Gibbon's Decline and Fall (17 page)

“What happened to Greta Wilson wasn't your fault,” he said again.

“Dear old Halcyon, I know it wasn't, not really. But, damn, inside me somewhere it feels like it.”

By ten o'clock they were well south of Santa Fe on the way to the New Detention Building, built three years before to replace the old prison. When Carolyn found a place to park that was shaded by the building, she asked, “Want to come inside?”

“I've seen it, thank you.” He picked up his book and settled himself, winking at her. For an ex-law-enforcement type, he was protective of his perceptions, sometimes almost squeamish. Hal said you could see enough dirt without looking, so why go looking? She left him with a wave, forced her lagging footsteps to become a brisk walk as she went through to reception, then lost all her purposeful momentum outside the steel gate, where the guard behind the counter poked at a computer and peered nearsightedly at her HoloID.

“Lawyer?”

She nodded.

“You're not the lawyer I've got here.”

“An attorney was appointed to handle her case. Ms. Ashaler has asked to see me. She has the right to an attorney of her own choosing.”

The guard sneered, started to say something, then caught himself as another guard came into the space behind the counter.

“All carry-ins on the counter, please,” he muttered.

She hoisted her briefcase onto the counter, opened it, let him look through her purse. No guns. No knives. No nail files that could be used as weapons. “Room G,” he growled at her.

The gate opened with appropriately ominous noises. She thought people who designed prisons must have manuals specifying suitable noises: echoey, metallic resonance; deadened thump of footsteps. The corridor she walked along was a case in point: a threatening, blind people-pipe, with anonymous metal doors opening at either side. On her left, centered in a newly painted stretch of wall, stood a wire glass double door, high and wide, the thick glass only slightly obscuring the view into the room beyond, where cells had once been stacked three high around an open light well. The sign on the door now said
VAULTS—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.

Behind her someone cleared his throat.

“Ms. Crespin? Carolyn?”

She turned to confront a familiar face, a guard she'd frequently encountered in her lawyering days. “Josh! What are you doing here?”

“Transferred out here from the old jail. You wanna see the cold storage?”

She looked around herself, almost furtively. “Would it get you in trouble?”

“Nah. Kinfolk come here all the time. Another year or two, they'll be taking kids through here on field trips from school. Only reason they have guards is they're worried about the crazies, turning off the pods, you know.”

She did know. There had been a lot of wild talk from the civil libertarians who had protested that deactivation and hibernation came within the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment. The facts seemed to indicate otherwise. There was no prison rape of those sentenced to being STOPPED—that is, deactivated—or those sentenced to being SLEPT—hibernated. There was no cruelty from guards or other inmates. There was no education in more efficient criminality. There was no brutalizing. There were no escapes. Prisoners did get older, of course. Joints stiffened and skin wrinkled, hair receded and turned gray, just as though the sleeper had been up and about. Chronic health conditions didn't change. It was not a reprieve; one lost the same chunk of one's life one would have lost in prison, but when the sentence was over, one was at least mentally and psychologically undamaged … well, unchanged. Older but no wiser, shrieked the libertarians. Older, but otherwise no worse off, said the courts. Plus, the psychologists murmured, testosterone levels would drop as sleepers aged, making them less likely to be troublesome in the future.

Josh held the door open for her, and after another quick look around, she went through into an area that felt momentarily familiar. It couldn't be familiar. She'd never been in this room. She had, however, seen pictures. She'd seen documentaries. She wasn't surprised by the ranked tanks, or pods, hundreds of them, aisles and decks of them. She found herself counting, estimating. The room was between two and three hundred feet long, separated horizontally into three decks by heavy expanded metal flooring. On each deck the pods were stacked three high, with three aisles separating two double stacks and two single stacks against the sidewalls. Five or six thousand pods, give or take, each pod occupying about a tenth
of the cubic feet a jail prisoner would have needed. Each pod was labeled with the name and age of the inhabitant, the crime of which he'd been convicted, the date of release. Each held a steadily glowing green light and a digital clock, counting down the years, months, days. They'd been tanking people for how long? The research had been secret; it had been going on for years but was announced only in ninety-seven. The government made the manufacture of hardware a top priority that same year, with federal loans for conversion of the prison systems. The defense industry switched from tanks and planes to pods, saying thankful prayers under its breath, and a new federal law allowed people sentenced to more than two years under the old penalties to be SLEPT instead of imprisoned. A little less than two years, they'd been tanking people. So many of them, in such a short time!

