Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  “Doesn’t matter.” Galen brushed her concern away. “Wife or widow, Ditani’s got to show off her figure for the male viewers. And you have to admit that particular dress makes a lot out of a little.”

  Jillian nodded. “Actually makes me look as if I’ve got a cleavage, you mean. Ok, you’re the director.”

  She stepped into the dress and carefully adjusted its deceptive neckline, dropped a smock over the costume, sat down before a set of mirrors and began applying her own makeup.

  “Jilli, I can do that for you,” protested their cosmetician.

  “Never mind, I like doing it myself.” It was their regular pro forma exchange, and true as far as it went. There was no need to mention that Jillian didn’t care for Pol’s style in makeup; he applied creams and colors so lavishly. She didn’t really need much making up for this part; she’d been chosen because, by some accident of fate or genetics, she actually had the perfect oval face and stunning profile of an Inner Circle lady after generations of genetic selection. And she wanted everyone to be aware of that. Even Love for Living wouldn’t last forever, and Jilli hoped to use her looks to keep getting well-paid and prestigious parts after the holodrama’s demise.

  “You know I like to use my own makeup,” she said now to placate Pol. That was true enough. Jilli had never cared for the idea of someone painting her face with sticks that had just been used on somebody else’s face, and with what she earned as ‘Ditani Stavros’ she could easily afford her own cosmetics.

  She kicked off her street shoes while the hairdresser was manipulating her pale blond hair into what she recognized, with amusement, as a copy of the style Liya had been sporting at the DelPlato party. The show’s stylists were always on top of the latest fashion; it wouldn’t do for ‘Ditani’ to look dowdy and unfashionable.

  Although it was, apparently, perfectly acceptable for her to wear a smartsilk gown with next to no back and the illusion of plunging cleavage, the week after Stavros had ‘died.’

  “Shoes!” Galen reminded her.

  Jilli put that off for a moment. “Is Charley here yet?” Rather obviously not; he’d have been fighting her for the best mirror. “I’d just as soon wait until he gets here.”

  Galen had a mania for putting her in the most extreme and uncomfortable shoe styles he could find. When she’d pointed out that the camera never showed her feet, he’d claimed that the shoes she was wearing affected far more than her feet. “When a woman’s wearing fine shoes she walks differently, she feels fashionable and confident. Everything about her appearance is affected by the shoes.”

  “No time,” Galen said. “We’re going to run through the scenes without Charley in them.”

  There weren’t very many of those in this episode. With the best grace possible, Jilli put on a pair of high-heeled sandals with straps going up her legs until they vanished beneath her dress.

  It was true that when she stepped into one of the sets she immediately felt more like Ditani, but she didn’t think it had anything to do with the ankle-breakers Galen made her wear. It was the illusion of light and space and luxury; never mind that the light was due to bright lights transmuted to an artificial daylight look, or that she knew perfectly well the deep-cushioned sofa upholstered in smartsilk had been a leather sofa in a bandit’s den in its previous incarnation. The illusion was all; Jillian fitted herself into the illusion and became Ditani Stavros, new widow, heart breaking not for her dead husband but for his opponent.

  Charley still hadn’t shown up by the time they’d made several recordings of each scene for Galen to pore over and edit into a convincing whole. Nor had he responded to increasingly irritated calls to his CodeX. Jillian was actually feeling a bit worried. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “So do I!” Galen exclaimed with more feeling than she’d expected. Is he actually human? But that hypothesis was dashed by his next words. “Writing two major characters out of the show in two episodes would upset the viewers. And we can’t afford to pay the writers for completely new scripts for the entire rest of the season.”

  The studio closing early meant less pay. But it also meant getting home sooner; things were difficult when she had to be away all day. And she wouldn’t have to waste a shopping day; she could go to the market, call at the Bureau for Security to see if there was any news of Tomas, and still be home earlier than expected.

