Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  “You gotta stop it. One day, you’ll die of fear.”

  “It’s this place,” I said, and broke down, and sat in a heap. “I want to get out!”

  He held me, gently. “Someday we’ll get out,” he said, and the hopelessness of it made me worse. “Someday it’ll be all right.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Hi, guys,” said Alice. “They’re really acting like pigs down there.”

  “They’re scared,” said Royce. “We’re all scared, Alice. Is that train going to come in tomorrow?”

  “Yup,” she said brightly.

  “Good. You know anything about electricity?”

  “Plenty. I used to work for Bell Telephone.”

  Royce disengaged himself from me. “OK. Do I put the plate inside the tank or underneath it?”

  “Inside? Good Lord no!”

  So Royce went back to work again, and said to me, “You better go back down, Rich.”

  “The agreement?” I asked, and he nodded yes. The agreement between him and Lou.

  When I got down, the Boys looked like discarded rages. There was piss everywhere, and blood on Lou’s penis.

  I went up to the top of the mound. All the leaves were gone now. For about the first time in my life, I prayed. Dear God, get me out of here. Dear God, please, please, make it end. But there wasn’t any answer. There never is. There was just an avalanche inside my head.

  I could shut it out for a while. I could forget that every day I saw piles of corpses bulldozed and mangled, and that I had to chase the birds away from them, and that I peeled off their clothes and looked with inevitable curiosity at the little pouch of genitals in their brightly colored underwear. And the leaking and the sudden hemorrhaging and the supple warmth of the dead, with their marble eyes full of seeming questions. How many had we killed? Was anybody keeping count? Did anyone know their names? Even their names had been taken from them, along with their wallets and watches.

  Harry had found his policeman father among them, and had never stopped smiling afterwards, saying “Hi!” like a cartoon chipmunk without a tail.

  I listened to the roaring in my head as long as I could and then I went back down to the Boys. “Is there any booze left, Charlie?” I asked, and he passed me up a full plastic bottle, and I drank myself into a stupor.

  It got dark and cold, and I woke up alone, and I pulled myself up, and walked back into the waiting room, and it was poison inside. It was as poison as the stuff going sour in our stomachs and brains and breath. We sat in twitchy silence, listening to the wind and our own farts. Nobody could be bothered to cook. Royce was not there, and my stomach twisted around itself like a bag full of snakes. Where was he? What would happen when he got back?

  “You look sick,” said Lou in disgust. “Go outside if you have to throw up.”

  “I’m fine, Lou,” I said, but I could feel a thin slime of sweat on my forehead.

  “You make me sick just looking at you,” he said.

  “Funny. I was just thinking the same about you.” Our eyes locked, and there was no disguising it. We hated each other.

  It was then that Royce came back in, rubbing his head with a towel. “Well, there are now hot showers,” he announced. “Well, tepid showers. You guys can go clean up.”

  The Boys looked up to him, smiling. The grins were bleary, but they were glad to see him.

  “Phew-wee!” he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. “That’s some stuff you come up with, Charlie, what do you make it out of, burnt tires?”

  Charlie beamed. “Orange peel and grass,” he said proudly. I thought it was going to be all right.

  Then Lou stood up out of his bed, and flopped naked toward Royce. “You missed all the fun,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know, I can smell it.”

  “Now who’s being a prig?” said Lou. “Come on, man, I got something nice to show you.” He grabbed hold of Royce’s forearm, and pulled him toward his own bed. Tom was in it, lying face down, like a ruin, and Lou pulled back the blanket. “Go on, man.”

  Tom was bleeding. Royce’s face and voice went very hard, and he pulled the blanket back up. “He’s got an anal fissure, Lou. He needs to be left alone. It could get badly infected.”

  Lou barked, like a dog, a kind of laugh. “He’s going to die anyway!”

  Royce moved away from his bed. With Tom in it, he had no place to sit down. Lou followed him. “Come on, Royce. Come on. No more pussyfooting.” He tried to put his hand down the front of Royce’s shirt. Royce shrugged it away, with sudden annoyance. “Not tonight.”

