The Water Thief (27 page)

I had accepted that.

But I needed to know the truth.
These realities could not both be right. To know the truth wouldn’t save me,
but I was long past caring about that.

If the crash came, if the world
ended, the truth would be pretty clear. And there would be hope—a chance that
maybe this horrific system could in fact be destroyed, by the only thing that
could destroy it—itself. If the Republic survived then there would be those who
would know that we could push back against our own nature. But if the crash was
going to happen, I wouldn’t live to see it. I was defeated, that wasn’t in
doubt. But if Kate had been real—if there really was a Republic—I would have
seen something extraordinary.

I looked at my own reflection in
the darkened television screen. Linus said that the person willing to risk the
most won in poker. I no longer cared what happened to me. I could risk it all,
and that would be my strength. I would make one last throw of the dice, and
this time I would win.

Once again the
guards left me in the foyer. Again I entered the master room, and again the
executive emerged from the hallway in the back.

“I’m sorry, Charles,”
he said. “I’m afraid we still don’t know what to do with you. You are beyond
repair; I’m convinced of that. I let you down, and I am sorry. I was unable to
fix you. Rest assured, I am among the best, and if I cannot do it... well, it
cannot be done. If it’s any consolation, there will be some profit in your
death. Even factoring in the cost of trying to fix you and the damage you’ve
done to the corp, the entirety of your life should net some small profit to
Ackerman. That should please you.”

“Why not just
kill me?”

The executive
looked disappointed. “Without profiting from it? My friend, how did you get
this far before getting yourself in trouble?”

“When will you
know what will happen to me?”

“I requested a
public hanging. I think that would be the most profitable way to terminate you.
You’re a perfect candidate. But it’s a tough negotiation; so many divisions
have a say in the matter—Reclamation, Perception, Leisure, Entertainment, even
Sales.”

“Just end it.
I’ll volunteer for the rope. I don’t want to be kept waiting.”

“Goodness
gracious, the delay is not out of any consideration for you. It’s simply that
there’s a lot to deliberate. We have to be very careful how many people we hang
publicly. Too many and the punishment becomes commonplace; we look callous and
unforgiving, and people begin to wonder just why it is we have so many
seditionists in the first place. But if we hang too few, then they might think
we don’t care about crime. And the condemned must look right—sufficiently
broken that people believe they are truly sorry, but not so much as to evoke
sympathy. We have to consider the whole aesthetic of it.

“Not to mention
that we’ve hung a colleague from Perception two months in a row now. Three, and
people may grouse that we’re targeting them unfairly.

“And if
Rendering had their way, there wouldn’t be hangings at all. When you fall, your
body pumps adrenaline into your bloodstream—makes your fat all stringy and
harder to render properly; it just won’t congeal right. They think that we
should toss all of you straight into a vat of boiling water and lye. Oh, your
death is a terribly complicated matter.”

I nodded.

“You were
difficult to place, Charles. I considered the gladiator ring for quite some
time. I admit to thinking that perhaps might help you. After killing a few
people you’d learn to appreciate the value of competition and be rehabilitated,
if you survived. But you are broken even beyond that measure of repair. You’d
just as likely put up no measurable resistance and let yourself get run through.
That kind of foolishness doesn’t make for rehabilitation, and certainly not for
good television.

“Of course,
there is no way to know what Reclamation will ultimately decide. I make my
recommendation, but they can be unpredictable.”

“Thank you for letting
me know.”

The executive
looked sternly at me. He shook his head.

“I know a man.
He loves to tell stories, little vignettes. I believe you know him, he’s an
Alpha.”

“Linus Cabal,” I
said. “He’s a high-ranked Beta, though.”

The man laughed.
“Linus? My friend, he hasn’t been a Beta for quite some time. He’s an Alpha—and
a high one at that.”

“That can’t be.
He’s a Beta.”

“He told you
that he was a Beta. That you couldn’t recognize him for what he was is not
entirely surprising—he’s really quite good at what he does, and you really are
quite dim.

