Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Yanking unsuccessfully at Dr. Yuan’s trousers, the Major Commissar tugged again, only realizing on his third attempt that the doctor was still plumbed into a tiny waste unit attached to the back of her belt. It was smaller than standard and looked expensive, but then anything better than regulation looked expensive to Chuang Tzu.

  “Disengage,” he told the box.

  Nothing happened.

  “Do it,” he ordered, which was pointless. All personal systems on the ship operated on owner order only. Not because that was all these systems could manage but because the original Commissar General believed in direct culpability. All ship-based systems, including personal ones, recorded all orders, which had to be direct.

  That way, if something went wrong there was never any question as to whom could be held directly and unequivocally accountable.

  “Major…”

  The Colonel Commissar’s voice was there again.

  “Madame?”

  “Your life readout.”

  The tiny diode below his breast badge now burned a dull orange. “Oxygen deprivation,” said a readout on his wrist.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Preparing the Doctor for cryo.”

  “Still?” The Commissar Colonel sounded exasperated and, below that, she sounded scared. “What’s the problem?”

  “Dr. Yuan’s wearing a waste box.”

  “Too bad.” Lan Kuei’s voice was cold. “Chill her down as she is. Then get yourself up here and renew your converter.”

  “Yes, madame.” Chuang Tzu looked from the half-naked woman to the waiting pod, its lid open and ready. He knew that to freeze the Doctor as she was meant death. An event which would never intrude on Dr. Yuan’s fragile consciousness. And this mattered to Commissar Major Chuang Tzu because it was his grandmother’s belief that a death not met was no death at all.

  Slicing up and around the top of each trouser leg, the Major Commissar removed both, then hacked up towards the Doctor’s groin. When necessary he flipped the woman over, turning her this way and that, like an old-fashioned tailor shuffling cloth or a fish wife filleting carp.

  Chuang Tzu worked quickly until all that remained was a floating box tethered directly into her spine. From the bottom of the box fed two narrow tubes, one entering her anus, the other splitting in two, the first catheter entering her bladder, the second her womb. Dr. Yuan’s mistake had been to prepare herself for hibernation instead of cryo.

  “Look at your light.”

  Chuang did. Orange, going on red.

  “Is the doctor safely frozen?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Then get yourself up here.”

  “On my way.”

  Sliding the Doctor’s body into its pod, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu slammed the lid. All that remained to do was run the sequences necessary to chill it. “You know how to do this?” he asked the machine.

  It lit for yes.

  “Do it,” he said.

  The pod next door opened as ordered, lights dancing through a start-up sequence. Slots in the side revealed themselves and the snake-like tubes, which were really something else altogether, blurred into smoke and became familiar: clear tubes ending in long needles.

  Chuang Tzu stripped effortlessly, hooking one foot under a handle to steady himself. The jacket he removed was an improvement on Kevlar, self-cleaning, airtight but willing to let his skin breathe in everything except vacuum.

  “Major Commissar Chuang Tzu,” he told the pod.

  “Confirm.”

  The young Chinese officer put his hand on a ceramic plate and felt nothing as it lit briefly then darkened just as swiftly.

  “Preparing for Koebe process.”

  “Proceed,” he told the machine, pleased to discover that his voice was almost steady.

  The needles were waiting for him. One entered his arm at the elbow, pumping in sedative, followed almost immediately by an anaesthetic. And then sleep came in a crash of waves and the smell of summer skies.

  Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was swimming in a waterfall on the slopes above his grandfather’s farm when the pod’s first blade cut his throat, a small incision wide enough to take a tube. A second blade opened the femoral artery and pumping began, glycol entering his jugular as blood drained from his groin. Chuang Tzu’s stomach was then pumped and his lower bowel flushed clean.

  In all the process took three minutes.

  And while Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei gave orders for the SZ Loyal Prince to draw closer to the nearest wall and wondered what had happened to the last remaining member of her crew, Chuang Tzu’s pod reached the end of its preparations and flooded with liquid nitrogen, reducing its occupant to the fragility of glass.

