The Seeds of Time (34 page)

They looked down on the shattered Sword of Power
.

“You weren’t supposed to do that,” Clio said softly
.

Petya’s face grew hangdog. “Maybe I can fix it.”

Clio looked up at his stricken face. “That’s OK.” She gazed around at the old backyard, with its mud-stomped snow, and the shingles missing from the house, and at Petya’s bulky form, enormous in his secondhand plaid coat
.

“It’s OK. Let’s bring in the wood.”

•   •   •

She lay back down on the bunk. Captain was late. Usually not late. Hurry up, you old fool. Gotta get some damn sleep. The moon moved out of the window, passed over the horizon.

Rita woke Clio. It was morning. Loren stood behind his wife, holding the baby over one shoulder. “Wake up, Clio.” Clio tried to push the hand away, damn annoying. “Wake up, Clio.”

“It’s morning meal, Clio,” she said. “Everybody’s already in line.”

Clio snapped awake. Oh God. Breakfast. No captain last night. Not good, not good. Don’t want to change the routine, no. She pushed herself up, shuffled to the john, headed out to join Loren and Rita at the end of the soup line. A breeze came in off the Issaquah hills, bearing its quota of brown pine needles, spattering her face like sand.

“How’s the brat?” Clio asked.

“He’s getting stronger, I think,” Rita said. She smiled tentatively, looking for confirmation from Loren.

Loren leaned in toward Clio. “There’s news, Clio. New quarry captain.” His face was somber, eyes dark. “His name’s Beecher. Got the guards nervous.”

“So what’s he like, this Beecher?”

“Don’t know. But got the guards real nervous. They rang the meal bell before dawn, rousted everybody up. Been waiting here for forty-five minutes, and the line isn’t moving.” He licked dryly at his lips. He saw the look in Clio’s eyes. “Probably they just need to make a show for him. First day. Making a show.”

Clio sighted down the soup line, saw the mess crew standing by the soup pots, but no one dishing out. Beyond the soup tables were barracks eight and nine, then the high nerve-wire fence, bent in on top. In the distance the pine trees in shades of brown clung to the hills like scabs. Rita elbowed her. A motion of brown uniforms out in the yard. A man stepped forward. Dressed in a clean, pressed uniform with smart leather jacket. The captain.

“Bring the soup,” he commanded. The servers looked
at each other for a moment, then, prodded by supervisors, brought out the huge pots.

“Dump it.”

The servers dumped the pots out, moving back from the captain to avoid his feet. A lake of yellowish soup soon lay upon the main yard.

“This is your breakfast,” the captain barked. “This may be your lunch. You’ll find out at noon. It all depends. Depends on what?” He began pacing, skirting the lake, eyeing the line of quarry-mates. “Depends on discipline and your behavior.”

Clio smirked. It was over. She knew it all, the whole picture, like you realize things sometimes without thinking. It had been too good to last. The queen of hell, she had been, now heading to be deposed. Her breath left her lungs, like the last drop of mediocre wine. Don’t care if it lasts. Never cared, you asshole, never cared.

Captain Beecher continued: “You’ve all been cheating, and that’s going to stop. Nobody works, nobody obeys, nobody earns their soup.” His chest seemed to swell as his voice reached out, “This is a quarantined facility of the U.S. government, Department of Social and Drug Enforcement! A DSDE quarantine facility to protect the health and welfare of the greater community. This is NOT a summer camp! Not a place to cheat and steal. And this WILL stop.

“Clio Finn, come forward.”

“Oh my God,” moaned Rita. Loren clutched his wife in his arms.

Yes. It was over. Clio Finn come forward, no different than the DSDE boot through her Mother’s front door, no different than Harper Teeg revealing himself as a DSDE spy, her whole front exposed. Had always been exposed. They knew, they always knew. They always catch you in the end. Clio stepped out.

“Further,” Beecher ordered.

She walked to the middle of the yard, entered the soup lake. Fearless, she was. Empty. Stopped in front of Beecher.

“Turn around,” he said for her ears only. She did so.

“This is a patient with special privileges,” he bellowed.
“This is a fellow-quarry-member with six blankets on her bed, extra rations—not only of soup, but also of cheese and fruit and even pastries. Excused from all work. Why? Tell them why, Finn.”

Clio looked over the heads of the patients to the sky in the distance, blue for once.

“Greed, sir,” she answered.

