Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “Is that so?” said Harod. “Yes, Anthony, that is so,” said Sutter. “You can bet your heathen ass on it.”

  Harod’s thin lips twitched in a smile. “I think I’m already doing that, Jimmy,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this week.”

  “This week is nothing,” said Sutter, closing his eyes and holding the cold glass of bourbon to his cheek. “It is mere prelude, Anthony. Mere prelude.”

  The week of prelude seemed endless to Harod. He mingled with men whose pictures he had seen in Time and Newsweek all of his life and found that— except for the aura of power that rose from them like the omnipresent scent of sweat from a world-class jock— they were visibly human, frequently fallible, and all-too-often asinine in their frenzied attempt to escape the boardrooms and situation rooms and conference halls and briefing sessions that served as the iron bars and cages of their rich and powerful lives.

  On Wednesday night, June 10, Harod found himself lounging in the fifth tier of the Campfire Ampitheatre, watching a vice-president of the World Bank, a crown prince of the third richest oil-exporting country on the planet, a former U.S. president, and his ex-secretary of state do a hoola dance with mops for hair, halved coconut shells for breasts, and grass skirts made from hastily gathered palm fronds, while eighty-five of the most powerful men in the western hemi sphere whistled, shouted, and generally acted like college freshmen on their first public drunk. Harod stared at the bonfire and thought of the rough cut of The White Slaver, still on the editing reels at his workshop, now three weeks overdue for the laying down of a soundtrack. The composer-conductor was getting his three thousand a day for doing nothing but cooling his heels at the Beverly Hilton and waiting to lead a full orchestra in a score that was guaranteed to sound just like the score he had done for his past six movies— all romantic woodwinds and heroic brasses made even more indistinguishable by Dolby.

  On Tuesday and Thursday, Harod had taken a launch out to the Antoinette to see Maria Chen, making love to her in the silk and paneled silences of her stateroom. Then talking with her before heading back to the evening’s Summer Camp festivities.

  “What do you do out here?” he asked. “Read,” she said. “Work on the Orion treatment. Catch up on the correspondence. Lie in the sun.”

  “Ever see Barent?”

  “Never,” said Maria Chen. “Isn’t he ashore with you?”

  “Yeah, I see him around. He’s got the whole west wing of the Manse— him and whoever the top guy is that day. I just wondered if he ever comes out here.”

  “Worried?” asked Maria Chen. She rolled on her back and brushed dark hair away from her cheek. “Or jealous?”

  “Fuck that,” said Harod and got out of bed, walking naked to the liquor cabinet. “It’d be better if he was screwing you. Then we might be able to get an angle on what the hell’s going on.”

  Maria Chen slipped from the bed, walked to where Harod stood with his back to her, and slipped her arms around him. Her small, perfect breasts flattened against his back. “Tony,” she said, “you are a liar.”

  Harod turned angrily. She slipped more tightly against him, her left hand cupping him gently.

  “You want no one with me,” she whispered. “Ever.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Harod. “Pure bullshit.”

  “No,” whispered Maria Chen, moving her lips along his neck between whispers. “It is love. You love me as I love you.”

  “Nobody loves me,” said Harod. He had meant to say it with a laugh, but it came out a choked whisper.

  “I love you,” said Maria Chen. “and you love me, Tony.”

  He pushed her to arm’s length and glowered at her. “How can you say that?”

  “Because it is true.”

  “Why?”

  “Why is it true?”

  “No,” managed Harod, “why do we love each other?”

  “Because we have to,” said Maria Chen and led him to the wide, soft bed.

  Later, listening to the lap of water and host of subtle boat sounds that he couldn’t put a name to, Harod lay with his arm around her, his hand idle on her right breast, his eyes closed, and was afraid, perhaps for the first time since he was old enough to think, of absolutely nothing at all.

  The ex-president left on Saturday after the midday luau and by seven P.M. the only guests left were middle-and low-level hangers on, lean and hungry Cassiuses and Iagos in sharkskin suits and Ralph Lauren denim. Harod thought it was a good time to go back to the mainland.

