The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  Kafari — remembering a boy with a broken arm and a shotgun, shooting into a barn full of Deng and Asali bees, remembering a woman who’d flung open her door in the teeth of Yavac fire, risking her life to offer them shelter when it would’ve been safer to just run for the cellar — clenched both fists. Kafari was so violently angry, she was literally shaking with the need to contain it.

  Yalena, correctly reading the threat in her eyes, hissed, “You wouldn’t dare lay hands on me!”

  It was a close thing, very close, to homicide.

  Yalena misinterpreted her hesitation and started to laugh. “You’re so pathetic, Mom. You and all the other pig farmers—”

  Kafari slapped her.

  Hard enough to bruise. Yalena’s eyes widened in shock. She lifted one hand to her cheek in stunned disbelief. “You — you hit me!”

  “And you damned well deserved it!”

  “But — but — you hit me!”

  The “why?” hadn’t even formed, yet. Her mind was still too stunned by the abrupt reordering of her reality.

  “I should’ve turned you over my knee years ago. It’s high time you got off that bigoted, lazy little backside of yours and learned some civilized manners. Not to mention a few critical lessons in reality.”

  “Bigoted?” Yalena shrieked. “I’m not bigoted! I’m a member of POPPA! Have you even bothered to read the Manifesto? It’s filled with beautiful ideas like economic justice and social parity and respect for the civil rights of living creatures! It’s built on the latest, most scientifically advanced social science in human space! And I believe in it, I live by it! How dare you accuse me of bigotry?”

  “Because you don’t have the brains God gave a radish! Let’s just take a look at those high and fine-sounding ideals, shall we? Then I’ll explain to you a little thing called reality. The POPPA Manifesto preaches equality and respect for everyone, doesn’t it? On page after page. Vittori Santorini’s little masterpiece gushes endlessly about everyone deserving love and happiness. That everyone’s entitled to their fair share of the planet’s wealth, that nobody is better than anybody else and nobody should be allowed to harm others. Tolerance and fairness for every man, woman, child on Jefferson — unless they’re farmers!”

  The whiplash in her voice was so sharp, her daughter actually jumped.

  Then her eyes widened with the dawning realization that she had not, in fact, accorded farmers the same social rights she thought everyone else deserved. For the first time in her life, Yalena was staring into an undistorted mirror. Given the look on her face, she didn’t like what she saw. It was rarely pleasant when one heard an ugly little truth about themselves, particularly when they couldn’t justify it under their own rules of conduct.

  Kafari shoved the mirror a little closer to Yalena’s face. “I have watched you spend hours defending the rights of leaf-cutting caterpillars, but by God, let a human being disagree with you on anything and you label them as subhuman deviants. Where’s the tolerance in that nasty little game? If someone dares to hold a different opinion, you treat them like animals. Worse than animals, which you’ve put on a pedestal and all but worshiped as gods, while behaving as though people who grow food are unfit to go on breathing. I dare you to deny it. I don’t think you can.

  “But what you pulled out there,” she jabbed a finger at the living room, where Pol Jankovitch was still jabbering away on the datascreen, “was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen you do. You sat there and gloated over the arrest of people you’ve never met. People the government has turned into literal, legal slaves, forcing them to work without pay on government-owned land, growing the food on your dinner plate! If they refuse or even complain, they’re thrown into prison. You want to show me where to find the equality, respect, or fairness in that? I don’t see it. And I don’t think you do, either, because it’s not there to be seen, not by you or me or anybody else.

  “And let me make one other point, lest you think this is merely an academic exercise in rhetoric. I wasn’t chopping onions when you walked into the kitchen. Two of those ‘pig-farming deviants’ you despise so much are dear friends of mine, with more courage and integrity than you will ever possess. When Dinny Ghamal was only twelve years old — twelve, damn you! — he watched Deng troopers murder his father and brothers right in front of him. His mother risked her life to open her front door so President Lendan and I could run to safety in her house. We’d no more than skidded through the doorway when the Deng shot out the front wall, ripping Aisha’s back open with flying debris. We jumped into their basement while Yavacs literally blew the house apart on top of us.”

