Changer's Moon (11 page)

Braddock pushed his glasses up. “Right,” he said. “Connelly.”

“Francis Connelly. Anoike just busted me out of an introg. What Zagouris said ain't the half of it. But he's got the right idea. Go back down as a corpse or not at all.”

Half a dozen tried to speak at once. Braddock came back onto his feet. “Siddown and shaddup,” he yelled at them. Into the ensuing quiet he said, “You talk, Tom. Rest of you keep still and listen of I'll have Ombele sort you out.” He flashed one of his sudden grins at another of the council, a man three times as wide as he was, half a head taller; even standing still the muscles visible in arms and neck were defined and shining like polished walnut in the shifting light.

He chuckled, his laughter as rich and dark as the rest of him. “Yeah,” he said. “Papa Sammy's muscle.” The assembly laughed with him but there was no more disorder. “Like the man said, Prioc, you're up next.”

“Tom Prioc. We can't stay here. Can't go down either. Seems to me there's three choices left. We can do like Georgia says and scatter. We do that, I see most of us starving or getting picked up one by one and put in the labor camps they've set up down south, or some of us, the ones without families, we can keep moving, living outta garbage cans, picking up shitwork now and then from scum too greedy to pay the legal wage. We die and don't get nothing to show for it. Me, I want the bastards to know I was here before they wipe me.” He folded his arms, nodded his head, his wispy brown hair blowing out from his face. “Or we head north tonight with as much as we can haul, split up in small groups so we can run round the roadblocks and copter traps they'll have waiting for us. Cross the border how we can. The Condies'll try shoving us back, don't want our trouble, they got troubles enough with the death squads coming across to hunt down what they call enemies of the UD. Won't be that easy, getting in and getting set up. Have to watch out for Condie feds, but we can stay together, that's worth something.” He chuckled, looked about the crowd, eyes lingering on a face here and there. “That's one hard border to close. Me and some of you, we did our bit in trade across it. Tempts me. I know those mountains and the trails.” He paused, rubbed at his nose. “But I'd kinda like to take me out a copter or two. Georgia and his bunch, they got us a good supply of rockets and launchers. There'll be gunships, but a single man's a hard target when he knows how to be. Third choice. I'd really like to take me out a copter.” He sat.

Braddock's long finger flicked to a comfortably round middle-aged woman with short blond hair and a peeling nose. “Cordelia Gudon. Tom's just about set it out. I can't see anything else, maybe some of you can. All I got to say, whatever the rest of us do, the kids gotta get out.” She sat.

“Blue.”

“Blue Fir Alendayo. I know the trails and the border well as Tom. Same reason. I say we go as soft as we can far as we can, shoot our way through if we have to, probably will, get the lot of us over the border, then those who want to come back and make as much hell as we can for these.…” She paused, searching for a word that would adequately characterize their foes, gave it up and went on. “Well, they can.” She sat, bounced up immediately, eyes shining. “And anyone who wants to stay now and shoot him a copter or two, why not.” She sat again.

The meeting went on its orderly way. Doubters and grumblers, quibblers and fussers, minor spats and a couple of yelling matches. Hern watched them, fascinated by a kind of governing he'd never seen before, even in the few taromate convocations he'd looked in on. He took his eyes away when the meeting was winding toward some sort of consensus. “Coyote,” he called.

The scruffy little man came out of nowhere, his eyes darting from the image in the Mirror to Hern to Serroi, back to the Mirror. “Yes?” he said, pointed ears spreading out from his head, pointed nose twitching.

“I want those. If they're willing. Those people, their weapons and transport.”

“Willing? What willing? You want them, I bring them through.”

“No point, if they won't fight. Are you going to bring them through here or can you transfer them directly to the Biserica?”

“Will I, not can I, Dom. Will I? Yes. No. Maybe. You go there.” His ears went flat against his head, then his grin was back, mockery and anticipation mixed in it. He' giggled. “Hern the happy salesman. Death and glory, you tell 'em. They buy you or they don't. Come through where I want if they buy. Not Biserica. Maybe Southport. I think about it.”

