by Malka Older
Following the border along its length reminds her of the story she told the camaradas. The technology here is totally different: instead of poured concrete and metal, the wall involves a close grid of feeds, nanosensors, and simulated electric-shock transmitters. It could be almost transparent, but Liberty has papered it over with patriotic projections. That’s probably a temporary solution until they can fit something more solid into the budget, but it makes the point: this isn’t only about preventing people from crossing over easily, it’s also about erasing the idea of an independent government from the experience of Liberty citizens. She shakes her head over the hysteria about a non-hostile foreign government and daydreams about Núria patrolling the other side of that border in uniform, which is why she doesn’t notice the man loping alongside her until he says something.
“Heeyy.” The man is dapper in a lavender guayabera open nearly to his navel, with a rangy swagger and hair in two-millimeter twists. “Look at you.”
Maryam sends him a death glare, and he holds up his hands. “Not verbally assaulting you, I swear. I’m just saying, we don’t see many Information staff around here.”
The death glare gains laser focus, but he laughs. “Come on! You think you don’t stand out?”
“I’m on vacation,” Maryam spits, and immediately regrets engaging.
“Sure you are,” he agrees amiably. “So am I. So refreshing to get out of Information territory for a time and still have access to almost all the amenities of home.”
Maryam peers at him, not sure whether he’s being serious or sarcastic. “So, you’re not from around here?”
“Not in the least! But I keep it on my list for when I get kicked out of micro-democratic territory for good.”
“And why would that happen?”
“I’m a bad influence. But I’m not sure yet whether I could stand to live here permanently. It’s a bit provincial for my taste, and these Independejos take themselves so seriously.”
“Seems easy enough to cross over into OLYS or NuevoPRI,” Maryam offers, falling into the rhythm of his banter.
“For now,” he says, darkly, and then offers his hand. “Domaine.”
Maryam disdains it. “Why did you approach me?”
“I told you. You obviously work for Information, and we don’t get many of those. Except for that famous one a while back.”
The memory hits Maryam in the guts, and she can’t believe she forgot about it: Valérie took a hyper-publicized holiday trip to Independentista territory right after her breakup with Vera Kubugli. The compilers were all over it: vid of her in a stringkini by the pool, walking down the picturesque streets, sipping coffee under a straw hat with augmented eye shading. Even the memory stings. Maryam, in the early stages of her relationship with Núria, was trying to ignore the breakup as much as possible, but the images were everywhere. To make matters worse, Nejime was silently furious that Nougaz was providing so much publicity to a non-micro-democratic vacation spot. It was part of the impetus that finally overcame her inertia and got her to move from Doha.
Maryam glances over at Domaine, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed her discomfiture. “And because I’m such a bad influence,” he’s saying, “I can’t exactly call Information to complain.”
“Complain about what?”
“Hierarchy, monopoly, poverty, democracy as distraction, the cost of elections, the advantage of large governments, that appalling show trial in New York—should I go on?”
“You want me to listen to you complain about the things Information is actively working to improve and still does better than anyone else?” Maryam asks, letting her boredom into her voice. What is it with the weirdos picking her out of the crowd lately?
“Isn’t it nice to hear from someone who doesn’t hang out in the Information fandom?”
“Oh, right. We never hear from anti-Information people, since they’re so restrained and nonconfrontational. Why do you think my public Information is muted?”
“Because nobody uses that shit here, and you’re undercover anyway?”
Maryam forces a laugh. “Information staff can’t take vacations?” A glint from a nearby wall catches her eye, and she turns her head to look.
“You like it?” Domaine asks. “My work. The design, that is; I’m not an artist.”
It looks like sprayed-on, analog graffiti but sparkles like sequins under a disco ball. Maryam is almost sure it’s a projection, if a beautifully crafted one.
“IntelliGeneration?” she reads, finally deciphering the script. “What is that, some kind of reproductive assistance service?”
