Against the Fall of Night
They’d equipped me, as well as they could. I had a suit that was adequate, and, for broomback wear, a padded broomer suit, much, much better than what Alexis had procured for us. Which was good, because I had to fly long distance across the ocean on a broom of the tiny sort, that could be clipped on a belt, and had no saddle or other comforts.
The clothes were all treated in such a way that they would dry very quickly if wet, would repel dirt, would not weigh me down unduly.
They tried to prepare me for all sorts of eventualities. My boots were equally supple and likely to stay dry, and infinitely more sturdy than the palace slippers I’d been wearing.
They also gave me a first aid kit that fit in an envelope, a special pouch to carry my currency under my clothes in such a way that I could not be pickpocketed and weapons. A couple of good knives, two burners that, like the suits, would take anything short of being set on fire, and I wasn’t sure about that.
And then Martha had seen me off, to an area from which I could take off without being noticed. She’d grabbed my arm again—it was a habit—and looked up at me and said, “I wish I could go with you,” she said. “I’d feel more confident that you would survive this, if I could. But Luce would have my hide.”
“How much does he really know of all this?” I asked.
She smiled a little. “Nothing, of course. He’s supposed to know nothing. He can’t be involved. But if I weren’t here, it would be noticed, and he would have to know something. He’d never forgive me.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t. It seemed to me there were more games being played than I was prepared to even understand, much less participate in. One advantage of having been raised as something apart from normal humans was that I’d never been involved in the sort of politics human friendships seemed to demand. Even in the small group of bioengineered pilots and navigators of the darkships, I’d stayed aloof from power plays, from guilt-inducement, from demands on me. The downside was that I’d also never experienced friendship. Love, surely, with Len, but Len was different.
Martha sighed. “It’s very difficult,” she said. “It’s almost impossible to balance the demands of our debt and our relationship to Simon, and the demands to our people and to those who have pledged themselves to our side of the revolution. We can’t put those fighting on our side in unnecessary danger. But then neither can we let Simon simply die.” She looked up at me, her intent and intense look reminding me of her twin, whom most people were scared of. “So we must count on you. You’re all we have. It’s a long shot, but perhaps you can do it. Perhaps you can bring Simon back alive.”
“I will try,” I said, feeling more doubtful of it than I had before.
She nodded, and clasped my arm for a moment. “Good luck.”
And then I’d flown off. I could remember the way. It is one of the things that was enhanced in me, beyond my genetic origins. Navigators, in Eden, were endowed with a sense of direction and a feeling for repairing machinery—not knowledge of it, precisely, possibly because, as Royce said, no one had figured out how to do that, and more likely, because technology could change in the twenty or thirty years a navigator operated, and if you created people for a certain technology, they wouldn’t be able to adapt. Instead, we were given the natural talents that would make it easy for us to understand and repair machinery, with very little preparation: a look at it, a tale about how it worked.
So I knew my way to Liberte. And I’d been given some of the intelligence that Olympus had: a notion of what was going on; an idea of what and whom to avoid. It wasn’t very reliable because, as Martha had told me, it would change from moment to moment. I was to avoid someone named Dechausse, someone referred to as Madame, and I was to stay away from certain areas.
What was going on was, in a word, chaos. It was not clear whether anyone had seized leadership of the mob yet. It was unlikely from what they knew that anyone had. The mob—or rather mobs, several of them, running rampant through the city—didn’t seem to be pursuing any unified objective or even to have any unified ideology, beyond ridding the world of anyone who might possibly be genetically enhanced.
My first mission was to avoid anyone who might be preventing outsiders coming in. This wasn’t exactly as difficult as might be believed. Most people at the moment couldn’t be paid enough to come into Liberte seacity. Even the few stories I’d heard in the public cast at Olympus, while eating a hasty dinner, had spoken of people killed, heads on stakes, general mayhem and torture, with the psychopaths that exist everywhere and everywhen in control of the situation and running the show.
Liberte was worried about people coming in, taking over, and stopping their revolution. They neither worried about nor organized against a single individual on a broom. What they feared was armies. The armies of the Good Men; the forces from other seacities; organized fighting men.
I might be organized, but I was a single woman, and no one would be on the lookout for me. At least, not unless I triggered their feeling that I was in some way enhanced.
So I had to land without being seen. I had to move about the seacity without arousing suspicion. And then I had to find where Simon was kept, and somehow to free him and leave the seacity with him. This involved finding out who was in control, to the extent that there was some control.
Look, I said it was chaos and it was, and the way most people were experiencing the revolution would be clashing crowds of people fighting back and forth and looting. It was the disorganization of a society that had lived for centuries under a repressive order and which had now been allowed to slip its bonds.
Without an overarching authority, without their guardians which had always prevented them from doing anything illegal or even rude, the people were doing what they very well pleased and came into their heads. Or a small number of them were, and the others were locked in their houses, possibly praying the confusion would pass them by.
But from what Martha had told me, there had to be others who were organized and someone in control of them. Probably someone left over from the old Sans Culottes hierarchy. There had to be someone in control because Simon had been taken and was held, something that would be impossible in mere chaos.
