by John Scalzi
“Not at all.” Now Shearer stood, revealing herself to be of average height and build, and—by her movement—younger than she looked. Or perhaps she merely kept herself in excellent shape. She did limp heavily on one side, however, and Cadie wondered if it were a transitory or a permanent hurt. “Let me tell you about brand name loyalty.”
This time, Cadie glanced at Homer before she could stop herself. He was regarding her with amusement, and she didn’t think it was directed at Shearer. “You are deliberately wasting my time, Stephanie.”
The irritation was a pose. The more of her time they wasted, the longer Cadie could stall, the more time the crèche had to spirit Firuza to safety. A first-class evacuation protocol was one of the reasons Cadie paid such a premium for Firuza’s registration there.
“Brand names,” Shearer said as if she had not heard Cadie’s challenge, “represent a particularly successful exploit of basic human psychology. They work because of the metrics humans use to assign trust.”
“Trust.”
“You distrust me now because you don’t know me. But in general, when you do begin to trust a person, it is because you know them, or you know people who know them, and can vouch for them. And you trust the word of certain people more than others, because you know them to be ethical, or well-informed. It’s a reputation economy.”
Cadie caught herself leaning forward a little. “I’m listening.”
“So a brand name is in essence a fake person you can feel like you know. The psychology is pretty simple.”
Homer cleared his throat and added, “And totally cynical, in application, because there is no person back there. No reputation to rely on. No sense of ethics. A corporate board, which has the same sense of morals as a stiff dick.”
Cadie leaned against the doorframe, careful not to nudge the door itself shut. This time, she let herself fold her arms, needing the sense of support. “I’m really not following why you are telling me this.” At length, but she kept that part to herself. She didn’t need to antagonize these people.
“It’s a philosophy,” Shearer said. “We want you to understand why we’ve approached you and why it is that you should help us. We’ve approached you because of reputation. Your personal reputation. Because you were willing to go up against Taras Boyko to protect the life of a child to whom you have no biological connection, and against whom you have reason to harbor a good deal of resentment.”
“She’s a child—”
“Nonetheless,” Shearer said. “Nonetheless.”
“You want something from me.”
She shrugged, a fatalistic gesture that Cadie took as confirmation of her—Cadie’s—grasp of the obvious. Nearer by, however, Cadie saw the corner of Homer’s mouth twitch. “We want you to do something for us. Something dangerous.”
“Or else you’ll hand me—or Firuza?—back to Taras?”
“Ms. Grange,” Homer said, sounding tired. “We are the good guys.”
Good guys. Sorry. Right. But Cadie didn’t say that either. “Then stop yanking my chain, please. Or my leg. Or whatever it is you’re pulling until it’s about to come off with a pop. What do you want, and why should I help you?”
Shearer wasn’t done with Cadie that easily, though. She smiled and glanced at Homer, who shook his head. “I always forget what it’s like, dealing with people who’ve been living outside for too long. Cadence, who do you think your crèche turns to in order to evacuate threatened children? Who do you think is most interested in raising children away from government programming? We know you can barely afford the residential program Firuza is registered for.”
She couldn’t stop the nervous scrape of tongue and teeth across her lips, and cursed herself for how much it gave away. “What do you want with my daughter?”
“She’s not your daughter.”
“Stepdaughter.”
“Interesting philosophical question,” Homer said. “Is your spouse’s bastard child still technically your stepchild? Or is it some other kind of nonbiological relationship?”
The sharp chill along Cadie’s spine intensified. She was good at keeping her expression impassive—a skill she’d perfected while living in Taras’s house—but apparently her poker face wasn’t good enough this time, because Homer and Shearer shared a significant glance, and Shearer said, “We’re not going to hold her hostage. We’ll help you take care of her whether you assist us or not.”
Rather than easing the tension across her shoulders and neck, the nonchalance in his statement brought it into sharp focus. “You’re giving me my child back. Just like that. What if I tell you I don’t want your help?”
