“Sako, is that you? What happened?”
“You overdosed. What did you take?”
“Just had a couple of beers.”
“Don’t bullshit me. The parameds are on their way, and they’re going to want to know what you’re on.”
Johnny fumbled a Bliss inhaler out of his vest pocket. “I was holding it for someone else and wanted to see what it was like.”
“You need help, Johnny.” He’d needed it for years, probably needed it when I was dating him, and it had never occurred to me to tell him that.
“I’m fine. Just need a little rest.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
The door swung open. “I heard someone in here needed a doctor,” Francis said.
“He needs a medical doctor.”
“I needed to piss anyway.” Francis stepped over Johnny and crossed to the bank of urinals on the far wall. “Do you want to help me out with this for old time’s sake? Your husband’s guarding the door. No one will come in.”
“You’re an ass.”
“And you’re married, which, for some reason, is really arousing me right now. Where are you staying tonight?”
“In your dreams, Francis. Why did I sleep with you again?”
He tucked his penis back into his pants. “Convenience, probably. And the publication opportunities.” He looked at Johnny. “Is he going to die?”
“No.”
“Good. Shitty thing to happen at a party.” He stepped over Johnny again. “I think I’m going to go. Big day tomorrow. Interviewing a new thesis candidate.” He winked. “Have a good life, Hisako. Look me up when you come back this way.”
Johnny was crying. “I’m such a waste, Sako. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.”
I smoothed his hair back. “I know. Rest. Everything will be all right.”
The door opened again, and Adem came in with a man wearing a plaid skirt. “This is Dooley, my father. He’s a doctor.”
“Hello, daughter,” the red-headed man said. “Imagine meeting a lady like yourself in the jakes.” He went to his knees and squinted at the telltales on the doc. “Bliss?”
I nodded.
“A bad batch goes right for the brainstem.” He tapped the docbox. “This is the only thing keeping him alive. Might need to get used to this thing, boyo.”
“Where are the parameds?” I said.
“Delayed,” Adem said. “There was an attack on the elevator. Some refugee rights group took down one of the access towers.”
Dooley snorted. “If so, they’ve done a lot more damage to themselves than they did to these La Mur assholes. They can repair the tower, but there’s no telling how many people died when it came down.” He stood. “You need to find a way to recharge the doc. It’s got maybe ten minutes left. I’m going downtown to see if I can help.”
“Do you want me to come?” Adem said.
“Soon as you’re done here.” Dooley ran his hand through his hair, making it stand up like rusty fire. “I’ll grab some of our people from the party.”
“Bring some lifter operators,” Adem said. “They might be able to run some of the rescue equipment.”
“Unless I am very much mistaken, the authorities are going to be more concerned with crime and punishment than in digging anyone out.” Dooley frowned. “We’ll see what we can do. Get him stabilized and come down. Don’t tell Rakin. He’ll have a conniption about using ship resources for something like this. Maybe pack up the leftovers from the buffet.”
The charge light on Johnny’s life-support system dropped to red, and a buzzer sounded. “Docboxes are supposed to last for hours,” I said.
“Twelve hours, but only if they’re maintained. The dust was so thick on it I doubt it had been touched in years.” Adem pulled a multi-tool out of his suit pocket and used it to pry open the charge port. “This thing is older than me.”
“I don’t want to die!” Johnny said.
“Don’t worry,” Adem said. “Tell me how you met Hisako.” He handed me the multi-tool. “Go get me three or four of the power units from those food warmers out there.”
Lucy was standing guard outside the door. The party was breaking up as news spread about the attack. “Your mother had to leave,” she said.
“She’ll have to work.” I grabbed Lucy’s arm. “I need some help.”
Lucy spotted the multi-tool in my hand and pulled one of her own from the small clutch she was carrying. “Never leave the ship without it.”
It was the work of only a couple of minutes to get the power units. They were built right into the warmers, but the laser cutter on the multi-tool made short work of the casings. One of the waiters squawked but shut up when Lucy pointed her cutter at him. We carried the units back into the bathroom. The light on the docbox was flashing rapidly, which wasn’t doing anything for Johnny’s calm. Adem was talking to Johnny and poking around inside a wall-mounted hand dryer with a bent fork. He took the heating units from us.
“Perfect.” He pulled a handful of wire out of the hand dryer and squatted beside Johnny. “These heaters run on broadcast power. I’m going to hook them into the doc’s power supply.”
“Won’t that just heat everything up?”
Adem passed me a handful of small metal strips. “Not anymore.” He used the multi-tool to connect the heating units to the docbox. “Johnny tells me the two of you used to date.”
“It was a long time ago.”
The light on the docbox stopped flashing, and the charge bar started creeping back up toward green.
“Stay with him,” Adem said. “I’m going down to the elevator to see what I can do to help. Lucy, check in with Mom. We’re going to need to use the elevator in New Berlin if we want to keep to our schedule.”
She nodded. “Stay in touch, and don’t do anything stupid.”
Adem dashed out the door. Lucy closed her eyes, and the implants on her forehead blinked. “This is going to screw everything up. We might have to get some of the crew up with shuttles.” She stood. “I’ll be back.”
