Edward Llewellyn - [Douglas Convolution 03]

by Prelude to Chaos (epub)

  PRELUDE TO CHAOS

  EDWARD LLEWELLYN

  SAW BOOKS, INC.

  Donald A. Woliheim. Publisher 1633 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019

  Prologue

  The Atlantic rollers, lashed by the storm winds of the equinox, thundered onto the rocks below the Pen and flung their spray against its walls. Working high on the radio tower, I paused to taste the salt on my lips, watch the gulls wheeling in the updrafts, and look out to sea. For over three years, ever since I had been sentenced, these brief interludes wben I climbed to adjust antenna couplings were my only glimpses of the outside world, my only sight of the desolation surrounding the last Federal Penitentiary in the United States.

  The last top-security prison on the continent; the final masterpiece of the prison-architect’s art. It stood alone, brooding and massive, at the tip of a barren peninsula. To the north, tides were racing into the Bay of Fundy, to the west, a rocky neck of stunted trees and coarse scrub merged into the forests of Maine, to the south, the coast was a curve of white breakers and distant headlands. And out to sea, to the east, night was rising from the Atlantic Ocean. All around me was desolation, a desolation which separated two hundred million peaceable Americans from wild animals like myself.

  An octagon of permacrete walls, moats, and watchtowers, of veralloy gates and fences, laced with every sophisticated device the twenty-first century could produce to keep our cage secure. For many kilometers the very soil was contaminated with the residue from physical and chemical weapons, the seas littered with debris and unexploded mines. This bleak peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic had once been a weapon test site and a training ground for amphibious forces. By the time the need for such places had passed, the land, poor by nature, had been made deadly by man. The perfect surround for a secure prison.

  The Penitentiary had been built early in the Affluence when a civilized society recoiled from executing even multiple murderers but had been forced to recognize that such creatures existed. A society which had discovered to its cost that neither punishment nor rehabilitation were protection against those prepared to kill. Nor was the usual prison a sufficient safeguard; killers of such caliber took hostages, murdered guards, escaped by force and guile to leave trails of suffering and death.

  An affluent society, too humane to revert to older and more brutal methods of defending itself, had set out to create a completely secure prison where incorrigibles could be held under the most humane conditions possible. The architects had had to meet two specifications: that the prison must be escape-proof, and that the prisoners should be able to lead lives that were close to civilized.

  The architects could claim to have succeeded, for nobody had escaped from the Federal Penitentiary on Jona’s Point during the twenty years of its existence, and even confirmed malcontents had been hard put to produce genuine complaints about the living conditions within its walls. For the first time in the history of penology a prison was staffed by a carefully selected cadre from which most of the men and women who wanted to become prison guards had been rejected for that very reason. The remainder were well-paid and trained to treat prisoners with kindness, firmness, tact, and continuous vigilance. A dedicated group of strong-minded idealists, none of whom had ever been found guilty of cruelty or the use of unnecessary force. Their paternalism was not regarded as a cause for complaint.

  The irony of this humane effort by the Affluence was that the buildings had just been completed and the trained staff installed when psychological restructuring became possible. Within a few years it was made a legal alternative to prolonged imprisonment. More and more incorrigibles had chosen “mind-wipe” instead of the Pen. Some because they did not realize what it entailed, some because they thought they could outwit the system, and some because they welcomed the destruction of their personalities and the loss of their memories.

  Others, unable to live without violence in the “free society” of the Pen, committed acts which proved beyond doubt that they were mentally unstable and so incapable of making a responsible decision. They had been certified by the Board of Psychiatric Assessors and mind-wiped willy-nilly. Now, twenty years later, the Pen held only hard-core prisoners; men and women like myself whom no honest psychiatrist could classify as insane but who refused to purchase freedom at the cost of character and memory. And I, Gavin Knox, was among the hardest of the hard-core.

  My communicator pinged and I heard a worried voice in my earphone. “How is it up there, Mister Knox?”

  “Windy. But the gulls like it!”

  Officially I should not have been up there. When I first arrived in the Pen no prisoner would have been allowed to work on the antenna tower, for no prisoner was supposed to see anything of the world outside except via video. But now there was no technician on the staff with the stomach and skill to climb the tower and adjust antenna matchings. In my prepen life I had made more difficult climbs than this, with deadlier bursts than sea-spray whistling past. As the Governor did not like to bring outside techs into the Pen, she had accepted my offer to do the job. I had done it well, and by not making the clamps overtight I had ensured that it had to be redone every few months, giving me these moments in the free air high above my civilized cage.

  “Mister Knox, I think you’d better come down now.” The voice was even more worried.

  “I’ve still got two Yagis to match.”

  “You can do them tomorrow. And supper is almost ready. You’ll need time to clean up.”

  “Okay—as soon as I’ve got the covers back.” Satisfied that I had won the promise of another breath of freedom I locked the covers over the matching boxes and began my slow climb down the tower. There would be at least three pairs of anxious eyes watching me on video screens.

