Awakening

by Margaret Ball

  What if that package is part of a sabotage plot? Plans for some vital factory, notes on weaknesses? Devra drifted into a short daydream: she could take them to the peace officers or maybe straight to the Bureau for Defense, become a Heroine of the State for exposing and thwarting the plot.

  Assuming you didn’t go to prison for receiving and hiding the papers. Anyway, Ferit wouldn’t work with Esilian saboteurs. Unless he thought the plan was funny.

  “All right, then,” Devra said aloud. She snapped the CodeX shut and cut off the newser’s annoying voice. Then she waved her hand along the balcony side of the room to close all the windows and shutter them again. Oh, she should slide the door open just enough to shoo the cat out. Later. When she was wearing her heavy oven mitts.

  She waved her hand over the lighting sensor pad and the apartment went dark. Another, more precise wave and the wall sconce nearest the table lit again. That was more than enough light for a dubious action like this.

  Setting the parcel on her table and cutting the heavy cords felt wrong. But not knowing felt even more wrong.

  Devra held her breath and then exhaled in a long, slow sigh as the scrap of fabric fell away. Ferit’s mystery package was nothing but paper – a stack of loose flimsies which were already marked up with pictures and words, so they weren’t even good for scratch paper. She ran her thumb up one side of the stack, riffling the right edge of the pages, and felt a premonitory shiver on the back of her neck. They all looked exactly alike.

  “Oh, Ferit,” she murmured. “What have been you up to?” But she knew. It had to be the next output from the Leafletter. What else had fifty identical loose pages and was bad enough to attract a pair of habbers? Ferit must have been given these to distribute around his neighborhood.

  Devra had never actually read anything by the Leafletter. The newsers said they were seditious nonsense and the next thing to outright treason. Distributing them was treason. Being caught with fifty copies of the Leafletter’s latest outpourings would probably be considered evidence enough that one was planning to distribute them.

  “Thanks for sticking my neck out, Ferit,” she murmured. A glance at the topmost sheet confirmed her fears. Much of it was devoted to a drawing of a face with a band of some sort over its mouth. Below that was a paragraph hand-printed in block letters. Words like liberty and public and freedom of thought stood out like pulsing lights. Devra suddenly felt short of breath. Her hands were shaking. She could not be caught with seditious materials in her apartment. Ferit had promised to collect his parcel tomorrow. That wasn’t soon enough. She had to get rid of the things now. Never mind that little fantasy about becoming a Heroine of the Party; nobody got rewarded for having treasonous literature. Take them to the community disposal? What if she was seen? There were at least two more lonely widows like Lili Partrij on Level 3, avidly clutching at scraps of information and weaving them into gloriously complicated theories about their neighbors’ private lies. And the horrid Majid children were always running around the level, shrieking and hitting each other and threatening to turn in their own parents – or anybody else who tried to civilize them – as enemies of the State.

  The damned cat yowled again and she jumped. Her heart was beating as fast as if she’d just raced up the stairs. Even the cat seemed agitated; it was pawing the floor. Oh! Pawing the floor. Cat for “I need to go.” A brilliant idea illuminated her mind.

  “Just wait a minute, will you?” Devra grabbed a temporary baking tray that she’d already used half a dozen times and began tearing paper. If she could get an inch or so of paper scraps in there, if the cat had learned manners from a previous owner – which it must have, seeing it hadn’t yet peed on the floor – Torn bits of paper covered the baking tray. Another layer, and another. The back of the leaflet looked like some kind of poem. More tearing, not quite so random now. The paper had a definite grain; it was easiest to tear long lengthwise strips. And they filled the tray much better.

  “Come on,” she urged the beast as it bent its head to inspect the new offering. “All that water, you must be bursting.” She swatted the cat’s behind lightly and it jumped into the tray. “Good! Give it your best.” She could always add some ammonia to stink up and dampen any scraps the cat missed, but there was nothing like authentic cat pee to make people wrinkle their noses and look away. Nobody would even question why she was carrying the stinking tray to the disposal tube.

  There was one page left; she’d tear that up as soon as she’d skimmed it. Devra felt that for her trouble she was entitled to just find out what sedition looked like, and keeping a single leaflet for a few minutes longer, when it was already in her apartment, wasn’t nearly as dangerous as picking one up in the street where anybody might be watching.

  “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man, as far as by it he does not hurt and control the right of another; and this is the only check which it ought to suffer, the only bounds which it ought to know. This sacred privilege is so essential to free government, that the security of property; and the freedom of speech, always go together; and in those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call any thing else his own.”

  Devra frowned. Apart from the archaic language and spelling, it read like a paragraph from her college Social Justice textbook, only all back-to-front and twisted around until it seemed to say that people ought to be allowed to say anything, even cruel or wrong or evil things. A country couldn’t maintain Harmony if they let people say mean things, and hurt people’s feelings, and criticize anybody or anything they liked. Did this writer think that the freedom to say anything you wanted, no matter how hateful, was more important than Harmony? That was stupid – it was practically a recipe for starting a war.

