Near me, Lynn had gotten through to someone. “I’m calling to renegotiate my contract,” she said, her voice triumphant.
The U.S. government will provide transportation to citizens in danger under certain circumstances, and that was one of the reasons I’d snatched Lynn. They don’t recognize the validity of bond contracts generally and they consider a U.S. citizen being held to work in a skin factory to essentially have been kidnapped and imprisoned under dangerous circumstances. I’d figured Lynn would take the first boat back to California, but instead she was spelling out a set of conditions under which she’d let John Butterfield resell her bond to someone else. “We’re not talking about profit,” she said furiously, pacing back and forth in front of the desk. “We’re talking about how much of a loss you’re going to take.”
“What happened to her?” Mr. LeBlanc asked me.
“She had kidney failure,” I said, and explained the sequence of events.
“Huh,” he said. “Kidney failure, really? Same thing happened with an escaped bond-worker last month, too.”
“What causes kidney failure, anyway?”
“Oh, lots of things. Untreated diabetes, certain illnesses, drug overdoses.… Kidneys filter out toxins, so an overdose of anything toxic.” He pursed his lips. “You’re not big on food and water inspectors here, you know. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”
“Lynn?”
She pressed the mute button on the phone. “Yes?”
“Which canteen do you subscribe to?”
“Clark’s. It’s near the locker rooms.”
Could that be the secret? That Clark’s was poisoning people? But thousands of bond-workers ate there; if it were poisoning people, the clinic would be overflowing with dying bond-workers.
No; if Lynn had been poisoned, she’d surely been singled out.
“Don’t renegotiate your contract,” I said. “Go back to California.”
She shook her head and returned to her conversation. I looked mutely at Mr. LeBlanc. He shrugged. “Fugitive bond-workers stay here more often than you’d think. In Lynn’s case, maybe there’s a warrant out for her arrest, and she’s taking advantage of the laws here to avoid extradition.”
Lynn glared at him and muted the phone again. “Drug charges,” she said. “Possession and manufacture of substances that are entirely legal on every island in the seastead. I’d bet dollars to scrip Mr. American Representative here has been known to possess an illegal substance from time to time.”
He shrugged.
“But even though she’s up on criminal charges back in the States, you’d still take her home, for free?”
“Well, not exactly for free,” he said. “We’d send her a bill later. She wouldn’t get sold into bond-slavery if she didn’t pay, though, we’d just garnish her paychecks.”
“Lynn,” I said. “I think the secret they’re protecting is that you were poisoned on purpose. Four other bond-workers were treated for kidney failure the same day as you, and all had their contracts bought by the same guy who bought yours. Other workers have disappeared from Gibbon’s dining hall, haven’t they? They’ve gotten sick, and never come back. I think Gibbon’s doing it. I think Gibbon, Janus, and Butterfield are conspiring to use the ‘terminal condition’ loophole to make sure Butterfield gets a steady stream of bond-workers.”
Lynn turned back to the phone. “Also,” she said, “I don’t want to be sold back to Gibbon.”
* * *
GIBBON, JANUS, AND Butterfield.
Min does have police, after a fashion; we’re not like Lib. But we don’t have a lot of police. Basically, they break up fist fights. If something gets stolen, you’d usually hire someone privately to try to retrieve it for you. There was a murder on the stead a few years ago and here’s what happened: everyone knew who did it, so the police went and arrested him and there was a lot of talk about trial procedures. While people were arguing about how exactly a murder trial ought to work, the victim’s brother hired a bunch of guys from Lib to break into the police station and kidnap the murderer, and then throw him into the ocean. And then everyone pretended not to know that it was the victim’s brother who’d done the hiring.
But here’s the other thing: the murder victim was a citizen, not a guest worker.
Something complicated like this—everyone would pretend they thought it was coincidence that all these people were developing kidney failure. Or maybe they’d blame Clark’s. The doctor at the clinic clearly thought it was Clark’s.
I did know one person who was powerful enough to actually make a difference, though: my father.
My father scared me. Especially when he was angry. But he was my father. I ought to be able to go to him with this.
* * *
“DAD?”
Our apartment was mostly dark; light spilled from my father’s office. “Come in here, Beck.”
“I need to talk to you about something,” I said.
He must have heard the seriousness in my voice because he pushed himself back from his computer and gestured to a chair.
“I was trying to find something kind of unusual this week,” I said. “I was trying to find a person.”
His eye twitched. “Really.”
“Well, I started out trying to find a pair of size eight sparkly strappy sandals. But the woman who had those wanted me to try to find her sister.” He didn’t answer. I swallowed hard and went on. “So, okay, I’m going to skip all the intervening steps and tell you what I realized today, which is that Mr. Gibbon, Mr. Janus, and Mr. Butterfield are conspiring to poison bond-workers, so that their contracts can be sold for skin farm work. It wasn’t an accident that L—” I broke off, suddenly not wanting to give my father any names “—the woman I was looking for got sick.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Do you have any actual evidence for this story you’re telling me?”
