‘I was trying to attract their attention.’
‘Don’t you know they can’t hear you?’
Billy didn’t say anything. It was all getting too much for him. The Minstrel Boy looked up and down the road.
‘I guess there’s no way round it.’
‘No way round what?’
‘I’m going to have to find out where we are.’
‘You are?’
The Minstrel Boy didn’t say anything. He shut his eyes and concentrated. A nerve in his cheek twitched violently. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He began to sway, and Billy was afraid he might collapse again. He recovered his balance and opened his eyes.
‘I think I’ve found us a place to go.’
‘Thank God for that.’
The Minstrel Boy looked sideways at Billy.
‘Don’t get too grateful too soon.’
***
Stuff Central had ceased to deliver. All over the damaged world, the stuff receivers were silent. No matter how much people frantically punched out orders and instructions, they refused to crackle into life. In some places there was panic. In others it was treated as a kind of divine punishment. The more conservative towns greeted the lack of stuff with an air of relief that they would no longer be forced to consume according to the dictates of a remote computer. A.A. Catto took it all extremely personally.
Her first response had been to have all the receiver operators executed. Then she had sent a large squad of technicians swarming over the huge spindly cages that stood on the plain behind the ziggurat. When they failed to make the machines work again, they too were shot.
A.A. Catto’s favourite word became ‘treason’. It cropped up in almost every sentence she spoke. A special security squad was formed to root out subversives, defeatists and, above all, those responsible for the nonfunctioning of the stuff receivers. Everyone in Quahal went more in fear of his life than ever before. Even the security squad had reason to be afraid. Whenever A.A. Catto felt they weren’t coming up with fast enough results, their numbers were decimated. In order to survive they were forced to come up with more and more ‘traitors’.
Every day, the number of executions increased and the death toll mounted. Nancy began to realize that if the insane situation continued for any length of time without replacement personnel coming down the stuff beam, the functioning of the whole Quahal strategic headquarters would be seriously impaired. Already, the war room was manned only by a skeleton staff of operatives.
Nancy didn’t mention any of this. All her energy was devoted to being totally unobtrusive. Ideally she would have liked to be as far from A.A. Catto as possible, but A.A. Catto wasn’t about to allow that. She insisted on Nancy’s continual attendance and support.
The Presley replica was a lot more lucky. A.A. Catto seemed to have forgotten him entirely. For his part, he’d made an exact science out of keeping out of the way. He seemed to be able to hide from both A.A. Catto and the security squad. The only time Nancy ever saw him was the occasional glimpse as he crept from one bolthole to another.
The thing that Nancy found most upsetting was that A.A. Catto insisted that she could come with her to watch the executions. A.A. Catto had become very fond of executions, and spent a good deal of her time in the larger chamber of the bunker that had been turned into a kind of hideous slaughter house.
All day long, its black basalt walls echoed to the tramp of steel shod boots, the crash of gunfire and the screams and pleading of the victims.
In order that she might watch the slaughter in comfort, A.A. Catto had had a high clear plastic dais erected at one end of the room. It was fitted with soft cushions, and a well stocked drink and drugs cabinet. There was also a video link to the war room so A.A. Catto could simultaneously monitor the conduct of the invasion campaign.
Nancy had noticed lately, however, that A.A. Catto seemed more concerned with the purging of her underground domain than the war of conquest.
All through the long execution sessions Nancy did her best to maintain a detached superior expression as the prisoners were marched out in batches of six, shot, and unceremoniously dragged away to be disposed of. She knew A.A. Catto expected her to enjoy the spectacle, and that to look away, or give even the slightest hint that the killing revolted her, could prove fatal while A.A. Catto’s temper was set on a hair trigger.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if the deaths had been strictly confined to shooting. At least the victims only twitched and bled a little. This wasn’t enough, though, for A.A. Catto’s inventive and easily bored mind. She constantly devised more elaborate, entertaining and painful methods of dealing with the supposed traitors.
One group of prisoners had been hung up by meat hooks through their throats. Another had been garrotted with leather thongs. A third had been beaten to death with steel whips.
The main drawback to the more baroque forms of execution was that they were very time consuming. The number of prisoners that the security squad pulled in, plus the death sentences that A.A. Catto arbitrarily handed out herself, dictated that shooting had to remain the standard form of slaughter. Other methods could only provide short exotic interludes, otherwise the whole system jammed up.
A.A. Catto would watch the proceedings with an expression of limp absorption. A thin black cheroot dangled between her thin white fingers. Nancy noticed that her hands had lately started to shake. She had taken to wearing an archaic white uniform with gold epaulettes and a lot of decorations of her own design.
She lounged on a jumble of black silk cushions. At her elbow was a small table that held a bottle of hock in an ice bucket, a cut glass goblet, and a small dish of precious stones. She would occasionally pick up a handful and play with them.
Her voice had become shrill and the delivery of her stream of consciousness monologue tense and jerky. The flow of words ran together until they were almost a babble. Then abruptly they’d stop in great swerving pauses. Her mind jumped around from subject to subject without sequence of reason. Her captive listeners were maintained in a state of anxious attention, desperately trying to come up with the correct responses.
One of A.A. Catto’s favourite, and more consistent, poses when watching the executions was one of sad disbelief that so many of her followers could betray her in such a base manner.
‘We ask ourselves where we went wrong.’
Nancy at these times knew she was expected to be placating.
‘I’m sure it was none of your doing, my love.’
A.A. Catto watched solemnly as another six were quickly shot down.
‘We were their leader, their guide. We made them the greatest conquerors in history. How could they turn on us in this way?’
Nancy ventured a suggestion.
‘Perhaps there was some minor error in the programming. Maybe that caused the problem.’
The suggestion was the wrong one. It had been A.A. Catto’s programme, and nobody criticized A.A. Catto and her works except A.A. Catto. She turned her head and looked icily at Nancy.
‘There was no error in the original programme.’
Nancy retreated behind a shield of bright stupidity.
‘Of course not, my love. I don’t know about those kind of things.’
A.A. Catto’s voice rose slightly.
‘There was no error of any kind in the original programme. The original programme was correct in every detail.’
‘Of course, my love, I was just talking. You know the way I talk.’
‘That kind of talk could be construed as defeatist. It could …’
A.A. Catto’s attention was abruptly distracted. The security squad executioners had started to put on a display for her. They were slowly putting weights, one by one, on the chest of a man who was strapped to the floor. He was one of the bald headed advisers from the war room. As he began to scream, A.A. Catto excitedly ran her tongue over her lips. One hand moved absently up and down the inside of her thigh. Nancy knew she had been temporarily forgotten.