How Dark the World Becomes (39 page)

“But not a lot of love,” I said. 

She smiled wistfully and shook her head. “I was . . . very promiscuous when I was younger. I suppose I was looking for something, someone, anyone really . . . but it didn’t help.”

“Your ‘bad boy’ phase,” I said, and she nodded. She blushed, too.

“I miss out on all the fun.” 

She laughed. “You’d have liked me even less back then, I think. What was your childhood like?”

“You sure you want to know?”

“Why not? Was it very bad?”

I nodded. “Yeah, looking back on it, it was pretty awful. But the truth is, when you’re a kid, you don’t know what’s normal and what isn’t. One thing we’ve got in common: we’re both orphans.”

So I told her the story of my younger days, how my father, mother, and older sister had gone out one day—one of the bad days, during the food riots—and only my mother had come back, her clothes torn, face bleeding. She’d never said anything to me, hadn’t even seemed to see me standing there. She’d just gotten undressed and gone to bed and never got up again. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t even drink water, no matter how much I begged her. She’d pissed and shit right in the bed, and laid in it, and eventually died there, I guess from dehydration.

“The bitch,” Marr said, and the anger in her voice surprised me. 

“She was . . . I don’t know . . . sad . . . ,” I started.

“How old were you?” 

“Seven, near as I can remember.”

“She left a seven-year-old boy to fend for himself because she couldn’t face the world.”

“She’d lost everything.” 

“No, she hadn’t. She still had you, but you weren’t enough to keep her alive, were you? How did that make you feel?”

“I never thought about it.”

“I don’t believe you. Did you have relatives?”

“No. And there were stories going around about the orphanages—how they chopped little boys and girls up for food. You know the kind of stories kids tell, but I was a little kid myself, and I believed it, so I hid. I stole food for a while, until the local merchants started getting wise to my hiding places. Then I hooked up with what’s called a bezzie pack. Bezzie is short for
bezprizornye
; it’s what the old-timers from Ukraine used to call wild orphans. There were a lot of us there for a while. A few of us survived.”

She didn’t say anything for a while, but her eyes looked so sad I thought she might start crying. But she didn’t, and while I was watching her, I understood why she had agreed to take care of Barraki and Tweezaa, risk everything—even her life—to help two orphans she’d never met before. They weren’t even the same species as her—not that that had slowed her up. 

Or me, either, come to think of it. 

She shook her head after a minute.

“Here you had a childhood that was a . . . a nightmare, and you don’t have a problem bonding . . . connecting with people. There’s something really wrong with me.”

I laughed, and she looked up sharply. I shook my head.

“Marr, I’m not laughing at you, honest to God. It’s just the idea that
I’m
the normal one . . . I mean, that’s pretty rich. Let me tell you something. That day before I met you, the woman I lived with tried to have me murdered.”

“Did you . . . ?” she started, but couldn’t finish the question. I shook my head.

“No, I didn’t hurt her . . . I’d lived with her for six years—six really good years; I couldn’t hurt her. I sent her away with some money.

“Here’s the thing, though; I don’t miss her. I never missed her, not for one second. I don’t hate her. I don’t have any bitterness, or anger. I don’t feel anything. Six years, Marr. Six years of the most intimate relationship of my life, capped with an attempted murder, and I don’t feel a goddamned thing, one way or another. So you think
you’ve
got attachment issues?”

This was not exactly turning out to be the romantic dinner I had half hoped and half feared it might. Instead it was devolving into true confessions of the emotionally halt and lame. I put down my fork and leaned back in my chair, no longer hungry. Marr sat looking off to one side, lost in thought. After a moment she turned and looked at me, and her expression was odd—serious, curious, but not sad like before.

“Sasha, this lady friend of yours . . . in the six years you were with her, were you ever scared you’d lose her?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know . . . really frightened. Down here,” she said, and touched her stomach with her hand. 

“No,” I answered, after thinking about it for a moment, “never.”

“Has there ever been anyone you were frightened of losing? Someone that . . . the thought that they might not go on being a part of your life . . . really terrified you, drove you almost to panic?”

