TYRANNICAL AUTHORITY
TYRANNICAL AUTHORITY
“I want him to die screaming,” I said. It wasn’t for the first time.
Katherine—Kath—Denovo gave me a sideways glance, but didn’t comment, because she knew I wasn’t referring to her little brother, but to Blondie.
Kath had picked me up, in her family flyer, which smelled of candy and had dolls and toy flyers hidden in the crevices of the seats. Right now something was poking at my backside. I suspected it was the outstretched, burner wielding hand of a plastic figurine. I had no clue how many children Kath had, and I suspected that Kit was hazy on it.
In a culture where most gestation took place in bio wombs, which one could pay professionals to tend, I sometimes suspected the parents themselves forgot exactly how many children they had. I knew Kath’s eldest, a Cat named Waldron, had just got married and started doing powerpod runs. But I suspected a couple of the toddlers that ran around the compound where Kit’s whole family lived—benevolently watched over by his father, Jean—were also hers.
Kath looked nothing like Kit. This made sense, when you realized he’d been adopted in utero and was no biological relation. Of course, they both had Cat eyes, hers in dark blue. She now lowered her eyelids halfway as she drove unerringly through the confusion of traffic in Eden Center, where flyers crisscrossed at all altitudes and in every possible path.
I confess that when I’d first come to Eden, I was horrified that they had no traffic regulations at all, no beacons tracking altitude, no enforcement of any kind. Of course, how could they have those when they didn’t have anything resembling authority? But still, I expected that they’d have accidents every three seconds. I’d swear that we barely escaped being smashed into about ten times on any run through Center. But it turned out accidents were very rare. Kit said it was because other people were actively trying not to hit us or be hit by us.
So, I knew this, mentally. But I couldn’t make my gut believe it. Going through the chaos of Eden Center felt like it should be lethal and I had trouble nerving myself to fly it. But Kath and Kit could do it without even giving it full attention.
Kath seemed to be deep in thought, though not about driving, something that happened more or less automatically, as her hands tapped lightly on the controls as we dipped and soared. I suppose once you drive a powerpod collection ship through the explosive coils of the powertree ring, driving through Eden is child’s play. “I agree with you,” she said, “on his dying screaming, but perhaps it is actually impossible to strangle a man with that part of his anatomy.” She gave me a sheepish look. “I don’t think it has enough elasticity.”
I tried to smile, but it wouldn’t quite gel. I made myself clasp my knees, instead of balling my hands into fists, but I suspected my fingers were leaving marks on my knees through the fabric of my pants. “What is his name?” I asked.
“Who? The president of the Energy Board?” she asked.
“Is that who Blondie is?”
A fleeting smile, while she brought us out of the traffic, and took one of the side streets. No. One of the side tunnels, only it didn’t look like it, because the tunnel was broad and showed neatly planted gardens and plots on either side of the road. Each of the gardens and plots would hide an entrance tunnel. Eden’s houses were always dug down or into the raw rock of the asteroid, from the tunnels that served as streets. Made logical sense, in an environment where rain and leakage were no danger.
Above, the stone was masked by a convincing holographic rendition of a sky with fluffy clouds. It turned out humans reacted better to that than to being enclosed in rock. “I like Blondie as a name for him, though it might give the impression he’ll be easy to defeat. He won’t. There’s poured dimatough under the patrician good looks.”
“I gathered,” I said drily.
“His name is Fergus Castaneda,” Kath said. “And his family have been members of the Energy Board for as long as Eden has been Eden, though usually in minor positions. He’s the first Castaneda to be president of the board.”
I absorbed this. It made a certain sense. Perhaps his resemblance to Caesar wasn’t simply external. When you ask why people do things and your only answer is “money,” you miss that more people want power than money. To many people, power is an aphrodisiac that money could never be. In fact, to many, if not most people, money is a way to power, not the other way around.
“I still want him to die screaming,” I said, sullenly.
“But only after he screams a long, long time,” Kath agreed dreamily. She drove down the street, turned into another street, which brought us to the profuse and spacious garden that covered the Denovo compound.
This idea of gardens covering the entire plot, with the house underneath, had puzzled me when I’d first come to Eden. It shouldn’t have. Underground houses have never quite taken on Earth for two reasons: first, because humans prefer natural light if they can get it; and second, because even with the most high-tech materials, it was truly impossible to make anything underground completely proof against the inevitable leaks. Construction on Earth was, ultimately, bound by the dictum that water flows downhill.
On Eden, water didn’t flow anywhere unless you paid for it to flow. Everything was underground—or everything above ground, however you chose to look at it—since everyone lived inside an asteroid and sunlight could be piped in anywhere. That meant that everyone lived at various levels. There was no reason to have the house at street level. So, most people didn’t. They burrowed under the plot—real estate contracts were for cubic space, not linear—and left a garden or a pasture or an orchard above.
