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peace.
To Miles's secret dismay, his analysis proved right.
The Cetagandans returned to their original rat bar routine, unresponsive again
to their prisoners'
internal permutations. Miles was not sure he liked that. True, it gave him
ample opportunity to fine-tune his distribution scheme. But some
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harassment from the dome would have directed the prisoners' attention outward,
given them a foe again, above all broken the paralyzing boredom of their
lives. In the long run, Tris must prove right.
"I hate an enemy who doesn't make mistakes," Miles muttered irritably, and
flung his efforts into events he could control.
He found a phlegmatic prisoner with a steady heartbeat to lie in the dirt and
count his own pulse, and began timing distribution, and then working on
reducing timing.
"It's a spiritual exercise," he announced when he had his fourteen
quartermasters start issuing the rat bars 200 at a time, with thirty-minute
breaks between groups.
"It's a change of pace," he explained in an aside to
Tris. "If we can't induce the Cetagandans to provide some variety, we'll just
have to do it ourselves." He also finally got an accurate head count of the
surviving prisoners. Miles was everywhere, exhorting, producing, pushing,
restraining.
"If you really want it to go faster, make more bleeding piles," Oliver
protested.
"Don't blaspheme," said Miles, and went to work inducing his groups to cart
their rat bars away to distribution piles spaced evenly around the perimeter.
At the end of the nineteenth chow call since he had entered the camp, Miles
judged his distribution system complete and theologically correct. Calling
every two chow calls a "day," he had been there nine days.
"I'm all done," he realized with a groan, "and it's too early."
"Weeping because you have no more worlds to conquer?"
inquired Tris with a sarcastic grin.
By the thirty-second chow call, the system was still running smoothly, but
Miles was getting frayed.
"Welcome to the long haul," said Beatrice dryly. "You better start pacing
yourself, Brother Miles. If what
Tris says is true, we're going to be in here even longer because of you. I
must remember to thank you for that properly sometime." She treated him to a
threatening smirk, and Miles prudently remembered an
errand on the opposite side of the camp.
She was right, Miles thought, depressed. Most prisoners here counted their
captivity not in days and weeks, but months and years. He himself was likely
to be gibbering nuts in a space of time that most of them would regard as a
mere breath. He wondered glumly what form his madness would take, Manic,
inspired by the glittering delusion that he was -- say -- the Conquerer of
Komarr? Or depressive, like Tremont, curling up in himself until he was no one
at all, a sort of human black hole?
Miracles. There had been leaders throughout history who had been wrong in
their timing for armageddon, leading their shorn flocks up the mountain to
await an apotheosis that never came. Their later lives were usually marked by
obscurity and drinking problems.
Nothing to drink in here. Miles wanted about six doubles, right now.
Now. Now. Now.
Miles took to walking the dome perimeter after each chow call, partly to make
or at least pretend to inspection, partly to burn off a little of his
uncomfortably accumulating nervous energy. It was getting harder and harder to
sleep. There had been a period of quiet in the camp after the chow calls were
successfully regulated, as if their ordering had been a crystal dropped in a
supersaturated solution. But in the last few days the number of fistfights
broken up by the Enforcers had risen. The Enforcers themselves were getting
quicker to violence, acquiring a potentially unsavory swagger. Phases of the
moon. Who could outrace the moon?
"Slow down, Miles," complained Suegar, ambling along beside him.
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"Sorry." Miles restrained his stride and broke his self-absorption to look
around. The glowing dome rose on his left hand, seeming to pulse to an
unsettling hum just out of the range of his hearing. Quiet spread out on his
right, groups of people mostly sitting. Not that much visible change since his
first day in here. Maybe a little less tension, maybe a little more concerted
care being taken of the injured or ill. Phases of the moon. He shook off his
unease
and smiled cheerfully at Suegar.
"You getting any more positive responses to your sermons these days?" Miles
asked.
"Well -- nobody tries to beat me up anymore," said
Suegar. "But then, I haven't been preaching so often, being busy with the chow
calls and all. And then, there are the Enforcers now. It's hard to say."
"You going to keep trying?"
"Oh, yes." Suegar paused. "I've seen worse places than this, y'know. I was at
a mining camp once, when
I was scarcely more than a kid. A fire gem strike.
For a change, instead of one big company or the government muscling in, it had
gotten divided up into hundreds and hundreds of little claims, usually about
two meters square. Guys dug out there by hand, with trowels and whisk brooms
-- big fire gems are delicate, y'know, they'll shatter at a careless blow
-- they dug under the broiling sun, day after day. A
lot of these guys had less clothes than us now. A lot of 'em didn't eat as
good, or as regular. Working their butts off. More accidents, more disease
than here. There were fights, too, in plenty.
"But they lived for the future. Performed the most incredible feats of
physical endurance for hope, all voluntary. They were obsessed. They were --
well, you remind me a lot of them. They wouldn't quit for nothing. They turned
a mountain into a chasm in a year, with hand trowels. It was nuts. I loved it.
"This place," Suegar glanced around, "just makes me scared shitless." His
right hand touched his rag rope bracelet. "It'll suck up your future, swallow
you down -- it's like death is just a formality, after that. Zombie town,
suicide city. The day I stop trying, this place'll eat me."
"Mm," agreed Miles. They were nearing what Miles thought of as the farthest
point of their circuit, across the camp from the women's group at whose
now-permeable borders Miles and Suegar kept their sleeping mats.
A couple of men walking the perimeter from the opposite direction coalesced
with another grey-pajama'd pair. As if casually and spontaneously, three more
arose from their mats on Miles's right. He
could not be sure without turning his head, but Miles thought he caught more
peripheral motion closing in behind him.
The approaching four stopped a few meters in front of them. Miles and Suegar
hesitated. Grey-clad men, all variously larger than Miles -- who wasn't? --
frowning, full of a fierce tension that arced to
Miles and scree'd down his nerves. Miles recognized only one of them, an
ex-surly brother he'd seen in
Pitt's company. Miles didn't bother taking his eyes off Pitt's lieutenant to
look around for Enforcers.
For one thing, he was pretty sure one of the men in the company facing them
was an Enforcer.
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