by Jay Allan
We descended to the tunnel’s middle, squinting into the low light. I didn’t know what I expected to find. Go’s fake blood splashed over the wall in a crimson model of Saturn and its many moons, maybe.
“Are you sure this is the right place, Fay?” I said.
“Completely.”
The dark gray curve of the walls was unmarked. A discolored spot on the floor, faint and star-shaped, may have been a blast pattern, or it could have been the spoor where a boozy traveler had upchucked his lunch. No sign of any bits of Go’s artificial body.
Pete scratched his upper lip. “I saved the splinters from your back. Could we use those?”
Baxter sighed through his nose. “They don’t know we exist, let alone what our bodies are composed of.”
“Look, somebody’s got to notice the face of the company’s gone missing,” I said. “We’re sitting on a house full of dynamite. All we need is a spark.”
It had been so easy to galvanize the omninet with Linigan’s candid broadcast. Since then, the colonists’ mood had squeezed through my fingers like quicksilver. Somewhere on Earth, OA’s security reinforcements assembled for shipment to Titan. If the constitution was formalized by the time they arrived in something like a month—and it showed every sign of being ready for ratification within the next two weeks—they would bring in the colony ship, load it up with colonists and their personal army, and set sail for our stellar neighbor.
And then they’d be free to come after us.
* * *
“Sometimes it feels like I’m running at normal speed and everyone else is stuck in slow motion.” Shelby sipped her murky blue glass, a local take on deimos that tasted even worse than what they brewed on Mars. “It’s such a rush. An entire planet’s going to run on the laws we’re establishing right now.”
“That must feel great.” I glanced across the bar we’d turned into our base of operations. Triumphant after another long day of kicking ass, she’d invited me out for a drink. I didn’t feel too good myself.
“It does. You blew up their whole foundation. They’re still blinking in the rubble as my people ride in and chop off their heads.” She finished her glass and struck the blade of her hand against the table. “Chop! Chop!”
“We’re lucky to have you.”
“We’re lucky we’ve got you, destroyer of worlds. If you hadn’t gone crazy I’d still be locked up down New Houston way. What makes you think you can get away with things like that?”
I gestured vaguely. “I’ve been around long enough to know a rule is just a suggestion.”
“There’s something about you,” she said, peering at me drunkenly. “Something different.”
I managed half a smile. “Most of my life has been pretty quiet.”
“Don’t, okay?” She jabbed me in the stomach with a stiff finger. “I hate that modesty shit. When you’ve done something right, you should be able to own it without getting pelted with fruit by the madding crowd.”
“I’ll own it once the job is done. Until then, I’ll just eye it through the shop window.”
Shelby leaned back. “What have you guys been up to, anyway? You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet. I feel like half the domes should be on fire right now.”
“We tried, but it turns out there’s no oxygen in the atmosphere. We’re just keeping touch with the colonists in case we hit any snags.”
Her grin inverted as she remembered her glass was empty. “How about Jia? You keeping in touch with her, too?”
I hunched forward. There were times I couldn’t believe I still got embarrassed, but so much of behavior is hard-wired physical responses. “Our relationship is strictly professional. Since her profession involves hauling a gun everywhere she goes, I’ve decided not to press the issue.”
“Smart. Very smart. You’re a smart man, Rob.”
“Can you say that into my omni?” I fished it from my pocket. “I may need proof of this later.”
She grinned, showing small straight teeth stained pastel blue by the algal liquor. They were still stained an hour later in our hotel hallway.
“Why don’t you come in?” She fumbled with the passcard to her room. “I’ve got something to show you. It’s my body.”
In a move I never would have tried sober, I reached out for her smooth blond hair, running it through my pinched fingers. She had a runner’s body, thin-limbed and compact, and her lean breasts curved gracefully under her earth-toned local’s polo.
“I would like to see that,” I said, promising my raging id I’d make it up to it, “but I can’t.”
Her alcohol-bright eyes flicked between mine, bluer than her teeth. “Past your bedtime?”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“Is this some spite thing? Because I snubbed on Hidey-Hole?”
I sighed. “If I held a grudge toward every woman who’d snubbed me, I’d have no time for anything but plotting my revenge.”
Her lips went tight. “Because you’ve had so many of them?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I jammed my hands through my short-clipped hair. “Can you trust me that I can’t for a reason so good I also can’t tell you what it is?”
“I can’t even understand it.” She shook her head, ponytail wagging. “Forget it. I know what I need better than you would anyway.”
She closed the door heavily. I retired to my room and went about my business. Between the whiskey and the post-orgasm endorphins I should have been snoring in seconds, but I stared out my window at the middle of the eight-day night. How is it that doing the right thing always turns out so tough? So wrong? How could it possibly be so rare to find a relationship where everything worked? I’d found it no more than five times in my three-thousand-year life—Nicky in Idaho, Alida in Amsterdam, Grazia in Italy, Vidya in India, and first and always Demostrate. Every woman since her had been, in a way, a search for her. For us. For the sixteen short years we’d had together.
