The Stone Dogs (36 page)

The guards were forming them up in lines of five in front of each chair, between painted white marks; there was a fair amount of shoving and shouting, but with two greencoats for each line it went quickly. For the first time she had time to notice the smell of the place, a combination of locker room and factory and slum police station, cheap soap and disinfectant and fear. And old concrete and metal; this place had been here for a long time, generations. She could see discolorations in the floor, places where partitions and wiring had been changed.

"Shuck to the waist," a guard shouted. The guards demonstrated on those first in line; overall unzipped and allowed to fall back. Marya complied, feeling her skin roughen in the dry chill. A few resisted, and there was the sharp frying-bacon sound of shockrods in action, choked moans from throats clamped tight. Echoes from above, off the roofing; this whole vast building must be divided into chambers like this.

"First rank, to the chairs." Marya swallowed dryly and looked away, realizing what this must be. There were unidentifiable machine sounds… Some of those waiting stared at the process before them, others at the ground or their feet or the walkways above. Few would meet her eyes.

"Next!"

She walked forward, feeling detached, feeling the pulse beating in her throat and ears.
Maman never
had her number
removed
, she remembered.
She could live with it. So can I.

The chair was more cold plastic. Bands fastened around her, and a helmet-like arrangement came down over her eyes. The technician fiddled with a screen and keyboard fixed to the rear of the chair as it tilted back.

"Keep y' eyes open," he said. A singsong accent under the Draka slur, probably local. Something flickered at her eyes; retina scan. Marya felt a tug at the loose fabric bunched around her waist; that must be the serf feeding the bar-coded tag into his machine. "Blood sample next," he said; she could hear a yawn through it. Something sharp stabbed her in the forearm, then a cold medicinal-smelling spray. "Spread y' hands on th' grips." A hum; finger and palm prints.

A metallic sound, and a cold bar of metal touched her neck below the right ear. "This hurts," the bored serfs voice continued.

More clamps immobilized her head.

"Ssss!"
That forced out of her before she could clench her lips together.

More cries of pain along the line of seats, someone wailing.

Cold stabbing along the bar pressed to her skin, then the bar of metal swung away, and another medicinal spray; this time it stung sharply, with a sensation that did not go away. The hood swung up, and she squinted at the lights. The technician was rummaging in a bin by his keyboard, full of dull-metal bracelets.

They were jointed; he put two around her wrist before grunting satisfaction and snapping one closed. It was about half an inch thick and two broad, featureless except for a small jack-receptor hole on the upper edge. He plugged a lead into that, and she could hear him keying behind her; then the jack was removed, replaced with a threaded plug. The auto-tattooing machine hummed and extruded a piece of paper. The technician peeled off its backing and slapped it adhesive-down on her arm.

She looked down. marya-I33M286.

The guard overseeing the room put the megaphone back to his mouth, as the bands released her. "Up!" he barked, and she stood beside the chair. "Dress." The twenty newly neck-numbered serfs zipped their overalls. "Yaz numbers is onna tag. Learn 'em quick." A cage door on the opposite side of the long room opened. "Out through there, move, move, move."

Marya forced her hands down, not to touch the patch of rawness on her neck.

About three hundred of us
, Marya estimated. It had taken an hour for the big room to fill; this one was square, under the same warehouse roof. Absolutely blank, except for a waist-high dais and comp terminal at one end. Four of the big steel-mesh doors, one in each wall. No chairs, of course. No talking allowed; one prisoner had persisted, and the guards had picked her up and thrown her into the wall, just hard enough to stun, and the shockrods were always there. There was another white line around them on the floor; the prisoners had learned enough to treat it like a minefield. Marya had worked her way to the second line from front with slow, careful movements.
They're going to
give us some sort of information
, she decided.
I'll get it all, and
make my own use of it.

This place had the depressing regularity of a factory; it was designed to make you feel like sausage-meat.
That is
information, too.
The door behind the dais opened, and two more Orpos stepped up on it, one going to the terminal; she laid a hand on the screen, then made a few keystrokes. A tall woman, hard to tell age with the shaven head. The uniform was a little more elaborate, with a sidearm and complicated equippment on a webbing belt; she had the traditional metal gorget around her neck on a chain.
Chain-dog,
Marya remembered.
That's what
the serfs call the Order Police. Appropriate.

