Kismet

by Watts Martin

  Gail leans forward. “Panorica’s pretty good for totemics, but I travel a lot. Anywhere I go about half the time the chairs will suck if you have a tail, the sound system will have a weird buzz cisforms can’t hear, hotels will only have water-based showers and handheld dryers, and if you say anything people get huffy about ‘special treatment.’”

  “Oh, that I’ve experienced. I mean, a little. I spent a week on Ferran visiting friends, and strangers would come up and—and just touch me, and ask all sorts of personal questions. My friends couldn’t understand why I didn’t like it. ‘Oh, I guess you get that all the time. You must be used to it, right?’” She shakes her head. “The hotel made me put down extra deposits in case I ‘damaged’ anything and charged me extra for housekeeping every day.” The litany ends, and she takes a sip of the Aerospike. “This drink’s really good.”

  “Ansel knows his alcohol.” So Nevada has only been a totemic for a few years, Ansel’s been one most of his life but remembers being cisform, and for practical purposes she’s never been anything but. Does that make these little humiliations easier for Nevada, or harder? She’s had less time to accumulate grudges, but less time to build up resistance. And the memory of what life’s like without facing them remains sharper and brighter. “So you wanted to talk about what I was going to say in class and make sure I wasn’t going to embarrass you, right? I hope I haven’t made you come far out of your way.”

  Nevada waves her free hand. “Travis and I live on the east side, so it’s not too far. And I haven’t seen you in years until yesterday. I’d hoped Travis would come out, too, but he’s on call tonight.” She lowers her voice, and grins impishly. “I think he’s worried you’ll get nervous if you’re around both of us together.”

  “Why—what, because he was my first crush? We’ve both been past that for a long time, I promise.” God, he’s past it too, right?

  But the vixen just laughs. “I know. I’m not worried. But you’ve been close to both of us at different times.”

  Ansel’s ears come forward. Gail stifles a sigh. “Yeah, but you and I weren’t dating.”

  “No, but you know I had a hell of a crush on you.” She laughs again, more sheepishly.

  Gail smiles back. It’s weirdly relieving to hear Nevada confess that out loud. Sussing out romantic intent has always been one of her blind spots. Intents like Adrian’s, those are easy: hey, that cute young guy is up for sex with a middle-aged woman! It’s when someone wants to go deeper than that she hits a brick wall. With—well, with Linda—she wasn’t absolutely sure.

  Maybe she didn’t really want to be sure, though. If Linda had been Nevada then, would she maybe have been more open? God, is she really that shallow? Linda was cute. Nevada is hot. Okay, yes, apparently she’s that shallow. “I kinda guessed, yeah. But I was pretty set on not settling down. So, uh, I’m not going to make things awkward by trying to be friends with both of you now, right?”

  Nevada laughs. “No.” She takes another sip of her cocktail, then folds her hands on the table. “But instead of making us both feel embarrassed, I wanted to tell you about the class you’ll be speaking to tomorrow morning, and answer any questions you might have.” Her cadence shifts as she speaks, hitting the conversational-but-instructive tone Gail remembers from nearly all her teachers.

  Ansel stares again. “You’re bringing in Gail to talk to your class? About what?”

  “About her mother, about the RTEA. About—well, about what we were talking about just a few minutes ago.”

  “You learn about activist groups in school here?”

  “We teach the history of totemics. By fourth stage they’ve already learned about Mara, about the symbology she was striving for, about the Ranger movement that grew up around her. And about the Purity counter-movement and her assassination.”

  “We learned that on Arelia, but it was just a class or two. I don’t think we were even tested on it.”

  Nevada looks down. “We learned all of it on Solera, but we learned it differently.”

  His ears flag.

  “So.” Back to Gail. “The presentation’s going to be to the fourth stage students, mostly in second and third year. They’ve learned a little about the RTEA and about your mother, but to them this is all kind of ancient history.”

  “Ancient? The Solera bombing was barely twenty years ago.”

