by Brendan Ball
I sat up and yawned.
“He’s being held?”
“He dead. Right in the cell. Asthma attack, except he didn’t have no asthma. Wouldn’t sign to what didn’t happen. Now they on strike, asking if we with them.”
He stood there against the white walls of our moon-cave in only the slacks he had thrown on, glowering and tattooed and numbered.
“What was all that Hey Zeus about?”
“Kid’s name,” he said, and I realised: Jesus. “One of the chosen, like you.”
*
The old silver head was good about it really - better than the new one would have been.
“Roland...” He spoke across the dark wooden desk of his office with the manner of a disappointed uncle. “How? Were you sick that day? You looked it.”
“Somewhat, sir.”
“Wén 5 approval for a convicted graffitist... The Ministry of Justice aren’t lovers of poetry, especially in four-foot letters. He might as well have signed your name. And then I find you’ve taken illegal copies you can’t possibly have needed for yourself...”
There was no answer I could make.
He said, “Is it a woman?”
I nodded. It was simplest, dissuasive of further enquiry. His round shoulders fell and he took off his glasses to rub his eyes.
“Roland, you of all people... For as long as nothing comes back to me I won’t - I can’t - throw you to the wolves. But you’re through here. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded again. I supposed the wolves were our employers and guardians. He must have been upset.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
“For this to stay between ourselves you’ll have to resign of course, and be accepted elsewhere before I put the paperwork in. You don’t want inspectors or police.”
He really seemed in pain. He was unmarried, and it occurred to me as a touch of black irony to wonder about his true feeling for me all that time. But I had not enough self left for indignation; I could only pity a fellow sufferer.
“I’m arranging that now, sir. Today.”
“At such short notice? There’s nowhere on earth that will take you without new checks and references...”
“Indeed, sir,” I said. “Nowhere on earth.”
She was on the usual monorail going home. We greeted one another with tight glassy smiles and I thought my heart would burst then and there. She sat beside me - she could have stood instead and probably been more comfortable, but she had that much kindness in her. So I sat there warm one final time in her invisible light, head angled away so that she staring through the window would not see my eyes were closed, breathing in all I could of her and screaming inside.
When her stop came and she rose to leave I handed her the note. It had details of the passage I had booked to the moon colony, and when and where I would be waiting.
*
The Ticks did not wait for permission to reopen. It hosted the council of war the same evening. The Hispanics and numbered hands had declared a strike; the others, restive since the Lunar Seas announcement, sent delegates from each language group. Monroe combed the place for bugs - it turned out he had experience - and I was roped in to the motley Babylon as interpreter for the Chinese.
After pledging all manner of worker solidarity they argued over a venue for the protest. In the main complex they would be penned in and cornered; outside the biosphere, in suits, no one could eat or drink. The most open place under cover was a crater pegged and staked for what rumour said would be a prison, with shuttle lines already laid to and from the PortHotel. So it was organised like primitive terrorism, nothing on tablets, nothing even on paper, all by word of mouth, gangs deputed to steal tools as weapons, the Saturday-Sunday overnight (when most authorities would be home and sleeping) chosen for the movement - of people by a hijacked shuttle, and of materiel by buggies borrowed or stolen. I had no idea how it would end, but I had only one thing to lose and I guessed, rightly, they would not think to take that.
I was among the first into the crater. As one work gang after another arrived to camp out under the Milky Way in the only habitable place in the known universe where there were still no cameras, I felt glow out from the locket on my heart the strangest sense of homecoming. People set up their banners, ate together, sang songs with anything that could be fashioned into an instrument - there was even a doctor, fallen like me I supposed, going around with stolen medical supplies removing neck chips under local anaesthesia.
The security arrived late in the afternoon almost in one body, riot shields and taser guns glinting in the starlight above the banners of No Justice No Lunar Seas and Better Grave Than Slave and We Refuse To Forget Jesus - Hey Zeus. Perhaps that was why I dreamt of the Iliad.
