“Looking at my own life, I see all the things MPs Agrim and Karana have mentioned, but I see the missteps, too. The things which, given a rewind and a playback, I would perhaps do differently.
“As I am sure many of you know, my brother Param passed away a little more than a year ago. He spent a year being treated for the cancer which he ultimately succumbed to. During that time, and in the months prior, our relationship changed. I realize that, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when or how it happened, I had let my thinking about his and my relationship change. In one stage of my life, he had been my beloved brother, with whom I maintained an ideological disagreement. Somehow, by the time I entered parliament, he had become the enemy, the one who would bring ruin down upon us if his ideology triumphed over mine.
“His illness did not allow me to maintain that illusion, and I had done far too much damage to our relationship in the intervening years to fully heal those wounds. Were I given a ‘do-over,’ so to speak, I would worry much less about proving myself right and much more about how politike I was behaving toward my own flesh and blood.
“Reconciliation, in the sense of contacting the nanite-bodied and establishing their intentions, is, I maintain, the best way to achieve security for the Reclamation. In this position, I have not the slightest doubt. However, a number of citizens, including my late brother, do not agree with us on this. We must strive to do what we believe is right and best, but we must not forget that politike demands cooperation, integration of good ideas, compassion, and mutual trust.
“The Guardian party is not our enemy, at least not today. But I fear the direction in which current political rhetoric is taking us. If we let ourselves forget, on both sides, that our grandparents fought tooth and nail to secure our freedom and our prosperity, that we essentially want the same thing, if we eventually forget that we all, deep down, desire a secure and prosperous nation, then we may end up fighting a war with one another, and nothing I can imagine would weaken national security more than that.
“I leave parliament to you, the up-and-coming leaders of the Reconciliation Party. Going forward, do remember that you will be defined just as much by the bridges you burn as the ones you build. Thank you.”
Sahaan still sat stunned. He clapped, but his mind reeled. And, momentarily coming out of his catatonia, he realized that the applause had been somewhat halfhearted. He looked around the room. Some severe expressions, some frowns. Not everyone though. Had that speech… not gone over well?
Sahaan had liked it very much.
~
After Mr. Vitar left, Sahaan checked the time and discovered it to be seven in the morning the next day. He didn’t feel the slightest bit tired, and, thankfully, his side seemed to be even better. He tested himself by shifting his weight a bit in bed, and a sharp pain shot up his spine. He instantly relaxed back into the mattress. He wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
He decided to catch up on the news until his family returned.
In summary, securing the Adamantine-Citrine wallroad area was proceeding as planned. A full two-thirds of the exclusion zone had been reclaimed. Details of the plans to restore train service to Citrine were being finalized by President Aavee’s government. Gadh was painting the whole affair as a massive political failing of Reconciliation government. He had begun claiming that during a Guardian government, no wall slabs would have been blown up or transmuted. He had additionally begun referring to Charles and Samantha as “invaders,” a term which other Guardian pundits had immediately picked up.
Martial law and the curfew remained in effect. Rioting had been quelled in the spoke cities where it had initially flared up in the wake of the train explosion, but it seemed a tense and fraught lull. Everyone seemed to have a sense that another incident could spark further civil disturbances. For the time being, at least, the military seemed to be keeping order.
A nurse arrived with breakfast, and his family followed appeared shortly after he’d finished eating. Lachel and Jaan both asked how he was feeling, to which he responded that he seemed to be improving. All three of them proceeded to watch the news together.
At about noon, the news erupted into a flurry of announcements that Samantha had arrived safely at the secure facility in Portal City, which had been set up for Charles. Discussion with her had thus far yielded nothing that Sahaan had not already learned from Charles. She seemed to suffer the same affliction as he did—while not reticent to be questioned, any minor recollection of nanite-bodied society induced extreme fatigue and at times frustration.
Sahaan resisted the urge to get on his handheld and see if he could find out more about how the investigation was going. It was possible they’d uncovered something from her that Charles had been unable to remember, but which they weren’t willing to share on the news.
The nurse who brought Sahaan’s lunch also had a bit of news. “I thought you’d be interested to know that Dr. Meharab is awake now. I think the doctor might be asking you to get out of bed and walk around tomorrow or the day after. If that’s the case, you’ll be able to go see him, if you’d like.”
“I’d like that very much,” Sahaan replied, glad for more good news.
And the good news just kept coming. He and his family cheered when the news showed the final wall slab of the Adamantine-Citrine wall being moved into place. Within an hour, it was reported that additional sweeps of the wallroad for nanite activity had turned up negative, and repair crews were en route to restore the damaged train tracks.
Still no news on who had caused the explosion.
Just as Sahaan was mulling that over, Mr. Vitar appeared at the door.
“Vice President Dokha to see you, sir.”
Jaan’s eyes lit up. “You think I can ask him about the Quantums?” The vice president had a reputation as a sports aficionado. At the last summer family luncheon, Jaan, the vice president, and his two sons had spent perhaps an hour talking about professional voidball.
