by Sarah Zettel
“I wish I could say it was on purpose, Sister Trust.” The cop, Regan, gestured at the free chair.
Mom sat without her spine bending an inch. Teal stood next to the chair, gripping its arm with both hands. She glowered at Chena, and Chena shrugged back.
“How should I take that remark, Constable?” asked Mom.
Regan’s long face relaxed, just a little. “Not all that badly,” he said, and Chena felt a little better, until he started explaining to Mom where he had found Chena. Mom listened closely, her forehead furrowing, one deep wrinkle at a time.
When he had finished, and Mom’s forehead couldn’t bunch up any tighter, the cop turned back to Chena.
“So, Niece, you were just about to tell me what you saw?” His eyebrows lifted in innocent inquiry, but there was a challenge in his gaze, as if daring her to lie or leave something out while her mother was watching.
Anger bubbled inside Chena, but there was nothing she could do. She described, as best she could remember, the half dozen people she had seen in line, and the crying baby. He shuffled through his record sheets and occasionally imprinted a marker against a note to refer back to later, but she could tell from the way his face tightened that she wasn’t telling him anything useful.
Good, she thought with sour satisfaction.
The cop was not the only one who didn’t like what she was saying. Teal kept staring at Chena with a smoldering anger Chena couldn’t figure out. What was her bug? It wasn’t like she missed out on anything particularly good. Then again, Teal always figured if Chena didn’t take her along, whatever it was that happened must have been good. Chena sighed inside her head. She’d have to help tell an extra long story later to make it up to her, or she’d be whining at Mom for days.
“Is there anything else we can do for you, Constable?” asked Mom when Chena finished her story. She planted both hands on the chair arms and was getting ready to stand.
The cop frowned at his record sheet. “No, I’m afraid not.” He stood, and so did Mom. Chena managed to push herself to her feet without wincing. Teal took Mom’s hand like a little kid, peering at Chena from behind her with that same glaring anger.
Chena just shrugged at her again, but Teal had already turned away, her chin tilted smugly upward.
They left, with Chena tagging along behind.
“Mom—” she started to say.
But Mom didn’t let her get any further. “I cannot begin to tell you how angry I am with you, Chena Trust.”
Chena swallowed. Here it came. Mom walked another few angry strides before she turned on her oldest daughter.
“I get home from my first day on my new job, and I find your sister down by the dock, practically in tears, saying you had not come to meet her and that you’d probably been dragged off to be chopped into bits. I look for you in the dorm, and you are not there. I look for you in the dining hall and the library, and you are not there. Where do I finally find you? In the superior’s office for having attempted to get your hands on an illegal substance!”
“No, Mom, that’s not what happened!” Chena took two steps forward, pleading. “I just wanted something because I hurt, that’s all. I was told I could get some aspirin up there. I thought she was a doctor!”
Mom’s face didn’t soften a bit. “And who told you this?”
“Sadia, but she’s okay, Mom, she really is.”
“Did she warn you where you were going?”
“No, but—”
“Then she is not okay!” Chena cringed from the force of Mom’s shout. In the next second, Mom straightened up and pressed her hand against her forehead. “I’m sorry, Chena, but you had me extremely worried. This is the second time in as many days you’ve wandered away I-don’t-know-where, and this time when you specifically promised to be there for your sister.”
“I didn’t mean to be late!” Even to Chena the apology sounded wispy, but it was all she had.
“I’m sure you didn’t. But you should be aware you are breathing very thin air right now, young lady.”
Chena subsided. There wasn’t much else she could do. She looked over the rail, down at the darkening village. It would be evening soon and all the living roofs were dimmed and edged in gray.
“Teal, will you do me a favor? Will you meet us down in the dorm’s common room? We’ll be right there.”
“Okay, Mom.” Chena turned in time to see the smug sweetness on Teal’s face as she trotted obediently away.
