Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  “Go on,” said Alice.

  We all just stood there. We weren’t sure what it meant, we didn’t even know that all those gates could open at once.

  “Go on. Get out. Hurry. Before one of the Wigs comes.”

  “You mean it?” Harry asked. We were frightened. We were frightened to leave.

  “We’ll say you got killed in the riot, that you were gassed or something. They’ll never know the difference. Now move!”

  “Alice, god-damn it, what are you doing, are you crazy?” Lou was wild.

  “No. She ain’t crazy. You are.” That was Royce. He stood up. “Well you heard her, haul some ass. Charlie, Harry, you go and get all the food there is left in the canteen. The rest of you, go get all the blankets and clothes, big coats that haven’t been shipped back. And Harry, fill some jugs with water.”

  Lou didn’t say anything. He pulled out a kitchen knife and he ran toward Royce. Royce just stood there. I don’t think he would have done anything. I think he was tired, tired of the whole thing. I mean he was tired of death. Lou came for him.

  The Grils burned him. They burned Lou. He fell in a heap at Royce’s feet, his long, strong arms all twisted. “Aw hell,” said Royce, sad and angry. “Aw hell.”

  And a voice came cutting into my head, clear and blaring. I was crazy. The voice said, “This is radio station KERB broadcasting live from the First Baptist Church of Christ the Redeemer with the Reverend Thomas Wallace Robertson and the Inglewood Youth Choir, singing O Happy Day.”

  And I heard it. I heard the music. I just walked out onto the platform, reeling with the sound, the mass of voices inside my head, and I didn’t need any blankets. O Happy Day! When Jesus wash! And Los Angeles might be gone, and Detroit and Miami, a lot of things might be gone, but that Sunday night music was still kicking shit, and if there wasn’t a God, there was always other people, and they surprised you. Maybe I’d been fooled by history too. I said goodbye to the cameras as I passed them. Goodbye Alice. Goodbye Hortensia. See ya, Scarlet. Butch, I’m sorry about the name.

  They were making funny noises. The cameras were weeping.

  I walked on toward the open gate.

  For America

  THE UNCONQUERED COUNTRY

  A LIFE HISTORY

  I watched a family of about eight persons—a man and a woman, both about fifty, with their children about one, eight and ten, and two grown-up daughters of about twenty to twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old in her arms and singing to it, and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The couple were looking on with tears in their eyes.

  The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.

  FROM THE TRANSCRIPTS OF THE NUREMBERG TRIALS AS REPORTED IN THE QUALITY OF MERCY: CAMBODIA, HOLOCAUST AND MODERN CONSCIENCE

  BY WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

  PART ONE

  THE NEW NUMBERS

  Third Child had nothing to sell but parts of her body. She sold her blood. A young man with a cruel warrior’s face—a hooked nose between two plump cheeks—came to her room every two weeks. He called himself her Agent, and told a string of hearty jokes, and carried a machine around his neck. It was rather like a pair of bagpipes, and it clung to him, and whimpered.

  Third rented her womb for industrial use. She was cheaper than the glass tanks. She grew parts of living machinery inside her—differentials for trucks, small household appliances. She gave birth to advertisements, small caricature figures that sang songs. There was no other work for her in the city. The city was called Saprang Song, which meant Divine Lotus, after the Buddha.

  When Third was lucky, she got a contract for weapons. The pay was good because it was dangerous. The weapons would come gushing suddenly out of her with much loss of blood, usually in the middle of the night: an avalanche of glossy, freckled, dark brown guppies with black, soft eyes and bright rodent smiles full of teeth. No matter how ill or exhausted Third felt, she would shovel them, immediately, into buckets and tie down the lids. If she didn’t do that, immediately, if she fell asleep, the guppies would eat her. Thrashing in their buckets as she carried them down the steps, the guppies would eat each other. She would have to hurry with them, shuffling as fast as she could under the weight, to the Neighbors. The Neighbors only paid her for the ones that were left alive. It was piecework.

  The Neighbors had coveted the lands of Third’s people for generations. Then the people of the Big Country, for reasons of their own, had given weapons to the Neighbors.

  Third’s nation had called itself the Unconquered Country. It had never been colonized. Then the Neighbors came and conquered the Country. They conquered the South at first, with its cities and City People. The North still fought. Its mobile villages moved into the hills.

  Third had been a child in a rebel village, hidden in a valley. She lived there until the end of her sixth summer. In the middle of the village, on a wooden pole, there flew the white and yellow flag of the Unconquered People. The women had worked the rice, while men kept watch in the hills, with old guns from other wars.

  The name “Third Child” had been a spell, to make sure that there would be no more children born to her mother and father. The spell worked. A month after Third was born, her father was killed. By a tiger, it was said. There were very few tigers left. They had become beasts of portent. They ate people.

  Third looked ordinary, to herself and others. She loved numbers. Her cousin, who was a man, had a position as an Accountant. Third would sit next to him in rapt and silent wonder, as the yarrow stalks clicked back and forth, counting in fan-shaped patterns. Her cousin was charmed that she was interested, sweet and silent as a child should be. He showed her how the yarrow worked.

