A Mother's Unreason

by Andy Graham

  Stella sank to her knees, buried her face in the pirate costume and wept.

  She wasn’t sure how long she had cried for, nor at what point she had fallen asleep, but when she woke, she was curled into a fetal position around a pillow that still smelt of Dan, her husband.

  Stella stretched the sleep out of her back and guzzled down a glass of tap water. After the desalinated salt water she had been living off in the sea towers for the last few months, this water tasted . . . well, not quite wet enough. As she drained the last drops, the florid handwriting in Rose’s letter floated in front of her eyes.

  Stella gagged. The water spluttered out of her mouth. It spouted through her nostrils. Her nose burned. Water swirled down the plughole. She reached out a trembling hand. The water was icy cold.

  “Surely the government schemes wouldn’t involve contaminating the water supply, too?”

  It would be an easy thing to do in the Gates, harder to achieve in the Buckets. “Not the Buckets,” she whispered, “the Free Towns.” Even now after all this time spent with people from the Free Towns, the constant exposure to the term made it hard for her to call the Bucket Towns anything other than that. “You’re being stupid, Stella. Poisoning the water supply is a ridiculous idea. Injections would be much easier to administer and track.”

  Her office was exactly as she had left it, not even any dust on the desk screen. Her husband would have kept that clean for her. He claimed he dusted so much for his asthma; both knew that he was quietly (and proudly) more domesticated than she could ever hope to be.

  From her window, the cadaverous buildings that had once been the Palaces of Justice and Reason loomed tall on the north bank of the river. “‘The seat of one of the oldest parliaments in the world’.” She murmured the words that Ms Edney had drilled into her at primary school as regularly as sunrise. “‘We had fair rule of law and a flourishing democracy while most people across the world were defecating at the back of the caves they lived in, and settling disputes with rocks and nooses.’”

  Ms Edney had been a spindly old stork — made up of a series of geometric shapes stacked on top of each other, perpetually on the verge of collapsing. Stella had been the schoolgirl who’d refused to wear her hair in bunches. The girl who had gone dressed as a dragon on fancy-dress day when all the other little girls were dressed as princesses. Her parents had received a note, written on real paper, warning them for encouraging subversive thoughts. Her father had wanted to frame it. Her mother had burned it.

  Now, looking at the stone sloughing off the oldest seat of democracy in the world like flesh being boiled off a bone, her teacher’s words had a different resonance. Edney had force-fed her students lessons they were required to regurgitate in the exams. Exams that started at age two, when kids should still be rolling in mud, not learning how to spell it. Edney had only made passing mention of the Silk Revolution. But even then, Stella had asked why the people of Ailan had rebelled if they had been happy with their lot as part of such a noble democratic tradition.

  “Because most people don’t know how good they have it,” had come the answer. Edney hadn’t made any mention of the hypocrisy of enforcing democracy on fledgling nations whose people hadn’t asked for it. Young kids being handed the keys to a shiny new nuclear submarine they had no idea how to drive. “You can’t watch your neighbours beating their children and not intervene, that would be immoral.” Edney’s desiccated voice rustled through the room.

  “I don’t like my neighbours,” Stella had said (having refused to take off her dragon costume that day). “They’re always screaming at each other and they never smile, but they’re dead clever and can count to a million. I’ve never seen them playing, though. Their dad’s bigger and stronger than my dad, their mum, too. But they’re mean. Apparently, he shot someone.” (This had been met with wide-eyed coos of fear, wonder, “cool!” and childlike incomprehension.) “With a gun. A real one. It had bullets in it this big.” (She had held up her hands and stretched them so hard her fingers had tingled.) “What if my neighbour’s dad decides we have to do what he wants?”

  The answer, according to Ms Edney, was too complicated for her pupil to understand. Stella’s questions had cost her two weeks’ playground time.

