(Part 250.2)
Undisclosed location, United Provinces of South America (de jure)
January 16th 1900
Jorge Suárez closed his eyes.
He extended his jaw as far as it would go and moved it from side to side until it clicked.
Then he cracked his knuckles for a while.
Finally, in desperation, he rubbed the same knuckles on his closed eyes in the hope of producing unusual lights and colours. Something. Anything. He had tried enough times by now and it was harder, every time. Sooner or later he would make himself blind by rubbing too hard. Maybe that was what they wanted.
He stopped. He remained still, silent. All was silent, save for the faint, ever-present, whisper-like hiss of the aquaform-elluftium flame jets of the electride lamps above as they licked the quicklime cores. The sound was subtle enough that it was easy to ignore, and then one second-guessed oneself, wondering if it was tinnitus. If he—if one was really here at all, if any of this was real. Maybe he was in a coma, maybe he...
He didn’t have to, he told himself. Nothing was forcing him to open his eyes and look at his surroundings once again. He had struggled with himself, at first, battled the urge for hours. Now, it felt like a pointless battle. As pointless as the war.
The thought made a crack appear between his eyelids, and the light flooded in. Slowly, resentfully, Suárez opened his eyes.
The room was unchanged, of course. It always was. He had examined it when he first arrived, when they first pulled that smelly leather bag off his head and left him here. At first he had felt relief. Now he longed for the return of that bag. Any sensory stimulation. Anything.
The room was white. Maybe more like greyish-white or off-white, but the blinding glow from the electride lamps in the ceiling sharpened it until it hurt the eyes. He looked down, saw the multiple shadows cast by his body and the chair that was the single piece of furniture in the room. The floor was concrete, whitewashed.
His gaze was drawn upwards against his will. The walls were concrete, whitewashed. The ceiling was concrete, whitewashed. The lamps were small, discreet in design. The room was a near-featureless white cube.
In practice, he knew, that was not a prison that could hold a man in the real world. There was a toilet, of the basic hole in the floor form found in prisons, and there were glass bottles of water. Both of these items were concealed around a claustrophobic hidden corner which also concealed the room’s door. From the chair, it was invisible.
Every day, when they brought his tray of bland food, they also thoroughly cleaned the toilet area. At first he had thought this a good thing, speaking of good hygiene and treating an important prisoner with dignity. Now he suspected he knew the real reason: to remove even the stimulus of the smell of his own body’s waste. Leaving:
Nothing.
They had left him his watch, surprisingly perhaps. He had wound it regularly, maybe over-wound it as sanity had slowly drifted away. He thought he had been here—perhaps two weeks? It did not seem enough. It seemed like years. Centuries. What had happened, why—
He had been asleep, he was sure, after a long night celebrating the reported destruction of the American army (or British, to be more precise) and that the remnants of the Home Fleet had managed to repel the American ships and their distraught crews from the upriver Plate. He had wondered exactly what had happened, and attempted to find out just what the wonderful Scientific Attack of Jaimes’ men was, but without much concern. That had been a night for celebration, a reprieve when all hope had seemed lost.
And then he had woken up with his head in a bag and rough voices yelling at him to cooperate. They had never answered his questions about what had happened to his wife and children. He tried to hold on to images of Maria and the kids in his head. They were something to live for, when all sense departed from the here and now.
Wherever the here and now was, in space and in time.
A sound.
It wasn’t meal time!
Suárez rose unsteadily to his feet and stared, his head feeling as though he was suffering from a hangover, as though it had been delayed since that first night’s celebration. But it was just the unfamiliar sensations, he was sure.
A man entered from the seemingly invisible passageway where the concealed dogleg of the toilet room was. He wore black; not quite a suit, not quite a uniform. A discreet armband wrapped one upper arm, bearing a symbol Suárez only vaguely recognised: three yellow lines meeting to form an inverted triangle, with a circle in the middle of it. Something like—wait, Sanchezistas used that, didn’t they?
Sanchezistas...why did that sound familiar? Something about...Jaimes, maybe? The man’s dissolute youth?
The man in black looked to be in, perhaps, his late thirties. He looked—he looked like a Meridian, of mostly criollo stock perhaps, maybe with enough of a hint of Negro to be an octroon. But it was always very hard to say, in a country that one poet had described as a crucible in which new alloys were formed from the metal of every race of man in the world.