  Numbers were portents too. They were used as oracles. This was a practical thing. Rice shoots were counted; yields were predicted; seed was stored. Numbers spread out in fanlike shapes, into the future.

  Third could read them. She saw yarrow in her mind, ghost yarrow she sometimes called them, and they would scurry ahead of the real stalks. They moved too fast for her to follow, flashing, weaving. They leapt to correct answers, ahead of her cousin.

  If anyone asked Third how much rice was in a bowl, she would answer, “enough.” It was always polite to answer that there was enough rice, even when there wasn’t. But if anyone had pressed for more detail, Third could have answered, “Six hundred to seven hundred grains.” The yarrow stalks in her mind would click, telling her how much space ten grains took—as represented by so many lengths cut into a stalk—and how much space there was in a bowl. The ghost yarrow opened and closed, like a series of waving fans, beautiful, orderly, true.

  As Third carried food to her mother in the fields, the yarrow would move. They told her the number of rice shoots, and the rate of their growth. She would have an early sense of the harvest, and how many days were left until they all could rest. She could not follow the waving fans, but she could feel her mind driving them. It was a pleasurable sensation, this slight sense of forcing something ahead. She could make them go faster if she wanted to.

  It was how she saw the world; it was as if the world were a forest of yarrow, moving all around her, as if numbers were leaves, rustling in the wind.

  Third did not talk much. This was considered delightfully demure. She helped around the house, she found helping about the house very easy, and even her mother, who was used to her, had to exclaim at the tidiness of Third. Her second sister was chagrined. But the eldest sister was proud of her. Everything was always tidy around Third. The mat, the vase, the wooden cup, the brazier, the clay pot full of sour sauce: they were in place. You knew Third had been at work because it was beautiful. Organized according to some unseen principle that even the number-blind could recognize as possessing quality.

  “Our little princess,” her eldest sister would call her. On
ly princesses in stories had time for arranging flowers. Third worked quickly. This house had no flowers, but it looked as if it did.

  The rebels had an interest in education. They sent a teacher to Third’s village, and she was a woman of great application. She stayed eight weeks and two days, and then she had to go back to the war. It would be, as one always had to say, enough.

  She was to teach the children how to read and to count. Third was averagely bad at her letters. This was mostly due to shyness. To read, you had to stand and speak, and this she had never been called upon to do. The language of the People was not pictographic, but it was tonal and each sound-sign had to show shifts in tone. It was ferociously complicated. Third was interested in the architecture of the signs. Their shapes kept turning in her mind into proportions that as yet had no meaning. The teacher would force her to speak, to say something.

  “I like that,” Third said, pointing to an arch in a sign and following it with her finger.

  “But what does the sign sound like?” the teacher would insist.

  Third would go quiet and downcast, feeling that she was doing wrong. The question made no sense. Sign sound like? A sign sounds? Small brown face and black button eyes were clouded with withdrawal and remorse.

  Oh, my People, the teacher would think, looking at her, despairing. There was so much to do. She could not be angry.

  It was at mathematics that Third was noticeably backward. Numbers for her were always part of something else. They could only exist in relation to other numbers, in relation to real things. They could not be uprooted and made alone. They were related, like people.

  “What number is this?” the teacher would ask, holding up a card.

  “Number as what?” Third would murmur. She tried to read the digits as she read the yarrow. Their proportions carried no meaning.

  “Number of anything,” the teacher would answer. “Just the number. By itself.”

  Third would stare back mournfully at her, and the teacher would pass on to another child. The teacher taught the children by day, under a screen of bamboo, so that they could not be seen from the air.

  “One day,” she told them, “the Neighbors will be gone. The Neighbors will be gone, and the foreigners will be gone, and the People will need to work, to build. You will have to build. You will have to work, to count, to read.”

  What the People needed to be, what they had to become, were fighters. That was what the teacher knew. Third was self-contained, beautifully mute, as was expected of children of the People, and this made the teacher very impatient. The People must stop being quiet. To stay themselves, to hold back the Neighbors and the Big People, who wanted to swallow the Unconquered.

  The teacher turned Third into a symbol. The symbol was this: when this one small girl learns to count, I will know I have done some good. Third became a target. It was a kind of love.

  She made Third stay after the others. She held up cards. “What number is this? What number is this, Third? Look. Tell me the number.”

  Third, seized with a panic that she was doing wrong, would not move, would not speak. She had never done wrong, and her teacher was trying so hard, paying her special attention. And Third hated it. That made her feel even more in the wrong.

  She went off at night, creeping out of her house, to pound the mud with her feet, and fling the yarrow stalks in her mind at the sky in anger, going over and over them, trying to find some link with the marks on the horrible cards. Even then, Third did not cry.

  Then one day, the teacher had an inspiration.

  It was after class. The other children were back out in the fields, shaking the muddle out of their heads. Third was alone with the teacher again.

  “Well,” the teacher said. “Today we try a different approach.” And she brought out the yarrow stalks.

  No, thought Third. Leave those alone.

  “Now, Third, look. One. One stalk. Not many stalks. Just one stalk by itself,” said the teacher, and smiled, and watched. “That is one.”

