It took the boy almost three minutes to die.
Hubbley said, very softly, “General Marion ended his Lynche’s Creek speech this way: ‘As God is my judge this day, that I would die a thousand deaths, most gladly would I die them all, rather than see my dear country in such a state of degradation and wretchedness.’ As God is my judge, watchers.” His pale eyes in their bony, sunburned face looked directly outward, filled with light.
Then everyone moved. The robocam must have been turned off. The shapes in my mind were tarry, foul. I had done nothing to save the boy. I hadn’t even tried to speak up. I had not tried to get myself on the uneditable tape, to provide the watchers some clue about where this abomination was taking place … I had done nothing.
“That’s a wrap,” Jimmy Hubbley said, clearly pleased with himself. “That’s old-time movie talk, it means the filmin’ is done. Y’all are dismissed. And Mr. Aden, sir, I think Peg better take y’all to your room. Y’all look a little peaked. If it ain’t too great an impertinence in me to tell you so.”
It went on like that for weeks.
Physical training, holos about the state of society (where were they made?), political drill. It was the worst of being in school, all over again. I kept finding small lace oblongs from Abigail’s wedding gown, and Peg never pushed my chair anywhere in spitting distance of a terminal.
There were no more executions.
I badly wanted a drink. Hubbley said no. He allowed sunshine, because it didn’t dull reaction time. I wanted a drink, because it dulled reaction time.
Hubbley had allowed me a handheld dumb terminal, the kind kids use for schoolwork, and a standard encyclopedia library. I said to him once, because I couldn’t bite back the words, “Francis Marion discouraged the killing of prisoners. He even spirited a Tory, Jeff Butler, out of his own camp when it looked like Marion’s men might butcher him.”
Hubbley laughed with delight and rubbed the lump on his neck. “Damn, you been studyin’, son, hail if you haven’t! I’m damn proud of you!”
My teeth hurt from clenching them. “Hubbley—”
“But it don’t make no never mind, Mr. Arlen, sir. No, it really don’t. General Marion showed compassion to Tories because they were his own kind, his neighbors, living off the land same as he did. He didn’t show that same compassion to British soldiers, now, did he? Donkeys ain’t our kind. They ain’t our neighbors in their snooty enclaves. And they sure don’t live like we do, deprived of education and personal property and real power. No, donkeys are the British, Mr. Arlen. Not Jeff Butler — but Captain James Lewis of His Majesty’s Forces, who was killed by a fourteen-year-old patriot named Gwynn. That’s natural law, son. Protect your own.”
“Marion didn’t—”
“You say ‘General Marion,’ you!” Peg yelled. She glanced at Hubbley, like a dog hoping for a pat on the head. Hubbley smiled, showing his broken teeth.
These were the people who had loosened the duragem dissembler on the country, wrecking civilization. These.
And it was wrecked. The HT in commons received donkey newsgrids. There was scarcely agravrail running a steady schedule, especially outside the cities. Most technicians had been diverted to major population areas, where the votes were. And the danger of rioting. Security had been tripled at most enclaves. Few planes flew, which meant the country was being run mostly by teleconferencing, at a distance. Medunits malfunctioned regularly. They didn’t dispense wrong diagnoses; they just stopped diagnosing.
A viral plague was spreading in southern California. Nobody knew if it was a natural mutation, or bioengineered.
A Liver messiah in East Texas had proclaimed this the Time of the End. He was quoting Revelations on the four horsemen, with a twist: The horseman of war must be loosed by the Livers. Now. When the state security squad tried to arrest him, he and his followers blew away thirty-three people with illegal Mexican weapons. The governor, said the newsgrid with concern, was virtually certain to fail reelection.
In Kansas, a soysynth factory owned by the D’Angelo franchise was ripped apart by hoarders, who carried off the treated and untreated soy. They also wrecked three million dollars of robotic machinery.
The lieutenant-governor of South Dakota was somehow knifed to death in his sleep, within a protected enclave.
Livers in San Diego broke into the world-famous zoo there, killed a lion and two elehippos, and ate them, following a report that animals could not get the new plague.
The northeast had been hit by early winter. Small towns were isolated without gravrails, starving without food. People starved. Small towns like East Oleanta.
Where was Miranda? And what was she waiting for? Unless something had gone wrong in the last steps of the project. Unless the GSEA had discovered Eden, traced it back from the carefully disseminated rumors in the little isolated Liver towns.
Unless there was even more that she, and Huevos Verdes, hadn’t told me.
For the first time, I wondered if she wasn’t coming for me at all.
“The greatness of the Constitution is in its Will to the common people,” Jimmy Hubbley said, his pale eyes bright.
“The greatness of the Constitution is in its checks and balances,” Leisha had always said. Leisha. Who. Was. Dead.
The dark lattice in my mind was furled tight as an umbrella, impenetrable, a thin sharp line that cut me inside.
Where were the checks and balances on Huevos Verdes?
“Take me around the compound again,” I said to Peg.
She was slumped in a chair in commons, watching a scooter race someplace in California. A part of California without plague. “I don’t want, me, to take you again. You seen everything you’re gonna see.”
“Fine. I’ll go alone.” I wheeled the chair away from her. I didn’t dare exercise my upper body, not even after she’d locked me in at night. I couldn’t see the surveillance monitors but I knew they had to be there. I settled for furtively hoisting myself a few inches above the arms of my chair several times a day, lifting my useless legs, careful to choose different locations each day.
“Wait, you.” Peg sighed and heaved herself up. Roughly she shoved the chair forward.
A white corridor with the featureless doors locked.
Another white corridor with the featureless doors locked.
And another white corridor with the featureless doors locked.
The landing stage, guarded by Campbell, who was asleep but not very. Another white corridor with…
A piece of Abby’s wedding dress lay snagged on a rough spot in the wall.
“Damn!” Peg said, with more energy than I’d ever heard her say anything. “That bitch can’t keep nothing tidy, her! This stupid stuffs everywhere!” She snatched it up savagely and tore the small oblong into even smaller pieces. Her face was a mottled, angry red. There were tears in her eyes.
Why was there a rough place on a nanosmooth wall to snag a piece of dropped lace?
“Stupid bitch!” Peg said. Her voice caught.
“Why, Peg,” I said. “You’re jealous.”
“You shut up, you!”
Through the zoom portion of my corneas, the rough place on the wall had an added-on look. Not a mistake in the nanopro-gramming, but a bump built later, with another clocked nanoas-sembler, manually. Why?
To snag an oblong of lace?
Every oblong was different. The lace had been programmed that way. To make a unique pattern on an old-fashioned wedding gown.
To make a code.
Peg had recovered herself. Blank-faced once more, but with red eyes, she shoved the torn bit of lace in the pocket of her hideously unbecoming turquoise jacks. Her mouth twitched in pain. No sympathetic shapes slid through my mind. Peg didn’t know what pain was. Peg hadn’t seen Leisha die, mud caked on her thin yellow shirt, two small red dots on her forehead.