Memory's Legion, page 43
Filip said, “I’ve been in a fight,” but he said it softly, and Nami Veh was talking over him. “Regardless, it’s clear a line was crossed. And we all know who was involved, so the question for us now is how we move forward. Jandro, these were your crew. They need to make this right.”
Filip saw the amusement in Jandro’s eyes and the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, okay. I’ll make sure they come apologize. You bet.”
“And return the cart,” Nami Veh said.
“If he needs the cart, he can have the cart.”
“And Leward?” Nami Veh said, turning to the science lead. “I think it would be good for the community if you and some of the science team could help with building the defenses.”
The cold feeling in Filip’s chest shifted, swelled. “What about the vote?” Three sets of eyes turned to him. “We voted to move the town. What about the vote?”
“Yes,” Leward said, waving a wide hand toward Filip. “Exactly.”
“We’re past that now,” Nami Veh said. “Leward? For the community.”
“We’ll give you the easy jobs,” Jandro said. “It’ll be fun.”
Leward pressed his lips together, thin and bloodless, then stood without speaking and walked out. Jandro chuckled as the door closed. He’d won, and he knew it. Filip knew it too.
“You need to keep your crew in line,” Nami Veh said, somewhere to Filip’s right. It seemed like she was a long distance away. “We desperately need everyone in the community working together.”
“They will,” Jandro said. “As long as we’re working on the right things, they absolutely will.”
Filip rose, made himself nod to both of them, and walked out. There was something wrong with him, but he didn’t know what it was. It felt a little like nausea, a little like vertigo. It wasn’t either one, though. This was something different, but though he didn’t have a name for it, he knew it. He had felt this before.
In the plaza, fewer of the buildings had their awnings up. The rain was getting colder and lighter. Filip listened for the song of the monsters behind it, but the white noise of the rain hid anything. If there was trouble coming, someone would have to warn them. And if there wasn’t trouble tonight, there would be soon. Every night of peace made the next night more dangerous. Filip thought that felt familiar too.
At the room, Mose was sitting on his cot. His jumpsuit was unzipped to the navel, and his eyes were red and bleary. Even without the smell of alcohol, Filip would have known he’d been drinking. Mose had finally found the still that some enterprising future rich person had set up. Filip sat on his own cot, his back against the wall. His clothes were wet, and rain seeped out of his hair and down his neck. He let it.
“You need a towel, Nagata,” Mose said, and then when Filip didn’t answer, he pulled a steel bottle out of his pocket. He reached over and put it on the cot by Filip’s leg. “One of the biochemists is making gin. I mean, it’s not real gin, but it’s close. It’s good. No tonic water, but it’s got the right…” He shook his head, searching for a word he couldn’t find. “It’s good.”
“Thanks,” Filip said, but it sounded like someone else’s voice.
Mose laced his fingers together, then looked down at his hands like they were a puzzle he was trying to solve. “I, ah, wanted to apologize. I keep it to myself, you know, but this whole thing? It’s been… It’s made me less good than I used to be, you know? Less professional.”
“It’s okay.”
“Denial. That’s what they call it, yeah? It’s just… I can’t…” He started to wheeze. It could have been laughing or crying or just the man starting to hyperventilate. Filip waited, watching Mose’s knuckles go pale where he was squeezing the blood out of them. After a while, the wheezing stopped. “Nobody’s coming. No ships. No shuttle. The gate’s gone. Whatever happened at Alpha, they’d have gotten the radio back up by now. We’re all there is. This shit-ass little squat of a town is all that’s left.”
It was true. It had been true for a while. It was still strange to hear Mose say it out loud, admitting the secret they both already knew. “It makes things more important,” Filip said.
“If I think about it too much, I can’t do anything. I’m taking off a fastening clip, and I think what if I break it? We’re never going to get another one. What if I fuck it up, and it turns out we need it later on? For this to work, a million things have to go right. For it to fall apart, just one of them has to go wrong.”