“We’ll try to convince you otherwise.” Homer shrugged. “We don’t operate that way.”
“But—why not?”
Shearer smiled. “We’re the good guys.” She limped a few steps away, as if giving Cadie room to think clearly. But once she got there she turned back and twisted her hands together earnestly. “And we want you to be one of the good guys too. Human neural hardwiring is deeply tribal, at the bottom of it. One builds trust by mutual cooperation. It’s like branding, only there are real people standing behind it.” She jingled her tags, a shimmer of sound like a glass wind chime. “To want to help us, you have to trust us. To build that trust, we offer you help, first. I realize we have some work to do with you—”
Cadie grimaced. “I mistakenly married a Ukrainian mobster,” she said. “He killed his mistress while we were married, and claimed he’d done it as a gift to me. It’s not the sort of mistake you want to make twice in a lifetime.”
“No,” Shearer said. “I imagine not.”
Homer shifted his feet. “You know, when Bluebeard tells you not to look in that little room under the stairs…”
It shocked Cadie into laughing. When she finished, she reached for the chair beside the door, the one she had been standing next to. She turned it slightly so it faced Shearer—the scrape of its legs on the gritty floor set her teeth on edge—and dropped into it, decisively. “—It’s time to ask for a divorce, yes. Are you going to tell me what you want from me?”
They looked at each other again. Homer shrugged. “You have a route out of eastern Europe,” Shearer said. “One Taras Boyko obviously does not know about, or knows how to monitor. And if he doesn’t, it’s a safe bet that nobody in government does either. We need it. There are people there who want to join us. You’re our hope of getting them out.”
“Oh,” Cadie said, when the silence had gone on long enough to make her shift from buttock to buttock with discomfort. “I see what you mean about dangerous, now.”
SCARLET. In Russian, the word for “red” was the same as the word for “beautiful,” as Taras has more than once reminded her. Another reason Cadie had been only too eager to leave her name behind. Not just because it was also his name, but because he had managed to ruin the part that wasn’t.
Shearer paused to pull a cane out of the stand beside the door, and then gestured Cadie and Homer after her as she led them down the short hall toward the back of the ratty little house. As she followed past the rear rooms of the house, Cadie made herself breathe evenly and calmly, and keep her hand from knotting around the butterfly knife in her pocket. She didn’t need any more dents in her hand.
Cadie asked, “So, do you live here? In this house? It’s a sort of safe house?”
She thought of terrorist cells, pallets on tile floors six to a room.
Homer shrugged. “Who lives anywhere, anymore? We’re digital nomads.” When he patted the omni on his belt, his tags jingled. “Where my data is, that’s my home. Stuff is just stuff. Almost anything can be replaced, or rented.”
A lesson Cadie had learned hard and well. When it’s time to run, you run, and don’t worry about your suitcase. Still she said, “You’ve given me a lot of ammunition. It makes me wonder how you’re lying to me.”
She wasn’t sure why she gave them that. Frustration. The urge to provoke. The hope that if she made Shear
er and Homer angry, one of them would let something slip past the facade.
Whatever response she anticipated, it wasn’t that Shearer would snicker behind her hand. “Honestly,” Shearer said, as if speaking to a ridiculous ten year old, “What do you expect anyone could do to us? Confiscate our goods? We don’t own any. Send us to jail? We’re not doing anything illegal, short of a little trespassing, although I suppose they could legislate against us. But if that happens, we just move on. We’re pioneers, Miss Grange. We’re leaving your stratified society behind and building something new.”
Shearer shifted her weight entirely to her crutch on the left side, and with her other hand threw open the door at the end of the hall. Wet, warm air and green light enveloped Cadie, as if that door led into a jungle. She half-expected birdsong.
Shearer ushered her forward. Framed in the door, Cadie stopped short, one foot still raised. Slowly, she put it down. The walls of what must have once been the master bedroom had been torn off, the spaces between the framing replaced with heavy billows of translucent plastic and glass walls constructed of a mosaic of car windows fixed together with lathing and caulk. Just within those stood tall racks, reaching from floor to ceiling, that looked as if they had been assembled from old car bumpers.
