by Jay Allan
“You look awfully happy for such a dirty mongrel.” A blond woman stood over me, smiling like a newlywed, rich and clean and young.
“That’s because I’m about to kill myself.”
“Is that considered exciting wherever you’re from?”
I flailed at her from my seat in the dirt. “Compared to life without my wife, it’ll be splendid.”
“You wretch!” She held her hand to her breast. “Did she leave you?”
“She thinks I died in the war. I came as soon as I heard she was in Syracuse, but I think she’s gone forever.”
“I doubt that. What’s her name?”
“Demostrate. Of Athens.”
The woman blinked, cocking her head. “Long dark hair? Eyes as blue as the bay? Tits that could knock a man off a horse?”
I bolted to my feet. “Where is she?”
“She left two weeks ago,” the woman said. “With my husband.”
The world tilted. My tailbone banged into the dirt. As if that had shaken something loose inside me, tears fell from my eyes, peppering the dirt.
“I know.” She knelt to squeeze my shoulder, white robes folding into the muck of the street. “You look like you’ve been sleeping in a butcher’s gutter. Come get cleaned up at my house. My name’s Seria. You must be Andronikos.”
Wordlessly, I rose and let her lead me to two slaves waiting up the street. She pulled them aside to explain why she’d picked up this filthy, bearded, reeking foreigner, then took me home.
It was absurdly rich, a classical palace of columns and marble with a sunny green courtyard grown half wild. Bitterly, I reflected that at least Demostrate would be well cared for. There, I was bathed, barbered, fed. How could she have run off with another woman’s husband? Had grief over my death warped her that far? After my meal, I excused myself to vomit in a secluded corner of the courtyard, literally sickened by her betrayal.
“Funny how a starving body forgets what to do with food.” Seria had materialized beside me. “Want some wine to wash out the taste?”
“Lots.”
She returned with a blanket which she spread on a patch of grass. I seated myself and stared at my knees. Some time later, a servant waddled up with a jug clasped in both hands, his chin tucked against its top.
Seria shooed him away, pouring our cups herself. Red wine splashed from the heavy jug, bleeding into the thick gray blanket. She sighed. “Everywhere a mess.”
I slugged down my cup, refilled it. “What happened?”
“She showed up last summer. Gorgeous. Suntanned bronze from sailing around looking for you. Your captain Xippian was from here, you know. She came to see if he knew what happened to you.”
“Did he tell her I died at Artemisium?”
“He said you’d fallen overboard,” she frowned. “That you’d probably drowned, but that the winds of war scatter soldiers too often to be sure.”
The wine was fruity yet bitter. We’d pitched our picnic in the shade, but I was sweating into my new white robe. “What did she do then? Why did she stay?”
“Well, she’d run out of money. My husband Diodorus and I were friends of Captain Xippian’s. When he told us her story, we took her in while she waited to hear back from Athens about silver.”
“How long did it take?” I said, voice shaking. “Before they fell in love?”
She smiled ruefully. “He mooned after her from the start. Who wouldn’t. But all she could talk about was you. And all I could do was watch as he listened to her. Cried with her. He loved her, and when she saw how Diodorus mourned for you, that, I think, is when she started to love him back.” She swirled her cup. “I should probably hate you.”
“You’d have to get in line behind the gods.”
“Oh, so dramatic. This is life. Every home you look inside, there’s a tragedy playing out on the stage.”
“Recently mine’s felt more like a farce.” Loosened by wine, I told her about the battle, my capture by the Persians and sale to the Babylonian merchant whose sweet children I’d run out on for the reward of hearing my wife had departed with another man. Seria didn’t do any crying, but at the end she was holding my face in both hands.
“Neither of us has lost everything, have we?” she said softly. “We still have our breath. Our wine. A beautiful body in front of us.”
This much was true; no amount of wool could hide her curves. I’d stayed abstinent these two years—not that I had much choice; locked up in chains so much of that time, I was lucky no sex had been forced upon me—but my wife, as I spoke to Seria in the lush courtyard, could well have her mouth too full of another man’s penis to do any speaking of her own.
Bitterly, I tossed back my wine and stripped Seria’s robe from her shoulders. We fucked like battling rams, grunting and tearing at each other, slapping together so hard the backs of her pale legs were soon red. Finished, I screamed and flopped on the soiled blanket, choking on my own breath. When I could sit up, I drank more wine, then drunkenly raved about fate long after she told me to shut up.
I woke beside Seria’s bruised face with no memory of having fallen asleep. My stomach churned. Gently, I extracted myself from the bedding, found the front door, and told the servant I was going for a walk. At the first corner, I broke into a cold sprint.
It would be another eighteen years until I learned everything Seria had told me was a lie. I never knew what Seria had in mind for me after her night of revenge, or if, had I stayed, her lies would have shown their cracks, setting me after Demostrate soon enough to have made a difference.
Ignorant, destroyed, I ran down to the bay and traded my fine fresh robe for passage east.
* * *
“I had an interesting night,” I told Baxter when he agreed to see me in his room.
He snorted. “I’m aware male humans like to brag. You should be aware that, lacking functional genitals, I have no interest in your escapades other than as cautionary tales.”
