Greetings. I have spent a few days worth of review and rewrite on a story I first wrote after a dream in 1986. I published it here a while ago, but this is a pretty substantially revised edit, and I think a good deal better and more finished. I'm putting it up here to share with family and friends, and if you are here, you are in that category. I worked this time with an app called Speechify, one of who's capabilities is reading back anything in a pretty decent version of one's own voice. Listening and following along in the story through multiple playbacks, edit uploads, and re=reads, I was able to correct quite a few jarring errors and omissions and to reword sections in my more mature voice. Well, yes, that's debatable, but see what this does for you, 'k?
Scott Gardner Merrick
6104B New York Avenue
4,450 words
All Rights
@ 1986 by Scott Merrick
The 21
by Scott Gardner Merrick
Karl Ivanovich pressed on.
He trudged through this frigid midnight’s
sooty snow toward his tiny room on the city's dingy fringe with his fur-capped
head lowered into the freezing gusts, heavy boot over heavy boot, as he was all
too used to doing.
The thick wolf ruff of his overcoat
collar was turned up to protect against the intrusion of that icy wind. He was
thinking about nothing.
The mind of Ivanovich was empty.
There was a reason for this. The mind of
Ivanovich focused with enervating
regularity twelve to fifteen hours per workday, six or seven days per week, depending
on the season, with ninety to ninety-four per cent of its Practically
Functional Capacity spent on keeping books for the State.
These percentages had been verified by
the Party.
As a result of this tremendously focused effort, maintained as it was for
such incredibly long durations of time, periods
of mental emptiness were needed. Some of
his other comrades simply sat at their
workdesks for an hour or two after the figurative whistle had sounded; Karl
Ivanovich sometimes took this tack, but he preferred to make his way home deliberately,
by foot, by foot, by foot, letting his footfalls lull his mind to rest, inhaling
the cold night air regularly and deeply until no thought could penetrate the
imaginary tank traps and fortress walls his mind had constructed. His feet knew
which way to steer his large frame. The entire trek home was over five
kilometers, and it normally took him two and a half hours to accomplish it,
give or take a half an hour.
When he arrived, he would no longer be only mentally exhausted, but also
physically tired and very, very sleepy. A cup of thick black tea, with perhaps
a small lump of crude sugar, would be enough 
to set
him to sleep, until the first hints of the next day would
invariably awaken him; and he would rise, wash sparingly, eat a modest breakfast, and finally catch the public mechanical transit back to
his small office.
Tonight, his full brown moustache was familiarly encrusted with ice and
particles of snow. The air was so frigid that the hairs inside his nostrils had
become brittle with it.
Sometimes, as was the case tonight, a flickering image of
a steaming teacup would intrude upon the emptiness of his mind and it
would cause him to interrupt his walking reverie with an instant of near-normal
consciousness. This was now the case.
He looked up.
He was approaching the corner of Malenkov and Kochetov streets, an intersection his
feet knew well. At this time of night there never any traffic, pedestrian or
mechanical, and so he once again lowered his head into the wind and pressed on.
WUUMPH!!! He was knocked off balance as he colided with a heavy man who rounded the corner at precisely the same instant as he.
In trying to regain his balance, Ivanovich lost it completely. 
It was much
the fault of the compressed snow at the corner of the sidewalk, which was slick
underfoot, and he cursed it loudly as he went down, flailing out for support
and catching only a handful of ruff from the collar of the other fellow's
overcoat. 
The fall took the wind out of him. When he could sit up, he did, and he craned
painfully around to witness the tall and broad figure of a man, dressed much
the same as he, receding hurriedly off into the heavier darkness. The other man
had not even uttered so much as an apology.
Karl Ivanovich picked himself up, muttering under his breath about
rudeness and bad manners, and dusted melting wet snow from his coat. He sighed
deeply and crossed the street, attempting to regain the regularity of his
breathing. Before
he could accomplish that, he heard a commotion behind him and started to
turn around. The heavy bullet slammed into his right shoulder and he heard the
loud report of a large firearm, oddly in that order. He fell again, this time
for a long, long time.
*****
Karl Ivanovich awakened in pain.
He made no sound, as his disjointed
senses attempted to piece
together
the puzzle of his whereabouts.
A numb but painful stiffness in his shoulder. Cold—a not unusual
sensation. A pungent antiseptic odor. Gray walls, relatively clean ones. And a
single blaring fluorescent ceiling light.
They took him from the
hospital barracks soon after he exhibited signs of consciousness. Sometime
during the move, he again passed out. He awoke on a musty bed in a dank cell.
