Newcombe grimaced. “Burt’s shovel did major damage to his spinal cord, paralyzed him. Martin Aziz decided it was time to step into Ishmael’s shoes. I presume that means our leader is now expendable….”
“That makes you expendable, too.”
“You warned me about politics. I should have listened.”
The G were on top of them, surrounding Talib, who looked up at each smiling facemask one at a time as if he could tell differences between them. They had stunners in their hands.
“I’m not going to resist,” he said.
“That’s a most mature decision,” one of them replied, friendly. The G reached out a hand to take his arm. “You’ll come with us now.”
Crane watched them lead Newcombe away.
“Why?” Crane screamed to the receding figure. “Why?”
He’d wanted to say something to Talib, to somehow confront the madness of it all. But when the time had come, there’d been no words, no deeds that could possibly matter or help assuage his terrible sense of loss. For a fleeting time he’d had everything and now it was gone forever. There was no why.
He looked at the ground, at the phony headstones over the phony coffins. There certainly was no comfort here.
A helo dipped down at the edge of the cemetery. Talib was put aboard and whisked away.
And just like that it was over, wrapped in a neat package to be filed away and quickly forgotten as the world went on with its business.
Lewis Crane was alone again.
Chapter 20: Shimanigashi
SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA
SPRING 2038, MID-MORNING
Abu Talib began what would be the most extraordinary day of his life the way he had begun every day for the last decade—by deciding not to kill himself.
He’d stared at the rope they’d left him, the hangman’s noose already formed. He felt its contours. The smooth nylon fibers slid easily through his palm. It was compelling, that notion of suicide, that control over his life, but it was not the option he would entertain today.
Every day for ten years he’d taken the noose out of the small drawer in his room—he hesitated calling it a cell since it had no bars—and held the rope, feeling the pull toward death. Every day for ten years he’d denied the pull, though sometimes it was stronger than other times.
At his trial—or the sham they’d called a trial—he’d been sentenced to an indefinite time in Shimanigashi. Isolation. The prisons and the FPF and the courts were run by private enterprise. There’d been no witnesses at his trial, no jury, no spectators, no lawyers. There’d only been an unidentified man in a business suit, the viddies of the attack on the Imperial Valley Project, and, of course, himself. He remembered signing some papers in triplicate.
The man in the business suit had been the last human being he had seen for ten years.
He’d been knocked out with some sort of gas and had awakened here, in this room with beige metal walls but no windows, a bed, a table and chair, a single light. And the rope, of course. There was also a very nice shower stall that ran for exactly sixty seconds a day, and a toilet that flushed by pushing a button on the wall. There were no mirrors.
He had no books, no teev, no music, no paper—except in the toilet—or pencils. His prison uniform consisted of a black jumpsuit made of a flimsy plastic material. At the end of the day he’d throw it in a disposal hole in his wall, and a new one would appear during the night. If he didn’t toss it at night, he didn’t get a new one.
As far as he knew, he was the only prisoner in this place. No guards ever walked by to check on him, no other sounds except his own kept him company. His food showed up twice a day through a slot in his door. The meals did not vary. Rice and broth. In the last few years, though, there had been an occasional meal of beans and pita bread, which made him think changes were occurring in the outside world… or in the management of his prison.
His hair and beard had grown for ten years. He’d discovered he had gone gray when his beard got long enough for him to pull it up and look at it. His hair hung almost to his elbows.
He’d been expected, of course, to go crazy, and had accommodated his captors by losing his mind more than once. Each time he went crazy he hoped that it would lead to human contact, an exchange of some kind. But it never had, and he was always left to confront his own mind again. Even the time he’d gotten extremely ill, sick to his stomach, there had been no contact. The room had filled with gas. When he awoke, he was on his bed with a scar where his appendix had been.
But it had been a start. It meant someone was watching him. If he talked, it meant someone was listening. It was reassuring in a strange kind of way.
Getting a fix on time and keeping track of it had been his first and most difficult challenge, especially during the time he’d been “out” with the appendectomy. Not knowing day or night, he’d had nothing to relate to; but it had occurred to him during the initial days of his imprisonment that if he lost all awareness of time, he’d only have the rope. That was when Abu Talib, born Daniel Akers Newcombe, began exercising his mind.
He’d counted out the seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—for days on end until he had the internal rhythm of a day. He’d considered trying to lengthen his nails, instead of biting them as he’d always done, to scratch a mark for each day somewhere into the metal of the room. Then he decided against it, reasoning that they’d repaint the walls to thwart him. If he was going to be a human clock, he’d have to go all the way.
And, so, having nothing else to do, he’d become a human clock. He chose to believe that in the ten years he had counted, he wasn’t more than a week or two off. Once he’d gotten comfortable with his clockhood, he’d found that he could sublimate it and think about other things.
He’d remembered reading once—why hadn’t he read more?—about a man isolated in a prisoner-of-war camp who’d survived by playing chess in his head, visualizing the board and the movement of the pieces. Talib found that after several weeks of futile effort, he was able to play chess in his mind and passed many hours that way.
