Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (11 page)

Andy's interrogation took place in the old prison on Hoover Square, in a fetid vault of stained concrete. The big guys stripped him and took him on in relays, like tag teams at a wrestling match. When beating and kicking failed to make him name names, they shoved a cold metal electrode into his anus and hit him with jolt after jolt. Every time they did he passed out, and the EMT required by regulations to be present at such sessions revived him to be jolted again. In time he broke, confessed everything, betrayed everybody—gave real names, Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen—all except Faith, whose real name he also knew, yet managed to sew up in a place his tormentors couldn't reach, perhaps in a chamber of his heart.

For weeks afterward he lay in a crowded ward in the prison dispensary, shackled by one ankle to the frame of a steel cot. The nights were the worst, for then every man lay alone amid the wreckage of his life. During the day the chatter of the others and the restless jingling of their chains distracted him, while a wall monitor brayed continuous propaganda interspersed with martial music and weather reports.

One day a talking head announced a rare piece of reality TV—the confession of the would-be presidential assassin, Andrew Walden Emerson III. His black eyes had pretty well gone down by then, so he was able to watch as well as listen when Virtual Andy appeared in three glorious dimensions—four, if you counted time. The simulacrum looked pale but in good health, its boyish face perfect in every detail, right down to an enlarged pore in its nasal cartilage left by a zit Andy had popped at the age of fourteen. Speaking in tones that any voice-analysis software would have recognized as his, the image told its story and begged for death as the only proper punishment for its crime.

Meanwhile, Real Andy—the one with the sore bones, the scarred rectum, the broken nose, two missing molars, and skin a Jackson Pollock of varicolored bruises—
that
Andy started cursing as loud as he could with his lower jaw held together by screws and wires. A memory from his days at New Yale had come back to him, an after-midnight bull session with other science students, their tongues liberated by cheap wine and the fumes of
Cannabis sativa
. Some physics wannabe was boring him with news of a new system for projecting 3-D images in real space, and complaining bitterly because the technique ("
really
interesting, you know, Emerson") hadn't been licensed for production. Instead, Security had hauled the inventor off to a Preventive Detention Center to continue work under official supervision.

Andy knew then that he'd sacrificed his friends, his freedom, his youth, and his future to shoot a conglomeration of pixels. And now, standing beside Gomez in the Pentagon hallway, he felt the old humiliation and despair return, because that brief chromatic shimmer in the tall man's uniform had told him that
his target wasn't real this time, either.

 
HE WHISPERED THE NEWS to Gomez. But that dark scarred man—older than Andy by ten years and even more experienced in disaster—only shrugged.

Something would turn up. Gomez had learned that long ago, growing up in the dusty streets of Laredo where he studied the secrets of crime and survival. He remembered a thousand fights, a hundred burglaries, and a dozen stays in jail. He'd lived like a stray dog, every man's hand against him, yet something had always saved him from death. Even when a weary judiciary sentenced him to Tuamotu Penal Colony for life as a habitual criminal, Destiny had given him the means to survive. Even to triumph.

By then he was a professional prisoner, what one of his judges had called "a perfectly institutionalized man." He knew the ropes and quickly became a snitch, alerting the prison cadre to fights and rapes and riots before they occurred, in return for food and favor. He wasn't surprised when his contact, a guard whose unique aura had won him the nickname Stink, pulled him out of the chow line one day and took him to a storeroom, ostensibly to clean it but really to receive a new assignment.

Stink told Gomez that a guy called Emerson had tried to shoot President Sol, had been condemned to death but later reprieved and his sentence commuted to life at hard labor. That hadn't ended the President's surprising clemency—an order had come down from HQ instructing the warden to make sure that Emerson survived in prison.

"Easy to say," Stink shrugged, and Gomez nodded.

They both knew the score. To the criminals, Emerson would be fresh meat. To the politicals, he'd be the fool whose ill-considered attempt on Sol's life had gotten them arrested during the worldwide roundup of subversives that followed. Because of the roundup the prison was jam-packed, with endless opportunities for somebody to plant a shank unseen. The crowding forced two men to share every futon, and Stink instructed Gomez to become Emerson's bunkmate, watch over him, and preserve him from harm.

"You can screw him if you want to," he added generously. "Just don't hurt him none."

