by Sean Wallace
I thought back to Attia’s letter that for all I knew was still in my coat pocket. How could I have been so stupid, to think it was her? She had left me more than twenty years ago.
“Gaius Plebius,” said a nasal voice.
Gaius was dead, killed during the riots in Aelia Capitolina. I was Artur now. The hood came off in a rush and I blinked into a bank of high-powered lights.
“My name is Artur.” My words sounded slurred. I might as well hold onto that, though I had no idea how much I had said already, mumbling away in a drug-induced lunacy.
Faint movement on the far side of the room. A mechanical lever clanked down and two of the lights popped off, leaving behind only the ghostly orange of cooling filament wire.
Two figures resolved from the lessened glare, both staring at me from across a low table made of polished wood.
I blinked and looked around. I had expected to find myself in a concrete interrogation room with discolored walls and a rusted iron door. Instead I seemed to be in some kind of living room – an apartment or hotel I couldn’t quite be sure. Light walls and gray carpets; beach wood accented furniture and coarse gray upholstery; thick white curtains filtering bronze streetlight.
What was I doing here? I turned to the two figures on the sofa across from me. A man who was seated and above him a tall woman with her arms clasped behind her back. The pair of them wore gray. A floodlight stood on a tripod behind them, its cable snaking to an outlet on the wall beneath a white radiator.
“Awake now, I see.” The man was looking intently in my eyes. For signs of awareness, I realized belatedly.
“Where am I?”
“You are in the Grand Whitebottom Hotel,” he said. “I’m sorry that the room is not so grand as it once was. Such are the times, Gaius.”
“That’s not my name.” This had to be some trick. Some kind of interrogation technique. The Commissariat’s Internal Security Directorate was shrouded in mystery and rumor, but everyone agreed they were subtle. And deadly. I wasn’t going to admit to anything. I was, after all, still tied to the chair.
The man sighed, looked up at the woman standing beside him. She showed no reaction. The man was pale and had dressed in the drab uniform of a Commissariat major (brass buttons, red piping, bright green New Commonwealth flag on the collar) and the woman – Han, apparently, which made her a strange sight standing beside this particular man – wore a party tunic-suit with a pointed collar that was cinched tightly to her throat. They were a contrast in shapes: him short and formed something like a tortoise, with a tiny shriveled head and a body that ballooned out at the waist, her tall with broad shoulders and a broad face, long black hair tied into a tight tail. She had large calloused hands, and kept her eyes turned down toward them, never looking at me directly.
The man slid two fotos out of a hemp folder and placed them on the table before me. “Gaius Plebius,” the major said for a third time. “A carded member of the Ravenna Student Continuance Council. Wanted for counter-revolutionary activities. A known instigator during the Aelia Capitolina riots.”
I had a brief image of Attia, there, on a street filled with blood and screaming, smoking rifling clenched in too-tiny hands.
I found myself leaning forward. The foto was black and white, grainy, but still intelligible: a young man sitting alone in a kaffahouse. I felt my heart lurch. The figure in the image looked twenty years younger and much thinner than the reflection I saw every morning in the cracked mirror of my one-room flat. I recognized the kaffahouse too, the same one in Aelia Capitolina where I’d laid low for three days, hiding, waiting for Attia.
I’d lost her there amid the blood and smoke and screaming. I’d run through those mad streets to a backwater kaffahouse where we’d agreed to meet in case we became separated. I’d waited in that kaffahouse three days, looking up each time the door opened, hoping vainly to see her walk back into my life, hoping vainly that she hadn’t been arrested or killed. But of course she never had. In the end I’d fled, taken a new name, and gone into hiding. In my heart I’d thought of her as dead.
Shock still thrummed through my body, reverberated down every nerve. They had known I was there, in Aelia Capitolina, in that kaffahouse, waiting for her. Why hadn’t they arrested me? “Where did you get that?” I whispered.
