Watson, Ian - SSC (5 page)

           
Would have done,
maybe, if we hadn’t been cracked wide open, by the day that brought the
Compensation Laws down on all our heads.

 
          
“You
know what I’d do to that bitch if we were out of these plastic cocoons,”
Grocholski growled. “That bitch” was around the corner preparing our meals.
“I’d rip off her sweet white mask and sweet white uniform, hook her up to this
marvel of medical science and drain her whole damn bloodstream while I raped
her as cool and clinical as you like, and put no liquid back in her but my
seed—what’s one fluid ounce to eight pints of the red stuff?—and I’d leave her
hanging here in the web for her friends to find like veal in a slaughterhouse.”

 
          
Vicious sentiments, Grocholski.
But Grocholski had performed
just as nasty as that—as cool and clinical, I had heard, though I hadn’t met
the man before the hospital threw us together here in the ward. He had pulled a
girl’s teeth out with pliers, one by one, for trying to walk out on him . . .

 
          
Vicious
enough to bring Marina out, so genuinely distraught that she ripped off her
white gauze mask and let us take a look at her full face for the first
time—beautiful, I thought, amazed, though I hardly dared let myself admit
it—not Barbi-dolly or Bambi-cute, but strong with a warp somewhere in it, maybe
in the twist of the lips, that gave her the stamp of authenticity—being unlike
the million other stereotypes from the same mold. And her green eyes blazed,
till they boiled with tears that evaporated almost as she shed them, so hotly
angry was she.

 
          
“I
don’t believe in any heaven. For you vicious beasts killed my man. My heaven
was here on Earth! But now I believe in hell. And I know how to make a hell for
you. Nobody will get any opiates from now on.
Nobody.
Thanks to your politeness.”

 
          
“Hey,”
protested a runner from his white webbing. “You don’t have the right to deprive
us— that’s illegal!”

 
          
“Isn’t
your people’s philosophy outside the Law?”

 
          
I
tried to tell her then, because suddenly I wanted her to know.

 
          
“We
do have a code to follow, the same as you—it’s a different code, is all . . .”

 
          
You
didn’t hear me, Marina, or you didn’t seem to. For Shanahan was shouting:

 
          
“They
always used the Indian women as torturers! The girls made the best!”

 
          
So
he’d noticed, too, how high your cheek bones were, though masked and hidden
partly by your rounded cheeks, the skin not pulled so tight—sealskin over a
canoe frame—the way it had been with some Indian girls I’d known, riding for
the sun with us, recognizing—and that was what I wanted you to understand,
Marina—how we were the new buffalo hunters of the darkness, the new braves and
warriors of the polluted darkened highways.

 
          
Then
things got noisy in the ward. The act of freeing your mouth from the mask’s
embrace had freed all of our mouths too—but not so much for taunts and
obscenities, for a while, till it turned ugly again, but for pointed remarks
directed at a real and sexy—if hostile—woman.

           
With the mask off you became more
real, and though we still hated you, we couldn’t dismiss you as a perfect
plastic wasp girl anymore. At least I couldn’t. You’d graduated to the status
of an enemy.

 
          
Marina
stared round the
ward
hotly, at the devils hanging in hell in their plastic wrappings, waiting
helplessly to repay their debts to society—and made no move to put her mask
back on.

 
          
She
even answered a question.

 
          
“Why
do I do this? I volunteered. It’s not a popular job, dealing with your people.
I volunteered, so I could hurt some of you the way that I’ve been hurt.”

 
          
“How
have you been hurt, Princess?”
yawned
Grocholski.

 
          
“Didn’t
you hear her saying we’d killed her man, Gr’olski?”

 
          
You
gazed at me bitterly, yet in your unmasked gaze was a kind of salutation.

 
          
“How
did it happen?”

 
          
“How
do you think you kill good men? You ran him down in the dark, deliberately,
while he was tending at an accident.”

 
          
“Did
you see it yourself?”

 
          
“Wasps
can’t see to fly in the dark,” jeered Grocholski, carrying machismo further
into the zone of his own personal viciousness.

 
          
“That’s
how I know,”
Marina
told me icily, ignoring Grocholski, who was thrashing about in his web
simulating laughter. “Talk like that. Attitudes like that. Oh, he could see you
coming on the radar screen before he stepped out of the ambulance. He could
see. But he stayed out on the road to rescue a woman caught in a burning car.
He was still foaming it down when you ran him over. You dragged him half a
mile. They wouldn’t let me see him, he was so smashed.”

 
          
“Wouldn’t
let
you see him?” Grocholski caught out
of what she said—but he didn’t press the point.

 
          
And
I wanted her to know—to really understand, inside herself—what we people had,
when we weren’t being vicious beasts—how we were the real authentic people of
our times, facing up to the dirt and dark outside instead of hiding in Fuller
domes, hunting down the last glimpses of the natural world—the sun, the sky!
How we were the last braves, the last hunters—how could I get that through to
the Indian in you smothered in the plastic waspish flesh?

 
          
“The
ambulance man saw it all on radar—how you changed course at the last moment, to
hit him, out there on the road.”

 
          
“Ambulance
man probably hated us anyway— tell
any sort of lie.”

 
          
“Do
you,” in that frozen voice that I yearned to melt, “deny you run men down just
for kicks?”

