Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (9 page)

I went to the funeral two hours early to make sure I had a seat. No one stopped me entering. Once I was in the church, I borrowed a phone and called my father.

"Hello, Beck," he said when he picked up.

I looked over my shoulder. "How did you know it was me?"

He sighed heavily. "You're the only person who has my private number. Besides, you're coming in from the Methodist church's data node. I'm not surprised you decided to go to the funeral."

"Well, I was calling to let you know I'm here," I said. "I know the ADs were going to do something horrible to the funeral the first time around, and the Cut-Rate Bastards were supposed to keep any minors from getting in. I'm here, Thor's here, and I think most of the other teenagers are coming. All the religious leaders are coming, including the Baptists and the Russians.
Stead Life
is coming. If anything goes down, it's not just bond-workers who will die."

There was a pause. Then he said, "You know, I was expecting you to bring up a more personal issue first."

My cheeks warmed. "Mom," I said. "I saw her on TV."

"Yes. 'Mom.' I suppose it won't do much good to give you my side of the story at this point, but she was trying to keep you from me, she was telling you lies about me, and it was clear that it was her or me—we could never
both
be your parents."

I didn't really want to argue about this. Not here, not on the phone. So I sat there silently, waiting to see if he had anything else to say.

"Come home, Beck," he said. "Please? You don't…I don't want you to feel like you
have
to go to her. To give up the sea, the stead, your life here. I'm sorry I turned you out. Just come home."

"Settle the strike," I whispered. "I know you can make it happen. Negotiate with the bond-workers, find a deal that everyone's satisfied with, and when the slowdown's over, I'll come home."

 
THE METHODIST CHURCH was a lot like the Catholic church, only bigger: one of the stead's large interior rooms, structural pillars here and there, folding chairs. They'd borrowed extras (probably from St. Peter's) and jammed them together, with standing room in the aisles and in the back.

The Methodist church had elaborately painted walls: they'd created twelve arched windows that looked out on various made-up scenes. One showed the sea on a sunny day; another had gardens. The window painting next to me depicted a playground filled with children. I wondered if children on real playgrounds all looked as joyful as the kids in the painting, or if in real life they squabbled a lot over whose turn it was to go down the slide.

Father Tim and the Methodist minister both appeared to be presiding. I wondered if Tim was nervous. He didn't look nervous. He welcomed everyone and then drew a cross in the air and blessed the crowd. Some of the people near me crossed themselves, but most kept their hands at their sides, so I didn't feel too conspicuous.

There was a series of readings. Some of them were religious: Father Tim read a passage about Moses saying "Let my people go." Some of the people in the crowd shouted "Amen!" to that, which appeared to startle Tim a little. The Methodist minister read a bit about tending vineyards and flocks and getting grapes and milk. "Is it about OXEN that GOD is concerned?" he thundered. ("No! Amen, brother, no!" someone near me said, half under his breath.) "Surely he says this for US. Whoever plows and threshes should share in the HARVEST." ("Amen!" the person near me said, louder this time. It didn't seem to startle the Methodist as much as it had Father Tim.)

There were also some poems, and then songs, but I didn't know enough of the words to sing along with them.

Then Debbie got up to deliver the eulogy. I was tired by now, and hungry, and it was hard to concentrate. Next to me, Thor took my hand and we laced our fingers together.

"Miguel is gone," Debbie was saying, "but the fight is anything but over."

There was something of a commotion and for a second I thought that despite all the kids, all the religious leaders, and everyone else who'd come, there was going to be violence. But it was someone with a note, which was passed up to Debbie to read.

She stared at it wordlessly for a moment.

"This says that a consortium of business owners has agreed in principle to providing health care as a standard part of every contract, effective immediately and retroactively," she said. "They're requesting a meeting to discuss details."

She started to go on, probably to say that the details might be important (for one thing, presumably the bond-workers would want it spelled out that they'd be seeing REAL doctors and not someone who got his medical degree by printing off an official-looking certificate) but her voice was lost in the ecstatic cheer.

Thor clapped, but he was looking at me, and I could tell that we were thinking the same thing:
that was way too fast. Too easy. What are they playing at now
?

Thor walked me back up to my father's apartment.

"Are you sure about this?" he said. "I still think a night down on the bottom level would be a pretty cool adventure."

"Have you ever slept on a concrete floor?" I asked. "It's
really uncomfortable
."

"Who said anything about sleep?"

My face flamed and he looked a little stricken. "I meant
talking
," he said, hastily. "We could just, you know, hang out." He lowered his voice. "And I don't care what you said to your father, I still think you should get off the stead."

"He's worried about losing me," I said. "He wants me to come home. If I leave, I lose any power and influence I have."

"I don't trust your father," Thor said. "Not to keep his word, and not to keep you safe."

"Me, either. But I don't think he'll
hurt
me."

"Well," Thor said, "at least the stuff about eating kittens was always a joke, right?"

"Right."

We were about to turn down the corridor where my father lived, and Thor stopped dead. When I looked up at him to ask what was up, he bent down and kissed me. Then he broke the kiss and looked embarrassed. "Sorry," he said. "I just realized, once we're by your father's apartment.…"

"Yeah, he has a camera," I said. "Good thought." I wrapped my arms behind Thor's neck and kissed him back.

The entry code let me into my father's apartment this time. He was waiting for me in the living room.

"I wondered if that would be good enough for you," he said.

"Well," I said, "it sounded like a good-faith effort."

He didn't smile. Instead, he let out a long breath and studied me in the dim light.

"Do you have any questions about your mother?" he asked.

"Where does she live?" I asked.

"California somewhere. I'm not sure, exactly."

