She had no say then, and it was obvious she couldn’t change anything now. All her carefully constructed plans had collapsed. Everything to this point had been done to avoid exactly this. She had put everything in the right place, all so she did not have to run away.
Children ran away from home. She was not a child. She could play master-level chess, write code, and manage her own money. Yet when it came to the final stage, she simply could not get out of her home and be on her own, be in control of her own destiny. When all was said and done, she was not her own agent, not permitted to be her own master. She could be tossed around by any adult who claimed the authority to play with her life. To make matters worse, she had left the apartment empty-handed. The two hundred dollars collected that morning was in her backpack. If she returned for it she did not know what her father would do, or even if he would let her back in.
No, he would let her in; she had something he wanted. The looks he had been giving her this last year were unmistakable. He had not yet acted on it, but Jen knew it was only a matter of time before he convinced himself that he had a right to her body, too. If it were not for that, Jen might have been able to wait another few years till her majority to leave legally and openly. Of course, it wasn’t much safer sitting alone in an empty doorway on an abandoned street. Jen loathed this world.
She glanced up. A couple of the lights visible in the sky were not stars. Orbitals. Habitats. Satellite factories. Jen felt a bitter longing. That’s where she wanted to be, and there was no way she could get there. No one—no adult—was going to let her.
Footsteps drew her attention back to the street. Three people walked down the center. They seemed to spot her just after she saw them and veered her way. Jen pressed her hands to the stone steps, preparing to push away and run. She hesitated; the taller of them seemed familiar. They stopped at the foot of the steps, two boys and a girl.
“Are you waiting for someone or just taking in the air?” the tall one asked. His accent was fake British layered over street-drawl; it had a pleasant effect. Jen recognized him, then. She had nearly landed on him that morning.
“Leave me alone,” Jen said simply.
“Ah. You’re meditating. I see.” He looked at the other two and smiled. “Come with us. We’re headed for the union meet.”
Jen frowned. “Union—?”
“Youth Union of National Guarantees. You ain’t heard?”
Jen thought for a moment. “The coalition for the rights of minors, the one with the constitution and the political action platform?”
“Among other things,” he said. “You have heard.”
Jen nodded. “I didn’t believe it.”
“I’m Cantril Foster and these are the members of my corporation.” He pointed to them. “Bigelow-Jigolo and Sonya.”
She nodded to them. “I’m Jen.”
“We’re on our way as delegates to the cause,” Cantril said. “Come with us. Every warm body helps get the message through.”
Jen smiled despite her fear. She weighed her options. If she did not go willingly they could force her, though she did not think they would. It was a better option at least than staying out here alone.
“Sure.” They walked together for a few blocks. Jen began to feel calmer, safer.
“What’s the meeting about?” she asked.
“Organization,” Bigelow-Jigolo said.
“Power,” Sonya added.
“Petitions, assertions, and acquisitions,” Cantril said. “The disenfranchised demanding franchise. Shit like that.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
He nodded. “And you can’t do shit, can you? You have to escape through the window from your own home and sit and brood in dangerous places, eh? Or do you come here often and I just ain’t noticed?” She frowned at him, and he laughed.
“She’s scared, Cantril; leave her alone,” Sonya said.
“We’re all scared,” Cantril said, “that’s no distinction. When you’re scared enough to run, you’re scared enough to change something—that’s distinction. That’s power.”
They rounded a corner and ahead Jen heard a low watery sound that half a block closer she recognized as a crowd. A big crowd. She felt herself growing anxious, excited despite her fear—or maybe because of it—and craned her neck to see more.
They walked faster, around a corner, and came to an abandoned park that angled away from one of the spaceport walls. A fence had been thrown up around it and signs posted prohibiting public use, but the gates were open and the field was illuminated with bright yellow-blue lights that bled onto the surrounding derelict buildings and asphalt.
Cantril’s group hit the edge of the crowd and people parted like water, giving them way and then filling in behind them. Jen saw faces glaring at them, smiling at them, curious, ambivalent, suspicious, but all young, all kids, though many looked years older than they ought.
Many wore colors, makeshift uniforms identifying them as part of a group. She saw tattoos on faces and torsos. One group was naked, their entire bodies covered with colorful designs warped around inset jewels, symbols scarring flesh. Bald kids, kids with waist-length braids, one bunch with circuitry layered over their skulls, down their jaws, disappearing into white jumpsuits. Black, Hispanic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Nordic, Mediterranean, and racial types mixed to the point that origin was lost, heritages obscured by generations of breeding with whoever was available. She saw banners held up declaring “Youth Rights Now,” “Take the Mandate from The Motherfuckers,” or “Eat Our Shit and Pass Cookies” to “Burn Racist Puppyfuckers.” There were kids who looked barely twelve years old whose faces were creased with rage and others much older who seemed as peaceful and devoid of rage as newborns.
