It was sheer bad luck that they broke into a shaft from below, and that the shaft was filled with armed foremen; and worse luck that Jakob was working the robot, so that he was the first to leap out firing his hand drill like a weapon, and the only one to get struck by return fire before Naomi threw a knotchopper past him and blew the foremen to shreds. They got him on a car and rolled the robot back and pulled up the track and cut off in a new direction, leaving another Boesman behind to destroy evidence of their passing.
So they were all racing around with the blood and stuff still covering them and the cows mooing in distress and Jakob breathing through clenched teeth in double time, and only Hester and Oliver could sit in the car with him and try to tend him, ripping away the pants from a leg that was all cut up. Hester took a hand drill to cauterize the wounds that were bleeding hard, but Jakob shook his head at her, neck muscles bulging out. "Got the big artery inside of the thigh," he said through his teeth.
Hester hissed. "Come here," she croaked at Solly and the rest. "Stop that and come here!"
They were in a mass of broken quartz, the fractured clear crystals all pink with oxidation. The robot continued drilling away, the air cylinder hissed, the cows mooed. Jakob's breathing was harsh and somehow all of them were also breathing in the same way, irregularly, too fast; so that as his breathing slowed and calmed, theirs did too. He was lying back in the sleeping car, on a bed of hay, staring up at the fractured sparkling quartz ceiling of their tunnel, as if he could see far into it. "All these different kinds of rock," he said, his voice filled with wonder and pain. "You see, the moon itself was the world, once upon a time, and the Earth its moon; but there was an impact, and everything changed. "
They cut a small side passage in the quartz and left Jakob there, so that when they filled in their tunnel as they moved on he was left behind, in his own deep crypt. And from then on the moon for them was only his big tomb, rolling through space till the sun itself died, as he had said it someday would.
Oliver got them back on a course, feeling radically uncertain of his navigational calculations now that Jakob was not there to nod over his shoulder to approve them. Dully he gave Naomi and Freeman the coordinates for Selene. "But what will we do when we get there?" Jakob had never actually made that clear. Find the leaders of the city, demand justice for the miners? Kill them? Get to the rockets of the great magnetic rail accelerators, and hijack one to Earth? Try to slip unnoticed into the populace?
"You leave that to us," Naomi said. "Just get us there. " And he saw a light in Naomi's and Freeman's eyes that hadn't been there before. It reminded him of the thing that had chased him in the dark, the thing that even Jakob hadn't been able to explain; it frightened him.
So he set the course and they tunneled on as fast as they ever had. They never sang and they rarely talked; they threw themselves at the rock, hurt themselves in the effort, returned to attack it more fiercely than before. When he could not stave off sleep Oliver lay down on Jakob's dried blood, and bitterness filled him like a block of the anorthosite they wrestled with.
They were running out of hay. They killed a cow, ate its roasted flesh. The water recycler's filters were clogging, and their water smelled of urine. Hester listened to the seismometer as often as she could now, and she thought they were being pursued. But she also thought they were approaching Selene's underside.
Naomi laughed, but it wasn't like her old laugh. "You got us there, Oliver. Good work. "
Oliver bit back a cry.
"Is it big?" Solly asked.
Hester shook her head. "Doesn't sound like it. Maybe twice the diameter of the Great Bole, not more. "
"Good," Freeman said, looking at Naomi.
"But what will we do?" Oliver said.
Hester and Naomi and Freeman and Solly all turned to look at him, eyes blazing like twelve chunks of pure promethium. "We've got eight Boesmans left," Freeman said in a low voice. "All the rest of the explosives add up to a couple more. I'm going to set them just right. It'll be my best work ever, my masterpiece. And we'll blow Selene right off into space. "
It took them ten shifts to get all the Boesmans placed to Freeman's and Naomi's satisfaction, and then another three to get far enough down and to one side to be protected from the shock of the blast, which luckily for them was directly upward against something that would give, and therefore would have less recoil.
Finally they were set, and they sat in the sleeping car in a circle of six, around the pile of components that sat under the master detonator. For a long time they just sat there cross-legged, breathing slowly and staring at it. Staring at each other, in the dark, in perfect redblack clarity. Then Naomi put both arms out, placed her hands carefully on the detonator's button. Mute Elijah put his hands on hers—then Freeman, Hester, Solly, finally Oliver—just in the order that Jakob had taken them. Oliver hesitated, feeling the flesh and bone under his hands, the warmth of his companions. He felt they should say something but he didn't know what it was.
"Seven," Hester croaked suddenly.
"Six," Freeman said.
Elijah blew air through his teeth, hard.
"Four," said Naomi.
"Three!" Solly cried.
"Two," Oliver said.
And they all waited a beat, swallowing hard, waiting for the moon and the man in the moon to speak to them. Then they pressed down on the button.
They smashed at it with their fists, hit it so violently they scarcely felt the shock of the explosion.