I thought about asking if I could write to her, but I knew if he
knew
I was writing to her, he'd be monitoring the mail. It might be easier just to keep sending letters through the embassy. I could have asked him why he lied, but we'd already covered that by phone, and I didn't really believe his answer anyway.

"Well," I said. "Now what? Do I go back to living here, sleeping in my own bed, going to school?"

"Yes," he said.

"Okay, then," I said, wondering why he was still looking at me that way.

"You'll be attending classes by video for now, though," he said. He had an abstracted look on his face—not angry, not the way he'd looked when he was grounding me.
Worried
. He raised an eyebrow at me, probably reacting to the look on my face. "I'm not punishing you," he said. "There was…there may have been an accident on Sal."

"What?" I whispered.

He laced his fingers together. "As it happens, the bond-workers' demand was something we'd begun to think we would need to provide anyway. There's an illness on the stead. It may be contagious, and it may be spreading. I'm not grounding you, Beck. I'm quarantining you."

There are many different sorts of rebellious acts. This story investigates some of them.

CONNIE'S LITTLE GYRO WAS crossing the Blue Ridge when Andy began to shiver. The city where he'd spent some of the worst times of his life was fast approaching. That was how he thought about Washington—it was advancing on him, not the other way around.

The plane entered the Potomac corridor and the wilderness of red brick and eroded marble inexorably took form. On the right, the grim gray hulk of the Pentagon appeared, surrounded by the white teeth of missile batteries. After the War, Americans had talked of demolishing the Puzzle Palace, yet there it was, now the headquarters for the world government's Security Forces.
It's like the Sphinx,
Andy mused.
The ugliest things always seem to last the longest.

His companions ignored the view. Connie was reading some sort of printout, while Gomez sprawled across three seats, snoring. Andy wished he could do the same. Instead, like a man reading Braille, he fingered the ridges of scars hidden by his poplin shirt. Astonishing to think that today he was wearing the same uniform as his onetime tormentors. Connie had checked every detail of their getups—their regulation haircuts, clothing, boots, insignia—before they left Tuamotu. Their ID badges displeased her, for they bore the Roman numeral IX. She'd wanted to get them X's, which would have enabled them to go almost anywhere, but didn't try for fear of provoking an investigation. She, of course, had top clearance and wore it casually, as she wore her gold-washed name tag saying
Griffin
and the stars on her shoulder-straps.

The gyro banked and descended. The roof of the military terminal rose to meet them, displaying in giant white letters the slogan of the Security Forces,
To Serve All Humanity
. Andy wore the same words on a patch sewn to his right sleeve, and he remembered guards at the penal colony where he'd served his time who had it tattooed on their biceps, along with
Mother
and
Born to Die.

With a small thump the gyro settled on the landing pad, the autopilot shut down, and Connie rose to her feet, stretching like a cat. Her skin had a yellowish tinge that sometimes made him wonder if she might be ill, yet her dark eyes glowed with all the old familiar fire. The waiting was over, the time for action close at hand. "Here we are, guys," she said. "Don't forget your weapons."

Better not,
he thought wryly, considering that their mission was to kill the world's most powerful man—in Andy's case, to kill him for the second time.

Improbably, in view of what he had since become, Andrew Walden Emerson III had been a quiet boy, raised by his grandmother after his parents were killed when an errant missile landed on—of all unlikely targets—Great Barrington, Vermont.

In her quiet, ladylike home he'd become an obsessive reader, summoning books on his Omnipad from every surviving library. By the time Security reprogrammed the servers to filter out all writings on the Index of Subversive Literature, he'd already read such dangerous works as
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Les Miserables,
storing away old-fashioned rhetoric and quaint notions of honor and self-sacrifice he could hardly have learned from the world around him.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,
young Andy liked to whisper to himself as he fell asleep. Yes!

But instead of going to the guillotine like Dickens's hero, he grew up and went to college. He decided to be a doctor, won a scholarship to New Yale, entered the pre-med program, and thought he'd found his calling. He was working hard, his fingers stained with chemicals from the labs, his life seemingly laid out before him, when he met an older woman—thirty at least—a blonde firebrand who called herself (revealingly) by the code name Faith.

He'd never known anyone like her, and went eagerly when she invited him to a meeting of a group she headed, Action for Anarchy. The members all had code names, which looking back was pretty silly, because the campus was such a tight community that they all knew each other's real names, too. The guys were Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen, but at meetings they had to be called Karl, Max, Oliver, Mandela, and Minh. When Andy joined, he was assigned the name Thoreau, a man he resembled in little except a regional inability to pronounce the letter
r
.

Faith taught her boys that the politics of bygone times, like the faux-medieval towers of Old Yale, had been ground into rubble by the War. (They all capitalized the word, even in their thoughts, because to them it was the only war that mattered.) Under a dictatorship, she declared, death was the only way to get rid of a bad ruler, and that was why all politics had become the politics of violence. The first time she gave Andy this revelation they were in bed, and despite the place and the mood and the moment he retained enough New England skepticism to protest that he didn't really think people could live without any government at all.

Faith told him not to be so literal-minded. "We're not into fantasy," she said. "We want to tear down the monster the War created and see what emerges, once people are free." Then she became again a passionate and demanding lover.

Such horizontal lectures made her the inspiration of the young men of the AFA. She slept with each in turn, partly for the sex (good sex, they all agreed, was in itself an act of rebellion) but mainly to inspire them with her burning vision of a whole
planet
, for God's sake, set free by the death of World President Mahmud Alonzo Sol. When the War ended, exhausted humanity at last had formed a universal government with teeth, including nuclear teeth. Sol won the presidency by democratic means—a perfectly deracinated man, suave, eloquent, full of generous thoughts, not identifiable with any race or nation or creed. Then he used the newly formed international army (called the Security Forces to make it sound less threatening) to seize dictatorial power.