“He’ll live,” Crane said, noticing helos overhead, white-clad G making their way through rows of headstones to reach them. “Where’s Ishmael?”
Newcombe grimaced. “Burt’s shovel did major damage to his spinal cord, paralyzed him. Martin Aziz decided it was time to step into Ishmael’s shoes. I presume that means our leader is now expendable…”
“That makes you expendable, too.”
“You warned me about politics. I should have listened.”
The G were on top of them, surrounding Talib, who looked up at each smiling facemask one at a time as if he could tell differences between them. They had stunners in their hands, “I’m not going to resist,” he said.
“That’s a most mature decision,” one of them replied, friendly. The G reached out a hand to take his arm. “You’ll come with us now.”
Crane watched them lead Newcombe away.
“Why?” Crane screamed to the receding figure. “Why?”
He’d wanted to say something to Talib, to somehow confront the madness of it all. But when the time had come, there’d been no words, no deeds that could possibly matter or help assuage his terrible sense of loss. For a fleeting time he’d had everything and now it was gone forever. There was no why.
He looked at the ground, at the phony headstones over the phony coffins. There certainly was no comfort here.
A helo dipped down at the edge of the cemetery. Talib was put aboard and whisked away.
And just like that it was over, wrapped in a neat package to be filed away and quickly forgotten as the world went on with its business.
Lewis Crane was alone again.
Chapter 20
SHIMANIGASHI
Abu Talib began what would be the most extraordinary day of his life the way he had begun every day for the last decade—by deciding not to kill himself.
He’d stared at the rope they’d left him, the hangman’s noose already formed. He felt its contours. The smooth nylon fibers slid easily through his palm. It was compelling, that notion of suicide, that control over his life, but it was not the option he would entertain today.
Every day for ten years he’d taken the noose out of the small drawer in his room—he hesitated calling it a cell since it had no bars—and held the rope, feeling the pull toward death. Every day for ten years he’d denied the pull, though sometimes it was stronger than other times.
At his trial—or the sham they’d called a trial—he’d been sentenced to an indefinite time in Shimanigashi. Isolation. The prisons and the FPF and the courts were run by private enterprise. There’d been no witnesses at his trial, no jury, no spectators, no lawyers. There’d only been an unidentified man in a business suit, the viddies of the attack on the Imperial Valley Project, and, of course, himself. He remembered signing some papers in triplicate.
The man in the business suit had been the last human being he had seen for ten years.
He’d been knocked out with some sort of gas and had awakened here, in this room with beige metal walls but no windows, a bed, a table and chair, a single light. And the rope, of course. There was also a very nice shower stall that ran for exactly sixty seconds a day, and a toilet that flushed by pushing a button on the wall. There were no mirrors.
He had no books, no teev, no music, no paper—except in the toilet—or pencils. His prison uniform consisted of a black jump suit made of a flimsy plastic material. At the end of the day he’d throw it in a disposal hole in his wall, and a new one would appear during the night. If he didn’t toss it at night, he didn’t get a new one.
As far as he knew, he was the only prisoner in this place. No guards ever walked by to check on him, no other sounds except his own kept him company. His food showed up twice a day through a slot in his door. The meals did not vary. Rice and broth. In the last few years, though, there had been an occasional meal of beans and pita bread, which made him think changes were occurring in the outside world … or in the management of his prison.
His hair and beard had grown for ten years. He’d discovered he had gone gray when his beard got long enough for him to pull it up and look at it. His hair hung almost to his elbows.
He’d been expected, of course, to go crazy, and had accommodated his captors by losing his mind more than once. Each time he went crazy he hoped that it would lead to human contact, an exchange of some kind. But it never had, and he was always left to confront his own mind again. Even the time he’d gotten extremely ill, sick to his stomach, there had been no contact. The room had filled with gas. When he awoke, he was on his bed with a scar where his appendix had been.
But it had been a start. It meant someone was watching him. If he talked, it meant someone was listening. It was reassuring in a strange kind of way.
Getting a fix on time and keeping track of it had been his first and most difficult challenge, especially during the time he’d been “out” with the appendectomy. Not knowing day or night, he’d had nothing to relate to; but it had occurred to him during the initial days of his imprisonment that if he lost all awareness of time, he’d only have the rope. That was when Abu Talib, born Daniel Akers Newcombe, began exercising his mind.
He’d counted out the seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—for days on end until he had the internal rhythm of a day. He’d considered trying to lengthen his nails, instead of biting them as he’d always done, to scratch a mark for each day somewhere into the metal of the room. Then he decided against it, reasoning that they’d repaint the walls to thwart him. If he was going to be a human clock, he’d have to go all the way.
And, so, having nothing else to do, he’d become a human clock. He chose to believe that in the ten years he had counted, he wasn’t more than a week or two off. Once he’d gotten comfortable with his clockhood, he’d found that he could sublimate it and think about other things.
He’d remembered reading once—why hadn’t he read more?—about a man isolated in a prisoner-of-war camp who’d survived by playing chess in his head, visualizing the board and the movement of the pieces. Talib found that after several weeks of futile effort, he was able to play chess in his mind and passed many hours that way.
He’d dealt with sleep-time by simply calculating how many hours of sleep he usually needed each night to feel rested, how many his body would take on its own. Seven seemed to have been his ideal number when he’d lived in the real world, so seven it became. He never took naps and made sure he was awake seventeen out of every twenty-four hours.
Having nothing else except physical exercise to keep him occupied, he would explore his mind—sometimes happily, sometimes not so happily. He had good powers of concentration and was able to recreate people and events vividly in his mind’s eye, to relive his past. Much of it was embarrassing to him, though what bothered him the most was the realization that he’d wasted an immense amount of time in his life that could never be recovered.
Of course, he dwelled a great deal on why he’d chosen every morning to live under such a ludicrous regimen rather than simply use the rope. He never had come up with a real answer except an ingrained competitiveness with those who sought to break him. It was not a satisfying answer.