Awakening

by Margaret Ball

  “Emergency override. You have mail.” This time the simulator sounded distinctly smug.

  “All right, all right.” Devra scanned the messages that had been coming in. They were all from SecHead Grigg, demanding she report to their meeting place to update him on her discoveries. “Oh, not now!” she wailed. She had to have time to get her thoughts straight first. Could she claim she’d never received the messages? No, but she could say she’d left her CodeX at the café, which did happen from time to time. Then what? She thought through the necessary steps. Go back to café for evening shift. “Find” her CodeX on the shelf where she usually put it when up to her elbows in water or dough. Send Grigg an apologetic reply and point out that she couldn’t slip away inconspicuously during the rush of evening costumers they usually had nowadays. And she could honestly claim that the same was true in the morning.

  That gave her twenty-four hours to think up something to tell him.

  Beep. Beep. BeepbeepbeepBEEP! “You have mail!”

  Devra grabbed her spare tunic and wrapped it around and around the CodeX to muffle the beep, then tucked the whole package under a pillow. Maybe now she’d be able to think about her real problem.

  If Mikal had been telling the truth, Esilia had been populated by the sort of people who got sent for medical rehabilitation now, and came back with most of their minds destroyed. People like her and Ferit, if they hadn’t been lucky. Devra felt that she would much rather be sent to a hot, dry country full of smelly thorn bushes and argumentative, backward young men than go into the chemical-smelling wards of a rehabilitation unit.

  So if Esilia welcomed such people, and if they wanted to go to Esilia, and… there was a final piece to the puzzle. Devra couldn’t quite see it. Didn’t want to see it. Couldn’t she leave it at that? Just say, all right, some of the history she’d been taught might not have been quite accurate?

  No. She’d started thinking now, and she couldn’t make the ideas and images clamoring in her head stop. That tired, frightened countrywoman with her exhausted children, who had somehow disappeared from the café without Devra’s seeing them go. And before that there’d been a pair of young men who also vanished when she wasn’t looking; she hadn’t thought much of that at the time, but they weren’t regulars. She’d never seen them before or after that one night. She only remembered them because that was the other time when there were no broken meat pies or half-eaten scones for Scat.

  Mikal and Vess suddenly, surprisingly, giving her evenings and mornings off after both of those quiet disappearances. The feeling that they wanted her to go away. Lights burning late in the rooms above the café on those nights – rooms that were usually behind a locked door at the head of the stairs, and nobody had ever given her the key to that door.

  Mikal’s surprise and alarm that morning, the first time Devra had been in their upstairs quarters. The strange way Vess had calmed his fears, with that odd emphasis to her words.

  What had she seen that could upset him? Nothing much – only the odd proportions of Mikal’s messy room. The wall between his and Vess’ room was at the head of the stairs, so you’d expect the rooms to be the same size. Why was his so much smaller?

  And among the piles of clothes on his floor, Devra remembered now, she’d seen something that looked like an abandoned rag doll. She had assumed it was an illusion made up of the way the clothing had been tossed, because it was so incongruous.

  Devra dropped onto her own bed and put her head in her hands. It was so obvious. Mikal had been right, she hadn’t been using her mind.

  University education, she thought with a rueful smile, and teaching only the known science that had not changed since Harmony was settled, had gotten her out of the habit of observing and thinking; it was so easy to just go along accepting what you were told by people who knew better.

  Baking was different. Enough liquid in the dough on a rainy day was not nearly enough on a dry one; synthegg wasn’t a perfect substitute for real eggs, so if you had to use it you wanted to alter the rest of the recipe; you had to pay attention to the feel of the dough and make minor adjustments as you went along, or what came out of the oven wouldn’t be your best work.

  Baking was, in a way, much more tied to reality than higher education had been.

  It had gotten her back in the habit of noticing little things and making little adjustments, of remembering what hadn’t quite worked yesterday so that she could improve on it today. And as well, seemingly, it had gotten her in the habit of noticing people and words and trivial-seeming actions until a story rose up out of those well-kneaded ingredients.

  And, Devra told herself with a sense of relief, that was all it was. A story. A concoction of dropped words and careless comments and odd behavior, with no actual evidence supporting it at all. She didn’t have to tell SecHead Grigg that Vess and Mikal were arranging to smuggle political dissidents to safety in Esilia; she didn’t really know it. What she’d observed so far was not enough to support her suspicions, and certainly wasn’t worth reporting.

  The thing to do was to put off meeting in person with the SecHead for a week or more, while she collected some hard data. For one thing, she really needed to know how occasional customers quietly disappeared, and what happened to them after that. If they went from the Green Cat to an Esilian ship in the harbor, how did they get there?

  Devra decided to use her afternoon break – what was left of it – in checking some of Mikal’s more outrageous assertions. She reached to tap her CodeX and stopped mid-gesture. Right, it was under the pillow and it had better stay there until she reported in for evening shift. What she had here was Mikal’s Esilian reader, which she couldn’t use to connect with the infonet, and – worse – even having the thing was probably good for a second count of possessing seditious literature. And she could hardly dispose of this one in Scat’s litter box.