But Mom didn’t give Chena much time to be angry about it. As soon as Teal was down the nearest set of stairs, she met Chena’s gaze. Her eyes had sunken in behind a pair of dark circles that hadn’t been there when they had left the station.
Mom studied her for a long time. Chena didn’t know what she was looking for. She kept thinking Mom would speak, but she didn’t. She just turned away again and rested both hands on the railing, watching the river below them slip between its mossy banks.
Chena felt her chest tightening as she tried to guess what Mom would say. Would she be grounded? Would she say Chena had let them all down? How much better Teal was acting, even if she was just the baby? Would she maybe say something about Dad? Or how long they’d have to stay here?
“Why are you doing this?”
The question was so soft and so distant that for a minute Chena wasn’t sure Mom was talking to her. But she turned her head and focused her tired eyes on Chena. Chena dropped her own gaze and shurgged. She didn’t know what Mom wanted to hear. She didn’t even really understand the question.
She heard Mom sigh. “Let me rephrase. What do you want to do?”
Chena shrugged again. “I don’t know. Get out of here.” The words were out before she knew she was going to speak them, but she knew at once they were true. “Go somewhere, somewhere that’s not planned or scheduled.”
Mom nodded slowly. “Show you something.” She jerked her chin in toward the center of the village.
“Okay.” Chena followed her mother along the crooked network of walkways until they came to a gap in the trees where they could see the four gleaming rails stretching away into the forest.
Mom pointed down at the rails. “I found out yesterday that you can rent pedal bikes that run on those rails. They let you ride down to the next town, Stem, which is on the shore of a major lake. In fact, it’s where the dirigible came in. There’s a market there, and a theater.” She faced Chena. “You give me one solid month of absolutely perfect behavior—no wandering off, no reports of being late or being where you’re not supposed to, no complaining about sleeping in the dorms or public bathing, no going off with this Sadia when you’re not sure what’s going on, and at the end of it, you can take one of those bikes out on your own. If that goes well, we can make it a regular thing. Do we have a deal?”
A month. A whole pissing month… but at the end of it, a little freedom, some time out from under. Maybe there’d be a chance in there to keep her promise to herself, to find a way to help Mom and to get them free of the fear and the debt, a way to get them all out of here.
“Yes. Deal.” She saluted her mother, and Mom saluted her back.
Around them, the twilight forest bloomed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Forces
Menasha, you shouldn’t have brought them here.”
“So, tell me, Respected Commander, what should she have done with us?”
Commander Beleraja Poulos looked down at the speaker. Malnutrition had stunted him during childhood. Infection had taken his right arm up to the elbow. Thanks to Menasha, she also knew the man had once had three children, all of whom had been left behind, their ashes scattered on the winds of a world called Koh-i-Noor.
Beleraja saluted the withered headman. “Forgive me, Father. I spoke without thinking.” She grasped Menasha’s elbow and propelled her fellow shipper up the battered access corridor and out the airlock into Athena’s tarnished docking bay. Menasha, wisely, kept her mouth shut until the ship’s outer hatch slammed shut behind
them and they both saw they stood alone among the angled lighting panels and jigsaw of colored sound-dampening squares.
“Where was I supposed to take them?” Menasha demanded, pulling her elbow free. “You were closest. Their jump engines are fried. They were trying to make it through normal space.” Menasha’s people had found the ships puttering along, barely two kilometers from each other, making a long slow creep through the real-space vacuum. The vessels themselves were five hundred years old if they were a day. The founders of Koh-i-Noor had hung on to them in case of emergency, instead of scavenging them for parts or selling them to the Authority, which was what most of the Called had done.
That emergency finally came.
“Their ancestors thought they were so lucky,” Menasha had told Beleraja when they first got in. They stood on the silent, battered bridge staring at the screens, half of which were not working, the other half of which were showing dubious readouts. “They’d found an unclaimed world that was a full seven on the compatibility scale. Earth-sized, one big moon for stimulating winds and tides, more water than land, sugars and proteins in the local biosphere that humans could digest, and a microsphere that could handle human wastes and assist human crops.”
