LEGACY BETRAYED

by Rachel Eastwood

  Indignation wasn’t a common emotion to the inhabitants of Old Earth, and Coal was no exception. Her anxieties were muted by the chemical cocktail she received weekly. But, if she could have experienced indignation at that moment, she would have. There was a sublime relief which would tide over her as those fluids wove through her veins. Toward the end of the week, when its effects wore thin and she felt a painful stirring in the back of her brain, Coal 106 looked forward to the pleasure-pain prick of the needle. She looked forward to the way the world around her would darken and flatten, becoming familiar again. Less threatening. Less mysterious. A relief. A weight lifted. No, dissolved.

  The shots came to a halt, and had not yet been re-administered.

  The night of the missed shot had been filled with wild, colorful dreams. Pounding feet that melted into golden wings. A chorus of screams, no, a flute-like round of hallelujah trembling from within the clouds themselves.

  These murmurs and shifts of her mind had been merely disconcerting at first. Almost like the mental whispers of a burgeoning schizophrenic. What is that big land in the sky? The faithful instinct to continue shoveling dented and fractured under the strain. How did I even get here? Why am I doing this? It had always felt as natural as divine destiny, though she’d never asked herself these questions. They were uncomfortable, like sitting on a chair above live embers. Prickling.

  She’d continued to work. She could shrug this off. It must’ve been a spell of some sort. Influenza. It would pass. Like that pain when she breathed, or that strange sensation she only felt late at night, like there was a balloon in her heart. She could shrug this off, and it would pass.

  But today had been different. The questions intensified, culminated, and it had started to feel good. This broiling thunderhead of resentment built and built as the shovel thrust into the piles of black stone, upending them into a bin. Today had been different . . . or was it tonight, now? She’d been here so long, and she couldn’t see the sky. How long had she worked? How long did she always work?

  It was hard to tell. The mornings and the nights bled into one another. The work crews of Old Earth didn’t wake and sleep at conventional hours, but woke and slept by the demands of New Earth. Sometimes the alarms shrilled while the moon was still in the sky, watching them so bleakly as they trundled on toward the mine, suited in their tunics and rebreathers for another day. Sometimes the air horn signaling departure from their shift didn’t come until shovels were being dropped by numb hands. Until blisters were breaking and weeping and workers already collapsed.

  Was it still today? Or was it night now? How long?

  Why must we work for so very long? she wondered, the heat of the question cutting through the fog in her mind like dawn. Coal sucked a breath through her industrial rebreather and immediately hacked it back out. Why must everything be so miserable for us? Surely . . . there is more. Better. Something. We see doctors, don’t we? If we see doctors, then why do we always feel sick? Why is nothing ever done?

  One of the wizened, glaring supervisors swept forward, examining Coal’s work and the work of her compatriots. This one was a woman, the skin of her mouth shriveled, her eyes shrewd and dark. She continued moving at a swift pace.

  “Why are the old people staying so close to us now?” one of the other miners asked.

  Coal normally had difficulty straightening her back after work, but she was suddenly capable of jolting upright. She dropped her shovel with an abrasive, echoing clatter.

  No one had ever spoken to her before.

  Not in years could she remember a single word, other than occasionally being told to lift her sleeve and get her tattoo scanned, or to open her mouth for a throat swabbing.

  “They’ll be back now,” one of the others said.

  Coal whirled on the second speaker as if they were monsters cropping up.

  “They let us work alone before,” a third contributed. This one did not stop working. “Did everything alone before, didn’t we? Better keep it up, you.”

  “Y-yeah,” Coal replied, coughing. Her voice was dusty with disuse. Realizing the third miner must have been talking to her, she snatched up her shovel and plunged it into the loose black rock. “Something must have changed,” she went on.

  “Shh,” one of them said. “Here she comes again.”

  The crew returned to their grim silence as the older woman approached. She was speaking into an instrument which, much like Coal’s coworkers, suddenly seemed to crop out of nowhere, never before seen. Yet, in her flat, gray memories, she knew that she had seen all of this before. It was only now gaining the color and dimension of newness, of significance. She knew these people. She had sat with them every day on the same trolley. She had seen them nude, hosed down, seen them collapsing from exhaustion and carried out of the shaft on the top of bins.