  Oh well. It wasn’t like anybody ever came to visit her here. She might as well read some Esilian-written histories and amuse herself finding the logical fallacies and missing events that proved they were lying. And when she went back for the evening shift she could give Mikal back his reader and point out the errors that had to be there.

  She started with something called, “A short history of the Esilian Nation,” which was… well, as a novel it would have been gripping reading. Devra had never realized how hard life had been for the first exiles, trying to grow their food in a desert land. She felt like cheering when the account got to the Third Deportation Ship. A dissident in the capital who was still free had loaded his e-reader with texts on irrigation and desert farming and everything else the new continent needed, and then bribed a sailor to smuggle it on board the ship for him. He was caught and arrested, but not before the e-reader had disappeared inside the ship. Interrogated, he confessed to the bribe but insisted he’d been paying to get better conditions for a young friend who was being deported. That story hadn’t held up for long, but Trevanian had refused to tell his interrogators anything else. After some serious efforts to beat the truth out of him they settled for sentencing him to be deported immediately on the ship he might have been trying to sabotage. The author of this history didn’t dwell on the interrogation, but the simple statement, “Trevanian never fully recovered from the beatings received after his arrest,” made her think they should have put up a statue to the man – oh, wait. The Trevanian Gardens in Travis must be a memorial to him.

  She stopped, shocked, at the beginning of a chapter headed “The New Citizens and the End of the Colony Debt.” How could there be such a thing, when Harmony still suffered to make the annual payments?

  She skimmed the pages. The story of the arrival of the New Citizens, that pitiful remnant of survivors from a failed colony, and of Harmony’s generous welcome to them, was all as she remembered. There was just one surprising addition to the story. ”As compensation for the expense of absorbing these indigent and uneducated colonists, the remaining debt owed by the colony of Harmony was forgiven.”


  A tap on the door made Devra jump in shock. Automatically she pinched the reader to collapse it into a thin rectangle and slid it underneath her pillow next to the CodeX bundle. Why today, of all days, would somebody come calling on her?

  As soon as the door slid open, the silver flash of a Habber suit gave her a clue to the answer. “Section Head Grigg sent me – wow. Like the new look. Brings out your eye color.” It was the shorter habber of the two she kept encountering. “He’s been sending urgent requests for an update for hours. Why haven’t you responded?”

  Devra glanced at her wrist and feigned surprise. “Oh! I must have left my CodeX at the café.”

  “Why would you do that?” He was moving closer to her than she liked.

  “And I’m going to be late for evening shift,” she said, with no good idea what the time was, but as an excuse to step out of her room before this man came in, made himself at home, found the Eselian reader. As the door shut behind them Devra stifled a very small sigh of relief.

  “The CodeX?”

  I was distracted by a reader full of seditious literature. Devra swallowed that answer and substituted another one, more generally true. “I’m a baker, remember? I spend half my working time up to my elbows in yeast dough or puff pastry or muffin mix. You can’t do that with a sensitive electronic instrument on your wrist. I’m always having to put it on a shelf in the kitchen, and I guess this time I just forgot to get it when I went on break.”

  The habber looked her up and down and seemed to accept her explanation – which was true enough, except not exactly for this one occasion. “All right. I’ll walk you to work to make sure you don’t forget to answer your messages.”

  “You can’t do that!” Devra exclaimed. After her first, instinctive reaction of fear she thought of a perfectly good reason. “Why do you think the SecHead told you to come here instead of looking for me at work? How much do you think they’ll trust me at the café if they see me strolling to work with a habber beside me?”

  “Oh. How far is it?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “The SecHead believes in keeping information in separate little boxes. I think that’s why he keeps using me; I don’t report directly to him – in theory, anyway, though I seem to be doing a discordant amount of it lately – but on the org chart, my immediate boss is like a layer of separation between Grigg and me. So anyway, he told me to wait for you at your lodgings, and he told me not to go to the café, but he didn’t tell me where this place I’m not supposed to go to is located.”

  “Oh…” The habber was being awfully chatty. For a habber. Was he trying to draw her into some dangerous admission? Security is making me crazy. Or Security is making my life crazy. Or Security is crazy… The multiple layers of meaning and possibility made her head spin. How did people spend their whole lifetimes as spies and not lose their minds? She fastened her own mind on dull, apolitical facts. “Well, the Green Cat is quite close – about half a block that way, you’d be able to see it from here if the street didn’t curve. So you should go away now, before I’m seen with you.”

  “Is it really a hotbed of dissidents and saboteurs?”

  “I’ve seen nothing like that,” Devra said firmly. “Just a couple of people working very hard to make a go of their business. Even if they are Esilians, they don’t actually have tails.”

  The habber grinned at her. On a habber’s face, above that silver uniform, the smile was disturbing. “And you’ve investigated that too, have you?”

