The Song of Phaid the Gambler

by Mick Farren

  Like all other prisoners, Phaid saw none of this. With his wrists manacled and secured to a chain around his waist, he had become a number, a single unit in the underground transit system. While he'd been in the hands of the Inquisitor, or even when the arresting officers were treating him to their particular brand of routine brutality, he was at least being given some sort of individual treatment. It had been something to hang on to. Down in the tunnels, however, he was just another item on the production line. He had no value whatsoever. He would be moved from where he was to a place where he could be stored until they were ready to dispose of him. Phaid had imagined many ways in which he might meet his end, but he'd never visualised anything so horribly impersonal. Somehow, in the span of just a few hours, they'd even made his death unimportant. The only way he could cope with the shock was to let his mind match the pace of his shuffling feet, and to live strictly one second at a time.

  The production line was less than efficient. Like so many other functions of the city, it was old, overused and

  prone to snarl up. The idea was simple. Prisoners were tagged, manacled and divided into groups of twenty. Linked by their ankles, they were moved by a short droptube down to the tunnels themselves. Each group was supervised by four guards.

  In theory, when a group of prisoners hit the loading dock, there should have been a cylindrical transport waiting for them with its doors wide open, so they could be marched swiftly and efficiently inside.

  Theory and practice rarely matched in Chrystianaville. The vaulted roofs of the tunnels rang with curses and the shrieks of contradictory orders as the guards attempted to create some kind of order out of the chaos that was spreading across the loading docks.

  The container that seemed to be earmarked for Phaid's particular group arrived at the right moment, but, for some reason, the doors failed to open. The four guards violently herded the prisoners together into a tightly packed bunch. A squad of techs began trying to pry off rusted access plates and worn inspection covers on the underside of the container.

  A cutting torch flared into life and Phaid realised that he and his companions were in for a long and miserable wait before they got to their destination.

  More squads of prisoners kept arriving down the tube and, with the containers temporarily not running, the loading dock was becoming dangerously crowded with terrified prisoners and increasingly hysterical guards.

  As the tinglers and clubs lashed out, Phaid made sure that he kept in the middle of his group, away from the worst of the assaults. He still clung to an almost psychotic determination not to think about either past or future, but to hold his mind locked in a neutral present that would leave him as numb as possible.

  He stared at the wall behind the container. Water was running down it in a slow, continuous seepage that fed a growth of dark green algae. Tiny stalactites were tenta­tively feeling their way down from the roof of the tunnel. Phaid started to wonder just how many hopeless indi­viduals had made the same journey since the stalactites had started growing. He quickly jerked his thoughts away from the idea. It was no good going in that direction. Just watch the drips fall one at a time. He no longer had hope of surviving. All he could do was to avoid as much pain as possible before the end came.

  After the techs had laboured and sweated for nearly an hour, the doors slammed back with a crash. From the surprised expressions on the faces of the techs, it was clear that they didn't know what they'd done to start the system working again.

  Phaid's group of prisoners bolted for the open doors like a bunch of frightened sheep. One of them, an overfed, middle-aged woman, tripped and fell. She was dragged along by the links-on her ankles. For a moment it seemed as though the whole group was going to go down, but then they were inside the container. More groups rushed in behind them until the bare, steel interior was packed solid with very scared humanity. More prisoners were pushed inside until there seemed to be a real danger of either being crushed or suffocated.

  The doors clanged shut and the inside of the container was suddenly pitch black. There were screams, the sound of rising panic. Then everything was drowned in an explosive hiss. The container jerked and accelerated. People were thrown to the floor. More groans and screams mingled with the loud, metallic hammering that resounded through the container as it rocketed down the tunnel. The inability to see made the vibrating, headlong rush doubly terrifying.

  Then, just as Phaid was letting go the grip on his sanity and considering retreat into all out screaming madness, the container came to an equally bone wrenching stop. The doors flipped open and before any of the container's occupants could even grasp that they had arrived some­where there were pink and green uniforms in among them, kicking and yelling.

  'Out! Out! On your feet scumturds! Out! Out! We don't have time to fuck around with you pieces of shit! Out! Out! Out!

  Blinking at the light, Phaid tried to stand. A similar move by the man next to him on the line jerked his feet from under him. He found himself thrashing around on the curved steel floor. Something seemed to be badly wrong with his shoulder. Before he could figure out how bad the damage might be, he'd been grabbed by the hair and dragged towards the door. A swarthy face with broken teeth grinned down at him.

  'Welcome to the White Tower, carrion. It's your last stop.'

  Chapter 21

  She was taller than most of the men under her command and she was built like an Aro wrestler from the land of the Tharmiers. She had massive, treetrunk legs, a barrel body with huge, if incongruous breasts, a bullet head and hands that looked capable of tearing the head off any lesser mortal.

  She wasn't fat, though. Every wide inch of her was solid packed, muscular hostility and aggression.

  She had unusually light amber eyes that gave her square jawed, carved granite face the look of a psychopath.

