Who Goes There?
Alexis knew exactly where the transport was, and it must have been very carefully procured because it looked nothing like an official vehicle.
It certainly didn’t look like anything that the Good Man would own. Parked in a narrow, deserted street, the flyer was gray, battered, with cracks showing on its ceramite finish. It was the sort of vehicle a very young man or a very poor one could own. It opened at the touch of Alexis’s finger in the genlock. We’d come to the street through a network of back streets, past bars and diners, past repair shops and used clothing stores.
Through it all, I kept my ears open and stayed alert, not because I didn’t trust Alexis, but because I didn’t trust anyone, because I had need of making sure he hadn’t lied to me simply to remove me from the seacity; because I had to make sure he wasn’t betraying me, or, worse, betraying Simon.
What I heard confirmed Alexis’s appraisal of the situation. First of all, there was the smell. Have you ever smelled large-scale burning? I hadn’t. I came from a colony world. Eden existed inside a hollowed-out asteroid. If we burned anything much, it would play havoc with the atmosphere scrubbers. And yet, I knew when I smelled burning that it wasn’t the normal burning of a log in the fireplace or a campfire like the one that Simon had built on his land to show me what it looked like. No. This was a…the only way to describe it is “dirty smell” compounded of chemicals and seared flesh and other things not meant to be burned.
And then there were the sounds. Echoes of singing, that even at this distance, with no words audible, sounded angry. Explosions. The occasional scream. And laughter. The laughter was the worst.
So I tried to help Alexis pass, to make us go unnoticed, to help us escape. I’d put my arm through Alexis’s and tried to babble about what we were passing. I wasn’t sure this was right. Len and I hadn’t talked much in the end because, like all navigators and pilots from Eden, we had a bioengineered mind link to each other. And it was probably not the normal talk. He knew what I was and so did I. And we had mind-to-mind communication, a handy thing engineered into nav and cat pairs. So there had been no need for much talk.
But I leaned into Alexis and tried looking affectionate. Would a couple out for a day together talk about the disturbing events around them, or not? I didn’t. I talked of the dress and the weather, and an advertisement moving murkily on a shop window.
The scary thing about these streets was how quiet they were. Sounds came from other areas, but not here. I’d been here before, on normal evenings, and they’d been full of people. People on their way to work, people looking for a meal, people out with lovers or friends or relatives.
Now the streets spread out, empty, with closed shops on either side shining forlorn lights from the windows and their signs onto the pitted dimatough pavement. Even the eating establishments were closed. I wondered how many of the owners, how many of the residents in this unglamorous part of Liberte seacity were actually home, hiding behind their closed doors and their shuttered windows. And how many were elsewhere in the seacity? How many had been part of the mob that had taken over the palace?
Explosions illuminated our surroundings in sudden orange bursts. But as far as I could tell, the explosions, the action were all on other levels in the seacity, above or below, accessible only by stairways and the public elevators, if those were still running.
We found the battered gray flyer, and Alexis opened it without a word. Inside, it was very clean and smelled vaguely of lemon, but the seats were cracked, and the controls looked shopworn.
Instead of taking off directly from parking, he flew just a little above the surface down the network of streets, as though the flyer were a ground vehicle. He caught my puzzled glance and said, “If we take off, we will be shot down. The word is out that there is an area from which we can take off. The Revolutionary Guard is vetting everyone allowed off the seacity. Not that they…” He shrugged. “They want to be sure, you know, that no one escapes.”
The thought came through that he might just be intending to turn me in, to have me killed as the price of his escape. Still, I remembered Simon more or less throwing me at Alexis, and directing Alexis to keep me safe, the desperate note but also the absolute trust in Simon’s voice. Sometimes the best you can do is trust that others know what they’re doing.
We flew at near ground level all the way to an area that might have been a parking lot in happier days. Now, there were some charred hulls of flyers, obviously set on fire. I wondered what had happened to the occupants, and refused to look too closely, just in case they were still there.
