned about the five deaths,’ he said to President Heelton. ‘But their concern will pass. It always does. And quite right too.’
‘Not if there are more deaths.’
‘True.’
‘And not if the other stories take hold. Someone is spreading dirty rumours: traitors or thugs or swindlers —’
‘Steady on: we’re all friends here.’
‘Wake up. They are collecting snippets of information and using them to make a brand-new picture. They’re framing that picture and projecting it on the wall like it’s something pretty, only it’s ugly and rancid, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I’m here to help, if only you’ll let me. What do you need me to say? A straight rebuttal? A warning? Tough love? Tell me what tone to strike. Tell me what lie to tell, if that’s what’s needed. I’m speaking plainly now.’
‘I hadn’t realised.’
‘Plainly, but metaphorically.’
‘Okay.’
‘I love you —’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘— and revere you. And I know, believe me I know more than anyone else in this whole damned city, what you’ve done for us. All of us. And what you’ve done for me. Personally. But the rumours.’
‘It takes you a long time to make your point, doesn’t it, Mr President?’
‘That’s my job. But have you been listening? Have you heard my words?’
‘Oh, I heard them. I heard every single one of them. Including the ones where you offered to lie to the people.’
‘Only if it’s necessary. Only if it’s what you want.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I was expressing my willingness, not my desire, to lie. I lie for you most days as it is. You must know this.’
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