He’d dealt with sleep-time by simply calculating how many hours of sleep he usually needed each night to feel rested, how many his body would take on its own. Seven seemed to have been his ideal number when he’d lived in the real world, so seven it became. He never took naps and made sure he was awake seventeen out of every twenty-four hours.
Having nothing else except physical exercise to keep him occupied, he would explore his mind—sometimes happily, sometimes not so happily. He had good powers of concentration and was able to re-create people and events vividly in his mind’s eye, to relive his past. Much of it was embarrassing to him, though what bothered him the most was the realization that he’d wasted an immense amount of time in his life that could never be recovered.
Of course, he dwelled a great deal on why he’d chosen every morning to live under such a ludicrous regimen rather than simply use the rope. He never had come up with a real answer except an ingrained competitiveness with those who sought to break him. It was not a satisfying answer.
What he had discovered in himself, though, was a core notion that redefined his thinking processes. He used his isolation metaphorically by isolating his mind, separating his thoughts from each other and from their emotional/egotistical components. He dealt with his thoughts and feelings indifferently, the way people do to relieve anxiety, examining them as he would earthquake data.
He didn’t much like the skull he’d seen beneath the skin. It seemed to him that too much of his time had been spent following the commands of his gonads and his emotions. Too little time had been spent thinking reasonably. It was difficult to be angry with those who’d imprisoned him, since he felt he deserved the sentence. Without sustaining anger, he’d managed to get beyond the human barrier of rationalization and see himself for what he was—an animal, acting out animal passions. Once that particular pathway was traversed, it became impossible to go back to blissful ignorance. He’d
learned to accept responsibility as a human being. People had learned less in ten years, he figured.
Then there’d been the “episodes,” the bouts with insanity. Each time he’d gone nuts, it had been after a particularly dark journey within himself, when he’d let a slow psychosis creep in that could overcome his reasoning processes.
One time he’d decided that he had been killed during the raid on the Project and was living in a hellish afterlife, that he would batter around in this room for an eternity of loneliness and silence. He went hysterical and starved himself for three days until they’d gassed and force-fed him. He’d awakened feeling much better, after an unknown number of days unconscious. He could conclude only that his jailers would not permit him death by such a passive method as not eating. Was his sole option the active one of using the hangman’s noose?
In another episode of insanity he’d fantasized that he was free and could come and go at will from his cell. He chose to stay because, as he’d loudly told himself over and over, “It was all for the best.” They’d ultimately had to gas him that time, too.
Now he feared it was happening again.
After he’d finished his morning ritual with the rope, he’d retrieved his rice and broth from the slot in the door and sat down to eat. He hadn’t taken three bites before he’d heard an unfamiliar clicking sound from within the door, followed, seconds later, by the door creaking open halfway. It had never done that before.
He’d stared at it for a long time. There was a hallway on the other side of the door, he could see that much. Painted blue, the hallway had a pale yellowish light spilling down its length.
That had been quite an extraordinary amount of data to receive all at once. He’d gone back to eating his breakfast and dwelled on it for a while. Between every bite, no utensils, only hands, he’d look up at the door to see it still open, to see that marvelous blue running to washed-out green under the fuzzy yellow light. The colors seemed alive, organic, breathing, interacting.
He finished the meal and took the tray back to the door slot, the door opening even farther when he touched it. He looked down the hallway, which traveled on for a hundred yards in either direction, the yellow ceiling bulbs spaced twenty feet apart. Doors filled the hallway on both sides and there were numbers on the doors.
As he stood there with the tray in his hands, he realized he was supposed to walk through that open door. It was the worst moment of his incarceration. He didn’t want to go. The fear flashed so strong that he physically recoiled from the door, the tray flying out of his hands and clattering onto the floor.
He wanted to think about that open door, to reason out its existence for several days, but the fact that it hung wide made its immediate use impossible to avoid. He took a deep breath and strode out into the hall.
He felt the fear for only a second, then pride welled within him. He’d done it, walked into the outside world.
There was a door on each end of the hallway. Which to choose? Suddenly the notion of a choice other than suicide excited him. Being right-handed, he decided that his natural inclination was to go to the right. He went that way.
As he passed other doors, he wondered who, if anyone, was on the other side of each. He’d never heard any sounds from outside his room save the mechanical sounds of the foodcart grinding down the hallway.
It was strange to walk so far in a straight line. When he finally reached the door at hall’s end, he once again overcame his inner fears and pulled it open. He stepped through.
He was standing in a room that was about twenty feet square. The room was beige and bare except for a metal chair bolted to the floor on one side and a metal bench bolted to the floor on the other. The door he’d come in was near the chair. There was another door by the bench. He sat in the chair and waited.
In due course it opened, and an attractive woman and two children walked in. The woman’s eyes opened in horror when she saw him and the children stepped back a pace. “Abu?” she said.
It was then he recognized her. “Kh… Khadijah,” he said, his voice hoarse. He hadn’t used it in a long time. “Is that really you?”
He stood and moved toward her. She put up her hands to keep him back. “No physical contact,” she said. “It’s one of the terms of the visit.”