  “The Hunt starts tomorrow,” said Sutter. “You don’t want to miss the festivities.”

  “I don’t want to miss Willi’s arrival,” said Harod. “Is Barent sure that he’s still coming?”

  “Before sunset,” said Sutter. “That was the final word. Joseph is being coy about his lines of communication to Mr. Borden. Perhaps too coy. I believe Brother Christian is growing annoyed.”

  “That’s Kepler’s problem,” said Harod. He stepped from the dock onto the deck of the long cabin cruiser.

  “Are you sure you need to pick up these extra surrogates?” asked the Reverend Sutter. “We have plenty in the common pool. All young, strong, healthy. Most came from my rehabilitation center for runaways. There are even enough women for you to choose from, Anthony.”

  “I want a couple of my own,” said Harod. “I’ll be back late to night. Early morning at the latest.”

  “Good,” said Sutter and there was a strange glint in his eye. “I wouldn’t want you to miss anything. This may prove to be an exceptional year.”

  Harod nodded good-bye and the launch roared to life and left the harbor slowly, building to speed once beyond the breakwater. Barent’s yacht was the last large ship left except for the picket ships and departing destroyer. As always, a speedboat with armed guards approached, visually confirmed Harod’s identity, and followed them as they covered the last few hundred yards to the yacht. Maria Chen was waiting by the stern staircase, overnight bag in hand.

  The night crossing to the coast was much smoother than the trip out. Harod had requested a car and a small Mercedes was waiting behind Barent’s boat house, courtesy of the Heritage West Foundation.

  Harod drove, taking Highway 17 to South Newport and taking I-95 the last thirty miles into Savannah.

  “Why Savannah?” asked Maria Chen. “They didn’t say. The guy on the phone just told me where to park— near a canal on the outskirts of town.”

  “And you think it was the same man who kidnapped you?”

  “Yeah,” said Harod. “I’m sure of it. Same accent.”

  “Do you still think it’s Willi’s doing?” asked Maria Chen.

  Harod drove a minute in silence. “Yeah,” he said at last, “that’s the only thing that makes sense. Barent and the others already have the means to get preconditioned people into the surrogate pool if that’s what they want. Willi needs an edge.”

  “And you’re willing to go along with it? You still feel loyalty toward Willi Borden?”

  “Fuck loyalty,” said Harod. “Barent sent Haines into my house . . . beating you up . . . just to pull my chain tighter. Nobody treats me that way. If this is Willi’s long shot, then what the fuck. Let him go for it.”

  “Couldn’t it be dangerous?”

  “The surrogates you mean?” said Harod. “I don’t see how. We’ll make sure they’re not armed and once they get on the island there’s not a chance in hell they could create a problem. Even the winner of that fucking fiveday splatter Olympics ends up six feet under mangrove roots in an old slave cemetery up the island somewhere.”

  “So what is Willi trying to do?” she asked. “Beats the shit out of me,” said Harod, exiting at the I-16 interchange. “All we have to do is watch and stay alive. Which reminds me— you bring the Browning?”

  Maria Chen removed the automatic from her purse and handed it to him. Driving with one hand, Harod slid the ammunition clip from the handle, checked it, and pressed it back in against his thigh. He tucked it
into his waistband, pulling his loose Hawaiian shirt over it.

  “I hate guns,” Maria Chen stated flatly. “I do too,” said Harod. “But there are people I hate more, and one of them’s that bastard with the ski mask and the Polack accent. If he’s the surrogate Willi’s going to send with me to the island, it’ll be everything I can do to keep from blowing his brains out before we start.”

  “Willi would not be pleased,” said Maria Chen.

  Harod nodded, turning off the side road that had led from the highway to an abandoned boat launch area along an overgrown section of the Savannah & Ogeechee Canal. A car was waiting, a station wagon. Harod parked sixty feet away as prearranged and blinked his headlights. A man and a woman got out of the car and walked slowly toward them.

