by Nancy Kress
“She asks,” said Marbet’s voice behind him, “how long it’s going to be until you take her in the flying metal boat to other worlds. She says you promised, through Enli.”
“Oh, soon,” Magdalena said.
Kaufman turned to look at Marbet, standing in the doorway. Marbet said, “Lyle, Ann wants you,” and walked out. Kaufman followed. She led him not to Ann’s hut but to another one, empty except for a small table, two plain floor pillows, and a rolled-up sleeping mat.
“This is where you and I will stay. Lyle, you shouldn’t trust anything Magdalena tells you.”
“How long were you standing there? Did you hear that data cube?”
“Yes.” Marbet motioned for him to sit on one of the pillows; she took the other. “That part is real, I think. She’s looking for her son, and she genuinely believes he’s alive and with Tom.”
“He’s not alive.”
“I know.”
“Have you ever met her before?”
“No.”
“What else could you see about her now?”
Marbet was silent for a long moment. Finally she said, “I already knew something about her. You can’t do Sensitive work in negotiations without sooner or later coming across one of Magdalena’s corporations. As part of my preparation for dealing with her people, I’ve been shown holos of her, and I was briefed on what’s known of her history. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“She was born in Atlanta, on Earth. Her mother was most likely a whore. What’s definitely known is that the mother, or somebody, left the baby in a box in front of a government clinic in the Plumbob, Adanta’s worst section. Not even cops will go in there.”
“Go on,” Kaufman said.
“The baby was adopted by a nurse at the clinic, Catalune Damroscher, who was or became a peen addict. She named the child ‘May.’ Maybe Catalune Damroscher started out wanting to be a good mother, but she abused little May horribly. There are records in ten different free clinics of the child being beaten, burned, kicked. May didn’t talk until she was four years old.
“When she was six, she disappeared off any records, anywhere. The next year Catalune overdosed on peen and died. Nobody knows where May went or how she lived between six and sixteen.”
“I see,” said Kaufman, who didn’t. How could a six-year-old survive in the Plumbob?
“May turned up in two-one-two-five on the pleasure beaches of North Carolina. Those places are very heavily guarded, but somehow she got in, and became the mistress of a rich man named Amerigo Dalton for three or four years. She’s mentioned in old deebees of gossip columns, things-like that. She went from Dalton to Evan Kilhane, the porn producer, or maybe there were men in between. Kilhane gave her the name ‘Magdalena’ and launched her porn career. You probably know at least the outline of the rest.”
“Yes,” Kaufman said. Magdalena’s sorry childhood had stirred him, “But I didn’t know she had a son.”
“By Bellington Wace Arnold. Illegitimate. Lyle, if you go on looking like that I’m going to slap you.”
“Looking like what?” A mistake, he shouldn’t have asked.
“Like a man about to weep over an injured kitten. Listen to me. Magdalena is dangerous. She didn’t have her son genetically engineered because she’s so arrogant she believed that any child of hers would be wonderful without any artificial help. At the same time, she’s furious inside at the perversion of genes that brought her the beauty which ruined her life.”
He said skeptically, “Was all that in the official records?”
“Of course not,” Marbet snapped. “I saw it in every line of her when she stood listening to that data cube. Magdalena is furious at what Laslo is. She also has focused on him every thwarted desire of her entire life, every single denied impulse. I’ll bet she’s never had one genuine orgasm.”
That was too much. Kaufman stood and stretched, feigning nonchalance.
“Don’t pretend with me, Lyle. You’re about as indifferent to her as a bear to honey. She destroyed any potential that son of hers might have had through controlling him, excusing him, smothering him. He hated her and worshipped her and they probably fought constantly.”
Kaufman said, “Don’t you think that’s a lot to get out of one short exposure? Even for you?”
Marbet stared at him. The longer she gazed, the more uncomfortable Kaufman became. She could see so damn much!
Finally she turned away, saying over her shoulder, “We need to have our things brought here from the flyer. Don’t let May Damroscher fool you, Lyle. She’s a person consumed, and you are no match for her at all.”
