Walking Dead (15 page)

“Um,” said Foxe. “Take the word ‘Shoes' in the last game—can you remember how that went?”

Three of the group looked at Vine. He glanced across the arena to Group B, which included Plantain. The fifth member of the group, a girl, bowed her head.

“This is Cedar's word,” said Vine in a low voice. “We begin to ask him two, three questions—can't remember those—then Cactus say ‘Shoes.'”

“What about ‘Helicopter?'”

“My word,” whispered Vine. “They ask a whole lot of questions—is it food, is it houses, is it people—not getting anywhere. Then Cactus say ‘Bird' and I shake my head. Then she say ‘But it fly' and I nod. Next somebody say ‘Aeroplane' and next Cedar say ‘Helicopter'.”

“I see,” said Foxe. The girl still wouldn't look at him—he remembered her now, mainly for her quite inappropriate name. Mushroom would have been better. She was grey-skinned, sleepy-eyed, shy-spoken; her skin looked loose on her, as though it was used to being filled with blubbery flesh; her other distinguishing feature was that she had scored bottom marks on Foxe's improvised IQ test.

“Was it like that with most of the other words?” he asked. “A sudden intuitive guess?”

“Yeh, but Plantain don't like we talk about her,” whispered Vine.

The other men's glances flickered towards Cactus and away.

“OK,” said Foxe, rising. “Look, Group C's finished—you weren't that far ahead. Thanks.”

Funny, he thought as he went back to the tables. If they thought Cactus had telepathic powers which they wanted to conceal they could have told her to ask the wrong questions. They were quite bright enough for that. He wondered how she did it—hypersensitive hearing, perhaps. Anyway, he told himself, we've got our nutter. You always get at least one.

For variety they switched to psychokinetics—a blindfold player trying to toss the metal plates they ate off into a target area, while the rest of his group, silent, willed him to throw in the right direction. The Khandhars took this game too with unnerving seriousness, so that Foxe began to feel that even rats, and certainly monkeys, would have shown more reaction to their fellows' antics; but these people played as though the game were part of their life's purpose—in fact Foxe began to worry whether they were too high-minded to cheat at all, and was brooding on possible incentives when a voice hissed out of the darkness above.

“Got a load of stuff for you here, Doc. You coming up?”

The usual anger burned, useless.

“OK, lower the steps,” he called.

He found Louis waiting at the top of the gangway, smiling uneasily, a child not sure whether he is going to get away with some blatant misdeed.

“Now listen,” said Foxe, “the Prime Minister doesn't want my experiment interrupted. Not at all. If I tell him you keep calling down to me, he will have you punished. Do you understand that?”

“Yeh, yeh,” said Louis, cringing a little but still smiling. “It's just he send all these tapes and we don't know where to put them.”

“In the guard cell, he said. I'll listen to some of them later. Now …”

“Doc, while you up here, you tell us the rules you playing? We can't bet on the game less you tell us the rules, uh?”

“You're betting on my game?”

“Sure,” said Louis, gesturing along the gallery to where the other guards, five or so, leaned on the rail discussing the scene below with jerky intent mutters. “I'm a fellow will bet on anything. I got a pair of cocks up the town will beat all the birds in the Islands.”

Foxe hesitated, trapped by a sudden notion. There is no sharper observer than a man with money on a game, and the people below wouldn't know they were being watched in this way. He couldn't think of an immediate use for this odd lab facility, but it was too potentially valuable to refuse.

“OK,” he said, beginning to walk along the gallery towards the other men. “It's very straightforward.”

“Yeh, bit too simple,” said Louis, following him, jovial with success.

“I could complicate it a bit, I suppose,” said Foxe.

“Fine, fine. Hey, man, why you not fix these bastards to fight, like the cockfighting?”

For emphasis he slapped Foxe's ribs with the back of his hand.

“Watch it,” said Foxe. “A bit lower and you'd have got my rat.”

The warning was a blast of frost, shrivelling the tendrils of comradeship. Foxe heard the indrawn sigh of shock.

