“I’m happy to disappoint you.”
“But still,” Savory said, smiling, “better than nothing, is that not so? The question now is what do we do with you. It is possible, of course, that your little act out at Eastgate could be ignored. Put it down to nervousness, let us say, rather than a deliberate act of sabotage. I doubt that the few insurgents you saved from ambush count for very much.”
“But there’s a price, right?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. There is always a price. I have the recordings of a few malcontents, enough to put them away of course, but really not at all what I want. Your friends know people much more important than they—one or two, if I’m right, who are seriously inconveniencing the war effort. You could lead us to them, and do the city a considerable service.”
“In other words, betray my friends. No. No, Mr Savory, I don’t think so. I did what I did because I don’t think the cause of the city is what’s best for the future of this world. Maybe it didn’t amount to much, but it was something to me.”
Savory sighed theatrically. “You are a very young man, Dr Florey. And a very naive one. If you do not help me it would be a great waste of your talent, for I would have no alternative but to send you to the internment camp. All right.”
The sergeant rabbit-punched Rick, then jerked him upright. Pain was like a rod of hot iron in his back. Through a red haze and pricking tears he saw Savory lean close to him, so close that a fine spray of saliva touched his face when the politician spoke.
Savory said, in the same even tone as before, “That is not one-hundredth of what you will suffer each day in the camp. I am a determined man, Dr Florey. I will not let your foolish loyalty to a few students get in my way. Sooner or later you will help me. You will realise that the city will win the war, and that when it does and if you are still in the camp you will spend the rest of your days in the mines of Cooper’s Hill. Not for you a return to the University and your work, not unless you help me. I will make sure that you understand that. Every moment in the camp will be devoted to making you understand.”
“All right,” Savory added, to the sergeant.
Rick tensed, expecting another blow, but the sergeant merely turned him around and marched him down the ward and out into the cold evening without a word.
For more than an hour, Rick was held with half a hundred other prisoners in an enclosure of razor wire strung from tall posts. Floodlamps glared from each corner. Some of the prisoners were insurgents who had been captured in the fighting; others, like Rick, were settlers who, for one reason or another, had until now been on the side of the city. For the most part, the two groups uneasily kept away from each other. Any scuffles were immediately broken up by warning shots from the guards outside the wire.
Rick learned from another prisoner that the insurgents had made probing attacks all along the defensive perimeter. In a few places they had actually broken through, and fighting was still going on as the cops tried to drive them back. The man who had told Rick this, Walton Sullivan, was a short, excitable automat worker who had emigrated to Port of Plenty more than twenty years ago, had married a citizen and fathered two children, but had never bothered to apply for citizenship himself. He had no time for politics, he told Rick. Sullivan took in the signs of Rick’s beating and was sympathetic, although he didn’t want to hear why it had happened. He was a simple, warm-hearted man utterly confused by the turmoil of the war and its capricious demands, touchingly confident that his internment was all a mistake, that he would soon be released. “I keep myself to myself,” he said, “that’s what I like about living in the city, that you can just get on with your life without everyone thinking they have a say in it.”
“I used to think that, too,” Rick said.
They both stood with their shoulders hunched against the cold, hands in the pouch pocket of their coveralls. There was no place to sit in the churned, ankle-deep mud. Sullivan peered into the darkness beyond the lights and the wire of the enclosure. “That looks like it’s coming our way. Maybe this will sort itself out now.”
“I hope it does,” Rick said, as the cushiontruck drew up by the gate. A police lieutenant climbed down and the guards, pistols drawn, ordered the internees to line up outside the wire. The lieutenant called off names, Rick’s and Walton Sullivan’s among them, and as those called stepped forward a guard took their brassards and then began to push them toward the truck. After his own turn, Rick heard Sullivan protesting, then the sound of a blow. When Sullivan clambered into the back of the truck, he was cupping a bleeding nose.