He also had an entirely blank expression, as though he was denying even that sensation to Suárez. He did, however, indicate his mood in a different manner: his right hand gripped a pistol, and a bulge on his opposite hip suggested additional cartridges. “Amigo Suárez,” he said. He put a strange accent on the first word, so it sounded almost like amico. “I think it is now time for you to join me. I have something I believe you would profit from seeing.” His Meridian Spanish was fluent, but again there were a few oddities. Yet they did not match any foreign accent Suárez had heard—and, as Foreign Minister, he had heard many.
Suárez took a step forward. “Who are you?” he blurted out, all his gentlemanly reserved run ragged by the days of sensory deprivation. “Where are—where’s my wife and—”
The man in black twitched his gun up slightly and Suárez fell silent, feeling every rumple of his soiled clothes. “All in good time, Amigo Suárez. Come with me.” The gun twitched in a new direction.
In practice, the man had to vacate the twisty passage and then allow Suárez to do the same. Stars flashed in his vision as he finally left the room, though the corridors outside looked similar, if a little more worn. Concrete was not that common a building material... “Is this the new facility where the Operation Vibora trials were held?” he hazarded.
The man in black quirked a sardonic smile. “More questions before I have answered your last. Not very civilised.” He gestured for Suárez to head down the corridor. As he fell in behind, to Suárez’s surprise, he deigned to answer those questions: “You may address me as Amigo Alvarez.” It was a common surname, but again that peculiar accent turned it into something more like ‘Alfarus’. “Your wife and child are safe and will not share your fate.” The second part of the sentence should have made Suárez’s heart pound, but relief from the first part was all he felt for a moment. “And yes, a commendable insight considering your friend Amigo Monterroso never showed you the place he was so proud of.”
Alvarez developed a sneer. “His great latter-day Alcázar of Segovia, in which he would keep undesirables until he either had sufficient trumped-up evidence to slay them, or they were driven mad by this place.” He nudged Suárez in the back with his gun barrel. “The greatest work of your friend.”
Suárez shook his head violently. “President-General Monterroso worked hard all his life for the welfare of the common people!” he protested. “I did not agree with all he did, but—”
“The common people he just fed into the meat grinder of a war so brutal and cynical that even the nationalistically blinded can see it as the pointless slaughter that all wars are,” Alvarez retorted. “But there shall be a reckoning, and you are called upon for an important purpose: to witness it.”
Suárez opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but they had reached their destination. The facility seemed almost deserted, but faint noise was audible behind this door: reassuringly wooden, not blending into the white walls. With one eye on his prisoner, Alvarez unlocked the door and nodded him in.
The room on the other side, though spartan, was dim to the point that Suárez had to wait for his eyes to adjust. On the opposite wall were two small doors, and between them were two large windows. In the corner, a small steam engine chugged away. Suárez had no idea what it did, beyond perhaps heat the already-warm room unnecessarily.
But he had little eyes for any of this. Visible through each of the large windows, oddly washed-out but their faces recognisable, was a man sat on a chair. Both of them were flanked by two men with guns, the tableaux almost comically perfect mirror images of one another, though the uniforms of the gunmen were different. Suárez’s eyes, however, were on the faces of the prisoners.
Two Presidents-General of the United Provinces of South America. Carlos Priestley and Álvaro Monterroso. Mortal enemies.
Oddly, Suárez thought, they seemed to ignore one another. He would have expected them to be yelling insults, yet they were both slumped into sullen silence as their guards periodically yelled at them instead. He could not make out the words over the sound of the steam engine, which might, on reflection, be its true purpose.
More to the point, he then realised, neither of them were looking at him.
He understood. “This is a transparent mirror, yes? It looks like a mirror from their side but a window from ours?”
“Very good,” Alvarez said, only half-sarcastically. “Doubtless Amigo Monterroso thought them a nice tool.[7] Able to gloat over his enemies being tortured without them knowing he was there...”
“Álvaro would never do that!” Suárez snapped.
“Believe what you will; your time is over regardless,” Alvarez said casually. A chill ran down Suárez’s spine. “And now be silent. It is not your place to enter here. Remain.” He locked the door by which they had entered, on the inside, then got out a set of handcuffs and cuffed Suárez to a loop mounted on the wall clearly for that very purpose. A voice at the back of Suárez’s mind said he should use this opportunity to try to grab the gun and get away, but something seemed to freeze him with fascination. He...he wanted to know what would happen next.
