After the Red Rain

by Lyga, Barry

  “The boy wasn’t registered, so we can’t be sure exactly where he’s from. It could very well be Dalcord.” No harm in giving the Magistrate what he wanted.

  Ludo smirked. “You want to—” He broke off and leaned forward, squinting. “What the hell is wrong with your eyes?”

  “It’s a birth condition called hetero—”

  The Magistrate waved as though fanning himself. “That’s all, Inspector. Good job catching this piece of puke.”

  “Thank you, Magistrate.”

  Markard stood still and silent as the Magistrate collected his tab—it had a perfectly shiny screen and only a couple of minor dings on the casing—and began flicking through it. After a moment, Ludo looked up.

  “I said that’s all, Inspector. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  Markard hesitated. “Yes, Magistrate. I apologize, Magistrate. I just… wanted to be sure… there was nothing else…?” He drifted off, hoping.

  Max Ludo ground his teeth together and snorted. “If there was something else, I would have said something else and not… Oh, wait.” A sly expression came over his face, settling into the creases. “You want something, don’t you? I’ve been running this Territory for thirty years. I’ve seen every hand stuck out in every way you can imagine. ‘Magistrate, I need this.’ ‘Magistrate, I need that.’” His voice paradoxically deepened as its agitation and volume rose. “‘Magistrate, button my shirt, tie my shoes, hold my dick while I piss.’ No one in this goddamn Territory can do anything for themselves. And they don’t have to do anything for themselves because I do it all for them, and all I ask in return is a little gratitude and a little loyalty. All I ask is that people do the little I ask of them. Why in the world should I reward you for doing your job?”

  Markard’s face flamed.

  “I apologize for any misunderstanding, Magistrate. I…”

  “See that motto?” Ludo jabbed a finger at the crest behind him. “It’s Roman for ‘Who looks out for me?’ I do! I look out for all of you! But who looks out for me, Inspector?”

  Max Ludo snorted blasts of air through his nose, his expression that of a man who believed himself capable of breathing fire, should he so wish. After several rough exhalations, he began strumming his strong fingers on the desk. “But maybe…” Thrud-duh-dum , went the fingers. Thrud-duh-dum. “Maybe you can look out for me.”

  “Me?” Markard wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there.

  “Yes. You. You’re the arresting officer, right? You have the datawork?”

  Markard nodded. A few details to take care of and the DCS Citywide reps would come take Rose away. Crimes like murder were always tried at the City level, not the Territory.

  “Maybe,” Ludo mused, still thrumming away, “maybe you don’t have a chance to get to that right away. Maybe you’re busy, and you take some time to process that information before the City boys can snap him up. Let him rot for a little while here. In my SecFac. I think that’s right. I think you were busy celebrating, weren’t you?”

  “Celebrating?” Markard said.

  “Your promotion, of course.”

  “Yes. That could put off my finishing the processing by a couple of days.”

  Max Ludo raised an eyebrow.

  “Did I say days?” Markard shrugged. “I misspoke. I meant to say weeks. My apologies, Magistrate.”

  Max Ludo’s smile widened into something that Markard would be able to accomplish only with a knife. “All is forgiven, Superior Inspector.”

  CHAPTER 27

  It was a story.

  It took Deedra a while to realize it, but the book Rose had given her was one long story. A made-up story. She hadn’t realized it at first because she wasn’t familiar with them. There were made-up stories on the wikinets, of course, but they dealt mostly with scavenging, figuring out ways to stretch rations one more day, that sort of thing. Some were stories of the Red Rain and what had caused it.

  But she understood now that this book was no more real than half of what she saw on the wikinets. It was no more real than Lanz’s God or Lissa’s aliens.

  This story puzzled her at first, but she found herself absorbed into it nonetheless. The rigid structure of it baffled her, the nearly obsessive use of punctuation and capitalization, the unbending grammar. But the words, the language, pulled her in, and she sat up the whole night reading. The unfamiliar sensation of turning the pages quickly became second nature.

  It was a story about a world she could scarcely imagine, and yet here it was, laid out for her. There was an obsession with clothing and with putting a certain face forward to the world. And no one ever seemed to work. Still, beyond that—through it and beneath it—ran a sense of yearning she understood. A need for more.

  A boy named Amory, who had everything Deedra could imagine and more, seemed to be constantly seeking something else, something elusive. At first, she had nothing but contempt for him. There was no scavenging, and the constant pursuit of resources had been reduced to simple transactions that—in his world—were so routine as to hardly merit mention. And, yet, he wasn’t satisfied. What a selfish, horrible person.

  Despite herself, though, she found herself drawn in. Amory had penetrating green eyes, like Rose. Maybe that helped a little. She couldn’t help but imagine Rose when she read about Amory, and that softened him for her.

  Amory also reminded her of Jaron, though. At least a little. Early on, Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, which seemed to be Jaron precisely. She didn’t know how to feel about Amory. He was desperate and sad, so she wanted to like him and help him. But he was also arrogant and baffling and selfish. In fact, he seemed to enjoy being selfish. She couldn’t reconcile the two sides of him.