  A rusty grating sound at her feet distracted her. After liberally dousing the scraps of paper in the baking tray, and adding a couple of cat turds for even more authenticity, the stray was sitting beside her.

  “I believe you’re trying to purr!” Devra exclaimed. She listened more carefully. Inside, the stray was making that harsh regular noise; outside, the rain that had been threatening all day was drumming down on the balcony. She looked approvingly at the baking tray. “Oh, discord! I gave you a cat box. And when the rain lets up, I’m going to empty it. It’s not fair to kick you out now. I guess I’m adopting you. So we need to agree on a name.”

  “Discord” actually sounded appropriate, except everybody would think she was shouting bad words whenever she called the cat. “

  “Travis the Terrible,” would fit, too, but naming it after the vicious guerrilla fighter who’d led the Esilian rebellion was probably not wise. “Scat!” she snapped as the cat reached its front paws up to her legs. Claws out. She could tell it was planning to insert climbing pitons into her shins.

  The cat actually dropped back to all fours, rubbed against her ankles and turned up its rusty purr a couple of notches. “Ok. If that’s what you answer to, you can be Scat.” That would do, whatever his sex – although she was pretty sure any animal that aggressive had to be a tom. She wasn’t willing to lose blood checking, though. She flipped the seditious leaflet over. War seemed to be what the writer wanted, judging from the exhortation that topped the page.

  “Citizens! Rise up and exercise your natural rights! Speak freely and tell the truth. Don’t let your masters hide it behind meaningless phrases like ‘the right to courtesy’ or ‘the importance of harmony.’ The only just war is the fight for liberty, and we will win it! Every day in this battle is Saint Crispin’s day!” Then there was the… poem? It was even more old-fashioned than the writing on the other side, and the lines were short but hard to understand.

  “Tomorrow is the feast of Crispian.

  He that shall live this day, and come safe home,

  Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,

  And rouse him at the name of Cr
ispian.

  He that shall live this day, and see old age,

  Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,

  And say, “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”

  Devra remembered being taught about saints, and fakirs, and prophets, and other delusional people on Old Earth. She hadn’t learned much, because it was really kind of a waste of time to study Old Earth history when Harmony had marked a new beginning for humanity. But at least she had an idea of the word.

  “Crispian,” sounded vaguely familiar, too. But not from history… Devra tapped the CodeX on her wrist and said, “Search for Crispian.” All her college texts were still stored there.

  A moment later the CodeX beeped and a shimmering screen appeared several inches above the table. Devra brushed a hand just beneath the top edge of the virtual display and tilted it to a comfortable angle for reading. “One result. Opening EngLit Survey.” Then those words disappeared from the screen and it filled with the bit she had half remembered.

  “Today is the Feast of Saint Crispian, and anyone who lives through the battle will always be proud. He’ll show off his scars and tell his son what a hero he was. He’ll exaggerate what he did in the war. Anybody who fights on my side will be like my brother from now on, and the guys who are sleeping at home now will always feel inferior to us.”

  A footnote informed her that the speech was from a play about an English king who, having led his army into France in an act of naked aggression, had managed to get them trapped in a place called Agincourt where they lacked food and shelter and were vastly outnumbered by the defending army. It added, with a notably disapproving air, that history showed the English had actually won the battle of Agincourt, but that there was no evidence that their king had actually made a speech the night before the battle or that it had inspired his soldiers.

  Devra remembered now: this reading had been part of a really boring lesson showing how Old Earth writers were always glorifying war and destroying humanity’s natural harmony. And as adapted to modern language, it had been mind-numbingly forgettable. Devra was surprised the name of Crispian had even rung a bell.

  This poem was a lot longer, and hard reading, but somehow it was more… More memorable. And the words wanted to be said aloud. Devra shaped them with her lips as she read, but they weren’t happy. They wanted to be called out loud, from some high hill, with a clear cold wind blowing. And as she came to the end, the words lay more quietly in her head, but echoing and reverberating and laying themselves deep in her memory.

  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

  This day shall gentle his condition;

  And gentlemen in England now a-bed

  Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

  That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  While Devra read, the autumn rains had announced themselves with a tearing east wind and a cloudburst followed by hours of steady, drumming, icy rain.

  Before the rain started, the habbers who’d lost Ferit had backtracked all the way to the shabby odds-and-ends shop where they’d first noticed him because of his furtive air and the way he held something flat against his body.

  They’d gone after him because he had run when they shouted at him to stop. The damn kid was fast, and he’d taken off deep into the New Citizen quarter whose twisty lanes he knew far better than any Security men. And the New Citizens hadn’t been any too helpful about clearing out of the way to let them give chase. And they themselves had only seen him in shadow, and he might or might not have been the (very tall, just about average, I-didn’t-notice) young man in the (green, blue-and-white, I-don’t-remember) shirt who had been (empty-handed, not carrying anything but his girlfriend’s basket, who-knows) spotted heading out of the quarter.

  “We should have checked out the shop instead of the kid,” Aleks grumbled. “At least shops don’t run away.” He glared at the shuttered windows flanking a sign proclaiming, “Benji’s Fix-It, Parts Bought and Sold, Electronics Repaired.”

