by Alex Oliver
"Lali, where are--?" She started, just as the flitter door opened and closed, and there the girl was, wearing a dark body-suit she must have had under the dress, and sitting primly in the passenger seat, as though she had not mysteriously materialized from the night.
She grinned at Morwen - a very pretty grin, with dimples - but raised her eyebrows and said, "Drive."
"How did you do that?" Morwen kicked the flitter's engines into maximum. They rose straight up like a rocket for a mile, then headed for the spaceport.
"Old marine trick," Lali said, nestling back into the white leather seat, like someone who is perhaps relieved to have failed. Her smile grew softer, more mature around the edges, and Morwen's very taken heart gave a little lurch. She was so pretty and so competent and so unselfconscious about all of it. She deserved to be better treated than this. She deserved to be the princess she claimed she was by blood.
"I don't like the physical stuff," Morwen confessed, finding her hands unsteady on the steering yoke. "I wasn't scared when it was happening, but I look back now and now I'm scared."
"I dropped the skirt and all the snakes slithered away," Lali said, grinning again. "They had springs in them, you know, to make them move. You should have seen all those pompous idiots jumping to get out of the way. It was hilarious. But that was the easy bit. To be honest, I thought they would have moved the baby somewhere – they'd have been idiots not to, but we had to try. Did you find anything in the house computers?"
Morwen ported the data from the nursery into the shuttle's small computer, let Lali read it from the inside of the windscreen as they flew. Distant lights worried her as they lifted off from what the flitter identified as a military base barely six hundred miles away but the speed was already at maximum so there was nothing she could do about them.
"Ah! No!" Lali exclaimed beside her.
"What?"
"When they received the captain's message, they took the baby to Diane in the Gamma Crucis system."
"Is that bad?" She wasn't sure why it elicited so much astonishment.
"No. Good. It's very good," Lali raised her clenched fist in what was presumably some kind of good luck gesture. "I think we're being looked after, you know? First you knew about Acacitli, and now the child is on Diane." She must have caught Morwen's look of incomprehension. She shrugged. "It's where I come from. I don't know this orphanage - it looks new - but I know the village around it, and some of the people. We'll have help there."
"That is good," Morwen agreed with less enthusiasm. She didn't believe in luck or blessings, and she found coincidences suspicious. Plus, the lights from the military base were gaining.
Well, she was certainly not waiting around for a shuttle. Tilting the flitter up on its tail, she flew straight upwards, out of the atmosphere and into space, leaving the pursuing jets behind.
"I'm going to see what the news is saying about us," Lali switched the flitter's entertainment screen on, and Morwen's sense of impending doom was like the crack of a bullet by her ear as she saw her own face, and then Priya's.
"They IDed you from the rope."
"I don't see how. I wore gloves."
"Hair then. There was probably hair left inside that helmet."
"Shut up!" she needed to hear this. The announcer was saying something about--
"The second woman is thought to be Priya Kumara, a known associate of the mutineer. An investigative unit has been dispatched to bring her in for questioning."
"Shit!" Morwen swore, slamming the shuttle into the closest available dock, and running out as if she could fight them all, right now, no matter that they were star systems away. "Why would they think that? Priya's done nothing!"
"She's brown, is she?" Lali asked, following her down the causeway towards Charity with a battle-ready alertness to her tread. "So am I. They probably can't tell us apart."
"I've got to go help her." Now she understood why the captain had made that rash promise about her child. Love overruled choice and reason. Captain Campos had to have her daughter. And Morwen had to have her wife. There was no alternative to that which could be lived with.
They had reached Charity's closed hatch just as the lights on her hangar began to pulse red. A mechanized voice called for her to stand where she was and surrender. Lali sealed her face mask again and flattened herself into the shadow as Morwen yanked on the manual release.
"You take Charity then and go to Priya. I'll get the baby."
Even in a panic that said she was about to be unmade, Morwen balked at that. "Alone? With no ship?"
