Aerovoyant

by P L Tavormina

  “It’s an edge. We’ll take it, use the narrative to move a few early bills.” Leverage works both ways, he thought. Sliding the pivot was the key, and he shifted the balance of the conversation to a new fulcrum. “Imagine if opening the Martire Arels to drilling topped the agenda.”

  Zelia smiled slowly. After a moment she laughed. “We appreciate any help you can offer.”

  She believes every word I’m saying.

  “Listen, Zelia, the reason I’m telling you is because a new path to the chancellery has opened.”

  She looked at him curiously. Gullibly. And not at all surprised by his words.

  “We’ve worked for years to put the belt under provincial law.”

  “It’s been a long haul.”

  He kept his face blank and gambled. “To install di Les as a new prime chancellor.”

  She nodded.

  Prime Chancellor di Les? Like fierno. “Here’s the thing. We don’t need a new chancellor. Nabahri’s wanted more direct oversight of the belt for years. He’s only held back because the steaders would revolt if he so much as hinted at naming a new province.”

  “Yes. We need di Les. He’ll order the marshalry—”

  “No, we don’t need him. We don’t need Congress at all. The droughts, Zelia. They work for us.” Alphonse waited a moment to let that sink in, then tilted his head sideways and smiled. “You’ll never believe how I spent the summer. Look at this.”

  He held out his hands and she took them. Hers were smooth and soft, the opposite of his—dark, calloused, and nicked from one side to the other, including the scabbed gashes from Ivette’s window two days earlier.

  “Autore.” Her eyes grew wide, and she turned his hands over and back again, wincing at the scabbing. “What happened?”

  “Manual labor. I worked in the belt, even grew a beard. Mother and I needed a read on these steaders—miere, Zelia. They’ve got no water. They’re dying.”

  Her words came out in a breath. “Because of the droughts.”

  “We need two things from them—to request provincial status and to follow continental law once they do. Period. And the first naturally leads to the second.”

  She looked out the window, her eyes flitting back and forth. “That’s right. If they request it, Nabahri would agree. We make them request it. He’ll name the province.”

  Alphonse flicked a smile at her. “Can you think of anything that would encourage the belt to request provincial governance?”

  She smiled back. “Can I offer you a glass of water, Mr. Najiwe?”

  He laughed. The ease of deceiving her revolted him. There should be a better way, a way to meet minds with this woman, open a debate, work on areas of common ground, as his grandfather would have. In this moment, he didn’t see it. “We are going to get the belt, and all the oil underneath. No more waiting. If steaders think of opposing any point of law that allows you to drill, you raise their fuel prices.”

  She ran both hands through her hair, her eyes still darting back and forth.

  “You get your wish. The Prime Chancellor gets his. And we’ll convince him that new tax revenue from the belt is a good rationale to offset your rate. He’ll put corporate taxes on the agenda. It stands a decent chance of passage. Mother has ten votes in the Continental Congress already.” Alphonse considered Odile’s comments about the Vastol Vendetta and gambled again. “Or twelve.”

  “Thirteen.” Zelia leaned back. “But the other provinces won’t want to dilute their control. That was one advantage of the long path. It gives legislators in each coastal city time to come on board with the idea.”

  “Renico is the sole economic power in Renivia Province. You call the shots here. Mother will sell the idea in Delsina Province. Chancellor Nabahri can convince the Assembly in Garrolin Province.”

  She stood and paced between the sofa and her desk. “Provincial status. Those steaders get testy when it comes to their land. They’ll block exploration.”

  “The timing, Zelia. The minute the belt’s named, you’re free to drill. They’ll be too busy electing a council, choosing a seat of governance.”

  She leaned back against her desk. “This plan—it all uses rather a lot of blunt force. More than I personally like. Still, the board might agree with you.”

  “They will.”

  “Forgive me, Alphonse, but I remember you as more interested in policy than in Renico’s needs.”