“Those bastards,” Sullivan said thickly but fiercely. “After all this is cleared up I’m going to report this.”
From a dark corner, David Janesson said, “I am afraid that you are labouring under a misapprehension. Yes, a misapprehension, I’m afraid. You see, and I have this from Colonel Savory himself, we are all of us to be taken directly to the internment camp.”
Janesson did not seem surprised to meet Rick again. “It seems that there has been a plan, a very detailed plan, for a comprehensive sweep of all potential subversives, a category I must admit I did not believe that I belonged to—nor you, Dr Florey.”
“Nor did I, until very recently.”
“Yes, I saw you brought in to be questioned by Savory. An honour I could have done without. Ah, we are off. We are off.”
Two guards climbed into the back, and after a moment the cushiontruck slidingly accelerated. Rick settled himself on the splintered loadbed as best he could. Sullivan, still cupping one hand under his nose, said that the camp was on the other side of the city, in the forest beyond the hydroponic farms. He had, he said bitterly, helped build the place.
“Then maybe you’ll know a way out when we get there,” a rough-voice woman said.
“My wife will get me out,” Sullivan said with a kind of desperate defiance. It was clear that he no longer really believed that his imprisonment was a mistake.
“None of that talk,” one of the guards said. Both of them were VDF and both were nervous. But both were armed, too.
The cushiontruck stopped at a checkpoint, where someone played a light over the dozen or so prisoners. Then it moved off again, down a narrow trail, tree branches scraping its sides. Once or twice, it had to pull over when other vehicles passed. Rick was no longer afraid now that he knew what would happen to him. Despite Savory’s threats, he couldn’t quite believe that the man would want to pursue him so relentlessly. Rather, he felt that he had been led to the lip of an abyss and offered the world, and knowledge that he could refuse such a temptation warmed him, if only a little. He thought of Lena, and wondered if she had been captured by now, betrayed by the spy which had woven itself into his nervous system. It was not inconceivable that he would see her at the camp, a hope both terrible and irresistible. He was thinking about that when the cushiontruck was hit.
There was a sudden bang and a jolting sideways slide, and then Rick found himself lying on top of two or three other people. One of them was Walton Sullivan, and he and Rick helped each other up in the darkness. The cushiontruck was canted at a steep angle. Everyone was asking everyone else if they were all right. But no one was hurt except for a few bad bruises, and they all scrambled out over the tailgate.
A little way past the cushiontruck, a white overlander was titled nose first into the ditch beside the track, a long dent marring its side. Its motor idled, half-shrouding it in vapour, and its headlamps brilliantly illuminated the lower parts of the trees which crowded beyond, mute witnesses to the accident. No one climbed out of the overlander. Instead, it ponderously backed out of the ditch into the middle of the unpaved track, pausing for a moment as if collecting its thoughts. When it started to move forward Rick suddenly realised who must be driving it, no cop at all, no, and ran after it, heedless of the two dazed guards.
“Web! Wait up, you crazy bastard! Wait up…”
But the overlander was already out of sight. The noise of its engine faded into the silence of th
e dark forest. Rick walked back to the cushiontruck and found that the guards were gone.
“When they saw that the driver’d been killed it took the fight out of the poor bastards,” a burly, rough-voiced woman said. She had taken one of the rifles and more or less assumed command. “What the hell were you chasing that overlander for? You a cop-lover, after all this?”
“Jesus, no! But that wasn’t being driven by a cop.” Rick laughed, thinking of Web setting out with serious intent in the midst of all this madness.
The woman frowned. “You must have taken a bang in the head is all I can say. Can you walk?”
“Sure. Where are you heading?”
“Why, over the wall, of course,” Janesson said. “I would say that we have very little choice in the matter, things being as they are. Very little choice indeed.”
“Well, no offence, but I have to go into the city,” Rick said. “I’ve something to do there, if I can.”
