Alphonse was back in the study, his hands around his mother’s neck, pulling at her sapphires. She sputtered and her face was turning an unhealthy shade of blue.
Shaken to his core, he threw his hands back. “Mother. Autore, Mother! Are you all right?” He backed against the far wall, horrified and out of reach of her. He couldn’t be here, with her. He wasn’t in his right mind. He wasn’t in this age at all.
Still, the blood from his hand stained her throat.
“Where does it end?” he whispered. “You’ve taught me to use people, to manipulate them. I needed another way, and I’ve found it, but I love you, and I miss you. How do we get past this?”
She looked at him with guarded eyes. “There is nothing to get past.”
‘We hope for change.’
He didn’t bother to question the voice. Change was the word. Alphonse closed his eyes, seeking the zone and giving up his final shred of hope for a different future in a different place. Like the last leaves falling from a sugar maple, the sweet possibility of life elsewhere faded.
He roped in for the longer route, the one he’d avoided since leaving Sangal months earlier, the one with cologne and wingtip loafers. “I’m running for Council in the next open election.”
“It’s too late. The seat’s gone.”
“I said I’ll run.”
She stared past him. “I very much doubt you’d win without my help. We’ll write a law. You’ll run unopposed.”
Her vise clamped straight onto him and instinctively he pulled a breath. And . . . his chest relaxed. It was a strange thing, like water rushing down a mountain canyon. He breathed, deep beautiful easy breaths, fresh air from the passes. “Listen. I’ll run fairly, on my own message.”
“It’s easy to add a rider. The Council’s in session.”
‘You could cooperate,’ Stavo suggested.
Alphonse shook his head.
‘Then adversity.’
Ivette watched him. She smoothed her dress, and her eyes were no longer wide. His blood on her neck had lost its bright tint. “We’ll find a way to weight the vote. My councilors do know why they hold their seats, after all.”
‘She doesn’t understand the scale of her actions, not at all.’
She continued, “We’ll find a way to seat you.”
‘Pay attention to the scale.’
You already said that.
‘It sometimes needs repeating. The time scale, pay scale, power scale. The scale of carbon released from combustion. By any scale, we’re out of balance, Alphonse. The scale is important.’
Alphonse and Ivette faced off at their perpetual impasse. He ached, losing her, for what might well be the last time, and gently said, “It’s wrong to use power as you do. You’ve become the tool. For combustion.”
‘One event,’ his grandfather nudged.
“And they murder people. They murder innocents.” He watched her face, as intently as she’d ever taught him to do. He knew her better than anyone. Surely she hadn’t known this. He still doubted Manny’s story was even true.
But her face held indifference. “Yes, they do.”
He swallowed, hard. He took another long breath of mountain air and wondered how closely she might have been involved with the killings, what exactly she’d known, and when. He wondered if he’d ever seek to find out.
“My father had all of Sangal behind him. And even so, one single industry detained him and beat him into nothing. Delsico, Garco, and Renico—they are relevant. They’re more important than politics ever has been. I’m not the tool, the government is, as I’ve told you a thousand times. Whoever holds that tool dictates terms.”
Tremendous pain filled his grandfather’s voice, ‘There are many who have inherited this way of thinking. She . . . Alphonse, she’s very rich.’
It didn’t matter. “I didn’t understand power, or scale, before. I see it now, what needs to change. Power must return to the masses.”
Stavo seemed to smile.
“What are you saying?” Confusion lit his mother’s eyes, and something else. Alarm. “Alphonse, what do you mean by that?”
“Goodbye, Ivette.”
* * *
6 A wide range of real-world applications of CRISPR-mediated genetic modification is described in Nature Biotechnology, volume 34, pages 933–941 (2016).
7 On Turaset, genes responsible for certain traits (e.g., left-handedness) have been lost from the population altogether. Nasoirian schoolchildren find it remarkable that some ancestors on Earth used a dominant left hand, for example. A fictional list of traits engineered into the human genome is provided in Appendix 3.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Myrta pulled up onto Nathan’s wagon bed. Jack was there, checking the stitching on some of the bags. One of the reasons Terrence sold grain instead of flour was because when the stitching came loose it was easier to set right.
She outlined her plan to him.
“We’re farmers, Myrta. You’re talking about taking on a huge industry.”
“If we can find a house of refuge, things will line up.” She swallowed and forced cheeriness into her voice. “We start by getting a message to Odile. We need a house of refuge, that’s all we need to start with.”
“Odile told you about those?”
He hadn’t been listening. “No. Mama told me. So, I find one, and whoever lives there gets a message to Odile. From me. Then when she gets the pollution records, she gets me the discerning records.”
“Mmm.” He was re-sewing the end on one of the sacks. She scooted over to help.
“I want their financial records.”
Startled, Myrta looked up. It was Alphonse, with blood on his shirt, on his trousers, and along his arm. “Did you cut yourself?”
He looked at his hand. “I don’t remember.”
