It seemed important to her.
At that moment, I could not understand why.
I am in the little restaurant, thinking all this, when a soft voice calls my name. I look up, and of course it"s Caralys: sweet, beautiful Caralys, who has found me in the place where we prefer to think we saw each other last. She is, of course, unmarked and unwounded, all the insults inflicted by the soldiers either healed or wiped away like bad rumors. She looks exactly like she did the night before last, complete with fringed blouse and patchy dress and two curling strands of hair that meet in the center of her forehead. If there is any difference in her, it lies in what I now recognize was there all along: the storm clouds of memory roiling behind her piercing black eyes. She"s not insane, or hard, the way she should be after enduring what she"s endured; Enysbourg always wipes away all scars, physical and psychological both. But it does not wipe away the knowledge. And her smile, always so guileless in its radiance, now seems to hold a dark challenge. I can see that she has always held me and my naivete in the deepest possible contempt. She couldn"t have felt any other way, in the presence of any man who had never known the Tenth Day. I was an infant by Enysbourg"s standards, a man who could not understand her or the forces that shaped her. I must have seemed bland, dull, and in my own comfortable way, even r.e.t.a.r.ded.
I find to my surprise that I feel contempt as well. Part of me is indignant at her effrontery at looking down at me. After all, she has had other tourists. She has undertaken other Projects with other men, from other places, trying time and time again to make outsiders into natives of her perverse little theme park to savagery. What does she expect from me, in the end? Who am I to her? If I leave, won"t she just find another tourist to play with for ten days? And why should I stay, when I should just see her as the easy vacation tramp, always eager to go with the first man who comes off the boat?
It"s hard not to be repulsed by her.
But that hate pales beside the awareness that in all my days only she has made me feel alive.
And her own contempt, great as it is, seems drowned by her love, shining at me with such intensity that for a moment I almost forget the fresh secrets now filling the s.p.a.ce between us. I stand and fall into her arms. We close our eyes and taste each other"s tears. She whispers, "It is all right, Robert. I understand. It is all right. I want you to stay, but won"t hate you if you go. "
She is lying, of course. She will despise me even more if I go. She will know for certain that Enysbourg has taught me nothing. But her love will be just as sincere if I stay.
It"s the entire reason she seeks out tourists. She loathes our naivete. But it"s also the one thing she can"t provide for herself.
Jerry Martel stands nearby, beaming and self-congratulatory. Dee has joined him, approving, cooing, maternal. Maybe they hope we"ll pay attention to them again. Or maybe we"re just a new flavor for them, a novelty for the expatriates living in Enysbourg.
Either way, I ignore them and pull Caralys close, taking in the scent of her, the sheer absolute ideal of her, laughing and weeping and unable to figure out which is which. She makes sounds that could be either, murmuring words that could be balms for my pain or laments for her own. She tells me again that it"s going to be all right, and I don"t know whether she"s telling the truth. I don"t even know whether she"s all that sure herself. I just know that, if I take that trip home, I will lose everything she gave me, and be left with nothing but the gray dullness of my everyday life. And if I stay, deciding to pay the price of that Tenth Day in exchange for the illusion of Eden, we"ll never be able to acknowledge the Tenth Day on the other days when everything seems to be all right. We won"t mention the times spent suffocating beneath rubble, or spurting blood from severed limbs, or choking out our lungs from poison gas. I will never know how many h.e.l.ls she"s known, and how many times she"s cried out for merciful death. I"ll never be able to ask if what I witnessed yesterday was typical, worse than average, or even an unusually good day, considering. She"ll never ask about any of the horrors that happen to me. These are not things discussed during peacetime in Enysbourg. We won"t even talk about them if I stay, and if we remain in love, and if we marry and have children, and if they grow up bright and beautiful and filled with wonder; and if every ten days we find ourselves obliged to watch them ground beneath tank-treads, or worse. In Enysbourg such things are not the stuff of words. In Enysbourg a certain silence is just the price of being alive.
