Dispatch from a Colored Room

by Matt Weber

doesn't flinch, but she doesn't meet his gaze either. "Mlle Pelerine," she says, "please have security correct their roster of authorized board members."

  "Oh, I'm authorized," said Charbon. "The good people at your former financial institution recognize my claim to the assets of Greyking Books."

  "We found M Charbon's claim to have inspired the colored room poem quite plausible," says a fleshy suit I vaguely recognize from my Dawnroad days. "In light of new evidence written in M Leblanc's own hand. We sent you the document."

  "You sent us an ocean of documents—" I begin, but Aimée cuts me off. "I know the document," she says. "It doesn't prove anything."

  "It seemed rather conclusive to us," says the suit. "'I have had the germ of a poem in my head for some weeks now, thanks to an image that my old friend Elias has created,' if I remember correctly." He knows he has; he's memorized it for just this occasion.

  "Elias Charbon is hardly the only Elias in Altronne," Aimée says. "And the poem may not be the only poem my father ever wrote. Or, for that matter, ever submitted for publication."

  I have to confess this quick thinking of Aimée's nearly astonishes me, but the suit seems to have anticipated the objection, if perhaps not from her. “You should find this a welcome development, Mlle Leblanc,” he says. “A living co-creator will help shut down the lawsuits at greater speed and less cost than we could manage without him.” This absurdity is uttered with a patronizing smile that makes me want to shove my fist wrist-deep into his suety face. “Well, I suppose reasonable men may disagree on these matters,” he says, digging in the word men. "But the duly constituted majority of this board finds it plausible. In light of which we propose a new division of votes—"

  "Where'd he get that suit?" I ask.

  "From a friend of his at Dawnroad Bank," the suit says, "in recognition of his hitherto unheralded work for the little press we have come to love so much."

  Aimée's eyes flash, and it makes me proud, but I take her elbow and turn her aside. "I know what you're going to say," I say. "This is transparently a power play, it probably violates two dozen corporate statutes, it'll never hold up in court. They know that. The fat suit back there is being obvious, which means he's baiting you. The idea here isn't actually to give half of Dawnroad to Elias; it’s to force us into court to defend it. In the meantime, we either sit out of these meetings in protest, and things happen behind our backs, or you have to sit through hours and hours of Elias Charbon staring at you and stinking up the room."

  Aimée blinks twice, but she gets it. I wonder what she's gone through, in the years between her father's last letter and my arrival on her doorstep, to help her understand this sort of thing. "So what do we do?"

  "We sit."

  "Fuck that."

  "No," I say, as fiercely as I can without letting the whole board hear. "We show strength. Look, none of these people actually want to be in a room with Elias. They're just gambling that you want it even less than they do. As soon as they see you're not intimidated by him, they'll cast him aside and he'll slink back to the sixth. The story about his 'contribution' will evaporate in less time than it'll take to get the smell out of the seats. Meanwhile, you show your allies that you don't knuckle under. That consolidates their loyalty, and maybe it switches a few who're on the fence."

  Aimée looks at me for a long moment, fear and loathing barely chained behind her eyes. I sigh inside and play my trump.

  "Besides," I say, "every minute he's in here is a minute he's not out on the streets, looking for Sim."

  Fear and loathing are joined by nausea and despair, and I see her throat move as she literally swallows it all. She draws herself up straight, her skinny frame suddenly regal. "You'll hear from our attorneys," she says, then picks up a chair and moves it to one of the wide spaces between Elias and two other Dawnroad suits. Elias nearly flinches; Aimée's gaze pierces him with hate, which seems to relax him, and the grin returns. Aimée deliberately turns away, toward the suit who'd spoken. "Let's hear what else you've got."

  "What was it like?" I ask, when it's over. "Having Elias Charbon 'take care' of you. What happened?"

  I'm at the desk; Aimée's home for one of her rare stretches, sitting on the couch in a crater scooped out of the mat of toys, Sim asleep on her lap. "It was just life," she says. "What should it have been?"

  "You don't think much of him now," I say carefully; the look she gives me shows she understands my understatement is intentional. "Was that always true?"

  "I didn't always have a little boy to protect."

  I make myself say it. "But you were little yourself."