"All of them supposed to understand talk," Marya heard her say to her companion.
Talk must mean
English
. She filed the datum away.

"Right." The voice boomed out over the huddled crowd, amplified now. "Listen up, cattle." The face scanned them; tight skin stretched over bone, a white smile. "Y'all are serfs. I'm a serf. There are serfs and serfs; y'all are cattle, I'm yo' god, understand?" An uneasy silence. "Yaz all from India. Yaz here because our noble mastahs," Marya's ears pricked; was that a note of sarcasm?
Listen. Wait.
—"are souvenir hunters. That what yaz are. Trinkets. We shippin' yaz fo' that. Sometimes, trinkets get broke."

The Orpo jerked a thumb towards one of the crowd. Marya recognized the young man she had helped earlier, with dried blood caked on his lower face and the nose swollen. A Bengali, slight and dark and with a nervous handsomeness apart from the injury, about twenty. A junior officer in the Indian ground forces, from his mannerisms. The crowd parted to leave him in a bubble of space as the guards closed in, shoved him roughly to the edge of the dais. The Orpo noncom had lit a cigarette; now she flicked ash off the end and looked down at the Indian.

"Just in case yaz thinkin' y'all too valuable to hurt," she said, and nodded.

The guards moved in; Marya could see their elbows moving, hear the heavy thuds of fists striking flesh. A moment, and the young man was hunched over when they parted, dazed. The Orpo with the cigarette nodded again, and her companion on the dais stepped forward, pulled a wire loop from his belt and bent to throw it around the man's neck. Marya drove her teeth into her lower lip and made herself watch.

The greencoat grunted and lifted the slight Bengali youth without perceptible effort, holding the toggles of the strangling wire out with elbows slightly bent. The youth bucked, heels drumming against the dais, made sounds. His face purpled under the brown, tongue and eyes bulging, sounds coming from him. From behind her, too, she could hear vomiting. A stain spread down the front of the Bengali's overall, and she could smell the hard shit-stink as his sphincter released; see the thin smile on the executioner's face as he jerked the wire free of the man's neck and cleaned it lovingly with a handkerchief. Blood trickled down Marya's chin.

I will remember you, too, my friend
, she thought grimly.

"Yaz nothin'," the amplified voice continued. Gray-suited attendants came in, threw the corpse on a wheeled dolly and took it away. The door slid shut behind them with an echoing clang. "Y'all barely worth the trouble of keepin' alive. Yaz cattle, meat, dogshit. Understand?"

The man who had used the wire noose bellowed: "That's
Yes,
thank yo', ma'am,
apeturds!"

Marya opened her mouth and shouted with the others.
Words
are nothing,
she told herself.

"One lesson, an' it all yaz need.
Do what y' told
. Anything y'

told, anythin' at all. Right now yaz total worthless; with hard work an' tryin', mebbeso yaz work up to just worthless.

Understand?"

"YES, THANK YOU, MA'AM!" the prisoners screamed.

Someone behind Marya was crying again, slow racking sobs.

"Oh, one mo' thing." The Orpo noncom pulled a flat crackle-finished box from a pouch at her waist; it was roughly the size of a pocketnovel, and a miniature keyboard showed when she opened it. "Them pretty-pretty bracelets. They new.

Space research, monitors. Traze yaz anywheres, identify yaz to the comps. Take readin's, heartbeat. And a little nerve hookup, inductor. Right to a center in yaz brains, if y' got any." Her lingers stabbed down on the controller.

PAIN. Marya fell limp and boneless to the floor and her head cracked on the concrete and the skin splitting was wonderful because for a single fractional second it blocked the PAIN but then there was nothing but the PAIN and there had never been anything but PAIN and her heart and lungs were frozen and death would be wonderful but there was no death only PAIN

onandonandonandonandon—

It stopped. Marya drew breath, screamed, blood and tears and mucus covering her face, and then she curled around herself and hugged the hand with the controller bracelet and laughed because it
stopped
and the bleeding from her cheek was heaven and the stabbing behind her eyes was better than orgasm and the sensual delight-that it had
stopped
and she knew she could never feel pain again because that had been pain not the pain of anything not surgery without anesthetic not grief not longing not fear, it had been everything and nothing and pure, purest simple pain.

