I have never felt so alone.
I got back on the gravrail and returned to East Oleanta.
IV
OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2114
The personal is political, and the political is always personal.
Thirteen
I was underground with the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost for two months, throughout September and October. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hide for days, weeks, months, from the GSEA. The Outpost was a bunch of nuts; what possible chance could they have of evading the government after killing three GSEA agents, murdering Leisha Camden, and blow-ing up an agency rescue plane? None. Nada. It wasn’t possible. That’s what I would have believed.
Nor did I believe it was possible to hide from Huevos Verdes. Daily, hourly, I expected them to come for me.
The shapes in my head were thin and fragile, like nervous membranes. Vulnerable. Uncertain. These shapes swam around the immobile green lattice like spooked fish. Sometimes they had faces, or the sketches effaces, on the uncertain shapes. Sometimes the faces were mine.
At 5:00 A.M. of my second day underground an alarm had sounded. My heart had leapt: their defenses were breached. But it was reveille.
Peg slouched in, sullen. She wheeled me to a common bath, dumped me in, pulled me out. I didn’t reveal that I could easily have done this for myself. She wheeled me to commons, jammed with people hastily eating, so many people that some gulped their food standing up. Then she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and thrust it at me angrily.
“Here. Yours.”
It was a printout of a schedule, headed ARLEN, DREW, TEMPORARY ASSIGNMENT COMPANY 5. “I’m assigned to Company 5. Is that your group, Peg?”
She snorted in derision and wheeled me around so hard I nearly tumbled out of the chair.
Company 5 assembled in a huge barren underground room: a parade ground. I didn’t see Joncey, Abigail, or anyone else I recognized. For two hours twenty people did calisthenics. I did intentionally feeble imitations in my chair. Peg grunted and sweated.
Next came two hours of holo instruction on weapons — pro-pellant, laser, biological, grav — I was amazed Hubbley let me see this, and then I wasn’t. He didn’t expect me to ever have the chance to tell anyone.
As the holo explained weapon charging, care, and use, the twenty members of Company 5 practiced with the real thing. I was ten feet away from wresting a gun from Peg and shooting her dead. She didn’t seem bothered by this, although I saw a few others glance at me, hard-eyed. Probably Peg didn’t object because these were Hubbley’s orders. Perhaps this was the way that Francis Marion had converted his prisoners of war.
Lunch, then more physical training, then a holo on living off the land. Incredibly, it came from the Government Document Office. I fell asleep.
Peg kicked my chair. “Political Truth, you.”
She pushed me closer into the company, who sat on the floor in a semicircle, facing the holostage. Everyone sat straight. I could feel taut shapes grow tauter in my mind. The atmosphere prickled and thickened. We were in for something more interesting than the Government Document Office.
Jimmy Hubbley came in and sat with the company. Nobody addressed him. Another holo began.
It had the deliberately grainy texture reserved for real-time unedited filming. There’s no way to alter any part of it without destroying the whole thing. It’s the same holo-creation technique I use in my concerts, although my equipment compensates for the graininess with deliberately softened edges, like a dream. But it’s important to people to see a real-life concert, not some patched together and edited version afterwards. They need to know it’s really me.
This holo had really happened.
It showed the underground, including James Hubbley, capturing the duragem dissembler in an outlaw lab. The captured inventors were then forced to manufacture dissemblers in huge quantities, which were stored in small canisters completely dissolvable once opened. None had been released until the canisters had been stockpiled all over the United States. Then the clocked dissembler had been released simultaneously everywhere, so no source could be traced. I was looking at information the GSEA would give its collective life to know.
The original outlaw lab had been located in Upstate New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, near a small town called East Oleanta.
I sat quietly, letting the shapes in my mind overwhelm me. There was no use fighting them. Miranda had always said East Oleanta had been chosen at random for the Huevos Verdes project, picked by a computer-generated random program to avoid the GSEA deductive-locale programs. That’s what she had told me.
You’re a necessary part of the project, Drew, A full member.
“Okay,” Jimmy Hubbley said, when the holo had finished, “now who can tell me why we all see this here holo over and over again like this, pretty near every damn day?”
A young girl said fervently, “Because we share knowledge, us, equally. Not like the donkeys.”
“That’s fine, Ida.” Hubbley smiled at her.
A man said in a deep, upcountry voice, “We need, us, to know the facts so’s we can make good decisions about our country. The idea of an America for real human Americans. The will to get us there.”
“That’s fine,” Hubbley said. “Don’t it sound fine, soldiers?”
Someone said hesitantly, “But don’t that mean, it, that we should ask everybody in the whole country what they think? For a vote?”
There was a little stir in the room.
“If they had all the knowledge we do, Bobby, then it sure would mean that,” Hubbley said earnestly. Light shone in his pale eyes. “But they don’t know all the things we do. They ain’t had the privilege of fightin’ for freedom on the front lines. Specifically, they ain’t seen the holo of the captured lab. They don’t know what weapons we got on our side now. They might think this here revolution is hopeless, not knowing that. But we know better. So we got the obligation to decide for them, and to act in the best will of all our fellow Americans.”
Heads nodded. I could see how special they felt, Ida and Bobby and Peg, deciding so selflessly in the best interests of all Americans. Just as Francis Marion had done.
I heard Miranda’s voice in my head: They can’t possibly understand the biological and societal consequences of the project, Drew, any more than people of Kenzo Yagai’s time could foresee the social consequences of cheap ubiquitous energy. He had to go forward and develop it on the basis of his best informed projections. And so do we. They can’t really understand until it happens.
Because they were norms. Like Drew Arlen.
There was a long silence. People shifted from ham to ham or sat preternaturally still. Eyes darted at each other, then away. I could feel my own back straighten. All this tension was not over some holo they had seen “pretty near every damn day.”
Hubbley said, “I said they don’t know what we got, and I meant they don’t know what we got. But they’re sure the hail going to find out. Campbell, bring him in.”
Campbell entered from one of the many corridors, half dragging a naked, handcuffed Liver. The man was a sorry sight, barely five and a half feet to Campbell’s seven and looking even shorter as he futiley resisted being dragged. He was hunched over, his bare heels scraping the floor. He didn’t make a sound.
Hubbley said, “Is the robocam ready?”
Someone behind him said, “I just turned it on, Jimmy.”
“Good. Now, y’all know this film is the kind that cain’t be edited without self-destructin’. And you watchers out there, y’all know it too. Son, look at me when I’m talkin’.”