  CHAPTER 20

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  “I did it.” The boy’s words were loud enough to turn every head in the police station. Behind the desk a man looked up. Moz didn’t recognize his rank but Mustapha Zil was a sergeant on secondment from Tangiers, part of a plan to build bridges between the two cities. He’d been in Marrakech for three months and still found the heat unbearable.

  “Tell me,” said the Sergeant, running a finger under the rim of his collar, “what exactly did you do?”

  “Took the watch.”

  Sergeant Zil raised his eyebrows. “Which watch?” he said.

  Moz stopped, thought about it and started again. “You’ve arrested a girl,” he said. “From the Mellah…She’s called Malika,” Moz added, forgetting her other name in his panic. It would have to do.

  Sergeant Zil skimmed down a handwritten list. In Tangiers, all crimes were typed onto cards and filed. All the same, he found the entry.

  “What of it?”

  “She didn’t take the watch.”

  The Sergeant looked at the boy. “You’re saying you took it?” And Moz wondered why the man behind the desk sighed.

  “Ahmed,” Sergeant Zil called to a new recruit. “Take this boy to room three, then wait to see if they want you to bring him back again…Go with the man,” he told the boy. “Don’t be frightened.”

  It was a fairly stupid thing to say because everything Sergeant Zil had seen in his last twelve weeks suggested the boy should be very frightened indeed.

  At the end of a ground-floor corridor, towards the rear of the police station, sat a row of interview rooms. Number three was the smallest, cloudy with cigarette smoke and already crowded. In one corner stood a young officer in khaki doing nothing. At a table sat two nasrani, a short-haired blonde woman in a silk blouse so sheer it revealed her breasts and a dark, hawk-faced boy with spiky black hair and some kind of hoop stuck through his ear.

  Except for the difference in hair colour they might have been brother and sister, though the woman was less thin than the boy and wore white slacks to go with her blouse, while he seemed to be dressed entirely in black.

  Standing opposite them was Malika, crying. A plain-clothes officer stood behind her, one hand gripping her neck.

  “He says he took the watch.”

  Major Abbas looked round, obviously furious.

  “This boy, Excellency.” The recruit sounded apologetic. “He says he took the watch.”

  “Your name?”

  “Moz,” said Moz.

  He watched the Major pull a nickname from his memory.

  “The Turk,” Major Abbas said and Malika looked up from her tears. No one had called Moz that for a while. Not since the afternoon behind La Koutoubia when he’d stamped on Hassan’s stomach.

  Moz nodded.

  “You stole the watch?”

  He nodded again.

  “But its owner saw this girl steal it.” Major Abbas gestured dismissively towards Malika. His hands now hung by his sides and Malika was busy rubbing her neck, trying to free it from the after-burn of the Major’s grip. Opposite her sat the two foreigners looking unhappier by the second.

  “Does someone want to tell me what’s going on?” The blonde woman spoke English, her question hanging
unheard in the smoky, overheated room.

  “You’re sure you took it?” Major Abbas looked serious, as well he might. Stealing from tourists was a crime treated severely in Marrakech.

  The teenaged boy could get five years breaking rocks in a prison peopled with thugs three times his age. The city might have changed since the old days, when naked prisoners were sometimes made to impale themselves on broken bottles, but the change was not so great that the boy would come out the person he’d gone in.

  “What is going on?” This time Celia Vere’s question was loud enough to shock the interview room into silence.

  “They’re deciding how many times to whip her,” said Moz, before anyone else had a chance to answer. He spoke broken English. “Which is unfair, because you’ve made them arrest the wrong person.”

  “Wrong…?”

  “I took the watch,” Moz said.

  “But Jake saw her.” Celia Vere looked worried.

  “No,” said Moz, “he thought he did. The watch was already gone. Malika was taking food from your plate.”

