Lament for the Fallen (18 page)

David has dropped two fishing lines over the rear of his boat, tying insects to the hooks. They will catch their dinner as they go.

After only an hour, the back of the boat tugs sharply downwards. The others cheer as first one and then the other lines go tight, the rear of the boat pulling down, almost level to the water, with the weight of each fish. They fight hard, but David and Sarah row until the fish are exhausted and can be easily pulled in over the side of the boat. They are catfish. David places them carefully in an insulated carrier behind Sarah.

The group lapses into silence, each at peace with their own thoughts. Sarah hums, but, other than that and the drip of oars dipping into the water, there is little sound.

They lunch on a bank, making do with fruit and nuts rather than preparing an entire meal.

‘We will need to port,’ says Joshua, talking more to Symon than the others, who know this route, as well as the drudgery of pulling laden boats overland. ‘The water systems change here, and it will take about an hour to drag the boats across the embankment.’

Over the bank is a sandy channel leading through the woods.

‘This is built,’ says Symon, looking along the ridge.

‘Yes, our people did this more than a generation ago. You will see when we get across, but we need to isolate our water systems from the Calabar and Cross Rivers. We blocked all the connections between the two systems until far above the city.’

Jason sighs, ‘It is still a punishment for scouts to go out for a month and maintain the reinforcements.’

‘Last time,’ giggles Sarah, ‘you fell into that lagoon and were covered in leeches.’

‘That was not,’ says Jason, attempting to maintain his dignity, ‘very funny.’

‘Your face,’ tears of laughter streaming down David’s face, ‘when you found one attached to your amu.’

Daniel tilts his head and shakes it in mock disappointment, ‘You young people.’

Joshua grips Daniel’s shoulder and motions, let us move. They fasten ropes to the front of each boat and start dragging them along the channel. As they reach the other side, the tone of the soil changes, becoming darker and sticking to the soles of their shoes. There is also a smell, like kerosene. The water has an oily sheen to it.

‘We do not eat anything from the water here,’ says Jason. ‘There are abandoned and unsealed oil wells all around Calabar.’

They paddle up the lagoon on the other side, turning again and again into different branches of the lattice of waters. The variety of trees gradually diminishes until there are only oil palm and raffia. There are few birds and no animals.

The sun is tipping against the top of the oil palms before they draw up on a sandy bank for the night.

David retrieves the catfish he caught in the morning. ‘They are not as nice as our river stocks but should still taste good,’ he says, holding up a fish in each arm, both hanging down to his shoulders. There is an expectant silence as the group waits for an offer. They are embarrassed to ask Symon to cook again.

‘I will make catfish pepper soup,’ he says to grins all round. ‘We have only pounded yam, though.’

‘That will be well,’ says Daniel.

The others make camp, clearing a space and searching for branches to chop firewood. They are not far from Calabar now, can almost see the loom of its lights on the horizon after the sun goes down.

It is not often that the others eat this well while travelling, and have the luxury of sleeping through the night without taking turns at watch. One by one they fall asleep.

Symon picked up a strange lingering smell coming from the north-east, perpendicular to their direction of travel, soon after they arrived. It is subtle. The others will not have noticed, but it is familiar to him.

He walks up the island, swimming across a channel to reach a further bank. At the far end of that island, he finds the source.

The man has been tied to an oil palm, his arms and legs knotted about the trunk, as if hugging it. His elbows and knees have been broken. Blood has caked and dried on the sand. Flies cover his hands and face.

What is left of his face.

His jaw has been ripped out, his upper palate and teeth visible where his head rests against the tree. There is a terrible, wet, gasping rattle from his exposed throat. His tongue is dry and coated in flies, hanging loose down his neck. Tiny maggots burrow and churn in the suppurating wound around the exposed bone of his upper jaw.

Above his head is a short loop of thick rope hanging from the handle of a heavy cellulosic knife. The knife is embedded in the trunk. The man’s lower jaw hangs from the rope.

