'Were you an officer, Suegar?' asked Miles curiously.
Suegar frowned at him, twisted his beard hairs. 'Marilac Army's gone. If there's no army, it can't have officers, can it?'
Miles wondered briefly if he might get farther faster by just walking away from Suegar and trying to strike up a conversation with the next random prisoner he came across. Groups and groups. And, presumably, groups, like the five burly surly brothers. He decided to stick with Suegar for a while longer. For one thing, he wouldn't feel quite so naked if he wasn't naked by himself.
'Can you take me to anybody who used to be in the 14th?' Miles urged Suegar anew. 'Anybody, who might know Tremont by sight.'
'You don't know him?'
'We'd never met in person. I've seen vids of him. But I'm afraid his appearance may be … changed, by now.'
Suegar touched his own face pensively. 'Yeah, probably.'
Miles clambered painfully to his feet. The temperature in the dome was just a little cool, without clothes. A voiceless draft raised the hairs on his arms. If he could just get one garment back, would he prefer his pants, to cover his genitals, or his shirt, to disguise his crooked back? Screw it. No time. He held out a hand to help Suegar up. 'Come on.'
Suegar glanced up at him. 'You can always tell a newcomer. You're still in a hurry. In here, you slow down. Your brain slows down. . . .'
'Your scripture got anything to say on that?' inquired Miles impatiently.
''. . . they therefore went up here with much agility and speed, through the foundation of the city . . .' ' Twin verticals appeared between Suegar's eyebrows, as he frowned speculatively at Miles.
Neither agility nor speed, but at least progress. Suegar led him on a shambling walk across a quarter of the camp, through some groups, in wide arcs around others. Miles saw the surly brothers again at a distance, sitting on their collection of mats. Miles upped his estimation of the size of the tribe from five to about fifteen. Some men sat in twos or threes or sixes, a few sat alone, as far as possible from any others, which still wasn't very far.
The largest group by far consisted entirely of women. Miles studied them with electric interest as soon as his eyes picked up the size of their unmarked boundary. There were several hundred of them at least. None were matless, although some shared. Their perimeter was actually patrolled, by groups of half a dozen or so strolling slowly about. They apparently defended two latrines for their exclusive use.
'Tell me about the girls, Suegar,' Miles urged his companion, with a nod toward their group.
'Forget the girls.' Suegar's grin actually had a sardonic edge. 'They do not put out.'
'What, not at all? None of them? I mean, here we all are, with nothing to do but entertain each other. I'd think at least some of them would be interested.' Miles's reason raced ahead of Suegar's answer, mired in unpleasantness. How unpleasant did it get in here?
For answer, Suegar pointed upward to the dome. 'You know we're all monitored in here. They can see everything, pick up every word if they want. That is, if there's still anybody out there. They may have all gone away, and just forgotten to turn the dome off. I have dreams about that, sometimes. I dream that I'm here, in this dome, forever. Then I wake up, and I'm here, in this dome. . . . Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm awake or asleep. Except that the food is still coming, and once in a while—not so often, anymore—somebody new, like you. The food could be automated, though, I suppose. You could be a dream. . . .'
'They're still out there,' said Miles grimly.
Suegar sighed. 'You know, in a way, I'm almost glad.'
Monitored, yes. Miles knew all about the monitoring. He put down an urge to wave and call
'Well, at first everybody was pretty inhibited by that—' he pointed skywards again. 'Then after a while we discovered that they didn't interfere with anything we did. At all. There were some rapes. . . . Since then things have been—deteriorating.'
'Hm. Then I suppose the idea of starting a riot, and breaching the dome when they bring troops inside to restore order, is a no-go?'
'That was tried once, a long time ago. Don't know how long.' Suegar twisted his hairs. 'They don't have to come inside to stop a riot. They can reduce the dome's diameter—they reduced it to about a hundred meters, that time. Nothing to stop them reducing it down to one meter, with all of us still inside, if they choose. It stopped the riot, anyway. Or they can reduce the gas permeability of the dome to zilch and just let us breathe ourselves into a coma. That's happened twice.'
'I see,' said Miles. It made his neck crawl.
A bare hundred or so meters away, the side of the dome began to bulge inward like an aneurysm. Miles touched Suegar's arm. 'What's happening there? More new prisoners being delivered?'
Suegar glanced around. 'Uh oh. We're not in a real good position, here.' He hovered a moment, as if uncertain whether to go forward or back.
A wave of movement rippled through the camp from the bulge outward, of people getting to their feet. Faces turned magnetically toward the side of the dome. Little knots of men came together; a few sprinters began running. Some people didn't get up at all. Miles glanced back towards the women's group. About half of them were forming rapidly into a sort of phalanx.
'We're so close—what the hell, maybe we've got a chance,' said Suegar. 'Come on!' He started toward the bulge at his most rapid pace, a jog. Miles perforce jogged too, trying to jar his ribs as little as possible. But he was quickly winded, and his rapid breathing added an excruciating torque to his torso.
'What are we doing?' Miles started to pant to Suegar, before the dome's extruding bulge dissolved with a fading twinkle, and he saw what they were doing, saw it all.
Before the force dome's shimmering barrier now sat a dark brown pile, roughly a meter high, two meters deep, three meters wide. IJC standard ration bars, Miles recognized. Rat bars, apocryphally named after their supposed principal ingredient. Fifteen hundred calories each. Twenty-five grams of protein, fifty percent of the human MDR for vitamins A, B, C, and the rest of the alphabet—tasted like a shingle sprinkled with sugar and would sustain life and health forever or for as long as you could stand to keep eating them.
The Cetagandan Psy Ops corps must contain some remarkable minds. If they ever fell into his hands, Miles wondered, should he recruit them—or exterminate them? This brief fantasy was overwhelmed by the need to keep to his feet in the present reality, as 10,000 or so people, minus the wholly despairing and those too weak to move, all tried to descend on the same six square meters of the camp at once.
The first sprinters reached the pile, grabbed up armloads of rat bars, and started to sprint off. Some made it to the protection of friends, divided their spoils, and started to move away from the center of the growing human maelstrom. Others failed to dodge clots of operators like the burly surly brothers, and were violently relieved of their prizes. The second wave of sprinters, who didn't get away in time, were pinned up against the side of the dome by the incoming bodies.
Miles and Suegar, unfortunately, were in this second category. Miles's view was reduced to a sweating, heaving, stinking, swearing mass of elbows and chests and backs.
'Eat, eat!' Suegar urged around stuffed cheeks as he and Miles were separated by the pack. But the bar Miles had grabbed was twisted out of his hands before he had gathered his wits enough to follow Suegar's advice. Anyway, his hunger was nothing to his terror of being crushed, or worse, falling underfoot. His own feet pummeled over something soft, but he was unable to push back with enough strength to give the person—man, woman, who knew?—a chance to get up again.
In time the press lessened, and Miles found the edge of the crowd and broke free again. He staggered a