Filip opened the bottle and took a drink. It wasn’t anything like gin, but it wasn’t bad. He wiped the mouth of the bottle on his sleeve and passed it over. Mose unlaced his hands to take it. Where he’d squeezed, there were marks in his skin. Filip watched his throat work as he drank. He wasn’t leaving much.
“One thing,” Mose said. “One thing wrong, and we all die. We’re all there is, and we all die. And no one even knows.”
“Could be worse.”
Mose’s gaze swam slowly upward until it found him. Outside, the rain had stopped and some of the local insects had started calling to each other with a sound like an air compressor going bad. Filip looked at him, and when he spoke, he felt like the cold in him was talking.
“What scares me, Mose. It isn’t fucking it up and dying. What if we fuck up, but we don’t die. What if we fuck it all up and live? We’re at the end of something, sure. Maybe we’re at the beginning of something too. Maybe we make a whole new world. A whole new planet like Earth used to be. Hundreds of generations. Billions of people, that all start here. And we fuck it up for them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What if we just go on like people always have? The same bullshit. Give the same bullies and liars power like we did before. Cut all the same corners. Put up with all the same hypocrites. Make everything here into more of the shit that got us here. That seems worse. For me? That’s worse.”
“I just want you to know I’m sorry for how I’ve been,” Mose said. He seemed confused by this new direction the conversation had taken. “I try to hold it together, but it all comes out anyway.”
“Everyone’s like that right now,” Filip said. “I’m sorry for how I’ve been too. For all of it.”
Mose started crying then. Not the wheezing, but slow, racking sobs. Filip went and sat beside him, one wet arm around Mose’s shoulder, and held him while the sorrow crested and fell away. He let Mose slide down onto the cot, pulled a blanket over the man, who was asleep almost at once. Filip rescued the liquor, put the lid back on, and left it on his own pillow like it was sleeping there.
He made one stop on the way to the maintenance barracks.
Jandro and his crew had two of the little prefab buildings near the western edge of the town. One was standard sleeping quarters with bunks stacked four high against the walls. The other had a few utility cots like Mose and Filip used and a lot of supply lockers. A little group was gathered outside the sleeping quarters in the light of half a dozen torches. Filip recognized the long metal shafts with spikes at the ends from the last time the monsters had come. The mat of oily moss burning at the end seemed like an improvement over what they’d had, though. The flame, longer-lived.
He counted ten people, most of them men, in the flickering light. Jandro, in a chair leaning back on two legs, had his back against the building. He was at the center like a king or a celebrity. Filip stepped into the light, and the conversation and laughter went silent. One of the people was Kofi, but the Belter didn’t acknowledge him. Fair enough. Filip didn’t know what he would have done if their places had been switched. Or, really, he did, and so he could forgive Kofi for his youth and cowardice. He also saw the two men who’d taken Leward’s cart. Their expressions were blank as snakes.
Jandro tilted his head. “Nagata,” he said. “You’re up past your bedtime, yeah?”
One of the others snickered, but Filip plastered on a little grin, like he was in on the joke. Like the little humiliations were shit he was willing to eat. He knew how to do that. One of the few useful lessons his father had taught him. “Guess so. I had some things on my mind.”
“Yeah?” Jandro let his chair come slowly down. Filip averted his eyes, showing his submission. The coldness in his chest was rage.
“About what she was saying,” Filip said. “Nami Veh. Community, you know? The good of the community.”
“I remember that part,” Jandro said.
“I thought I should clear the air.”
“You didn’t do anything to cross me. Maybe Alyn and Yuri got a little annoyed, though.”
Filip looked over to the two from the cart. “Hey, Alyn. Hey, Yuri.”
“Hey, subcontractor,” Yuri said. Jandro made a disapproving grunt, and Yuri looked away. Chastised.
“I just wanted to say—” Filip meant to apologize, but the coldness in his chest wouldn’t let him say those words. The lie of it was too big to fit through his throat. “I just wanted things to be right. I want things to be better than they were.”