  We will,” said Lukas. “Tomorrow we’ll interrogate the owner.”

  “He probably lives nearby, we could do it now. Want to roust a few citizens and ask where to find him?”

  “Nope.” Lukas shook his head. “Have you looked at this neighborhood?”

  “Getting too dark to see much, now.” Benji’s Fix-It was a poor advertisement for the owner’s claims; the light fixture over the shop sign was broken.

  “You might have noticed, before. It’s almost as much of a slum as a New Citizen settlement. We’re not hugely popular with the choof-and-crime set, and the seriously addicted choofers are often too high – or just too dumb – to be warned off by seeing their buddies in a tanglefield.” Lukas patted the blaster on his left hip. “We might have to kill somebody, and I do not want to spend the next week wading through forms and interviews.”

  Aleks poked irritably at the rolled-down green shutters. “I bet I could break this lock.”

  “And then what? Break the window? Climb in over broken glass? While the citizens in the next house call their peace officers?”

  “I bet peace officers won’t come to this area after dark.”

  “That,” said Lukas patiently, “is because they’re smarter than you. Leave it, Aleks. We can talk to the shop owner in the morning. No breaking locks and windows, no fuss with the discording choofer types who doubtless infest this slum, no difficult explanations to peace officers.”

  There was a crack of thunder from the rumbling clouds and a cold wind blew down the street. A torrent of icy water poured down on them as the wind picked up, persuading Aleks that Lukas had the right of it. “I hate Harmony City,” he grumbled as they turned back.

  “What, it doesn’t rain in your district?”

  “Not sideways.” Aleks tugged on his collar, stretching it out into a sort of tube that closed around his neck. At least that stopped the rain trickling down inside his tunic. “And my feet hurt, and I’m hungry, and we’ve got no discording result for this entire shift’s work.”

  “Tell you what,” said Lukas, “you go straight home. I’ll stop at headquarters and write our report. Go ahead,” he said as Aleks stared at him. “I’m senior to you, it’s my job anyway.”

  ***

  An hour after the two habbers had left, some odd clanking sounds came from within the closed shop. Possibly Benji had been inspired to catch up on some odd jobs in the middle of the night. Possibly he had chosen to fix some things with a hammer. It was the oldest part of Old City; stranger things had happened.

  The short, slight man who eventually slipped out of the shop by the back way wore a shabby coat with the collar turned up and a muffler wound around it. Both items of clothing predated the smartcloth revolution, and they soaked up water with every step. With a peaked cap pulled down over his face, it might have been hard for him to see his way, but he stepped quickly and surely down the alley. Residents of Old City got a lot of practice finding their way without street lights; one might even have thought they liked the challenge, considering how frequently the city’s lights were broken or stripped of their connections.

  The little man turned into a street, went a few paces and turned again into a space between two houses, and emerged on a slightly more respectable street leading to a part of the city that was more shabby-genteel than slum. In this remorseless, icy downpour, he had no company. His arms were wrapped around him as though to ward off the cold, but the meandering path he chose suggested that he was in no particular hurry to reach his destination. All the same, he was shaking when he finally stopped to scratch at a door halfway down a curving, narrow street.

  “We’re closed,” said the woman who opened the door just a crack. “Go… Ben?” She swung the door farther open, letting golden light fall over the ra
in-silvered street. Ben turned his face away from the light even as he squeezed through. The woman shut the door very quietly and turned three locks.

  “Y-y-yes, it’s m-me,” Ben answered in a low voice. He was shivering with cold. “Who else did you expect to announce himself with two short scratches and one long?”

  “On a night like this, I wasn’t expecting anybody. And as for the signal, who can hear anything over the thunder and the rain? You’re lucky I just barely heard your last scratch. Now. Were you followed?”

  Ben shook his head. “Not in this rain, not the route I took. Might have been, though, if it w-wasn’t for the storm. I’m done, Vess. The shop’s blown. A couple of habbers chased one of my runners, probably didn’t catch him though because they came back. At least they didn’t break into the shop yet. But they’ll set a watch; I can’t risk distributing from there any more.”

  “Your runners?”

  “All local boys. They’ll hear in the morning that Fix-It Benj did a flit, they’re too bright to risk hanging around the shop after that.”

  “The papers? The copier?”

  Ben carefully unbuttoned his coat and reached into one of the large inner pockets. “I’d already distributed about half of this batch. Here are the rest, if you want to do anything with them. And here’s the sensor panel of the copier – these pockets are a lot deeper than they look – and most of the electronics. The next Fixer will have to scrounge his own frame and trays though. I didn’t dare bring them with me, too bulky, and somebody might have been watching. Couldn’t leave them either. They’re sure to search the shop tomorrow.”

  The woman called Vess nodded once, sharply. “The parts you left, they’re not recognizable?”

  “What do you take me for? It would take somebody with as much mechanical genius as – well – as me to recognize them for anything but scrap. I need different clothes – dry would be a nice change – and something to warm my belly, and then I want out.”