She hopped off and took his hand. The gash was clean, like a knife cut. “What’s going on with you? You need to lie down.”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, I have a friend in the industry. He’ll have ideas, how to get at financial records. I thought they might also have records of what they do to people like you. Do you want to come?”
She smiled at Jack. “See? We’ve got friends inside the industry.”
The next afternoon the three of them walked into Sangal City. Buildings rose on either side, sooty gray brick. Tall. Taller than anything in Collimais, than anything in the belt. The sidewalks were hard, and the people passing them kept their lips pressed tight. More auts than she’d ever seen, with streams of carbon billowing out. Myrta pulled her collar over her nose.
They turned to a side street. Alphonse had been rattling off what all the buildings were—this was a museo, that was a mail center, there was a bank, those were legal offices. She hadn’t expected how busy everyone would look. How does a person look busy by walking?
They eventually reached some homes. Some of them could really use cleaning up. Tires and things that looked like old tools lay in the yard of one. They stopped in front of a little house with a cracked window. Alphonse knocked and yellow paint flaked onto the stoop.
“Who is it?”
“Eduardo, it’s me.”
The door opened, showing a sliver of a face, then it swung wide. A middle-aged man grabbed Alphonse in a one-armed hug. His other arm was in a sling, and he had stubble on his chin and a smudge of black sauce, like they’d caught him eating.
“You came back.” He said it into Alphonse’s shoulder with his eyes closed.
Alphonse held the man awkwardly but firmly, and he was blushing. He was such an odd one, Myrta thought. So hard so much of the time, but it was plain he and Eduardo cared about each other.
They went inside, through a cramped hallway to the kitchen, and it was all rather depressing. Faded wallpaper, a can of baked beans open on
the stovetop next to a piece of partly eaten toast. A teeny window to gray brick outside. She tried to see it all as charitably as she could. It was a home.
Eduardo cleared off a few chairs. Some of his things lay on top of a counter, and the smell of the room was pungent, like the inn’s generator fuel. Myrta altered her lensing. Ring compounds like the ones off the creosote plant, those were everywhere. The air was filled with carbon rings, benzene and such. And there was a cloud of blue around Eduardo’s sling, like breath, but from his elbow.
She whispered to Jack, “His arm’s rotting.” Jack looked at her sharply.
Alphonse introduced Myrta and Jack, and then said, “You’re hurt.”
“Accident. One of the wellheads blew.”
“Autore. What happened?”
“You know what happened. They took shortcuts, skipped guidelines. They want the oil, end of story. We’ve known the valve couldn’t take the pressure. Did anyone care? It’s cheaper to keep pulling. There must’ve been eighteen or twenty citations, and they ignored all of them.” Eduardo wiped crumbs off the counter without speaking for a moment. His face drew down. “The blast killed eleven of my people. I can’t stop thinking about them. I just wanted them safe.”
“Have you been to a doctor?” Jack asked.
“There’s no insurance.”
Myrta stared harder at the blue cloud around his arm. It didn’t come off in pulses, like breath, it just hung there, near the fleshy part of his forearm. It had to be rotting. “You might lose it.”
Alphonse looked at her, and she screwed up her face, looked at him, then tipped her head at Eduardo’s sling. It was rotting, too much carbon coming from it. She could almost smell it.
Alphonse said, “Yes, you need that treated.”
Eduardo shook his head.
“Look, Eduardo. I almost lost my leg a few months ago. Even in the foothills you could get that seen to. Don’t just swallow this like some kind of misguided hero.” Alphonse pulled a piece of paper from the pile and wrote down a name and number. “Ivette’s doctor. Give them this account and her name. They’ll see you.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“Take it. You know where she gets it.”
Eduardo stared at the paper for a moment, then nodded and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “I’ll go first thing in the morning. What can I do for you?”
“Tell us about Delsico. The plant. The refinery.”
“Why?”
Alphonse’s jaw went tight. “I thought the workers’ issues were bad, but it’s worse. Their plans are bigger. They cover everything, the whole continent. They’ve got plans to change up the chancellery, the foothills, all of it. Whatever you can tell us about Delsico’s layout, operations—it’ll help us come up with a strategy.”
Eduardo let out a long, slow breath, and his eyes unfocused. “All right, but I’m mostly on the extractor these days.”
“Whatever you can tell us, it’ll help,” Alphonse repeated.
“Yeah, okay.”
Eduardo used his free hand as he spoke, gesturing, mostly pointing. “So the extractor’s a couple miles out. Pipelines bring the crude in to the refinery, on site, north of the city. The generator burns it to power the city and the manufacturing plant.”
Alphonse looked over. Myrta nodded. It made sense.
Eduardo continued, “Pretty soon, not just the city. New lines are going in. Out to the foothills.”
Jack whistled. “The length of those lines—how’s that possible?”
“Di Vern’s promoting it. He says it makes jobs.” Eduardo rubbed at his bad arm. “He’s right. But it won’t be quick, and his actual goal is holding his seat.”
Alphonse leaned back in his chair. “Wiring the continent. That sounds like it could be Ivette’s idea.”
