Morris chortled and sang,
“Hide and seek,
chase and find,
we will play tag
with Shaytan.
“Oh, and I want to see you this evening when I am a bit more rational. If I am not asleep by then.”
We stayed with them for an hour more, telling Morris we would be sure to see him when he woke up, telling Singh we were hidden and safe, telling each other over the comm that we loved each other and would face each problem as it arose. I could not promise her more in honesty and I refused to lie. She had stared death in the face and knew at last it was real. After that, Morris and Singh finally fell asleep. We slipped out and returned to our room before the other ministers woke up.
2357-03-07 00:30
Aristocracy
I had thought we might leave immediately for the Moon, but it was another two hours before the acceleration alarms sounded. We used the time to numb our over-stressed brains with exercise, eat a battle-ration lunch, and keep quietly away from Mindy, who was sleeping in a corner beside banks of medical equipment. Leilani and I kept our armour close by, but luxuriated in each other’s arms, telling each other over and over how much we loved each other.
It felt so perfect, so right, a commitment to hope and love for all the years to come… and so utterly wrong. So contrary to the Mission I had to complete. I could not love her and do this to her. I was betraying Leilani with lying promises I could never fulfill. As the day wore on I felt steadily angrier with myself, though I could not tear myself away.
I think my nerves started to worry everyone else as well. Trying to find ways to kill the time, Toyami asked privately if there was more to my story about the rattlesnakes, hawks and chickens? I had mentioned Diego and Pedro, but they never entered the part of the story I had told her. I used the comm to call everyone to gather around for another story time. I wondered how that story would be remembered, so I asked Toyami to repeat it for everyone. She gave a brief but remarkably clear summary of my job minding the next-door neighbour’s chickens and my panic when two rattlesnakes appeared and some hawks drifted overhead. I had run around, trying to chase the chickens into the coop, but had only succeeded in making them too frightened and confused to recognize my intent.
I picked up the story again. “Diego heard me crying and shouting and called big brother Pedro to come and help. They were astonished to see rattlesnakes on both sides of the yard, hawks overhead, and the five-year-old me running around the yard trying to chase the chickens into their coop where they would be safe. Pedro immediately told me to stop being stupid and come over to where they were standing. I stopped, tears running down my face, and Diego, always trusting of his big brother’s wisdom, called me as well. Ashamed of my tears, I walked over and watched incredulously as the chickens ran into the coop the next time a hawk’s shadow swept over the yard.
“Pedro punched my arms a few times to make me stop crying, then explained with an eight-year old’s gravitas (none – more arm punches and a few laughing pokes in the ribs) that chickens were already afraid of snakes and would avoid them of their own accord. Moreover, the rattlesnakes were scared of me, not the chickens, which were too big for them to eat and too small to squish them. The snakes would get bored and go looking for mice if I just left them alone for a while. Chickens were naturally terrified of hawks and would not even come out of the coop while they were nearby.
“It turns out that there are times you have to run around and fix things, like when the chickens are hungry and need more food or when the water runs low, but there are other times when everyone already knows what to do and I only need to let them do it. The terror of that day seared itself into my memory and burns every time events run dangerously out of control, but in some ways the second part of the story is more important.”
I was about to apologize for the brevity of the story, when we realized that Mindy had woken up and was watching us. Doctor Tran got up and checked on the levels in the IV that kept her hydrated and fed while she was unconscious. He was silent while he did it, then came back to our group.
Finally, she muttered, “What part of hell am I in now? Pain, boredom and drugs seem to be all I have any more. Why am I not dead? Or am I?”
I felt a huge pang of sympathy for her, and a deep remorse that my crimes from so many years before had placed her in this position. Despite the risk, I wafted over to her side, and asked, “Has anybody told you what is happening outside? We are all trapped here in this prison of a ship. There are assassins in the halls, a huge fleet of Martian warships on every side, and it seems a new government that may want to kill everyone on board. They told us when they brought you in that you had tried to attack the ship. That took a lot of courage but was perhaps not the wisest course of action.”
She perked up a bit. “The Imperium is here? Oh, but then they will know I failed. My babies will be aborted. They will want to kill me, too. Why did I bother?”
“Actually, I am not sure they know anything about you. It has all happened so fast, and with so much confusion, that I expect they will be looking for you in the airtight rooms on the Gandhi.”
“So, the iron rain worked? How about the madness and the nerve gas? Have the partisans risen to overthrow the TDF in Soam?”
And then she stopped, perhaps realizing that she had said too much. She was probably being fed a cocktail that made her more cooperative and less secretive. I assumed the madness referred to the emoji attacks, which had been bad but were mostly under control right now. The nerve gas might refer to a variant on the glue bugs, which migrated along the air ducts and were in an ideal place to release air-borne toxins. The uprising in Soam was entirely new. I passed warning of the nerve gas and uprising to Wang, wishing I could tell Morris as well. I got back a curt “thank you”, which was more than I expected under the circumstances.
Smiling sadly did not require acting. “Is there a name we can call you? It might be wise to make one up, given the turbulence right now, especially if there is a risk you might be mistaken for a Ghost Follower. Please call me Oldman, which is becoming traditional within this group.”