The door swung wildly behind her. Johnny made a rattling sound, and after a moment of panic, I realized he was snoring. All of the lights on the docbox were green, and the hodge-podge charging system Adem had made with heating units, a hand dryer, and a fork hummed happily beside him.
And – oh, yeah – I was married. The gray nightmare I’d been having for the past eleven years had come true.
Johnny blinked sleepily. “Thanks for inviting me to the party, Sako. It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah. It’s good to see you, too, Johnny.”
ADEM
Versailles City, Oct 22, 3260
Adem hot-wired a delivery scooter to speed up the trip, but Dooley already had a triage area established and was covered in dust and blood by the time his son arrived at the elevator depot. The attack had taken down one of the four lattice towers workers used for maintenance of the system.
“How did you get past the security cordon?” Dooley said.
“Walked. They stopped me on one street so I went three blocks over. What’s happening?”
“Death and destruction. All east of here.” Dooley wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a dark smear on his fair skin. “The damned tower was three klicks high. I’m just grateful they only took down the one.”
“City’s not doing much to help.”
“We’re it for the moment. Bunch of rubes fresh from a party.” Dooley handed Adem a first-aid kit. “The thing fell across something the locals call the Square. Get in there and see what we’re up against.”
Adem slung the kit over his shoulder and followed the debris. The explosion had gone off at the tower’s base, toppling the structure like a giant tree. Gravity had been kind enough to lay some of it on the roadway. Mostly though, it had fallen into apartment blocks and squats.
Adem climbed the tower’s now sideways framework to get through the fence surrounding the Square. The struts and guy lines
, a mixture of aluminum, synthetic-diamond weave, and carbon nanotubes, scraped through the knees of his thin wedding trousers and into the flesh beneath. He took a moment to inspect his wounds and gave both knees a squirt of insta-bandage.
The tower had flexed as it fell, missing a cluster of food carts and smashing through a low wall and into a large garden. Adem followed the destruction past neat rows of vegetables. A hutch full of lizard things had been smashed flat, and the survivors were meeping pitifully to be let out. Adem kicked it open, wincing at the impact through his thin, shiny shoes. The five or six survivors scurried into the plant growth on either side of the impact zone.
“Ought not to have done that,” a woman said. Adem twisted to see who it was and nearly fell against the tower’s lattice again. She pointed at the departed lizards with her chin. “People will be hungry. You cut loose their food.”
“I’m sorry,” Adem said. “They were trapped and–”
“It’s done now.” She squinted at him. “You lost? La Mur is that way. Might want to get back there before folks start looking for someone to blame.”
Adem brushed at his clothes. “I was at a party. My wedding. We came down to help.”
Tears streaked paths down the woman’s dust-caked face. “Help won’t help,” she pointed farther east, the way she had come, “it came right down on the Children’s Village.”
“Show me,” Adem said.
He followed the woman to the far corner of the garden and helped her over the remains of the interior fence. The tower had fallen across a cluster of huts and tents.
“What is it?” Adem said.
“Illicite. We keep them safe when their parents run off or go to prison. Feed ‘em, put a roof over their heads.”
Adem surveyed the rubble. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived. “How many were in there?”
“Dozens.” The woman’s hands rose to her face. Her fingers were scraped raw, two of them nearly to the bone.
“Let me see your hands.” Adem coated her fingers liberally with insta-bandage and helped her to a seat against the wall. “Stay there and rest.”
He walked carefully into the rubble. Here and there, a small hand or foot protruded from the piles of cloth and wood. Each time, Adem dropped to his knees and checked for signs of life.
“Hello!” he shouted. “Is there anyone here?”
He tugged a handmade stuffed animal from under a beam and held it in both hands. He shouted again. A low cry made him drop the stuffed animal and stumble toward the outer wall. He heard it again.
“She’s dying!” the voice said.
Adem heaved at the rubble and succeeded in lifting a large portion of roof up. The fallen roof had created a small zone of protection where three children crouched: two boys and a little girl. The older boy blinked dust out of his eyes and pointed at the girl. “Her arm. She’s dying!”
One of the children had tied a rough tourniquet around the girl’s arm, which ended in a mass of pulped flesh and bone. Adem checked her pulse. He sprayed the rest of the insta-bandage on the girl’s arm and strapped the first-aid kit’s small docbox to her tiny chest.
“There’s a woman near the garden wall,” he told the older boy. “Take her back to the elevator and look for a man named Dooley. He has red hair. Tell him I’m coming with the girl. Okay?”
The boy took the younger one’s hand and pulled him toward the wall. Adem turned his attention back to the girl. Her skin was gray from blood loss and shock, but the telltales on the docbox said she was stable. It hissed as it administered some drug or other.
“What’s your name, honey?” Adem said.
The girl’s eyes fluttered open. “Chuchu.”
Adem slid his arms under her and lifted. She weighed next to nothing. She leaned her head weakly against his shoulder. “Okay, Chuchu. Let’s get you somewhere safe.”
HISAKO
I gave up waiting for Adem and his father to return and took a cab to my mother’s apoartment. She came home four hours later and made me breakfast. She was exhausted. Even though Transit didn’t run during emergencies, she’d been out straight with her public-relations duties, fielding questions and complaints the best that she could.