They all seemed like a half-formed idea of what civilizations should be, instead of just the products of cultural insistence that had no real direction, no real goal. The crowd was caught between innocence and ignorance, on their way to being something and then left unfinished by their creators after forming in unwanted shapes, like fetal material un-aborted but cast away after all, unwanted, unusable, un-absorbable.
As Jen plunged deeper into the assembly she could feel its frenetic vitality. She heard arguments, saw a few fights, watched a group of girls gathered around a beat-up portable computer hammering out a petition, debating points, changing phraseology. There was nothing dead here, nothing that felt like defeat or disillusion. Maybe civilization had abandoned them, but to Jen it looked as if civilization was being built here. She could not take it all in—one trio of bald, black-clad boys were screaming incoherently at a gang of blacks who stood a few meters away grinning at them and making jokes while twenty steps away a girl in a toga was carefully explaining the principles of Jeffersonian Republicanism to fifteen or twenty Vietnamese. Leaflets littered the field. Jen snatched one up. “Do you understand what the Vote is? Do you know how to rate a candidate and how to deconstruct campaign rhetoric? Do you know how to press a point with someone who doesn’t respect you? The following are twenty points to help you in the war for the franchise—”
“Attention!”
Jen looked up at the bleachers and saw a girl with long black braids, wearing red synth-leather, waving a clipboard.
“Everybody, attention!” she called. “We’ve got some platform suggestions that we think we’ll go with. Now, we don’t want to put everything in one upload, so all of these have to be given serious consideration and several chosen for action, possibly all of them.”
“Who picked the list?” someone demanded from the crowd.
“The Committee of Chiefs,” the girl answered. “Anybody have a problem with that?”
“Who picked the Committee?” someone else shouted. Laughter chittered from a few.
The girl scowled and flipped the bird, then read from the papers in her hand. “In-person demonstrations at the private estates of all district representatives and state senators. Now w
e mean demonstrations, not riots. We don’t want any property destroyed; we don’t want anybody hurt; we don’t want to give anyone any reason to call the storm troopers. This is to go with the same type demonstrations at the state legislatures and the capitals, plus in Washington. Same rules apply.
“Next we’re looking at class-action suits against parents and guardians. We need lawyers, and we need press time for this. Then we’re looking at homesteading blighted urban areas. This is to tie in with the class-action suits to keep our people in the houses they settle. We expect property tax problems and hassles with contract law. That’s why we need the lawyers. We already got people in the Urban Coalitions and the ACLU interested.
“After that, we go to classroom invasions. Groups are to enter schools and attend subscription classes. Steal the books, we don’t care, but we want our presence in classrooms we can’t get into now. For this we need to touch base with kids in welfare academies, get them out of the slum-schools and into the good ones, get the ones already attending the polyversities out of the standard-track classes and into the ones that they can’t afford.”
Jen listened, dismayed. The girl read on. The propositions blurred.
“Any of them sound good to you?”
Jen looked around. Sonya was talking to Cantril.
“Don’t know,” he said. “I suppose we ought to vote on that ourselves.” He smiled at Jen. “What do you think?”
“She’s not even one of us,” Bigelow-Jigolo said.
“She’s with us,” Cantril snapped. “You gotta problem with my choice of members?”
The boy shook his head and glowered at Jen.
“The class-action suit sounds good to me,” Jen said immediately. “I’d like to see my parents on trial.”
They looked at her blankly for a moment. Then Cantril chuckled. “You have parents?”
Jen frowned at Cantril, and then looked at the other two. They watched her as if waiting for the realization to sink in. Jen suddenly felt ashamed of herself, then envious. The two emotions mixed badly and left an acid pall over her thoughts.
Cantril smiled and shook his head. “What’s the difference? We all had parents once, eh?” He touched her face. Jen was surprised the gentleness. “Just some of us still have them. Like the flu, isn’t it?”
The others laughed. She knew that laugh. She did not belong here. They were tolerating her, she felt, which was just another way of telling her that they did not know how to get rid of her. As if reading her thoughts, Cantril said earnestly, “We don’t patronize anybody here.”
The girl in the bleachers had at some point stopped talking. Cantril frowned and looked around. The others turned, as if sensing something was wrong. Silence fell across the field. Then Jen heard it: hovers.
A storm-wind of spinning propellers filled the air, setting the entire park in motion. The gathering split like an atom, people shooting out in every direction. Cantril grabbed Jen and pulled her close. He shouted to the others, but Jen could not make out the words in the deafening roar of the crowd and the pounding beat of the hovers. They ran.
A new sound sliced through, the sharp echoing bellow of bullhorns and police orders. The words were indistinguishable, lost in the noise, but Jen understood their meaning as if they were somehow encoded in her genes, handed down from generations of arrested and persecuted.
Cantril’s gang hammered a path through the mêlée. They veered left, toward the bleachers. Kids were climbing the fences, jumping from the top row of the bleachers, their fall broken at the last instant by lines around their chests: smart-rope dropped from above. The hovers’ searchlights poured down on the chaos.