The bars in the window of the single small steel door made
clear his circumstances.
For several days no one
spoke to him. A silent jailer came in twice daily with coarse bread and thick
gruel, each time taking away the plate and bowl left the previous visit.
Once a doctor came in
and changed the dressings on his shoulder. When the flesh had been laid bare,
Ivanovich saw the ugly scab which had begun to congeal over the gunshot wound.
It appeared to be healing. The doctor's work was carried out in silence, except
for the prisoner's single attempt to communicate.”Please, Comrade Doctor,
please tell me. Why have I been shot? Why am I here?"
The already wrinkled skin
surrounding his large brown eyes wrinking further in perplexity, the
physician muttered, "Why, Comrade?"
Karl Ivanovich’s only answer
was silence.
The angry wound was
treated with a gelatinous substance and bound with clean bandages, then the
doctor packed up his beaten black satchel and departed.
Never once had the
Comrade Doctor’s eyes met those of Karl Ivanovich.
Karl kept track of passing
time by scraping a notch in the mortar between two granite blocks in the wall
of his tiny cell at the end of each day. At the end of 15 days they came for him.
Two imposingly gruff
guards in the drab uniforms of the State came and fitted his hands into heavy
manacles. His feet were clamped into wider steel shackles and then connected to his bound hands by a single heavy
iron chain. Karl understood immediately that words with these men would be
useless.
What could they communicate
that could be of any use to him?
Out through what seemed
like miles of gray corridors he was led. He found it difficult to walk with the
heavy chains, but not impossible. The guards seemed to have had a great deal of
experience leading chained men: Once
when they reached a short flight of three steps, they simply picked him up
under each armpit (the shoulder cried out, but Ivanovich did not) and hoisted
him up. He was half-led, half-dragged into a small waiting room, and the two
guards left him alone there. The door shut with a muffled thud.
All Ivanovich was certain
of was that he was in trouble.
Think as he might, he
could not come up with any reason for the Party to treat him so despicably. He
was a hard worker, not decadent, and not publicly critical of the State. He was
impossibly confused.
A single guard entered
the room.
"Karl Ivanovich,"
he stated, "please rise and follow me.”
Karl struggled to his
feet and shuffled through the little door and into a mouldy-smelling, nearly empty courtroom.
He was led to an
ancient heavy wooden stool, upon which he was commanded to sit. He slowly
raised his head to survey the other occupants of the room. There were only
three. A stern looking magistrate glared down from an elevated podium. An angry
looking guard stood behind the judge, not glaring at Ivanovich, but
certainly glaring at the world. An emaciated clerk sat directly across from the
defendant, looking bored.
"Guilty as
charged," he heard the judge say, "of the theft of a loaf of bread.
You are sentenced to hard labor in the Wilderness Labor Camps, for a period not
to exceed thirty years.”
Karl Ivanovich wanted
to scream, but he could not. Something inside him denied that what appeared to
be happening was really happening. It was too absurd, too dreamlike, or rather
too much like a nightmare.
Later, he would put a
name to that "something." He would call it: "Foolishness."
*****
Karl Ivanovich opened
his eyes, which fought against that effort. They felt as if they had been glued
shut, but the truth was that they were frozen shut.
As his eyes adjusted to
the dim, scattered light, a loud and constant rumbling bombarded his ears, and the
distinct piercing aroma of stale urine and feces burned into his nostrils.
Yes, he thought, the
train.
He lay there for what may
have been a long time. The exact duration was difficult to ascertain since
nothing perceptibly changed: It might have been an hour; it may have been two
days. The soiled and scattered straw upon which he lay did not change. The
uncertain light which filtered through cracks in the rail car did not change.
The ice which encrusted the flat iron grid which enclosed Ivanovich 's tiny
cell did not melt or grow perceivably thicker.
The heavy roaring of steel wheels upon
steel track did change, all the time. There was a murmur, then a roar,
then a stage whisper, a very loud one; then there came a maddening, deafening,
whining followed by a gentle tattoo, then a little rat—a—tat—tat. Underneath it
all droned a heavy bass ostinato, forever and always it seemed to say. Forever.
Always. Then the roar would steal back into the song, followed by another long
murmur. Before long, Karl Ivanovich would come to believe that he had heard all
the permutations; and just when he was sure of that, a new sound would manifest
itself.
He sat up. The effort drove his breath from
the warmth of his body out into the harsh cold of the freight car. Thick clouds
of it hung heavily in the air, and then, like hope, were gone. "You
afraid?," he heard a hoarse male voice inquire.
