by Nancy Kress
“To Luna. Why?”
“To find someone who can help me. My father’s been kidnapped.”
His eyes widened. Amanda felt a mean satisfaction. For the first time, she’d had an effect on him. He said, “Dr. Capelo? Kidnapped? When?”
“Just a few hours ago.”
“By whom? Do you know?”
“No. I just—”
“Tell me the whole story, Amanda. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out, even if you think it’s not important.”
She related the events, feeling a relief she didn’t want to acknowledge. A grown-up was back in charge. Father Emil listened carefully. When she finished, he stood and walked to the picture on the wall. With his back to her, he said, “Who were you going to look for on Luna?”
“Marbet Grant.”
“The Sensitive? Why?”
“She’s a friend. I thought she could help find Daddy because she’s rich and she knows a lot of people all over the Solar System.”
He was quiet a long time. Then he turned away from the picture and touched his forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. Amanda wondered if he had a neurological disease, like Thekla’s mother, who had uncontrollable tics.
“Amanda,” he said, sitting beside her again, “I’m going to help you. You already know you can’t show your passport for legitimate passage to Luna without entering the government deebees. If it was government people who took your father—”
“Do you think it was?”
A strange expression crossed Father Emil’s face. He did the tic thing again, and dosed his eyes. “I think God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders for to prove, and He tests our hearts in ways we cannot understand.”
Amanda said impatiently, “What does that mean? Do you think the government took Daddy or not?”
“A tunnel-visioned rationalist. Your father’s daughter. Thus are the sins visited on the children. Yes, Amanda, I think the government kidnapped your father. I also think they will blame it on the antiwar movement.”
“Why? Why take Daddy?”
“Haven’t a clue. I’m neither a politician nor a scientist, thank the Lord. Was your father working on some new big piece of science?”
“My father is always working on a big piece of science.” Really, Father Emil didn’t know much about scientists.
“Yes. Well. Maybe that was the impetus. Maybe not. The Lord provides.”
“Provides what?” Amanda said, but Father Emil had turned away again. He went to the picture of the bloody man and knelt in front of it, his lips moving silently. On Father Emil’s face was a look of such anguish that Amanda was afraid.
She had studied religion in history class, of course, although history was her least favorite subject and she hadn’t paid much attention. Maybe there had been a religion called “Catholic.” There had been so many. And all of them, her father said, were silly and irrational, which had further decreased Amanda’s interest in them. But she nonetheless knew what Father Emil was doing. He was “praying,” asking “God” for help. Help with what?
Amanda eyed the door. If she tried to leave, would the Wrath of God stop her? The huge metal robot looked as if it could stop an earthquake. And if she did get out the door, where would she find herself? Was she still even at Walton Spaceport?
Before she could decide what to do, Father Emil stood. “Amanda, I’m going to help you get to Luna.”
She should have felt grateful, but something in his voice bothered her. She said cautiously, “Why?”
“Because the Lord does provide in mysterious ways, child. For both of us. I have friends, and they have ships, and you won’t need to show your passport to any government deebee.”
There was something wrong with this statement. Amanda thought, and found it. “But … even if you have ships, they have to be cleared and tracked by a spaceport, and that’s the government.”
“Not entirely. Or, rather, there are spaceport employees who are on our side, and who will enter data that records the takeoffs and landings of the ships accurately, but not who’s aboard or why.”
Amanda was bewildered. She said, “Why do they do that? What do you mean, ‘employees who are on our side?’ Our side of what?”
“Politics. Not everyone likes General Stefanak, you know.”
Well, of course she knew that. Everybody knew that. Whole bunches of people thought General Stefanak was doing a terrible job of fighting the war with the Fallers. The news holos were full of demonstrations and editorials and stuff, all boring. Amanda lost interest. What did it matter what these people’s politics were? “Science is above politics, and outlasts it,” Daddy always said. The important thing was to get to Luna to find Marbet so she could help get Daddy back.