TEN
LOWELL CITY, MARS
The Ares Abbey of the Benedictine Brothers was the strangest place to live that Amanda could imagine. Everyone was kind, but no one made any sense.
The first few days she had stayed in bed, terrified and exhausted. Brother Meissel had brought her food and sat on the edge of her bed, which embarrassed Amanda because all she had on was somebody’s old tunic that she was using as a nightshirt, and anyway she hadn’t bathed and might smell bad. Brother Meissel talked about faith and prayer and the testing of the spirit until Amanda pretended to be asleep, and then the “priest” would go away. Often she fell asleep, but she always woke to nightmares about her father or about Father Emil.
Once she interrupted Brother Meissel to say abruptly, “Why do people have to die?”
“You mean Father Emil,” Brother Meissel said.
“Yes. He … he…”
“He died to save your life, is what you think.”
“Didn’t he?” Amanda said, confused.
“No,” Brother Meissel said. “He died for the greater glory of God.”
This made no sense to Amanda, who had clearly seen Father Emil shot down as he tried to protect Amanda. Daddy said people died because their telomeres gave out, plus Nature no longer needed them after they passed breeding age. That wasn’t exactly comforting, but at least it made sense.
“Father Emil’s soul is with God,” Brother Meissel said. Amanda couldn’t think of anything polite to say to this, so she said nothing. She had no answer. Father Emil had been a good person. It wasn’t right that he should die like that, shot down in the street to lie in his own blood.
After a few days, her natural resilience asserted itself, and she got out of bed, looking for a holovee. She didn’t find one. In fact, to her incredulity, there was no terminal anywhere in the abbey. No terminal! She had never before been in a place without any terminal. “The things of this world are not our concern,” Brother Meissel told her, twitching his long brown dress. “A terminal would only distract us from our sacred work. However, there is a flat-screen TV to receive news in an emergency. I will have that set up for you in the refectory.”
Amanda said skeptically, “If you don’t have a terminal, how would you even learn there was an emergency to turn on your flat-screen for?”
“In the refectory, Amanda. And only there.”
She explored the abbey, with its many “chambers.” Every room was called a chamber, although most of them also had other names, words Amanda had never heard before: refectory, chapel, stillroom, choir stalls, cellarer’s office. Each chamber had a purpose, and everyone in them was engaged in that purpose whenever they were there, which they were at the same time every single day. There was no “living room,” no lounging around, no spontaneity. And yet no one seemed unhappy.
Not that there were very many people to be either unhappy or happy. Seventeen “brothers” in the entire place, and fourteen never left, ever, under any circumstances. Amanda was appalled to hear that. Only Brother Meissel and Brother Wu were allowed to leave the abbey to buy things or go to the bank or do normal living. The abbey was a “cloistered order,” she was told. More strange words. The boy who had first let her in was a “postulant.”
What everybody did, mostly, was sing and feed people. Three times each day Brother Meissel and Brother Wu carried the hug
e vats of food the others cooked to “outside the grille.” The grille was a real thing, a thick elaborate grid of steel made to look like intertwined trees and leaves. The fourteen “cloistered brothers” stayed in that part of the building between the grille and a wall that backed right up to the descending piezoelectric arc of the city’s main dome.
There was a small space between the abbey wall and the dome wall, no more than a foot wide. In this space nondegradable rubbish was stored: a broken bedspring, some plastic crates not needed at the moment, a wheel that Amanda could not imagine ending up there. Exploring, she poked around in the various piles of rubbish, then stood to gaze out over the wall. Beyond the thick, multilayered plastic spread the red rocky ground of Mars.
People came to the crowded room beyond the grille to eat for free. Brother Meissel and Brother Wu served them, squeezing between the packed, tiny tables. Space was expensive in Lowell City. After the meal, some of the people stayed to hear the brothers sing.
That, Amanda thought, was why they really came.
