Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  “I know what our words were, Richard,” Sofie snaps.

  “Careful,” he says, flourishing the gun.

  Sofie takes a deep breath before resuming. “The revolution’s spread had become a matter of great concern to the Upperworld by this time, and there was talk of diplomacy to address the Lowerworld’s grievances. But we feared that such talk was little more than a stalling tactic, that the most we could expect was more wrangling and delay. It was our hope that a well-placed Upperworlder, new to the revolution, could help us secure representation on the JIPOC starships in the desperately short time that was left to us. Richard was the first to provide a referral.”

  “I started by trying to recruit Adrian,” Griff says. “Because of his dad. But I realized ten seconds after I conned him into watching the first video that he was a lost cause. Then I saw how you responded to the hacked feed. You were exactly what the revolution was looking for: young, impressionable, extremely well-connected. And it didn’t hurt that you were obviously gaga for Sumati’s protégé.”

  The pain in my legs has subsided, but the pain everywhere else in my body, starting with my heart, is growing. “New York CITI was a setup,” I say.

  Griff grins.

  “Was Sumati supposed to die?”

  The grin falls. “I had nothing to do with that. You were supposed to meet Sofie, that’s all. The Upperworld saw their chance to silence the revolution’s leaders and took it. I can program Terra Tanks, but I can’t stop bullets.”

  There’s another long silence after that little gem. Sofie smoothes her robe with shaking hands before speaking.

  “New York CITI changed everything,” she says. “Prior to that point, I had been the public face of the revolution: the one to make speeches, rally the crowds, supply the photo opportunities Sumati no longer possessed the energy to provide—”

  “Or the looks,” Griff says. “Can’t forget that.”

  Sofie glares at him but goes on. “Because of my childhood experience on the worldlink, managing the symbolic side of the revolution had been my duty from the moment Sumati won me to the Lowerworld cause. I was her disciple and her successor, yes, but in private she confided to me that I must also be her younger self, the image she could no longer project. But with her assassination, I was thrust into the role of revolutionary leader. I did not believe I was ready for such a responsibility, but there was no one else, and there was no time to train another. And when the members of my team complained that you were not progressing rapidly enough, Cam—”

  “That you weren’t being brainwashed fast enough, she means,” Griff adds.

  “—it was decided that some more extreme measure was needed to bring you along. I remembered my own first visit to a targeted village when I was a child, before I became hardened to what I saw there. I felt that seeing such a place might have a similar effect on you. But I could not tell you, Cam. If you had known the truth about the village, about me, you would never have agreed to help our cause.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “I feared it,” she says in a voice that’s barely a whisper. “I had promised so much to so many, and I feared what would happen if they felt I had deceived them.”

  “So you lied to me instead.”

  She nods, huddled in her purple robe. Her face is a mess, cheeks splotchy and eyeliner smudged in black streaks. She looks so unlike the girl who stood up to Peace Corp. soldiers and worldlink adjournalists and corponational CEOs, the girl who shouted defiance from Upperworld stages and Lowerworld scaffolds, who faced death a hundred times a day. Was that Sofie nothing but an act? All the stories, the speeches, the prayers? Could she have been so perfect an actor that her lies felt like they’d opened up a new, truer world for me? And not just me. Could she have been so convincing that she’d dazzled Aakash and the rest of her team and billions of the world’s people into throwing their lives into the cause?

  And what about the other Sofie? The one who held my hands, touched my face, kissed me the night of the interview? The one who’d smiled at me minutes before Griff pulled out his gun. Was that Sofie an act too? Was she doing what she did only because it made great video, pumped up the crowd, achieved revolutionary imperatives?

  Lying there on the floor of the SubCon cruiser, with the girl I thought I knew sobbing beside me and my legs twitching from the ion discharge and my former second-best friend pointing a gun at my head, I find that I can forgive all the lies except one. I don’t need to know everything about the revolution and the corners its leaders cut to succeed in a cause I fundamentally believe is right. But there’s one thing I do need to know, and I don’t give a damn if Griff hears me ask it.