“It's all right,” he said. “He's been asleep all morning. Now about this game …”

They had reached the lounging guards, who listened, discussed the rules and suggested a few variations which would make their gambling more amusing, until Louis re-introduced his suggestion about the cockfight. At once all interest in the game below vanished. Foxe found himself saying over and over, “I'll think about it,” when he knew quite well that his mind had closed like an anemone at the first touch of the idea. In the end he dropped his hand into his jacket pocket and said, sharply, “Louis.”

The enthusiastic mutter stilled. A tick appeared at the corner of Louis's mouth, and the nearest of the guards made the same sign with his left hand that Foxe had seen Mr Trotter use.

“Where are these tapes?” he said. “I've got a lot to do. I'll think about this other game, but I can't promise anything.”

“I show you,” said Louis soberly. “Going off duty now—only hung around for the betting. Coming, fellows?”

Two of the other men grunted and Louis led the way into the tunnel. A few yards up on the left he pushed open a steel door, nodding to Foxe to follow him through. The room was another cave, but made, or at least adapted, by man; Foxe could see on the walls the slant parallels left by the hacking tools that had shaped this cramped cuboid. It was lit by one bleak bulb, and the furniture was a plain table and two crates. There was a cardboard carton on the table, with a tape-recorder beside it; on a side-wall hung a small control panel with switches and lights and sockets. This cell had a strange, musky smell, like an animal's lair—a reasonably cleanly animal, but one which over the years had impregnated the place with its own faintly foetid odours; it reminded Foxe of the rooms of misogynist dons at old universities.

Louis went to the panel and spoke into the air.

“Coming out now, Robbie.”

“Why you been so long?” said a tinny voice. “Andy's lot been in twenty minutes.”

“Setting up a game. Tell you. Now I just got to show the Doc these tapes, right?”

Louis turned to the table, unravelled the flex of the recorder and plugged it in on the control panel. The machine must have been already loaded and switched on, but it didn't seem to Foxe to be working because an extraordinary whining wail filled the room.

“Hi! Turn that stuff off!” called the tinny voice. “I studying, I tell you!”

Louis prodded a big finger onto the recorder and stilled the racket.

“He got to listen to this,” he said. “Doctor O says.”

“OK,” replied the voice. “Show him how he take this circuit out.”

“Right,” said Louis. “Watch here, Doc. When you listening to these tapes, you cut out the mikes. This the switch here. Ready, Robbie? Three, two, one, now.”

At the last syllable he pressed a switch to the left of the one he'd shown Foxe. A green light glowed above the panel. Louis grunted and strode away, and Foxe stood listening to the pad of soles up the tunnel. In the silence a faint voice muttered.

“Group A. Twelve throws. One hit, one on the line.”

“One and one, OK,” answered Mr Trotter's voice, just as faint. A red light began to wink on and off and a loud bleeper drowned all other sounds until one of the fresh guards scampered in and threw another switch, which stopped the bleeping and let the light glow steadily.

“OK. Shut them now,” said Robbie's voice.

“Three, two, one, now.” The guard clicked switches and turned.

“Coming out, Doc?” he said.

“When I've checked this recorder. It was making a rum noise.”

“OK,” said the guard and left.

By training and instinct Foxe always checked machinery the moment it was delivered. Now he closed the microphone circuit to the outer guard-hut and started the recorder again. The same racket filled the cell, but before he could switch off the noise stopped and was replaced by a heavy, quick panting, unmistakably non-mechanical.

Captain Angiah's voice said, “Your name is Lucilla Banker.”

Another voice, still panting, said, “My name be Cactus.”

Immediately the wailing began again.

6

T
he girl who called herself Cocoa Bean had been educated by a nursing order of nuns. She scowled at the large needle.

“This will hurt,” she said.

Foxe shut his eyes, thinking of the thousands of superfine needles he had in his life slid painlessly into the animals he'd handled. He felt Cocoa Bean's fingers exploring for the best spot in the flab of his upper arm, and then the sudden stab of pain.