“What you thinking now, man?” said Monroe’s voice beside me.
I put my hand to the locket and said, “Stand in the trench, Achilles...”
The Rivendale army formed up into a line between us and the route back.
*
The shuttle port itself was smaller than I expected, like revisiting a scene of childhood, except that it was everyone’s future and no one’s past. With the single bag of belongings I had not even filled, I sat in a foyer that could have belonged to any provincial airport. I held out no hope that she would come - how could I? - but the whole point was to kill the hope before the hope killed me.
Shuttle crew went through priority gates with suited officials too important to carry their own luggage, the golden ‘R’ in their lapels. Through the walls of bomb-proof bullet-proof glass I saw on one side under armed guard a group of numbered hands and on the other, in the transit area (for the port was one of only two in the world) a gaggle of Indians and Arabs and Caucasians dozing or arguing or praying. Such, not the officials, would now be my circle. A professional job on the colony required background checks and interviews: they wanted references and parents’ birth certificates before handing you a pen, but you were welcome to a pickaxe and a shovel. So I enlisted as a labourer.
When the voice behind me said my name I thought I was being arrested. It was a delivery boy with a bunch of flowers in sprays the colour of blood. I signed and he handed them over.
They were Azaleas. Inside was a tag no bigger than a watch-face with the words Good luck and sorry.
*
By the first night in the crater it was clear they planned to starve us. It was pragmatism. Replacements for casualties would be slow in coming, and such delays expensive. Hunger would make conquering easier and safer, but so of course would some dividing.
First they brought up the signal jammer. That isolated us from all outside - friends, family, the old world. The sense of comradeship and carnival, unassailed by a call back to work that went from invitation to advice to command, dwindled with the food supplies among doomed human shadows cut off from all but the stars.
Then the sleepless quiet of night in the camp was broken by the trill of messages - a few select tablets returning to life. The recipients were the thirteen union delegates. How Rivendale identified them was not asked amid the paranoid accusations and the demands, in all corners and languages, for a sight of what was written. Ten looked scared and argued; three - numbered hands all, an Englishman and a Japanese and a German - obliged. It was a Rivendale offer of promotion and reward if they used their influence rightly. That was the end of the other ten: before anyone could calm down or talk sense they were beaten out to the enemy.
Any chance of sleep or rest went with them. The night was given over on every side to arguments over replacement leaders and whether it were better to give up and remain in one piece. Morning met frayed nerves and empty stomachs. Sharp at seven the blue line changed guard, and at nine their public address blared again.
“Anyone surrendering peacefully in the next hour may return to work without criminal charges. No further such offer will thenceforward be made...”
If worker solidarity was already cracked, that drove in the
chisel. About one in four accepted, most from the groups whose delegates were gone, and thronged away with heads bowed in the mournful starlight under curses of betrayal and cowardice.
That those of us remaining still outnumbered those facing us will be taught to future schoolchildren here. That only they had guns will not. (If I speak with assurance, you must remember where I have worked.) It will go down in the history of the colony as the Battle of Monsanto Crater. History is written by the winners, and ‘battle’ sounds honourable - almost like a sporting contest, with more than one possible outcome.
*
A bunch of flowers is not something a labourer carries to the moon. I took one from the bunch and put it in my jacket with the card. The rest I handed back to the delivery boy and said to give them to his girl if he had one.
Before boarding I took a trawl through the shopping arcade. I bought a locket intended for a miniature photo, and in that I pressed the petals. It was a strange solution, but I thought it would serve.
It has. It was with me through the shuttle journey from which I knew there would be no return; it was with me through every day of rock-breaking in Rivendale’s trenches, of laying down shuttle rail for the bright shining future I will never see; it was with me every night in the Basement 7 residence, undetectable by hidden microphone and needing no encryption; it was with me through the therapy that was powerless against it; it was with me in the crater when we gathered for our stand, when dissension split us, when the food ran out and when the end came.
