James P. Hogan (23 page)

“Her hands are chapped. Can’t you see her hands? Obviously she’s not used to working.”

“Why not? Doesn’t anyone work in America?”

“Well, of course somebody has to work. The blacks work, and the oppressed classes work, for their capitalist masters.”

“Then, she must be a capitalist.”

“A capitalist’s princess daughter – much better than the likes of us.”

“Sophisticated, you see.”

“Very noble and haughty.”

“It won’t do her much good here, though, will it?” Giggling-

“Hey, is that right, Princess? Is your father a capitalist? Did you grow up in a big mansion with silk sheets and servants to wipe your nose for you?”

“And her behind!” Shrieks of laughter.

“Now you know how much fun it was for your servants.”

“In Russia, everyone wipes their own nose.”

A small washroom containing two basins and a single, unscreened toilet bowl opened off the rear of the cell. Paula was attempting to clean off the day’s grease with lukewarm water and the gritty, seemingly unlatherable soap provided, when Katherine, a thinly built Byelorussian with long black hair and pale skin, came in. Katherine had a comparatively reserved disposition bordering on aloofness, and said little; but her eyes had a studied look as they took in the surroundings, and her words when she did speak were those of a person with a different background from most of the others. She hung her towel on one of the hooks behind the door and set down a plastic bag that she had been carrying. From it she took a piece of soap, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth powder, and a comb, and then turned on the faucet without saying anything. The faucet shuddered violently, hissed with the release of trapped air, and then began emitting a trickle of yellowish water. Water in the colony was supposed to be recycled through a closed ecological system. Sometimes Paula wondered.

The soap Katherine had laid out was whiter and creamier looking than the gray cake that Paula was holding. Paula looked at it, then she shifted her eyes to catch Katherine’s in the metal mirror and inclined her head. “Where did you get that?”

“It was issued.”

“I got this. Why is it different?”

“Oh… sometimes it varies. If the store woman has preferences…”

“Some people are favored, you mean.”

“You have to be accepted.”

“And I take it I’m not.”

“She maybe has something against Americans.”

“But not just her.”

Katherine shrugged and hung her shirt and pants next to the towel. Paula carried on scrubbing her arms in silence for a while. Then she said, “Can I talk to you, Katherine?”

“I cannot prevent you from talking.”

“There’s something I don’t understand. Look, why do Russians believe all that propaganda? I mean, they’ve got eyes, haven’t they? They’ve got brains – they can think, Surely you people don’t believe everything they tell you about us. I mean…” Paula made a helpless gesture in the air. “After a hundred years of it, you
must
know… Our politicians tell us stupid things about Russians, too, but we know that’s just the way they are. We might not like everything the Soviet system stands for, but we don’t confuse that with the
people
. We don’t have anything against you as individuals.”

“You talk about having eyes and brains, and about people, but it is you who serve the system that crushes people.”

“But that’s not true. The things they tell you aren’t true. People are free under our system. It’s —”

“Then, that makes it even worse, If you had no choice because you were forced to be slaves, that would be oppression. But if you are free and choose to be slaves… And it is us who you say are propagandized?”

Paula shook her head wearily. “You really believe that every American is hostile to all Russians?”

“America is the heart of capitalism. It is inevitable that the capitalists must try to destroy progressive socialism be-fore they themselves are swept away. Our priority has always been to defend ourselves against this. It had to be. Look how many times you have attacked us…. And
you
accuse
us
of hostility!”

Paula stared at her bemusedly. “We attacked?… I don’t understand, What are you talking about? No Western nation has ever attacked you – except Hitler, and then we were all on the same side. No Western democracy ever attacked Russia.”

“You see, they lie to you,” Katherine said. “In the very first year of the nation, in the summer of 1918, the capitalists sent their armies into Russia in an attempt to help treacherous counterrevolutionary forces destroy the new Soviet state. Is that not attacking us?”

History had never been one of Paula’s consuming passions. She shook her head. “I don’t know…. I guess I never really looked into that particular period.”