Did the decision date from that moment? Sometimes Foxe could distinctly remember the change of attitude flooding through him as the pain dwindled to soreness: a second before he'd been thinking of fine disposable needles and cursing himself for not realising that if he didn't insist he'd be offered these iron-age prodders; the next he was thinking, We've got to get out of here. Not I but We. At other times, and equally distinctly, he could remember not thinking about that at all at that moment, but experiencing a gradual change over several days from a state when his mind in spare moments automatically turned to the details of the experiment to a state when it turned to the experiment only as part of the machinery of escape.

There were only three hypodermics, all blunt, so injecting the Khandhars took almost an hour. Mr Trotter sterilised the needles over a butane flame and Cocoa Bean did the actual injections, leaving Foxe free to check who the next sufferer was and fill his needle with SG 19 or saline solution, working behind a screen so that no one else could see who was getting what. He'd made it clear that they could select any single dose prepared for one of them and ask Foxe to take it instead (the only way Foxe could think of to prove that he hadn't been giving himself the saline every time) but this first morning Plantain had given one of his rare, bleak smiles and asked Foxe to go first. Plantain was in one of the SG 19 groups, so Foxe got his dose.

Last of all Foxe injected Cocoa Bean. As he was looking for a spot on her shrunk arm where there might be muscle enough to take the dose she began to mutter.

“Screwy jabs! Why you not get us good hypos? Cactus say Old Woman. Screwy jabs. Up above. Hell that hurt. Watching. Finished? Sorry. Even jabs with a good hypo I hate.”

Foxe nodded to show he'd understood the message, buried almost inaudibly among the gasped complaints. For the moment what impressed him was not what Cocoa Bean had said, but that it had been she who'd said it. Though she played her part in the games with the same surrender to the group will that all the other Khandhars displayed, in her individual contacts with Foxe she had been chilly and brusque; so it was a measure of how far the Khandhars assumed that Foxe was wholly on their side that she'd, so to speak, given Cactus as a hostage into his hands. From his one brief talk with Plantain about Cactus Foxe had discovered that the Khandhars were touchily protective of her, and also that they guessed the whole arena was bugged.

His mind had switched to this last point, and the problem of how to organise any kind of escape if you might be being listened to at any moment, when a voice yelled from above.

“What they signs? Foxy, what they signs?”

Foxe had almost forgotten the ritual pattern in the sand through which the Khandhars threaded their gawky dance each evening. He was unwilling either to exploit or to deny his supposed magical powers, so it had seemed simplest to take the pattern for granted and ignore it—though he'd noticed that Mr Trotter, who'd become sufficiently accepted among the Khandhars to sit with them and talk herbalism, kept well away from the area. But yes, it was old Mrs Trotter's sort of thing, of course.

“Can't come now,” he called.

“Foxy, you come right up an' tell me.”

“I'll be free in about ten minutes.”

The gangway ropes creaked. Foxe ignored them, prickly with anger and frustration at his inability to control these irruptions into his kingdom. He stowed and locked drugs, needles and dose records in the file cabinet that now stood on the sand like a fragment of Dali landscape. As he turned he saw a guard coming towards him. He knew most of the soldiers by name now—this one was Andy, a black, wiry, slow-witted man with a strong resentment at anything that lessened his own authority over the creatures of the Pit.

“Mister Doc, when
she
say, you come,” said Andy. His gun was slung over his shoulder, but in his right hand he held a thing like a flattened truncheon, bound in leather, and he slapped this against his thigh as he spoke. Foxe stared at him, aware of the man's hatred and contempt, but at the same time of an odd undercurrent of nervousness, as though he half-expected Foxe to produce some threat more powerful than his own truncheon or Mrs Trotter's anger.

Foxe smiled, unlocked the cabinet again and took out a couple of sheets of paper which he thrust at Andy, who stared and backed away.

“You take those up to her,” said Foxe. “Tell her to try and work out what ought to be in the missing picture. I'll be up by the time she's done that.”