  I jumped from the base, took a last glance at the stormy world around me, and then looked down through the transparent dome at the secure world below. The Pen had been built as an octagon, with an outer zone for the guards, an inner zone for the prisoners, and a central area of some ten hectares roofed over by lucaplex to let in the sunlight and keep out the rain, snow, and cold. A warm area of lush greenery, of hydroponic gardens and boxed orchards, ringed by byres and pens, sties and bee-hives, with temperature, humidity, and air movements held at optimum for the crops we grew and the animals we bred.

  The battery hen, the stalled ox, the tanked lobster, the online cow; prisoners to feed prisoners. Now that there were only some five hundred of us left the Pen was almost self-sufficient in foodstuffs and could be lavish with energy. The test-bed for the first Linus fusion reactor, we generated more electricity than we needed and used the surplus to synthesize the metal hydrides which were starting to replace petroleum in the affluent nations of the world.

  There was plenty of work for all, and among us murderers there were men and women skilled in the kinds of work that had to be done. I had given my trade as “electronics technician” on arriving in the Pen, which was partly true. In an establishment packed with complex electronics a good technician had been welcome, especially as the number of competent technicians among the staff had been dwindling.

  The voice in my ear gently reminded me not to loiter. I slipped through the hatch and down the ladder; the door leading inwards to the prisoners’ zone opened for me and I stepped into the corridor that ringed our quarters. I was back in the sealed center of the prison where the outside world was only a video picture; where we talked only with the images of outsiders. Few prisoners ever met their guards in the flesh and the people we faced on the screens, lacking smell, seemed hardly human.

  I turned in my tool kit and checked each item under the eyes of such an
image, one of the older women who had been a guard since the days when the Pen had held three thousand murderers. She watched me take off my coveralls but did not order me to strip, and I had already started for the door when she called me back.

  “Don’t you think you should wash your hands before supper, Mister Knox?”

  “Of course! Sorry!” I went to the washbasin, suppressing my resentment of her reproof. It was hard to hate these well-intentioned tyrants. The elderly woman smiling at me from the screen had spent the first few years of her service trying, in the face of insult and provocation, to instil some elements of civilized behavior into urban savages.

  It was a long walk to the mess-hall and I ran all the way. The architects had made sure prisoners got exercise by providing plenty of stairs but no elevators. To get from one segment to another one had to go down three flights and then back up another three. I had run up and down fifteen by the time I arrived at the mess hall.

  Most of my fellow criminals were already eating, and I went to the serving counter to choose between roast pork, fried chicken, and lobster thermidor. (There were at least two first-class chefs among us.) I took the chicken and looked around for congenial company with whom to eat. A cafeteria designed to feed thousands now catered to only a few hundred and they were scattered in small groups across the hall. I had avoided becoming a regular member of any one clique and sometimes dined alone, though not too often. Any prisoner who showed antisocial tendencies was liable to be psychologically tested and so exposed to the threat of reclassification and compulsory character restructuring. Latterly the Board of Psychiatric Assessors had become more rigid in their definition of “normality” and all “unstable” minds were being wiped. We knew the reason. The Pen was a vastly expensive operation, the electorate was notably less liberal than it had been, and closing down the Pen would now be popular with the voters. The first step in that direction would be to certify as many as possible of us as “mentally unstable”; a diagnosis which justified forced mind-wipe while skirting the legal definitions of insanity.

  A woman, sitting alone, glanced toward me. Judith Grenfell, among the most recent of the condemned. Titian hair—-that glorious auburn-gold—flashing as she turned her head. When she looked at me a second time I noticed her eyes were green. We had never exchanged more than a few words, but that second glance was an invitation. Living under continuous observation by invisible guards, knowing that everything we said might be monitored and recorded, we had evolved a subtle sign language among us. And as the prison population had fallen in size but risen in education and intelligence that sign language had grown in complexity. I responded to her signal by circling the mess hall, tray in hand, before drifting over to her table, acting like any diffident man seeking to join a pretty woman.

  “Mind if I sit down, Judith?” I asked. Manners were a must in the mess hall if one wished to avoid a later scolding from the guards.

  “Of course!” She looked up and smiled what the screens would show as a smile of welcome. A smile that told me she had something both private and important to discuss. And a smile that raised her from “good-looking” to beautiful.

  There was nothing unusual in sharing a table with a woman in this prison. It had been designed for sexual integration but none of the avant-garde penologists who had founded the Pen could have imagined it would become integrated in fact as well as in theory. Since the eighties of the last century the percentage of violent crimes committed by women had been steadily increasing as sexual equality became one of the better aspects of the Affluence and as more women were trained in the use of firearms. But even by the twenties most murderers were still male.

  Yet there were now almost as many women as men among ms hard-core incorrigibles. A phenomenon which the experts whose opinions I had read in the library journals had never explained to even their own satisfaction, and all of whom had avoided giving the reason I thought obvious. Women defended their memories and identities more stubbornly than men because women are by nature more stubborn, more pigheaded than most men. And Judith Grenfell, extracting the last of the thermidor from her lobster, looked more stubborn than most women.

  Still concentrating on her lobster she murmured, “Are they listening to us?”

