by Alan, Craig
When she opened them again, the room was empty. Elena sat up in her chair. Vijay and Public Affairs were gone, and she hadn’t even heard them leave. She was alone.
The door to the corridor outside opened, and a tall woman in a dark suit stepped inside. In one hand she held a wand, and the other a pad. She swept the room quickly and professionally, and ignored its occupant completely. Elena watched the stranger work from her chair, and soon she was done and out the door once more. But she left it open.
He was shorter than Elena expected. She knew that people said that about every famous person—they almost certainly said it about her—but it was true. He was broad shouldered and deep chested, and he looked big on camera, but in the flesh he was no taller than the average South African male of his generation, which was to say he was only a few centimeters taller than Elena herself.
“Don’t get up,” Jacob Erasmus said.
“Did I look like I was about to?” Elena asked the Prime Minister.
“I’m sorry. A few days ago the people around me, people I’ve known and worked with comfortably for years, even decades, developed the strange habit of standing whenever I enter the room. It makes me feel silly, so I in turn have developed the habit of launching a pre-emptive strike every time I open a door. How’s the hand?”
Erasmus pulled a chair across the floor to sit before her, and when he bent down she was left looking at the snowy expanse of his full head of hair. It was swept back from his forehead and somewhat askew, despite the complete lack of wind at Solstice. He reached for her hand, and she pulled it from the ice.
“It’s fine. You didn’t actually open that door. And ‘pre-emptive strike’ was a poor choice of words.”
“The latter two of those three statements are true. In place of the first, which is a lie and you know it, let us add to them that before I was Prime Minister Erasmus, I was Doctor Erasmus, and a simple case of politician’s hand is not beyond my abilities.”
Elena held back.
“I understand,” Erasmus said. “I’d be afraid of the pain also.”
Elena rolled her eyes and held it out, slowly. She tensed herself, unwilling to flinch in front of him. But he took her by the wrist instead, and ran a fingertip lightly along her carpus. He clucked his tongue.
“Aren’t officers allowed to wear gloves to this sort of thing?”
“No one told me I should.”
“Amateur,” Erasmus said.
“I’d have worn my spacesuit if they’d let me.”
“Oh, that would have been a sight,” he said. “I haven’t noticed a single one so far.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Are they as uncomfortable as they look?”
“You get used to it.”
“People keep telling me that,” Erasmus said, gently rubbing the flat of her hand with the pad of his index finger.
“So how’d a guy like you manage to spend two days in a spaceplane without the press noticing?”
“This is a time of, as my new Security Minister told me when we first met a week ago, ‘heightened concern.’ Which is his way of saying that I must keep my head down, lest a member of my own Space Agency lob a missile at it.”
Erasmus softly stroked her lifeline.
“No one knows I’m here. If I’m to live with this security theater of the absurd, I will at least make good use of it.”
“You don’t think there are people out there who’d like to kill you?”
“Just a few more than usual, really. I may have never served, Captain, but that wasn’t the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at my head.”
“Metaphorically.”
He didn’t answer.
“Well,” Elena said, “I’m flattered that you’d risk your imminent death to fly all the way out here and see me get a piece of metal stuck to my jacket.”
“It’s not wise to be impudent towards those who can cause you a great deal of pain,” Eramus said, massaging her bruised bones gently. “It must have felt good though. An entire roomful of your colleagues and superiors, all praising your name.”
She wouldn’t admit that.
“Not as good as winning worldwide elections, I bet.”
“It wasn’t worldwide,” Erasmus said. “And it was the first election I ever won. It’s the first time I ever stood, as a matter of fact.”
“Beginner’s luck?”
For the first time since he’d entered the room, the Prime Minister looked her in the eye and held it.
“Luck, was it?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Nor did I.” He turned back to her hand. “What a pair of happy accidents we must look.”
“Not the adjective I’d use.”
“Would you rather have been cashiered? The Director has taken quite a dislike to you, I’m afraid. It’s endearing.”
“So it was you.”
“Yes, I have been me for longer than I care to admit.”
“You called off the dogs.”
“Oh, that. Yes, I suggested that their investigatory efforts be directed elsewhere. And that the Director could do better to protect the reputation of his beloved Space Agency than to crucify its greatest heroine since Captain Muller.”
He dipped her hand back into the melted ice, and withdrew. When she pulled it out, the pain was gone.
“Ask me how I did it.”
“Heroine. Is that what they’re calling me?”
“Oh, yes. Well, mostly. The opinion is not universal. You have, for instance, been burned in effigy in Trafalgar Square. You don’t like the word ‘heroine?’”
“I was just doing my job.”
“Not many job descriptions include the phrase ‘averting world war’ among its responsibilities.”
“Yeah, that’s actually not anywhere in my job description.”
“Which is?”
“Kill outsiders.”
“A lot of outsiders on Victory, were there?” he asked.
“Va chingate,” Elena said.