Their original thousand settlers had spread out, claiming acre after acre of land for their families. Feuds split the group into fragments, which scattered as far from each other as they could. Storms took some, winter took others. Crop and mine failures forced those who failed into the service of those who succeeded. While all this was going on, the microsphere ate what it was given and started on its own campaign of divide and conquer. When the local diseases were ready to begin their major assault, the storms, the winter, and the droughts didn’t think to stop so the settlers could deal with the new disasters.
The skilled died too fast to be replaced. Machinery broke down and could not be repaired. The survivors decided that the freedom their ancestors had sought was not worth any more lives. They reboarded their ships before they lost all ability to fly them.
Sympathy and frustration pulled Beleraja’s thoughts back to the present and to Menasha calmly facing her in the empty docking bay.
“It’s another four hundred people!” Beleraja flung out her hands. “We have a deal going with Pandora that we will keep the refugees away from them.…” Beleraja let the sentence trail off as she watched Menasha’s gaze shift sideways.
Beleraja had not seen Menasha Denshyar since she had apprenticed with the Denshyar family’s fleet. They’d kept in touch when they could, leaving each other notes at various communication stations. Like Beleraja, Menasha had risen to be the matriarch of her family, as well as commander of their fleet. She’d done well by them, even though she had decided they would spend their time trading information and goods between the Authority cities rather than between the Called worlds.
More time trading between the cities—the thought repeated itself to Beleraja. What were they even doing out this way? Pandora was a long detour if the Denshyar fleet was heading between Atlantis and El Dorado, which were the two closest cities.
Oh, no Mena. What have you gotten us into? “What were you thinking?” she asked again.
“I was thinking of saving lives,” snapped Menasha, but Beleraja heard the hollowness under the conviction.
Beleraja gave a short, sharp sigh, a sound her children had learned to be wary of when they were young.
“How about this, then: What’s the Council of Cities thinking?” she demanded, folding her arms.
Menasha shrugged, but still wouldn’t look at her. “It’s been ten years.”
“By the burning name of god.” Beleraja hung her head. “You’re here to put pressure on Pandora.”
“Ten years, Bele,” repeated Menasha, real heat rising in her voice. “Do you have any idea what it’s like out there?”
“No, I don’t,” snapped back Beleraja. “Because I’ve been stuck in this tin can for the past five years instead of out with my family. I’ve been here trying to keep things going between the Authority, all the Called, and Pandora.” She swept her hand back toward the corridor. “This place is jammed to the gills. We’ve got ships out turning away everybody we can, but people are still sneaking in. Director Shontio is tearing his hair out. I’ve been trying to keep him cool, but he’s under pressure. There’s a really good chance your refugees are going to be stuck in their ships, especially if they can’t pay the air tax.”
“You should tell the Pandorans,” replied Mena calmly, “they’ll have to take more people down to the surface.”
Beleraja shook her head. “Not likely.” She remembered far too clearly the complete indifference on their faces when she’d sat at the end of their conference table and talked about the plight of the Called. Indifference that had turned to sheer horror when she had threatened them with colonists landing on the pristine world.
“Then they’re going to have a problem, aren’t they?” Menasha cocked her head toward Beleraja, and Beleraja knew the Council of Cities did not have to work very hard to convince Menasha to take this assignment. “And maybe this will just be the first problem.”
Beleraja turned away, her chest heaving and her fists clenching and unclenching. Was the council out of their minds? They knew, they knew that this was the work of years. What under the wide black sky were they thinking?
They were thinking they had not seen enough results from Pandora. They were thinking all the reports and assurances might be bogus. They were thinking of the settlements on another five worlds that had failed in the last city-measured year. They were thinking that if there weren’t enough worlds to sustain all the Authority shippers, the shippers would move back to the cities, which might not be able to take care of them, because those cities depended on the goods the shippers brought in.
