by John Scalzi
The dispassionate part of her mind, the internal observer, is fascinated by the dichotomy. The city is too big—know-your-neighbor security doesn’t work among several thousand people with a churn in transient population. That’s a tribal practice, useful by the dozens or the scores. There is a reason military companies are sized the way they are. You know everybody.
This place isn’t a company. It isn’t even a battalion. It’s a brigade. Only there is no brigadier.
If it were not her life at stake, she might laugh at the way these people are betrayed by their own anarchist ideals.
Instead she keeps her chin tucked down, works in the saw pits concealed deep in ravines where deadfall and the harvests from ultra-low-impact logging were processed into usable wood. She doesn’t ever sleep in the same place twice. People talk here, all the time, in soft, pattering voices, but they never ask questions.
A capable woman willing to work a two-man saw for an entire overnight shift is an asset not to be doubted.
She has met haulers, bargemen, teachers, engineers, farmers, lifelong activists, bereaved parents, orphaned children, people lost within their own drug-addled souls, and even one ancient, renegade venture capitalist who likes to talk about the old days on Sand Hill Road down in Silicon Valley. Cardoza says little, but when it is her turn to tell some story she talks about a fictitious childhood on Vancouver Island, recalling lost Victoria before the winter hurricanes and the sea level rises finally overwhelmed that city.
“I’m just here,” she says. It’s a common refrain, one heard time and again.
Sometimes watchers from the Security Subcommittee pass by. Cardoza has made herself shorter, wrapped herself in tie-dyed muslin with lumps beneath that mask her muscles. They will not do face checks, these people—against what they stand for—so the pit boss just nods and security moves on.
All it takes is one chance meeting on a path, or one question too many, and she is done.
Her weapons and body armor are stashed amid a cache of such personal gear. They would mark her out in a moment, but she does not need them now. She has only kept the chirper, to bounce the simplest codes off satellite overflight and report back to her employers.
Cardoza is in, but there is no obvious next step.
This is not a city which can be set on fire. There are too many people to kill them all in their beds. They are too spread out to be gassed or strafed.
It would take fire from the sky, as has happened further south along the Cascades recently if rumor is to be believed, to stop these people.
Worst of all, in her hiding, she has not seen the singing man since. Tygre, his name is, and it’s on everybody’s lips. He spends too much time around the Citizen’s Executive, around that stone bastard Bashar—people she can’t afford to be near. Close, but not close enough. Far, but not far enough.
So she clicks out her simple codes, ignores the whispers about government spies in hiding, and watches the path ahead of herself with the paranoia of a hunted animal. Something will break soon, Cardoza is confident. So long as it is not her, she will survive.
CROWN stalked his office, worried. Two weeks had passed since the bombing at Three Fingered Jack. He’d sent people into the resulting burn zone. There had definitely been something there. A fraction of the size of Cascadiopolis, perhaps a hundred people total, but it had been there.
Like aspens spreading along a mountainside, the greenfreaks sent out runners.
What drove him nearly to distraction was a complete vacuum of information about who had ordered the strike. Colorado Springs was uncharacteristically silent—the Air Force leaked like a sieve at command levels, when the right questions were asked by the right people at the right cocktail parties. Not this time. Likewise corporate chatter was mute on the subject. Not even Edgewater was talking, and that hit was very much their style.
Strange.
It was a wildfire, nothing else. Nothing to see here, citizen, move on, move on.
Reports from his Cascadiopolis assets were just as thin. Asset Tau had fallen silent, though Asset Chi had indicated in code that Asset Tau was still active in the city. Their codes were too thin to communicate everything Crown so desperately needed to know now, though.
“Streeter!” he shouted.
Another silence, which was even stranger.
Crown stared out the window, looking across the sullen brown waters of perennially flooded Willamette toward Portland’s east side. Despite the recent rain half a dozen smoke plumes rose. More warehouse bombings, some street front rising against the dammed capital represented by stored merchandise.
“What the economy does not kill on its own, we kill for it,” he whispered. “Streeter!!!”
A clerk stepped diffidently through the door. Berry, his name was. A fairly recent promotion to his personal staff. Crown couldn’t remember the young man’s first name.
“Ms. Streeter has gone out for coffee, sir.”
“Coffee?” Crown was incredulous. “Seven years here, she’s never gone out for coffee. Besides, we have catering.”
Berry shrugged.
Crown realized the young man was dressed oddly too. Though his coat was cut the same as all staff uniforms in the arcology, the weave was too dark and glossy.
Even before he’d framed the thought as to why someone would be wearing Kevlar in his presence, Crown sprinted for his desk. He dropped and rolled as Berry opened fire with something that hissed like a fire extinguisher. The blast-grade window behind him rattled hard under a rain of darts.
A riot gun was clipped to the bottom of each pedestal of his desk. Crown snatched the right-hand one free, flipped the slide, rolled once, and fired through the modesty panel. It was sheathed in the same mahogany of which the desk was built, but thin fiberboard on the inside for precisely this purpose. The scattershot from the riot gun left a cloud of splinters.