He started pulling more fotos from his folder. With each new print I saw that same man, the same reflection, but ageing as the prints and the years went by – the last twenty years of my life spread out there on the table
I almost couldn’t breathe. I’d been hiding from the Commissariat for twenty years. Certain that they would arrest me if they ever found me. That I would be sent to the northern labor camps and worked to death like so many friends I’d had. But they’d known. They’d always known. They’d followed me from afar for years. Why?
“Song, would you untie Gaius please?”
The woman – Song, apparently – frowned at the major and then with a blurred movement whipped a sling blade out from some hidden sheath. She paced around and sliced the ropes that bound my hands. When she leaned close I caught the scent of stale tobacco. Why were they untying me?
“I’ll be honest,” the major said, “we aren’t much interested in what you did or did not do twenty years ago. This all would have been much easier if you hadn’t tried to kill poor Charlez with a saucer.” The major’s smile revealed a glittering nest of amalgam fillings that wove through his teeth. “We can assure you that if we were from the Political Directorate you wouldn’t have even had the chance to defend yourself.”
I struggled to follow what he was saying. The Commissariat Political Directorate protected the state from sedition and counter-revolutionary activities – the crimes I was guilty of. So if these two weren’t members of the Political Directorate . . . “Who are you?”
“We’re with the Primary Directorate.”
The second true shock since I’d woken. Primary Directorate. Foreign Intelligence. Spies. What would spies want with me?
“We brought you here,” the major said, as if in answer to my question, “because we need your help.”
The room, my life, my understanding of the word, all of it wobbled. What was happening here? A widening gulf between expectation and result. “Why – I mean . . . For what?”
Song stared at her strong hands. Flexed them. She still hadn’t looked up at me. The major kept on smiling.
“When was the last time you saw Attia Vitellia?”
I felt my gut twist. The telegram. They had sent it.
“We know you were both at the riots,” the major said. “We know that you were lovers.”
Lovers. Once. Old betrayals die hard. “The last time I saw her,” I said, “she on the front page of The Truth.”
That had been the final knife. Years after the riots, years after thinking her dead, I’d woken one morning to see her smiling face with its mismatched eyes splashed across the front page of the Party newspaper. There she was, the woman I’d loved, who I’d thought hated the Party as much as she loved me, shaking hands with some minor functionary. A desperate scan of the article revealed that she had become a magistra at one of the state universities and was being awarded a medal for some breakthrough she’d managed in physics. The fact that she was still alive was enough of a shock. But there she was: working for the Central Committee. She hadn’t died or been captured. She’d betrayed me, our friends, everything we believed in, for the sake of her fucking work. If any vestige of Gaius had remained, that had killed him.
The major leaned back and smiled a little bit. “When did you last speak to her?”
“The riot,” I knew that was an admission. At this point I didn’t care. I’d followed her from a distance, as she published her papers and became one of the most famous physicists of her age. But I couldn’t bring myself to do more than that. I couldn’t bring myself to confront her.
Too afraid . . .
“What does any of this have to do with her?” My anger thrummed through
me, vibrating along every nerve.
The major flitted his gaze up to Song and she responded by finally meeting my eyes. “There’s no reason for you to know this,” she said, “but five years ago theoretical metallurgist Attia Vitellia defected to the Mandate government.”
A thought and a pang, one that I recognized as both familiar and irrational. And yet there it was: how could she have left without me? We’d often spoken of leaving the New Commonwealth altogether, to forge a new life in Nova Roma, or even maybe the Mandate. I gritted my teeth. But that was twenty years ago. She left because she doesn’t give a shit about you.
The major adjusted the round spectacles on his nose. “At least that’s what everyone but Song, myself, and now you believes.” The major straightened in the sofa. “Vitellia has, for each of those last five years, been working with us. Spying for us. She’s been deep cover on the inside of a top-secret Mandate military project in the Taqlar Makan desert.”