  And she’d known these devices for a long time as well. Oddly shaped creatures of metal and mesh, figurines of man or insect, little spiders or birds, which the older people –and the others, their occasional visitors –spoke into, listened to, and carried constantly. But their antennae were springs rather than feelers, and their eyes and ears tended to be speakers or knobs.

  “. . . left us totally unprepared! At least install some damn locks on the damn . . .” The woman’s voice faded as she receded, pitchy with frustration.

  “Something’s going on,” Coal reiterated. She found herself loving this newfound sensation. Speaking. Thinking. Wanting. Wondering.

  “Do you think it has anything to do with that big island in the sky?” one of the other miners asked.

  Coal gasped, then coughed. “I was thinking about that too,” she confessed. “What is up there? And why are we . . . down here?”

  The air horn blew, and for the first time, the sound brought a fresh, welcome welt of gratitude to Coal’s heart.

  “. . . shared several classes, too,” Miss Sotheby droned overhead, pulling Dax from his vacant stare into the 2312 census report.

  “Huh?” he asked, knowing fully how rude he seemed just now.

  Although she was technically his boss, Miss Sotheby was also a kind, matronly mathematician. Unmarried and long-since ineligible, perhaps she saw in him the son she’d never had. Her eyes softened. “Are you all right, Dax?” she asked.

  The normally bright blue eyes were hemmed in wrinkles, and beneath his rebreather was two days’ worth of growth. He’d been staying at Glitch’s with Legacy, and the mattress had caused him to develop a limp.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m really sorry. What did you say?”

  “The girl with two Companions,” Miss Sotheby repeated. “I did some research on her, and learned that she excelled at building models in secondary school, which is just perfect, because one of the Companions placed as a civil engineer. And they shared several classes together. They probably even know each other.”

  Miss Sotheby always gleaned great satisfaction from a good match made. “Great,” Dax said. It seemed like the right thing to say.

  Miss Sotheby looked at him more closely. “Why don’t you take a break, Dax?” she offered. “You look exhausted.”

  As she progressed to the next station, Dax gazed back down into the current census report. He didn’t bother to inform her that this was not “work.”

  It was a report he’d pinched from the archives.

  The Compatible Companion Selection Services lab was usually a great place to work. It paid well, enough for him to live alone with modest savings, and he didn’t have to deal with the general public, which was a blessing. His problems and the tools with which he solved them were numbers, or machines, logic and probability. It suited him, usually. His head just couldn’t stay clear today. Or yesterday.

  On the outside, CCSS was a simple building, located not far from the hospital and the schoolyard, but the interior more closely resembled a factory. The lab was composed of individual stations, each housing a difference engine. The gleaming, bronze machines were the size of three large adults sid
e by side. Twenty-four spines of numerical value ran vertically and were churned by the turn of a crank, spiraling into one another like eight twisting double-helixes as they calculated the difference. The standard tasks of the day were much more complex than the turning of a crank, however. The results of each eligible citizen’s examinations were tallied –and these “results” were as intricate as pages of gene sequencing and a two hundred item personality profile –fed into the machine, exclusions defined, and the crank turned until the most complementary match was produced –or, otherwise, until the machine emitted smoke.

  The lab was also home to a repository of citizen files: everything from the census data, which Dax now inspected, to school notes and placement scores to legal documents, every ticket, every form. At the Centennial, when Legacy had submitted her question for approval by the court steward, Claude, her identity and question had been marked and filed. Almost everything anyone born of Icarus had ever done was in these archives. They were intended as background research, but could easily be abused.

  For example, if a budding revolutionary decided to run the numbers on the possible influence of his sect on the whole of Icarus, it wouldn’t take too long to discover that Chance for Choice comprised less than .5% of the population, which was less than a sixth of the number requisite to tilt probability even slightly to their favor.