  Her full attention was on him. She was really listening, offering her thoughts in exchange for his. In a flash, Alphonse saw Zelia not as an adversary, but as a person whose goal was financial success for the industry. And that was all. His grandfather surely would have debated this woman, tried to shift her priorities ethically.

  There was still no time for debate. He stood and joined her at her desk. “I’ve become more interested. The only point Mother and I are unclear on is the population of the belt. Do you have census information?”

  “Yes, certainly. In the records vault.”

  He smiled.

  They went down the stairwell to the basement. She unlocked the door at the bottom and led him into a small windowless room with yellow lights overhead.

  A man with knobby bulk sat inside, paging through a log book of some sort. Beside his desk was a heavy door.

  The man nodded to Zelia and handed her the log book. She wrote her name and Alphonse’s, and the guard unlocked the vault.

  It was enormous, extending well past the periphery of the building. With sinking realization, Alphonse’s eyes fell on row, after row, after row of shelving. He’d need to find information on pollution, the line expansion, discerning . . .

  Zelia turned back to him and seemed to register his dismay. “Right. You’ve never been.”

  It was an absolute maze. “No, I haven’t. You know, Mother and I could plan strategy more easily if we had a better handle on your resources.” He pulled a file off of a nearby shelf as he spoke. It was from the industry’s counterpart in Deasoir.

  Zelia gave him a small smile. “That’s a good idea.”

  She led him to the central corridor, her heels clicking underfoot. Small aisles branched off every few feet.

  “Everything is sorted by topic and year. It’s not hard to find something when you understand the organization. Each section of the vault has an overarching purpose.” She pointed to one portion of the room after another. “Mapping and reserves, research, personnel. You get the idea.”

  He drew a map in his thoughts as they walked. She described new extraction techniques, horizontal drilling, solvents to release more carbon from the ground. Alphonse listened, absorbing what he could, running the flat of his hand along the documents.

  Deeper into the maze, they reached the section on finance, her specialty. Files on managing the market through supply, or political pressure, through trade practices between the provinces and with Deasoir.

  An entire eighth of the vault stored data on the accumulated effects of combustion on health.

  ‘Alphonse,’ he thought he heard, ‘the scale of their impact.’

  Deeper yet, she showed him protocols. Recruitment methods, training methods, medical procedures to identify genetic traits within the population—the vision trait and dozens of others by the looks of the tabs.

  How many are there? he wondered, and his grandfather laughed. And for a brief flicker Alphonse was a strand of genetic material recombining and altering in a thousand different ways.

  He swayed and held the stacks. Seeing it all in one place, documented and categorized. “Zelia.”

  She stopped and turned. “Yes?”

  “This is stunning. I need a minute.” He leaned onto his knees, breathing slowly, running his thoughts through the mental map he’d made and solidifying his understanding of key areas of the vault. This was a climb. He needed the zone.

  As his bre
ath steadied, he remembered Odile arguing about pollution. Jack’s willingness to risk himself for Myrta, who might be dead right now because of a combination of DNA she’d inherited. He thought of his own grandfather dying alone in prison because he fought this industry’s too-rapid growth, and he thought of Eduardo and his workers on that rig. Of Ephraim Vonard and his dedication to justice.

  He tried to comprehend the vastness of this vault, tried to pull the layout of it into a single coherent thought, and at that moment, the stacks flickered into trees with yellow light streaming down. He was an ape child. No, he wasn’t. He was a fully grown ape deep in a forest, and his job was to protect the others.

  “That’s better. I’ll just make sure I’m all here.” He straightened and paced a few feet down the aisle and back, into the past and back to the present, time tied together in the ape and the man, funneling into a primal rage. Alphonse felt an overpowering urge to bare his fangs.

  He came up from behind Zelia and landed a bludgeon-blow behind her ear where his distant ancestor knew it would have the greatest effect. Zelia let out a small crying moan and crumpled to the floor.

