The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  “No. Because you’re a bunch of dipshits.”

  Sahaan realized the man’s eyes were red, and some of his friends were wobbling on their feet. They were clearly drunk. The crowd of students was looking at them now, more apprehensive or put-off, while Sahaan was desperately trying to push through them to reach Lachel.

  “We’re doing it because it will protect us a hell of a lot better than building more walls!”

  “I’ll bet the Vedans said that, too.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion, but that’s no reason to berate people attending a political rally. We all love the Reclamation—”

  He had begun laughing at her mid-sentence, and Lachel stopped, hands balling up, face red with fury. Sahaan had almost reached them.

  One of the brute’s troglodyte friends reached out and grasped Lachel by the arm. She shrieked and tried to pull away. Now the Reconciliationists were turning, and some were shouting at the man to let her go.

  Sahaan’s world was a blur. He’d never been a particularly physical person, and he’d avoided sports in high school. He’d certainly never been in a fight. All the same, he found himself hurtling toward the man with his hand on Lachel’s arm and a lecherous look on his face, roaring, “Get your hands off her!”

  His fist went flying through the air, all around were other people, a blur, stifling the air, an impact in his gut, then noises, perhaps voices, but he couldn’t understand any of them. He found he was lying on the grass. A face hovered into view, and he smiled. It was Lachel’s face, her dark hair hanging down in brilliant strands, the lamp by the path illuminating them into millions of lines of light.

  “That was really stupid,” she said. “But thank you all the same.”

  All of a sudden, he realized she was reaching out a hand toward him. He grabbed it, and she pulled him up. His head spun, and he stumbled, feeling off-balance. His gut ached terribly, and he reeled momentarily, but then felt a hand on his shoulder steadying him. Her hand, he realized. His pain was forgotten. The spinning became a kind of giddiness, and his stomach quaked, because Lachel was talking to him or perhaps because of the punch he’d absorbed, he wasn’t sure.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sahaan.”

  “I’m Lachel.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Same.”

  Sahaan blinked. “Where’d they go?”

  “The bullies? A group of Reconciliation caucus members started moving toward them, and they ran off. One of them told me he got a picture of them grabbing me and ask if he could report to the campus police. I told him he could.”

  Sahaan felt momentarily worthless, but then he smiled, because he was talking to Lachel.

  “Are you in the caucus?” she asked.

  “No, I’m a poli-sci major,” he said. “I always go to these.”

  “Do you just jump in like that every time you see trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Sahaan said, quite honestly. “I just didn’t like the idea of those guys… assaulting you like that.”

  “They’re bullies,” she said, fidgeting, and looking off in the direction of the crowd. “Most of the time you can get bullies to back down if you stand up to them. It’s because they’re insecure. Apparently that doesn’t work when they’re drunk.”

  Sahaan realized she probably had somewhere to be. “Can I walk you back to your dorm?”

  Lachel smiled. “Sure. If you’re feeling up to it.”

  “I couldn’t be better.”

  ~

  Citrine Central Station was shabbier than its hub city counterparts. The infrastructure in all the spoke cities felt that way. It wasn’t for lack of government funding, certainly. It was for lack of people, which diminished their overall tax revenue. Government reports had made the fact clear for the last four decades—the Reclamation’s population was migrating away from the spokes and into the hub. Anyone who could was getting out of the spoke cities. Despite the other reports, that ones that explained that the spoke cities weren’t any more dangerous to live in than the hub cities, it simply felt safer to have fully reclaimed land outside the city limits. The spoke cities, to contrast, possessed a single wallroute connecting them to the hub. Besides that, it was nanite-bodied territory everywhere outside their city limits.

  Sahaan exited the train station and hailed a cab, giving the driver the address of the venue. It was still early in the morning, and it was a bright, gorgeous, early summer day. He watched the streets as he went past. Half the storefronts were boarded up in the commercial district, and several houses in the residential district looked vacant, too.

  Citrine had a city hall at the edge of the business district, but Sahaan had chosen a park at the city limits for his town hall meeting. He wanted the location itself to underscore the message of his presentation.

  First of all, he wanted to drive home the point that the Reconciliation party’s primary mandate was in fact that maintenance of the existing walls. No contact would ever be possible without adequate protection against the worst. The Reconciliation leadership understood this, despite what fringe members of their party might say.

  The second element the venue highlighted was related to the park itself. Greenery was uncommon in the Reclamation. Most of the plants they had were imports from Alterra, the parallel world accessible via the portal in Portal City. However, there were also some native flora. The modern cities had all been built upon ancient defensive outposts, most of which had also been research laboratories, and some of those had preserved Asura’s original flora through the dark years. Citrine’s Orchard Park was also a literal orchard, one of the biggest of the Reclamation’s ecological achievements. Sahaan wanted to show them that Reconciliation recognized that accomplishment.

  He had a beautiful day for it. They reached the granite gates of the park, and he instructed the cab driver to drop him off at the great amphitheater at the park’s rear, the one up against the metallic wall slabs, beyond which lay nanite-bodied territory.