  “Why?” said the thin boy with the weird earring, although when Moz looked carefully he realized the dark-haired foreigner was too old to be a boy and that he was wearing make-up. “Why take scraps from Celia’s plate?”

  The stare Moz gave Jake Razor was withering. One Moz had seen used by imams in the mosque when answers were wrong. “Look at her,” he ordered. “Why do you think she was stealing food?”

  Catching Malika’s eye, Moz sucked in his cheeks and after a second’s hesitation Malika did the same, standing there with hollow cheeks and tears drying on her thin face. A bruise closed one of her amber eyes, but that looked old.

  “She’s hungry,” said Jake.

  Moz turned to find Major Abbas watching him, a weird smile on his lips.

  “Children in this city die every day,” the Major said flatly. He spoke French, which only Celia understood, and his tone was such he could have been discussing the heat. “They die of hunger or lack of medicine, even of lack of schooling. You’d be surprised what can kill people in this city.” He looked from Moz to the foreigners.

  “You accept you got the wrong child?”

  Celia nodded doubtfully.

  “Okay,” said the Major, “so we’re releasing the girl.” He spoke to Malika. “You can go,” he said.

  The girl just looked at him.

  “Go,” said Major Abbas, “before I change my mind.”

  When the door banged shut, the Major reached into a drawer and pulled out a fistful of forms, dumping them in front of the nasrani couple. “You need to fill these out and make a sworn statement.”

  “Saying what?”

  “That you were robbed. Without this we can’t send the boy to prison.”

  Moz watched the woman’s eyes trail from the pieces of paper to his face and then to the Major. For a moment it felt like he could look right inside her head, into the mind of a nasrani.

  The two foreigners looked at each other.

  “Life’s too short,” said the man.

  “Plus I got my watch back.” Celia Vere pulled back her silk sleeve to show a gold Omega. “And it was stupid of me to leave it on the table like that. I should stop taking it off when I make notes.”

  “You’re a journalist?”

  Something in Major Abbas’s voice worried the woman. “Mostly a photographer,” she said. “A little bit of writing, now and then. Rolling Stone, Sounds, NME. I even did a short piece on punk for the Mail last month, though I probably shouldn’t admit that.”

  When Jake Razor grinned he showed broken teeth.

  “We’re going to leave it,” said Celia, dismissing Moz, the interview room and Major Abbas with an all-inclusive wave of one hand. “I think we’ll just find our hotel.”

  “Your decision,” the Major said. “I’ll still need to see your passports.” One was American, the other British. The Major flicked through to check for visas and entry or exit stamps. The blue passport was new and had only one stamp, Casablanca. The red one was heavy with stamps going back several years, starting with Mexico.

  “Everything all right?” For the first time that afternoon Jake Razor sounded something other than bored.

  Major Abbas nodded at the passport. “Be careful,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “About being here,” the Major said. “About drugs and drink, about not offending people, about who you and your girlfriend accuse of stealing things…”

  “But we really like this place,” said Jake, and Major Abbas sighed.

  CHAPTER 21

  Lampedusa, Monday 2 July

  “What’s he doing?” said Specialist Stone, mostly making conversation. They were four hours into a night shift and her companion had spent much of this drumming his fingers impatiently on a table. He wanted his bed, MTV and oblivion. This shift was Master Sergeant Saez’s way of telling the man he probably shouldn’t have kicked the prisoner when Miles Alsdorf was there.

  “Eh?” The thickset marine glanced up from his fingers and checked the screen. On it Prisoner Zero was knelt where his bed should be, his head almost touching the floor, his fingers scrabbling at something unseen.

  “Reckon he’s lost it?”

  “Fucked if I know. When did this start?”

  “About five minutes ago.” Specialist Stone was lying. She had no idea when Prisoner Zero had begun this latest routine. She’d been too busy watching Corporal Thompson out of the corner of her eye.

  “Wake the Master Sergeant,” said Corporal Thompson, and Specialist Stone looked at him, then saluted. “Yes, sir,” she said. Her smile lasted most of the way to the Sergeant’s quarters.

