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"So when did you start to question your Guidon?"
It might have been the time I went to the basement. There was an incinerator down there for medical waste and so on, and I was responsible for destroying certain records. Lost records are the bureaucrat's best friend when trouble pays a call, Valentine, and don't you forget it if you ever rise to a desk.
"Now usually I just dumped the files down the chute, but it was after normal office hours and for some reason I thought the incinerator might not be burning since we were on a winter fuel savings drive. I went down to check. The basement had its own cargo lift, otherwise you had to take the stairs, and there were two doors out of the lift. The first set, by the buttons, went to the incinerator. I'd always heard that only people who were dropped went out the back doors.
"I took the lift down to the basement because they were painting in the stairs and the fumes bothered me-we'd hit the natal goal for the year, and the doctors and nurses from the delivery ward were having all their faces painted on the landings-and I heard a sound from the other side of the back door as my exit opened. It was like . . . like a sander, a belt sander or one of those ones with the little round pads. I heard screaming."
"We'd always been told, you see, that everything was done to make death painless and worry-free, right down to the use of drugs to relax the person designated for recycling. I still hear that whirring noise and the screams, right to this clay, like someone made a tape of it.
"I went to the incinerator and burned the old records and took the stairs back up. Though it almost choked me."
Valentine asked Ediyak to see if she could scare up some food, worried what the ten fingers of bourbon consumption would do to Brother Mark's nerve-worn system.
"You're a good boy, Valentine."
"Where did they send you after the hospital?"
"Education in Washington, DC, seat of the New Universal Church. The Vatican, Medina, Jerusalem, and the River Ganges all wrapped up around one green mall. Ever seen it? No, I suppose you haven't."
"No."
"Well, all the Church upper education schools and monuments are there. Tor the service of mankind,' they all say. Yes, each and every one of them. Sometimes in letters six feet high in marble.
"My six years there reaffirmed my faith in mankind's future. I took lots of classes on old wars, intolerance, racism, studied how mankind had been in a downward spiral and that the so-called Age of Reason led to anything but. I could recite the four controls Homo sapiens needed and wrote long essays on the correctly actualized person.
"Oh, and I had my great moment of fame, when I acted in an atrocity film. I got to play both a local priest bemoaning the slaughter of an entire town and a colonel who admitted giving orders to your terror operatives to poison water supplies feeding hospitals and schools.
Different films, of course."
"Of course."
"I wondered if anyone would recognize me. Of course I had a full beard and an eyepatch when I was playing the captured colonel.
"They assured me my script was based on actual documentation. The problem was the colonel's testimony sounded quite similar to a film I'd seen three times as a Youth Vanguard.
Of course they always began and ended with a 'authenticated documentation' seal and statement. Of course, my films bore one too. I had to wonder. Since we were filming fake documentaries allegedly based on real documentation, I naturally began to have doubts about the veracity of the real documentation. Had it been based on the documentation in that film I saw sixteen years before? I wondered whether my transcribed testimony based on the real documentation might serve as further documentation for another film. Do you follow?"
"You lost me two documentations ago."
"Sorry." He took another drink.
Ediyak arrived with some flatbread sandwiches and a shredded-meat stew that didn't commend itself to close analysis.
* * * *
They camped the next night with Valentine's usual caution, flanked by the legworm clan encampments, Coonskins to the south and the rest of the Alliance to the north, in a hummock between two higher hills. The hills sloped off to the west like unevenly cooked souffles, and were situated above a good supply of firewood and water in an old crossroads town. His scavengers dug up a supply of wire in town. Old copper wire had any number of uses in a military camp, mostly in quick repairs. The only interesting feature was an almost paintless church with a steeple that served as a cramped observation post. Otherwise it was no different than any of their other half-dozen camps in the hills of central Kentucky.
Distant gunfire, a sound like sheets slowly torn under a comforter, woke him. He had his boots on by the time the camp siren went off.
The sound brought moisture to his palms and dried his mouth.
Only two events warranted that alarming wail: Reapers in the camp or a surprise attack.
The wail brought the camp together like drizzle turning into pools on a waterproof tarp.
Individual drops of soldiers sought their nearest comrades and corporals with the same molecular cohesion of water. The fire teams called to the nearest sergeant or officer as captains passed word and gave orders.
Valentine needed to travel only forty feet or so to headquarters, Bee appearing like a genie summoned by the siren. He forced himself to go at a brisk walk, buckling on his combat harness. The first flares burst to the south as he did so, turning the twigs and leaves of the young trees on the slope into a lattice.