“Did Shelby say something to you?”
“You and our security detail did, at wall-piercing volume.”
I realized, then, all the effort Jia’d put into concealing her message wouldn’t mean a damned thing if I just blurted it out to Baxter in his possibly-bugged hotel room. “How about a walk?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Baxter, hear me out. This is way more important than being mad about kidnapping each other.”
When he shook his head, it was at himself or his situation, because he stood up and walked with me to the lightly peopled mid-afternoon street. I paused at a stall for an algae cake, calculating it was the food least likely to get bounced right back out of my stomach like a child on a trampoline, and there in the open thoroughfare, as safe as we could be in a city owned entirely by the company that apparently wanted to kill us, told Baxter what Jia had told me.
“Huh,” he said. “I suppose our next step is to contact Go.”
“You think so? What if she meant he’s in charge of our assassination?”
“Sounds to me he’s the leader of OA’s dissenters. Fay?”
“My take is she meant ‘Go see Go,’“ Fay chirped immediately. “Analysis of her voice shows she associates positive feelings with his name.”
“I’d like to think that was due to the context in which she said it.” I stopped cold. I’d been too drunk to remember to take off my throat mike last night. To Jia, it would have looked like a small mole. We’d unwittingly voyeurized Fay with a high-energy dose of phone sex. “Uh. Sorry, Fay.”
“You guys are loud!”
“You’ll understand the day you meet a sexy, laser-slinging rocket ship of your own.”
“We need to act before the constitutional convention,” Baxter said. “Shelby will expect us at the table with her.”
“He’s not some corporate Rapunzel locked away in an office tower,” I said. “He’s our liaison. There’s nothing suspicious about us wanting to liaise with him.”
Baxter nodded. “To feel
him up, as they say.”
“Out.” I dialed him up on my omni, calling in 2D.
Go’s long face appeared on the screen. “What’s up, gentlemen?”
“We need to talk.”
“Talk on.”
“In person. Over a drink, maybe.”
He brushed a sheaf of black hair away from his eyes. “Yeah, I’d love to, but I’m all tied up down here, you know? A million and two different things to take care of before the big meeting.”
“Go, this is critical.”
“So’s the mass of the explosion Linigan will unleash on me if I don’t stick to schedule. Why don’t you tell me right now, guys?”
I bugged my eyes at Baxter. “We can’t, Go. We need to see you.”
“I’m sorry, but it’ll have to be the night after the first hearing wraps up. All booked through then. Gotta go right now, even. See you in a couple days!”
His faced blipped off my screen.
I slapped the back of my neck. “I’ll try Jia. She must know more than she told me.”
Baxter nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, you seem to have an in with her.”
“I get it!” Fay laughed.
I left them to their jokes. As I approached the hotel, Jia ran out the front doors in full uniform.
“Where have you been?” she said. “You’re not supposed to go anywhere without us.”
I gestured to take in the city. “Following up on our conversation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Our X-rated kung fu lesson?”
“Kung fu lesson?” Her ponytail swung as she shook her head. “I don’t remember going in your room.”
“Maybe your mind was blown by all the sex.”
Jia’s thick features drew tight. She stepped forward and stuck a finger in my chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Any of it. If you’re looking for love, try your little blond lawyer.”
Anger coursed over me. “This guilt of yours is so pathetic. There have been hundreds like you. You’re nothing special.”
Her brows pinched together and I knew she was just trying to protect herself but I didn’t care. Human behavior wore me out sometimes. A cycle of fear and yearning and rationalization, and in the end, they settled for what was available rather than what they wanted. I knew better than most—than anyone—how it felt to be trapped for years at a time in a place or position you loathed. I knew, too, there were two ways to get yourself out of anything or anywhere: to dedicate years or even decades to change, or to be willing to leave everything behind and strike out for the unknown.
But the former took work and the latter was scary. People like Jia lacked the vision to plan or the deep-down understanding that by definition, unless a choice actually killed you, you’d make it out the other side intact. Jia did things through half measures, tipping me to her superiors’ schemes instead of doing something about it herself. And then she got scared. Brushed me off.
This, here, was the history of human problems. Nothing frustrated me more than watching people screw up in the exact same way as everyone else. Elevating their fear and guilt over their own happiness. Quite obviously, I had no patience for it.
Or maybe I was mad because there wasn’t a fucking thing I could do until Go met with us after the first round of the constitutional conference.
Turned out “conference” was hardly the word for it. I had imagined legions of speakers on both sides crowded into a ball room or theater, catcalls and harrumphs and motions passed by yea or nay. Instead, citing safety concerns and policy, the negotiations for the revised rights of the Workers’ Alliance of Titan and the Extrasolar Colonies took place in a boardroom high up Olympian Atomics’ main office, a steep pyramid of deep green glass that gave way to shimmery white at the apex of its upper floors.
We were allowed four participants. Shelby was a given, as was Becky Morgan. For their second representative, the colonists sent Calbert Quarro, a doughy man whose light brown scalp was shaved bare but whose colossal sideburns burst from his cheeks like a hairy fire. Over the protests of everyone but Shelby and Fay, I was granted our final seat.