  At Miles Alsdorf’s suggestion the marines had allowed Prisoner Zero a new mattress and blanket. Well, an old mattress really, stuffed with horsehair and worn down to its warp and weft along one seam. It was stained in the way old mattresses seem to get stained with a lifetime’s worth of precipitous periods, spilt coffee, babies made, born and then grieved over.

  Prisoner Zero wasn’t sure why that mattress had been chosen. Maybe it was all the marines could find at short notice or perhaps Sergeant Saez really believed it was the most disgusting thing possible. If so, he should have seen the squat in Amsterdam.

  The blanket which came with the mattress was US issue, the colour of goose shit and machine-sewn along all four edges. A label glued to one corner claimed it was made from recycled plastic bottles, thus helping the environment.

  Since it was July and the room in which the cage lived had only one window and this was sealed shut, the winter-weight blanket was as useless as it was unnecessary; but Miles Alsdorf had demanded his client be given a blanket and a mattress and Colonel Borgenicht had seen to it that he had.

  So tightly was the mattress squeezed between the sides of Prisoner Zero’s cage that it could only be edged out a little at a time. The prisoner then had to lift free the metal frame which supported it, raising one end until he could manoeuvre the other away from the brackets welded around one end of the cage to support his bed. All of this he had to do in silence.

  The floor beneath his bed was steel mesh, plastic-coated like the rest and soldered at the edges to the frame of the cage. The darkness had suggested he begin his tunnel under the bed, where four tiles met. To help himself remember this, Prisoner Zero had scratched a cross into his arm to mark the inner edges of the four tiles and then run a circle around that point to indicate the tunnel.

  Having cut free the tiles, he would need to tear his way through the mesh on which he knelt before he could prise the tiles from their setting. This created so many problems that Prisoner Zero decided he’d better worry about them later.

  The difficulty for Prisoner Zero was that he needed space to walk in order to focus. Itchy inside his own skin, that was how one girl had put it a very long time ago. Nail him down, sit him in a café with a latte, a spliff or that day’s paper and he would drift away into dreams, complex interplays of e
vents misremembered, rewritten memories and occasional flashes of something Prisoner Zero used to think of as genius.

  In the days before he realized he didn’t rate that word.

  “You think we ought to stop him?”

  Corporal Thompson reached for a can of Pepsi Max, ripped the tab and shook his head. “You heard the Sergeant. The guy’s nuts. Get over it.” Master Sergeant Saez had been and gone, barely stopping long enough to glance at the screen.

  Staying with the picture for only as long as it took him to finish his Pepsi, Corporal Thompson switched his attention back to the DC comic in front of him, leaving Prisoner Zero to scrabble helplessly against the mesh of the floor.

  “This is getting bad,” Specialist Stone said, when another five minutes had gone. “We should pass it up the line.”

  “Feel free.” Corporal Thompson nodded at the house phone. “I’m sure Sergeant Saez will be delighted.”

  Ten minutes after that Specialist Stone came to a decision. One that would have had her cleaning shithouses for the rest of her career if Master Sergeant Saez had found out about it. She telephoned the Lieutenant.

  “Sir, it’s the prisoner. He’s trying to tear up the floor of his cage…”

  “With his fingers, sir.”

  “No sir, he’s not getting away.”

  “Yes sir, the steel mesh is still in place.”

  “The guards are still outside his door, sir.”

  “Why did I call you? It was my mistake, sir.” Specialist Stone stood very straight as she said this, listening while Lieutenant Ashcroft provided his own answer.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Told you,” Corporal Thompson said, passing her that week’s issue of Spider-Man.

  Inside the cage the prisoner was wrestling with the steel frame that supported his mattress, prior to dragging that mattress back into position against a side wall so it could hide the entrance to his tunnel. He’d cut free the grout from around the tiles, just as the darkness instructed, and made a start at worrying his way through the mesh.