“Mindy is good enough, and they probably told you that when they dumped my corpse in this recycling bin.”
“You do seem to be rather badly torn up. Would it be impolite to ask how it happened? It does give you something in common with Beloved over there, who caught a stray bullet in the stomach.”
Over the comm I sent, “Sorry, Katerina. It is your favourite word and does suit you rather well.”
She sent back, “Bah, I can think of better names to describe you than Oldman.”
Mindy, however, sneered. “I will call her Ghostbitch. You do not need any better names than that.”
Evgenia and Leilani tried to introduce themselves as Liberty and Flower, but with similarly disappointing results. We retreated to our side of the room and tried to discuss how to handle this development. Mindy asleep was just a piece of the room we could not use, but Mindy awake was someone we had to watch, and Mindy so openly hostile was someone we had to fear. She could now identify us by sight. I wondered who had delivered her to our room out of all the rooms on the ship.
She called across the room, “You are talking about me over the comm. I know you are. I can see the messages, even if I cannot read them. Stop talking about me!”
I went back over. “Mindy, it is really boring in here. We were telling each other stories of our lives to help pass the time. Would you like to join us? Just something from so long ago that it does not matter anymore. Who knows? We may have more in common than you think.”
I could see she was torn. The complete absence of human contact, except maybe from a hostile interrogator, would leave anyone desperate for company. But she was stubborn. “I have nothing to say. The grenade in my stomach exploded. Why am I even alive?”
“Then let us include you in our circle and you can at least listen.”
I summoned everyone over, and reluctantly they cam
e and formed a new circle including Mindy. A dangerous tactic, I knew, but she would be even more dangerous if she believed we were all enemies.
I looked around. “To answer your question first, you are alive because we all want you to live. From the looks of things, you have been glued back together and probably have templates inside that will provide a structure to guide your new organs as they grow. You can ask the doctors. For the time required to regenerate your stomach and intestines you will be fed intravenously. You do not actually need any of those organs, nor even your heart and lungs, if you are in a good medical facility. The TDF can keep its people alive after much worse injuries than that if they can get them to an infirmary in time.
“But back to our stories. Who goes next? Flower? Do we want some pictures on the walls? This place feels even more depressing today than usual.”
Flower replied, “Sure. How about a prom party from, oh, say 2340? Think they have that in the library of backgrounds?”
Valentino replied, “Yes, as a matter of fact they do. Any special part of the world? How about southern Europe?”
Leilani, now the Flower, nodded. Valentino went over to the controls for the walls and rummaged through the interfaces for a few moments.
I asked Katerina, “Did he really memorize all the images in that library?”
She responded, “No. Remember his grandfather was an Italian costume designer, so he was particularly interested in that section when we were looking for decorations for the Soiree and was disappointed that he did not get to use them.”
An image of a party blossomed out across the walls. We appeared to be on a patio beside the sea, separated from the beach by a trellis festooned with grapevines. Beautiful young people dressed in the elegant best of teenage fashion from that era swayed back and forth along the trellis, twirling in dances that made me nostalgic for my own youth. Beyond the trellis, naked people were splashing in the water, throwing balls and chasing each other, sometimes catching. My spacer-trained eyes had always admired the minimal simplicity of Italian fashion, especially when worn by people who could display it to its best advantage. A glance at Mindy reminded me that Martian cities did not waste precious energy on heat; the fashion sense of a Martian girl like Angela would never tolerate the exposure of so much skin.
“Mindy, have you ever been to the Earth? Anywhere that is warm most of the year?”
She closed her eyes, and shook her head, probably the only motion she could still perform voluntarily.
“Italy, could you try for something from a cooler climate, maybe a winter dance from Westrus?”
“Really? OK, but I liked that one. With a towel to lie on and a Chianti, I would have been home again. How is this?”
The scene changed to a ballroom with huge glass windows looking out over a small northern lake fringed with snow-covered trees. It was evening, with lingering traces of what must have been a beautiful sunset in the darkening sky. Within the ballroom, light came from three golden chandeliers with hundreds of candles and long crystal pendants. A waltz was playing softly in the background, while beautiful young women in long flowing gowns of turquoise, silver and green swirled around in the arms of dashing young men wearing scarlet jackets and stiff white pants.
Mindy cracked her eyes open, then gazed about in wonder. “It is so strange. Is the Earth really like that?”
Flower answered, “Some parts of it, at least on the days when people are having a party. This was clearly a classically themed costume party in an expensive dance hall, so the clothes are deliberately archaic, maybe from five hundred years ago, and they would have been recycled back into sensible working clothes the next day. And people are not really that beautiful except on their prom night.
“Thank you, Italy, the beach filled me with nostalgia as well but this scene more closely captures the spirit of my tale, which was an aristocratic birthday party in Sicily. Imagine if you can that it is warm and sunny, in the mountains of Sicily, but with that same kind of formal stateliness. The men would have been wearing tight black pants with wide belts, flashy jackets and hats with wide, swishy brims and long peacock plumes. The women would have had similar dresses to these, but lighter and with more sequins.
