Seeking the Mythical Future (16 page)

Black couldn't trust himself to speak; he could barely nod, too furious and sick at heart to do anything else. He prayed that there would be another purge. He wanted to see Benson suffer. He would like to have seen him bitten by a two-headed King snake and his yellow shrunken corpse thrown into the alligator pits.

*

The inmates were allowed to wander freely within the wire enclosure, though for most of the day it was too hot to venture outside the huts. Inside, it was like a Turkish bath, while outside was an open-hearth furnace. Along with two hundred other newly-arrived deportees, Q was herded into F Compound, one of the twenty or so pre-screening compounds; they were a mixed bunch of both sexes and all ages, several of them under twelve years of age. One of the women was with child.

They were fed twice a day, morning and evening and, in between, there was nothing to do except lie on the bunks and run with sweat. A few made paltry attempts at conversation, but the heat eventually overcame all activity, even that of
moving the tongue and mouth to produce sounds. It was as if the brain had gone flaccid, like a heavy decomposing sponge resting on the cranial nerves. Water was strictly rationed, one cupful of warm brackish liquid with each portion of food. The children were allowed half-a-cupful each.

Escape was never discussed, nor even mentioned, because it was plainly impossible: there was nowhere to escape to. Outside the compound lay the desert, and beyond that the sea. These people were here for ever; perhaps the odd one might return to civilization, but he or she would be altered beyond all recognition. And for those who, after screening, would find themselves committed to the High Intensity Complex there was no hope whatsoever. The journey was one way, deeper into the burning hinterland.

Towards sunset a sluggish movement would manifest itself as the inmates drifted from the huts into the faint stirring of air, hardly a breeze, which merely shifted the heat from the desert into the compound. But, with the day advanced, it was fractionally cooler, bearable enough to walk on the ground without blistering the feet. The guards usually waited till after the sun had set before issuing food – not for the benefit of the inmates but because it was less arduous for them, carrying the slop and ladling it into the waiting wooden bowls. Anyone not in the queue didn't receive any food.

Afterwards, in the fast falling darkness, there was the sound of slurping and grunting as everyone sucked the bowls dry, crunching to fragments whatever bones they happened to find. It was sustenance of a kind, just enough to keep body and soul together. And sometimes there were other sounds – cries and frantic scramblings – as one of the guards, for a bit of amusement, threw a snake over the wire and watched it wriggle among the close-packed bodies before being stamped to death in the red earth. It was a harmless diversion at the end of the day, good spectator-sport for the three or four guards who stood laughing outside the perimeter fence. On other nights they might decide to prolong their pleasure, swaggering into the compound and selecting one of the younger females and raping her in full view of the other inmates. If she protested they
would beat her with wooden sticks; providing they didn't kill her, anything was permitted.

With the fall of darkness, and the guards retired for the night, the inmates would gather in small groups, sitting crosslegged or slumped in the dust, conversing in low murmurs and perhaps bartering the few meagre possessions they had managed to conceal. The talk was mostly of the past: no one was willing or prepared to visualize a future which they knew to be, though hardly conceivable, worse than the present.

Q was accepted as just another inmate. His peculiar paleness – even more noticeable in this blistering climate – aroused no comment or curiosity. He sat with the others, listening to their reminiscences, now and then prompting them when their stories seemed fragmentary or incomplete. His own past was still largely a mystery to him. He could remember parts of it, dimly realized, as though perceived in dreams, but these dreams were insubstantial scraps which seemed distorted, as if viewed at immense distances through clouds of whirling gas. At other times a revelation crystallized complete in his head, usually a piece of knowledge or information which arrived out of nowhere, so that he knew its most intricate detail, except how it had got there. The thought occurred to him that it might be a religious vision, that he was a prophet of the coming Messiah. But he also knew that if he revealed the thought it would only confirm – to his fellow inmates as much as to Black – that he was truly insane.