Domaine laughs easily. “You’ll find out; don’t worry.” And just like that he turns away and walks off.
Maryam stares after him, wondering if she offended him, and then shakes herself. She doesn’t care if he’s offended.
“Oh, by the way,” Domaine says, turning back and tossing her a bit of line-of-sight data. “Here’s a great place to get tlayudas. Not in the guidebooks, or at least not in the ones on Information. Local knowledge is still worth something.” And he winks before turning again and disappearing into the crowd.
Uneasy, Maryam turns back to her hotel. She triggers a script she wrote years ago to detect people following her—developed for creepy male stalkers rather than political spies—before remembering that it won’t work without feeds. She’s disturbed enough to duck into a café and drink some chocolate with a view of the street. She doesn’t see Domaine—can that be his real name?—again, and she decides it’s safe to return to the hotel. She has work to do.
Maybe because now she’s looking for it, she notices another two IntelliGeneration signs on her way back. She sets up a search on the neologism to run as soon as she has Information access again. And another on Domaine, in case that slightly odd name turns anything up.
* * *
Djukic’s team of workers are chuting the dirt directly into a compressor, which packs it into more easily stored bricks, and stacking the bricks in the basement rooms. It’s moving quickly, but not quickly enough for Roz. She is exhausted from the night before and a little annoyed that Djukic doesn’t even have a hangover.
“Any guesses?” Roz doesn’t really care about guesses, but she’s not drinking coffee, and she needs some kind of conversation to stay awake.
“Guesses?”
“What we’ll find.”
“Not my department,” Djukic says.
Roz turns away, suddenly annoyed by Djukic’s go-to answer.
“But based on the engineering specs, as far as we know them…” Either sensing her annoyance or interested in the question, Djukic decides to speculate. “Comms are a safe bet, but you’re right; from the size, it’s something more. Yes, probably human transport, but I think not regular. It wouldn’t be very comfortable. Maybe an escape hatch.”
Not a bad guess. Roz tries to remember Pressman’s arrest, and when she’s still not sure, she replays the footage. Halliday was careful not to give Pressman any notice, so maybe he did have an escape route that he never got to use. It would be an interesting historical footnote, but as Nejime pointed out yesterday, and again in an irate message this morning, the real issue is whether the tunnel is still in use. Roz can feel herself getting twitchy again. She wishes the election were over already. She sits down, rubbing her belly. More bricks clunk out of the compressor.
“Where do you live?” Roz asks, again trying to stave off boredom and nerves. She had a pre-conception vision of herself as the serene and graceful pregnant woman, but instead she spends most of the time feeling sweaty and off-balance.
“EuropeanUnion,” Djukic answers, kicking a clod of dirt. “One of the Belgrade centenals. And you?”
Roz shrugs. “I live in Doha. All the centenals there are AlThani, based on the local royalty.”
“What’s that like?” Djukic asks.
“It’s okay,” Roz says. “I live there for work, and they like having so many of us there bringing in business, so they m
ake it convenient for the office and comfortable in terms of living. But…” She pauses, realizing she’s getting personal, and then forges ahead. She was the one who asked first, after all. “After the baby comes, we’re planning to move to my husband’s centenal, part of the DarFur government, in a small city called Kas.”
Roz can see the flashing against Djukic’s eye as she looks it up. “Wow, it’s in the middle of nowhere! What’s that like?”
“It’s…” Roz finds that she is smiling as she searches for a descriptive to convey the feeling of it. “You know, when I first went, I didn’t like it at all, but I guess it’s grown on me. It’s quiet, people know each other, and yet there’s this wildness too, because the desert is right there…” She shakes her head and changes the subject. “And EuropeanUnion? How is that?” She rarely asks people about their governments. She hates feeling like a pollster. Besides, she has so many data-driven opinions on all the major governments that it seems disingenuous to ask citizens what they think.