  “Did you love me?” I say. “Or was that all in my head too?”

  She looks pleadingly at Griff through a face smeared with tears. He waves his gun at me. “No lies, Your Holiness,” he says.

  Even with the threat of the gun, it’s a long time before she answers. When she does, it honestly sounds like she’s reading from a script.

  “I was not meant for love,” she says. “That is what I told myself when I took the bindi as a pledge of my devotion to the Lowerworld. I had given my all in atonement for my sins, and I believed I was meant to preach of love, not to know it myself. To risk my life for the many, not to risk my own heart.”

  She’s quiet for another long spell, and out of the corner of my eye I see that Griff’s getting edgy, shifting from foot to foot and adjusting his grip on the gun. But I focus on Sofie, and when she speaks again, it’s in a voice so laden with sadness I can’t believe she’s speaking a lie.

  “Love is selfish, Cam,” she says. “You say you have never asked me to betray my people, and I know you would not do so willingly. But the night I kissed you, the seeds of betrayal were sown. On that night, I came close to sacrificing the dreams of a whole world to the one tiny dream of an unworthy heart.”

  She shakes her head, and seems to collapse into herself.

  “I thought to love you once,” she says. “But I know what it means to live in thrall to hatred, and I cannot allow myself to live in thrall to love. That is why I could not join myself with you on Earth, and why I cannot join myself with you on any other world. I am sorry.”

  Her head drops to her knees, and her sobs fill the void left by her final words. Griff lets out a mocking laugh, the hand holding the gun waving back and forth in the air as if he’s playing a violin.

  “You two are breaking my heart,” he says. “And now, Your Holiness, you’re coming with me.”

  She rises like a sleepwalker, lets Griff put his hand on her arm to steer her away from me. When I try to stand, he points the gun at me and releases a short burst that sizzles the floor at my feet. “Where are you taking her?” I ask.

  “Her Holiness is about to receive a lesson in revolutionary exigency,” he says. “She’s going to leave you here, and then she’s going to come with me so we can watch my Terra Tanks burn the Executor to the ground. But not before she gives another of her pretty little speeches to the fat cats cowering inside that luxury liner of a ship.”

  “Richard,” Sofie says, but her voice is so dull it’s lost the capacity to plead.

  “Or you can stay with Cam, and I can order the Tanks to destroy every pod aboard the Freefall, just like Conroy wanted,” he says. “How about we do that instead?”

  She lowers her head, blinking away tears.

  “I thought you’d see it my way,” Griff says. He smiles, and I wonder why his smile looks so strange. “Now say good night, lover boy.”

  His visor lowers over his face. The air I gulp tastes sweet and stale. I fumble to stand, but my motions are slow and uncoordinated. Sofie freezes, her eyes closing, her breath leveling. I assume she’s going into hibernation to escape the gas.

  My last thought is that I wish she’d taught me that, too.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Night

  Hey, buddy.”

  I’m lying
in darkness on something soft. The air’s freezing cold, but there’s a trace of warmth left from my own body. For a second I’m back in bed on Earth, my dad stooping over me to wake me up for Pre-Classification. That’s what he used to say to me when I was a kid: Hey, buddy. Before he got too big to pay attention to me. Before I got too big to pay attention to anything.

  “Earth to Cam. Do you read me, Cam?”

  There’s a laugh, not my dad’s. A beeping sound. Red light parts the darkness behind my eyelids. The cold makes me shiver.

  I open my eyes.

  A bright red glow floods my vision. It’s too much for me after the darkness, and I squint against the glare. My brain feels like rubber. I try to concentrate and realize I’m lying on spongy rock. In fact, I’m surrounded by rock, top to bottom and all around. My breath rasps, the air on my face feeling hot and sticky. I reach up and find I’m wearing an oxygen mask. The surrounding air is absolutely frigid. The best I can figure is that I’m outside in the planetary night, though why I’m hemmed in by rock doesn’t quite compute.

