The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  They landed on their feet in the alley beside two supine bodies, one inert from Amon’s dust and one twitching on the tarmac from Rick’s pipe blow. There was a crack and a groan as a man with a stake leapt at Amon from behind only to take Ty’s wheel in his temple and flop to the ground. Ty stood on a balcony about three stories up, near the entrance of the alley, behind and to the right of Amon and Rick. Below him, two more bodies were sprawled unmoving on the ground. Before the dead end in front of them stood about a dozen men and women, the teenagers, kid, and older man in the rear. The young men and women held a mismatched assortment of weapons: shards of golf clubs, chunks of concrete, a jagged hunk of steel slag, whips of coiled wiring haphazardly fused … but the field priest, standing front and center, had become the locus of everyone’s attention, for in his outstretched hand was an archaic weapon: a double-barreled machine pistol. He was aiming it at Ty but, seeing Amon’s duster, now brought it down to aim at him just as Amon aimed on the crowd.

  “This is a paraplegic duster set for wide dispersal,” Amon growled. “Shoot me and I’ll incapacitate every last one of you!”

  Amon was lying—only assault dusters, not the Liquidator standard issue hand duster he carried, had such a setting, and it could only fire nerve dust—lying because he could see they were in trouble. If they’d merely been outnumbered, Amon’s duster combined with Ty’s tricycle and Rick’s brute force would have tipped the confrontation in their favor. But the field priest’s gun, if it wasn’t merely for show and actually had ammo, gave the clear advantage to their enemies, for its bullets would be lethal. They had not been prepared for this. Neither Ty nor the security planners who briefed them seemed to have considered the possibility. It was rare for Opportunity Scientists to have long-range weapons like this, aside from perhaps the occasional slingshot or makeshift bow, and the three of them would never have done something so foolhardy as trying to take on twenty if they’d even suspected.

  “Back up and stand with me,” shouted Ty, and Amon did as instructed with Rick following, edging backwards while facing the OpScis until they were just below Ty’s ledge. The angle of the barrel pointed at Amon seemed to beam terror into his chest, the field priest eyeing him with mortal uncertainty, neither shooting nor averting his aim. When they were far enough away, he barked something and a woman and two men broke off from their group to approach the two nearest of their fallen comrades.

  “What do we do?” hissed Amon up to the ledge.

  “We try to find an opening to run and retreat back to Xenocyst,” said Ty. “But for now, we wait. The next move is theirs.”

  The two men began to drag away the one with the broken collarbone despite his groans of protest. The woman bent over the one Amon had dusted and slapped him in the face, eliciting no response. Then, after checking the man’s pulse, she went over to the gunman priest, who kept his eyes and aim on Amon, and whispered in his ear. Several OpScis then huddled around them and, after exchanging a few muttered words, they all began to stalk towards Amon, Rick, and Ty. They formed two lines three men deep, the priest on the left in the middle pair with his wrist on the shoulder of the man in front, taking cover while keeping the barrel pointed at Amon.

  “That wouldn’t happen to be a nerve duster, would it?” asked the priest, his eyes and barrel boring into Amon. “Eh, gene suckers!”

  His heart pounding, Amon kept all his attention focused on the priest, trying not to show his fear lest the bluff be exposed definitively, ready to shoot the moment he heard the trigger click. He was hoping that Rick or Ty would shout some order that would get them out of this mess, for he could think of nothing. There was no way to run before the bullets ripped through Amon and Rick standing side by side, and firing preemptively now that the priest had cover would only produce the same result. The best that they could hope for was that Ty might manage to flee with his life, though his success too seemed doubtful as he had several stories to climb to the roof and all it would take for the priest was to change the angle of his arm.

