Vale of Stars

by Sean O'Brien

  “My God!” Dolen shouted suddenly, leaping from the sofa. He was pointing at the screen. Kuarta and Jene watched as Tann pulled a small flechette gun from his pocket and shot the argie woman squarely in the chest. She slumped to the ground, taking the defenders on either side of her down with her. The weapon had made little sound and had not caused any visible signs of trauma to the woman save for her collapse.

  It was at that moment that Kuarta recognized the woman—she had been at the museum a few days ago when Yallia had been pushed to the ground. Hers had been the face of compassion for Yallia and hatred for what the others were doing to her. She had not had the strength to act then. Now she was dead.

  As Kuarta and her family watched, Tann grabbed the police captain and whispered something to him the floating recorders could not quite pick up. The captain looked at Tann with uncertainty for a moment, then called to the one officer standing nearby to remove the limp body of the woman from the building.

  “If you do not disperse immediately,” Tann said calmly to the remaining wide-eyed defenders, “the police will take similar action against all of you. You will be detained and brought to trial for incitement. If you leave now, no such charges will be brought.”

  The defenders started at each other and at the spot where the woman had stood. Before any of them could answer, however, a disturbance in the crowd erupted. The shot changed abruptly to a vantage point above the crowd, where perhaps five hundred people milled about. Within the mob, a fight had broken out, and as the hovercam zoomed in for a closer look, Dolen mumbled, “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?” Kuarta asked, her eyes fixed to the screen.

  “Those are students,” Dolen said, pointing. Dozens of young argie men and women were hand fighting with many more argie adults in the crowd. The hovercam picked up occasional snatches of shouted invective. It seemed the fighting students were themselves defending the Verdafners while a significant majority of colonists were demanding Yallia’s incarceration.

  The fight could not find release, having started in the middle of a huge crowd. In a mater of seconds, the melee grew as onlookers chose sides and started throwing punches and elbows.

  A moan of despair was wrenched out of Jene as she stood watching the image. She buried her face in her hands.

  Another camera shift—quickly back to the front of the building, not lingering long—he or she only allowed a brief shot to establish what was happening at the scene before cutting back to the action, but in those few seconds, Kuarta saw Tann looking not towards the fight, but up towards the Verdafner’s apartment. For a split second, the hovercam lens caught his eyes and he was suddenly staring through the screen right into the Verdafner living room. Kuarta imagined she could hear him taunting her, asking, how much longer are you going to let this continue?

  “No longer,” Kuarta mumbled.

  Jene looked at her. “What?”

  “We’ve got to stop this.”

  “How?” Jene said, and her eyes went immediately to Yallia. “No.”

  “Look, Ma. Look at what is happening. Tann will keep this riot going for as long as it takes. He’ll kill dozens, hundreds of people if he has to.”

  “Newfield will stop it. The government will stop it.” Jene said.

  “When? After how many deaths and what kind of irreparable damage to our world?”

  “The world will recover.”

  “So would have Ship.”

  Jene looked at Yallia again. The little girl looked back, her eyes large. “What is it, Gramma?” Jene looked away before she started to cry. She looked at Dolen, who was still watching the screen. If he had heard the exchange, he gave no sign. “Dolen, you talk to her.”

  Dolen did not move his eyes from the violent images as he said, “What should I say? That I love my daughter more than I love my world?”

  “The public will not allow a little girl to be—” Jene stopped with a glance at Yallia. Even now, she thought of protecting her grandaughter.

  “To be what, Gramma?” Yallia said.

  “There’s the public, Jene,” Dolen said, pointing to the screen where many of the students had been knocked to the ground, protected from kicks and blows by the remaining upright students. All were bleeding. “If we don’t give up now, the government might not be able to protect us. Then we’ll lose her forever. If we give her up, she might…have a chance.” Dolen’s voice was steady until the end.

  “I can’t do it,” Jene said.

  “You don’t have to.” Kuarta stroked Yallia’s hair a few times. “I’ll go outside. Don’t worry,” she added to Jene while still looking at Yallia, “It’ll be different this time.” She started to get up, trying to deflect and hush Yallia’s anxious cries. Dolen and Jene comforted her as best they could, but Yallia would not be pacified. She wailed piteously as her mother walked out the door to the waiting mob below.

  Kuarta stepped down the last stair to see Tann facing the glass entrance. One of the panes was cracked in a spiderweb pattern where a demonstrator had no doubt thrown something against it. Tann stood patiently, hands behind his back, while behind him the crowd surged against the police barricade. A roar of unidentifiable emotion came from the crowd as Kuarta stepped out of the building.

  “Doctor Verdafner,” Tann said simply. His words were all but soundless in the din.

  Kuarta surveyed the crowd. She could not see the fights breaking out in the thick of the mob—all she could see in the front were apoplectic argie faces screaming with rage, argie arms and hands clawing past the police in a vain effort to reach the object of their loathing.