And it is with me now, all I have barring pen and paper, as I sit beneath Lunar Seas in the balneal whiteness of a subterranean cell, hearing footsteps pass the door with a whistle of Red River Valley.
*
The second night in the crater was longer and colder on empty stomachs, and the night shift guard ranks did regular drill to stop us sleeping and keep us arguing. On the morning of the third day they played the trump card.
The Chinese accounted for about half the camp, and the announcement was made in their language:
“All labourers born within the borders of Greater China will receive an unconditional pardon and 3 per cent pay rise if their collective surrender is received within the next fifteen minutes. All others have now been convicted in absentia of illegal assembly for purposes of hate crime and terrorism, as well as theft and breach of contract...”
That was as much as I heard: they were fighting among themselves even before it finished. When the numbered hands realised what it was about they pitched in for those who would stay, who then turned on them in defence of their countrymen.
And that was when the smoke and gas grenades plopped down on the crater floor - we had no idea such things existed on the colony, and that and the fighting gave the guards, a metre or two above us, the time to put on masks.
I ran breathless through the thickening cloud to where I thought was the nearest edge, but there was no way through in time. It was chloroform or something similar - they could not afford to destroy the whole workforce, we had at least been right about that - but some must have got out before it stopped them because the gloom burst with taser and gun shots. I remember the screams, the all-nation faces drowning in mist and contorted with blind rage and panic, my every muscle lulling me down with the treacherous promise of rest. My last thought was to fall on my front to hide and protect the locket.
I opened my eyes with a sensation of falling. I was being dragged, backwards by the feet, hands bound behind. I looked up and saw the crater - the bodies down inside, the new blood glistening dark around the rim - and just had time to feel the locket still beneath me before something hit my head.
I woke the second time slumped against a wall. Down a long line of us, and flanked by armed guards, came the new silver patrician head that had spoken to me of wellness; he was picking out those he wanted taken elsewhere. He got to me and gestured.
“This one.”
A needle pierced my neck and I passed out again.
*
Another needle woke me. A white ceiling slowly unblurred. My hands were still bound, the locket still in place.
“Welcome.”
I turned my head from where I lay on the couch. He sat back at his desk, on which lay a blown up image of the flower I had drawn. The office was different but the posters were the same. I worked my tongue around my mouth until I could speak.
“What do you want?”
“You,” he said. “I have told you the nature of my work. Without such as you, we can not grow.”
He pressed a button in the desk. A guard came in, hauled me to my feet and held me till I could stand.
“Come.”
I was taken out, down in a lift and along the corridors of this Lunar Seas basement.
“Few behold this. You are deemed worthy.”
A Bach organ somewhere played soft and low as they led me into a candlelit hall, vast, majestic, like nothing I had ever seen. An arcade of pillars, all draped in rich cloth bearing the Rivendale ‘R’, supported a high ceiling of black quartz. Up from the floor unending beyond sight rose a thick shaft in the far centre.
“That goes all the way up.”
It was embossed - the Rivendale ‘R’ again - in diamonds, rubies, gems I did not know. The woman in the white kaftan knelt before it, palms and forehead to the ground. Its base was garlanded with manacles and money, and spattered with what looked like blood. They walked me up to a panel in the front.
“To grow the oak, one must plant the acorn. And the right acorns make our mighty oak.”
The head hunter unlocked the panel, let it read his fingerprints, and entered a code. It slid open. Inside revolved a display case, and lining the shelves, preserved by freezing, were amputated human heads.
They will be here soon. I have spent my last hours writing this testimony at their request, to be burnt as part of the ceremony. It shall therefore never meet human eye unless some heroic traitor waits in their ranks. I must part with the locket - my only regret - but the petals now are under my tongue where no one will think to search, and where, all being well, they shall remain for the rest of eternity.
Acknowledgements etc.
Cover design by Keri Knutson.
Sincere thanks to Jasbir S. Jagdeo & Joe Quigley.
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By the same author:
Thieves in the Night