by Astrid Amara
Tover looked at the soup bowl, the salads, and something fried on a plate, and was at a loss where to begin. Distantly he knew that, despite his lack of appetite, it had been over a month since he’d been offered food with any genuine flavor. The smells enticed him to pick up the spoon and try the soup.
His hand shook slightly, either from fatigue or the drugs. He felt embarrassed, eating while Ana sat there. She watched him closely, as if holding her breath. The intensity of her stare made him sip at the soup suspiciously.
The taste was both simple and complex, spicy but with a vibrant freshness to the ingredients. It had layers of flavor. It tasted…homemade, something he never had. Not that he could remember in any case.
Ana stared, hands pressed together.
Tover took a larger spoonful. He nodded. “It’s good.”
Ana’s smile brightened her entire face. Her big, unfitting teeth seemed to shine in the darkly lit room. “Not too spicy for you?”
Tover shook his head. “Just right.”
Ana made a fist of triumph. “You like corn?”
“Yes.”
“Jalapeno?”
“Yes.”
“Tamales?”
“Don’t know.” Tover took another spoonful. Something fragile about the taste, or the ingredients, made him strangely homesick. It tasted like someone who cared about him had made it. He closed his eyes.
“Well, it’s time you know.” She sounded breathless. Ana leaned over and hugged him. His eyes shot open and he tensed in surprise. The soup sloshed in the bowl.
She rushed from the room. Tover didn’t understand her at all. Then again, he spent little time around young women. Most of the women he knew were older, employees of the Harmony port operations, and they definitely didn’t act like her.
He enjoyed the soup slowly, savoring the flavor. As he looked around the room, he found the remote for the window fabric and turned off the shading for a glimpse of the world outside.
It was as if the house were buried under a ball of ivy.
Green vegetation strangled the building in thick vines, which were chopped from the window in uneven chunks. The clearing through this vegetation showed that plant life stretched as far as he could see. Even fields of some crop nearly as tall as Tover himself were on either side of a red clay driveway.
The sky was a pale green color, but not evenly shaded. Blue shimmered in patches from above and shifted like a living cloud formation. The air seemed to have a thickness to it, and not for the first time, Tover felt how each breath was a little harder to take here.
He couldn’t understand why people came here for holidays.
It looked hot and unpleasant. He was grateful for the rotofans above his head, but claustrophobic. Everything seemed to press in on him. He wanted to leave.
He caught movement from the driveway. A bright flash which, as Tover narrowed his gaze, transformed into a reflection of something metallic.
A gun.
Two men patrolled the driveway, dressed in fatigues. They looked a lot like Cruz—dark skin, black hair, strong arms. They appeared bored and dangerous. They didn’t glance at the window, but they did keep their focus on the house in general.
Lourdes had told Tover they were being watched.
Tover finished his soup, and munched on the rest of the offerings. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he looked down and discovered he’d polished off the entire tray. He felt full now, and less sick than before. He sat there, wondering what to do next. He couldn’t walk yet, but he was far more conscious than he’d been for several days. He kept expecting Cruz to appear, although the very idea of seeing him made him anxious. He wondered if there would be a way to contact Harmony.
His neck itched, and as he reached up to scratch the bandage of nu-skin, he remembered that he always had the choice of leaving. One orbifold, and all this could be in the past.
Tover carefully moved the tray off his legs and put it on the table. Lifting anything hurt his wrist, but it held weight without crumpling. If he could do that, he could navigate. He’d done so under worse conditions on the Jarrow ship. Nothing stopped him now.
And yet the second he closed his eyes and visualized the clinic on Dadelus-Kaku, his heart began to pound wildly and a cold sweat broke out across his forehead. Nausea blossomed in his gut. He fought back the sensation. He had to concentrate.
Tover opened his mouth and tried to activate his navigational cords. The second he did so, a living, breathing panic seized him. He looked down to see his hands shaking.
“Don’t be such a fucking pussy!” he cursed himself. He tried again.
