Survivors

by Margaret Ball

  “Trust me,” Chaco said now, “it’s not as great as you’re imagining. Didn’t you hear the ‘excruciating boredom’ part?”

  With superhuman effort, Jef stopped looking at Krisi, gulped, and answered his boss. “Yeah, but they’re talking about my home now. I really wish I could follow the debate. All of it.”

  “Ok, you can leave the sound on – low – as long as it doesn’t distract you from work. No holo, though.”

  A moan from Krisi and Chuy greeted this pronouncement. “No music?”

  “I let you play your awful slipity-bop music too often. You’re getting spoiled.” Chaco scowled at them.

  “It brings people into the shop,” Krisi protested.

  “It’s the music of our generation,” said Chuy.

  “We can’t help it if you’re an anachronism,” they said together.

  “And it’s not awful. You like slipity-bop, don’t you, Jef?”

  Jef paused in his sorting of program boards and tried to think of something tactful to say. Chaco saved him.

  “No fair, Krisi. You’re using your powers for evil. Don’t you have some data to enter? Accounting programs to run? If you can do your job and still take time to tease Jef, maybe I ought to cut your hours.”

  Krisi took herself back to the corner where she kept track of all the numbers that mattered to the Chop Shop, and left Jef alone to see whether he could sort program boards with his eyes while listening to the Assembly debate with his ears. It wasn’t that hard, he just had to think of his brain as a multi-processor system.

  The debate had opened with a long, passionate, florid speech on the duty of Esilia to send a rescue fleet to Harmony. Now that speech was being neatly deflated by a little man – that was what his voice sounded like, anyway, a little man who cared about little details – who pointed out that Esilia could hardly be said to have a fleet at all. That led into an acrimonious debate about who commanded the merchant ships that used to import rice and grain from Harmony.

  “Each one is a free and independent trade consortium with the same rights as a citizen!” one assemblyman yelled.

  “Nonsense, how can a ship be a citizen?”

  “Yes, and they can be drafted in the public service, just like citizens!”

  “What about the three ships Fishr Brothers owns? Are they three citizens or one citizen?”

  “Depends how many Fishr Brothers there are, stupid, not how many ships!”

  The debate broke up into a cacophony of separately yelling voices, each one intent on his argument and most of them straying extremely far from the original discussion.

  While the Chair of the Assembly was banging something that sounded like a wooden mallet and shouting down the disorderly assemblymen, another refugee from Harmony came into the shop wanting to sell his game collection. Chaco yanked Jef away from his prosaic sorting task to advise him on the games. It wasn’t difficult: two were genuinely new and complex enough for Esilian taste, the rest were recycled old stuff that nobody over ten would bother playing now. But it broke his concentration on the debate.

  “Sorry,” Chaco said, paying over the agreed price for the two games he took, “but I can’t use those others.”

  “They’re good games – for little kids.”

  “Yeah, but the under-ten market doesn’t have the money for hologames. And their mommies and daddies aren’t going to buy them anything called “Blood War Zombies IV.”

  “Oh, all right.” An annoyed glance at Jef. “If I’d of known he was here, I wouldn’t of bothered bringing them in. Say, what happened to that icy music you used to play?”

  He shuffled out and Krisi spun in her chair to raise her hand to Jef. “Hurray for us!”

  Jef took her hand briefly. “How come?”

  “That jerk just validated my music and your expertise, that’s how come!”

  Jef went back to sorting parts, but it was some time before his ears tuned in to the Assembly debates again. She touched me. She actually touched me! I should have, no I shouldn’t, she didn’t mean anything by it, she might have meant something…

  When he stopped reliving those absolutely wonderful three seconds of skin contact, the Assembly had also quieted down. They were now debating, fairly soberly, how much it would cost to send the merchant fleet back to Harmony, how many people could be saved that way, and how many refugees from Harmony Esilia could absorb.

  “If we take the money from the resettlement fund, they won’t have anything to live on while they’re finding their feet.”