She was surprised by the sound and the smell. It was damp in the room. She stepped closer to the right-hand rank, peering through a faceplate at the sleeper within. Young. God, so young. Sallow skin. Eyes closed, lashes fringing the cheekbones. Mouth relaxed, calm.
Violent crimes against children
, said the label. Twenty-five years. Release date, FAT, February 25, 2025.

“FAT?” she asked.

“For approved treatment. If there is one. By then.”

“A treatment for what?”

“For whatever made him choke those two little girls and then rape them.”

“And if there isn't a treatment?”

“He stays here until there is a treatment or the green light goes off, whichever comes first.”

“The light goes out if they die?”

“Right. This don't keep them young, it just keeps them going.”

She wandered down the line of pods. Fully half bore the letters. FAT. Why hadn't she known about FAT? Or had she? Known about it and forgotten it, purposefully.

She turned back, on the other side of the aisle. These cubicles were shorter, just big enough for a person reclining in a rocking frame. Monitors were fastened to head, belly, arms. A tube snaked from a gauge and disappeared into the mouth. From the neck down the body was concealed beneath a light rigid covering, but one could see the tubes that ran from beneath it. Eyes stared straight ahead, but not a muscle moved.

“These pods are for the ones who are STOPPED?”

“The manual calls it ‘penitential deactivation.' The pods are a little bigger, because they're still being fed. They shit. That's what the smell is. The sprays go on twice a day to wash 'em down.”

She noticed it for the first time, a slightly feculent stench under the resinous cover-up. “Can they see us?” Carolyn whispered, feeling goose bumps popping out on her arms, switching briefcase from hand to hand to rub them vigorously. The place was horrid; nightmarish, but hideously personal; intimately awful. “The ones who're STOPPED, can they see us?”

“The ones facing us can. They can see, hear, taste—or could if anybody fed them anything except through that tube. They just sit there, STOPPED. Nobody's got the antidote but the Department of Prisons, and they don't come up with the dose till the sentence is up.”

“How in hell did anyone ever come up with something like this!” she snarled, knowing full well how.

He took it as genuine curiosity. “It was accidental. Some guy out in California was makin' designer drugs, you know, and he made a mistake, put a atom in the wrong place or something. Some people took the drug, and they turned off. Like Parkinson's disease, only worse. Some doctor used L-dopa on 'em, they woke up. Only trouble, the cure didn't last. They all ended up turned off again. So when some government scientists found the cure in ninety-seven, the government took all the rights to the drug and the cure. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than keeping them in cells, and you don't get no riots, no rapes, no guys gettin' a shank in the ribs on their way to dinner.”

“Why both? Both the tanks and this?”

“Oh, this is short-term. Anything from thirty days up to a year. SLEEP? That don't rehabilitate anybody, nobody claims it does, but STOP? Now, that might do some rehabilitation. I tell you the truth, it'd sure as hell rehabilitate me!”

She turned away from him, fighting panic. “Josh, do they come out sane?”

“I've only seen a few,” he admitted. “They seemed all right. Course, they were short-termers. Not more'n a year.”

“So we don't know about the long-termers.”

“STOP's only for short-termers. And the long-termers won't be my worry. All the SLEEP ones for ten years or more,
they get moved to that row over there against the wall.” He pointed to an area beside an open overhead door, with a forklift parked beyond it. “Whenever there's a truckload, I haul 'em down to those tunnels near Carlsbad. The ones they dug for nuclear waste.”

“The Waste Impoundment Pilot Program? WIPP?”

“WIPP, yeah. Only they never got around to puttin' waste in much of it. So we use 'em for people storage instead. Lotta space down there; might as well use it for something.”

She shook her head, depressed.

