"You say for the most part," Bits prodded. "Is there a hole to hide in?"
"Naw, man," Needles sighed. "Ain"t no hidin" from these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. No hidin", no. But every once in a while you have a dude like Logan--"
"Watch it, junkie," Moomja warned.
But Needles just waved his hand to dismiss the threat.
"Yeah," Needles said. "Logan was a good dude, good guy, but he could be the coldest m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kah you could imagine. He was blood in RadCon5: a.s.sa.s.sin. One day, upside, he saw a guard twenty feet off. You know that screw"s wife was a widow the second Logan"s stone hit his head."
"Why didn"t the snake pack juice him?" Bits asked.
"Because he didn"t have no feelin"s. For all the snake knew he was just takin" a stretch. Uh--" Needles held up a finger. "They puttin" the H in early tonight." Then he spoke to the unseen roof, "You need more"n that, Roger. You need a lot more"n that."
But Needles was flagging. His eyes were going in and out of focus.
"After that Logan took sick. Finally one day he was just gone. Poof!" Needles gestured with his hands to express the magic of it all and then he slumped over into unconsciousness.
Bits wanted to think about what he had heard but he too felt tired as the drug flowed into his veins.
In the middle of the night Bits came suddenly awake. He realized that he had to urinate. He sat up and saw a purple dotted yellow line leading away through a gap in the circle of light. The line led to a yellow outlined urinal.
On the way back he spied two guards on the tier just below. They were carrying a stretcher between them which held the nude body of a white prisoner.
Bits didn"t slow down or allow his heart to race. He just walked back to his cell.
As soon as he put his head down he was fast asleep again.
After the harvest, time was the enemy. As much as eighteen hours of every day was spent in the cell. There were three forty-five minute eating periods when the men were herded into a great cafeteria walled in black. There the men from Level 18 could mingle with prisoners from other cells. Stiles always ate with the Itsies, International Socialists--n.a.z.is on a world scale.
Moomja had a friend named Thomas whom he always ate with. Jerry knew a few young men. They played a gambling game with a foreign coin that one of them had found during harvest. The winner could keep the coin until the next meal, when the game would start over.
"How do you play?" Bits asked Jerry during one of the long idle spells in their cell.
"You bet on a number, either one or two," Jerry said. He had won the coveted dinner game and had the coin clutched in his hand for the night. "Then somebody flips. We take turns flippin". If you bet one and it comes up heads, you get a point. If you bet two and it come up tails, you get a point--"
"How you know the difference between a head and a tail on the crazy coin?" Loki asked. "I seen it. You cain"t tell what it is."
"We just decided on what was what," Jerry said. "The side got the star on it"s the head. An" ain"t n.o.body talkin" to you anyway."
"Anyway," Jerry said, turning back to Bits. "At the end of twenty-five flips the one with the most points keep the coin."
"What if there"s a tie?" Bits asked.
"Then we have a play-off," Jerry said, grinning.
"More flipping?"
"Yes sir."
The cell was round, seven meters in diameter as closely as Bits could figure. There were seven cots s.p.a.ced evenly around the perimeter. Most of the time Bits stayed in his bed. It was an unspoken rule that no one talked to you if you were on your cot.
The men, with the exception of Stiles, often congregated in the central s.p.a.ce. They sang songs, told riddles, and made up long and intricate stories that they had committed to memory.
Time, in between harvests, nearly stopped. The days had no names, the hours had no numbers. There were no seconds or minutes, only s.p.a.ces spent waiting for the next meal and the next two-week harvest. The only light was the green circle that defined the cell and a weak luminescence that allowed the men to see each other.
There was no physical contact beyond brief handshakes, because any prolonged physical interaction caused a dose of pain.
At first Bits wondered why they hadn"t all gone insane. Why hadn"t the men decided to cross over that green line three times and go comatose forever? Then he began to see.
The snake pack was an amazing and subtle device. It could read s.e.xual excitation and violence in nerve endings; it could perceive biological needs in the blood. But there was more. The snake could also identify anxiety, depression, and even more complex psychological manifestations. It could keep a man from feeling claustrophobia even if he was buried alive, Bits thought.
Slowly, over time, Bits began to feel hatred. It was a new emotion for him. Maybe, he thought, before the mem-job I hated. But he didn"t remember. All he knew was the spite he felt for the snake and its master--Roger.