The two glanced at Jandro, unconsciously seeking for what reaction they should have. It was all so familiar, Filip could almost see Cyn and Karal, Wings and Chuchu and Andrew. The ghosts of the war he’d fought and lost. The dead he’d turned his back to.
“Your boss tell you to come?” Jandro asked.
“Mose? No. I’m just… following my conscience. And, hey. Something else. Something to help, yeah?”
He took the little red box out of his pocket, sliding off the protective rubber sleeve as he did it. He held it out, careful not to touch the case and the power port at the same time. It was wider than his hand, but just by a little. Jandro frowned and pointed his chin at it. What is that?
“You remember how the slug thrower failed that night the monsters came? They had to cycle the capacitor.”
“That’s true,” Kofi said. “I heard him talking about it.”
“Okay,” Jandro said, but there was interest in his eyes. Now they were talking about when he’d been a hero. They were talking about killing. He liked that.
Filip held up the box with a grin. “This, though? This is a capacitor from the yeast tanks. Take a look.”
He tossed it gently, like he was passing a beer to a friend. Jandro caught it, turned it over. “I don’t know about this power grid shit, Nagata.”
“Open the back plate,” Filip said. “You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
Jandro steadied the box on his knee and pressed against the back plate with a palm. “What does this thing do?”
The discharge was as loud as a gunshot and as bright as lightning. Jandro drifted to the side, collapsing slowly in the light gravity. His thigh had popped open like an overcooked sausage, and his eyes were empty.
“It kills monsters,” Filip said, but no one was listening to him. They were all shouting and jumping to their feet. Filip turned and walked into the darkness. Jandro’s crew were so shocked and confused that he made it almost thirty meters before they caught him.
The improvised cell was dark and cold. He lay on the bare floor. Everything hurt. He was pretty sure that at least one of his ribs was cracked, and his left wrist was swollen badly. Whatever other damage the beating left, he’d have to wait to discover. For now, it was enough just to hurt.
He knew that day came from a little fault in a weld about a third of the way up the wall. A pinpoint of light that started fainter than the smallest star and grew slowly brighter until a tiny shaft of light pushed through. A pale dot no bigger than his thumbnail began its slow track across the floor. He watched it. The air tasted like dust.
Outside, there were occasionally voices. He recognized a few. Kofi. Mose. Nami Veh shouting in a way that wasn’t her usual style at all. He wondered if she was holding off a lynch mob. It seemed plausible.
The shaft of light came closer and closer to the wall, and then faded as the sun came overhead. Filip became aware of a growing thirst, but there wasn’t any water, so he tried to sleep instead. The most he could manage was a half doze disturbed by his aches. He’d lost all sense of time when the sound of a bolt being thrown roused him.
The door opened, light spilling in around Nami Veh’s silhouette. Filip tried to sit up, but his back had stiffened so badly that it took three tries.
The administration woman sat across from him. In the spill light from the next room, she looked both tired and resolute. An angel, come to pass sentence or grant absolution.
“Well, it took eighteen hours,” she said after a long pause, “but we lost him. You are now officially a murderer. What? Is that funny?”
“I don’t mean to laugh,” Filip said. “There’s some context that makes that… I didn’t mean to laugh.”
“What were you thinking?” The angel was gone. The façade of gentleness and kindness and professionalism was gone. It was almost like meeting her for the first time. The weary anger in the words was like the back of his own head, given voice.
“That it had to be done,” he said. “And no one else was going to do it.”
“It didn’t have to be done.”
“I’ve known men like Jandro. He showed you what he was. He showed all of us what he was. And he got away with it. There’s no law with a man like that. The town voted, but he was more important. And you bent. You failed. You let him do what he wanted, and there was never going to be a path back for him. When someone like that wins? He’d never stop pushing.”
“And so you decided that deserved a death sentence? You’re seeing the irony here, right?”