Lali's hiss of laughter reminded her, just a bit, of the rustle of that skirt of snakes. "I'm a trained marine, with ten million dinar in my pocket. They don't know who I am, and they're all hunting for you. I'll be fine."
"But--"
"Go." Lali insisted, giving Morwen a shove towards the open hatch, and she didn't want to waste a moment, but she didn't want to leave Lali to face a cruel universe alone.
When she turned from the shove and the involuntary step inside, the girl was gone, pressed into a shadow somewhere, already slipping towards the door. Morwen opened her mouth to say 'are you sure?' But of course Lali was sure. No dark unknown daunted her on Cygnus 5 when she plunged into the warren of ancient underminings alone. Why should it worry her here?
"Thank you," Morwen whispered as she sealed the hatch behind her, abandoned her mission and prepared to ride to the rescue of the love of her life. "And good luck."
~
Lali faced no enemy more perilous to her than boredom on the way home. Since they had been careful to take their millions out in cash, she had money to pay for new clothes and a library of books both fictional and informational which she could pass on to the new colony once she returned. She had to wait a week for the next commercial flight out of Salvation and into Zawiyah Madina, a greater travel hub, from which she could get the twice weekly shuttle to Tlalticpac - known to outsiders as 'Diane.'
She read up on child care on the first leg of the way. But as she sat in the waiting area on Zawiyah Madina, preparing to open another book, a woman with a live turkey in a wicker cage sat down next to her. She wore a shawl in three different shades of red, and a big bowl of a black felt hat, and Lali had said "You're from the Coszcatl Mountains, aren't you?" before she had time to consider whether it was wise to be drawing attention to herself.
"I am," the woman beamed at her as at a kindred spirit. She had a missing front tooth filled in with a denture of green stone, and the wrinkles of hard work and laughter on her angular face. She narrowed her eyes at Lali's nondescript black skirt and flowery blouse. Lali had done her hair, military style, in a hard little bun at the back of her neck and covered it with a headscarf tied under the chin. She didn't think she was giving anything away, but the woman said "Zyanya Lakes woman?" anyway.
"How could you tell?" Lali laughed, slipping into Nahuatl as if into her own skin.
"Something around the face." The woman opened the bag by her feet and offered Lali a wrapped parcel of marranitos. She took one of the sweet pig biscuits eagerly and offered one of her own travel mints in return.
"Cualli Citlali," she said, taking a small bite and savouring the taste of home. "My friends call me Lali."
"Maria Rey. You've been long away from home?"
Lali tucked her book reader away and settled down to catch up with the news. A little later, a priest joined them, and a forester from the equitorial Otero reserve, and a small parcel of twelve children with a nun as their nursemaid, who were going back to the capital to join their families for the harvest.
There were two white people too. Oh, the colonial stock of the world had come mostly from various nations in South America, and there had been pale Latins among them - people who insisted that they were Spanish by descent. But after two thousand years of settlement, however pale they remained they clearly belonged in a way that these two did not.
They were both quite beautiful, with chiseled features that spoke of
illegal cosmetic surgeries. Everything about their dress and luggage spoke of wealth, and they sat in the far end of the shuttle on their own, without sharing food, looking simultaneously titillated and frightened by their company.
Maria caught her looking at them and bent close to whisper "Chingones! They come and buy a house, and then they have to buy grounds and move in their servants, and then they need better airports and spaceports and entertainment in their own language. And all the young people go to work for them because they pay more. Suddenly there's no land for us. Suddenly we can't afford to live in our own communities. While you've been fighting for us out there in the stars, they've been coming in and eating the ground out from underneath us."
"I heard," pieces slotted together in her mind, "about a rich admiral's child who was being looked after in an orphanage here. I wondered why they would choose somewhere so far away from their own folk."
Maria rolled her eyes. "That too. Hospitals - for them. We're not allowed inside except to clean. Orphanages, so they can get their mistakes out of their sight. But I don't know if it's a tide any of us knows how to hold back."
