Edward Llewellyn

by Prelude to Chaos

  This time her movement showed me not only herself, it showed me the butt of her gun hidden between the cushions of the couch. I watched her fingers stray toward it. “Gavin, I hear you’ve seen a video of the shooting. What did it show?”

  “It showed the President hit and dropping.” So Humboldt had told her! Had he told Sline also? Had he told Gerald Fu-trell? How many and who were part of this treason?

  “Did it show anything else?”

  She knew what it showed. And she knew I was the only agent loyal to the dead President who had seen it. She was nerving herself to do what she thought she must do.

  “Sherry,” I snapped. “Don’t! It’s suicide for a novice like you to go against a veteran.”

  “Gavin, I don’t understand what you mean.” The tragedy was that she didn’t. She was even less aware than I had thought. It was my mistake. I had not stopped her soon enough. Her right hand was under the cushion.

  “Sherry—”

  She made her last and fatal error. She acted precipitously and she signaled her act. “Gavin, I hate to do this! But freedom’s more important than either of us. And that video—” She had her gun half out.

  It was too late for both of us. I fired from the pocket and I hit her in the heart. Even as I sprang toward her I was thankful I had not smashed the beauty of her face. Even as I bent over her, realizing the enormity of it all, I was glad that her loveliness was marred only by the scarlet patch spreading out across her nightdress from between her breasts.

  I had not realized the full enormity. I was still on my knees beside her when Brodnax burst in from the bedroom with Sline at his heels. There was an instant of recognition, of shock at finding her dead instead of me. Then Brodnax fired. I was lucky that he was in first for he was armed with a Jena dart-gun, probably planning to knock out Sherry while they removed my body. Sline had a 9mm magnum which would have flung me across her with my head blown off.

  I took a dart in the chest and dropped unconscious.

  I woke up in the Service holding cell, charged with first-degree murder. I found that when I joined the Service I had waived my right to an open trial if my offense involved national security. The medieval Bill of Attainder, abolished in England but allowed by the U.S. Constitution, had been revived by Futrell and attainder of the person was used against me. I was flooded with Paxin, the universal solvent of personal problems, and tried in camera. The evidence against me was damning; Sherry and I had been passionate lovers who had become bitter enemies. Paxined as I was, I could deny very little nor gather enough of my mind together to tell the Court the truth, even if my lawyer had put me on the stand and given me a Chance to tell it.

  He chose to plead that mine had been a crime of passion. That might have helped had I been an ordinary citizen. The Judge rightly said that a trained killer who gave way to passion was too dangerous to be ever again released upon a defenseless public. He sentenced me to imprisonment in the Federal Penitentiary for the term of my natural life. He, and everybody else, assumed that I would choose character restructuring instead. Despite the Paxin my willpower was still strong enough to refuse that offer.

  A sentence to life imprisonment was the legal equivalent to execution. For all practical purposes I was now dead. The only message I got from the Service was that both Sherry and I were being recorded as “killed in the line of duty,” thus preserving our good names and the Service’s honor. And, as the law directed, I was immediately handed over to officers of the Federal Penitentiary to be held incommunicado for ever.

  Those officers were still untainted by the venality diffusing through the Federal Government and its Agencies. They let the Paxin leach out of me before they took me before the Board of Psychiatric Assessors, the experts who would decide whether I was sufficiently sane to make an informed decision. If the Assessors decided I was not they could order involuntary character restructuring. The whole operation went too smoothly for me to believe that I was the first obstacle to Futrell’s ambitions who had been disposed of by this route.

  The Board were still an obstacle of a kind; most of its members were honest psychiatrists. I tried to tell them my true story but they refused to consider anything except my present mental state. The Court had decided on my guilt; the Board’s only task was to decide on my sanity. My past actions were not their concern. Psychiatry had outgrown its Freudian diapers. My mental status was judged by my current behavior and by a range of psychological, physiological, and neurochemical parameters. My insistence on dragging up the past might be regarded as showing present mental disorganization. When I saw one member of the Board taking rapid notes while I was disputing this point with the Chairman, I gave up. I had been examined by psychiatrists every six months for years; the Service had always been meticulous about ensuring its agents were sane. I let them run their tests, half-expecting that they would be faked and I would be sent to forced mind-wipe.

  I was brought back before a Board that was obviously discomfited at having to admit that any killer was normal in terms of their measurements. The Chairman, a kind, intelligent, and sympathetic physician, did his best to persuade me to accept voluntary character restructuring, but when I still refused he had to certify that I was capable of deciding my own fate.

  I was immediately shipped off to the Pen, and here I have been for the past three years. I cannot dispute the ultimate justice of my sentence, only that I have been condemned for the wrong reason. Mine was guiltless but punishable error. I should have stayed beside Grainer. I should have warned Sherry sooner.

  I was not an admirer of my own character and would have gladly forgotten my old self. But I must not forget Futrell. Hatred is an emotion which Praetorians cannot afford; one of my few virtues had been my freedom from hatred until I met Futrell. I had hated him—I don’t know why—even before he debauched the Service, led Sherry into treason, and arranged the assassination of his President. Now my only ambition was to expose him as a traitor and kill him as a murderer.

