Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (14 page)

Did the authorities, Andy wondered, intend to jam all those hundreds of men into that one ship? He tried to recall what Connie had said about Operation Clean Sweep. A really dirty job—but why was closing the prison and shipping the cons someplace else a dirty job? It sounded complicated, a problem in logistics, but that was all. Or—the thought came to him suddenly—could this be the reason Connie had arranged his escape? Did she want him out of the prison before something bad happened?

His head began to hurt as if another migraine were coming on. Some part of him already knew the score and Gomez knew it, too, for his face settled into grim lines and he began to mutter curses under his breath. Esperanza looked merely baffled, for she had lived her whole life among decent people and found acts of great cruelty unimaginable. But Susan was as old as Gomez, and—Andy noticed for the first time—her blind eye, an opalescent globe like a milky opal, had the thin pale scar of a razor slash leading up to it. This lady had lived hard, which might be one reason why she and Gomez got along so well. She sat tensely watching the scene, one hand over her mouth, the other closed in a fist between her scrawny breasts. Like the men, she knew what was about to happen.

Sunset was stoking a tropical effusion of red and yellow and green and purple fire in the west when the merchant ship left the dock. But not under her own power—the
Pelican
was under tow by the cruiser. About a kilometer offshore, the hawser either broke or was released, leaving the rust bucket to wallow helplessly in the waves. Andy could imagine the men in the hold, thrown this way and that, puking with seasickness and terror, maybe raving and fighting in the claustrophobic darkness. By now even Esperanza understood what impended, for she turned her back to the sea and lowered her face until her nose touched Corazon's belly. The others went on staring, unable to look away.

The first missile struck the old ship at the starboard waterline, causing it to shudder, list, and spin slowly around. A few seconds passed before the sound of the blast reached the watchers. The second missile hit astern on the port side, leaving the
Pelican
mortally wounded and settling fast. No more firing followed—missiles cost money, and the job had been done.

Punctured on both sides, the ship filled more or less evenly, the only drama coming when a hatch cover blew off amidships. For an instant the heavy metal square hovered like a kite, sustained by a geyser shooting up from the flooded decks below. Then it turned sideways and fell like a guillotine blade into the ocean. Within minutes the ship followed, its rust-stained sterncastle vanishing last of all. A whirlpool formed, then broke up into random turbulence, waves foaming and dashing and parting. Gradually the Pacific erased the maelstrom, and with it the last traces of the men who had lived and suffered in the penal colony.

Esperanza bent over folded hands, muttering prayers in Tagalog, her childhood tongue. Susan wept from both her live eye and her dead one. Gomez sat rigid, trembling with fury. Andy's head stopped hurting, but his heart turned to something much harder and colder than mere ice. All the failures and humiliations and agonies of his life fused into a single need to find vengeance, to strike back, to kill. He pronounced sentence in the tones of a hanging judge.

"Somebody will pay for this," he said, and Gomez growled, "
Si.
But who?"

Well, obviously, the man whose name Andy wasn't authorized to know, the name only Connie could tell him. He and Gomez kicked the problem around but reached no conclusion. How were they to get hold of her? And how could they make her talk?

For some reason, the fisherman Joe Aiaiea had been tapped as Fate's messenger. Two days after the
Pelican
incident, Andy was shelling beans for supper when Joe entered his house, bearing in his arms the stick figure of a man. He'd carried his burden all the way from the reef, yet wasn't even breathing hard as he laid him gently on the plank bed. "'Nother con like you," said Joe. "Damn shit, but he in bad shape, him."

He explained that when the hatch cover blew off the
Pelican,
the geyser must have thrown the man into the sea and the sharks, busy with the other bodies, hadn't wanted him. So he drifted with the onshore current and got caught on the reef, where Joe had been casting his net and found him.

"Enda da story," he concluded, shrugged, and walked away, leaving Andy to stare aghast at the dying man, his fellow conspirator Karl, aka Friedberger. He must have been serving time in the same prison, only in another barracks. The two had spent more than a year close enough to yell a greeting, yet like corpses buried in adjoining tombs, had never seen one another.

