by Alan, Craig
“Now there is no shame in being a scavenger. God only knows that there was no work on any kind in that part of the world, in those days. Retrieving valuable and not-so-valuable objects from what was left of Mumbai? That was a public service to my way of thinking, even if he did sell them on the black market. My own mother was a scavenger, as you know. She had walked, pregnant, barefoot, and bleeding, over fifty kilometers to the refugee camp to give birth to Nishtha and myself. Any woman who could do such a thing could hold her head high among kings and queens, and to hell with anyone who says different.”
Elena nodded. She did know this part. Vijay’s mother had died the next day, of radiation poisoning. She had probably been drinking the wrong water. Little Vijay had come out with five fingers and five toes on his four perfect little limbs. His twin sister Nishtha had been given three arms, two hearts, and only one week to live outside the womb. The Global Union doctor who had delivered them had euthanized her, despite the Treaty’s ban on eugenics. Vijay had never known his father and never learned his family name, and had instead taken his sister’s as his own.
“Sanjay was a scavenger as well, and a good one. But that sort of work took its toll, and old man Sanjay paid the price in tumors. He was covered in them. We could see them when he bathed in the river, great bloody tumors all over his body. He even had them on his face, one the size of a walnut hanging from his cheek. They were benign, of course. He never would have survived as long as he did otherwise. But they were hard to miss, and children being children…There were names. And stones, occasionally. The peacekeepers would put a stop to it if they could—they did business with Sanjay, just like everybody else—but they couldn’t be everywhere at once, not in the camps. I am not proud of what…I am not proud of the things that were said to that man. Or done.”
Elena carefully kept her face blank as Vijay looked away, towards the maps beside her desk.
“So on. I grew older and needed to find work for myself, and one way or another I ended up working for Sanjay. I never went into the forbidden zone myself, he would not hear anything of it. I would camp outside—I was about twelve at this time—close enough that nobody else came by, but far enough to still drink the water. I would wait for him while he walked into the ruins. When he came out I would hide whatever he had found near my campsite, until we had nearly too much for the two of us together. And then we would walk back to the camp. We rarely spoke.”
Elena had never been to a forbidden zone, but she had seen them from orbit countless times, scattered across Asia and North America. Most of them would be hot for decades, settled only by the wilderness. Her ancestors had been fortunate. Her own country had been untouched by the nukes, and suffered only their aftermath.
“This went on for a year or two. And then one night, halfway between Mumbai and the camp, I worked up the nerve to ask: Why did he not just get the bloody things removed? The Union doctors probably would have done it for free, that was the sort of thing for which they had come. And he asked me why I thought it was, that out of all the scavengers in the camp, he was favored above all others? It was true. Sanjay did excellent business, and the peacekeepers let him alone. Even the highwaymen would actually buy our wares, instead of stealing them.”
Vijay was still facing Elena, but he was no longer looking at her—he had gone blank the way one does when talking on the phone and imagining the person at the other end. She could almost see Sanjay reflected in his eyes.
“He told me that when a man was as lumpy and ugly as he was, he had proven himself to be the genuine article. He was no piker. You saw those bloody great tumors, and you knew that this was a scavenger who had done the job for a long time, and done it well. Sanjay had earned his stripes, so to speak. They were badges of honor, and he would no more cast them aside than a prince would his crown, or a beggar his bowl.”
Vijay leaned back in the chair, one foot hooked around the legs. He was smiling slightly.
“I had been working for Sanjay for months and months, but this was the first time that I thought I truly knew him. I felt that his wisdom required some reflection, and back then I did my best thinking as I smoked. So I rolled a cigarette, and as I felt that we were now companions, I offered Sanjay the first pull. And do you know what he said to me?”
She shook her head on cue.
“‘No thank you, son. Those fucking things give you cancer.’”
Elena burst into laughter, and immediately put a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, mi dio. I’m sorry. That’s terrible.” She giggled again.
“Yes, it is.” Vijay grinned. “But to hell with it. Why should he have not joked about it, as much as he had suffered? I saw plenty of people die in the camps. There was pneumonia every winter, heat stroke every summer, starvation for every season. The first girl I kissed died of diarrhea when she was only twelve years old. The first boy I kissed was beaten and drowned in the river. Elena, if you want to whistle past the graveyard, I will be happy to play you a tune.”
She smiled. He hardly ever used her first name.
“Talk to Golus, make the arrangements,” she said. “And inform the crew.”
Vijay saluted.
“Aye, Captain.”
“And thank you.”
She returned his salute, and Vijay turned to leave. He was nearly at the door when she asked the question.
“How did Sanjay die?”
Vijay stopped at the threshold, but didn’t turn around.
“I am not certain. He went into the zone one night when I was sixteen, and as far as I know, he never came back out.”
“Did you hold a funeral for him?”
“I did. I even built a headstone, and carved it as well as I could. But his true grave is wherever he fell.”
An empty grave—just like the one that Arnaud’s next of kin would gather around on Earth.
“Walk with me for a moment.”
