Colony, page 33
“She’s my prisoner,” David said. “And so are you.”
Leo laughed, a bubbling chuckle that quickly grew into a head-tossing roar. “I’m your prisoner? Yeah? ’Cause you got that little popgun in your hand? Man, you could shoot that thing at me all night and it wouldn’t do no good.”
“Don’t try to bluff me,” David said.
Leo’s laughter subsided. “Okay. No bluff. But what you gonna do about the two dudes back there who got their guns pointin’ at you?”
David glanced quickly over his shoulder and, sure enough, two wiry black youths were pointing rifles at his head.
With a reluctant sigh, David handed the pistol over to Bahjat. “I guess I’m your prisoner again,” he said.
“I guess you are.” She turned to Leo. “Why are you here instead of at your headquarters? Are you leaving?”
“Got my escape route all planned out,” Leo said. “Nice little laboratory upstate a ways. Right on the river. Nobody’d look for PRU guerrillas there.”
“When do you leave?”
Leo shrugged massively. “When the white-asses make their counterattack. We can’t hold out against the Army; I know that. When they make their move, I make mine.”
“You’re going to leave your people here to fight and die while you run away?” David asked.
“Damn’ right. We can always get more troops. That’s easy. But you gotta protect the leaders. Can’t replace them.”
“But...” David spread his arms and gestured at the blacked-out city. “What was the point of all this? The killing, the terror, the destruction... what was the point?”
“To show the white-asses that we’re gonna get ’em,” Leo said. “Show ’em that we can tear this whole country apart if they don’t give us what we want.”
“It’s a revolution,” Bahjat said, “a true revolution. What was the point of Bunker Hill, or Lexington and Concord, in the American Revolution?”
“The first American Revolution,” Leo corrected. “You just saw the opening shot in the second American Revolution.”
David sank down onto one of the boat’s plastic-covered benches. “It’s all so futile. You kill whites so they’ll send in their army to kill blacks.”
“Yeah, and when they do, every non-white in the U.S. of A. will hafta pick which side he’s gonna be on. And they’ll be on our side, all of ’em. Ain’t no other choice.”
“The American Army itself is mostly non-white, isn’t it?” Bahjat asked.
“Yeah. How you think they gonna feel when they get ordered t’wipe out whole city blocks?”
David could feel his head spinning. “It’s just blood. Blood, blood, and more blood. There’s got to be a better way.”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and of patriots,” Bahjat said. “Thomas Jefferson wrote that.”
Leo added, “He also wrote that all men are created equal—not just white-asses.”
But David said, “You can’t build a better world by destroying the one you have. What will you replace it with?”
Leo grunted. “We’ll worry ’bout that when the time comes.”
“The time is here,” David insisted.
“Hey, look!” called one of the kids at the stern of the boat. “Planes!”
Leo pushed past David and Bahjat to get out from under the canvas top. Bahjat was right behind him. David turned and, leaning an elbow on the gunwale, peered out the side of the boat. Silvery, feather-like contrails were etching across the moonlit sky. David counted five groups of a dozen each: sixty planes.
“Start the motor!” Leo snapped.
“They ain’t doin’ nothin’,” said one of the kids. “They too high.”
“Ain’t here for our health,” Leo muttered. “An’ whatever they gonna do, they gonna do it to the city. Get this bucket movin’ now!”
Within minutes a fine golden dust sprinkled out of the sky, but the boat was racing so fast—bow out of the water—that the dust blew off them as fast as it came down. In a few moments the golden snowfall was over. Leo let the kid at the helm ease back on the throttle.
As they slid past the blacked-out city, they could see the streets choked with gray-green gas. Leo scanned the scene silently with a pair of binoculars. After several long, wordless minutes he handed them to Bahjat. She put them to her eyes, then gasped.
David heard her murmuring in Arabic. “What is it?” he asked.