Beleraja took a deep breath and turned back around.
“Mena, take them to Atlantis.”
An expression of sincere regret crossed Menasha’s face. “I can’t.” Beleraja blew out another sigh, a long, slow, disappointed one this time. “You mean you won’t.” Because you’ve been paid to help pressure Pandora. Mena, how badly did you need the goods?
“I can’t,” said Menasha sharply, as if she’d guessed Beleraja’s thoughts. “Atlantis won’t take them. They’ve already said so.”
It took a moment for her words to penetrate to Beleraja’s understanding. “Why not?” she asked, her forehead furrowing. “Atlantis needs new blood. The cities are losing people just like the planets are.”
“And it’s making them extremely reluctant to allow in anybody who might be a new vector for infection.” Menasha folded her arms. “They are all remembering how quickly that plague spread across Old Earth.”
“All right, all right.” Beleraja waved her hand weakly. “I’ll try to smooth it over with Director Shontio. Maybe we can find room for them.” She turned away, heading for the hatch to the stairway.
“Bele,” said Menasha hesitantly. “The council did not put you here to make things easy for the Pandorans. You’re flying right past the mission goal here.”
Beleraja did not look back. “No, I’m not.”
Leaving Menasha to take that however she chose, Beleraja cranked open the nearest stairway hatch and stepped through.
As ever, the stairway was crowded. The stair shafts had always been the equivalent of public parks for Athena Sation, which had never been designed for full-time residents. The air was heavy with the smells of disinfectant and warm humanity. Men and women stood around talking, children ran up and down the stairway between the adults, or sat in clusters playing games with balls or cards. Adolescents slouched against the rails looking tough and disinterested, hoping someone would notice how tough and disinterested they were. The voices blended into a single rush of sound.
All long-term inhabitants of artificial environments tried to make their enclosures more like an open world. Since Athena lacked space for more than the occasional potted plant, parks and groves were
out of the question. So its inhabitants had taken to keeping small animals: dogs, birds, ferrets.
Some of the people recognized Beleraja as she passed. They saluted and hailed politely as they stepped aside for her, pulling their children and pets out of the way. As always, however, not all of the gestures were polite greetings. That was something else she’d gotten used to during her time here.
Between the regular traffic, another set of people lined the stairways. Some of them held out begging cups or empty hands. Most of them, though, only huddled on their blankets in the middle of their bundles of belongings. Beleraja didn’t want to stare, but she couldn’t help glancing down. Mostly they were normal human faces—all the shades of brown, beige, and pink, tight with embarrassment, worry, or embattled dignity. Here and there she saw tumors, drastically shortened arms, a twisted foot, or an enlarged head and sunken eyes. There she saw an old man trembling and trying to hide it under layers of coats. Here she saw a child let its head fall onto one side as if the child lacked the strength to hold it upright. A hunched, pale woman, probably the child’s mother, caught Beleraja staring and glowered at her, looking like she might spit if she hadn’t known it was forbidden.
Refugees. Beleraja’s family fleet patrolled the best jump points around Athena looking for the ships as they came in. But that meant covering hundreds of millions of kilometers of space, with only ten ships and a limited array of beacons and satellites. All the Called knew that Pandora was working on the cure to the Diversity Crisis, and many of them decided not to wait until that cure, whatever it was, came out to their ravaged worlds.
Beleraja had gotten Director Shontio to ram through a policy of giving temporary shelter to those refugees who could pay at least for their air and water. Much of her time was taken up in arranging with shipper families to take these refugees to whatever surviving worlds would have them. What surprised and frightened her was how few worlds would take anybody, even with their own populations on the brink of extinction. They feared importing yet more disease, many of them said. But some would not bring in anyone who would not convert to their way of life. They would die before they let in strangers.