Slowly I came back out of the past, out of the bitterness that waited there. I came back into the cold white hotel room. For the first time I noticed that the major seemed worried. “What?” I said.
The major sighed. “She’s a double agent. Attia is our best scientist, and the Mandate were all too willing to believe that she wanted to defect. She’s been feeding us military secrets for years.”
Song pursed her lips unhappily. “About a month ago Vitellia came to me.”
“Song,” the major interjected, “is Attia’s courier and control officer. Her local contact inside the Mandate.”
Song continued, “Attia said that she was ready to come in from the cold. Back home to the Commonwealth. She said that she was going to bring . . .” The tall Han woman paused there for a moment, as if searching for a word. “Bring a high value asset with her.”
The major nodded and drummed his fingers on the table. “The extraction was supposed to have happened two weeks ago.”
I was still trying to process everything they were saying. Why were they telling me all this? Why would they reveal state secrets to some one-time counter revolutionary who had been hiding like a coward for the last twenty years? Was it part of some elaborate ruse? It didn’t make sense . . .
Unless they need me. Instantly I knew it to be true. Why else would they bring me here, why else tell me this? I licked my cracked lips and leaned forward. “What happened to her?”
Song shook her head. “She didn’t show. She disappeared from her apartment, her labs. Vanished without a trace. Our initial assumption was that she’d been burned. Caught by counter-intelligence agents.”
“She makes a habit of missing appointments,” I muttered.
“But then,” the major continued, “last week we received a coded message from her at a secondary dead drop. Vitellia wants to meet again.”
Curiosity warred with anger. “So what? What does this have to do with me? What do you want?”
“The message indicated that she would only meet with one man. One Gaius Plebius, known currently by the alias Artur Liefson.”
Song pointed to my pocket. “She gave us that letter.”
Something shifted inside me. A small gap opened and all my fear drained away. All that remained was anger. She left me sitting alone in that fucking kaffahouse for three days. For twenty years. Until now, when she wants something. Another betrayal, in a long line of them “What,” I nearly growled, “what does she want?”
“We don’t know.” The major folded his face until it manifested as something miserably unhappy. “We need you to find out.” He entwined his fingers and leaned forward. “You and Song will travel to Korla in the Eastern Mandate, and there make contact with Vitellia. We need you to talk to her. Find out what happened.”
“You are going to help me extract Attia and the asset.”
I wanted so badly to laugh. It was just too ridiculous. Travel with spies into the heart of the Mandate? “And why,” I said instead, “should I help you?”
The major flashed his row of capped teeth. “Curiosity?”
All mirth was gone now. I glared at him.
His own false smile fell. He pulled a gun from his pocket and placed it on the polished wood table. “You’re going into the Eastern Mandate, or you’re being pulled out of here by your feet.Your choice.”
I stared down that cold barrel. I wasn’t afraid, I realized. A Commissariat bullet was how I’d always thought I’d die, though I’d always pictured it happening with me blindfolded and lined up again a brick wall rather sitting in a well-appointed hotel room.
I couldn’t help but feel that I had nothing to lose. I ignored the gun and locked gazes with him. “You wouldn’t have brought me here unless you thought you needed me,” I told him. “Sounds like if you kill me then you’ll never be able to get her out.”
The major narrowed his eyes. “Maybe so. But getting her out is merely our preferred option.”
Song stepped forward. “We need your help,” she said. “If you help us then you will get your life back.”
“I don’t want my life back,” I said, thinking of the moldering apartment that was my home, the rusted gas element and sink full of pots that was my kitchen, the ceiling with flecked spots of black mold, the bookshelf with a handful of dusty volumes, the bowed mattress with stained sheets. The walls without picture frames, paintings or art.
“Your old life then,” she said.
Smoke and blood and screaming students in Aelia Capitolina. I wasn’t sure I wanted that back either. I flicked my gaze from Song’s pleading eyes to the major’s expressionless ones, to the cold barrel of the gun. “You said that she was bringing out a high value asset. What is it?”
