by Patty Jansen
“The police?”
“No, the protesters. They have come with vehicles.”
“Cars?”
“No, they have two wheels.”
“Bikes.”
He gave me a blank look and craned his neck to try to see over the heads of the crowd. “We really need to get out of here.”
A group of people on the street were yelling slogans. I couldn’t hear what was being said, because the shouts echoed between the buildings. Veyada pushed into the crowd first, then Evi, then me with the Pengali followed by Amarru’s guards who had quietly materialised out of the crowd. I was surprised no one had contacted the others yet, but I was sure there was some kind of plan.
The people in the street shouted. There was pushing and shoving, and sirens going off, a man yelling through an amplifier for people to go home.
The whole crowd in front of the courthouse started chanting the same words they had also chanted to the betanka music. When I saw it on a placard, I finally understood what they were saying: Justice is right for Blue and White.
The crowd consisted of Africans, a lot more than had been camped in front of the courthouse, as well as people in wheelchairs and others rejected from the White class.
People came in from a side street riding bikes, tens, hundreds of them, pouring into the square. They were all ringing their bells and the chorus of ding-ding-ding-ding was deafening. One of the men at the front—a big African with hundreds of plaits hanging down his back, wore a headset attached to a sound booster strapped to the back of his bike.
“Come and stand up with us!” he was yelling.
Part of me wanted to join them. I found the system of grading people according to their perceived “risk” and “intelligence” factors revolting. I had scraped into being classified White because I got my father to sign a declaration that said that my mother’s cancer had been nonhereditary. Of course no one knew. Had I lived on Earth, this matter would have ruled my life and my ability to study and get work. Had I lived on Earth, I would have been there with them.
But we needed to get the Pengali to safety. I had gamra to think about. Thayu would be worried.
We pushed our way through the crowd.
Down in the street, we lost track of what was happening. People were pushing and shoving around us, mostly going in the other direction, to the unrest, while we were trying to get away from it.
Bright light flared behind us. Police voices gave orders in loud booming amplified booms of sound. Residents in the buildings facing the street came to windows, looking out at the chaos.
Abri, Kita and Ynggi were so much smaller than the rest of us that they could easily get lost in the sea of people. I checked that Kita had Idda, which she did; I could see the tail sticking out from under the jacket. The Pengali kept close together, in the middle of the group, all of them holding the trolley.
I hoped we were going to make it to the hotel unscathed.
I was just wondering if we should perhaps see if we could use the dinghy to get back when someone touched my arm. Someone tall and muscular with the familiar feel of the rubbery material that made up Asto-made body armour.
I looked aside into a grinning young face I had long hoped to see.
Since when had Deyu grown so impressive? Reida and Telaris were with her, too. I realised they had probably been following us, on the lookout for anything that might harm us in the forecourt to the courthouse.
And Sheydu was there. She greeted Amarru’s guards with a stiff nod. I was so incredibly glad to see the rest of my team again.
I wanted to hug them, but one did not hug Sheydu. I wanted to ask them where they’d been and what they’d been doing, but this was not a time for talk. We needed to get out of here safely first.
With their help, we managed to make it out of the busiest part of the protest. The street was full of police vehicles. Lights flashed, people spoke into devices, loudspeakers crackled, screens flickered. A van that looked like a command post had a holo projector set up, displaying the whole area.
“What were you doing there?” Sheydu asked. “I can’t believe that your people would have approved of this. Where is Thayu?”
“She wasn’t feeling well.” I hoped she hadn’t worried too much about us. Although if she had, she would have come here, I was sure of that. She wouldn’t let fatigue stop her.
We’d gone half a block before I realised we were going the wrong way.
I tapped Sheydu on the shoulder. “Hey, the hotel is that way.”
“I know.” She kept going without changing course. Veyada was behind me, and the familiar figure of Telaris behind him, and Deyu and Reida on either side of me, but I couldn’t see any other members of our party. Not the Pengali, not Evi, not Amarru’s guards.
“Then what is this about? Where are the others?”
“Going back to the accommodation.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
I did see. We turned a corner and came to a main road, now empty. In the middle of the road stood a black bus with darkened windows, surrounded by at least a dozen guards on motorbikes. There were also two dark unmarked cars, one in front, one behind. A guard approached from the front vehicle. He wore the grey Nations of Earth uniform, with the small patch that identified him as a member of the president’s guard.
That bus . . . could I hope that Margarethe was in there?
The presidential guard spoke briefly to Telaris and gestured for me to keep going, off the footpath, onto the road where, a block back, a few confused road users were bring stopped, wondering what was going on.
The door to the bus opened at my approach. I climbed up the steps.
A small light burned in the back of the bus. In its pool of golden yellow sat a grey-haired woman I was well familiar with.
“Margarethe.”