I looked away.

I looked away because suddenly I couldn’t speak. Since my family had died, I had never been scared of losing anyone, ever in my life. Ever. 

Until right then. 

Then I felt her hand on mine, and when I turned, there were tears glistening in her eyes.

“Me, too,” was all she said, her voice husky with emotion.

I looked at her and then shook my head.

“Son of a bitch! You’re the cigar that’ll ruin me for everything, aren’t you?” 

She looked puzzled, so I told her the story of that perfect imported cigar, and how I’d never smoked another local cigar or cigarette again. She got sort of a dreamy look when I described how perfect everything was about it. When I finished, she sat there for a long time, just looking at me. It gave me an odd feeling, because I was looking right back at her, and I had no idea what was going on behind those green eyes. 

“Sasha,” she finally said, “do you ever miss those other cigars?” 

I thought about that for a while, really thought about it, because the truth was, I had never considered it before. Finally, I had to shake my head.

“No,” I said, a little surprised at the answer. “Not really.”

She smiled that soft, lopsided smile, and gave an elegant shrug.

“Well, then,” she said.

THIRTY

There is something surreal about falling through silent star-speckled space, falling in love, and all the time knowing the world is falling apart around you. Some worlds deserve to fall apart; maybe this was one of them. But deserve it or not, it was crumbling, that much was sure.

It’s not as if there hadn’t ever been shots fired in anger before in the
Cottohazz
, but this was different. All the stuff before was low-level fighting between different countries over borders, water, minerals—the usual stuff. That’s how a lot of Human mercenary units made their living, fighting these little brushfire wars on the peripheries. But this was a full-scale war between two of the most powerful Varoki nations, and they weren’t just fighting it out on the colonies with surrogates—they were using their own armed forces and taking it into space—even shooting at the forces of other
Cottohazz
members if they got in the way. 

We got both sides of the story over the course of the next couple days. The uZmataanki Marines had the parole of the living spaces, and they were more willing to talk to us—and to the uHoko—than to the uBakai military personnel. Once the uZmataanki talked to us, the uBakai wanted to as well. Everybody wanted to tell us their side. All of their stories were bullshit—not that they knew it. They just repeated what they’d been told, what they believed, but it was all bullshit.

I don’t know that I’d have figured it out on my own, or that Marr would have, or Ping, but the three of us together—that was different. We’d seen this world from three different perspectives—seen its gears turning, its wheels going round and round—and seen the different machinery from up close: law, crime, finance, trade—home worlds, colonies, deep space—rich, poor, and everything in between. 

And it stunk.

Pretty much everyone knew that all the sputtering little brushfire wars were struggles between the major powers but by proxy. This colonial administration, that guerrilla group, the trade union over there—all were masks of one sort or another for one of the principal Varoki nations. But somewhere along the line, even the Varoki national governments had become masks—masks for money. 

Peezgtaan had been an uZmataanki colony. After all the trouble on Nishtaaka, Peezgtaan had gotten its independence, and its own legislators. And who had elected them? Simki-Traak money. That was the real political shift—not from colony status to independence, but from AZ Kagataan—the money behind the legislative majority in the uZmataanki national territory—to AZ Simki-Traak, a lot of whose board members were “closely associated” with the uBakai senior executive. Different puppets, same show.

And down in the basement of the puppet theater, which Shadow Brotherhoods were plotting to gain control of AZ Simki-Traak? And for what? 

Maybe it didn’t really matter. The big money was fighting again, and they’d stepped the violence up another notch. I didn’t figure the
Cottohazz
was strong enough to hang together through all of this, and whoever ended up controlling the floor of the
Wat
might find it deserted except for discarded masks. Why? 

Because there really wasn’t anything else to it. 

It was
all
masks,
all
proxies, all smoke and mirrors and greed, and it was probably all coming down. Everybody was used to having it around, but nobody loved it—not the way you need to love something to lay your life down for it. Nobody was willing to die for somebody else’s greed.

