by Neil Clarke
Sitta stared at him, unable to speak.
“Consideration,” he cautioned. “At this altitude and at these speeds, you might hurt innocent people.”
In the end, she killed no one. Embarrassed to be found out, to be so transparent, she kept on living; and years later, in passing, she would wonder who to thank for this indifferent, precious help.
7
Farside, like every place, was transformed by the war. But instead of world-shaking explosions and craters, it was sculpted by slower, more graceful events. Prosperity covered its central region with domes, warm air and manmade rains beginning to modify the ancient regolith. Farther out were the factories and vast laboratories that supplied the military and allied worlds. Profits came as electronic cash, water and organics. A world dry for four billion years was suddenly rich with moisture. Ponds became lakes. Comet ice and pieces of distant moons were brought to pay for necessities like medicine and sophisticated machinery. And when there was too much water for the surface area—Farside isn’t a large place—the excess was put underground, flooding old mines and caverns and outdated bunkers. This became the Central Sea. Only in small places, usually on the best estates, would the Sea show on the surface. Icenice had lived beside one of those pond-sized faces, the water bottomless and blue, lovely beyond words.
It was too bad that Sitta wouldn’t see it now. Looking about the railbug, at the morose, downslung faces, it was obvious that she was doomed to be uninvited to every celebration. That incident with the bag had spoiled the mood. Would it be Varner or Icenice who would break another promise? “Some other time, darling. Where can we leave you?” Except they surprised her. Instead of excuses, they began to have the most banal conversation imaginable. Who remembered what from last year’s spinball season? What team won the tournament? Who could recall the most obscure statistic? A safe, bloodless collection of noise set everything right again, and Sitta ignored the prattle, leaning back against her seat, her travels and the pregnancy finally catching up with her. She dropped into sleep, no time passing, then woke to find the glass walls opaque, the sun up and needing to be shielded. This was like riding inside a glass of milk or a cloudbank, and sometimes, holding her head at the proper angle, she could just make out the blocky shapes of factories streaking past.
Nobody was speaking; furtive glances were thrown her way.
“What do they do?” asked Sitta.
Silence.
“The factories,” she added. “Aren’t they being turned over to civilian industries?”
“Some have been,” said Varner.
“Why bother?” one of the strangers complained.
“Bosson uses a few of them.” Icenice spoke with a flat, emotionless voice. “The equipment is old, he says. And he has trouble selling what he makes.”
Bosson is your husband, thought Sitta. Right?
She asked, “What does he make?”
“Laser drills. They’re retooled old weapons, I guess.”
Sitta had assumed that everything and everyone would follow the grand plan. Farside’s wealth and infrastructure would generate new wealth and opportunities . . . if not with their factories, then with new spaceports and beautiful new cities.
Except those wonders belonged to the Martians.
Varner wore a stern expression. “If you want to sleep, we’ll make up the long seat in the back. If you’d like.”
On a whim, she asked, “Where are Lean and Catchen?”
Silence.
“Are they still angry with me?”
“Nobody’s angry with you,” Icenice protested.
“Lean lives on Titan,” Pony replied. “Catchen . . . I don’t know . . . she’s somewhere in the Belt.”
“They’re not together?” Sitta had never known two people more perfectly linked, save for the Twins. “What happened?”
Shrugs. Embarrassed expressions, and pain. Then Varner summed it up by saying, “Crap finds you.”
What precisely did that mean?
Varner rose to his feet, looking the length of the bug.
Sitta asked, “What about Unnel?”
“We don’t have any idea.” Indeed, he seemed entirely helpless, eyes dropping, gazing at his own hands for a few baffled moments. “Do you want to sleep, or not?”
She voted for sleep. A pillow was found and placed where her head would lay, and she was down and hard asleep in minutes, waking once to hear soft conversation—distant, unintelligible—then again to hear nothing at all. The third time brought bright light and whispers, and she sat upright, discovering that their railbug had stopped, its walls once again transparent. Surrounding them was a tall, delicate jungle and a soft blue-tinted sky of glass, the lunar noon as brilliant as she remembered. Through an open hatch, she could smell water and the vigorous stink of orchids.