There was a desk below the two windows, with cupboards and drawers. Alvarez opened one and pulled out a cap, jacket and trousers which matched the ones of the guards watching over Priestley. They looked like standard Fuerzas Armadas gear, but with armbands and sashes bedecked with symbols suggesting extreme Adamantine or even Neo-Jacobin ideas: white diamonds and upside-down black Torches of Liberty on a red background. Alvarez quickly and un-selfconsciously changed his clothes in front of Suárez, then opened the door on the left.
Suárez saw him enter the room, saw Priestley shout something at him (again inaudible over the steam engine’s noise) which Alvarez ignored. Alvarez seemed to give an order to the guards, who readily acknowledged his authority. Both of them saluted, turned and left through a different door, which Alvarez locked. Priestley stood up—Suárez could see his ankles had been cuffed to the chair to immobilise him—and again Alvarez ignored whatever he was saying. Instead, Alvarez went to something in a corner of the room that Suárez could not see given the limitations of the transparent mirror. Despite the sound of the steam engine, he thought he could make out a clicking sound like a clockwork timer. Surely Alvarez wasn’t setting a bomb!
Oddly, though Priestley continued to shout impotently, through the other window Monterroso did not react at all; nor did his guards. Suárez finally realised that the windows did not look into the same room, but two different rooms—or one with a thick partition. Neither former President-General could see the other.
Alvarez withdrew from the room on the left, already removing his jacket, cap and trousers. “Do you understand yet?” he asked Suárez cryptically, then stuffed the clothes messily back into the drawer without waiting for an answer. In their place he withdrew a new uniform, again Meridian-looking but this one covered with logos of the big pseudopuissant corporations. He opened the door on the right.
This time Suárez did, indeed, understand. The scene repeated itself, with the two guards in similarly corporate-influenced uniforms again saluting and withdrawing on Alvarez’s order, while this time Monterroso cried out, probably more pungently if Suárez knew his friend Álvaro. Alvarez switched on whatever the clockwork thing was in the corner of Monterroso’s room, then returned to Suárez’s room. He discarded the second uniform and once again donned his black clothes. He went to the small steam engine and switched it off. “So you can hear,” he explained briefly as the chugga-chugga sound faded. “But do not cry out, or you will regret it.”
Suárez felt too paralysed by the bizarre drama to speak even if he had wanted to. He just nodded.
Alvarez went into the room on the left, Priestley’s, and released a couple of locks that allowed him to push aside the partition—which, though Suárez could not see it from his dead-on view, looked to be some sort of sliding metal door in segments. He immediately divined when Monterroso and Priestley could see each other, and this time he could actually hear the insults. He winced at the fury in Álvaro’s voice, finally naked and laid bare by years of ruinous war. And Priestley gave as good as he got. If both men had not been chained to their chairs by their ankles, their hands would be around each others’ throats.
Alvarez let them scream themselves hoarse for a minute, then clapped his hands, a sound rendered slightly indistinct by the gun in his right. “Enough,” he said quietly, and charismatic though both Presidents-General were, the one word immediately gripped their attention. Their verbal fury died away, echoing in the far reaches of the concrete room.
“Enough,” Alvarez repeated. “That’s what it’s all about. Enough.” He slammed his gun metallically against the wall. “We—have—had—enough—of—you!”
“That’s right!” Monterroso and Priestley yelled in unison. “He’s ruined the country! Help me finish him off!” Suárez supposed they hadn’t actually said the exact same thing at the exact same time while pointing at each other, but that was how he would remember it. What was it Alvarez had said to him? Do you understand yet?
He feared he did.
Alvarez slowly shook his head. “Even now. Even now, while millions lay dead across the world, you cannot let go of your hatred.” He cocked his gun. “If I threw this pistol between you, you would fight each other for it, and then you would turn it—not on I, your mutual captor—but on each other. You are fools.” The depth of contempt dripping from his voice startled even Suárez, who had thought he had seen all the heights and depths of political vitriol in his career.
Evidently Monterroso and Priestley felt the same way, for they both drew back. “Who are you, anyway?” Monterroso demanded.
“Yes, what’s happening?” Priestley added. “I thought before you were dressed as one of his goons,” he jerked a thumb at Monterroso.