The thought pricked her as she stepped off the shuttle onto her own world once more and took a bus to the lakes. If Keene and his overpaid set put their minds to gentrifying Tlalticpac, was there anything she could do?
She'd come to no conclusion by the time she stepped off the bus at her own lake-shore terminus. Night was just beginning to creep into the cold greyness of dawn, and the lake's surface looked like a forest from here, willows trailing in the water from the four corners of each chinampa. The lake waters threaded still as steel rulers between the floating islands, and on the largest artificial island a light shone from the bright glass windows of the church, and a smaller lantern bobbed among the rows of grave markers. This church was literally built upon the bodies of its parishioners. They had gone into the chinampa to fill and fertilize it and return to the earth the goodness they had had out of it in life.
Lali slipped one of the communal boats from its mooring and poled up the central canal. Since she was arriving at dawn it was probably politer to say hello to the dead first, before she called on her parents.
The artificial ground underfoot was springy and resilient, and bursting with flowers, and as she walked to where her relatives lay the sun came up, crimson, huge and red and sullen like a smoky ember. the heavy mists swirled and glittered like a lake of blood, and all the flowers opened up their petals to the warmth, and poured out perfume on another beautiful day.
That was her parents, she thought, looking at the movement of the lantern, the straight backed, rough haired form of her father. Her mother's embroidery, distinctive and bold around the hems of her huipil. It struck her almost with disbelief, that they were still here. Still in this place that should have ceased existing when she left, still going about their daily lives without her.
"Tatli, Mantli!" She ran up the familiar path and stopped at their look of utter unpreparedness, her mother's flinch, her father's upraised hands. "It's me."
The sun caught like a flake of ruby in her mother's eye, and it watered. "Cualli? Are you alive or dead?"
The first fear of rejection fell away. "I'm alive," she laughed. "Did they tell you I wasn't?"
Her father had stepped in front of her mother as if to protect her. Now he was shoved aside as Mantli barrelled forward to hug her tight with arms that had dug islands out of the lake bed for fifty years. She felt the breath go out of her, and then her father's arms joined her mother's and all three of them stood, soaking each other up, while the native insects began their wind-chime welcome of the rising sun.
"I don't know what they told us. It was lies," Tatli's eyes were glossy too. He pulled his white cotton trousers up as if he was pulling himself together and said, "Come home, eat breakfast and tell us everything."
She spent two days there, sleeping on her own pallet beneath the unglazed window, waking with the pink sunrise and soaking in the dim warmth of the amniotic sun that rolled across the sky like a comfortable drunkard, never too hot to hurt, or too cool to chill. Her brother was married now, and she learned all about his experiments with cross-pollinating new varieties of squash as she and Xipil, her new sister, leaned into the straps of slow, inefficient, ancient looms.
The lake ssshed around her house, and the black bellied ducks paddled hooting along the canals, and she felt knots in her soul unravel. But though everyone was concerned about the slow invasion of rich tourists, no one was concerned enough to want to come with her to a perilous unbroken world soon to be besieged, and finally on the third day she had to tear herself away and ask directions to the orphanage.
"I'll take you." Xipil - when she was not playing housewife - ran a side business by renting out space in her four person flitter. It looked like a mossy rock - edible algae had been planted all over the roof, and she harvested it monthly, but it rose with only a little instability and limped its way over the many lakes and towards the mountains.
"It takes hundreds of years to build a good garden," she said apologetically, "and when you have spent that time, your family's bones lie in it. You can't leave your ghosts to fend for themselves. But I wish you luck with it. Building a whole world from the fences inwards... It's a worthy task."
They could see the orphanage from miles away, splattered on the sides of Cerro Tzontehuitz like a bird dropping. Not just the poured concrete building with the cross and the statue of Mary and Jesus, but a complex of equally ugly grey cubes under a mess of scaffolding. Huge gates with watch towers and electronic surveillance surrounded it, more suitable for a prison than a complex of homes.
