‘If we were.’
‘Go to Earth, if I could.’
‘Don’t you want to be fixed up first?’
‘I can get fixed up on Earth, can’t I?’
Amy smiled. ‘Perhaps we could go together.’
‘To New Zealand?’
‘Why not? I’m sure it’s still there.’
A military ship touched down at the prison’s landing field, and robots unloaded construction materials, transported them into the tent, and fabricated a geodesic dome close to the western flank of the rim wall. Two days after the dome had been completed and pressure-tested, a second ship arrived and disgorged a batch of prisoners from Earth. They were marched straight to the new dome and put to work, constructing a barracks inside it. There were rumours that they were renegade scientists and scions of the great families who had shown sympathy with the agitators in Greater Brazil, but no one knew for sure because the new prisoners were kept entirely separate from everyone else.
Amy said that it was a sign that the government of Greater Brazil was weakening. ‘If President Nabuco was confident that he could crush the revolution, he would have killed those prisoners instead of sending them here.’
‘They are hostages,’ Felice said.
‘Exactly so. If the government falls, the president will use them to bargain for clemency.’
‘What about us?’
‘Let’s hope we also have some value. To one side or the other.’
Soon after the new prisoners arrived, one of the Outer prisoners disappeared. Goether Lyle, an expert in n-dimensional topology. When he didn’t turn up for his daily session with his collaborators in Greater Brazil, trusties were ordered by the prison administration to search the barracks and the vacuum-organism fields; later that day, his body was discovered a few hundred metres from the new geodesic dome. It appeared to be a straightforward suicide. Goether Lyle had been found sitting cross-legged, head bowed, his face mask, air tank, and harness rig lying nearby.
That evening, Felice asked Amy if Goether Lyle had ever talked about killing himself.
‘I didn’t really know him.’
‘He was from Athens, like you.’
‘So are many other people in this place.’
‘Well, did he ever talk to you about it during one of his health checks?’
‘If he did, it would have been in confidence. Between patient and doctor.’
‘That doesn’t matter now, doesn’t it?’
‘It matters to me. Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind, Felice?’
‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Felice said.
‘It wasn’t?’
Felice cupped the back of his neck with his palm. ‘The surveillance system tracks our implants every minute of the day, everywhere in the prison. But it took several hours to find Goether Lyle’s body. Either his implant had been turned off, or it had been removed.’
‘You know that isn’t possible.’
‘I was thinking that one of the guards could have switched off Goether Lyle’s implant via the surveillance system before luring him out into the fields and killing him.’
‘If one of the guards happens to be listening to us right now, that kind of talk could get you into trouble.’
‘They don’t much care what we think.’
Amy studied him. ‘You haven’t really changed, have you? You’re still looking for someone to save.’
‘I can’t save Goether Lyle.’
‘You think someone killed him. You want to save other people from the same fate.’
‘You could talk to your friend. The European doctor. Ask him whether there was any unusual bruising on Goether Lyle’s body. Any indication of a struggle.’
‘Goether killed himself, Felice,’ Amy said, with uncharacteristic asperity. ‘He found a dead spot in the surveillance system and took off his face mask. As suicides go, it would have been more or less painless. The high concentration of carbon dioxide would have rendered him unconscious before the low pressure could cause internal haemorrhaging. People have killed themselves before, in here. And they’ll do it again. So let this go. Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘When someone else dies,’ Felice said, ‘you’ll know that I’m right.’
5
Cash Baker rode out of Omaha in an R&R truck driven by a cheerful middle-aged woman who told him to take good care of himself when he swung down from the cab at the depot on the outskirts of St Louis. He hitched a ride on a freight train that headed north and east out of St Louis and stopped at every station along the line to Indianapolis. It was raining in Indianapolis. Seven in the evening, the sky sheeted with low cloud, floodlights burning along the tracks in the freight yard, rain falling on the strings of boxcars. Cash followed the instructions he’d been given and caught a bus that would take him to the east side of the city. Two men sat behind him and when the bus started moving again one of the men leaned forward and told Cash that they were there to help him.