“It took some organising, but finally we meet. Sit down.”
Chapter 18
* * *
I WALKED ALONG the aisle in the bus and sat on the soft leather bench opposite Margarethe.
Alone. Sheydu stayed behind. Deyu stayed behind.
We had left the dead zone, but there was no communication noise in my head. The bus probably contained a different kind of communication block.
The door shut, and it was just us in a woolly bubble of silence.
Footsteps sounded along the side of the bus, a door slammed and we were off.
“Did you get my message?” Her face looked tired.
“I did. We were escorted out of the airport and had no opportunity to see you. I tried to see Conrad Martens the day before yesterday, because I had a feeling he was going to relay your message, but you know what happened there.”
She nodded, her face grave. “It’s the situation we are in. We can’t trust anyone, especially those in positions of power.”
“I spoke to Gusamo Sahardjo’s partner. He told me that a number of the judges have been bought.”
“A number? Pretty much all of them. The assembly appoints the judges every three years. The new bench are all choices that the cartel would approve of. They are also behind many political movements.”
“What do they hope to achieve?”
“Get richer. Let commercial concerns run the world. Get rid of rules. Control people’s decisions. These people are obscenely rich. Not even you or I have any concept of how rich they are. They have funded many scare campaigns. They own media, governments politicians.”
“What about you?” I thought about last year’s election.
“I’m reasonably safe, I think. Nobody has threatened to pull any of my funding if I didn’t do certain things, and if there was anything fishy about the funding of my campaign, my office staff would have found that out a long time ago. Sadly, we all depend on private money to run for office. It’s a fact of life. Also, because I’m not running any more elections, I am not an attractive target. These people want to buy power in the future. As for me: they want to turn me i
nto a lame president because they control everyone around me, so that I can’t do anything they don’t like because I don’t have the numbers.”
“What can be done? Expose the rackets? Bring them to court?”
She snorted. “That’s what they want. They own the courts. They make sacrifices out of single people—”
“Like Robert Davidson.”
“Yes, like him. Getting him convicted satisfies people, but they never get to the big reasons behind big business. The whole process is designed to obfuscate.”
“Any other alternative to stopping them?”
“There is only one that seems effective to me.”
“And that is?”
She sighed. “There is some backstory to this. Do you want a drink?”
“Not an alcoholic one.” I had been nearly killed while talking to President Sirkonen while having a drink, and Asha Domiri had tried to feed me zixas in a bar in Barresh, and I no longer thought having a drink while discussing important events with an important person was a good thing to do.
“I have tea or coffee, too.”
“Tea would be nice.”
She leaned over and pressed a button on a panel next to her. There was a soft humming noise and a door opened. Inside its lit interior stood a cup with steam rising from its safety lid. There was even a holder in the table next to me.
I clutched the hot cup with both hands. The bus was moving at a steady speed. Where to, I had no idea, but we seemed to be on a main road, one of those interconnecting ones that were raised over the water. The occasional light flashed past the window, and sometimes I could see reflections on surrounding water, but other than that it was dark outside.
“I guess you are aware that companies owned by Pretoria Cartel families have bought entire governments when they defaulted on their debts. At first they only did the small countries. The island states no one really cares about. I think Morocco was the turning point, where we started to get worried about it. Not that anyone could do anything. As soon as we helped one country, there would be a long list of others wanting the same level of help. We could help one country. We could not help twenty. A lot of the problems are systematic. The land can no longer support the population. It’s too dry, or too wet. Agriculture that has sustained people for thousands of years has vanished. Governments are failing to provide help. They can’t help, because they have no money. The citizens are powerless. They can’t study because they have the wrong classification, and because they can’t study, they’re unemployable in the newer industries. Worse, there are plenty of people with education to take up whatever jobs are available, which aren’t many because no one is spending any business capital in those areas. It’s an ever deepening rut. I don’t think anyone had the illusion that these debt companies would be altruistic in their aims, but at least they managed to get the issue of countries falling into anarchy off our plate. Most of this happened more than ten years ago.”
I had been a student on Mars back then, full of politics and ideology. I remembered the alarm bells about companies buying the debts of countries. We had even debated it. To us, young students from well-off backgrounds, most of whom had spent much of our lives off Earth, the issue was distant and clinical, but of course it involved real people and real people’s lives, and people reacted to things that happened to them, leading to unexpected outcomes.
“So the issue of insolvency of countries did go away for a while, but of course the underlying problems did not. The countries still can’t support their own population, only now there are these companies that transport and provide food for the people. In return, the people are supposed to be grateful, vote for the right politicians or buy the right products. They have giant schemes of favouritism where people who openly support a nominated cause get more and better supplies.”
She sipped from her tea.
“So where does all this take us?” I asked, clutching the warm mug.
