Bleak History

by John Shirley

  “You have the suppressor,” Loraine pointed out. “Shouldn't that be enough to stop him from contacting any...thing?”

  The suppressor was difficult to see on the monitor, from this angle; it looked like a short column of metal disks, behind the chair Krasnoff sat in. It was said to partly suppress the powers of the CCA subjects.

  “Yes.” Helman nodded—he nodded too much, almost like a bobblehead doll, as if he didn't have a lot of practice in casual communication with people. He always seemed hard at work trying to seem sincere. And always came off the opposite. “Yes, under normal conditions the suppressor would be enough. But it can only deal with so much...and the background energy these people draw upon is fluctuating. Sometimes rising quite alarmingly.” He suddenly stopped nodding and put his glasses back on to peer at a second monitor that showed Krasnoff's vital signs. “There is a breakdown of...ahhh, of a force that kept their ability to contact that background energy in check. And certain UBEs”—he pronounced each letter—”have been taking advantage of that. As Mr. Krasnoff might too. You see, the suppressor...1 know it sounds contradictory...is an amplifier, really. It amplifies one thing so it can suppress another. It amplifies the...the signal, so to say, of the Source in the North. Which signal suppresses people like Krasnoff. Keeps them at low power. If there's no signal, or an erratic signal, the suppressor has nothing to amplify, don't you know.”

  “I see.” Though she didn't, entirely. Where was the real source of this “signal”? She had heard of the Source in the North vaguely, but had never been intensively briefed on it. “Anyway—the suppressor's only reliable...sometimes?”

  Helman bobbled his head. “Essentially, yes—only reliable sometimes.” He returned his attention to the observation monitor. “If the suppressor cannot be counted on, we must give him as few opportunities as possible to implement mischief against us. And Mr. Krasnoff is quite capable of mischief. Oh yes. When we first had him in custody, he caused a flight of UBEs to attack the transport plane. I don't know how he thought he would survive a plane crash. Fortunately we were able to land the transport safely, after a rather tense interval, despite some minor damage.”

  “Urn—what sort of UBEs were those?”

  “I believe they took the form of what mythology called Harpies. Probably because that's what Krasnoff visualized. But we're not entirely certain. He can seem to be cooperating with us and then we discover that he's barefacedly lying.”

  “But...” Loraine was boiling with questions. “But—you do encourage him to use his...his abilities sometimes. Don't you? I mean, isn't that part of the point of this whole...containment?”

  “The point?” Helman turned toward her—she saw him glance at her bosom, then look quickly away. “Yes, CCA has plans for these people. For me, the point is scientific study—to a particular purpose. An ancient one, really. The commander in chief himself has asked us to make sure that the Source in the North...” He let his voice trail off and tapped his whitened teeth with a thumbnail as he considered her. “Very soon, you'll be taking a trip to the north,” he said suddenly, in a confidential tone. “I know I have been tantalizing you with it for a while.” He gave a smile that struck her as almost a leer. “One enjoys tantalizing such a...” He stopped himself, and his cheeks reddened. “I prefer to brief you when we get there. As for our containees—don't get emotionally identified, Agent Sarikosca. These people have been using their powers criminally, many of them, all along. In casinos, sometimes in robberies, to duck the police, oh, in all kinds of little scams. And Mr. Krasnoff is especially...well,

  he's one of our problem cases. One of the most recalcitrant. But also one of the most gifted. We do have a few trained former Shadow Community personnel—but their gifts are very limited. It's almost as if the intensity of a ShadowComm's power is in proportion to how unruly they are! As if the more problem they are for us—the better their contact with the...Ah—now. You see there? Mr. Krasnoff is talking to himself. He's not incapable of wetting his pants, if he gets restless, and the janitor is quite unhappy with me afterwards. Come along—and do bring that briefcase for me, if you please.”

  She picked up the briefcase, and Helman led the way out of the surveillance room, down the hallway—like the bland gray-and-blue corridors of the Pentagon, with flat fluorescent lights, where she'd worked before CCA—to the next-door entrance of Containee Investigation Room 77.

