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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 . . .'
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" Twin verticals appeared between Suegar's eyebrows, as he frowned
speculatively at Miles.
Thank you, thought Miles. I'll take it. He pulled
Suegar up. "Come on, then."
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 Hi, Mom!
Monitoring must be a stultifying job for the goons out there. He wished they
might be bored to death.
"But what's that got to do with the girls, Suegar?"
"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
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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.
Shall we have a contest, children, to guess how many rat bars are in that
pile? Miles thought. No contest.
I don't even have to measure the height and divide by three centimeters. It
has to be 10,215 exactly. How ingenious.
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
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