Andy hesitated, frowning. In the silence Foxe heard Quentin begin on one of his rampaging scuttles round the second drawer of the cabinet, which was now his home. At the first scrape of sound Andy's face changed; he snatched the papers, backed a couple of steps away, turned and then only just managed to keep his walking pace from teetering into a run. Still smiling Foxe locked the top drawer, opened the second and took Quentin out. When he turned to the Khandhars his fingers automatically fondled the smooth fur, soothing the fret away. They watched him with none of the fear that the guards showed, but with a sort of deepened seriousness, as though he were about to demonstrate some difficult and important technique.

“Right,” he said. “Now we've got to take a bit of exercise to distribute that stuff round our blood-streams. Vine, you used to teach this sort of thing, didn't you?”

“Sure.”

“OK, will you organise something while I go and talk to our visitor? Nothing too violent, and if you can manage it everybody using about the same amount of energy. OK?”

“I get you.”

As he started to climb the steps Foxe was thinking that not having proper lab facilities was a great time-saver. A guess is much quicker than measurement. Next came tests for sedative effects …

“What you try to do to me, Foxy? What these pictures? You can't tie me with no pictures.”

She was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, a squat idol. Further along the gallery the President leaned on the rail, scratching his buttock, while his white-jacketed keeper stood impassive against the rock. Foxe discovered that he was still fondling Quentin, so he slipped him into his pocket but kept his hand caressing the soothed pelt.

“It isn't a spell, ma'am,” he said. “It's what's called a matrix test—it's a way of measuring intelligence. Look, this one is a single bar, and in the second picture it's turned through forty-five degrees. This one's a double bar, and in the second picture it's turned through ninety. This one's a triple bar, so in the missing picture it's got to be turned through a hundred and thirty-five. Good morning, sir. How are you?”

“He's OK,” said Mrs Trotter. “I doing what you say, Foxy—I cut out the owl-crap and the marra-rood, and I sing for Bakubaku to ease his bowels, and like you say he getting better, a little. But those signs on the sand—you telling me they're the same like these pictures?”

“The same sort of thing, only much more complicated. They've got to find the right way through—do you remember the mazes in my laboratory? I wanted these people to do a difficult intelligence test …”

“They ain't indelligent! They stupid!”

“Everybody's intelligent about some things and stupid about other things.”

“That's right, Foxy! My clever son, he's stupid about his soul, and my stupid son, that's the only thing he clever with.”

She cocked ahead and frowned again across the arena, not looking at the ranks of Khandhars swinging from the hips in time to Vine's monotonous chant, but at the magical pattern in the sand.

“Some of those look to be snake-signs,” she said.

“You're looking at them upside down,” said Foxe blandly. “It's the same with the Q on my rat's back—people look at that upside down and think it means something else. Look, you can see the marks of the footprints going through the maze.”

“You let my son see your rat, Foxy? Hi, Dimmy, got something to show you.”

The President grunted and came shambling along the gallery, followed by his keeper. Very reluctantly Foxe drew Quentin from his pocket and held him up, stroking his nape with his free hand. The President gave an extraordinary little chortle and reached forward with his own hands cupped like a beggar's.

“I've got to have him back, ma'am,” said Foxe in an urgent whisper. “He's essential for the experiments.”

“Sure, sure,” said Mrs Trotter. “Just let the boy hold him a little.”

Quentin didn't seem to object to being dropped into the pudgy palms, but sniffed at the new, strange reeks with an eager nose. For a moment the President peered crooningly at his prize, then swung ponderously round to face his keeper, raising his hands as he did so until they were directly between the two faces. The man stared, the mask of numb detachment suddenly vanishing, replaced by the shock of ambush. The President blew at him, a long sigh of a breath that fluttered Quentin's fur on its way, and the man seemed to go into trance, his lips parted and his eyes wide and staring. The President chuckled and stepped forward, letting Quentin drop as he did so. Foxe saw him nudge his keeper on the shoulder, and the keeper beginning to collapse with the slow-all-of-a-piece sway of a demolished chimney-stack, but by that time Foxe himself was on hands and knees, grabbing at Quentin before he could recover from the shock of his fall and scuttle into some cranny. It seemed overwhelmingly important to regain control of his totem before anything else happened. He felt the jar of the man's weight hitting the boards just as his fingers closed round the fur, and by the time he rose to his feet the President had taken another step forward and with happy little cries was kicking at the inert form.