“What are the… other terms?” he asked quietly, reseating himself.
“I can’t give you anything,” she said. “I can’t tell you where you are. I must leave when they say.”
He nodded. “I see.”
“You look… like a wild man,” she said. “Your hair… your beard. Haven’t they cut your hair at all?”
“No,” he answered. “Are these the children?”
She nodded, taking the bench, a boy sitting on one side of her, a girl on the other. “Najan?” he asked the girl, bright-eyed above her veil. “Do you remember me?”
“No, sir,” Najan answered quickly. “But I know you’re my father.”
“And what’s your name?” he asked the boy, about nine by his calculations.
“Abu ibn Abu Talib,” the boy said, standing. “I was named after you.”
“And I’m very proud. You look like a fine young man. And that shirt you’re wearing… does that change colors?”
“Yes, sir,” his son said. “Everybody wears them.”
“Do you get any news here at all?” Khadijah asked.
He shook his head slowly. “Nothing,” he said, then pointed at her. “March 13, 2038.”
“It’s April 24th,” she replied, narrowing her eyes.
“Close,” he said triumphantly.
“You must have a million questions,” she said, leaning forward as if to study him better.
“Not so many. I gave up asking questions. You’re looking wonderful, though. You’ve rounded out.”
“Childbirth had its advantages.” She smiled, and he smiled in return, but his cheek muscles tired immediately.
“Are they going to release me?”
He’d been afraid to ask the question, tears coming to his eyes as he said the words. He choked them back.
“No,” she said. “They’re too afraid of you.”
“Afraid… of me?”
She nodded. “Once Ishmael joined the long and distinguished list of assassinated—”
“Assassinated? No! When… how?”
Her brows rose. “Of course. You wouldn’t know. A few years back. Assassin unknown, never caught.”
She took a breath. “You, then, were the only visible symbol of the movement. Martin took over. He’s a good administrator, but no one knew him. To keep the flame of rebellion alive we made you our cause. We began demanding your release as a political prisoner. You became the glue that held the Islamic State together in the War Zones, a worldwide symbol of an imprisoned people. You got the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Your influence is global.”
“Well, imagine that,” he said without enthusiasm. “It sure sounds like I’ve been having a good time.”
“I want to show you something,” she said excitedly, sliding a disk into her wristpad. It was half the size of the pads he remembered and was smooth without symbols.
A viddy came up on the beige wall. It showed the War Zone emptying of people, huge groups migrating southward as the Islamic State was opened.
“When?” he asked.
“Last year,” Khadijah said. “President Masters signed the Partition Order on Thanksgiving Day of 2037.”
“President Masters?”
“Kate Masters? I think you know her.”
“I thought I did,” he said enigmatically. “How did they work it?”
“The government and the YOU-LI Corporation have been quietly buying people out for years in those states. The earthquake in Memphis helped a lot. Most of the whites wanted to go anyway.” She pointed to the screen, house-to-house fighting in a small southern town, race against race. “Those who didn’t want to leave held out for a time, but we eventually got rid of them all.”
&n
bsp; “Got rid of them? There’s an Africk army?”
The kids giggled, Talib cocking his head.
“That term isn’t used much anymore,” Khadijah said, smiling.
“Why not?”
“Our African Islamic brothers didn’t think many of us were black enough to call ourselves African.” She smiled. “They started calling us ‘mestizos.’ The name stuck.”
“It’s not a complimentary title,” he said.
“We’ve made it one.” She sat up straighter, regal all of a sudden. “So the country is now called the United States of America and Islam. New Cairo encompasses Florida, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.”
“Why did they give in after all this time?” he asked. “It must have been damned expensive to buy out that many people.”
“They had no choice,” she said. “The world is seventy percent Islamic. The Chinese Syndicates are dying fast because they no longer control trade. Africa is the seat of economic power right now. Ultimately, the Chinese cut a deal with us to funnel trade to the rest of America through our back doors at preferred prices. It keeps both countries alive.”
The wall now showed Martin Aziz waving to crowds and making speeches. “He is in charge,” Khadijah said. “But you are the heart of the people. We wouldn’t accept a settlement with the whites until they agreed to either let us see you or see your body. Nobody knew if you were alive or dead. Now that we know, I promise you, Abu, we won’t rest until you are free.”
“Why do I have the feeling this has very little to do with me?”
“You’re a symbol. You’re Abu Talib, larger than life. The people of New Cairo need a figure to look up to in these difficult days. When the whites left after partition, they burned everything behind them. We’ve been building from scratch. Your example is their strength.”
“My example,” he said, smiling again, the muscles hurting again. “I have set no example. I’ve been surviving like an animal here. I want you to know it hasn’t been easy. I’ve… changed quite a lot. To be even more honest, I haven’t thought much about the movement since I’ve been in here. Instead, I’ve thought about smelling real air again, or seeing the sky.” He held his hand out, slowly forming it into a fist. “I’ve thought about grabbing rocks out of the ground and knowing everything about an area there is to know through its rocks… a whole history through rocks to the beginning of time! I’ve thought about sex….”