The greencoat grunted and lifted the slight Bengali youth without perceptible effort, holding the toggles of the strangling wire out with elbows slightly bent. The youth bucked, heels drumming against the dais, made sounds. His face purpled under the brown, tongue and eyes bulging, sounds coming from him. From behind her, too, she could hear vomiting. A stain spread down the front of the Bengali’s overall, and she could smell the hard shit-stink as his sphincter released; see the thin smile on the executioner’s face as he jerked the wire free of the man’s neck and cleaned it lovingly with a handkerchief. Blood trickled down Marya’s chin.
I will remember you, too, my friend, she thought grimly.
“Yaz nothin’,” the amplified voice continued. Gray-suited attendants came in, threw the corpse on a wheeled dolly and took it away. The door slid shut behind them with an echoing clang. “Y’all barely worth the trouble of keeping alive. Yaz cattle, meat, dogshit. Understand?”
The man who had used the wire noose bellowed: “That’s Yes, thank you, ma’am, apeturds!”
Marya opened her mouth and shouted with the others. Words are nothing, she told herself.
“One lesson an’ it all yaz need. Do what y’ told. Anything y’ told, anythin’ at all. Right now yaz total worthless; with hard work an’ tryin’ mebbeso yaz work up to just worthless. Understand?”
“YES, THANK YOU, MA’AM!” the prisoners screamed. Someone behind Marya was crying again, slow racking sobs.
“Oh, one mo’ thing.” The Orpo noncom pulled a flat crackle-finished box from a pouch at her waist; it was roughly the size of a pocket novel, and a miniature keyboard showed when she opened it. “Them pretty-pretty bracelets. They new. Space research, monitors. Trace yaz anywheres, identify yaz to the comps. Take readin’s heartbeat. And a little nerve hookup, inductor. Right to a center in yaz brains, if y’ got any.” Her fingers stabbed down on the controller.
PAIN. Marya fell limp and boneless to the floor and her head cracked on the concrete and the skin splitting was wonderful because for a single fractional second it blocked the PAIN but then there was nothing but the PAIN and there had never been anything but PAIN and her heart and lungs were frozen and death would be wonderful but there was no death only PAINonandonandonandonandon—
It stopped. Marya drew breath, screamed, blood and tears and mucus covering her face, and then she curled around herself and hugged the hand with the controller bracelet and laughed because it stopped and the bleeding from her cheek was heaven and the stabbing behind her eyes was better than orgasm and the sensual delight that it had stopped and she knew she could never feel pain again because that had been pain not the pain of anything not surgery without anesthetic not grief not longing not fear, it had been everything and nothing and pure, purest simple pain.
“Up and quiet, or I give yaz anothah five seconds. Now, wasn’t that wonderful!” A shriek. “Understand?”
“YES, THANK YOU, MA’AM!”
They were all up, quiveringly silent. All except for one woman who lay motionless while the serfs with the dolly came and removed the body, and some of the others looked at it with envy.
“Most places, it’s bettah to live than to die. Here, we can make it bettah to die than to live. Remembah that, cattle.”
The van doors opened. “Out,” the serf guard said. Marya slid forward and looked around; they were in the Citizen section of Mashad. Startling after five days in the blank steel and concrete of the Transit station. The guard pushed her ahead, through a revolving door into a hotel lobby. Warm. The first real warmth since Kabul, and a fear worse than the gnawing anxiety of the cell came with it. Across the ornate marble-and-tile splendors of the lobby, the walls were sections from the mosques that had once made this city a wonder of Islamic architecture. An elevator, bronze rails and fretwork, that took them up five stories. Down a corridor, through a teakwood door. Her mouth was paper-dry again; she called up strength from the reservoir within.
But what do I do when it’s empty? she thought for a moment. Then: Never.
A serf came to meet them in the vestibule, a room of pale glossy stone walls and floors covered in rugs of incredible colors. She was odd enough to snap Marya’s attention aside for a moment; a black woman with yellow eyes and a flamboyant mane of butter-blond hair, in a white robe. There was pity in the brass-colored eyes, and in her soft voice.
“I’m sorry,” she said, after signing the invoice the driver presented. “I’m really sorry. I . . . tried.”
More corridors, then out into a double-storied lounging room, massive inlaid furniture and a glass wall looking out over a cityscape coming alive with evening lights, reflected on the falling snow. A Draka waiting in a reclining chair, smoking a water pipe, dressed in a striped djellaba with the hood thrown back. The face from Chandragupta Base. Thinner, with dark circles under the huge mad gray eyes; Marya lowered her own to hide the sudden stab of fury she felt. Looks older. Marya knew the lines that grief drew. Good.
“Stop,” the Draka said. “Look at me, serf.” Marya looked up. “I’m Yolande Ingolfsson. Remember me?”
“Yes, Mistis,” Marya said with equal softness. A smile twitched at the Draka’s lips. The American swallowed a sour bubble at the back of her throat.
The black serf spoke hesitantly. “Mistis—”
“Jolene,” Yolande said, “I heard you out. I said no. Now if you don’t want to watch, get out. I’m not angry with you. Yet.”
The African bowed silently and left; Marya could hear her steps quickening to a run.
“Take off the overall, and stand ovah there,” Yolande continued. Marya moved to obey, found herself in the middle of a three-meter rectangle of clear plastic sheeting; the rug scrutched underneath it, feeling bristly-soft to her bare feet.
“Oh, it’s good to see you again. Took a while, gettin’ leave, and I don’t have long until I have to report to the Astronautical, but it’s good to see yo, Yank. You fault, it is.”
“Now,” the Draka continued. “There’s somethin’ I want from you. Guess?”
Marya looked up sharply. The other’s eyes were fixed on her with a curiously impersonal avidness.
“Are you . . . going to abuse me again, Mistis?” she asked flatly. There was no sign of a drug injector.
Yolande chuckled; it had a grating sound. “Oh, not that way. That was a special occasion . . . No, there’s something else I want you to do fo’ me. It was you fault, aftah all.”
Her free hand pulled something out of a pocket in her robe. Crackle-finished in black, the size of a small book. Opened it. Marya felt herself begin to tremble, heard a moan. Knew that in a moment she would beg, and felt a brief stab of shame that she felt no shame, because nothing was worse than that.
“What—” she choked, swallowed to clear her mouth of saliva. “What do you want me to do?” she asked, clamping her hands together to halt the shaking.
Yolande opened the controller and poised her finger. Her eyes met the American’s, and Marya could feel them drinking.
“I want you to scream,” she said, and pressed down.
NEW YORK CITY
FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT
DONOVAN HOUSE
JANUARY 21, 1977
“I still say it stinks, General,” Frederick Lefarge said. His body somehow gave the impression of tension, even when he sat relaxed in the stiff government-issue office chair.