  “Not ever?” asked Lou, amused.

  “Come on, Royce, give it up man,” said Harry. He grabbed Royce playfully, about the waist. “You can’t hold out on us forever.” He started fumbling with the belt buckle. “Hell, I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “Oh yes you have,” said Lou, and chuckled.

  “Harry, please let go,” said Royce, wearily.

  The belt was undone, and Lou started pulling out his shirt. “Let go,” warned Royce. “I said let go,” and he moved very suddenly. His elbow hit Harry in the mouth, and he yelped.

  “Hey, you fucker!”

  “You turkey,” said Lou.

  And all the poison rose up like a wave. Oh, this was going to be fun, pulling off all of Royce’s clothes. Gary, and Charlie, they all came, smiling. There was a sound of cloth tearing and suddenly Royce was fighting, fighting very hard, and suddenly the Boys were fighting too, grimly. They pulled him down, and he tried to hit them, and they held his arms, and they launched themselves on him like it was a game of tackle football. I thought, there is a word for this. The word is rape.

  “Alice!” I shouted up to the camera. “Alice, stop them! Alice? Burn one of them, stop it!”

  Then something slammed into the back of my head, and I fell, the floor scraping the skin of my wrists and slapping me across the cheeks. Then I was pulled over, and Lou was on top of me, forearm across my throat.

  “Booby booby booby booby,” he said, all blubbery lips, and then he kissed me. Well, he bit my upper lip. He bit it to hold me there; he nearly bit through it with his canine teeth, and my mouth was full of the taste of something metallic: blood.

  The sounds the Boys made were conversational, with the odd laugh. Royce squealed like a pig. It always hurts beyond everything the first time. It finally came to me that Royce wasn’t gay, at least not in any sense that we would understand. I looked up at the camera, at its blank, glossy eye, and I could feel it thinking: these are men; this is what men do; we are right. We are right to do this to them. For just that moment, I almost agreed.

  Lou got up, and Charlie nestled in next to me, fat and naked, white hairs on his chest and ass, and he was still beaming like a baby, and I thought: don’t you know what you’ve done? I tried to sit up, and he went no, no, no and waggled a finger at me. It was Lou’s turn to go through him. “Rear Admiral, am I?” asked Lou.

  When he was through, Charlie helped me to my feet. “You might as well have a piece,” he said, with a friendly chuckle. Lou laughed very loudly, pulling on his T-shirt. The others were shuffling back to their beds in a kind of embarrassment. Royce lay on the floor.

  I knelt next to him. My blood splashed onto the floor. “Can you get up, Royce?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. “Royce, let’s go outside, get you cleaned up.” He didn’t move. “Royce, are you hurt? Are you hurt badly?” Then I called them all bastards.

  “It was just fun, man,” said Harry.

  “Fun!”

  “It started out that way. He shouldn’t have hit people.”

  “He didn’t want to do it. Royce, please. Do you want anything? Is anything especially painful?”

  “Just his ass,” said Lou, and laughed.

  “He’ll be OK,” said Charlie, a shadow of confusion on his face.

  “Like fuck he will. That was some way to say thanks for all he’s done. Well? Are any of you going to give me a hand?”

 
Harry did. He helped me to get Royce up. Royce hung between us like a sack.

  “It’s that fucking poison you make, man,” said Harry to Charlie.

  “Don’t blame me. You were the first, remember.”

  “I was just playing.”

  They began to realize what they’d done. He was all angles, like a doll that didn’t work anymore.

  “What the fuck did you do?” I shouted at them. He didn’t seem to be bruised anywhere. “Jesus Christ!” I began to cry because I thought he was dead. “You fucking killed him!”

  “Uh-uh, no,” said Gary. “We didn’t.”

  “Pisshead!”

  Charlie came to help too, and we got him outside, and into the showers, and he slumped down in the dark. I couldn’t find a rag, so we just let the lukewarm water trickle down over him. All we did was get him wet on an evening in November.

  “It’s cold out here, we got to get him back in,” said Harry.

  Royce rolled himself up onto his knees, and looked at me. “You were there.”

