Awakening

by Margaret Ball

  One could, though, keep one’s imagination under some control by thinking very hard about something else. Could she, for instance, remember the speech she’d read just last night, before destroying the last leaflet?

  “Tomorrow is the feast of Crispian.

  He that shall come safe home…”

  No, that wasn’t right. She was leaving something out.

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

  Will…”

  What would he do? She’d just read it….

  The king had been speaking to men who were cold, wet and hungry as well as outnumbered. If they could stand their ground in the face of a French cavalry charge, she could handle a little waiting.

  By the time the door behind her slid open, Devra had reconstructed the whole speech in her head and was going over it for the third time.

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

  And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

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

  Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors.

  Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

  But he’ll remember, with advantages,

  What feats he did that day –”

  The interrogator’s entry broke through her concentration; the words that had strengthened her flew from her mind like scraps of paper on the wind, and all at once she was very conscious of how her legs ached.

  “I don’t need to ask you any more questions,” the man said, and for a crazy moment Devra thought he was about to let her go. “We have your accomplice now. Ferit Hoja, who actually was a student of yours, I believe?” His voice said I know. “So if you’d told us that, it wouldn’t have been a lie. Well, let me save you the work of thinking up any more lies. Citizen Hoja has told us everything.”

  “Has he? Because he hasn’t told me what he was up to.” Had they really caught Ferit? And what had he said? Devra believed that he would try not to bring her down with him. He was a good kid.

  A flicker of annoyance passed over the interrogator’s face. “So he claimed. Agent Nikols apprehended him at your apartment. He admitted he was coming to see you – to explain, he said.”

  “And did he?”

  “He’s confessed that he took copies of the newest Leaflet from a shop owner and intended to distribute them among his New Citizen friends.”

  “Ferit? The Leafletter? That’s not possible.” Devra interpreted the interrogator’s words to imply more than he’d actually said, so that she was able to sound credibly unbelieving. “Look, I know this kid, he’s a practical joker but if you could see the homework he’s turned in you’d know he could no more write a coherent paragraph about politics than he could fly. He –”

  “Did not claim to be the originator of the leaflets. Only a distributor – the sort of risky task, requiring no real intelligence, that would just suit an adolescent boy.”

  “What did the shop owner say?”

  The man frowned. “He’s disapp—that is, we’re still investigating that link in the chain. But once we find him, he’ll tell us who brought him the original, and that will lead us to the Leafletter. We’re only hours away from exposing the whole subversive gang. So you need to decide now whether you’re going to go down with them, or be smart and cooperate with our inquiry. Bear in mind that there will be no lenience shown to those who refuse to cooperate.”

  Half a dozen things flitted through Devra’s mind in an instant. One was a desolate voice wailing that she was doomed, doomed for one mistake made in haste. Another thought was that the interrogator hadn’t actually promised leniency in return for cooperation.

  “What about Ferit? If he’s told you all he knows, are you going to go easy on him?”

  A quick frown. “That is none of your business. And cooperation weighs little against the fact that he undoubtedly read and handled the leaflets before passing them off to a confederate.”

  So that was that. If Devra admitted that Ferit had given her the leaflets, and that she and Scat had destroyed them, she’d be in exactly as much trouble as he. “Did he happen to tell you who his confederate was?”

  “He hardly needs to.” The interrogator leaned forward. “There you so conveniently were, with your shopping basket full of black market delicacies – half a dozen little packages to help disguise the leaflets. It’s obvious that he slipped them to you, and my fools of men let you get away with them. Now just tell us about your contacts, and we’ll be through here.”

  “My contacts?”

  “Don’t pretend to be stupid! Somebody told you to be waiting in the bazaar for the boy to slip you the leaflets. And they’re not in your apartment – your former apartment – so you passed them on to somebody else. Give us those two names.”

  “I can’t,” Devra said, quite truthfully. “I don’t have any contacts. I was shopping in the bazaar for pastry flour and preserves and other supplies so that I could make some trays of pastries for a friend’s party tonight. I guess I won’t have time to bake, now. Anyway, the reason you didn’t find any leaflets in my apartment is that I never had them. Ferit didn’t ask me to carry anything for him” – that part was true, anyway – “he just walked me out of the bazaar. Look, if he was distributing seditious literature, I’m the last person he’d have asked for help! I’ve always been a good citizen; I helped out at my crêche, I gave up a good job as a baker for Gunter’s to take the education course when my counselor told me of the need for secondary school teachers, I’ve never missed a day of teaching. My record should speak for itself.” Up until yesterday, anyway.

  “Then where are the leaflets he was carrying?”

  “I have no idea.” At the bottom of Block P’s community disposal tube, and nobody is going to be interested in reading them. “I thought you said Ferit had them.”

  “The boy claims he dropped them at random while fleeing through the bazaar.”

  Thank you, Ferit. He hadn’t confessed to planting them in her basket. Maybe she would get out of this tangle yet. “Then I suggest you search the bazaar for them. They’re probably being used to wrap kebab sticks or something; New Citizens aren’t great readers.”