  Just then, there was a thud and a clack as the priest’s head and pistol slammed into the left wall. Four hands had reached through one of the cracks and jerked the man towards them in a rapid, barely perceptible motion. A few shots went off, but the bullets ripped into the Fleet wall against which the barrel rested and never emerged. Hearing this sound, Amon fired twice and heard shrieks as two men fell limp-limbed in front of him, before a hunk of concrete arcing from the back of the group whacked into his hand, knocking the duster from his grip and richocheting into his chest. The impact toppled him onto his back as the duster flew over his shoulder behind him, the hunk now pinning him down. Quickly, he rolled the weight off his ribs just as a man lunged down at him with a badly chipped machete. With no time to get out of the way, Amon mindlessly flailed his legs towards the man just as Rick piped him in the jaw. The glinting blade fell spinning erratically towards Amon’s shins but chanced to strike the ground with its tip just between them before leaping up to his right with a twang and clattering against the wall, the piped man crumpling atop the flat of it. Amon sprang to his feet as Rick blocked the swing of a dented aluminum bat with his pipe, a dull metallic clang followed by the bat redirecting into his hip. Amon punched the batter square in the cheekbone as a wheel whirred over the man’s head, cracking into the forehead of an approaching woman, bouncing back to crack the batter in the back of the head like a pinball, and then shooting down to smash someone’s knee before Ty reeled it back in. Amon picked up the bat and lifted it over his shoulder, ready to wallop the next person who crossed his path—but saw all the remaining OpScis now flattened to the floor and walls of the alley. He watched as the priest’s ankles disappeared into the crack he’d been grabbed from, wailing as he was yanked out of sight, and the woman who’d clued in that Amon carried a nerve duster was beside him being held and throttled by the three right hands of unseen assailants. One man lying on the ground was being slowly dragged by other hands into a crack between the floor of the alley and the base of a building that seemed entirely too thin for someone to fit—at least without breaking a few ribs. Another man was being choked by hands reaching from a jagged hole in a sliding door while a different pair of hands held the man’s ankles in place from a lower hole as he writhed about and tried to pry the fingers from his neck. Yet another was being gripped in various places by child-like fingers, and a mouth was biting his ear as kicks rained down on him through holes from different directions. The residents, it seemed, had been itching for the chance to do this, and Amon, Rick, and Ty just stood there panting as their pent-up rage unfolded, until Amon remembered his duster had been knocked away and picked it up, as though it might shield him from the shock and horror of the scene.

  Once the OpSci men and women had been pacified or hauled away, residents in kimonos and yukatas began to emerge from unseen nooks to strip the fallen ones of their clothes and weapons before carrying them off the way they had come. Amon hated to imagine what would happen to the prisoners next, even if they had brought this on themselves. The child too was nowhere to be seen …

  There was only one man left, the grandfather of the family, who was curled up in the fetal position in the corner of the dead end. Three residents were creeping towards him with clubs and chipped spindles seized from their victims, wary as though his apparent defenselessness might be a ruse, their eyes wide and vengeful.

  Ty, who had now climbed down to the ground floor, said, “Tell them to keep off him,” flicking his eyes towards Amon’s duster. “We need one to question and send back to the Peaks so they’ll hear what happened and learn to fuck off.”

  Amon held his gun out so it was clearly visible and called out in his sternest Liquidator voice, “Step away from that man immediately. We’re here from Xenocyst to restore our alliance with the residents of this community. Everything you can scrounge from the survivors is yours, but we need him for questioning.”

  The three residents paused and stared at Amon defiantly, but ma
de no further moves towards the old man.

  “Please!” Ty cried. “Remember it was thanks to us these guys came out in the open and you had a chance to get them off your back. So would you kindly turn that man over to us.”

  After another pause, the older of the three, a man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties, nodded to the other two, and they all melted into the walls.

  5

  When they reached the man, he was crouching with his torso between his knees and his head bowed, his long gray matted hair hanging over his face onto the ground. Scrawny, ragged, and dirty, flakes of cloth fluttering off him on the slight breeze, he trembled as their footsteps neared.

  “Hey old man,” said Ty. “We’re here to have a word.”

  At the sound of Ty’s voice, the man’s back bristled, but no response came.

  “Your friends are finished, but we’ve got no plans to hurt you. So long as you talk.”

  No response.

  “Eh!” barked Ty, grabbing for the man’s shoulder, but the man knocked Ty’s hand aside with a swift forearm parry.

  “Watch it geezer. If you don’t—”

  “Please leave me alone!” bellowed the man. For such a grimy, pathetic creature he had a shockingly clear voice, a voice that Amon immediately recognized. “I haven’t done anything to anyone.”