  The red light, it dawns on me, has a point of origin: a flare, the electronic kind that needs no oxygen to burn. It waves in front of my eyes, tracing squiggles that make me dizzy. Finally, it stops moving and I’m able to lock in on the one who’s holding it.

  Griff.

  “How’re you feeling, buddy?” he says when he sees me looking at him. His words fog the inside of his own mask, and he’s wearing the oversize helmet, except the visor’s up so I can see his eyes. “You okay?”

  “I feel like shit,” I say, which is true on many, many levels.

  “Just breathe deep,” he says. “You walked all the way down here in a semiconscious state. Good thing too, because I sure as hell couldn’t haul your fat ass.” He laughs. “The oxygen will clear away the effects of the anesthesia in a few minutes.”

  I do as he says, breathing deeply, the cobwebs thinning. My legs ache, but not so bad I can’t move them. When I’m strong enough to sit, I push myself up from the ground to face him.

  “Where’s Sofie?” I ask.

  His face twists. “You don’t need to worry about her anymore.”

  “What did you do with her, Griff?”

  He throws himself to his feet. We’re in some kind of cavern, not much taller than he is. The red light casts his shadow against the walls, fading in and out as the flare blinks in his hand.

  “We all know what you did with her,” he says. “So let’s not talk about me, okay?”

  He laughs, though not the laugh of my old friend. The harsh sound echoes in the enclosed space, making my head hurt all over again. I’ve oriented myself enough to our surroundings to be sure we’re underground, which explains the freezing air. For the first time, I notice tunnels branching off from the main cavern, too dark to see down. And I also notice the deep scratches that run through the spongy rock at my feet, their edges illuminated by the red light. Gashes like scratch marks from something heavy and metal dragging itself across the stone.

  Like tracks.

  “God, Griff,” I say. “What have you done?”

  He returns to the place where he was sitting. This time he’s got his gun out, pointing straight at me. His face is placid again, even friendly.

  “It’s all right,” he says, gesturing toward the rear of the cavern. “It’s quick. Adrian went quick.”

  I take a glance at the dark shape he’s pointing at, then look away, bile rising in my throat.

  “On the plus side, our good buddy learned some humility before the end,” Griff says. “It was quite a breath of fresh air, watching the great Adrian Conroy beg for his life.”

  He smiles, looking so much like the old Griff I can almost convince myself that everything that happened on the Maverick, everything that’s happening right now, is a crazy joke, or maybe a nightmare, that the real Griff is going to jump out of this imposter’s skin and have a good laugh for scaring the shit out of me. But then he starts talking again, and if I weren’t already freezing, his words would chill me to the bone.

  “I gained access to the starships by hacking into my dad’s program,” he says. “Dumped a buttload of extra stuff into the Executor’s code while I was at it, made sure it would arrive with all its systems trashed. Reprogrammed its Centurions, too, so they’d go after the Executor. That was hard, and I had no idea they’d react to the sunlight and the sonic devices. It’s taken me all this time to get them back to where I wanted them. Conroy even managed to regain control of one—temporarily, anyway.”

  He lets out the ugly laugh, then reaches into the pocket of his jumpsuit and produces what looks like a selfone. He stares at it a long time before raising his eyes to mine. “I ever tell you about my mom?”

  I take the phone. The screen shows a woman, late twenties. But if I’m expecting her to look anything like Griff, I’m disappointed. She’s got jet-black hair, dark eyes, petite features. “She was—”

  “From MicroNasia, yeah.”

  “I was about to say she was beautiful.”

  Griff looks at me as if he’s momentarily disarmed, then his face hardens into a scowl. “For all the good it did her. I could show you how she died.” He points at the phone. “Apparently it was a big hit back in the day. A real crowd-pleaser.”

  He reaches for the phone, glances at it before shoving it into his pocket. Then he lets out a hard breath that steams his mask.

  “She was one of Sumati’s earliest supporters,” he says. “Helped get the movement off the ground. But thanks to Her Current Holiness’s parents, the Peace Corp. tracked her down and tortured her. For names. And when she wouldn’t give them what they wanted, they killed her.”

