teletrooper ducked through the doorway shielded lenses scanned gun-arm swung to cover
two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat M-16s like toys beside its armaments and they like boys blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble
fucking traitor commie cunt
HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT
the blue roundel on the brow of its dome the white circle of olive-leaves the line-scored globe
OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW
death is not lived through
He ran up the Coyoacan corridor gasping in the heat and burst into the Old Man’s study. There was no one at the desk. Dust-motes danced in the yellow shaft from the window. He reached out for the paper on the desk. It crumbled as he picked it up, and as he looked around the room he saw the shelves emptying and the books crumble and rot: there was a momentary, overpowering and disgusting whiff of mildewed paper.
Someone behind his shoulder
Jacson, with his ice-pick raised high, and smashing down on
But it is in my brain
It crashed into the desk into the crumbled paper the yellow pamphlets
Death agony tasks transitional program
He ran
Greenbelt streets green grass
and sunlight everywhere
dark now
He saw them as teletroopers, an endless and ever increasing army of marching metal, that hacked into all the systems, all the hard ware and the soft: the neural networks burned, the programs corrupted and degenerated.
He was driven back and back as they pried into, levered apart and splintered memory, intellect, feeling, sense; until the last shard of his shattered mind was broken smaller than the quantum of reflection, and he died.
A single cry came from him, and his head crashed forward and down on to the databoard. Janis leaped to his shoulder, with Van a moment behind her. They lifted him and tilted him back in the seat. Janis stared into his unblinking eyes as she felt his neck for a pulse. There was none.
Van helped her lower him to the floor, then snatched a phone. As soon as he put it down it rang again. He listened, hardly speaking, then turned to where she laboured to save Moh’s life. For minutes they took turns blowing into his lungs, hammering his breastbone. A screeching stop; feet on the stairs. Janis paused, drew back, drew breath. Two paramedics stuck trodes to his head, stabbed a needle into his heart, pumped oxygen into his mouth, slapped shock-pads to his chest.
Then they looked at each other, looked at her and Van, and stood back.
‘I’m sorry,’ one of them said. ‘There’s nothing—’
‘Nothing you can do?’ she whispered.
‘Nothing there. Not a reflex, nothing. The nerves aren’t even carrying the shocks.’ He paused as if appalled at what he had said. ‘What happened to him?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!’
Janis threw herself over the body and howled.
18
The Americans Strike
They told her she had to get out, and she refused. They told her the Black Plan had been lost, the whole momentum and direction of the offensive thrown into disorder, and she nodded. They told her that the revolution was on the edge of defeat, that the regime could recover its balance and strike back at any moment, and she agreed.
She would not leave.
Van and the paramedics left, taking Moh’s body with them. Van had looked almost ashamed to ask, mumbling about ‘practical considerations’, fumbling with a pathetically irrelevant organ-donor card they’d found on him. She knew they wouldn’t give a part of this body to their worst enemies. They would dissect it with remotes in a sealed room, and when they’d learned what they could from its ravaged nerves they’d ash it.
They left the contents of his pockets: a few cards, a knife, a phone; and the helmet, the glades and the gun, tools of his trade. Van paused in the doorway and glanced from the gun to her, and back.
She shook her head fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ she said. Perhaps missing the English ambiguity, Van left. She heard racing trucks, and a helicopter taking off. There was a fine research facility at Nairn, the Republic’s provincial capitaclass="underline" that was where it was headed. She might go there someday, find out if it had been the drugs that had killed him. Or the lack of drugs.
MacLennan’s words came back. She hadn’t been a good guard, a good soldier.
Not even a good scientist.
The memories that had eluded her on the hilltop came back now, clear and bitter. She remembered the war. The War of European Integration, when Germany had led a desperate bid to unite the continent under the star-circled banner, snuff out the national conflicts fuelled by US/UN meddling and create a counterweight to the New World Order.
Just a lass, not really understanding. The stifling heat of the Metro shelter had made her gasp and cry. Her mother shouted at her for walking over the bedding spread on the platforms. The three-metre-high screens curved to the subway walls showed the progress of the war.
They weren’t in this war: they were neutral; and yet British soldiers were fighting in it. Some of the channels spoke as if Britain itself were fighting. It was confusing and terrifying, especially as some people down in the shelter cheered when British soldiers appeared while others shouted with anger.
Her mother tried to explain. ‘It’s the King’s men who are in the war, love, not us. But the King’s government has a seat at the UN—’
She paused, not sure if Janis had understood. The girl nodded firmly. ‘The den of thieves and slaves,’ she said.
‘That’s right. And they’re fighting against the Germans on the side of the UN, that really means the Americans, so that when the war’s over the Americans will help the King and all his men to come back here and rule us again, or the Germans will attack us before the war’s over and then we’ll be defeated another way.’
She had been playing in one of the side corridors when she heard a roar of voices, and rushed to the subway platform to look at the screens and take in the excited words. Germany had stopped fighting. The war was over. She didn’t stop to see her parents; she didn’t see or hear them shove through through the crowds and call after her as she turned to race up the stationary escalators.
She had known only what was over, not what was beginning. She didn’t know that Berlin and Frankfurt had been incinerated in Israel’s last favour for its old protector. She didn’t know that this would be the pretext the US needed to make itself the arbiter of the planet. Nothing her parents had told her, nothing even in the political-education classes, could have prepared her for the next six days: the bombers roaming the undefended skies, the pillaging, rampaging assault of the US/UN’s illiterate conscripts and barbarian levies, the teletroopers punching through walls and crushing the defenders in steel fists, the demoralized crowds cheering peace and surrender and Restoration, turning on the radical regime that they blamed for their plight, joining in the witch-hunts and roundups and lynchings.
She didn’t know that the wind was from the east and that the rain washing away her sweat and stink was laden with fission products from the earlier obliteration of Kiev and Baku. Until her frantic mother dragged her back into the shelter she celebrated the peace.