Empathy

by Ryan A. Span

“When I was just a boy,” Mahmoud boomed, “my father used to tell me tales of the great men in my family line. He told me of their heroism, their patriotism, their sense of duty or honour. They were flawed men, as all men have flaws, but my father taught me to appreciate their memory for the good they did, not the bad. As we should appreciate all men for the good they do.

  “My father told me a lot of crap like that while I was growing up,” he continued, and grinned as a little laugh rippled through the crowd. “It was not his fault, truly. The stories were important to him, told to him by his own father, who heard them from his father, and so on. Like family heirlooms passed down the generations. They gave him a link to the past, to a simpler life where our people were free as birds and did as they pleased wherever they pleased. He once asked me if I wished him to write his stories down, but I said no. It was the telling that made them special. So now I give you a story of my own father, Djalil Omar Kerensky.

  “You will not find this name in any history book or epic poem. My father was one of those men whose lives are never written down, but who make you know how much less the world would be if they had not existed, and he too had his brushes with heroism in the days when the Recommunist revolution came to Ukraine. But let me begin at the beginning.”

  “Djalil was born in the middle of a thunderstorm on the Black Sea, aboard a fishing boat called Son of the Wind. His father was the ship’s steersman, my grandfather. My grandmother, though big with child, had insisted on joining her husband for the journey so that they might be together when the child was born. The ship’s doctor could not dissuade her. So Djalil Omar entered the world amidst crashing lightning and ten-metre waves, a healthy baby boy named in the tradition of my grandmother’s Muslim family.

  “He grew up aboard Son of the Wind, learning the ways of the sea from all the people aboard. When Djalil was fifteen years old, the ship’s captain died of pneumonia. Leaving no sons of his own, the captain passed his ship to my grandfather. That was when things began to change.

  “Word of the underground Recommunist movement reached Odessa when my father was eighteen. At first he heard stories of non-violent protest marches against the Russian government, against their inability to lift the terrible poverty gripping the country, even though their politicians lived fat and easy off the proletariat’s taxes. At the time, however, the revolution was far away and my father could do little but wish them well.

  “The marches slowly spread throughout Russia, ever larger and more numerous. Even people in the Ukraine started to grumble about their own lot. The Russian government attempted to stop the marches by deploying armed police, which would finally give Djalil the impulse he needed, when those same police gunned down a column of unarmed protesters in Saint Petersburg. To my father, who grew up with stories of ancestors who lived during the October revolution, it was as if the Tsarists had returned. He would not stand for it. He called up the fishermen of Odessa and started to march, as did many others elsewhere, rising up in the hundreds of thousands all across Russia and Ukraine and Belarus.

  “He was soon recruited into one of the Russian Recommunist groups, spreading pamphlets about the government’s crimes on both sides of the border. He was arrested several times during marches and pamphlet drops, and spent weeks in a cell in Kiev, but in the end he was always released without charge. He always told me that it was because the police did not want their stations under siege.

  “Djalil often took to the streets with a megaphone, calling for people to vote for the political opposition. It worked. Opposition parties everywhere were set to take both countries by storm. Then the joint governments of Russia and Ukraine suspended elections. Again my father was in the thick of it, speaking for the revolution and the Recommunista, until even the army began to turn against the government. The Recommunista simply looked like a better option, promising leadership and prosperity through cooperation and joint work. The government tried harder and harder to suppress it, but more and more soldiers declared their support for the revolution as things grew more violent. In the end, Djalil knew they could wait no longer, and urged his group to act.

  “With his help they made a plan to infiltrate the Kremlin, aided by the army, planning to depose the government without firing a shot.”

  Mahmoud observed the crowd again, which was getting noisy and restless, and he sensed that their patience wouldn’t last much longer unless he got to the point. He nodded to himself.