And a small price it is, in light of how blessed those who live here have always been.
Just about all Caralys can do, as the two of us begin to sway together in a sweet slow dance, is continue to murmur rea.s.surances. Just about all I can do is rest my head against her chest, and close my eyes to the sound of her beating heart. Just about all we can do together is stay in this moment, putting off the next one as long as possible, and try not to remember the dogs, the hateful snarling dogs, caged for now but always thirsty for a fresh taste of blood.
"The mere absence of war is not peace. "
-President John F. Kennedy.
For J. H..
Resistance.
by Tobias S. Buckell.
Tobias S. Buckell is the author of the novels Crystal Rain, Ragam.u.f.fin, Sly Mongoose, and the New York Times bestseller Halo: the Cole Protocol. He is a Writers of the Future winner, and has published more than thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Nature, Lightspeed, Science Fiction Age, and a.n.a.log, and in anthologies including Mojo: Conjure Stories, New Voices in Science Fiction, and I, Alien. Much of his short work has been collected in Tides from the New Worlds. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.
In November 2008, American voters elected Barack Obama president of the United States. The race was not as close as it has been in recent elections, but the real excitement of the day was the high voter turn-out. With an estimated 61% of all registered voters choosing to cast votes, the 2008 election stands as the highest voter turnout in more than three decades.
Of course, that means 30% or so of all registered voters didn"t bother to turn up. And who knows how many U. S. citizens never got around to even registering in the first place?
There are thousands of explanations for voter apathy, but in the world Buckell portrays in our next story, none of those excuses really matter; it"s a techno-democracy failed by its own voters. But Buckell knows first-hand about systems that begin with high hopes only to crumble into disaster. He was born during a 1979 coup d"etat in Grenada, where the new government, according to Buck-ell, "fell into the spiral of quashing opposition to the point where it became draconian and people ended up lined up against walls and shot. "
It would appear that a utopian government is only as strong as the voices of its resistance.
Four days after the coup Stanuel was ordered to fake an airlock pa.s.s. The next day he waited inside a cramped equipment locker large enough to hold two people while an armed rover the size and shape of a helmet wafted around the room, twisting and counter-rotating pieces of itself as it scanned the room briefly. Stanuel held his breath and willed himself not to move or make a sound. He just floated in place, thankful for the lack of gravity that might have betrayed him had he needed to depend on locked, nervous muscles.
The rover gave up and returned to the corridor, the airlock door closing behind it. Stanuel slipped back out. The rover had missed him because he"d been fully suited up for vacuum. No heat signature.
Behind the rover"s lenses had been the eyes of Pan. And since the coup, anyone knew better than to get noticed by Pan. Even the airlock pa.s.s cut it too close. He would disappear when Pan"s distributed networks noticed what he"d done.
By then, Pan would not be a problem.
Stanuel checked his suit over again, then cycled the airlock out. The outer door split in two and pulled apart.
But where was the man Stanuel was supposed to bring in?
He realized there was an inky blackness in the s.p.a.ce just outside the ring of the lock. A blotch that grew larger, and then tumbled in. The suit flickered, and turned a dull gray to match the general interior color of the airlock.
The person stood up, and Stanuel repressurized the airlock.
They waited as Stanuel snapped seals and took his own helmet off. He hung the suit up in the locker he"d just been hiding in. "We have to hurry, we only have about ten minutes before the next rover patrol. "
Behind him, Stanuel heard crinkling and crunching. When he turned around the s.p.a.cesuit had disappeared. He now faced a tall man with dark skin and long dreadlocks past his shoulders, and eyes as gray as the bench behind him. The s.p.a.cesuit had turned into a long, black trench-coat. "Rovers?" the man asked.
Stanuel held his hand up and glyphed a 3-D picture in the air above his palm. The man looked at the rover spin and twist and shoot. "Originally they were station maintenance bots. Semi-autonomous remote operated vehicles. Now they"re armed. "
"I see. " the man pulled a large backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.