“That year I was a junior agent in Legal Intelligence specializing in commercial law, barely back from space and just out of sleuthing school. It was one of my earliest assignments, trying to sort out the mess of broken contracts in the Italian theatre world in the months after the bombing that started the Martian Incursion.”
Mindy interrupted with some indignation, “That never happened! It was just propaganda to try to excuse the Governor’s oppressions and the Genocide on Mars after we had won our independence.”
Flower looked over, “Oh, Mindy, surely you cannot still believe that? They told us you had been on the earth stations for a couple of years. You can see the scars of the dead cities from the viewing ports with your own eyes or go to the Central Square on the Kennedy and watch the big monitor displaying the view of the Earth below.”
Mindy scoffed, “Yes, I saw them. Those are just left over from the Final War. Lies and tricks are all you ever get from the Earth.”
“But Mindy, none of those scars are in the regions that fought the Final War, and the cities that were destroyed in that war have become so overgrown with vegetation over the last three hundred years that they are hard to recognize without hi-res imagery. Dead cities do not stay barren for very long, even if they are badly irradiated. The new scars will be overgrown as well in anther twenty to fifty years.”
Mindy said nothing but looked truculent. I decided to risk an interruption.
“Mindy, you have surely seen the classical pictures of the Earth from before the Final War? Yes? I think I can find an interesting little video showing the Earth over the last four centuries, compiled from weather satellites, selecting only those parts of the surface free of cloud in their summer seasons. The first part is spotty because we lost so much from before the Final War, and there is a fifty-year gap when we could not launch weather satellites, but it is still informative. Ah, here it is.”
The image popped up in a big window, in front of the dancers and snow swirls. It showed the Earth in the late twentieth century, just before the environmental crisis became disastrous and they started passing serious environmental laws. I set the world slowly spinning.
“See, here is the old core of the New York megalopolis along the Noram seacoast, and London in Europe Eng, while over here is ancient Moscow, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing. Huge, wealthy and dazzling cities. Now we step forward a few years and watch how they grow.”
The cities swelled across the landscape, gobbling up more and more of the fertile land. Then the image went dark for a bit, until it restarted with different cameras from the first weather satellites after the Final War. All the great cities of the USA, Russia, China, and northern India were gone, along with a random set of other famous locations, destroyed for reasons no human had ever understood. Geneva was one of the few European cities to have been hit, possibly because it hosted so many international organizations, but why Manila? Why Bogota?
In their place were patches of grey and brown rock with rectangular textures that showed the ancient grid of roads and houses. During the two-year long Fimbulwinter, when the smoke made the days as dark as the nights in the northern hemisphere and ice formed on equatorial lakes, much of the Earth’s vegetation died. During the decades of the Great Burning that followed, continental-scale fires raged across the forests and grasslands. Even after that, however, seeds had remained in the soil, so by the time the new satellites were launched, greenery was spreading rapidly across the devastated landscape. As we watched, forests and grassland covered the radzones left from the war, even the parts that would remain uninhabitable by humans for thousands of years. Slowly, civilization regrew in Europe, Africa, southeast Asia, Soam, and Australia. In south Asia, the Indus and Ganges river basins were wastelands filling with jungle, but from the Deccan so
uth most cities had survived. Centam and the northern half of Noram struggled back, but more sparsely. I stopped it again, just before the Incursion. The deserts were bigger because of the overheated climate, but most of the rest of the world looked green and lush.
I pointed to the former capital of Noram Prairie.
“My whole family lived there. It was a beautiful city, with hot summers and cool winters, laced with canals joining the big reservoirs. Its towers were surrounded by parkland, linked with spacious, boulevards arching high above the forests that lined the canals. It was surrounded by the dry grasslands of the southern prairies. It was also the location of the largest and northernmost spaceport in Noram. It was called Winterpeg, which I thought was a silly name until I learned it had been much colder before the Final War.”
I stepped the scene forward again. There was another short blank for a year after the Incursion before they replaced the weather satellites again, then a picture appeared of a world recently devastated, with twenty-five new scars where vibrant cities had existed the previous year.
“On Mars, the First War for Liberation – that is what you call it these days, isn’t it? – had been in progress for three or four years, slowly growing in violence and scope. Outside the offices of Extraterrestrial Affairs and a few of the largest corporations, no one on the Earth knew much about it and most of them attributed it to labour unrest.
“Then, two hundred million people on the Earth died without warning as a Martian fleet disguised as freighters attempted to prevent reinforcements from being sent to Governor Ngomo. It failed, of course, although it took four years to rebuild our freighter fleet as warships and another year to send them to Mars.
“My whole family died in Winterpeg. My mom and dad, my grandparents, all my aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, everyone I had left. They had gathered into that beautiful, wonderful city, and then they were gone. It is hard to find anyone on the Earth who did not lose someone that day. That is why the Terrestrial fleet was so cruel, so vindictive, when they arrived at Mars.”
Lord Banshee- Fugitive Page 16