The racks were full of tanks, and the tanks were full of plants. Tomatoes, cucumbers, gourds, melons. Things Cadie didn’t at first glance recognize. The air smelled green and sharp, fecund. She breathed deeply by reflex, and had to remind herself not to enjoy it. “A garden?”
When she looked over, Homer was grinning. “Distributed resources,” he said. “There are a lot of abandoned homes in Detroit. Some of them are petroleum farms, some are food farms. All salvaged materials. We have our own network. All salvaged materials.”
“Salvaged?” The planters were old-fashioned, plastic gallon milk jugs. Cadie reached out and touched the nearest, setting if swinging slightly. Moisture dewed her fingertip. She rubbed the pads together, thinking she would like to taste it.
“Landfills are essentially giant plastic mines,” Homer said.
“All you need to live,” said Shearer. “Food, water, a place to sleep, protection from the elements, connectivity. Exploitation of natural resources, manufacturing—stuff—is a dead technology, Miss Grange. The world needs to invent something new. New ways to live. We’ve proven that upsizing and globalization really don’t work as well as we’d hoped. Economies of scale make stuff cheaper, but they also demand that we move stuff from place to place, and create demand for stuff that’s really not needed. And so rapid growth may lead to rapid collapse. With modern communications, you don’t need to be big anymore to be diversified.”
“And you think these are the first steps towards inventing it?”
“More than the first steps,” she said. “The federal government has been manufacturing petroleum in landfills for years, by seeding them with bacteria that consume organic material—but manufacturing synthetic oil doesn’t help address issues of carbon load and climate change. And burning those hydrocarbons returns carbon load to the atmosphere that was previously trapped in discarded consumer goods. Growing carbon-negative crops and processing those into synthetic petroleum may be more helpful, but surely it’s even more helpful to stop shipping your food from Costa Rica?”
Cadie thought of the oranges at the market, trucked from Florida at perfectly daunting prices. She touched a broad-leafed plant by the greenhouse door. “This is a banana.”
“It is,” Shearer confirmed.
Cadie said, “You really are trusting of somebody you just met.”
“We know you very well.” Shearer folded both hands together on the handle of her prop. “Besides, what are you going to do to us? Tell your ex-husband that we plan to smuggle a few random Ukrainians out of Kiev? I don’t think so. Inform the authorities? You’re no more a threat to us than a knife is to water, Miss Grange.”
It was just like Kiev. When order crumbled, something rose to fill the vacuum. Something like Taras.
Or maybe something else?
Cadie thought of people trapped where she had been trapped, without the resources she’d had. At least she’d had money. Taras had never minded if she spent money. Giving her things was a way to keep her dependent, to ensure loyalty. She touched the shiny leaves of the banana again. “So you want to use me as a tool.”
“No,” Homer said. “We want you to be an ally. Come on, we’ve got something else to show you. We need to take a little drive.”
“I need my bike—”
“Your bike will still be here when you get back, if you decide you need it.”
THE other presumed bicyclists had never materialized, though their rigs were still by the back door. However, out of deference to Shearer’s infirmity, when Cadie and the others left the little house with a freeway in its yard, they took a tiny hybrid car with Homer driving and Cadie scrunched into the backseat, pondering.
Perhaps it indicated a lack of imagination on her part, but she was having a hell of a time figuring out the catch. And like the feral animal she’d become, that in itself made her wary. If you couldn’t see the trap, it still stood to reason that there might be one.
She had ceased to worry about simple abduction or a hit, at least. If they wanted her, they’d had her the second she walked into that weird gutted house that grew like a leaf off the dying stem of 1-75. There was no reason to string her along like this, except for a con, and a con would have been appealing to her greed or vanity by now. Of course, there was always the possibility that they were exactly as they seemed…
Unlikelier things had happened.