A youngster with long, tangled hair had slung the other rifle across the back of his neck and was sort of leaning from it. He squinted at Rick through the semidarkness, backlit by the tipped headlights of the cushiontruck, and said, “You sure you’re not a cop-lover?”
“What are you going to do, shoot me if I don’t go?”
“Oh, hell,” the woman said. “We aren’t going to force you. But you just be careful, hear? I don’t want the cops on to us because of you.”
Rick assured her that neither did he. He shook hands with Janesson, and then the group moved off raggedly into the darkness beneath the trees. As Rick started in the opposite direction, someone came running up behind him.
It was Walton Sullivan.
“I don’t belong with them,” the little man said breathlessly. Blood had crusted blackly on his upper lip. “Really I don’t. Once I’m back in the city my wife will be able to sort this out. Now look, we ought to go this way. If you go that way, you’ll come out by the University. This is quickest.”
Rick wasn’t sure that Sullivan was right, but the man was insistent. As they picked their way through the dark quiet woods, he told Rick that he had liked to take walks there when he could; it reminded him of the country around New Haven, where he had been born. Certainly, he moved with great skill through the scrubby undergrowth, swift and silent while Rick blundered behind him, scratched by vines and raking twigs, his heart heavy with anticipation and dread.
He was certain that Lena had been arrested by then. Hours had passed since his interrogation, and if Web really had been driving the overlander which had crashed into the cushiontruck, it was likely that the boy was fleeing his own arrest rather than taking advantage of the confusion of the insurgents’ attack. Otherwise he would have broken through the defensive line at the height of the offensive, not now.
With those thoughts dragging at him, Rick didn’t see the lights glimmering through the trees until Sullivan pointed them out. Ten minutes later they parted at the intersection of two nondescript suburban streets, by the patchy light of the domes which swelled behind their uniform gardens of clipped shrubbery.
Rick wished Sullivan luck, asked him what he would do. “Oh, my wife will look after me,” the little man said with irrepressible faith, and lifted a hand in benediction before setting off down the mundane street. Rick never saw him again, never knew the end of that story—whether Sullivan reached safe haven or fell into betrayal, whether or not he survived the fall of the city.
Rick had his own rendezvous to keep. He wanted to walk, to pretend to be just another anonymous weary soldier returning from the front, but edgy sliding panic soon tipped him into running, boots slapping the sidewalk, cold air brushing his ears, burning harshly in his mouth. Passing dome after dome as he ran along the quiet gently curving streets toward the house of Lena’s father.
20. The Source Cave
The fissure was one of many that ran back from the lip of a deep winding river canyon, its blind end cracked by a ragged slit twice Miguel’s height but scarcely wide enough to admit him. A little stream ran out of the slit and down the gutter of the fissure to fall into the canyon, torn into billowing spray by the cold wind before it could reach the talus slopes far below.
In darkness at the bottom of the fissure, up to his ankles in water, Miguel asked the tenant in his head, “How long they gonna be? Can’t you feel I’m freezing here?”
—Have patience, Miguel. The cryostat is a delicate piece of equipment and must be properly protected. If any part of it knocks against the rock walls on the way down it could be irreparably damaged.
“Goddamn zombies, you could have sent one of them down here instead of me.”
—Yes. But I would have had to make you as them, temporarily. You do not know anything about the cryostat.
“Okay, okay,” Miguel said hastily. It was no idle threat. The blue brother had made it clear that its strength would never again fade, not while it had permanent contact with its original in the city via the compsim and the overlander’s transceiver. Miguel stamped his feet to keep some feeling in them, splashing water over slimy stones, flapped his arms at his chest. He had had to throw away his overjacket, stiff and stinking with Jonas’s dried blood; the white raincape he had found in one of the overlander’s lockers was a poor substitute. “How long they going to take? I feel like I’m in a cryostat, down here.”
—Soon, Miguel, soon. Then you will see.