Around the still-unfinished settlement, a shanty town of local workers had thrown itself up. Corrugated iron roofs on packing crate walls, and flowers in tubs between them, and flowers down the middle of the road, because why would you not have flowers wherever there was earth?
"How will you get her out?" Xipil asked, her own cut blossoms wilting in her plaited hair.
"I don't know," Lali admitted. She'd always been too lowly a grunt to be involved in the tactical planning. "I thought I'd go and see if I could find her. Work out the layout of the building, schedule of guards, that kind of thing. Then I'll come back and figure out what to do. This is just a reconnoiter. Will you stay?"
"Of course," Xipil grinned and looked speculatively along the shanty town of workers' huts. "I bet there are people here who want to buy maize and fish. Just beep the horn if you come and I'm not there."
The gates stood open, and a slow trickle of villagers were going in and out, but it still reminded her uneasily of the gates of the citadel at Cygnus 5. Inside, despite a profusion of window boxes, roads and houses so new their edges and their colors had not softened into anything human, the feeling was similar to a siege. She saw some rich white people looking anxious behind more gates in their splendid houses, and some looking fatuous and pleased with themselves.
In the church's new, stained glass windows, all of the saints were white. She'd almost found it quaint at first, this replication of a kind of separation that history told her had died out a thousand years ago, but gradually it dawned on her that this was for real - that this innocence was how it started; white people coming in and stealing the country out from under you, almost before you noticed.
It made her feel a little better about stealing back the captain's child.
Playing 'curious peasant woman' for all she was worth, she ducked into the orphanage door while the nun at the desk was distracted by the beginning of Nones. As the woman bent her head to say her own momentary prayers, Lali slipped through the nearest archway and into a cheerless corridor lined with closed doors.
She bent to peer through the keyhole of the first - some kind of office, with a server humming to itself in a nest of wires. Morwen could have found out everything from that, but to Lali it was useless. She carried on down the corridor, then up narrow stairs at the top of which she was sure she heard a wail.
The stairs dumped her out into an airy tall atrium, where glass walls filled a marble space with rosy sunlight. A flitter landing outside the windows said this was the main entrance, and doors painted with frolicking pale children opened to her cautious touch.
One look. She saw lines of cribs, neat and white, each with its own infant, to her, indistinguishable from the others, and then a hand came down on her shoulder and her stomach tried to punch out of her mouth. The distant nun who stepped out from behind a pillar at the other end of the room did not surprise her, but this guard? He was almost seven feet tall, and silent, and dressed in the white uniformed coat of the already-dead. He was an Innocent, the deadliest of all bodyguards. Where the hell had he--
Oh, she looked at the atrium again, all the light and glitter of it, and here near the door a mirrored cubical just the size of a man.
Of course after Aurora's threat they would have known someone would come. Of course they would have taken steps.
"Well well," he said jovially, while his meaty hand squeezed her collarbone until she thought it would break. "Stand there, they said, see what you catch, and look, I have a fox come to rob our coop."
"Sir," her voice was unsteady, but she was a poor peasant woman and so it should be. "I don't know what you mean. I live in Zyanya Lakes. I hope to adopt."
"Of course," he laughed, and his other hand came up to press the barrel of a gun into her spine. "Then you won't mind submitting to a DNA test."
~
What had they done to Priya? Morwen tried to feel appropriately guilty at leaving Lali behind, but there was no room for it beside the fear for her lover and her concentration on the high level reprogramming of Charity's ID tag, again.
"Switch that over the instant we get out of ex-space," she told the ship, whose internal clocks were more reliable than her own. "So we look like we disappeared on jump.”
"I understand," said Charity, "I am becoming adept at evasive maneuvers. Also, thanks to the enhanced scans Mr. Bryant Jones installed, I have been able to strip the databases of ships docked near myself. I have learned a lot from the pleasure cruisers of the rich."