Katherine nodded. “There, you see. Yes, American, British, French, Japanese, they all came. You didn’t know? And even after Russia had been weakened by four years of war in Europe and then torn apart by the Revolution, still the people’s Red Army was invincible. And then you say Hitler was not one of you, because you are the democracies. But it was the so-called democracies that rearmed Germany and allowed Hitler to rise, so they could send him against Russia to fight the war for them that they were too cowardly to fight themselves. They tried to start a war that they would wriggle their way out of like worms, but they underestimated Stalin.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I —”

“Pah! What do you know? You know nothing. And then, when the tiger they had tried to ride about-turned, it was Russia that killed it and saved them. And then it was Russia that drove the Japanese invaders out of China and ended the war. Russia has always defended countries that were invaded. After the war, you Americans and your puppets tried to invade Korea. And you tried to invade the Middle East, you tried to invade Cuba, you tried to invade Vietnam.”

Paula stared. “You mean that’s what they teach?”

Katherine shook her head uncomprehendingly. “And you say we have never been attacked, that we are being paranoid. You think you are victimized, and wonder why. It is we who have
always
been attacked.”

Paula sighed. “I don’t know, your propaganda, our propaganda… Who’s to say what’s right? But neither one of us is responsible for whatever really goes on. Why should any of it affect us here, personally? In here of all places, I’d have thought we had enough in common to outweigh all that, whatever the real story is.”

Katherine looked at her coldly. “The reason I’m in here is that my loyalty is in question,” she said. “I used to have a husband. He went to London with a Soviet trade mission, and while he was there he met a reporter from a New York art magazine, and she seduced him. The Americans let him return with her, and now they are living down there somewhere with a family. So, you see, Princess, I do not exactly have strong reason to be fond of Americans, American women in particular, and especially American women journalists. Does that answer your question?”

Paula lay in the dark, clutching the coarse blanket around her and staring up into the black shadow of the bunk above. She was picturing teenage days of sailing among the islands in Puget Sound, the shining towers of downtown Seattle across the water, and the Olympic Mountains, green in the sunlight, rich with recent rain. As she thought back, she wondered what had become of the self-assurance and single-mindedness that she thought she had learned from her mother, Stephanie, With Paula’s father being so long away at sea, and having come from a naval family before that, Stephanie had always been in control of herself and her life. She’d socialized a lot and thrown lots of parties. There was always a stream of visitors calling at the house. Hence, for Paula, learning to assert herself with people around had been simply another part of growing up. One thing that had made an impression on her, she remembered, was her mother’s adroitness in handling the advances – usually tactful, but sometimes crude – that an attractive woman left on her own for long periods of time was subjected to by the men who came to the house. Ever since then she’d tended to regard men as polarizing into two groups: either they were strong, or they were weak; they were either smart, or stupid; worth getting to know, or not worth wasting time on. She could respect the ones who met her standards… but there weren’t many of them. When she was about fifteen, by which time they had moved to the East Coast, she remembered one of those intimate mother-daughter conversations, in which Stephanie had confided that, yes, sometimes she had gone along with those propositions when Paula was younger – with discretion, naturally. Intrigued, Paula had wanted to know which ones. Stephanie mentioned a couple of names, and Paula had found that she approved the choices. Instead of feeling indignation as she had half expected, she had found her mother to be a suddenly far more human and exciting person.

“Hello, American Princess,” a voice whispered from nearby. “Are you awake?”

Paula turned her head and made out a figure crouched by the bunk in the darkness. “Who is it?”

“It is I, Dagmar.” Dagmar was an East German girl, about the same age as Paula, auburn-haired, not unattractive, with a firm, shapely body and freckled face.

“What do you want?”

“To say hello – be friends. Is not right they all mean to you like this. I think is not Princess’s fault if world can’t get along, yes? So I come, make good. We can be friends together, yes?”

Paula blinked sleepily – she had been farther gone than she’d realized. “Why not?… Maybe.”

She sensed the face coming closer in the darkness. There was alcohol on the other woman’s breath. “Yes, Dagmar and Princess can be good friends. No sense to fight…”

Paula felt the blanket being lifted and the hand sliding softly over her breast. “Fuck off!” She knocked the hand away sharply, pulled the blanket back around her neck, and turned away.

“Stuck-up bitch!” Dagmar’s voice hissed.