“There’s a difference,” Filip said. “You’re going to punish me. I’m going to answer for what I did.”
Nami Veh shook her head. “Oh, Jesus.”
“This is how it’s supposed to go. You do something wrong, and you’re supposed to pay for it. Supposed to suffer. That’s what keeps the Jandros from taking over everything all the time, just because they can.”
“So that’s your plan? Make yourself a martyr on the cross of the law? Am I supposed to thank you for that?”
“You don’t understand what men like him are.”
“Of course I do,” Nami Veh said. “Alejandro was a bully and narcissist. And more than a little sadistic too. And he was physically strong. And he was charismatic. And he was brave. He’d throw himself into danger without a second thought. Leward? He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’s a snob. He can’t ask you to pass him a fork without rubbing someone the wrong way. Adiyah will work double shifts and never complain for the rest of her life if you let her, and she’ll stir up romantic drama every chance she gets. Moses is a solid worker and emotional wreck. Merton is one of the most lovely, empathetic, kindhearted people I’ve ever met, and he’s already got a still set up in the biolab because he’s an alcoholic. We’re all like this. This is what humans are.”
“Jandro was different,” Filip said.
“And you,” she said, leaning over and putting her hand on his ankle. “You are a very experienced technician, with an irreplaceable wealth of knowledge and experience. You’re also desperate to be punished for something, and I don’t know why.”
“He would have taken over. You’d have lost control to him.”
“Maybe.”
“If I have to die for saving you from that, it’s all right.”
Nami Veh’s laugh was low and earthy and rueful. “Oh no. As my sainted mother would say, no easy way out for you. I’ve failed at a lot of things, but I won’t be the one who gives this settlement capital punishment. Can you walk?”
“Can I get some water first?”
Walking hurt badly when they started. His whole body was stiff, and when they got outside, he could see the bruising more clearly. All the others in the town lined the little almost-streets. Mose was there, looking dour. A clot of people in maintenance crew uniforms, standing together with hatred in their eyes. They didn’t follow, but they watched him pass. Filip tried to keep his back straight, to carry himself with some dignity. Nami Veh walked with him, ready to steady him if he needed it. He made a point not to.
Yesterday’s rain had left the ground slick with mud, but the sky was wide and clear now. Cloudless. Filip found himself expecting the crowd to do something. Cheer him or vent their rage. They stayed quiet, watching him go.
By the time they reached the wall at the edge of town, his joints were starting to loosen. His wrist had angry, shooting pains when he tried to turn it, but that was the worst. He didn’t complain. Nami Veh walked out the access gate between the plates that had once been the hull of a ship.
The southern valley rolled out before them. It was easy, staying inside the town, to forget how wide the valley was, and how full. Things that looked not entirely unlike trees rose along the banks of the river below them. A pack of long-legged animals somewhere between deer and huge spiders made their way to the west, following some trail he couldn’t see or else making their own. A pile of equipment lay in a circle where human boots had crushed the ground cover. Nami Veh walked to it and stopped.
“That’s an emergency blanket you can use for shelter,” she said, pointing to a tiny silver packet. “That’s a micro-solar array. It’ll power the yeast cylinder there. Moses said that the carbon fixation chamber is only good for about two years at best, so you should find something local that provides sugar if you can. Hopefully the device can make it nontoxic for you, but be careful eating new things.”
“Exile?”
“It’s the compromise I could make,” she said. “The maintenance team wanted you dead, no surprise. I think Leward would have given you a public stipend and housing. It was between incarcerating you in town or… This takes up fewer resources. It’s the best I could do.”
“It’s probably more than I deserve.”
“If anyone from maintenance sees you here in the next five years, they’ll probably just kill you, and I won’t be able to stop them. I think most of the rest of the town wouldn’t, but there are some that would, and you won’t know which is which. After that, if you’re still alive, you can come petition to be let back in. If we’ve survived that long.”
