eyes, dully noting the vehicles sailing past. But their glances were brief; they knew better than to look. Something official; it has nothing to do with me. At least, it better not.
Guilder watched the flatlanders from the passenger window, full of contempt. How he loathed them. Not just the insurgents, the ones who defied him—all of them. They plodded through their lives like brute animals, never seeing beyond the next square of earth to be plowed. Another day in the dairy barns, the fields, the biodiesel plant. Another day in the kitchen, the laundry, the pigsties.
But today wasn’t just another day.
The vehicles halted before Lodge 16. The eastern sky had softened to a yellowish gray, like old plastic.
“This is the one?” Guilder asked Wilkes.
Beside him, the man gave a tight-lipped nod.
The cols disembarked and took up positions. Guilder and Wilkes stepped clear of the car. Before them, in fifteen evenly spaced lines, three hundred flatlanders stood shivering in the cold. Two more trucks pulled in and parked at the head of the square. Their cargo bays were draped by heavy canvas.
“What are those for?” Wilkes asked.
“A little extra … persuasion.”
Guilder strode up to the senior HR officer and snatched the megaphone from his hand. A howl of feedback; then his voice boomed over the square.
“Who can tell me about Sergio?”
No reply.
“This is your only warning. Who can tell me about Sergio?”
Again, nothing.
Guilder gave his attention to a woman in the first row. Neither young nor old, she had a face so plain it could have been made of paste. She was clutching a filthy scarf around her head with hands covered by fingerless gloves black with soot.
“You. What’s your name?”
Eyes cast down, she muttered something into the folds of her scarf.
“I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
She cleared her throat, stifling a cough. Her voice was a phlegmy rasp. “Priscilla.”
“Where do you work?”
“The looms, sir.”
“Do you have a family? Children?”
She nodded weakly.
“So? What do you have?”
Her knees were trembling. “A daughter and two sons.”
“A husband?”
“Dead, sir. Last winter.”
“My condolences. Come forward.”
“I sang the hymn yesterday. It was the others, I swear.”
“And I believe you, Priscilla. Nevertheless. Gentlemen, can you assist her, please?”
A pair of cols trotted forward and grabbed the woman by her arms. Her body went slack, as if she were on the verge of fainting. They half-carried, half-dragged her to the front, where they shoved her onto her knees. She made no sound; her submission was total.
“Who are your children? Point them out.”
“Please.” She was weeping pitifully. “Don’t make me.”
One of the cols lifted his baton over her head. “This man is going to bash your brains out,” Guilder said.
She shook her bowed head.
“Very well,” Guilder said.
Down went the baton; the woman toppled forward into the mud. From the left came a sharp cry.
“Get her.”
A young teenager, with her mother’s face. Onto her knees she went. She was crying, trembling; snot was running from her nose. Guilder raised the megaphone.
“Does anybody have anything to say?”
Silence. Guilder drew a pistol from beneath his coat and racked the slide. “Minister Wilkes,” he said, holding out the gun, “will you please do the honors?”
“Jesus, Horace.” His face was aghast. “What are you trying to prove?”
“Is this going to be a problem?”
“We have people for this kind of thing. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“What deal? There is no deal. The deal is what I say it is.” Wilkes stiffened. “I won’t do it.”
“You won’t or you can’t?”
“What difference does it make?”
Guilder frowned. “Not very much, now that I think about it.” And with these words, he stepped behind the girl, pushed the muzzle of the gun to the back of her head, and fired.
“Good Christ!”
“You know what the biggest problem with never growing old is?” Guilder asked his chief of staff. He was wiping down the blood-tinged barrel with a handkerchief. “I’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Fuck you, Horace.”
Guilder pointed the pistol at Wilkes’s colorless face, leveling its sights at the spot between his eyes. “You forget that you can die.”
And Guilder shot him, too.
A change came over the crowd, their fear turning to something else. Murmurs moved up and down the lines, whispered calculations, the building energy of people who knew they had nothing to lose. Things had moved rather more briskly than Guilder would have liked—he’d hoped to get something useful before the hammer came down—but now the die was cast.
“Open the trucks.”
The canvas was pulled away. An eruption of volcanic screaming: no mystery now. Guilder walked briskly to