It was not a bad roll-call of achievements for someone who barely qualified as a human being.
Seth flipped his desk intercom. 'Saskia, would you bring in a kid and the ceremonial knife?'
He looked at Duroc. 'Blood must be spilled, Roger. There must be a seal on the mission.'
The Frenchman was unable to hide his distaste.
'You will understand, Roger. When the time comes, you will understand.'
The doors opened, and the plastic woman led in a young goat.
Part Two: Who Was That Masked Woman?
I
The US Cavalry had no idea how to treat her, and so she had spent the morning being given a tour of Fort Apache and its environs. Captain Lauderdale, the spare officer Colonel Younger had ordered to keep her out of trouble, had taken her outside the perimeter walls and shown her London Bridge, the red British telephone boxes, and what was left of The Old Dog and Duck Pub. Lake Havasu had sold itself as a tourist attraction before the Colorado River dried up. Chantal understood it was a typical ghost town, its residential area turning gradually to desert as the sand drifted in and the houses collapsed. In a thousand years, you would never know there had been a community here.
The bridge, transported stone by stone from England, was really falling down now. Lauderdale attempted a joke about it, and called her 'my fair lady,' but she didn't respond. She thought there was something creepy about the captain, and her training had taught her to trust her intuitions. She didn't have any measurable
Spanning a channel of rancid mud and cracked, dry earth, the bridge did not look special. It was rather a bland design, with nothing distinctively British about it. There were wrought-iron lamp-posts, mostly twisted into half- pretzel shapes.
'The story goes that the people who bought it got the wrong bridge.' Lauderdale said. 'They wanted the one that goes up and down…'
'Tower Bridge.'
'That's right. Tower Bridge.'
Chantal examined shared heart graffiti etched into the stone, and looked towards the remains of the town.
'Does anybody live down there?'
Lauderdale looked both ways, as if afraid his superiors were listening. 'Not officially, but there's a large detachment of men and women at the Fort, with no way to spend their pay and not much to do in their off hours…'
'So?'
'I am given to understand that there are…um…camp followers, and a bar or two, where they have…um… gambling.'
A tumbleweed rolled lazily by. There wasn't much wind, so the things must mainly lie and rot.
'The place looks completely deserted.'
'They come out at night, Ms Juillerat, and sleep during the day.'
'Like vampires?'
'Yes, exactly like vampires.'
From the look of distaste curling about his thin lips, Chantal guessed that Captain Lauderdale had little use for camp followers and gamblers. Perhaps he subscribed to one of the many repressive protestant doctrines running rampant here in the United States? She found it hard to keep them separate in her mind—Mormons, Josephites, Scientologists, Moonies, Seventh-Day Amish, Hittites, Mennonites, Danites, Disneyworlders, The Bible Belt—and imagined they themselves had the same problem. Being a Catholic was a lot easier since 'Vatican LXXXV' loosened things up.
'Where did the people go? The ones who lived here?'
They had found a skeleton dressed as an English policeman, half-buried in rubbish and sand, but few other signs of previous habitation.
'The nearest PZ, if they could afford it. If not, there are squatters' towns around most conurbations. Some take to the roads, like the okies in the '30s. They're the problem.'
'I don't understand?'
'It's difficult to drive around the burned-out vehicles. Defenceless citizens should keep off the interstate.'
From the outside, Fort Apache looked more like a mediaeval castle than the wooden stockades of the Old West. Its windowless walls were stone and steel, and the structure was tiered like an old-fashioned wedding cake. A few sensors, tiny at this distance, revolved on the roof, and the Stars and Stripes flew, hanging stiff from a rod. It was one of a chain of identical forts dotted throughout the Western States.
There was a noise, and Lauderdale drew his sidearm. It had been another stone falling from the bridge into the mud. The captain grinned without humour and holstered his weapon.
'You have to be alert,' he explained.
'It's too quiet out there, you mean?'
'Huh?'
'In the films, that's the cavalry catch-phrase. Just before an Indian attack, someone says 'it's too quiet out there' and an arrow sticks in him.'
Lauderdale didn't crack a smile. Their senses of humour were noticeably out of sync. 'I never liked Western films much, Ms Juillerat. Never liked films, really.'
'Then what are you doing dressed up like John Wayne?'
The revived US Cavalry wore outfits modelled exactly on the 1870s styles. Lauderdale had a blue tunic, a modified stetson with the cav insignia and carried a Colt .45.
'It's just the uniform. I'm here to serve my country.'
Most of the personnel Chantal had met at Fort Apache said something like that. They were proud that the US Cav was still an arm of the US Government, especially since it fought off the last privatisation plan. However, the organization was mainly involved in keeping the interstate routes clear for GenTech and the other multinats. She guessed that private citizens, like the modern okies Lauderdale had complained about, were mainly considered to be a nuisance. This was no era to be an innocent bystander.
From the bridge, they could see the approach road. A column was nearing the fort. Motorcyke outriders, a couple of cruisers, and a triple-jointed tanker.
'Here comes the water and the gas,' said Lauderdale. 'Supplies for a month.'
'You really are cut off here?'
'That's right. Where there's no water, people don't live. This is not a natural community. We had pipelines, but the Maniax trashed them during the first days of the joint action.'
'Ah yes, the Maniax. In Rome, I saw on the teevee about them. Children, were they not?'
Lauderdale spat, 'savages!'
'They have been…pacified?'
'If you mean killed, mostly they have. The rest are in Readjustment Camps, or on the offshore penal colonies. You have the same set-up in Europe, I believe, You dump all your human garbage on Sicily.'
'The European Community does. I'm not a Eurocitizen.'
'The Maniax moved in after it started to break down. When it stopped raining, when food became scarce. The