  Yalena’s mouth fell open.

  “The broadcasters haven’t mentioned any of those facts, have they? You want to know why? Because misbegotten, silver-tongued snakes like Pol Jankovitch aren’t telling you. He makes his living lying through his teeth and lining his pockets with POPPA’s cold, hard cash. And of course a good little POPPA puppet like you wouldn’t dream of signing onto the datanet to find out the truth for yourself. That might require actual work. If you can be bothered to work up a sweat, check the Granger datachats, starting with Anish Balin’s. But be damned careful if you do, because you just might learn something.

  “I suggest you bear one final thing in mind. POPPA can guarantee your right to say what you like. But that sword cuts both ways. When you’re talking to me, you may be damned sure that bigotry will always get what it deserves. If you don’t like it, go live somewhere else!”

  Kafari stalked out, too furious to care that she, herself, was risking prison time and a “reeducation” sentence. She slammed her way out of the house, not even sure where she was going until she found herself in the aircar, heading for home. The only home she had left. Her mother, recognizing the car as she set down on the landing pad, took one look at her face and said, “You finally belt that brat like she’s been needing?”

  Kafari said, rather stupidly, “How did you know?”

  Then burst into tears.

  Her mother guided her into the house. She was so blinded by salt water, she couldn’t even see what her feet were stumbling over. Then she was on the sofa, with her mother’s arms around her. She huddled against a warm, safe shoulder while her mother rocked her. Fifteen years of fear came pouring out, mixed up with two agonizing years alone, trying to raise a hellion with a poisoned mind while Simon was on Vishnu, learning how to walk, again.

  When Kafari’s paroxysm of grief finally eased, her father appeared with a tumbler of Scotch. She was trembling so badly she couldn’t even hold the glass. “Steady,” her father said quietly, holding the rim to her lips. She gulped the burning stuff down. It helped. Or maybe the fire in her throat and gullet just distracted her enough to regain control of herself. Her mother was brushing wet hair back from Kafari’s face, drying the tears with one corner of the apron she’d worn every day of Kafari’s life. Kafari hadn’t realized how much silver there was in her mother’s hair, how deep the sun-plowed furrows in her father’s face had become.

  She met her mother’s worried gaze. “Was I ever as much trouble as Yalena is?”

  The twinkle in her mother’s eyes surprised her. “Oh, no. That must come from her father’s side. Eh, Zak?” She winked at her husband, who grumbled, “Well, I mind the time you set fire to the pearl shed, and the day you pushed young Regis Blackpole out of the dairy-barn loft and I had to pay for his crowns and bridgework, and the note we got from Vishnu, that you’d landed in the hospital with kraali fever, and of course there were those worrisome days when you were sleeping with an off-world stranger and hadn’t made up your mind yet to marry him…”

  Kafari let out an indignant snort. Then bit one lip. “Mom, Dad… what am I going to do?”

  “What tipped the scales, today?”

  She told them. Zak Camar’s jaw muscles jumped. Her mother’s expression would have given a rabid jaglitch pause, which gave her a fair idea what her own had been, in the apartment.

  “How bad was
the snap?” her mother asked quietly.

  “One slap worth’s. A hard one. She may bruise.”

  Her father snorted. “She’ll mend. Mind, I’m not in favor of belting your kids. But she needed that slap, my girl, needed it more than even you probably realize.”

  “And if she reports it—”

  “I’ll give her something else to report.” Then he touched her wet cheek with one gentle fingertip, lifted her chin back up where it belonged. “Her father would’ve done the same thing and he’d have been right, too. When a child’s been brainwashed for as long as they’ve had Yalena, you can’t wake ’em up with hugs and flowers.”

  “How do you wake them up?” Kafari asked in a low, weary voice. “We’ve tried everything.”

  “Except slapping her,” Kafari’s mother said drolly. “Who knows? Maybe she’ll be so shocked, she’ll go onto the datachats and find out for herself?”

