Prisoner 52 (15 page)

Day 17

The crystalline shores of Velvae stretched out to either side of him, to ends unknown beyond the coastal horizon. The waves lapped gently as they always did and glittered beneath the pale light of the moons altered above
to hold them to that tranquility. He crouched naked on the lip of the gemstone cliffs that burned with a gentle and warming glow and looked out to the far ocean, delicate and full of promise. There was no sound but the rustling of jungle leaves behind him and the sway of the grasses that crowded the roots of their trees, brought on by the soft breeze that blew and could be felt only across the skin. The sweet scents of growing things wafted to him and he breathed deep of them. Somewhere out there an animal trilled, but only just.

He felt then upon his shoulder the hand of the woman who slouched beside him. She drew up close to him to ensure that he could feel her against him and for the second time he turned to regard her. She was all that he had ever desired among women, in figure and in feature, but he was numbed to it. The dark hair that framed the pale face did nothing to draw his gaze back when it wandered again to the sea. She entwined herself about the arm that he steadied himself upon that he be reminded of the voluptuous perfection that was there to wait upon his every passion, but still he stared.

“This is a Euphor-world.” Sejanus said. “I’ve never been to a Euphor-world.”

“Maybe you read about it somewhere.” She said and rested her head on his shoulder and he could see her in his periphery to look up at him with the clear, blue depths of her eyes that were not unlike the tides below. “Or one of the boys told you; you know how you talk.”

“We were only awake long enough to fight.” He said and took his arm away to stand.

“Then I don’t know.” She said and leaned down from her hands to rest upon her arms that she might draw him to the press of her breasts against the crystalline precipice. “I don’t
remember being here either; but I’m here with you and that’s all that matters to me. Come, lie with me.”

“This is a trick.” He said and turned away from her to look about himself at the jungle, at the ocean that shined back at him with a thousand stars in miniature. “A simulation, with thought scans.”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s not real.”

“Does it matter?” She said again.

He watched the branches of the trees as they wavered, the perfection of their leaves. He saw the white puffs of cloud beyond them that never interfered in their track across the sky with the smooth discs of the moons, but to partially obscure them and contrive the nightly tableau. Sejanus tested the sit of his foot on the crystal beneath it and could find no uneven surface, nothing that jabbed or pained him. Everything was as it should be, as it ought to be. No wave off the coast grew greater than he wished it or too still to displease him.

There was nothing in the voice of the woman who did not bid him to turn round again and nothing in her way to prevent him from staying once he did. It was a dream world, that he perhaps imagined in some long forgotten sleep – man or boy. A seabird cawed then out in the moonlight and the surf crashed somewhere out of sight, just as he had once imagined it would hearing of things such as oceans and trees and sunlight in the long ago of the Citadel.

“I didn’t earn this.”

“You didn’t earn me.” She said and rolled onto her back, stretched out like a jungle cat upon the rocks. “But here I am, everything you’ve desired. Touch, and you will feel me; ask, and I will please you in all the ways there are.”

“No,” He said and drew his lips to the tight line of the skull
that his face was an aspect of and shook his head at the curvature of the watery horizon. “It’s what your masters would want.”

There was a blaring, caught somewhere in the distance, and a red light rolled across his induced dream-world. It turned green fields to rust and blood, the woman beside him there in that paradise to some imp come to haunt him. He cared little. This dream was theirs, and what had come after. He awoke then and the pressure seals of his sleeping berth evacuated their gasses in hissing plumes that he could
see only just beyond the cross-section of glass that was its window. He moaned in some vague noise he had no control over and squinted his eyes into a light that was not there. He imagined that he would stumble forward into everlasting nothingness if he but had the room.

The needles of auto-hypos pierced him unseen and all over and the haze cleared at once. He could of a sudden hear the faintest sounds beyond the molding of the sleeping
berth and those that were near enough nearly deafened. The smallest imperfections of the glass shielding before his eyes were readily apparent. And even those things that he could not see and could not hear were there for him, and he processed them all in that colorless way which comes with the formulaic identification and removal of threats. A pale world, forever to remain pale when there are no enemies.

The door of the pod parted before him at its center, lifting
away above and below upon grimy struts, and its gurney tipped flush with the wall outside. The restraints about his limbs retracted and he was spilled out onto the floor. The air in the cell chilled him to the bone and he could feel as he balanced himself onto his knees the light tugs of the NervLink cables fastened along their ports in his spinal column. They popped free one after the other and were reeled back into the neuro-hub that had rested above him within the berth. He then looked about himself, at the other 5 men with whom he shared this cell and in whose eyes he saw the same faded dreamings – the same chemical madness.

"Line!" A voice called over a transmitter outside and so they stood. "Line."

They did as it bade and moved in anxious starts out onto the tier, to meld into the ranks of their neighbors that were four rows deep already. He looked up and saw the drones flitting through the pale golden drab of the light that shone down from above. They rolled their scanning waves across the prisoners and one soon ascended to the seven hundredth tier to which they belonged, up from the level below it. The blue grid fell over them and thus a klaxon began to sound.

"Unauthorized inmate presence detected." Master Control said from the drone's communicator. "Rectifying."

It swivelled in place where it hovered and the extended dishes of its targeting arrays settled on him. He heard across the long space the chamber of its railgun energizing and so he made to duck down behind the men before him; but they had done so as well and they along with those behind him held him up to the drone. Villagers to an angry god.

"Removing," Master Control said. "Please remember: a chaotic society makes for no society."

"Belay that, Control." The same man said over the open-air transmitter.