Cadie folded her hands in her lap and resigned herself to wait. Wait, and ask questions, as Detroit purred past outside the hybrid’s windows. The little car only made louder sounds when it struck rutted pavement. Cadie wondered how it stood up to the mess of Detroit’s alleged streets.
“What makes you think Firuza’s not perfectly safe where she is?”
Homer didn’t glance away from the windshield. “We found her.” A flat informative answer, and a very good point.
Cadie settled against the back of the chair, folding her arms over the safety belt. Her butterfly knife gouged her hip.
“You haven’t explained yet how you live without…stuff,” she said. “Everybody needs stuff. Clothes, cooking utensils. Sheets and blankets. Vacuum cleaners. Lawn mowers.”
Shearer rummaged in her purse. “How often do you mow your lawn?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your lawn.” She craned her neck so she could look at Cadie over her shoulder, frowning. “How often do you mow it?”
“Right now, I don’t have a lawn.”
“Fine. And if you did?”
Cadie paused, thinking back to Taras, his house, the staff and the manicured lawns. Just picturing the place—a dacha, by which he meant palace—had her swallowing nausea. He’s on the other side of the world, she lectured herself. He can’t get to you here.
Except if she did what these weird people wanted her to do, she might be leading him right to her.
Anyway, regular people probably didn’t mow as often as Taras’ gardeners did. “Once a week,” she said, trying to sound like she wasn’t guessing.
“So what do you do with the lawnmower the other 167 hours of the week?”
“Oh. So you only need one lawn mower for 168 houses?”
“Well, no,” Shearer said. “Because sometimes people want to mow their lawn at the same time—everybody on Sunday afternoon, right? And sometimes it’s dark out. But you can have one lawn mower for ten houses. Or fifteen. Or you can all chip in for a lawnmower and then take turns mowing all the lawns. Say you have one lawnmower and ten yards. You mow five lawns Saturday, your neighbor mows five lawns Sunday, and then both of you are off the hook for a month. And collectively, you have saved the price—and the resource drain—of nine lawnmowers. I mean, it would be more sensible not to mow the lawn at all, but people like short cropped
grass. You have to work within the sacrifices people are willing to make, and take it slow. Once they realize how much cheaper it is to share equipment, living space, and so on—a lot of them come around. We’re really a quite communal species, the last couple of hundred years excepted. We’ve built bridges and mills and fences and barns as a team for centuries. When we’ve become conscious of the advertising messages that surround us constantly, exhorting us to own things—the shinier and more expensive the better—we adapt remarkably well to sharing. Collective child-rearing is already making a comeback; it’s just too hard to bring a baby up alone. Here.”
She thrust her hand into the back seat. A metal circle like a medieval seneschal’s key ring dangled from her fingers, a single pierced silvery tag swinging from it. “Take this.”
“What is it?”
“It entitles you to access our resources—as an apprentice, in a limited way. More tags are awarded for contributions. It’s a means of keeping the unscrupulous from gaming the system. And of rewarding labor, which is one of the problems Utopian communities have traditionally had. Well, that and attempting to move urban people into a rural lifestyle without the proper training or technology, so they more or less had nothing to do but starve and quarrel…but then, we’re a practical community rather than a Utopian one.”
Shearer paused, as if she was considering saying more. And then she shook her head and turned her face back to the road ahead, which now wound pockmarked and undermaintained through the sort of suburban war zones that had become unsupportable in the oil crunch. As they ventured deep into the Wilds, Cadie found herself watching carefully, as if spotting a potential threat along the side of the road would help them avoid it. There were gangs out here, packs of the disenfranchised, squatters and petty warlords. Nobody went out of the city if they could help it.
Certainly, nobody took surface roads.
Cadie slid a little lower in her seat, half-expecting a roadblock or a group of armed men to materialize in front of them. She’d heard stories of cars stripped, of office buildings and grocery stores and homes sacked and occupied. Very small city-states, she thought, swallowing a nervous giggle.