Null States

by Malka Older

  “The consultants were helping him work for … autonomy?” Roz was still confused. “But why…”

  There was a hum, and they both looked up to see the crow passing to their north on its way to the compound.

  “I have to go,” Roz said. She couldn’t keep them waiting; this couldn’t be the reason she kept them waiting.

  “I knew you would leave, but I thought we had more time.” Roz had expected Suleyman to be his usual unshakable self. She wasn’t ready for this: the tremble of his smile, the emotion in his voice. “I thought I had more time.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and turned. Their hands brushed; she doesn’t know now, thinking back on it, whether she let her hand sweep out on purpose or whether he reached. Maybe both. But she didn’t look back. After that was the breathless rush to get to the compound, Amran’s unexpected tears as she said goodbye, climbing the ladder into the press of her peers, all of whom understand: you go somewhere, you stay a while, then you leave.

  Sometimes it happens this way, Roz tells herself, eyes closed and face turned against the wall so no one will talk to her. Sometimes it’s harder. But it will pass. And she lives again and again the moment when he leaned in toward her, and each time that brings her back to the question: autonomy?

  CHAPTER 31

  The SVAT crow stops twice in Kurla to drop the team members from Bangui at various locations and again at one of the rural centenals, where Maria and the last of the other team gets off, and then continues to Urumqi, where Roz will be stationed. The first thing Roz does is buy a huge down parka; the days are still hot, but the nights drop to near freezing, and she’s not confident enough in the electricity grid surviving a war to want to depend on a heated jacket. It’s autumn in the northern hemisphere, and western Asia is smoky and chilled, street corners gleaming orange with persimmons or pale yellow with sultanas against the brown-grey of impending war.

  Roz is teamed up with two SVAT members. Laurent, an ex-LesProfessionnels, was with her on the Kashmir job, the first after the election, and greets her with a hug. She’s only worked with Nerol on one other assignment and doesn’t know her nearly as well, but she doesn’t have to worry about figuring out her motivations or weaknesses. It’s not her job this time: Laurent is the team lead. Roz doesn’t care, doesn’t want to. She is still numb from DarFur, still wondering if Minzhe is actually a spy and who killed Al-Jabali and whether she fucked everything up. No, not whether: how badly.

  To take her mind off of self-blame and unsolved mysteries, she focuses on the distractingly dire situation at hand. Information has finally caved and coughed up the money to deploy an initial detachment of LesProfessionnels. They are part of a coalition of soldiers from the top eight governments, the first joint mission ever. This includes contingents from 888 and 1China, which not only bulks up the numbers but, it is hoped, may act as a deterrent to China from stomping over them to reach the K-stans. There seem to be armed soldiers on every street corner. Which is nice and all, knowing that they are here to protect her, but Roz has spent a lot of time with soldiers over the past two years. Even by military standards, these don’t look happy. Just beyond the centenal borders, two huge armies are pounding each other. It’s like watching two school bullies fight, wondering when one or the other of them is going to realize how much easier it would be to just take your lunch money. And on the other side, only a few layers of centenals to the east, waits the massive military of the remaining PRC. Roz imagines both sides like steamrollers, flattening everything before them. Getting caught in the middle is not an attractive prospect.

  The day after she arrives, Kyrgyzstan takes Ili from Kazakhstan. By the next morning, the refugees are pouring into the centenals. The SVAT teams have their hands full supporting humanitarian logistics and working with locals to prevent backlash. If Karamay falls, it will get worse.

  Still, it’s some relief to be in a place where everyone understands the stakes, where everyone agrees on Information’s role, and the very grimness of the outlook spurs truth-telling and the camaraderie of arms.

  The SVAT members work in a small office in the centenal hall and take turns making themselves available at rotating public locations to answer questions and allay fears. They sleep in a small shared apartment, bare floors and sparse fake-wood furniture. At night, they go up to the roof of the apartment building, thirty-some stories of dubious concrete in a forest of similar-sized steles, and watch the flashing across the border. They are too far away to hear the explosions, but when the clouds are right the light bounces off them in staccato leaps. They try to guess, from the rhythms, who is attacking whom.

