by Neil Clarke
We were nine women, four men and one female-identifying male transsexual (to give the Sista her prison-system designation). The details on my tablet were meagre: names, ages, ethnic/national grouping, not much else. Mrs Miqal Rohan was Iranian and wore strict hejabi dress, but spoke perfect, icy English. ‘Bimbam’ was European English, rail thin, and haunted by some addiction that made her chew frantically at the inside of her cheek. The other native Englishwoman, a Caribbean ethnic calling herself Servalan (Angela Morrison, forty-three), looked as if she’d been institutionalised all her life. I had no information about their crimes. But as I entered nicknames, and read the qualifications or professions, I saw a pattern emerging, and I didn’t like it. Such useful people! How did you all come to this pass? By what strange accidents did you all earn mandatory death sentences or life-without-parole? Will the serial killers, the drug cartel gangsters, and the re-offending child rapists please identify yourselves?
I kept quiet, and waited to hear what anyone else would say.
The youngest of the men (Koffi, Nigerian; self-declared ‘business entrepreneur’) asked, diffidently, “Does anyone know how long this lasts?”
“There’s no way of knowing,” said Carpazian, who was apparently Russian, despite the name; a slim and sallow thirty-something, still elegant in the overalls. “The Panhandle is a prison system. It can drug us and deceive us without limit.”
The man who’d given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. “We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room; or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these co-ordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be annihilated, and know GOD no longer.”
“But then we wake up on another planet?” pleaded Servalan, unexpectedly shy and sweet from that coarsened mask.
“Perhaps.”
The prophet resumed staring at the floor.
“Isn’t it against your religion to be here, Mr Drummer?”
He made no answer. The speaker was ‘Gee’, a high-flier, corporate, who must have got caught up in something very sour. A young and good-looking woman with an impervious air of success, even now. I marked her down as a possible troublemaker, and tried to start a conversation about survival skills. That quickly raised another itchy topic. Is there really no starship? Not even a lifepod? Are we really, truly meant to pop into existence on the surface of an unknown planet, just as we stand?
“No one knows what happens,” said ‘Flick’, another younger woman with impressive quals, and a blank cv. “The ping signal that registers a successful transit travels very, very fast, but it’s timebound. They’ve only been shipping convicts out of here for five years. It’ll be another twenty before they know for certain if anyone has reached the First Landfall planet, dead or alive—”
When Big Nurse’s amplified voice told us the session was over, and we must return to our cells, my tablet said that two hours had passed. It felt like a lot longer. I was trembling with fatigue. I went over to the booth while the others were filing out.
“Take the armband from me,” I muttered.
Annihilation, okay. Six billion kilometres from home, a charade set up around the lethal injection: whatever turns you on, O fascist state authority that ate my country, my world and its freedoms . . . But I refused to accept the role the bastards had dumped on me. I did not stand, I will not serve. I didn’t dare to resign, I knew the rest of them wouldn’t take that well. The system gives, the system better take away.
“I cannot,” said Big Nurse, reasonably. “I am a bot.”
“Of course you can. Make this vanish and appoint the next trustie on the list.”
Software in human form answered the question that I hadn’t asked. “All good government tends towards consensus,” she said. “But consensus operates through forms and structures. Leader is your position in this nexus. The system cannot change your relation to the whole.”
The girl with the braids was shuffling out, last. She walked as if she was struggling through treacle. Through the veil I saw a young, limber body, full of grace. I could not stop myself imagining the springy crease between her bottom and her thigh, and how it would move. I swallowed hard, and abruptly changed my mind.
Live to the last breath. Play the game, what does it matter?
In my cell, the ration tray that had been waiting for me in the ‘morning’, when I woke, had disappeared. Another prison meal had arrived. I ate it. I had a drinking fountain in a niche in my wall, and the water tasted sweet. My God, what luxuries!
Aside from the four people who never turned up, everyone attended the dayroom, including Drummer and the unresponsive woman. Most of us were playing the game to ward off madness and the abyss. Some of us genuinely got interested in setting up the ground rules for a new world. I couldn’t tell the difference; not even in myself.
Carpazian said we would need an established religion.
“Religion,” he reasoned, “is not all bad. It contains the incomprehensible in human life. People need deities, doorkeepers between the real and unreal. And the Buonarotti device has made the world stranger than people ever knew before.”
I don’t think he meant to do it, but he started something. Mike, the fourth man, said he’d heard that the Panhandle was haunted by murdered prospectors. Flick said she’d felt someone in her cell with her, invisible, watching her every move.
“They say the Buonarotti Transit broke something open,” offered Koffi. “They say it unleashed monsters. And here we are right next to the torus.”
We shouted him down, we rationalists (including Carpazian). We were all feeling vulnerable. It was hard not to get creeped out, with the ever-present hum of that annihilation wheel, Big Nurse our only company, and the knowledge that we had been utterly abandoned. We were little children, frightened in the dark.
I decided to go and see Hilde. We were all quartered on the same corridor, and the doors had nameplates. We were free to make visits, other people were doing it. I didn’t know how to make myself known, so I just knocked.