  He stared at the woman unconscious at his feet, horrified that he’d fallen so fully into putting his own ends before hers. Surely there was a better way to change the industry than through physical assault.

  ‘Now is not the time, Grandson.’

  He turned, ran down the aisles, and pulled records. Summaries of pollution, of proposed expansions and anything to do with the belt. Files on public policy, influence into politics, the courts, law enforcement.

  He took files on profit margins and investments. On health. On spills and leaks. On genetic variants like Myrta, and on discernment. He took maps and census summaries. Racing through the maze, he pulled anything that might be of use to Odile, to Myrta, to Ephraim, to himself.

  Finally, breathing hard, he reached the door and set the folders down to straighten his jacket and tie. He picked up the stack and stepped through. The door clicked shut behind him. He set the files on the desk as if it were perfectly normal to carry out so many. “Ms. Naida’s faint. She’d like some water.”

  The guard eyed the files.

  “We’re working on the belt expansion.” Alphonse fought an urge to bolt up the stairwell. He looked for the next grip up the cliff.

  The guard stood and poured a glass of water. “Everyone gets faint in there. It’s too stuffy.”

  He needed to take this man out too.

  He pulled back and threw a punch, but the guard ducked, dropped the glass and hit back, catching Alphonse on the chin. His head spun, and black spots filled his vision. He lunged toward the man’s legs, toppled him. Wrestling, they slid into the water.

  Sinking into a sea of history, Alphonse was a blue-green bacterium, floating. He made sweet, sweet sugar from carbon dioxide . . .

  ‘Now is not the time.’

  Fighting back, his own past enveloped him. Alphonse’s hands wrapped around the guard’s throat, and he yelled, “You didn’t help Grandfather. You tried to buy him, and you never helped him!” The guard tugged mightily at Alphonse’s hands, sputtering, but Alphonse forced the man’s head back against the floor twice. It was enough.

  Staring at the man, lying there like Zelia inside the vault, Alphonse rocked back onto his heels.

  This can’t be right. Assaulting living, breathing people because they stood in his way. He felt a fleeting moment of identity with Ivette’s passions. Sickened, he stood and grabbed the stack. He dashed up to ground level and left for the training barracks.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Myrta came to consciousness on a hard surface. A thick strap bound her chest and upper arms; another bound her stomach and forearms, and a third, her thighs. Her feet and shins tingled, and pain throbbed from the back of her skull.

  People were speaking nearby. Cracking her eyes, a light overhead blazed. She jerked from the glare, but metal clamps held her head in place. Panicked, she groped at her pocket for her knife. It was gone. Oddly, other blades lay within reach, pointing upward from a tray.

  Three of those knives were long and broad. Five were short, with blades no bigger than her thumbnail. There were two syringes with short, wire-thin needles beside the knives.

  Five people stood across the room, including Odile and Melville. Floyd. Two others.

  Slowly, she moved her hand toward the blades. She wrapped her fingers around a short one, pulled, but it held.

  Bile came up and she swallowed it. She reminded herself that the only way out was to move, to find the resolve to do that, like Odile always did.

  She needed to fight. She turned her attention to the voices.

  “. . . incisions kept shallow . . . everything functional.”

  The recruits—their expressions were unnerving. One kept clenching his jaw.

  “Acuity,” Melville said. The three fiddled at their sides, and then they all—all of them—their eyes fell on her, and it felt like that first day in the back office at the inn, when she saw herself as a mistake. Odile’s expression was worse—she looked like Celeste did when it was time to butcher a goat. Grim, with empty terror filling her eyes.

  Melville’s breath brushed her face. “Hello, Myrta.” She struggled against the strap at her legs, but it held fast. If she could get her fingers to the fasteners, she might be able to work it loose.

  Melville turned to the side. “Floyd.” The younger man came over, swallowing nervously, beads of sweat on his lip. He lifted a body off the floor, limp and gagged.

  Jack!