Am I afraid, he wondered, "No,"
Karl answered, although he did not turn his head toward the sound of the other
's voice.”No, Comrade, I have traveled beyond fear into a place that is colder
than any other.”
Silence.
Then, laughter. It began as a low
chuckle, a gurgling, really, and gradually rolled up into a quiet, shaking hysteria.
After a few moments Karl Ivonovich managed to half-sit and, pulling himself out
of the fog that was his perception, took notice of the one who mocked him.
The creature seemed to occupy most of the
adjacent cell. It was, or appeared to be, male, from the deep timbre of its
noises, but whether it was human was another question altogether.
The cells were a uniform size, and Karl counted
them now. There were twenty-two of them, each occupied by a prisoner, each loosely
carpeted with straw, each furnished with a single bowl for defecation and
urination. By noon, somewhere between three days and a week into the journey to
the outlands, the bowls were all overflowing. The corner of each cell had become
an excretion zone, with the overspilling bowl occupying a befouled space in the
corner and serving as a target.
At the moment, the giant next door was
aiming his shriveled member at his own target/bowl. He was not really hitting
it because he was still laughing too hard. He finished his business and
buttoned the fly on his heavy qiviut wool trousers, and then he lumbered over
to the iron bars which separated his cell from Karl's.
His huge hands grasped the bars and his filthy
face pressed hard up against them. It was a grotesque visage, framed by wild long
greasy hair and a thick red and brown beard, the forehead protruding massively under
bushy red eyebrows, and a malformed bulbous node at the end of the large
crooked nose.
"Let me look at ya. Ah, yes,"
the giant hissed, and hissed again, "Ah, yessss, a Comrade from the City.”
His head turned this way and that, like that of an inquisitive lower primate
checking out the new arrival at his zoo cage.
"Not afraid, are ye." It
sounded more a statement than a question.
"I have done nothing wrong."
"Not afraid, because nothing wrong
have ye done,” he growled, and then his tone of voice changed altogether,
became civilized, almost delicate, as he seemed to muse more to himself than to
his prisoner mate, “How curious, how infinitely baffling." The behemoth’s head lowered and he turned away from the bars,
muttering under his breath.
"Wait!" Karl stood up,
painfully, for he had been without exercise for days, at least. He shuffled to
the cage "My name is Karl Ivanovich, and I think we need each other.”
The giant turned and uttered, “Need?
Need? What we ‘need,’ my friend, is a weapon. We do not ‘need’ each
other." He had to bend slightly to stand upright, but now he did, and he slowly
returned to the cell divider bars. “My name is Aleksandr Denentyev, Comrade
Karl Ivanovich, and I am a thespian, not a criminal.”
Karl saw something like a great sadness
in the eyes of this huge man. He asked quietly, "What was your supposed
crime, Comrade Denentyev? "
The giant chortled, "It so happens
that I did kill a man. But he was attacking me with a loaded weapon. I
protected myself with 
these." He outstretched his mammoth
hands, palms outward.
"I have talked with many fellow
prisoners since my capture," he continued, "and some of them are
guilty. Many are most clearly innocent. In the end, it makes no difference once
the corrupt courts get ahold of 
them. Slave laborers are all the judges
want, though they have no shortage of them. Of us." He lowered his wide-set
eyes and mused,
"It is the System.
We are no more or no less products of it now than we were at our honest
professions.”
Denentyev’s bulk sidled away from the
bars, off to another corner 
of his ridiculously inadequate cell. ”I
must rest. Soon I will 
have a new kind of Quota to
meet, and I suspect that the punishment for not meeting it will be somewhat more
stringent than loss of a bonus. I must gather my strength and be prepared to
work." His bulk succumbed to gravity onto his own ragged mattress.
Karl heard him murmuring something about "outrageous
fortune,” 
but he could not decipher anything else
the giant muttered. After a while, both men had once more succumbed to the
stupor of imprisoned sleep.
Sometime later, Karl made the
acquaintance of his only other neighbor, one Vsevolod Thrardovsky, a student
who also professed innocence. His “crime”: the theft of a book. The boy appeared not well
to begin with, and by the time the Keeper came to empty the slop bowls and to
dole out a skin of water and a torn chunk of bread to each starving prisoner,
there was that one less body to feed.
The Keeper, a silent, grizzly old man
with an oddly elegant weighty wooden staff slung over his shoulder, moved from cell to
cell repeating the same routine—handcuffing each prisoner through the bars of
the outside face of his cell, tossing down the food and water in one corner, and
dumping 
waste from the bowl in another into a
large barrel he dragged along the rail car’s floor behind him. Each time, he
would wipe his hands on the rag draped through his belt, like a bartender might
wear one.