Andy dripped cool water into his mouth, watched him try to swallow but fail, and shook his head. Esperanza used a clean rag to wipe his eyelids, inflamed and crusted with salt, and then his bristly face. When his cracked lips moved, Andy put his ear down to listen. It was hard to tell what Friedberger was trying to say, maybe,
They killed them all.
What Andy heard was
kill them,
and he promised, "I will."

An hour later the man was gone. Andy called Gomez to help, and they buried him in the village graveyard. The Kahuna delivered another of his incomprehensible sermons, and the townspeople sang "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." Afterward, Andy went home and slept and slept and slept, as if he could put off the demands of Destiny by remaining unconscious. But his sleep was uneasy, beset by restless dreams, and he woke suddenly, smelling a goat.

That seemed odd, for Tuamotu had plenty of feral pigs, but no goats he'd ever seen. He raised his head from the bed of boards, and there in the brown shadows stood Stink, with George and Joe holding his arms. "Dis guy say he know you," said George. "We was gonna break his neck."

"It's okay," said Andy. "Let me have a word with him."

Stink sat down on the ground, holding a small paper-wrapped bundle in his lap and wiping nervous sweat off his face. For the first time in their long acquaintance, Andy took the trouble to read his name tag—Fowler. So the guard had a real name, possibly even a real life. When he spoke he sounded shaken.

"What'sa matter with these guys? I know 'em, we trade together, I get 'em things, they get me things, but today they wanna kill me."

"They blame you for the
Pelican.
"

"Why blame me? I didn't have nothin' to do with it."

Andy nodded. Of course that was true. To calm Fowler down, he summoned his bedside manner and asked about his family. Fowler had been born in Wyoming but grew up more or less everywhere, for his father had been in the American Marshal Service and the family moved often. "Law enforcement," he said proudly, "it's in my blood."

That was why he'd entered the world government's Prison Service, which paid better than anything impoverished America could offer. He took pride in his job. Guards were role models, he said, teaching cons by discipline and example how to live upright, honorable lives. Andy found this astounding. Sneak and Stink as role models? But Fowler was serious, and anger darkened his face when he spoke about the massacre.

"Here we take care of these guys, try to point 'em the right direction, give 'em some discipline, whack 'em when they do wrong, get 'em shaped up. Then somebody comes along and kills 'em. Without even a warrant! How can you execute somebody without no warrant or nothin'?"

He started to denounce Connie. "The one in charge was a little bitch come out of HQ. But when she's watchin' it happen, I look at her face and I know she's made a mistake. She did it, but she hated it—drownin' all those guys like rats! That takes somethin' she ain't got. I figure that was why she went and cut her wrists afterward."

For a few seconds the dim interior of the house spun slowly around Andy's head. "She's dead?" he whispered, filled with a complex of emotions he couldn't have named.

Fowler shook his head. "No such luck. Somebody found her and called the medics. Sometimes I wish those guys would just leave well enough alone, you know? Pretty soon she'll be fixed up and ready to kill a bunch more people, I guess."

"So she's still on Tuamotu."

"Yeah."

At that point, Andy's mouth opened and he heard himself make a request to which Fowler, though looking baffled, agreed. Then the guard picked up his bundle and stood, casting a nervous glance at the doorway of the hut.

"All I want is a nice fish, so the cook can fix it for dinner. I wonder if those guys gonna try and kill me again."

"They won't now," Andy promised, walked him outside, and nodded to Joe, who nodded back. Relieved, Fowler shook Andy's hand for the first time in their long acquaintance. A guard couldn't shake the hand of a prisoner, but the gesture was permitted with a man who was both free and—officially at least—dead.

"You look like you doin' good, Emerson," he said. "Funny, I never figured you for a survivor. It's hard to tell, sometimes. Big guys croak and little guys go on forever. It's really hard to tell."

He started unwrapping his package, which contained the usual mirrors and whatnot. Joe approached, and they squatted on their haunches and started to bargain, all thoughts of killing forgotten.