The brothers sat hidden behind the grille, in their individual “choir stalls,” and sang music such as Amanda had never heard before. Beautiful, haunting music, with no recorded instruments or synth music to accompany them. “Plainchant,” Brother Meissel called it. They sang with an intensity that Amanda didn’t really understand, as if the music were not just music but something else. “We are praying,” Brother Meissel said. “Singing the Holy Office. Your ignorance is appalling, Amanda.”
Six times a day they sang, although outside people only came to three of them. The times had more strange names: Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Vespers, and Matins. Some of these were in the middle of the night and Brother Meissel wouldn’t let her go to them. Amanda needed her sleep, Brother said. She liked to go to the other singings, however, even though the words were in Latin. She wasn’t interested in the words but in the sound.
Amanda stayed, always, behind the grille. The brothers knew she was there, but no one else on Mars knew. Nor would anyone come in to find her, Brother Meissel said. No one ever came behind the grille.
“How do you get money to buy food and things?” practical Amanda said, having observed that nobody paid for the meals or the singing. (“It’s not a performance, Amanda.”) Brother Meissel said the abbey received donations from Earth.
“Why?”
“For the greater glory of God.”
Apparently the flat-screen TV was a donation, too. It sat on a rough table at one end of the refectory. (“Oh! It’s a dining room!” Amanda said.) She was allowed the TV only because of her father, and she was permitted to turn it on only when the refectory was empty. She sat at the end of a hard, backless foamcast bench meant for four people, her arms hugging her knees in the pants Brother Meissel had sewn for her, and watched newscasters and avatars and important people, even General Stefanak, talk about her father’s kidnapping months ago. It was still news.
“No trace of eminent physicist Dr. Thomas Capelo, decoder of the Protector Artifact, who vanished last—”
“Gone into thin air, bonus? No clue who. No—”
“Citizens of the Solar System, until each and every one of us is safe in our own homes, atrocities like the disappearance of—”
“—terrorist groups like Life Now! They seek to betray us to the enemy! They will do anything, even kidnap a man of science like Dr. Capelo, in order to discredit—”
“War traitors—”
“Collaborators in—”
“Never rest until Dr. Capelo is restored to—”
“Dr. Capelo and his young daughter Amanda, fourteen years old—”
“Reward for any information leading to—”
Amanda went over and over that night in her mind. She could see the big blond man in her father’s bedroom, the man waiting beside the dark car, her father walking unnaturally stiffly between two other men. Nothing she could remember told her who they were, or why they had come.
Once Amanda caught a brief interview with her stepmother, looking shaken and pale. Carol merely said she had been at her parents’ with Sudie, and then asked anyone on Earth, or anywhere else, with any knowledge at all of what had happened to her husband and stepdaughter to comlink the system number on the screen.
“Amanda, that’s enough,” Brother Meissel finally said. “You’ve watched enough. Brother Killian needs your help in the kitchen.” Brother Meissel believed in keeping “idle hands” busy. Amanda went to pound Martian-grown herbs to flavor soysynth.
Food at the abbey was plentiful but boring. Sometimes her mouth watered for an orange, or a candy drop. Once she dreamed of lemons.
After she’d been at the abbey for two weeks, the newscasts changed. There were no more mentions of Amanda’s father, or of anything else except General Stefanak.
Amanda ran to Brother Meissel’s office and knocked on the door.
“Deo Gratias … what is it, child? Why do you look like that?”
“The TV says there’s a revolution in Lowell City! Right here! Now!”
Brother Meissel went still. After a moment he said, “I will come.” He followed her to the refectory and listened for a while. Amanda watched his lips move in prayer.
“Brother Meissel … what’s happening? What does it mean?”
“I can’t be sure, Amanda. The reports are very confused.”
“It says there’s fighting outside!”
“Yes.”
“What are we going to do?”
“At this moment,” Brother Meissel said calmly, “we are going to sing Terce. Turn off the screen, Amanda.”
“But—”
“Turn it off. It is time for Terce.”