  The interrogator frowned and spoke towards the holodisplay hovering over his desk. “Henrik Grigg to Minister, private com.”

  Moments later an irritated voice said, “What, Grigg, can’t you interrogate one smallish woman without calling the boss?”

  “Sir, I believe that she knows nothing helpful to us. Her citizen’s record was unblemished up to this point. It might be better to…” He turned and snapped at the guard standing in the corner. “Don’t just stand there, put her in a holding cell! I need to settle some other matters before final disposal of this case.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The holding cell had a bench. Devra thought it was the most beautiful piece of furniture she had ever seen. But some time after she sank down on it, when she could be aware of sensations other than the throbbing pain in her feet and ankles, she realized that she was desperately thirsty. Better go thirsty than take water from your enemy, Gran’s voice said in the back of her head, one of the proverbs she was always quoting. But the Bureau for Security wasn’t her enemy – was it? Every year in the crêche they’d had a civics lesson – simple for the little kids, with more detail added as they grew older. But the basic structure was always the same. The Central Committee was charged with the care of all Citizens. The Bureaus reported to the Central Committee, and each Bureau was responsible for a different aspect of life. The Bureau for Security existed to protect Citizens against secessionists, saboteurs, and other enemies of Harmony. She was no enemy of Harmony; she and Security were on the same side to that extent.

  Now all I have to do is convince Security of that. But her interrogator had sounded half convinced of her innocence – just before he threw her into this cell. Devra thought back to his last words. It certainly sounded as if he wanted to talk to his boss about her – and that he didn’t want h
er to hear the conversation. She hoped that he was persuasive enough to convince his boss.

  She was back in the interrogation room before her feet had even begun to finish complaining about standing on cold tile floors in house slippers. But this time there was a chair for her, and a glass of water, and Grigg seemed almost jovial. It was an expression that didn’t fit well on his face, and it didn’t reach his cold grey eyes at all.

  “My superior officer agrees with me that there’s no need to hold you pending further investigation; we think you’re not a traitor, but a soft-hearted young woman who made a very serious mistake yesterday. Do you understand the severity of your mistake? And do you undertake never, ever again to mislead the authorities about anything? A second such action,” he warned her, “would not be excusable.”

  Devra nodded. She felt as if she’d taken one step back from the edge of a precipice. One slip, and the water they offered her would most likely have been drugged, and she’d have awakened in the antiseptic rooms of a medical rehabilitation center. The girl who should never have existed would have turned into the woman who no longer existed. She did not want to be this close to the edge ever again.

  They hadn’t found the leaflets. That was the key. And since they hadn’t caught Ferit with the leaflets either, probably he would be all right too.

  “Just one or two little things to clear up, then,” the interrogator said pleasantly. “Your record suggests that you could have been a very good baker, if you hadn’t been needed in the secondary schools. And judging from your taste in, ah, foods of dubious origin, you’ve kept up the hobby?”

  Devra nodded again, thoroughly bemused. Did the man want to have a cozy chat about puff pastry and pâte à choux?

  “Good, good. You have a secondary skill to fall back on. Good luck, Resident Fordise.”

  “Citizen,” Devra corrected automatically. “Resident” was only used for those pitiful fragments of humanity, like the choofers begging outside her block, who could not carry out the duties of a respectable citizen.

  The man’s grey eyes hardened. “Citizenship,” he said, “is a privilege that can be forfeited. Maybe some day you will have a chance to earn yours back, Resident.”

  Devra was still puzzling over the point of that remark when the personnel flitter dropped her off at Block P. Night had fallen while she was in the windowless rooms of Security, and the first cold rains of fall were coming down. Viktorya would be furious with her – not only had Devra failed to deliver the pastries, she hadn’t even shown up for Stela’s party. But she’d understand when Devra explained. She could count on Vikki for that and much more; a friendship like the one that had developed between them in Devra’s last two years of teaching wouldn’t crumble over a minor misunderstanding.

  Her apartment door was a black hole in the wall of Block P3 South. It was standing wide open, fully retracted into the wall, and it didn’t respond to her hand in front of the reader. The lighting sensor still worked, though: Devra waved the lights on and then stood open-mouthed at the chaos before her. She’d assumed that her apartment would be searched, and thought that could only help her. They were not, after all, going to find the slightest scrap of seditious literature in her place.

  But her room had been gutted, not just searched. The couch that opened out into a bed had been slashed over and over again, and its stuffing was distributed in handfuls over the floor. At the kitchen end, pastry flour and broken eggs and glutinous thornberry jam made a sticky mess that looked as if someone had stirred it with his boot. The curtain had been ripped off the corner she used for a closet, and the shelves and pegs behind the curtain were bare. Were her clothes part of the disaster on the floor? And where was her CodeX – and the little reading light Gran had given her on her twelfth birthday – and all her baking pans?

  The CodeX was so small, it could be anywhere in the maelstrom of debris and destruction. She had to find it; her whole life was in it, pictures dating back to her first day in Gran’s apartment, all her schoolbooks and term papers, contact information for her friends; her class schedule; her favorite songs – it had to be here somewhere. She shuffled forward into the debris and began picking things up, numbly, without a plan, and putting them down again somewhere else.