“It was probably that group your father used to drink with,” she said. “I’ll be lucky to keep my job if that ever comes to light.”
That group had never amounted to much. A few protests, some minor sabotage… Most of its members had been rounded up when I was still a teenager, but I didn’t see any point in arguing with her. As we ate, I tried to get her to talk about the past, maybe dredge up some warm memories and good feelings to take with me up into the dark. She didn’t bite.
“Your father was the sensitive one. He’d be crying now, or reading some of his poetry.” Her face darkened. “What did that ever get him? He drank, you know. He wasn’t a saint.”
He was not. Some nights he didn’t come out of their bedroom because he was sleeping off a hangover. When he hugged me during my teenage years, all I could smell was the cheap, sweet liquor he liked to drink. It oozed out of him like sweat.
“He tried,” I said.
“He should have tried harder,” she said. “Maybe he would still be alive.”
After I helped her with the breakfast dishes, I called a taxi. Lucy and her mother had already taken a shuttle up to the ship. The rest of us had to take a train to the elevator in New Berlin and get to the Hajj from there.
The train was near capacity. The attack on the tower had sent many who could running to second houses and family friends far away from the perceived danger. They didn’t seem to care that midtown and La Mur hadn’t been touched.
Dooley was already aboard the elevator when I arrived. He smiled wanly and invited me to sit with him. “Quite a night. None of us got any sleep. Adem’s still working.”
“Was it bad?”
“Letting people build right up against the elevator was a piss-poor idea. The city council will have a lot to answer for.”
“They won’t,” I said. “Nobody important died. There are always more refugees coming. I bet you brought some with you.”
“We did at that.” Dooley was in his fifties, but exhaustion and the ghost of all he had seen the night before made him look older. “Another five thousand waiting in orbit to come down.”
“You’d be surprised how few of your freezer pods ever make the surface. Most of them are probably still floating around up there.”
Dooley rubbed his face. “Once they’re off our manifest we don’t think too much about them.”
The elevator shook as it began its two-day trip up the tether. The acceleration was smooth, but many of my fellow passengers looked queasy. I recognized a few faces from my party and guessed alcohol consumption might be adding to their miseries.
“You ever been up to the New Berlin Station before?” Dooley said.
“A few times. Once for a long weekend with a boyfriend. His family owns an asteroid.”
“How big?”
“A kilometer end to end. Nothing too grand.”
“I’d like to have one of those someday. Dig it out. Spin it for gravity, maybe a nice, easy three-quarter g. Open a little pub and let the universe come to me for a change.”
“Would the captain come with you?”
“If the Hajj was in good hands. Her mother passed it on to her like that. I think she’d like to pass it on to one of the kids.”
“Adem.”
“I think Lucy would be her first choice. She’s hella smart and a fantastic pilot. Adem has a better heart, though. He’s kinder.”
“That doesn’t always make a good leader.”
“Or a successful Trader. But the Sadiq family has never been about making money, and don’t let Rakin tell you different. We get through, make a living, and try not to fuck too many people over in the process.” He smiled. “Hey, I like that. I’ll try to get Maneera to let me paint it on the hull.”
The elevator car trembled an
d accelerated again.
“Lucy told me that you were in an arranged marriage.”
“Parents worked a kelp farm on Freedom. I was an accident of love, my da told me. Put us one kid over the quota. It was either find me a match or abort. I can’t complain about the way it turned out. Maneera is a good woman. We’ve had three beautiful children and no jail time.”
“I’ve not met the third.”
“The youngest decided to get off on Freedom about five years ago. Maybe a hundred and twenty-five years ago your time. He got married, had a family. Died at a hundred and thirty.” He reached for his pocket. “I have pictures on my reader if you want to see them.”
“That’s okay.” I leaned back in the seat. “Relativity makes it all really weird.”
He chuckled. “Adem is the oldest by three years. Then Lucy, but she spent a dozen years planetside so she’s older than Adem now by about six years biological. Hafgan was the youngest. Said he wanted to live under the sky. He sold his shares to become a farmer and a historian. Wrote some books. We have copies, real printed copies, up on the ship.”
“Have you read them?”
“Cover to cover more than once. We all have. It’s the only thing we have of him now.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t tell Adem I said this, but I’d recommend you get your own suite at first. You two need to get to know each other before you set up housekeeping.”
“Can I do that?”
“Course you can. The contract says you have to get married and spend two years with us. That’s it. You don’t have to like us. You don’t even have to talk to Adem except for ship’s business if that’s what you want. But you might be missing out. He’s a good boy.”
“I didn’t know I could get my own place. I thought…”
“That you were coming up to be ravished by Traders? Didn’t you read the contract? Your parents were supposed to give you a copy as soon as they told you about the arrangement.”
“I tried to avoid thinking about it.”
“I broke into my mother’s reader to get at mine. It was no secret that I was to be married off, but I wanted to get a look at the girl I was supposed to be making babies with. Scared the hell out of me. I read about her black belts and thought she would beat me to a pulp as soon as look at me.”
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