“I don’t know. Di Vern, he always has his own motives. He has a habit, you know. He always has, saying one thing and meaning another. I don’t know, Alphonse. It sounds like his idea to me.”
“Do the foothills want wired electricity?”
“Not as far as I know.”
But none of what they were talking about had to do with the discerning program, and none of it would get them any proof of it, at least Myrta didn’t see how. She said, “If someone was recruited to work for Renico, is there a way to speak with them? Is there a way to visit?”
Eduardo frowned and shook his head. “Not easily. Recruits sign a financial obligation up front, a sort of indenture to cover training and supplies, that sort of thing. They’re sequestered until that’s paid. It takes a while. Longer than you’d expect.”
Alphonse leaned toward his friend, his face intent. “There’s a girl. Young woman. New recruit. She wanted to work in records, wanted to get at the pollution data. She said she knew how to get assigned there. She’d be safe enough, right? It’s not like she’s on an assembly line.”
Eduardo was shaking his head slowly. “Recruits are assigned based on what they can handle. She won’t pick her assignment.” He said to Myrta, “Is she young, like you?”
Myrta nodded.
“She’ll go on the line. No question. She’ll do a simple task ten hours a day. She’d only go to records if she had a physical disability, like she was unable to stand.”
Alphonse raised his voice. “But she said she knew what to say. She said she’d be in records.”
His face was breaking. It looked like his very heart was breaking.
Holy heavens, he cares for her.
Thinking back, of course he did. That’s why they spent so much time together, back at the inn. Why Odile was so angry after he left. They were in love. Myrta found herself smiling. In a strange way it helped, knowing Alphonse cared for someone in her family.
Eduardo shook his head. “She’s on the line.”
On the line. If Odile wasn’t in records, she couldn’t just walk into some room somewhere and poke around for information. Myrta mulled it over while the men spoke. Maybe Odile had met someone in records, or maybe Eduardo was wrong about the assignments.
He slammed his fist on the counter, bringing her attention back.
“—every year. Now, if a new recruit is connected to someone important, say you, Alphonse. If you went to Delsico, you’d go straight to sales. You’d have an office in the city and not know anything about what goes on at the plant.”
“That’s not all the assignments,” Jack said. “What about handlers and discerners?”
Eduardo raised his eyebrows. “How does a farm boy know about discerners?”
“There were two in Collimais.” Her words came calm, and Myrta realized she must have come to terms with things. Melville didn’t frighten her as much as he once had, probably because she was finally doing something about it all. “They’ve been out to the belt too.”
Eduardo rubbed his face and forehead. “Sounds like they’re ramping everything up.” He pushed away from the counter, began to clean up the beans and toast on the stove. Myrta went over to help. He said quietly, “A long time ago my mother was on the Council. That’s how I met Alphonse, because of his grandfather, Councilor di Gust. My mother worked with di Gust before he was locked up.”
Myrta looked over to Alphonse and wondered again who this handyman, this logger, this city man was. But he was holding his face in his hands.
Jack looked perplexed, and Eduardo sounded none too solid himself. “The way they brought di Gust down. Jailing him on bad charges, wrapping it all up in legal talk about the economy when anyone with any sense could see that protecting those ranges is better over the long term. When I was young I thought I’d go into politics, but it started to look like a bad career. You write good law and someone sends you to jail for it. As crazy as it sounds, going into combustion started to make more sense. You know, like if you want to change things maybe it’s best to go to the heart of the prob
lem.” He laughed without humor. “I thought I could make the industry accountable from the inside. I started in sales, managed the line for a while, then the extractors. But I was wrong. I was wrong about changing any of it.”
Alphonse moaned quietly.
Eduardo had more to say, and Myrta wanted all of it. He was giving the sort of open-book accounting she’d always wanted from Ephraim.
“Discerners,” Eduardo said morosely. “You know. I started hearing the rumors. About what they do to the people they find. They take their eyes. They cut out their bloody eyes! And when you hear that from enough people in enough places, you start to wonder. You can’t help it. And then you start to believe it. At this point, I’ve come to believe they’d cut the eyes out of combustion science itself if they could. They’d make the whole world blind sooner than take responsibility for the harm they do.”
His words fit everything Odile had said.
“Some of the payouts from the company don’t add up. There’re a few buildings on site that no one has access to, things like that, and they make zero sense. Eventually, discerning was the simplest explanation.”
Alphonse’s voice was rough. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Alphonse. You had a hard time believing the little things. And discerning sounded like a myth at first. When I . . . learned.” His head tipped down, making it hard to hear. “It’s just that . . . people have a remarkable ability to ignore all sorts of atrocity. We always have, back to the beginning.”
After a still moment, Eduardo took another deep breath. “My mother put everything into di Gust’s defense. Everything. All her money, any favor she could call in, all of it. In the end he died, and she was voted out, penniless. Di Les holds her seat.”
Alphonse’s head was twitching, back and forth. Eduardo went around the counter to him and pulled up a stool. “Alphonse, what they did—”
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