  “Twenty-one, so seven or eight years before most of them were born. At that age, that seems ancient.” Nevada laughs. “And remember, most of them were born here, with a totemic majority population, and might never have been off the Ring.”

  “Fine, it’s ancient. I’ll bring a cane to wave around.” She rolls her eyes. “Anyway, so I’ll come in and talk about my mother and how she got involved with the Equality Association. As crazy as it might sound, I’ve been studying for this.”

  Nevada smiles warmly. “Don’t let this be too stressful. I know you weren’t ever involved with the RTEA yourself.”

  “I was, kind of. I mean, I went to meetings with mom, and sometimes protests. I understood what was going on.” Why does this make her bristly? “But, I mean, yeah, I know you want history, not, like, a call to action. But what if they ask about me? What if they have questions?”

  “Answer them.” The vixen pats her hand. “You can always say you don’t know, or don’t have the answer, or that it’s too personal.”

  “Any tips?”

  “Just try and be entertaining.”

  “You’re losing an audience if they’re looking around and coughing.” Ansel tilts his head. “Is Sky coming with you?” His tone makes the question into Sky’s coming with you, right?

  “No, she’s going to be really busy tomorrow morning, remember?”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  She takes a sip from her drink and half-smiles. “That’s not a confidence-building question.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” He waves a hand. “Sky has more background in what the RTEA is doing now—at least, I’m guessing she does—but I think you’ll be a hell of a public speaker.”

  Really? She’s heard that twice in as many days. If it was true, she’d have been able to sell her bank on unlocking her account, or Dani on letting her skate by without unlocking her bank account. “I don’t know why people think that.”

  “Because we know you.” Nevada grins. “I think you’d make a good teacher.”

  “A teacher.” Oh, come on. The vixen might as well say she would make a good concert pianist.

  Ansel strokes his chin. “Hmm.”

  Gail downs the rest of the martini.

  Chapter 18

  Nevada’s staring at her with embarrassingly open admiration. “Gail, you look beautiful.”

  “Thanks.” After agonizing over her clothes this morning—casual but not too casual, colorful but maybe not so space bum—she thought about her mother’s clothes that Sky had saved, the ones she’d refused to take, and rifled through them. Finally she’d settled on a moss green dress, short-sleeved and dyed with batik. After she’d put it on she’d thought it looked ridiculous, but Sky had told her she’d looked stunning, too.

  As she follows Nevada into the school, the panic she’d predicted when they spoke last night doesn’t hit her quite as hard as she’d feared. But isn’t this school bigger than the one she went to? Bigger and nicer: rich mahogany walls, colorful (if scuffed) flooring, a woodsy-floral scent that makes her think more of hiking than it does of young teens in need of baths.

  “So this is just fourth and fifth stage students? Mine had all the stages.”

  Nevada nods. “This is one of six upper schools around New Coyoacán, and there are ten lower schools. We try to get about three hundred students per school now.” They enter the building through a small foyer, clearly not the students’ entrance, and head right into a teachers’ lounge.

  Two other teachers—she guesses—sit in the lounge, a stout white tigress with short-cropped head fur and a partial cat transform who looks just enough
like Adrian to make her think inappropriate thoughts. They look up as she and Nevada enter. “Gail, this is Tabitha,” she gestures at the tigress, “and this is Enrique.”

  Gail waves. “Hey.”

  Tabitha’s already standing. She looks like she’s come to attention, eyes wide, expression nervous, like she’s meeting a star. Oh, God. “Ms. Simmons. It’s an honor.”

  No. Just no. Don’t start that. “Just Gail. Please.”

  Enrique stands, too. “Nice to meet you, Gail.”

  “It’s nice to meet both of you, too. So, uh, Nevada warned you that I don’t have a prepared speech, right? People keep telling me I’m good at extemporaneous talk, but I think that’s—” No, not an appropriate word for school, ratface. “Uh, overly generous.”

  “That’s fine. Just talk about you. Your mother. The River Totemic Equality Association.” Tabitha’s words tumble out so fast they barely stay in the correct order.