  “Watching destruction from rooftops is a time-honored responder tradition,” Laurent says, drinking.

  “As is drinking,” Roz says, drinking.

  Later, lying in the spinning darkness with Nerol’s soft snores coming from the next bed, Roz thinks that the worst part is not her doubts about Minzhe or her failure to manage her feelings for Suleyman, but the lingering sense that it isn’t over, that she missed something with consequences into the future. Someone could be assassinated at any moment! She conjures up a government-filter globe the size of her fist and spins it in the darkness, looking for small, populist, new governments at risk of losing their heads of state. She gets nowhere but dizzy before she falls asleep.

  * * *

  In Juba Ken meets Malakal, who has agreed to accompany him to Kas and stay for a night or two while he gets settled.

  “So, you’re the guy Mishima left Information for, huh?” Malakal asks Ken as soon as they’ve taken off.

  “Um,” says Ken. Malakal is at least a foot and a half taller than he is, and now that he thinks about it, he’s pretty sure he used to be Mishima’s boss. “I think she was already leaning toward leaving. And,” he adds hopefully, “it seems like now she’s joined again!”

  Malakal glowers. Ken shuts up and looks back at the screens showing the land below them.

  The handover notes failed to prepare him for the remoteness of this place. They cruise above kilometers and kilometers of empty land, and every minute of flight makes him feel farther and farther from anything he’s ever known.

  They land directly on the office, a one-story building in the middle of a small compound ringed with brick walls. As they climb down the ladder, Ken is struck again by the wildness of it all. From this small height he can see where the city’s buildings fade into the emptiness, and the office building he expected is decomposed into cement cubes and cylindrical huts. He is pulsing with excitement, waiting for the challenges and difficult decisions to arise. Malakal points Ken toward his hut and then, once he’s put his bags down, takes him into the office to update his access and show him around the file system. After an hour or so, Malakal slaps Ken on the shoulder, probably not unnecessarily hard. “Lunch should be ready soon. Why don’t you go start? I’m going to finish up a few things here.”

  In the courtyard, Ken looks around. He doesn’t see any lunch, and he’s itching to get out of the compound, check out the market and town. He’s edging toward the gate when Minzhe wanders out of his hut.

  Ken jumps. “Man! What happened to you?” As usual, Ken has skimped on the background reading.

  “I got mistaken for an 888 spy,” Minzhe says, rubbing his jaw.

  “Really?” Ken examines his face. “Funny story, the same thing happened to me once. Although looking at you, I’m starting to think I got off easy.” Ken proceeds to tell some crazy story based in Beirut during the Information blackout of the last election, but Minzhe doesn’t seem to find it very funny.

  “You know most 888 spies are not Chinese.”

  “I know, I know…” Ken catches the tone and, a second later, the fact that Minzhe said spies, not staff. “Well. Glad you’re okay.”

  Minzhe glares. Ken retreats to the hut he’s been told is his.

  * * *

  The next morning, tired but sober, Roz takes a more rational approach to the problem. She sets up a list of g
overnments that fit the pattern of assassinations and studies it at eye level whenever there is a lull in her official duties. It’s a long list; she needs more criteria.

  She does find one possible additional case: a deputy head of state who died in an unsolved mugging in Tegucigalpa six months ago. Roz can’t be sure if Mishima missed it or dismissed it as irrelevant, because she still can’t contact Mishima, and she doesn’t have time to sort through the case details herself. She sends it to Maryam to take a closer look.

  While she’s at it, she asks Maryam to do a geographic analysis of the feeds in Kas to see if there’s any pattern to places that weren’t covered. She also sends some detailed instructions to Ken; being up on the roof last night gave her an idea for how Minzhe might have transmitted his intel if he was a spy.

