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But what held my attention was the presence of three Captains lying on the cushions: two men and a
woman, their pale, naked, hairless bodies almost childlike in appearance. There were also three collared
women, who had apparently been sexually engaged with the Captains, and showed bruises and other
marks of ill use, and a collared man who was obviously dead; his chest and limbs were deeply gashed,
and he was lying arms akimbo by a wall, as if he had been tossed aside. When we entered, one of the
Captains, the larger of the two men, put a knife to the throat of a collared woman; the other two reached
for what I assumed to be weapons -- short metal tubes resting on the floor at arm s reach; yet their
movements were languid, casual, as if they were not really afraid of us. Or perhaps they were drugged.
Whatever the case, they were overwhelmed before they could pick up the tubes and dragged from the
room. The Captain holding the knife looked at me -- directly at me, I m sure of it -- and smiling, slashed
the woman s throat. She began to thrash about, clutching at the wound, and the Captain pushed her off
to the side. He was still smiling. At me. The daft little shit was amused by my reaction. His androgynous
features twisted with amusement. Something gave way inside me, some elemental restraint -- I felt it as
tangibly as I might have felt the parting of my tissues from a knife stroke -- and I rushed at him, ignoring
Wall s order to hold back. The Captain kind of waved the knife at me, but again he did not seem overly
concerned with any threat I might pose. Even after I kicked the knife aside and yanked him to his feet,
even after I grabbed him by the throat and shoved him back against the wall, he continued to regard me
with that mild, dissipated smile and those wet purplish eyes that gave no hint of what might lie behind, as
empty as the eyes of a fish. I had the notion that I was doing exactly as he expected, and that my
predictable behavior was something that reinforced his feelings of superiority.
Let him go, said Wall from behind me.
In a minute, I said, tightening my grip on the Captain s throat. I was still full of loathing, but it was a
colder emotion now, albeit no less manageable. I fixed my gaze on those inhuman eyes, wanting to learn
if anything would surface in them at the end, and I plunged my knife hilt-deep into the top of his skull. His
mouth popped open, the eyes bulged, and thick blood flowed down over his head like syrup over a
scoop of vanilla. Spasms shook him, and a stream of his piss wetted my legs. Then it was over, and I let
him fall. It looked for all the world as though his head had grown a bone handle. In some part of me that
had been obscured by anger, I could feel a trivial current of revulsion, but most of what I felt at first was
satisfaction, though not long afterward I began to shake with the aftershocks of my violent act.
I turned to Wall, who stood regarding me with a thoughtful expression. You got two of em, I said.
Two s enough.
Behind him, they were trying to remove the collars from the surviving women. Neither was doing well;
blood was leaking from their ears.
There s more, Wall said. You gonna kill em all?
The question did not seem in the least rhetorical, and I did not take it as such.
Long as we re here, I said.
But I did no further killing that night. The vengeful, outraged spirit that had moved me gradually
eroded as we passed through the Black Garden, led by the two collared Captains, our path lit by burning
shrubs and doorways into golden light left open to reveal scenes of luxury and carnage, like a score of
tiny stages mounted on the dark upon whose boards the same terrible play had been performed, and I
only watched the others do the bloody work. The violence I d committed had worked a change in me, or
else had exposed some central weakness, and I grew disinterested in the outcome of our expedition.
Maddy had to urge me along, or else I might have just stood there and waited for my end, displaying no
more concern for my fate than the Captain that I d killed; and I wondered if the fact that they had done
so much violence was at the heart of their dismissive attitude toward life and death -- but I don t believe
that. To imbue them with human qualities would be assuming too much. They were no more human than
the apes, and the apes, despite what I d said long before to the man in the bubble car, which had been
something I d said mostly to impress him, were in no way human.
Apes came at us now and again as we went, singly sometimes and sometimes in small groups, flying at
us from dark crannies, their knives flashing with reflected fire, and they succeeded in killing three of our
people; but they were disorganized, without slaves to support them, and this gave us hope that the other
three parties had done well, that the battle, if not yet finished, was on the verge of being won. We killed
them all, and we also killed every Captain whom we came across.
Wall was in his element. He burned and burned, and when the laser gave out or broke or whatever it
is that lasers do when they go wrong, he killed with his hands, in several instances literally tearing the
heads off scrawny white necks. There was a joyful flair in the way he went about it, and I was not the
only one who noticed this; I saw others staring at him with a confused mixture of awe and distaste as he
carried out the business of slaughter. It was not that the Captains deserved any less, nor was it that
vengeance was inappropriate to the moment. No, it was instead that Wall did not appear to be carrying
out a vengeful process. Watching him was like watching a farmer scything wheat -- here was a man
engaged in his proper work and enjoying it immensely. The minor wounds he accumulated, the red stains
that flowered on his rough shirt, his arms and face, gave him the look of an embattled hero, but the sort of
hero, perhaps, whom we -- who were ourselves the pitiful result of laws that heroes had written
thousands of years before -- no longer cared to exalt; and we moved ever more slowly in his wake,
letting him run ahead of us, separating ourselves from him, as if this would lessen our complicity and
devalue our support.
Still, we made no move to keep him from his pleasure. The things we found inside those golden
rooms, the flayed bodies, bits of men and women used for ornament or more perverted purposes yet, the
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