Gravity Box and Other Spaces (42 page)

“Who picked the list?” someone demanded from the crowd.

“The Committee of Chiefs,” the girl answered. “Anybody have a problem with that?”

“Who picked the Committee?” someone else shouted. Laughter chittered from a few.

The girl scowled and flipped the bird, then read from the papers in her hand. “In-person demonstrations at the private estates of all district representatives and state senators. Now we mean demonstrations, not riots. We don't want any property destroyed; we don't want
anybody hurt; we don't want to give anyone any reason to call the storm troopers. This is to go with the same type demonstrations at the state legislatures and the capitals, plus in Washington. Same rules apply.

“Next we're looking at class-action suits against parents and guardians. We need lawyers, and we need press time for this. Then we're looking at homesteading blighted urban areas. This is to tie in with the class-action suits to keep our people in the houses they settle. We expect property tax problems and hassles with contract law. That's why we need the lawyers. We already got people in the Urban Coalitions and the ACLU interested.

“After that, we go to classroom invasions. Groups are to enter schools and attend subscription classes. Steal the books, we don't care, but we want our presence in classrooms we can't get into now. For this we need to touch base with kids in welfare academies, get them out of the slum-schools and into the good ones, get the ones already attending the polyversities out of the standard-track classes and into the ones that they can't afford.”

Jen listened, dismayed. The girl read on. The propositions blurred.

“Any of them sound good to you?”

Jen looked around. Sonya was talking to Cantril.

“Don't know,” he said. “I suppose we ought to vote on that ourselves.” He smiled at Jen. “What do you think?”

“She's not even one of us,” Bigelow-Jigolo said.

“She's with us,” Cantril snapped. “You gotta problem with my choice of members?”

The boy shook his head and glowered at Jen.

“The class-action suit sounds good to me,” Jen said immediately. “I'd like to see my parents on trial.”

They looked at her blankly for a moment. Then Cantril chuckled. “You have parents?”

Jen frowned at Cantril, and then looked at the other two. They watched her as if waiting for the realization to sink in. Jen suddenly felt ashamed of herself, then envious. The two emotions mixed badly and left an acid pall over her thoughts.

Cantril smiled and shook his head. “What's the difference? We all had parents once, eh?” He touched her face. Jen was surprised the gentleness. “Just some of us still have them. Like the flu, isn't it?”

The others laughed. She knew that laugh. She did not belong here. They were tolerating her, she felt, which was just another way of telling her that they did not know how to get rid of her. As if reading her thoughts, Cantril said earnestly, “We don't patronize anybody here.”

The girl in the bleachers had at some point stopped talking. Cantril frowned and looked around. The others turned, as if sensing something was wrong. Silence fell across the field. Then Jen heard it: hovers.

A storm-wind of spinning propellers filled the air, setting the entire park in motion. The gathering split like an atom, people shooting out in every direction. Cantril grabbed Jen and pulled her close. He shouted to the others, but Jen could not make out the words in the deafening roar of the crowd and the pounding beat of the hovers. They ran.

A new sound sliced through, the sharp echoing bellow of bullhorns and police orders. The words were indistinguishable, lost in the noise, but Jen understood their meaning as if they were somehow encoded in her genes, handed down from generations of arrested and persecuted.

Cantril's gang hammered a path through the mêlée. They veered left, toward the bleachers. Kids were climbing the fences, jumping from the top row of the bleachers, their fall broken at the last instant by lines around their chests: smart-rope dropped from above. The hovers' searchlights poured down on the chaos.

Cantril let her go as they reached the fence. The sluglike shapes of the hovers were settling down on the nearly empty field. Groups of fallen kids lay motionless on the weed-torn Astroturf. Police in riot gear erupted from the bowels of the hovers and began chasing down those who were still running, while others began cuffing and carrying the fallen back to the hovers. Those caught by the smart-rope were being pulled skyward in clumps.

When they reached the fence, Cantril shouted, “Cut it!”

Bigelow-Jigolo pulled something from his jacket, a compact device that glowed yellow-red at its tip. He pressed it to the wire and the metal gave way.

“Through!”

Bigelow-Jigolo and Sonya pushed at the wire mesh. Cantril grabbed Jen's wrist and pulled her along.

Then she was running. She did not think: no time, no room. She lagged behind. The air felt hot and spiked with barbs, her pulse rushing too fast through her veins. Ahead a car pulled around the corner. Searchlights blinded her. She heard someone call her name.

Her entire body suddenly seized up in a massive muscle spasm. She felt herself shaking uncontrollably.

Then she passed out.

Jen opened her eyes. It took concentration to decipher the image: the plastic housing of the single light. Rainbows seem to surround it. She squeezed her eyes shut to clear her vision, then carefully sat up.

She was in a small cell. Her arms and legs ached, but not badly enough to prevent movement. Part of her realized she had been hit with a stunner. She was dressed in an off-white jumpsuit with a holographic tag over the left breast. She was barefoot.

The door slid open. A uniformed woman motioned Jen out. Dully, Jen stood and stepped into the corridor. The woman pushed her forward. She was taken to a larger room where she found Ella Preston sitting on the opposite side of a table.

“You have fifteen minutes,” the guard said, and left the room.

“Sit down, Jen,” Ella said, gesturing to the chair opposite her.

Jen frowned at her and continued to stand. She tried to slide her hands into her pockets, but found the jumpsuit had no pockets. She folded her arms, instead.