The damage-control team had worked fast—the breach in the port hull had already been sealed and the compartment repressurized, and the disabled utility trunks in the outer hull had been rerouted. The missile body was still embedded in the armor on the other side of the bulkhead, but there was nothing that could be done about that until they returned to port in Union territory. Here and there were dents and gouges in the walls where bits of shrapnel had bit into Gabriel’s insides. Elena approached the breach and ran her hand over the discolored patch on the outer bulkhead which had, just a few hours before, been a gaping wound in Gabriel’s side.
“I have already prepared the report for Control,” Vijay said. He spoke quietly, and Elena could barely hear him over the clanking and whirring of the machinery embedded in the hull around her. That noise had always been there, but it had been months since Elena had noticed it. She only heard it when it wasn’t there. “We are waiting for you to sign off before we transmit.”
“He had family?”
“A mother and sister, Fredaline and Serafina. Both of Port-au-Prince.”
She nodded. No children, thank God.
“We’ll want to send a message to them as well.”
“Of course.”
Together they left the breach and went to the hatchway where Arnaud had died. It was open and inviting, and the atmospheric monitor was now entirely green.
“I am sorry to insist,” Vijay said, “but you have yet to answer my question.”
“Which was?”
His eyes were on the panel beneath the monitor, and the door handle which lay beneath it.
“Would you have done anything differently?”
Arnaud had made a choice, but he wasn’t the only one. The ship’s log showed that someone in compartment P-10 had requested a manual override of the quarantine—and that the bridge had refused it.
“We’d been breached, and for all you knew we were still under attack,” Elena said. “There was no way to tell if
you’d be exposing more of the crew. What you did was well within regulation.”
“Was it what you would have done?”
“Yes,” she lied. Elena checked her bracelet and sighed, though the shift change was nearly seven hours away. “I have to review that report,” she said. “You’ll speak to the doctor?”
“Leave it to me, Captain,” Vijay said.
She floated to the topside hatch to return to her quarters, and left him alone at the grave site.
Back in her stateroom, she found his report to be accurate and concise—Vijay had praised the bridge staff and deck crew for their quick responses, and he had unflinchingly owned up to keeping the compartment locked down with two of his crew inside. Elena added a section of her own as the first responder, and signed off on it. But before it could go out, she had to write the message to Arnaud’s family. Elena sat at her desk, his personnel file open on one screen, a blank page on the other.
Ten minutes later, it was still blank. She consulted the computer and found nothing in the Space Agency guidelines other than a boilerplate notification letter. But the vast majority of deaths in the service were accidental, and the form made no mention of courage in the face of the enemy or selfless devotion to duty, or any of the pretty words that she had expected. It was as if the Agency had forgotten that it was fighting a war.
Elena called up a new personnel record. Unlike her, Captain Muller never cut her red hair short, and even in an unflattering file photo it managed to catch the light and shimmer. And also unlike her, the commanding officer of Archangel had never had to write any letters to the families of the forty four men and women who had served under her. She’d gone down with them.
Elena stared at the photo for a moment. Then she bent her head and began to write.
The Agency didn’t commission chaplains. Gabriel was the largest ship in its fleet, and it was still too crowded to take on anyone who didn’t wear at last two hats aboard ship, and preferably more. Even the stewards, the lowliest hands on deck, were trained in emergency medicine and damage control. And if a chaplain had the acumen to serve in a more technical role, the Global Union’s multitudinous religions would make seeing to everyone’s spiritual needs an endless problem. The faithful saw to their own devotions.
But Arnaud could not perform the last rites himself. Nor could he deliver his own eulogy. For the first time since she had stopped attending mass in protest of the schismatic behavior of her parents—her father had stayed in the Catholic Church while her mother had followed the nuns into the Parochial Church, and their daughter had gone to each in turn, one every other Sunday—Elena wished that she had a priest.
They lined the walls of the cramped corridor, dozens of men and women in either direction, come to heed the call: All hands bury the dead. There would be no grand ceremony. Gabriel had no flags to lower, and no firing party to salute him. His mates in the steward department had already made their remarks, and left their tokens of respect inside his graveclothes—nothing more than a pair of disposable antiseptic sheets wrapped round his nude form and sewn together. Each spacesuit cost as much as what a Third Officer made in a year, and they had seen no sense in jettisoning a perfectly good spare. Someone had found a paintbrush, and scrawled two flags on the sheet—the black and white Agency ensign, and the red and blue Haitian flag.
Arnaud had been a Catholic as well, and a search of his footlocker had turned up a small, gilt-edge Bible. Elena turned it in her hands. She had no idea what to say. She had been too preoccupied with the report and letter, and finding a few precious hours of sleep, to think much about it at all. She had not even known who to ask. Elena hadn’t been to a funeral since she’d laid Anne to rest a few years before. She would never have guessed then that she would preside over the next one she attended.
Yasmin Tehrani, Arnaud’s immediate superior, was the last to speak. Shee had stopped by the oxygen garden and taken a single green frond, almost as green as her eyes, which she now slid into the seam between the sheets. It was no rose, but it would do just as well. Then she stepped back into the rank with the other department heads.