There were also other flyers, like ours, with people inside them, forming an irregular line. Down each side of the line came young men armed with burners. They were wearing red Frisian caps. I didn’t wonder at it. It had been part of the paraphernalia of the Sans Culottes, and Simon himself had worn one when he declared his own reign over and the transition to the Tenth Republic initiated. But there was something to the way these young men wore it that implied they were more serious—or at least less careless—of all that those caps implied. Liberty caps. I knew from Eden the history of the revolution they were associated with. Not in detail. It was ancient history, after all, and I was not a historian. But enough to know that it had become a bloodbath. I clutched my hands on either side of my seat and held on.
One of the young men came to our window and bent to look through it at us—dark brown hair, gray eyes, a face that looked as though it had been smudged in an explosion, with a sort of sneer that might mean pride or fear. Or both. “What business do you have flying out?” he asked. His voice was raspy. “And who are you?”
“I’m Alexandre,” Alexis said. “Alexandre Borde. This is my friend, Madeleine Fabron. We’re—That is—” He looked equal parts confused, scared, and perhaps embarrassed. “My mother is scared. In Shangri-la. She was on the com to me, and she’s scared. We’re flying back to stay with her.”
The young man’s lip curled upward. “You’re from Shangri-la?”
“Yeah,” Alexis said. “I work there, at the Debussy café. I’m the cook.”
The young man looked over at me. “Madeleine is the waitress there,” Alexis said. I realized that the light over the passenger seat was broken and wondered if he’d meant it that way. Then I told myself, of course he meant it that way. I was not in the hands of a casual conspirator. His words I was on death row for revolutionary activities came back to me, and I wondered what those activities had been. Had he tried to overthrow the government of the Good Men? Had it all been propaganda and the distribution of pamphlets against their rule? Or had it been something more material? I had heard it was possible to get killed simply for disagreeing with them, but I didn’t know if that was true.
The young man sneered at me, and made a comment—fast and in archaic French—at Alexis, who looked startled then said, “Eh,” and shrugged. “She is a pretty one, but not that kind of girl.”
I thought he’d seen enough of me to think I looked too pretty. We’d aroused suspicion. From the other side, far away on the left, was the sound of a burner zapping, and then an explosion and screams. Our inspector barely lifted his head. “Stupid,” he said. “But they will try to escape, those improved ones.”
I realized my heart was pounding. Pounding so fast I was afraid he’d hear it.
He looked at us again. “Where in Shangri-la does your mother live?”
Where do our decisions come from?
I’d never even been in a firefight before. I had fought duels—most people in Eden do, growing up—but they had been bare hands or, on one memorable occasion, daggers. I won’t say I’d never thought of killing someone. I had. When I thought my life was in danger. But I’d never actually pulled the trigger. Except the once, with Len. But that had been different.
Now, there was no time to think—no time to run through the consequences of my actions. I saw the young man reach for a com at his belt, and I moved with the super speed that had been originally engineered into the man whose genes I carried. I took out the burner, set it on cutting beam, leaned past Alexis. I ran the beam clear through our questioner’s heart before he could react. I punched the takeoff button on the flyer on the way to leaning back in my seat.
I still don’t know why we weren’t shot out of the air. Unless it were because we were up in the air and flying fast by the time the young man in the liberty cap even fell. Plus, I’d used the cutting feature, not the fire one, so they might not even know he was dead, until they got close enough to him to see the blood. And by then we were well away, up in the air.
My last view of Liberte seacity as we took off was a smoldering ruin where the wedding cake-topper palace had been. It looked charred and black, like the skeleton of an ancient beast rising out of the dimatough base of the seacity.
We were slammed against the seat by the force of the takeoff. Burner rays spent themselves in our wake. Alexis got pushed back in his seat with a wide-eyed look in his eyes.