  I just don’t see the way out anymore, he thought, running his fingers through his rumpled brown hair. Once, I thought that there was something we could do, but that was before everything went so wrong. Maybe the best we can do is just put Legacy onto that airship and send her off to Celestine.

  Because, as hopeless as his situation was, hers was infinitely worse. The monarchy was bound to be bloodthirsty after this affront to its power. If Trimpot didn’t quench that thirst –and he was oily enough to slip the noose, Dax was sure –then Legacy’s head would suffice. Of course, the girl would never agree. Not with her parents here, and him here, and then, there was that other girl Dax had discovered in the N.E.E.R. dome down on Old Earth. She was eerily identical to the silver-haired, golden-eyed metalsmith, whose features weren’t exactly plain, and in the records room, he’d seen an entry in the ledger from Legacy’s own parents, dated on her birthday.

  He hadn’t told her. And he probably wouldn’t.

  What good would it do? It’d only ensure that she’d never accept the lone logical conclusion to this mess: leave. Leave Icarus.

  But, as long as she had family here –and as long as she had Dax here–she never really would.

  Would I go with her, if she asked me? Dax wondered, closing the census report and standing to return it to the archives. That was a good question. A few weeks ago, he would have said yes without hesitation. But now?

  Dax strode down the center of two columns of stations, opened the door to the basement vault, and trod a long stairway into the dusty depository of files and files and files.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  What if Legacy had only attached to him due to proximity? They’d come of age side-by-side. It wasn’t as if Legacy had been a social butterfly in youth, and she was still, after all, only on the verge of turning twenty-one. What if she just hadn’t met anyone better suited to her yet – like the earl. Kaizen.

  Dax replaced the 2312 census tome and just stood, staring, for a moment.

  He’d heard what Liam had said.

  Liam Wilco, Legacy’s mandated Companion, had accosted her in Heroes Park several days ago. Liam was the stiff, law-abiding type, and he worked directly beneath Dyna Logan at CIN-3. He didn’t care for the connections repeatedly drawn between his reluctant bride and the rebels, and he’d been both furious and loud about it.

  “I know what you’re doing with the earl. And I know it goes a lot further than just kissing. I’m not an idiot. You think I can’t put the clues together? You, running around with the CC, then you, with your hands all over the duke’s son? It’s some kind of a set-up, isn’t it?”

  A pause. Legacy spoke, inadvertently confirming his allegations. “How did you get these?”

  “CIN-3 has slushers. They just review footage and harvest the stuff. Obviously, they wanted this to go straight to the top. It could either be the newscast of the year – or it could mean that everyone at the station gets a nice, fat shut-up bonus from Taliko.”

  He could only assume that the cameras that raced along every pipe and slat of CIN-3 had captured some frames of Legacy and Kaizen. Kissing.

  The thought still made his stomach turn. When? he wanted to ask her. Why? But then, she’d almost been left behind during the turbulent venture to Old Earth, and in her safe return, the tide of his relief had swept the jealousy offshore.

  But it was still bobbing out there.

  Dax meandered to the Taliko archive, easily locating Kaizen’s file. The lab had experienced so much trouble matching him, the casework had been moved to a shelf accessible without use of the ladder.

  Next, he went to scavenge for Legacy’s folder.

  When he’d rescued her from the prison tower during the coronation, she’d been wearing this strangely sexy, silky slip dress. And her handcuffs had already been torn free. Why? And why had no charges formally surfaced?

  Finally, Dax uncovered his own file.

  He had a wonderful, awful idea.

  With the three sheaths of paper-thin gold pressed to his chest, he returned to his station with a grim vigor.

  He knew he was ineligible. He’d always been ineligible. Born ineligible. His material had never been entered, because what would it matter? At best, the marriage application would be denied and he’d be fired for gross misconduct. At worst, he’d be in direct violation of the Companion Law, which was a felony.

  But at the same time, who gave a damn? There had to come a point where all the legal chatter fell away, and the human condition surged forth unscathed. And he’d reached that point.

  Limiting the data pool of his difference engine to these three matrices alone, he carefully inserted each page, and began the turning of the crank.

