Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Helen. Your sister’s out of it. Be thankful she’s at peace.”

  “It’s the children! She had to be out of her mind to leave them like that. What if I’m driven out of my mind, Carolyn? What if I think I can’t stand it anymore … ?”

  “I told you I’d pick you up anytime, day or night. I told you I’d bring you here to take you anywhere you wanted to go. You don’t have to stay there.”

  “It’s the children.”

  “I can put you in touch with a network, Helen. They hide mothers and children. We can arrange to have the kids picked up, you picked up, both at the same time.”

  “Oh, I’ve dreamed about that, Carolyn, but it wouldn’t do any good. They’re in special schools! Scott’s attending the American Institute. Jake says it’s for kids who need to be kept quite safe from any improper influences. He means me, of course. I don’t know where the place is, or where Emily is. Even if I could find them, Jake would find us. He’d kill them. He’s told me so.”

  Carolyn heaved a deep breath, silently beating her head against a symbolic wall. She’d been through all this before.

  “He still won’t let you answer the phone? He still checks the phone bill? He still doesn’t let you have any money?”

  “He won’t let me use the phone, no. I’m calling from a public phone half a mile down the road. He calls home now and then, just to be sure I don’t answer. The only money I find is what he leaves in his pockets, and even then I have to be careful because it might be bait. I found the money I used to call you under the cushion of his desk chair. I think he moved us out here just so every call would be long-distance! He figures I’m too proud to call you collect, as though I had any pride left.…”

  “At least let me bring you some money. And a phone card. The bills will come here, he won’t even know.”

  Long silence, then a sob. “All right. There’s a stone lantern down at the entrance road, it has an arched opening on each side. Put some money in there, in the corner, where it doesn’t show. Quarters, Carolyn, please. So I can at least get the operator. Bring me a bottle, too.”

  “Helen! You’re not drinking?”

  “Maybe one or two drinks a week. When things get … impossible.”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow. Has he hurt you?”

  Helen’s voice took on a note of quavering pride. “He doesn’t hit me. I know the rules. That’s how I triumph, knowing the rules well enough not to get hit.”

  “He’ll end up killing you.”

  The ghost of a chuckle. “I’m not afraid of dying, Carolyn. Like they say about seasickness: It’s only the hope of dying that’s keeping me alive.”

  The phone went dead. The line buzzed vacantly in Carolyn’s ear, like a call to forever, waiting to go through. Sighing, she hung up the receiver, hauled herself off the bed, and stalked down the hall to the big bedroom. Hal was sitting against piled pillows, peering at a book.

  “Hi,” she breathed, crawling in beside him.

  “Hi, yourself. To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I’m miserable.”

  “Something on the phone? I heard a distant alarum, a clangor, a tocsin.…”

  “Helen Jagger.”

  “Poor soul,” he said solemnly, meaning it, gathering her up into his strong old arms and kissing her ear. “What has that bastard Jagger done now?”

  “Nothing more than usual. You know, when I first met Helen and Greta, they were as independent and strong as any women I’d ever known. Jagger went after Helen like a terrier after a rat, but why she married him, I’ll never know. And now Greta’s dead and Helen’s just limp, all the starch battered out of her. He doesn’t even need to hit her, he just threatens to hurt the kids and she caves in. He’s got them in some cult school, someplace like that compound in Waco. The American Institute?”

  “An Alliance school? It probably would be like the Branch Davidians in terms of access, but it’s bound to be one hell of a lot bigger.”

  “She doesn’t even have family to turn to, and I can’t help thinking part of it’s my fault, Greta’s death and all.”

  He hugged her again, saying chidingly, “It was a divorce case, Carolyn, plain and simple. We lawyers don’t ordinarily walk into a courtroom expecting to confront Mr. Hyde.”

  “I should have been paying more attention.”