  It was too hard to hope. She couldn’t bear to be disappointed again. “I’d better go back,” was all she said. “There’s going to be an ugly mood in town, over this. Yalena is just young and stupid enough to go out and be part of it.”

  Worry flashed in the glances her parents exchanged. “All right,” her mother said softly. “Call if you need anything. Including a place to hide.”

  Kafari just nodded. Then hugged them both tightly, wishing she didn’t have to let go, again. She finally climbed into her Airdart and headed back to town in the gathering gloom of early evening.

  II

  Yalena didn’t know what to do.

  Her face still smarted from that shocking slap. Worse, she didn’t know what to think. Her mother’s angry revelations had stunned her far more deeply than the palm across her cheek. What if… She gulped. What if her mother was right? About the Hancock family? About everything? She realized there was one way to settle her uncertainties over the Hancock massacre.

  She sat down at her datascreen and tried to get into the main Granger chats. They were jammed. So badly, she couldn’t get through to the main datahub that carried several of the Granger chats. She finally set her system to auto-retry, and even that took nearly half an hour of constant attempts before her request went through.

  Once in, she went straight to Anish Balin’s chat. It was hard — the most difficult and painful thing she had ever done — to watch the recording. It looked genuine, not some kind of mock-up. She sat very still, scarcely breathing, as that one recording shook her carefully constructed beliefs to pieces. When her wrist-comm beeped, Yalena jumped in the chair, heart pounding. Her fingertips shook.

  “Yalena,” she said, scarcely recognizing the croak that emerged as her own voice.

  “It’s Ami-Lynn. Are you watching the news? Oh, Yalena, it’s horrible! Just horrible. Those poor boys…”

  She heard her own voice, tinny and strange, say, “Ami-Lynn, sign into Anish Balin’s datachat. Just do it. Then call me back.”

  Twenty-three minutes later, her comm beeped again.

  “Is this stuff real?” She sounded shaken, like she’d been crying, or still was.

  “Yes,” Yalena whispered. “I really think it is. Mom…” She had to gulp. “Mom knows Dinny Ghamal. And his mother. Why isn’t Pol Jankovitch or anybody else telling people the truth? And nobody’s mentioned that Dinny and his mother helped save President Lendan’s life, during the war. They got Presidential Medallions. So did my mom. Ami-Lynn, I’m going downtown. There’s a Granger protest march, this afternoon. I want to find out the truth. And I want to talk to some Grangers, ask them… I don’t know what, exactly, but I’ve got to find out what’s really going on.”

  There was a long pause, then Ami-Lynn said, “I’m going, too. And I’m going to call Charmaine.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I know I don’t. And I probably shouldn’t. My parents would throw a fit and ground me for a year. But I don’t like this, Yalena. I don’t like it and I don’t understand it and I’m scared to death of what I might find out. But I’ve got to know the truth. So do you. And so will Charmaine.”

  Yalena drew a deep, uneasy breath. “Okay. Where do you want to meet up?”

  “It’s going to be crowded, down there. How about we meet up at Charmaine’s house? She’s pretty close to the downtown.”

  “Good idea. I’ll meet you there.”

  Yalena turned off her datascreen, made sure her wrist-comm was securely fastened, then pulled her scooter out, locked up the apartment, and headed for Charmaine’s house. She had no idea what she was about to find out. She didn’t have the slightest clue as to what she would do about it, if her mother and that security tape were right. Her mother still insisted that POPPA had sabotaged her father’s aircar, trying to kill him with that crash. Yalena had refused to believe it. Still didn’t want to believe it. But she was no longer a trusting baby, either.

  One way or another, Yalena intended to find out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I

  Trouble has erupted again.

  At 2030 hours, I receive an urgent call from President Zeloc, who does not bother to go through Sar Gremian, this time. Given the disturbance I am tracking through the heart of Madison, by way of law-enforcement broadcasts and news crews, his wild-eyed demeanor is not surprising. His order is no more than I expected to hear.

