by John Kessel
Even if they didn’t want him. Maybe he could be of use to whoever had to deal with the foredoomed intervention. Amestris could help, if she would make the move with him. Maybe he could persuade her.
His thoughts had spun on in this way, slowly, more exhaustion than planning, really, when he was brought back by someone moving up the tunnel. Looking down the track, Erno saw a man coming their way. Long red hair, filthy with grime, and, when he drew closer and the light caught them, blue eyes. It was Val.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
IF MASCULINITY IS A PERFORMANCE, WHO WROTE THE PLAY? WHO ARE THE ACTORS AND WHO ARE THE AUDIENCE? AND WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE DRAMA’S OVER AND THE CURTAIN FALLS?
—CAREY EVASSON, Lune et l’autre
A WEEK AFTER THE DISASTER, Mira was working at a primary school that had been turned into a clinic for the injured. Ebullism and gas embolisms were common, hemorrhages, and other signs of barotrauma. Of people injured by falling debris, they had the less serious cases. When this was over there was going to be a good market for replacement limbs.
Public buildings were converted to living space for the thousands who had lost their homes. Mira had taken three survivors into her apartment: Tess Sabrinasdaughter had lost her partner, and Sabat Olgasdaugher and her son, Ryan, had shared an apartment with two other women now living in a temporary dorm. Mira was so numb, she did not care about having to stumble over strangers on her way to the bathroom.
At times she felt he was in the next room. Any minute now he would come in with a bulb of tea. She remembered his attempt at a comedy routine in the Oxygen Warehouse, mocking the idea of the untreated sociopath. The way he had looked at her, dismayed but unsurprised, when she’d lied about him at the hearing. His self-assurance, boyishness, sometimes insufferable ego. Her sheets still smelled of him, as did the old sweater he had given her. She wore it all the time, though it was absurdly large on her.
Four hours after the dome blowout a battalion of six hundred OLS peacekeepers had arrived by rocket from Apollo. To the patriarchs that might seem a nominal force, but to the Society it was overwhelming. OLS troops, sixty percent of them men, were everywhere in their black uniforms and body armor, carrying pulse rifles. Checkpoints had been established at every major pressure door in the colony.
The Lieutenant Colonel in charge, Ah Haitao, had set up headquarters in the tourist hotel, but plans were already underway to repair the Diana Tower and establish permanent OLS offices there. The tower had not suffered irreparable structural damage, and it was estimated that it could be repressurized within six weeks. The dome, it was feared, would take as long as eight months to repair.
Everything that had been alive within the crater was dead. Images of frozen trees and grass, dead animals, empty residences, offices, and schools, well lit but devoid of atmosphere, were burned into Mira’s mind. Recovery of bodies continued; currently the toll of the dead and missing-presumed-dead had reached 2,532. Of these, seventy-seven had not been found or identified, among them Carey Evasson, SCOCOM representative Martin Beason, and the investigative reporter Carrollton’s Sirius Alpha-Ultra vom Adler.
OLS investigators sought evidence to establish the perpetrator of the terrorist attack. Everyone thought it significant that the second bomb had been planted in the SCOCOM offices, but whether this indicated animus toward the OLS or that the OLS was the source of the explosion was hotly contested.
Video of Erno and Carey working together in the rubble saving people’s lives was played all over the moon. Witnesses had seen them together in the tower. Erno had warned in advance of the explosion and tried to move people into the underground. To many, these facts made them heroes, while others were not so sure. How could Erno know there was going to be a second explosion? They pointed out that Erno had occupied constables while Carey ascended to the forty-second floor.
As Looker, Mira had undergone three days of questioning and was released. Forensics had shown that she was not responsible for the BYD Incident, and in the aftermath of the greater disaster, nobody cared what she did anymore. She could hardly care herself what she did, moving through the dry hours like some expert simulation of Mira Hannasdaughter.
In the middle of her day Mira left the school, through halls decorated with children’s art, to take a break at the nearest refectory. She was drinking a cup of hot soup when Eva Maggiesdaughter sat down across the table from her.
“Hello,” Eva said.
Eva’s eyes were red, sunken. She looked ten years older than on the evening Mira, in a rage, had raced away from her home.
“Hello,” said Mira. She didn’t feel that rage anymore. She studied the older woman.
Eva scanned the crowded cafeteria. People looked like they had slept in their clothes, if they had slept at all. Two helmeted OLS peacekeepers stood at the entrance, rifles slung over their shoulders. One of them tried to chat with a young woman, who ignored him.
“All these displaced people,” Eva said.
Eva’s home was in vacuum. “Where are you living?”
“I’m with my sister and her children. She’s not doing well. Her son is still missing.”
Mira looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“We lost Hector, too.” Eva smiled ruefully. “Both versions of him. But there’s more where he came from.”
Eva’s attempt to laugh crumpled and they were quiet for a moment.
“How is Val?” Mira asked.
“He’s hurting. Roz, too. I need to thank you for finding him and keeping him safe.”
“But I didn’t save Carey.” Mira’s voice caught in her throat. “You know that he had nothing to do with this. Carey was trying to stop it, not cause it.”