“Oh, you know,” Djukic says. “It’s okay. They have some odd old ideas, but they’re pretty good about protecting the environment, people’s rights … I would have liked SavePlanet, but there was no chance of them winning a centenal in Belgrade, and EuropeanUnion is a decent compromise. Pretty good schools for the kids. Our head of state is a genderqueer sociologist, which says something about the electorate. And no smoking—there’s a PhilipMorris centenal adjoining us and the fug is—” She scrunches her nose and waves her hand expressively.
“Is it looking pretty safe in the election?” Roz asks, pulling up the data as she does.
“Probably,” Djukic says, but her tone is uncertain, and Roz sees what she means: EuropeanUnion has a lead but not what she would call a safe one. PhilipMorris is next, building off their neighboring constituency, and EasternPromise, a regional group somewhat smaller than EuropeanUnion, is in the mix.
Roz is about to ask whether Djukic plans to move if the smokers win when her belly stiffens to the ache point and she winces.
“You okay?”
“Sure,” Roz says, rubbing and then standing up. “Just a practice contraction.”
Djukic had sounded only mildly concerned, so Roz isn’t surprised when she answers: “Oh, ugh, yes. I had lots of those with my second son.”
“I get nervous about going into early labor.” Roz glances at her wrist, where a bracelet over her vein is monitoring oxytocin levels: no spike.
“You are still a couple of months away, though, no?”
“Six weeks or so, but you never know. That’s why they let me use the crow for these trips,” Roz says. “I can start back immediately if I need to.”
“Nice.”
“I appreciate you not asking before,” Roz says, trying to keep the rapport growing. “I got so sick of people asking when I was due that I thought about putting the date in my public Information in big pulsing letters.”
Djukic guffaws. “Why didn’t you?”
Roz shrugs. “It seemed unprofessional.” She remembers Rasmussen using her public Information to emphasize her vegetarianism; maybe that’s how you get to be a head of state, by not caring. “Also, that would make it even more public. The ideal is less to tell everyone than to have no one ask, because why do they need to know? Fortunately, my husband is … He tends to quell frivolous questions.” Suleyman is neither large nor rude, but the command he exudes makes people think twice about idle chatter.
“Useful.”
“It is. I wish he could teach me how he does it.”
Djukic goes over to take a look at the progress on the dig, and wanders back.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but are you going to use nanobots for the delivery?” Djukic asks.
Roz can’t repress a wriggle of discomfort. “I … don’t think so. I know everyone says they speed and smooth the process, but just the idea of them … down there … and then that they’re on the baby when it’s born…”
Djukic laughs. “Yes, I understand. I turned them down for my first one but used them for the second birth.”
“Did it make a big difference?” Roz asks, not sure she wants to know.
“It did,” Djukic answers. “But they say the second is easier anyway, so I’m not sure how much of it was the bots.”
Roz knows that rates of nanobot usage in delivery, like other controversial pregnancy and birth technologies, correlate strongly with government of citizenship. The only stronger indicator is the government where the attending doctor or midwife did their training. She keeps her mouth shut; she doesn’t want to suggest that Djukic’s choices, already in the past, were influenced by politics or dodgy data.
Djukic, on the other hand, is happy to continue the conversation. “What about painkillers?”
Roz gets an update at eye level. “Hassan and Niamh just arrived,” she reports, relieved not to have to answer. “And just in time, too.” The hole is only a few feet short of the tunnel. “I’m going to go upstairs to meet them.”
* * *
Amran doesn’t find Langer, or Misra, at the hotel, though she spends the rest of the evening planted in the lobby coffee shop, with feeds from all around the entrance dotted across her vision. It’s possible that Langer is in her room, huddled (Amran imagines) in front of a workstation filled with quickly written Free2B ad copy. Or maybe she’s out late, scouting locations or gathering local knowledge, or maybe she found a way to sneak back in without being seen. Seeing the Free2B pop-up has unsettled Amran. It triggered something in her narrative disorder that has convinced her, despite all the efforts of her conscious mind, that Langer has already left the city. She spends quite a lot of time scanning through airport and train station feeds, even as the facial recognition programs run on them. Sometimes you need human eyes. But she finds nothing, neither in the automated scan nor in the tiny fraction she scrutinizes personally.