“In honor of
Linus, I’ll tell you my own little story. There was a HighCon barbershop—on the
other side of the city. My father took me there twice a month. I met a child
there, maybe five or six years old. The executives would come by every week and
toy with him. They’d tell him that they would give him either a single cap or
two quarters. Each time he would take the two quarters, and they would laugh
and joke at how stupid he was.

“One day, and I
must tell you this is probably the only time I’ve ever acted selflessly, I went
up to him and said ‘Don’t you know that two quarters is half a cap?’ He
laughed. ‘Of course I know.’ I asked him why he kept taking the lesser amount.
He said, ‘Because the day I take the cap, they’ll stop giving me quarters.’ I
made it my business to get to know that young man.”

“Why are you
telling me this?”

“Because I’ve
known Linus a long time, Charles, and on his best day he’s never gotten two
quarters out of me.”

“I don’t under—”

“We’re playing
poker right now, you and I. You’re pretending we’re not, dancing around it,
being conciliatory, and thinking I won’t notice. But we’ve been playing since
we met. You’re the one who didn’t realize it. So let’s end this game. Ask me
your question.”

“I have no
questions,” I said.

“Ask.”

“Was it Linus
who turned me in?”

The executive
sighed.

“That was not
your question, but since you asked, I will tell you what I can. The truth is
that Linus had high hopes for you, but he’s been suspicious for quite some
time.”

“You call that
efficiency? You send an Alpha to capture a Delta?”

“You
overestimate your importance. He was not sent, he goes of his own accord. He’s
constantly looking for new talent, people the scouts miss. And where the scouts
simply look for talent, he tries to foster it. Those who understand what he has
to offer he often hires, takes them under his wing. The others he keeps an eye
on, and if he sees anything suspicious, he turns them in for a nice profit.”

“So he did turn
me in.”

“I didn’t say
that, nor do you care.”

I laughed at the
man who presumed to tell me what it was that I wanted to know.

“Despite my best
efforts, you simply will not learn. I can read you like a book. I can read
every twitch, every eye movement, and every curl of your lip. When you choose
to be silent, when you think you are keeping everything from me, that is when I
am learning the most.”

“So when I am
silent, I’m speaking to you?”

“Volumes.”

“Then I won’t
say anything.”

“It is too late.
I know you in your entirety. Your problem is a lack of discipline. You have
failed to devoid yourself of emotion. When you win you’re happy, and when you
lose you’re sad. It’s immature—you have the emotional control of… oh, probably
a twelve-year-old. You have failed to understand that winning is temporary and
only through the grace of God, and that losing it is just as temporary. There
is never any need for happiness or sadness, to be arrogant or humble. A true
Ackerman colleague has absolutely no emotion whatsoever. He is an employee, from
the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to bed—even in his dreams.

“Your failure to
understand this has fostered this hope of yours for a better life. You hope
that there is more than our Darwinist selves, that we can act in some way other
than for our own pure, unadulterated self-interest, that somehow we are not
human beings. One can either accept our nature or not. But you cannot change
it, and your efforts to do so have done nothing but bring you misery and
failure your entire life.

“Hope is a
mental illness, a defect, very hard to cure. It is, by definition, the
unwillingness to accept reality, the abandonment of rationality and reason for
fantasy. You are psychotic, my friend, plain and simple

“Hope has
brought you to this end, Charles, to this room. It’s a common failure, though
fortunately not often as severe as it is in your case. But hope is the flaw
inherent to all low and MidCons. Everyone believes he is special, that he
deserves what an executive has, that he can actually earn it. He believes that
anyone can be an executive, that it’s an easy job.

“We don’t beat
that hope out of them, because that belief drives them to work harder. But hope
leads to expectations, and whatever joy you get when expectations are met is
fleeting, and soon replaced with even greater expectations, until the
inevitable outcome is reached; you have unrealistic expectations that can never
be met. I have found few things that destroy a man faster than unrealistic
expectations. Hope, therefore, truly is the death of the human spirit.