She’d worked in the Athenian bakery with me for nine months before we spoke in any meaningful way. I noticed her the first day— hips as round as the moon, sea-blue eyes framed by wavy hair that tickled the middle of her back when she walked—but she was young, eighteen years old when she showed up, and between that and her beauty I’d written her off as not worth knowing (at least, the moment I learned she was engaged). Not that her age was a social problem; in those days we were much less concerned about the youth and gender of the people we went to bed with, and to see her on the arm of a man of some thirty apparent years wouldn’t trouble the eye of Athens’ stiffest prude.
Still, on the inside I was nearly three centuries old, which was at least 250 years longer than I needed to know that young, pretty people never say anything worth hearing. Not until the years have beaten both the youth and the beauty off their faces.
I sweated at the ovens, she sweated delivering baskets of steaming bread to our roaming vendors. When work made us, we talked about the job. Otherwise I ignored her. She was involved. Fools will tell you all’s fair in love, which conquers all, but trying to worm your way into the bedrock of someone else’s relationship just gets you covered in mud. And, generally speaking, crushed.
Then I learned, to my great dismay, Demostrate had a sense of humor.
“With all the bread you eat,” she said, catching me munching a heel I thought no one would miss, “it’s a wonder you don’t sweat butter.”
“Where do you think ours comes from?” I said, spraying crumbs. “I scrape it from my robes every morning.”
Her nose scrunched up in equal parts laughter and disgust. “If I throw up right now, would you bottle it as wine?”
After that, we talked every time we were in the same room. She made me laugh and the hours pass. I didn’t pine for her—unlike the socially incestuous pack of delivery boys and girls who went running off to the theater together the moment we shut the bakery doors, I was wise enough not to try to be friends outside work, where feelings could become confused, hearts so
easily mangled—but at night I thought wistfully about how well we matched, her sly goofiness, my catholic lack of concern for day to day problems. In another life, perhaps. A few months later, I turned from the ovens to pass her a basket of bread and caught her wiping tears from both cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
Her voice was a phlegmy quiver. “Looks like I’ve joined Hera in the land of the forgotten. My boyfriend’s done with me.”
“I’m sorry,” I remembered to say once I’d finished contemplating the extent of his idiocy and how long I could afford to let her emotions recover before some other man pounced on her instead. “You must feel terrible.”
I decided to give her a month. Three weeks and three days later, she wandered into the hot kitchen, rearranged the loaves in her basket, and struck up some idle chatter. I extracted myself from the kneading bowl and toweled the goop from my hands.
“What’s this?” I said, plucking a note tucked under a round floury roll on the stone table where we let them cool; Hippias, the bakery’s owner, sometimes gave us advice and admonishments this way. “Was this here a minute ago?”
“Let me see.” Demostrate snatched at it. I held it away, unfolding it with one hand. If Hippias had left me an order or a recipe adjustment, I could have screwed up the entire day. Demostrate flushed and zipped for the door. “Read it later.”
Of course I read it then. I was too surprised by her words to be surprised she could write: “You’re fun. Maybe we could go for a walk some time?”
Maybe it was its vulnerable girlishness that had my own heart beating like a teen’s. Brave, too: men forbade their wives to appear in public without them, let alone vote or lead any semblance of an independent life. At the time, I agreed with these things. A woman’s humors fluctuated too violently to have any sway over public policy (our scientists could prove it!), and anyway they didn’t have the heart for hard decisions. Highly enlightened age. But Demostrate, still nineteen, had struck before I’d had the change.
I left the kitchen, but she was gone.
I pulled her aside when she returned to refill her basket. She blushed, but agreed to walk down to the ocean with me on our day off.
We married less than a year afterwards, and though the fifteen years between then and the great chaos of the Persian invasion weren’t wholly free of arguments and hard words, I never stopped grinning at her pretty face, her strange jokes, her keen analysis of the increasingly deranged politics of the Assembly.
I did my best not to think of the day I would have to leave her. For sparing me that moment, I owed the war that much. But I would never forgive it for the years it stole from us.
* * *
Still awake, less drunk, I dressed myself and left my room, intending to catch some recycled not-so-fresh dome air. Jia fell in a few steps behind me. I wanted to strangle her with her own rifle strap. Not for confusing me—life is confusion—but because having someone follow you around like an overprotective dog is fucking annoying. For fun, I paced around on the sculpted yellow dirt in front of the hotel and Jia paced along with me.
“Can’t you watch me from inside?” I said, boiling over. She stared back with sleepy brown eyes that didn’t seem to care about anything. I shooed her toward the hotel. “Stop treating me like a goddamn kid.”
“Sure,” she said. “Soon as you tell me what happened to Go.”
“What are you talking about?”
One more sign of the schizophrenic reality we faced. We’d decided that until we could find concrete evidence, we needed to stop with the cuckoo conspiracy talk. None of the colonists believed it and any attention it drew from OA would be the kind that got you exploded in the night. OA appeared to be biding its time. No need to go poking them with sticks until we had one sharp enough to put out their eyes. Jia had been Go’s friend, maybe his lover—I’d shared enough close quarters with Baxter to know his artificial body mimicked a man’s from head to foot and everywhere in between—but she still wore that lightning-striking-a-mountain logo over her left breast.
