Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "It was all paid for in blood. It's how birds feed their young and wolves keep their territory, and for humans, it's the cost of civilisation. There is no other way. Even if you build something great out of nothing but kindness, someone else will see it, and they will want it. When they come for it, they'll have your blood or you must spill theirs. It's the way of the world, and at least you, unlike most of the people out there..." He gestured towards the car window. "You know the cost, and you've earned the prize."

  "The prize seems less shiny in light of the cost."

  "Real kick in the teeth, isn't it? Point is, there are things you can change and things you can't. You've got to figure out which is which, but don't let the bad spoil the good. And Joy... you shot me in the face."

  "I know," she said, cringing, wishing he'd not put it quite so bluntly. "I'm sorry."

  "I spent three months in the hospital because of you. Three months learning how to walk and talk and type all over again, face like sausage meat, brain like scrambled eggs. I like to think that we were sort of friends, but it was your hand that pulled the trigger on me. I bet that made you feel like crap. I bet that kept you awake at night."

  "Yes," she whispered, on the verge of tears.

  "It would've been real easy for you to run from that guilt. You didn't need to see me ever again. Once we were off Cato, there was really nothing connecting us anymore. You could've taken all the bad feelings and drowned them in alcohol or brushed them under the metaphorical rug and forgotten all about me. I wouldn't have blamed you if you did. It'd be a very human reaction." He pulled out a cigarette from a crumpled pack in his breast pocket, rolling it between his fingers. "But you wrote me every day. You sent me pictures and videos every week. The one of Gogently at the range had the whole med-wing cracking up; had me tear my new jaw tendons. When I wrote you back, I probably made no sense in the beginning. All those painkillers in my system, I could hardly think straight. But because of you, I had something other than myself to think about. You didn't have to do that. You didn't have to face your guilt, but you did. You don't shy from truths, Joy, not even when they hurt. That's good. That's... I think it's something we're all going to need in the days to come."

  "What do you mean?" She was crying now, and Rhys put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. The car's leather smelled of sandalwood and Rhys of tobacco, and outside the window, the landscape shifted as the car drove onto a lantern-lit bridge. Leafy residential neighbourhoods made a quilt of lawns and tiled roofs below, and up ahead crystal towers gleamed on Kirkclair's skyline.

  "It's funny," Rhys said, his stubbled chin scratching her forehead. "You wanted us to save you from Cato, but I think you're the one who'll save us from ourselves."

  * * *

  Their hotel was one of the crystal towers, coloured a gradient rose and emerald like a rod of tourmaline, and it, too, was owned by the Lucklaw family. In the lobby, a porter immediately appeared to wish Corporal Somerset and Captain Rhys welcome, and to take them to their suite on the penthouse floor.

  "Oh my God." Out of a drill instructor's earshot, Joy let the forbidden words slip. Couldn't help it, really – the only thing more breathtaking than the suite was the view through its crystalline walls.

  Kirkclair was a wonder. Familiar shapes and curves still remained, patterns woven by roads and sloping walls of iron-rich impact glass, but to the west, a forest grew on the once-featureless plain that had housed Atwood Campus. A business district stood where slums had once festered, and old mine boreholes had become waterfalls. Finn's first apartment was gone too. The view he'd loved so much, the fuzzy black mould and the awful neighbours – all gone, all turned to dust and regenerated into a glowing jewel of a city.

  Oh Finn. She placed her palms on the window, feeling the cold glass against her skin. What would her brother have made of the new Kirkclair and the sacrifices required to build such a marvel?

  "A little over the top, if you ask me." Rhys dropped his duffel bag carelessly on the floor, Achall mud staining marble. "I'm starving, but look at the room service menu – not exactly medic-salary friendly. You up for going out for dinner?"

  * * *

  The small, dimly lit basement restaurant had, in spite of Kirkclair being a NO-SMOKING ZONE, ash trays on every table and a blue haze in the air. When placing the dessert order, Rhys added oh, and a pack of extras, and the waiter returned carrying a discreet box of cigarettes and matches.

