Limiting Factor
“Not particularly experienced,” he said, as I came out of the fresher and asked about his experience with undercover work.
He too had got dressed in the same sort of cheap-but-gaudy attire, in his case an aping of the tight pants with broad-shouldered jackets that Simon’s circle wore—also made of plasticlike fabric in an unlikely sky-blue color. I noted that his gaze barely flicked over me, more as if verifying I’d done the job properly than with any prospective interest, no matter how remote. I wasn’t used to indifference. Not that I minded it.
“It’s just that I have some idea how to survive underground,” he said. He shrugged again. “The Good Man Simon St. Cyr picked me out of death row. Insurrection. Activities against the state.” He must have seen the expression on my face, as I was thinking these were strange qualifications to become the main chief of security to the Good Man. He grinned, a surprisingly attractive expression that made him look ten years younger, almost boyish. “Well, you see, his father had just become incapacitated and Simon—St. Cyr was replacing his father’s security force with his own, so that, well…so we’d be loyal to him.”
“And he was, of course, involved in rebellion himself. one of the Sans Culottes.”
Alexis nodded. I got the impression that there was something more he wanted to say, but when he spoke again, what he said was, “I got us broomer suits. Used. Cheap. Pray we don’t have to use them.”
“Why?” Broomer suits were the padded leather clothes one had to wear when riding the antigrav wands that were forbidden in most places on Earth, but which people still rode anyway—either as a safety measure to escape from a crashing vehicle, or when they were up to something they didn’t want the all-pervasive authorities of Earth to know about. Being illegal, brooms didn’t have built-in trackers that were on every other vehicle.
“Because if we have to use brooms it means that we already botched all sane escape plans.” He looked at me, as though he were upset that I hadn’t picked up on the subtleties of the situation. “They’re monitoring traffic. Patrols and…every other way, even possibly infrared. I don’t want to travel long distance on a broom, but we might not be able to use a flyer. Flyers are much easier to trace.”
“Are you sure we have to leave the seacity to look for help? Can’t we contrive a plan to rescue Simon on our own, if it’s so difficult to leave?”
It seemed to me the longer we took to fight back the more people would die. It was well and good for Brisbois to say Simon was too valuable to be killed, but, as far as people knew, his family had ruled the seacity for years. Fearing him had been a matter of survival. They might not feel free until they killed him. I vaguely remembered it had been like that in old France. The king had had to die.
For the first time he showed a normal human emotion: there was raw fear in his eyes. He put his ear to the door again, as though to confirm there was no one outside. He turned around to face me, and his broad, homely face looked pale and haggard. “I…you’re going to think I’m insane, but it looks to me like we’re in the middle of new Turmoils.”
“New—?”
“Turmoils,” he said. “With a capital T. Historical disturbances, when all the bioed people were killed!” he said. “In Liberte, at least.”
I stared. He had to be exaggerating. You see, unlike most people on Earth, I had seen images of the Turmoils. Most people on Earth had heard of them, but not in the detail we’d heard of them in Eden, partly, I thought, to hide the fact that after the Turmoils the Mules—now calling themselves Good Men and pretending to be completely non-bioenhanced—had climbed back into power. On Earth, the pictures, videos and holos of that time period were restricted or censored. On Eden they were mandatory viewing, because that was our genesis story, the reason our ancestors had left, the reason we kept our home secret from Earth and guarded it.
For a while, at the end of the twenty-first, the fate of everyone on Earth had been determined at birth. Either you were one of the enhanced ones or you were a serf, at best a working drone, at worst one of the myriad dependent on the state for charity.
And then it had broken.
In Eden we were taught it had gone wrong because the biorulers, the Mules, weren’t quite human. They were genetically human, mind. Made of human DNA. Yet they hadn’t been raised as people, but as instruments of the state. They had no loyalty to humans or the ways of humans. They had wreaked havoc on the Earth while purporting to improve it. They’d destroyed vast portions of the fauna and flora of the continents and ruthlessly moved populations around, reduced some populations, enhanced others. We’d been taught it had gone wrong because governments were too powerful. Because one person, whether bioed or not, could not decide best for multitudes.