  And every time someone in the book bought clothing or coffee or food, Deedra chewed her lip a bit and gripped the book a little tighter. The people in the book thought nothing of food or clothes or shelter. They had no Magistrate, no DeeCees, to fear. They drove in cars—which in the real world were strictly limited to government use. They rode in buses and on trains—which in the real world no longer functioned.

  She remembered one time she’d argued with Rose. He had been trying to convince her that the world had been better in the past, not worse. He’d pointed out the bridges in the distance, the train tracks underfoot.

  “Why would these things be here if people didn’t use them at one time?” he asked. “People had to travel. To go places. To go from Territory to Territory in vehicles, not on foot. The evidence is literally under your feet.”

  And she had laughed indulgently and told him not to be ridiculous. “Those were for government use,” she’d told him. “Not for citizens. I bet they used to transport goods that way, before the Territories became self-sufficient with the factory system. And anyway, the environmental hazards were too risky, so they had to shut them down no matter what.”

  He’d given up the argument, but she knew she hadn’t convinced him. And now, reading the book, she wondered.

  In the world of the book, people—normal, average, everyday people, it seemed—went where they pleased, when they pleased. No need for passage papers to move from one Territory to another.

  It was an absurd world, an impossible world. There was sunshine and no need for air masks, and Amory actually owned a house that had once belonged to his father, and…

  She ran out of exceptions, stopped counting the ways in which this place could never truly exist, immersing herself in it, embracing the futility of it.

  By the end, she was near tears. Not from Amory’s travails and triumphs—he was too privileged to garner her empathy—but rather from the unattainability of the world in which he lived. It thrilled her and crushed her in the same instant, this vision of a world that could not be.

  She never knew she could want something so badly.

  She couldn’t bear to part with the book, even though it was over. Craved contact with it, even though it saddened her. Clu
tching it to her chest, she lay back in bed, staring up at the ceiling through the weave of the roach netting.

  Why had Rose given her this book? What had he wanted her to glean from it? Maybe Rose was cruel and crazed, a soulless murderer. Maybe he took pleasure in introducing Deedra to a life she could never have, forcing her to live it through the power of the book’s words.

  Or maybe it had to do with the very end, when Amory cried, “I know myself, but that is all.” She wondered if maybe that was the point. If maybe that was why Rose had given her this book. To expose her to a world that she couldn’t imagine, and at the same time to show her what he undoubtedly already knew: That figuring out herself mattered more than anything else.

  It’s a long story, Rose had said, speaking of how he’d recovered her pendant.

  He’d recovered the pendant, but more than that, he’d told her to hide the book. The book was somehow more important than the pendant. More important than Rose’s own freedom.

  Still holding the book to her chest, she drifted off to sleep. She dreamed that night not of the DeeCees nor of Pride Execution Camp No. 12, but rather of Rose. He stood before her, dappled in sunshine, and the air was redolent not of metals, but of something akin to the perfume she’d smelled the night Rose had stayed with her.

  He was the source of that perfume, she realized in the dream, and upon realizing it, she perceived it rolling off him in subtle, pink-tinged clouds.

  “Take my hand,” he said, holding it out to her. When she touched him, his hand transformed, becoming a collection of sinuous tendrils plated in green. She should have recoiled, but instead, she gripped the “hand” tighter.

  Then vines shot out all along Rose’s body, wrapping themselves around her, just as they must have wrapped around Jaron. She caught her breath (in the awake world, her body twitched once, twice, then lay still again) and stiffened but soon enough sank into them as Rose’s green coat billowed out and caught a wind. They were airborne, drifting up and out, gently aloft on the breeze.

  The Territory peeled away beneath them, and a rolling field of tall golden grass wavered into view, dotted here and there with the bushy green explosion of a tree. The buildings of the Territory were long behind them, and she spied other buildings far off to the west, but they were a forever away. In the meantime, below them scrolled endless fields, broken occasionally by blue rippling brooks and downy, soft carpets of fescue.

  “It’s almost too beautiful,” she said.

  “The world was like this,” he told her. “Once upon a time. Long ago.”

  “Before the Red Rain?” she asked.

  “Before even the thought of the Red Rain.”

  They drifted farther. The golden grass gave way to fertile browns and greens, grayish rills threading the land. The sun beat down on them, and they raced their shadows along the ground.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  And Rose’s arms and tendrils slackened. The air above them grew rocky and forced them down, hard. Still airborne, Deedra realized that Rose would lose his grip and she would plunge to her death on the rocky ground below.

  She did not panic. A part of her knew it was a dream, but even the part unaware did not sound the alarm.

  To die in a world like this, her dream-self thought, would be fine.

  In the morning, she realized it: The book was real.

  It lay heavy on her chest, so, yes, obviously it was real. The revelation was more along the lines that the story within was real. Or at least described a version of reality. It wasn’t entirely made up.

  It’s always been this way. She had said that to Rose once, and she’d believed it. Nothing she had ever seen, read, or experienced had even hinted at a better world. To the contrary: Everything she knew told her that the world had been worse, that the Red Rain and the time before it had been even more crowded, more brutal, more desperate.