  “Djalil Omar was part of the group that went into the Kremlin. Army guards turned a blind eye to him, some even helped to surround and block all the entrances and exits of the palace buildings. When Djalil gave the signal, they marched in on the government in session. The Prime Minister, President, everyone of importance was there and could not escape.

  “Due to his gift for speech, Djalil made the Recommunista’s statement to the assembled officials, and himself placed the Deputy Prime Minister under citizen’s arrest. Then it fell to him and his compatriots to pick up the rule of two great nations. They set out to implement their reforms as they had promised, and my father was part of the initial debates, always pushing for the rights of the poor.

  “However, homesickness took its toll, and he soon became frustrated with politics and his own lack of education compared to the other Recommunistas. After only a few days my father left Moscow again to return here. To his ship and his family, to honest work and honest people, to the sea and the bounty it brings us. To a simpler, better life.”

  “A toast!” someone shouted from the crowd. “To a simpler, better life!” The crowd boomed their approval and drank, then gave Mahmoud a roar of applause.

  Gina found herself clapping as well, without even realising it. The story had drawn her in so deeply that she had lost all track of herself. It seemed like Mahmoud had inherited his family’s speaking skills -- or maybe it was just because of all the vodka boiling in her stomach. Her head started to spin, and she steadied herself against the sand.

  When the quiet returned, Mahmoud said, “My father never spoke of his involvement with the revolution. Not even to me. The story was told to me by one of my uncles, and I have read enough to satisfy myself that it is true. That is why Djalil Omar Kerensky is worthy of a place among my honoured ancestors, and why he is my father.”

  Mahmoud finished in a solemn tone and lowered his head. A respectful silence fell, until Mahmoud looked up again and raised his glass. They all drank in complete quiet, with Gina following their example, and then sprang up again to continue the party. The musicians resumed their playing and Mahmoud headed over to the tables to get something to eat. She raised her bottle to him when he glanced over to where she sat, and he responded with a smile.

  The mother of all headaches pounded in Gina’s skull, like a giant hammering on some great drum inside her brain. She moaned, but even the act of moaning hurt. So did moving, breathing, thinking, and pretty much everything else under the sun. She tried to keep as much blanket as possible between her eyes and the painful sunlight peeking through the porthole, the very thing that had woken her up in the first place. It was white and bright and horrible and she wanted it to go away.

  What on Earth was I drinking last night? she asked herself despite the pain, but the whole evening had become a blur in her memory. ‘Something pretty strong’ seemed like the obvious answer. She’d drunk herself silly plenty of times in the past, but never in her life had she experienced a morning as bad as this.

  For a moment she thought she heard someone speak, and grunted at them to shut up. She was in a foul mood and didn’t want to do anything except lie around in perfect peace and quiet until the hangover went away. This demanded absolute silence from everyone else on board.

  On board? she thought, then remembered she was on a ship. How had her situation changed so much in just a few days? It seemed like an eternity since she’d taken the job that landed her in all this trouble, and ever since she’d been running for her life, with Bomber -- an ex-army soldier for hire wi
th a pretty twisted past -- as her constant companion and only friend. She wondered where he could be, what he might be doing, if he were still alive...

  Jock and Rat might be able to answer that question if she could only get back in touch with them. They were some of Bomber’s acquaintances that Gina had met and come to like along the way. Well, she liked Rat, anyway. Jock was still a royal asshole and she still owed him a punch in the mouth.

  God, sighed Gina, it’d be good to see their faces again. A sense of cold loneliness overcame her. Unfortunately the ‘Net seemed pretty far away from where she was now. Some VR linkups had to exist in Odessa, but they might as well be a million miles away. At the moment she couldn’t even afford a minute in a public booth.

  More voices, louder now. Again she called out for them to shut up. Her brain throbbed as if trying to violently burst out of her head, and the talking just made it worse. Being hung over was a lot like taking a hit of the telepathy drug, ‘Spice’ or ‘third eye’, in that your thoughts turned to mush and you were often overcome with the futile desire to stop all your senses from working.