The door slid open. She stared at me, and began to back away.
“Do you mind if I come in?”
She gestured consent, zombie-slow, and embarked on the difficult task of clambering back onto her bunk. There was nowhere else so I sat there too, at the foot of her bed. She fumbled with the room controls, the door closed, we were alone together. It felt perilous, uncertain; but not in a nightmare way.
“I just wanted to say, the sessions are obviously a strain. Is there anything I can do? Nothing’s compulsory, you know.” Her braids were fuzzed all over, after days without any attention. I wanted to ask if she had a comb.
“I . . . am . . . Not like this . . . willingly . . . Captain.”
Beads of sweat stood on her brow, by the end of that momentous effort. Her eyes were dark, her lashes long and curling. Her mouth was very full, almost too much for her narrow face to bear. She would have been pretty, a misfit, awkward prettiness, if there had been any life in her expression.
“Oh no!” I cried, consternated by her struggle. “I’m not the boss, please. The system did that to me, I’m not checking up on you. I meant—”
What did I mean? I could not explain myself.
“Do you have a comb?”
“Ye’uh . . . Ma’am.”
She clambered slowly down again, groped inside the dry shower stall and brought out a dingy ceramic fibre comb, Panhandle issue. Her hand flailed piteously as she tried to hand it over; and yet the same thought flashed on me as had come when I first saw her. Somehow she was untouched. She was not only the youngest member of my ‘team’, she was nothing like the rest of us: weary criminals, out
laws fallen from high places. She had been cared for, loved and treasured; and become a zombie on Death Row without ever losing that bloom. It was a mystery. What the hell had she done? Was she a psycho? What had made this gentle nineteen-year-old so dangerous?
“Turn around.”
I loosened her braids, combed out her wilful mass of hair and set it in order again, as if I were her mother. It was the sweetest thing. I was glad she was turned away, so she couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.
“There. That’ll do for a while.”
She faced me again, another painful, laborious shift. “Th . . . an’ . . . you.”
I had run out of excuses to touch her. “Shall I come again?”
She struggled fiercely. “Yes . . . I like . . . that.”
iv
The fourth session was a practical. We had been warned on our room screens, but it came as a shock. The dayroom chairs and the booth where Big Nurse sat had gone: as soon as the fourteen of us had arrived, the doors closed and we were plunged into a simulation. A grassy plain, scattered trees, and a herd of large animals coming over the horizon . . . Disoriented, bewildered, we cooperated like castaways. The consensus decision was that we should treat these furred, pawed, sabre-toothed bison-things as potential transport. We tried to catch a young one, so we could tame it. My God, it was a disaster, but it was fun. I had to set a broken bone. Koffi, tough guy, got through it without any pain relief; we discussed bottom-up pharmacology and bull-riding.
Sista and Angie (who had announced that she no longer wanted to be called Servalan) started bunking together, and no retribution descended. Gee hustled me for a simulated childbirth drama: thankfully I had no control over what the system chose to throw at us. I found out I’d been wrong about Bimbam the addict. She was not addicted to any recreational drug. She was a former school teacher, amateur mule. Her problem was a little girl of seven, and a little boy of five, from whom she’d been separated for two years. In prison on earth she’d had visiting rights, on screen. Now she would never see them again. She crawled back towards life, carrying the wounds that would never heal. Drummer, too, crawled back to life. He asked us to call him Achmed, his real name. But he would never be easy company: a man who believed himself damned to all eternity, separated from GOD.
Once, I walked along the curving corridor and saw someone oddly familiar, oddly far in the distance, coming to meet me: a trick of perspective. I was mystified by a huge feeling of foreboding, then saw that it was myself. I was walking towards myself. I turned and ran; another figure ran ahead of me, always at vanishing point. I reached my own cabin, my nameplate. I clutched at the glassy surface of the door, sweating.
*
We all had experiences. They were difficult to dismiss.
I woke in the ‘night’ and heard someone crying out in the corridor. I went to see, hoping that it would be Hilde and I would comfort her. It was the elegant and controlled Carpazian, crouched in a foetal curl, sobbing like a baby.
“Georgiou? What is it?”
“My arm, my arm—”
“What is it? Are you in pain?”
He was nursing his right arm; he pushed up the overall sleeve and showed me the skin. “I cut myself. I have no secret weapon, the ceramic won’t cut you; I used my teeth. I was keeping tally of the ‘days’ and ‘nights’ in blood, hidden under the rim of my bunk. It’s gone. I have asked the woman called Gee, she says I never had a mark on me. I’ve fucked her but she isn’t real. This place is haunted, haunted—”
It wasn’t like him to use a word like “fucked.” There wasn’t a scratch on his right arm, or his left. “It’s the torus,” I said. “It’s warming up. That’s where the strange phenomena come from, it’s affecting our brainchemistry, it’s all in our minds. Don’t let it get you down.”
“Captain Ruth,” he whispered, “how long have we been here?”
We stared at each other. “Three days,” I said firmly. “No, four.”