"So. . . what now?" Stanuel asked.
The gray eyes flicked up from the pack. "You don"t know?"
"I"m part of a cell. But we run distributed tasks, only checking it with people who a.s.sign them. It keeps us insulated. I was only told to open this airlock and let you in. You would know what comes next. Is the attack tonight? Should I get armed? Are you helping the attack?"
The man opened the pack all the way to reveal a small a.r.s.enal of guns, grenades, explosives, and-oddly-knives. Very large knives. He looked up at Stanuel. "I am The attack. I"ve been asked to shut Pan down. "
"But you"re not a programmer. . . "
"I can do all things through explosives, who destroy for me. " the man began moving the contents of the pack inside the pockets and straps of the trenchcoat, clipped more to his belt and thigh, as well as to holsters under each arm, and then added pieces to his ankles.
He was now a walking a.r.s.enal.
But only half the pack had been emptied. The mysterious mercenary tossed it at Stanuel. "Besides, you"re going to help. "
Stanuel coughed. "Me?"
"According to the resistance message, you"re a maintenance manager, recently promoted. You still know all the sewer lines, access ducts, and holes required to get me to the tower. How long do you guess we have before it notices your unauthorized use of an airlock?"
"An hour," Stanuel said. The last time he"d accidentally gone somewhere Pan didn"t like, rovers had been in his office within an hour.
"And can we get to the tower within an hour, Stanuel, without being noticed?"
Stanuel nodded.
The large, well-armed man pointed at the airlock door into the corridor. "Well, let"s not dally. "
"Can I ask you something?" Stanuel asked.
"Yes. "
"Your name. You know mine. I don"t know yours. "
"Pepper," said the mercenary. "Now can we leave?"
A single tiny sound ended the secrecy of their venture: the buzz of wings. Pepper"s head snapped in the direction of the sound, locks spinning out from his head.
He slapped his palm against the side of the wall, crushing a b.u.t.terfly-like machine perfectly flat.
"A bug," Stanuel said.
Pepper launched down the corridor, bouncing off the walls until he hit the bulkhead at the far end. He glanced around the corner. "Clear. "
"Pan knows you"re in Haven now. " Stanuel felt fear bloom, an instant explosion of paralysis that left him hanging in the air. "It will mobilize. "
"Then get me into the tower, quick. Let"s go, Stanuel, we"re not engaged in something that rewards the slow. "
But Stanuel remained in place. "they chose me because I had no family," he said. "I had less to lose. I would help them against Pan. But. . . "
Pepper folded his arms. "It"s already seen you. You"re already dead. "
That sunk in. Stanuel had handled emergencies. Breaches, where vacuum flooded in, sucking the air out. He"d survived explosions, dumb mistakes, and even being speared by a piece of rebar. All by keeping cool and doing what needed to be done.
He hadn"t expected, when told that he"d need to let in an a.s.sa.s.sin, that he"d become this involved. But what did he expect? that he could be part of the resistance and not ever risk his life? He"d risked it the moment one of his coworkers had started whispering to him, talking about overthrowing Pan, and he"d only stood there and listened.
Stanuel took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay. I"m sorry. "
The s.p.a.ce station Haven was a cla.s.sic wheel, rotating slowly to provide some degree of gravity for its inhabitants so that they did not have to lose bone ma.s.s and muscle, the price of living in no gravity.
At Haven"s center lay the hub. Here lay an atrium, the extraordinary no-gravity gardens and play areas for Haven"s citizens. Auditoriums and pools and labs and tourist areas and fields, the heart of the community. Dripping down from the hub, docking ports, airlocks, antennae, and spare ma.s.s from the original asteroid Haven had taken its metals. This was where they floated now.