Beyond the ragged hole, Berry slipped in his own blood.
Crown put a second burst into the young man’s head as he fell. He counted to three, listening for footsteps, then low-crawled around the left side of his desk.
Nothing. No one.
And killing Berry meant no questions could be asked.
He rose, dusting himself off. He’d been played, and he knew it. Streeter was compromised, possibly beyond repair. A little too old school, maybe, to stay bought. And Asset Tau was in the same position. No one on his staff could be trusted now. Not even for money.
Only Asset Chi, a contractor, seemed to have remained loyal—out of reach of the infection here.
Riot gun at the ready, Crown tapped out 911 to reach arcology security. That at least was answered.
“What is your emergency?”
“Suite 900,” Crown said. “Challenge Buster.”
“Seven niner Eugene,” security replied promptly.
“I need a hard team up here now. Trust no one except me.”
Strobe lights began to flash as blast doors slammed all around his level.
Waiting for rescue or death, whichever came first, Crown tapped out a coded message to Asset Chi. Whether the asset would ever receive it was an open question, but he had to try.
Maybe something could be salvaged. If not here, with his backups in Istanbul or Hong Kong.
THE chirper embedded in the seam of Cardoza’s microfiber camisole buzzes as she works a log. A week on observation and two on penetration, the only message she’s received from her employers was a single-bit ack to her informing them of the contingency penetration. Now she’s on one end of a two-man saw and the stupid buggers want to talk.
She ignores it. The chirper’s memory will keep the message in place until she can sensibly retrieve it. No way to parse the click code against her skin when she’s working this hard. And stopping to scratch where it itches isn’t her way.
They work a while, she and her saw-mate—a whippet of a boy named Mueslix still struggling to be a man. Human sawmill is hard work, but at least the wood stacks up like bodies so you c
an mark your progress. Mueslix has a very misguided case of the hots for Cardoza, and smiles too much, but he’s okay.
His callowness makes her wonder what ever happened to New Kid for abandoning his post and bringing her in. Cardoza has stayed away from anything to do with security, for fear of discovery. Not to mention fear of Bashar.
Cardoza has missed something Zazie the gang boss called out. She can feel Mueslix slacking off through the change in the tension of the blade, so she slows her own effort.
Moments later they are all silent. This is a day shift, for safety reasons, so everyone can see Zazie just fine.
“We’re on a stand down,” she says, her voice carrying despite its softness. Zazie has a command voice Cardoza has admired, much more difficult for a woman to accomplish than a man. Deeper voices mean bigger muscles, after all.
It’s all monkey politics in the end.
“What’s up?” Mueslix asks.
“Security Subcommittee says we might be seeing incoming soon.”
Crap, Cardoza thinks. Someone sussed her inbound signal. The chirper has no battery, only a static accumulator powered by the movements of her body, and it’s small enough to pass anything but a very thorough pat-down. A tight enough sweep with the right gear would detect the fragment of silicon and carbon fiber. Or a strip search.
I am just one of two thousand here, Cardoza tells herself.
They drift off into the woods by ones and twos, leaving the site behind but taking their tools. She finds a moment’s privacy and scratches where it itches despite her principles. She must ditch the chirper very soon, and wants to understand the message that could yet be worth her life.
AN excerpt from the Bacigalupi Lectures:
We talk about secret societies all the time. The Masons, the Illuminati, Opus Dei. Paranoid fantasies, right? How secret could they be, with their temples and their lodges?
Nonetheless, behind the glare lie simpler, harder truths. From the earliest priestly cults in mud brick cities lost ten thousand years ago to the politic parties of today, memes propagate through channels of secrecy and trust. The cell system so beloved of revolutionaries has always existed. We call it family. Friendship. Lovers. The 1950s housewife gossiping over the back alley fence with the milkman. The beat cop having lunch with the City Hall reporter.
We no longer have beat cops or milkmen, any more than we have priests of Baal Melqaart. More’s the pity, some people might say. But they’re wrong.
Those relationships still exist. And with the world dying around us, they are stronger than ever. Secret societies of two and three are everywhere. The true unit of economy is the exchange between individuals. Forget capital markets and balance of trade. I give you something, you give me something else. Tomatoes from your window box. Ammunition. Sex. Information.
It doesn’t matter.
We are all secret keepers. We share with our intimates, share less with our tribe, and tell nothing to the Man when he knocks down the door to ask questions. Some people know where to score good blow, other people know the true reason for the street layout of Washington, D.C.
The substance of the secret is irrelevant. The form of the secret is everything. Carry what you know into the world, gather what people have to tell you, and you are one of the Illuminated.
We began in light, so shall we end in light.
CARDOZA hunts. The message was clear, one of her employer’s own conditionals. She has a termination order.
This has become a suicide job. She’s almost certain of that. There are large bonds which will be paid in the event of her death, money to flow to a sister she hasn’t seen since early childhood. She doesn’t care so much now. Walking away would probably be just as fatal at this point, and accomplish less.
Newcomer, the message had said when she unpacked it. Terminate newcomer.
