The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Graal shrugged. “They know we have more people than food. That is why they made the offer about the slaves, I think. I mean -- slaves -- who cares about them?”

  “Some of them might have the same ancestors,” Glaive said dryly. “There is something important you both missed. Something that speaks to your theory about visitors from the Big Moon,” he told them.

  “What, Viceroy?” Yourel asked.

  “They knew Togan was coming, they knew when and where it would be and they ambushed it. Either someone in this camp told them -- or they have radio as well.”

  “They couldn’t understand us,” Graal said fiercely. “We only transmit in code!”

  “Perhaps... but if nothing else, they could tell a weak signal was growing stronger. Personally, I think someone is listening to us on the radios. There are other nations with radios, don’t forget. Perhaps one of them has beaten us here.”

  “If any of them had weapons like the short one has, we’d all be dead,” Yourel stated harshly.

  “Aye, that’s why I think you might have something with the visitors from the Big Moon idea. That means we have some important information that has to be communicated back home. It has to be, at whatever the personal cost to the three of us, no matter how many lives are lost here. We need to find a way to get the transmitter out to Abna without the barbarians knowing about it -- they are surely going to inspect us as we leave, and if they know about radios, they will know what to look for.”

  Graal smiled. “I can see to that, Viceroy!”

  “You can?”

  “Aye, sir. We will triple wrap it in oiled canvas, and then we will add some other bits of oiled canvas to help float it. I have two men who are divers off the Sea March reefs -- they use air skins over their heads to help them stay under water longer. When it gets dark, the two of them can go down to the water with the transmitter and swim out to sea with it. If there’s time, we can do the same thing with the receiver.”

  “Do it. Yourel, tell them we agree. We take our weapons, food and a bag of personal items for each person. Be sure we conceal the spare parts for the radio among those personal items.”

  * * *

  Kris woke up with a start. She remembered the blackness and opened her eyes, afraid she had died. She looked around, recognizing the small infirmary that they’d brought the Tengri girl to.

  She turned and saw her mother a few feet away, talking to another woman, both of them wearing hospital scrubs. “Am I okay?” she asked. “Or have I messed up off-world travel for all time?”

  Her mother hugged her tightly for a second, then smiled at her. “You gave me a little scare, my dear, but then you’ve done it once before, when you were six.”

  “What did I do when I was six?”

  “You had to have your tonsils out, and no matter how much I plied you with stories of all the ice cream you could eat after the procedure, all you were fixated on was that they were going to cut part of you out. The night before you were to go to the hospital, you had an asthma attack -- just like you had yesterday.”

  “Asthma? I don’t have asthma!”

  “Well, yes and no. To be honest, no one really has a good grip on what exactly causes asthma -- even if we can describe what it is. Your bronchial tubes contract and you can’t breath. Treatment is a bronchial dilator and, in severe cases, adrenaline.”

  “Adrenaline?”

  “You bet. You weren’t awake to see what the injection does. It’s really cool -- every hair on your body stands on end.”

  “You think that’s cool?”

  “Even the fine hairs on your arms,” her mother said, chortling. “It looks really cool. It’s not good for you, but it’s not that big of a deal.”

  “Asthma?”

  “Yes, stress induced I think. Stress is a known risk factor for asthma attacks.”

  “Is that girl okay?”

  Her mother laughed, which Kris thought just one more bizarre thing. “What?” she asked her mother.

  “Conundrums, my dear, conundrums. Say you’re the President of the United States. Say a slave-holding refugee, one who survived white men massacring her family and friends, shows up one day on your doorstep, battered and bleeding.

  “Then the doctor on the scene, a cruel vindictive bitch who wants to nail your pecker to the nearest wall, tells you that the refugee needs to be in a hospital. Just what do you do in this PC world of ours, where absolutely nothing makes sense any more?”

  Kris sagged back on what she realized was a gurney. “Is that doctor anyone I know?”