"Up and quiet, or I give yaz anothah five seconds. Now, wasn't that wonderful!" A shriek.
"Understand?"

"YES, THANK YOU, MA'AM!"

They were all up, quiveringly silent. All except for one woman who lay motionless while the serfs with the dolly came and removed the body, and some of the others looked at it with envy.

"Most places, it's bettah to live than to die. Here, we can make it bettah to die than to live. Remembah that, cattle."

The van doors opened. "Out," the serf guard said. Marya slid forward and looked around; they were in the Citizen section of Mashad. Startling after five days in the blank steel and concrete of the Transit station. The guard pushed her ahead, through a revolving door into a hotel lobby.
Warm
. The first real warmth since Kabul, and a fear worse than the gnawing anxiety of the cell came with it. Across the ornate marble-and-tile splendors of the lobby; the walls were sections from the mosques that had once made this city a wonder of Islamic architecture. An elevator, bronze rails and fretwork, that took them up five stories. Down a corridor, past through a teakwood door. Her mouth was paper-dry again; she called up strength from the reservoir within.

But what do I do when it's empty?
she thought for a moment.

Then:
Never.

A serf came to meet them in the vestibule, a room of pale glossy stone walls and floors covered in rugs of incredible colors.

She was odd enough to snap Marya's attention aside for a moment; a black woman with yellow eyes and a flamboyant mane of butter-blond hair, in a white robe. There was pity in the brass-colored eyes, and in her soft voice.

"I'm sorry," she said, after signing the invoice the driver presented. "I'm really sorry. I… tried."

More corridors, then out into a double-storied lounging room, massive inlaid furniture and a glass wall looking out over a cityscape coming alive with evening lights, reflected on the falling snow. A Draka waiting in a reclining chair, smoking a water-pipe, dressed in a striped
djellaba
with the hood thrown back. The face from Chandragupta Base. Thinner, with dark circles under the huge mad gray eyes; Marya lowered her own to hide the sudden stab of fury she felt.
Looks older.
Marya knew the lines that grief drew.
Good.

"Stop," the Draka said. "Look at me, serf." Marya looked up.

"I'm Yolande Ingolfsson. Remember me?"

"Yes, Mistis," Marya said with equal softness. A smile twitched at the Draka's lips. The American swallowed a sour bubble at the back of her throat.

The black serf spoke, hesitantly. "Mistis—"

"Jolene," Yolande said, "I heard yo' out. I said no. Now if yo'

don't want to watch, get out. I'm not angry with yo'. Yet."

The African bowed silently and left; Marya could hear her steps quickening to a run.

"Take off the overall, and stand ovah there," Yolande continued. Marya moved to obey, found herself in the middle of a three-meter rectangle of clear plastic sheeting; the rug scratched underneath it, feeling bristly-soft to her bare feet. "Oh, it's good to see yo' again. Took a while, gettin' leave, and I don't have long until I have to report to the Astronautical, but it's good to see yo', Yank. Yo' fault, it is."

"Now," the Draka continued. "There's somethin' I want from yo'. Guess?"

Marya looked up sharply. The other's eyes were fixed on her with a curiously impersonal avidness.

"Are you… going to abuse me again, Mistis?" she asked flatly.

There was no sign of a drug injector.

Yolande chuckled; it had a grating sound. "Oh, not that way.

That was a special occasion… No, there's something else I want yo' to do fo' me. It was yo' fault, aftah all."

Her free hand pulled something out of a pocket in her robe.

Crackle-finished in black, the size of a small book. Opened it.

Marya felt herself begin to tremble, heard a moan. Knew that in a moment she would beg, and felt a brief stab of shame that she felt no shame, because nothing was worse than that.

"What—" she choked, swallowed to clear her mouth of saliva.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked, clamping her hands together to halt the shaking.

Yolande opened the controller and poised her finger. Her eyes met the American's, and Marya could feel them drinking.

"I want yo' to scream," she said, and pressed down.