As Symon nears, the man opens his eyes.

He makes a sucking, gargling sound: a plea. His eyes are begging, too dry to weep.

Symon studies him. Assesses. He places his hands about the man’s head and efficiently snaps his neck. He stares into the other’s eyes all the way through, acknowledging the gratitude and release as the man goes.

He buries the body beneath the shadow of the oil palm, returning in the morning to camp. He carries a small stone in his pocket. The symbol cut into it is two parallel arcs, one broken off-centre with a dot between them.

He says nothing.

A few hours later, they paddle into the docks at Beach Town, below the city.

24

‘Symon!’ screams Samara in the vastness of his memories. He is being dragged again towards a point. He knows where it has to be. ‘Please, not there. Symon!’

He becomes aware again. Drifting, floating, his naked body angled diagonally to the two-and-a-half-metre by two-and-a-half-metre cube that defines his cell. The walls are padded. There is no bed. A pipe protrudes from one wall, a plastic cap on the end. The cell smells of old sweat, urine and excrement. A single light burns from a shielded bracket flat with the upholstery.

‘Symon!’ he yells again.

[I am here.]

‘Symon, is that you? No,’ his voice filled with anguish, ‘only echoes of you.’

He is subsumed in the memory once more.

‘Where are we? Orbit?’

[I have only just resumed awareness. That blow knocked me out as well.]

‘Where’s the connect?’ feeling his head, the jagged tears where his ears used to be. ‘My ears! They cut off my ears!’ Howling in outrage, frustration and fear.

[Samara. Control.]

‘My ears!’ Rubbing at the scars, as if willing them to return. Pounding at the walls, achieving nothing more than flinging himself awkwardly around within the cell.

Eventually, Samara calms, his screaming and sobbing giving way to moans, then hoarse breathing.

[Samara, we are on Tartarus. We will remain in solitary confinement until we are released or we can get that door open.]

Samara strokes the fabric of the walls, pushing on it. The surface is smooth and lined with stiff foam.

He maps his space. The tube is for waste and he discounts it. He inspects the corners, looking for the doorway. As he does so, a small slot, wide enough for a sachet of food, rotates out of the wall alongside him, slightly above the fabric of the wall below it.

[Eat. We must have our strength.]

The slot remains open. He can see that it is self-sealing so that he cannot get a glimpse of the outside of the cell. He takes the sachet, orienting himself so that he is facing it, his feet on the panel below and his left arm braced against the opposite wall so that he does not move.

He sucks down the paste. It is tasteless, but Symon quickly analyses it, confirming it is nutritionally complete. He can see now the microscopic edge of the doorway along the vertices of this face of the cube. This is the door.

Still sucking the paste, he pushes his forefinger into the corner.

[I can’t squeeze through. It is metal-on-metal and under pressure. No space.]

Samara finishes the sachet, rubbing his finger to secrete a tiny silver drop on the outside, and deposits it back in the slot. The fluid is the substance of Symon’s biological mesh network. Symon can maintain connection and use the fluid to interact or explore remotely. It will decay quickly outside a host, but Symon may find a control panel he can access.

The panel slides closed. A vacuum gust sucks.

Samara feels the pressure change inside the cell and realizes that air transfer takes place via a fine mesh panel running alongside the slot in parallel to the wall.

On the other side of the wall, empty sachets fly out from all along the pipe from other feeding slots. The silver drop clings to the bare metal. Slowly, it slides across the panel, tracing the outline of the outside of the cell, looking for a control panel, wiring, locking mechanisms, anything that can offer a way through.

This pipe is too narrow. It is the width of a corridor between facing cells, but only a few centimetres high.

There is nothing. It must be in the walkway above. There is no access.

The drop continues, searching for an inspection panel, but it gradually fades and dissolves before it finds anything.

Back in his cell, Samara pounds the walls in frustration.