“You see, my son got the power, 'cept he don' know how do use it,” said Mrs Trotter with sad pride.

“Yes, so I see, ma'am. Er, I ought to go back now or the experiment will get out of hand.”

“Sure, Foxy, sure. I get these stupid soldiers help carry Marcus out. Be lucky.”

“And the same to you, ma'am.”

Only on his way down to the arena was Foxe struck by the fact that it had seemed completely natural to lie to Mrs Trotter about the meaning of the pattern on the floor.

Time, not measured in days, ground past. Foxe felt no impatience, because his mind was filled with the work; everything became subsumed to it, even the most meaningless elements of the routine of the Pit. It was like the sand which, despite the still air, found its way into food, under clothes, between sheets of paper, into Quentin's drawer, into ears and nostrils. Not even the bout of reeking diarrhoea which afflicted the party for four days was free of the question, Does it help? Just as, earlier, Foxe had woken with his mind already buzzing with the experiment, now he woke with the mechanisms of escape half-built behind the façade of dream. In one sense the escape was an experiment too; even guessing at the reactions of guards had affinities with guessing at those of rats and monkeys. Only an occasional freshet of panic served to remind Foxe that there was no question of tinkering and then running the work again if it failed first time; but mostly the details of planning, which included organising games in a way that allowed small moments of whispered or coded conversation, numbed such fears, though he was never infected with the Khandhars' almost loony certainty that all would in the end be well.

It took a dream to remind Foxe why he was in the Pit at all. He woke vaguely aware that Ladyblossom had brought him a present in a brown paper bag, and the picture vivid in his mind as he eased his eye-bandage up, screwing his eyes tight against the glare of the floodlights, was of a red-cheeked apple crawling with caterpillars. Peeling his orange in the mid-morning break he remembered about it.

“What's snake-apple, Mr Trotter?”

“Pseudodatura Wilsonii.”

“Is it common? What does it do? How does it work?”

“No, not common at all. I never see it. Grow only two places, and the Government put a big fence round them. Say it for to protect the plants, but course it for to stop people getting to the snake-apple.”

“It's against the law to carry it, isn't it?”

“Yeh, but you can't carry the apple round—it rot too quick, and it only get poisonous just before it begin to rot. You take an apple and stick it full of thorns while it still on the bush. When it fall down to the ground and begin to rot, you come and pick your thorns out, and if you lucky all the poison gone into them. Some old witches still got a few thorns left, I guess, but there ain't many about.”

“Presumably the Government could still manufacture them if it wanted to.”

“Yeh, I guess so. I guess the Old Woman got a few. But it ain't that good for a poison—there's plenty better. Snake-apple were a witch-poison, cause of when it work the man go walking around for a while, like one of the Secret Ones come into him …”

Foxe stopped listening. It was all irrelevant, merely confirming guesses. If the Government controlled the supply of snake-apple, then it was fairly clear that they had had Ladyblossom killed, merely in order to trap him into this work. That didn't matter now. What mattered was the escape.

The Prime Minister came twice more—at least Foxe had to go up and talk to him twice more, but according to the girl Cactus he was once there, watching in the darkness, not making his presence known. Foxe had no idea whether this was true—he had been too busy to test her subliminal hearing.

On Doctor Trotter's first acknowledged visit he merely grumbled about the childishness of the games and the lack of progress or of results, not being much appeased by Foxe saying that he had found no measurable sedative effects in SG 19. This was a gross overstatement, of the sort that Foxe had despised all his working life. It was only not a lie because the measurement techniques had been so coarse—Foxe was fairly sure in his own mind that the stuff was a mild general sedative. No doubt that was why the Company had been interested in the first place.