Then he would relock the cell, retrieve
his handcuffs, and move on to the next prisoner.
Karl learned all this only by pressing
his face to the bars and watching as the Keeper made his slow way down the
center aisle. His own cell
was near the forward end of the car, beside a door which presumably led to a
connecting platform and then to another 
car. Were there other prisoners? Other
cars?
So the old troll made his way first down
the side of the jostling car which contained twelve cells, and then back up the
other side, with its heavy sliding door in the middle. In the last cell he came
upon the corpse of the student. “Get up, you little girl,” he growled, “If you
don 't get up now, you will have no food nor drink until I come again, and who
knows when that may be. There is a very important card game in the guard car. GET
UP, come on, you son of a hog. No? You will live in your own stench a few days
more, then.”
"He's dead.”
The
voice was that of Karl Ivanovich, and the Keeper's fury now turned upon at him.
SMACK, went the Keeper 's staff on the bars of Karl’s cage. “Don’t you ever
speak to me unless I order you to, swine! Don't you ever stick your
thieving nose in where it doesn't belong! Now I shall have to file a report
today, and that will rob me of more winnings at the table.”
Karl lied, stalling, in an effort to gain
more information from the Keeper. "He was a Christian, and he wanted me to
plead for you to see that he has a Christian burial.”
"I’ll show you a Christian burial,
you smart bastard! Gavno!"
The key clanked into
the iron door and the freight car door was yanked open, lumbering loudly, and left partly open. The body of Vsevolod
Tvardovsky was dragged out of his cell by his worn leather boots and left laying
twisted upon the floor while the Keeper strode back to the door and pulled it
halfway open. Biting wind and snow rushed in, and a minor uproar issued from
the cells. He returned, smiling grimly, and lifted the student up over his shoulder.
"Oh, "snarled the Keeper,
"I haven’t prepared the body yet. Here, let me anoint it with oils. He
grasped the student 's lifeless hair in his fist and dunked the dead face into
the barrel of waste. 
It came up slathered in excrement, oozing
brown and green slime.
"There, there
young man, that should freeze nicely and keep you your baby-boy expression for
all eternity.” The animal smiled broadly at 
Karl Ivanovich before carrying the
student down the aisle and standing 
him at the open door. ”I commit you to
your god, you pig-sucking son of a whore, " declared the Keeper. He shoved
the reeking corpse roughly out the door.
"Come here.” He was back at the
front of Karl’s cell. “Give me your hands again. Karl did as he was told and was
once again handcuffed to the front of his cell. His food and water were taken
away, and none left behind, and the cell door was relocked. The jailer released
him, and his rheumy eyes met the cold stare of
Ivanovich.
"Maybe you will join your friend next feeding day, Samaritan.
“I will try to devise a new and even more entertaining ceremony.”
Days passed.
The straw. The bars. The ice and the clouds of breath. The omnipresent
stench. These things remained.
The incessant rattle and booming of steel on steel and the
rushing whistle of wind and snow.
Despair did not leave any of them, not for an instant.
Karl Ivanovich lay on his left side, his left arm asleep and
perhaps dead forever. His breath was regular and shallow, and he stared at the
bowl in the corner. What we need is a weapon.
With an effort whose presence surprised him, he rolled over
and pulled himself over to the bars which separated his cage from that
of Aleksandr Derentyev.
The giant slept.
"Derentyev, " Karl choked out, "Derentyev,
wake up.” One large eye opened in that jumble of a hoary face.
"I want to thank you for breaking bread with me. But it
was not enough. There is one more thing you must do.”
The other eye opened, and the thick brows curled
slightly.
"Break your bowl for me, Thespian.”
*****
The door at the front of
the prisoner car creaked and the Keeper stepped heavily in. The noise of the train's passage
was shockingly loud beyond the open door. The
jailer stood for a moment, staring into Karl 's cell before reaching outside the
car and dragging in his barrel and bag.
"Pig-turd, mudak, oh darling, t' he
called tauntingly, "Rise and shiiiiiiine. I’ve come with your eggs and
potatoes, your steak and your wine.” He peered into the cell for an exceedingly
long time, as if to assure himself that the motionless lump at the back of the
cell was indeed as lifeless as it did appear to be.
A key dully clattered into the lock, and the grizzly old man
entered the cell, his staff upraised to strike. He took two steps into the cage
and brought his staff heavily down upon the leg of the man on the floor.
