Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  “OK, log off,” she said. She slid the CD out of its player, and saw Eamon’s picture printed on it, and that’s when she began to weep. Water leaked into her mouth tasting of salt. Tears of rage, pity, joy—take your pick, at least you know you’re alive. She knew then that Eamon, her Eamon, would always be with her, inside. There were words flickering on the screen. Like all of us, the machine wanted its actions to be authorized.

  PLEASE SAY GOODBYE, it asked.

  Billie found that she couldn’t.

  O HAPPY DAY!

  They’re fooled by history. They think they won’t be killed until they get into camps. So when we load them onto a different train, they go willingly. They see an old country railroad station with a big red hill behind it, and they think it’s just a stop along the way.

  They slip down from the cars and can’t keep their feet on the sharp-edged rubble of the track. They’re all on testosterone specifics, a really massive dose. They’re passive and confused, and their skin has a yellow taint to it, and their eyes stare out of patches of darkness, and they need a shave. They smell. They look like a trainload of derelicts. It must be easier to kill people who look like that, easier to call them Stiffs, as if they were already dead.

  We’re probably on specifics, too, but a very mild dose. We have to work, after all.

  We load the Stiffs into cars, the Cars with the special features, and the second train goes off, and ten minutes later it comes back, and we unload them, dead, and that is life under what we call the Grils.

  We are the Boys. We get up each morning and we shave. We’re male, so we shave. Some of us do our make-up then, a bit of lipstick and slap, and an earring maybe. Big Lou always wore an earring and a tight short-sleeved T-shirt that showed off his arms. It was very strange, all those muscles with his pudding basin haircut and hatchet face, all pressed and prim around the lips.

  Big Lou thought what was happening was good. I remember him explaining it to me my first day, the day he recruited me. “Men are violent,” he said. “All through history, you look at violence, and it’s male. That was OK in the jungle, but not now, with the gangs and the bombs and everything else. What is happening here is simple evolutionary necessity. It’s the most liberating event in human history. And we’re part of it.” Then he kissed me. It was a political kiss, wet and cold. Then he introduced me to the work.

  After we unload the trains, we strip the corpses. There are still shortages, so we tie up the clothes in bundles and save everything else of value—money, watches, cigarette lighters—and send them back on the train. It would be a terrible job for anyone, but it’s worse for a faggot. Most of the bodies are young. You feel tender toward them. You want them to wake up again and move, and you think, surely there must be something better to do with this young brown body than kill it? We work very quickly, like ants on a hill.

  I don’t think we’re mad. I think the work has become normal for us, and so we’re normal within it. We have overwhelming reasons for doing it. As long as we do this work, as long as there is this work to do, we stay alive. Most of the Boys volunteered, but not for this. At first, it was just going to be internal deportation, work camps for the revolution. They were just going to be guards. Me, I was put on that train to die, and I don’t know why. They dope whole areas, and collect the people they want. Lou saw me on the platform, and pulled me in. Recruited me, he called it. I slept with him, out of gratitude and fear. I still remember sleeping with him.

  I was the one who recruited Royce. He saw me first. He walked up to me on the gravel between the trains, nothing out of the ordinary, just a tall black man in rumpled khaki. He was jingling the keys in his pockets, housekeys, as if he was going to need them again. He was shaking, and he kept blinking, and swaying where he stood, and he asked in a sick and panicky voice, “It’s cold. It’s cold. Isn’t there any food?”

  The information that he was good-looking got through slowly. The reaction was neutral, like you’d get from looking at a model on a billboard. Then I thought: in ten minutes’ time, he’s going to be dead.

  You always promise yourself “just once.” Just once, you’ll tell the boss off; just once, you’ll phone in sick and go out to the lakes. Just once. So here, I thought, is my just once: I’m going to save one of them.

  “Are you gay?” I asked him. I did it without moving my lips. The cameras were always on us.

  “What?” Incomprehension.

  Oh God, I thought, he’s going to be difficult, this is dumb. I got scared.

  “What did you ask me?”

  “Nothing. Go on.” I nodded toward the second train.