I could see him hesitating, weighing.
“Tell him,” Song said.
Finally, he just shrugged. “Dragon’s eggs,” he said.
This time I really did laugh. The major blinked in surprise, which just made me laugh harder. The last dragons had died out nearly forty years ago, along with the Empire and their patrician masters. And now the New Commonwealth, a state founded to destroy them, worked to bring them back. And somehow Attia was in the middle of all of it.
Res mutatae mutatae non sunt . . . The words – her words, our words – came back to me then. All humor drained away. Was this why she’d written them. Had she been trying to tell me something?
I looked to the Song, and the major, still waiting, breath baited, for my decision.
I realized then that I’d already made it.
EXCERPT FROM “ON WINGS OF VICTORY”
(TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANDARIN)
The first mechanical flight – conducted in what is now the Commonwealth, on the Dis Pater Collis by the brothers Antropov – was actually witnessed by members of no less than five patrician families, a cartel of dragonriders who had funded the endeavor on a whim. Upon seeing the brothers’ rickety wooden contraption skim a bare two hundred feet down the side of the hill, the riders are said to have only laughed. The thought that one of these flying machines might ever pose a threat to the great draci of their houses was beyond anything they could imagine. They couldn’t see a future for that ridiculous contrivance of wood, string, and wire. In the Mandate, however, officials would take the brothers, and their invention, a little more seriously.
3
I sat with Song in the back of a military plane, a noisome Ruz-54 that glinted silver in the sunlight and juddered from the power of its twin props. We were to go south and east to Eikstown, and then on to Marakanda on the Mandate border. We would cross the border by train, as air travel between the two nations had been once again severed.
It was the first time I had ever flown, and I realized quickly that I hated it. The rumbling engines roared so loud I could barely think, and the brief moments of free-fall that accompanied every patch of turbulence were terrifying. At my feet was a disintegrating leather bag stuffed with spare clothes. In my hands I clutched a copy of the Party Green Book. I’d grabbed both from my apartment before we�
�d left, inspired by the words that had been written on that letter.
I flipped the book open. On the inside cover: res mutatae mutatae non sunt, scrawled in her handwriting. I flipped it open to a random page where the margins were filled with more of her cramped writing.
It was the same book she’d been writing in the night I’d met her, at a party for disaffected students Sina and I had hosted in our walkup. Even in those days she’d had been something of a prodigy, assisting the university’s most senior magisters with experiments at the cutting edge of chymistry and physics. She hadn’t been political when we’d met, it was only after the struggle sessions and university closures of the Cultural Adjustment had threatened her work that she’d fallen in with radicals like Sina and I. It had taken some time to get started, but our affair had burned hot and bright.
She’d given me the book the night we’d snuck into the great hall of the university library, after it had been locked and shuttered, to make love beneath the suspended ebony bones of a dead dragon. We’d been lying, sweaty and tangled in a scratchy woolen blanked that we’d thrown hastily over the marble floor, when she had pressed the book against my chest. I remember feeling the weight of it, the heat of her beside me as she lay curled against my body, watching the dragon above us sway slightly on its hanging wires. “When I’m a famous magistra and find my new element,” she said, “I’m going to name it after you.”
It was the night I’d known that she loved me. Now the memory of that set my teeth on edge.
“What a good little Party member you are,” Song said, raising her voice to carry over the droning engines. She was sat across from me in the long, bare metal fuselage of the transport plane.
I blinked and looked down at the book still in my hands. I shoved it into the leather bag. “A different kind of memento.”
She stood and stepped surely across the deck toward me, a thick folio clutched in her strong hands. She had changed outfits, eschewing her gray Party tunic-suit for a dark pleated jacket and thigh-length skirt, fashions, I gathered, that were popular now with women in the Mandate. She had unbound her hair and it fell loose about her shoulders. She sat down. “I don’t like having to yell.”