They had put on vacuum suits and were breathing pure oxygen as they came up the last tunnel, clearing it of rubble. A great number of other shafts were revealed as they moved into the huge conical cavity left by the Boesmans; tunnels snaked away from the cavity in all directions, so that they had sudden long vistas of blasted tubes extending off into the depths of the moon they had come out of. And at the top of the cavity, struggling over its broken edge, over the rounded wall of a new crater. . . .
It was black. It was not like rock. Spread across it was a spill of white points, some bright, some so faint that they disappeared into the black if you looked straight at them. There were thousands of these white points, scattered over a black dome that was not a dome. . . . And there in the middle, almost directly overhead: a blue and white ball. Big, bright, blue, distant, rounded; half of it bright as a foreman's flash, the other half just a shadow. . . . It was clearly round, a big ball in the. . . sky. In the sky.
Wordlessly they stood on the great pile of rubble ringing the edge of their hole. Half buried in the broken anorthosite were shards of clear plastic, steel struts, patches of green grass, fragments of metal, an arm, broken branches, a bit of orange ceramic. Heads back to stare at the ball in the sky, at the astonishing fact of the void, they scarcely noticed these things.
A long time passed, and none of them moved except to look around. Past the jumble of dark trash that had mostly been thrown off in a single direction, the surface of the moon was an immense expanse of white hills, as strange and glorious as the stars above. The size of it all! Oliver had never dreamed that everything could be so big.
"The blue must be promethium," Solly said, pointing up at the Earth. "they've covered the whole Earth with the blue we mined. "
Their mouths hung open as they stared at it. "How far away is it?" Freeman asked. No one answered.
"There they all are," Solly said. He laughed harshly. "I wish I could blow up the Earth too!"
He walked in circles on the rubble of the crater's rim. The rocket rails, Oliver thought suddenly, must have been in the direction Freeman had sent the debris. Bad luck. The final upward sweep of them poked up out of the dark dirt and glass. Solly pointed at them. His voice was loud in Oliver's ears, it strained the intercom: "Too bad we can't fly to the Earth, and blow it up too! I wish we could!"
And mute Elijah took a few steps, leaped off the mound into the sky, took a swipe with one hand at the blue ball. They laughed at him. "Almost got it, didn't you!" Freeman and Solly trie
d themselves, and then they all did: taking quick runs, leaping, flying slowly up through space, for five or six or seven seconds, making a grab at the sky overhead, floating back down as if in a dream, to land in a tumble, and try it again. . . . It felt wonderful to hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.
After a while they sat down on the new crater's rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of "Bucket" and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight—earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome glass sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.
"What do you think they'll do with us when they get here?" Solly asked.
"Kill us," Hester croaked.
"Or put us back to work," Naomi added.
Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.
Sacrament
by Matt Williamson
Matt Williamson's fiction has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine, Gulf Coast, The Portland Review, Ruminator, and The Cimarron Review. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he's currently working on his first novel.
Ever watch TV and think the ads are funnier than the sitcom they interrupted? Or see a beautiful photo in a magazine, only to wonderingly discover it's an advertisement? Moments like these blur the boundaries between art and advertising, a borderline that grows increasingly unclear in this era of corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Matt Williamson spins a world where art and advertising have collided on such a large scale that a Nike art project can fill Times Square, and an Apple light show can be seen from outer space. The world is loaded with art-advertising objects so massive and inescapable that an international war has erupted over its imperialist presence. Or perhaps that's just the view of our protagonist, a character who maintains his own uncertain boundary between art and his life's work as an intelligence extractor.
It's not an easy craft, pulling information out of the unwilling. It takes special tools, a unique skillset and a sense of intuition that can't be taught. It's a gift. A talent. It's easy to see why some people might call torture an artform.
But it's only in a truly broken world that anyone would.
Bones are not organs, under the Protocols. I've got that stuck up on the wall in the locker room, the briefing room, big signs, all caps: BONES ARE NOT ORGANS.
That leaves a lot of running room. The kneecap? What you can do with the kneecap? That alone will get you farther than you need to go, in almost every case. The kneecap. The chin. The lowest knuckle on the forefinger. Those are
my favorite bones.
I always say, you can tell my guys in a crowd. From their hands.
The trick is, can you keep him lucid. Can you keep Ali sharply focused on the Program all the way through. Part of it is physical control, part of it is drugs, and part of it, I say a little facetiously but not totally facetiously, is artistry: the artistry of the lead interrogator. Before the pinpoints, before Suspensions, we couldn't keep a guy from passing out. Wake him up with ammonia, it's not the same as having him alert. Now we've got pinpoint synthetics that allow sustained equilibrium. No fainting, no grogginess, no euphoria. It isn't quite the same as True Awake; Dr. Ghose calls it a simulacrum. It's better than True, in some ways. Ali's awake, sans certain defenses. With catheters and drips, we can preserve that balance—not for hours, but weeks, months. Last week, I left a Session, went home, played kickball with my son, dinner with my wife, long night's sleep, woke up, breakfast, walk the dog, read the paper, when I come back in, Ali's still going from the night before. With the pinpoints, we don't have to take the Rests, and there's not the same concern about organic damage.