  “Look!” shouted Ty, baring his teeth. “We’re not—”

  “Barrow? Chief Executive Minister Lawrence Barrow?” Amon interrupted. At the mention of this name, the old man’s shoulders contracted visibly as though he were trying to squeeze himself into a tiny ball.

  “Wait! You sure? Because of his voice?” said Rick. Then to the man, “Hey, you! Say something! Anything!”

  “Who cares who he is! This old lump of shit out here pretending to be Gramps so he can rob these people of a bit of fucking food!”

  Ty stamped one pace towards the man but Rick put his arm in front of him, saying, “Let me take care of this,” before putting his palm on the man’s forehead and giving it a sudden push. The man spasmed too late against the force and toppled backwards onto his side, the curtain of gray strands falling away from his face, leaving Amon and Rick no doubt.

  “Once you said it, I knew it was his voice,” said Rick. “And there he is.”

  Though he looked like he’d aged ten years since the last time Amon had seen him, whether from lack of digimake or from the tribulations of camp-life, this was indeed Lawrence Barrow, Chief—no, ex-Chief Executive Minister. His lustrous ponytail degenerated to ratty shag, his forehead deeply furrowed with wrinkles, he was at least twenty kilos lighter, looking withered and frail, though he still had his broad shoulders and impressively commanding nose below those husky-blue eyes. Rising up onto his buttocks, he sat there propped on his hands as his eyes twitched back and forth fearfully between the three men until he seemed to realize something and then honed in on Amon.

  “You!” said Barrow with a frown. “It must be you.”

  “I …” Words failed Amon.

  “Alright. Chief executive shithead, whatever your name is. We’ve got some questions for you, and if you can answer them you’ll go free. If not, well … take a look at the mess they’re cleaning up behind us!”

  Ty began to ask Barrow various questions about the movements of the Opportunity Scientists in the Gifted Triangle: how many groups there were, when they operated, where they gathered at night for the raids, what plans they had over the coming weeks. Barrow answered everything clearly and in detail without hesitation. Occasionally when he said he didn’t know something, Ty would threaten him with spit-flying fury, delivering a few boots to his thighs when he insisted on his ignorance. But since everything Barrow denied knowledge of appeared unimportant to the overall OpSci strategy and he revealed a number of useful logistical facts, it seemed clear that he was being forthright and honest. The whole time, Amon and Rick stood by passively observing the exchange, confused about how to involve themselves. From Rick’s slight frown and squinting eyes, Amon guessed that his friend was almost as stunned by their stumbling upon Barrow as Amon was. Rick had likely never met him in the flesh and was surely stricken with the dissonance of encountering a celebrity he remembered as exceedingly successful suddenly reduced to a despicable nothing in the service of a pseudoscientific cult. For Amon, it was their second meeting and he’d witnessed unsavory sides to Barrow that colored his perception of the man in a different way, but that made the encounter no less bizarre for him. Though he’d known Barrow would be down here in the District of Dreams, somehow he hadn’t prepared himself for this moment. Here was his old idol, the man he’d been deceived into betraying and identity assassinating. He’d tried to shoot Amon with a crossbow, understandable under the circumstances perhaps, yet this had nearly taken Amon’s life. Should he apologize? Contribute his own kick for the trickery in the spa?

  Over the course of Ty’s interrogation, they learned that Barrow, like Rick, had graduated from the Er facility run by Rashana before joining with a nostie collective in the Tumbles, a vast region that took up the southern half of the island. Living far from Delivery at the northern tip had been tough and when his collective had tried to build new dispocrapers slightly closer to the supply road, an OpSci proselytizer militia had swarmed in and issued the ultimatum to convert or face their wrath. Barrow was made a slave at first but managed to talk his masters into emancipating him after a few weeks and had since served as a baggage carrier for various patrols and missionary expeditions. Listening to his smooth, masterful Japanese, Amon wasn’t surprised his tongue had gotten him out of his predicament—or at least elevated him above the worst of it. Even though his Hinkongo would not yet be perfect, there would be no missing the mellifluous rhythm, with its entrancing pacing and carefully timed pauses, or the purity and richness of the voice he seemed to summon from the core of his body.