  He rolled his suitcase behind the amphitheater and parked it there, then walked up to the podium at the center of the stage. The chairs had been set out, and he saw a few of the park staff lingering in a nearby park shelter. He waved to them, and they waved back.

  No one had prepared a banner or any kind of sign with the Reconciliation logo on it, he noticed. It was probably better that way. Let the park and the walls send their message.

  Just before noon, Citrine citizens started to filter in and fill the chairs. The turn out wasn’t amazing. He had perhaps a hundred people, about a third of the available chairs remaining empty. It reminded him of the student caucus political rallies he’d attended as an undergraduate. Too many people with ‘more important things to do.’ But it was a substantial group, he reminded himself. He could honestly tell Lachel and Jaan that he hadn’t come for nothing.

  ‘You’re here to keep the dialogue going across the aisle,’ he reminded himself. It was as important for the MPs to do that with their colleagues as it was for those in his position to make time for constituents of all varieties.

  At five after twelve, he decided not to wait any longer and to get things started.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, and the mumbling of the audience dissipated. “My name is Dr. Sahaan Ekeer. I’m the Senior Consul to President Aavee, though that’s just a fancy way of saying I advise him on what’s going on in the country and help arrange things when he has to give a speech or host a formal dinner. Thank you for having me here, and especially for allowing me to host this event in Orchard Park, where you have all these beautiful fruit trees, some of which are the only of their kind in the entire Reclamation. I don’t have anything else in the way of a speech. I wanted to use this time to hear your concerns and questions.”

  Hands shot up immediately.

  “Yes,” Sahaan pointed. “There in the blue shirt.”

  A middle-aged man stood up, and a park service person passed him a special handheld that was connected to t
he amphitheater speaker system. “Hello, Dr. Ekeer. I am very concerned that we will continue to have a Reconciliation government after this election. We are out here all alone, and if Reconciliation makes contact, we will be the first to go. That’s why I support the Guardian party.”

  About half the audience clapped at the man’s statement, while the other half remained awkwardly silent and looked embarrassedly toward the amphitheater’s edge.

  Sahaan nodded very slowly. “I hear that you’re concerned about what Reconciliation governments will do to ensure your safety, and about what will happen if we establish contact with the nanite-bodied. I share your concerns, and so does everyone in the party leadership. The first priority of both Reconciliation and Guardian is the maintenance of our existing walls. The Aavee government has fully funded wall upkeep and an Una government would be no different in that regard. As to the threat level to Citrine in particular, it is a threat level that you share with the rest of the Reclamation. No one place in the Reclamation is more vulnerable than any other. The perimeter monitoring software in Citrine is the same as the monitoring software in all eleven other cities. Now, about contact. I know this can seem particularly worrisome. I want to assure you that contact with the nanite-bodied is a defensive strategy. We have not had any communication with the nanite-bodied for over a century. For having shared this world with them for all that time, our information about them is shockingly limited. Satellite scans show us the locations and configurations of their cities, and that is the entirety of information about them. Establishing their intentions is, in my opinion, the best way to defend ourselves against them, if they indeed remain hostile.”

  More hands. “Yes, with the red hat.”

  An elderly woman stood, was passed the microphone handheld, her hands shaking as she spoke. “We want more wallroutes out of Citrine. Why won’t Reconciliation build more wallroutes?”

  “Great question. There are a number of problems with building more wallroutes right now. The biggest problem is production. Wall slabs need heavy exposure to a metaxic field for over a decade in order to work. Right now, we only have the one permanent portal to Alterra. A plan to open others is in the works, but until that happens, we can only generate about twenty wall slabs per year. Right now, we need twelve wall slabs per year in order to maintain all the walls we’ve got. Building a new wallroute would increase the number of wallslabs we need for maintenance, which would put our ability to maintain the walls at risk. And if there were an emergency, we could end up in a situation where more of our wall slabs fail in a year than would be able to replace. This would leave us open to attack.

  “But there’s another problem, too. Remember that we know nothing about the nanite-bodied right now. If we build new wallroutes, that act in itself might be perceived as an attack. For that matter, anything we do might be perceived as aggressive. We simply don’t know. Knowing more will help us defend ourselves better. And the only way to know more is to start talking to them.”

  Sahaan noticed that some of the audience members who had clapped after the first question were now stroking their chins, or looking away pensively. He smiled inside, but didn’t dare let it show on his face. Moments like these made his job feel worthwhile.

  He pointed to a man in the back.

  The man snatched up the handheld and spat as he spoke. “Why you callin’ them ‘nanite-bodied’ instead of ‘deranged’ like they should be called.”

  Multiple members of the audience winced at his use of the slur, especially those who had not clapped.

  “If we go back in our history, we come to a time one hundred and twenty-one years ago, the dark period, before the Reclamation existed, before our contact with Alterra. Shelters had to be covered with nanite defense perimeters, which guzzled energy and required both artificial and enhanced human intelligences to keep up with the nanite-bodied’s attacks. That term you have used comes from that time, when we were under constant attack and rightly worried that our species would be eradicated.

  “That time is past. Our walls have kept us safe for over a century, and all indications are that they will do so for many more centuries to come. If we are to further ensure our own safety, we should not use that term to describe them. No one would broker a treaty with a person who names them with an insult. And again, a treaty, if handled correctly, would not be a sign of weakness, but a step toward true security.”

