"Kit Reed - On The Penal Colony" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Kit)

It wasn't bad food that drove Quiven. It was compression. When he cleared
solitary he was assigned to the Old Stone Jail. Then he heard Joanna scream.
Fury drove him to crack the leg irons and wrench off the cell door. Compression
sent him out of the jail and across the Village Green to Cotton Mather House. He
went in spite of the fact that the belt's secret workings intensified as he got
farther from his designated post.

Quiven was in agony by the time he reached Cotton Mather house. Screaming Joanna
was bent backward over her spinning wheel by a sexcrazed tourist in a FUCK ME
I'M AMERICAN T-shirt and an International Harvester cap. In spite of the teeth
of pain Quiven pulled her away from the horrified tourists and took her
upstairs. Security programming sent a couple of jolts into her anklets to keep
her in place but love overrode the pain.

"Oh, Quiven," she said, or so Gemma reports.

Quiven looked at her with his own death written in his face. "I love you." They
both knew that this was not only the first time for them, it would be the last
time.

It was excruciating, but they didn't care. The anklets wouldn't kill her, only
scar her, and when push comes to shove in prison, it is the moment you strive
for, not the terrible aftermath or punishments to come.

So Quiven and Joanna locked themselves into a bedroom where they murmured and
touched for as long as they could manage until the gnawing scorpions in the belt
overrode even Quiven's compressed love and grief and he fell out of himself,
never to return.

"Because of its nature, a democracy is obligated to pretend to rehabilitate. To
work, rehabilitation has to be voluntary. Since it is mandatory it never works.
Therefore, the state's only obligation is to make it look as if we have tried."

By the time Bullfinch's cadre in their Revolutionary war uniforms broke in on
them, pain ruled. Quiven was dead. And Joanna? Joanna had gone so far back
inside herself that not all the thorazine in the world could retrieve her. She
was lost to us.

No deed goes unpunished and nothing in prison passes without note. Bullfinch
took off the belt and strung Quiven's body up in the underground cellblock. He
made us file by to see the exact cost of rebellion. They hung him upside down,
so we walked by cranksided with our heads resting on our shoulders so we could
see into his face.
"Sometimes you can only teach by example. That's why the state gives us the
death penalty. Sometimes the example itself is more powerf-al than the threat of
death."

Bullfinch Warden actually said, "Look on my works, ye mighty." '