Desolation Road

41

Every morning at eleven minutes of eleven Arnie Tenebrae would stand on the end of her bed so that she could see the three things beyond the bars on her window. In order of perspective they were an orange tree in a terracotta pot, thirty-six kilometres of dry Stampos, and one blue sky. None of these three things ever changed in the slightest, but every day at eleven minutes of eleven Arnie Tenebrae stood on her bed not because she found those three items in the least bit interesting but because Migli had expressly forbidden her to stand on her bed (fear of hanging, she surmised) and as he arrived promptly every day at twelve minutes of eleven she liked to gain some petty victory before the indignation of the daily rehabilitation sessions.

“Miss Tenebrae, please, ah, don’t stand on the bed. The, ah, warders don’t like it.”

Sky was blue. Stampos brown and orange tree dusty green. She could get down now.

“Morning, Migli.” “Migli” was Prakesh Merchandani-Singhalong, rehabilitation psychologist at the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre: small, brown, mousy, flustered, clumsy with tape recorder and notebooks, he could be nothing but a Migli.

“What’s it today, Migli?”

He experimented with various arrangements of tapes, recorder and notebooks on the table.

“I, ah, thought we might, ah, continue from where we left off yesterday.”

“Where were we?” These talk sessions were a waste of government time and money. She suspected Migli felt the same, but the charade must be played out with all the busy jottings-down and lies little and not so little that the game demanded.

“Your early days with the North West Quartersphere Truth Corps, the, ah, various sexual, ah, liaisons with its members.” Migli leered owlishly through his bottle-end spectacles. Arnie Tenebrae folded her hands and sat back on the bed. She opened her mouth and let the lies flow.

“Well, after I’d had about half a year on the Truth Corps-it was okay but kind of boring-the romance wore off and it was just long hot dusty trike rides and a couple of days in some ass-end village plugged into the telecommunications net: it wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d actually got to record the music. But all that travelling, I got bike-itch between my legs; what I really wanted was to get onto an Active Service Unit.”

“And what did you do?” Migli leaned forward eagerly. He’d probably already heard this from the interrogation tapes. Arnie Tenebrae stretched an arm to scratch the back of her nails against the plaster.

“Invited Paschal O’Hare, Commander North West Quartersphere Brigade, to sample the sweet joys of my nine-year-old body behind the communications shack at Oblivionville HQ. He was resupplying at NWQHQ same time we were and the opportunity was just too good to miss. Have you any idea how good a lover he was?” Migli slavered in classic Pavlovian fashion. Arnie Tenebrae was disgusted that a graduate of the Universuum of Lyx should be so credulous of her tale of seduction and khaki sex. Nothing of what she had described had ever happened, but Migli did not really want to know that. She had indeed met Paschal O’Hare at Oblivionville and traded all Dr. Alimantando’s secrets for a place on an active service unit and only dribbled her sordid tale of sexual humiliation, torture, deprivation, torment and discipline to titillate Migli. For a rehabilitative psychologist he was very much in need of some of his own therapy. Spotty deviate. She described her three months combat training in graphic detail while in the cinema of the imagination she reviewed the reality. Months of sitting on hands, of cold winter bivouacs in the Ecclesiastes Mountains, of boredom and dysentery and diving for slit trenches every time an aircraft passed overhead.

“And what happened then?” asked Migli, vicariously high on death and glory.

“It’ll keep for tomorrow,” said prisoner Tenebrae. “Time’s up.” Migli glanced at his watch and scooped up his armfuls of tape recorders, notebooks and pens.

“Same time tomorrow, Migli?”

“Yes, and, ah…”

“Don’t stand on the bed.”

But she was standing on the bed same time tomorrow, and Migli’s small tantrum of temper pleased her so much she closed her eyes and extemporized a lengthy and glorious fantasia on her first year’s active service for the Whole Earth Army, a spectacular of gun battles, bombings, ambushes, bank robberies, kidnappings, assassination and diverse atrocities in places with euphonious names like Jatna Ridge, Hotwater Valley, Naramanga Plain and Chromiumville. But when Migli was gone and she sat on her bed weaving cat’s cradles from her bootlaces, she remembered the way Group Leader Heuh Linh’s blood had leaked away through her fingers into the muddy foxhole at Superstition Mountain. She remembered how, with his death all over her hands, she had looked up from the red mud to see the Black Mountain Militia charging, charging charging, their mouths wide wide open. She remembered the fear that had smelled like the blood on her hands and the shit in her pants and had driven her fear-crazy with its howling until she dragged up the MRCW and screamed and fired and screamed and fired until the fear was gone and it was still. She hadn’t wanted the promotion. The citation had read “Gallantry against overwhelming odds” but she knew that it was the fear that had made her shoot. It was not until several months later that she discovered that Paschal O’Hare’s first raid with the new field-inducer weaponry had been a turkey shoot and the citation had been his way of thanking her. Sub-major of the Deuteronomy division. Cat’s cradling in her cell in the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, she couldn’t even remember what she had done with the medal.