Serroi straightened. “Ser Coyote.”

Coyote rocked on his heels, his head tilted, long narrow eyes filled with a sly laughter that she didn't particularly like. “Little green person.”

“If they refuse, then Hern chooses again because your debt isn't paid.”

Coyote squirmed, went fuzzy around the edges as if he vibrated between shapes, then he wilted, even his stiff gray hair. He sighed. “Yesss.”

“That being so,” she said more calmly than she felt, “put us through.”

POET-WARRIOR

Julia set about the reams of paperwork, the miles of red tape that should eventually land her in the public ward of some hospital and pay her surgeon's fees.

You know the route, you've helped a thousand others along it. Faces pass before you, good people, petty tyrants, both sorts overworked until anything extra is an irritation not to be borne, both sorts harried by their superiors and the local politicians who found attacking them a cheap window to public favor. You're unemployed? Haven't you tried to get work? What do you mean too old? At forty-seven? They say no one's hiring untrained forty-seven-year-old women? You say you're a writer. What books? Oh, those. You own nothing? Not even a car? Estimated income for the year. Oh, really, you expect me to believe that? I've seen your name, you're won prizes. Or—hi, Jule, haven't seen you for years, what you been doing? Oh, god, I'm sorry. Cancer? All that high life catching up with you, no I'm just joking, I know it isn't funny. I hate to tell you what funding's like this year. Look, let toe send you over to Gerda. And don't be such a stranger after this. On and on. Keep your temper. They're really trying to help you, most of them, if they get snappish it's because they hate having to tell you they can't do anything. Answer patiently. Show the doctor's report. Explain you couldn't afford insurance, you can't afford anything, you're just getting by. Say over and over what you've said before as you're shunted from person to person, watch them hunt about for cracks to ease you through. Be patient. Experience should tell you that you can outwit the system if you keep at it. Try to wash off the stain of failure that is ground deeper and deeper into you. And try to forget the fear that is ground deeper and deeper into you as the days pass. You know the lumps are growing. You can't even feel them yet, but you know they're there, you have nightmares about them. Treacherous flesh feeding on flesh.

Yet more aggravation. The landlords raise the rents to pay for a sort of sentry box they've built into the side of the foyer, equipped with bulletproof glass, a speaker system and controls for the automatic bolts on the inner and outer foyer doors and the steel grill outside. An armed guard sits in the box day and night, no strangers are allowed in without prior notice. The landlords also save money by doing no repairs no matter how much the tenants complain. And as the chaos increases in Julia's flesh, the disruption increases in society around her. There are food riots and job riots. In the suburbs, vigilante groups are beginning to patrol the streets armed with rifles and shotguns. There are a number of accidents, spooked patrols shoot some night-shifters going home, but are merely told to be more careful. Police are jumpy, shoot to kill at the slightest provocation, even imagined provocation. At first there is some outcry against this, but the protesters are drowned in a roar of outrage from those in power. The powerless everywhere begin to organize to protect themselves since no one else seems willing to. No one can stand alone in the world that is coming into being here.

Except Julia. Stubbornly alone she plods through the increasingly resistant bureaucracy. More and more of the people she has worked with are being fired or laid off or are walking away from impossible conditions; funding is decreasing rapidly as the fist of power squeezes tighter about the powerless. It is becoming a question of whether she can break through the last of the barriers before the forces eating at the system devour it completely. She is growing more and more afraid, but bolsters herself by ignoring everything but the present moment. The economy is staggering. More and more are out of work, thrown out of homes, apartments, housing projects, more and more live in the streets until they are driven from the city. Tension builds by day, by night. Prices for food are shooting upward as supply systems begin to break down. Underground markets dealing in food and medicines begin to appear. Hijacking of produce and meat trucks becomes commonplace, organized by the people running the illegal markets, by bands of the homeless and unemployed desperate to feed their families. The UD overgovernment organizes convoys protected by the national guard. It is clumsy and inefficient but food fills the shelves again. Prices go up some more. The first minister of Domain Pacifica declares martial law. The constitution is suspended for the duration of the emergency. The homeless, the jobless, the rebellious are arrested and sent to labor camps. The city begins to quiet, the streets empty at night, night shifters are rarer and generally go home in groups. Knots of angry folk begin to form in the mountains, people driven from the city by the labor laws, local vigilantes or GLAM enforcers—bands of men generally in their twenties and fanatically loyal to GLAM principles. Because these men wear black semi-uniforms on their outings, they're given the name blackshirts by those likely to be their victims.