Unless you fool them, of course, and make them think they’re dying for uBakaa, or uZmataan, or some other flag. Of course, when they figure out they’re fighting for AZ Kagataan’s bottom line instead, they’ll be really pissed. A lot of them never will figure it out—not because they’re stupid, but because they’ll lose someone they love, and they love them so much they’ll never be able to accept the possibility that they lost them for nothing. 

But a lot of them
will
figure it out, because greed is arrogant and cocksure. Greed can’t keep a secret—can’t help bragging about who it screwed and how. There’s no such thing as “enough” for greed, so it will never step away from the table. It will just keep rolling those dice, double or nothing, until it busts. 

Greed is stupid. 

We always forget that. We put greed in charge of the farm, because greed says it will run it more efficiently, and then greed cuts open all the geese to get the eggs quicker.

Pile all the creepy secret-society crap on top of the naked greed and the bad-to-the bone government corruption, and the one thing I knew for sure was that we—Humankind—had to get the hell out from underneath these guys’ thumbs. 

I wasn’t the only one who’d figured that out—Sarro e-Traak had as well, and he’d sure done his bit to make it a better world—for the Varoki, too, to my way of thinking, but obviously not everyone saw it that way. He’d at least purged the poison from his own blood, and given the two kids in the next room a shot at freedom from this madness as well. Maybe it would work for them. I’d come to love those two kids—Weasel Boy and the Dark Princess—and I hoped they could stay clear of this nightmare, but I’d done about all for them I could at this point. Pretty soon their family would be back in the picture, and God help them then. 

I wondered about
Tahk Pashaada-ak
, then. Had old Sarro e-Traak swung it so there was a Secret Brotherhood just watching out for his kids? What had Mr. Nobody called them? The Twin Diamonds? Maybe. But the brotherhood wanted to spill the beans on the whole K’Tok eco-form as well. What was the angle there? Were they part of Sarro’s bigger plan? 

The truth was, I’d probably never know. That’s the thing with secret societies: you can’t just call them up and ask what’s on their mind. And with Sarro gone, who knew who would take over—assuming he’d been kind of in charge anyway—and what they’d decide their
real
mission was now? No telling. After all, the Knights Templar had started off as a bunch of guys running a church or something.

*   *   *

We didn’t see much of Ping after we broke J-space in the Akaampta system. Once the naval brass on Akaampta got the decoded versions of the burst transmission from
ABk-401
, Ping and a couple senior officers from the transport had spent most of their waking hours answering questions over tight beam to Naval HQ. With Lieutenant Palaan dead back on K’Tok, Ping was the surviving go-to guy on the space battles. Late one night when he got back to the module, I’d asked him how the brass was taking it.

“The tops of their little heads are coming off,” he’d answered. 

Yeah, I imagine so. Everything was sliding down the mountainside, and these were the guys who were supposed to stop it. I was glad I didn’t have their jobs, because they were going to fail, and they could see the train wreck coming, and they didn’t know how to stop it, or how to get out of the way. No matter what they did, it wasn’t going to be right, it wasn’t going to be enough, and they’d go to their graves thinking that a smarter guy, or a more determined guy, or a more ruthless guy might have prevented what came next—whatever the hell that turned out to be. Here’s the epitaph they’d write for themselves:
A better man would have held back the night.
 

“Don’t lose any sleep over them,” Ping advised that same evening after a couple stiff rums. “You have to remember . . . these
Cottohazz
admirals and flag captains are Navy guys who never fought a war, never even really saw a war. You know what sort of top leadership you get in the military when you go a generation without a war? Bureaucrats. Empty suits. Most of them are more concerned with covering their own asses than preventing a disaster—because they have no concept of disaster. They’ve never seen disaster, never been in disaster. Disaster is just a report that needs to be explained so they don’t get down-checked on their next performance review.”

“Some of them, probably,” I agreed. “But there will be some who get it. They’ll try the hardest, and fall the hardest, probably.”

“Stubborn bastards,” Ping said, and raised his glass of rum to them. He took a drink and then settled back in thought.