As she scans and lurks, Amran tinkers with a draft message to Mishima. She’s sure she will be recalled from this assignment as soon as she alerts Mishima, either because it’s dangerous (Exformation is at least as dangerous as Anarchy) or because they simply don’t trust her, untrained as she is, with such a delicate assignment. Amran is tempted to wait longer, but she doesn’t want to be the stupid expendable character in this story, getting killed or messing up the mission with her temerity. A little before midnight, she gives in and sends the coded message, then goes back to her hotel to get some rest.
The next morning Amran wakes up and checks the drop-site plaza to find, as expected, a message suggesting she take the first flight home. At least Mishima didn’t think it was important enough to break protocol and buzz her. Taking courage from that, Amran replies to the effect that she has a few loose ends to tie up and will fly out late that night or the next day. She checks her feed notifications, but there is no sign Langer has been back to the hotel, and Amran concludes that she’s gone. Then she goes to meet Dalmar for bagels.
* * *
Roz makes small talk with Niamh and Hassan, none of it involving birth, for twenty-two minutes before the compressor judders noticeably to a halt. “We’re there?” Roz asks.
“Just about,” Djukic says. “We have to slow down now; we don’t want to hit the tunnel, in case they have motion sensors.”
“They’re going to feel something anyway when we break into it, right?”
“It depends how sensitive their security is,” Niamh says. “We have ways to avoid detection.”
“We were planning to use a nano-cutter on a low setting,” Djukic says.
“That could work, but we have some modifications to help further,” Hassan says, and throws up a projection, drawing Djukic into deep technical discussions. Roz wanders away to call Suleyman; this is going to take a while yet.
She’s still talking—minute details of the ever-evolving pregnancy experience, the baby’s movements, the food in Switzerland, what he’s been doing in Doha—when a message from Djukic pops up: We’re at the ca
sing. Roz signs off and walks over to the hole.
They’ve set up a live projection from the bottom of the pit, where Hassan and one of Djukic’s engineers—no, Roz decides, looking around, Djukic herself—are hovering in climbing harnesses. Hassan is documenting the smooth curve of the tunnel, and then Roz sees his hands as he sets up the nano-cutter. Djukic is holding the motion sensor, instructing Hassan on how to adjust the settings. Hassan cuts at an angle so the oval won’t fall in once it’s cut through. As he slides it off and Djukic cautiously swings her legs in, Roz has an uncharacteristic moment of wishing she was the one lowering herself into that dim hole, but comforts herself with the reality that at the moment she wouldn’t fit through it.
“There’s definitely room for a vehicle,” Djukic says, her light playing on the narrow space. “Not much more than a two-seater, I’d guess, unless they … Hassan, you better get down here. That is a lot of comms cables.”
* * *
Maryam debates whether to go to the tlayuda place Domaine suggested. She doesn’t particularly want to meet him again, especially if he takes her presence as encouragement. But the vibe she got from him wasn’t sexual, exactly, more cryptic and knowing. If she takes him at face value, he was clear that it was her job, not her appearance, that interested him. And his nod to tourist guides is intriguing. Still, she checks with the hotel staff before she leaves.
“Not … exactly a restaurant,” the young man at the desk tells her. “It is very informal, you understand. Yes, they have food, but if you would prefer something with, perhaps, a roof, I can recommend an alternative.”
Maryam lets him do so, mostly to create doubt about her location in case someone is trying to follow her, and then heads for the tlayuda place, which apparently doesn’t even have a name. As she walks, it occurs to her that she’s more worried about random gender-based violence than targeted violence based on her work. That’s something she should probably reevaluate. The thought gives her chills but also an odd sort of satisfaction.