“All right,” she said to Father Emil, “I’ll go to Luna on your friends’ ship. Thank you.”
“Oh, child,” Father Emil said, and again his lips moved in that pointless “prayer,” until Amanda looked away. She wished he’d get on with it. She had to get to Luna as soon as possible.
THREE
LOWELL CITY, MARS
There are, Lyle Kaufman discovered, a thousand ways for a government to stop a citizen from doing something legal that the citizen wants to do. None of the ways involved violence, nor even threats. No deebees were penetrated, no information falsified, no lies told. No one ever actually said, “No.”
Instead, files disappeared. Meetings were canceled due to “emergencies.” People, whose retinal signature to electronic documents was vital, were temporarily out of reach, traveling beyond remote space tunnels on “war-related business.” Information systems suffered breakdowns, viruses, input confusion, data bleeding, gate bubbles, and deebee atoll erosion. Kaufman had been trying for five months to obtain authorization to travel beyond the Solar System in a private ship, to the nonproscribed planet World, away from any known theater of war. He was still in Lowell City, as stuck as if he were welded to one of the huge struts holding up its piezoelectric dome.
“It was easier to move around when I was in the army,” Kaufman complained to Marbet Grant. She had stayed on Luna until last week; both of them thought it would be easier for Kaufman to obtain initial travel authorizations if they didn’t name the system’s most famous Sensitive as a “staff member.” But Kaufman missed Marbet. And the authorizations weren’t coming through anyway. So last week she had flown from Luna City to join him.
“Of course it was easier to move around when you were in the army,” Marbet said. “They want the army out beyond Space Tunnel Number One, fighting the war. They want citizens safely at home.”
“I’m not so sure, Marbet. More and more of the army seems to be right here on Mars.”
“I know,” she said, and said no more. Both of them knew Kaufman’s hotel was probably bugged.
It was a cheap hotel, the kind used by army dependents while they waited desperately for short-supply military housing. Small bare rooms, corridors swarming with children who had nowhere else to play except the narrow streets, drab foamcast walls without windows—for security reasons and because there was no view anyway. The war made everything on Mars more crowded and inconvenient. Kaufman, most of his life a soldier, barely noticed. Marbet did, and minded, and said nothing. Lyle had enough to contend with. She read his tension and his doubt and his unjustified guilt in every line of his body and every note of his voice.
Marbet Grant was a Sensitive, aggressively genemod in appearance. She was short and slim, with cheekbones that cut like knives above a wide, soft nose. Her skin was chocolate brown, her eyes emerald green, her short curly hair auburn. She looked wholly artificial, but the real genetic engineering had been of her mind.
Throughout history, there had always been people who were unusually sensitive to others, unusually adept at reading others’ states of mind. Historians claimed it was a survival necessity of the underclasses: serfs, slaves, women, subject peoples. Life itself might depend on correctly reading the mood of the masters.
/> Evolutionary biologists pointed out that this fit well with Darwinian theory. Survival of the most accurately perceptive, those who could adapt to others because they perceived accurately what they must adapt to.
Social researchers documented the tiny, unconscious clues that signaled emotion and intent: minute facial changes, shifts in body distribution, voice intonations, rise in skin temperature. Crosscultural anthropologists traced the existence of people good at perceiving these clues, almost always without knowing how they did it, in all societies.
But it was the genetic engineers who tied this perceptiveness to specific genetic patterns, subtle but identifiable combinations of otherwise disparate genes. And it was a single group of geneticists who engineered for it, starting with the most available research subjects—their own children. The geneticists had believed themselves to be giving their children a survival advantage, not much different than the augmented muscles, boosted intelligence, or enhanced beauty common to the rich. It hadn’t quite worked out like that. Instinctively understanding your neighbor might aid you, but it disconcerted the neighbor. Many, many people do not wish to be understood. They would rather that their feelings and intentions remained hidden.