The snake didn"t keep prisoners from hating. Hate, Bits thought, was good therapy for a man who was buried alive.
He began having dreams about a long, green, luminescent serpent. It would be after him, intent on devouring him. When Bits saw the snake his heart began to race, and then--it was always the same--he would feel a tingling in his arm and the snake"s flesh would evaporate, leaving only an empty skin draped over a grinning skeleton.
Every morning Bits awoke exhausted from the drugs and the unrequited hunger of the snake.
The only things that a convict could look forward to were meals, harvests, free days, and jog time.
Jog time was alotted to every prisoner. It was the optional daily regimen for aerobic exercise, mainly running. There were long black corridors with padded floors where the prisoner could run as long as he kept his heart rate within the range prescribed by his snake pack. The first few times Bits couldn"t run more than ten minutes before he had to stop. When his heart rate fell below the appropriate cardiovascular level the purple dotted line flashed, indicating that it was time to return to the cell.
At the end of three months Bits could run for two hours at a time. These were his best moments, the only times he felt free.
Three weeks after the second harvest a Free Day was granted.
The Free Day, Bits learned, was a random holiday that happened anywhere from seven to twenty times a year. On that fortuitous day there were movies and reading lamps with books and censored magazines; there was a music center for loud Jacker tunes and bedrooms set aside for health-cleared and consenting couples or triples or quads to have nonviolent s.e.x together without black marks or inhibitor injections. Prisoners were free to move about, though only after reserving the time, down the many avenues of colored lights in blackness or up on the plantation grounds. There were basketball games and Ping-Pong and p.o.r.no shows in 3D vid chambers that played all day long.
One of the most exciting events was the gladiatorial arena--the Circus, as Roger called it--where men fought nearly to the death. Regardless of all the control exerted by the snake packs and the monitoring systems, convicts still developed grudges that taxed their bio-limits and the more expensive drugs dispensed by the snakes. This problem was alleviated by these grudges being settled on Free Day.
The period lasted for twenty-four hours and was followed by a rest period of twenty-four hours more. Bits was first made aware of the holiday when he awoke to a flashing strobe of red light that woke all of his cell mates.
"Free Day," Jerry said, leaping up from his mat. He was still limping a bit from the scorpion"s sting but the snake pack had saved him.
Soon all the men were up and talking. It wasn"t long before they were voicing their preferences to the void and were off following varied colored lights to their desires.
In less than five minutes everyone was gone except Bits and the white man Stiles.
"You gonna choose or what?" Stiles asked angrily.
"What"s your problem, white boy?" Bits retorted.
"I do what I do without a nig peanut gallery if you don"t mind."
"Why don"t they put you with the white boys if you"re so unhappy with us, Stiles?"
"Nuthin" I"d like better," Stiles said. "But they don"t want all of any in one pot. You got cells up to six white men but there"s still a nig or spic in the cream. That way they got a backup spy if somethin" goes down."
"And you"re mad at me?" Bits said with as much sarcasm as he could.
Stiles gave Bits a hard stare and then said, "I could never trust you people. You were born to stab us in the back. It"s you who took our good white world and made it into a mess. Raped our women, stole our jobs."
Bits paused a moment as if he were digesting the white man"s words. But he wasn"t thinking about what Stiles had said. Bits was a worldwide revolutionary. He defined himself as a cla.s.s warrior, and though he suffered the pain of racism he did not exclude other races from his side. He knew that over 80 percent of American-backed prisons were non-white. He knew that crime by blacks against whites was negligible compared to the crimes committed by universities and corporations. But he also knew that he could never convince Stiles of their common cause.
"You and me, Stiles," he said slowly. "It"s you"n me."
"You wanna fight me in the Circus?"
Bits pointed at Stiles and then at himself, then curled both of his hands into fists at his waist level. He knew that there were computers recording and deciphering every word and gesture, that the computers were linked with vid monitors. At the first sign of rebellion Roger would be warned and either he or Stiles would be transferred.
"f.u.c.k you," Stiles said, which was his privilege on a Free Day.
"I want to go to a library if you have one," Bits announced to the powers that be.
