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= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 22.

Chapter 16

Night had fallen when they were outside. "What did you think of our crowd?" Lindy asked.

"I'm glad to get away from them."

"You're smart. If you're like me, don't make friends with any of them. Don't even talk with them or make eye contact. They are all bad news."

The two woman each walked with hands in pockets, solitary yet side by side. Puddles glittered like black glass. The sky had an undercoating of smoky clouds, amid which distant spotlights roved, looking for enemy air activity.

"If you stay out of trouble, they give you a lot of freedom," Lindy said, as they walked along a high, ivy-overgrown brick wall. "Not those brain-dead broads back there, but someone like you or me."

Tedda didn't answer. She felt a bit tired, and confused. She would sort things out in time. The road went slightly but steadily downhill, and the walls on either side got taller. Pretty soon they passed high walls with windows in them, and yellow light poured out as people worked late at their arcane tasks. "Everything for the war machine," Tedda said from some rote memory that bubbled up.

Faint banging motions signaled a battle in progress. Lindy sniffed the air, as if trying to detect drifting gun smoke. "It's over to the east more tonight. Somebody is bombing someone, or maybe it's artillery. Some nights it goes on for hours."

Tedda had a sense that this had always been part of the scheme of things, and didn't answer. She was more fascinated with the lights and buildings growing around them. "This is neat. What is it?"

"The University," Lindy said. "There are a lot of very smart people here, doing front-line war research."

"Is that what you do?"

"Honestly? I'm not sure. I help people think."

"How is that?"

Lindy shrugged. "I dunno. I'm just there. It's a talent I think you have also. I'm just there and they talk to me. Sometimes they talk around me. Then I see something, and I say something, and everyone gets very quiet. They look at me as if they are thinking about what I said. One time, they applauded. They threw a special dinner for me and gave me a medal, saying I had saved many lives."

"Did you?"

"I have no clue. I didn't tell you that Major Grün called me aside yesterday and said we had a bright new quant coming in."

"What's a quant?" She thought of what it might mean, and laughed.

Lindy laughed also. "No, no, they just say that if they want to. Quants are people who can work incredible masses of equations in their heads. Do you know you do that?"

Tedda shook her head. "No. I have trouble figuring out postage and recipes."

"Ah yes. They're like autists, only we have no social difficulties. Well, not much."

"Like with the ladies back at the dorm," Tedda said laughing. They both laughed. Lindy added: "Yeah, the Miss Gotha lineup. What a bunch of grotesques. I lock my room at night."

"Oh yuck. Any of them ever come rattling the door handle at 3 a.m.?"

Lindy looked at her darkly. "They're mostly chained to their beds at night. So unless they carry their bed under their arm, no."

"So what did they do?"

"I've always been afraid to ask." They walked a bit further. The sky was clearing up, becoming luminous. As the roiling clouds blew away, the sky assumed a dark blue tint that was almost black, but with an ink-blue glow on the horizon. A few stars twinkled. There was no moon, but the buildings around them glowed with a new liveliness. They crossed intersections where cars whispered past, and people waited to walk at stoplights. As the sky cleared, a new cannonade opened up somewhere far away. A hundred guns must be blazing away on both sides, but it was too far to hear shells whistling. The exploding rounds kept up a low murmur underneath it all.

"We're on the main campus now," Lindy said.

"This doesn't seem much like prison." Tedda felt amazed. She didn't want to return to their place of confinement.

A patch of vapor drifted with Lindy's breath, and she lifted her scarf so it covered her nose. "There are supposedly electric fences with barbed wire and dogs, and guard posts with machine guns, but they are miles away. We're on a reservation of some kind."

"Then you haven't seen the fences?"

Lindy shook her head. "No. I never had a reason to go that far. As long as I stay one step ahead, and mind what I do, I have the freedom to roam. That's all I want." She stopped, grabbed Tedda's arm, and spun her gently but firmly around. "Don't you get it?"

Tedda stepped back, startled. "What?"

Her friend's face was cold and intense. Her eyes glittered darkly, and all expression had drained from her face—except perhaps a vulpine craftiness that seemed to elongate her already thin face. "They, the government, the fatherland, they think they are holding us prisoner here. In reality, this is the safest place we could be. Think about it. We are under attack night and day. Here, you can—." Lindy stopped in frustration. "Come over here. I'll show you something." She grabbed Tedda's sleeve and towed her across the street. They approached a yellow stone building with sharp, pleasing lines. "Get close to the window and look inside." Tedda did as she was told, standing on tiptoe amid bushes near the wall, while a broken sprinkler kept clicking near her right foot and made her sock wet. Tedda was too astonished to notice at first. Inside, under fantastic modern chandeliers, sat dozens of elegant and handsome young people in fine clothing. They were eating on linen-decked tables, waited on by men and women in black tailcoats. They ate with what looked like real silverware, off china plates. Tedda caught a whiff of something wonderful coming out of a large, ornate pewter tureen: a soup containing every nutrient available, doctored with rare spices and salted to taste. Special waiters in white jackets walked around carrying white and red wines wrapped in linen towels for anyone who cared to try. "What is this place?"