“Maybe next time,” Sahaan said.
Lachel gave her usual smile. “Come on, Jaan. Let’s take a walk to the hotel.”
Jaan begrudgingly followed his mother out the door past Mr. Vitar. Vitar himself promptly disappeared, and the vice president entered the room.
“Good to see you, Sahaan.” He approached the bed and sat. His movements were tense, betraying that despite the good vibes projecting out of the news stations, all was not well. The vice president was a tall man with dark hair and handsome features. He dressed well on most occasions, but today he wore only a plain white collared shirt and slacks that had seen better days. He’d come here in a rush.
“Good to see you, too, Mr. Vice President. How is everything?”
“As you’ve probably seen from the news, we’ve restored the wallroad to Citrine, and Samantha is safely in the containment facility in Portal City, but we’ve got two major problems. The mayor of Citrine spoke a big game in working with us to apprehend the terrorists, but he has done little or nothing to actually help. Short of ordering the military already there to start ransacking private property, we’re at a loss as to next steps. Additionally, our undercover agents in other spoke cities have identified at least three other potential terrorists groups, ones which simply haven’t had the opportunity to strike yet. This problem has morphed from a single missing visitor to a full-on threat to national security.”
Sahaan shook his head. “As I told the president, I can’t think of anything about Charles that would help us find him now. As far as we could tell, he was human. He fell asleep a lot. That will be a liability for whoever has him now.” He shuddered to think about that. He hoped that Charles was not being physically mistreated.
“I need your help with another matter.”
“Yes?”
“Tomorrow I’ll be going in to talk to Samantha.”
“Have we learned anything from her that’s not on the news?”
“I’m afraid not. Anytime her interrogators take the conversation in that direction,
she’ll reply with something vague, or just stare at them blankly, then yawn, then ask to lie down. They’ve lost hours of potential discussion time that way.”
“That sounds like Charles. No. It sounds worse than Charles. Charles seemed to be trying to remember things. And details would surface on occasion.”
“Do you believe the sleepiness is genuine?”
“With Charles, yes.”
“Any advice on how I should proceed?”
“Get her talking about the generalities that she can remember. With Charles, the more he talked about generalities the more he strayed into details. At the end, he seemed to remember an important detail, even.”
“Oh? The president didn’t mention that.”
“It was right before we got on the train. There were media people there, so I asked him to wait until we got to Portal City. I still don’t know what it was. But he did say, right before we got on the train, that Guardian and Reconciliation were waiting to realize that we both wanted the same thing. ’Different, but actually the same,’ he said.”
“What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“I’m not sure.” Sahaan shrugged. “I’ve been rolling it over in my mind these last two days, and I still don’t know. We got that far because I shared our high-level political organization with him. He found the whole history of the two parties interesting. You might take Samantha down a similar line and see if you can get her to the same realization.”
“Sounds like a good place to start.”
“You could see if she likes voidball.” Sahaan winked.
The vice president smiled. “Somehow I doubt it, though I suppose it’s worth a shot at this point.” The vice president stood. “Thank you, Sahaan.”
“Mr. Vice President.”
With that, the vice president turned and left.
His gait was too tense. The feelings of normalcy coming out of the media seemed now a rouse, a false signal. At least three other terrorist groups, who might at any time decide to blow up a chunk of wall, and an election in less than three days which appeared would go to Gadh.
Unhappy thoughts, these.
His family appeared in the doorway, however, and at least in that moment, Sahaan was again able to smile.
~
The speaker who followed his grandmother wore the oddest expression on his face as he approached the podium, and when he began speaking he made these strange little interruptions. It was as though he now had reservations about the kind words he was saying about Sahaan’s grandmother. There was so much about adults that Sahaan still didn’t understand, but he did guess that his grandmother’s speech had made a number of her friends angry with her.
Sahaan found himself perplexed. He thought on all the things he’d observed, all the incongruous details, and then, without notice, the pieces flashed together in his mind. His mother’s family, he now realized, espoused Guardian ideas, and his father’s family, clearly, was Reconciliation. But neither of his parents were much interested in politics. In fact, they seemed to go out of their way to not talk about politics. They’d removed themselves from it, escaped it as best they could.
The last speaker ended his speech, and an army of waiters and waitresses began delivering plates of food. Everyone ate, and the mood returned to more or less amenable. His father talked to the man next to him, and his mother to the woman next to her, but there was still something in the atmosphere. Sahaan sensed it. Something was wrong.
More remembered details came together in his mind, coalescing with his recent epiphany. A time on the playground when he’d prevented two other boys from getting into a fight, a time when he’d noticed something another student had said had made his teacher angry, and he’d talked to his classmate later and told her she should avoid saying things like that. Sahaan had assumed this was all perfectly normal, but none of the other students did this.
It was as though he was sensitive to… something.