“How does it feel to cheat your quarry-mates, Miss Finn?”

“I laughed at them for being so stupid.”

“And who brought you the blankets and pastries?”

Clio paused. What the hell. “A few corrupt guards, sir.”

“And how did you persuade them to do this?”

“By seducing them. Sir.”

A blow to the back of her head sent her to her knees. Wet. Chopped carrots in the soup, some still with hair on the peels. And floating everywhere, the brown needles of the sagging trees.

“You liar. They are as degraded as you are.”

Clio moved away from herself, saw herself kneeling there, a tall, scrawny woman with a mass of short red hair. A woman in a grey tunic and pants getting ready to die. The captain was still barking at them, her ears were still ringing from the blow. His voice came to her from far away, tinny and incoherent.

An hour might have passed, but still she didn’t move. Movement in the yard, lines of people, a soft buzzing.

Someone pulled her to her feet, threw her in line. People surged away from her. The new quarry-mate, the fat man, sneered, “Pastries and cheese.” Someone kicked her.

After a time she heard a buzzing noise. It went on and on. The woman in front of her turned around, her face tight with worry. “They’re cutting off our hair,” she said. She wore a little lipstick, her eyebrows were plucked into neat arches. She seemed to wait for Clio to answer. Clio looked to the head of the line.

Two guards were shaving the head of an old man whose hair was already clipped close. Bits of hair dispersed on the breeze like pollen. The woman in front of Clio whimpered.
“Not my hair,” she said. She touched the lustrous brown coil of her hair, drawn up into a roll so carefully that the hairpins didn’t show. She tucked in an errant wisp. She pleaded with Clio again, “Not my hair.” Clio looked her in the eye, feeling nothing. When the woman’s turn came, she quieted, kneeled with head bowed. They pulled the bun down and cut it off with scissors in three strokes, threw it, hairpins and all in the great pile of hair, now growing large behind the guards.

Clio watched her own turn come up. She kneeled, neck exposed. They started at the nape, the fearful buzzing right behind her ears, sheared up the back and over to her forehead. The auburn chunks sparkled in the sun. Her head was cold as she stood up, naked in a shameful way. Again, she looked down on herself, this time seeing a prisoner like every other. No difference. Makes no difference. To one side, a huge pile of hair, guards using shovels to stuff it into large plastic bags.

Then the pimply guard was at her elbow, yanking her back to the barracks, and people were crying. Or was that her. No couldn’t be her, no tears left.

The next events came swiftly upon each other. Several guards in the barracks swinging pistols, hitting people. In the clamor, Clio was jerked back into herself, forced to listen, watch. The young guard was taunting her, had his bag of powdered milk. He slit it with his knife, swung it around in circles, white powder everywhere, the smell of gluey milk in her nose. Clio stared at her tormentor vacantly, though he was shouting. This seemed to enrage him. He looked quickly about the room. People hid on their bunks—those that were not already involved in the fray—everyone was covering their heads, newly shaved, newly vulnerable. He found Loren and Rita, pulled on the baby’s wrap, and Loren sheltered the child with his shoulder, Rita shouting next to him.

Then he was struggling with Loren, the baby on the floor, the guard propelled backward by a mighty fist from the diminutive Loren, and all was silent in the room but for the baby’s cries. Even the other guards stepped back,
waiting for their fellow-guard to react. In another moment he did, drawing his pistol, marching forward, raising it to Loren’s head and pulling the trigger. A small round hole appeared in Loren’s forehead as he tipped backward against the wall, dead before he hit the floor. Amid Rita’s screaming, Clio felt her body move, full of a strange heat. She pivoted to her left, grabbing the rifle strap from the guard next to her and kicking him in the side, pushing him away, swung the rifle to bear on Loren’s killer, who now had the baby by the arm, lolling at his side as he silenced Rita with a blow to her face. Good. Very good. Both his hands were weaponless.

“Freeze!” Clio screamed.

He did, his face amazed.

“I’ll kill him before you can kill me,” she shouted for the benefit of the other guards. “Tell them to back off,” she ordered him.

“Don’t shoot her, you might miss,” he told them. He brought the baby up in front of his chest. “You gonna kill us both?”

“Yes.” Clio cocked the rifle, adjusted her aim.

“Hey,” he said backing up, hitting the bunk behind him, “you’re crazy. You kill me, you’re dead too.”