  After two hours, mostly standing and walking in what Jillian rhetorically called “Ditani-boots,” her good old flat street shoes felt like feathers caressing her feet. Walking to the market would be no problem at all. She tied her hair back and wiped off the makeup; being recognized as the star of Love for Living would just mean that shopping would take even longer, and it was bad enough as it was. As she strode along the pavements, she shook out the two super-compressed shopping bags she always carried in a pocket. It was a pity Trisha never felt well enough to stand in line; using her ID, they’d have four shopping days a week instead of just two. Oh well, it couldn’t be helped. Probably the line wouldn’t be as long as it had been last time: there’d been other problems that day, some markets had closed early, so more people came to the one Jillian used.

  The line was even longer today. People, alone or in groups of two or three, formed an irregular serpent of humanity that ended around the corner from the market. As she reached the end of the line, a convulsive movement ran through it; everybody shuffled a few steps up. The woman in front of Jillian, obviously a person of forethought, heaved herself out of her folding chair and pushed it up to the new end of the line before sitting down again.

  An old man with a tray slung from his neck hobbled up and down the line. “Limon, freezies, gum!” he called out every few steps. “Fresh cold limon, freezies two for one!”

  Jillian wondered how he kept the freezies and lemon drinks cold, then registered the two barefoot urchins running back and forth between a portable chiller and the old man’s customers. When he nodded to the boys, they picked up the chiller and moved it to another section of the line.

  “Wait a minute!” she called to the boys. Two freezies for a silver was a good price… these days. “You have blue ones? I’ll take two.” Freezies all tasted alike, a sort of generic-almost-fruit flavor, but the blue ones made her feel cooler.

  It turned out to be two freezies for a mark. She wondered how much the vendor was making by the deliberate ambiguity. Oh well. She was a star; she could afford to overpay for a freezie.

  She could even afford to give one to her neighbor, the woman in the plastic chair. Because obviously, in this heat, she couldn’t consume both frozen treats before they melted; the sticks were already shedding blue water on her hands.

  “Thank you kindly,” the woman said, sticking the freezie in her mouth and slurping up all the half-melted slush in one go.

  After tasting hers, Jillian wasn’t sure she deserved thanks. The treat had no flavor at all, not even synthetic fruit, and it clearly hadn’t been frozen long enough or it wouldn’t be reverting to slush already. She’d planned to distract herself from the boredom of waiting by making her freezie last a long time, but now she was forced to consume it all before the line even moved. Her neighbor’s instant slurp technique might be unlovely, but it worked.

  “And what are you in line for?” Jillian asked the woman.

  She cackled. “Anything they have, sweet. Anything they have. What I don’t eat myself, I can sell on to a free distributor.”

  She meant the black market, where goods routinely sold for ten times the price-controlled community markets charged. Jillian was momentarily shocked that she was standing behind one of the greedy profiteers whom the newsers regularly denounced – but not shocked enough to pick a fight with someone who would be next in line to her for an hour or more.

  Her restraint stood her in good stead, as the woman enlightened her about what might be found in the market today. Things had changed since Jillian’s last shopping day, three days ago. Bread was no longer to be found, or if it was, it wa
s from the baking four days ago and too stale to be worth buying. Jillian would do better to buy flour to make her own bread. There was still cooking oil, and some fresh produce to cook in it. Vat meat – Jillian controlled a grimace. The stuff was so flabby and untextured, it made her think of meat-flavored jelly. But apparently the ham hocks she’d bought last time belonged to the last shipment of real meat to come in from a cooperative. Of course there would probably be another one tomorrow or the next day, but that wouldn’t do her and Trisha much good.

  Beans, Jillian decided. Beans and cornmeal together made a complete protein, and Trisha could watch the bean pot simmer if Jillian started it before going to work. She was less optimistic about bread making, but decided to invest in a couple of pounds of flour and some yeast.