Cantril let her go as they reached the fence. The sluglike shapes of the hovers were settling down on the nearly empty field. Groups of fallen kids lay motionless on the weed-torn Astroturf. Police in riot gear erupted from the bowels of the hovers and began chasing down those who were still running, while others began cuffing and carrying the fallen back to the hovers. Those caught by the smart-rope were being pulled skyward in clumps.
When they reached the fence, Cantril shouted, “Cut it!”
Bigelow-Jigolo pulled something from his jacket, a compact device that glowed yellow-red at its tip. He pressed it to the wire and the metal gave way.
“Through!”
Bigelow-Jigolo and Sonya pushed at the wire mesh. Cantril grabbed Jen’s wrist and pulled her along.
Then she was running. She did not think: no time, no room. She lagged behind. The air felt hot and spiked with barbs, her pulse rushing too fast through her veins. Ahead a car pulled around the corner. Searchlights blinded her. She heard someone call her name.
Her entire body suddenly seized up in a massive muscle spasm. She felt herself shaking uncontrollably.
Then she passed out.
Jen opened her eyes. It took concentration to decipher the image: the plastic housing of the single light. Rainbows seem to surround it. She squeezed her eyes shut to clear her vision, then carefully sat up.
She was in a small cell. Her arms and legs ached, but not badly enough to prevent movement. Part of her realized she had been hit with a stunner. She was dressed in an off-white jumpsuit with a holographic tag over the left breast. She was barefoot.
The door slid open. A uniformed woman motioned Jen out. Dully, Jen stood and stepped into the corridor. The woman pushed her forward. She was taken to a larger room where she found Ella Preston sitting on the opposite side of a table.
“You have fifteen minutes,” the guard said, and left the room.
“Sit down, Jen,” Ella said, gesturing to the chair opposite her.
Jen frowned at her and continued to stand. She tried to slide her hands into her pockets, but found the jumpsuit had no pockets. She folded her arms, instead.
“Do you want something to drink?” Ella asked. “I can get us something. Please sit down.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
Ella frowned and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t understand something. I went over your entire academic record after you left yesterday. Everything. From grade school till now. With the exception of your fifth grade year you are an exemplary student. Perfect attendance, excellent grade point, very solid independent study work. You’re a bright girl, Jen.”
“So what don’t you understand?”
“Why did you run? Why didn’t you tell me what the trouble was?”
“What trouble?”
“Your parents.”
Jen squeezed her mouth shut and averted her eyes.
“Jen?”
This was too much. She was tired, she needed sleep, real sleep.
“Jen?”
“What?”
Ella sighed. “We don’t have time for verbal sparring. I went by your home last night, to talk to you, to meet your parents. I met your parents.”
Jen looked at her, wary.
“So why didn’t you tell someone?”
“It’s no concern of yours.”
“Look, I can’t help you—”
“Where am I?” Jen snapped. “Jail, right? Guess what happens next! I get welfared or remanded to the custody of my parents with a record! You know what that means? Everything I’ve tried to do is gone, vapor, smoke! Because you had to talk to my parents! Well, thank you very damn much!”
“You’re here because you were apprehended at an act of civil disobedience, not because I spoke to your parents.”
“Why do you think I was there?”
“Ah. Look, Jen—”
“Don’t.” She raised a finger at Ella. “Don’t give me institutional concern.” She turned away not wanting to look at Ella and paced the room. Six steps to the wall, nine to the opposite wall. She stopped in the corner, nowhere else to go.
“All I wanted to do was to get away from them. Both of them. You met them. Don’t you think I had good reason to want to do that?”
“You could have requested separat
ion.”
Jen crossed the room to the table and leaned close to Ella.
“And what happens? They welfare you and stick you in a dysfunctional-family program. You get a state stipend that’s fixed so you don’t get the good teachers, the good programs, because you can’t buy them. So you don’t get a chance at things like the co-op with the orbitals. You get slotted into a profile and they, whoever the fuck ‘they’ are, determine what’s best for you. Change one set of bad parents for a whole building full of the same.”
She stepped back. “The only chance I had was the way I was doing it all these years: secretly, paying my own way, forging my parents’ signatures on all the forms, keeping them completely in the dark. I did it that way because if they’d known, if they’d gotten a hint of what I was doing, they’d have stopped it.
“My father would have, anyway, and my mother is useless when it comes to defying him. And you fucked it up for me. You had to talk to my parents. Do you think that thing I have for a father would have let me go to space? God, he doesn’t even think women have brains!
“The moment I would have brought them in, that would have been the end of everything I wanted. Nothing you could have done would have changed it because I’m a minor, because I have to do what I’m told, because I have to have their permission. Half the things I’ve been interested in all my life they wouldn’t have a clue about.”
Ella pursed her lips, her fingers quietly drumming on the edge of the table. She drew a slow breath. “You forged all the signatures?”
Jen grunted. “I’ve been doing it all my life. It’s not that hard.”
“Where did the money come from for the special classes?”
“I earned it. It’s mine. When I was little I ran errands, did some housecleaning for old people. Now I do tutoring when I can. A few other things.”
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