“I grieved for Diego and Pedro, the first real loss that I could not overcome by hard work or trickery. I grieved also for the loss of trust from my Mom and Dad. In some ways, I think they might have preferred to die rather than learn how badly I had deceived them. They struggled more than I did with the new language and were grateful for my help, but it inverted our relations in a way that made them even more uncomfortable. Each term I laid my improving grades before them in hope that they would forgive me, but they knew I was not really working for their approval anymore and grew increasingly worried about my goals in life.
“Eventually, all the old gang members had been arrested and re-educated, along with numerous executives in the three corporations who backed them, several politicians in the regional governments and even a few in the Terrestrial Council. The case was considered to have been settled, so we left witness protection.
“Mom and Dad both got menial jobs and our lives stabilized, but they were not content until some of our family chose to move nearby. Eventually, almost all the family who had survived the regional war gathered in our new city, Winterpeg.
“Mom tried to become involved again in school board politics, but instead got an education in how badly we had been treated before. Almost the entire education system of our old region had been corrupted to generate poorly trained, cheap labour, in direct violation of the Law on Freedoms, Rights, and Duties that guaranteed the right to equal educational opportunities for all. Each region tailored its education policies to suit the local culture, but students had the right to graduate ready to take a job anywhere on the Earth. The region had been sliding farther and farther into violation of that most fundamental right for almost a century. Only the wealthy received their educational rights, but as privileges that had to be paid for with bribes.
“Mom had not even graduated from high school and was self-taught in the subjects she had mastered. She was so embarrassed by the deficiencies in her education that she enrolled as a student herself as soon as her language skills improved sufficiently. It was profoundly strange to compete with my own mother in the classes we shared, mostly required courses in subjects like regional history and cultural issues. I was glad that we only shared a few courses because she whopped me solidly on cultural issues.
“We graduated from high school together, but that was a moment of both shared pride and surreal awkwardness. Have you ever tried to invite a girl to the prom when she knows that your Mom is bringing your Dad to the same prom? What kind of fun could we hope to get into at a dance like that? In the event, it was not as bad as I had feared. The humanities students celebrated Mom as their most exotic member. They dragged her and Dad over to the other side of the hall, leaving me with my date to play the game of ‘Is that really you?’ with the strange people in wild clothes and exotic hairstyles who were our friends in disguise.
“I did date girls, lots of them, in high school and university. My parents still hoped I would find love, marry, have kids and settle down. There was little chance of that. I no longer wanted to be like Ignatio, but my ambition to be a spacer marked me firstly as weird, and secondly as a likely prospect for girls who wanted to marry rich. They knew the odds against my achieving that goal and reasoned that I would put my talents to work for some large company where I would make a fortune. Most of them turned away when they learned my Dad was a custodian and my Mom in her spare time was an educational activist working part time for minimum wages.
“One of the big surprises in our new school system was the existence of generous scholarships and bursaries for students with high grades. Noram Prairie kept tuition fees at university low, reasoning that a highly educated workforce was an investment in future prosperity. Mom and Dad were proud of my admission to university, but also uneasy when they realized it was no longer an insurmountable barrier to my ambitions to become a spacer.
“My parents were more hopeful when they learned that my drive and enthusiasm had made me friends amongst the academic girls at university. I liked them. They were fun to play with, to dance with, to hike with through the wilderness. However, it was hard to stay friends with them when I put finishing my homework over honouring a date. Whenever I could, I tried to hook them up with other guys who seemed to be a better match for their real interests. The few who stuck with me were ultimately discouraged by my firm intention to disappear into space for five to ten years, possibly forever if I chose to emigrate. None of them wanted to join me in space. Even the two who were invited to apply by the Spacers Guild had the good sense to realize that their ambitions were better served on the Earth.
“For most people, starting university is one of life’s major events. For me it was just a bigger school with more options and better challenges. I loved the stimulation, but I had been working twelve to sixteen-hour days since we relocated. University just seemed like more of the same.
“My big event was the Recruitment Fair at the end of my first year when for the first time I could apply to become a spacer. I filled out all the forms, worked through the physical test, demonstrated my command of two major languages, and was given an appointment the next day for the academic qualifying exams. For two days, the future opened wide and everything fitted into place. I was ecstatic, hyper on adrenaline, ready for anything.
“Except rejection. They turned me down flat. Not politely, either. The recruiting agent who gave me the results told me that I sounded like a country bumpkin in both languages. I was missing credentials in six required courses. I was physically flabby and would not survive a day in space in my condition. If they needed bodies to recycle into food, they might give me a call.
“The only thing that saved me was that I still remembered how to be a smart aleck. As I sat there, desperately trying to understand this catastrophe, I could only gasp out the stupidest thing I have ever said in my life.
