Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  He tried again a few weeks later, writing to her as the merchant that he’d imported some contraband hashish—the real thing, not the fake stuff that went into those useless e-spliffs—from the North African territories. Would she like to try some? He couldn’t trust it with the usual couriers. When could he see her?

  After that, Reuben was certain he’d offended her, or scared her off. Waiting for her response, he became as impatient as an addict craving the next hit. A full day passed, and Reuben wondered whether his plan had backfired. He’d have to arrange a security detail to find her quickly, before she could run. He was just about to give the orders when her message came through, agreeing to a meeting. No more circling around each other, just a businesslike note fixing the time of their meeting: 11 p.m. the next night, at a neutral place: “I only work at night.”

  So she liked drugs; one more thing to trap her with when it came time to take her in. He wrote back to suggest a greenhouse in the eastern quadrant of the City Park, a popular spot for Green City marriages. At night nobody ever came there, and he could make sure the usual Security patrols left them undisturbed (he didn’t tell her that). They could meet there in anonymity, talk safely in the silence and the darkness.

  She agreed, then cut the communication channel permanently.

  He knew she would come, like a hawk returning to its master’s arm. Plotting out her arrest in his mind, he waited for the hours to roll around with feral, almost sexual anticipation. Would she fight him, try to get away, or acquiesce meekly to his authority? He felt the keen thrill of success in his grasp, the jolt of the moment between the first cut of a knife and the blood welling to the surface of the skin.

  Reuben drove to the greenhouse at ten in the evening. He’d had the area cleared on the pretext that he was conducting a sweep for a visiting dignitary from Kolachi the next week. He would personally inspect the eastern part of the park, where a reception for the dignitary would take place at the end of the week. No, he didn’t want to take anyone with him. And he wanted to be alone while he was there. His subordinates obeyed; they were frightened of displeasing him.

  When Reuben arrived at the park there was nobody else there, not even the Security patrols or the maintenance workers. The far-off lights of the city glimmered in the distance, but darkness and a sad silence misted the park’s myriad wonders: the rainforest simulation, the massive food gardens, the xeriscaped terraces. They all thronged with crowds during the day but lay empty and barren now. Reuben strode past them all, toward the edge of a burbling stream. He waited anxiously for the bridge to unroll and flatten so he could cross over to the cooled conservatory on the island in the water.

  He let himself in through the main door—all government-owned buildings and public spaces allowed him immediate access—and keyed in a code to keep the door unlocked. It took him a moment or two to orient himself to the greenhouse’s blanket of cool, humid air. Small phosphorescent bulbs illuminated curving pathways, and fireflies, glowworms, and bioluminescent millipedes moved and shimmered all around him in points of flickering light.

  Reuben edged his way along a pool where oversized lily pads covered the water like lush dark teacups. He sat down by the side, breathing in the slightly mossy, moldy scent; he trailed his hand in the water and drew it back quickly, smiling, when a fish nibbled at the tips of his fingers, breaking through the furious concentration with which he was watching the doors, waiting for her to arrive. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him smile, especially before an arrest, when the teeth-chattering adrenaline coursed through him like this. But he found himself savoring this interlude punctuated by trickling water and the clicking of geckos hidden in the plants. All the pieces of his plan were in place, and he only had to wait for the queen to step into the square he’d marked out to checkmate her.

  The woman appeared at the door of the greenhouse, spectral and shapeless in her full black veil. Reuben watched her from his hidden vantage point as she glanced around, then opened the door and stepped into the entranceway. She looked not quite real as yet, with the glass ceiling arching high above her head and the breezy mist from the humidifiers pushing the veil around her body in gentle undulations.