  “Get yourself into town, machine! Now! We’ve got armed insurrection in the streets!”

  I have been scanning all law enforcement, military, and commercial transmissions for the past sixty minutes. A massive Granger protest march is underway, demanding the immediate release of the Hancock Family detainees and opposing the wild demands for weapons confiscation, which the Senate and House of Law have already introduced, less than two hours after the violence at the PSF barracks near Port Town. I see no evidence of Grangers participating in armed rebellion, but the political demonstration underway has rapidly devolved into another explosive riot.

  Police units are attempting to clear the protestors, using methods that qualify as brutal under any civilized standard of law-enforcement. The violence has spilled into the streets surrounding Assembly Hall, as urban counterprotestors put in their own appearance, blocking the retreat of the Grangers. From what I have been able to see, most of the Grangers are simply trying to get away from the truncheons and riot-bombs hurled at them by federal police. Those police have not used the paralytic agents that the ill-fated President Andrews used to disperse POPPA rioters sixteen years ago, but they are using what appears to be retch gas, as well as the more ubiquitous tear gas.

  Caught between hammer and anvil, many of the Grangers have started tearing up anything that can be used as a weapon, smashing store windows to obtain broken glass and impromptu clubs from the merchandise behind them, tearing down street signs to use as shields, hurling stones and bricks and refuse cannisters at their attackers. With the riot shifting straight toward the Presidential Residence — which is virtually undefended, since most of the city’s law enforcement officials were stationed at Assembly Hall to guard the Joint Assembly — the current state of affairs has sufficiently alarmed President Zeloc that he has put through a frantic call to me.

  Despite the fact that Gifre Zeloc did nothing to prevent the violence gripping Madison today, the situation must be contained and I am apparently the only force sufficient to disperse a crowd of this size. I therefore leave Phil Fabrizio puttering in my maintenance depot, where he is attempting to learn the use of the major tools of his new trade. I clear the edge of Nineveh Base and enter the city, once again seriously hampered by the presence of panic-stricken motorists and pedestrians. I order the city’s psychotronic electric power controller to shut down the grid, only to discover that I have been locked out of the system.

  I cannot order the city’s computers to turn off the grid. This leaves live power lines dancing wildly through each intersection I traverse, inevitably clipping newly installed cables and dragging down newly replaced traffic signals as I maneuver my bulk through the
narrow spaces. It is an expensive business, ordering me to perform riot-control duties at the heart of a city. I broadcast warnings, ordering vehicles and pedestrians out of the way. I am still eleven blocks away when receive a second urgent call from Gifre Zeloc.

  “What’s taking you so long? Speed up, dammit! Those murderous bastards are practically spilling onto the lawn outside my window! They’re armed like soldiers, out there. They’re in open rebellion, and you’re poking along at a goddamned crawl!”

  “I am not authorized to inflict the kind of collateral damage to civilians that would occur if I were to increase my speed. I have avoided crushing anyone thus far, but I cannot maintain that if I am required to transit streets and intersections more rapidly.”

  “You’re not paid to be a Good Samaritan! And your caution won’t do me a hell of a lot of good, if you get here too late! Speed up. I want you here yesterday!”

  This is an impossible command, since no Bolo ever built can reverse the flow of time. I have been given an order, however, to proceed more rapidly against an armed enemy. When I tap police cameras, I do, in fact, see actual weaponry in the hands of rioters. Whether these guns were stolen from stores along the way or smuggled into Madison is irrelevant. The situation has altered from one of mere riot-clearance duty.

  “If I am to engage an armed enemy, I need to assume full Battle Reflex Alert status.”

  Gifre Zeloc scowls into his data screen. “The last thing I need is a Bolo shooting up downtown Madison! Just drive in here and flatten them. That’ll teach the whole dirty pack of ’em the lesson they need. After today, they’ll damned well know I won’t tolerate armed arrogance.”

  I attempt to educate the man issuing my instructions. “Without my full battlefield cognitive functions, there is a serious risk of miscalculation—”