“I don’t give a shit, soldier.” She was smiling now, exhilarated. Kill this bad ass, then go down to death and taunt him there, too. All gonna die now. ’Bout time.

Rita ran forward to grab at her son. They struggled. Clio fired into the ceiling. They froze in a tableau, baby between them. “Let the kid go, maybe you’ll live.”

Rita swiped the child from his grasp, retreated to the far corner. Clio circled around, joining her there. Kneeled down behind the far bunk, gun sighted.

“Get out of here, all of you. Get out!” The guards hesitated, then backed from the room. The young one started toward the door. “You stay,” she said. He stopped.

She lifted her face to the top bunks. “The rest of you, get out too.” Her barracks-mates moved down from the bunks and hurried for the door.

Clio turned to Rita. “You can go or stay. Either way,
you’re dead, you and that baby.” She held Rita’s gaze. “Maybe you’re better off out there. Try your luck. I’m not your savior, just get that straight. This is where we all die. I can’t fix this one, it’s gonna happen. So you make your own decisions.” Rita slunk back into the deep corner behind Clio, fussing over the baby’s hysterical cries, her eyes deep in their sockets. Loren’s body was just to their left, slumped along the wall.

“You,” she said, raising her voice, “take the body over to the bunk by the door. Lay him out on it.”

The guard did so.

“Cover his face.”

When the guard finished, Clio said, “Go back where you were and kneel, facing the door.”

Clio was shaking.
Gonna die. Come so close so many times. This is it, though, this time, this is it
.

She sat a long time, head vacant as a windy plain. Even the baby quieted. A cockroach stalked across her shoe, disappearing into the shadows near the wall.

Then a bullhorn outside. “Clio Finn. This is Captain Beecher. Let that young man go. He’s a murderer and will be dealt with. Don’t you commit the same crime. Come out, and you and the woman will be treated fairly.”

Clio rested her chin on the bunk, rifle by her ear, one arm resting beside it, finger on the trigger. Shaking hard now. Not afraid of death, no. When everything’s gone, nothing left to lose. Family, oh, gone long time back. Petya, disappeared so long ago it was hard to remember him now. Big, he was. Tall, hulking, still a boy, always a boy. Eternal childhood. Not like her, an old woman now, aiming the gun at the man’s head. Old at twenty-eight. She had seen too much death, seen her quota, time to die. Earth was old too, had its quota of autumns, dying too. No springs now, no regreening. Now that her seeds were dead. Scorched in the remnants of the Amazon coast, her last stand for the fading Earth. Should have died then, a good death it would have been, all at once, not in pieces as over the last months.
Make up for it now, I guess
.

She held on to the rifle. The barracks door opened.

A man entered. Opened the screen door, closed it behind him, turning to do so, stood casually before her, arms at his sides. About five-foot-ten, a trim man, with sandy brown hair combed carefully into a small wave at his temple with too much gel. Maybe fifty years old. Dressed in U.S. Army khaki. From the distance of five meters, Clio couldn’t read his insignia, but he was brass, high brass. He stood before her, looking straight down the barrel of the rifle. His face pleasant, a small smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

“You’ll be Clio Finn, then,” he said.

“You’ll be dead if you move closer.”

His expression didn’t change. He held out his arms, palms out, and slowly turned. Short sleeves, looked unarmed. Could have a gun strapped to his ankle.

He looked down at Loren’s body. “That shouldn’t have happened.” He looked past Clio into the corner. “I’m deeply sorry, Mrs. Scally.”

Clio remained kneeling, rigid. “Go fuck yourself.”

His lips pursed. “I don’t blame you for your cynicism. The quarantine facilities are hard places. Those that come here, come here to die. People are desperate—and dangerous. The quarantine captains must use harsh means occasionally to keep order; sometimes they go too far. It’s a hard balance. I wouldn’t want the job.”

She was starting to feel sleepy, bored by his gentle droning. Snapped her head up.

“You’re tired, I’m sure. Let me get to the point.” He gestured to the bunk across from her. “May I sit down?”

Clio didn’t move. Couldn’t decide what to do next.

He moved to the bunk on the other side of hers, sat, hands clasped between his knees.

“Now that you’ve got me, I think you can let this youngster go.” His voice was sonorous, amiable. Threw her off. She swung the rifle up to aim at his head. Too cramped a position. She moved back to join Rita against the wall, braced the rifle on her knee.