  Information is staffing a refugee fair to match the newcomers with micro-democratic governments. Some of the governments have restrictions, requiring documentation on criminal backgrounds or trades and skills, but for the most part, refugees are recognized as a good bargain. Treat them well, and they will vote for you more loyally than citizens who were born in your centenal.

  The fair is set up with “booths”—in fact, spaces separated by waist-high, half-transparent projected walls—for governments to make their cases. 888 offers those who stop by a bamboo basket of helpful coalition company products (a travel tea thermos, silicone cooking pots, personal translators), while 1China soldiers do regular parade maneuvers to attract visitors to their display. Heritage sent troops as part of the coalition, but with all the recent disruptions in their government, they didn’t manage to send a promotional team, and few refugees are choosing to immigrate there. PhilipMorris has their usual free cigarette cart drawing people in to see the slick projections of their most appealing centenals. Policy1st has deployed personnel to offer individualized counseling on which centenal to move to, and—in a nice, practical, policy-based move that probably does more for them than anything else—offers child care for people exploring the fair, no strings attached.

  China has its own booth. They have long been aware of the power of population, and although they require strict screenings, their lusciously produced vid projection gives refugees the hard sell for joining the Middle Kingdom. However, these people have heard horror stories about the giant to their east all their lives, and few of them sign on.

  While the sorting process continues, the refugees still have humanitarian needs, and Laurent’s team is helping the centenal government organize the inflatable shelters and volunteer kitchens. In between the rushes of work, Roz’s mind drifts back to DarFur. She wonders what Suleyman thinks of her now. She wonders if she’s right about how Minzhe communicated his findings without being noticed by Information if he was a spy. She spins the geographic analysis in front of her eyes whenever she has a chance, overlaying it with different data patterns. And she goes back to the four—or five—suspicious death cases and looks for more similarities to add to her algorithm, wondering how much time she has left.

  CHAPTER 32

  Given the sensitivities around spies within Information, Roz was hesitant about getting Ken to check her theory, but she decided she trusts him. Also, she didn’t think he would figure out why she was asking him to look for repeaters. In this, as it turns out, she underestimated him.

  “Wait until you’re sure no one else is around,” she cautioned him, and it’s not difficult. Malakal is already gone. Minzhe hangs around the courtyard until ten or so and then shuts himself in his hut, and Amran and the locals are already in bed by then. As instructed, Ken climbs up to the roof of the office. There’s no rope ladder there now, but Roz told him where to find an actual ladder, and it’s easy enough to set up, if louder than he expected. Standing on the roof, he pulls out his handheld and takes a long, slow turn. He’s looking for a line-of-sight repeater, so he starts by pointing at one of the low hill ranges he can see out of town, the one to the south, because Roz suggested a general southeasterly direction. Nothing. Maybe he is holding the handheld at the wrong angle. When people set up a repeater, they usually program their handheld or tablet with the coordinates, so it can automatically guide the alignment. Ken keeps pinging, moving his handheld up and down in each direction before shifting minutely to his left and trying again.

  At thirty-one degrees from where he started, his ping bounces back to him. He’s so startled, he jumps and has to align all over again, but he finds it, logs the coordinates, sends them to Roz. He’s sitting on the low wall along the edge of the roof, waiting for further instructions, when his antennae twitch for the first time since he’s gotten to this low-stimulus environment. The miniscule cameras that watch Ken’s back have caught an anomaly and sent vibrations along the microfilaments that run down the nape of his neck to alert him. Ken turns to see Minzhe’s head come up over the ladder.

  “Hey, man,” Ken says, getting up quickly and moving into the middle of the roof, as far away from any of the edges as he can get. “What’s up?”

  Minzhe climbs the rest of the way up, slings a backpack off and lays it along the low wall, then walks over to stand beside Ken. “I guess you found the repeater?” he asks, looking out at the horizon.

