The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (73 page)

At the sudden movement, Vasily’s head fell off Max’s shoulder and he sagged into Max’s lap. Max shook him. “Come on,” he whispered. “We have to get off here.”

“Huh,” Vasily said, drowsily. “What?”

“Sh,” Max said. “We won’t live to the next camp.” He shoved Vasily aside and stepped over the bodies and around the seats to the doorwell. He grabbed the man propped upright on the steps. “Hey, there’s a bench open, back there – I need to stand a while.”

The man, sunken-eyed, peered over the seats, full of desire and mistrust.

“You won’t get a second chance,” Max said. “Promise I won’t want it back.”

The man rose awkwardly, crabbed his way past Vasily to the empty bench. Vasily squeezed into the doorwell next to Max. Every time he tried to ask a question, Max held up his hand for silence in case others listened.

Dawn rose like a wail of despair, thin and piercing. No man wanted to face another day of sun and heat. The bus rattled and shook, kicking up dust over the unfinished, unpaved road, so that only Max, who was looking for it as they came over each rise, saw the bunkers floating in a little pond of green surrounded by the ocean of sand and rock.

When the other men finally saw it, some declared it a mirage while others raised a feeble cheer, thinking it their destination. Max knew Intelligence would never leave them all at one camp – it would be some here, some at the next one, divided among camps, spread among strangers.

The mirage came steadily closer, resolving in dreary detail – the rounded corrugated roofs of the half-buried huts, scoured by the wind and sand to the same dull tones as the landscape; the surrounding fence, topped by razor-wire, its sharp points cutting the sky so that it bled light; the little bowl of brown and green mud visible beyond the camp.

Bodies pressed behind Max as the bus rolled slowly to a stop and the cloud of dust settled. Past the last bunkers, Max saw the camp population standing in lines for the morning roll. The sign above the gate read:

RECLAMATION CAMP 42

“THEY WERE JUDGED EVERY MAN

ACCORDING TO THEIR WORKS.”

The guards jumped off their skimmers. Most of them stood, jawing, while one went to the gate to meet the camp staff.

Max beat on the door. “Pray,” he grunted to Vasily.

“For what?”

“That they come to this car, not the second one.” That Drozhin got my message and has someone waiting for us, he would have added. His fist grew numb, so he banged his forearm on the door. Other men, not sure what was up, followed his lead, beating the walls and window frames.

The camp minister limped to the gate with his assistant and several guards. Dusty grey clothes, indistinguishable of rank, hung loose on their lean forms. Camp supervisors were still called ministers, instead of directors, despite the changes following the revolution, because the camps were nominally for rehabilitation.
Drozhin, come get me
, Max heresied to himself,
and I promise to be a better man.

The minister argued with the guards, pointing at the front half of the bus: he wanted men still alive and with some fight in them – he could get more work from them before they broke. The guard listened indifferently, yelled something to the other guards, who came to Max’s door aiming weapons.

Sixty bodies pressed against Max, trying to elbow their way in front of him. Max elbowed back, hooking his arm around Vasily to keep him close.

“Ten,” shouted the main guard, spreading his fingers. “Just ten of you!”

The bodies slammed forward again, banging Max’s head into the doorframe. Hands tried to claw him back. The guard removed the locks and the doors opened halfway, stopped by the press of men. Max yanked his head free from a fist in his hair, bit a finger that clutched at his face, and gripped the door so that no one could push past him. A grunt, as punches landed in his kidneys, then he ducked as the gun’s electric sizzle flew over their heads, setting their hair on end. One guard was yelling, “Back, back!” and another grabbed a fistful of Max’s shirt since he was in front, and pulled him through the door, calling, “One.”

Max still had an elbow hooked around Vasily’s arm, who tumbled after him. They both sprawled in the dirt.

“Make that two.”

Max stood up quickly before anyone could jerk him to his feet, smoothing his clothes, tugging up his pants, as the guard counted, “Nine, Ten, and that’s it. Get the hell back!” A roar of protest was followed by the sizzle of the guns, cries of pain, and the doors snapping shut.