  Reuben forced himself to get up and move calmly, approaching her as if she were standing on a ledge and might topple over if he came close too fast. When he stood face to face with her, he held his breath and waited to see if she’d stay, or flee. He would be behind her in two seconds if she tried to escape. But as she pushed her veil back from her face, it was he who felt his legs tremble, the immense kick of attraction at the pit of his stomach. Close to her, he could see now that it was Lin Serfati, but that his digitized photograph had lied. Her face radiated a type of beauty that no camera could capture: a perfect symmetry of features, translucent skin that held a shifting landscape of emotions—boldness, fear, certainty, doubt. Sharp hazel eyes that looked as though they knew melancholy well peered at him defiantly, fixing him in his place.

  “Lin Serfati?” He tried to sound authoritative, but inside he felt as lost as a motherless boy. His heart beat fast, throbbing in his own ears. She must be wondering how he knew her identity, and who he was. She’d have to have been living underground for years to not know Reuben Faro, by name and deed.

  She nodded. “How do you know who I am?” Her voice was low, with an accent he couldn’t place. Where had she grown up? “And you’re no merchant. Why have you called me here?”

  “My name is Reuben Faro.”

  “I know who you are.” She tilted her head, angling the lower part of her face up to peer down at him from the lower corners of her eyes, as if she were measuring him up. “Who doesn’t know Reuben Faro in this town?” Then, unexpectedly, she leaned close and whispered, her lips nearly touching his ear, “Are you here to arrest me?”

  “That depends on your crime.” His whole body tingled at the sensation of her breath on his skin. She was so close to him, close enough that he could smell her scent. He leaned away, doing the exact opposite of what every cell in his body was urging him to do.

  She smiled in the darkness; he couldn’t see it, but he knew that he was being mocked from the lightness in her voice. “And this is where you conduct your interrogations?”

  How dare she sound so amused? Surely it was his place to toy with her, not the other way around. Every muscle in Reuben’s body strained with the effort to stand completely still. She should talk more, to truly incriminate herself. He’d always found it more satisfying when they trapped themselves in their own attempts to escape the reckoning, but he knew he was lying to himself. He only wanted to hear more of her voice.

  “You have to admit, this is an unusual place to meet. There are eyes everywhere. But then, I suppose most of them belong to you.”

  “I had to resort to unusual measures to bring you out from your hiding place. You weren’t exactly easy to find.” A moth flitted by, brushing its wings against Reuben’s cheek. He waved it away, irritated, snapping back into the reality of why they were both here: so he could arrest her. But the woman wasn’t reacting the way he’d expected to, with tears or fright. He guessed she’d start to bargain now, or offer a clumsy attempt at seduction in order to sway him from his path.

  “And yet you found me after all,” she said. “How clever you were.” She averted her body to move past him, cutting a path through the foliage as if she knew exactly where she was going. Reuben followed quickly, wanting to reach out and catch her by the arm, yank her back, and haul her to the Agency. She wouldn’t be so reckless in an interrogation room, stripped of all her pretensions. Clever? Nobody had ever used that word for him before. Brilliant. Genius. Powerful. But clever? That was praise for a monkey who performed tired tricks in front of a bored audience.

  He allowed her to keep walking. At last she stopped abruptly in a clearing, a small grotto of bottle palms that grew only slightly taller than their heads. A few spotlights pic
ked out the clearing, a circle of light in the surrounding gloom. The trailing fronds of the palm trees tapped like gentle fingers on Reuben’s chest.

  She spoke again, an edge in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “Don’t you already know my crimes? Reluctance, rebellion, revolt. I’ve committed them all.” She held up her slim fingers and counted them off, her hand in the air like a curse in front of his face. Here was the defiance that he’d been expecting, the show of anger. He suddenly imagined her palm on his cheek in a stinging slap. He could feel himself craving the blow.

  “You’d better tell me everything,” Reuben said. “The outcome will be more favorable for you if you do.”

  “Oh, I will tell you everything. Did you know, there’s one thing you left off your holy list of gender crimes. Can you guess what it is?”

  “We left out nothing. It’s a perfect system.” He spoke with the certainty of someone who had worked his whole life to uphold it. Why she wasn’t begging him to let her go? He’d seen men drop to their knees, pleading for leniency, for their lives. She was hissing at him as if he were the criminal. Did this woman truly not know what was at stake for her?