  “Am I gay?” He said it quickly, glancing around him. I just nodded.

  The last of the other Stiffs were being loaded on, the old ones, who had to be lifted up. I saw Big Lou look at us and start walking toward us, sauntering, amiable, with a diamanté earring.

  “Yes,” said Royce. “Why?”

  “Make like you know me. My name’s Richard.”

  “Royce,” he said, but I couldn’t catch it.

  Then Lou was standing next to us. “A little tête-à-tête?” he asked.

  “Hi Lou,” I said. I leaned back on my heels, away from him. “We got ourselves a new recruit.”

  “Don’t need one, Rich,” he said, still smiling.

  “Lou, look. We were lovers. We lived together for two years. We did a lot of work for the movement together. He’s OK, really.”

  Lou was looking at Royce, at Royce’s face. Being black was in Royce’s favor, ideologically. All the other Boys were white. No one wanted the Station to be accused of racism.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” said Lou. “But OK.”

  Lou walked toward one of the cameras. “Hey!” he shouted up to it. The camera was armed. It turned toward him, slowly. “We’ve got a new recruit.”

  “What was that?” asked the camera, or rather the voice of the Gril behind it. The sound was flat and mechanical, the tone offhand and bored.

  “A new recruit. A new Boy. He’s with us, so don’t burn him, OK?”

  “OK, OK,” said the camera. Lou turned back, and patted Royce’s bare, goose-pimpled arm. Royce lurched after him, and I grabbed hold of his shirt to stop him. I was frightened he was going to get back onto the train. I waited until it was pulling out, creaking and crashing, so that the noise would cover what I said.

  “It’s terrible here,” I told Royce. “But it’s better than dying. Watch what you say. The cameras don’t always hear, but usually they can. It’s all right to look disgusted. They don’t mind if you look a bit sick. They like us to do the job with distaste. Just don’t ever say you think it’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, and I thought: Oh God, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what’s going on here. And I thought: now what do I do with him?

  I showed him around the Station. It’s a small, old-fashioned building made of yellow and black brick, with no sign on it to tell us where we are. One hundred years ago women in long dresses with children would have waited on its platform for the train to take them shopping in the city. There would have been a ticket-seller behind the counter who knew all the women by their last name, and who kept a girlie calendar pinned on the wall. His booth still has ornate iron bars across it, the word “Tickets” in art nouveau scrolling, still slightly gilded. The waiting room is full of temporary metal beds. The walls are painted a musty pistachio, and the varnish on the wooden floor has gone black. There are games machines in the corner, and behind the ticket counter is an electric cooker. We eat sitting on our beds. There are cold showers, outside by the wall, and there are flower boxes in the windows. James the Tape Head—he’s one of the Boys—keeps them full of petunias and geraniums. All around it and the hill behind are concentric rows of wire mesh, thirty feet high and thirty feet deep, to keep the Stiffs controlled, and us in. It isn’t a Station, it’s a mass graveyard, for them and probably for us.

  I tried to get Royce to go to bed, but
he wouldn’t. He was frightened to be left alone. He followed me out onto the platform where we were unloading the Stiffs, rolling them out. Sometimes the bodies sigh when they hit the concrete.

  Royce’s eyes went as wide as a rabbit’s that’s been run over by a car.

  “What are you doing? What are you doing?” he yelped, over and over.

  “What the fuck does it look like?” I said.

  We strip them on the platform, and load them into trolleys. We shake them out of their trousers, and go through the pockets. Getting them out of their shirts is worse; their arms flop, and their heads loll. We’re allowed to leave them in their underwear.

  “They’re doing it. Oh God, oh Jesus, they’re killing them! Nobody knows that! Nobody believes that!”

  “Help me carry them,” I said. I said it for his sake. He shook his head, and stepped back, and stumbled over arms and legs and fell into a tangle of them.

  Only the worst, we’re told, only the most violent of men. That means the poor bastards who had to pick up a gun, or join a gang, or sign up for the police or the army. In other words, most of the people we kill are either black or Latino. I tried to tell them, I tried to tell the women that would happen.