  “You couldn’t have known in advance that Jagger was like that.” Hal removed his glasses, laid them on the bedside table, and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “There aren’t many lawyers who will create evidence out of whole cloth in order to win. Even I didn’t imagine he’d do that, and I had more reason to suspect him than you did.” He extricated his arm from around her, restored his glasses, and swung his legs out of the bed. “Pity I’m not still with the Bureau. Maybe I could get him bumped off.”

  Carolyn plumped her pillow and settled herself. “Is that the proper word usage? Isn’t it something about terminated with extreme prejudice?”

  “That’s more CIA, I think. Oh, hell, I was just an analyst. I was never into that stuff. I probably couldn’t touch Jagger anyhow. Rumor is, Jagger is connected at the top. He’s said to be a protégé of Webster’s.”

  “Webster?” The name was familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

  He stood up and stretched, wincing when the muscles in his leg and back protested. “You saw him one time, love. Remember? First time we met. You in that adorable hat! When Albert was showing you through the Bureau, Webster was with the director.”

  “Oh, of course! The Alliance founder and head honcho.”

  “That’s him. A man who’s lately very cozy with the Vatican, according to Mike Winter. Also very cozy with several Arab states, serving as liaison among all of them.”

  “Liaison for what?”

  “The Vatican wants the help of Islam in carrying out its agenda.”

  She sat up, glaring at him. “What agenda? When did this happen?”

  “Has been happening. For years, sweetness.”

  She threw up her hands, her voice rising: “Stop calling me sweetness and explain what you’re saying!”

  He leaned against the bedpost, assuming a professorial expression. “The imams and the pope made common cause some years ago and have been supporting each other at population conferences and at status-of-women conferences ever since. Back in ninety-five, for instance, the pope and the Arab states moved together to prevent women’s groups from attending a women’s-rights conference in China. They didn’t succeed, but they came close, and they’ve had better luck since. The Vatican has been acting with the Arab states to defeat population-control measures at the UN for ten years or more. And it was the Vatican acting with the Islamic states that defeated the UN women’s educational effort in ninety-eight, the so-called women’s-empowerment crusade. The imams don’t want women empowered. It was Islamic terrorists who bombed the dormitories at Vassar and Wellesley, and the same men had previously blown up girls’ schools in Pakistan and Egypt. They were brought into the country by a certain religious order—guess which one? Capisce?”

  “Where did this come from?”

  “I told you, Mike Winter. He tells me things.”

  “You don’t tell me, evidently!”

  “I thought you knew. Bits and pieces have been in the papers all through the nineties.”

  She knew that. She could remember the bits and pieces, but not this … this planned subversion. She shook her head, angry at herself. “I guess I didn’t … connect it.”

  “Well, Mike found out about the connection to the Vassar-Wellesley bombings a few days ago. He got it from the Israelis, because our own intelligence people have been told to keep their nose out. Which doesn’t surprise me.”

  “You’re saying the FBI is on … on Webster’s side.”

  “Well”—he made an equivocal gesture—“comme ci, comme ça. One of the difficulties of being the good guys is that even open societies have to have secret police, and secret police turn toward repre
ssion as a compass points north.”

  “And Jagger’s one of the bad guys.”

  “He’s an Alliance man.” He leaned forward, stretching, rubbing at his injured leg, which itched. “Which raises the interesting question, are you considering our daughter’s crazy request?”

  She got up, annoyed, not at Hal’s asking but at the subject itself. “Her asking me to defend the Dumpster mama? I’ve been diddling around, not saying yes or no. Stace finally called and jogged me. I’m going to see the accused today. Want to go with me?”

  “Prisons do not greatly enliven my day.”

  “You could keep me company on the drive; you could read some more of whatever you’re reading.…”

  “I was rereading. Sophy’s first book of Women’s Stories.”

  “What got you onto that?”

  “My talk with Mike. In the light of that conversation, Sophy’s books have acquired a certain … ah, prophetic resonance. All these antiwoman factions getting together would have been her worst nightmare. I was wondering how she saw so much of that kind of thing thirty-five years ago? Did she go looking for it?”