“Down in the tunnel,” she said. “Tin said something awful must have happened.”
“Yes. It did. And no one believes us.”
Her sleepy eyes went wide. “I’m sorry about the other stuff. Just please tell me what happened to Go?”
“Did you know what he was?” I said. She shook her head, blinking. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “They blew him up.”
“What do you mean they blew him up?”
“I mean your employers, to stop him from telling us their treacherous plans, hit him with a device that dispersed him into such small pieces they became embedded in the tunnel walls. And my back.”
She covered her mouth and nose with her hands, elbows clamped against her flat belly. “No they didn’t. They don’t do that. You don’t just blow someone up.”
I held up my palms, helpless. That gesture, more than any words could, did her in. She blinked harder, lashes clumped with tears. Should I care? I didn’t want to. But it was one of those moments where some primal empathy takes over. I hugged her and she spasmed silently against my shoulder, refusing to give her grief a voice. Soon, she tensed her arms, pushing me back.
“They fucked up this time.” Tear-bright under the streetlights, her eyes burned with the cold fury of the stars in the vacuum. “I know how to take them down.”
The guard led him to a windowless room with a plain table and two equally plain chairs. Baxter could no longer hear the noise of the terminal. The guard asked for his ticket and passport and told him to wait.
“As if we have a choice,” Arthur said as he left.
“They’re going to know,” Baxter said. “We’re going to be destroyed!”
“We’re not going to be destroyed.”
“Well, they’re not going to shake our hands! They’re going to shoot us into us-dust!”
“Will you calm down? All they’ll know is you’re not who you say you are. They’re not going to begin to suspect you’re not human. You forget this because you’re not one, but that man would have to be a crazy person for it to even enter his mind that you’re not exactly what you look like.”
“What if they take us to the police?
“So what if they do?”
Baxter sat completely still a moment, then put Arthur on the table and held his hand over the box’s little square screen. “I don’t have fingerprints.”
18
I heard the shouts before I woke. My slumbering brain borrowed them for the audio track to a dream of armored hoplites leaping from ship to ship over the seas of Artemisium, spears shining over the dark water and piercing the throats of Persian sailors. One of those sailors faced me on the trireme’s deck, axe in his hand, but however hard I strained, I couldn’t lift my spear.
My omni rattled on the hotel nightstand. I rolled over, heart thudding. Still dark out. “Hello?”
“Get down here, you idiot,” Baxter said.
“Down where?”
“You haven’t seen?” He paused, dead silent. “Look at your news feed. If you want to save time, look on your way to the Pyramid.”
My head hurt and my nerves felt like a ham-handed man had played them like a violin. I thumped down on the mattress, angry at everything and especially Baxter, and clicked over to the news feeds, cursing him again for being so vague.
It didn’t matter. It was everywhere, mirrored at a dozen nodes, crosspunted by every colonist and worker on the network.
It had been much darker in the tunnel than on the most popular video—someone must have refiltered it—but even had they maintained the original levels, anyone who knew Go would have recognized his flagpole body and the dark drape of his hair. The camera showed a ceiling-high perspective some thirty feet away. Most of our words were too soft to make out even in the videos that amped up the audio.
The video split, pushing us to the right half. The left side became a high perspective of a man kneeling outside a tunnel entrance. Feverishly, he tap
ped at an omni. Beside him lay a small black tube.
On our side, the camera went dead. On his, the tunnel mouth went black as a rabbit hole. He pocketed the omni, picked up the tube, and descended.
The tunnel mouth flashed, accompanied by a faint and hollow thud. The timer on both feeds leapt forward six minutes. The camera in the tunnel blinked back on along with the lights. The tube-trapped smoke had dispersed enough to see a wide scorch mark in the middle of the floor and sprays of gleaming liquid drooling from the walls. At the foot of one wall, a round object, draped in black, sat like a discarded ball.
Two men screeched up in an open-roofed cart, unpacking their cleaning supplies with professional haste. They wore long-billed hats and plain clothes, but the auxiliary material at the end of the clip package matched still frames of their faces to a pair of Olympian Atomics HR mugshots. An attached text file outlined OA’s plan to overthrow the colonial government mid-flight and capture Fay and our crew on Titan.
I got on my shoes and ran for the Pyramid, bounding along in the low grav.
Neither Jia nor Tin was in the hotel hall, but down on the street, I wasn’t alone. The harsh glare of late morning streetlights illuminated a dozen others jogging toward the same tunnel. Confused faces shouted from open windows. The stall vendors had packed up or abandoned their booths. I rang up Baxter.
“What’s happening over there?” I said.
“Massed confusion with a high chance of precipitating violence. Where did that video come from?”
“Our female guardian angel. Or one of her friends.” I jogged into the dim tunnel. “Last night she found out about Go. Must know someone with access to OA’s security feeds.”
He was drowned out by an eruption of boos and an amplified voice echoing through their dome. Baxter tried again. “Well, if you’re a fan of anarchy, you should probably get over here.”