  “I’m tired of worrying about what’ll please Willi or please Barent or please fucking anybody,” Harod said through gritted teeth. He stepped out of the car and pulled the automatic loose. Maria Chen opened her overnight bag and removed the chains and padlocks. When the man and woman were twenty feet away, hands still empty, Harod leaned toward Maria Chen and grinned. “It’s time they all began worrying about how to please Tony Harod,” he said and raised the pistol, aiming it steadily and precisely at the head of the man with the short beard and long graying hair over the ears. The man stopped, stared at the muzzle of Harod’s pistol, and adjusted his glasses with his index finger.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Dolmann Island Sunday,

  June 14, 1981

  Saul Laski felt as if he had been through it all before.

  It was after midnight when the boat bumped against the concrete dock and Tony Harod herded both Saul and Miss Sewell off. They stood on the dock, Harod no longer showing the weapon since these were two catspaws he was supposed to be controlling. Two electric golf carts glided up and Harod said to a man in a blazer and slacks, “Take these two to the surrogate pens.”

  Saul and Miss Sewell sat passively in the middle seat of the cart as a man with an automatic rifle stood behind them. Saul glanced at the woman next to him; her face showed no emotion or interest. She wore no makeup, her hair was clipped back, and her inexpensive print dress hung loosely on her. As they stopped at a checkpoint on the south end of the security zone and then rolled forward through a no-man’s-land paved with crushed shells, Saul wondered what, if anything, was being relayed to Natalie via Melanie Fuller’s six-year-old familiar.

  The concrete installation beyond the north fence of the security zone was awash with bright lights. Ten other surrogates had just arrived and Saul and Miss Sewell joined them in a concrete courtyard the size of a basketball court surrounded by high barbed wire fences.

  There were no blue blazers and gray slacks on this side of the security zone. Men in green coveralls and black nylon baseball caps stood cradling automatic weapons. From Cohen’s notes, Saul was sure that these were members of Barent’s private security force, and from interrogating Harod two months earlier, he was equally sure that every one of them had been conditioned to some extent by their master.

  A tall man with a holstered sidearm stepped forward and said, “Awright, people, strip!”

  The dozen prisoners, mostly young men although Saul could see two women— little more than girls— near the forefront, looked at each other dully. All of them seemed drugged or in shock. Saul knew the look. He had seen it approaching the Pit at Chelmno and leaving the trains at Sobibor. He and Miss Sewell began discarding their clothing while most of the others stood where they were and did nothing.

  “I said strip!” shouted the man with the sidearm and another guard with a rifle stepped forward and clubbed the nearest prisoner, a boy of eighteen or nineteen with thick glasses and an overbite. The boy pitched forward without a word, his face striking the concrete. Saul could clearly hear his teeth breaking. The nine other young people began taking off their clothes.

  Miss Sewell finished first. Saul noticed that her body looked younger and smoother than her face except for a livid appendectomy scar.

  They put the prisoners into lines without segregating men from women and marched them down a long concrete ramp into the earth. Out of the corner of his eye, Saul caught glimpses of doors leading to tiled corridors running off from this central subterranean avenue. Security men in cover-alls came to doorways to watch as the surrogates were marched by and once the two lines had to press against the walls as a convoy of four Jeeps came by, filling the tunnel with noise and carbon monoxide fumes. Saul wondered if the entire island was honeycombed with security tunnels.

  They were marched into a bare, brightly lighted room where men in white coats and surgical gloves looked in mouths, anuses, and the women’s vaginas. One of the young women began sobbing until she was slapped into silence by a guard.

  Saul felt strangely calm even as he wondered where these other surrogates had come from, if they had been Used yet, and how his own behavior might visibly differ from theirs. From the examination room they were led down a long, narrow hall seemingly cut from the stone of the island itself. The dripping walls were painted white and small, hemispherical niches in the rock held naked, silent forms.

  As the line stopped for Miss Sewell to enter her hole in the rock, Saul realized that full-size cells were not required because no one would be kept on the island longer than a week. Then it was Saul’s turn.