  “Go. Away,” Devra said. Huh. I guess that’s a side benefit of being Security’s spy; I’m not afraid to be rude to a habber. But I’m afraid of Grigg, and I need time. “Oh, and tell your boss’s boss that I can’t possibly come in for another interview tomorrow or – well, for several days, probably. My boss sprained her ankle badly and I’m working extra shifts until she’s on her feet again.” No need to mention that the sprain had happened over a week ago and that the main thing limiting Vess’ movements now was her and Mikal yelling at her for overdoing it. She turned and marched down the street without waiting for the habber’s response.

  Lukas lounged in the lodging-house doorway, watching the girl. From the way she moved, she probably had a very neat and tidy figure under that shimmering, sea-colored tunic; she certainly had a nice complexion and smooth, shiny dark hair. And killer blue eyes, now that she’d learned to dress in colors that emphasized them. He wouldn’t in the least mind chatting her up and learning more about the – what was the name of that café? – Oh, yes, the Green Cat. Maybe he’d go there some time. In civvies. Just to talk. The way his thoughts had been running lately, it was probably safer to talk with Esilians than with respectable Citizens.

  ***

  Devra finally unwrapped her CodeX at midnight, after her usual shift of serving customers, replenishing the baked goods display, cleaning up after closing, and preparing for the next morning. She dictated a brief message to SecHead Grigg, saying much the same as she’d told the habber.

  “And I hope he’s sleeping with his own CodeX next to his ear,” she told Scat, “and I hope he’s set the notifications volume up so high it’ll wake him!”

  ***

  Some days later, not having heard from Grigg and not having seen any more customers vanish, Devra was almost able to convince herself the crisis had been all in her imagination. Of course Mikal and Vess weren’t smuggling fugitives out of Harmony, they didn’t have time to do anything so complicated and dangerous while trying to run a café whose business had doubled since she started working there. And of course SecHead Grigg would accept her statement that there was absolutely nothing surreptitious going on there; he must have had some doubts in his own mind or he wouldn’t have planted her there to spy on Vess and Mikal.

  She returned Mikal’s reader, but developed the habit of borrowing it every afternoon when the café was closed. She’d stopped reading history when she discovered poetry. The early Anglic of the writing was confusing but she’d “done” some of the poems in school; the school versions were flat and rather dull but at least she was able to tackle the originals with some idea of what they were about.

  “The cold queen of England is looking in the glass,

  The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the mass,

  From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,

  And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is smiling in the sun.”

  That sent her on a detour through ancient history, which was almost as hard to understand as the poetry.

  Others were virtually incomprehensible, but the sweeping glory of the language carried her along.

  “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”

  At least she could puzzle out the meaning enough to understand why she would never have seen a modern translation. Fairy tales and fantasies were just as bad as any other form of superstition; Harmony children were taught to learn facts, not to dream dreams.

  Somehow this attitude no longer seemed as unquestionably right and good as she’d always believed it to be. Facts were important, but what was wrong with a little dreaming on the side?

  And then there came one of those days when everything that could go wrong, did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  They were almost out of butter; on her last marketing trip, the dairy shelves had been almost empty and rather than waiting for them to be restocked she’d bought just enough to get by for a few days. If she prepared her usual amount of puff pastry dough that evening, they’d be completely out. Devra dared to interrupt Mikal’s puffy-eyed morning trance – he was only on his second cup of kahve – to ask him to go over to the nearest community market and buy several pounds of butter. At least, she thought, this time it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Maybe he’d appreciate the good sense of price controls when they were saving him money.

  The first batch of sweet rolls went into the lower oven and came out scorched; the ones in the upper
oven were fine. The single tray of sour cream muffins, in the lower oven, took far too long to bake, and even when they were too dry on the top they were still soggy in the middle. And that was the last of the sour cream, and she hadn’t asked Mikal to get more. If only the retro idiot would wear a CodeX she’d be able to message him now, but no… he had a coms device he called an Xphone, which wasn’t connected to the Harmony system, so Vess was the only person who could reach him. Devra left the message with Vess and went back into the kitchen to check on her thornberry scones. She’d put those in the upper oven, and they came out golden and perfect; she broke one open to be absolutely sure.

  “Good news is, it’s not my yeast,” Devra said aloud, around a bite of scone so full of preserved thornberries that it had almost broken itself open spontaneously.

  “What’s not your yeast?”

  Devra, startled, inhaled crumbs and went into a coughing fit.

  “Here, drink some water.” Vess went to the sinks, hardly limping now, and came back with a tumbler of water which she pressed on Devra. “I only came in to tell you I got hold of Mikal and passed on your message. I didn’t go to startle you like that!”

  “I know – you didn’t,” Devra explained between coughs and sips of water. She drank the rest of the water and washed the last of the crumbs down. “I’ve just got used to hearing you coming. You know. Thumping the cane and cussing under your breath. Now I have to get used to you being back to normal. Oh, and you were wondering about the yeast? It’s not the yeast.”

  “I think this is where I came in,” said Vess. “What’s not the yeast, and why is that the good news?”

  “Remember those sweet rolls I made a couple of weeks ago that were such utter disasters? I thought either the yeast was too old or I’d set the oven wrong? And then after that everything seemed normal again, so I kind of forgot about it.”

  “So when you say it’s not the yeast, you’re telling me it is the oven?”