  “I’d like to see some evidence that the ones we’ve already got have any intention of finding their feet!”

  “Yeah! I mean, seconded! The kahve shops in Travis are full of refugees telling us how important they used to be back home and how it would be beneath them to actually go out and look for work!”

  “Why did we give resettlement money to people who obviously got out with plenty of portable assets?”

  “Who cares? It’s the others who are going to be a problem. If we take in more than we can absorb, you know what’ll happen with the ones on the bottom of the heap. The ones who can’t keep the rules of the settlement houses are already setting up as street vendors or prostitutes or worse. The people of my district - ”

  “Oh, are they cutting into your hometown hos’ business?”

  “Sir, how dare you malign my constituents!” And another confusing uproar started.

  Jef ducked his head over his work, reddening. Maybe it wasn’t so good, after all, to hear what Esilians really thought about his people. “You can switch back to music now,” he told Chaco at the next opportunity. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Ah. You’ve recognized we were right about the boredom factor.”

  Jef nodded. If he didn’t say it out loud, it wasn’t quite a lie. “I guess I’ll just catch the evening summaries from now on.”

  “Wise beyond your years, young Jef.” Chaco tapped the ‘caster and something poured out that was neither pounding slipity-bop nor shouting politicians. Jef didn’t know quite what it was, but it seemed to involve a multitude of string instruments alternating with the heavenly singing of ethereal woodwinds.

  Chuy and Krisi retched loudly. “You and your ancient music!”

  “If that’s ancient music,” Jef told Chaco quietly, “I – I like it. It makes me feel as though something is stretching out my soul.”

  “If I have conveyed appreciation of Bach to just one person,” Chaco said, mock-solemnly, “I have not lived in vain.” He raised his voice. “Hey! Krisi!”

  Jef reached out his hand. “Don’t tell Krisi!” he whispered.

  “What now, Chaco?”

  Chaco made an almost unnoticeable restart. “Did you run that new program to correlate our ad buys and sales responses?”

  “Are you losing your mind? I already told you I haven’t had time to populate the data set. I’ll get to it when I get to it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Now that she didn’t have a job to go to or any food to bring home, Jillian tried to make herself useful around the Donteven. Until her knee got better she couldn’t do much; Merdis suggested she help old Mariya to make blankets.

  The clear cold days provided enough light for Mariya Yair to sit by a window and sew until her hands got too cold to move. She took worn-out pre-smartcloth clothes that the residents had discarded or that the Abadi boys brought home from their foraging expeditions, cut out the good pieces of fabric, and patched the scraps together to make blankets and bulky jackets. Jillian actually got to sew three scraps together before Mariya demoted her to bringing hot cups of tea and tying the patched blankets to their backing with separate knots scattered all over the surface. Well, all right, so she hadn’t exactly got those three scraps flat; they’d come out more of a pyramid shape. Jillian still thought she could learn, but Mariya said she wasn’t having any more precious fabric messed about like that.

  Even the blanket-tying was a verdict on Jillian’s incompetence. Before
her hands got so bad this winter Mariya had quilted her patchwork creations in beautiful flowing patterns, but she laughed out loud when she saw the big irregular stitches that were Jillian’s attempt to emulate her. “Know what we call stitches like those, girl? Toenail catchers! Never mind, tying is quicker than quilting and we all need more blankets as fast as you and I can make them!”

  Once she could stand easily, Jillian was more than happy to help Merdis Abadi with the cooking. She didn’t have to worry about Trisha; the necessary oil stove made the Abadi kitchen the warmest room in the building, and the few women without jobs turned it into an unofficial clubhouse where Trisha was happy to spend hours.

  As she had donated their huge supply of cooking oil to the communal larder, Jillian didn’t feel quite like a freeloader – yet – but it still made her feel better to do a stint of chopping and peeling for Merdis. Being around other people was good for Trisha, too. She donated some of her less disgusting herbal teas to the kitchen. After they got home from work, the twins from the third floor, Sheri and Stayci, kept a kettle on the boil and whisked round with hot mugs of “tea” for everyone who had a hand free to take one. The twins teased Trisha, claiming that after the baby was born she would become a boyfriend-snatching menace.

