There had to be something to do with them.
As it turned out, there was.
That’s my theory, anyway. Or, rather, one of them. I’ve got a million: Hyperautomation. Cumulative hardening of the collective conscience. Circular determinism. The implicitly aggressive nature of hierarchic structures. Compassion fatigue. The banality of evil.
Maybe people are just no damn good. That’s what Shriver would have said.
The next day I went zombie, pretty much. Going through the motions, connecting the dots. LaShana in Requisitions noticed it right away. "You ought to take the day off," she said, when I dropped by to see about getting a replacement PzC(15)/pencorder. "Get away from here, take a walk in the woods, maybe play a little golf."
"Golf," I said. It seemed the most alien thing in the universe, hitting a ball with a stick. I couldn’t see the point of it.
"Don’t say it like that. You love golf. You’ve told me so a hundred times."
"I guess I have." I swung my purse up on the desk, slid my hand inside, and gently stroked the device. It was cool to the touch and vibrated ever so faintly under my fingers. I withdrew my hand. "Not today, though."
LaShana noticed. "What’s that you have in there?"
"Nothing." I whipped the purse away from her. "Nothing at all." Then, a little too loud, a little too blustery, "So how about that pencorder?"
"It’s yours." She got out the device, activated it, and let me pick it up. Now only I could operate the thing. Wonderful how fast we were picking up the technology. "How’d you lose your old one, anyway?"
"I stepped on it. By accident." I could see that LaShana wasn’t buying it. "Damn it, it was an accident! It could have happened to anyone."
I fled from LaShana’s alarmed, concerned face.
Not twenty minutes later, Gevorkian came sleazing into my office. She smiled, and leaned lazily back against the file cabinet when I said hi. Arms folded. Eyes sad and cynical. That big plain face of hers, tolerant and worldly-wise. Wearing her skirt just a smidge tighter, a touch shorter than was strictly correct for an office environment.
"Virginia," she said.
"Linda."
We did the waiting thing. Eventually, because I’d been here so long I honestly didn’t give a shit, Gevorkian spoke first. "I hear you’ve been experiencing a little disgruntlement."
"Eh?"
"Mind if I check your purse?"
Without taking her eyes off me for an instant, she hoisted my purse, slid a hand inside, and stirred up the contents. She did it so slowly and dreamily that, I swear to God, I half expected her to smell her fingers afterward. Then, when she didn’t find the expected gun, she said, "You’re not planning on going postal on us, are you?"
I snorted.
"So what is it?"
"What is it?" I said in disbelief. I went to the window. Zip zip zip, down came a rectangle of cloth. Through the scrim of mosquito netting the camp revealed itself: canvas as far as the eye could see. There was nothing down there as fancy as our labyrinthine government office complex at the top of the hill–what we laughingly called the Tentagon–with its canvas air-conditioning ducts and modular laboratories and cafeterias. They were all army surplus, and what wasn’t army surplus was Boy Scout hand-me-downs. "Take a look. Take a goddamn fucking look. That’s the future out there, and it’s barreling down on you at the rate of sixty seconds per minute. You can see it and still ask me that question?"
She came and stood beside me. Off in the distance, a baby began to wail. The sound went on and on. "Virginia," she said quietly. "Ginny, I understand how you feel. Believe me, I do. Maybe the universe is deterministic. Maybe there’s no way we can change what’s coming. But that’s not proven yet. And until it is, we’ve got to soldier on."
"Why?"
"Because of them." She nodded her chin toward the slow-moving revenants of things to come. "They’re the living proof of everything we hate and fear. They are witness and testimony to the fact that absolute evil exists. So long as there’s the least chance, we’ve got to try to ward it off."
I looked at her for a long, silent moment. Then, in a voice as cold and calmly modulated as I could make it, I said, "Take your god-damned hand off my ass."
She did so.
I stared after her as, without another word, she left.
This went beyond self-destructive. All I could think was that Gevorkian wanted out but couldn’t bring herself to quit. Maybe she was bucking for a sexual harassment suit. But then again, there’s definitely an erotic quality to the death of hope. A sense of license. A nicely edgy feeling that since nothing means anything anymore, we might as well have our little flings. That they may well be all we’re going to get.
And all the time I was thinking this, in a drawer in my desk the device quietly sat. Humming to itself.
People keep having children. It seems such a terrible thing to do. I can’t understand it at all, and don’t talk to me about instinct. The first thing I did, after I realized the enormity of what lay ahead, was get my tubes tied. I never thought of myself as a breeder, but I’d wanted to have the option in case I ever changed my mind. Now I knew I would not.
It had been one hell of a day, so I decided I was entitled to quit work early. I was cutting through the camp toward the civ/noncom parking lot when I ran across Shriver. He was coming out of the vic latrines. Least romantic place on Earth. Canvas stretching forever and dispirited people shuffling in and out. And the smell! Imagine the accumulated stench of all the sick shit in the world, and you’ve just about got it right.
Shriver was carrying a bottle of Spanish champagne under his arm. The bottle had a red bow on it.
"What’s the occasion?" I asked.
He grinned like Kali and slid an arm through mine. "My divorce finally came through. Wanna help me celebrate?"
Under the circumstances, it was the single most stupid thing I could possibly do. "Sure," I said. "Why not?"
Later, in his tent, as he was taking off my clothes, I asked, "Just why did your wife divorce you, Shriver?"
"Mental cruelty," he said, smiling.
Then he laid me down across his cot and I let him hurt me. I needed it. I needed to be punished for being so happy and well fed and unbrutalized while all about me ...
"Harder, God damn you," I said, punching him, biting him, clawing up blood. "Make me pay."