He said, “Hey. Don't look so down. If they're guilty, it's better, honestly. The young ones, they don't get raped. They don't get beat on. And I don't have to do any beating. It's better for both of us.”

“They don't feel anything,” she cried, surprising herself. “Not anything!”

He shrugged. “What would they feel? People who do stuff like that?” He ran his hand across the label she had read. Violence against children. “This guy was only happy when he was rapin' some six-year-old baby he'd just strangled. You want him to go on feelin' that? Maybe better he's not feelin'.”

She felt the walls closing in, felt a swirling, unfocused anger, stopped short, took a deep breath. “You're right, Josh.”

He let her out the door. “You know those old fairy stories about ogres, Carolyn? There's lots of true stuff in old stories like that. Ogres are true. That's one there, in that box. Looks like a nice kid, but it's really an ogre. Born that way.”

She almost stopped, stunned at his words, reaching for a mental association that wouldn't come.

He patted her clumsily on the shoulder. “You always wanted people better than they are. You always did. Always surprised you when they turned out bad.”

He patted her once more, then wandered back into the room, humming under his breath. She mechanically turned the other direction, searching for the door marked G, finding it only a few steps farther on. She paused outside the door, almost leaning on it. Ogres. Like Jagger. And that room, with all the pods in it. When she'd entered the room, she'd had a weird sort of déjà vu, as though she'd seen it before, and she knew she hadn't.

She shook her head, bringing herself out of paralysis. The thought of Jagger did it, like a snake hypnotizing a bird. Maybe he counted on that. The freezing power of absolute
dread and frustrated fury. She goaded herself, making herself move.

Beyond the door was a mere closet, little or no improvement on the hallway, a plastic-covered cell of some indeterminate shade between cream and taupe, with a bolted-down table and light plastic chairs, unsuitable for use as ad hoc weapons and probably chosen for that reason. The only variation in texture came from outside the streaked window where a metal grill broke the slanting sun into rough diamonds across the table and floor.

Carolyn put her briefcase on the table, took out a package of chewing gum, a legal pad, and a fiber-tipped pen. Her small purse went into the briefcase, which she locked and set on the table. The voice-activated microphone built into the case would record whatever went on. The pad and pen were for show. At one time she'd brought cigarettes, but this place, like all others, had become no-smoking territory. Now she offered gum. It was a way of making contact, of breaking through the inevitable suspicion. Not that it always helped. Sometimes nothing helped.

The door opened and a stumbling figure was propelled into the room. Carolyn caught only a glimpse of the wardress's thrusting arm and scowling face before the door swung shut once more. The girl stayed where she was, swaying, head hanging, arms protectively wrapped across her chest, hands clamped in her armpits.

“Lolly Ashaler?” Carolyn asked.

The girl snuffled but did not reply.

Carolyn rose, went around the table, pulled out the other chair, and took hold of the girl's upper arm. The skin quivered beneath her hand, like that of a whipped dog. Sheep got like that when they'd been chased by dogs, slashed at by teeth. They stood and quivered, waiting to die.

Carolyn stopped gripping, patted instead, little pushes that guided the girl toward the chair and into it. She seemed not so much reluctant as inert. Patted at, she moved. Patted on, she sat, her dull eyes fixed on the tabletop.

Carolyn sat opposite her and waited. The girl slumped, making no effort to meet her eyes, the slime-green jail-issue shirt rumpling shapelessly around her, the not-quite-matching trousers sagging around her ankles.

“Lolly?”

No response.

“I'm here to help you, Lolly. I can't do it unless you talk to me.”

The words came all at once, a single spurt, like vomit. “ 'Fyou wanna he'p me, lemme the fuck alone.”

Carolyn spidered one hand atop her head, fingering her scalp, fighting the urge to snarl, to curse, to get up and leave without another word. Her jaw had been set ever since she'd entered the building. Now she felt the familiar pain in her ears from the rope-hard muscles. She'd fought it every step getting here, her scalp tensing and pulling like rawhide drying. Now her head was a drumhead, throbbing with every word the girl spoke. Damn it, she had left all this! She had stopped dealing with all this! For the love of heaven, what was she doing here?