She knows who they mean. Tygre is everyone, everywhere. People say he’d already joined the Citizen’s Executive, the tenure and seniority requirements waived. Others say he’d charmed Symmetry’s torturers, and they do his bidding now.
Her body armor is still in the cache. She slips into the carbon mesh panels, tightens the straps with all the weight of ritual. She sorts through her weapons—some things cannot be carried openly here, even now in the end game. A gas gun with shellfish toxin-laced needles will do, she thinks.
Turning, Cardoza find Mueslix staring at her. How had he gotten so close?
“You’re on the Security Subcommittee,” he says, his voice shaking. “You was spying on the log gang.”
“Right,” she tells him. The lie is convenient, he already believes it. This way she might not have to kill him.
She is getting soft.
“It wasn’t nothing but a little dope.” Now he is whining.
Dope? she thinks. That’s not even against the rules around here, unless you’re handling weapons or delicate equipment. “Look, kid,” she says, letting exasperation creep into her voice. She really should kill him—his dead body will cause far less trouble for her than whatever he might say to Zazie or anyone else on one of the subcommittees. “Go back to your squat, lay low, and don’t come out for a day or so, no matter what.”
“You going after Zazie?” Now the fool sounds almost eager.
“I’m going after you if you don’t skid out of here and keep your damned mouth shut!”
At that, he backs away through the brush which conceals the hollow where the cache is located. “I-I’m sorry,” he says from outside.
“Me, too, kid,” Cardoza responds.
Her earlier burst of fatalism notwithstanding, she already considers her possible lines of retreat once she has terminated Tygre.
COMMUNION
GLORIA Berry takes up the hunting knife she uses for emergencies. The blade is longer than her forearm. She has carefully blacked it out, keeping only the edge sharp and bright.
Everybody is on high alert suddenly, and she knows damn well why. Tygre has finally betrayed them.
She will serve him his own fare, blood warm. And if that fool Anna Chao stands in her way, Gloria will serve her as well.
We are disturbed, we of the city. One of the wire mesh dishes strung high in the Douglas firs has picked up a signal, confirming the ghosts which had muttered at the edge of confirmation in the weeks since Tygre has come to us.
Something is on the move. A bombing, a murder, or simple old-fashioned betrayal. It does not matter. Cascadiopolis’ years of paranoia are bearing fruit.
In another lava tube called Objectivity, the Citizen’s Executive meets in a rare, closed, emergency session. The man Tygre is not present. It is well into the day, and most of us should have been sleeping long ago.
“Anyone who has entered the city in the last months,” shouts the Chair of the Labor Subcommittee.
Manufacturing and Craft shakes her head. “We already know where the problem is. That bastard will have us all dancing to his tune in another few weeks.”
“Do you seriously believe Tygre is taking orders from outside?” Bashar asks quietly.
“He doesn’t have to,” mutters Manufacturing and Crafts. “He’s plenty dangerous all on his own.”
“Popularity is not danger,” Bashar replies.
“Ever heard of demagoguery?” demands the Chair of Political Education and Theory.
Bashar cracks a small, deadly smile. “Leaders emerge from among the people.”
“We are a collective,” the Executive Chairman says. “We don’t have leaders.”
In that moment, Bashar knows they have lost. He rises. “Excuse me, but I need to go supervise the security arrangements.”
“Against an air strike?” demands Labor.
“Against Tygre, if you must know.” Bashar shakes his head. “And for him. Either one.”
A CHILDREN’S call-and-response chant, used by early childhood facilitators in Cascadiopolis:
Why are we green?
Because nature is green.
Why do we hide in the
hills?
Because nature lives in the hills.
Who do we trust?
Ourselves. And nature.
Who do we fear?
Everyone outside.
What will we do?
Grow and grow, like nature.
Until when?
Until the world is green.
TYGRE heads back to the kitchen where he cooked the first night. It is time to cook again. Wine at the wedding, catfish and cornbread for the crowd, blood beneath the plow boards—food is the oldest sacrament.
He has been here long enough to know more about the ingredients. Wood ears grown in the deadfalls on these slopes can be as rich as a steak. Wild onions and sweet herbs from the water meadows provide a flavor which speaks of these high places. Saps boiled to bitter syrups add a tinge.
So he makes a stew, humming the doxology. Different words are in his mind now than the old hymnals would have it, about the quiet green cathedrals of these high slopes and the basalt bones buried in the loam beneath his feet. Tygre is not sure whether he will share them.
The stew comes along slowly and he hums. Cooking by daylight is not so common—smoke can escape sometimes, and most people shift their meals in the early evening and later night hours, to be well abed by dawn.
But he knows a strike is coming. Probably not the orbital kinetics which reduced Jack City to ash, though that is possible. Even the oldest schools, the most ancient secret keepers, have some very modern codes. And their own quiet, bloody disputes.
Except he is not weapon, but target. The hurried busyness around him confirms that. It might have gone differently, lasted longer, been sweeter, but this is of no mind to Tygre now.
One way or another, these forests will burn bright, even if no match is ever set. Like those pines which only germinate amid flame, this city will not truly spread its seed until the threat is overwhelming.