A drone floated high above, sharply silhouetted against the blue of the dome. Felice could hear the faint whisper of its fans as he loped across the grass, Zhang Hilton turning to him, smiling, asking him if he wanted a piece of the action.
Felice ignored the man and asked Bel Glise if she was all right. She nodded once, straight up and down, her bloodless lips clamped tight.
‘I’ll walk you back to your room,’ Felice said.
‘We just got her warmed up and you step in?’ Zhang Hilton said. He was still smiling, but his gaze was deadly serious. ‘Man, I don’t think so.’
‘How is your arm?’ Felice said.
‘I heal quick,’ Zhang Hilton said. ‘How about you?’
‘If you want to fight me, don’t involve anyone else. Just walk up and ask,’ Felice said.
He was staring into Zhang Hilton’s face, watching for the cues that would give away the man’s intentions, but he was also aware of Zhang Hilton’s friend in his peripheral vision, turning now to look at something. He glanced around, a half-second jerk of his head. Two men were coming across the plaza from the west and a man and a woman were advancing from the east, all moving with the jaunty bouncing stroll that marked out Edz Jealott’s lieutenants. Felice saw Zhang Hilton’s expression change slightly, caught the man’s wrist when he began to reach inside his jerkin and bodychecked him and threw him to the ground and kicked him hard below the angle of his jaw, at the spot where nerves clustered, then pulled his shock stick from his belt and flicked it on and turned to face the other man, who’d conjured a three-ball flail from somewhere. The man held it low and swished it to and fro as he sidled to the left. Felice turned to follow him, aware of the other lieutenants closing on either side, armed with various of the non-lethal weapons permitted by the prison administration.
The drone hung unmoving high above. No help there. In the early days, the guards had put a stop to every kind of trouble by zapping everyone involved, but now they intervened only if it looked like someone was going to be killed.
Felice stepped towards the man with the flail, drawing circles in the air with his shock stick. The man swung at him and he drew himself in, the three iron balls at the ends of their taut chains whirring past his belly, and jammed the shock stick against the man’s ear. The man howled and fell to his knees and dropped the flail; before Felice could snatch it up, the other lieutenants charged in on either side. A man jabbed a shock stick at Felice’s face and Felice kicked him in the kneecap and put him straight down, spun in a half-circle and broke the woman’s nose with his elbow. Another man moved in from the left, swinging a cosh fabricated from a flexible sleeve of plastic stuffed with gravel and sand. Felice fended off the first blow with his left arm, the shock numbing it from elbow to shoulder; the second caught him on the side of the head and drove him to his knees. He saw the bloody-nosed woman wrestling with Bel Glise, saw Zhang Hilton staggering towards him with a cudgel gripped loosely in one hand, saw the cosh come down again and ducked away and felt air part above his head. Then the fourth lieutenant stepped in and kicked Felice hard in the small of his back and laid him out flat and breathless.
That wasn’t what knocked him out. The drone did that, zapping everyone in the vicinity with bolts of white-hot pain before Zhang Hilton could smash Felice’s skull.
When Felice Gottschalk regained consciousness, he was lying on his back, looking up at Edz Jealott and the blue curve of the dome. The light hurt his eyes. His head felt as if it had been split open and his left arm was hot and swollen. When he pushed to his knees, his sight pulsed black and red and the world revolved around him at a tilt and he almost fell down again.
‘You started a fight,’ Edz Jealott said. ‘I won’t have that in my town.’
Men and women stood in a wide and loose circle around the two of them. Edz Jealott’s girlfriends and lieutenants, other trusties, scientists. The young giant wore only a body suit rolled down to his waist, white elastomer moulded to his muscular legs and bulging over the bullybag of his genitals. On the broad shield of his chest a nest of tattooed snakes composed entirely of flame writhed around each other in slow motion. His skin was milkily translucent and his mane of black hair hung in oily ringlets to his shoulders.
‘If you want to fight anyone, fight me,’ he said, and struck the knot of flame-snakes with a hand big enough to wrap around Felice’s head. ‘I’ll even let you take the first shot.’