Elena looked around her, at all the lives that had been entrusted to her care. She had not expected to see Rivkah there, and wondered at her own surprise. The doctor was easy to miss, at attention in the middle of the rank to Elena’s right, instead of at the front with the other senior officers. But why shouldn’t Rivkah see him off? He had been her patient too, despite what little comfort she could give him.
She suddenly remembered the duty roster that Ikenna had shown her hours before, so long ago, and the religious holiday that the had requested. She regretted not going to the doctor for advice. Surely Rivkah could have recommended something, a passage from the Old Testament, the books that Elena had never read.
All eyes on her. Most of them had never beheld the death of a colleague. The proud officers of the Space Agency were more technicians than soldiers. Their parents and grandparents had lived with death every day, but that time was over. The men and women gathered around her had spent their entire careers building and maintaining robots, and sent them to kill other robots. It had been the perfect war—battles were won and lost, but nobody had to die. They had grown up in the shadow of the outsiders, but they had convinced themselves that shadows couldn’t hurt them. Now they knew better, as she did.
The doctor was the only person aboard the ship who had already been born when the outsiders had destroyed the Solstice. Elena knew that there had been men and women who had lived through the dark days from beginning to end, from the coming of the Storm to the founding of the Union. She could only hope that those like Rivkah, within living memory of the time before fear, would one day know it again. This too would pass.
Elena opened the Bible to the right chapter, and found her verses easily. She read.
“‘Now it came to pass that on a certain day he went into a ship with his disciples. And he said unto them, let us go over unto the other side of the lake. They launched forth, and as they sailed he fell asleep. And there came down a storm of wind on the lake and the waves threatened to sink them. And his disciples came to him and awoke him, saying, master, master, we will perish. Then he arose, and rebuked the howling of the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. And he said unto them, where is your faith? And they were afraid and wondered, saying one to another, what manner of man is this? For even the winds and water obey his command.’”
She closed the Bible, and looked up. They stared back at her, Christians and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, atheists and agnostics, and a Sikh and a Jew. There was no pattern to what she saw in their eyes now. They had all expected something about ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And while some of them had understood, some had not.
Elena didn’t care, and she didn’t think that Pascal Arnaud would care either. Where he was, nothing could help or hurt him further. Funerals were for the living. She had her own disciples to watch over, and whether they put their faith in God was none of her concern. But she wanted them to know that they could put their faith in her.
Vijay tapped his bracelet, and the long, doleful notes of le sonnerie aux morts began to play over their helmet intercoms. As one, Arnaud’s comrades raised their hands in salute.
This fell to Elena also. She had already pressurized the airlock and opened the hatch. She took her fallen warrior gently by the arms and steered him inside, careful not to bump him against edges. Alone in the airlock, Arnaud seemed much smaller than Elena remembered. She retreated, and closed and sealed the inner door just as the piece ended. Arnaud had met her at this very airlock on the day of her last spacewalk, and Elena had wondered when any of them would know the sun again. He would be the first.
Elena vented the airlock, and laid Pascal Arnaud to rest.
Dusk and Dawn
Six months earlier
Elena tried to do nothing, and found that she
didn’t know how.
She had departed Port Avramovich the day before, and the spaceline, well aware of how unbearable twenty four straight hours on a plane would be, had done its best to make sure that she never wanted to leave her seat. Even when she did get up, there wasn’t much to do or see. The craft’s windowed fuselage was big enough to hold two heads, a tiny galley, and a cubicle for each of its forty eight passengers. Even if she wanted to float about the cabin, there wasn’t enough room to properly enjoy herself.
Elena checked her bracelet for the latest of several hundred times that trip, but there were no new messages waiting for her. Her cubicle, a meter and a half to a side, was fully stocked with entertainment. It was mostly contemporary media that she had failed utterly to recognize, as well as three news organizations—Lunar Times, The Nile, and Transnational—which had paid a large sum to have their electronic broadsheets placed next to every seat and guaranteed bandwidth on the ship’s antennae. Elena idly ran her fingers over the newspapers in their slots. They were plastic, as thick as a sheet of heavy bonded paper and about as flexible. Electronic broadsheets were transparent when powered down, and the tracery of wires which coursed under their surfaces were completely invisible to the human eye. The technology was almost as sophisticated as the touchscreens aboard Gabriel. She tapped the Times lightly, and it sprang to life with animated text and video that crawled over the sheet.
Election coverage dominated the front page, and Elena watched a few highlights from the previous night’s debate. It had been an awkward affair, as the Socialists and Conservatives, currently shackled together in an unhappy marriage at Tahrir Square in Cairo, seemed to have resigned themselves to another four years in coalition. The administration’s approval numbers had dropped quite a bit from their peak during the Nuclear Crisis, five years earlier, and neither Prime Minister Helena Dixon nor her deputy Nguyen Van Thanh had dared to attack the other, or the leader of Liberal International, their preferred partner. Instead they had ganged up on the Alliance for Sovereignty, whose candidate seemed to bask in their scorn. The Sovereigntists had never won an election in the Global Union—and as they denied that it should even exist, they probably never would.