Tales of Old Earth (25 page)

Tex nodded warily.

“Sit down.” Lenin gestured to a chair, and Tex collapsed into it. His body felt bruised, aching, ugly.

“My friends …”

“You can do nothing for them.” The militiaman, Tex noted, had not left but merely drawn back against the wall where he stood, arms folded, watching everything with avid eye.

Lenin stood, walked over to the guitar case, and brought it back to his chair. Resting it across his knees, he undid the snaps. “A Martin.” He held it up, admiring its shape and heft. “Not bad, for an acoustic. How did you come by it?”

“I brought it with me from Austin.”

Tex waited for the usual questions, but Lenin surprised him by merely remarking, “You should paint the front like the Lone Star flag. It would be good theater.” He ran a thumb over the strings, coaxing a sigh from its twelve-stringed throat. “You like it here in Sevastopol?”

“Sevastopol is—” He stopped. “It's a beautiful city. But I miss Texas.”

An inattentive nod. Lenin put the Martin down. “What kind of music do you play? Thrash, reggae, acid house?”

“No way! I only play good ol' rock and roll.”

Lenin snorted. “Rock is dead. The bloodsuckers and moneymakers have drained it dry. There's nothing left but the carcass. Word just hasn't gotten out to the street yet.” He was silent for a long moment. “There was real excitement to it in the old days. It was raw, it was impolite, it was everything your parents hated. It said to them: You cannot control us. You can't lock us in, hold us back, keep us down. We're free and we know it and there's nothing you can do about it. The future is ours.

“Now? Pfaugh! It's been bought and sold, homogenized, pasteurized, processed, and packaged, like so many waxed-paper cartons of yogurt.”

“But not your music,” Tex said eagerly. “Your music is—”

“
Look at me
!” Lenin slammed his fists on the dresser. Shocked, Tex for the first time actually looked at him critically, and saw how haggard his appearance was. There were purple circles under his eyes, and the skin hung loose and white and dry from his skull. He was more corpse than man. “I'm a fucking zombie. I've been on the road so long I can't remember anything else. Doesn't it seem to you that there's something obscene about a man my age strutting and posturing on stage, acting out juvenile fantasies of power and rebelliousness? It's a farce. It's—”

An officious little man with a clipboard stuck his head in the door and barked, “Fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, yes.” The life went out of Lenin's face. Wearily, he picked up a makeup brush. His eyes lifted to the glass and met Tex's in the reflection.

“Take him out,” Lenin said. His face was a mask. In the mirror, the fat militiaman smiled. A cold sizzle ran up Tex's side as he realized that anything could happen to him now. One word from Lenin, and he would be led to the basement and beaten to death. No one would ever know. The Boss stared at him for a long time, enigmatic, unreadable. Then, as if he had just now come to a decision, he added, “Give him a seat in the hall.”

Tex found himself dazedly sitting third row center as the roadies slouched about the stage, hooking together the amps and running sound checks. Without fanfare the band came on, one by one, and picked up their instruments. Ignoring the applause, they tightened snares, checked the tuning of their guitars, slid a finger up and down the keyboard. Familiar faces all, but nameless. Somebody threw a spot on the empty mike at the center of the stage. The Boss did not appear.

The audience began to clap in rhythm. “Len-in, Len-in, Len-in!” they chanted. The noise filled the hall, pounding, urgent, desperate, and climaxed in an explosion of screams and cheers when a sudden spotlight alerted them to curtains parting to stage left.

Lenin.

He strode briskly, almost angrily, on stage, while the applause went on and on and on. Light bounced from the shiny tips of his shoes. The crease in his grey trousers was sharp as a knife. When he reached the center of the stage a roadie scuttled up to hand him his Stratocaster and a second patched in the jack. They faded quickly back as, looping the guitar strap over his head, he stood up to the mike. The audience was still applauding madly.

He held up a hand for quiet.

The crowd hushed. He cleared his throat. The stage lights brought out the circles under his eyes, the gaunt appearance, the fatigue lying just under the skin. In an unaccented, emotionless voice, he said, “The Workers Control the Means of Production,” then turned to give the band the downbeat.