  She squinted across the River Tenns, shielding her eyes. The city was too dark, the rotating brownouts fading to black. The moons were blossoming over the river, staining the rippling water a rusty purple. Her eyes tracked back to the crumbling palaces where the limestone was off-yellow and pitted.

  The colours were wrong. Her flat felt odd. The city was grimier than it ever had been. There were more police than before her enforced disappearance. Many of the officers were patrolling alongside grim-faced legionnaires. The latter’s tinted visors matching the mirrored shades favoured by their civilian partners.

  She could feel her desk screen, what the Resistance still called computers, watching her. That machine knew almost every secret about her, except the ones she had whispered to her husband, and the buried ones everyone kept out of the light. The screen had provided her with the answer about Ray Franklin’s history: the twin brother he’d never know. She’d used her privileged access codes as a medical researcher to dial up information about the camp Rhys Franklin had been kept in, the camp where her ex, Phoebus Donaghue, had worked and Lenka Zemlicka had died. Camp X517, where they had attempted to reverse engineer right-handers from left and recreate genetic disorders that now existed only in old medical manuals.

  “If I’d kept my nose out of Ray Franklin’s affairs, I’d still have a family to make my flat a home. Had I stayed out of the Kickshaw that night, or at least kept my wedding ring on, then none of this would have happened.” She wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Enough. Get a move on. Do what your dad would have done: learn from your mistakes, frame them, don’t let them frame you.”

  She tapped a fingernail on the glass of the screen. Would her old access codes and passwords still work? Could she find information on Dan and her son Jake? The government tracked every internet search, even keystrokes at times, in the name of security, but surely this was worth it? She could try and find info to back up what Rose’s letter had spelt out. Was she curious on behalf of the cause she had been dropped into, as a revulsed parent, or purely out of medical curiosity? It wasn’t her area of expertise. But even with her limited knowledge of genetics and retroviral solutions, it was theoretically possible. “It would be easy to administer, too,” she said, trying to fill the silence around her, “just slip the dose into the annual vaccination schedule. Everyone trusts a doctor, right?”

  She’d powered up the screen before she realised what she was doing.

  “Why not?” a voice said in her mind’s ear. “What are you going to lose now that you already haven’t?”

  “Playtime,” came Ms Edney’s dusty response. “With your kids.”

  Stella typed in her password.

  Nothing. Just the government access portal to the internet that blocked her medical access codes. That wasn’t a surprise. Official passwords were known to be revoked even while you were still on a green light.

  She tried her research codes.

  “Welcome to Stat-Net,” “Dr Stella Swann. We are here to enhance your research experience.”

  “I don’t believe it. It works.”

  The tinny computer voice that had grated on her nerves so often was now a welcome sound. It rambled on with a list of protocols, what-if situations and disclaimers. The desk screen hissed and popped its way through the final stanzas of its inflectionless speech. “Please select a category or archive to continue.”

  Where did she start?

  “Eugenics.”

  Nothing.

  Stella typed again, mouthing the words as she did.

  “Genetic. Population. Control. Post Silk Revolution.”

  This time, there was the germ of a thread to be followed.

  She sat motionless, hunchbacked over her des
k screen and keyboard, trawling through the search results. Behind her, the twin moons, Lesau and Melesau, rose high in the sky, framing Stella’s body in split moon shadows that stretched along the floor, up the walls and kissed the ceiling of her small office.

  32

  It’s All About Stories

  Rose left the preoccupied Lynn huddled in a secretive conversation with Martinez. She made her way to Melesau Tower, strode up to the guards at the front, announced herself and told them the president would want to see her.

  They sent her away.

  She told them she was expected.

  They ignored her.

  She took names.

  A series of whispered radio calls later, she was rushed into a private elevator. They gave her a cursory pat down — while she tried to ignore her heart thumping underneath her skin — but missed her gun. The snub-nosed pistol felt like a rock, its handle pressing into her arm pit. The stone-eyed legionnaires watched as the doors slid closed.