Erasmus didn’t react, and for a moment Elena wondered if he knew what those words meant. Then he rose slowly from his chair, and made his way to the mural on the wall.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “What do you want with me?”
“Do you recall your first memories of childhood?”
Her mother and father beside a bonfire on a Pacific beach, fingers intertwined, orange light playing on young faces.
“What the fuck? No. Who does?”
“I do. I’ll never forget them. My family owned a farm in the bush west of Bloemfontein. The Storm had hurt us less there than in some other corners of the world, and my mother and father and their family and their hands did well for a time, growing wheat and raising goats behind our fences with our guns. There was an old township less than ten miles away, where the black fellows lived. My family never set foot there, and they knew better than to come anywhere near our home. We were entirely white on the farm, of course. So it was quite a shock when a man calling himself Dr. Mbeki arrived one morning and waited, completely unarmed, at the gate. He was the township’s only healer—or the only one who had actually seen the inside of a medical school, at any rate. And he had come on a mission of mercy.”
Elena could see Erasmus leaning close to the mural and turning his head from side to side, as if he were trying to look each figure in the eye. That was impossible—Tel Aviv had been destroyed only fifty years before the picture had been taken, and the winds had carried the fallout south to Jerusalem. That dead and deserted city had been as hot in 2098 as it was in 2152, and each of the Treaty’s signatories wore a bulky radiation suit and helmet.
“We knew from the radio that the black commandos were on the rampage in the east, that Pretoria and Johannesburg had been burned to the ground. But that had seemed
all so far away, until they struck Bloemfontein. Mother put me to bed before everyone gathered around the radio that night, and so I didn’t hear what happened. But the next morning there was a column of black smoke rising against the sun.”
Erasmus turned away from the mural, and sat down in his chair across from hers. He steepled the long fingers that had soothed her hand.
“We still held out hope that they would pass us by. The commandos were a jumbled lot, wandering to and fro as they pleased, and as our farm was off the main highway there was a good chance that they would never see us, that they’d move on to Kimberley in the north. But Dr. Mbeki told us how wrong we were. The black townships still maintained their ties, one to another like a chain across the country, and word had been passed along. A band of dozens, hundreds, was on its way, and they would arrive within a day or two. The doctor had taken a jeep and a few liters of the township’s petrol, and driven to our farm to offer us refuge on the other side of the river. The blacks there had guns themselves, far more than we, and were prepared to burn the bridge to keep the commandos on the far bank. There were only a score of us on the farm, and defending it against determined attack was a forlorn hope. Dr. Mbeki had come to offer my father salvation.”
Erasmus was quiet for some time.
“What did your father do?” Elena asked.
“What do you think he did? He called Dr. Mbeki a kaffir and spat in his face. Then he stuck a rifle in that face and ordered him off our land. The next day my mother took me into the big house just before sunset. There was a crawlspace beneath the sitting room floor, and she took up the boards and placed me inside with a few bottles of water and some dried beef. She kissed me on the forehead and stroked my hair before closing me in. She told me to be quiet, as quiet as a little mouse, or she wouldn’t let me out for supper. She was crying. I remember that.”
Elena didn’t know if she was supposed to look away, or not. Eramus continued as if he hadn’t noticed.
“I was the youngest. My brothers and my sister were old enough to fight, but my mother wouldn’t hear of me doing the same, so she tucked me away. When my father came and pried up the boards, I assumed it was to pull me out and put a gun in my hands. And he did. But he didn’t send me out. He picked me up and laid me back in the hole. He showed me the safety and how to move it. The pistol was loaded, and there was a round in the chamber. I had only to flip that switch, and pull the trigger. The gun would do the rest. My father told me that if anyone lifted the boards without calling my name first, I was to point the gun up and out of the hole, and shoot them.”
He unclasped his hands to look at them. Elena tried to imagine a time when those fingers had been tiny.
“He put one big hand on my head, and looked at me. I don’t think he said anything else. I can’t even remember what he looked like now. But I remember how blue his eyes were. Then he put the boards back, and he was gone. I never saw him again after that long night. There were gunshots and screams, and I could see a red light through the cracks. At one point the crawlspace filled with smoke, and I was so ashamed of coughing that I cried silently afterwards, afraid that mother would leave me in there until morning, because I had broken my word to her. Then I heard the door to the sitting room bang open, and my sister Sonja, and some other voices. These were not my uncles or the hands. They were men that I didn’t know, and they were laughing. Sonja was screaming and crying, and I wondered why they were being so mean to her, to make her cry like that. She didn’t stop for hours. Then the voices left the room, and everything was quiet. And I mean everything, even the guns. I stayed in my burrow, determined to stay so silent that mother would have no choice but to come for me, and Sonja too. I stayed quiet even when something wet and nasty began to drip between the boards and onto my face.”
This time, Elena did look away.