The band was a little ragged on the first number. The applause at its conclusion was loud but not really enthusiastic, more dutiful than heartfelt. Lenin stared down at his shoes, then up again and said, “Religion is the Opiate of the Masses.” He struck a chord.

Listening, Tex experienced a dismay so complete that he could feel it down in the soles of his feet. Again, the music was uninspired. There was nothing fresh there; it was all the same chops, the same licks, the same words delivered with exactly the same phrasing as they had been twenty-forty-sixty million years ago when Lenin was young and the songs were new, and people still believed that rock and roll could change the world. All the energy, all the significance was gone, transformed to mere nostalgia.

And so it went, for song after song.

This was horrible. One side of his face was swelling up, and Tex wanted to cry. If he hadn't been given so prominent a seat, he would have stood up and slipped away—he could hear a faint rustling off to the edges of the crowd that might be people doing just that. But it would be too noticeable if he left. It would be a slap in the Boss's face.

He had no choice but to stick it out.

Tex glanced to either side of him. The naval officer to his right was looking down at his watch. A moon-faced girl to his other side looked puzzled, like there was something wrong but she didn't think herself smart enough to understand what. He wondered what had become of Yuri and his other friends from the assault on the door. Their sufferings seemed grotesquely wasted now.

But gradually then an odd thing began to happen. With each number, Lenin seemed to gain strength from the crowd, energy from their gathering enthusiasm, power from their applause. The band pulled together behind him. The music got tighter.

Midway through “Rural Electrification,” it all came together. The band went into the break, organ soaring and bass like thunder. They were really cooking now. With sudden vigor, Lenin shucked out of his grey jacket and stood in shirt and vest.

A roadie materialized from the gloom to take away the jacket, but the guitarist ignored him. He ran to the edge of the stage and held the jacket out at arm's length, above the waving, grasping hands; and began to tease the fans. He dipped it down almost within their reach, then yanked it back again, and danced to center stage.

Again Lenin dangled the jacket, his eyes flashing with dark amusement. And though Tex knew it was an illusion, that with the lights in his eyes Lenin couldn't distinguish one audience member from another, he felt an electric spark of contact. He leaped for the jacket, as mad as any of them to snatch the prize.

Suddenly Lenin jerked back. He whirled the jacket around his head three times, then skimmed it out into the crowd. While those nearest to where it came down fought frenziedly for a scrap, he snatched up his guitar again and, spontaneously abandoning the song midway through, shouted, “Red October!”

It was one of his best numbers, a real rabble-rouser, and the first chords brought all the auditorium to their feet.

How long that number lasted, no one could say. He stretched it out, working changes and playing variants no other musician would even have attempted. He wrung every last drop of sweat there was to be had from it. He drove his listeners wild.

Then, without pausing, he segued into his signature anthem, “Workers of the World, Unite!”

The audience
roared
. They were standing on their chairs now, clapping their hands over their heads, dancing in the aisles. And when he came to the chorus, everyone joined in, without exception, all voices raised to sing along, one voice, united:

You have nothing to lose!

You have nothing to lose!

You have nothing to lose …

But your chains.

The guitars soared and snarled. The drummer was going crazy. The noise was thunderous, the stressed-concrete roof billowed outward into the starry night to make room for it, and still it grew. Tex was jumping—jumping!—up and down atop his chair, wild with joy, ecstatic, singing along. Caught up in the music, for the first time since leaving Austin he felt not alone, but among friends. A great wave of solidarity took the crowd and made them all one, united, a part of something great.

You have nothing to lose …

But your chains.

Now people were linking arms, Red Army with Black Sea Fleet, doctors with bureaucrats with factory workers, forming chains that stretched clear across the hall, swaying in time to the music and singing along. Up in the balcony too, everybody was singing, so great a flood of song that the Boss's voice was lost in it. Tears were rolling down Tex's cheeks. He felt such a joy as would be impossible to describe. They were all, every one of them, brave and selfless and free. They were all one.