“They’re all yours,” the guard told the minister. Turning to his second, he said, “Call 43, tell them they need to be ready to take fifty, water a hundred, and they have to put us up for the night.” To the rest of the guards he shouted, “Wheel up, wheel up, we’re moving out!”

Guards closed and locked the camp gate. The minister walked up and down the short line of prisoners, sucking on his teeth, as mean-looking as a rib-thin dog. He wore goggles to keep the sand out of his eyes, which kept Max from reading his expressions. Finally, with the bus already a plume of dust over the hill, he turned and walked back toward the roll call. The guards shoved Max and the other prisoners after him, back toward the compound’s waste pits. Max tried not to choke on the stench; he made careful note of the dead bodies laid out at pit’s edge. Escapees. Nine of them, in various states of decomposition.

Vasily nudged his shoulder, whispered. “At least we’re not starting off on the lowest rung in the camp.”

He glanced in the other direction. In front of the razor-wire fence, apart from the other rows of men, stood a clump of sunburned, emaciated Adareans. Max had noticed them, but he found it more interesting that Vasily seemed determined to ignore the dead bodies.

“Take your clothes off,” one of the guards ordered. He offered no reason for them to strip, no pretence of inspection or health check, but he seemed so bored by the command, so ready to use his gun, that they did what he said immediately. The earlier conditioning was already paying off.

As soon as they were naked, a guard gathered up their clothes.

The minister grinned at them. “Welcome to Camp Revelations.”

Of course, thought Max. The camp would be named for the Bible book its verse came from. He looked again at the dead bodies and wondered if the sea or hell had delivered them up.

“Many of you noticed the verse inscribed above the entrance of our humble enterprise,” the minister said. “I promise each of you that during your time here you will be judged according to your deeds.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, shook the dust from it, and wiped his goggles clean. Then he walked down the line, looking each one of them over.

“My name is Minister Pappas, but you may call me sir. If you ever address me at all, which is not something I encourage you to do. You are penitents and you are here to do penance for your crimes. There are guards and deacons in this camp, and you will respect them just as if they were me.”

The guards were regular service, but Max knew if they posted out here they either weren’t very bright or had some kind of pathology. Deacons were prisoners trusted to act like guards, except they weren’t trusted enough to have their fingerprints keyed to the guns.

“Your work here will be to turn this valley from desert to oasis,” the minister said. Behind him, a few hundred prisoners stood in ranks, like cans on a store shelf or pieces off an assembly line. Beyond them, beyond the razor-wire fence, the low green slopes reached up to the raw, wind-scarred hilltops and the sere blue sky.

“Three kilometers over that hill lies the sea. All of you remember the stories about the first settlers – that’s what you do now. You carry the rocks to the sea, bring back the algae, and we seed it with enzymes and bacteria and earthworms to create topsoil for farming. In a decade, these hills will be covered with plants and trees.”

Max didn’t plan on being here in a decade to see it, though he knew some of these men would.

“At this moment,” the minister said, tucking the handkerchief back in his pocket, “I would draw your attention to the corpses you see in front of you. Those are your camp uniforms. You are expected to dress appropriately at all times.”

Max was old enough to remember the shortages of food and basic supplies the winter after the nuclear bombing of New Nazareth. Without the meanest rags to wear, even the strongest died. So he broke the line and ran to the corpses, hurrying to the end where they looked only a day or two dead instead of weeks. There was a cleaner uniform on one of the bigger Adareans, but he grabbed the ankle of the one closest to his own size – the body weighed no more than a stick – and yanked off the soiled, foul-smelling overalls. He felt the arms crack as he tugged the top off the dead man’s back.

This was meant to shame him, classic psychological manipulation, but he would not be shamed by survival. He thrust his legs into the pants one at a time. The orange uniform, dulled by sun and sand, fit him no worse than his other clothes and had the advantage of needing no belt. The sandals were no worse than his shoes. He took the straw hat off the dead man’s face, and put it on his head, returning to his place in line while the others pulled on their uniforms.

Only Vasily remained, wandering naked from corpse to corpse. “What? What am I supposed to wear?”

“That’s your problem, not mine,” one of the guards said, backing him up with the gun.