“He was a hero,” Eva said, a certain bitterness in her voice. “Another story for men.” She gazed at the tables of Cousins tallying their losses, figuring their prospects. “It doesn’t matter. The patriarchies were bound to force their way into the Society.”
Eva sounded so rational, passing over Carey’s death as if it were another item to be ticked off on a checklist of political consequences.
“The Society’s over. People like me—Looker”—Mira said the name with contempt—“made it easier for them. We gave them a pretext.”
“It’s not over yet.”
Mira warmed her hands around her cup. “Seems over to me.”
“We have to do what women have had to do throughout history,” Eva said. “We’ll have to be subversive. We’ve established a system of values, myths, songs, art, stories, games, jokes. An army can’t defeat a song. We have to keep these things alive, and when the time comes, they’ll burst forth and blow all their power away like smoke.”
“I don’t know if I can believe that,” Mira said.
Eva rubbed her temples with thumb and forefinger, then laid her hands limply on the table in front of her. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can either.”
“Carey’s dead,” said Mira.
Eva stared at her hands.
“It’s just a habit with me, Mira, to be the rational Matron.” In the low buzz of conversations and the clink of silverware, her voice was hard to make out. “Sometimes I hate that woman. It’s a weakness, not a strength. That’s me. And Carey’s dead.”
Mira saw the grief in Eva’s face, and it was more than she could take. “I loved him,” she said. “I finally figured out how to do that.”
“He loved you, too.”
“And now he’s gone.”
It all came down on Mira then, the weight of the things she had done and not done, her mistakes, things she’d said to Carey and that he had said to her, her petty jealousies, her desires true and foolish, the fundamental unfairness of the universe. Images of her mother, Marco, Carey. The tears came, and once they started she could not hold them back.
Eva reached out to touch Mira’s wrist. Through her tears Mira noticed, for the first time, that Eva’s fingers were Carey’s fingers, strong and blunt.
“I
came here telling myself that it was to help you,” Eva said. “I thought I was strong enough to bear all of this. But you could help me. I need you to help me. Will you become a Green?”
Mira avoided Eva’s eyes. The soldier had given up trying to flirt with the woman. In the food line, two inappropriately rowdy teenaged girls poked at each other, bouncing on their toes, nervous with the energy of youth. Behind them, an old man scowled. Mira turned back to Eva.
“Yes,” she said.
• • • • •
The light from Erno’s helmet glinted on something in the frozen grass. He crouched, his leg protesting. A medallion. He held it on his gloved fingertips and let the light play over its surface. The enameled disk bore the image of a woman in Roman dress wearing a crescent moon crown, driving a chariot, bow slung over her shoulder.
“What’s that?” Li’s voice sounded in his ears.
Li was at his shoulder. Erno held the medallion out to him. “The Goddess.”
“Oh,” Li said, interest evaporated. He turned back to the OLS forensics team.
Erno slipped the medallion into his belt pouch and rejoined the others touring the destruction. Each footstep he took on the dead grass snapped off blades frozen stiff as crystal. The damaged sky was turned off, leaving the crater in profound darkness. In the airless space, the shadows thrown by their lights were stark. Places he had grown familiar with as a boy now stood lifeless, colors washed out in a deserted underground world like the ruins of some ancient civilization. Troy after the sack by the Achaeans, Machu Picchu four hundred years after the conquest.
Near the path to the tower his light swept over a set of broken orange wings, pinned to the ground by a fallen dome strut. A dead flyer, a young man, remained strapped into his harness, a frozen smear of blood across a tear in his neck. Erno hurried to catch up with the others.
One of the OLS soldiers accompanying them shone a powerful spotlight up the side of the tower to the place where the blast had blown open its side.
“From the looks of that, and the debris pattern, I’d say the charge was planted on the inside,” the leader of the forensics team said.
“I agree,” said another.
They entered through the lobby. A dust of frozen water vapor, already scuffed with bootprints, covered the floor; Erno was surprised that it had not sublimed away. They crossed the lobby and ascended the stairs. No one spoke. Erno listened to the sounds of their breathing over his phones, followed the jerking of light and shadow from their helmet lamps. The stairwell, encased in the building’s core, was intact all the way up to the thirty-eighth floor. There they found the railing twisted and the walls of the elevator shaft blown out. The rooms of the thirty-eighth through forty-fifth floors above them were exposed like cells of a honeycomb. As their lights played over the broken walls, Erno saw a desk listing halfway into space where the floor had fallen away beneath it. Charred cabinets, a picture hanging sideways, floor tiles, tablets, drink bulbs, and debris everywhere; exposed plumbing and wiring.
Previous investigators had rigged a temporary bridge from the stairwell to the forty-second floor. One at time the party climbed up to the SCOCOM offices.
“Careful where you step here,” the chief investigator said.
The interior walls on the east side had been blown to flinders. Some warped structural members still stood between the floor and ceiling. Beyond, all that remained of furniture and office equipment were fragments scattered against the remaining walls.
Neither Sirius nor Beason had been seen since the day of the disaster. It was assumed Beason had been in the SCOCOM offices when the second explosion occurred, but nobody knew for a fact. Erno maintained that Sirius and Carey had both been there.