  “I wasn’t part of it. I tried to stop it.”

  “You were there. You didn’t help.”

  “I couldn’t!”

  He grunted and stood up. We tried to help him, but he knocked our hands away. He sagged a bit at the knees, but kept on walking, unsteadily. He walked back into the waiting room. Silently, people were tidying up, straightening beds. Royce scooped up his clothes with almost his usual deftness. He went back to his bed, and dropped down onto it, next to Tom, and began to inspect his shirt and trousers for damage.

  “The least you could have done!” I said. I don’t know what I meant.

  Lou was leaning back on his bed. He looked pleased, elbows sticking out from the side of his head. “Look at it this way,” he said. “It might do him some good. He shouldn’t be so worried about his little problem. He just needs to relax a bit more, try it on for size. The worst thing you can do with a problem like that is hide from it.”

  If I’d had an axe, I would have killed him. He knew that. He smiled.

  Then the lights went out, without warning as always, but two hours early.

  There was snow on the ground in the morning, a light dusting of it on the roof and on the ground. There was no patter. Royce did not talk to the cameras. He came out, wearing his jacket; there was a tear in his shirt, under the armpit. He ate his breakfast without looking at anyone, his face closed and still. Hardly anyone spoke. Big Lou walked around with a little half-grin. He was so pleased, he was stretched tight with it. He’d won; he was Boss again. No one used the showers.

  Then we went out, and waited for the train.

  We could see its brilliant headlight shining like a star on the track.

  We could see the layers of wire-mesh gates pulling back for it, like curtains, and close behind it. We began to hear a noise coming from it.

  It was a regular, steady drumming against metal, a bit like the sound of marching feet, a sound in unison.

  “Yup,” said Charlie. “The drugs have worn off.”

  “It’s going to be a bastard,” said Gary.

  Lou walked calmly toward the cameras. “Alice? What do we do?” No answer. “We can’t unload them, Alice. Do we just leave them on the train, or what?” Silence. “Alice. We need to know what you want done.”

  “Don’t call me Alice,” said the camera.

  “Could you let us back in, then?” asked Lou.

  No answer.

  The train came grinding into the platform, clattering and banging and smelling of piss. We all stood back from it, well back. Away from us, at the far end of the platform, James stood looking at the silver sky and the snow in the woods, his back to us, his headphones on. We could hear the thin whisper of Mozart from where we stood. Still looking at the woods, James sauntered toward the nearest carriage.

  “James!” wailed Charlie. “Don’t open the door!”

  “Jim! Jimmy! Stop!”

  “James! Don’t!”

  He waved. All he heard was Mozart, and a banging from the train not much louder than usual. With a practiced, muscular motion, he snapped up the bolt, and pulled it back, and began to swing open the door.

  It burst free from his grasp, and was slammed back, and a torrent of people poured down out of the carriage, onto him. His headphones were only the first thing to be torn from him. The Stiffs were all green and mottled, like leaves. Oh Christ, oh Jesus. Uniforms. Army.

  We turned and ran for the turnstile. “Alice! God-damn it, let us in!” raged Lou. The turnstile buzzed, angrily, and we scrambled through it, caught up in its turning arms, crammed ourselves into its embrace four at a time, and we could hear feet running behind us. I squeezed through with Gary, and heard Charlie behind us cry out. Hands held him, clawed at his forehead. Gary and I pulled him out, and Lou leapt in after us, and pulled the emergency gate shut.

  They prowled just the other side of a wire mesh fence, thick necked, as mad as bulls, with asses as broad as our shoulders. “We’ll get you fuckers,” one of them promised me, looking dead into my eyes. They trotted from door to door of the train, springing them. They began to rock the turnstile back and forth. “Not electric!” one of them called. They began to pull at the wire mesh. We had no weapons.

  “Hey! Hey, help!” we shouted. “Alice, Scarlett. Help!”

  No answer. As if in contempt, the warm-up lights went on.

  “We’re using gas,” said Alice, her voice hard. “Get your masks.”