So long as it could find a way around the building’s communications lockdown, Fay would attend as our uninvited fifth. Security would have stripped my dot mike (as it was, they scanned us, ensured our omnis were network-disabled, and made us sign, in hard copy, a ream of nondisclosure agreements), so that morning Pete held me down while Baxter slid a flexible tube down my throat and affixed the mike to my insides instead. I subjected the mike to a surprise field test by gagging all over the carpet.
“Please don’t do that again,” Fay said.
The meeting arrived. In the boardroom, Titan’s yellow light cast a buttery glow on Linigan, Go, a black man in the pea coat-style suit that seemed to be the unofficial uniform of OA management, and a basset hound-eyed white woman who tickled data from a wide-screened omni propped on the desk. Over the years, I’d heard enough pleasantries and empty rhetoric to tune out the preliminaries. I started paying proper attention once their tone and postures indicated they’d moved on to substantial matters.
“You’ve had three days to look over our proposal,” Shelby said, referring to the representative-style constitution that may have squeaked out a popular vote in most Earthside democracies. “Let’s hear your gestalt take.”
“Right,” Linigan said in his Hong Kong British. “Thing is, it’s just not going to fly.”
“What part?”
“Any of it.”
Shelby went still. “Philosophically, it’s in tune with modern guidelines. Practically boilerplate.”
“I know. If we were looking at a new state in the Balkans or even Luna, their citizens would be proud.”
Becky clasped her thick fingers on the desk. “We’re just looking for reasonable pay and reasonable rights.”
“What’s reasonable?” said the man in the pea coat suit.
“A contract you can read to Joe Earthman without him laughing out loud.”
Linigan nodded out the window to the curve of the dome and the swirling orange clouds beyond. “This look like Earth to you?”
Becky’s brow creased over. “People are people wherever you go.”
“Fay,” I subvocalized. No reply. I tapped my throat.
“Earth isn’t actively trying to kill every person on it every second of the day,” Linigan said. “On Earth, if you break a window, three hundred people don’t die.” He fluttered his copy of the constitution. “This is written by people who don’t know the first thing about what it’ll take to stop them from freezing, starving, and suffocating on Centauri. We’re not opposed to making one wing of the government citizen-run—we’ve got some models for you based on the original House of Commons—but the power to make decisions is going to remain with Olympian Atomics.”
“What he’s saying, philosophically speaking,” Go said, removing his index finger from his mouth, “is it’s wild out there, you know? You’re looking at disasters you can predict and tragedies you can’t. It’s a different reality. You need something more centralized so if an earthquake cracks half your domes or I don’t know, your fusion line’s cut and suddenly it’s igloos and whale blubber time, we can react fast enough to keep everybody safe. I mean, have you thought about the liability we’re accepting?”
“Fay,” I said into my mike. “Fay.”
Shelby nodded like a pecking bird. “And a little thing like protection from random search falls by the wayside. I mean, Becky could be carrying a nuclear arsenal in her pocket.”
“Are you trying to make us sound like assholes?” Linigan’s eyelids bunched up like he was in pain. “Most of what we need we’d only break out in case of emergency. Everyday life, you’re going to see a society not much different from Mars or Luna or India.”
Becky laughed across the table. “I never been any of those places, but I can tell you none of them wants to ban talking about your job on the omninet.”
Linigan
pulled a face. “Our work on Centauri is proprietary information. We let you talk about what you’re up to there, why don’t I just feed our competitors our business plan and lay you off right now?”
“Hi Rob!” Fay said in my ear. “You wouldn’t believe the scrambler they’re running. Wow! Almost completely—”
“Can you get a line into the local net?”
“Of course! Are you bored in there?”
“I need you to broadcast this to the civilian news feed. Suggest if they don’t like what they’re hearing, they should come to Olympian Atomics One and say something about it.”
“Done and done!”
The hound-eyed woman was watching me work my throat. I coughed, then interrupted Linigan mid-sentence. “Quit bullshitting us, will you? First you say life out there will be a constant emergency, then you say you’ll only use your kingly powers in event of emergency. Any time the citizens leave their homes, you want to be able to stick your hands up their asses like a sockpuppet. To send in security to bust up the omni of anyone who criticizes company policy. To be able to suspend pay on the flimsiest of grounds. This isn’t about safety. It’s about control.”
With the dot mike lodged inside my throat, I didn’t know how well it would capture the sound in the room. I let my mouth hang open. Shelby flashed her eyes, then shook her head at my lobotomized expression.
“Maybe,” Linigan shrugged. “Whole point is we don’t know how it’ll go down out there. We need total power to react.”
“What if a group of colonists was planning something you thought could put the colony at risk? Would you arrest them?”
He narrowed one eye at me. “Of course.”
“After a proper investigation,” Go said.
I smiled. “By Olympian Atomics security, after being authorized by an Olympian Atomics judge.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Linigan said. “With the amount of monitoring we’ll be doing, we’ll hardly need some judge to decide whether we’ve got enough intel for a warrant.”
“Let’s get back on track here,” Shelby said.