  “It’s that look in her eye,” Stayci would say. “You can tell this girl is a wild one!”

  “No, it’s the heart-shaped face,” said Sheri. “Men always fall for these kitten-faced girls! We’re just lucky that Nathan is so short-sighted, he can’t see past the big belly to the pretty face. But when she’s got her figure back, I’m never letting Nathan loose on the second floor again!”

  The twins shared – amicably, as far as Jillian could tell – the shy young man who daily walked the two of them home from their clerical jobs with the Bureau for Labor.

  Trisha laughed and called them silly little girls. Some color came back to her cheeks during those busy afternoons and evenings, and Jillian rejoiced.

  When she could get up and down stairs without a twinge in her knee, Jillian launched on a long-deferred project. The Abadi boys found her a mop and a bucket; Mariya contributed a bundle of threadbare rags with no useable patches left; and Lorens Danko “found” a box of disinfectant soap, too harsh for skin but eminently suitable for Jillian’s project.

  She mopped up and down every step of the syncrete stairwell, and knelt to scrub out the corners, while Sheri and Stayci ran back and forth with buckets of clean water. It took vigorous stirring to dissolve the soap; the exercise kept her warm.

  By the end of the day, Jillian’s knees and shoulders were aching, and her hands were red from the soap – protective gloves were a thing so long in the past that she didn’t even lament the lack of them. But the stairway no longer smelled of cat piss.

  “What’s the point?” Sheri – or possibly Stayci – asked. The twins had happily taken the day off to help Jillian, saying that a stairwell scrubbing party was a lot more interesting than sitting in the Ministry all day with nothing to do. Jillian understood that they didn’t mind whether the attack of cleanliness lasted or not; it was enough that they’d done something different to break the deadly monotony of winter. But Stayci – or possibly Sheri – had just a tiny bit of intellectual curiosity. She went on, “Won’t the feral cats just get in and stink it up again?”

  Jillian gave her a level glance. “I haven’t seen any cats since the first days of winter. Have you?”

  “Ohhh.” One twin absorbed her meaning. “I hope we haven’t been eating cat!”

  “If we have,” said the other one, more soberly, “I don’t want to know about it.”

  Trisha exclaimed over the state of Jillian’s hands, and wanted to mix some of her healing teas into oil for an improvised lotion, but Jillian dissuaded her. “Tea is for drinking, oil is for cooking, and my hands will be fine tomorrow. You’ll be all right this evening?

  “Yes. It’s Sheri’s turn with Nathan, and Stayci’s coming back after dinner to play cards.” One or the other of the twins had to vacate their room when Nathan came to call. They seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement, and it worked out well for everybody. The odd twin out had a place to visit and a companion not much older than she was, Trisha had company, and Jillian was free to slip downstairs into Ruven’s room.

  The only problem was Ruven.

  Jillian couldn’t understand the man, and he was driving her crazy.

  Ruven tormented her with long, sensual kisses, cupped her breasts in his palms, shivered when she ran caressing hands down his broad back... but beyond a certain point he would not go, nor allow her to go. He had not only the self-control, but the physical strength, to pick her up bodily and sit her down in a chair if she crossed one of his invisible lines. They’d been at this unsatisfactory point ever since she moved in and Jillian was no closer to seducing him than she’d been on the first day he kissed her. Discord - she hadn’t even gotten his pants off! Or hers, for that matter. He would touch her through her clothing, just enough to make her hot and desperate for more, but let her try to wriggle out of that silky scrap of fabric to give him better access, and she would find herself firmly placed in a hard straight chair like a toddler in time-out.

  Her sense of touch convinced her that the problem wasn’t impotence or lack of interest. Was there something embarrassing that he didn’t want her to see - a stupid tattoo in a stupid place? No, that couldn’t be it; he was just as prudish in the dark as in the light, just as intent on avoiding her nakedness as on covering his own.