  It was like a door beginning to open, and it was as if Third slammed it shut. Third was in terror, though she did not know why.

  “Now, Third. Two. Two yarrow stalks.”

  Lips pressed together, Third jammed all the stalks back together in a bunch.

  “No, no. Two. See? Only two.”

  Blindly this time, Third reached for the yarrow, and the teacher took hold of her hands, and pushed them away. She picked up the yarrow stalks and hid them behind her back. Third tried to reach around her, one quick, tiny hand after another. The teacher had to use both hands to fend her off. The yarrow stalks were left behind her on the mat. Third sat back. The teacher relaxed. Third leapt forward, and grabbed a fistful of the yarrow, and the teacher laughed.

  Third made a fan, one yarrow stalk between each finger. Still chuckling, shaking her head, the teacher grabbed the yarrow and used them as levers to prize apart Third’s fingers.

  “Sit there,” the teacher said, and pushed Third back. “Now. One. Two. Three.” She laid the stalks down, but far apart, in parallel lines that Third knew could never meet. Third. Three stalks together made three parts of a whole. These did not. Third understood, and she did not want to. As if tearing through flesh, the teacher was rending the numbers apart. She was making them alone.

  Third turned and tried to run. The teacher yelped with laughter, and grabbed her, and hugged her, controlled her by hugging her.

  “You won’t get away that easily,” said the teacher, grinning.

  Third wanted to hit her. She wanted to yell and scream and get away, but she could do none of those things. She was frozen. She was going to have to count.

  “Give me numbers,” whispered the teacher.

  “One…two…three,” Third said, looking down, in a tiny and wan little voice.

  For some reason, the teacher was disappointed.

  “Oh,” the teacher said, and dropped her arms, and gave Third a little pat. “Good. That was simple, wasn’t it? Now you can count. And after that is four and five.” The teacher laid down more stalks. “See? Four and five. Say ‘Four and five,’ Third.”

  “Four and five,” murmured Third, and everything around her seemed bated, like breath.

  “Now say them all together, all the numbers.”

  Let me go, Third’s eyes pleaded, but the teacher pretended not to understand. The teacher kept it up, all the way to ten. In the end, it was the teacher who had to leave. Third was left alone, under the screen, quick night having fallen. She was afraid to move.

  Something terrible had happened to the numbers. They wouldn’t work. Third tried to drive the yarrow in her mind, but as soon as they touched on any one of the new numbers, they were snagged by something. They stopped, and had to start again, grew confused, or were left naked, hanging, and Third realized she had never really understood how they danced their way to answers. They were going away, like friends.

  She walked to her cousin’s house, taking tiny steps. She was frightened that if she ran, she would disturb the numbers more.

  They were eating at her cousin’s house, but Third gave no words of greeting and did not take off her shoes. She walked very carefully to her cousin, and dropped to her knees next to him and folded herself up into a tight, supplicant little ball. She was shaking.

  “Third Child, cousin?” he asked, alarmed, meaning, What is wrong? He thought her mother had died.

  “The numbers. The yarrow,” she said, her words like little parcels.

  “Ah!” said her cousin, and began to smile.

  “Show me how they work!”

  “But you know how they work.” Third said nothing. Her cousin cradled her up next to him, and kissed her forehead, and held her to his plump bosom and his crisp plaid shirt. “Your teacher,” he said, “says I must not.”

  He could feel her wilt.

  “You will get used to the new numbers in time,” he cajoled her, shaking her slightly with affection. It was touching how important small things
seemed to children. “You will see. They are new, modern numbers, and we can use them to fight the Neighbors.” But his face was darkening, for under his hand, the child was trembling.

  Third’s eldest sister came looking for her. “Little princess!” she said in alarm. “What has she done to you?” They began to understand that something had been broken.

  Sometimes at night, the old numbers would return, like the ghosts they were. Like ghosts, they were disordered, limping. The things they whispered made no sense. They were sad in the way that ghosts are sad, trying to fight their way back to life, back to sense, irredeemably marred.

  Third welcomed them, and hoped for them and wanted them to work. She pitied them, and finally, she grew weary of them. She could still use the real yarrow stalks as well as other children did. That was, after all, enough.

  She did not remember the exact day that the teacher left. She only remembered the hateful nugget of gladness she felt when the teacher was gone. The teacher was going back to the war. When Third heard the teacher had been killed, she was glad.

  There was the rest of the summer. It seemed a long time then. It rained. The marriage of Third’s cousin was arranged. He would be wed after the monsoons, and Third would help with the flowers.

  His family had a house-birthing for him. His new house was born, and was led baby-wet and making soft, breathy noises from house to house. It stumbled on its fat, dimpled white legs, and it wore strings of bangles as it was paraded. The People sang it songs, and patted it, and the children rode on its patient back. Third’s cousin would train it as it grew, to shelter his new family.

  The houses of the People were alive. They lived for generations, with wattles and wrinkles and patches of whisker, like ancient grannies. They wore roofed porches from their heads, like reed hats. They knew their families and cared for them. It was said that they remembered even those who had died long ago, and grieved for them. It was said they had a special cry for the dead, to greet their family’s ghosts.