However, when the singing, which Amanda had learned to call “the Holy Office,” was over, Brother Meissel permitted the TV to be turned back on and everyone to watch it. Even ancient, half-deaf Brother Killian left his kitchen to cluster around the ancient TV. They were all there when the announcement came.
“A grave occurrence has just been reported,” said the elderly, human newscaster the abbey preferred to watch. Amanda preferred a jazzy avatar named Stix, but had never said this. “The enemy, the so-called ‘Fallers,’ have attempted to penetrate Space Tunnel number one and enter the Solar System. Due to the treasonous betrayal of humanity by high-ranking officials in the Tunnel Administration, three Faller ships actually passed through the tunnel, where they were destroyed by alert ships of the Solar Alliance Defense Navy loyal to General Stefanak.”
“Oh my dear Lord God,” Brother Wu said, and made the sign of the cross.
“As a result of this action, General Stefanak has declared temporary martial law until those leaders of the military, who have inexcusably betrayed humanity, can be identified and removed. All citizens of Lowell City are now under curfew. No one may be on the streets between twenty hundred hours and oh six hundred hours each day. For the general safety, army soldiers will be checking buildings for enemies of the Solar Alliance. Your cooperation is urged in this endeavor to protect our homes and families. General Stefanak made this statement a few moments ago:”
The newscaster disappeared and General Stefanak filled the screen, bald and fleshy, powerful shoulders straining against the shoulders of his uniform. Whenever Sudie had seen him on holo she’d hidden her face, saying he was too scary. Amanda had always mocked her sister for that, but Sudie was right. General Stefanak looked scary.
“Citizens of Lowell City, the corruption in our government runs deep. I have begun to root out and—”
A dull boom shook the room. The priests looked at each other. “What is it?” Amanda cried.
Brother Meissel said calmly, “Just a warning about curfew, I imagine. Brother Wu, please check outside.”
Old Brother Killian said to Brother Meissel, “The child…”
“I know,” Brother Meissel answered. “Not yet.”
Brother Wu returned. “It’s all quiet out there. But a lot of soldiers have suddenly appeared on the stree
ts.”
“Martial law,” Brother Meissel said. “The searches will be next.”
“What will we do?” cried Brother Kawambe, excitable and not very bright.
“We will sing Vespers. It is almost time.”
“But if the Fallers return with their artifact … what that physicist said about destroying the fabric of space … if the Fallers come through the tunnel again into the Solar System…”
“There were no Fallers at the tunnel,” Brother Meissel said patiently. “That was an excuse for Stefanak to declare martial law and attack his enemies in the council. Calm yourself, Brother Kawambe. Amanda, a word with you, please.”
The others filed to their stalls to sing Vespers. Amanda, her chest tight, wrenched her attention away from the TV.
“In the next few weeks,” Brother Meissel said, “the abbey may be searched, perhaps more than once. Soldiers will probably come behind the grille, although I will try to dissuade them from invading sanctified space. When they come, you must hide. I’m going to show you where. Do you know what a priest hole was in the seventeenth century?”
“No,” Amanda said.
“I can’t imagine what content fills your history software. Follow me, please.”
The “priest hole” was a secret place reached through a hidden panel in an unused cell, which was what the brothers called their tiny bedrooms. Brother Meissel showed Amanda how to press the places that opened and closed it. The hole was big enough for two people, three if they squeezed, but half the small space was taken up by a surface suit, complete with boots, helmet, and oversized airtank.
“What’s that there for?”
“Just in case. Here is how you operate the second door. It leads outside, to the rubbish heap.” He showed her.
“In case of what?”
“In case God calls upon someone to need it.”
That was the sort of thing Brother Meissel always said, and that was the tone he said it in. The tone allowed no argument. Amanda said resentfully, “My father always says you shouldn’t make a statement you can’t express clearly in either words or numbers.”
“I’m sure he does,” Brother Meissel said imperturbably. “One more thing, Amanda. If you come in here, and if time permits you to do it safely, I want you to bring the chalice with you.”