The Russian shook his head. “‘You don’t know . . . What if it isn’t the torus? What if something got out, what if something is with us, messing with us?”
“Maybe the ghost of one of the old prospectors? I think I’d like that. You’re the Patriarch, what should we do, your holiness? Hold a séance; try to make contact with the tough old bird?”
He laughed, shaky but comforted, and went back to his cell. I went back to mine. I wondered if the system itself was telling us something through these spooky hints. That nothing is real? That only what Drummer called the soul, subtle distillation of mind and body, exists?
Hilde invited me to her cabin.
Some of us were treating the Panhandle as a Death Row singles bar, and why not? Carpazian was being kept busy, and Koffi and Mike; nobody had dared to approach Drummer aka Achmed. As captain I got to know these things . . . I knew it couldn’t be that. The girl couldn’t possibly be making a sexual approach, but I was unspeakably nervous.
I’d been protecting her with signs of my approval; but being careful not to make her into teacher’s pet. I’d had her on my team in the simulation room, things like that. Small, threatened groups are hungry for scapegoats. I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d been wondering why she’d been kept under such heavy medication.
She was certainly a different person, after five days clear (or was it four?). There was light in her eyes, energy in her movements. It was enough to break your heart, because something told me she had never really been free, never in her life: and now this child would go into the void without ever having walked down a street, bought an ice-cream, skinned her knee, played ball, climbed a tree.
We chatted about the animal-taming. She was going to confess something, I was sure; but I wouldn’t rush her.
I wanted to offer to comb her hair again.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “This is too much.”
“You don’t believe that First Landfall exists?”
I shook my head, letting my hand rest on the faintly warm ‘mattress’ where her body had lain. Tastes and smells are the food of the gods; and touch, too.
“No, I can believe they’ve been identifying habitable planets hundreds of light-years away. I can grasp the science of that idea, and the science that says earth-like planets are bound to exist, though we know for a fact that there’s nothing within our material reach except hot and cold rocks; or giant gas-balloons.”
She nodded. She had no life experience but she was not ignorant or stupid. She’d proved that in our sessions, as she came out from under the drugs.
“I can even, just about, believe that the torus can send us there, in some weird way that means new bodies will automatically be generated when we make landfall.”
The void opened when I said that. None of us really believed we would wake again. The transit was a fairytale, disguising annihilation, annihilation—
I shook my head solemnly, pulling the conversation around. “But I cannot, no, I’m sorry . . . I’ve tried, but your captain cannot believe in the gruffaloes.”
The tawny bison-things, with the clawed paws and sabre teeth, had instantly been named gruffaloes. Hilde began to giggle, helplessly. We laughed, leaning close together, white mice trying to understand the experiment. Gallows humour!
“If we wake on that plain,” said Hilde, and she stopped smiling. “It will be the first time I’ve ever been outdoors in my life.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“Your hair’s a disgrace again,” I said. “Do you want me to comb it?”
“I’d love that,” she said. She reached for the comb, which was lying on the bunk, moving light and limber, with the grace that I’d seen like a ghost in the shell, when she was drugged to the eyeballs. But she didn’t hand it over.
“No . . . Wait, I want to tell you something. I have to look at you while I tell you. I have a termination-level genetic disease.”
“Ah.” I nodded, shocked and relieved. So this was the secret.
“My parents are . . . I me
an they were . . . members of a church that didn’t allow pregnancy screening. Their church believed all children should be born, and then tested. So, when I was born they found out there was something wrong with me and my parents took me away, to a city; because the elders would have turned us in. When I was old enough to notice that I was different from the children on my TV, my mother and father told me I was allergic to everything, and I would get sick and die if I ever set foot outside my bedroom door. I never wondered why no doctors ever came, if I was so ill. I accepted the world the way it was.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know, Ruth. I remember my sixteenth birthday, and then it’s like a thick blank curtain with holes torn in it. A lot of screaming and crying and slamming doors. A hospital corridor, a horrible jacket that wrapped my arms together, another room where they never let me out . . .” She shook her head. “Just blurred scenes in a nightmare, until I was here.”
“What about your parents?”
“I suppose they got found out, I suppose they’re in prison.”
“Do you remember what they thought was wrong with you? You said ‘termination-level’. Who told you that? What gave you that idea?”
She wiped away the tears before they could fall. I saw her struggle, the way she’d struggled to speak the last time I was in here. This time she lost the fight. If she had ever known what was wrong, she didn’t know now—
“I can’t remember. I think my parents never told me anything, but maybe I heard something in the hospital, or I saw something on the TV.” She pressed her fist to her mouth, the knuckles staring white. “I don’t know, but I’m scared.”
The nail that sticks out will be hammered down. The USE saw certain ‘traits’ as enemies of the state. By no means all of the proscribed genes were life-threatening.
“You don’t have to be scared. They don’t send just any condemned criminals to the Panhandle, Hilde. We have to be aged between eighteen and forty, and normally fertile. If you’d had a termination-level genetic disease you’d have been sterilised as soon as they spotted you; and you wouldn’t be here.”