But in any case, the results had been disastrous. The rebellion against the Mules was known as “The Turmoils,” capitalized, as though there had never been and there never would be worse disasters on Earth.
It had started as a hunt for the Mules left behind, but, as those proved elusive, it had expanded to a hunt for all the Mule servants left behind, and, finally, for anyone who was smarter, prettier, faster—anyone who could be bioed. In some places, they’d used gen readers to identify modified genes, but in most places beauty or competence were considered evidence enough.
Interestingly, but not unexpectedly, given the abilities they’d been endowed with, most of the Mules left behind had not only survived, they had gotten new identities and they’d thrived. They’d taken over. In the fullness of time they’d become the Good Men, Earth’s rulers under a regime that forbid bioenhancing and research, and concentrated on keeping the Earth as stable as possible. Having defeated the cloning stops in their genes, they’d also stayed in power. To keep up appearances, they had their brains transplanted into the bodies of their supposed sons, generation after generation and inheriting from themselves, to hold the Earth in an immutable grip.
Simon had escaped the fate of the other sons of Good Men, of becoming a body donor for his “father,” because his father had suffered a disabling accident before he could have the operation performed. Simon had figured out the system and what his fate would have been. I didn’t know if he’d become a rebel then, or if he’d been a rebel before. A few other sons of Good Men had escaped the brain-transfer, and were part of the Earth-wide revolution raging against the old regime. I’d met two of them: Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva and Jan Aldert Hans Reiner.
It was impossible there could be Turmoils in a world where most of the territory was still in the control of the Mules-by-another-name, still part of the regime that had given Earth a vaunted three-hundred-year-long stability. Wasn’t it? I backed up to sit on the bed. “What do you mean Turmoils? What would precipitate Turmoils?”
I couldn’t read him. I couldn’t tell if he was confused or upset, or if he felt sorry for me. It was all there, but what he said aloud was, “I think.” He swallowed. “I think it’s just as it was, and that they’re hunting down and killing anyone they believe is bioed. That was…the raid on the palace, the people surrounding the seacity. Not the Good Men, but the people, in the territories and in the other seacities. Most of the people here are administrators, so they think…”
“That they’re bioed?”
He nodded. “It was always a danger. The Sans Culottes, you know, want equality, so they swear allegiance to natural people, not to any state. And now they know the Good Man is not precisely of the people, not like the rest of us. And they whipped up a frenzy of maybe there are more. If the Mules lied and took over again, they might be all over.”
“How do they know?”
He made a gesture, like it was all up. “The Usaians,” he said, referring to the messianic cult that had modeled their revelations on the principles of the long-vanished country which used to occupy vast portions of North America, the same cult that was now firmly in control of Olympus seacity and its dependencies. “They broadcast—Their propaganda station—They broadcast the truth about the Good Men.”
I looked blankly at him for a moment. It had been part of the regime of the Good Men to prevent wide broadcasting and news reporting except by those licensed to do so. The technological stop for such activity was in Circum Terra. Simon and I had been part of an invading party that had taken control of the station and removed those controls.
“But how can that be in their interest?” I said. “Lucius Keeva, in Olympus, is as much of Mule stock as the rest of them, and he’s the face of the Usaian revolution.”
“Oh, they’ve convinced everyone he is different. He saved one of their own. Some act of heroism or other, all conveniently filmed.” He made a face, then a dismissive hand gesture. “The thing is, we have nothing like it. And it’s different, anyway. The Usaians want only equality under the law, but our movement was supposed to make everyone equal. Really equal.” He sounded almost desperate. “The law can’t make you really equal.”
A sarcastic voice at the back of my mind asked how they intended to perform this miracle, but I didn’t say it. He went on, “So, when they found out what Good Man St. Cyr was, he wasn’t an acceptable Protector. Some hotheads got to talking, out in Shangri-la, likely in some tavern or bar or diner, and they decided that he was just doing what they’d done before, the Mules becoming Good Men and some people, not quite hotheads, who had been plotting this for a long time, found the opportunity they needed to ignite a revolution only they have the power to control. A revolution far more destructive than we anticipated. The Good Man is caught in it, and—”
“And?”
He bowed his head. “We’ll need help. Don’t tell me you’re enhanced. The Mules were enhanced. But they fled or laid low until the madness of the crowds passed.”