Icenice was coming for her. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I was just going to shake you.”
The others stood behind Icenice, lined up like the best little children; and Sitta thought:
You want something.
That’s why they had come to greet her and bring her here. That’s why they had endured searches and why they had risked facing any grudges that she still might feel toward them.
You want something important, and no one else can give it to you.
Sitta would refuse them. She had come here to destroy these people and devastate their world, and seeing the desire on hopeful, desperate faces, she was so deeply pleased. So blessed. Rising to her feet, she asked, “Would someone carry my bag? I’m still very tired.”
A cold pause, then motion.
By different straps, Varner and one of the strangers picked that bag of human flesh, eyeing one another until the stranger relinquished the disgusting chore with a forced chuckle and bow, stepping back and glancing at Sitta, hoping she would notice his attempted kindness.
8
Artificial volcanoes girdled the earth’s equator, fusion reactors sunk into their throats, helping push millions of tons of acid and ash into the stratosphere. Constant eruptions maintained the gray-black clouds that helped block the sunlight. Those clouds were vital. Decades of bombardment had burned away forests, soil and even great volumes of carbonate rock. There was so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that full sunshine would have brought a runaway greenhouse event. A second Venus would be born, and the oceans would rise into the stratosphere, and then the world would be broil until dead. “Not a bad plan,” Sitta’s parents would always claim, perhaps as a black joke. Perhaps. “That world is all one grave anyway. Why do we pretend?”
The earthly climate was hot and humid despite the perpetual gloom. It would be an ideal home for orchids and food crops, if not for the lack of soil, its poisoned water, and the endless plant diseases. Terrans, by custom, lived inside bunkers. Even in surface homes built after the war, there was a strength of walls and ceilings, everything drab and massive, every opening able to be sealed tight. Sitta was given her own concrete monstrosity when she arrived at her post. It had no plumbing. She’d been promised normal facilities, but assuming that she was being slighted by the Terrans, she refused to complain. Indeed, she tried to avoid all conversation. On her first morning, in the dim purple light, she put on a breathing mask to protect her lungs from acids and explosive dust, then left her new house, shuffling up a rocky hill, finding a depression where she felt unwatched and doing the essential chore and covering her mess with loose stones, then slinking off to work a full day in the farm fields.
A hospital was promised; every government official in Athens had said so. But on the earth, she was learning, promises were no stronger than the wind that makes them. For the time being, she was a laborer, and a poor one. Sitta could barely lift her tools, much less swing them with authority. Yet nobody seemed to mind, their public fury focused on a thousand worse outrages. That was greatest surprise for the new Plowsharer. It wasn’t the poverty, which was endless, or the clinging filth, or even the constant spectre of death. It was the ceaselessly
supportive nature of the Terrans, particularly toward her. Wasn’t she one of the brutal conquerors? Not to their way of thinking, no. Acidic clouds ruled the sky. The moon and Mars and the rest of the worlds were theories, unobserved and almost unimaginable. Yes, they honestly hated the provisional government, particularly the security agencies that enforced the harsh laws. But toward Sitta, their Plowsharer, they showed smiles. They said, “We’re thrilled to have you here. If you need anything, ask. We won’t have it, but ask anyway. We like to apologize all the same.”
Humor was a shock, set against the misery. Despite every awful story told by Farsiders, and despite the grueling training digitals, the reality proved a hundred times more wicked, cruel, and thoughtless than anything she could envision. Yet meanwhile, amid the carnage, the people of this city told jokes, laughed, and loved with a kind of maniacal vigor, perhaps because of the stakes involved, pleasures needing to be taken as they were found.