  “Your father chortles at me, reminding me of one of his favorite aphorisms -- a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. They tortured me, Kris, they tortured me for no reason at all. I know they had a reason to be upset with Linda, but breaking both of her legs -- I’ll never be a liberal again. Never.” She laughed, still bitter. “Of course, I’m not going to be a Republican either, but that’s another story that can wait for later. Let me check you over.”

  Instead, the other doctor moved forward and did the examination. From behind the doctor examining Kris, her mother said, “Kris, meet Dr. Billie Reid, here to help us, sent by our friendly government. The poor dear has had a bad day, not being able to come up with a better diagnosis than asthma.”

  “It could have been an allergic reaction,” the doctor said absently, as she listened to Kris’ chest. “The symptoms are functionally identical.”

  “Of course, except she got sick on Earth, in a clean room. Go figure. And when we used the standard treatment for asthma, by your own order, she improved. The adrenaline confirmed the diagnosis.”

  “We will wait a while and see,” the other doctor said darkly.

  Helen Boyle laughed. “You know, Kris, Billie here is praying that you break out in suppurating boils and bits and pieces start to fall off. But, as much as I make fun of her, she’s a good doctor -- and an honest one. I think she just wants to treat someone with something totally new.”

  “Has she looked over the girl?”

  “Oh yes; yes, indeed. We both have. It was funny to watch Billie. The President ordered Diyala -- that’s her name, I’m told -- to be taken to Cedar-Sinai, which has adequate facilities -- except he just sent a regular ambulance. Poor Billie here nearly had apoplexy on her own. They had to get to fetch a special military vehicle with Cat 5 containment capability for Diyala and transported her in that. Then they had to wait an hour, trying to figure out how to get her into the hospital, because they hadn’t bothered to put her in a containment suit first. The Keystone Doctors -- I do believe Billie should have been left in charge. In the end, they sent Diyala back.”

  “They’re idiots,” the other doctor agreed. She turned to Helen Boyle. “I know you think I’m an idiot, too.”

  “You’re helping them, aren’t you?” Helen said bluntly. “So, yes.”

  “I’ve spent my life training to deal with alien organisms -- and with nary a thing to work on. Now, all of a sudden, I’m offered the promised land. Like you’d have said, ‘No,’ yourself.”

  “Dr. Mengele used that as a defense and was hanged anyway,” Kris’ mother retorted.

  “Mom -- how is Andie? Ezra? Kurt and Jake? The others?”

  “Ezra and Kurt are still on other side of the door, working with the local King and his sidekick. The bad guys are slowly loading their ship, preparing to depart. I’m not sure what Jake’s doing, it has something to do with a marathon poker game and taking people’s money away from them.

  “Andie and Linda are in a private room in the containment facility here and are getting to know each other better. Your father is on his way to Sacramento to explain to the governor that California would be far better off with fusor technology than without.

  “Otto Schulz is alive and kicking and has figured out a way to be with Andie for his last days -- he’s agreed that his body should be cremated, and he’s going to be brought here later today. The President has gone to the Supreme Court to enjoin him
from doing so -- who knows who will win that battle?

  “Outside is chaos. I mean it, literally. Linda started this thing of live reporting, and she had someone with a camera near the beach when Andie was negotiating with those Tengri people. It looked like a scene from a bad movie, Kris -- Andie started killing them. I mean, she killed more than a dozen of them. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but she demanded something from them and they didn’t respond. So she killed them.”

  Helen looked at her daughter. “Kurt and Jake explained to me that you had to do what you did in self defense... but Andie...”

  “Mom, Andie is far more peaceful than I am,” Kris told her. “You say you’ve been mugged. Mom! You have no idea what it’s like there. It is what life was like on Earth before modern times. Most people then -- and here -- think that might makes right. In fairy tales you can sit down and talk to people and make it all come out peacefully. How do you talk to someone who, given half a chance, would put chains on you, and kill you if you didn’t obey their every whim after that? And Mom, I talked with the slave girl I rescued. That’s every whim, Mom. Every last single one.

