Politician

by Piers Anthony

  Radar is simply an electronic signal broadcast into space. When it encounters an object, it bounces back to its source. A receiver notes that returning signal and calculates the distance by the time required for the signal to return. This is normally a reliable procedure, except when the region is crowded with a confusing number of objects, such as the particles of a planetary ring system. Even then, a properly programmed computer can identify all of the natural and “friendly” objects in the vicinity and highlight the suspicious ones. But the principle remains: The computer depends on the returning signals to spot the objects. If no signal returns the machine assumes that region of space is clear. This seems reasonable enough.

  But suppose you could evade or divert the signal, so that it did not bounce back? Reflect it to the side instead of back? Or simply absorb it? That is what a sub does. It uses a special gravity shield to form a black-hole effect that absorbs all incoming energy, including the radar signals. That makes it effectively invisible to radar. Of course some care is necessary; if a sub passes between a person and the sun, it will show up as a dark blot. It also blots out the light of any star it occludes. Parties watching for subs are alert for this and pay close attention to what isn’t visible, such as a particular star, as well as what is. Again, a programmed computer can constantly verify the positions of all light sources and signal alarm when any fail even momentarily. But a carefully maneuvered sub can avoid occluding any sufficiently bright stars while it floats near a planet and so remain invisible—up to a point. Close to a planet there are too many watching satellites, and the silhouette of the sub looms proportionately larger until concealment is impossible.

  So most subs remain deep enough in space to hide but as close to the target planet as feasible, covering it with their deadly missiles. Jupiter subs surround Saturn, and Saturnine subs surround Jupiter. If war should break out the planet-to-planet missiles might well be intercepted before scoring, but sub-to-planet missiles could devastate any city on any planet. That is the true balance of terror. Subs, more than any other factor, contribute to the general feeling of insecurity on every planet; no one can be sure that his city would survive a third System war—and there is a general fear that such a war is inevitable. It makes planetary populations edgy, in much the way that a man threatened with arbitrary execution might be edgy. There are reasonably frequent flare-ups of protest and even violence scattered around the System, but no one has found a way to diffuse the threat. Perhaps one of the major appeals of the difficult life in the Belt is that the widely scattered settlements there would be most likely to survive a System war.

  So I was in a sub. What was the significance of that? This was surely not a missile sub; those were too precious for the mere torturing of mem-washed captives. But escape from any sub was hopeless to the nth power. I couldn’t flash a light out a porthole, for the signal-damping field would extinguish that. Theoretically I might surprise someone, grab a weapon, and take over the ship, but that sort of heroic is feasible only in fiction, and not the best fiction at that. In real life ships have safeguards, such as automatic sleep gas released into the air when unauthorized personnel step onto the bridge, and secret codes for the life systems support and drive computers. Only the regular personnel could operate this ship; I knew that without needing verification. It was one of the advantages of my Navy experience: I knew what wasn’t practical. All I could do was try to steal a suit and escape the ship—and outside was only the void.

  My presence here also meant that some military outfit was in charge, for civilians did not have subs of any kind and neither did pirates. Only governments. That meant I was the captive of a nation. Was I a hostage? Then why the mem-wash, degradation, and torture? That didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. It would help if I could remember my position in life, but evidently they didn’t want me to know it. Maybe I was some high military officer who knew something about an enemy nation’s covert operations; they had kidnapped me and now were trying to erase that knowledge from my mind. Yet the torture wouldn’t help do that....

  The panel opened again, blindingly. I clamped my eyes shut again. Something dropped beside me; then the panel closed.

  I felt about me and found a soiled package. It was a loose net enclosing a hard loaf of bread and a soft plastic bottle of fluid. This was my meal, and it was already soiled with my own excrement.

  I discovered I was ravenous. But how could I eat bread smeared with fecal matter? If I did it would only process through my system to become more excrement. Yet what choice did I have? If I did not eat I would starve.

  I wiped off the bread as well as I could against my upper arm. In the darkness I couldn’t see how well I was doing, but when I bit into it, I could tell that the job was incomplete; some refuse had been absorbed by the crust. I controlled my finicky reflex, uncertain how long it would be before I received anything more to eat. I drank the fluid; it seemed to be straight water.

  As I finished the bread, I chewed down on something hard. Startled and pained, though the sensation was only a whisper of what I had felt during the torture session, I dropped my jaw reflexively without opening my mouth.

  The object jumped to my throat and I swallowed it before I could control myself. The thing tried to catch in my throat, scraping it; I had to gulp the last of my water to get it clear.

  How had something like that, whatever it was, gotten into my bread? Were they trying to break my teeth? That didn’t make much sense; they could break my teeth directly if they wanted to. Evidently they didn’t want to; they preferred to torture me in various ways without physically injuring me. So this had to be poor quality control. Henceforth I would chew more carefully.

  I tried to move about, to get more comfortable, but there was no comfortable position in the limited cell. I drifted off to sleep, steeped in my own manure.