  Carolyn walked to the window, forehead furrowed, wishing this conversation were about something else. “Of course she went looking for it; it was what she wanted to know about.”

  “But, still, a woman, alone …”

  “We used to say that. ‘Sophy, you shouldn’t go there, not alone!’ I’d have been scared to death to go some of the places she went, but she’d just smile and set off without a qualm. Of course, she had one thing the rest of us lacked, and that was an almost supernatural facility for languages. She picked them up in days. She could take on local color, too, wherever she was, so as not to seem a stranger. If it meant wearing head-to-toe black wrappers, she’d do it.”

  “She sure had a nose for tragedy.”

  “It was more a nose for …”

  “For what?”

  “I’m trying to remember. She told me once she was looking for the basic imbalance. Something that was wrong, not natural.”

  “That’s what I always thought about her.”

  “Sophy? That she was unbalanced?”

  “No. That she wasn’t … natural. You know, as a man, there’s a kind of … oh, recognition signal you get from women, and I mean all women, even those who aren’t interested in you in a sexual way. Maybe just a lifted eyebrow or a smile or a word said a certain way, whether they’re eight or eighty. It’s not a come-on. It’s a sort of categorization, a mental filing. You know what I mean?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well, Sophy never filed me as a male. She accepted me, just as she did you, but for all she cared, we were both the same sex.”

  “How funny,” she murmured, trying to adjust her image of Sophy to include what Hal had just said.

  “Definitely odd,” he emphasized, reaching for his cane. “Carolyn, dear love, if you will scramble me some eggs for breakfast, with some of that Jack cheese and some green chiles, please, I’ll keep you company today.”

  “If your leg’s well enough.”

  “The leg notwithstanding. That’s part of the covenant—faithfulness, like a good dog.” He grinned at her. “Me and old Hector.”

  “Both so well trained. Such good dogs.” She gave him a hug, then rubbed his back and shoulders while he made appreciative noises. “Do come, Hal. I feel all sort of adrift. I don’t really want to do this, but I’m afraid I’m getting sucked in. I hate it, I really do. I hated it quite badly enough before Helen called, and now I really hate it.”

  “What happened to Greta Wilson wasn’t your fault,” he said again.

  “Dear old Halcyon, I know it wasn’t, not really. But, damn, inside me somewhere it feels like it.”

  By ten o’clock they were well south of Santa Fe on the way to the New Detention Building, built three years before to replace the old prison. When Carolyn found a place to park that was shaded by the building, she asked, “Want to come inside?”

  “I’ve seen it, thank you.” He picked up his book and settled himself, winking at her. For an ex-law-enforcement type, he was protective of his perceptions, sometimes almost squeamish. Hal said you could see enough dirt without looking, so why go looking? She left him with a wave, forced her lagging footsteps to become a brisk walk as she went through to reception, then lost all her purposeful momentum outside the steel gate, where the guard behind the counter poked at a computer and peered nearsightedly at her HoloID.

  “Lawyer?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re not the lawyer I’ve got here.”

  “An attorney was appointed to handle her case. Ms. Ashaler has asked to see me. She has the right to an attorney of her own choosing.”

  The guard sneered, started to say something, then caught himself as another guard came into the space behind the counter.

  “All carry-ins on the counter, please,” he muttered.

  She hoisted her briefcase onto the counter, opened it, let him look through her purse. No guns. No knives. No nail files that could be used as weapons. “Room G,” he growled at her.

  The gate opened with appropriately ominous noises. She thought people who designed prisons must have manuals specifying suitable noises: echoey, metallic resonance; deadened thump of footsteps. The corridor she walked along was a case in point: a threatening, blind people-pipe, with anonymous metal doors opening at either side. On her left, centered in a newly painted stretch of wall, stood a wire glass double door, high and wide, the thick glass only slightly obscuring the view into the room beyond, where cells had once been stacked three high around an open light well. The sign on the door now said VAULTS—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  Behind her someone cleared his throat.