Days pass. He regrows his ears but lacks the materials to resynthesize his antennae. He locks himself inside his mind, drawing on Symon’s long-term memory store to hide in a simulacra of the world he has lost. He watches old movies, slips into reveries of Shakiso, walks in meadows and swims in the great lakes on Achenia.

Symon continues to explore, little silver beads visiting other cells via their food slots. He finds little.

Tartarus is a prison. The American government was early to the rush to orbit, building one of the first space elevators and, then, one of the first metal cities in the sky. It had a suitably glorious name: Star City 1. They imagined a world of casinos and exclusive hotels along with rich retirees.

Then they watched as other, private, initiatives surpassed it. Their city atrophied, died. The few investors moving to other cities. Budget cuts meant that funding such a city was unaffordable. It was a vanity project, and Congress was not willing to let it go.

A way to finance it was found.

More than six million inmates clog the American criminal justice system. Sentencing is automated, calculated, swift. But there are prisoners the country would rather forget. Prisoners they cannot kill since the end of the death penalty. Prisoners they do not want.

They send them into orbit. Two hundred and fifty thousand individual cells were built. There is an air-processor. Megatons of food sachets are sent up once a year. Prisoners are transported, unconscious and naked, weekly. Effluent is ejected, frozen, into space.

The company that manages the prison has automated as much as they can. They tell the families that any bodies are converted to fuel for the station: a lie. The fusion generator provides all the energy the system needs. In a rare moment of introspection, they realized that casting dead bodies into space might cause consternation if any are seen burning through the atmosphere. Instead they are dumped at sea, buried amongst other waste. There are no wardens. Just a single control system called Athena.

Athena watches. Athena dispatches her Furies – deadly drones – to patrol the endless tunnels between the cells. None escape. All are forgotten.

It has been wildly popular. Except with the inmates. They usually go insane within months.

They gave it a glorious new name: Tartarus One. There are plans to build a second, larger prison. It may even happen.

Samara can hear the other inmates. Their manic cries, the incessant sobbing and pounding against the walls. There is no hope here, no prospect for release, no path to rehabilitation. And they will not let you die.

Every day he hears doors open, somewhere all through the city. He assumes that new prisoners are arriving or that bodies are being removed. He refuses to enter his memories again. He knows that he could decide not to come back, preferring to die in the arms of a remembered Shakiso than remain in his cell.

Instead he waits, floating in gravity-free confinement.

More days go by.

The light never changes. The interval between meals is always the same. Every six hours. The slender hatch remains open till he eats and returns the sachet.

[Samara.]

‘Yes.’

[I have calculated the approximate time since we blanked.]

Samara says nothing.

[Tartarus has a slightly eccentric position. It is affected by the sun and moon. The attitude adjusters are not quite accurate. It has been twenty-three days.]

‘We have only fifty-four days before Achenia departs.’ His voice is flat.

[I have also tallied the periodicity of when doors open.]

Again, Samara says nothing.

[There is something unusual about the sequence. An elevator arrives once every seven days. At that time a number of doors open and close as prisoner exchange happens. There is also a set time once every twenty-four hours when it appears that dead prisoners are extracted from their cells. However, every two or three days a door opens at random.]

‘What?’ Samara is suddenly alert.

[I have been processing the data. It sounds as if an individual prisoner is released into the tunnels at these random intervals.]

‘Do you have any idea what for?’

[I am not sure. But – I do not believe it ends well.]

‘The Furies?’

[Yes, they hunt the prisoners.]

‘To what end?’

[I do not know. Perhaps for sport?]

‘That could work in our favour. Do you have any idea of what those released have in common?’

[I do not know. I will process.]

Samara lapses back into silence, but he has a glimmer of hope. He waits. Days pass.

[Samara. There is a potential pattern. From the sound signatures it appears that these inmates maintain their fitness. Perhaps performing exercise will attract notice?]

Samara straightens and places his hands against one panel and his feet flat against the panel below. He realizes that the prisoners attempting this must all be tall, otherwise performing this trick is impossible. There is no way to gain leverage, and exercise is otherwise impossible without gravity.