It could have gone on forever.

13

Radiant Doors

The doors began opening on a Tuesday in early March. Only a few at first—flickering and uncertain because they were operating at the extreme end of their temporal range—and those few from the earliest days of the exodus, releasing fugitives who were unstarved and healthy, the privileged scientists and technicians who had created or appropriated the devices that made their escape possible. We processed about a hundred a week, in comfortable isolation and relative secrecy. There were videocams taping everything, and our own best people madly scribbling notes and holding seminars and teleconferences where they debated the revelations.

Those were, in retrospect, the good old days.

In April the floodgates swung wide. Radiant doors opened everywhere, disgorging torrents of ragged and fearful refugees.

There were millions of them and they had, every one, to the least and smallest child, been horribly, horribly abused. The stories they told were enough to sicken anyone. I know.

We did what we could. We set up camps. We dug latrines. We ladled out soup. It was a terrible financial burden to the host governments, but what else could they do? The refugees were our descendants. In a very real sense, they were our children.

Throughout that spring and summer, the flow of refugees continued to grow. As the cumulative worldwide total ran up into the tens of millions, the authorities were beginning to panic—was this going to go on forever, a plague of human locusts that would double and triple and quadruple the population, overrunning the land and devouring all the food? What measures might we be forced to take if this kept up? The planet was within a lifetime of its loading capacity as it was. It couldn't take much more. Then in August the doors simply ceased. Somebody up in the future had put an absolute and final end to them.

It didn't bear thinking what became of those who hadn't made it through.

“More tales from the burn ward,” Shriver said, ducking through the door flap. That was what he called atrocity stories. He dumped the files on my desk and leaned forward so he could leer down my blouse. I scowled him back a step.

“Anything useful in them?”

“Not a scrap. But that's not my determination, is it? You have to read each and every word in each and every report so that you can swear and attest that they contain nothing the Commission needs to know.”

“Right.” I ran a scanner over the universals for each of the files, and dumped the lot in the circular file. Touched a thumb to one of the new pads—better security devices were the very first benefit we'd gotten from all that influx of future tech—and said, “Done.”

Then I linked my hands behind my neck and leaned back in the chair. The air smelled of canvas. Sometimes it seemed that the entire universe smelled of canvas. “So how are things with you?”

“About what you'd expect. I spent the morning interviewing vics.”

“Better you than me. I'm applying for a transfer to Publications. Out of these tents, out of the camps, into a nice little editorship somewhere, writing press releases and articles for the Sunday magazines. Cushy job, my very own cubby, and the satisfaction of knowing I'm doing some good for a change.”

“It won't work,” Shriver said. “All these stories simply blunt the capacity for feeling. There's even a term for it. It's called compassion fatigue. After a certain point you begin to blame the vic for making you hear about it.”

I wriggled in the chair, as if trying to make myself more comfortable, and stuck out my breasts a little bit more. Shriver sucked in his breath. Quietly, though—I'm absolutely sure he thought I didn't notice. I said, “Hadn't you better get back to work?”

Shriver exhaled. “Yeah, yeah, I hear you.” Looking unhappy, he ducked under the flap out into the corridor. A second later his head popped back in, grinning. “Oh, hey, Ginny—almost forgot. Huong is on sick roster. Gevorkian said to tell you you're covering for her this afternoon, debriefing vics.”

“Bastard!”

He chuckled, and was gone.

I sat interviewing a woman whose face was a mask etched with the aftermath of horror. She was absolutely cooperative. They all were. Terrifyingly so. They were grateful for anything and everything. Sometimes I wanted to strike the poor bastards in the face, just to see if I could get a human reaction out of them. But they'd probably kiss my hand for not doing anything worse.

“What do you know about midpoint-based engineering? Gnat relays? Sub-local mathematics?”

Down this week's checklist I went, and with each item she shook her head. “Prigogine engines? SVAT trance status? Lepton soliloquies?” Nothing, nothing, nothing. “Phlenaria? The Toledo incident? ‘Third Martyr' theory? Science Investigatory Group G?”