  I flung down the draft, disgusted with myself. I had set out to write an accurate and succinct account of President Grainer’s murder. I had lapsed into verbose, self-justifying sentimentality. Into an hypocrisy as bad as Sherry’s.

  I had presented myself as a Praetorian outside politics. In my heart I had been Grainer’s devoted supporter ever since Western Moonbase. And Sherry had known it I had killed her before she could kill me. That was a memory I longed to lose, but not at the cost of forgetting to cry “Treason” against Grainer’s assassins. To expose them at least; to kill them at best. Those were the only goals I still had.

  I settled down to compress onto one page all the evidence against Gerald Futrell. A single sheet that I might hope to slip to some outsider before I was recaptured or killed. When I was satisfied that it was as convincing as I could make it I hid it in the lining of my jumpsuit.

  I took my original effusion to the garbage disposer and then hesitated, reluctant to pulp the only literary effort of my life. I looked around my cell, then eased the grill off the air-conditioning vent. I stuffed the bundle of papers up the shaft and round the first elbow where it was unlikely to be found in a cell inspection, even the kind of inspection this cell would get after I had gone.

  Perhaps one day in the future, long after the Pen had ceased to be a prison and my words had lost their relevance, some worker cleaning out air shafts would read it, laugh, and toss it away.

  Or perhaps it would become a footnote to history.

  II

  We lay in each other’s arms on the grass under the cherry blossoms, pretending to make love while talking escape. My attention was divided between Judith’s voice, soft in my ear, and her body, firm against mine. When she started to outline a plan which would probably leave us dead or mind-wiped, her woman-scent became more exciting than her words and my hands went off on a program of their own, sliding over her taut jumpsuit.

  She brought them to an abrupt halt as they started to explore further. “Stop it, Gavin!”


  “I’m only trying to show our closed-circuit nursemaids that I’m maneuvering for a lay!”

  “You’re getting me worked up! And this is no time for that.” She caught my fingers. “Are you with me so far?”

  “I degrade the cameras and mikes in your cell and in the passage. I fake the interlocks in your cell. You haven’t told me how you plan to fix the block doors.”

  “Doctor Shore came to fetch me himself on that night we operated. I saw the codes he used to get from the block to the hospital. So if you can let me out of my cell I can take us as far as the hospital.”

  “What then?” My hands stopped moving as I became more interested in what she was saying than in how she felt.

  “At two in the morning the duty nurse will probably be asleep. There are no serious cases in the ward at present and, like everywhere else, the hospital is short-staffed. We can go through the operating room into the surgeon’s lounge. There’s a door from the lounge into the guards’ zone, and I saw Doctor Shore key that too.”

  “Did he see you key it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe the doc was laying a trap. He wants you to volunteer for—”

  “Doctor Shore isn’t that kind of bastard!” she hissed.

  “Okay! Okay!” I hoped he wasn’t. “Go on.”

  “There aren’t any circulating patrols now.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Certain. Not at night, anyway. The staff knows this place is closing down. They’ve been leaving to take permanent jobs.”

  That I knew. The social atmosphere outside the Pen had been changing fast. There was a generalized uneasiness which seemed to have its origin in a sudden decline in births to young mothers. The decline was unexplained but was continuing, so that within a few years the population profile of every country in the world, First, Second, and Third, would show a gap like a knocked out tooth, even if birthrates started to increase immediately. Economists were at odds about what this gap would do to the economy, but most ordinary people could see uncertain personal futures and were putting pressure on government to prepare for the unknown by sacrificing the present—including social luxuries like the Pen. And the staff of the Pen, no longer certain that pensions would be inviolable, looked around for jobs that would continue into old age.

  “Once we’re into the guard zone we can reach the elevator to the morgue.”

  “The morgue? Why the morgue?”

  “I told you! Cold-storage is full. There are four bodies waiting to be shipped out on Saturday morning. It’s high tide at six, just before sunrise.” The sailings of the John Howard were governed more by the tides than by the clock.

  “You mean we switch with the corpses? That won’t work. If we take their places—”

  “We don’t go out in place of the bodies. We go out under the bodies. The coffins come in one size—large. They’re deep enough to take a corpse with a hundred and fifty centimeter waistline. Poor old Josh was down to skin and bone by the time he died, and Greta was a small woman. They pack the coffin with foamed styro to make a nest for the body. We can burrow our own nests under that.”

  “My God!” I stared at her, appalled.

  She stared back. “Don’t soldiers sometimes hide under dead bodies?”

  “Fresh dead bodies! And I’ve never had to—” I swallowed.

  “Okay, so we’re nested down underneath Josh and Greta. What then?”

  “The coffins are already in the shipping container. On Friday I’ll be helping them move Josh and Greta from the cold-storage lockers to lay out in the coffins. The lids will be off und the container left open so that they can be checked in the morgue and at the inspection station. That’s where they’ll put on the lids and close the container. Then it’ll go through the tunnel, out onto the wharf, and be loaded on the deck-rails of the John Howard."

