The slums failed to end. They became, if anything, thicker and more ominous. She entered an area where the men were scarred and openly carried long knives on their belts, and had shaved heads and tattoos. A group of women in greasy burlap were wailing, without much enthusiasm, over a dead boy stretched out in the doorway of his hovel.
She spotted familiar bits and pieces of the outside world, her world, which had lost a grip on reality and swirled here into hell. Burlap bags, with fading blue stenciclass="underline" hands in a friendly clasp and the legend in French and English: 100% TRITICALE
FLOUR, A GIFT TO THE PEOPLE OF MALI FROM THE PEOPLE OF CANADA.
A teenage boy wearing a Euro-Disney World T-shirt, with the slogan "Visit the Future!" Oil barrels, blackened with trash soot over curlicued Arabic. Pieces of a Korean pickup, plastic truck doors and windows painstakingly cemented into a wall of red mud. Then a foul, smoke-stained lodge or church, its long, rambling walls carefully outlined in a terrifying iconography of grinning, horn-headed saints. Its sloped mud roof glittered with the round, stained-glass disks of broken bottles.
The van drove for hours. She was in the middle of a major city, a metropolis. There were hundreds of thousands living here. The entire country, Mali, a huge place, bigger than
Texas-this was all that was left of it, this endless rat warren.
All other choices had been stolen by the African disaster. The drought survivors crowded into gigantic urban camps, like this one. She was in Bamako, capital of Mali.
The capital of the F.A.C.T. They were the secret police here, the people who ran the place. They were running a nation ruined beyond hope, a series of monstrous camps.
In a sudden repellent flash of insight Laura understood how
FACT had casually carried out massacres. There was a sump of misery in this camp city big enough to choke the world.
She had always known it was bad in Africa, but she'd never known that life here meant so utterly little. She realized with a rush of fatalistic terror that her own life was simply too small to matter anymore. She was in hell now and they did things differently here.
At last they rolled past a barbed-wire fence, into a cleared area, dust and tarmac and skeletal watchtowers. Ahead-Laura's heart leapt---the familiar, friendly look of brown, walls of concretized sand. They were approaching a fat domed build- ing, much like her own Rizome Lodge in Galveston. It was much bigger, though. Efficiently built. Progressive and mod- em, the same techniques David had chosen.
Thinking of David was something so amazingly painful that she shut it off at once.
Then they rolled into the building, through its double walls of solid sand four feet thick, under cruel portcullises of welded iron.
The van stopped. A wait.
The European flung open the doors. "Out."
She stepped out into dazzling heat. She was in a bare arena, round baked-earth exercise yard surrounded by a twostory ring of brown fortress walls. The European led her to an iron hatchway, an armored door leading into the prison. Two guards loomed behind her. They went inside, into a hall lit by cheap sunlight pipes bracketed to the ceiling. "Showers," the
European said.
The word had an evil ring. Laura stopped in place. "I don't want to go to the showers."
"There's a toilet, too," the European offered.
She shook her head. The European looked over her shoul- der and nodded fractionally.
A club hit her from behind, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. It was as if she'd been struck by lightning. Her entire right side went numb and she fell to her knees.
Then the shock faded and pain began to seep in. True pain, not the pastel thing she'd called "pain" in the past, but a sensation truly profound, biological. She couldn't believe that that was all, that she'd simply been hit with a stick. She could already feel it, changing her life.
"Get up," he said, in the same tired voice. She got up.
They took her to the showers.
There was a prison matron there. They stripped her, and the woman did a body-cavity search, the men examining
Laura's nakedness with distant professional interest. She was pushed into the shower and handed a cake of raw lye that stank of insecticide. The water was hard and briny and wouldn't lather. It shut off before she had rinsed..
She got out. Her clothes and shoes had been stolen. The prison matron jabbed her in the buttock with five cc's of yellow fluid. She felt it sink in and sting.
The European and his two goons left, and two female goons showed up. Laura was given trousers and shirt of striped black-and-white canvas, creased and rough. She put them on, trembling. Either the injection was beginning to take effect or else she was scaring herself into the belief that it was. She felt lightheaded and sick and not far from genuine craziness.
She kept thinking that there was going to come a time when she could take a stand and demand that they kill her with her dignity intact. But they didn't seem anxious to kill her; and she didn't feel anxious to die, and she was beginning to realize that a human being could be beaten into almost anything. She didn't want to be hit again, not till she had a better grip on herself.
The matron said something in Creole French and indicated the toilet. Laura shook her head. The matron looked at her as if she were an idiot, and shrugged, and made a note on her clipboard.
Then two female goons cuffed her hands behind her back.
One of them pulled a billy club, wrapped it cleverly through the metal chain of the old-fashioned handcuffs, and levered
Laura's arms up in their sockets until she was forced to double over. They then marched her out, steering her like a grocery cart, down the hall, and up narrow stairs barred at top and bottom. Then, on the upper floor, past a long series of iron doors equipped with sliding peepholes.
They stopped at cell #31, then waited there until a turnkey showed up. It took about five minutes, and they passed the time chewing gum and wisecracking about Laura in some
Malian dialect.
The turnkey finally flung the door open and they threw her in. The door slammed. "Hey!" Laura shouted. "I'm hand- cuffed! You forgot your handcuffs!" The peephole opened and she saw a human eye and part of the bridge of a nose. It shut again.
She was in a cell. In a prison. In a fascist state. In Africa.
She began to wonder if there were worse places in the world. Could anything be worse? Yes, she thought, she could be sick.
She began to feel feverish.
An hour is:
A minute and a minute and a minute and a minute and a minute.
And a minute, and a minute, and a minute and a minute and a minute.
Then another, and another minute, and another, and yet another, and another.
And a minute, then two more minutes. Then, two more minutes.
Then, two minutes. Then, two minutes. Then a minute..
Then a similar minute. Then two more. And two more again.
That's thirty minutes so far.
So do them all over again.
Laura's cell was slightly less than four paces long and slightly more than three paces across. It was about the size of the bathroom in the place-where-she'd-used-to-live, the place she didn't allow herself to think about. Much of this space was taken up by her bunk. It had four legs of tubular steel, and a support frame of flattened iron struts. Atop the frame was a mattress of striped cotton ticking, stuffed with straw.
The mattress smelled, faintly and not completely unpleas- antly, of a stranger's long sickness. One end was lightly spattered with faded bloodstains.
There was a window hole in the wall of the cell. It was a good-sized hole, almost six inches around, the size of a drainpipe. It was approximately four feet long, bored through the massive concretized sand, and it had a crisscrossed grill of thin metal at the far end. By standing directly before the hole