If the unorganized mob had captured him, he’d have been beheaded. Or if he escaped that fate, he’d also have escaped altogether. For him to be a prisoner, there had to be an organized enough force to keep him, an organized enough force to have a leader.
Who that leader was, and what that force looked like, or how many men strong, we didn’t know and couldn’t know. Not until I got to Liberte and looked around.
They’d told me he was kept in a prison beneath the palace, where apparently the Good Men—or, since they’d all been one man, whose brain periodically got transplanted to younger clones, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say the Good Man, St. Cyr—had kept secret prisoners for centuries. It was near impregnable and probably very well guarded. The Good Man was an asset not to let go lightly and the people in charge were smart enough to remain both invisible and in control.
They probably expected an attack on the prison and were prepared to defend it.
No one had given me instructions on how to breach that prison. No one had given me instructions on how to free Simon. I suspected they didn’t know how. At any rate, I didn’t know how either. My general plan was to find my way there, to free him, and then—somehow—to find my way out again.
Details were vague because the circumstances would change. Really change, I guessed, depending on what I found on the ground.
My first view of the seacity made me afraid of what I would find. As we’d flown off, the palace had looked charred, but now it looked like the whole seacity was on fire. Fires glowed all over, like orange wounds in the dark blue-green of the seacity. Not bonfires, but blazes that engulfed buildings.
Closer in, I could hear sounds of singing and shouts, and screams, explosions, and the roaring of the fires. The whole place seemed to be awake and restless, animated by something between a party and a massacre.
I should have landed in one of the areas at the edge of the seacity, possibly in the lower levels, the sort of semi-peopled, darkened area like the beach from which Martha had opened the tunnel into Keeva’s room. I should.
I’d had it in my mind to do just that: land somewhere away from human habitation and from any roaming murderous crowds.
And then I realized my subconscious had made a different decision. I flew closer to the center, looking for a place near the palace to land, a place that was relatively deserted. This forced me to hover over the heads of the crowd, just far enough away that I didn’t risk—too much—being seen. From the air what this revolution looked like was a looting party. I saw more people carrying as much as their arms allowed than people unburdened by possessions, or people actively hurting someone else.
But then it occurred to me to wonder if I was looking at looters or refugees. If the homes of the better-off citizens of Liberte had been broken into as the palace had, and they had time to escape, would they not leave, carrying what they could?
For whichever motive, the night was full of people running here and there, talking in whispers, carrying possessions in arms—as well as singing revolutionary songs, and attacking anyone who looked bioimproved.
The air over the seacity was relatively calm, possibly because of the habit of burning down anyone who tried to take off.
I got the impression of other brooms, one headed away from me, and one towards me, but they were too far away for me to even be sure of the impression, much less definite about who they were and where they were, and what they looked like.
And then I spotted a space. It was behind a burned structure, and it looked like whoever had been involved in the drama of destroying it had long gone. If there had been inhabitants of the place, who’d taken off in a hurry, they were far away. And whoever had set fire to it had long ago left, too, of necessity.
All that was left was a vast ruin, with a soaring front wall, made of dimatough, looking like a wing beating at the sky. There was a smell of burned building, which is not like the smell of burned anything else, containing, as it usually does, the scent of materials not meant to be burned. It felt acrid and unpleasant to the nose, and something crunched underfoot as I landed.
I clipped the broom—one of the little cylindrical models, with no saddle, and painful enough to ride across the ocean—to my belt, and crunched my way, cautiously, around the outside of the burnt walls. The palace was above me, and I had two choices to get there. One was to go through the roads, and perhaps come across parties of people. Royce Allard had—he thought, and I hoped—made me unremarkable in a crowd, but it still might not be the brightest thing in the world, as an unescorted woman, to meet a party of people animated by looting and inspired by a sense of righteous envy of those better off.
Yeah, I am faster, stronger, smarter. One of the things you learn early on, when you’re endowed with all of those attributes, but are also a woman, is not to lead those not as fast or as smart or as strong into temptation. You don’t present yourself as a likely and easy target, because that will just cause them to attack you and get hurt.
Likely I could take on any small party of marauders and survive. But in the scale of things, mere looters seemed almost blameless, and fighting them a waste of my abilities. And besides, it would attract attention, and if it attracted attention, it could attract a larger group of people. Even my abilities were no match against a sufficiently large party.
So instead of going through the paths that led to the palace, I decided to take the route through Simon’s vast, well-manicured lawns.
The strange thing is that they were still well manicured. If one managed not to smell the fire that had taken half the palace, or to look up at the desolate ruin, one would think, from the lawn alone, that nothing untoward had happened.
Here, while the seacity burned and people killed each other, or robbed armfuls of whatever they’d coveted, the lawn was soft, cool and deep underfoot, the trees were looming, dark and green and fragrant above, casting deeper shadows where the moonlight filtered through their branches. Here, small things ran scurrying in the undergrowth as I passed.
As I went around a tree, close to the shadow, my eyes and ears open to any sign that there were humans, hostile or not, nearby, a hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm.