Before Sahaan knew it, the clock at the far side of the auditorium showed four twenty-five, and Sahaan’s parents were excusing themselves. He followed them dutifully. They weaved around the circular tables, toward the stage, but then turned out a door beside it rather than ascending onto it.
They entered a backstage hallway, which led them around to a room behind. A man’s voice became audible as they approached, very loud and irate.
“Vibha, this is insanity! Do you realize what you’ve done to the party?”
Then his grandmother’s voice. “Not you, too, Niraash.”
A woman’s voice. “He’s right. This is a complete disaster. And it will take us at least two election cycles to clean up the damage. If not more.”
“What does that mean?” his grandmother insisted.
His grandmother and her two interlocutors came into view now. They stood in a backstage conference room with a large table and numerous pieces of paper taped to the wall, most of them filled with text.
“It means,” the man named Niraash took a step forward, “that we will now have a lot of work to do to convince our base that the party’s founding member isn’t in fact a Guardian in disguise.”
“That is not what I said.”
“That is what everyone in the audience heard,” the woman said. “They heard Vibha Ekeer tell the entire party that we are to reach out and embrace the backward, idiotic ravings of redneck yokels.”
Sahaan noticed his mother stiffen her back and purse her lips. His father clenched his fists and his eyes widened.
His grandmother met Sahaan’s eyes, and her entire countenance dropped. She tensed, then her eye twitched, and annoyance became anger. A lifetime of political training could not possibly have taught her how she could contain the situation presented to her now, an older Sahaan would come to realize.
She did, however, the best she could under the circumstance. Looking directly at the woman, she said. “You are a disgrace to the Reconciliation party. That is my family at the door.”
His mother took a step forward. “And I suppose that makes me the backward, redneck yokel.” At the time, Sahaan had been frightened at the escalating rhetoric, but he would look back on this moment as one of the bravest things he had ever seen his mother do, and he would never be more proud of her than in that moment.
The woman deflated, and the man called Niraash frowned.
“Let’s go,” Niraash said.
The woman followed him silently away. His mother and father glared at them the entire way as they left.
His grandmother came over to them, hugged Sahaan’s father, and said, “I’m so sorry, son. You shouldn’t have seen that. I didn’t realize how badly I’d misled the party. I didn’t think it would be like this.”
“You did the right thing tonight, mom,” his father said. “I’m proud of you.”
She smiled, and Sahaan thought he caught a tear. “My darling boy.”
Her grandmother released him and turned to Sahaan’s mother. “Saana, how can I ever—?”
“Thank you,” his mother said. And, much to Sahaan’s amazement, she embraced his grandmother in a hug. Even Sahaan’s father seemed shocked.
“What happens now?” Sahaan’s father asked.
His grandmother took a deep breath in and out. She shrugged. “The party goes on. Wherever it will.”
“I really liked your speech,” Sahaan said. “Especially the part about the philosopher. Did you really read him because of me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Can you show me the book?”
“Sure,” she said tentatively. “It’s a hard one, though.”
“I want to try.”
Both his parents were now wearing smiles.
They sat and talked for a bit. His mother and grandmother seemed to be having a frank and honest chat for the first time in Sahaan’s life. It seemed like a small miracle to watch them interacting. He realized, then, that there had been a tension between the two of them that had only been at the very edge of his perceptions. Not caring about
grandma’s party, he’d noted her behavior as a curiosity. But now…
At five, they hugged, said goodbye, and left. They picked up their things from the concierge, hailed a cab, went to the train station, and waited to board. It had begun to rain, and Sahaan could make out the droplets splattering the domed glass roof of the train station far above his head.
He thought about his books, about the books his grandmother had read, about Guardian and Reconciliation, and then he turned to his father.
“Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“Can telling people stories help them see things in different ways?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“So, if I come up with a story, and if I tell it just right, I can help people understand each better, and maybe yell at one another less?”
“Seems… possible. Difficult, probably. But possible.”
Sahaan had decided, just then, at the age of twelve, exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
~
Evening rolled around, and Sahaan found himself drifting off to sleep against his will, despite the fact that the upcoming election had taken over the news cycle. With nothing noteworthy (or at any rate reportable) about the progress in finding Charles, and with Samantha safely ensconced in one of the securest facilities in the Reclamation, policy debate between Una and Gadh had come to the fore.
The polls now showed Una catching back up to Gadh, since Reconciliation’s handling of the aftermath of the explosion was largely considered impeccable. Additional political points had been scored for getting Samantha safely to the capital.
He awoke at seven the next morning, now only two days away from the election. He found Lachel at his side, Jaan slouched into her. He smiled, seeing the two of them here.
He decided not to wake them and instead used his handheld until the nurse arrived with breakfast. He tried shifting his weight again, too, which today didn’t result in nearly as much pain.
Doctor Aarogy returned just before noon and indeed wanted for him to try taking a walk. After dressing in an additional layer of gown, a walker was pulled up to the bedside, and Sahaan slowly sat up, pulled himself out of bed, and managed to move across the room at a decent pace.
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