Julia gets her novel manuscript back without comment; the next day a letter comes requesting the return of the advance. She immediately withdraws the last of her money from her savings account, leaves just enough in her checking account to cover current bills, writes the publishers that she is taking their request under advisement, wishing she could tell them they could whistle for their money. She sighs over the royalties they'd withhold, but with the courts in their present mood, there isn't much she can do but be glad for once that these are reduced to a trickle, since most of the books are vanishing from stores and libraries into the fires of the righteous. She cannot understand what is so offensive about her books. There's a bit of sex, but nothing really raunchy—it wasn't necessary—some misery, for after all she is writing mostly about the poor, about the odd characters she'd grown up with. She likes her people, even the most flawed and evil of them, writing of them with sympathy and understanding of the forces that shaped them. She grows depressed when she thinks about them vanishing in black smoke, can only hope that moderation and intelligence will make themselves felt before the country tears apart.

She sleeps badly; things are closing in about her. She has enough money to keep her going another few months if prices don't rise too drastically, or the city itself doesn't shut down. By then she should be in a hospital somewhere. She has stopped watching the news or reading newspapers, notices events only when they impact directly on her life.…

Until the day she comes home worn out, sick, beginning finally to admit she could fail, dispiritedly wondering if she could somehow pry the money out of Hrald.

She pressed the bellbutton, stood with weary impatience while the guard looked her over. She was too tired to feel any more anger at the obstacle between her and the bath she wanted so much, even though the water would be cold and she'd have to heat pots of it on the stove, feeling absurdly like the pioneer women who helped settle this region more than five centuries before. When she was still writing, she rather enjoyed the process, working on her novel while the water heated, the tub was filled, pot by slow pot. How good it was going to feel, sliding into water almost too hot to bear, hot soapy water spreading over her body, a last pot set aside to wash her hair. The locks buzzed and she pushed inside.

As she trudged up the stairs to the fourth floor, she ignored the irritating echoes, the ugly smears on the walls, the dead smell in the air. These were once the firestairs, meant for emergency use only. The metal steps were worn and dangerously slippery especially during the hot rains of summer when the walls oozed moisture and drips fell six floors, bouncing off the steps and spattering on the heads of those that had to use them. She plodded up and around, cursing the landlords who wouldn't fix her heater though the law said they were responsible for it. And she couldn't bring in an outside repairman without permission and she couldn't get permission because they wouldn't answer her calls or her letters, leaving her more than half convinced they wanted her out of there. If she wanted hot water, she could move.

Halfway up she stopped, laughed, seeing as silly the gloom she was indulging, knowing she'd almost regret getting the heater fixed. Once she was inside her apartment, she'd relax into the pleasures of anticipation. The making of her bath was one of the many small rituals she found herself adopting lately, rituals that gave a kind of surety and continuity to her life as things around her degenerated into chaos. She straightened her shoulders, chuckled when a single warm drop of water bounced off her nose, then started up again. It wasn't that late, not even two yet. Three of the people she had to see left word they'd be out of town until the end of the week. She glanced at her watch, nodded. She could start looking through her manuscripts and her notebooks, seeing if there was something that could be salvaged, something she could get to her foreign publishers that might bring her in a little money. She knew what those messages meant; one of them was from an old acquaintance who liked her well enough to be uncomfortable about giving her a bad answer; she suspected he'd seized the opportunity to send a nonverbal message he knew she'd understand. She stepped onto the fourth floor landing, shoved at the press-bar with her hip, nudged the door open and started down the hall.