  Royce was suddenly sick. It was partly the drugs wearing off. Charlie and I hoisted him up and dragged him, as limp as a Stiff, into the showers. We got him cleaned up and into bed—my bed, there wasn’t any other—and after that he was very quiet. Everybody was interested in him. New dog in the pound. Harry offered him one of his peppermints. Harry came up smiling, but then Harry is always smiling like the Man who Laughed, yellow teeth in a red beard. He’d got the peppermints off a Stiff. Royce didn’t know how precious they were. He just shook his head, and lay there staring under the blanket, as one by one we all came back from the platform. Lou was last, thumping in and sighing, like he was satisfied with something. He slumped down on my bed next to Royce’s knees, and I thought: uh-oh, Lou likes him too.

  “Bad day, huh,” Lou said. “Listen, I know, the first day is poison. But you got to ask yourself why it’s happening.”

  “Why is it?” asked Royce, his face and mouth muffled in the crook of his elbow. He sounded like he was going to be sick again.

  “Why?” Lou sounded shocked. “Royce, you remember how bad things got. The assassinations, the military build-up, the bombs?”

  Only in America: the gangs got hold of tactical nuclear weapons. They punched out their rivals’ turf: parts of Detroit, Miami, Houston, Chicago and then the big DC.

  “I know,” said Royce. “I used to live in Los Angeles.”

  Los Angeles came later. I sometimes wonder now if Los Angeles wasn’t a special case. Ever hear of the Reichstag fire? Lou went respectful and silent, and he sat back, head bowed. “I am really sick at heart to hear that. I am so sorry. It must be like your whole past life has been blown away. What can I say? You probably know what I’m talking about better than anyone else here. It just had to be stopped, didn’t it?”

  “It did stop,” said Royce.

  “Yeah, I know, and that was because of the testosterone specifics. The women gave us that. Do you remember how great that felt, Royce? How calm you felt. That’s because you’d been released from your masculinity, the specifics set men free from themselves. It was a beautiful thing to do.”

  Lou rocked back on the bed, and recited the old doggerel slogan. “TSI, in the water supply, a year-round high. I remember the first day I could leave my gun at home, man. I got on the subway, and there was this big Kahuna, all beads and tattoos, and he just smiled at me and passed me a joint. I really thought the specifics were the answer. But they hurt women, not many, but that’s enough. So the specifics were withdrawn, and look what happened. Six months later, Los Angeles went up. The violence had to stop. And that’s what we’re going for here, Royce. Not men per se, but violence: the military, the police, criminals, gangsters, pornographers. Once they go, this whole thing here stops. It’s like a surgical operation.”

  “Could you let me sleep?” Royce asked.

  “Yeah sure,” said Lou gently, and leaned forward and kissed him. “Don’t worry, Royce, we take care of our own here. These guys are a really great bunch of people. Welcome home.”

  The Boys went back to playing computer games in the waiting room. Bleep bleep bleep. One of the guys started yelling because a jack was missing from his deck of cards. James the Tape Head sat on his bed, Mozart hissing at him through his headphones. I looked at Royce, and I thought of him: you are a good person.

  That’s when I began to have the fantasy. We all have the fantasy, of someone good and kind and strong, who sees who we really are when we’re not messed up. Without knowing I was doing it, I began to make Royce my fantasy, my beautiful, kind, good man. The strange thing was that in a way the fantasy was true. So was it a fantasy at all?

  The next day—it was the very next day—Royce began his campaign.

  I volunteered us both to get the food. The food comes down the tracks very early in a little automatic car. Someone has to unload it and take it into the kitchen. I wanted to get Royce and me away from the Boys to talk. He was unsure of me; he pulled on his socks and looked at me, solemnly, in the eye. Fair enough, I thought, he doesn’t know me. Lou loaned him a big duffle coat, and Royce led us both out through the turnstiles and onto the platform.

  We didn’t have our talk. Like he was stepping out onto a stage, under the cameras, Royce started to play a part. I don’t like to say this, but he started to play the part of a black man. It was an act, designed to disarm. He grinned and did a Joe Cool kind of movement. “Hey! How are you?” he said to one particular camera.

