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"You wanted to see me, General?" Valentine asked
Xray-Tango thrust a curious, umbrellalike apparatus into the ground. It was a five-foot pole with four arms projecting from the top. At the end of each arm hung a string with a washer tied to the end. The spear end, currently buried in the dirt of what had been an underpass, was tipped with metal.
Styachowski was back in the tent she shared with a female sergeant. The ground had dried up, and the river was down feet, not just inches. Mrs. Smalls was expected to deliver within hours. Men still worked the levee, but life was returning to what passed for normal in Consul Solon's Trans-Mississippi KZ.
Xray-Tango smiled. "I hope this isn't a bad time. I'll try not to keep you too long. Technically, I'm off duty. I keep what used to be called 'business hours.""
"Curtiz said that, but he told me that I could find you here right now. I'm used to coming immediately when sent for. I'll be in first thing tomorrow, if you'd rather, General."
"No need. Unless you had plans for the evening."
"Maybe a trip to the screen center."
The south side of the river had two common rooms with projector screens, one for officers and me other for enlisted ranks. The soldiers lounged on everything from club chairs to old sofas watching the impossibly vivid colors on the pulldown screen. Valentine had put in an appearance at the officers' screen center and learned about the designer of a new riot bus, a biography of a woman who had produced an astonishing sixteen children, then an inspirational speech by a colonel who had won a brass ring in the rugged mountains in what had been West Virginia. He left to walk past Xray-Tango's headquarters and poked his head in the enlisted room, where a video of dancing showgirls on a Memphis stage had the packed soldiers drooling. An advertisement for a reenlistment bonus all-expense-paid trip to Memphis played immediately following. He hadn't gone back since and didn't intend to.
"Give the popcorn a miss. I think the butter is reclaimed machine oil."
"If you don't mind me asking," Valentine said, "what are you doing?"
"I started out as a section chief on the railroad. I still like to survey. You do anything to clear your head, Le Sain?"
"I swing an ax. To cut wood. I like turning big ones into little ones."
"I would have guessed music. Something artistic. There's a look in your eyes that makes me think you're the creative type. For Christ's sake, at ease, Le Sain. This is a chat, not an ass-chewing."
"Music's a good guess, sir. My mother used to sing. I had a little ... recorder, that's what it was called. A recorder I'd play. Since you said this is just a chat, can I ask what that thing is, sir?"
"It's called a groma. It's an old Roman surveying tool. They used it to make straight lines. Works good for corners, too, but it's best for staking out roads." He leaned over, hands on thighs, to eyeball the lines strung with washers at the end, comparing them with the shaft. When he was satisfied that it was level, he sighted down the groma and waved a private holding a flag over a step to the right.
"No fancy optics," Xray-Tango went on. "The Romans built their roads straight, using that doohickey."
"They were great road builders, weren't they?"
"Yes. The old United States interstate system only built about half the miles that the old Roman network had. If you leave total lanes out of account, I imagine. They would have caught up, if they'd lasted as long as the Romans."
"Kur took care of that," Valentine said, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
Xray-Tango waited for another twitch to pass, then signaled to his private to place the little red-flagged stake. "You've had the usual indoctrination, I suppose."
"It varies from place to place."
"What's your wrist-cuff crib on it?"
Valentine had heard the Kurian catechism so often he was able to repeat it without thinking, half believing it. It had been drilled into him, twice weekly, at the community center meetings and Universal Church lectures in his time in the Zone. "Our planet was dying. War. Overpopulation. Pollution. Disease out of control. Mother Earth had a cancer called the human race. They came in and restored balance, brought order to the chaos. Kur did for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. Over half the population has proper food, shelter and health care now; everyone in care has access to the doctor. There are even dentists in a lot of places. New Orleans, for example. In Natchez we had to go to a plumber to get a tooth taken out."
"You know the words. You ever think about it?"
Valentine looked around to see if they were being overheard. "I think history gets written by the winners. The Old Regime had its problems, but they made some beautiful stuff. How many engines they built fifty or sixty years ago still run? Lots. If Kur makes anything that wonderful, they're keeping it to themselves. What's made now is clumsy by comparison, even when it works."
"The terrorists? The renegades?"
"They're right about them. Most of them are just misled. They don't know the Reapers are like white blood cells in an organism. If a piece of the body isn't working right, if it doesn't belong, if it's dead wood, it gets taken out to keep the rest of the system healthy."
"So you don't have problems with the system." He waved his assistant farther away to plant another stake.
Valentine's dancing heart missed a step. He'd found that among people who disliked the Kurians, they put a little extra stress on the phrase "the system" as a way of sounding out others who might share unorthodox opinions.