  "Have you been here before?" Joy asked.

  "Nah. Just got a nose for where to find the good places."

  He did, and not just when it came to vices. After the surprisingly nice dinner, they went for a walk down the streets of Kirkclair and somehow stumbled into a myriad wonders. When they stopped on a bridge overlooking a canal and fireworks bloomed in the night sky, Joy laughed, incredulous.

  "This is just too nice to not have been planned. Come on, Rhys, tell me. You and Lucklaw must've arranged all this somehow."

  "We did no such thing. It's bloody typical, is what it is. The one time I take a girl out and it's not a date, everything turns out perfectly romantic. You should've seen my first date with Cecilia. I was late, she spilled her drink, I got in a fight with a bouncer and lost badly, the train broke down on the way home... Still, the evening ended with a kiss, so it can't have been all bad."

  And so did this evening, as Joy placed a good-night kiss on his cheek in the doorway between their adjoining rooms. He looked surprised, touching a hand to his scarred skin.

  "That a normal thing to do back in your day?"

  "Yes," she said. "Isn't it now?"

  "Maybe it should be." He made to reciprocate, but changed his mind at the last second. "Apologies. The commander... I feel like I'm overstepping my bounds as it is. And speaking of bounds, do you mind if we leave this door ajar? The commander wasn't keen on you leaving Achall; wanted to slap a no-fly order on you, in fact. I talked him out of that, telling him it'd be weirdly controlling, though I'm not sure he understood what's weird about control. But the fact of the matter is that Skald might be looking for you. If it comes for you here, I want to be ready for it."

  * * *

  Apart from uniforms and fatigues provided by Bastion, Joy had very few clothes, and all of them purchased from Scathach Station's single clothing store (everything's twenty years out of fashion, Hopewell had sneered). As for other possessions, she hadn't enough to fill a suitcase. She was going to have to replace everything – but Kirkclair demonstrated very bluntly just how far her 3,700 merits was going to get her.

  "If I buy it, I'll have less than five hundred merits left," she said, turning this way and that to look at herself in the shop mirrors. The lavender dress fell to just above her knees – the length she'd seen on other women in the streets, and several inches shorter than anything Scathach Station offered – and was tight about the waist. Even Rhys, who'd spent most of the shopping trip with his eyes glazed silver, had agreed that it was very nice.

  "So? Bastion will take care of you. Food, housing – all of that's covered. And pretty soon you'll be pulling in a salary. Just buy it and let's go."

  She did, although it felt wasteful and utterly terrifying to see her merit account drop so sharply. The shop assistant gave her a pitying look, as though he could sense her poverty, but wished her a good day nonetheless.

  Primaterre social dynamics were hard to get used to. Her purchase had been made between her primer and the shop's systems, and yet a shop assistant had told her the total and bagged the clothes. Friendly and polite, yet cool, and she'd seen the gun he carried inside his jacket.

  In the streets, nobody smiled at strangers. Nobody said hello or nice weather or even pardon me if they bumped into another – although, that was a rare enough occurrence. Kirkclair's streets were safe and clean and sparsely populated, pedestrians giving each other wide berths. On the train, everybody picked seats as far away as possible from one another, some preferring to stand rather than to sit next to her or Rhys.

>   "We're strangers," Rhys said, shrugging. "We're Primaterre, which affords us respect, but that only goes so far. The shop assistant can't know how seriously you take purity. As far as he's concerned, every new customer who walks into his shop is a potential vector for a demonic outbreak. Yet at the same time, doctrine tells us that community and cooperation is purity, which means that he has to treat us well, or he'll become a source of impurity himself."

  "It wasn't like this on Achall."

  "The whole point of Basic Training is to turn strangers into one big happy Bastion family. Every soldier knows that their comrades went through the same training and passed the same vigil. That fosters trust and a sense of community. Civilians sort of do the same thing – see those terraces over there?"