  The masks were in the waiting room. We turned and ran, but the cameras didn’t give us time. Suddenly there was a gush of something like steam, in the icy morning, out from under the platform. I must have caught a whiff of it. It was like a blow on the head, and my feet crossed in front of each other instead of running. I managed to hold my breath, and Royce’s face was suddenly in front of me, as still as a stone, and he pushed a mask at me, and pulled on his own, walking toward the gate. I fumbled with mine. Harry, or someone, all inhuman in green, helped me. I saw Royce walking like an angel into white, a blistering white that caught the winter sunlight in a blaze. He walked right up to the fence, and stood in the middle of the poison, and watched.

  The gas billowed, and the people billowed too, in waves. They climbed up over each other, in shifting pyramids, to get away, piling up against the fence. Those on top balanced, waving their arms like surfers, and there were sudden flashes of red light through the mist, and bars of rumpled flesh appeared across their eyes. One of them had fine light hair that burst into flame about his head. He wore a crown of fire.

  The faces of those on the bottom of the heap were pressed against the fence into diamond shapes, and they twitched and jittered. The whole wave began to twitch and jitter, and shake, against the fence.

  It must have been the gas in my head. I was suddenly convinced that it was nerve gas, and that meant that the nerves of the dead people were still working, even though they were dead. Even though they were dead, they would shake and judder against the fence until it fell, and then they would walk toward us, and take us into their arms, and talk to us in whispers, and pull off the masks.

  I spun around, and looked at the mound, because I thought the dead inside it would wake. It did seem to swim and move, and I thought that Babylon would crack, and what had been hidden would come marching out. The dead were angry, because they had been forgotten.

  Then the mist began to clear, blown. I thought of dandelion seeds that I had blown like magic across the fields when I was a child.

  “Hockey games,” I said. I thought there had been a game of hockey. The bodies were piled up, in uniforms. They were still. We waited. Harry practiced throwing stones.

  “What a mess,” said Gary.

  There were still wafts of gas around the bottom of the platform. We didn’t know how long we would have to wait before it was safe.

  Suddenly Lou stepped forward. “Come on, let’s start,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. He pulled back the emergency gate. “We’ve got ma
sks,” he said.

  None of us moved. We just didn’t have the heart.

  “We can’t leave them there!” Lou shouted. Still none of us moved.

  Then Royce sat down on the grass, and pulled off his mask, and took two deep breaths. He looked at the faces in front of him, a few feet away, purple against the mesh.

  “Alice,” he said. “Why are we doing this?”

  No answer.

  “It’s horrible. It’s the worst thing in the world. Horrible for us, horrible for you. That’s why what happened last night happened, Alice. Because this is so terrible. You cage people up, you make them do things like this, and something goes, something inside. Something will give with you, too, Alice. You can’t keep this up either. Do you have dreams, Alice? Do you have dreams at night about this? While the Wigs are at their parties, making big decisions and debating ideology? I don’t believe anyone could look at this and not feel sick.”

  “You need to hear any more?” Lou asked the cameras, with a swagger.

  “I mean. How did it happen?” Royce was crying. “How did we get so far apart? There were problems, sure, but there was love, too. Men and women loved each other. People love each other, so why do we end up doing things like this? Can you give me a reason, Alice?”

  “You do realize what he’s saying, don’t you?” asked Lou. He pulled off his mask, and folded his arms. “Just listen to what is coming out of his closet.”

  “I am not going to move those bodies, Alice,” said Royce. “I can’t. I literally cannot move another body. I don’t think any of us can. You can kill us all if you want to. But then, you’d have to come and do it yourselves, wouldn’t you?”

  Lou waited. We all waited. Nothing happened.

  “They’ll—uh—start to stink if we don’t move them,” said Gary, and coughed, and looked to Lou.

  “If we don’t move them,” said Harry, and for once he wasn’t smiling, “another train can’t come in.”

  “Alice?” said Lou. “Alice?” Louder, outraged. “You hear what is happening here?”

  There was a click, and a rumbling sound, a sort of shunting. A gate at the far end of the platform rolled back. Then another, and another, all of them opening at once.