  The numerical spines whirled together, tabulating. Comparing. Deducing.

  He hardly noticed the way the room began to blur. The sweat prickling his brow. The vague odor of smoke in the air.

  But are the engines infallible? he wondered. After all, they placed Liam and Legacy together, and those two are just –

  “Dax!” Miss Sotheby cried, puncturing the bubble of his daze. The woman approached at a run, flinging a stack of notices onto his personal desk. “Dax, stop!” She raised the hem of her petticoat in a manner most uncharacteristic, fanning at his machine, which was when Dax blinked and stepped back into his right mind. The engine was fuming. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “I – I thought I’d run Earl Kaizen’s numbers again,” Dax explained. “I had the extra time on my break – and I –”

  “For God’s sake!” Miss Sotheby cried. “I thought I told everyone to stay out of that boy’s file until we were ordered – and besides, there is plenty enough to be done without – and that’s the last thing on the duke’s mind at this moment, I assure you!” He hadn’t often seen Miss Sotheby mad, but she was sputtering through rebuttals, and she had such an excess of counterpoints. “If you want something to do, Dax, why don’t you go for a walk and clear your head? Here!” She stopped fanning the overheated engine only long enough to thrust the stack of notices into his hands. “Deliver these!”

  “Are you –”

  Miss Sotheby pointed at the door. “Just go! It’s fine!”

  Dax grimaced, but took his leave, shuffling through the pile of notes. They involved Companion reassignment, which was a constant pain in the lab, but not one with which he often dealt. People were reassigned for a whole host of reasons, from aging to mental breakdown to incarceration.

  Dax exited the CCSS laboratory, pivoting toward CIN-3 before he realized to whom this notice of reassignment was addressed.

  Liam Wilco.

 
Exa Legacy’s status had officially been updated to “ineligible.”

  Meanwhile, Liam Wilco was alone in the radio station’s third floor prep room, glaring down at a glossy strip of filament strung between his thick fingers.

  In the photo negatives, skin was ink black, the shadows where their bodies met a burning ribbon of white. His Companion with her legs wrapped around the Earl of Icarus. A stranger’s mouth buried in her neck, and that sickening expression of ecstasy on her face. Sprawled on the foot of a goddamn staircase, in public, like animals, when all she’d ever graced him with was that humiliating display of apathy in the very hallway outside this door.

  “But this?” She grabbed his hand and pressed its palm over her heart. “I feel nothing,” she told him. “I feel nothing at all . . .”

  Still, he’d felt compelled to protect her when the slusher came to him the following Monday, elated with the explosive footage. It was hard to explain why. Frustrating? Yes. Evasive? Undoubtedly. But also trustworthy. Also principled. Compassionate. Or so he thought, anyway. He suspected that this Trimpot fellow was some sort of hypnotist. It was the only way he could lead good people to such a bitter end. She couldn’t have made this decision on her own. It wasn’t her; it wasn’t the Exa he’d always envisioned. Trimpot was puppeteering her, using her as some political Jezebel in his plot. So how could Liam turn this evidence over to Dyna? She’d drag the entire Legacy family into her studio and mortify them. Exa was an innocent girl caught in Trimpot’s undertow.

  Of course, Dyna no longer needed this story to make CIN-3’s antennae hum, now preoccupied with every little development as it trickled down, from supposed sightings of Exa in Groundtown – of all places – to rumors of city-wide curfew and the imminent arrival of the Monarch himself.

  The slushers hadn’t forgotten, though.

  Liam had kept the negatives for the past week, but they never forgot to ask what Dyna thought of them; even as a retrospective expose on a dead man, it was worth reporting. Of course, not many people knew this yet, but Earl Kaizen was not only alive, he was duke; it was Malthus who was dead. Although Dyna had sworn to progress the new duke’s agenda of disinformation, she had informed Liam, as head of her prep team, of the truth. Would the tawdry story ever run? Doubtful. Did the duke need to be reminded of his place in this delicate ecosystem? Assuredly.