  Enrique smiles. “Just introduce yourself and tell them why they might be interested in you, and let them lead the conversation.”

  “Really? Uh, can they?”

  Nevada waves a hand. “They’re teenagers. Couldn’t you lead a conversation with an adult when you were that age?”

  “Does sulking in your room and shouting go away at your sister before you turn up your music count as conversation?”

  Enrique laughs and walks toward an interior door, motioning Gail to follow.

  Well, she signed up for it, and compared to her last week it can’t be too difficult. She follows the catboy (oh, God, he is a boy, isn’t he, she might be a full decade older than he is, is he even qualified to teach these kids) down the hallway. She peeks into a room of fifteen or sixteen older students clustered in small groups, poking at holographic displays together. That part hasn’t changed much since her day, at least. The displays might be higher quality.

  They turn a corner and step through a set of double doors—manual ones, propped open with rubber doorstops. The space beyond is much larger than she’d expected. Tables fill about two-thirds of it; the other third, the third she’s stepped into, has cushiony plastic seat-mats rolled out. Dozens of students have gathered into a rough semicircle. Many dozens. A few sit at the tables behind the mats, too shy or too cool to join their peers. A half-dozen teachers sit farther back. All hundred-odd turn to look at her as she enters, with expressions ranging from curiosity to canonical teen boredom.

  Gail stops dead. “Is this all the fourth stage students in New Coyoacán?” she hisses, trying to keep her voice low enough not to broadcast her discomfort directly to the students.

  “No, silly. Relax,” Nevada murmurs, patting the rat’s shoulder reassuringly.

  She grunts, and lets Nevada lead her toward three chairs in the center of the semicircle. Enrique and Tabitha take the two to either side, leaving Gail the middle spot. Nevada pats her shoulder again and heads toward the back.

  Enrique, thankfully, begins. She can’t tell where the spot microphones are, but his voice rings with low amplification. “How many of you are studying River history right now?” About half the hands go up. “And how many of you have heard of the River Totemic Equality Association?” Most of the same hands stay up; about half of the rest rise, too. “And how many have heard of Judith Simmons?” About half the hands drop again.

  “Today we’re lucky to have Gail Simmons, Judith’s daughter, here to visit. She’s not here as a lecturer, so don’t get too worried.” He spreads his arms. “But since you don’t often get a chance to talk to someone who actually lived through your history lessons, her friend Ms. Argent asked her to come chat a little while with you.” He looks to Gail expectantly.

  She clears her throat and looks out over the audience. At a guess, she’d say three-quarters are transforms, mostly full rather than partial. The cisforms are a disproportionate number of the ones who look like they want to be somewhere else.

  “Hi. Uh, so.” She looks around, then scoots her chair forward so she’s closer to the students. “I feel like I should start by admitting that I haven’t been involved, uh, involved much in activism since I was younger than you are, so I guess I’m mostly here to talk about my mom.”

  She pauses and glances around. Well, at least most of the eyes are on her. She glances at the teachers, hoping she doesn’t look too lost.

  Apparently she looks just lost enough for Tabitha to give her a prompt. “Some of the class is studying what happened to Judith, but tell us more about her life. Your life. What was it like living with her?”

  Gail leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “To me she was just my mom, you know? So it was like living with your mom. I mean, I can tell you she wasn’t a great housekeeper, but I wish I’d gotten some of her recipes. Maybe I’d be a less terrible cook.”

  That gets her a few hesitant smiles from the students. Okay, good sign.

  “Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention then to what she was doing. I just knew she was away a lot and that she was a hero to a lot of people, but I didn’t understand why. I mean, she just stood up and talked in front of crowds, didn’t she? I saw her on the news sometimes leading protests and chants and sit-ins. That was weird.

  “Then she came home from a rally on Panorica when I was…seven, I think it was, with her ribs cracked. That was my first clue she made some people really angry. And that totemics made some people really angry. Up until then, I’d never had to think about that.” She sighs, smiling wryly. “And I asked her why. Why would they hate us that much? She said it was fear, the fear that totemics are better than cisform humans.”