“Is there a breech in the hull, Sir? Has the reactor scragged? Is this the list of courses I need to make up? I will register for them. I think I know how to get back in shape. I will find a dojo and join it. As for languages, oh, I will have to ask my friends. Are there any that you would recommend?
“And then I froze, unable to process that my entire life had crashed and was burning in front of me.
“Bizarrely, the recruiter smiled and said, ‘Not a bad plan for the spur of the moment. Did somebody warn you? It will take you two years to complete that many courses, hard but possible if you are willing to put in the effort. In any case, you will need to demonstrate proficiency in Mandarin and Russian in addition to the languages you already speak. Hindi would also be useful but can be postponed if you really register for that many courses. If you are making adequate progress and do not die from overwork, perhaps I will see you next year?’
“And with that, he ushered me out the door.
“It was only much later that I realized I had just taken a psychological stress test. I was in the program.”
Leilani interrupted, “Brian, stop it. These people are trying to understand who you are so they can help you, and this has been one long boast about how hard you worked and how bright you were. They had thousands of hardworking, intelligent applicants. You were accepted for one reason, and one reason only. They would not have even let you in the door if it were not for your teacher.”
I was desperate to stop her. “No, I do not want to talk about that!”
She was adamant. “If you do not, then I will.”
She started, “Unlike Brian’s other supervisors when he first joined CI, I read his briefing documents and personal history. All of them. I wish I still had them here, because it would make your job much easier.
“The Spacers Guild knew that he was going to apply long before he walked through the door. It was no secret on campus, and they kept track of all likely prospects. They had already done a preliminary background check, so they knew he had come through the Witness Protection Program. That would normally have halted the process by itself, but his file had been flagged as intere
sting in the weirder than usual sense.
“The Guild had a need-to-know that broke open the seals that would have protected any normal person in the WPP, and the first thing that showed up was that he had been deeply involved in serious criminal activity as an unofficial member of a gang.
“The detectives were not fooled by the deposition you made that implicated the thunderbirds and vipers. They immediately broke into the accounts of the chickens and put monitors on every account they could find to see who would try to access the money. Most of it was ultimately corporate money, so the expectation was that corporate accountants and executives would try to reclaim their assets, a strategy that helped track the web of corruption all the way to the top. But there were some accounts containing piddling amounts of money that were never claimed. Do you want to tell them why?”
I was turning pink with shame again. Actually, for the first time in far too long. “The gang paid me for my services since I was not yet a member. I put that money into my own accounts. To the police, it was all just the proceeds of organized crime, but to me it was honest income. I may have been a kid, but I knew how to hide money. I created a string of phony ID’s and temporary accounts leading to the set of real accounts that would hold the money. I deposited the money they gave me into one of the gang’s petty cash accounts that I controlled, then shuffled it from account to account until it was safely hidden in my private account. Then I deleted all the temporary accounts that I had used, leaving just those few that held real money. They were not dead accounts, either. I had just learned how to invest in stocks and bonds and had set up each account as an investment in a major company that I trusted far more than any of the ones popular with the gang.
“And then, of course, everything fell to pieces and the money was stranded. I knew I would have to be extraordinarily careful to access that money after we entered the WPP. If I withdrew any of it, or even passed it to anyone in my own extended family, I could be brought up on charges as an unreformed criminal. I was still young enough, and stupid enough, to believe that I had hidden the money where it could not be found but refused to risk disaster until I learned enough to manage it properly.
“In high school, I managed to squeeze in a short course in forensic computing, which mostly focused on recognizing discrepancies in account statements, tracking lost accounts and finding missing people. It was more sophisticated than what I learned as a Kid, but of course penny ante stuff compared to what I can do today.
“At the time, I still felt there were some loose ends that I ought to clean up. My teacher, the one who had driven us to the police station and then fled town, had lost her job and nearly lost her life because of me, so I hid myself behind a series of phony IDs again and began to search for her, to see if she had survived.
“It took three months of careful sleuthing, but I tracked her to a distant city where she was living in poverty with a very unsavoury relative. She never dared return to our town while the regional war flared up and was suppressed by the TDF, nor afterwards for fear that the gangs were still looking. She was too afraid to contact anyone to say where she had gone, so she had been fired by our school board and left completely without an income. She had withdrawn some of her savings using banks in towns along her escape route but stopped doing that long before she reached her destination and had been forced to abandon the rest. She could never teach again without some form of reference from her former employer and was too afraid to make that contact.