  Helman tapped a combination on a wall keyboard, and the door opened. They went in, hearing the hum of the suppressor, smelling urine and sweat almost immediately. Helman sighed.

  “Mr. Krasnoff,” he said.

  “Doctor, how's it hangin'?” Krasnoff said. An accent from the West. Loraine remembered from his file that he was from Pahrump, Nevada. His mother had worked as a blackjack dealer. No father around. “I'd shake hands,” Krasnoff added, “but them big punkin' rollers of yours got 'em locked down.”

  “Well, Mr. Krasnoff,” Helman said, taking the briefcase from Loraine, “formal greetings won't be necessary. This is Agent Sarikosca, by the way—Mr. Orrin Krasnoff.” She nodded to Krasnoff, but avoided meeting his eyes.

  Helman knelt, opened the briefcase on the floor behind Krasnoff, who tried to turn in his chair, watch over his shoulder. “What's in that little suitcase you folks brought in?” Krasnoff asked. “You ain't gonna use that electric thing on me today, are you?” There was more resignation than fear in his voice. “Not with this pretty lady here?” His sad, droopy eyes rolled at Loraine. “Nice to look at a lady, in this place, anyhow. Something besides that stupid little room they got me in. Won't even let me watch TV, you know that?”

  She started to answer but Helman interrupted, “You know you can summon things, unauthorized things, with a television, Mr. Krasnoff.” Helman stood up, bringing two objects over to the front of the concrete chair. “And we don't want you to summon something troublesome.”

  Krasnoff looked at the objects in Helman's hands, winced, and looked away, his mouth moving soundlessly.

  Helman carried a small, specialized Taser, and a rod about sixteen inches long that looked almost like a scepter, made of copper, with sections of two kinds of wood, one very dark, and a knob of white, glossy material that might have been ivory at one end.

  “This chair sure is uncomfortable,” Krasnoff said suddenly, to Loraine. “You ever sit in a concrete chair, missy?”

  “No, no, I haven't.” Don't get emotionally involved.

  “My skinny little butt hurts on an ordinary chair, after a while. With this here thing I'm achin' near to breakin”. You know...say, listen, I could work on the streets with you folks, I could go out in the cars and see the world. I could do things with you folks out there and be a real help. What you got to keep me on a concrete chair for? With no TV, and no—”

  “Could you really work with us, in the field?” Loraine asked. “Maybe—”

  Then she was aware that Helman had turned, was glaring coldly at her. He didn't want her talking to Krasnoff, it seemed. Why was she here if she couldn't even speak to the containee? Helman had said she was to “familiarize” herself “with certain processes.” Observation, then. To what end?

  “Pretty lady, he's got that buzzer there,” Krasnoff was saying, looking at the instruments in Helman's hands. “Like I'm a dog in some ol' Russian laboratory. He's gonna make me drool like a dog. I don't want to do this...1 could work on the streets, I could go out in cars.... Sure would like to have a steak in a nice, regular steak house. There's a steak house in Carson City—”

  “Mr. Krasnoff,” Helman interrupted, talking, Loraine thought, as much to her as to him, as he put the little taser in his coat pocket and sprinkled a fragrant oil from a vial on the scepterlike rod, “you know that when we have tried to work with you in the field, you summon UBEs, nasty entities indeed, and two of our people had their faces badly mutilated. One man lost an arm.”

  “The angel tells me,” Krasnoff muttered, tapping his feet and hands animatedly. “Shiny Fella gives the 'w
hich way to go.' He says, 'You play their game 'n' you'll become game. You'll be game hunted in the Wilderness, in the After. Your spirit will run crying through the Hidden.' And, Doctor, I don't want to be in the Wilderness, when I'm in the After. I don't care that much what happens to me in this life. Shiny Fella says this life is just prep, it's just...” He fell silent.