  Eventually Ty went quiet and stared at the man for a few moments. Then, he turned to Amon and Rick. “Anything I forgot to ask before we send him back to the Peaks?”

  “Well, actually, yes. Sort of …” said Amon. “I mean, there are some questions I—we need to ask him, though I don’t think they’ll help us much in this conflict with the OpScis.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “You heard Amon’s story at the council, right Ty?” said Rick, who had heard about the hearing from Amon. “So you know that this man was at the center of everything that happened to us before we cash crashed. He might be the only person in the whole District of Dreams who can give us any clarity.”

  “So you want to ask him about your lives in the Free World? How long is this gonna take? Another OpSci gang could show up any second, and as the Xenocyst agent in charge I can’t let them catch us just standing here.”

  “I do think we’ll need a bit of time for this,” said Amon, “so maybe we could try to find somewhere out of the way?”

  “Like where? This place is crawling with all sorts of people we know nothing about. Some will be OpSci traitors.”

  “Can we try asking one of the residents?” Rick suggested. “They might know a good place.”

  “If it helps at all, I promise to answer as quickly and completely as I can,” said Barrow. “For personal reasons, I want to speak to these two, but I don’t want to be held up here any longer than I have to either. Not with those vindictive locals around.”

  The pleasing harmony of Barrow’s voice humming in their ears, Amon watched as Ty looked back and forth between his, Rick’s, and Barrow’s expectant eyes, until at last he nodded. Then Barrow stood up to face them, raising his head and broad shoulders into an upright posture that reminded Amon of the imperturbably confident politician he had once been.

  6

  After Ty had strip-searched Barrow, he asked one of the nearby residents for a private place to talk. They were led by two men into a rift between buildings, up several half-flights of stairs, along a winding squeezeway, and finally into a tatamifoam room. Lit by direct sunbeam pins
through tiny punctures dotting the ceiling, it was spacious enough for all four men to sit in conference.

  “So, as you seem to have already realized for yourself,” said Amon, “I’m the Liquidator who dispatched you. This here is my old partner, and this is one of Xenocyst’s key security operators.” Amon omitted their names though Ty had shouted his out earlier, as Amon had been trained not to give information unnecessarily to the OpScis.

  “Pleasure,” said Barrow with a slight nod to each of them and no detectable sarcasm. “What is it you’d all like to hear from me?”

  “Well, my first question,” said Amon, “is why you were identity assassinated. How exactly did that come about and who do you think set it up?”

  “What a question for the assassin to ask of the assassinated! Though the key question, I suppose. I’ll answer to the best of my ability, but I can’t guarantee you’ll be satisfied because my knowledge is far from complete.”

  “All we ask is what you know,” said Rick.

  “Yes. Well, let me start with the day before I had a run-in with this young gentleman here. It was early in the morning while I was having breakfast. A message suddenly appeared on my eyes. It said simply ‘accept our offer within twenty-four hours or lose it all.’ The moment I had finished reading it, the text burst open like a balloon spraying confetti and instructions popped out. These consisted of two statements, expressed as facts about the future as though their occurrence was already predetermined. First, I would admit to being the owner of the house full of analog detritus in Tsukuda, accept false evidence that showed I had siphoned public money to buy it, and bow out of office in shame. Second, I would accept the transfer of a massive amount of money and the deed to a warehouse full of high-quality anadeto after retiring.

  “Naturally, I assumed this threat and bribe were coming from my political enemies. The Absolute Choice party obviously wanted me out, as my leadership and dare I say charisma threatened to keep them from power while my policies were anathema to their lobbydeology. But the more serious threat was a radical faction within my own Moderate Choice party. Although they had been opposed to me for some time, we had managed to keep them muzzled in the interests of holding our unified government together. I had already fired up this faction’s animosity with my nationalization of urination and defecation, because they were fiscal conservatives and opposed the increase in credicrime fines required to implement it. As I’m sure you two know from following the news over the last few years, I managed to appeal to their punitive leanings by convincing them that the rise in fines would provide stricter retribution for those who violated the law, and this kept them quiet for a time. However, they became vocal again when I announced my plan to nationalize blinking as well, and the situation worsened when someone in my cabinet leaked other plans they were sure to oppose. I’m talking about the further nationalization of breathing and swallowing.”