But on the other side of the hub hung a long and spindly structure that had once housed the central command for the station. A bridge, of sorts, with a view of all of Haven, sat at the very tip of the tower. The bridge was duplicated just below in the form of an observation deck and restaurant for visitors and proud citizens and school trips.
All things the tower existed for in that more innocent time before.
Now Pan sat in the bridge, looking out at all of them, both through the large portal-like windows up there, and through the network of rovers and insect cams scattered throughout Haven.
One of which Pepper had just flattened.
Stanuel knew they no longer had an hour now.
Pepper squatted in front of the hatch. "It"s good I"m not claustrophobic. "
"This runs all the way to the restaurant at the tower. It"s the fastest way there. "
"If we don"t choke on fumes and grease first. " Pepper sc.r.a.ped grease off the inside.
Stanuel handed him a mask with filters from the tiny utility closet underneath the pipe. He also found a set of headlamps. "Get in, I"ll follow, we need to hurry. "
Pepper hauled himself into the tube and Stanuel followed, worming his way in. When he closed the hatch after them the darkness seemed infinite until Pepper clicked a tiny penlight on.
Moving down the tube was simple enough. They were in the hub. They were weightless. They could use their fingertips to slowly move their way along.
After several minutes Pepper asked, voice m.u.f.fled by the filter, "so how did it happen? Haven was one of the most committed to the idea of techno-democracy. "
There were hundreds of little bubbles of life scattered all throughout the asteroid belt, hidden away from the mess of Earth and her orbit by distance and anonymity. Each one a petri dish of politics and culture. Each a pearl formed around a bit of asteroid dirt that birthed it.
"There are problems with a techno-democracy, "muttered Stanuel. "If you"re a purist, like we were, you had to have the citizenry decide on everything. "the sheer amount of things that a society needed decided had almost crushed them.
Every minute everyone had to decide something. Pa.s.s a new law. Agree to send delegates to another station. Accept taxes. Divvy out taxes. Pay a bill. The stream of decisions became overwhelming, constantly popping up and requiring an electronic yes or no. And research was needed for each decision.
"The artificial intelligence modelers came up with our solution. They created intelligences that would vote just as you would if you had the time to do nothing but focus on voting. " they weren"t real artificial intelligences. The modelers took your voting record, and paired it to your buying habits, social habits, and all the other aspects of your life that were tracked in modern life to model your habits. After all, if a bank could use a financial profile to figure out if an unusual purchase didn"t reflect the buyer"s habits and freeze an account for safety reasons, why couldn"t the same black box logic be applied to a voter"s patterns?
Pepper snorted. "You turned over your voting to machines. "
Stanuel shook his head, making the headlamp"s light dart from side to side. "Not machines. Us. The profiles were incredible. They modeled what votes were important enough-or that the profilers were uncertain to get right-so that they only pa.s.sed on the important ones to us. They were like spam filters for voting. They freed us from the incredible flood of meaningless minutiae that the daily running of a government needed. "
"But they failed," Pepper grunted.
"Yes and no. . . "
"Quiet. " Pepper pointed his penlight down. "I hear something. Clinking around back the way we came from. "
"Someone chasing us?"
"No. It"s mechanical. "
Stanuel thought about it for a moment. He couldn"t think of anything. "Rover?"
Pepper stopped and Stanuel collided with his boots. "So our time has run out. "
"I don"t know. "
A faint clang echoed around them. "Back up, "Pepper said, pushing him away with a quick shove of the boot to the top of his head.
"What are you doing?"
"We"ve come far enough. " Four extremely loud bangs filled the tube with absurdly bright flashes of light. Pepper moved out through the ragged rip in the pipe.
Another large wall blocked him. "What is this?"
Stanuel, still blinking, looked at it from still inside the pipe. "You"ll want the other side. Nothing but vacuum on the other side. " Had Pepper used more explosive they might have just been blown right out the side of Haven.
"Right. " Pepper twisted further out, and another explosion rocked the pipe.