Tens of thousands lived together, few of whom could be called old by Farside standards. Children outnumbered adults, except they weren’t genuine children. They reminded Sitta of five and six year-old adults, working in the fields and tiny factories, worldly in all things, including their play. The most popular game was a pretend funeral. They used wild rats, skinning them just as human bodies were skinned, pulling out organs to be transplanted into other rats, just as humans harvested whatever they could use from their own dead, implanting body parts with the help of primitive autodocs, dull knives, and weak laser beams.
By law, each district in the city had one funeral each day. One or fifty bodies—skinned, and if clean enough, emptied of livers, kidneys and hearts— were buried in a single ceremony, always at dusk, always as the blister-colored sun touched the remote horizon. There was never more than one hole to dig and refill. Terrans were wonders at digging graves. They always knew where to sink them and how deep, then just what words to say over the departed, and the best ways to comfort a woman from Farside who insisted on taking death personally.
Despite her hyperactive immune system, Sitta became ill. For all she knew, she had caught some mutant strain of an ailment devised by her parents, those circumstances thick with irony. After three days of fever, she ran out of the useless medicines in her personal kit, then fell into a delirium, waking at one point to find women caring for her, smiling with sloppy toothless mouths, ugly faces lending her encouragement, a credible strength.
Sitta recovered after a week of near-death. Weaker than any time since birth, she shuffled up the hillside to defecate, and in the middle of the act she saw a nine-year-old sitting nearby, watching without a hint of shame. She finished and went to him. And he skipped toward her, carrying a small bucket and spade. Was he there to clean up after her? She asked, then with a wise tone, added, “I bet you want it for the fields.”
The boy gave an odd look, then proclaimed, “We wouldn’t waste it on the crops!I”
“Then why?” Hesitating, she realized that she’d seen him on other mornings. “You’ve done this other times, haven’t you?”
“It’s my job,” he said, a prideful smile behind that transparent breathing mask. She tried to find her other stone piles. “But why?”
“I’m not suppose to tell.”
Sitta offered a wan smile. “I won’t tell that you did. Just explain what you want with it.”
As if nothing could be more natural, he said, “We put your turds in our food.”
She moaned, bending as if punched.
“You’ve got bugs in you,” said the boy. “Bugs that keep you alive. If we eat them and if they take hold—”
Rarely, she guessed.
“—then we’ll feel better. Right?”
On occasion, perhaps. But the bacteria were designed for her body, her chemistry. It would take mutations and enormous luck . . . then yes, some of those people might benefit in many ways. At least it wasn’t impossible.
“But why keep this a secret?”
“People like you can be funny,” the boy warned. “About all kinds of stuff. They thought you wouldn’t like knowing.”
Disgust fell away, leaving her oddly pleased.
“Why do you hide your shit?” he asked. “Is that what you do on the moon? Do you bury it under rocks?”
“No.” Farside came to her mind’s eye. “No, we pipe it into the Sea.”
“Into your water?” His nose crinkled up. “That doesn’t sound very smart, I think.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” she agreed. Then she pointed at the bucket, saying, “Let me keep it. How about if I set it outside my door every morning?”
“It would save me a walk,” the boy agreed. “It would help both of us.” He nodded, smiling up at her. “My name is Thomas.”
“Mine is Sitta.”
A big, long laugh. “I know that.”
For that instant, in the face and voice, Thomas seemed like a genuine nine-year-old boy, wise in the details, innocent in the heart.
9
Icenice’s home and grounds were exactly as Sitta remembered them, and it was as if she had never been there, as if the scenery had been shown to her in holos while she was a young and impressionable girl. “Privilege,” said the property. “Order.”
“Comfort.” Sitta looked down a long green slope, eyes resting on the blue pond-sized face of the Sea, flocks of swift birds flying around it and drinking from it and lighting on its shore. After a minute, she turned and focused on the tall house, thinking of all the rooms and elegant balconies and baths and holoplazas. On the earth, two thousand people would reside inside it and feel blessed. And what would they do with this yard? With everyone staring, Sitta dropped to her knees, hands digging into the freshly watered sod, nails cutting through sweet grass and exuberant roots, reaching soil blacker than tar. The skins of old comets went into this marvel, brought in exchange for critical war goods. And for what good? Pulling up a great lump of the stuff, she placed it against her nose and sniffed once, then again.