  Helman turned back to Loraine and spoke with clinical detachment. “You'll find that they often allude to an indifference to what happens to them in this world. Do not mistake it for depression, or passive aggression, as it might be in a subject of interest for mere psychological reasons. They feel that way because they know life-after-death intimately. The soul, we have discovered, is real—though naturally it will be found to have a scientific basis. What happens in 'the After,' as they call it, is more important to them than to most people—that is, they believe in it more. They know for a fact it exists. They have all gazed into it. They identify as much with the world of the Hidden as this one. It makes threats of execution a bit...weaker than normal.”

  Loraine turned to him, startled. “Execution?”

  Acting as if he hadn't heard her, Dr. Helman turned to Krasnoff, putting the scepter in the bound containee's hand.

  “Here you go, I've put the myrrh on it. Focus on it, Mr. Krasnoff.” The containee shook his head mutely.

  Helman reached into his pocket and took out the small Taser. “Do not mistake the compactness of this device for feebleness. The 'jolter' uses a new kind of battery. It packs quite a punch. And it concentrates it rather uniquely, like a bee sting. Or perhaps more like a manta ray. Or indeed—the shock of the electric eel? Shall we discover together what the best analogy would be?”

  Krasnoff hunched his shoulders, cringed back, shaking his head, making a low moaning sound.

  Loraine wondered if Helman was testing her, by showing her this. Maybe he wanted to know if she could deal with it.

  They knew she was having doubts about CCA. Had been having doubts for a while. She was sure of one thing: whatever the Hidden was, it had to be used for the benefit of the country or prevented from being used at all. But how far should she go?

  She'd worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, analyzing satellite data; later recruiting unhappy Muslim women in Syria, working out of a safe house in the old district of Damascus. Had recruited her own string of veiled wives secretly angry at the traditional oppression of their gender; women willing to quietly gather intelligence for her. When her string had been abandoned by the agency the moment the Syrian Secret Police started suspecting them, Loraine had angrily asked for a transfer away from the DIA. She'd found herself in the CCA—and was beginning to wonder if she should have stayed in Syria.

  She'd heard an expression, working at the Pentagon: “Don't like it? Suck it up or move on down the road.”

  You were always reminded to try to see the big picture. And the big picture seemed to indicate that ShadowComm, uncontrolled, was dangerous. A freewheeling cult of loose cannons.

  The Hidden probably was a natural phenomenon of some kind—ghosts and all. What did they call it? The spiritual ecology. But to the CCA, ShadowComm was like the arrival of assault weapons in street gangs. Chaos—a change in the balance of power. A threat to ordinary people, and to the stability of the country.

  Her limits weren't CCA's limits. She remembered the debate on Guantanamo, years ago. Torture? Mild stuff, compared to the leeway President Breslin gave the intelligence agencies now, of course—he had the power to do it. Far worse was done to prisoners accused of sedition than what was happening here. And if she objected too strenuously, Loraine could find herself strapped into a chair in some barren room, somewhere.

  But still. There were limits. Weren't there? Krasnoff yelped, jerking her attention back to the man in the concrete chair. She smelled burnt hair and ozone. A red swelling stood out on his right forearm. She hadn't even seen Helman use the little taser.

  “You can spend some time out of this building, once we get real help from you, Mr. Krasnoff,” Helman said, in a gentle voice.

  Panting, Krasnoff rolled his eyes at Helman. “I...can? Doctor?”

  “Yes. We'll have to keep a suppressor near you except at certain controlled moments. But it can be arranged.”

  Can it really?'Loraine wondered. If Krasnoff s furlough to the outside world was dependent upon the suppressors, she doubted it would happen anytime soon. They cost several million apiece, and so far as she knew, they never let them out of the building. She didn't entirely understand how the suppressors worked, but she knew there were only three of them. Delicate and expensive mechanisms. And they were not the key to containment here. Drugging and isolation were the primary methods of containment at this facility. And the suppressors were said to be less effective the farther south you went.

  “I can't stand being cooped up no more. But I'm afraid...like if...if I do the wrong thing here, I'll end up in the Wilderness.”

  Helman had tucked the scepter under one arm and was making a minute adjustment on the little jolter. “Let's see what a stronger jolt has to say to you. You might find it quite revelatory. Possibly we might apply it to the back of your head—it might induce you to lose control of your bowels. Embarrassing, in front of the lady. But, if it's necessary...”