  Indeed, she probably was a psychopath. Her name was Borkastra and she was the undisputed queen of the White Tower. Although a courtier called Maltho-Pos held the nominal title of Lord Custodian and was supposed to have ultimate authority over the city's prison system, he defer­red to Borkastra in all practical matters. The rank of Chief Overseer put all real power firmly in the vicelike grip of her massive hands.

  She didn't hesitate to use her power to its ultimate extent, and, presumably, gloried in the use of that power. Rumours of her sadism and brutality abounded. Her interrogation methods were the subject of sickening legend, and there were tales of a private discipline room from which prisoners had emerged insane, blinded and even castrated, if they ever emerged at all. There were also rumours of another private suite, in the seldom used upper levels of the White Tower, where she maintained a harem of sullen, doll faced girls in pastel stockings and very little else. The few prisoners who claimed to have been on cleaning details, or performed other duties in the area told stories of how they seemed always to bear welts and bruises from the silver topped cane that Borkastra habitually carried.

  Right at that moment the cane was being tapped almost hypnotically against her right veebe-hide boot as the pale eyes moved slowly across the ranks of newly arrived prisoners. The physical presence of the huge woman, and the stories about her that had gone before, left not a single prisoner in any doubt that those eyes could bore clear into their souls if they chose to.

  Borkastra took a deep breath. Phaid noticed that this caused her giant breasts to place a not inconsiderable strain on the fastenings of her severely tailored and heavily decorated pink tunic.

  'I'm here to welcome you to the rest of your lives.'

  Her voice was carefully modulated. It was as though she was pacing each word for maximum impact.

  'For you, there is no longer an outside world. This prison is all that you will know from now on. You have come here for one reason and one reason only. You have come here to die. This is the only purpose left to you. Accept that and such future as you have will be a great deal easier.'

  Borkastra paused to let this information sink in. The new intake
of prisoners stood motionless and naked in front of her. Only a lunatic would have dared to breath. Flanked by her escort of guards and a quartet of attacker dogs on short chains, she left no room for doubt that she was in complete control.

  'Some of you may be thinking, if you still have the courage to think, that since you are doomed, there is nothing else we can do to you. In that you are very wrong. You have come here to die, but your death will not come quickly. You will all be here for quite some time. Exter­mination and disposal of vermin is a complicated business. We only have a limited capacity and there are delays in the process. I don't blame Madame President for wanting to do away with vermin like you, but until Madame President sees fit to enlarge the steamer installation you are all going to have to wait.'

  There was a ripple of relief among the prisoners. Borkastra sensed this and an unpleasant smile slowly spread across her face. Without any warning, Borkastra's cane lashed out at a young woman in the front rank. The woman shrieked and fell to her knees. Borkastra stood over her, flexing the cane. Her voice was cold and brisk.

  'On your feet and stop snivelling. There's going to be much worse to come. If you didn't want to be punished you should have stayed on the straight and narrow.'

  The woman scrambled to her feet. Blood was running down her cheek. Borkastra roared.

  'Stand at attention, don't slouch unless you want more of the same. This is a prison, not a rest home!'

  The girl stiffened. She was white with terror. Borkastra seemed, for the moment, to be satisfied.

  'I think we're all starting to understand each other!'

  Not a single prisoner dared to even attempt a nod.

  'You people are the lowest. You have nothing left. You have been condemned by the rest of the world. You are corpses, waiting in line for the actual moment of your deaths. The only person who cares about you is me. I own you. I possess you. You are mine.'

  She moved nearer to the woman whom she'd struck with her cane.

  'You may think that a prison like this is an inhuman, impersonal place.' She was now standing directly in front of the young woman, looking straight into her eyes. 'Once again, you would be very wrong. The relationship be­tween us will be a very close one. It will be a relationship of great intimacy. You will no longer have a freewill. I and my guards are the ones who decide what you do and what you don't do. We will order your every move. We will tell you what's right and what's wrong. We have the whip, the post, the tingler and the jerk field to ensure that you have a full understanding of what is expected of you. The intimacy of our relationship is the intimacy of punishment. It will be that way until your death separates us.'

  Phaid felt his flesh crawl. It seemed that only the mad were given power in the Republic. He knew he would do anything to stop himself falling into the hands of this monstrous woman. Borkastra took a step back and scan­ned the faces of the assembled prisoners. Phaid thought that she had finished her harangue, but apparently she hadn't.

  'There's one more thing that you ought to know. I'm certain that there are some among you who are under the illusion that you have done a deal with either the police or the Inquisitors for some sort of favourable treatment. From this moment on, you can forget all about it. It is nothing more than an illusion. There is no favourable treatment. The police and the Inquisitors have no power inside these walls. I am the power and you are all my creatures.'

  Borkastra eye's moved from face to face as this final piece of bad news settled. Phaid was too numb and exhausted to curse himself for believing the Inquisitor. He knew that luck could run out. He knew that it could go bad, but he'd never realised that a man's luck could turn gangrenous. Borkastra motioned to her escort. Two of them moved forwards and the woman whom Borkastra had attacked with her cane was pulled out of the line. She was manacled. She flinched as one of the dogs turned and sniffed at her.