  “Perfect for you. Perfect for Green City. Reform, repopulate, redress the imbalance that we were left with after the War. But it all fell on us. We’re the ones you relied on to make the system work. You didn’t even ask us if we consented to your grand plan. And if we’d said no, would you have even listened? Understanding is better than blind compliance. You want us to choose our prisons willingly. Oh, I can see you already know that phrase. I know every word of that wretched Handbook. I ought to.”

  Could she truly be this preternaturally calm, or was she terrified inside, he wondered. No man could have acted this well. “Because of Ilona Serfati?”

  “My aunt.”

  “Is she the one who took you?” The pieces were all coming together now. But why was his breath coming and going so heavily? His intellect was still working, despite the antagonistic, animalistic response of his body to her presence. “She worked for us, you know.” He watched her face carefully for her reaction, but found himself staring at her lips as she spoke.

  “She saved me. She taught me everything. The procreation schedules. The fertility testing. You pump us full of hormones and expect us to produce children as if we’re cows. With each new baby, a new hope for Green City and South West Asia is born.”

  “It’s not like that. We preserve your dignity and your respect. Without this, you’d be bought and sold on the open market, like slaves.”

  “Don’t you see? We already are.” She frowned, as if he had given her a gift she didn’t like. “But as I said, there’s one crime you didn’t write about in your Handbook. You weren’t so clever after all.”

  He wished she would stop saying you, as if he was the one who had come up with everything. “What crime is that?”

  “Refusal.”

  “What?”

  She lifted her chin. “I refuse to be part of your system. Arrest me for that, if you have to.”

  Just then a lock of auburn hair escaped the veil and fell down to her shoulder. An urge seized him to wind it around his hand and pull her head back to expose the lines of her throat, then trace the vein in her neck with his fingers. He didn’t know what force compelled him forward, but he pressed his mouth against hers long and hard. She strained against him, but he could not stop himself. After a moment, it seemed that neither could she. He kissed her angrily, greedily, as she shivered in his arms.

  The kiss hurt as much as it helped, bruising their lips and knocking their teeth together. He thrust his hands under her veil without refinement or control, feeling the contours of her body from shoulders to hips as she pressed her legs all the way down the lengths of his own.

  Reuben drove up to Joseph’s apartment building and immediately spotted Sabine lying on the ground. A curse escaped his lips. She was on her stomach, her black cloak obscuring the upper part of her body, her arms and legs bent, a broken doll, not a girl. What on earth did Lin think he’d be able to do for her? Sleeping with Lin was one thing, but helping a woman of the Panah once above ground was collaboration, something for which he would not avoid censure. The Agency would never spare him for the crime of interfering with their self-designed order. Such a transgression, even for him, would be fatal. For an Agency official, or a Leader, collaboration was worse than reluctance, rebellion, and revolt put together. Collaboration equaled treason, and there was no coming back from that.

  But there was something about the girl’s body that made him feel uneasy, as if he’d unwittingly had a hand in bringing her to this point. If he left her there, she’d be discovered by someone else, and they’d follow the trail all the way back to Lin. He had to take her right now; he’d figure out the next step once she was somewhere safe.

  He angled the car so that she was shielded by it as he pulled the emergency brakes and threw open the door. A glance up and down the street revealed nobody else, though any moment the robot cleaners would come trundling down the street with their chemical blasts and hygiene fumigators. Joseph resided in a high-security, low-crime neighborhood; early-morning Agency patrols occurred less frequently than in the more populous areas of Green City. Although it was never publicly stated, to better maintain the illusion that all Green City residents were safer because they were always watched. Not a soul lurked in the doorway of Joseph’s building, but someone might still be spying on him behind one of the reflective blue windows of the high-rise tower.