"It's the Leadership Party dining hall," Lindy said. "These are the scholars of the nation, who keep everyone safe by inventing the next great thing that counteracts the next great thing that East Gotha throws at us."

Tedda winced. "It sounds like a never-ending cycle. Where does all the money come from to keep it going?"

Lindy shook her head. "I wonder sometimes. People work, and pay taxes, and make sacrifices. It's all for the great cause of the fatherland."

Tedda stood on the sidewalk and had to hold her head. Things were spinning.

Lindy paid no attention. "This way. I'll show you to the Bit Cave."

Tedda shook off her ague and hurried after her friend. "Is that where you work also?"

"I drift from place to place, wherever they need me."

"Do you know Nurse Amit?"

"Oh yes, I know her. We get a monthly physical over at the military hospital. Amit is a nurse practitioners. I prefer when she checks me, rather than the male doctors."

Tedda nodded in satisfaction, glad for once one of her dots connected with someone else's. Maybe she could connect more dots. It seemed her universe had been disintegrating, and maybe now she could start reassembling it; if only she knew where to start. Maybe then those urgent feelings would stop tormenting her.

They came to a round, two-story building that resembled a lantern, of sorts, in that it had continuous bands of glass from the grassy lawn to the flat roof. Soft light glowed from the glass. The other surfaces were a kind of pinkish, rough-finished concrete. From the manicured lawn all around, small spotlights pointed up at the walls. Maybe the lights gave it that calming Depression glass sheen.

"We go in here," Lindy said, pushing carelessly through the main door, a double glass door framed in soft green aluminum. "This is the Lobby."

"Wow," Tedda said as they came into a kidney-shaped reception hall with a round counter of speckled maroon marble in the center, and a pair of elevator doors opposite that. The air smelled of magazines in racks, and floor polish, and a lingering gardenia scent—the daytime receptionist's perfume? The elevators were in a recessed niche amid ribbed mahogany paneling and brushed steel door frames. Everything in the hall was hushed, sepulchral, lit indirectly by soft wall sconces in lemon-yellow and frosted glass. The walls all around were richly paneled in fine dark wood. Lindy brushed past the modern elegance and pressed the single elevator button. It was a see-through plastic square backlit with a faint baby-blue glow. Tedda took a last look around as the elevator rumbled in its shaft. The central apse of the cylindrical building, above the reception counter, was open all the way to the glass ceiling one story higher. Through the glass, Tedda could see stars twinkling and a lone, high jet flying overhead with its sub-fuselage lights winking.

"Here we are," Lindy said as the door slid open. They stepped into a ten-by-ten elevator that showed a lot of wear inside. Tedda was surprised at the difference. Its plain steel walls were dented and scratched, with faint graffiti showing—initials, curses, threats, swastikas, obscene words and images, invitations to fight or have sex. The emergency phone had been torn out, so that an armored cord hung out of the wall and ended in two burned, twisted wire-ends. The car smelled odd, like pheromones, like the hair of violent people, like the smell given off by the skin of those consumed with anger and adrenaline.

Lindy pushed the one button—a battered little black hockey puck on a steel plate. The elevator door closed, and the elevator trembled for a minute. Then it stopped trembling and a door in the opposite wall opened. "Here we are," Lindy said. They stepped outside into a maze of dark corridors lit only by small amber lights high up on corners, and red warning lights atop metal batteries for emergency lights. "You'll like them," Lindy said.

Tedda followed Lindy among hallways done in yellow tiles, like subway corridors, but very narrow. The raw concrete ceiling beams visible looked like those in a bomb shelter. The floors too were plain concrete, and smelled faintly of dampness and cement. Tedda felt claustrophobic, until, five minutes later, they entered into a large auditorium-like room whose extent in all directions was masked in darkness. In the center of the room was a work-area of cubicles. Beyond that lay an undefined blackness striated with mysterious vertical gray lines. Occasionally one saw a flickering vertical red or blue line, or maybe a dancing stripe of yellow or green, very brief, faint, and never standing still. "That's the File," Lindy explained. "You'll learn all about it." She called out: "Visitors on board."

Out from their cubicles came a grinning, congenial half dozen or more young men and women, waving and greeting. A few wore blue prison garb. A few wore uniforms of the various services, Air, Land, and Sea. The remainder wore dark suits and looked very much like intel ops. Now why do I think that? Tedda asked herself. How do I know such a thing?

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