  “Ms. Crespin? Carolyn?”

  She turned to confront a familiar face, a guard she’d frequently encountered in her lawyering days. “Josh! What are you doing here?”

  “Transferred out here from the old jail. You wanna see the cold storage?”

  She looked around herself, almost furtively. “Would it get you in trouble?”

  “Nah. Kinfolk come here all the time. Another year or two, they’ll be taking kids through here on field trips from school. Only reason they have guards is they’re worried about the crazies, turning off the pods, you know.”

  She did know. There had been a lot of wild talk from the civil libertarians who had protested that deactivation and hibernation came within the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment. The facts seemed to indicate otherwise. There was no prison rape of those sentenced to being STOPPED—that is, deactivated—or those sentenced to being SLEPT—hibernated. There was no cruelty from guards or other inmates. There was no education in more efficient criminality. There was no brutalizing. There were no escapes. Prisoners did get older, of course. Joints stiffened and skin wrinkled, hair receded and turned gray, just as though the sleeper had been up and about. Chronic health conditions didn’t change. It was not a reprieve; one lost the same chunk of one’s life one would have lost in prison, but when the sentence was over, one was at least mentally and psychologically undamaged … well, unchanged. Older but no wiser, shrieked the libertarians. Older, but otherwise no worse off, said the courts. Plus, the psychologists murmured, testosterone levels would drop as sleepers aged, making them less likely to be troublesome in the future.

  Josh held the door open for her, and after another quick look around, she went through into an area that felt momentarily familiar. It couldn’t be familiar. She’d never been in this room. She had, however, seen pictures. She’d seen documentaries. She wasn’t surprised by the ranked tanks, or pods, hundreds of them, aisles and decks of them. She found herself counting, estimating. The room was between two and three hundred feet long, separated horizontally into three decks by heavy expanded metal flooring. On each deck the pods were stacked three high, with three aisles separating two double stacks and two single stacks against the sidewalls. Five or six thousand pods, give or take
, each pod occupying about a tenth of the cubic feet a jail prisoner would have needed. Each pod was labeled with the name and age of the inhabitant, the crime of which he’d been convicted, the date of release. Each held a steadily glowing green light and a digital clock, counting down the years, months, days. They’d been tanking people for how long? The research had been secret; it had been going on for years but was announced only in ninety-seven. The government made the manufacture of hardware a top priority that same year, with federal loans for conversion of the prison systems. The defense industry switched from tanks and planes to pods, saying thankful prayers under its breath, and a new federal law allowed people sentenced to more than two years under the old penalties to be SLEPT instead of imprisoned. A little less than two years, they’d been tanking people. So many of them, in such a short time!

  She was surprised by the sound and the smell. It was damp in the room. She stepped closer to the right-hand rank, peering through a faceplate at the sleeper within. Young. God, so young. Sallow skin. Eyes closed, lashes fringing the cheekbones. Mouth relaxed, calm. Violent crimes against children, said the label. Twenty-five years. Release date, FAT, February 25, 2025.

  “FAT?” she asked.

  “For approved treatment. If there is one. By then.”

  “A treatment for what?”

  “For whatever made him choke those two little girls and then rape them.”

  “And if there isn’t a treatment?”

  “He stays here until there is a treatment or the green light goes off, whichever comes first.”

  “The light goes out if they die?”

  “Right. This don’t keep them young, it just keeps them going.”

  She wandered down the line of pods. Fully half bore the letters. FAT. Why hadn’t she known about FAT? Or had she? Known about it and forgotten it, purposefully.

  She turned back, on the other side of the aisle. These cubicles were shorter, just big enough for a person reclining in a rocking frame. Monitors were fastened to head, belly, arms. A tube snaked from a gauge and disappeared into the mouth. From the neck down the body was concealed beneath a light rigid covering, but one could see the tubes that ran from beneath it. Eyes stared straight ahead, but not a muscle moved.