That left Göttsch, Li, and himself to file the final report to the OLS. Though the intervention of troops had superseded their deliberations, the report was still necessary to justify any further action. Erno argued for an intervention of minimum duration. He wanted Sirius’s role in this—and Cyrus’s, if it could be proven—exposed.
Erno’s sending Carey up alone to face Sirius was something for which he had no remedy. He told himself that with his injuries he would have been useless. Carey was the hero type and Erno was the beta male, not the confrontational leader. Erno had watched one of the videos people were making so much of, showing him and Carey working to help those buried in the amphitheater; after three minutes he decided he would never need to see it again.
When they turned their lights toward the exterior, they saw where the glass wall of the tower had been completely blown out, but the floor and ceiling were intact. Beyond the lip of the floor, their lights disappeared in the yawning blackness of the crater’s interior.
The lead investigator ventured near the clifflike edge, illuminating the floor and ceiling. “Blasted outward,” he said. “Would you concur?”
“Yes,” Göttsch said. “This isn’t probative of any particular theory of the agents involved.”
“The bomb must have been planted inside the elevator shaft, perhaps in one of the elevator cars. A lucky thing. If the blast had occurred here, the decompression in the tower would have been instantaneous.”
“Perhaps whoever did it had no access to the offices.”
“Sirius had complete access,” Erno said. “Carey must have found the bomb and moved it away from the outside to the elevator. He saved a lot of people.”
“We are familiar with your theories,” Göttsch said. “We don’t know that Sirius was even here. Let the team do their work.”
“They’ll need to do it fast,” Li said. “Colonel Ah wants the building repressurized as soon as possible. They’re going to start cleaning this place out tomorrow.”
“That’s not enough time to complete an investigation,” the forensics man said.
“You’ll have to speak to the Colonel about that.”
Erno turned back toward the interior and poked gingerly through the fragments of material against the remaining walls. He was just thinking that they’d have to microanalyze to determine whether any human remains were mixed with this debris, when he nudged a scrap of metal and his light fell on what he thought was a sliver of bone, a centimeter long, with a bit of frozen brown flesh attached to one end.
He crouched for a moment, wincing at the pain in his knee, and listened to the voices of the others over the common circuit. He didn’t touch the bone. He felt his breath draw in and out; he imagined he could hear the steady pulse of his heart in his throat. It could be Beason. It could be Sirius. It could be Carey. A DNA test would tell them.
He brought one of the forensics people over to what he’d found. The man became quite excited and summoned his colleagues. Meticulously they took samples and recorded microvisuals with special cameras. They speculated but drew no conclusions.
Erno told them he was going back to the hotel. They sent an OLS soldier along with him. Erno and the solider, a taciturn man of about his own age from New Guangzhou, made their slow way down, then across the crater floor to the emergency airlock that had been erected near the entrance to East Seven. As he removed his helmet, Erno took care not to disturb the dressing on his forehead. The wound there would leave a scar that could be erased cosmetically, but Erno was thinking of keeping it. His knee throbbed. He had torn the meniscus; a simple nanosurgery would repair it but he had not taken the time to do anything yet.
The hotel was crowded with OLS officials. The troops had taken over a men’s dorm in this sector, but the officers were all here. Emergency workers from the OLS humanitarian agencies bustled about the lobby. Erno went up to his room, hung the Diana medallion he’d found from the light stand over his desk, and set to work on his statement for the SCOCOM report. Although intervention was a fait accompli, Erno was determined to see that the report included his observations of Sirius’s machinations.
An hour later one of the staff came to his room. “There’s someone here to see you,” the man said.
“I’m working,” Erno
said.
“I think you’ll want to see her.”
Erno went out to the suite’s lounge. The OLS security man who usually sat watching videos in the living room was not there. Instead, standing in the center of the room was Amestris.
“Hello,” she said.
Erno stood there, quite shocked. She wore a traveling suit, her hair done up under a shawl. “I couldn’t wait until you returned, and so I spoke—”
“Don’t explain,” he said, and embraced her. He held her tightly, his eyes closed. He smelled her hair. Her warm breath brushed his neck.
At last he let her go.
She touched the bandage on his head. “You look tired. Your eyes are bloodshot.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Would you have wanted me to come?”
“No.” He kissed her. He sighed. “Yes. Come with me.”
He led her back to his room. They lay on the bed and talked, and then they didn’t talk at all for some time. Erno had not realized how much he had missed her. She kissed his forehead. Erno felt more peace of mind than he had in weeks. How had she managed to get here? It was a miracle, but not a miracle. “Your father sent you.”
“He didn’t send me,” Amestris said. “I came with him.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes. I needed to see you. I needed to touch you again.” She paused. “I don’t want us to live in Persepolis.”
Erno’s hand rested on her shoulder. He perceived her anxiety, and something else—hope?
“The OLS is going to open up the Society,” Amestris said. “They’ll allow investments, free enterprise. I think we should move EED to Fowler.”
It was not what he’d expected. He’d been steeling himself to explain to her how he felt he needed to stay in the Society despite his estrangement from it. Now she was offering to give it to him without his having to appeal. It unbalanced him.