There was a heavy thud and that was all.
He took hold of the dead man 's heavy boots and dragged him
out of the cell, leaving him bent and crooked on the floor as he moved heavily down
the aisle to the side door. It slid open, and once again the icy wind rushed
in. This time, though, there was no sound from the prisoners. This struck the
Keeper as strange, and he turned to survey the cells. What he saw was a dozen
faces, tired and in various stages of starvation, despair, and exhaustion,
pressed up against cold iron bars.
"So. The swine want
their feed," crooned the Keeper, “It looks as though the twenty-two has dwindled
to twenty. But never you mind, you see I get paid whether I arrive with twenty-two
or with two. The Party, the Party knows it is a long and difficult journey. I
am paid by the rail mile, not by the prisoner! Ha, " he laughed,
"and," he looked back up the aisle to where the dead man lay,
"we’ll be stopping tonight, you see, we'll be stopping tonight at the
rail station outside of Kirtutsk for food and
water and fuel to take you deeper, yes, deeper into the deep deep taiga, where
you will work to build this world, yes," he spoke to them all as if they
were an assemblage of Union Workers, and he shuffled up the aisle, shouldering
his staff. ”Yes, many hands, light work, hee, hee.”
The body of Karl Ivanovich was much heavier than that of the
student, so the Keeper decided to drag it to the door instead of 
throwing it over his shoulder. It
was in the course of the dragging that the arms fell out behind the corpse, and
the Keeper noticed that there was something in one of the hands.
“Wha…” he began to ask, but it was too late for
questions.
Ivanovich
was up and knocking over the jailer with a stout 
hammering of his fist to the man
's forehead. The old man grappled for the staff on his shoulder, but
again, too late. Into his throat something was deeply driven, and Karl felt the
burning heat of the man's blood washing his hand. He ripped the sharp fragment
of bowl sideways and the Keeper collapsed in a heap, his nearly severed head
all ajar on his blood-spewing neck.
Karl Ivanovich stared down at the man he had killed.
Into his pocket went the sharp shard of wood from Derentyev’s
broken bowl. He rifled the jailer's pockets and came up with the precious 
key. From the dead man's shoulder
he slipped the staff. He held it up so that it gleamed brightly in the soft
light. It was a beautiful thing, incongrouously elaborately carved, and he
pointed it at the corpse and squeezed the handle just so.
A pinpoint beam of blue
light issued from the business end of the staff and lit upon the mangled face
of the Keeper. There was a “poof” sound. The
shaft of light vanished and so did the ugly
head.
Karl stepped to the open door and took a deep breath of
fresh cold air. His leg and his shoulder throbbed mercilessly.
Luminescent snowglobes blew past almost horizontally, their
speed enhanced by that of the train car. The dazzling yellow and blue phosphorescent
sheen of them, each animated and swirling like mother of pearl, was almost
blinding. Each crystalline bulb was different in shape from all others, and
Karl looked out over the plains, 
witnessed their bursting by the
millions upon impact with the glistening yellow snowcovered ground. Beyond, out
beyond the taiga, the bright turquoise forest spread out forever. There was
shelter there, and 
there was forage, and there were whole
new worlds to be fashioned out of that vast well of raw materials.
We shall
disappear into those forests, and we will enter those hills and find us a
valley, he thought, half-aloud. And when we have built something, we will
make our way back into the city and we will liberate enough men and women to thrive
and prosper, and we will disappear once again. We will be our own Party.
Our Comrades will be our true brothers and sisters, freed victims of the
Old Way, harbingers of the New.
The New World 's New World.
Perhaps we will be known, for all time, as The 21.
In but a few moments he had freed all of the other men. They
were bunched up behind him at the door.
He leaned his face out into the wind. Off in the distance he
could just make out the tiny image of Kirtutsk, a large city really, the
connection not only between the cities and the wilderness but also between 
the New World and the Earth.
There, there, there was the citiy’s distant little bubble, the gigantic dome
which sheltered the living quarters of over a million and a half people. The
Elevator lines 
stretched out into the white sky
on up, on up to the orbiting station.
Through the swirling and flashing lemon and blue ice snow he
could only just make out the shape of the shining small sun, glowing blue, indistinct.
Perhaps if it cleared later in the day the giant golden sun would be visible,
too.
Oh, but he felt alive, for the first time in years.
He held tightly to the powerful sleek staff and made himself
into a ball as he jumped, tucked more tightly yet, and rolled.
*****
I am adding a recorded version in a voice trained by Speechify to simulate my own. You can listen to that here.
