I move down the corridor, turn at a corner. Nala is there; she looks at me without interest or guile. “You came,” I say. “You’re going with me.”
She shrugs and shakes her head. “It does not matter,” she says. “It does not matter anymore. But yes, I will come with you. It was so agreed.”
I touch her hand; it is damp and cold. “What happened?” I say. “What has happened to you?”
“I won’t talk about it. There is nothing to say. Please don’t ask.”
“What happened? What have you learned?”
“We’re late. If we want to make the rendezvous with the others, we must go now.” She encircles my hand, her fingers like a bracelet around my wrist. “Come,” she says.
“Something has happened,” I say rather stupidly. “Something has happened to you; you are changed.”
“Nothing has happened. I am the same as I was. If you don’t want to go, Quir, tell me. I’m only doing this for you. I’ll go back to my room and go to sleep.”
“Does it matter that little?” I say. “Don’t you want to escape?”
“There is no escape,” Nala says. Her voice breaks and then she modulates it. “Of course there is an escape, Quir,” she says. “Ignore that; it’s merely my state of mind. Escape is always possible. Come, let us see what we can do.”
She leads me a few steps down the hall and finally I pick up her pace, blend with her. She moves with alertness and cunning, dropping against the wall now and then to observe, then coming out to the median point. “We must be cautious,” she says. “We are allowed to roam these halls freely, of course, but there is no reason to attract attention.” She motions for me to drop behind her, follow at a few paces, seemingly disassociated. Strangers one hundred and fifty-eight and one hundred and sixty-one, out for their separate evening strolls in the enclosure. I follow her, feeling that my leadership has been taken from me. I originated the plan and now it is in other hands. My conspirators are dispersed at this moment, moving independently of me, needless of my direction. I have lost all initiative.
We come to the end of a corridor, turn, and find ourselves confronted by an open door which leads, through a strange luminescent glow; into a larger area. This is the first outer point of the enclosure; the point marking where we may go without special permission. I have been beyond it several times, but always escorted by my therapist, who has pointed out places of interest in the enclosure and reminded me that escape is hopeless. Now I come into the room unsupervised. There is a strange, airless feeling, like tottering unaided at a great height. Nala pauses and takes my hand again.
“Come,” she says. “Just move through, Quir. Don’t look at it too much. This is where they keep the old machinery.”
I turn, look against the walls where she has pointed and see what I have never seen with my therapist, being too interested in his dialogue and finger-gesturings. Along the wall, half-hidden under covers and burlap, are the outlines of machines. From gaps in the covering glint shards of metal, the dull blankness of shielding, joints and pistons. The machines are various sizes and shapes, all of them of the same color. They have a vague resemblance to certain large armaments I have seen the aliens occasionally carry, and to devices I have noticed in the therapist’s office. But they are difficult to glimpse and it is hard to understand their function.
“This is where they put the machines when they’re obsolete,” Nala says. “It’s a storage room. New equipment is always coming in as they work on us.”
“Oh,” I say. I move more quickly through the room, now looking at the floor. I am afraid of the machines, I find.
“No one is ever expected to come through here,” she says. “It’s merely a point between the part where we live and the part where they do. It’s for storage.”
“You know a great deal about the enclosure,” I say.
“Yes, I do.”
“You know more than I do; more than any of us. How did you find this out?”
“We’ve been here a long time, Quir,” she says. “We’ve been here almost two and a half years. If you stay alert, if you try to understand the situation, there is a great deal that you can learn.”
“I’ve stayed alert.”
“You see nothing, Quir,” she says kindly. “Nothing at all. You accepted your fate and did not want to look beyond it. Even this escape is just accepting your fate. You feel that they want you every so often to try to get out of here so that is why you’re trying. Oh, don’t look that way, Quir,” she says and runs a hand up and down my arm. “There’s nothing personal about all of this and anyway it’s the truth. I can’t lie to you anymore. It’s too late for lies. Come, move quickly; we’ll meet the others and escape.”
I want to talk to her further but I cannot. Something about what she has said to me, along with the menace of the machines, has left me speechless. I had never been aware of the machinery, the sheerweight of the devices they had used to brutalize us; now, seeing the obsolete remains I feel that I cannot deal with it. Nala must sense some trembling within me, puts her arm tighter around my waist and halts me.
“Please, Quir,” she says. “You must retain control if this is going to work. Remember, you created the plan yourself.”
“I know that,” I say, choking. “I know. I know. All right.”
“I didn’t mean to say those things to you. Ignore them. I have as much respect for you as for any of us here.”
“Yes,” I say, shaking my head. I feel for some reason that I am going to cry and this is impossible because we never cry. None of us has ever broken in that way. I have read with puzzlement passages in the alien written materials where they speak of other aliens “crying.” How is this possible? Now I know.
“Quir,” she says, “Quir,” and she is almost tender, “I did not understand. Forgive me. These have been very difficult times for all of us. Look. Look, I’m here with you, am I not? That means something, doesn’t it? I’ve joined you to escape.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
“We know one another. It’s not as if we didn’t. Could I have said the things I said to you if I didn’t know and trust you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I am suddenly disgusted by my near-breakdown and determine to control myself. A savage thrust of will deflects various daggers of pain within me; I feel myself reassembling. “All right,” I say. “Enough. Everything is adequate. Let’s go on.”
“I’m glad, Quir.”
“Tell me nothing,” I say. “I want to hear nothing from you. Do not tell me of the enclosure. Do not tell me of your speculations.” I push ahead of her, now leading. “I do not care for you, Nala,” I say unexpectedly but realize that this is true. “I do not care for you anymore at all.”