  “No, we’re not coming with you,” they replied to her question. “We know exactly where you’re going.”

  The lift was not much larger than a twin-sized coffin. The only break in the walls was a small bronze grill at head height. Rose got the impression there were eyes behind it, watchers in the lift shaft. Apart from the faint sinking feeling in her stomach as the lift started moving, she wouldn’t have known she was “ascending into hell”. The lift only had two buttons, down and up. At up, Rose stepped into the president’s private office.

  It was panelled with dark, heavy wood from the wolfbark trees that made up much of the Weeping Woods. Lights hung from thick burnished iron crosses that jutted from the walls. On a desk, next to an antique phone, stood two mugs. Steam rose from them, writhing up to the ceiling in spirals. Next to them was a stack of papers and manila envelopes. Inlaid into the parquet floor was an eternal knot. The whole effect, Rose decided, was that of a steampunk submarine, not the private office of the most powerful woman in Ailan.

  “Person,” she corrected herself, “not woman, person.” Despite the many faults Bethina had, and Rose wanted the woman to have, she would give credit where it was due. Bethina Laudanum’s drive for equality blazed with the intensity of the Hallowtide bonfires that lit up the Free Towns once a year.

  Bethina was pacing on the balcony, talking on the phone. The words were hidden by the thick glass doors. From the angular stabbing gestures she was making, Rose didn’t think it was a pleasant conversation. Rose clasped her hands behind her back and waited. The only hint of the seething fury she held back was the rapid tick of a vessel on her temple. After just enough time for her temper to reach that point where it would either fade or flare, a blast of cold air and noise flooded the room.

  Bethina Laudanum, pristine in her white suit, held out a hand. “My apologies for the delay. I hope you don’t think I was playing games. You and I should be beyond that by now.”

  “It had occurred to me that your delay was deliberate.”

  “Has it also occurred to you that my pre-emptive denial of the game-playing is an extension of that game, conspiracies within conspiracies?” Beth sighed. “Sometimes my cynicism wearies even me.

  “Cynicism means survival. I learnt that from you.”

  “So does victory, Rose. And most people will do anything to survive.”

  One terse handshake later, they were sitting on opposite ends of a worn leather sofa. Each woman held one of the mugs of tea that had been on the desk. They clutched them in front of their chests. Almost like shields, Rose thought. Maybe Bethina’s as nervous as I am. That made her feel slightly better. It didn’t, however, dampen her rage. Beth was watching her over the lip of the mug. Her cold blue eyes patient. Damn you, woman. Enough of your games. There were so many questions burning to get out, Rose let them come as they would. Maybe one would unsettle Bethina. “Is it true the VP killed David?”

  “Yes, your eldest son killed his father.” The woman’s voice had less emotion than an answer phone message.

  “You loved David, didn’t you?” Rose asked.

  “You mean before you slept with him?”

  Rose felt her cheeks colouring. Beth smiled. Rose was expecting it to be vindictive or gloating. It was neither. If anything it was tender, possibly regretful.

  “Did I love him?” Beth could have been speaking to herself. “Almost.” Her voice picked up. “But there was only one man I really loved. There was a time when I would have crawled naked through the seven levels of hell to bring him back. You know who I mean, don’t you?”

  “My father,” Rose said, teeth gritted.

  “Yes, I loved your father. I . . .” Beth faltered. “I tried to save Rick.”

  “You tried to steal him from my mother. You ripped my parents apart.”

  “I tried to save him. And you. I promised Rick I would look after you.” Her voice steadied, the momentary waver gone. She matched Rose’s stare, blue eyes meeting brown. “But that’s not why you agreed to come here, is it? You could have come to me to discuss this at any point since the Silk Revolution.”

  “I was five when that happened.”

  “Don’t be pedantic.” Rose’s pulse spiked. “You know what I mean. This visit concerns something else.”