“I’m not certain how long I was in there. I only knew that I had eaten all my food and drank all my water, and mother hadn’t come. When it seemed like I couldn’t take it anymore, I heard footfalls once more. But these were not my mother’s. They were heavy, and slow. I thought maybe the boards would lift, and I would see my father’s face once more. But they didn’t. The feet kept coming and going, and coming and going, and now they were right above me, and no one had called my name.”
Erasmus picked up the bowl of water and lofted it in one hand.
“Have you ever held a pistol? It’s always so much heavier than you expect. This gun was small, but so was I, and I had to hold it with two hands all the same. I could feel my arms tremble as I pointed it towards the ceiling. If I hadn’t rested it on my chest I wouldn’t have been able to aim it at all. I flipped the switch, like father showed me. The boards creaked, and I put my finger on the trigger. And then there was a black face looking down at me, and in a flash I knew what was going to happen. I had to kill him, or he was going to hurt me and make me cry, like they had made Sonja cry.”
All this time Erasmus had held the bowl out before him, and Elena could see his arm begin to tremble. He set it down.
“But I didn’t. I looked into those eyes, around the barrel of the gun, and I tried. I couldn’t pull the trigger. He reached down and took the gun from me, and then he knelt and pulled me out. I fought and bit, but two days underground had taken their toll. Everything hurt, parts I didn’t even know I had. The daylight burned my eyes so badly that even putting my hands to them couldn’t keep it out. I felt metal on my lips, and then water. I drank, and he pulled the cup away after a few seconds. Dr. Mbeki knew better than to let me have my fill. Instead he pulled my hands away from my eyes, and poured the water over my face.”
Erasmus traced a finger over the surface of the bowl. The ice had entirely melted.
“When I could finally see, I couldn’t find Sonja anywhere in the room. And when he took me outside to where the jeep was waiting, I didn’t see mother or father, or anyone else that I knew. But I did see that the garden had been torn up and piled over, and that made me sad, because Mother had loved her flowers. Dr. Mbeki took me to the township, where I spent the next decade of my life. Those three days on the farm are my only memories of my first family.”
“Is that why you became a doctor?” Elena asked. “Because of Mbeki?”
“Yes. Well, it didn’t start that way. I ran away more times than I could count, but there was always someone to find me and take me back to his clinic. After a while, I started to see the looks on their faces when they handed me over. My father’s hands had looked at him in a similar way, but this was different. My father’s men had respected him, and feared him, but none of them had loved him. But it’s hard not to love a doctor who will leave his bed in the middle of a night to see to your child’s fever, or to wade in the blood of a man with HIV to pull a bullet from his chest. Everyone loved him. And eventually, I did too. I went away to Capetown for medical school, but I always came back to Bloemfontein and the township, and to Tata’s clinic. He died the year before I graduated. But for the rest of my career—in the townships, the Red Cross, Liberal International—I carried with me the memory of a black man who had pulled a white child out of a hole in the ground, washed his sister’s blood from his face, and loved him as his own son. I wanted people to look at me like they had looked at him.”
For the first time since his story began, Erasmus looked Elena in the face, and for the first time she saw in his eyes how old he really was, how long ago this had been.
“There are people out there in the world who need healing, and I will be here for them, as long as I can. But there are also those that need hurting, and I haven’t held a gun since that day on the farm. And there will be others like me. People who won’t be able to pull the trigger, or even have a trigger to pull. They won’t be as fortunate as I. There will be no Dr. Mbeki for them. I need someone who can take the shot that they can’t. I need you.”
“You want me to kill for you.”
“To prot
ect my people for me. I don’t fear those who hate me, Captain. I will die for this planet, if I must. But . . . yes. I need someone to kill for it also.”
“You say you can’t pull the trigger,” Elena said. “It seems to me like you did just fine a few days ago.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“You gave me the order.”
“You asked for it. And if I hadn’t given you what you wanted, would you have taken the shot anyway?”
Elena had tried very hard not to ask herself this question.
“Yes.”
“Well, there we are,” Erasmus said.
“Anyone in my position would have done the same.”
“You believe so? I’ve reviewed the telemetry records from that day. I usually have no idea what I’m looking at, but I have people to explain it to me slowly, in small words. Every single Agency ship and station in orbit could see what you were seeing, and so could Solstice. What did they tell you to do?”
Elena looked away from those yellow eyes.
“To stand down.”
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that there are elements within the Agency who would not be displeased if every independent satellite were to fall from the heavens, and leave the opposition helpless.”
“You think that Solstice deliberately ordered me down to help Victory?”
“I don’t know that Solstice did that. And I don’t know that they didn’t. All I do know is that I need someone I can trust for this job, and Solstice it is not.”
“Job?”
“Your crew is on leave right now, but they shall return to Glenn Station within the week. And when they do, they will be informed of your true destination, and be given the opportunity to decline. If any do, you will have full authority to recruit replacement officers of your choosing from the candidates that we are pre-positioning at Glenn as we speak. And when you have a full complement, you will depart for Jupiter.”