A quiet ensued between the two then and he could hear again the low pulse and hum of the turret that hung slantwise from its spherical body, a mess of wires and offcenter plating outlined by the light above it.

"Are you certain, Enforcer Oborz?" It said finally and to Sejanus sounded disappointed.

"We have the transfer file right here. Synching the code status with your mainframe now."

"Recieved." Master Control said and then the drone floated away, saying: "Please remember: reactionary acts cause reactions."

"You're welcome." The voice said once it had gone and the other inmates released him. "Greetings from Tower 8, Prisoner
71."

"You would have done the same." One of the convicts said from behind and brushed past
him to the front of the ranks.

Sejanus said nothing, nor did he acknowledge in any way those around him that had arrested his flight. He knew on some level that they had been right to do it and that perhaps the man could have been right in what he said, had he addressed them. Thus the ghosts of the old rage flew up at him from where he stared betwen his feet and urged him onto those that had taken hold of him. But it was to be expected, and ghosts know little of what to do with the things in life that are.

"Alright," Said the voice of the control tower. "Looks like everything‘s by the numbers. Meyers. Who's this? Teague Meyers, who's seen him? Come on, pipe up."

"He's dead." Some prisoner from a tier below them shouted.

"What's that, 574?"

"He fell out of the pod that way. I don't know what happened to him."

"Must be another godsdamned hypo malfunction." They heard him mutter to whomever shared the booth with him and then went on. "Well it don't give you mourning rites, dickhead. Go on, hussle up. Hit the chutes."

They wobbled about face all across the tiers that ringed the vast, lighted heights of the holding tower. Sejanus moved as they moved and started forward only when they would and no more. They meandered slow into the mouth of the chute ahead and kept the air alive with chatter indistinct to him. The sea of their heads passed into twilight and beneath figures that flailed at them
with their electrified whips from upon platforms to either side, shouting amidst the crackling and drawn out of the gloom like phantoms in the light of the electrodes. He thought then that if they had wool, they should be sheep. Himself stuck in amongst them, a piece unable to be fit and no matter the turn of the hand that did it.

He passed
beside the guardsmen stationed along the walls that harried them with voices lost in the cacophony of them all, beating at them with batons and spittle flying from their lips. He had gone deaf to them and their blows fell upon him as they would upon stone. He flinched at their coming only in the way tired men do at sounds imagined or real. They passed through the lights overhead, tucked up between the crossbeams so that they shone like lone beacons through the darkness. The scanners there as well alerted at intervals the guards that were hidden within recesses in the walls and invisible until they were already within reach. These took some of the inmates that came near enough and into the rooms that they stood guard without. Random happenings in the greater mess of things that transpired under no more notice than one would pay sudden movement or sudden noise.

A greater light broke ahead and within it the rusted gloom of the magrail port. A haze moved across the opened gateway and billowed through its teeth in great clouds that the floodlights above the opening penetrated diffusely. He wondered then as the inmates plunged through the bloody glow of its curtain if they had not found the Helmouth, if his waking that morning had not been his life passing from one condemned existence to another. The lights atop it flared with a secret fury and the toothed archway itself quivered as it screamed with the thousands it had seen damned within. Then he
was herded beyond and the clarity of the world became normality. Metal only metal; light only light.

Teams of guardsmen lashed them into formation from above and the smell of ozone filled the air each time the whips struck true, the smell of burnt flesh. They were thus
corralled before the outfitting hubs and were taken onto the supply pads by threes and then ejected, discarded to bear the next trio. Like clockwork, dispossessed men pilgrimaging to sites of plenty and recieving it in a manner unexpected. A creature of humanity stepped onto the dais and once swept round became something more, something less. Beings of heavy, protective leathers and filtration masks and equipment packs that went lopsided and borne down beside their naked peers as they progressed to the platforms of the magrail port. Man had contrived how to make chains of what clothed him.

Soon they filled the platforms that sat stuck out into the dark of the tunnels like quays into a terrible sea and milled about their great expanse in the cold and red dusk of the station. He watched the plumes of the steam rise to the ceiling from the gaps at the edges of the grated floor where it met the wall and curl across the lamps scattered spare upon the distant ceiling. They flocked to the light of these in some dim memory of what it had been to stand in the sun and held their arms close about themselves. Speaking low beneath the eye of the Enforcers and passing jury-rigged chem-sticks amongst groups that made competeing circles in the press of them all. Sejanus had made himself a part of them in search of latent body heat, if not for the company there is in misery.

"You don't talk much, soldier." A man said to him with blue rag tied about his arm and Sejanus traced with his eyes the symbols cut as scars into his cheeks and singed into his long beard.

"Soldier?" He said through the filtration mask and met
the man's coal eyes.

"Don't play with us." He said and the others in the circle who shared his color and his signs laughed. "You are OBPAF; you have the mark."

The bearded man took two fingers and smacked at the back of his own neck.

"Lots of guys do." Sejanus said. "What's it to you?"

"Nothing much," He said and put his hands out in mock concern. "Except that we are all True Union here. But you may not know it. Outside you called us SepSecs, while you busied with murdering our people."

"Listen," Sejanus said and stepped into the circle. "Are we having a problem?"

"I don't know, soldier." The bearded man said and joined him in the center and closer he was a bigger man. "The talk is that loyalists love causing problems. Baby does not like being put down in one place too long, I hear."

"Tram arrival," Master Control said over the port's transmitters. "Imminent. Tram arrival:
imminent. Please stand clear of the edge and assemble for boarding."