by John Barnes
"Moreover, one of the several crimes the Reverend Saltini is charged with is that, during his last hours in office, he ordered PPP agents to seize the personality preservation records at several insurance companies, and deliberately destroyed all copies of many personalities which had been connected with the opposition movement. Among the personalities apparently lost permanently are Thorwald Spenders and Anna K. Terwilliger."
"They're dead," Margaret said beside me. "Really really dead."
It seemed to take many ages for us to learn the full story. Partly it was because I was very short on sleep and so didn't always grasp things readily, and partly it was because there were things I did not really want to hear.
There had been perhaps ten people inside the Center who were supposed to be arrested for being unemployed. Thorwald, probably because the authorities had not touched the Center yet, had tried to give them sanctuary.
The PPP had used that, in turn, as a cause to stir up anger at "meddling offworlders," and to surround the Center with protestors, so that every cat or trakcar pulling in or out was greeted with a shower of rocks and bottles. Supposedly for the protection of the Center, the PPP had set up riot lines, but people Saltini approved of crossed them freely, and they seemed to be much more interested in identifying everyone coming or going. A couple of routine food shipments were deliberately torn up and left in the mud by PPP guards, and the Center received a whopping fine for "poor sanitary practices."
The crowds grew almost by the hour; even during Morning Storm, they hardly seemed to diminish. At first they had taunted and shouted; then they had thrown stones; during the last Light, according to people who had been in the Center with Thorwald, they had barely spoken at all, and did not move, until someone would try to drive into or out of the Center. Then they would close in, pushing and shoving against the cat or the trakcar, until very, very slowly the PPP guards would stroll over and clear a path.
People said their faces were contorted with hate, and a weird hunger that reminded them of media horror shows.
This would last until the vehicle door opened and the driver and passengers ran the last six or seven meters to the door; then there would be several rocks, aimed, thrown hard and flat to hurt or kill.
Again, slowly, so slowly as to make it clear to everyone else how they felt, the peeps would move in front of the already-closed doors, raise riot shields, and make a show of holding back the silent watchers.
Inside, they said, Thorwald displayed no emotions other than compassion for those who were hurt and frightened, and a certain cold anger that one of them said was "frightening— but made me glad to be with him."
In the last two hours of Second Light, the mob had begun to press in closer to the Center. Thousands of receivers in Utilitopia had picked up our distress message, and somehow there was a rumor among the crowd that a big protest march, or a rescue mission, or something, would set out from the Center as soon as it was dark. They had not known it, but the rescue was already under way; Bruce and Bieris had been among the last people to drive out of the Center, Bruce taking a bad hit that later turned out to have cracked his ribs. They had driven to a warehouse Shan had sent them to in the city, where, somehow or other, the springers and supplies were waiting for them. Already at that time, taking turns driving, they were roaring up the river valley, making all the speed they could for us. "It must have been a stretch of the rules for Shan to do that out of the Embassy budget," I said to Bieris, after she told me about it.
"Shan had a pretext in that you're his employees, and then he simply told the Council of Humanity that it would be intolerably bad public relations if he didn't rescue the whole party. Not that they really cared as long as he gave them excuses that would sound good enough." Bieris sighed. "He did his best, Giraut. You know, I think he was really fond of Thorwald ... maybe of the Center as a whole. He used to really seem to enjoy being there, and I think he was sort of recruiting Thorwald for Council of Humanity service. This all hurt him terribly."
I nodded; I knew in an abstract way that I was hurt, too, but also that it might be months or years before I really felt the torn and shredded edges of the huge, aching void the Center—and Thorwald, and even Anna—had left in my soul.
Bieris went away without talking more, and I went back to sleep.
The end of the story was something I heard from, of all people, Major Ironhand, almost ten days later. He had come by, he said, because I'd done such a good job of making him feel welcome the first day, and because he thought as a matter of honor there were things I should know that other people might not have told me.
When it became clear the building might be stormed, not counting on the PPP guards, Thorwald had taken some of the neuroducers from the dueling arts kits, had someone technically proficient defeat the safeties so that they would put out really dangerous signals, and mounted them on mop handles. "As an improvised riot weapon," Ironhand assured me, "it was damned good. But there were just too many of them. No one could have held against that mob in that building. There were more than a thousand of them storming the Center. It was never meant to be a fortress, and your friends had no projectile weapons to keep them back. I don't think I could have held that crowd off in that building with anything less than a fully armed platoon."
The mob had rolled over the PPP lines like a lawn mower over a snake; four guards had died and several were badly hurt. The doors had come down just from the pressure of the bodies.
Thorwald and some of the larger people had tried to hold the spiral stairway leading up to the main spire; it was about the only place in the building narrow enough to defend.