  I drank my juice and started noisily on my soup. “Not listening. Only taping. But they hardly ever check mess hall tapes these days.” I dropped my napkin and, reaching down, I knocked the microphone connection hidden in the leg of the table. “Now the tape will be too noisy to monitor. Daren’t do that too often or they’ll nab me. So I hope you’ve got something worth saying.”

  “You work in electronics, don’t you?” She pushed away her lobster and started on apple pie. Prison had not affected her appetite nor spoiled her figure.

  I nodded.

  “I work in the hospital and morgue.”

  “Interesting but depressing!” I waited for her to hint at why she should mention her job.

  “Joshua Schwartz died last night.”

  “Poor old Josh. They put him here in the beginning. He held out to the end.”

  “There are now four bodies in the morgue. They’ve closed .down most of the lockers so there’s no cold-storage space left. They’ll have to ship those four out soon.” She looked at me with an expression suggesting escape.

  At one time or another almost every man and woman in the mess hall must have dreamed up some plan of escape and I had listened to most of them. To maintain our morale we still reassured each other that no escape-proof prison had ever existed. Books telling of escapes from prisons, fortresses, camps, chain gangs, and harems were among the most popular reading in the library. The guards must have grown sick of hearing us plan escape for by now they seldom reprimanded us for discussing it openly among ourselves; they probably approved of such talk for its therapeutic value.

  To some extent I think the remaining guards admired us remaining prisoners; men and women any of whom could be free with a new name, a new character, and an allowance adequate for reeducation merely by signing a “consent to restructuring” form. Moreover, although all of us had been condemned as killers, few of us later arrivals seemed to be the recidivist murderers for whom the Pen had originally been built. What we were we did not know for we avoided telling each other about our crimes, and only the Governor and her Deputy had the details. I watched Judith sipping coffee, wondering whom she had murdered and why. She didn’t look like a murderess, but then few killers look the part. I classified her as a professional woman, with a mouth that suggested passion and a jaw that showed stubborn determination. The kind of woman I had learned to avoid.

  She had some ingenious plan she wanted to tell me about and, like all the others, I knew it would be hopeless. The kindest thing to do would be to listen and then gently point out how hopeless it was. To warn her that escape was safe to discuss but deadly to attempt. It was impossible to get out of the Pen, so an attempt to do so was madness and therefore prima facie evidence of that “mental instability” which justified the Assessors ordering mind-wipe. A crunch that for some reason was called “Catch-22.”

  She finished her coffee and stood up. “Feel like a walk through the woods?”

  A “walk through the woods” was usually an invitation to spend an amorous hour among the trees of the orchard. But Judith’s green eyes told me that it was not sex she had on her mind. She wanted a secluded place to unfold her plan, and the “woods” provided that. The patches of grass between the potted trees were monitored by microphones and cameras, as was everywhere else within the prisoners’ zone, but direct surveillance was relaxed when a couple were in each other’s arms. The Governor in her monthly pep talks to us always emphasized that the staff respected our privacy as much as possible; that any voyeurs among them had been screened out long ago.

  I picked up my tray. “Suits me fine!’’ It would suit me very well to be seen spending the hours before lights-out with a woman. I had been getting hints from the staff that a normal sexual outlet wa
s essential for my mental health and that they would be happier if I sought one more often. I had certainly not been celibate during my three years in the Pen, but my affairs had been brief and intense, fired by physical hunger rather than by a need for female companionship. And that, as judged by our supervisors, partook more of carnality than normality.

  We put our trays on the disposal belt and walked together across the mess hall, exchanging pleasantries with the men and women still talking at the tables. It was obvious where we must be heading but there were none of the crude jibes I would have heard had I escorted a woman across other mess halls where I have eaten. That was partly due to staff disapproval of crude jibes and partly because few of our hard-core colleagues were crude by nature.

  Outside the mess hall Judith took the first flight of stairs at a run, and I ran after her up and down six more flights before we reached the gardens under the lucaplex dome. She seemed surprised to find me still on her heels, and as we walked between the hydroponics toward the orchard I asked, “Do you check the fitness of every guy you ask to walk through the woods?”

  “I haven’t invited many!” She glanced at me. “And you’re the first to stay With me on that run. You keep in training. Why?”

  That was a question I had often asked myself, and to which I had no convincing answer. “I aim to reach the handball finals this year. Did you know handball was a popular game among the debtors in the old Fleet Prison in London? Interesting that it should be so popular here too.”

  She showed no interest in the popularity of handball but walked quickly past the vegetable tanks toward the comparative seclusion of the orchard. As soon as we were among the first trees, heavy with ripe fruit, she turned toward a strip of grass. I caught her arm. “Let’s go farther. To where they’re in flower. The cherries have just blossomed.”

  She glanced at me, as though surprised at some out-ofcharacter remark, then walked with me through the fruiting sector into the division where the trees were foaming with the pinks and whites of cherry, apple, and pear. In the controlled environment of the Pen we could practice continuous rotatioa of crops so that by walking through the orchard we had gone from winter through fall across summer and into spring. I urged her toward a rustic bench. “Let’s sit here and smell the flowers,” I said, then added softly, “The local mikes are noisy and the blossoms block the videos.”