The cruelty of their enslavement, the regular humiliation they endured, brought hot tears to my eyes as nothing had done since the lunch I’d had in Sister Theresa’s office, when we’d had pastry from Bellini’s, more than seven years earlier.
If duty would require killing Emmerich and those who defended him, here was proof enough that the killing would be justified.
Looking around at the sleeping workers, Bridget said, “Sedated for long hours every day, enslaved, always under threat, the stress of living in this hellhole—they wear out fast, both mentally and physically. Habitual anesthesia is dangerous. There must be an ongoing need to replace them.”
“In the making of his tens of billions,” Panthea said, “Bodie Emmerich also made friends with the highest officials in governments worldwide, often with others as misanthropic and contemptuous of democracy as he is.”
She didn’t need to say more. We could figure it out. In any dictatorship where citizens are regarded as little more than chattel of the state, there would be leaders pleased to pad their pockets with millions from their friend Bodie in return for supplying him with the tradespeople and technicians he required. Bring them into the country on diplomatic flights where their names don’t appear on the manifest. Convey them to the Oasis in vehicles bearing diplomatic plates. The saps aren’t told to what fate they’re being committed. What does it matter? Who are they anyway but beasts of the common herd, hapless plebes, bourgeois strivers who naively believe the platitudes of the ideology that claims to value them? Those above them in the political food chain, whether fascists or communists or high priests of a theocracy, deceive them and use them with no more compunction than they would feel after deceiving a hen to take her eggs or after using a hammer to drive a nail. To those who lack a conscience, there is no such thing as remorse.
I wanted to free the twelve sleepers, but we had neither the time nor the understanding of how to strip off their collars safely, nor a means of getting them out of here without raising an alarm. The alternative was to rescue them by killing those who used and brutalized them. Murder was an act of grave injustice, taking the life of an innocent or one whose crimes didn’t warrant eradication. Killing was the righteous taking of a life, as a soldier acting according to the rules of war, as a policeman shooting an abusive husband who had slashed his wife and with the same blade threatened the child they conceived together, as a homeowner gunning down an armed intruder before he was gunned down himself. After what I’d seen here, I was ready to be a guardian. I still had no translation of aluf shel halakha or Legis naturalis propugnator, but in my heart the concept was complete and the limits of my license understood.
Without the need for discussion, Bridget and Sparky and Panthea and I—and Winston—arrived at the same conviction and the same intensity of desire for action. We didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know worse horrors than the sleepers would be found in this oasis of narcissism and depravity, where all virtues were hated.
Throughout the room, automated oxygen-tank valves clicked off. Click . . . click . . . click . . . A sleeper groaned. They would wake, shower, dress, and begin a workday in perhaps half an hour.
The stairwell to the next, lower level awaited us.
|?33?|
As the day slowly waned, the night approached, and with each passing minute, the one who called himself the Light came nearer to awakening, to be followed by his soul children in all their terrible vacancy, who would then disconnect the workers from their tanks of fearful dreams and mock them in their soiled sleepwear. As darkness fell on the desert, life would return to this world below. It would not be life as we know it, but the life of a hive organized for the purpose of moral disorder and unaware of the contradiction.
The third floor, the second subterranean level, was the largest yet. Like the spokes of a wheel, five corridors branched off a large hub, and by the look of them—door after evenly spaced door, as in a hotel—these were bedrooms where the followers of the Light spent their days in sleep or other pursuits, waiting for their adored life guide to call the night a new day.
At the center of this level were three large rooms, one flowing graciously into the next, each an Art Deco masterpiece, sumptuously furnished, softly lit. You might even say the lighting was romantic, for it was cunningly layered and shaped to fold empurpled shadows and buttery incandescence into one another as if they were luxurious fabrics, and it revealed mysterious depths in the exotic woods that had a lustrous piano-quality finish. The artwork, surely commissioned for these rooms, was without exception sensuous, whether it offered visions of stylized flowers, ripe fruit, or naked human bodies; none of it was outright pornographic, but the intent was, with subtlety, to tease the libido, although also to provide such a high-class environment that even the most savage carnality, if indulged here, would seem sophisticated. I thought the furnishings, though the very essence of the 1930s and ’40s, were in their arrangement and purpose reminiscent of drawings dating to ancient Rome, images of grand rooms where bacchanalian orgies were held, festivals of wine and flesh.