At first glance Gomez saw that he could do as he pleased with Andy. The guy was small, skinny, badly battered, and so new to the system that he still wore a bandage on the back of his neck where his ID chip had been implanted. To judge from his collection of half-healed scars, he must be pretty dumb, too—probably tried to be a goddamn hero when they were using muscle on him, instead of saying whatever they wanted to hear at the beginning, and saving himself grief.

Gomez had no objection to prison-style sex when nothing better was available, yet didn't do what he could so easily have done. He had an abstract hatred of big shots, all big shots everywhere, and looked with something like awe at this skinny kid who had tried to kill the biggest shot of them all. So instead of raping Andy, he adopted him—called him Li'l Brudda, stuck close by his side, and warned anybody trying to mess with him, "Bet I pull your effin heart out and effin feed it to you."

Andy was surprised and grateful—becoming some guy's punk was the only humiliation life had so far denied him, so he'd rather expected it to happen—and he worked hard to learn the lessons Gomez taught him. They weren't easy to master. Gomez told him to watch out for a guard the cons called Sneak, but Andy was used to solitary musing and had to learn the hard way how the man got his name. One day when he was with a gang working in the cornfield, instead of pretending to hoe weeds like the others, he sat on the ground in a posture resembling Rodin's
Thinker,
brooding about the mysteries of life and fate.

That was when Sneak materialized out of the tall green stalks and used a bamboo cane he carried like a swagger stick to beat him bloody. The cons wore only straw hats, khaki shorts, and flip-flops cut from old tires, so he had a lot of skin to work on, and made the most of it. Andy was sore for a month, sorer because he'd burned in the tropical sun and already resembled a medium-rare steak when Sneak attacked him.

But he'd learned the hard way to stay alert every waking moment. Other useful lessons followed. Keeping the cons half-starved was the cadre's simplest and cheapest method of maintaining control, but Gomez taught him how to steal handfuls of food without getting caught when he was on kitchen police. Working in the rice fields gave him a condition called paddy foot that made him feel as if he'd been walking all day on hot coals instead of cool slimy mud. But Gomez rubbed his soles with an antibiotic ointment he'd scrounged from a trusty who worked in the dispensary, the skin healed, and in time Andy's feet toughened and became as insensitive as a pair of boots.

The rest of his adaptation to prison happened just because it happened. His sunburn peeled and healed, and all the skin not covered by his shorts turned to a kind of leather resembling cordovan, save for the white scars memorializing his past. They never changed color, as if the story of his life were written on him in cuneiform, like a stele. He often told Gomez that he hated prison and wanted to die, but he only shrugged. Andy was a survivor—Gomez recognized the breed, being one himself—who just couldn't release his grip on life, even if he wanted to.

By the end of his hard first year, Li'l Brudda had turned from a college boy into a creature of bone, sinew, and cordlike muscles, a sort of hairless two-legged coyote, wary and silent and almost unkillable. His gray eyes gazed out of his sun-darkened face as if through a mask, and when he needed to convey a message he did it with lips unmoving, like a ventriloquist. He began fighting his own battles, winning some and losing others, but gaining respect in a world where respect was everything.

Gomez felt pride at the transformation. His own life had been mostly cruel and selfish, and he felt an unfamiliar glow because for once he'd done what was right, helped a dumb kid survive until he was ready to get along on his own. Improbably, the Yalie and the Latino burglar bonded and became brothers—the only kind that matter, those who stand together as allies against fate. And so they remained.

One day Stink took Gomez aside and gave him a new and unbelievable order—so unbelievable that he made the guard repeat it twice, to make sure he'd heard it right. Yet it confirmed his feeling that there was something uncanny about Andy, something exceptional,
raro, extraordinario.

For the time being he said nothing, because a secret known to two people is a secret no longer. When Stink passed over several cons with more seniority to select them for a gang working outside the wire, he merely remarked
bueno, bueno,
that meant they were now trusties and would get a little more food. About that he was right, for next day at the predawn shape-up they received a breakfast of beans with shreds of real pork in it. Andy and the others ate like dogs, eyeing each other with suspicion, swallowing quickly and licking their plastic bowls clean. Then they fell into line and marched to the camp's Sea Gate, flip-flops crunching on ruler-straight streets of red gravel that other cons had pounded from lava.