“Do you want something to drink?” Ella asked. “I can get us something. Please sit down.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Why?”

Ella frowned and leaned back in her chair. “I don't understand something. I went over your entire academic record after you left yesterday. Everything. From grade school till now. With the exception of your fifth grade year you are an exemplary student. Perfect attendance, excellent grade point, very solid independent study work. You're a bright girl, Jen.”

“So what don't you understand?”

“Why did you run? Why didn't you tell me what the trouble was?”

“What trouble?”

“Your parents.”

Jen squeezed her mouth shut and averted her eyes.

“Jen?”

This was too much. She was tired, she needed sleep, real sleep.

“Jen?”

“What?”

Ella sighed. “We don't have time for verbal sparring. I went by your home last night, to talk to you, to meet your parents. I met your parents.”

Jen looked at her, wary.

“So why didn't you tell someone?”

“It's no concern of yours.”

“Look, I can't help you—”

“Where am I?” Jen snapped. “Jail, right? Guess what happens next! I get welfared or remanded to the custody of my parents with a record! You know what that means? Everything I've tried to do is gone, vapor, smoke! Because you had to talk to my parents! Well, thank you very damn much!”

“You're here because you were apprehended at an act of civil disobedience, not because I spoke to your parents.”

“Why do you think I was there?”

“Ah. Look, Jen—”

“Don't.” She raised a finger at Ella. “Don't give me institutional concern.” She turned away not wanting to look at Ella and paced the room. Six steps to the wall, nine to the opposite wall. She stopped in the corner, nowhere else to go.

“All I wanted to do was to get away from them. Both of them. You met them. Don't you think I had good reason to want to do that?”

“You could have requested separation.”

Jen crossed the room to the table and leaned close to Ella.

“And what happens? They welfare you and stick you in a dysfunctional-family program. You get a state stipend that's fixed so you don't get the good teachers, the good programs, because you can't buy them. So you don't get a chance at things like the co-op with the orbitals. You get slotted into a profile and they, whoever the fuck ‘they' are, determine what's best for you. Change one set of bad parents for a whole building full of the same.”

She stepped back. “The only chance I had was the way I was doing it all these years: secretly, paying my own way, forging my parents' signatures on all the forms, keeping them completely in the dark. I did it that way because if they'd known, if they'd gotten a hint of what I was doing, they'd have stopped it.

“My father would have, anyway, and my mother is useless when it comes to defying him. And you fucked it up for me. You had to talk to my parents. Do you think that thing I have for a father would have let me go to space? God, he doesn't even think women have brains!

“The moment I would have brought them in, that would have been the end of everything I wanted. Nothing you could have done would have changed it because I'm a minor, because I have to do what I'm told, because I have to have their permission. Half the things I've been interested in all my life they wouldn't have a clue about.”

Ella pursed her lips, her fingers quietly drumming on the edge of the table. She drew a slow breath. “You forged all the signatures?”

Jen grunted. “I've been doing it all my life. It's not that hard.”

“Where did the money come from for the special classes?”

“I earned it. It's mine. When I was little I ran errands, did some housecleaning for old people. Now I do tutoring when I can. A few other things.”

“Don't you think somebody with your academic record would have been given special consideration?”

“No, I don't. I've never gotten special consideration.”

“Have you ever tried?”

Jen looked away. She wanted Ella to stop talking. It was too late now for everything; more words would change nothing.

“What happened in fifth grade? Your average fell apart, your attendance declined.”

“My father wanted me to drop out. He'd joined some church that taught against state education, science, politics, anything they couldn't understand. He was angry. I made him angry. He—he'd lock me in my room. He said there was no reason for me to have an education, that it was costing him money. It wasn't, but he didn't know that. I'd escape and go to school, stay at friends' houses until he found me and raised hell with the parents so I wouldn't be welcome back.

“I finally figured out that I had to fight back, so I documented the abuse and filed the data somewhere safe. I told him I'd have him arrested if he didn't leave me alone. It took a while to convince him. I had to arrange for a visit
from a state family services agent, but he finally believed me and let me be. He drank a lot then.”

“Why didn't you use the same threat to get them to agree to this program?”

“Statute of limitations ran out. I had to file those charges within eighteen months. He didn't know that then, but he found out later.”

“You've been paying your way through all your special classes?”

Jen shrugged then nodded.

Ella frowned. “All the checks to the school have been through your parents' account.”

Jen rolled her eyes. “Look, I take the money out of my account and transfer it to theirs, then write the check. The books always balance since I do that, too. Any more questions?”

“Jen, let me help.”

“Can you get me into space?”

“I don't know.”

Jen went to the table and sat down. She looked at Ella evenly, spoke in soft, reasonable tones.

“I want to go to space. I decided years ago that that's what I wanted. That's my choice. Now, if you want to help me, then you do that. I want to get off this planet, somewhere—somewhere my father can't ever get to me.”

“You're just running away from your troubles.”

Jen slammed her fist on the table. “When you reach majority, it's called making choices, but at my age it's ‘running away from your troubles.' I'm just trying to run my life! Don't analyze me!”

Ella regarded her for a long time. Jen began to think she was just going to stare at her until the time was up.

Finally, Ella let out a loud breath.

“All right,” she said. “I'm going to make you an offer, but you have to agree to my terms.”