On the third day Migli came again with his tapes and his notebooks. Arnie Tenebrae was sitting on her bed.

“Not at the, ah, window today?” His attempts at sarcasm were puny.

“Haven’t seen what I’m looking for yet.” She had decided that today she would tell nothing but the truth. There was no satisfaction in lying when only she knew she was lying. “Today, Migli, I am going to tell you about the raid on the Cosmobad landing guidance system. Got enough tape? Enough paper? Batteries all right? Wouldn’t want you to miss any of this.” She sat back against the wall, closed her eyes, and began her tale.

“Orders came down from the regional command for a major offensive during the planetary assembly elections. After the battle of Smith’s Shack several of the Deuteronomy division’s command levels got knocked out-we didn’t have F. I. weapon systems yet-and I was left in charge of the fifth and sixth brigades. Because we hadn’t been issued the new equipment, we thought, I thought, we’d aim for a low-level target, namely, the landing guidance systems at Cosmobad. They drop off the Skywheel on remote, so if we knocked out the guidance radars, no shuttles would be coming in at Belladonna. We synchronized our action with the others in the sector and moved into position at Cosmobad.”

The raid had been adeptly planned and flawlessly executed. At twelve minutes of twelve the 65 radar beacons were destroyed by mines and the guidance computer scrambled with a hunter-killer program bought from the Exalted Families. All ground-to-orbit communications in the Belladonna landing sector were hopelessly scrambled. It had been beautiful, not with the beauty of yellow explosions and collapsing towers, but the intellectual inherent beauty of something done right. Platoon leaders reported all primary targets destroyed. Arnie Tenebrae gave the order to withdraw and disperse. Her own command group, Group 27, had retreated toward the town of Clarksgrad and ran straight into A and C Company of the New Merionedd Volunteers who had been on manoeuvres in the area. The firefight had been short and bloody. She remembered she hadn’t fired a single shot during the brief engagement. She had been too stunned by her own stupidity for not checking the military presence in the area to even raise her MRCW. Group 27 sustained 82 percent casualties before Sub-major Tenebrae surrendered.

“Next time I’ll make sure of my intelligence,” Sub-major Tenebrae said.

“There’s, ah, not likely to be a next time.”

“Whatever. Anyway, Group 27 was obliterated and now I’m resident in the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, talking to you, Migli, and telling you your time’s up for today. What would you like to talk about tomorrow?”

Migli shrugged.

That night Sub-major Tenebrae lay in a shaft of bar-broken starlight, twirling a piece of string between her fingers. She thought starlight thoughts of fear and loathing. Since the morning she left Desolation Road on the back of Engineer Chandrasekahr’s terrain bike, a day had not passed that she had not woken fearful and gone to sleep fearful. Fear was the air she breathed. Fear came in greater or lesser breaths, like the bowel-loosening fear of foxhole Charlie with Hueh Linh bleeding himself away through her fingers, or the tense skyward glance of identification at the beat of an aircraft engine. She twined the bootlace around her fingers, round and round and round, and feared. Fear. Either she used fear or fear used her.

Her fingers froze in their dance. The thought struck her with irresistible profundity of divine law. Her aimlessness was illuminated by its holy glow. Until that moment fear had used her and had bequeathed her incompetence, failure, loathing and death. From this bootlace-twining moment forward she would use fear. She would use it because she feared fear using her. She would be more terrible, more violent, more vicious, more successful than any Whole Earth Army commander before her: her very name would be a curse of fear and loathing. Children yet unborn would dread her and the dead die with her name on their lips because either she used fear or fear used her.

She lay awake a long time that night, thinking in the slatted shaft of starlight.

On the fourth day, at twelve minutes of eleven, Group 19 of the Deuteronomy Division of the Whole Earth Army stormed the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, eliminated the guards, released the prisoners and effected the rescue of Sub-major Arnie Tenebrae. As she buckled on the new field-inducer weapons pack her rescuers had brought for her and made her escape, a small, bespectacled young man, like a dirty-minded owl, jumped out of a doorway waving an immense Presney long-barrelled reaction pistol he clearly did not know how to use.

“Stay, ah, where you are, don’t, ah, move, you’re all, ah, under arrest.”

“Oh, Migli, don’t be a silly Migli,” said Arnie Tenebrae, and blew the back out of his head with a short burst from her field-inducer. Group 19 burned the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre behind them and rode off across the dull brown Stampos with the dull brown smoke hanging over them.