 
          
“You’re
not so kind yourself, are you? Why not ask yourself deep down what you’re doing
here torturing us—whether you aren’t enjoying it?
Revenge?
A long revenge, hey! Something you’re specializing in?” (Dared I say it yet—and
expect you to accept at least a little bit of it—if not immediately, then
later maybe when you were alone, lying awake in bed and worried because
something had gone astray in your scheme of things?) “You’re interested in us
beasts. You took this job to be near us. Like a zoo visitor watches the tigers.
Smell our musk, our fear, our reality.” Marina’s hand cracked across my face,
so hard my whole body rocked in its white cocoon.

           
I swallowed the taste of blood in my
mouth and stared hard at her, whispered:

 
          
“True,
it’s true, think about it.”

 
          
A
look of horror came into her eyes, as she quickly pulled the gauze mask over
nose and mouth again.

 
          
I
suppose the Compensation Laws worked our way too. How else could it be, in a
split society?

 
          
They
bought our tacit support for the maintenance of “civilized” life—the deceits
that otherwise we’d have done our best to explode, us sunclubbers, saboteurs,
ghettopeople, all of us outlaws (whom it’s plain ridiculous to call outlaw when
full fifty per cent of the people live outside of wasp society). And the wasp
world could only blast us out of existence by turning its own massive nuclear
artillery upon itself—so, in return for the relative security of its slave
superhighways, our own relative freedom to roam them. If the wasp world put too
many feet wrong, explosives would go off in its highway tunnels, gatherings of
the tribes pull down a Fuller dome, a satellite shuttle plane blasting off be
met by a home-made missile with a home-made warhead on it. And if we put too
many feet wrong (taking wasp lives with our sun buggies was one way) and if
they caught us, there would be a blood debt to pay, hooked up to their milking
machines, where we were not supposed to be hurt too much, or die, or get brain
damage, but just
repay, repay
society. For they need red blood like vampires need it.

 
          
So
I began working on your mind, Marina.

 
          
As
for the others, well, Grocholski’s thoughts were of tearing his enemies’ teeth
out with pincers, he knew nothing about minds. A king—but a stupid
king,
like many kings who must have triumphed over the
stupidity of their subjects by a greater and crueller stupidity.

 
          
Shanahan
was a subtler sort of president, had some idea what we stood for,
could
put it some way into words. Yet he couldn’t see his
way clear, as I could, into this woman’s soul with all its possibilities.

 
          
And
you worked on my body, Marina.

 
          
Neglected your promised cruelties to the others.
Still
treated Shanahan and Grocholski like dirt, but carelessly, indifferently, reserving
your finest moments for me.

 
          
And
I tried to grit my teeth through the pain and not scream out meaningless noises
or empty curses, but always something that would drill the hole deeper and
deeper into you—as the sun drills through the smog—till the protective layers
were undercut and the egg of myself could be laid in your heart.

 
          
“Milkmaid
with buckets of blood in your yoke, why not believe me?” I winced, as Marina
thrust the gruel of drugs into the tender parts of my body. “We’re hunting for
something real in a dirty world—the dirt you wasps have spread around, till
there’s such a pile you have to hide yourselves away from it.”

           
She drained the blood from me till I
fainted, green eyes boring into me, doting on my pain. . . .

 
          
The
Myth of the Five Suns—how brightly Marti told it one day after a long fruitless
race for the sun that took us near five hundred miles across the plains, till
we pulled in tired and restless at a service area run by ghettopeople with
their hair like head-dresses, like black coronas around eclipsed suns.

 
          
“Five
worlds there were,” said Marti, the pupils of his eyes dilated to black
marbles, his tight brown skin over small sharp bones like a rabbit sucked dry
by ants, wizened by the desert sunshine that he had smarted under in his
dreams. “In the first World men swam about like fishes under a Sun of Jewels.
This world perished in a flamestorm brought about by the rising of the second
sun, the Sun of Fire. The fishes changed into chickens and dogs that raced
about in the great heat, unwilling to pause for their feet were burning. But
this Sun of Fire died down in turn, gave way to the Sun of Darkness, whose
people fed upon pitch and resin. They in their turn were swallowed up by an
earthquake and a Sun of Wind arose. The few survivors of the Sun of Darkness
became hairy dancing monkeys that lived on fruit. But the fifth sun was the Sun
of Light— the one the ancient Mexicans knew. Which sun are we under now, can
you riddle me that?”

 
          
“Sun
of Darkness,” answered one of the ghettopeople. “Here’s your pitch and resin
to eat.” Dumping our plates of hamburgers, which may have been made from oil
sludge or algae—so perhaps he was right in a way.

 
          
Then
Snowflake—of the snub nose and blond pigtails, with her worry beads of rock-hard
dried chestnuts on a silver chain—who was riding with Marco in his buggy—wanted
to tell a story herself, and Marti let her go ahead while we were consuming
the burgers.

 
          
“There
was this waspman, see, whose slave car broke down on the highway miles from
town, and quite by chance in the midst of a sunspot. He’d lost all sense of
time on the journey, watching video, so when the car stopped he thought he’d
reached hi's destination—especially when he opened the car door and saw the sun
shining and a blue sky overhead, like at home in the Fuller dome. He got out of
the car, too busy with his briefcase to notice that under that sun and that
blue sky the land stretched out black and devastated, a couple inches deep in
sludge. An area where some light-hating plants had taken over, see, which had
the trick of dissolving if the sun came out ...”