But every time he activated his navigational cords, terror clutched him, and he couldn’t stop himself… Nausea coiled through his gut and up his throat. He leaned over and threw up onto the tasteful maroon rug.
He fought back tears. How terrible, that even this had been taken from him. He could no longer be Harmony’s top navigator if he puked every time he tried to create an orbifold.
He was worthless.
“Oh no!”
Ana rushed in, looking scared. “What did I do? I’m so sorry!”
Tover was too exhausted to tell her it wasn’t her cooking that had made him sick. It was his own fucking mind.
Lourdes came in as well, and the two of them cooed pleasantries and cleaned up his mess, chatting as if it were nothing, as if that little experiment hadn’t meant the end of Tover’s career, the end of everything.
Chapter Seven
Days passed and Tover didn’t try making another orbifold. He dealt with the impotence of his situation by alternating sleeping and eating. He looked out the window and caught daily glimpses of his kidnappers, a changing roster of men, and occasionally a woman, patrolling the driveway as if the house were a fortress.
He never saw Cruz among them. He never saw Cruz at all. The prospect of confronting him formed a rankling anxiety. He wasn’t sure how he would react when he did see the man again. He strongly suspected he’d still have an overpowering urge to shoot him.
Although Cruz didn’t appear, other men and women frequently came to the house. He heard Lourdes speaking with what Tover could only assume were patients, discussing injuries or the health of relatives with them as she led them to her office. Yet even with her heavy load of patients, Lourdes checked on Tover every few hours.
On his fifth day in her care, as Tover glanced through his open bedroom door, looking for Cruz, she must have sensed his apprehension.
“He’s not here,” Lourdes said out of the blue.
Tover hated his transparency. “I’m surprised he hasn’t stopped by to see how soon I can be sold off again.”
Lourdes sat beside him on the bed and reached for his bandaged wrist. She didn’t respond to his comment, instead firmly but carefully unwrapping the bandage around his wrist.
Tover had been on a lowered dosage of painkiller for the last two days and now felt every jostle of his bones.
Despite the fact that they were in her home and she was nursing him back to health, Lourdes seemed to have an impeccable sense of style. She wore a light pink dress, perfectly tailored to her small frame, and her hair was fashionably styled in a bun with numerous sparkling charms beaded amongst the strands. Her ever-present lace cardigan floated around her, blown by the rotofans. Tover stared at the beads to keep his mind off the gnawing pain in his wrist every time the bandage jerked against him.
“You have another son?” he asked.
Lourdes quirked her eyebrow. “No. Why?”
With his other hand, Tover pointed at the man in the family portrait on the wall behind her back. “Who’s that?”
Lourdes glanced over her shoulder at the photo, then laughed. “Oh, that’s Mario. Thank God he’s not my son. I pity his mother.” The nu-skin bandage clumped onto itself as she rolled the edges ba
ck. “Mario was Cruz’s partner for three years.”
Tover couldn’t hide his shock. “He’s in your family photo?”
Lourdes shrugged. “He was Cruz’s lover. He was family.”
Tover stared down at his wrist. Lourdes finished unwrapping the bandage and gently prodded the joint. The skin was still bruised, but the pain beneath his skin had lessened greatly, and the nu-skin had healed the lacerations from the cuffs. The swelling was almost completely gone. Lourdes slowly bent his wrist, watching Tover’s face for reaction. He winced but the joint moved freely.
“Hurt much?” she asked.
“A little.” Tover rolled his wrist himself. “Not so bad.”
“Bone knitters are very handy,” Lourdes said.
Tover frowned but didn’t tell her why he disagreed.
They sat close, watching him move his hand.
“It doesn’t bother you?” Tover asked after a minute.
“What?”
“That Cruz is a homosexual.”
“Cruz is my son,” she said. “It is who he is. He’s also left-handed. I don’t love him any less for being either.”