The other men fell back into line with Max, who began to size them up as possible partners.

Vasily hopped frantically between the corpses while the guards chuckled at him. “I need a uniform. You have to —”

“No,” the minister said, who had probably chosen the number of prisoners with this amusement in mind. “We don’t have to do anything.”

“Wait,” Vasily shouted. He walked over toward the clump of Adareans and pointed to the one in front. “Give me that pig-man’s uniform. I deserve it more than him.”

Nothing might have happened then – Vasily was a newb, lower than the lowest, and not worthy of tolerance – except that the Adarean balled his hand into a fist.

That slight gesture, Max realized, tipped the scales. The deacons wouldn’t tolerate even a small show of defiance from a fellow prisoner, especially a pig-man. One ran over and cuffed the Adarean on the back of the head; a second arrived an instant later, and cracked his knees with a pipe, knocked him to the ground. Guards shifted position, using their guns to keep the other Adareans at bay. The man in the tower rang a bell and brought up his sniper rifle.

While all this happened, Vasily hovered around the guards, desperate, shouting, “Don’t stop there, I’m one of you, I’m a human being!”

The deacons looked at the minister, who paused to regard Vasily. The Adarean pushed himself up from the dirt, and one of the deacons kicked him – the Adarean caught his foot and shoved it away.

Without waiting for the minister’s approval, the deacons fell on the Adarean, striking and kicking him with a fury they had saved up from a thousand other unanswered frustrations, fears, and slights.

Vasily shouldered his way between them. “Don’t mess up my uniform!” He put his arm around the Adarean’s neck and, while the deacons pinned him, choked until he was still.

Moments later the deacons dragged another body over to the compost pits. They tossed it directly into the waste, and added the other naked corpses after it.

The minister walked down the line, pausing when he reached Vasily. The handkerchief in his pocket was the colour of Vasily’s faded orange uniform. “What did you think you were doing?”

“What I needed to do, sir.”

“You won’t do it again without my permission first. You clear about that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll do just fine then,” the minister said. He turned to his camp clerk, a prisoner carrying an antique keypad, and said, “Enter ten new penitents on the rolls, record nine runaways, and mark one piece of trash disposed.”

He moved along the line, stopping to inspect each man for a few seconds as if he were looking for something. He found it when he reached Max, because he stood there, staring, then slipped his hands into his pockets.

“You,” he drawled, “already look like a corpse.”

“That was my nickname in the space fleet, sir,” Max replied, staring straight ahead, past the goggled face. “It’s just what I look like, sir.”

After a long pause, the minister sucked on his teeth, turned to the deacon with the keypad, and said, “Help me remember something here. Did I ask him a question?”

“No, sir, you didn’t.”

“And did he speak to me anyway?”

“Yes, sir, I believe he did.”

Max cursed himself silently. It was all about demonstrating power. He’d guessed right on the uniforms, but made a mistake here. The only thing he could do was keep his head down, take his punishment, and survive it.

The minister sucked his teeth again, leaned over and got right in Max’s face. His breath smelled like onions and tooth decay. “That group over there,” he said, with a nod toward the Adareans, “they’re one short. You go take that spot.”

Max hesitated. Being with the Adareans was a death sentence, but a slow one. He had the feeling that defying the camp minister, here, at this moment, would mean his immediate death.

Spinning on his heel, he turned and walked crisply over to the small group of Adareans: the guards and deacons laughed behind him, while the minister assigned the other nine men to work groups in the main camp.

Max studied the Adareans. They were all taller than him, a half a meter or more, bred for a planet with lower gravity. Their skin colour ranged from grass green to sandy brown; their hair ranged from thick sawgrass to normal human, gray. Their features were soft, halfway between male and female, but the expressions on their faces were uniformly hostile. No one met his gaze.

“Hi, I’m Max,” he said. There was no response. He wanted to ask where the food and water were, but decided not to waste his energy.

“All right, time to go to work,” the minister shouted. “It’s going to be another scorcher and I don’t want no more of you dying from heat stroke. So it’s light work today in the gardens and turning the fields. You can get your assignments from Smith. Prayer Block 13 has sea duty.”