“We can’t wait that long. Did they capture Simon?”
Alexis frowned. He looked puzzled or perhaps upset. When someone has a face that doesn’t owe much to beauty and which time has etched with wrinkles clearly due to frowning a lot, it’s hard to tell if they’re frowning or merely thinking. “Yes,” he said. “Or at least the word is that they’re trying to trade him to the Good Men, in exchange for a promise not to invade and not to pursue their vengeance against the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries hope to establish their own fiefdom here, with no interference. They’d rather reign in a tiny place than get in an enormous war they’d be sure to lose.” He took a deep breath. “The other people—The people at the palace…Most of them. Not all, but most of them…” He made a gesture with his hand. “Heads on stakes.”
There was a suppressed emotion. I thought the words were compromise words for what he’d really like to say. For “people at the palace” he most likely meant “my friends, my subordinates, everyone I knew.” For “heads on stakes,” “they were all killed.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
“We must go outside the seacity to find friends of the Patrician,” he said. “The people in Olympus owe him.” He stopped as though it had occurred to him such debts are often hard to collect and said, on a down note, “The Remys like him. They were children together. Or at least they were young together. Same broomers’ lair.”
This much was probably true. The Remys, retainers to the Good Man of Olympus, seemed to include Simon in their adventures and they had indeed been part of an illegal broomers’ lair together.
“But you said it’s turmoils against bioed people. It can’t be. There are no bioed people anymore. There haven’t been since the late twenty-first, right?”
“From my looks no one would ever suspect me of being bioed, right?” He shrugged. “But people knew me by sight, and someone might recognize me.” He looked up at me. “And you—Well, if they see you! I mean, you did a good job, but anyone who looks at you too intently…” He shrugged. “Bioed people escaped back in the Turmoils and a lot of those who served or serve the Good Men…the hereditary families, are bioimproved in some way. At least people say it’s obvious, looking at them. And their existence is an affront to equality. No one can be equal if some people were designed not to be.”
“But no one can be equal,” I said, and refrained from pointing out that if my readings of history were right, there had been enough variation before bioing. “How can they enforce everyone being equal? People are born different, too.”
He shrugged again. “Yes, but it’s not so obvious, or at least it’s not deliberate. It’s an act of God or fate or providence. Allons, that’s what they say, and so, anyone who worked for the Good Men, particularly those in hereditary positions, but even the others, too, were considered…suspect. And so…We must go. You and I can’t save anyone alone. Not against a whole seacity. If we try we’ll just end up dead. And we can’t find others, if there are still others, not without going back to the palace or chancing capture ourselves. And then the Good—the Protector will die for sure. But if we get help, we’ll have a chance.”
I hesitated. A chance. Just that. I wanted to say I could take on the whole seacity with my hands tied behind my back. But while I might be faster than any one person, stronger than any three people, I knew I was no match against five hundred thousand. “And so, what do we do? You got us in these outfits, and I agree we will pass at least cursory glance. So, we’re a not-very-well-off couple out for a night on the town, right?”
He bit his lower lip. “I have arranged for a car. Enfin, my service has…had resources. It is my hope,” he said, “that we leave the seacity and…go to the Good Man’s friends. Olympus. Olympus would work. They would know how to help me free him. And how to protect you.”
I understood without being told that it wasn’t even a matter of loyalty or of doing as he was told. No. Alexis was holding on to these orders as the one thing still giving structure to his life in a world gone suddenly insane. I didn’t say that having people working on protecting me made me feel like a coward.
“Once we’re out of the hotel—can we get out of this seacity?”
“If we look like them, if we say we’re going to Shangri-la, or…or something, to see my mother, yes, we can. I think. From what I saw and heard, at least, it won’t be easy, but it shouldn’t be impossible.”
“Your mother lives in Shangri-la?”
He shook his head, and who was I to ask him questions? After all, he might not want me to know where his family was. Why would he trust me? I was a stranger tossed into his lap. More or less literally.
“Once we’re out of the seacity, you’ll have discharged your duty.” I said. “I’m sure there is no large-scale hunting of those who might be bioed going on elsewhere. I’ll be safe. And then I might come back with the rescuing party.”