  No hands went up.

  “Next?” Sahaan asked.

  The assembled crowd seemed fixated on him, and they all just stared. Even the park attendant who had been running the handheld around was just staring at him.

  Sahaan furrowed his brow. It had been a long time since he’d found reading an audience to be a challenge. “Are there really no more questions?” The last question had been awkward, but he thought he’d handled it well enough. What was wrong with them?

  It was then that he realized that the assembled crowd was not looking directly at him, but slightly to his right, just off the edge of the amphitheater. Sahaan hesitated, then brought himself to walk down off the stage and peer around the amphitheater edge. The Citrine citizens behind him began screaming, at first one, then many more. He heard the sounds of a stampede—chairs toppling, shrieks of pain from the trampled, but his eyes remained fixed on the wall. One of the slabs was glowing bright red. It had started a dull red but was increasing in luminosity by the moment.

  Sahaan stumbled backward but was unable to take his eyes off the wall slab. He stumbled over a fallen chair, fell, and righted himself, all the while staring at the wall slab, which had now moved from bright red to bright orange, then a brighter yellow-orange.

  He stuffed his hands into his pockets and pulled out his handheld. He dialed the emergency number, and a voice began speaking, but he yelled over them, “Code 1! Code 1, Code 1! Citrine! Orchard Park! Amphitheater!”

  All at once, the yellow, coruscating wall slab condensed, collapsing in on itself into the shape of a person, a person perhaps ten or twelve years old. It remained glowing yellow, but that yellow was becoming orange, then red. Features began to emerge, a face, eyes, hands, feet—a boy.

  The red diminished to the gray sheen of metal, metallic everything, skin, hair, eyes and all. The boy seemed to be looking around, gaining purchase of his surroundings. Sahaan remained transfixed on him. He could just hear police sirens wailing in the distance.

  All at once, the boy’s metallic skin began oozing skin-colored pigmentation, a light brown. His eyes gained the appearance of human eyes, and his hair turned black. Despite being naked, he now looked rather ordinarily human. He certainly would have passed for human if he hadn’t just metamorphosed out of a slab of metaxically-treated wall paneling. He stood now in the gap where the panel had been.

  Sahaan redialed the emergency number.

  “Yes?” the voice said this time.

  “There is now a gap in Citrine’s defenses. We need to get a replacement panel to Citrine now.”

  “How was the panel destroyed?”

  “It turned into a boy.”

  “Sorry, we must have misheard that.”

  Sahaan repeated the sentence, but he was drowned out by the sirens of the twenty-odd police cars that were screeching to a halt behind the mess of chairs he was standing in. When the last siren had been turned off, he said again, “the panel turned into a boy.”

  “What kind of boy?”

  “He looks…” Sahaan decided to finish the sentence. “He looks human.”

  ~

  The path from Thiksay Hall to Choglamsar Hall ran around the periphery of the campus, skirting the edge of a pond. Maple and oak trees lined the other side of the path. The sun had fully sunk and light posts now provided the sole illumination.

  All Sahaan could think about was not stuffing his hands in his pockets, looking forward, speaking confidently, all the stuff they’d been teaching him in the social science portion of his studies. That, and trying his best not to smile too much.

 
“Where are you from?” Lachel asked him. Most of the students at Portal City University were from other Reclamation cities. The university prided itself on diversity.

  “I grew up in Eline. Most of my family’s there. How about you?”

  “Besserine.”

  Sahaan smiled. Besserine was famous for having set wall slabs into the ocean floor, with a second set on buoys. Besserine possessed the Reclamation’s only beach. But there was something about the way she’d said it that made Sahaan hesitant to ask more about that.

  “What made you choose poli-sci?” she asked.

  Sahaan hesitated. That topic would open up a million issues he didn’t want to talk about yet. How to proceed?

  “I’ve seen a lot of political disagreements. And, I admit that I don’t understand it all— no, more like I see a lot of conflicting data. I guess, I kind of want to make sense of it all. Put it all together in a way that’s coherent. I’m not making much sense right now, am I?”

  She shook her head.

  He supposed he’d have to broach the subject sooner or later. Might as well be sooner if she decided to hold it against him. “I’m talking about my family. My last name is Ekeer.” And with that, she would instantly recognize the other half of his family.

  “Oh.” Lachel’s eyes widened slightly. “Your grandmother is very brave. I’m very proud of how she handled things in parliament.”

  “My family doesn’t talk about that much.”

  Lachel nodded, seeming to understand. “Do you have to live in the shadow of that? Of everyone recognizing your family when they hear your name?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t realize until she’d said it aloud just how much he envied the way everyone else could just be themselves, they didn’t have a ‘name’ or a world-famous great-great-grandfather.

  “Then the next time you need someone to treat you as you and not as some extension of your family, come find me.”

  Sahaan would later identify that moment as when his crush started to bloom into love.

  ~

  At first, no one moved. Sahaan stood in the sea of wrecked chairs, and the police took up positions behind their car doors, pointing their guns at the boy. The boy just looked around.