But Andy's thoughts were of nothing except killing. He'd finally accepted the harsh demand of Destiny, to leave a woman he'd come to love and a life where he was happy and content, in order to kill a man he'd never met. He could curse the burden, but he couldn't shift it.

When he told Esperanza, she surprised him by understanding. She'd seen the
Pelican
sink, washed Friedberger's face, sung a hymn over his grave. Like all her people she believed in honor and vengeance, so she wept but didn't try to stop him. As for Gomez, there was never any question that he would stand beside Andy if he could identify the target and find a way to reach him.

They met Connie together, choosing the tabooed valley because it was remote and private. Again Sneak accompanied her, and he and Gomez stood back to let the others parley head to head. But something in the atmosphere—maybe the way Gomez looked at him, as if he were personally responsible for the
Pelican
—made Sneak edgy, and after fidgeting a few minutes, he muttered, "You stay here," and followed Andy and Connie, maybe concerned for her safety as well as his own.

As ever, the valley was shadowy, lush with tropical jungle, blazoned with strange flowers, filled with the sound of rushing water and the echoes rising from the fumarole. Today they sounded sometimes like thunder, sometimes like cries and distant laughter. Connie's long-sleeved uniform shirt gave Andy only glimpses of the bandages around her wrists. She was pale, her face lined, her eyes enormous. She looked years older, and the first thing she said was, "I didn't give the order."

"No?"

"You've got to believe that. I was sent here as an observer, to make sure Tomsky's instructions were carried out. I had to do it. He's like Stalin. You have to become an accomplice in his crimes or he gets rid of you."

"Who's Tomsky?" Andy had never heard the name before.

"The Chief of Security. His name's an open secret, one of those secrets that everybody who's anybody knows."

"Why did he have them killed? Those guys were helpless, totally helpless. They couldn't have hurt him."

She sighed and sat down on the same boulder as the last time. She looked thin, weary, tallowy, used up. Either she was suffering from a wasting illness or she really had hated watching the prisoners drown. Or maybe both. More important, he saw that she hated the man who'd forced her to become his accomplice.

"It comes down to fear," she said. "All the worst things people have ever done have been caused by fear. They burned witches for fear of the Devil. They burned heretics for fear of new ideas. Hitler killed the Jews—well, I don't know
why
Hitler killed the Jews, but I bet fear was at the base of it.

"As I told you, the world government's in trouble. Rebellions are breaking out on every continent except Antarctica, and if anybody but penguins lived there, they'd probably be rebelling, too. And it's a shame, we really do need a government to prevent another war. But first Sol with his stupid dictatorship and then this fool with his policy of terror have messed things up so badly that it's going to fall. Tomsky's afraid of the future, he knows he'll be held accountable for his crimes, and the prisoners were the only enemies he could get at and destroy. It wasn't a rational action, but whoever said that people are rational?"

"Somebody did," muttered Andy. Somebody long ago, for whatever reason, had called the species
Homo sapiens
, rational man.

"Well, he must have been an idiot, whoever he was." She opened her hands and looked at the palms as if something written there could explain it all. "What's happened to my life, Andy? There I was, trying to do my job and get ahead, and first I lost you and then I lost my soul. God damn this island," she said with sudden violence. "For me it's the Isle of the Dead."

"Finished whining?" he asked.

"I suppose so, but—"

He wasn't conscious of hearing a sound, yet suddenly he spun on his heel and there was Sneak close behind him. Without a thought, Andy swung the heavy hand he'd developed during years of manual labor and wrestling fat infants out of tight wombs. His knuckles connected with Sneak's left ear and the guard's eyes spun around in his head. As he fell, Andy caught him by his uniform belt, dragged him a few steps, and threw him headfirst into the fumarole. He leaned over, rubbing his knuckles, and waited for the splash, which was a long time coming but came at last.

Connie was shocked. "Andy, he was just making sure I was okay!"

She'd risen, but he pushed her back down. For a few seconds he stood quietly, thinking of the man he'd turned into. Then he dismissed his first homicide with a shrug and got back to business.

"Let's," he suggested, "discuss the assassination of Tomsky." She continued to stare, said nothing, waited for him to go on.