In the warm pressing darkness the people sat huddled in groups, talking quietly. Above them the stars were like beacons, huge and near enough to touch, filling the sky to every horizon.

‘In New Amerika, so they say, the King has ordered a purge,' someone was saying – a woman in her thirties with thick glossy black hair tied back with grimy ribbon.

‘What happens in New Amerika needn't bother you,' said a man's tired voice. ‘You are here, my friend. There could be fifty purges and you'd still be here.'

‘The King might grant a pardon. It has been known.'

‘Has it? I've never heard of it. You're living in daydreams. Better give up hope now, then you won't be doubly disappointed later on.'

*

‘There has been a purge,' someone else said, a young man in his early twenties. ‘It was on the telegraph.'

‘How do you know what was on the telegraph?' the man scoffed.

‘I heard the guards discussing it. They said a message had been received direct from King Jimmy K himself; they said it would affect everyone but them. They were laughing about it.'

‘Purges come and purges go,' said the man. ‘We stay here for ever.'

A middle-aged woman sitting a little apart from the group said, ‘My family are making representations to Court. They've hired a lawyer and an advocate.'

‘Is that so,' the man said dryly.

‘The lawyer has discovered an edict, an ancient one, which prohibits deportation for any person if more than two members of their family have been on active duty in the service of the King.'

‘I take it you've paid the lawyer in advance,' the man said, turning his head to look at her.

‘He's been paid a retainer,' the woman admitted.

‘A handsome one, I'll bet. Well, I'll tell you this for nothing: there is no such edict.'

‘Are you a lawyer?' the woman said coldly.

‘No. Not that it makes any difference. You'll find that the larger the retainer, the more ancient the edict; it seems there are edicts by the score just waiting to be discovered.' He turned back into the circle. ‘The one you mention is pure invention.'

‘We were assured on oath—'

‘Of course you were. They can be very assuring. That's their job.'

‘The Court wouldn't permit malpractice of that sort.'

The man laughed harshly. ‘The Court not only permits it, it encourages it. Where do you suppose the bulk of the Court's revenue comes from? Every representation to Court costs exactly half the lawyer's fee; the higher the fee the sooner the representation is heard and considered. And all that means is
that you get the same answer as everyone else, only quicker. You'd have done better to save your money …'

His voice dropped away as he heard a sound, that of the woman crying. She wept with the utmost consideration, inwardly, not seeking to impose her grief or elicit sympathy. It was the most private and intense kind of anguish: utter hopelessness.

The murmur of voices filled the compound, the bowl of dust underneath the stars. Q said: ‘There's no possibility of reprieve, then?'

‘Not a chance,' the man said.

‘It doesn't seem that any of you are dangerous people,' Q said. ‘What is it you've done wrong?'

The young man said, ‘I wrote some poetry that didn't rhyme. It wasn't logikal. It defied reason, so they said.'

‘What about you?' Q asked the man.

‘I don't know, they wouldn't tell me. I was accused of subversion against the Crown and the State. Apparently the MDA had been keeping a file on me for some time, observing my movements, and so on. I think it was a neighbour who put them on to me. I don't really know.' He added lamely: ‘You can't fight because you don't know what you're fighting against. There's no sense to it.'

‘But it's logikal,' the young man said.

‘So they say. I don't understand their Logik, perhaps that's the trouble.'

The woman with black glossy hair said, ‘If there has been a purge, perhaps there'll be a new ruling. We might be released any day now, without warning.'

‘But don't you see,' the young man said, ‘that wouldn't be logikal.' He leaned earnestly into the group, the soft darkness all around them. ‘Whenever there's a purge and a new ruling no one is released. Releases are only made when there isn't a purge.'

‘But if there isn't a purge things will go on as before, nothing is changed.'

‘You've got it. That's logikal.'

‘I don't understand,' the woman said.

‘That's why you're here. That's why we're all here. If everyone understood, there'd be no need for Psy-Con.'