  “God, Griff,” I say. “I never knew.”

  He looks at me resentfully. “No one did. Not even me. I was too young to realize what was going on, and my dad never told me.”

  “Was he with Sumati too?”

  “That’s a laugh,” Griff says, making a sound that’s anything but. “When my mom was caught, you know what Richie Rich did?”

  I don’t answer. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to.

  And I’m right. “I got the whole story from Cons Piracy,” Griff says. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was born in MicroNasia, but, after my mom was killed, my dad found some guy in the Upperworld who was known for erasing people’s pasts. Changing their appearance.” He waves a hand around his face. “This guy helped me and my dad move to CanAm, got him a job working on starships. They didn’t know about my mom. And when Conroy ordered my dad to reprogram the Freefall and turn his dead wife’s people into monsters, the son of a bitch did exactly what the chairman wanted.”

  He swipes at his eyes above the oxygen mask, his motions so violent it’s as if he’s trying to gouge the tears from his face.

  “So, anyway,” he says after he’s given up trying. “The Upperworld needed to be taught a lesson. That’s why, when I programmed the Executor to land on this shit hole, I made sure the Freefall would arrive right after. Give the filthy-rich bastards a chance to sweat it out, see what it’s like to have less than nothing, and then have to go crawling to the Lowerworld, begging for a handout. And on top of that, have the Prophet spit their words back in their face.” He laughs, that short, ugly bark. “Exactly the kind of revenge she was talking about back on Earth.”

  I can’t keep quiet any longer. “Were you listening to her, man? She’s been talking about justice, not revenge.”

  “Revenge is justice,” he says. “Turning the tables. Sun orbiting moon. Take what’s theirs, leave them to fight over scraps, and then burn the whole goddamn place to the ground. That’s what she said.”

  I try to remember Sofie saying anything like that, but I can’t, not in all the time I traveled with her. “She never said—”

  “You weren’t listening!” Griff shouts, his face contorted with anger. “The destruction of the old world. The walls of wealth falling down. She laid it all out that day in New York CITI, man, and it was g
reat. The top was going to come crashing to the ground, and the bottom was going to rise up and take what was theirs.”

  He shakes his head, the flame in his face instantly dying. Where a second ago he was raving, now he’s breathing heavily, looking old and vulnerable and sad. None of this is like the Griff I knew. The Griff I never knew.

  “But she didn’t keep her promise,” he says. “As soon as you joined up, she started talking about peaceful reconciliation between Upperworld and Lowerworld. All that hearts and flowers crap she spouted in the interview. It wasn’t bad enough you violated her body. You infected her mind, man!” he shouts, the vehemence jumping into his voice again. Then he continues more quietly, as if he’s trying to reason with me. “She lost her way when she fell for you, Cam. I knew I had to bring her back to the light. I kept you alive all this time so I could test her. And I think you saw today that she’s on her way back.”

  Even with the numbing cold and my dizziness from the gas, it doesn’t take long to put the pieces together. Griff had been tracking me after touchdown as he had on Earth, and when he realized my pod was missing, it was him, not Adrian, who chased off the Centurion that first night. He was the one who programmed the homing device to get me into the Freefall, who arranged for the Maverick to take me to Conroy’s quarters. Could he have been the one who made sure Sofie didn’t die when her deepsleep was shut off? Or was his plan almost ruined when Conroy gained temporary control over the single Centurion? But when she did survive, he brought the cruiser back to the Freefall so he could see if the girl whose parents had killed his mother was willing to carry out his design. If she was willing to make a choice.

  Kill me, along with all the people aboard the Executor. Or save me, and watch her own people die.

  I don’t blame her for the choice she made.

  I think about the times Griff and I used to talk, on Earth and on this planet. The stuff I told him about my days with Sofie, the accusations I leveled at Chairman Conroy and his son. Griff drank it all in, the way he’d drunk in Sofie’s speeches back home. And he’d used it to carry us to this cold, lonely place where love and hate and justice and revenge were one and the same, where the only way things could end was with the end of everything.