‘Who am I talking to?’
Cash had his hand in his slingbag, holding the grip of his pistol. But there was no point pulling it because the men could be armed too, and if he caused any kind of trouble the bus’s AI would lock the doors and call the police.
‘Friends who want to keep you out of the hands of state security,’ the first man said.
‘Your contact in Tower Twenty-Eight is compromised,’ the other said. ‘You’re lucky we spotted you before the OSS did.’
‘We’ll get off at the next stop,’ the first man said.
They got off at the next stop. A banana-yellow electric car was parked at the kerb under the dripping foliage of a big people tree. Gouts of rain drove across the deserted plaza beyond. The tiered lights of a residential tower rose into the wet black night.
Cash climbed into the back of the car and one of the men got behind the wheel and the other sat beside Cash and insisted on shaking his hand. A simple human gesture that made Cash feel slightly better, although the men wouldn’t tell him where they were going. They drove for an hour or so along a twisty route, at last turning off the road and gliding down an avenue of trees and pulling up in front of a big white-porticoed house that looked as old as the United States, rain spearing down out of the night all around.
A burly dark-skinned old man with a trimmed white beard stood in the big, double-height doorway, framed by yellow light, calling out to Cash as he unpacked himself from the little car, telling him to come on in out of the goddamn weather.
That was how he met Colonel Bear Stamford.
The two men drove off in their little yellow car and Cash followed the colonel into a hallway, dripping on the tiled floor, taking in the wooden staircase and the wooden panelling on the walls.
‘We’ll get you dry, and then we’ll talk,’ the old man said.
A house robot floated out of the shadows beyond the staircase and led Cash to a bedroom where he showered and put on the sweater and jeans laid out on the bed. He spent a moment thinking about whether or not to tuck the pistol in the waistband of the jeans, decided it wouldn’t make any difference, and followed the robot downstairs to a large room where ladders of old books crowded real wood shelves and a memo space showed a view of Earth from geosynchronous orbit.
Colonel Stamford rose to greet him from one of the leather wing chairs that stood on either side of a carved stone fireplace in which real wood logs burned, asked him if he preferred whiskey or brandy. Cash said he’d settle for coffee. Another robot, smaller than the first, poured him a small cup from a silver pot while Colonel Stamford asked Cash about his adventures with Alder Hong-Owen and the houses and hunting lodges of the rich that he’d attacked last year. They used the memo space to check them out. The view was live, patched from surveillance satellites, tracking in to show the ruins of buildings blackened and burnt in their various wildernesses.
‘You stopped after four actions,’ Colonel Stamford said.
‘The point wasn’t to destroy every one of those places, but to make folk aware of them. That’s why I took the photos and made the movies,’ Cash said. ‘I think it worked, because I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I?’
‘Perhaps you didn’t expect to meet someone like me. Someone who is quite obviously of the establishment, such as it is.’
‘This past year I’ve learned we have all kinds of friends, Colonel.’
‘When did you last eat, Captain Baker?’
‘I’ve mostly been travelling today. I had me a good breakfast before I started out.’
‘I would be honoured if you would stay and have dinner,’ Colonel Stamford said.
They ate in a room that seemed to have been furnished solely for that purpose, with a long oak table and oak chairs with carved backs and seats cushioned with cracked red leather. The small robot glided back and forth on its ball drive between the room and a kitchen somewhere else in the house, serving onion soup and fresh bread, a rice dish with bits of vegetable in it and three kinds of sauce in silver pitchers. The colonel drank blood-dark wine; Cash, wanting to keep a clear head, stuck to water.
The dining room, like the hallway, was panelled with dark wood. Life-sized oil paintings of men and women in military uniform hung along one wall. Three of them in pressure suits of antique design. One, Colonel Stamford told Cash, had been the first woman to step onto the surface of Mars; somewhere in the house was one of the rocks she had brought back.