  Reuben hurled himself out of his seat, ran a few paces, and crouched over Sabine. He pulled the veil off her, revealing her face. At first glance he could tell that she was lovely, but her pallor was alarming. He lifted her and carried her quickly to the car, trying to be gentle. If he had a daughter, he’d want the world to be gentle with her too.

  In a moment she was inside on the back seat. The car engine hummed a strange lullaby for the girl. Reuben was alarmed by her lifeless face, her closed eyes, her head lolling back. He raised her arms and tried to tuck her head in between them, then he straightened her tunic, uncomfortable with her naked back showing. He had at least to give her some dignity.

  Reuben climbed into the driver’s seat. He set course for Shifana Hospital, then erased the route. He’d drive without navigation; he knew the way well enough, and it wasn’t far from here. And there was someone there who he thought might come in useful in helping him make sure Sabine was all right, before he took her back to the Panah, if he could. He glanced in the rearview mirror to check on the girl. Her chest seemed to rise and fall, although whether due to her breath or the vibrations of the car, he couldn’t be sure.

  He gunned the engine, driving the accelerator almost down to the floor. Only after he pulled away from the curb, leaving the streets of Joseph’s colony far behind, did he remember her black veil still lying like a shroud on the pavement where she fell.

  From The Official Green City Handbook for Female Citizens

  The use of contraceptives is strictly prohibited in Mazun. Anyone caught trying to buy or sell, deal in, or trade any substances used to prevent or end pregnancy will be dealt with severely by the Perpetuation Bureau. All citizens are charged with the duty of aiding any and all pregnancies to go to full term; every new baby is a new hope for Green City. By the same token, abortions are forbidden in all South West Asian territories. Under no circumstances will any pregnancy be terminated at any stage. Anyone caught trying to procure an abortion, for herself or others, will feel the full wrath of Green City’s authority. Order brought us out of the near-collapse of our nation, but chaos is a danger to the future of Green City. The authorities consider anything that harms an unborn child no less than treason against the state. Beware of those who urge you to revolt against Green City; they cannot be trusted, and you, no matter how young, will receive the same punishment as your cohorts.

  Sabine


  Standing is uncomfortable; walking requires more effort. I plan each step carefully to minimize the jolt it sends up my spine. Julien tells me I’m lucky: I haven’t lost as much blood as he’d feared, which will make my recovery faster.

  “We’ve pumped you full of bio-healers and chemical endorphins. It’s a cocktail of drugs and natural hormones that stimulates the body into repairing itself,” explains Julien, like a professor. I nod gravely at him as if I’ve understood him, when in reality I’m still dazed by everything that’s happened to me so far.

  At first, even getting up out of bed is agony, but I push myself and make it to my feet. Then I attempt a few steps from the bed, only to collapse back into it. After a few tries, I reach the bathroom and back. Again, again, again, five times an hour, as much as I can bear the weight on my legs. Julien says the drugs work better if I keep my circulation going: my heart will pump all the drugs to all the right receptors in my brain. Right now my heart is trying to dig its way out of my ribcage.

  Finally, I make it all the way to the window, a distance of about six feet, and stand there, trembling with weakness. For the first time I realize the room is at a great height; at least thirty stories above ground. I’ve never been so high before—Green City’s skyscrapers are built for the rich and powerful, and we crawl close to the earth. I didn’t know people could live this high and perform all their functions without the ground underneath to steady them.

  Dizziness strikes when I peer down at the rows of houses. Maybe we’re closer to forty stories. The windows are polarized; they keep changing color with the ambient light and the sun’s journey across the sky. Right now they’re turning everything outside to notes of blue and green and soft gray, taking the glare away so I can look at everything without squinting. The solar panels are catching the brilliant early morning light even though the sky hasn’t yet taken on the punishing white heat of the daytime. The buildings form grids intersected by neat roads ribboning away towards the sea, the cars traveling on them small bullets moving in all directions. I’m calmed by looking out at the sea, a flat sheet of deep blue in the distance, and I feel as though I’m in an airplane, moving quickly over the rippling greenish-blue waves massaging the shore.