The captive raised his head. He made no effort to cover his genitals. I saw with a shock that his lack of height wasn’t due to bad Liver genes; he was a boy. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, and genemod. It was there in the bright green eyes, the sharp handsome line of his jaw. But he wasn’t donkey. He was a tech, those offspring of borderline families who can’t afford full genetic modification, including the expensive IQ boosters, but who aspire to be more than Livers. They buy their children the appearance mods only, and the kids grow up — early — to provide those services halfway between robots and donkey brains. My roadies were techs. At Huevos Verdes, you could argue, Kevin Baker’s grandson Jason, a Sleepless, was nonetheless a tech.
The boy looked terrified.
Hubbley said, not to the boy, “What did General Francis Marion’s young lieutenant call him?”
Peg answered fervently, “ ‘An ugly, cross, knock-kneed, hooknosed son of a bitch’!”
“Y’all see, son,” Hubbley explained kindly to the boy, “General Marion warn’t genemod. He was just the way his Lord made him. And he became the greatest hero this country ever had. Curtis, what did General Marion say was his policy when he was too outnumbered to attack the enemy directly?”
A man to my left said promptly, “ ‘Yet I pushed them so hard as in a great measure to break them up.’ ”
“Absolutely right. ‘Pushed them so hard as to break them up.’ And that’s just what we’re doin’, you watchers out there. Pushin’ y’all. This here man is a captured enemy, a worker in a genemod clinic. Parents take their innocent unborn babies to this place and turn them into something that ain’t human. Their own children. To some of us this is damn near inconceivable.”
I wanted to say that in vitro genetic modification happened before there was a ‘babe,’ that it was done to the fertilized egg in artificial biostasis. But my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. The tech boy stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, like a rabbit caught in bright lights.
“Now, y’all might think that this boy is too young to be held accountable for his actions. But he’s fifteen years old. Junie, how old was Francis Marion’s nephew Gabriel Marion when he was killed fightin’ the enemy at Mount Pleasant Plantation?”
“Fourteen,” a female voice answered. From my chair, I couldn’t see her face.
Hubbley’s voice grew confidential. He leaned forward slightly, “Y’all out there see, don’t y’all? This is war. We mean it. We got the Idea what kind of country we want to live in, and we got the Will to get there. No matter what the personal cost. Earl, tell all our watchers out there at the GSEA about Mrs. Rebecca Motte.”
A man dressed in purple jacks stood awkwardly, his arms dangling loose at his side. “On May 11—”
“May 10,” Hubbley said, with a brief frown. He didn’t want any inaccuracies in his uneditable tape. Earl, rattled, took a deep breath.
“On May 10 General Marion and his men attacked Mount Pleasant Plantation, them, ’cause the British had took it for a headquarters. They made the lady and her kids move, her, into a log cabin. Her name was Mrs. Rebecca Motte. The house was too well fortified for direct attack, it, and so the general decided, him, to shoot flaming arrows and set it on fire. But they didn’t have no good bow and arrows. Lighthorse Harry Lee, who was working with General Marion, he went, him, to tell Mrs. Motte they had to burn her house down. And she went into the cabin and come out with beautiful bow and arrows, real donkey stuff. And she said, her, about her house, ‘If it were a palace, it should go.’ ” Earl sat down.
Hubbley nodded. “Genuine sacrifice. A genuine patriot, Mrs.
Rebecca Motte. You hear that, son?”
The tech didn’t appear to hear anything. Was he drugged? Leisha had always warned me against believing history’s more colorful stories.
“We cain’t never stop resistin’ all you enemies of America. And you watchers are the worst, just like traitors and spies is always the worst in any revolution. They pretend to be on one side while plottin’ and workin’ for the other. GSEA agents are all traitors, pretendin’ to safeguard the purity of human beings while actually permittin’ all kinds of abominations. And then handin’ over this great country to those same abominations, the donkeys, just like we Livers didn’t realize y’all would let us starve if you could. And in fact y’all are. Joncey, what did General Marion say in his speech to the men before they attacked Doyle at Lynche’s Creek?”
Joncey’s voice, so much stronger and at ease than Earl’s, recited, “ ‘But, my friends, if we shall be ruined for bravely resisting our tyrants, what will be done to us if we tamely lie down and submit to them?’›:
I turned around. The room was full of people, all the “revolutionaries” from other “companies.” Staring at the young tech, I hadn’t even heard them come in. Neither, I was convinced, had he.
Hubbley said, “This here boy is a traitor. Workin’ in agenemod clinic. He’s goin’ to die like a traitor, and y’all out there remember that he ain’t the only one today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. Abby?”
Abigail came out of the crowd. She carried a featureless gray canister, no bigger than her closed fist.
“Abby,” Hubbley said, “what did General Marion do with goods confiscated from the enemy?”
She turned to speak directly to the robocam. “Every metal saw the brigade could find, them, they hammered into a sword.”
“That’s exactly right. And this here—” he hoisted the canister high above his head ” — is a saw. It ain’t even been concocted in some illegal gene lab. This here comes straight from the biggest traitor of alclass="underline" the so-called United States government.” He turned the canister around. I saw stamped on it PROPERTY OF U. S. ARMY. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.
I didn’t believe it. Hubbley had painted the words on. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t even know as yet what the canister held. This ragtag bag of so-called revolutionaries had delusions, dreams, pathetic wishes … I didn’t believe it.
The lattice in my mind sighed, as if wind soughed through. “Okay, Abby,” Hubbley said, “do it.”
Abby, her back to me, did something I couldn’t see. The shimmer of a heavy-duty Y-energy shield appeared around the naked tech, a domed and floored hemisphere six feet in diameter. The canister was inside the shimmer.
The boy wasn’t drugged after all. Immediately he started screaming. The sound couldn’t carry through the shield, which was the kind nothing got through, not even air. The boy beat his fists against the inside and screamed, his open mouth a pink cave, his eyes round with terror. There was faint down on his upper lip, like a fledgling bird, and scarcely more on his groin.
Jimmy Hubbley looked disgusted. “He lives causin’ death and then cain’t even die like a man … do it, Abby.”
Whatever Abby did, I couldn’t see. The canister glowed briefly, then dissolved into a gray puddle.
“This here is your metal saw you made to cut us up with,” Hubbley said, “but we made it a sword. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Matthew 26:52. Y’all already know what this stuff does.
But for them that don’t—” he looked directly at me ” — I’ll repeat it. This here’s one of your own genemod abominations. It takes apart cell walls, cells of livin’ human beings. Like this.”
The boy had stopped beating against the shield. He was still screaming, but his mouth was changing shape. He was dissolving. It wasn’t the same as when someone had acid poured on him — I had seen that once, in the days before Leisha took me in. Acid burns away the flesh. The boy’s flesh wasn’t burning, it was breaking up, like ice in springtime. Bits of skin fell to the dome floor, exposing red flesh, and then bits of that fell. He went on screaming, screaming, screaming. I felt my stomach heave, and the shapes in my mind heaved, too, around the ever-closed lattice.