Solaris Rising 2 (6 page)

The community leaders weren’t stupid. They knew that twenty-feet-high walls, the most that the technology permitted, could be gotten over. The richest of them cleared a wide area around the outside of the circle and put it under continual electronic surveillance: visual, infrared, and metal detection.

The plan that Wayne’s group – we never gave ourselves a name – came up with was ingenious in its simplicity. We joined a tent community just beyond a cleared area. Inside a ragged tent we built a medieval catapult of wood. We obtained a canister to be lobbed over the wall and break apart on contact, releasing tear gas into the gated community right at dinner time on a sweet summer night, when everyone was outside barbequing, playing tennis, drinking cocktails in designer lawn chairs whose cost would have fed the hungry people all around us for a week. Everything was in place.

Except that the week before, in the tent camp, I had met Aisha.

She was skinny and Muslim and starving and she reminded me of myself, who had never been any of those things. She was six years old, and she was dying. She coughed blood. I took her and her frantic mother to a hospital, but even though I paid for her care, she died. Too little, too late. I never even got to tell her to go to that happy place in her mind.

The doctor, not knowing I was with her mother, said to me, “Just as well. One less sewer rat in the world. Keeps the rest of us safer in the long run.”

I heard my father’s voice: “
The weak look pitiable, Catie, but they’re actually dangerous. They will bring down the strong if they can – from envy.
”

Two days later Wayne sent me to buy the canister. I made an elaborate, blind-folded journey through Chicago, arranged by SunnyJay, and followed by even more elaborate blind transfers of electronic funds. On the black market, you can buy anything, and it was my money, from grandmother’s trust. I didn’t get a break-apart canister of tear gas. I got one of sarin.

T
HE
H
AMMET
H
OTEL
, named for a famous seaside resort in Tunisia, is seedy but not overly dangerous. I wait there, paying cash for everything and producing SunnyJay’s fake ID as needed, for fully three weeks. Most of the time I watch TV, newscast after newscast about the breakthrough that will permit HomeWalls to “shield entire towns from terrorists and violent criminals.” No one ever said how many would be evicted from those towns, or where the evicted would then go. Hour after hour I watch these state-run broadcasts. It’s pretty much like again being in prison.

Then my ‘lover’ arrives, with my package. The next day I catch a greyhound to Chicago.

E
VEN FIFTEEN YEARS
ago, Wayne was a careful person. Inside our tent, beside the catapult, he meticulously examined the canister. “It doesn’t look like tear gas.”

“It is. Unless you think they pulled a bait-and-switch on us?”

“No, I don’t think that.” And then, “Catie?”

“It’s tear gas.”

And he nodded. We were sleeping together, we were passionately in love. The canister went into the catapult.

But someone else in our group must have checked, too. Because there was an anonymous call – not to the cops, who would eventually have ferreted out the caller. The call was to my father, on condition that he not reveal it to the cops. He agreed. The cold-feet traitor to our unnamed movement told him that people, inhabitants of a HomeWall his company had created, were about to die.

The quisling called Wayne, too. We had just enough time to scatter. When I was caught, I was charged with attempted assault. It would have been attempted murder had not Wayne already changed the canister that the feds found in the catapult. He’d known the original wasn’t tear gas. He’d asked me about it not to obtain information, but to see if I would lie to him.

I might never have been caught, since even back then, SunnyJay had been that good. The cops might not have found me, except for Douglas Jaworski. They asked him if he knew of anyone, besides the organizations they were already watching, who might have planned such an attack.

“My daughter,” he said. “Caitlin Maria Jaworski.” And gave them DNA samples, retina scans from house security, and enough personal information to find any pebble on any beach, anywhere at all.

I
F MY FATHER
refused to see me, my plan would be at an end. His house, the same one I grew up in, stands under a HomeWall dome, Model D-2, the second generation of the original two-acre shield. D for Douglas. C for Caitlin.

But when I give my name to the guard at the access, he nods. Not without bristling – almost I can see the hairs on his neck raise. But he has his orders, and after I’m retina-scanned and DNA-sampled for a positive ID, he passes me on to house security.

They strip-search me. They run full-body metal and plastic scans. They analyze my breath and urine. When it’s clear there is no way I can harbor a weapon, they give me a soft, expensive robe and slippers, and usher me to the library.

“Caitlin.”

He stands by the fireplace, alone. A curt nod dismisses the bodyguard, who scowls ferociously but leaves. No way Douglas Jaworski wants the hired hand to hear his daughter’s vitriol. And I had just been rendered perfectly safe.

He’s aged in fifteen years, even more than was evident on TV, even more than SunnyJay. But unlike that jolly criminal, this criminal has gone scrawnier, thin as shadow, shadowy as dusk. The lights are low, as if he can’t bear to see me too clearly. Some things never change.

Thousands of times I’ve rehearsed what I would say to him. Five thousand four hundred seventy-five times, in fact: every night in prison. But now that my father is in the same room, I don’t feel like saying any of it. What would be the point?

But it turns out he has something to say to me. “I knew you would come for me. Eventually.”

It sets off all the old, battered, primeval rage. “You did not! You don’t know anything about me! You never took the time or effort to know!”

“You’re wrong, Catie.”

Not a quaver in his voice. He thinks he’s safe, that because of his crack security team and his careful planning and his fucking dome, I’m walled away from him. I reach under my robe for my thigh. The only thing that will go through state-of-the-art surveillance devices is the human body. The pocket of skin on my thigh, its thin scar indistinguishable from all the other scars I acquired in prison, opens easily if painfully. From within I pull the slim knife made of bone, not unlike what might have been used on the savannah ten thousand years ago. But much sharper.