Felice didn’t reply. There was no point. Besides, it was taking most of his concentration to stay on his feet. The ground was pitching to and fro and Edz Jealott’s face kept doubling and sliding back together, the man making a speech now about the need to stick together, why it was dangerous for anyone to think that they could do what they wanted and ignore the common good. There was a commotion amongst the people loosely gathered around them - it was Amy Ma Coulibaly, intercepted by one of Edz Jealott’s lieutenants as she pushed through the watchers, the man twisting her arm up behind her back. Felice stepped towards her, and Edz Jealott caught his arm, swung him around, and swept him up in an implacable embrace. For a moment, they stared at each other; then Edz Jealott reared back and slammed his head forward and with the stony prow of his forehead broke Felice’s nose. Felice fell flat on his back, dazed and half-blinded by the hot knot of pain. He rolled over and pushed to his knees, and Edz Jealott’s kick caught him square in his chest and sent him flying backwards. The Moon slammed into him with all its unforgiving mass, and he didn’t feel anything else.
Waking once more in Amy Ma Coulibaly’s clinic, staring up at the pale glow of its ceiling, Felice felt as if he had reached without passing through any intermediate stages the terminal point of his illness. His torso and his left arm were badly bruised, he could feel his ribs creak every time he took a breath, and his nose was swollen and splinted. Amy told him that he had a concussion, and insisted on subjecting him to a battery of neurological tests. Rather more, he suspected, than was strictly necessary, but he was too confused and too weak to put up any resistance. He asked about Bel Glise. Amy told him that she had suffered nothing more than a few bruises and a mild case of shock.
‘I’m glad.’
‘You should be ashamed,’ Amy said, jabbing her slate with her forefinger, flipping through the false-colour representations of his brain’s neurodynamic activity. ‘Causing trouble like this. Is it pride, Felice? Or is it because you don’t really understand other people?’
‘I couldn’t walk away from it. I had to try to help her.’
‘You knew it was a show, didn’t you?’
‘When I saw the others, yes. Not at first.’
‘You knew that they were using Bel to lure you into some sort of trap. And you knew that they wouldn’t have done anything really bad to her because the guards would have punished them. You should have walked away.’
‘I was angry. Because they were using her. Because I had put her in danger.’
‘And now?’
‘How do I feel now? Ashamed. Confused. I poison everything I touch. I put your friend in danger, and you must be in danger too. I should go . . .’
But when he tried to sit up his head ripped wide open and muscles across his chest seized up with pain, so he lay back and watched the ceiling tiles slide apart through fat lenses of self-pitying tears.
‘This isn’t in any way a normal society,’ Amy said. ‘It’s more like a tribe of wild primates. Ruled by an alpha male with the help of a circle of men and women who behave like him because they are frightened of being exploited and threatened like the rest. And because Edz Jealott is at the head of the tribe, it reflects the way he thinks, and the way he thinks is crippled. You challenged his authority by acting as though it had nothing to do with you. He couldn’t ignore that because it was damaging his reputation, and reputation is all he has. Hence this.’
‘If he wanted to fight me, he could have called me out.’
‘He wanted to humiliate you. Hopefully, he thinks that he’s succeeded, ’ Amy said. ‘Otherwise he’ll come after you again. Now, not another word. Let me finish up here, so you can rest.’
Felice slept for a while, and woke to find Amy sitting straightbacked beside his hospital bed, hands folded prayerwise in her lap. She asked him how he was feeling, and he said that he felt that she had something to tell him.
‘The bruising and cracked ribs are healing amazingly quickly. And your nose won’t look quite as noble as it once did, but it’s healing too,’ Amy said. ‘But I need to ask - have you been experiencing any numbness or dizziness recently?’
‘It’s my condition, isn’t it?’
‘The tests show an impairment to your peripheral nervous system. It’s a natural progression. Neither faster nor slower than I expected.’
‘This is why Edz Jealott could beat me up.’
‘That’s exactly the attitude that got you in so much trouble,’ Amy said, and he shrivelled from her look of severe reproof.
Because he knew that she was right. He’d thought that he was different to the other prisoners and trusties. A nation of one, a secret king harbouring the secret wound of his illness, aloof and invulnerable, noble and virtuous. Edz Jealott had proved him wrong. Had shown him that he was as human as everyone else. He supposed that he should be grateful, that he shouldn’t hate the man, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Perhaps that was part of being human too.