‘My family has a long history of serving the United States of America. As has yours. Those days are part of the long ago of course, but we still maintain some of the old traditions.’
At last Cash dared to ask the question he’d been itching to ask ever since he had arrived. ‘Are you in charge of this thing I joined?’
‘I don’t think you could say that anyone in particular is in charge of anything.’
‘That’s what they say. I’ve always found it hard to believe, though.’
‘Because of your military background. I quite understand. But we are not in the military now. We are part of a horizontal and highly distributed organisation, and it’s very important that it stays that way. First, because it means that it cannot be destroyed by cutting off its head. Second, because it means that it belongs to everyone. For my part, I have connections with people who are interested in what you and your friends have been doing this past year. They supported the peace and reconciliation movement before the Quiet War, and they are very much against the idea of going to war against the Pacific Community.’
‘You mean the Fontaine family. This is their territory, right? And I know they’ve always voted against military spending. Even though we fought for them. I fought for them, back when. Around Chicago. How are you connected with them?’
‘I served as a soldier for Greater Brazil for thirty years, Captain Baker. Fighting against so-called bandits and wildsiders to consolidate the Fontaine family’s grip on this territory. To make it safe for the R&R Corps to move in and begin to clean up the Great Lakes region. I am retired now. This house is my family’s house. My great-great-great-grandfather bought it in 1948. We held on to it through the Overturn, the civil war, and cession to Greater Brazil. As I believe your family held on, in Bastrop.’
‘It wasn’t a matter of holding on. It was more like we just kind of never left,’ Cash said.
‘My family has a military tradition,’ Colonel Stamford said. ‘We fought in every major war and most of the minor ones. I number two congressmen and a senator amongst my ancestors, as well as the woman who was in charge of the Indianapolis militia when things went bad during the Overturn. But I am the last of my line. My wife died a year after our son was killed in a firefight in the ruins of Detroit. I retired soon after that, and I became interested in history. I was spending most of my time writing a history of my family that no one would ever read, and then I fell in with the Freedom Riders after I was asked by a friend to make contact with them. And I came to believe that I could still make a contribution. That I could help to right the wrongs done in the name of Gaia. Oh, much good has been done, of course, but it is despite the so-called great families, not because of them.
‘I dare say that you know all about the way the great families have traduced the holy project of restoring and renewing Gaia for their own purposes, so I won’t rehearse those arguments here. We have been trying to help people understand that. We have learnt from the Outers about communitarianism and nonviolent resistance, and we have helped those hungry for change to form a democratic movement. We have made alliances with wildsiders who have more in common with ordinary people than any in the great families. In short, Captain Baker, we have sown a harvest that we will soon gather in. I’m ready to make my own small contribution to that, and I hope you are, too.’
Cash told the colonel that he believed he was here because someone needed him to fly a space shuttle, told him that he wasn’t sure he was up to it.
‘Because of what happened to you in the Quiet War.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’ve been frank with me, Captain. That takes courage. As for your peripheral nerve damage, we may be able to do something about that, by and by.’
‘The Air Defence doctors told me it was permanent, sir.’
‘I think you should get a second opinion,’ the colonel said. He poured the last of the wine into his glass, gave Cash a wry look across the table, and said, ‘I drink too much. And I also talk too much. A failing of the old, who can no longer do much of anything but talk. Still, I hope my company will prove tolerable to you for a few days. My friends need to verify your credentials. Despite your long association with our mutual friend, despite his assurances, they must be certain that you are not a double agent. I do not think you are. But I have nothing to lose, and they stand to lose everything if I am wrong, and so they must be very careful. I hope you understand.’
‘Are you saying I’m a prisoner here?’
‘You are my guest, Captain. You can come and go as you please in the house and in the grounds. Beyond that, you are on Fontaine family territory. Their police force could keep you in custody while you were checked out. But that would risk getting the attention of the OSS. Who would disappear you so thoroughly that no one would know you had ever been born. So here you are. It’s a compromise, but not, I hope, an unhappy one.’