That's the drug side. Part two is, the control technologies, and some of the advances over there. The tech stuff's done a lot to change the playing field. The new Chairs don't just offer refined muscular control; we actually have retinal. When I peel the skin back, when I kiss the edges of the F1 joint with my drill, Ali's going to be paying close attention. And because of the synthetics, he's not in la-la land; he's tracking, he's alert, and he's ready to talk.
We're careful to stay on the right side of the line. I've referred three men for crossing that line. Dishonorables in every case. It's something we take seriously. Even without the Protocols, I'd tell my teams: nothing that results in death or organ failure. Because it's lazy, because it's counterproductive. Because it misses the point. The promise of survival: that's everything. The promise of emerging intact. If you don't understand that aspect, you won't understand Deep Interrogation—I don't call it Heavy, I call it Deep—and that lack of understanding's going to show up in your Usable Intel numbers.
The other reason's trust. When you do the cowboy shit, you might break through some walls, but other walls are shutting up tighter than before. The new model, we do much more than break the subject. Break Ali's will, reduce him to a state of dependence, we do that, but it's just step one, the first pivot point. In any interrogation, there are multiple pivot points. The first is when Ali discovers he no longer has the power to end his life. Everything before that moment is pre-interrogation, as far as I'm concerned. That's why, in the Chair, we keep him ventilated and catheterized. We decide whether and when you eat, shit, piss, breathe—and we can keep you here as long as we like. And we can. We can keep these guys alive forever.
Not literally—not yet. That's one of my dreams: the replenishers, the Suspensions—push them to the point where we can squeeze these guys indefinitely. We're on our way. It won't happen in my lifetime, probably, but someday, yes. Keep Ali in the Chair thirty, forty, a hundred years. I'm not kidding. Ghose is doing stuff that's going to change the medical sciences forever, forget about interrogations. And the longer you keep these guys, the more you can do with them. Their reality is changing every minute, every hour. At 90 days, you aren't looking at the same Ali you had at 30. At 30, he's still fighting you, in some small part of himself, whether he knows it or not. By 90, 150, 200, you have the power of a God.
That's why we welcome hunger strikes. That's why we welcome suicide attempts. You can tell Ali, you'll be here till your hair's as gray as mine, but it's just talk until he makes a move. That's why it works for us when Ali tries to kill himself. It's a teaching moment. Suicide we don't allow. Starvation we don't allow. Ali wrapping his head in a bedsheet noose is Ali testing the boundaries, feeling out the limits of his field of control. Ali chewing off his tongue is Ali testing the limits. And what he finds, in every case, is exactly what we said he'd find. There's one way out of this, and it's through us.
But that, as I say, is only the first part of our work. When you break a subject, you get the stuff he wants to keep from you. A Deep Interrogator's after more. We want to get inside the memory and experience of a subject—get inside and have a long look around. Look, listen, smell. And we get everything: childhood, adolescence, grief, anger, fantasies and phobias. We get the transient moments
and impressions that may not seem, in themselves, to hold any strategic value, but which, in combination with a thousand other such impressions, taken from a hundred other guys, form a kind of tapestry—or, as Ghose puts it, a vivid four-dimensional map—of daily life in extremist enclaves. You can think of the new model, then, as a way of getting access to the peripheral perceptions. Ali's no longer the author of his story; he no longer gets to judge what's worth our knowing.
I'm not afraid to talk about it. It's a tricky area. Interrogation of Confirmed Innocents. It's complicated, and there are good arguments on both sides.
Defense knows what its policy is, certainly. To some extent, we'll follow that. Certainly, we obey the Protocols. We'll track the White Papers to a point. And then, to some extent, we'll go our own way. There's a degree of autonomy. But the short answer is, yes. If there's usable intel, we will interrogate. We don't look to Culpability as an Entrance Criterion.
That doesn't mean we don't wrestle with it. We make evaluations on a case-by-case basis.
Last year, after the Ramadan attacks, the decision was made to go ahead with a Deep Program on a suite of CIs. Before we initiated that Program, we did ask ourselves, what are our obligations here. In the end, the determination was made to go ahead. And I stand by the decision. Why? Because we found the bomb. That's not to say it's simple—and there will be some people for whom that's not enough. Find the bomb, save a couple thousand lives, that's not enough, and I respect that. Where you are on that issue is, I think, largely an ethical matter, and something that will differ for you, depending on who you are personally. For me, the Objective is decisive. Without the CIs, the bomb explodes. The target was a metro station in central DC, which is maybe something to consider.
Different Guidelines will apply, of course, if it's a CI in the Chair. That's literally—as in, there's a separate set of Guidelines printed off, everybody has a copy—and also in the—maybe just the attitude you take into the interrogation room.
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