“He’s also a terrorist, a murderer, a liar and a hypocrite,” Tover said.
Lourdes started wrapping his wrist with a fresh bandage. “Not a hypocrite,” she said softly.
“You’re fine with the fact that your son kills people?”
“I don’t like what my son does.” She met Tover’s eyes. “I never approved of his methods. But I believe in his cause. He is trying to save this world. There is no malice in his motive.”
“Only his methods,” Tover sulked.
Lourdes didn’t answer. She finished bandaging Tover’s wrist and tucked his hand under the bed sheets. Then she reached up and stroked Tover’s head. “I’m sorry he hurt you,” she said at last. “And I won’t justify what he did.”
Tover clenched his eyes shut. Lourdes finished her examination in silence and left. But she returned a few minutes later, carrying an older-model portable screen with her.
“I’m cutting back your meds,” she told him. She put the small holoscreen panel on the table. “So you’re going to be awake more. I figure you might want to watch or read something.”
A thrill of excitement rushed through Tover. With contact to the net, he could transmit his location and alert Harmony. It was the first ray of hope he’d had in weeks.
But as Lourdes adjusted the remote power source and turned on the device, she sighed. “They’ve disabled our communications, so access is limited to our own media library. I hope you like romances, cookbooks and films about pirates.”
Tover scowled. “No.”
Lourdes shrugged. “As a boy, Cruz watched every swashbuckling film that was ever produced. You know his first word was “booty”? She laughed.
Disappointment flooded him, and Lourdes stopped smiling.
“I know it’s an inconvenience, Tover. Trust me. It pisses me off as much as you. I have to drive to the clinic in town every morning now because I can’t remotely check on my patients.”
“How is that allowed?” Tover asked. “Isn’t there some fucking government around here that can stop these terrorists from doing what they want to your communication?”
Lourdes shook her head. “You don’t understand what it’s like here. Los jefes are not our enemy. Without them, Carida would roll over and die for Harmony profits.”
“You are deluded,” Tover said. “What do you think, a company like Harmony is going to kill people? They wouldn’t do that, not only because the company has morals, but because it would be bad for business. They need a positive image. They aren’t your enemy, Lourdes.”
“Did you say the company has morals?” Lourdes looked furious.
“Yes!” Tover defended. “Their charter—”
“I know two people fired from the Harmony base,” Lourdes interrupted. “Both because of their ‘questionable moral standing’ according to their severance letters. One woman was fired because her religion prevents her from harming living creatures, and her work in the lab would have required vivisection. The other woman was fired for having a wife.”
Tover flushed. He knew all too well Harmony’s strident policy encouraging traditional family units.
Lourdes looked as if she was going to snap something else, but she clenched her mouth shut and waved her hand through the screen. It was an older model, with a simple file structure, and Tover didn’t need her to give him a tour. But she looked pissed so he kept his mouth shut. She flipped through files of films and books and games angrily, barely looking at the file images.
After a minute of tense silence, Tover said, “I don’t think you should let the Pulmon Verde tell you what to do, especially when it comes to your own house. And how does Ana feel about all of this?”
Lourdes continued to flip through screens, barely looking at them. “Ana only recently moved back with me, so she doesn’t get a say.” Lourdes hesitated. “Her husband was killed three months ago, and their home torched.”
Tover blinked. “Why?”
“He was Pulmon Verde.” Lourdes’s expression darkened. “Not everyone on Carida approves of their methods, Tover. And my son-in-law was a very brash man. But he loved Ana dearly, and she loved him. They were only married a year.”
“That’s too bad,” Tover said, although he didn’t really give a fuck about Ana’s dead husband. “What’s she going to do now?”
“I don’t know.” Lourdes smiled slightly. She looked like Cruz whenever she smiled. “I keep trying to kick her out and make her get a job, but she doesn’t seem inclined to do much other than cook, so I’m letting her do that. She’s actually a wreck, but hiding it by obsessing. She goes through various fixations. Last month she fixated on rock climbing. Before that she planted all those spotted jewel weeds and trumpet creepers.”