Over the next few weeks Bits began to have a different sort of disturbing dream. He would find himself sitting at Roger"s desk, in the faux open sky, doing math problems on a reusable paper-screen. At first everything was going fine, but then the numbers began to wriggle on the screen, becoming three-dimensional, growing red fangs and claws as they did so. They"d jump off of the paper-screen and chase Bits into the blackness of the prison"s interior.
The numbers mutated into serpentine equations that breathed fire and crackled with electricity. Soon after the monsters appeared Bits would be injected with a sedative. But later in the sleep period the monster equations would rise again, and be squashed again. Each time the dream would unfurl a little further.
He was sure that this was no ordinary dream, that it was a message. But he had no idea what the significance was.
After many nights the dragons a.s.sumed names like Master Slasher, Ten-Foot Stamper, and Gutter Gutter. Bits began a nightly meditation to empower himself, allowing him to make friends with the demons. As he overcame his fears the snake pack"s medications decreased.
After six months of meditation Bits managed to attain a dream state in which he could exist side by side with his monstrous nemeses. Like different species at a watering hole, the calculate-demons and Bits lived a wary truce during his sleep.
Both Moomja and Needles were taken from the cell in that time. Moomja lost over fifty pounds and spent half the time in the infirmary. He became lethargic, unable to rise at the waking hour even with the pep injections from his snake pack. Finally he was led off by a blue and green line which never returned.
Some weeks later Needles started singing an improvised song. It was a blues song with many repeated lines. He insulted Roger and the guards and called Angel"s Island a concentration camp for freedom fighters. Needles sang until the sleep hour and beyond. In the morning he was gone.
Bits hardly noticed these departures. His time was spent studying the lifelike equations. Whenever he thought that he was un.o.bserved he"d make fists at Stiles.
After sixteen Free Days, what Bits figured to be two years and some months, he was ordered by a bodiless voice to follow a red line until he came to his destination.
While he walked he wondered what life was like on the outside. He thought about his mother and brothers, revolutionaries all, and his father the cop. He wondered what Stiles had meant at the last harvest when he came close to Bits"s left side, with the wind blowing in his face, and mouthed, I"m with you.
Had he understood Bits"s offer after all this time?
Bits had tried again and again to beat the snake pack. He awoke at the right time and forced himself to sleep. He followed every order and never spoke when he shouldn"t. He worked hard and slept in silence. In the blackness of the cell at night he spoke softly with Loki and Darwin and Jerry, and the new guys, Everett and Charles. He spoke to everybody but Stiles, whom n.o.body liked and who liked no one.
But try as he might some infraction always brought him down. Crossing a perimeter, breaking for too long at work. Once he veered too close to a guard and received a shock and a nova demerit which meant he wasn"t allowed to accrue markless days for eighteen months.
After all that time Bits realized that he would never earn his freedom, that he was nothing and no one forevermore. His crime had been too successful, his threat ended his existence in the world.
"Cancer of the lung and colon," Sella said as Bits lay under bright yellow light on the silvery operating table. "The snake identified it a month before it would have been irreversible."
There was the sound of success in her voice. Bits wondered, not for the first time, if carcinogens were entered into the prison food and air, if the study of the snake packs was the first step in a much larger plan.
"He"ll need three weeks in solitary for the treatments to work."
"I thought the magic bullet took only two days?" Bits asked.
Neither of the meds answered his question.
He was treated in a big white room that seemed to go on forever like Roger"s. There was a bed in the room and a console computer in a transparent plasteel casing. Bits received an aerosol treatment from ga.s.ses released out of four canisters controlled by the computer system.
When he was attended by guards or the meds, they appeared from thirty feet or more away, approaching like nomadic angels wandering a forever white sky.
Now and again Bits glanced at the computer, never for too long and not at regular intervals either. The vids might be set to watch for his interest in the computer system.
After three weeks of daily treatments he was taken to the infirmary.
"Colon is fit," M Lamont said. "But the lungs have not progressed far enough. Looks like a subbac cancer. A new regimen is indicated."
Sella nodded.
"Can I go back to my cell?" Bits asked.
"Yes," Sella said without looking at him. "You can even work. We will allow the cancer to grow again, so that we can tell exactly what it is. If it"s subbac it won"t take long. The snake will tell us when you are optimum for the next procedure."
"Another three weeks breathing gas?" Bits complained.
Sella smiled. "No. The next treatment is one shot and then three hours of observation. You may return to your cell now, convict."
3.