I had a moment to think it was Martha, but the moment didn’t last because the hand was larger and much stronger, and before I could turn to see who had grabbed me, he—had to be a he—had turned me around so that his arm went around my body, holding me fast, preventing me from moving, and his hand had covered my mouth, preventing any sound.
There is only one thing you can do in this situation, and I drew my head back, preparing to do it, preparing to hit out with my head at the nose and mouth of my captor. It’s not ideal, mind you. You will feel concussed and a bit dizzy. But a man whose nose you’ve just shoved in with your head will be in no position to take advantage of that. At best, he’ll have had his nose pushed into his brain case and will be dead. At worst, he’ll be bleeding profusely and blinded by pain.
I’d judged this man to be taller than I. It’s not one of those things you think about, it’s one of those things you feel, from the relative position of his hands and mine. It would need a little jump to hit him in the face, but it could be done. Yes, even with him holding me. After all, I was faster and stronger than even the males of the species.
Making sure my plans weren’t betrayed, not even by a sudden tenseness of muscles, I slammed my foot down into the ground, to propel me up, and threw my head back at the same time and—
And hit nothing, overbalancing. My captor had stepped back away from me, and now spun me around, all without letting go of my mouth, and letting go of my arm only as I was starting to fall, then grabbing my other arm, and saying, “Shh.”
Dazed, I looked up and into the homely countenance of Alexis Brisbois.
He said again, “Shh.” And then pulled me back with him into the shadow of a tree and put a hand across my middle, keeping me still. He’d let go of my mouth, and I wanted to speak, but before I could even figure out what to say, I heard approaching footsteps, and voices that weren’t trying to be quiet at all.
The words were in the curious patois of Liberte, and I didn’t understand them immediately, but the conditioning at the back of my mind understood them. They were talking about killing someone or other, in the tone of someone who had played a prank of some sort. There was neither remorse nor fear in the voices that sounded both male and young as they walked past. They looked male and young, too, two of them possibly juveniles, the other three probably early twenties. They also sounded drunk, or perhaps high.
I let their voices recede away from us, out of hearing distance, then their footsteps. I know I have a more acute sense of hearing than a normal person. I waited till I couldn’t hear them, which meant they couldn’t hear me, and then I said, as low as I could, “What do you mean by this? Why did you grab me?”
He shook his head. His features remained as hard to read as ever. When he answered it was in the same voice I’d employed. Almost soundless. “Remember the orders I was given. I’m supposed to keep you safe.” He made a face somewhere between disgust and anger. “It’s probably not possible now.”
I opened my mouth, but he shook his head. “Don’t. Not now. Let me try to get us to a safe place. But first you might want to take off your suit, and hide it.”
“Why?”
“Same reason I hid mine,” he said. “It’s too good, too expensive, too likely to cause someone to stop us and rob us. You can’t want that, any more than I do. I’ll hide it here, on the grounds. It’s unlikely anyone is going to comb the grounds tree by tree, unless they have reason to think they’ll find the Good Man in one, and they don’t.”
It took me a moment, but I obeyed. There didn’t seem to be anything to gain in defying him. I doubted that he wanted to get me out of my broomer suit and steal it, or something of the sort. For one, it wouldn’t fit him. For another I had a feeling I was in the presence of one of the most honorable men I’d ever met. I felt a reliance, a trust in him that didn’t make any sense. Perhaps, I told myself, it was only that I trusted him because Simon trusted him. Simon didn’t strike me as an idiot. And neither was I to come to rely on this man so much in such a short acquaintance.
So I removed my suit and gave it to him. He disappeared with it, around the tree, and I followed. He skirted close to a clump of tall, overgrown bushes, and then near another tree. Between tree and bush, into a dark area, he thrust the suit. Then he turned, and nodded, seeming not at all surprised to see me so near.
He extended his hand to me. “We shall be a happy couple, again,” he said.
“A happy couple in this?” I asked.
“What, you think there aren’t any?” he asked. “People might be scared and shaken, worried for their possessions, and unsure of what the future will bring, but I warrant you that they’ll also be excited and interested, and, not least of all, grateful that their normal work and duties have been interrupted, and happy that they can take the time off to be together.”
It was probably true, but it didn’t make it any more pleasant.
It was a strange situation. I didn’t know Alexis or trust him. But I knew one thing for certain, he was supposed to protect me. What part of that also meant that he was supposed to keep me from doing anything I might want to do, I didn’t know. I was very much afraid that he thought the two were sides of the same coin. And I couldn’t allow that. You see, I intended to rescue Simon.
Yes, it would be dangerous, and it was unlikely, and no one would hold it against me if I had refused to do it.
But he had given me shelter and he’d accepted me with no condition and no demur. It was not honorable nor decent for me to abandon him to his fate. And while I might not have been brought up to love or friendship, I had been brought up to honor and duty.
I put my hand forward, and let Alexis Brisbois grasp it. His hand was cold and calloused. He held me close, all the way back from the lawn to a path. We walked down it, meeting groups of people who didn’t give us more than a passing glance. So far at least, the disguise they’d given me was working.