  Melville flicked his head upward, and Floyd pulled Jack to his chest.

  Then Melville wheeled a cart over. It held canisters like the ones back in Collimais. Her head swam, the room unfocused, and she whimpered at the thought of Melville having canisters like the ones Ephraim had; the reason Ephraim might own such canisters falling into place.

  “Ah. You’re familiar with these. I’d hoped Ephraim might have played this game with you.” He picked up a canister and sprayed methane.

  When had her vision turned on? She switched it off.

  “What gas is that?”

  This couldn’t be true, where the game had started.

  “She’ll tell us.” Melville flicked his head at Jack again, unconscious against Floyd’s chest.

  Floyd pulled a knife, her knife, from his pocket. He put the blade on Jack’s forehead. She switched her vision on again—Jack was breathing.

  Melville sprayed the canister again. “We’re waiting.”

  She couldn’t get air. Floyd pressed the point of her knife into Jack’s scalp.

  “She needs encouragement.”

  “No!”

  Melville put his hand up. “That’s fine.” The tension in Floyd’s grip released, and the dimple of pressure against Jack’s forehead disappeared.

  Melville strode up to the table, released a syringe, and before she knew what was happening, he stabbed it straight into her right temple. She screamed, not from pain but shock. He released a scalpel and pushed the blade against her eyelid. “Tell me the gas.”

  Her right eye was numbing, growing cold.

  Melville turned to Floyd and roared, “Cut him.”

  Floyd gashed along Jack’s hairline, and Jack was awake and howling through the gag.

  “Methane! Don’t hurt him.”

  The recruits turned to her in astonishment. Even Odile seemed stunned.

  Melville spun on his heels, eyebrows up. He looked at the canister’s label and then said to the three recruits, “She’s right. Eight to go.”

  Jack struggled against Floyd, but Myrta focused on Melville. He sprayed a second gas.

  “Oxygen,” she sobbed, and Odile looked intrigued again, which made no sense, and Myrta’s heart was breaking. Her family was breaking.

  Melville sprayed gas
after gas, and Myrta choked her way through them. He brought the recruits up next.

  “You control her.” In their eyes, she saw glimmers—it seemed the idea of power twisted alive in their thoughts, and somehow she understood at a deeper level that these recruits were learning to feel repulsed by her from the simple demonstration of her ability.

  When Odile stood with the final canister, Myrta murmured, “No,” but her cousin looked like the others. “Carbon dioxide,” Myrta whispered. Underneath her despair, anger rose. No one even treated an animal like this, not like this.

  Melville pushed the cart away, and the recruits turned to him. He handed Odile some colored pens. “Diagram her anatomy.”

  Odile stared blankly.

  Melville repeated, “Draw her alterations on the side of her face. Just draw it. All of it.”

  Odile studied the pens in her hand. “Yes, sir.” She turned to Myrta, tilting her head as if in thought. She began to draw.

  Odile was being abused too. The thought added to her fury, that this way of thinking that Melville had, that it was being propagated, like a crop, into a new generation.

  With her head clamped, her feet asleep from the too-tight straps, her right eye unable to focus, Myrta saw abuse as an idea passed down.

  This idea needed to die.

  Odile drew around Myrta’s temple and eye socket, she used color after color. She used the entirety of the left side of Myrta’s face, all of her forehead, her cheek, her chin, down her neck.

  When she stepped back at last, Melville nodded approvingly. “You know the tissues.” Odile pushed something against her waist and her face flushed.

  Melville’s eyes raked Myrta’s face. “I keep a tradition for aerovoyants like you. Anyone old enough to understand why your trait risks us all. I doubt you have any idea how we lived before we harnessed archaic carbon. Do you know Turaset’s history, Myrta? The millennia after the founding? The centuries we spent dying? Ephraim would have us on wood fires and stone knives. We would not be able to feed people without oil and gas. We would not produce the medicines that save lives. Archaic carbon is why we survive on this world.