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“Enough of that,” the vet said. “I don’t want talk like that getting back to Scrappy. He takes after his great-grandfather a bit much.”
“I’d rather worry about it getting back to the Old Man,” the staff director said.
“Don’t tell me you believe that story about his body not being in the family crypt,” the vet said. “Rig on the gardening staff says he’s seen it personally.”
“Rig’s never been inside the crypt. Nor anyone else on the staff, unless you coun
t . . . well, himself.”
While this conversation interested me, my helpful Grog persona would concentrate on where his next mug of root beer might be coming from. “Who I work for now?” I asked.
“You’re due for some R & R,” the staff director said. “I wouldn’t put too much trust in Rig. Damn drunk.”
“You’d be a drunk too if you found bodies like he does when you’re mowing the golf course and raking sand. They aren’t too particular about what they do with the bodies after they’ve been drained.”
The nurse hurried out with her tray of bloody gauze.
“Enough of that horror talk. How’s the big boy’s health? Can he handle hard labor?”
“Send him to the mines. They always need strong backs,” the vet said.
“To a point,” the staff director said. “He’s kind of big. They won’t much like feeding all that.”
“He can eat the other miners for all I care. I’m tired of smelling wet Grog in the morning.”
PART TWO
THE BLACK CURRENCY
THE LAST STOP
I was an oddly sized part passing through the gears of the Maynes Empire. Had I been a man, they probably would have made me a security guard at a warehouse or fuel depot and made me work my way up from a clean slate. After all, my drunken superior had given me orders, and I hadn’t been clever enough to figure out a way of not following them.
As I possessed a strong back, the default was to send me to the mines.
Why do I use the word default? I fought alongside an ex-Quisling who taught me the term, as he saw it. His name was Post, and we’d first met on the Louisiana coast when I served with a Grog labor detachment I had infiltrated. At the time, he was a prematurely aging lieutenant and heavy drinker. Much later, after he’d switched sides, he would sometimes talk about surviving in the Kurian Order. While these aren’t his exact words—my memory is not good enough to recall those without notes—they are faithful to his view.
“You never wanted the system to ‘default’ when making a choice about you. It started in childhood. The default was to get almost no education at all, just a few years of primary painting horrible pictures about the pre-Kurian past, terrifying propaganda about the guerillas, and reverence for the system and what it was trying to do for mankind. If you defaulted there, you usually ended up apprenticing at eight or eleven to resource work—farming or logging or fishing if you were male; most females ended up diapering or cleaning.
“So the more default settings you avoid, the better an education you can get. Youth Vanguard helps a lot, of course, but in some KZs, only Quisling kids make it in. Funny how geniture aristocracy grows in any society like a weed.
“Then when you’re working, the default is to keep you at whatever job you started, have you get married, and have you be a member of the same church, in the same town, with the same neighbors, until you fear change more than you fear them. Then, once you’re older and have had all the children you’re likely to have, slowing down a bit and not so much able to put in the fifty-five-hour weeks, the default setting of the Order comes with teeth and yellow eyes.
“The Order’s default is always to keep you in whatever little sorting tray where you were first placed, like one of those puzzles kids get where they have to put the moon in the moon slot and the hexagon in the hex slot. It takes a mighty effort to make it out of one of those slots. That’s why you find so many of the more driven types on the fringes of the Kurian Order, where there’s room to widen the slots so they fit in a lot of different ways.”
Will Post was a pretty good man even when he was a drunk. Once he came over to the free territories, he became a better one. Sadly, he was badly injured in an air raid near Dallas, and at the time of this memoir had headquarters desk duty from a wheelchair.
In the Coal Country, the default was ore work in one form or another, either extracting it, transporting it, or keeping the men and machines doing those two other tasks running.
So some men in the White Palace security uniforms explained to me, like a teacher with a problem child, that I’d be living somewhere else for a while and working with train carts and shovels.
“Yes, work hard!”
“Good! Work hard, and you’ll get honey doughnuts and chocolate.”
The honey doughnuts weren’t bad; in fact they were tastier than the service pastries I’d had with Southern Command, but the chocolate they sold in the ordinary stores was crumbly, bitter stuff that tasted like chalk.
They escorted me to a bus shelter and the low man on the roster waited with me until a rather dirty bus wheezed up the hill toward the White Palace. I’d encountered coal dust before; it was hard to spend much time in this Kurian Zone without being acquainted with it here and there, but this was the first time it looked like no effort had been made to rid either the exterior or interior of it.