  But what about long ago? So long ago that no one alive today could know someone who knew someone who knew someone who lived then?

  Decades, even centuries, before the Red Rain.

  What had the world been like then?

  There was nothing on the wikis, but she thought it might be like the world described in the book. Otherwise, what was the point of the book? It was an ancient thing, to be sure. No one possessed such things now, though now that she knew its contours so intimately, she thought that perhaps she’d seen the burnt, charred remnants of books during her scavenging. Were they all like this one? Or were they like the wikinets cast in physical form, each one a different universe, united only by language and shape?

  Maybe Rose was right. Maybe the world used to be a better place. After all, if someone wanted to tell a story about a better world, wouldn’t they pretend it was the future? Or even the present? Why pretend it was in the past? What would be the point?

  She flipped through the book to a passage that had captivated her, a simple description that she had read over and over, trying to envision it, suspecting she was failing: As they neared the shore and the salt breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea.

  She closed her eyes and tried to picture it. With no frame of reference, she couldn’t be sure she was getting it right, but she hoped so.

  The book, she realized, described the world that had been. Because who could otherwise imagine something like long, level stretches of sand? Just as people writing a wiki today would reflect the world around them, so, too, had the person who’d written this book reflected the world at the time of the writing.

  And such a world!

  Lissa was still in MedFac; the rumor mill said that she was “expected to make a full recovery” after being injured “by the murderer of Jaron Ludo.”

  It was already spreading—Rose had shot Lissa during his escape attempt. Even though he’d never had a gun.

  And people—even the ones who’d seen it happen—believed it.

  In the absence of truth, everything was true. And so, nothing was true. Deedra had lived her whole life this way, and it had gnawed at her, had itched. But she’d never understood until now, until she saw people blithely ignoring the evidence of their own eyes.

  People believed what they were told. And if they were told too much, or if accounts conflicted, they just believed whatever was easiest.

  But not her. Not anymore.

  The world has always been ruined.

  Be a good citizen.

  I deserve what I am given and am grateful for it.

  The Patriot Oath.

  These were the slogans and dogmas bashed into her head all day, every day. Rose had given her the first inklings of it, but his presence had proved so distracting that she’d never made the connection until he was gone.

  And until the book.

  She listlessly made her way through work each day, robotically assembling, missing Rose, missing Lissa beside her. The book was with her, in her backpack. It would always be in her backpack, she thought. She wanted it near her all the time, readily accessible. More important than her knife, even. It lay hidden there like a secret made solid. Even when not touching it, she could feel the too-dry roughness of the paper pages, of their ineffable tactility. Running her fingers over the paper, she’d felt a direct connection to the text, as though it transferred to her through osmosis.

  After a shift, she headed for the abandoned building where she and Rose had encountered Jaron and, luckily, a passing drone. She heaved herself up the makeshift ramp to the very top again. The ugly sprawl of the Territory lay splayed out all around her. In the distance was the Broken Bubble, which somehow seemed sadder and more neglected than ever, even though it had not changed at all.

  The clouds gathered. The clouds always gathered. A little sunlight in the morning, then tufts and gatherings of slate gray until nightfall, when the sun filtered through at the horizon line long enough to dapple the bellies of the clouds before sinking behind the western skyline.

  But the
re was enough light to read, and so Deedra curled up against a section of wall that still retained enough integrity to support her weight. She’d packed up some rations—fruit discs and some leftover scraps of dried synthetic turkey and a small bottle of water. It was three days until Ration Day, and she could ill-afford such a snack, but she munched mindlessly as she delved back into the book. Far from being bored reading it a second time, she found a new urgency, a special kind of kinship with the story. This time, she saw layers she’d missed before, and the characters’ struggles took on new dimensions. She knew what would happen already but found herself just as invested, as if the story could change, like a wiki, at any moment.

  But it couldn’t. It was already set. And that thrilled her. She was powerless in the hands of the person who’d written the story.

  Snack finished, she shifted position and kept reading.

  I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in books, Amory said.

  Deedra couldn’t. But, she realized, now she wanted to.

  She fished her pendant out from under her poncho and ran it back and forth along its chain as she read. The touch of it made her think of Rose, and the only antidote was to submerge herself back in the story. She could do nothing for Rose but miss him. And remember him. The penalty for murder was often death itself, but for the killer of Jaron Ludo, she imagined the Magistrate wouldn’t wait for a trial. There were dozens of ways to eliminate Rose before he ever had his day in court, and no one would dare speak up.

  Not even me.

  The thought made her sad. It was cowardly, but realistic. What could she do? What was within her power?

  Nothing. She had no power.

  As the sky darkened to night, she tucked her pendant under her poncho again, put the book in her backpack, and scrambled down to street level. She had just enough time to get home before curfew. She was depressed and exhausted, even though she’d done nothing.

  Nothing but read. And maybe that was something. Maybe tomorrow she could figure out what to do next. Figure out what her next step could be. She couldn’t just slip back into her old life. Not after Rose. Not after his arrest. Not after reading the book. There had to be something she could do. And she would figure it out. No matter how long it took.