  “No!” Krasnoff said, sitting up straight, struggling with his restraints. “Open it up. Turn the thing off. I'll show you what you want, if I can!” He slumped back, breathing hard, almost weeping. “But you got to promise an outing. You got to promise no more of the jolter.”

  “You may consider it...promised,” Helman said silkily.

  Loraine was thinking about Helman's using her to taunt Krasnoff. As a tool of torture, essentially. The thought made her stomach squirm. She wanted to grab the jolter and apply it to Helman's smug face.

  But telling herself, Stay frosty, stay professional, she just stood there. Keeping her expression impassive. And waited.

  Helman put the jolter into his pocket and handed Krasnoff the scepter. “One moment. I'll open the shaft and turn off the suppressor.” He went behind the chair, turned a switch on the back of the chair. A section of ceiling slid slowly back. He threw a switch on the suppressor—and the device stopped thrumming.

  Loraine looked up, had to shade her eyes against light coming through a small square hole in the ceiling, like a skylight, but it extended about three yards up to an opening in the roof where another panel had slid away. She could make out blue sky up there.

  “But,” Helman went on, “there are guard personnel, right down the hall, Orrin. I'll summon them to stand close by, outside the door.”

  Odd, Loraine thought, that he'd suddenly taken to calling Krasnoff by his first name. The psychology of interrogation?

  Helman pressed a button on a beeper clipped to his belt, summoning the guard. “So just remember, Orrin, if you play false with us this time, they'll come and use that regrettable excessive force that seems to come so naturally...and the lady will see you at your worst. You must not disappoint me, Orrin. Not me and not the lady.”

  Krasnoff nodded. “I understand, boss.”

  ***

  CHINESE BOXES, ONE INSIDE another.

  The camera that had watched Krasnoff strapped down alone in the concrete room now took in Dr. Helman and Loraine Sarikosca, with Krasnoff, and its image was being transmitted to two men sitting in quite another sort of room, a cluttered office in the Pentagon. The watchers sat at a computer terminal. Both wore the uniforms of U.S. Air Force. Both had stars on their shoulders. Generals Swanson and Erlich, officers in their sixties. The budgetary buck for CCA stopped with them.

  Erlich was stocky, with thin white hair, a jowly, wide face, stubby nose. Sat in a chair to one side of the desk—this was Swanson's office.

  Swanson was taller, with stooped shoulders—a bit of osteoporosis—and a thinly carven face, heavy black brows, shaven head. Swanson had been a captain, and a major in Iraq. Had seen every military tragedy, every snafu. And
he was usually unflappable.

  But the scene on the computer surveillance window had him grinding his teeth. “Erlich—I don't like where this is going. First of all, it was supposed to be about fighting terrorism. But we hear precious little from these people about that. CCA's not staying on task. This other stuff's not its mandate. Like this experiment now—for Christ's sake—putting pressure like this on...on freakish people of this kind. You don't know what the hell you'll get. They're connected to... to things, my friend. Things we don't want a relationship with.

  “But it's the same old problem. If we don't do something with these ShadowComm types, we have no control over them,” Swanson added, taking a cigar from his desk. “Same goes, Forsythe says, for the...things, the spirits they deal with.” He smelled the cigar wistfully. He wasn't allowed to smoke in here, but he chewed on the cigar's end, without lighting it.

  “The human race got by without...recruiting from that pool for centuries,” Erlich pointed out. “They used to burn these guys at the stake.”

  “What I heard, they were always burning the wrong people. And things have changed. The signal that suppresses their contact is getting weaker. More of these guys are showing up. Some pretty bad ones. Guy just broke out of jail, probably using those capabilities. Forsythe's looking into that. We

  might be able to fix the thing in the north but...I'm not sure the president wants to. He wants the edge. He supports this program. Forsythe's got him in his vest pocket.”

  “Exaggeration. Breslin's no surer than we are. I think we ought to explore the possibility of shutting down this program.”