“I’m sorry, Quir.”
“Don’t tell me about sorrow,” I say. I push open a door at the end of the hall of machines and we find ourselves in another hall this time, a much larger one lighted by glare instead of phosphorescence and extending in a convoluted fashion out of sight. The floor seems uneven underneath us. “This is their quarters,” Nala says. “The outer limits of their quarters.”
“I know that.”
“We will continue to follow this line as far as we can and then we will find the guards.”
“I know that too. I originated the plan.”
“I was just telling you again, Quir,” she says softly. “We will of course be reassembling at a point just before the guards, immediately out of their line of sight.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for telling me that. I would not have known otherwise.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, missing the irony. She has missed everything except how to hurt me. Such is the complexity of this female.
We continue down the new corridor. The light, much brighter and harsher than any we have seen in our section of the enclosure, highlights certain aspects of Nala’s features in ways I have not suspected. Her face is drawn with strain; her eyes seem pitted deep in her head and glare frantically. Her skin has taken on a strange olive tinge; she looks unwell. I realize that she is ugly and earlier, because I was excited by her, I did not notice this.
“Faster,” she says, taking my hand again and we virtually speed through the halls, half-trot, half-run. Aspects of this part of the enclosure assault me marginally as we move through; there are cracks in the walls, dents, fissures, every few hundred yards, half-concealed behind glass, there appears to be some kind of weaponry. “Protection devices,” Nala says, but I do not believe her. “The enclosure is not fireproofed; it was originally constructed a long time ago for other purposes and abandoned; when we came here it was reconstructed for our purposes but remains of an older style. I know a great deal about the enclosure,” Nala says, moving rapidly, puffing a little as she tries to continue her lecture without breaking stride, “my therapist used to tell me interesting things about it; that’s how I know.” She is trying to be accommodating. Her mood now is winsome, confidential, as if the small pieces of information she slips me one by one are the only tokens of apology which I can be given.
“Faster,” she says again as we move through a long, sweeping curve, the harsh lights dazzling us as we come up against a bulb, “we must make the rendezvous on time. Don’t look around, Quir; everything is the same. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. The enclosure is twenty-five square miles although it is more circular than rectangular; actually it is an ellipse or oblong. It is four hundred yards high at its highest point. I know all this, Quir. Move quickly.”
I move quickly. She is setting a ruthless pace, there is no doubt about it, and in order to hear any of her comments as they trail like small balloons from her passage I am forced to break into a mild trot, then a shambling run. Her hand is like iron in mine and I have the sensation of being dragged. “It is fifty-five years old,” she says. “Originally it was constructed as a detention center for political dissidents. The structure is largely metallic. Some wood however is used and also synthetics. Do you know the number of staff here?”
“No,” I say.
“Do you want to know?” she says, really panting, her breath coming out now in small groans of evisceration, but she will not stop. We keep up our pace. Nothing in the hall changes. The curve breaks and leads into a long straightaway.
“All right,” I say. “How many?”
“There are two hundred and forty-seven of us now here. How many do you think they need to supervise and manage us?”
“A thousand?” I say. It hardly matters. All the numbers are abstractions. I feel small filters, then bursts of pain within my temples, feel my respiration waver and finally break. Nothing seems quite clear. “Two thousand?”
“Five thousand,” she says. “Five thousand for two hundred and forty-seven of us. Of course, not all of them are on duty at the same time.”
“No, of course not.”
“They work in shifts. But at any given time at least eight hundred of them are on duty.”
“Oh,” I say. “Oh.” I realize that I am shouting, that her voice too has been higher in pitch and that we have been unconsciously trying to compensate for an unpleasant background noise that builds as we move along. It is a whine, under the whine a booming roar which comes at us in waves, battering. “The machines,” she says, now shouting. “The support system. We’re right over them now.” I can feel the floor shaking. “Quickly!” she says, “it gets worse before it gets better,” and panicking I break into a full, swinging run, tearing my hand from her grasp, sprinting ahead of her, momentarily unconscious of her pursuit. The noise is massive, bursting, I feel as if we are moving into a funnel of sound, all of it slanted toward us, vomiting noise like destruction and we pass through a point where the noise is so strong that I cannot hear my own breath, cannot hear the screams I bounce against the walls. Slowly then it diminishes, my run collapses, I slow to a shambling walk, the roar diminishes to the whine I had heard and at last goes away. We move up a small rise and face a wall with two flanking branches.
“The machines occupy a small area but they’re very powerful,” Nala says matter-of-factly. Streaks of sweat like tears are aligned down her face. “They have to generate all the power for the enclosure. We go left here. Left and then cut right and that will be the rendezvous point.”
“I didn’t know,” I find myself saying as she takes my hand again like a child, “I didn’t know it was this way. I didn’t know they had machines. I didn’t know about the thousands—”
“Don’t worry, Quir,” she says, gasping, the cycle of her breath shaken but still, somehow, she manages to sound soothing. “Don’t worry about it, it’s all right, all right. I’m sorry, Quir, I was too hard on you, I expected too much,” and I do not know what she is talking about and I do not know what is happening and everything seems very much out of my hands as we make our way down the right branch and to the point of rendezvous. The others seem to be all there. They are waiting for us in what appears to be various attitudes of patience. Two of them are dropped on the ground in postures which look pained but when we come they shamble embarrassedly to their feet and I understand that in the presence of my plot, my massive escape, my plan to leave the enclosure forever they have only been sleeping.