  The camera stayed still, and silent.

  “You can’t fool me, I know there’s someone there. What’s your name?” he asked it. Silence, of course.

  “Aw, come on, you can tell me that, can’t you? Listen I have got a terrible name. It’s Royce. How would you like to be called after a car? Your name can’t be as bad as that. What is it? Grizelda? Hortensia? My favorite aunt’s called Hortensia. How about Gertrude? Ever read Hamlet? What about…Lurleen?”

  There was a hollow sound, like in a transatlantic phone call, when you talk over someone and it cuts out what they’re saying for a couple of seconds afterwards. The camera did that. It had turned off its voice. And I thought, I didn’t know it could do that; and I thought, why did it do it?

  “Look. I have to call you something. My sister is called Alice. You don’t mind if I call you Alice? Like in Wonderland?” Royce stepped forward. The camera did not have to bristle; its warm-up light went on.

  “You see, Alice. I—uh—have a personal question.”

  The camera spoke. “What is it?” The voice was sharp and wary. I had the feeling that he had actually found her real name.

  “Alice—uh—I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but, um, you see, I got this little emergency, and everywhere I look there are cameras, so, um, where can I go?”

  A pause from the camera. “I’m sorry,” it said. “There are toilet facilities, but I’m afraid we have to keep you under observation.”

  “Really, I don’t do anything that much different from anyone else.”

  “I’m sure you don’t.”

  “I mean sometimes I try it standing on the seat or in a yoga position.”

  “Fine, but I’m afraid you’ll still have to put up with the cameras.”

  “Well I hope you’re recording it for posterity, ’cause if you get rid of all the men, it’ll have real historical interest.”

  There was a click from the camera again. I stepped out of the line of fire. Royce presented himself at the turnstiles, and they buzzed to let him through. He made his way toward the john singing “That’s Entertainment.”

  All the cameras turned to watch him.

  Just before he went into the shed, he pulled out his pecker and waggled it at them. “Wave bye-bye,” he said.

  He’ll get us all killed, I thought. The john was a t
rench with a plywood shed around it, open all along one side. I went to the wire mesh behind it, to listen.

  “Alice?” I heard him ask through the plywood.

  “I’m not Alice,” said another voice from another camera. She meant in more ways than one, she was not Alice.

  “Uh—Hortensia? Uh. There’s no toilet paper, Hortensia.”

  “I know.”

  “Gee, I wish you’d told me first.”

  “There are some old clothes on the floor. Use some of them and throw them over the side.”

  Dead men’s shirts. I heard a kind of rustle and saw a line of shadow under the boards, waddling forward, crouched.

  “I must look like a duck, huh?”

  “A roast one in a minute.”

  Royce was quiet for a while after that. Finally he said, grumbling, “Trust me to pick tweed.”

  He kept it up, all morning long, talking to the Grils. During breakfast, he talked about home cooking and how to make tostadas and enchiladas. He talked about a summer job he’d had in Los Angeles, working in a diner that specialized in Kosher Mexican Food. Except for Royce, everyone who worked there including the owners was Japanese. That, said Royce, shaking his head, was LA. He and his mother had to move back east, to get away from the gang wars.

  As the bodies were being unloaded, Royce talked about his grandmother. He’d lived with her when he was a child, and his father was dying. His grandmother made ice cream in the bathtub. She filled it full of ice and spun tubs of cream in it. Then she put one of the tubs in a basket with an umbrella over it on the front of her bicycle. She cycled through the neighborhood, selling ice cream and singing “Rock of Ages.” She kept chickens, which was against the zoning regulations, and threw them at people who annoyed her, especially policemen. Royce had a cat, and it and a chicken fell in love. They would mew and cluck for each other, and sit for contented hours at a time, the chicken’s neck snugly and safely inside the cat’s mouth.

  It was embarrassing, hearing someone talk. Usually we worked in silence. And the talk was confusing; we didn’t think about things like summer jobs or household pets anymore. As the bodies were dumped and stripped, Royce’s face was hard and shiny with sweat, like polished wood.