  “What’s the point?” someone asked. The voice was clearly in the same room, but muffled, tinny as if distorted by a bad recording. Gina opened her eyes to look, but found no one.

  “Who’s there?” she asked. No response. She became aware of her increasing light-headedness, as if floating further and further away from her body. Sighing, she replaced her face on the pillow and tried once more to block everything out. Great, more hallucinations, just what I needed. As if I wasn’t loopy enough already.

  Even with her hands covering her ears, she could hear the voice speaking again, warbling at the edge of her hearing. “You’re wasting your time,” it said. Gina couldn’t place the voice, someone she didn’t know, only one voice amidst the growing susurrus in her head.

  “Are you talking to me?” she asked, but got only silence in return. It seemed the answer to that was a firm and unequivocal ‘no’. For a long time she heard no sound at all, and she couldn’t help worrying about what was going on with her. Hallucinations might actually be the more benign explanation, when the truth could be so much worse.

  Somewhere in this mad adventure, being in contact with Gabriel and his impossible telepathic abilities, Gina had started to develop some weird talents of her own. They came and went, but at times she could read people’s minds without taking any Spice at all. Feel their thoughts, see through their eyes, even make them do things against their wills. It was scary and wrong and shouldn’t be possible but it was undeniably happening. A tiny part of her had held out hope that the fever might’ve killed it off. More realistically, however, she doubted she’d ever be so lucky.

  She recalled the short time she’d spent on Gabriel’s airship. Sleeping with Gabriel probably hadn’t been her best idea ever, but at the time it seemed inevitable. But she’d also kissed Bomber, and she’d be lying if she said there hadn’t been any feeling behind it. Boy, was that ever a bad love triangle to be in. Bomber, whom she had last glimpsed through the door of a falling lifeboat, lunging at Gabriel in a misguided attempt to protect her. Knowing full well that Gabriel could kill him with a thought.

  It might not have been all self-sacrifice, knowing the immense, bottled-up rage in Bomber’s heart, but it was still a pretty shocking gesture. Gina sighed. She missed him. She missed him more than anything, and she hated the spark of hope she couldn’t push down which kept saying that, against all odds, he could’ve survived. Somewhere, somehow. Maybe.

  Futile, she thought, kicking herself. She should stop thinking about Bomber and everything to do with him. But it wasn’t fair. She didn’t deserve to be alone again...

  “She’s gone, accept it,” the voice echoed. “You’re hardly in any shape to--”

  Suddenly another voice gonged through her head, deeper than the first, and her heart leapt into her throat when she recognised the rolling southern American accent. Her eyes saw two different rooms at the same time, a simple ship’s cabin superimposed over a small square hotel room, pink floral-script logos stamped on every piece of decoration, a blurry but familiar face staring at itself through a mirror, a thick coat of stubble growing on its chin.

  It snapped, “Enough! I’m sick and tired of hearin’ you moan. I don’t give a damn how much time it takes, how much money it’s gonna cost, any of that bullshit. I’m gonna find her.”

  The voices continued, but Gina couldn’t make anything out after that. Her trembling hands were covering her face, wet with tears, and her whole body shook against the pillows.

  He was alive! The thought screamed joyfully through her veins. But it was followed by a bitter aftertaste, one that made her eyes sting fresh and painful.

  If Bomber still lived, then the whole mess wasn’t finished. As long as they were both breathing, neither would stop -- not Gabriel and certainly not Bomber -- until the other was dead. Never mind the mysteries of the burnt city and Gabriel’s strange ‘Hephaestus’ nanobots, both of which still plagued Gina.

  The same old storm seemed about to swallow her up again, and the relative peace she’d found here in Odessa would be nothing more than the eye of the hurricane.

  She bit back the rest of her tears and swung her legs out of the hammock. It was past time she took control of her situation. Forcing some clarity into her muddled brain, she pulled on some clothes and went off in search of Mahmoud.