  Ken almost denies it, but Minzhe looks both certain and, with his overlay of bruises, scary. “I was doing what Roz told me. I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “I know the DarFur militia have been scouring the hills for it,” Minzhe says, still looking away. “Poor guys. They’re amazing, you know; they just have nothing to work with.”

  “Yeah,” Ken agrees, thinking: If you like them so much, why did you sell them out? “So, um.” He edges toward the ladder.

  “The repeaters were already here, you know,” Minzhe goes on. “They’ve been there for decades. They were old walkie-talkie repeaters, if you can believe it. My mother just repurposed them for line-of-sight. She moved some of them too, I guess. Anyway. When I was deployed here, she suggested we use them to communicate. Not to spy, really, just to talk.”

  “Of course,” Ken says, still trying to get himself to the side of the roof with an exit route. “Makes total sense.”

  Minzhe is in confession mode. “Then … when I saw the guns, I was shocked. Worried. You have to understand I didn’t just see them sitting around somewhere. I saw them being used in battle.” He stops, replaying the images.

  Despite himself, Ken is interested. “You were in a battle? Here?”

  “I hacked into their closed feed and watched.”

  Ken is almost as impressed by that.

  “I was worried about my mother and her whole centenal. Not that my mother had any plans of attacking these guys, but what do I know? They could have wanted to get her or her people. Her land, right? As if land meant anything anymore. Guys with guns get crazy. And there are lots of people who still don’t want people who look like us here. So I told her, just to warn her.” He lowers his head. “I should have guessed she’d go to Information with it. She’s always been a stickler for the rules.”

  “If she hadn’t, somebody else would have,” Ken says, trying to sound reassuring and reasonable. “We would have seen it eventually.”

  “I guess,” Minzhe says. “I feel terrible about it. Not because I got beat up; I feel bad for the guys in the militia. They’re really good guys. Most of them. And they’re just trying to defend their territory.”

  “Do they really think their territory’s at risk?” Ken asks. “I mean, all their neighbors belong to the election system.” With the news compilers constantly pounding on about Xinjiang and Russia, it’s hard to take any conflict that doesn’t include null states seriously.

  “Of course it is! You don’t think the borders shift with every battle, in ways that don’t show up on Information? This hill, that tree, changing hands over and over. We might think it’s silly, but to them, territory still means something.” Minzhe shakes his head, although Ken can’t tell whether it’s over the hopelessly outdated idea of geographical size or the
micro-democratic world’s scorn. “But I should have said their people. That battle I was talking about—it was right out there.” He points into the darkness. “At that point they weren’t fighting for some empty plot of land, they were fighting to protect noncombatants. I’m pretty sure we—the Information team—would have been in danger if they hadn’t had the guns.”

  “Yeah, but … guns.” Ken’s been on the wrong side of them often enough to want them all eliminated.

  “Yeah, I know.” Minzhe deflates again. “There are plenty of legal weapons they could have used. And the more they use them, the more the others are going to think they need them, the more they’re going to use them here. That’s why I…” He still doesn’t want to say ratted them out and can’t seem to find any softer synonyms.

  Ken’s starting to get more concerned about Minzhe throwing himself off the roof than for his own safety. “Look, man,” he says. Minzhe turns toward him, throwing a hand up in irritation—Why are you bugging me about feeling crappy about this?—and Ken takes a cautious step back and around toward the ladder. “Easy,” Ken says. “I’m on your side.” Ken’s not actually sure about that, but it seems like a good thing to say.

  “What?” Minzhe’s eyes widen, and then he laughs. “What? Are you actually worried?” He laughs louder and relaxes into it. “Look, I’m going to lose my job, okay? I can live with that. I would have told Roz where the repeater was if she had just asked me.”

  “I don’t think she wanted to believe it was you,” Ken says, a little more relaxed himself but still staying away from the edge of the roof.

  Minzhe shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And, if it makes you feel any better…” Ken is frowning. “… I don’t think it was your mother who turned them in.”