I felt like I had an elephant on my chest. But being stronger than normal people has its uses. I reached over and pressed the leveling button. Then I brought up the map, blindly, and punched remembered coordinates in. Olympus. As Alexis had said, Simon had friends there. Simon and I had helped them when they needed, and now was their turn. And I would see they followed through, if need be.
Alexis took a deep breath. He looked at me. I had shot a man in front of him, with very little provocation. I expected horror in his eyes, but there was only a sort of wondering look. “They will follow us,” he said.
“It will take them time to get in flyers and find us,” I said. “And they might not want to leave the seacity. By now word of what is going on out there must be on the coms. They’ll fear reprisals.”
Alexis took a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “Reprisals from whom?”
Again, where do our certainties and our actions come from? I hadn’t thought before I shot, but now I knew why I’d shot, and also why we hadn’t been killed yet. And I knew where the danger would come from for those running riot in Liberte. “Everyone, I should think,” I said. “Including the old Good Men, or do you think they’ll welcome a repeat of the Turmoils?”
Alexis nodded. “Why did you shoot him?” He didn’t ask me how I’d known the coordinates to set a course for Olympus, nor did he change it. Instead, he checked my settings, and made minor alterations. I realized he was changing it so we didn’t pass over areas currently controlled by the Good Man regime, and mostly kept us over Usaian-controlled areas. The question about the shooting was asked in a curious tone, too. I thought that most people—not that I understood much about most people, of course—would be shocked, or worried, or perhaps outraged at my killing someone. Instead, his question was wondering…like the question someone would ask in a classroom. Interested, not immediately pressing.
“He was suspicious,” I said. “And he was reaching for the com at his waist. He’d have called Shangri-la, and probably given the alarm before he did. We’d have been surrounded and watched while he called to confirm our story. I figured if I killed him before he gave alarm…”
He raised an eyebrow, gave me another sidelong glance, and then was quiet. After a while, flying over the ocean, he said, “Was this the first person you killed?”
I shook my head, not wanting to explain about Len. I suppose it wasn’t that hard to explain. We’d got attacked while trying to harvest powerpods in Earth’s orbit, and he’d got a full shot of radiation. We didn’t have anything aboard to cure radiation poisoning, not that extensive. So I’d given him the coup de grace, and limped back to Eden. But there were complications to the events.
Later I’d learned that, in the same situation, Kit—whom I suppose I could call my brother, the man made from the same genes that had created me—had instead taken his radiation-poisoned wife to Earth, and got her treated.
I knew the situations were not the same. Athena Hera Sinistra, Kit’s wife, was, like me, the female clone of a Mule. But her “father” was the Good Man of Syracuse on Earth, and his willingness to do anything to cure her had made her treatment a foregone conclusion. Even then, escaping afterwards had been almost impossible. Len and I had no one on Earth. Even getting someone’s attention would have taken longer than that, and chances were we’d both have gotten killed out of hand. And I might have been captured and tortured for the location of Eden. But what if? What if instead of killing him, I’d refused to concede? What if I’d done the crazy thing and flown to Earth? Would he still be alive today? I closed my eyes.
“Uh,” my companion said.
I opened my eyes. “And you?” I said. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
He lifted his hand to his square face, and smoothed it down over the myriad little wrinkles as though of frowns past. He looked very tired. “Dozens of people.”
Which I suppose made sense, right? He’d been head of security. It would involve neutralizing threats to the Good Man, right?
So why did his answer make me feel uneasy? Surely I hadn’t taken him for an innocent lamb? What use would an innocent lamb be to me right now?
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Alexis, for given values of trusting him. Simon had flung me into his arms with instructions to keep me safe. And he had. So far. And I didn’t think he was going to break his oath to Simon. Not really. And Simon might be slippery, but he did like me, and had been kind to me.
But Alexis had killed dozens of people. Really?
At any rate, soon I’d be in Olympus seacity and safe.