“No,” I said, honestly. “I mean, I’m not a police officer or a doctor. But I bet if you examined any of the bond-workers who’ve been treated for kidney failure in the last month—”
“Yes, most likely you’d find traces, if a poison was involved. Well. Yes.” He pondered that. “I assume your, ah, your date, this afternoon … was the woman you were searching for?”
He’d heard from the ADs already. “Yes.”
“You are remarkably tenacious.”
“Thank you,” I said, even though I could tell this hadn’t been a compliment.
“And just what do you expect me to do about this, Beck?”
“Go to the police and make them investigate?”
“You must realize that you’ve overlooked a wide range of alternate possibilities. These individuals might have eaten or drunk something dodgy, first of all; that’s the simplest explanation. It might be pure coincidence. Or perhaps most likely of all, they might have all ingested something recreational that displayed questionable judgment on all their parts.”
“And coincidentally, Butterfield bought up all those people with kidney failure?”
“Oh, I’m sure that wasn’t a coincidence. He has an arrangement with the man who holds the patent on the kidney regeneration technique and can have it done at a discount. Undoubtedly, he has a standing request at the hospital for notification when anyone has significant kidney damage.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know a lot of things, Rebecca.” He fell silent and watched my reaction. I tried hard not to give him one. “Now,” he said, “I received several interesting calls today. Apparently you were pestering Janus outside of his dining hall, after talking your way in. You had nothing wrong with you this morning at the clinic, although you did cost me a fair sum what with all the tests they ran. And you went to Lib this afternoon.”
He hadn’t heard about Embassy Row. I didn’t tell him.
“All, apparently, to find—and eventually to personally rescue this particular bond-worker. Surely the rescue wasn’t in your original agreement with the owner of the sandal
s.”
“… No.”
“No.” He leaned back. “So? Explain.”
“When I was down by the locker rooms today someone attacked me, grabbed me from behind and hit me, and told me to mind my own business.” I glared furiously at my own feet. “I was done but that made me think I must have missed something important. Something worth hiding.”
“I see.”
He fell silent. I lifted my chin and stared out the window. Or at the window, since it was dark.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve demonstrated that you are stubborn, disobedient, and disrespectful.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“No, you’re clearly not.” He tapped his desk with a pen. “I’m going to have to think on how best to use you. In the meantime, I’m grounding you for the next month. If Jamie still wants you as a Finder when the month is up, that’s between the two of you.”
I swallowed hard. “What about Gibbon and … what about the bond-workers?”
“I expect there won’t be any more mysterious kidney failures,” my father said, turning back to his computer screen. “I’ll pass the word along that if their plot could be unraveled by a persistent teenager they need to knock it off. I expect they will. Also, I don’t like people manhandling my daughter, especially considering how thoroughly the tactic backfired. I’ll see if I can identify the thug.”
“But—what about L—I mean, my date from this afternoon?”
He looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t go looking for Lynn Miller again,” he said. “I doubt that you will like what you find.”
* * *
BACK IN MY room, I turned on Stead Life, laid out my homework, and changed into pajamas. When I took off my jeans, they crinkled; the letter I’d been handed at the CSB was still in my pocket.
My father hadn’t mentioned that particular bit of disobedience. I smoothed the letter out, then opened it.
Dear Becky,
Happy birthday, darling. This is the twelfth of these messages I’ve written. Every year I send a new one to the Services Bureau on Rosa, in the hopes that eventually you will come in, and they can deliver it.
I’m not sure what your father has told you about me. I just want you to know that I love you, and I would like to see you. If you’re not willing to come stateside, I would like to speak with you by phone or correspond by letter. Whatever you’re comfortable with. If you’d like to leave New Minerva, the Bureau will provide you with transportation to San Francisco. I’ll meet you there, and take you home—to my home.
I just want you to know I haven’t forgotten you.
I’ll never forget you.
I hope to see you again someday.
Love,
Mom
My father had lied to me, I realized, staring at the letter.
My mother was alive.
I wondered what else my father had lied about.
WEEP FOR DAY
Indrapramit Das
Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia, and is currently in Vancouver, British Columbia, he says, “working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, game tester, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood.” He attended the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop and was a recipient of an Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Apex Magazine, and others, and in the anthologies Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (Zubaan Books) and Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars. He is writing a contemporary and historical fantasy novel set in India.
“Weep for Day” was published in Asimov’s, and is evidence, if anyone needs it, that Asimov’s is still a leader in the field. Michael Swanwick praises it, in an online review: “The prose reminded me of early Zelazny. It has touches of Gene Wolfe and Mary Gentle and other writers to it as well.” The world is changing over the lifetimes of the characters and that gives the story an elegiac tone, and an underlying power.
I WAS EIGHT years old the first time I saw a real, living Nightmare. My parents took my brother and me on a trip from the City-of-Long-Shadows to the hills at Evening’s edge, where one of my father’s clients had a manse. Father was a railway contractor. He hired out labor and resources to the privateers extending the frontiers of civilization toward the frozen wilderness of the dark Behind-the-Sun. Aptly, we took a train up to the foothills of the great Penumbral Mountains.