  It was hard to judge time in this eternal opacity. In due course I woke, feeling the urge of nature, and had no choice but to contribute to the refuse already all around me. Well, perhaps I could judge the passage of time by the level of organic matter. That indicated perhaps one more day, added to the several that had preceded my present awareness. I slept again.

  More time passed, and the darkness remained, broken only by the periodic openings of the bright panel for food and, again, my removal for cleaning and a torture session. I feared and hated that pain, finding no rationale for it; apparently my captors simply wanted me to hurt. Hurt I did, though there was no mark on my body.

  I had to do something to preserve my sanity, for the deprivation of comfort, light, and memory was getting to me, as it surely was supposed to. I explored my cell, discovering only blank walls. No help there, either physical or mental. I sank slowly into apathy.

  Then I became aware of a presence. There was someone in the chamber with me! The panel had not opened, but somehow an entrance had been made.

  “Who ...?” I asked.

  A warm hand came to touch my arm. “Don’t you remember me, Hope? I am Helse.”

  Helse! I remembered her but without context. I loved her.

  I took her in my arms. I was covered with slop, while she was clean, but she did not protest. She moved her sleek body to accommodate me and spread her finely fleshed thighs to embrace me, and she was as naked as I, and the shape of man’s desire. She leaned forward to kiss me, and her lips were honey and her breasts touched me with electrifying sensation. Suddenly I was in her, penetrating more deeply than I had thought possible, and my essence was pumping into her with an almost intolerable pleasure.

  Then she was gone, and I was left spent, my substance dribbling into the muck. Helse had not been real; she had been a succubus, a phantom of my desire.

  Yet I knew I had loved her in reality, once. Where and when and how had that been? What had become of her? What had become of me ?

  Dispirited, I tried again to remember my situation but could not. All I remembered was my distant past. I had grown up on Callisto, part of a family of five. Two sisters,
one older, one younger, but I could not recall their names. Mem-wash does tend to eradicate specifics, such as names, more than generalities, such as being part of a family.

  I wrestled with that, annoyed that my own family names should be lost. I was sure that if I could once catch a name, I would retain it. Helse had given me my own, Hope, though I seemed to have little hope at the moment. My father had been—surely my own surname should—ah, I had it! Major Hubris, who worked at the coffee plantation. My mother, his wife, Mrs.—Charity Hubris! And-

  Suddenly I had it all, as if the memories had been accumulating in the course of the recent hours, awaiting this effort. We three children—Faith, Hope, and Spirit. We had had to leave Callisto and had suffered disaster.

  Almost, I wished that memory had remained obscure. My father, my mother—brutally dead in space. My older sister raped. Our friends and associates perished. I alone had survived that terrible journey. No—some children had been taken as slaves, perhaps. And my sisters had not died, that I knew of, but perhaps they might as well have. They had been taken aboard pirate ships. And my girl friend, my woman, my beloved Helse.

  I screamed, but it did no good. Still I saw Helse’s corpse. I had survived, but at what price? My love had perished.

  I banged my fist against the wall, trying to stifle the pain of memory; that was as bad in its fashion as the physical agony of the torture. But there was no escaping this horror. I sank back into the muck, my mind feeling as soiled as my body. The guilt of Helse’s death lay on me.

  Yet she had returned to me, here in this hole, to love me one more time. How much better her love had been than mine!

  Finally I slept, dreamed, and woke in an agony of remorse. Whatever had happened after Helse died hardly mattered. If it had led me to this hole, well, here was my punishment, fitting enough. Helse had forgiven me, but I had not forgiven myself.

  At some point the panel opened and another meal plopped down. Another six hours gone, perhaps. I ate, having no resistance, and chewed on another object. This time I fished it out of my mouth and felt it with my fingers. It was a sharp-edged fragment of metal, a rivet or nail. It must have been a similar object that I had swallowed before. I hoped it wasn’t chewing up my insides, then realized that it didn’t matter; what was a little more punishment to one who deserved it?

  Yet the sharpness of it gave me a notion. Was it enough to scratch the metal wall? I could mark off meals, keeping track of time more precisely.

  Time? Why bother. I was here as long as my captors decreed. Better to write myself a message of consolation.

  I propped myself up, slid my fingers along the wall to verify that it was smooth—and discovered that it wasn’t. There were scratches already on it, perhaps made by a prior prisoner. Not large or obvious—of course, they were invisible in the pitch darkness—but clearly the handiwork of some person. I traced to the upper left and found the edge of the scratches, licking my fingertips to make them more sensitive, never mind what they tasted of. Could it be?

  Yes! There was a number there. The figure 1. Next to it, the figure 2, and on, proceeding to the right, a continuing series. There were four lines of numbers, and when I had traced them all, this was the pattern:

  1 2 1 14 4 15 14 27 8

  15 16 5 29 27 1 12 12 25

  5 27 23 8 15 27 5 14 20

  5 18 27 8 5 18 5 28 27

  I sat back and pondered. Obviously someone had used a pointed bit of metal, like the one I had recovered from the bread, to scratch this series. Why?