Silence was broken by someone clearing his throat.
“Ah-hem!”
Icenice jumped half a meter into the air, turning in flight and blurting, “Honey? Hello.”
The husband stood on the end of a stone porch, between stone lions. In no way, save for a general maleness, did he match Sitta’s expectations. Plain and stocky, Bosson was twenty years older than the rest of them, and a little fat. Dressed like a low-grade functionary, there seemed to be nothing memorable about him.
“So does my dirt smell good?” he shouted.
Sitta emptied her hands and rose. “Lovely.”
“Better than anything you’ve tasted for a while. Am I right?”
She knew him. The words; the voice. His general attitude. She had seen hundreds of men like him on earth, all members of the government, all middle-aged and embittered by whatever had placed them where they didn’t want to be. Sitta offered a thin smile, telling Bosson, “I’m glad to meet you, finally.”
The man grinned, turned. To his wife, he said, “Come here.”
Icenice nearly ran to him, wrapping both arms around his chest and squealing, “We’ve had a gorgeous time, darling.”
No one else in their group greeted him, even in passing.
Sitta climbed the long stairs two at a time, offering her hand and remarking, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Have you?” Bosson laughed, reaching past her hand and patting her swollen belly. “Is this why you quit playing the Good Samaritan?”
“Honey?” said Icenice, her voice cracking.
“Who’s the father? Another Plow?”
Sitta waited for a long moment, trying to read the man’s stony face. Then, with a quiet, stolid voice, she replied, “He was Terran.”
“Was?” asked Icenice, fearfully.
“He’s dead,” Bosson answered. Unimpressed; unchastened. “Am I right, Miss Sitta?”
She didn’t respond, maintaining her glacial calm.
“Darling, let me show you the
room.” Icenice physically moved between them, sharp features tightening and a sheen of perspiration on her face and breasts. “We thought we’d give you your old room. That is, I mean, if you want to stay . . . for a little while . . .”
“I hope you remember how to eat,” Bosson called after them. “This house has been cooking all day, getting ready.”
Sitta asked nothing. She didn’t mention the husband or invite details about him. Yet Icenice felt compelled to explain, saying, “He’s just in a bad mood. Work isn’t going well.”
“Making laser drills, right?”
The girl hesitated on the stairs, sunshine falling from a high skylight, the heat of it making her perfumes flood into the golden air. “He’s a Mercurian, darling. You know how bleak they can be.”
Were they?
“He’ll be fine,” Icenice promised, no hope in her voice, “A drink or two, and he’ll be sugar.”
Following the familiar route, she was taken to an enormous suite, its bed able to sleep twenty and the corner decorated with potted jungles. Bright gold and red monkeys came close, begging for any food that a human might be carrying. Sitta had nothing in her hands. A house robot had brought her bag, setting it on the bed and asking if she wished it unpacked. She didn’t answer. Already sick of luxuries, she felt a revulsion building, her face hardening. Misreading her expression, Icenice asked, “Are you disappointed with me?” Sitta didn’t care about the girl’s life. But instead of honesty, she feigned interest. “Why did you marry him?”
Bleakness seemed to be a family trait. A shrug of the shoulders, and she said, “I had to.”
“But why?”
“Because there was no choice.” She said it as if nothing could be more obvious. Then, “Can we go? I don’t want to leave them alone for too long.” The robot was left to decide whether or not to unpack. Sitta and Icenice went downstairs, discovering everyone in the long dining room, Bosson sitting in a huge feather chair at one end, watching his guests congregating in the distance. His expression was both alert and bored. Sitta was reminded of an adult watching children, always keeping count of the pretty baubles. Sitta arrived, and whispers died.