  The terraces of an office building had been converted into gardens tended to by volunteers from all walks of life, from the elderly to the wealthy. On the next block, a school was being repainted, and Joy watched as a man stepped from a car nearly as nice as the one that had picked her and Rhys up at the spaceport. He pulled on paint-spattered coveralls over his business suit, and set to work.

  "Community work isn't mandatory, but very meritorious. Most people do some form of it, and so their trusted circle grows to extend from their immediate family to a neighbourhood or an entire settlement."

  "As nice as that sounds," Joy said, "they do it out of fear. It must be such a stressful way to live."

  "I never thought much about it before. The way we act, the things we do... It all just seemed rational. Normal. Now... I had a lot of time to think in the med-wing. A lot of time to figure out how I feel about the way things are."

  "And?"

  "It's secure and orderly, and people mostly mind their own business. On the other hand, there are no kisses on the cheek." He smiled at her, though there was a touch of sadness in his eyes. "And I think it's not for me to judge. You're the only one who can see us with clarity. So look around, Joy, and you tell me. Are we slaves and fools, or is there merit to our way of life?"

  A difficult question. The Primaterre Protectorate offered its citizens great security and comfort, its achievements and advancements undeniably amazing. But as Rhys had said, the cost was blood, and in Kirkclair's Botanical Garden, she learned just how true that was.

  At first, it was wonderful. They wandered in the shade of banana trees where butterflies made the air a storm of colours. A kaleidoscope of white butterflies landed in Joy's hair, and Rhys took pictures. As it turned out, he knew quite a lot about botany and what he didn't know, he was happy to discuss. It was a kind of fun that she hadn't had in a very long time, so much so that she forgot about the gun on Rhys's hip and the lies whispered into the minds of the people around them.

  Then they reached the agricultural section of the Garden, where Joy understood how the Primaterre Protectorate had made its fortune.

  When humanity had set forth to explore the galaxy, they had found it mostly empty. A handful of worlds contained life in the form of bacteria and archaea, a few more boasting insects, arachnids and even fish. Mammalian life was limited to a single discovery of rabbit-like creatures. Exo-flora was more common, but rarely useful, hardly ever edible. In order to settle other worlds, humanity had been forced to bring Earth along, planting Earth seeds and breeding Earth animals.

  And now the Primaterre controlled Earth. It had been off-limits for over a century, protected by the Sol fleet and surveilled by a ring of satellites called the Luna Belt. Drones deployed from the belt tended to Earth's flora and fauna, collecting samples for genetic modification in agricultural laboratories on Luna. The modifications were marvellous, every seed tailor-made for the terraformed environment where it was meant to grow, every plant made hardier and more fruitful. But they also made the seeds sterile – one crop was all that would ever grow. Each season, farmers needed to buy Primaterre seeds anew, in addition to paying the Protectorate a licensing fee and a portion of their crops.

  The Primaterre held the breadbasket of civilisation in an iron fist, entire worlds depending on them for their continued food supply.

  "What about seeds from the time before the Primaterre? There would've been crops on these worlds already."

  "Terraforming is difficult," Rhys said. "No matter how successful, you can't change the fact that you're making things grow where they were never meant to. Weather changes, natural disasters, diseases; you name it. The Andromeda Conglomerate were wiped out after a series of blights ravaged their colonies. The dumb bastards wouldn't bend to Primaterre demands, and so they fought and bled and starved and died."

  "You think those blights were natural? Hardy seeds aren't the only things you can grow in laboratories."

  "I..." He frowned, pulling a petal off a nearby daisy. "I'd like to think so, but..."

  Another unpleasant potential truth, another question that he had never thought to ask, although it seemed so obvious. Their primers conditioned them be unquestioning, stifling their curiosity. That was almost worse than the fear – and, Joy thought, the reason Rhys suddenly seemed so angry. He had fought the Andromeda Conglomerate on the shores of Vainamoinen, and though he wasn't about to shed any tears over the dumb bastards, he was a man inclined to scepticism and critical thought. The realisation that his rational mind had been clouded all along had to hurt.