  Whatever the reason, Jillian felt that she was only getting part of him. And for a long time she had been afraid to ask why, for fear that he’d go away altogether. This bitter winter would be unbearable without the warmth and kindness Ruven brought into her life. Anyway, her previous experiences suggested that kissing and cuddling was the best part. Actual sex had been something of a let-down. Both times.

  Only - well, that sounded kind of pathetic, didn’t it? And she was Jillian Lisadel, who took care of herself. She was not some feeble nobody, putting up with halfhearted attentions from some man who - she faced her biggest fear - was only using her as a substitute for his real girl, back home. Or worse – he was working up to telling her that his wife didn’t understand him.

  “Have a good time?” Trisha asked casually when Jillian came in that night.

  Jillian surprised herself by bursting into tears. It wasn’t about Ruven, she insisted. It was just – just – everything. She hated winter!

  “Hmph,” Trisha said. “Why do I have this feeling that ‘everything’ is named Ruven?”

  Bit by bit, she got the humiliating details out of Jillian. Finally she finished the cup of tea she’d made for Jillian, hm’d some more, and tapped her beautifully kept fingernails on the side of the cup. “You know what your problem is, Jillian? You’re too beautiful.”

  “Ha!”

  “And a star,” Trisha went on. “You’ve had a lot of practice fending men off, but no practice at all in chasing them.”

  “I shouldn’t have to chase him,” Jillian sniffed. “He says he loves me.”

  “And I’ve seen his face when he looks at you,” said Trisha. “Whatever the problem, it’s certainly not that he doesn’t want you. He looks like a starving man outside a bakery.” She hm’d again. “You know what, Jilli, you’re just going to have to seduce him.”

  “Evidently that’s just what I cannot do,” said Jillian bitterly.

  “There, there. Just you let Auntie Trisha cogitate for a while.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Trisha was still “cogitating,” when Sheri and Stayci brought home some alarming news.

  “There’s a new rule,” Sheri said.

  “From the Minister himself,” said Stayci.

  “And it’s been approved by the Central Committee!”

  Jillian thought that the Minister for Labor could make any rules he liked, but how was he going to enforce them? Ruven had been quite right when he predicted that the coup
at the Bureau for Security would result in no peace officers on the streets at all.

  “Anyone who is not registered with a job approved by the Bureau can be sent up-river to work on a farming coop for six months!”

  “What are you going to do, Jillian?”

  “Oh, that won’t make any difference to us. Look at Trisha – would anybody in his senses try to make her work on a farm? Now?”

  Trisha smiled. “One good thing about being as big as a transport float, nobody’s going to try and make me wreck my hands.”

  “But Jillian, you don’t have a job either!”

  “Nor does Merdis Abadi, if it comes to that. Or Ruven, who’d actually be some use on a farm. Don’t worry, girls. Obviously the rule isn’t intended to apply to people with reason for exemption. I’ve got Trisha to take care of, Merdis is feeding nearly two dozen people every day, and Ruven isn’t even on the Ministry’s rolls.”

  Sheri frowned. “I don’t know, Jillian. In the office they say he really means this.”

  Jillian shrugged this off. “There’ve been other silly rules. I’ve never had any trouble getting an exemption before.”

  But apparently the Minister was serious. Merdis wasn’t summoned, but two ugly characters turned up at the Donteven with an official summons for “Jillian L3529i”

  “I don’t like this,” Merdis said. “Those men look like common thugs. I don’t think you should go with them, Jilli.”

  Jilli didn’t much like the looks of the men either, but they had badges just like the ones Sheri and Stayci took off each day after work. And they were armed. The Donteven defense brigade might be able to deal with two armed thugs, but what if that brought a dozen more to their door?

  “It’ll be all right,” she said with more assurance than she felt. “Look, it’s broad daylight, you know where I’m going, you’ll tell Ruven when he comes back. I’m not going to disappear. It’ll be much easier if I just go along with these gentlemen and explain why I can’t leave town just now.”