"They killed him with a rock," Ironhand said, looking down at the floor, I think unsure of what my reaction would be. I know I was unsure myself. "With that mop handle gadget he'd brought down six of them—amazing, really, for a kid with barely any training. Your people might say 'que enseingnamen,' and mine might just say 'guts,' but all we really would mean is that we don't understand how he did it. But finally he couldn't hold, no one could have, and he got hit hard enough with a rock to fall down, and—well, they beat him to death with broken pieces of furniture, we think. And they headed up for the next kid, what's his name, Peterborough, the one still in the hospital, and would have done the same, except that's when the Occitans finally got there."
By a very elastic reading of the rules, Shan had at last managed to declare the Center under his protection, apparently by claiming that since my personal effects were in there, and since some of the people who worked there worked for me ... it didn't matter. Probably the Council just approved of what he had done after the fact, and he could just as well have said that he did it because he felt like it.
He had already hired several units of troops from Thorburg, including the Occitan Legion. That unit was actually only six companies, but they were trained to fight in the urban environment, and perhaps more importantly their costumes looked vivid and threatening. They were on standby when Shan commed for help, and in minutes the helicopter carrying their portable springers had rolled through the springer at the Embassy, extended its rotors, and flown to the Center. Occitan troops poured out of the springers and into the Center—
And found an angry mob that had already beaten one brave young man to death, and was in process of burning every tapestry and painting, wiping every vu, and crushing musical instruments into scrapwood.
I'm told a Council of Humanity report later concluded that although there was no alternative available at that instant to Shan, sending Occitan troops into such a situation was a mistake that still should have been avoided, never mind how.
For about ten minutes discipline collapsed. Reports later called it a "police riot," a technical euphemism centuries old for "the forces of law and order go berserk and attack the civilians." At the end of it, the people who had sought refuge up in the spire were safe, and were quickly brought out of the building; the Occitan troops were yanked and beaten back into their ranks by the Thorburger
officers...
And eighty of the mob were dead, and because of the lost time, the Center could not be saved from the fire.
Whether true or not, a rumor raced through PPP ranks that Saltini's agitators had caused the riot—and it was certainly true that the first casualties had been from the PPP. Two hours later, still within that single long Dark, at least half the city's PPP security forces were in open mutiny, and the city police, still bitter from the coup, joined on the rebel side. As fighting intensified, Saltini gave a series of orders; he wiped the records needed to revive any dissidents, sent loyal units of the PPP to attack the Embassy, and cordoned off the always-rebellious waterfront area, apparently planning to lay siege to part of his own city.
It was the pretext Shan had wanted for many days. The Council of Humanity jumped in with both feet, and the city was now under martial law. The cultural charter was revoked, and the Council of Rationalizers dissolved. In a few days Aimeric's father was to form a government, with himself as President and Head of State. It was an open secret that Aimeric would be the first Prime Minister of Caledony.
I heard all this and I lay there and stared at the ceiling. Now and then they came and hooked me to machines or gave me pills, and I complied. As often as they would let us, Margaret and I would go outside, into the courtyard of the hospital where they had us, and sit and hold each other in the blazing yellow sunlight. When we could, we cried.
I understand that Thorwald and Anna went into the regenner to the sound of hundreds of people singing his version of the Canso de Fis de Jovent. I don't think he'd have been displeased. I can never know, of course.
PART FOUR
M'ES VIS,
COMPANHO
ONE
There was a new procedure, just out from research in the Inner Sphere of settled worlds, called "accelerated grief,-" and they brought out a specialist in it, Dr. Ageskis, a tall blond woman who spoke very little. I remember it as the time when I slept twenty-six or twenty-seven hours per day, and endured dreadful nightmares. In them, Thorwald and I had terrible shouting matches, and Raimbaut followed me around pestering me with his self-pity, and Anna pointed out in public that I had never understood her poetry ... it went on and on like that. A hundred times I saw the lead cat drop into the crevice again, and Thorwald crawl out of the regenner just as we were sitting down to breakfast, his head as mangled as Betsy's had been. I wept and screamed, woke to be fed and exercised, went back under to more nightmares.
And slowly the nightmares diminished. The neuroprobes built healthy, though sorrowful, acceptance around the losses, triggered the waves of anger and then prevented their bonding onto the memories, found the crazy spots and excised them from the natural loss. I don't know how many days it was before they began to put me under for only two "maintenance" hours per day, but by that time I seemed to sleep through "maintenance" without difficulty, and after more days, they began to merely keep a running probe on me for "observation."
Apparently they liked what they observed from me, and from Margaret, but they had to wait a few days to make sure nothing more would come screaming up.
I had just reached the point of being really bored with being in the hospital, and of taking some interest in Aimeric's doings as Prime Minister—many stiffnecks were quietly coming around to him because he was working so hard to get cultural autonomy restored—when there began to be far too many visitors to the hospital. All of the them were offworlders from the Embassy, scientists and scholars of one sort or another, and they all wanted to talk about the ruins that Susan, Robert, and I had seen up in the Pessimals. Had there been any evidence, to my perception, that the gateway into the city was more recent than the dwellings? Or that it was less recent? Even though I had not approached the buildings, how tall did I think the doorways were? Had I noticed anything at all unusual about the shadows, the stonework, the regular curves of the doorways, the spacing of the doorways? Had there been anything lying around loose on the ground? Was I lying, and had I actually gone into one of the "dwellings"? Was I sure I wasn't lying when I said I wasn't lying? The endless procession of them asked the same questions again and again, as if none of them ever communicated with any of the others.