Still, Marbet worked continually. For corporations wanting an edge in negotiations. For law enforcement interviewing major crime figures. For the government seeking to know more about individuals than the individuals wished to give away. And, once, for the military seeking to understand the only Faller enemy ever captured alive. That Faller had died, but not before Dr. Thomas Capelo had learned from it the information that had changed the whole feel of the war.
All that had occurred on World, where Marbet had met Lyle Kaufman. Where together they had wrecked a civilization.
Marbet no longer tried to talk to Lyle about his guilt. Her talk had made no impression. Only going back to World might do that. If the authorities ever let them.
Those authorities had kept dose watch on Kaufman for the last few years, just as they undoubtedly had on Marbet Grant and Thomas Capelo. All three knew too much about the dead Faller. So of course the room was bugged. General Stefanak’s power depended on information as much as on the army presence steadily and inexorably increasing on Mars. It was an army fanatically loyal to Stefanak. The general had spent a decade building that fanaticism: promoting certain officers, transferring others to the colonies, manipulating all-important budget allocations. Some—many—said Stefanak was building to a dictatorship, under cover of martial law made “necessary” by the war. During the last year, fewer had dared say it too openly.
Marbet picked up the handheld—the hotel room didn’t even possess a proper voice-activated house system—to flick on the news, and there he was, Sullivan Stefanak, Supreme Commander, Solar Defense Alliance Council, “—here tonight only because the danger to all Solar citizens is so great. A danger not from the enemy, but from our own people. The antiwar faction known as ‘Life Now’ represents—”
“Here we go again,” Marbet said. Kaufman stayed expressionless, and knew that to Marbet he was not. His feelings about Stefanak were still confused. Kaufman was—had been—a soldier, and Stefanak was the greatest soldier of his generation. It was his leadership that had kept the Fallers, humanity’s technological superior, from already winning the war. It was also Stefanak that was destroying the republican structure of the Solar System alliance, a structure inevitably fragile since Mars, not the more populous Earth, controlled the Council. Mars controlled the space tunnels. That was all it took. Mars—
“What did he just say?” Marbet said. Kaufman had not been listening. One look at her face and he began.
“—cowardly kidnapping of a civilian. Dr. Thomas Capelo, as you all know, is the Solar System’s preeminent scientist, the man who deciphered for us the Protector Artifact that keeps our precious homeworlds safe from the enemy sworn to destroy every last vestige of human life. Life Now has finally gone too far! Dr. Capelo, father of two daughters, respected professor at UAF’s venerable university of Harvard, was not even a combatant. Many regard him as a savior, and indeed—”
“When?” Kaufman said.
“Last night. SShhhh…”
“—grateful his family was not at home at the time—”
Kaufman thought rapidly. It could have been Life Now, yes. They were gaining strength. Their core of idealists was backed by some very powerful families and corporations with a lot to lose if Stefanak became dictator. But Life Now wasn’t the only candidate for kidnapper. Kaufman had been stuck commanding a backwater space station for the last year of his military service. He was out of touch with Solar politics. But before that, he had been a military strategist in the Solar Alliance Defense Army. It wasn’t inconceivable that some faction of the government itself, some faction bitterly opposed to Stefanak, had kidnapped Capelo. But why? Or …
He said to Marbet, “Do you know what Tom was working on now?”
She made a face. “Lyle, physics is so complicated now that I don’t think even most of Tom’s colleagues understood what he was working on. Maybe Tom himself didn’t really know. It wouldn’t be the first time.” Her expression changed. She said, “I feel ill, Lyle. That food at lunch, I told you…”
Their signal. He followed her into the bathroom. She knelt over the toilet, he knelt beside her, and she whispered into his armpit, “You think Stefanak himself might have kidnapped Tom.”