  Why else? A message! In code, so the captors would not realize. A message to whomever followed. A camaraderie of prisoners, the first extending this tiny fragment of comfort to the next.

  Code. Would the numbers simply stand for letters of the alphabet? That seemed too easy, but I tried it. Let 1 be A, 2 be B, 3 be C, and so on through. What was the result?

  I worked it out, and was amazed at the confirmation and ease of translation. I had hit it right the first time. 27 was a space, 28 a period, 29 a comma. The message said:

  ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  My enthusiasm collapsed. This was no communication of encouragement—it was counsel for defeat! Who would do such a thing?

  I pondered, still bemused at how readily I had unriddled the sequence. It was almost as if my thoughts were identical to those of the prior occupant. And the message itself, so simply coded— any guard could have translated it almost as readily as I had. This could hardly be expected to remain secret.

  Then I suffered a new revelation: It was supposed to be easy! This was an open code, intended for the guards to decipher; therefore its message was spurious.

  Yet what was the point? The captors had complete control, anyway; what did it matter whether they were fooled by a pseudo-secret message?

  I rolled it over in my mind. I was a creature of reason; I believed in cause and effect and in purpose in everything, however devious. If I assumed the prior prisoner had a mind like mine, then he certainly had had reason to plant that message. What would my reason be if I were to do such a thing?

  Well, confusion. That is, I would try to fool the captors into believing I had capitulated, when in fact I had not. That way they might go easy on me. That was certainly a worthwhile effort.

  Still, it wasn’t enough. What other reason might there be?

  A diversion. Like sleight of hand, an action of one type that diverted attention from a more important action elsewhere.

  What else could there be, here in the dark, in accumulated excrement?

  I mulled it over. Then, cautiously, I slid my hands along the floor beneath me, under the slop.

  Sure enough: there were scratches. A hidden message! But these were neither letters nor numbers. They seemed to be a pattern of boxes, like the border of embroidery, some complete, some partial, some with dots or circles inside, some empty. What did it mean?

  It meant a more sophisticated code, obviously. One that would not yield readily to simple analysis. One the captors could not decipher, assuming they became aware of it at all. A double baffle: concealment where they would be least likely to look, and an almost impossible code to crack.

  Who would devise such a thing? Offhand I had just one prospect: myself.

  If I had been confined here and had known or suspected that I was to be subjected to memory-wash, this was what I would do. Leave a secret message to myself, to provide necessary information to confound my captors.

  Well, had it been me? Quite possibly. As I explained, I know the smell of my own refuse; some practical calculation based on the estimated quantity of material suggested that I had spent about a week here before the mem-wash, and my memory would have been with me then. I had known or suspected what was coming, so it was only natural that I prepare for this post-wash period. My life and welfare probably depended on it.

  It had to be me; I had used a quote drawn from Dante’s Commedia that related most aptly to my situation: the soul’s entry to hell. It even included my name: Hope. I was literally the Hope who had been abandoned. No one but me would have thought to use that particular reference.

  This conclusion was exhilarating. Now I had, as it were, a companion in the cell whom I could trust absolutely: my former self. One who might not have known the future, but certainly knew the past, and would share it with me. Now I could tackle the problem of my captivity with confidence. Why had my captors waited a week to mem-wash me?

  Not for psychological reasons, as the mem-wash would wipe out any attitude I developed. Probably the sub had taken time to work its way free of the planetary environment without risking discovery, so they had waited to give me the treatment until they were certain things were secure. If they got caught early they could be charged only with abduction. So they had locked me into this secret hole and allowed my filth to accumulate so that it would have the appropriate psychological effect after the mem-wash. There was no problem about illness deriving from the filth, as there were no applicable agents of disease
here. Certainly they were putting pressure on me by keeping me in a degrading situation except when they actively tortured me. The average person would soon break down under such treatment and do anything the captors wanted, just to get free of it.

  Unfortunately for them I was not an average person. I had prepared for my humiliation and incarceration, giving my mind something compelling to occupy it. And, surely, some advice on how to deal with this situation.

  Well and good. Now all I had to do was crack my own code. Doubtless I had learned its elements somewhere during the period of my life now washed out of memory. Or had I? Surely I would have anticipated that forgetting, so would have made it a point to draw from my early memories, giving myself a chance while keeping it difficult for any other person.

  I felt again for the scratches—and realized that I might be under observation now, or at least monitored by recording. The cell was quite dark to me, but might not be so to my captors. That meant I should be careful how I approached the message below, so as not to give away its presence. Indeed, why had I hidden it so carefully, unless concealment were necessary? The “open” message on the wall suggested that I should at least seem to abandon hope. I had to seem to be sleeping or mulling fatalistically on my fate.

  I reached up and retraced the message on the wall. I shook my head in obvious frustration. “But I don’t even know what they want!” I muttered. “I have no hope, but they pay no attention!” It was easy to say; the isolation and degradation and torture sessions were intended to make me feel that way, and to an extent they did. The pattern was beginning to make sense.