“Don’t do this to yourself, I pleaded. You’ve got yourself so worked up you’re not even thinking straight.
“‘I wish I had a hundred like you at the Square Mile, Katya. You’d make a great camp commander, in fact; it’s a pity you’re not a man.’
“‘Now, Uncle Eddie,’ she chided him, brushing the hair from his brow, ‘can you really wish such a thing?’
“He laughed. ‘Well, I can, old fogy that I am, but I imagine the young men at MGU would put up quite a protest.’ He looked at her again, mist in his eyes. ‘You’ve grown into a fine woman, Kitty.’
“‘Oh, Uncle Eddie,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek, ‘you always know just what to say.’
“In my head she shrieked: I WILL kill him!
“‘Please, Katya!’ I said. Only when he looked at me did I realize I had spoken aloud.
“‘You’re Russian? But—’
“And before he could work out the implications, Katya grabbed the bar of steel on her lap, and thrust the forked end into his face. His head was driven back into the side window, through the glass, which cut the arteries of his neck. When I reached across her to grab the steering wheel and slid over to hit the brake, the inside of the truck was already covered with blood. By the time we pinballed to a stop, my left leg was on his lap and my right on hers, and both of them were perfectly still.
“‘He made me kill that man,’ she said. ‘He murdered thousands—and he drank tea with my stuffed animals—and he made me kill that man.’
“‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ I said, trying to embrace her. I might as well have been hugging Uncle Eddie. Of course it was not all right. From Square-Mile-on-Martha’s-Vineyard to Square-Mile-at-Kamiyaku, and from my mind to hers, as far apart as those two islands, nothing was in the least all right. And it is my shame that when I should have been trying to comfort her, my thoughts were of myself. I kept trying to figure out just when I had stopped being a child, playing a game with secret names and passwords.
“At last she said, ‘Let’s take care of the body.’ I realized that I was still clutching her, so hard it must have hurt. I let her go: and that was the only time that we ever embraced.
“As the days passed, her shock faded into a seraphic calm that, in her, was profoundly unwholesome. When they came to arrest us, her only comment was, ‘It’s about time, loves.’
“‘Tell them the truth, Katya,’ I said. ‘I’m the dissident, she’s innocent—my God, this is the Heptarch’s daughter!’
“‘Don’t tell lies, Pavel,” Katya said in a false Russian accent that only a Guardian could have believed. ‘They’d only find it out, and it would go worse for us in the end. I am Katya Andropova, no relation to the Heptarch. Let’s get it over with.”
“Then we were at Square-Mile-on-Volga, in a holding area thrown together out of barbed wire, along with thousands of others. They didn’t know it was we who had raided the camp; they were just rounding up every dissident they could track down, on the slightest rumor. We would stay in the enclosure for a time, and then when the camp had recovered from the fire, we would be processed.
“‘Maybe some of us will be let go—maybe you,’ I said. ‘Look at all these people. There’s not room to keep more than a few.’
“‘You see that column of black smoke, from behind the hill?’ Katya said quietly.
“‘Yes,’ I said, craning my neck. ‘What is it?’
“‘Room.’
“On the evening of that day, our first, Piotr arrived, and rounded up enough of our tribe to get a good groupthink going. Piotr had read Gandhi, and understood him about as well as Piotr ever understood anything, so he thought it would be a capital idea to try out some passive resistance on the Guardians. He suggested that as a start they refuse to eat their dinner, as a token of resistance, and also because it was likely to contain meat. Now, Katya had not managed to make all of our group into vegetarians; but even those that weren’t cheerily acceded. A principle not important enough to eat cabbage for had become important enough to die for, just because it might irritate the fellows with the guns. I tried to tell them that passive resistance was only useful when you had reason to suspect your enemy possessed a conscience. I described the terminal isolation cells, and asked them whether they thought that men who could do such a thing would be swayed by children who didn’t want to eat their food. It didn’t help. I appealed to Katya, but she only said, ‘Let them do what makes them feel better; it’s all the same in the end.’
“When dinner came—a ladleful of thin soup in a tin bowl, as we squatted in the dust—the guards noticed that Piotr and his followers were not eating. They found this singularly funny. ‘It looks nasty now,’ one said, ‘but a week from now you’d eat it if I pissed in it.’
“Piotr stood up and gave his little speech; the guards roared. ‘I tell you what,’ one of them said. ‘You’re going to eat your soup, and if one of you leaves one drop we’ll shoot you down to the last man.’ Rifles were leveled. Piotr’s little band of Gandhis still refused. Here and there a knee was trembling, but their jaws were set. They were magnificent, as a bull charging a wall is magnificent; I had to admire their courage, even as I regretted their stupidity.
“Then a miracle happened. The Guardians put down their guns and looked at each other sheepishly. Then they started frisking Piotr and his people, taking all their personal effects and spare change. Passive resistance had made killers into pickpockets.
“‘It worked,’ I said in amazement. ‘They won.’
“‘No, they didn’t,’ Katya said gently. ‘They did something unexpected, and Guardians can’t handle the unexpected. But they’ll find some way to pump up their courage, and then finish what they started. Piotr’s people will be dead soon, and the sooner, the better for them. Eat your soup now, Pavel, before they come for us too.’
“If she had not commanded it, I don’t think I could have managed. It seems so ridiculous now; the animals were already dead, and besides, we had killed men, and besides, the Guardians weren’t likely to waste meat on the likes of us. If that slop had a connection to any bleeding thing, it was only some microscopic globule of anonymous hydrocarbons. But at the time, it was as though I dismembered the deer with my own hands, and sank my teeth into its throat. Because it was then that I knew I was a traitor to the bone. I would betray everything I believed in, simply to survive another day. It was the great lesson of the camps, and I was fortunate to learn it so soon. That saved me trouble in the end.
“Then, a disaster. One of the guards who had been frisking prisoners for nickels and kopeks came over to us. ‘You, too, sister,’ he said. ‘Stand up.’ And he put his hands on her.
“‘Is this the only way you can get a girl to look at you, poor thing?’ she said.
“He ignored her, but blood rose into his cheeks. He found the flask strapped to her thigh, reached into her pants to take it out— I could have cut off that hand without regret—opened it and sniffed it. A smile curled his features. ‘You’ll need it where you’re going,’ he said. ‘Too bad it’s not allowed.’ And he poured the flask out in front of her and crushed it under his heel. Then he moved on to me.
“We exchanged looks of panic as his hands touched my shoulders. In desperation she burst out: ‘Now do you like the boys better, Johnny, or is it just because the girls all laugh at you?’