Monterroso stared at him. “No, you idiot! He was dressed as one of your secret cryptic-reserve[8] supporters! You’d launched a coup against me!”
“Had I?” Priestley said incredulously. “When?”
Alvarez actually chuckled. “Let me disabuse you of those notions, Amigos. My name is Amigo Alvarez and you have been overthrown—not your governments, but the whole false shadow that is the so-called United Provinces—by those who have cast the scales from their eyes, those who know the truth promulgated by Pablo Sanchez.” His voice became a whisper. “Humans.”
Both Presidents-General stared. Priestley was the first to react. “Societists?” he laughed. “Sanchezistas? You couldn’t overthrow a cow at the top of a steep hill! I’m a good friend of Bartolomé Jaimes, who was one of you when he was a foolish young man, and he told me there were only dozens of you left! DOZENS!”
Priestley laughed caustically, but his laugh swiftly trailed off as he saw Alvarez’s sardonic grin.
“It was convenient,” Alvarez said softly, “for you to believe that Amigo Jaimes was a former supporter of ours.” He turned to Monterroso. “Just as it was for you to think that Archbishop Ramírez was on your side.”
Monterroso shook his head. Suárez was secretly impressed by how swiftly he recovered himself, unlike Priestley who was still opening and shutting his mouth in disbelief like a fish. “I made a mistake there, then,” he said perfunctorily. “I was desperate. I’m not surprised you were able to con men of the Archbishop’s class, or that idiot—I’m surprised you didn’t go after Jorge Suárez.” The words hurt Suárez to the point he almost cried out in anger, especially since his own thoughts of Monterroso had been favourable.
“We did,” Alvarez said smugly. “He, too, blindly signed up to something which might hold the secret to winning the war.”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Monterroso replied. “Societism has always been an attractive ideology for upper-class dilettantes,” he continued, sounding like a lecturer dismissing a trivial point. “It allows them to say that, actually, the hierarchy of society, the class system, is a natural thing, donchaknow, so stop complaining, you hungry masses, you don’t deserve to eat...”
In one whiplash movement, so fast one could have blinked and missed it, Alvarez had taken a step across the room and smashed Monterroso across the face with the side of his pistol. Suárez really did cry out this time, but nobody seemed to notice. “You know nothing about Societism,” Alvarez hissed, his eyes flashing with fury for the first time. There was a monster there beneath that carefully controlled exterior, Suárez realised with a chill.
Monterroso straightened his neck, blood oozing from his bruised cheek and what looked like a broken nose, but grinned caustically. “I know enough to get a rise out of you.”
Alvarez glared at him, then turned his back on him. His friend—his less than loyal friend, Suárez reminded himself—had scored a point.
“How did you even do this?” Priestley asked shakily. “Maybe there aren’t only dozens of you. But that fool’s right, damn him. You don’t have an army. How did you even capture us?”
Alvarez recovered his sardonic smile. “That’s the secret, the secret Amigo Caraíbas worked out a long time ago.” He gestured back and forth. “You were taken captive by men who think they’re working for a Neo-Jacobin coup in support of him. You were taken captive by men who think they’re trying to restore the corporations to power under him.” He shook his head. “Societism is an easy truth, but its consequences are too difficult for many—yet. Manipulation is sometimes required.”
“Very well,” Priestley said shakily. “So you manipulated us. You told them—Monterroso and Suárez—you told them what? You told them about the death-luft?”
Monterroso sat upright. “Death-what?” he whispered. This was news, too, to Suárez.
“Oh yes. Yes, I’m afraid the magical way we proposed to win the war for you did not involve something as prosaic as, ooh,” Alvarez counted on his fingers, “a new artillery targeting system, or a set of alienistically-designed messages that would sow discord in loyalties between the enemy forces. No.” He nodded to Priestley. “That gentleman’s company produced a poisonous luft that can be delivered to a battlefield by artillery shell, or bomb dropped from a cielago. As the army from the North-West of Zone 17, what you would call England, discovered a few weeks ago.” He shook his head. “An effective weapon, but a horrible, horrible death.”
“Slaughter,” Priestley muttered. “Like animals...”
“So unlike blowing them apart with bullets and bombs,” Alvarez said sarcastically. “Nonetheless, the novelty of this new means of killing has indeed caused shock amongst the inhabitants of...” he waved a hand as though simplifying for a small child. “You would call them Americans, as well as the English themselves. That has helped trigger division between themselves, which, while always a tragedy in general, helps us in the short term...” He raised his gun again, “but it has also caused anger. They are crippled and would find it economically difficult to pursue their war against the Human forces now occupying what was formerly known on maps as the United Provinces, but anger for revenge would drive them...”