  “And crews in the morgue and the inspection station will examine the coffins and every square centimeter of the containers. They’ll be scanned by thermistor beams, gas analyzers, and God knows what else. They showed me what they do to anything that goes out of here. When I first arrived. So I’d see how useless it was to try. Didn’t they show you their gadgetry?”

  “They did. But two years later. By then most of it wasn’t operating to spec—I saw that. As you said, they’re short of techs. I’ll bet the ones they have aren’t wasting time fixing things they consider useless gadgets. Two inspections by guards should be enough to pick up any nut trying to go out with the garbage.”

  “They should. And probably will.”

  “How closely would you inspect a coffin and a body at dawn on a March morning? Would you move poor old Josh around to probe underneath him?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Okay—we can hope they won’t. So they snap down the lids. Close up the container. And slide it aboard. The John Howard puts to sea. It’s a six-hour trip to Clarport. At about eight Surveillance Center finds we’re missing. They’ll radio her to come about and alert the guards to shoot us on sight. Or are you hoping Surveillance will let us lovers sleep late on a Saturday morning? That we’ll be buried and digging our way out before they come to dig us up?” “There’ll be no digging by anyone. All prisoners from the Pen are buried at sea.”

  “Balls! When I arrived they made me sign a form saying where I wanted to be buried when the time came. And if cremated what was to be done with my ashes. I said I didn’t give a damn what they did with my body, just so long as they made sure it was dead first. But they insisted I made a choice and signed the form. It didn’t offer sea burial as an option!” “That form’s a fake. A justifiable fake, perhaps. It makes some people happier while they’re alive if they think they’ve chosen the place where they’ll be planted when dead. In fact, no corpse leaving the Pen ever reaches the mainland. The container they use to haul away the coffins is like a garbage container. It’s loaded onto the same deck rails. When the John Howard reaches deep water, and that should be well before eight o’clock, the Skipper stops the engines, reads a non-denominational burial service, and pulls the ‘dump garbage’ lever. The container tips, the side swings open, and the coffins slide overboard like garbage bales. Those coffins have a concrete block built in at the foot. I’ve checked on that! So they’re shot out into sis hundred meters of water and go straight to the bottom.”

  “And we swim back to the surface after the John Howards sailed on?”

  “Gavin, if you haven’t managed to get out of your coffin by then, you deserve to go down with it! We leave the container when it starts to tilt and the side swings open, grab the minicopter, and take off. By then we should be outside the CPB zone.”

  “How the hell do you know so much about this sea-burial business?”

  Judith hesitated, then murmured, “Greta was a Believer.”

  “A what?”

  “A Believer. A disciple of the Teacher.” She paused, then added, “So am I.”

  I was not as surprised as she expected. I had become used to the paradox that as the educational level of prisoners rose so did the prevalence of superstition. Among us were a Baptist minister, an Episcopal priest (both female), a Rabbi, a Jesuit, and a Suffi Mullah (all male). How this collection of ecclesiarchs came to finish up in the Pen I couldn’t imagine, though I knew why they chose to stay. They were fanatics who refused to surrender their sacred memories and would not desert the little flocks each had gathered around her or him. They practiced a kind of applied ecumenism in that they did not raid each other’s congregations for converts and presented a solid religious front to the prison administration. I suspected they were all hankering after the crown of martyrdom.

  In addition to these representatives of established religion there were numerous other clusters of people who gathered for prayer and meditation. The “Believers” were one such group and I knew that their “Teacher” was a revivalist hav-ing some success cm the outside, although I did not know which particular superstition he was reviving. Anyway, he led the kind of
“back to land” movement which appeals to people who have never had to live off the land, and had established rural Settlements to which his followers could flee from the wrath to come.” Much the same program as was being sold by many of the other gurus who were flourishing in the lush economy of the Affluence. Although to have converted a surgeon like Judith and a first-class intellect like Greta he must be offering something more nourishing than the pabulum his rivals were dishing out.

  So when Judith admitted she was one of his followers I only nodded. “How did that help you learn about this sea-burial stuff?”

  “We Believers have—well—certain restrictions on how we should be buried. A funeral pyre is best. An earth burial is worst. A sea burial is acceptable.”

  “You have a kind of theological ecology?”

  She ignored my remark. “When Greta was dying she grew frantic. She’d been a Presbyterian, and when she was sent here she’d asked to be buried in her family vault. Now she was horrified at the prospect of being parked among the decaying bones of her ancestors. Doctor Shore promised her that she’d be buried at sea. His promise let Greta go to the Bridge happy.”

  “The Bridge?”

  “The Chinvat Bridge. The bridge the soul crosses on its way to the judgment. The Teacher uses certain Zoroastrian revelations in his exegesis of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness.”

  In other words he’d lifted picturesque metaphors from established superstitions to construct his own brand of revelation, “So the Doc was trying to reassure Greta that she wouldn’t be food for earthworms. And I’m sure the Doc would he to make a dying patient happy.”

  “I was at Greta’s bedside with him. And he didn’t want me to think him a liar. Later he told me that some prisoners, after they had died, were buried at sea. Greta’s going to be one of them.”