It was the first time my brother and I had been on a train, though we’d seen them tumble through the city with their cacophonic engines, cumulous tails of smoke and steam billowing like blood over the rooftops when the red light of our sun caught them. It was also the first time we had been anywhere close to Night—Behind-the-Sun—where the Nightmares lived. Just a decade before we took that trip, it would have been impossible to go as far into Evening as we were doing with such casual comfort and ease.
Father had prodded the new glass of the train windows, pointing to the power-lines crisscrossing the sky in tandem with the gleaming lines of metal railroads silvering the hazy landscape of progress. He sat between my brother Velag and me, our heads propped against the bulk of his belly, which bulged against his rough crimson waistcoat. I clutched that coat and breathed in the sweet smell of chemlis gall that hung over him. Mother watched with a smile as she peeled indigos for us with her fingers, laying them in the lap of her skirt.
“Look at that. We’ve got no more reason to be afraid of the dark, do we, my tykes?” said Father, his belly humming with the sound of his booming voice.
Dutifully, Velag and I agreed there wasn’t.
“Why not?” he asked us, expectant.
“Because of the Industrialization, which brings the light of Day to the darkness of Night,” we chimed, a line learned both in school and at home (inaccurate, as we’d never set foot in Night itself). Father laughed. I always slowed down on the word “industrialization,” which caused Velag and me to say it at different times. He was just over a year older than me, though.
“And what is your father, children?” Mother asked.
“A knight of Industry and Technology, bringer of light under Church and Monarchy.”
I didn’t like reciting that part, because it had more than one long “y” word, and felt like a struggle to say. Father was actually a knight, though not a knight-errant for a while. He had been too big by then to fit into a suit of plate-armor or heft a heavy sword around, and knights had stopped doing that for many years anyway. The Industrialization had swiftly made the pageantry of adventure obsolete.
Father wheezed as we reminded him of his knighthood, as if ashamed. He put his hammy hands in our hair and rubbed. I winced through it, as usual, because he always forgot about the pins in my long hair, something my brother didn’t have to worry about. Mother gave us the peeled indigos, her hands perfumed with the citrus. She was the one who taught me how to place the pins in my hair, both of us in front of the mirror looking like different-sized versions of each other.
I looked out the windows of our cabin, fascinated by how everything outside slowly became bluer and darker as we moved away from the City-of-Long-Shadows, which lies between the two hemispheres of Day and Night. Condensation crawled across the corners of the double-glazed panes as the train took us further east. Being a studious girl even at that age, I deduced from school lessons that the air outside was becoming rapidly colder as we neared Night’s hemisphere, which has never seen a single ray of our sun and is theorized to be entirely frozen. The train, of course, was kept warm by the same steam and machinery that powered its tireless wheels and kept its lamps and twinkling chandeliers aglow.
“Are you excited to see the Nightmare? It was one of the first to be captured and tamed. The gentleman we’re visiting is very proud to be its captor,” said Father.
“Yes!” screamed Velag. “Does it still have teeth? And claws?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“I would think
so,” Father nodded.
“Is it going to be in chains?”
“I hope so, Velag. Otherwise it might get loose and—” He paused for dramatic effect. I froze in fear. Velag looked eagerly at him. “Eat you both up!” he bellowed, tickling us with his huge hands. It took all my willpower not to scream. I looked at Velag’s delighted expression to keep me calm, reminding myself that these were just Father’s hands jabbing my sides.
“Careful!” Mother said sharply, to my relief. “They’ll get the fruit all over.” The indigo segments were still in our laps, on the napkins Mother had handed to us. Father stopped tickling us, still grinning.
“Do you remember what they look like?” Velag asked, as if trying to see how many questions he could ask in as little time as possible. He had asked this one before, of course. Father had fought Nightmares, and even killed some, when he was a knight-errant.
“We never really saw them, son,” said Father. He touched the window. “Out there, it’s so cold you can barely feel your own fingers, even in armor.”
We could see the impenetrable walls of the forests pass us by—shaggy, snarled mare-pines, their leaves black as coals and branches supposedly twisted into knots by the Nightmares to tangle the path of intruders. The high, hoary tops of the trees shimmered ever so slightly in the scarce light sneaking over the horizon, which they sucked in so hungrily. The moon was brighter here than in the City, but at its jagged crescent, a broken gemstone behind the scudding clouds. We were still in Evening, but had encroached onto the Nightmares’ outer territories, marked by the forests that extended to the foothills. After the foothills, there was no more forest, because there was no more light. Inside our cabin, under bright electric lamps, sitting on velvet-lined bunks, it was hard to believe that we were actually in the land of Nightmares. I wondered if they were in the trees right now, watching our windows as we looked out.
“It’s hard to see them, or anything, when you’re that cold,” Father breathed deeply, gazing at the windows. It made me uneasy, hearing him say the same thing over and over. We were passing the very forests he traveled through as a knight-errant, escorting pioneers.
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