Miguel looked up at the thread of night sky pressed between the limestone flanks of the fissure, but could see nothing of the two insurgents—insurgents no longer, now and for evermore the slaves of the blue brother, their own individuality wiped away when they had been converted by the compsim. He could hear, faintly, the sound of the overlander’s radio, the stuttering scratch of other human voices; he had kept it on for company after the blue brother had finally relinquished control of his body. The unresponsive passivity of the two slaves made him uneasy. They now seemed no more alive than two human-shaped machines, for all that they breathed, their hearts beat, their stomachs worked on the food they had eaten before the blue brother had taken them.
Under the control of the blue brother, Miguel had driven all night and half of the next day into the Outback. Driven hundreds of kilometres to escape the patrols of the insurgents, across rolling grassland into stony hills, skirting steephead gorges and swallow holes, long slopes of scree and stands of stunted trees, until coming into sight of an aborigine village, a dozen round huts clustered on a rocky promontory that jutted over a deep river canyon.
The blue brother had released Miguel then, but he hadn’t been allowed to rest until he had found the Source Cave, a wretched weary hour tracking the paths that led out of the village without being able to use the snakeroot extract to help his merely human senses.
Then he had been allowed to eat, and sleep if he could. But, tired as he was, Miguel had not been able to sleep in the unsettling presence of the blue brother’s slaves. They mostly sat still, breathing evenly but hoarsely in unison, their eyes half-closed, arms dangling loosely. But occasionally one or another would be gripped from within, the whole body quivering, or the head twisting from side to side and up and down, or just the fingers on one hand opening and closing. The pieces of the blue brother inside them were completing the work of infiltrating their nervous systems. Worst was when they tried to speak, half-coherent gurgles and moans like the panicky animal noise of a sleeper caught in the worst of nightmares.
To divert himself from this, Miguel had listened in on confused snatches of radio traffic, garbled further by static, which made it clear that something was going on around the city. The blue brother had not explained what was happening, beyond saying that now his task was even more urgent, but Miguel had guessed that it was to do with the insurgents’ advance on the city’s perimeter. Outside, the shadows of the short winter afternoon had lengthened into evening; when night had fallen, the two slaves had been suddenly roused to activity. The woman, Mari, had plugged herself into the overlander’s compsim and mo
ved the vehicle close to the edge of the fissure. Then both slaves had hauled the cryostat out, and Miguel had been ordered to clamber down the narrow path the abos had carved in one of the walls of the fissure, down to the entrance of the Source Cave.
Now, stamping his feet impatiently in the shallow stream, Miguel heard the whine of the overlander’s winch. He switched on his torch and saw the padded shape of the cryostat slowly descending toward him. He moved out of its way as it settled on wet stones. A loop of cable spooled loosely down and then the winch cut off and there was only the noise of running water.
As Miguel began to peel padding from the cryostat, he heard someone coming down the steep path. It was the erstwhile radio operator, Stoy Matthews. Miguel held up his powerful torch while the slave finished the task of unpacking the cryostat, eyes unfocused and mouth half-open, hands moving with eerie independence, quickly and deftly stripping away padding, unhooking the cable.
The cryostat was a slim cylinder about half Miguel’s height, not heavy but awkwardly balanced. Miguel and the slave had a great deal of difficulty getting it through the ragged slit of the Source Cave’s entrance, but once inside there was enough space for the slave to hoist the straps of the cryostat over his shoulders so that it hung at his back.
Miguel played the beam of his torch around. Quivering motes danced on the stream’s dark skin as it flowed past; the limy crust which coated the walls glittered with slippery, nacreous reflections. Farther in, the walls came together so that the two men had to wade in single file through the stream’s rippling current. For a long while the only sounds were the sloshing of their boots and the water’s sibilant rush. And then these sounds gained a tiny, hushed echo, a dimension of distance. A moist breeze brushed Miguel’s face. The passage had opened on to a chamber so huge that the light of his torch was only a calm glint at its very edge, like a single star reflected by the water at the foot of a deep well.
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