  She twines a strand of Sim's golden hair around her finger, making sure not to pull it taut at the base. "I don't remember him well from when I was very little. He came around a lot. He and my mother had a lot of arguments. He was very sweet to me, or tried to be—he had an idea of how girls liked to be talked to, his voice would go high and he'd say how pretty I was, or my clothes were. Ask about boys and school. I didn't like those visits. I liked it better when he'd bring his friends to meet and talk, even if they would drink. You can get away from a drunk—he can't catch you, and he won't hate you for it in the morning."

  "Sounds like you had a read on him all along."

  She shakes her head. "Those were bad years. He borrowed from us; stole too, I think. Though he would bring food and clothes at least some of the times we needed them, and that was often. Shabby stuff, but still a shield against death.

  "Then he gave my mere a bag of shekels.

  "And it wasn't the last. He'd still have the men from the 7th over, but they'd drink good spirits, now, and touch glasses and cheer.

  "There were a few good years of that. He stopped paying attention to me, mostly. I don't mean he pretended I didn't exist—he just stopped pretending we were friends. And then we got to be friends, a bit. He talked about the Hoofstone mission." She shudders. "Can you imagine? The Dandelion Knight inside the sixth's strongest fortress, like maggots in bread. Papa and Elias and Jesson shooting literally at shadows, by bioluminescence that could fail any minute, moving forward inches an hour for two whole days. They were poisoned, you know. The whole unit was. That's why they were discharged. Mama told me someone from the government came by to monitor him every month until he left."

  "That sounds familiar," I said, and Sim pipes up from Aimée's lap to say "What would you know about it?"

  He takes a few minutes of merry shit for eavesdropping and Aimée sends him off to bed. When he's quiet, she picks up the story again.

  "Nothing lasts forever, I guess," she says. "Eventually the bags of shekels stopped coming. Food and clothes, as needed, they kept coming, but the same ratty shit that he gave us when he was poor. And, do you know, it took me maybe a year to realize he really was—that this wasn't simply holding out because he didn't like us any more, that wherever the money had come from, it was gone.

  "By that time I was almost through at the lycee, and people started noticing." She looks to the side and presses her lips together. "Look, even when we were flush, you'd have called us poor. That's all right; everyone on the peripheral sixth is poor, no matter how much cash they have. But there's poor, and then there's hard up. And when I was just poor, I wasn't as kind to the hard-up souls at the lycee as I might have been. And when people noticed that I was hard up again..."

  Aimée lets the sentence trail off. "Just because your allies desert you," I say, "doesn't mean your enemies flock to your banner, does it?"

  She gives a little, bitter smile. "It does not, in my experience," she says.

  I run the numbers in my head. "That takes you through the lycee," I say. "And you're what, now, twenty-eight?"

  "Twenty-four," she says. Don't forget, she looks a hard-lived forty. "There's one kind of person who does flock to your banner when no one else will, of course."

  "Your loyal friends?"

  She looks at me as though I'm joking. I ask myself whether I had been, and don't quite know the answer. "
The person who wants the very last of you," she says. "The person who'll take the scraps that even the carrion crows left behind."

  I look through the door that opens on the hallway, down toward Sim's bedroom.

  Aimée follows my gaze and says "Not the father." The small smile's now no longer bitter, just a little rueful. "Oh, he wanted what he wanted, but I wanted the same, and we left each other no poorer for the taking." I wait for her to say richer, even, or words to that effect—but she doesn't, and I find myself condemning her for it, as though she were not entitled to some ambivalence at being forced to raise a child alone. "You know the sort I'm talking about. They give you something; then, when you want more, they set a price because they know you'll pay. He scared them off me for a bit." She gives a hollow chuckle here, like dropping a plass cup on a tile floor. "I thought I was done then. But they reassigned him to a patrol on the fourth and fourth. Folio and Binlang, you know the area?" I nod, naturellement. "And it was free again, one time only, and it was like those weeks with him had never been.

  "He scared Elias off too." The smile again, the bitterness returned. "And when he was gone, Elias came back. See the similarities, there? I didn't. Elias never cared that I was using. But as soon as he learned that I was pregnant, he got me clean. And I was so grateful for it that I didn't think twice when Sim was born, and once