  Borkastra made an impatient gesture and swept away from the new intake of prisoners. Dogs, escort and, a lot less willingly, the unfortunate woman followed.

  There was a sigh of relief. Not only from the prisoners but also among the guards. Some even relaxed from rigid attention, but then they quickly compensated for their lapse by screaming all the louder as they pushed the new intake through the induction process. An hour, and a considerable number of cuffs, slaps and punches later, Phaid found himself sprayed, shaved, sterilised, retina printed and brain scanned for a second time, indoctrin­ated, inspected, assigned to a hall and weighed down by a pile of clothing and bedding.

  Hall A7H was the kind used for those deemed not to be potentially violent; apparently somewhere along the line of scanning and inspection of Phaid's brain it had been decided that he wasn't cut out to be a troublemaker, even though his file now had him listed as a multiple sex killer.

  Hall A7H was an open plan room with pillars holding up a low vaulted ceiling. At first sight it reminded Phaid of a shadowy and extremely daunting cave. It seemed to be filled with a jumble of ramshackle constructions, almost as though someone had attempted to build a kind of indoor shanty town.

  Originally there had been lines of dormitory style three-tier bunks, but these had been rearranged by the inmates. Those at the top of the hall's pecking order, the rich and powerful, along with their lovers and sycophants, had built themselves what amounted to makeshift private suites with material from the bunks serving as walls and room dividers. Carpets and lengths of cloth gave these premium dwellings a sense of, in jailhouse terms, exotic luxury.

  At the other end of the scale, those who couldn't manage to compete for a place in the hierarchy of the hall found themselves sleeping on rudimentary pallets on the floor near either the guards' catwalk, the latrines or the jolt fields that sealed off the hall's arched entrance.

  Like every other part of the White Tower, Hall A7H had an atmosphere of great age. The hall was as much like a natural rock formation, an organic thing, as something constructed by the hands of men. The ceiling was black­ened, impregnated with centuries' worth of bad air, smoke, cooking smells and human misery. There was a damp chill in the air that reminded Phaid how, short of a miracle, he was cut off from the sun forever.

  The jolt field cracked as it snapped back into life, having been shut down by the guards to admit Phaid to A7H. With his bundle of prison issue slung over his shoulder, he stood looking around, wondering what to do. Just inside the jolt field a small wizened nut of a man had made up what looked to be a bed of dirty rags. He looked up at Phaid and cackled.

  'New, huh?'

  'Uh . . . yeah.'

  'I guess you're wondering what to do.'

  'You could say that.'

  'It's always rough at the start.'

  'It gets any easier?'

  'No.'

  'So?'

  'You kind of get used to it.'

  Phaid eased the load on his shoulder.

  'This is a fascinating conversation, but I was rather wondering where I should stow all this gear.'

  The little wizened man patted a bare space of floor next to his pile of rags.

  'You best dump it down here, fresh fish. You ain't going to get any better straight in the door.'

  Phaid dropped his bundle and looked at the maze of bunks further into the hall.

  'Ain't one of these bunks supposed to be mine?'

  'Supposed to be, but it don't work that way.'

  'How come?'

  'Because space, comfort and a degree of privacy are things that get bought and sold inside this place. You smuggle in any booze?'

  Phaid shook his head.

  'No. It wouldn't be possible to get a bottle through that induction process.'

  'It happens. Did you bring in any dog gold?'

  'No.'

  'Candy even?'

  'No. I don't see how anyone could get anything past the screening.'

  'You'd be surprised.'

  Phaid looked wearily at the little man. He noticed that most of his teeth were missing.

  'I got to tell you, friend, no
thing would surprise me in this place.'

  'Yeah? Well, if you didn't bring anything in with you, you're in a whole bunch of trouble.'

  'I am?'

  'If you ain't got a brother who's a guard or nothing like that.'

  'Nothing like that.'

  Phaid was starting to realise that, despite Borkastra's bombast, for the most part the prisoners seemed to be left to their own devices.

  'You're going to have to start from scratch, and that can be rough.'

  'Isn't everything?'

  'It don't have to be. If you're a hall duke, a wheeler-dealer or a big man in the jailhouse, you can make it. You can have really an easy life, with most of what you had on the outside, if you go to work on it.'

  'But it helps to have something to start with.'

  'That's right.'

  Phaid looked at the little man and his pile of rags.

  'It don't look as though you've done too well.'

  'I didn't have much to start off with.'

  'Just like me?'

  'Matter of fact, young man, you do have something that you can bargain with.'

  'I do?'

  'Sure you do.'

  'Well, don't keep me in suspense.'

  The wizened man shook his head.

  'I ain't about to tell you. That's business too. I don't get nothing for sitting around here telling the fresh fish what's what. If you don't have no booze or no candy, then I'm keeping my mouth shut.'

  'You're a charmer.'

  'I look after myself and anyway, you'll be visited quite soon by some people who'll be more than eager to set you straight.'