I have only seconds before my father, or my own motion, activates whatever defenses the room has: gas, electric shocks, something so new I haven’t even thought of it. But my father doesn’t move. Instead he says, “You’re going to kill me. But first let me explain something to you.”

It’s a trick, of course. Keep me talking until help comes. But all at once I want to hear him, more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my entire life. An irrational desire, as strong as sex, or despair.

“You never had a child, Catie. But if you did, and you saw that child embrace beliefs you didn’t share, immoral beliefs, you’d try to stop her. You’d lock her in her room, force her into therapy, even use mind-altering drugs, all the things I did and you resented me for. But what you were doing was immoral. I was trying to make the world safer and you were adding to its sum of violence.”

“Safer by condemning a fifth of the population to misery!”

“They were already miserable, and I was making it possible for the other four-fifths to raise strong and happy children who might have found ways to rescue a world descending into darkness. Mine was the moral act because it aimed at the future.”

He believes it. The self-serving son-of-a-bitch believes it.

“Imagine one step further, Catie. You have a child set to commit a terrible crime, in which people might die. Do you turn that child in?”

“It was tear gas!”

“But you didn’t know that, did you? You weren’t content with tear gas. You wanted more.”

I lunge. But now I’ve waited too long, listening to his bullshit –
why
? Whatever defenses are built into this room will take me down before I can reach him.

Except that they don’t.

I cross the room. My bone knife connects with his chest. He’s not wearing body armor. No alarms sound. My knife slides in. He gasps and sags against me.

He never even calls for help.

His body is so light.

I sink to my knees, my father in my arms. Blood trickles from his mouth. Still no one comes. My rage threatens to blind me. But I can speak.

“
Why
?”

“My... punishment.”

“For the domes?”

“For... wanting... more for you... than...”

Than what? He can’t finish speaking. Yet he doesn’t die. His eyes, full of pain, stare at me, and what I see in them is not anger but infinite regret.

I begin to babble crazily, hardly knowing what I’m saying. “Think of a good time! Think of when we were in the car going to school – back in the car! You’re asking me about the colors, remember? We’re in the car, it smells of aftershave and leather, we’re cozy and warm and safe... Daddy!”

He’s gone. I sit there, waiting. After all, I knew right along that I would not survive this meeting. Either immediately or in the aftermath, it would be my death, too. I knew it – and yet now I just want a few additional moments, a few more words from him, a few seconds –

– more.

SHALL INHERIT

JAMES LOVEGROVE

Prolific author James Lovegrove’s most recent novels are
Age of Aztec
, latest in his bestselling Pantheon series, and
Redlaw
. He has written extensively for teenagers and younger children, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages and shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, and the Manchester Book Award. His “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story. James is a regular reviewer of fiction for the
Financial Times
and contributes frequently to the magazine
Comic Heroes
. He lives in Eastbourne with his wife, two sons and cat.

M
ORNING,
C
LOUD
C
ROWD
! It’s Johnny Nimbus, your AI network host, comin’ atcha with a streamcast of all your views, all your news, all the time. And the big topic of discussion today is – what else? – the launches. In a few short hours the crew of the IS
Pandora
will be getting hoicked up to near-Earth orbit to take their places aboard the super space ark that’s going to fly them to a galaxy far, far away, never to return. The forums are open, as ever, so get commenting and communing, tweeting and browbeating, ’cause without your thoughts there’s no show and without the show where will your thoughts go?

T
HE LIMO ARRIVED
punctually at eight. Serene and black and unforgivably ostentatious. Everyone in the street would know who it was for, why it had come. Furtive curtains twitched. Brazen neighbours came out onto their front doorsteps and stared, arms folded.

I went upstairs to chivvy Martin out of his room. He was on his computer, piffling about on the internet. Astronomy sites and the like, as usual. Just as though it was any other morning, in no way a special or different day.

Special or different
meant nothing to Martin.

“Time to go,” I said.

“Yeah.” He didn’t look round; didn’t move.

“Now.”

“Okay. Coming.”

“Really now. Not ‘soon’ now.”

“I said okay.”

Ten minutes later he deigned to descend. The limo driver had already put his suitcase in the boot. Martin had met the 20kg luggage allowance exactly, down to the gramme. He’d made an eclectic choice of belongings to take with him. A few of his favourite books, cherished physical copies. T-shirts with videogame characters on. A penny jar that accounted for nearly a fifth of the suitcase’s laden weight. A nightlight that he probably wouldn’t be able to plug in anywhere. A handful of Lego models and Warhammer figurines.

He had needed some persuading to include a framed photo of us, his family, and the Good Luck card his classmates at school had signed.

Outside, he started quizzing the limo driver about the car. Maximum speed. Fuel consumption. Brake horse power. Stopping distances. All the Top Trumps stats.

“How should I know, son?” the driver said, despairing. “I just drive the thing.”

T
HEY’RE NOT EVEN
proper astronauts. What’s up with that? NASA didn’t send civilian nobodies on the
Apollo
missions. Armstrong and Aldrin and the others, they were test pilots, air force guys, elite. Best of the best. Trained within an inch of their lives. Now it’s a bunch of randoms? That’s what we’re manning a trillion-dollar spaceship with? Don’t make me laugh
.

A
YEAR EARLIER
, someone from the government had come round to interview us. We weren’t sure why at the time. Claire and I thought maybe it was a benefit-fraud investigation. We’d done something wrong, claimed money we weren’t entitled to, ticked an incorrect box on the disability living allowance form, something of that sort.

Why an infraction like that should have seemed important to anyone, given what else was going on in the world, I didn’t know. But it was the government. Rules were still rules, even as civilisation inched inexorably towards the precipice.

The woman conducting the interview, Maggie, tried to put us at our ease. “It’s just a formality,” she insisted, “an assessment, nothing more. You don’t have anything to be anxious about.”