She gave him the binoculars. David couldn’t see much at first, but as he learned to hold the glasses steady in the chugging boat, he started to make out human forms in the swirling tendrils of gas. They were staggering, falling, spasming. Everywhere he looked, in the streets, in the green park area along the riverfront, he saw chaos. People who had huddled on rooftops to be safe from the marauding guerrillas were tearing themselves apart to get away from the gas and whatever else it was that turned them into spastic, gibbering epileptics. He watched someone hurl himself from a roof and fall twenty stories to the street, twitching and screaming all the way down.
David handed the binoculars back to Leo.
The black man lifted his chin a notch and pointed skyward. “An’ those are the guys who’re tryin’ to help the white-asses in the city,” he said, his voice a deep, rumbling sadness. “They don’ mind killin’ their own people t’get at us. So don’ think we’re that mutha-humpin’ bad.”
~~~
The strangest, saddest, gladdest day of my life!
As soon as they assembled us in a meeting room at Space Station Alpha, the instructors told us that we had all just about completed our training for Island One, and we were going to move right on to the colony as soon as they could send a spacecraft to pick us up. No more classes, no more testing. We had made it!
They let us try to reach our homes by picturephone. I got Mom and Dad okay. There wasn't any fighting in Minnesota—for once the weather was kind to us. Ruth couldn't get through to California for hours; then the Corporation finally put through a special high-priority link. Her parents were okay, but their house had been burned to the ground and they were living in an army barracks.
Three of the class asked permission to go home. They didn't want to go to Island One while their families were in danger. So that left eight of us—out of sixty who started the classes a few months ago.
I talked it over with Ruth, about going to Island One. All of a sudden I found myself telling her we ought to get married so there'd be no problem about us living together in Island One. And she agreed! So we found the chapel down on level one [full Earth gravity] and had the ceremony performed with two of our classmates as witnesses, and with Mom and Dad watching by phone link. We couldn't get through to Ruth's parents, but my folks promised to send them a videotape.
We honeymooned last night on level six [nearly zero gravity—wow!]. Today we head for Island One to start our new life together. Man and wife.
—The journal of William Palmquist
~~~
THIRTY-TWO
Hamoud paced the white-painted dock impatiently. He wore the clothes the local PRU activists had given him, knee-length pants and a loose shirt with gaudy stripes and numbers splashed across it. An imitation of a sports uniform, the current rage among American youths. He felt ridiculous, but he regarded the costume as necessary camouflage.
Up on the hilltop overlooking the river stood the research laboratory. No one suspected that it was now a PRU headquarters. The lab had been officially closed by Garrison Enterprises, and the staff had been given indefinite leave, with pay. They were all home, nervously locked inside their suburban houses, ready to protect family and property in Nyack, Tarry town, and Peekskill. Sitting in front of blazing TV screens with shotguns on their laps, they watched with horror as cities flamed and died. They thanked God and Garrison Enterprises that they lived far from downtown. But was it far enough? Each of them wondered.
It was a gray, cloudy day and the wind along the river was damp and chill. Hamoud shivered as he strained his senses, trying to conjure up the expected boat the way a fakir entices a cobra from its reed basket.
Bahjat was on the boat, he knew. The radio message he had received during the night had been in code, but it was quite specific. Scheherazade was coming to him, together with the New York leader, Leo. And she was bringing him a gift, a treasure, a prisoner—the man from Island One.
A jewel of inestimable price, this prisoner from the space colony. He knew all about Island One: its workings, its security, its weak points. A gold mine of information. And the research laboratory was an ideal place to extract that information from him. Afterward? Hamoud shrugged to himself. Worthless prisoners don’t livelong.
Evelyn was staring at the river, too, waiting for the boat to arrive.
She was in one of the laboratory offices, standing at the window and looking out at the gray sky and grayer river. Even the conifers on the other side of the Hudson seemed gray and lifeless under the low, scudding clouds.
Why do I feel like this? Evelyn asked herself. Her hands were knotted into sweaty-palmed fists. Her insides were fluttering. Deep within her she had the feeling that something bad, very bad, was about to happen.