  “That woman’s owner punished her by forbidding her to eat dinner, then he raped her a few times, and he was going to kill her when he woke up. That’s what they’re like. Maybe, at some point in time, we can make some sort of peace with them, but that attitude has to go.”

  Her mother started to speak and stopped, turning pale. “I was just going to say, ‘Who is to say which culture is better?’ That’s just stupid, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty much. Even the people we made friends with -- they had some bastards too, out for themselves and screw everyone else. I saw a man kill his king, because that king wanted his army to kill me. It’s given me a lot to think about.”

  “You should try spending some time in jail,” her mother said.

  “Well, I did spend a night in chains.”

  Her mother grimaced. “Not..”

  “No, prison shackles.”

  Her mother sighed. “Being in a cell with Linda Walsh was educational. Your father is a nice man, but really -- I’ve factored in his political beliefs ever since we met and I barely pay attention to them -- until recently.

  “Linda told me that people like myself, liberals, progressives or whatever we call ourselves, are beguiled by intentions, and that so long as someone assures us, like our current President has, that his intentions are good, we’re not supposed to be interested in looking further. We ignore results, because we believe all it will take is an adjustment of the details to get it right.

  “She is, she told me, a rocket scientist. In her world, good intentions don’t build spaceships. They might get you started, but to actually build a spaceship you need to show reliable results. I watched them torture her. Oh, God, Kris, I’ve never been more ashamed in my life! Towards the end, I was begging them to take me and not her. She would laugh at them, and no matter what they did to her, she didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.

  “I spent days and days doing nothing but crying. Crying in frustration, crying in agony for what that young woman was going through. I still don’t understand how someone could have the courage to do what she did. The two times they beat me, the questions they asked me were stupid and there was no way to answer them. Finally I realized that they just wanted to beat me, to humiliate me, and couldn’t care less whether or not I answered or what I said.”

  Her mother laughed bitterly. “After that, I would give them my name, my job title and my social security number and nothing else.”

  “It’s been an exciting summer,” Kris told her.

  “It has been. I’m sorry about the house.”

  “It was a nice house,” Kris said sadly. “But you have to remember it was nothing you did, it wasn’t anything I did and for that matter, it wasn’t anything Andie did. They did it to please themselves and to hurt us. It was little people doing little things, to paraphrase Ezra.”

  “Amen,” Helen replied and turned to the government doctor. “Well, Doctor, do you think my daughter will survive the rest of the night without medical supervision?”

  “I believe that there is a reasonable expectation that she will,” Dr. Reid said with a laugh. “She can probably sit with the others in quarantine as well.”

  “And will it reset their quarantine clock?” Helen Boyle asked the other doctor.

  The woman shrugged. “We have enough of a baseline already to know how pointless that would be.”

  Not very much later Kris joined eight men in the quarantine area. There was laughter and exchanges of comments and experiences.

  Kris was happy to be at home with such men, far happier than she’d ever been before.

  All of the other things she’d done in her life, all of the other things she’d ever contemplated doing in her life didn’t begin to hold a candle to stepping through a blue door with a Far Side someplace else.

  It wasn’t going to be an easy life, and it certainly wasn’t going to be something that would suit everyone.

  She focused on one thing. There were people like Ezra and Jake who knew how to deal with things like they were on the other side of the blue doors. Both of them freely admitted that they were only journeymen, that the masters were officers. And the officers they respected the most had a special cachet, and many of them had been to a particular school.

  She pulled Kurt Sandusky away from the poker game and spoke to him, looking him right in the eye, “What would I need to do to get into West Point?”

  Chapter 25 :: Think About This

  Kris was reading a book on military tactics when Kurt Sandusky knocked on the door to the women’s quarantine quarters. She put her book down and got up. “What do you need, Kurt?” she asked.

  “Kris, do you have a minute?” Kurt asked her.