We opened the door artfully concealed by rose bushes and went down a staircase enclosed in walls with niches, where fragrant plants grew. Entering the Denovo house involved going through a riot of smells, a symphony of perfume. Most of the time, just coming home made me feel better. Not this time.
Despite what Kit had said, about this being the safest alternative, it didn’t make it a safe alternative. He’d never said he’d be perfectly fine. That was because he couldn’t be sure, and my darling hated to lie.
It all felt wrong. I loved the Denovos, who had taken me into their family as if it were perfectly normal for one’s son to bring home barely controlled human wrecking balls born and raised on Earth. But they were Kit’s family before they were mine. And he should be here with me, when I came back. The fact he wasn’t was at least partly my fault.
At the end of the entrance tunnel opened a small hall, which led into a much larger hall. The Denovo compound didn’t look like any normal house on Earth. It was closer to a public park—with an even carpet of grass underneath, plants everywhere, and even the occasional statue. Though they had sofas and chairs in other rooms, in the public areas people mostly flopped down to the grass floor, children and adults alike, reclining to eat or to work. Little robots I called “turtles” roamed around picking any object left out of place and cleaning it or returning it to where it was supposed to be.
I was never sure that what was underfoot was really grass. It felt like it: cool, soft and alive. I was sure on the alive part, because Kit had once made a comment that any crumbs dropped or even skin cells sloughed off would get eaten by the floor covering. But, unlike grass, the carpet didn’t seem to grow on dirt, but on some cushiony surface that gave and adapted under one’s weight. And it never needed mowing.
This time, the entire Denovo family, or at least all the adults, were crammed into the tiny front hall to receive me. There was Kit’s eldest sister, Anne, old enough to be his mother, who was a navigator by bioengineering and profession. Next to her was her husband, Bruno, a tall, olive-skinned man, with dark brown Cat eyes.
Then there was Kath’s Navigator Eber, a man so well grounded, so thoroughly calm and self-contained that people often wondered—sometimes even in Kath’s hearing—why she didn’t roll over him and completely silence him. But she didn’t. I’d known them now long enough to realize there was a fund of extreme stubbornness in Eber that was a perfect match for Kath’s more ebullient forcefulness.
Standing just behind him were Kit’s parents. Jean—his name was pronounced Je-ahn in the ancient French way and routinely butchered by strangers—looked a lot like an older, male version of Kath, but was one of those people who always gave the impression of being quietly sure of themselves. So quietly sure that they didn’t need to project outward, or make a big fuss out of anything.
Not implying that he was smug. He wasn’t. He was attentive to his surroundings and to his family and always sure of the course to follow. I’d been shocked when Kit had first told me that Jean had raised most of the children on his own, while his wife did water runs to Proxima and Ultima Thule. Most, because I understood that early on they’d simply taken Anne on their runs for powerpods. It was only after they had retired that Jean had decided to stay behind and make a stable home for the children and grandchildren while his wife preferred to make the long lonely-but-lucrative runs for the Water Board, after her vision had aged enough to make powerpod collecting runs to Earth orbit dangerous.
In retrospect, it was silly to be surprised that a man chose to or could be the care taker for his children. The biowombs had freed men too, because when women could do whatever they wanted to, so could men. Most women still raised their children, but no stigma attached to the husband choosing to do it.
Tania, Kit’s mother, would have made an awful care-taking parent. She loved her children, even Kit, the non-biological one. But I suspected her attempts at keeping house and organizing family would have fallen apart between boredom with her task and finding something more interesting to do.
That she looked subdued and worried right then was a bad sign. That all the Denovos were at home was another very bad sign. In a household of Cats and Navs, who traveled for a living, this was a very rare occurrence, made more ominous as Waldron, Kath’s eldest, came from the inner room, bringing his wife, Jennie, with him. If even the younger generation was home, something was wrong, beyond what had just happened to Kit.
I stared around myself at a circle of eyes, half of them normal, the other half feline-looking. They all shimmered with tears.
Suddenly Anne grabbed my arm and hugged me. Next thing I knew I was being hugged by the entire family.
I started to explain that this was all my fault. It would never have occurred to Kit to ask for Earth help, if I hadn’t got myself stupidly burned. It would never have occurred to anyone in the Energy Board to arrest him if he hadn’t stopped on Earth to get me help. So the trouble Kit was in was all my fault, and I hadn’t even managed to prevent his being arrested.
“Shush, now,” Jean said. “That’s nonsense, and I suspect you know it as well as we do. First of all, I think they have…other motives, and could have found another excuse, or done the thing in a way that would have been far more…permanent. As it is, they’ve practically played into our hands. Judicial murder is the most difficult form of murder on Eden. It has constraints, while other forms of murder don’t.”
I looked around at a circle of nodding people, and started to wonder if insanity ran in my family-in-law.