She watched Hamoud pacing the dock like an eager little boy. He had ignored her since they had arrived at the laboratory the night before. Normally dour, often surly, he had been all anticipation since the radio message had come in that Scheherazade was on her way.
He's madly in love with her, Evelyn realized.
Good. She was glad he wanted Scheherazade and not herself. And David was on that boat, too. The premonition of danger, of death, that was hanging over her had to do with David. Somehow she wished he were somewhere else, no matter where, just as long as he could be safely away from Hamoud.
The office she was in was a small one, with little more than a desk, some shelves for tapes, and a chalkboard. Evelyn had slept fitfully for a few hours on the carpeted floor in a sleeping bag that the local PRU kids had provided. Shocking blue. Even more shocking against the lime-green walls and pale gray carpet. It was dusty on the floor, and Evelyn had coughed herself awake every time she had drifted off.
There were color photographs of a woman and two tots in slim metal frames on the desk. The chalkboard was half-filled with indecipherable equations; the other half had been wiped clean with a smeary plastic sponge.
The laboratory’s cafeteria was closed, of course, but the locals had brought in bags full of soggy sandwiches and rancid, cold coffee. Evelyn couldn’t stomach any of it. She went back to the window and watched Hamoud watching the river.
“So how do you like living in a tropical paradise?” Garrison asked Arlene.
They were on the rooftop of a low, gracefully designed house set in the midst of the lush tropical growth of Cylinder B. Birds chittered and squawked in the sunlight. A narrow, fast stream gushed nearby.
“It’s sure different from Texas,” Arlene said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to having the ground curve up clear over my head.”
“You will, you will,” Garrison said. “You’re gonna live like a princess up here. Like a goddamned jungle priestess.”
She smiled at him.
“I could just sit here an’ look all day long,” Garrison said. “Th’ work of a lifetime... I’m finally here. I’ll spend the rest of my days right here, honey. Safe home at last.”
“Dr. Cobb called again a half-hour ago,” Arlene said. “Said he needed to talk to you about...”
“Let Cobb cool his ass,” Garrison snapped. “He’s all hot and flustered about the rioting back in the States. Looks like some sympathy riots have busted out in other places, too. Tokyo got hit pretty bad.”
“You’ll have to speak with him sooner or later,” Arlene insisted.
Garrison wheeled his powerchair to face her. “Now don’t you take that schoolmarm tone with me, lady!” But he was grinning. “C’mon, let’s go back downstairs and see how Houston’s makin’ out.”
Arlene followed him to the elevator doors and they went down the single flight into Garrison’s office area. The windows were wide and unglassed. Birds could fly in and out. The lounges and chairs were set along the grass-covered floor as casually as an interior designer could calculate, and the decor looked more Tahitian than Texan.
But in the corner was a ceiling-high smoked glass screen, and behind it the intricate electronic machinery of a holographic video set.
Arlene sat in a rope-webbed chair beside Garrison. Her flowered skirt was slit to the hip and slid away to show her long suntanned legs.
But Garrison was looking at the smoking ruins of Houston, in the three-dimensional viewscreen. The city was a shambles: buildings gutted or blasted out, rubble and dead bodies choking the streets. Even the Garrison Tower had been attacked and its lower floors were charred and blackened, windows gone. An Army tank squatted ponderously in the otherwise empty parking area beneath the Tower, its long cannon drooping slightly downward, as if ashamed of what it had been doing.
“Not’s bad as I thought it’d be,” Garrison muttered.
He tapped the keyboard on his armrest. New Orleans. Pittsburgh. Los Angeles. St. Louis. Atlanta. Gutted, flattened, blood-soaked. As if earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes had all come together at once. But the destructive power of nature could not equal the deliberate calculated deadliness of man. Battles were still raging in Chicago and New York. Garrison watched network news coverage of the street-to-street, house-to-house fighting.