On the way they passed rolls of razor wire threaded with sensors and a gleaming catapult with a drone whose missile, everyone knew, homed in on the ID chips in their necks. They crossed a three-meter death zone where the earth had been plowed and raked to show footprints, and at last reached the electrified perimeter fence. Military lasers craned down at them from ten-meter watchtowers as they passed one by one through a narrow postern. Sneak counted them out, his clipboard beeping when he touched it; he was chewing something and his bluish lower jaw moved slowly, like a ruminant's.

Then, wonder of wonders, Andy was outside the wire, and gaping at the amazing fact that the world was
still there.
Beyond a white line of foam at the coral reef, the Pacific glimmered bluely, the same ocean that touched America, Asia, the world. The air blew fresh and salty, and he was inhaling it in gulps when Gomez spotted Sneak sidling up, poked him in the ribs, and saved him from another caning.

They set about the day's work, unloading supplies from a freighter at the dock, cleaning the warden's house and the barracks in the cadre's compound, sweeping the blinding white concrete of the gyro landing pad and hosing it down with seawater. They ate lunch on the quay and at sundown shuffled back to camp—stick figures, all burned mahogany except the Africans, who were burned ebony. In the latrine they showered in seawater, wearing their shorts to wash them, too. Finally they marched damply to the mess hall where they ate standing up, scooping dollops of brown rice and boiled cabbage into their mouths in handfuls.

Back in the barracks, Andy collapsed on the futon, too weary to gamble or quarrel or gossip or anything. But when the lights dimmed, Gomez pulled their thin cotton blanket over their heads and began to whisper. In the confined space Andy wondered why after all these years Gomez smelled peppery, as if all the chilis he'd ever eaten were still working their way out through his pores. It took him a while to realize what his bunkmate was telling him—they were going to escape. Remembering the wire, the sensors, the death zone, the drone, he wondered what the joke was supposed to be about, and in his minimal Spanish replied, "
Absolutamente loco.
" He turned his back and in ten seconds or less began to snore.

Meanwhile Gomez meditated. He'd rejected his first idea of escaping via the Sea Gate, even though the dense jungle lay down the beach only a hundred meters from the dock. But they'd have to swim, and the goddamn sharks nosed up close, hoping for a handout of mess-hall garbage, or maybe for an edible con.
It's the Mountain Gate then,
he thought, and fell asleep with a crescent of white showing beneath each eyelid, for even in dreamland Gomez never felt safe with both eyes completely closed.

A few days later, he and Andy were once more assigned to work outside the wire. On the camp's landside, jungled slopes rose to the heights of Mount Tuamotu, the extinct volcano that long ago had created the island. The peak above the treeline wore a small, neat cap of snow, and Andy gave a dry sob at the sight, for it reminded him of other snow-capped mountains near his lost home and vanished youth. Today's job was to clear a thirty-meter field of fire between the perimeter fence and the jungle. The gang received weed cutters—archaic buzzing devices with little hydro engines and spinning lengths of tough plastic—and moved west across the narrow neck of land that connected the prison to the body of the island. Then back east, toward a black-sand beach where the sea growled at boulders of broken lava.

There a con working in a patch of weeds suddenly screamed and vanished to his waist. Gomez grabbed the man under the armpits and Andy helped wrestle him out of a fumarole—once a vent for an ancient lava tube, but now invaded by the ocean and filled with its distant surge and murmur. Andy was staring into it when a sudden wasplike sting set him doing the dance the cons called the Bamboo Two-Step.

"Wake up, scum!" Sneak shouted, and swaggered away, a thick bandy-legged man, making his cane whistle through the air.

That night Andy didn't fall asleep as quickly as before, because of the still-burning line across his calves. Gomez was wakeful, too, but for a different reason—he had a message to deliver. After lights-out he turned on his side, again pulled the blanket over their heads, and whispered that Andy should prepare himself, for their escape would have to come soon. Andy replied concisely, "
Merda
," and after a few more curses, this time in English, grumbled his way into slumber. Gomez lay awake for almost another hour, watching everything come together in his mind. After all, it was merely a question of the weather, and in the tropics the weather is nothing if not predictable.
Bueno,
he thought,
está bien,
and went to sleep as usual with half-closed eyes.