Paula heard her straighten up and stamp away to the far end of the cell. Peals of female laughter came through the darkness a moment later. “What, Dagmar, no luck? What did we tell you?”

“
Der Seicherin
! That’s it. She can rot for all I care now.”

“How much did we say you owe me, Dagmar? Or would you rather climb in here instead and call it quits?”

Paula pulled the blanket around her face and put everything out of her mind but sleep.

“I remember an American couple I met last year, when I was on vacation with a girlfriend over in Connemara on the Irish Atlantic coast. Nice looker, too; used to model flimsy knickers and things – you know, the kind you see on the posters in the tube stations…. Anyhow this couple – a carpenter of some kind and his wife, they were, from Michigan – had bought a porcelain figurine, you see, that they’d found in some little antique shop in a fishing village they’d driven through. It was rather attractive, I must say – two leprechauns with long pipes and evil grins, hatching mischief over jugs of grog. It could easily have been a hundred years old or more….”

“Jeremy,” from the British Special Intelligence Service, paused to smile at the recollection as he sat between the two women in the rear seat of the London taxicab. He was suave, urbane, smooth-shaven, wavy-haired, and nattily dressed in a dark three-piece suit with a buttonhole carnation. His speech and manner evoked something of an image that Barbara thought had gone out of style with tailcoats and dreadnoughts.

He continued, “Well, this figurine had an inscription round the base in Gaelic which had been intriguing them for days, but nobody they’d met had been able to translate it for them. But Gaelic poetry was something I used to dabble in, back at university. Would you have believed I’d decided to try and become a playwright, years ago? I actually got a couple of things staged, too – the usual provincial kind of thing, you know.”

“So what did it say?” Sylvia asked from his other side. She was also from SIS, and had been carefully picked for the job because of her tall, lean build, tapering face, and black, shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a navy two-piece costume with polka-dot scarf and trim, white shoes and matching purse, a floppy white hat, and carrying a lightweight pastel-blue shoulder wrap over her arm.

“That was the funny part,” Jeremy said. “You see, it said, ha-ha… it said, ‘Made in Taiwan. ’”

Barbara smiled and looked away at the crowd thronging the sidewalk on Oxford Street, a few hundred yards east from Marble Arch. It was well into July, and the summer sun and blue skies had brought out the colors on the London streets: the shirts and dresses of the tourists and late-morning shoppers, the seasonal offerings in the windows of the fashion houses, and riotous displays of orchids, roses, and lilies on the carts of streetcorner flower vendors. There were couples old and young, some arm in arm, some with children; businessmen strolling to lunch, jackets slung over their shoulders, women in colored slacks and bright summer dresses; two Arabs studying a painting in one of the shop windows; an Indian in a turban, munching an ice-cream cone. Just ordinary people, wanting nothing more than to be left alone.

Barbara liked watching people minding their own business. It summed up her outlook on life, as she’d said to Foleda. She thought it a pity that so many people were incapable of doing likewise. And always the wrong people. For invariably, it seemed, it was those of mediocre talents but inflated ambitions, with no affairs of their own worth minding, who meddled the most in other people’s. So the people most likely to end up making decisions about other people’s lives were usually the last ones anyone would want doing the job. Although she worked for a government, privately she thought they were not unlike germs: the only thing anyone really needed them for was to protect themselves from other people’s.

The cab crossed the end of Baker Street, and Jeremy glanced at his watch. They were exactly on time. The driver slowed down and cruised for a block. A woman was waiting on the corner of Duke Street. She was tall and lean, with a tapering face, black shoulder-length hair, and wearing a navy two-piece costume with polka-dot scarf and trim, white shoes and purse, a floppy hat, and carrying a lightweight pastel-blue shoulder wrap. “That’s her, Freddie,” Jeremy said, pointing. The woman was looking at the taxicabs in the oncoming traffic. She saw the yellow-bound notebook wedged on top of the dashboard inside the windshield and raised her arm. The cab pulled over, and she climbed in, seating herself next to Sylvia, who was on the curb side. Because of the tinted rear windows and the high upright back with just a tiny window in the center that London taxis had, it would not be apparent to anyone watching that it was already occupied. The woman would seem to have simply hailed a cab and climbed in.