“Lotta dead niggers,” he said.
“A lot of dead whites,” Arlene added, her voice flat, hard, controlled.
“Yeah, now. But I mean later. After the fightin’s over. Next week. Next month. They’re gonna have ballparks filled with PRU punks—blacks, Chicanos, PR’s, Indians. Gonna get rid of boatloads of ’em.”
Arlene stared at her boss. “You had this all figured out, didn’t you? Months ago, you had all of this planned.”
“Years ago,” Garrison said, watching the screen. Canadian jets were dive-bombing a block of city-built apartment towers on Chicago’s South Side.
“But why?” Arlene asked. “How could you do this...”
He flicked a glance at her. “Feel sorry for ’em?”
“Sort of.”
“Can’t make an omelet without breakin’ eggs.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How is this going to help you? What’s all this got to do with protecting Garrison Enterprises or the Island One Corporation?”
Garrison leaned back in his chair and grinned crookedly at her. He broke into a cackling laugh.
“You really haven’t put it all together in your head, have you?”
Arlene said, “Tell me about it.”
“Look at her.” Garrison chuckled. “Sooo curious. Sooo eager to learn what my strategy is. Figger you’re gonna take over when I’m gone, honey?”
Arlene’s eyes flashed. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t make any plans for my funeral, ’cause I’m gonna outlive most of you.”
“You’re talking silly.” She was all innocent surprise and hurt feelings.
“Sure I am.”
“I just want to know how all this is going to help us.” She slid off her chair and knelt beside him, turning her ice-blue eyes up toward Garrison’s. “I’m just trying to understand how your mind works, that’s all.”
“I’ll bet,” he said. Then, “It’s a trick the Commies useta use, back in the Cold War days. Stir up as much hell as they could, anywhere and everywhere. Bound to help ’em, one way or another, ’cause they were against the status quo. Wherever there was trouble, war, riots, hunger, labor strikes, guerrilla movements, th’ goddamn’ Commies’d be right here, helpin’ the underdog. They didn’t believe in any of it. They weren’t interested in the underdog... they just wanted t’ knock off the overdog so’s they could take over themselves.”
Arlene nodded. “And that’s what you’re doing now.”
“The World Government wants t’ control markets, prices, tax rates... those damn’ bureaucrats’ll put a stranglehold on everything. All in the name of helpin’ the poor countries... feedin’ the starvin’ billions. Well, the more you feed ’em, the more starvin’ billions they make. And the less able they are to feed themselves. That’s why the World Government’s gotta go.”
“And they’re bad for profits,” Arlene added, smiling.
“That too.” Garrison smiled back.
She gestured at the viewscreen. Heavy olive-green Army tanks were trundling slowly across the George Washington Bridge. No guerrillas were in sight.
“But all this fighting in the cities, how’s this going to get rid of the World Government?”
“It was gonna happen anyway,” Garrison said. “Sooner or later the cities were gonna explode. Miracle is they didn’t blow up years ago. We just helped ’em blow off the steam that’s been buildin’ up for years.”
“And the World Government...”
“Looks bad no matter what happens. If they had moved fast and sent in their troops to help the U.S. Army, the American people woulda got pissed off about foreign soldiers in their backyards. Most of the World Army’s just as black an’ brown as these PRU guerrillas... blacker. The African troops are blacker than any American nigger. They might not’ve wanted to shoot up their colored cousins. Even if they did, there’d be lotsa pillaging and raping. Always is when you get foreign troops.”
“And that would have stirred up the American people against the World Government.”
“Shorely would. Especially with our new media folks stirrin’ ’em up.”
“But the World Government didn’t act. They haven’t done a thing...”
“Even better,” Garrison said. “Now we can blame them for sittin’ on their fannies while American cities went up in smoke.”
“What about De Paolo’s death?”
Garrison snorted. “Thirty years too late. Everybody dies. Except me. I’m gonna go on forever. Don’t you ever forget that.”