“It takes us to how these people worked their way up to the assembly, to parts of the world where we are definitely not happy to let them exist, to how we almost lost the election to people affiliated with the Pretoria Cartel.” She gave me an intense look.
I knew Margarethe had won by the smallest of margins, but had never heard the full story. “I didn’t think Fiona Davidson came close to gaining enough votes.”
“No, she didn’t, but Ricki Guatierez definitely had a chance. In addition, if Fiona Davidson had simply been elected into the assembly, she would have taken a lot of supporters, and would have tipped the balance.”
The president was elected by the assembly, not by the people. The assembly dissolved before the president was chosen, and prospective assembly members in each country campaigned on the basis of their support for a candidate.
“It was very close.” She stared at the window for a short while, her face etched with worry. “These people have ended up in control of many of the important positions. The speaker of the assembly, the head of the Resources Committee, almost all the court judges, most of the representatives from Africa, I could go on and on. These people are everywhere. They’re owned by companies.”
“Surely there are regulations against that?”
“There are, but the ownership of these companies is so deep that you can’t extricate it from the national interest. There is nothing on the surface that goes against our rules, and no covert relationship between the politician and the company; but when someone comes from a small town with only one employer, and all of their friends and family are employed by this employer, the person in question will have no demonstrable vested interest but will still vote against anything that harms the company. Their influence is engrained in these societies. Many representatives from those countries have already made it into the assembly. Next time, the vote will not go in our favour.”
“What will the cartel do with this power? What is their aim?”
“Goodness only knows. There is one thing I know they will not do, and that is negotiate with the Exchange or any official gamra bodies.”
“Why not?”
“Too many rules, according to them. Well, they don’t put it like that. They say that the rules are all controlled by interests off Earth, and that most people on Earth haven’t the financial resources to communicate with them.
I felt cold. I’d heard all those arguments before, out of the mouth of my then-fiancée Eva’s father and out of the mouth of acting president Sigobert Danziger, all of whom wanted gamra to go away. “So . . . what can we do to stop them?”
Margarethe folded her hands, leaning forward on her knees. “This is why you’re here. I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I’m going to push for gamra membership.”
What? In this political climate? What had gotten into her?
“Don’t look at me like that.”
I spread my hands. “Well . . .” And let my hands sink again. “Well, that seems like political suicide to me.” Not to mention a whole lot of other things. A decision of this magnitude would require a referendum. That was a massive, expensive operation. If it failed, it would be many years before the assembly could afford to try again.
“Oh, it is political suicide, but it’s my last term in office, and I can’t be re-elected. Over the past few months, I’ve had a legion of people collect numbers for me. I think we might be able to pull it off. The cartel will fight it, but I think we’re in a fairly good position to expose the foul schemes they’ve imposed on the countries where they have taken over government debt.”
Well, that brought the protest outside the courthouse to a whole new level of importance. And, holy shit, what about all those people trying to keep me away from that forecourt “for my own protection”? Damn and double damn.
Actually, fuck on a fiddlestick.
A deep breath. And another one.
“All right. I’m guessing I’m here because you want me to do something?”
“No, you’re here because I like to entertain people in this bus, driv
ing around in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.”
“Ha, ha.”
She chuckled, but then her face turned serious.
“I’m guessing you want me to make sure Robert does not get off easily.”
“No. You haven’t been called to the witness box, and I don’t want you to do anything. Let them think they own the trial. Let them put Robert Davidson in jail. That’s probably where he belongs anyway. I want you to continue getting information about the people outside. I want to know who their leaders are. No, not on paper, because I can find that out. I want to know which people have the power and respect to make people act a certain way.”
I remembered something, and produced the little card that Dharma had given me. I gave it to her.
“That’s Gusamo’s partner. He has a few things to say about the cartel in Jakarta. And there is a man in a wheelchair named Charlie. He has stories about missing children in Africa.”
“I will get people on it.”
“Can’t you just send in some Special Services people to clear the forecourt?”
“I need a mandate to do that, and I have no strong reason to do it. The police have got the protesters surrounded, saying that these are dangerous subversive elements, but of course a lot of the police belong to the cartel and they’ve received hints that protecting your safety from those naughty unruly people is of utmost importance, and that is not untrue.”
I was going to ask if it was really that bad, but I saw in her eyes that it was.
“The assembly is virtually under siege. I do have the mandate to disband any service that is performing gross transgressions of boundaries, but I will do my utmost best to avoid that, because a lot of data about the cartel and the technology to track them has been supplied by the Exchange.”
Oh shit, I saw it now. This was precisely what I had so long been saying.
Coldi had been on Earth since 1961. Their technology was intermingled with everything, and, some people argued, every bit of electronics included spy routines that the Exchange could access.
I’d pushed the issue away, figuring that it wasn’t my problem and that if it ever became my problem, I’d worry about it then.