He glanced from President to President. “Unless we find a scapegoat. The real mastermind behind the Scientific Attack. Perhaps the one whose company made the weapon...” the gun hovered over Priestley. “Or perhaps the one who signed the order.” He turned the gun on Monterroso.
Monterroso found his voice first. “You’re going to hand me over to the Yanquis?” He sneered. “Go ahead. I’d rather see their executioner’s blade than live through the mess you’re going to make of this country. I’ll die a martyr to inspire our people to overthrow you.”
Priestley licked his lips. “I have money,” he said hesitantly. “Even now. I can set you up for life. You can’t run this country without the corporations, and I know how to get them on side...”
“A coward to the end,” Monterroso said contemptuously.
“I said enough!” Alvarez barked. He glanced over his shoulder, as though at Suárez through the transparent mirror, as though to ask ‘are you paying attention?’ “Even now, you don’t understand!” The gun went back and forth again between Priestley and Monterroso. “Rule the nation in the interests of Capital, or rule the nation in the interests of Labour? Set one class against another, as though the steering wheel of a mobile is more or less important than the drive shaft?”
Flecks of spit were visible on Alvarez’s black pseudo-uniform as he ranted. “All in the interests of ruling the nation. What a miserable choice. Well, there is a third way.” He shook his head. “A third way. No nation at all. Only Society, served by both Capital and Labour, in peace and harmony forever.
“And it begins here. It begins today.”
Alvarez raised his gun one last time, then paused. “I forgot one important point.”
“And what is that?” Monterroso demanded.
Alvarez shrugged. “I’m ambidextrous.”
The second gun was in his left hand before Suárez could blink.
The bullets rang out in what felt like perfect synchronicity.
An instant later, twin red blooms painted the blank walls of the two rooms.
And then, only then, did Suárez realise what the clockwork clicking was. Not bombs, but cameras. Repeatedly taking asimcons in that brightly-lit room with its electride lamps.
Clearly Alvarez didn’t even have enough men to do that for him. He had done this all himself. Somehow.
When Alvarez returned to the room, he found that Suárez had sagged to the floor, one arm stretched comically up to where it was handcuffed to the mount in the wall. “Why did you make me watch that?” he whispered. “You’re only going to do the same to me, right?”
“Not quite,” Alvarez said. “Those two Amigos were sentenced by a Classes’ Trial to execution. You, on the other hand, had your sentence commuted to exile.”
“Exile?” Suárez asked, hating himself for the little flame of hope in his heart.
“To the Zone known to you as...oh, the ENA,” Alvarez said. “You will go with the bodies of those two men, photographic evidence of their executions,” he patted the plated in the black envelope he held in his hand, “records of legal due process, the death-luft project with his signature on, the order to fire with his signature on...”
Suárez thought to point out that there was also an order with his own signature on, but decided against it. “You want to buy peace,” he said flatly.
“More literally than you think,” Alvarez said. “There will also be quite a lot of gold on board: the first installment in our quid pro quo payment for the region known as Venezuela, plus a little to bribe Urb-...that is, Fredericksburg society against Princess Daniela’s group.”
“You think we can keep—how would we pay for—” Suárez stuttered.
Alvarez smiled. “The national debts of the regions known as—oh, you know—Carolina and Brazil, among others, are secured against gold stored in the Bank of Córdoba. Gold we now have access to.”
“But the Brazilians—”
“Are in the process of being liberated by an army which thinks it is working for that Amigo,” Alvarez nodded to Monterroso’s corpse. “Soon all these arbitrary borders will be stripped from human imagination, the only realm in which they have ever possessed reality, and then real history shall begin.”
Suárez stared at him for a long moment, then turned away. “It is not a history in which I wish to feature as a character,” he said softly, coldly, with a final note of defiance.
Alvarez unlocked his cuffs. “A truth common to all forms of history,” he said simply, “is that that choice is never yours to make.”
[7] In OTL the one-way mirror was patented in 1903. In TTL it happened about ten years earlier and social thinkers have already suggested their use in situations such as police interrogations, though this is an early example of that implementation.
[8] OTL: Fifth column.