‘What if we try to understand?' the woman asked. ‘What if we say that we understand?'

‘That isn't being logikal. If you did understand, you wouldn't be here. Saying that you understand
now
only proves that you don't understand their Logik.'

The woman said helplessly, ‘So, if there has been a purge, it won't make the slightest difference.'

‘Oh yes,' said the young man. ‘There'll be a new ruling, new people in charge, new methods introduced. There's no point in having a purge if nothing is changed.'

‘But that means we won't be released … isn't that what you said? When there's a purge no one is released.'

‘That's right.'

‘But why?' the woman said desperately. ‘Why couldn't they change their minds and release us? Why couldn't they suddenly decide that everyone in Psy-Con has been deported in error?'

‘I don't think they could do that.'

‘But why not?' the woman cried. ‘Why?
Why
?'

‘It wouldn't be logikal,' said the young man.

*

Black was in a ferment of desire. During the early evening he had walked along the perimeter of the pre-screening compounds, trying hard though none too successfully to conceal his frustration; the guards were surly and suspicious, recognizing that he was not a member of the permanent staff – who in any case were never seen near the compounds, but kept strictly to the circle of huts which comprised the medikal section and their own private quarters. Black didn't care; he was desperate.

He watched the inmates feeding, just as darkness was falling, and selected two or three likely candidates. The trouble was, he soon realized, there was no way of identifying them. They weren't named or numbered and wouldn't be until screened and assigned to their ultimate destinations, wherever those might be. All that he could do was make mental notes of their appearance and trust that the guards would be able to pick them out from the descriptions he gave. He only needed one, just one.

When he returned to the small dusty cubby-hole they had given him for an office, bathed in perspiration, there was a note awaiting him – on paper headed with the seal of the King's Commission – scrawled in Benson's hand. It read:

I've decided, as part of the new ruling on standard procedure, to take charge of further investigation of the deportee Q. I shall require all medikal records and notes, also details of the galvanology procedure used so far and how applied. If you would like to assist I'll give it consideration.

M. Benson

Special Envoy (Designate)

Black stood trembling at the trestle-table. He felt ill: he had a fever: the heat was like a blanket wrapped round his head, shutting off the air. How had he come to this in only a few weeks? He was angry to the point of palsied shaking, and so frightened that the future seemed to have gone suddenly dry and wrinkled, drawn in on itself like an old mildewed prune. Was there a plot? the thought shrilled in his head. Was Benson compiling a dossier on him? Was Benson's threat that he could have him seconded to the High Intensity Complex a devious hint, a piece of sly humour that even now Benson was chuckling over with his cronies in the mess, gathered in the corner under the trophies on the wall?

It seemed that it didn't take very long for the world to collapse. In no time at all you could fall from security to a level of shifting uncertainty, never sure from one minute to the next who you were supposed to be and what was expected of you and whether you would still be here in a week's time. He was losing control, and Q was to blame. Why was the MDA so interested in him? Had they directed Benson to take charge of the case or was it Benson's own idea, scenting glory and distinction in presenting the Authority with a fully-documented case-history of a type of delusional illness not so far recorded in medikal annals? Conflicting emotions fought within him. Should he make a formal protest about Benson taking over the case,
his
case, or
should he offer to assist, discretion being the better part of numbed uncertainty?

And there was an even more pressing problem. Black summoned one of the guards and gave him a description of the kind of inmate he wanted to see. The guard looked at him with barely concealed insolence and said that there were probably forty or fifty inmates in the compounds who tallied with such a vague description.

‘Any one of them will do,' Black said, pretending to sort through the papers on the trestle-table so that he wouldn't have to meet the guard's eye. ‘Pick one at random. Young.' He felt himself trembling under the guard's stare and could feel the sweat tricking down from his armpits. The papers were a fuzzy white blur covered in black squiggles. The guard went away, banging the door unnecessarily.