  “Not that Ms. Simmons is saying that they are,” Enrique cuts in.

  Really? Is he seriously worried she’s a totemic supremacist? “Uh, yeah, I figured they’d probably pick up on me not having actually said that.”

  That gets a laugh from more of the students. A cisform girl raises her hand. She’s got dark brown skin, matching eyes, hair in frizzy ringlets. “What made your mom an activist?”

  “Wow.” That’s a great question she hopes she can come up with the answer for. “She was Riverborn, but she grew up cisform. And she grew up with a lot of the assumptions we all kind of have. One of those assumptions is that state power tends to, uh, enforce discrimination by drawing lines. This group can vote, that group can’t. This group can own property, that group can’t. You get legally protected discrimination. If you don’t have a state, or you have a very limited one, you can’t have that. It doesn’t make discrimination go away, but it takes away its protection. You should have a more egalitarian society, right? And that’s what she was taught.

  “But when she was eleven or twelve she learned about totemics, and she realized something weird. Where she lived, there weren’t any. She’d never met a single one. And the adults told her the animal people just must not like it on Solera.” Some of the kids murmur at the name, and she grins wryly. “Yeah, you’re ahead of me. Most people wouldn’t rent living space to totemics, or let them eat in their restaurants, or even sell them groceries. So she wondered how this could happen without a state.”

  “There’s no state to outlaw discrimination, either,” the girl says.

  A mouse kid sitting behind her says disdainfully, “It’s not the same thing. You’re free to do business with whoever you want.”

  “Freedom of association. Right.” Gail spreads her hands. “We’ve structured almost everything around market transactions. Contracts. But what she realized—at eleven, which is just amazing to me—is that those have a hidden bias toward whoever’s starting with the power. Usually, who is that?”

  “The seller,” a rabbit girl says. She looks familiar, although Gail can’t quite place why.

  “Exactly.” Gail points at her. “I don’t like people with fur, so I’m not going to sell to you.” She points at the cisform girl. “I only like people with fur, so I’m not going to hire you.” At the mouse boy. “I’m fine with most totemics, but I’m a self-hating rodent, so I won’t ren
t to you.” Some of the kids laugh.

  “Some people came out to the River—even helped start it—to avoid discrimination, but some people also came out here because they wanted to be free to discriminate. Hate groups that were illegal on Earth aren’t here, right? We’ve decided that’s an acceptable cost for free speech and free association. Usually nobody questions that, but my mom asked the most uncomfortable question you can ever ask. She asked why. Why does having that freedom mean we can’t do anything about discrimination?”

  “So that’s why she became a totemic?” The rabbit girl tilts her head.

  “Well, no, I remember her strongly identifying with Mara, with the idea that instead of constantly fighting for dominion over our ecosystem we needed to integrate with it, fuse with it. She really loved what she saw totemics representing. But her answer to her ‘why’ was that without a state, you equalize the power balance in other ways. She came in and said, look, just asking people to stop being mean to one another isn’t working. She started leading sit-ins and boycotts and blockades. She went to platforms and even just neighborhoods where totemics weren’t treated as equals. She said, okay, we don’t have the power of the state, but maybe we have the power of shaming combined with the power of hurting your business.”

  Nevada’s looking at her with wide eyes. God, she’s screwing this up, isn’t she? She told her—no, the vixen’s giving her an encouraging smile. She thinks.

  “But isn’t that coercion, too?” the mouse says.

  Gail tears her eyes away from Nevada and clears her throat. “I asked myself that then, and I don’t think I had an answer. But I think I do now.” She takes a deep breath, looking back at them, meeting as many eyes as she can. “If someone’s going to have the freedom to discriminate against me, then I have to have the freedom to call them on it. To stand up for myself, and for you. To tell them they’re wrong. And to tell everyone else that person’s wrong, too. If that’s coercion, then maybe there are some kinds of coercion we need.”