  The niches were staggered at different heights, tiers of crescent-shaped cracks with steel bars set in white stone, and Saul’s niche was four feet above the ground. He rolled into it. The stone was cool against his flesh, the ledge just long enough to lie full length. A gutter and foul-smelling hole carved into the rear of the shelf showed him where he would relieve himself. The bars slid hydraulically from the roof of the niche into deep holes in the shelf, with the exception of a slit that left a two-inch gap where food trays must be inserted.

  Saul lay on his back and stared at the stone fifteen inches from his face. Somewhere down the corridor a man began to cry out in a ragged voice. There were footsteps and the sounds of blows on metal and flesh, and silence returned. Saul felt calm. He was committed. In a strangely intimate way, he felt closer to his family— his parents, Josef, Stefa— than he had for decades.

  Saul felt his eyes closing and he forced them open, rubbed them, and set his glasses back in place. Strange they let him keep his glasses. Saul tried to remember if they had let the naked prisoners wear their glasses to the Pit at Chelmno. No. He remembered being part of a detail that shoveled hundreds of glasses, thousands of glasses, great heaps of glasses, from a room onto a crude conveyor belt where other prisoners separated the glass from the metal, the precious metals from steel. Nothing was wasted in the Reich. Only people.

  He forced his eyes open, pinched his cheeks. The stone was hard, but he knew he could slide into sleep with little trouble. Slide into dreams. He had not truly slept for three weeks as each night the onset of dream state, rapid eye movement, triggered the posthypnotic suggestions which now formed his dreams. He had not needed the stimulus of the bell for eight nights now. REM alone triggered the dreams.

  Were they dreams or memories? Saul no longer knew. The dream-memories had become reality. His days with Natalie, preparing, planning, and plotting were dreams. That is why he felt so calm. The dark, the cold corridor, the naked prisoners, the cell— all this was much closer to his dream-reality, the unrelenting, self-induced memories of the camps, than were the hot summer days in Charleston watching Natalie and the child Justin. Natalie and the dead thing that looked like a child . . .

  Saul tried to think of Natalie. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly until they filled with tears, opened them wide, and thought of Natalie.

  It was two days earlier, three now, a Thursday, when Natalie had come up with the solution. “Saul,” she cried, setting down the maps and turning toward him as they sat at the small table in the motel kitchenette, “we don’t have to do this alone. We can have somebody at the extraction while someone else watches in Charleston!” Behind her,
blown-up photographs of Dolmann Island covered one wall of the kitchen in a grainy mosaic.

  Saul had shaken his head, too stupid with fatigue to respond to her enthusiasm. “How? They’re all gone, Natalie. All dead. Rob, Aaron, Cohen. Meeks will be flying the plane.”

  “No—someone!” she said and slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “All these weeks I’ve been thinking there’s someone— someone with a vested interest. And I can get them tomorrow. I won’t be seeing Melanie until our Saturday morning session at the park.”

  She told him then, and eighteen hours later he watched as she disem-barked from the flight from Philadelphia, a black man on either side of her. Jackson looked older than he had just six months earlier, his balding head gleaming under the bright terminal lights, his face set in lines that declared a final, tacit state of neutrality with the world. The youth to Natalie’s right might have been an antimatter opposite of Jackson’s: tall, skinny, loose limbed, with a face so fluid that expressions and reactions flowed across it like light on a mercurial surface. The young man’s high, loud laughter echoed in the terminal corridor and caused heads to turn. Saul remembered that the man’s nickname was Catfish.

  Later, during the drive into Charleston, Jackson said, “Laski you sure this’s Marvin we talking about?”

  “It’s Marvin,” said Saul. “But he’s . . . different.”

  “Voodoo Lady got him good?” asked Catfish. He was fiddling with the car radio, trying to find a good station.

  “Yes,” said Saul, still not believing that he was talking to anyone besides Natalie about this. “But there may be a chance we can recover him . . . rescue him.”

  “Yeah, man, we going to do that,” said Catfish. “One word to our main men and Soul Brickyard’ll be all over this cracker city like a rubber on a trick’s dick, you know?”

  “No,” said Saul, “that won’t work. Natalie must have told you why.”

  “She told us,” said Jackson. “But what do you say, Laski? How long do we wait?”