“So both your son, and your son-in-law, joined a terrorist group,” Tover said. “That’s a high percentage, Lourdes.”
“My husband believed in helping those who can’t help themselves. He was an engineer himself, a professor at Santa Maria College about fifty kilometers from here. He and I chose to live near the village where we could help those in need of education and medicine. We have always believed in giving back more than we received. And I taught my children that.”
“So what are you teaching them now, that you are willing to compromise your patients and your job in order to please a group of men with guns?”
Lourdes shook her head. “I wish I could explain it to you better. You need to talk to Cruz. He’s the one who understands how el Pulmon Verde work. He’s been with them since his years in college.”
“Your son is the last person I ever want to see,” Tover croaked.
“I know you feel Cruz used you, but—”
“Used me?” Tover gaped. “I trusted him with my life. He was my best…” Tover clenched his eyes shut. No. He wouldn’t say it, because it was no longer true.
He took a deep breath. “He betrayed me. And I’ll never forgive him.”
Someone laughed loudly outside the door, and Tover’s eyes snapped open. A group of people had come into the house, chatting loudly, calling for Lourdes.
Tover’s door burst open.
“Lourdes, are you in here?” a man asked. He was dressed like the other Pulmon Verde, in lightweight fatigues, sporting a bloody bandage over his right hand. But he looked hardly past puberty. At the sight of Tover he flushed red.
“Sorry! Didn’t mean to interrupt.” He backed out.
“What did you do to yourself this time, Angelo?” Lourdes asked wearily.
He stuck his head shyly back in. “I helped Soto move pallets but then…” He swallowed and glanced to Tover. “…Hey? Are you the navigator I heard about?”
Tover scowled.
Rather than backing
away, the man hesitantly moved closer. “Wow! I never met a navigator before. It’s an honor, really! So, you’re going to help us?” he looked excited.
He was very young, Tover decided, taking in his boyish features and pitiful attempt to sport a moustache. But his enthusiasm seemed genuine, and nonthreatening, despite the crude bolt gun at his belt.
“No. I’m recuperating,” Tover told him.
The man smiled. “Oh! Well, get better soon, man. You’re in the best care. Lourdes is a miracle worker. Last year she saved my fifth son, we thought he was a goner.”
Tover’s eyes widened. The kid looked like a teenager, not the father of five.
“Go wait in my office,” Lourdes instructed Angelo. “I’ll be right there.”
“Thanks.” Angelo gave Tover a thumb’s up. “Good luck, Navigator.” He shut the door.
Lourdes left Tover the holoscreen. She patted his shoulder and followed Angelo out.
Tover tried to sleep but the noise of so many people in the house made it difficult. And he still had difficulty breathing with the clips on his mouth and nose. He worried he’d knock one of them loose in his sleep. He settled instead for the mindlessness of a stupid pirate movie over brooding about his sorry state.
Lourdes hadn’t been kidding. The Arcadio family media file had over four hundred dimensional and traditional films, two thirds of which had some sort of piratical theme. Their download dates spanned a period going back to when Cruz must have been around seven, up until he was twenty. It felt strange prying into this part of Cruz’s past. Tover hadn’t really known anything about the man, and yet here he was, looking at Cruz’s childhood entertainment files. He found galleries of family portraits and even sets of Cruz’s original engineering sketches from his university years. Many elements of the files were missing since there was no net, but with this kind of access, Tover would be able to piece together an entire history of the man he had only known as a lover, and later as an enemy.
Tover chose a dimensional movie set on the exotic sands of Arcava and made himself comfortable.
Sometime after a dramatic explosion of the enemy fleet, Tover must have drifted off. He awoke hours later, the room once again bathed in murky light, the holoscreen tipped over glowing into his lap. The lamp beside the door had automatically switched on. And by the low light, Tover made out the shadows of a man, sitting in the chair in the corner.