  “Your vice president—”

  “Who is your eldest son, as I recall.”

  “The son you stole from me and his father, and rehomed like a dog.”

  “I didn’t steal your son. You and I both know that. You were given a choice, weren’t you?”

  Rose felt the blood drain from her face. She pulled her mug — her shield — tight to her chest. Beyond the windows, the Folly Tree rustled in the night.

  Bethina’s voice was soft. “You and I are both fighting for the same thing: peace and equality. We are just looking at different sides of the same coin, a coin bent by all the good-meaning attempts at enforcing peace.”

  Different sides of the same coin. Beth’s words echoed back in Rose’s head. She’d heard them from the same woman many years ago, in the room under the former hospital. She shuffled on her seat, suddenly feeling awkward and ungainly. Her legs were going numb. Her back ached. Just like they had the last time the women had met. It’s not real, she told herself. They’re just memories of old pains, long forgotten. Your mind’s playing tricks on you. She’s playing tricks on you! Her hands shook. Steaming hot tea spilled over her fingers. Rose barely felt it.

  “I do not see where you fit into this fight for peace, Laudanum.”

  Bethina Laudanum, the woman who had dragged herself from poverty to the presidency, knew exactly where she fitted into this. She squeezed her eyes shut. Being so close to Rose was bringing her last promise to Rose’s father struggling and spitting to the forefront of her mind, to the point that it was hard to think.

  Once more, she and Rick Franklin were alone in the converted laundry van. It was just before he was smuggled out of Effrea to the mines. Underneath the scent of gun oil that had always lingered around him, the van stank of soap and sweat and blood. Beth stroked the wedding burn marks around his wrists. He showed her the bent coin that De Lette had tossed him. He smiled. Tears ran down her cheeks. She looked up into his eyes. They melted and became replicas of that bloody coin.

  Beth blinked.

  She wanted to tell Rose this, to fill in some of the gaps in the Franklin family history for Rick’s sake. But at this time, through habit, spite, jealousy, or just plain irritation, she decided to make Rose Franklin wait.

  Rose slammed her cup down next to her feet. Tea slopped over the china rim onto the floor. “Are you going to answer me?” What is wrong with the woman?

  “I have always done what I thought was best for the future of the nation and the world,” Beth said. “I always have. I always will. I had to let Rick go during the Silk Revolution. Edward De Lette would have sent me to the mines, too, had I not. If that had happened, my hopes for Ailan would have been buried alongside us.”

  “Is that what yo
u told my father? The man you profess to have loved so much?”

  Beth’s fingers tightened on her mug. “Amongst other things, yes.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what those other things are?”

  Beth’s head tilted to one side, a quizzical smile on her lips. “Would you?”

  Rose felt the heat rising in her cheeks.

  “Nor do I think you’re here purely on Dr Swann’s behalf,” Bethina said. “So tell me—”

  “Did you follow us to the Kickshaw or is the place bugged?” Rose gave herself a mental kick. That was the question she should have asked first.

  “If you had my resources, what would you do?”

  The answer was instant. “Both.”

  “We are more intimately linked than you dare think, Rose Franklin.”

  This time, Rose wasn’t sure if the other woman’s expression was smug or satisfied.

  “I know Dr Swann’s in the city. You and your rebels could try and extract her family without the great risk of your coming here. So I ask again, what is the reason for this personal visit?”

  “I know what you’ve been doing, Laudanum.”

  “Please, Rose, call me Beth. We’re practically family, in more ways than you can imagine.”

  “What?”

  Beth held up a finger. “You will, however, have to be a little more specific. The last time I saw you face-to-face was almost twenty-nine years ago. The time before that, as you just stated, you were only five. That’s a lot of years to try and cover. My guessing at the specific wrong of mine that you are referring to would be like trying to find a needlefish in the ocean.”

  “I know what you and your dictatorship have done to me, my family, and the devil only knows who else.”