  They left the Garden to have coffee at a cafe overlooking a waterfall. The air glittered with mist, droplets of water pearling the mezzanine railing, and Joy, who had seen once seen this very crater riddled with blackened boreholes, couldn't help but be amazed by the Primaterre again. She told Rhys what her Kirkclair had been like, and how much she loved the new one. Before too long, he was smiling again.

  "Joy Somerset!"

  Two armed men approached the table. Their uniforms were emblazoned with the Primaterre sun, the ballistic fibre in their jackets sparkling silver in the afternoon sun.

  "You're not authorized for this zone," said the man who'd addressed her so imperiously. He reached for her arm, but Rhys was faster. He grabbed the back of her chair, pulling it and her away from the man.

  "You want to relax, officers? She's new."

  "That's exactly the problem. Provisional citizens may not enter zone D-25."

  "She's a good twenty metres away from D-25's border. Give the girl a chance to be warned by her primer before you jump in, yeah?"

  "Give her a chance to assassinate her target or set off her explosive device? Chances get people killed, civilian."

  "Imperceptive law enforcement get people killed. She's no terrorist, and I'm no civilian."

  "Bastion," said the other officer, a touch of regret in his tone.

  "Scathach Banneret Company."

  "You're armed."

  "And licensed."

  "This area is off-limits to AC-6 and above."

  "And I'm an AC-5."

  "All right. Well." The officer sniffed, looking Joy up and down. "Keep an eye on your girl, yeah, or next time she'll be in trouble."

  "Will do," said Rhys, but as soon as the officers were out of earshot, he rolled his eyes. "Bloody cops. As nosy as Base-Sec and twice as bored. She'll be in trouble. I'd like to see them try."

  "I wouldn't," Joy said. The other people in the cafe were giving her funny looks, and there was definitely more space around her and Rhys now than before. People were avoiding her, as though she'd done something wrong.

  "Don't worry about it. Bastion's got your back. I've got your back. Hell, next time you get hassled by the law, just drop your boyfriend's name and see how fast they back off."

  "I couldn't do that. It wouldn't feel right."

  "They wouldn't feel right once he was through with them."

  She smiled, shaking her head. "What's an AC-5?"

  "Augment Class Five. It's just a shorthand system for how augmented a person is. You've got the basic medical and sensory augments, but no other work done, right?"

  "Couldn't afford it even if I wanted to."

  "So you're barely an A
C-1. Look; let me show you."

  He shared a map of Kirkclair to her primer. The city was divided into nearly fifty irregularly-shaped zones, each named and marked. Zone D-25, just across a bridge near the cafe, housed the city hall and the judicial district.

  "It's classed as sensitive, so provisional citizens can't enter without permission. If the officers hadn't been so damn hasty, your primer would've told you all this as you neared the border. If you'd persisted in spite of the warnings, law enforcement would've been notified. You might have noticed at the spaceport that plenty of taxis turned south instead of east. They would've been carrying non-citizen visitors to the outer zones, Kirkclair proper being off-limits to them."

  "But why can't AC-5s enter this area?"

  "Because this is a target-rich civilian neighbourhood. After a certain degree of augmentation, a person becomes a living weapon. The sort of weapon that, if possessed, would be able to do untold damage before anyone here could stop them."

  "What class is Cassimer?"

  "AC-8, last I knew. The way he's running these days, though, who knows. I wouldn't put it past him to have had more work done. The man's on a mission and wouldn't want something as trivial as human limitations to get in his way."

  "Eight. So he couldn't be here with us." Couldn't have a cup of coffee on a mezzanine outside the Botanical Garden. Couldn't have dinner in the smoked-in restaurant. Couldn't even have entered her hotel room.

  "He could, but he'd have to relinquish his kill switch code to the officer in charge of the area, which in reality means that no, he'd never come here. Highly-augmented people don't tend to be high-trust people."

  "But this is what he's fighting for. This place, these people... he's out there, facing the universe to keep them safe."