“When I found her, she was trying to start a pottery shop, but needed start-up money. How did I know that? I broke into the nearest bank, the only one she could walk to, where she had applied for the loan. This triggered an alarm I did not know about, and almost sent a squad of police to arrest me as a relapsed gang member. Fortunately, before they did, I had opened an account at the bank, a legitimate account, using the money from one of my gang accounts. I again thought I had been very clever, using a string of fake IDs and temporary accounts to extract the money, then deleting everything within a few minutes. Using yet another fake ID, I told the bank manager that I was a personal friend of my former teacher and would allow her to use the money in the new account as collateral if they were willing to extend her the loan she needed. For myself, I requested to remain anonymous.
“Naturally, but unknown to me, the bank manager told the police what had just happened, and it was so strange they agreed to stay charges against me while they waited to see what else I would do.
“At the time I had to be patient, but later, much later, I learned that when the bank manager called my teacher to tell her that an old friend had provided collateral and that they were now willing to give her the loan, she was first delighted, then terrified that the gangs had located her and were closing in for the kill. She asked for time to think about it and moved to a different relative to see what would happen. After a few weeks, nothing had happened, but she was still sure the money was poisoned and was unwilling to touch it. Apparently, she was being abused by both relatives because she finally relented, took the loan and started her shop.
“I suspect she was the most diligent, hard-working merchant who ever ran a pottery shop, because it throve and grew, allowing her to pay back the loan within two years. So far as I know she never asked about the mysterious friend who had supplied the collateral money. The bank must have frozen my account a long time ago because I never tried to access it again either. I suppose, in time, it will revert to the state.
“Was that what you wanted to tell them?”
Leilani nodded. “Pretty much. There was so much to-do about the gang war that escalated into a regional war that all those accounts have been monitored ever since. The Spacers Guild knew all about your gangland activities, knew about the money sitting in the accounts, and knew that the only use to which any of it had ever been put was to rescue your old benefactor from poverty, without even touching the principle.
“They were willing to forgive your childhood indiscretions, but only because that one act had demonstrated proper concern for the consequences of your actions on innocent people. You were willing to make restitution and had shown both a delicate hand and quiet patience in the operation. But for that, you would have been told long before you walked through the door that your criminal past made you completely unacceptable. If you had ever used that money for personal gain, your whole career would have ended in a reformatory cell.
“They also recognized that you were not nearly as clever as you thought you were. Yes, I read that in the reports. The conclusion was that a sharp lesson in humility might make you into a proper spacer, so that is what you got.
“If it is any consolation, they gave me three heavy courses and made me learn both Mandarin and Quechua, as though anybody in space uses any of the Quechua languages, outside a few small colonies in the Belt that might not even exist anymore.”
That made me laugh, briefly. “My Love, I looked you up too. They made you learn one of the Quechua languages because you already knew all the major languages in space. And when they made you take Mandarin, it was classical Mandarin literature. While I was learning how to ask my way to the washroom, you were reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. While I was memorizing my first thousand characters, you were discussing the works of Kong Zi, Lao Zi, Mo Zi, and Sun Zi. You were already a gymnast, head of your student council, and enrolled in a heavy forensics program. I know that Legal Intelligence was already trying to recruit you. The three courses you had to take were core courses for the spacer program that almost everyone had to take, and just happened to be outside your own chosen program. You could have skipped them if you had decided to join LI on the ground, but you chose to become a spacer first. I am only surprised that it took three years for them to entice you back to your first love.”
It was her turn to demur, but she actually said, “I regret nothing. I still think of myself as a spacer first and everything else second. But Brian, you have hidden virtues that few others are aware exist. This w
as not his only act of anonymous charity. There was Diego’s mother...”
I cried over the comm, “NO, NO! Remember the Fatwa. If Martian Intelligence learns of those people they will all be in peril!”
She stopped, but the other three all demanded to know what had become of Diego’s mother. I hesitated, but they already knew she had survived, so the peril existed and could not be erased. Reluctantly, I began.
“Diego's mother had been severely traumatized on the night her family was murdered, and the trauma continued as the city burned around the hospital that was treating her physical injuries. They evacuated her to a different city, then to a different region as the fighting spread. She spent over two years in psychiatric care, but finally emerged and re-integrated into her new society.
“She joined a local church in her new neighbourhood, met a man there and married again. A year later, she applied for permission for a fourth child. Having lost her first three in such a horrific way, and with the endorsement of her psychologist, the application was granted immediate approval. In her early fifties, she gave birth to a baby girl.
“Diego’s mother had never really got on with my Mom. She had enthusiastically supported the traditional regional culture, focussing upon family values and homemaking skills. She had organized seminars and taught classes for young married couples. Her leadership had earned her the privilege of a third child, Diego’s little sister.
“Mom had been equally active, but far more of a rabble rouser. Most of her rousing had been for my benefit, but she had pushed against the boundaries of a very traditional society on many other issues. Conversations between the two women had always been strained.
Lord Banshee- Fugitive Page 23