  She looked up at him and shrugged. “I have three days and four hours.”

  “I’d like to talk to you,” Kurt told her.

  “If you want,” she said dispiritedly. “Is the day room all right?” She waved at the door at the other end of the room she was in. That was the sleeping quarters. Currently only Andie and Linda were in there, and Kris was fairly certain that they weren’t sleeping. Her mother and Jo Christensen were up and about doing their various and sundry things.

  He nodded and the two of them started down the hall to the public recreation room.

  “You said that you were thinking that you might want to attend West Point,” Kurt told her as they walked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, yes,” she replied.

  “It’s the middle of September, you know. They start in the middle of July,” Kurt told her.

  “So? I have, if nothing else in the last nearly four months, learned patience. That’s ten months from now. If I can do a month of quarantine, I can wait another ten months or so to start college.”

  “You’ve gotten steadily quieter and more withdrawn as our time here nears completion,” he observed.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she told him. The day room was empty, which brought a raised eyebrow from Kris. “Where is everyone?”

  “They are making themselves busy so that we can talk privately.”

  “I’m not sick, Kurt.”

  “I never said you were. But something is bothering you.”

  “I keep thinking about this summer, I keep thinking about what I want to do with my life.” She turned to face him squarely. “Nothing in my life prepared me for reality, Kurt. I didn’t play with toy guns when I was growing up -- Andie learned about weapons from her father, but I didn’t. Movies -- all I’ve seen and heard was in movies, TV, and an occasional book.”

  She looked at him. “I’ve heard my father talk about self-defense all my life. But for him, it was a theoretical exercise. My mother is still shocked that I’ve ‘hurt people’ as she describes it, because the reality isn’t something she can believe.

  “I was there, Kurt; I do believe it. I just... the
more I think about it, the less I understand it.”

  “Americans have always struck our enemies as insane and conflicted,” he told her. “We beat the living crap out of them, we bomb their cities flat, we slaughter them in droves -- and then we go in and heal the wounded and sick and patch up or rebuild the things we’ve destroyed. No one, Kris, no one in the entire history of the Earth, has done that sort of thing before. Before, if you had someone down, you either killed them or stole them blind.

  “It really confused the hell out of the Japanese when one second we’d be trying to shove a bayonet into one of their soldiers, and then the medics would come along and try to fix him up. It was the reverse of what the Japanese would do: if they thought you’d fought well, they’d cut your head off. Otherwise, they just shot you.”

  Kris looked at him. “I guess that’s it. I can’t make the mental leap from high school student to high school graduate who had to defend herself by killing others. And, by the way, rescuing a few stray kittens on the battlefield.”

  Kurt nodded. “We’ve told Melek and Collum a couple of times that we’re looking after Diyala. They think we’re going to pump her dry and then kill her.”

  Kris shook her head vehemently. “Never! You and I killed her mother, her aunt and uncle and her cousins -- and hundreds of others of her people.”

  “I know. Like I said, the US fights a different kind of war than anyone else.

  “Back to the question at hand, Kris. It would be a slam dunk to get you into West Point next summer. Now -- well, like I said, they start in July. We could get you in now, but there would be a lot of resentment because they spent six weeks of physical torment during the summer.”

  “And I didn’t?” she said, smiling for the first time in a while.

  “Like I said, it could be done, but there would be a fair amount of resentment no matter how you spent your summer.

  “Did I mention that after two years at West Point, and I’d should emphasize the ‘two years’ because they don’t take the summers off, you have to make a choice. Bail or stick it out. If you stick it out, you owe the Army two more years of college, five years of active duty, and three years in the inactive reserves. Right now because of Afghanistan, the reserve duty has been frequently extended beyond three years, and it’s been pretty active. It’s a serious commitment, Kris. I tell you true -- you can pretty much get out of it by saying that you want to get out of it, but no one from West Point or any military officer after that would have any respect for you at all. None.