“How do you do that?” he blurted, before he caught himself. You’d think by now he’d have learned. She couldn’t explain the minute changes in body language, facial tone, eyebrow movement—all of it—that she intuitively read, and when she did try to explain it, Kaufman couldn’t follow. Her skill was wholly nonverbal.
He whispered, “Yes, I think it’s possible that Stefanak himself might have had Tom kidnapped.”
“Why?”
From the holoscreen in the hotel room Stefanak said “—my personal appeal for any information leading to the recovery of Dr. Capelo and—”
Kaufman said, “A way to discredit the antiwar movement, to use Life Now as an excuse to appropriate more power to himself.… I’m not sure. If so, it’s a clumsy technique. More what amateurs would do.”
“So you think Life Now abducted Tom?” And louder, “Oh, God, Lyle, I’m so dizzy…”
He said, “I don’t know. If Stefanak wanted it to look like a Life Now operation, he might deliberately make a clumsy move … That’s it, darling, just let it come…”
Marbet stuck her finger down her throat, retched violently, and sat up woozily. Lyle ran cold water on a cloth and handed it to her. Surveillance now had bona fide vomit to record.
When she rejoined him, he said, “Better now?”
“Yes, thank you. But let’s not eat at Katouse again.”
“Affirmative. Marbet, I’m going to call Carol.”
“I doubt you’ll get through.”
He didn’t. Kaufman left a message for Tom’s second wife, offering whatever aid he could, whatever hope he could manage. Carol would have cops with her, UAF federal agents, family, and friends. Kaufman knew she and Amanda and Sudie would be safe; by now there would be enough soldiers ringing the Capelo household to form a company by themselves.
He took Marbet’s hand. The two sat quietly, thinking about Tom Capelo, that brilliant and difficult and complicated man. His two daughters adored him. They’d lost their mother in a Faller raid years ago, and if their father was also murdered …
The terminal sounded. Without a house system, it merely rang a bell. The screen flashed INCOMING RECORDED MESSAGE, and Marbet punched her handhold to bring it up. An unfamiliar woman, dressed in not-very-expensive business attire and with an unfortunate haircut, appeared on the screen.
“Colonel Kaufman, Ms. Grant, the Civilian Travel Section of the Martian Space Tunnel Administration, State Department, Solar Alliance Defense Council, is pleased to inform you that your application for a privately funded trip to the nonproscribed planet Osiris, Isis System,
Space—”
“But we don’t want to go to Osiris!” Marbet said. “Futile to interrupt,” Kaufman could have said. It was a one-way recording.
“—Tunnel Number Eighty-nine has been approved. Flight plan, tunnel itinerary, and Tunnel Administration regulations follow. Be advised that the itinerary requires you to enter Space Tunnel number one between October sixteen and October nineteen of this year. Note also that this approval is not legally binding upon the Martian Space Tunnel Administration, may be withdrawn at any time without notice, and does not include any responsibility for the course or outcome of your expedition.
“The Administration wishes you a good trip.”
Kaufman and Marbet looked at each other. Osiris was nowhere near World. It would take time to correct the bureaucratic “mistake”—weeks, months. Never.
Kaufman’s clear brown eyes remained steady. A steady man, Marbet thought for the hundredth time. Calm. Not easily diverted. No one but she knew the calm, steady guilt, not easily diverted, that lay underneath. He gazed at her, and she read him clearly: He was done with official requests.
She said aloud, for the recording devices, “That’s the wrong planet!”
“Nothing to do but start over,” Kaufman said. “But, Marbet, it will take a while. We don’t need to waste funds on a hotel, do we? Do you think we can still move in with your friend Amy?”
“Yes, she’ll be glad to have us,” Marbet said. “She told me just yesterday to come anytime. I’ll start packing.”
Let the State Department, or whoever, spend time looking for “Amy.” Or looking for Lyle and Marbet, for that matter. They had wanted to do this legitimately, but had made contingency plans in case they couldn’t. There was, as the government endlessly reminded everyone, a war on.
Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money.