“To achieve
something you must let go of your desire for it. You are too undisciplined to
let go of your passions. That is why you are here, why you think you can win.”

“Win what?”

“The answer to
your question. Ask me what you want to know.”

I looked at the
executive, whose stare back was cold and callous.

“You cannot
defeat me,” he said. “You can get nothing from me that I do not choose to give
you. You are already broken. You were born broken. You were born to come into
this room and do anything I want. You are incapable of anything else. You
simply don’t comprehend it.”

“I don’t know
what you’re—”

The man opened
his jacket pocket, reached inside and pulled out a revolver.

All at once I
panicked. I had thought I was ready to die. Now that it was about to happen, I
was terror struck.

His mood
changed. He looked mean, vicious, and violent. The pillar of self-control, the
master of the universe, had vanished, replaced with murderous hatred.

He slammed the pistol
onto the table, threw open the poker set and slammed both cups down in front of
me. He released his own cup, but held onto mine, the pistol resting between us.

“If you want to
play, let’s play.”

I looked at the
table.

“If you win, I
will pay your debt to Ackerman myself and see your life spared,” he said
angrily. “They’ll throw you out, but you’ll live.”

“If I lose?”

He glanced at
the pistol.

“Five twos,” he
said.

The truth was
that every game of poker that had ever mattered to me, the times I most believed
that, with enough heart, desire, and will, I could grab a win, I was wrong. My
hope failed me every time.

He knew I was no
good at poker. And he placed a staggering bet. Five twos? The odds were five to
one against him, maybe more. Yet he knew those odds and bet anyway—hadn’t even
looked at his own dice.

The dice could
have been loaded, or nothing but two’s on all sides. In that room he was a
master of the universe, he could bend the very laws of probability to his will.

He had the five
twos. I knew it. By luck or design, he had them. If I called or raised, I’d
never leave the room alive.

I slumped back
into the couch, head held in my hands.

He wasn’t smug,
didn’t show any sign of pleasure at winning. He wouldn’t even give me that much
credit. He deftly slid the revolver back into his coat and scooped up the dice.

Not even an
I-told-you-so.

He returned the
shooters to their respective places and closed the lid. He ran his hands over
the box ceremoniously. If the man derived pleasure from anything, it was from
this box, the principal tool of his work.

“Why don’t you
just ask me your question?” the man said. “Is it so hard? Is your cowardice
really that great?”

I was defeated,
in every sense of the word. Calm washed over me. I had nothing to fear anymore.
He would do what he wanted to me, when he wanted. Nothing I could do would have
the slightest influence on my life from that point on.

“Was Kate in on
it?” I asked.

He took a deep
breath. “Congratulations. It cost you everything, Charles, but you finally
reached the point where you could ask. Now, finally, at the end of things,
you’ve become a man. Well done.”

“Was she?”

There was a buzz
at the door.

“I’m sorry,
Charles. Our session ran longer than I thought it would. That would be
Reclamation. You will be in their hands now. They will tell you your fate.
Honestly, I do not know what it will be. But may you die well.”

“Just tell me if
she was in on it.”

Two men came in
through the door. He nodded toward me, and they grabbed me under each arm. I
had no pride or self-respect left—it had all been bartered away.

“Please,” I
pleaded. “It costs you nothing to tell me. I just need to know.”

“We’re done
here.”

I knew at that
moment that I would be sent to the gallows. I’d have a couple of weeks, maybe a
month or two, but someday soon I would find myself there, on the first Monday
of the month, walking up those worn, rickety steps. I’d be the one people
talked about, one of those whose lives were extinguished publicly for money. In
the canteens they would say things like, “Did you know how he betrayed the
corporation?” and “He’s a horrible little creature.” But I could stand on that
platform with dignity, if I knew the answer to a single question.