  Scat wasn’t here either. Well, no sensible cat would stay around while people were ripping and tearing and breaking things. He’d probably come back tomorrow. Devra picked up a double handful of couch stuffing and dropped it in a box to take to the community disposal. Under the stuffing was a broken embroidery hoop. Well, she didn’t really need that, you couldn’t embroider smartcloth anyway. But it had been in the box of Gran’s possessions that they’d given her when she got out of the crêche, and she’d never really made the decision to throw it away.

  Scat might have taken off for some sheltered corner, but she needed a place to stay tonight. She wouldn’t be able to sleep in this disaster zone, with the door wedged open like that. Maybe Lili Partrij would let her have a place on the floor, just for tonight; she could arrange to have the door mended while she taught school tomorrow. Oh, where was that blasted CodeX with her lesson plans and a teacher’s copy of the Basic Science textbook, not to mention the whole rest of her life? She couldn’t keep searching now; Citizen Partrij went to sleep early.

  “Oh, Devra, dear!” Lili Partrij surged forward as her door slid open, and tried to hug her. The height difference meant that the top of her head rested on Devra’s breasts – Lily was a tiny woman, shrinking into old age with a dowager’s hump – but it was a kind gesture. Devra was beginning to feel that she had better be grateful for any kindness that came her way. “I’ve been so worried – that young habber was in your apartment for so long, and I kept hearing thumps and crashes and things breaking. And he left the door wide open, and you know how some people in this block are. So I just went in and collected a few of your things before those noisy children could start poking around. So they wouldn’t get stolen. You do understand?”

  “Of course, and I’m very grateful to you,” Devra said. So the damage hadn’t all been done by the habber. She felt absurdly relieved by that; such a mess hadn’t been necessary for the most thorough search, and one didn’t like to think that officers of the Bureau would engage in malicious mischief. The mixing and spoiling of her groceries looked more like the work of the Majid kids.

  Two springform baking pans and a blue plastic mixing bowl were stacked in a tottering tower on Lili Partrij’s table. A wooden spoon stuck up out of the mixing bowl, her little lamp stood beside the pans, and – Devra stepped closer – yes, there was her CodeX, its discreet black and silver cover gleaming against the dark blue of the bowl. “Oh, thank you,” she said with more enthusiasm. “I was at my wit’s end; my whole life is in there.”

  “I barely got to it before one of the Majid boys,” Lili said. “I would have liked to rescue more things but those boys, they’re bigger than I am and no more well behaved than wild beasts.”

  “Well, I’m very much obliged to you,” Devra said, picking up the CodeX and strapping it to her wrist. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to keep the other things overnight, my apartment door doesn’t seem to be working. In fact –”

  “Dear, I’m so sorry,” said Lili again, “but I’m afraid it’s not that the door is broken.”

  “I couldn’t get it to respond no matter how much I waved my hand chip around it.”

  “Well, the thing is, I think maybe it’s not programmed to respond to your ID any more.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “You had the apartment through your teaching position, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. All the teachers at Wilyam Serman are assigned apartments in Glen Estates, because it’s the closest residential neighborhood.

  “Well… you’ll want to check, of course… but I think you’re not teaching there any more.”

  “What!” But even as Devra flipped her CodeX open, she had the sinking feeling that Lili Partrij had gotten the block
gossip right this time. And she’d thought Security was letting her off lightly…

  Her name was no longer on the list of teachers at Wilyam Serman Secondary School. Somebody she’d never met was listed as being in charge of all her classes tomorrow.

  “It’s a mistake,” she said, “It has to be some sort of mistake. I’ll have to straighten it all out tomorrow… but I need a place to sleep tonight?”

  Lili was shaking her head sadly. “Dear, if it is a mistake, I’ll be ever so happy to see you again… but if it isn’t… You understand? I wouldn’t be able to live on my pension if they hadn’t given me this apartment. I’d have to go on the list for Indigent Seniors housing…”

  A remnant of pride straightened Devra’s shoulders. “Of course I understand,” she said crisply. “I wouldn’t want you to risk your own apartment. There are plenty of other places I can go.”

  But, trudging back down the stairs, she could think of only one place where she had a friend who would stand by her regardless of what trouble she was in.

  She hoped Viktorya wouldn’t be too angry about her failure to bring over the pastries.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Viktorya looked annoyed when she opened the door and saw Devra. “Oh, so you’ve finally deigned to –” got changed to, “Discord and Dissonance, Devra, what’s happened to you?”

  “It’s complicated. I’m sorry about the pastries, and about disappointing Stela. May I come in to apologize to her?”

  “She’s already gone back to the crêche. Tomorrow’s a school day, you know. I ought to be going to sleep myself, and so should you.”

  “Well, then. May I come in and sit down?”

  “Yes, of course.” Viktorya stepped back from the doorway. “But I hope this isn’t going to take too long. It’s late, you know.”

  “It depends on how many details you want to know.” Devra sank down on the couch where Stela slept when she was staying with her mother and not at the crêche. “The very shortest version is, I need a place to sleep tonight.”