3
The front-line camp of R&R Corps #897 was a row of Quonset huts hunched at the foot of the tanks and towers of a soil factory. To the south, gleaming like steel under the darkening sky, the Platte River ribboned away through a patchwork of restored reed beds and grassland. Everywhere else was a desert stripped of topsoil by a century of megastorms. A vast and tumbled waste fretted with gullies and crevasses and sinkholes, haunted by strong and restless winds that prowled writhing ridges of rock and winnowed tufts of tough catchgrass that clung amongst broken stones and blew swirls of sand past the posse of riders heading towards the camp, hunched on their horses in flapping dusters or serapes like road agents escaped from the myths of the long ago, the red blaze of a sunset foundering on the low and level horizon behind them.
An advance party had ridden into the camp several hours before. As the riders came down the ancient blacktop a small crowd surged through the gate in the security fence, whooping and cheering. Cash Baker checked his horse and thumbed back his broad-brimmed hat and looked around. Men and women dressed in green denim shirts and blue jeans; a jostle of upturned faces pale in the glare of the arc lights strung along the fence. This was the part he liked the least. An assassin could step forward, face cold and pitiless as a snake’s, and aim a revolver or trigger a satchel bomb. Soldiers could jog out from the shadows under the soil factory’s towers . . .
People raised their hands towards him and he reached down and shook a few. The other riders were shaking hands too, and their leader was halted in the middle of the crowd, leaning on the horn of his saddle and talking with an officer who had caught the bridle of his horse. After a few moments he sat up, blond hair shining in the arc lights, and lifted his hands over his head. The crowd grew quiet. Every face turned towards him as he thanked them for their hospitality. ‘We’ve ridden a long way to be here, so I hope you’ll excuse us if we take an hour to tend to our horses and freshen up. But I look forward to talking to you. We have much to discuss!’
Cash Baker had been riding with Alder Hong-Owen and his crew for six months now. At first they’d worked their way north along the Rocky Mountains, visiting with fugitive groups of so-called wildsiders. People who refused to quit the land and lived as nomads, a thousand small groups with a thousand names. Some of them native Americans, fiercely proud and independent. Others the descendants of refugees from the great shipwreck of civilisation. Sheep-herders and goat-herders in their temporary camps in summer pasturage high in the mountains. Bands of hunter-gatherers who pitched their smart-fabric tents here and there for a few days or a few weeks, tending little gardens hidden amongst rocks, in clearings in forests of pine and birch and alder, moving on. There was a village of houses built into ledges in the side of a steep canyon, with gardens strung along the canyon floor and wind-powered turbines hidden in tunnels carved through the ridge-rock. A group of rabbit farmers who presented everyone in Alder’s crew with patchwork gilets stitched from black and white pelts. A group that had colonised a nuclear shelter from the long ago, tending a hydroelectric plant, a farm of ancient mainframe computers, and a communications network that stretched along the backbone of the Rockies.
Everywhere they went, Alder Hong-Owen’s pilgrims distributed people-tree seeds, talked about revolution, and discussed the latest news from the rest of Greater Brazil and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Bandits, criminals and the like who’d gone feral were rare in the mountains. Most had been hunted down by the wildsiders, who either killed them in firefights or captured them and dumped them bound and naked and tattooed with lists of their crimes at the edges of the ant-heap cities. But when Alder’s crew of pilgrims quit the mountains ahead of the winter snows and cut around the northern end of the Great Desert, they were twice attacked by bandit crews. The first time a sneak raid at night, two guards left dead with their throats cut, five horses stolen amidst a wild stampede in the pitch dark. The second time, one snowy day early in December, a woman was shot out of her saddle by a rifleman as they rode through the ruins of Coleharbor, south of the great salt pan of what had once been Lake Sakakawea. They were pinned down by desultory gunfire until, as dusk began to fall, Cash led a counterattack. They engaged several indistinct figures in running gunfights amongst wrecked houses, lost their only drone, and pressed on until they reached a position the bandits had abandoned only minutes before, a horseshoe of stones amongst a stand of leafless sycamores, bloody bandages and clothes scattered around a smouldering fire, tracks trampled into the snow heading towards the hills to the north. The next morning, riding out of the ruins, they passed poles alongside the road, leaning into the blizzard and topped with grisly heads wearing caps of bloody snow, eyes rolled back, ears sheared away. Whether meant as threat or tribute they never knew nor cared to discuss.