On our first day out of the hospital, the Council of Humanity put Margaret and me up in the best of the local hotels, a building that had not existed when we'd departed on our trip—some hotel chain out of Hedonia had grown it in the interim, and it still smelled slightly of new-building dust. It was now the tallest building in Utilitopia, but in the tradition of hotels, it was perfectly rectangular and looked like a child's building block rammed on end into the city around it.
The room, however, was comfortable—trust the Hedons for that!—with an enormous temperature- and resistance-controlled bed, a couple of different baths and showers, and several other amenities. We had only had a few minutes to explore it when the door pinged, and I opened it to find Aimeric.
"The Prime Minister has nothing better to do than visit pricey hotels? Do the taxpayers know about this?"
He grinned. "Moreover, he brings pricey wine with him—" he held the bottle aloft, and I saw it was some of Bruce's best private issue—"and he's already ordered an expensive meal to come up here with him. Corrupt as they make them—he learned it from his old man. May I come in, or shall I eat and drink it all by myself out in the hall?"
The set-up for dinner arrived almost at once, so our conversation was fairly limited for a while, but at last Aimeric said, "It may have occurred to you that it is fairly odd for a Prime Minister, even one whose culture is actually being run by the Council of Humanity at the moment, to have this much time on his hands. The first piece of news I have is part of why that's true—and it also might help me prepare you for the big news.
"There will not be any Connect Depression in Caledony. Or rather, it's all over already." He let us think about that for a moment, then went on. "The reason is that vast quantities of offworld cash are being spent here, and the reason that is happening is because we have something like eight thousand scientists and scholars crawling around the ruins you found up in the pass in the Pessimals, Giraut."
"Does that include the two thousand who interviewed me and always asked the same questions?"
He snickered. "I realize it must have seemed that way to you. There was a reason for it. They had to make sure that you were telling the exact truth as you knew it. They went so far—this was very much against my wishes and I've filed a protest on your behalf—as to put in a tap on some of the neural work that you were having done."
I vaguely remembered a dream or two of the ruins. "So now they've decided I'm not a liar. How comforting."
"Giraut, I know you tell the truth, and so does everyone who knows you, but this was too important for the Council's experts to take our word for it. And luckily for you Robert and Susan are equally truthful, or they might have kept you in till they found out for sure who wasn't. It was vital that they make sure those ruins could not have been forged. What you stumbled across is—and I don't exaggerate at all—potentially much more important than anything connected with Caledon or Council politics ever was.
"Now that they're sure they've got every bit of testimony they can from you, you're going on a tour of the ruins tomorrow—sorry but it's an order, and Shan will back me up on it if necessary—to see if anything there will jog your memory. They have to get you there right away, before you have a chance to hear any rumors—and believe me, there are plenty. So I hope you weren't planning to go out tonight—"
Margaret grinned lewdly and in a mock-husky voice said, "Have you looked around this room? We'll be hard pressed to get to all the surfaces in here."
Aimeric made a face; for some reason, this was serious to him. Since he clearly could not have a sense of humor about it, I said, "Well, then, what springer do I report to, and at what time?"
He told me; I was a bit surprised it was so late in the day, until I realized that I would be springing two time zones west—even
after all this time, because you could see the Pessimals from Sodom Gap, I tended to think of them as "close," when in fact the parts you could see were virtually sticking out of the atmosphere.
There was little enough to say after that, but Aimeric and I were Occitans, so it took us an hour or so to say that little. After he left, Margaret and I treated ourselves to some very slow shared massages and lovemaking, and then had another light meal, and finally just fell asleep like any two lovers with no other cares. It was wonderful. I dreamed of Thorwald and Raimbaut that night, but though it was sad when I awakened and they weren't there, the dream itself was pleasant. I woke up saying "I love you," not sure who I was saying it to, but it woke Margaret, so I said it again to make sure it was for her.
Our guide was a middle-aged man named al-Khenil, from New Islamic Palestine, a culture on Stresemann. He was a pleasant, scholarly sort who didn't seem to be much interested in answering questions. I realized after a few of them that he wanted to answer—was probably dying to talk to someone who didn't already know the ruins as well as he did—but must have been under orders not to give me any information that might slant my answers to the questions he was asking.
It seemed as if he had a question every three meters. They had marked all our footprints in the dust, and first he had me slowly rewalk the path I'd taken, but I saw nothing new; at the time I had mainly been trying to get Susan back to the cat so that we could get going again. In the better light, I saw that the fountain was a fountain sooner, but that was the only real change. I had not realized that the stonework on the fountain and on the dwellings had been laser-fused together, but considering the laser-cut pathway into the space, that really didn't surprise me much.