  That turned out to be a wasted decision; by the time she reached the front of the line and held out her hand for an ID scan, neither wheat flour nor yeast remained on the shelves. She splurged on a bag of soft plantains, bought the two pounds of corn meal and one pound of dry black beans that were all she was allowed to purchase at one time, and – after tedious mental calculations – invested the rest of her grocery budget in cooking oil, which for some reason was unrationed today. She caught herself thinking that she could always sell it on to a “free distributor” or trade it for other food. The two hours of standing in line had definitely weakened her moral fiber.

  Her shopping bags were heavy, and she didn’t have the energy to go by the Bureau for Security to ask about Tomas. Maybe she didn’t need to; maybe a com call would be as good as a personal visit. Or maybe, she told herself, he had finally got leave and was at the apartment right now!

  That hope was wearing threadbare by now. It had been more than two months since Tomas had asked Jillian to move in with her pregnant sister-in-law, more than three weeks since they’d heard from him. His duty hours as a peace officer had been increased again and an unpredictable schedule made it impossible for him to know when he’d be at home. Trisha, he’d explained to Jillian, needed a certain routine and predictability in her life. He would, of course, be home whenever he could.

  In the end, Trisha had moved into Jillian’s spacious apartment. She felt embarrassed that her work as an actress qualified her for a far better place than a married peace officer could find, but it was only sensible for them to hold on to the best apartment and let the Bureau for Housing reclaim the other. And one thing she had to say for Tomas, he never showed any envy of her position. If anything, he was proud of her for doing so well in her career.

  When he was there…

  For the first weeks of the arrangement, Tomas had managed sporadic visits, sometimes only three or four hours long. Jillian worried about his evident exhaustion but Tomas laughed off her concern, saying that long hours came with the territory. She should remember that he’d never wanted to be anything but a peace officer and protect his fellow citizens.

  But now it was over three weeks since Tomas had been home, and he hadn’t sent a message either. The front-desk clerks at the Bureau for Security had first said he was on a special riot squad, and then had stopped saying anything at all on the excuse that they weren’t authorized to release information to anyone other than his wife. “What, a sister isn’t close enough?” Jillian had stormed.

  “Not now that he’s married.”

  The transit system, slow that morning, had apparently now come to a complete stop. Jillian eyed the growing crowds at the transit stations and decided on yet more healthy exercise. It wasn’t that far to the apartment; she shopped at the community market for their neighborhood, which usually had better stock and more variety than markets in less favored parts of town.

  Trisha was outside the apartment to meet her. “What did you find out from the Bureau?”

  “I haven’t been,” Jillian confessed. “I’ve been in line at the market all afternoon.” Gratefully she entered the shady, climate-controlled space of their apartment. It might not be a high-rise luxury place like the DelPlato apartment, but who, for pity’s sake, could realistically use colorchange smartcloth for upholstery? Their furniture, most of it inherited from her parents, had the scrapes and scars of family life but each piece spelled home to her. And since their parents, like Tomas, had never aspired to a place this large, with actual separate rooms, their old furniture fitted in graciously and without crowding anyone.

  “Really, Jilli, I thought you could do this one thing for me!” Trisha’s eyes filled with the tears that came all too quickly now she was pregnant.

  Jillian heaved up her laden shopping bags and set them on the counter. “They wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. You need to go yourself, Trisha.” Perhaps if she could coax Trisha into venturing out as far as the Bureau for Security, her sister-in-law would enjoy being out of doors so much that she’d be willing to use her shopping days.

  Trisha acted as if she hadn’t heard Jillian. “I cut Brena’s hair this afternoon. She says I have a real gift for it. Of course I trained to be a beautician, but then I married Tomas…” She was busy taking things out of the bags. “What a queer collection of stuff. Why didn’t you buy any bread? Or fresh fruit? And why on earth did you lug home so many bottles of cooking oil? We hardly use any, fried food isn’t wholesome. Besides, it gives me heartburn now.”

  Jillian eased off her street shoes. Some time ago they’d stopped feeling like feathers. “I bought what they had,” she said wearily. She’d tried to explain the sporadic shortages in the markets to Trisha, but the message never seemed to get through. She tried a joke. “If the lines get any longer and the markets any emptier, we’ll be living on sludge. Then I can trade the oil for spices to make it taste better.”

  Trisha made a face. “Impossible. Nothing makes sludge taste good.”

  “Well, at least it’s nutritionally complete. It can’t possibly give you heartburn. And it’s free. And not rationed.” Jllian disliked the bland, untextured stuff as much as Trisha, but it was one of the minor miracles of the modern age: a nutritionally complete food assembled by nanotech from inedible biomass. Nobody died of starvation nowadays.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It wasn’t his style of argument that was at fault, Ruven thought; it was the difficulty of getting anybody to listen to it. These city dwellers had the attention spans of butterflies. He’d just been about to finish explaining to Ray Elmasri how the new quotas and prices would affect his dairy cooperative when the afternoon news came on automatically and the room was filled with the voices of the newsers, while Ray’s eyes went to the miniature holograms of the talking heads, lined up on top of his entertainment cabinet with images of charts and maps behind him.

  “Rather a novel way to watch the news, eh, boy?” Ray chortled. “Got a projection tech to set it up for me. I like to get the newsers out of the box, see.” He laughed enough at his own joke that Ruven’s failure to join in wasn’t noticeable.

  “Very clever,” Ruven agreed. He felt a silence hanging between him and Ray, even as the projected newsers bantered. Some more praise? “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Ah, do you have a recording function?”

  “Naturally we do! It’s automatic. We’re not exactly living in twenty-third century squalor, you know.”

  Ruven’s tongue got tangled up between trying to assure Elmasri that he hadn’t meant to imply squalor and suggesting that if the news program was being recorded, perhaps his host could watch it after their meeting and not during.

  “Nonsense,” Ray Elmasri waved this suggestion away. “In my position, I have certain responsibilities, you know. Weighty responsibilities. It’s my duty to stay informed on current events.” His eyes were glued to the central newser, a young woman with an improbably large bust for her slender build. She was wearing a dress that made it clear there was nothing stuffed down her front but her. “D’you think those are implants?” He tapped a control and the holo of the woman newser grew to half life-size, dwarfing the two men projected on either side of her. “Jek and I have a wager on
it.”

  Ruven couldn’t decide whether Elmasri was really fascinated with the woman, or just wanted a way to drop the name of the second most powerful man in Harmony.

  “Perhaps you could get me a hearing with Jek,” he suggested, but Elmasri was shaking his head before the sentence was finished.

  “You don’t understand what a busy man he is. Now stop chattering, I want to hear this.”

  The buxom brunette announced a new initiative to save energy, from suggestions sent in by their viewers and assessed by the Minister for Energy himself. “So here they are, fans – your very own energy-saving measures, designed by the people for the people!”

  She rattled off a list of ideas most of which sounded fair useless to Ruven. Limiting store opening times to daylight hours, running only half as many transit flitters, and restricting use of private flitters to urgent official business were the serious ones, and also the ones that would inconvenience the most people. Perhaps in an effort to disguise that, the list was padded with fluff like urging women not to use their hair dryers, remembering to shut down appliances when they weren’t being used, turning off lights in unoccupied rooms, and going to bed an hour early.

  She finished by announcing a beauty parade of patriotic hair styles, all achieved by combing and fashioning wet hair straight out of the shower. While a series of smiling women replaced the holo of the newser, Ruven asked Elmasri why the city was having power troubles.

  “It’s an economic war organized by Esilia,” Elmasri said, naming the only other country on the planet, “and aided by Esilian saboteurs and our own dissidents. Out of sheer envy they’ve crippled our interplanetary trade, and now that we can’t hire experts from off-planet to fix things, they’re sabotaging our power plants. They want to lower our standard of living to their own primitive level. Oh, look: Ashli’s coming back on.”