  Tann spoke again. Kuarta had to look at his face when he spoke in order to read his lips. “You know why I am here,” he said.

  Kuarta nodded.

  “Are you prepared to surrender the girl?”

  Kuarta looked at the crowd. She could not make out any individual words, but the overall tenor of the mob was quite clear. Had the police not been there, she would surely have been attacked, her daughter taken forcibly from her, her family beaten.

  “You did this,” Kuarta said to Tann, her eyes still on the mob.

  “Does that matter?” Tann said louder. “They are here, and I cannot control them.”

  “The police could disperse them.”

  “Perhaps. But the police are under my orders not to interfere. They have no experience with riots, you know. They are only too happy to oblige me in this.” He laughed. “One of the unexpected weaknesses of a peaceful, egalitarian society is a fairly ineffective police force.”

  “Egalitarian?” Kuarta turned to him, her resignation giving way to anger. “How can you call our society egalitarian? You have experimented on me, on thousands of human beings to produce a mutant. And now that you have done so, you want to exile her. And you call your society egalitarian?”

  “You still persist in that ridiculous fantasy. Let us not argue politics, Doctor. The crowd behind me grows more restless by the minute.”

  “How would you stop me from broadcasting what you have done all over the newsweb?”

  “I would not stop you.”

  Kuarta blinked. She had expected Tann to have blocked her transmission privileges (illegal, but a trifle compared to the egregious illegalities he had already perpetrated) or arranged some other technological barrier.

  Tann continued. “Who would believe you, Doctor? Oh, I’m certain a small percentage of the population would,” he said, preempting her answer, “but the vast majority would see your words as a desperate attempt to smear the government and save your child.” Tann stepped closer and unclasped his hands from behind his back. “In any case, would it matter? Even if you convinced the world that what you say is the truth, the facts would remain the same: your daughter is a dangerous mutant, responsible for the brutal murder of an innocent argie child. How long do you think it would take me, even if your rhetoric had its intended effect, to get my way? And how many deaths out there,” he waved a hand behind him to the roiling crowd, “woul
d result?”

  He was right, Kuarta thought, even as she damned her analytical mind for concluding so. Yallia was a mutant, and the colony would not tolerate her. If she stayed in the Dome, even under constant supervision and detention, public sentiment would be so against her that she would live in constant fear of attack.

  Kuarta felt her shoulders droop a little. She saw Tann’s at the gesture. Both knew that she would surrender, and Tann would have his victory.

  “How did this happen?” Kuarta said, looking again at the mob.

  Tann seemed to understand. “It was always there, Doctor. Behind the façade of civility and tolerance, there has always been hatred and fear of those who are different.” His eyes darkened. “I know about that.” He regained his composure and said, “All I needed to do was mobilize it, spur it on.”

  “Why?”

  Tann glowered. “You will not ask me that. My motives are not for you to question. You will turn over the girl immediately, or I shall release the crowd.”

  Kuarta took a deep breath and nodded. Tann nodded in return and turned to face the mob. As he did so, Kuarta had a vision of herself leaping upon him and pummeling him mercilessly. She saw his head slam against the hard pavement over and over as the vision of herself relentlessly attacked him. She saw his head open up, black bile ooze out, and somehow everything was all right. The crowd smiled and cheered and hugged one another and there was the sun, inside the Dome? No, there was no Dome—she was outside. And Yallia was with her, and they were smiling and laughing.

  The vision abruptly ended as a missile, a rock of substantial weight, whistled past her to crash into the already-cracked glass of the lobby. Kuarta felt heavy as she turned to reenter the building and give her daughter away.

  Chapter 12

  “You’ll be a hero, Doctor Verdafner,” Tann said hours later back in his office in Valhalla Dome. Yallia had been safely transported to Onizaka’s labs again, which were now under the temporary supervision of a promising young geneticist named Parvin from Nirvana Dome. The young argie scientist was bright, to be sure, but more importantly had been thoroughly checked for any anti-government sentiment in his writings or personal relationships and found extremely patriotic. He would begin where Onizaka left off.

  Kuarta, Dolen, and Jene sat opposite Tann in various stages of numb defeat. “The populace will be told of your sacrifice for the good of the colony.”

  “Mr. Tann,” Dolen said, “you are either wholly ignorant of the social dynamics of this colony or you are purposefully trying to mislead us. Since I cannot believe a man could rise to your level of power in the government without at least a basic understanding of sociopolitical science, I must conclude the latter. You know the population will not see my wife in that light.”

  “I thought you were a historian, not a sociologist, Professor Verdafner.”

  “A good historian must be both. We learn about social structures by studying history.”

  “Oh?” Tann leaned back and steepled his fingers. “And what does history teach us in this case, Professor?”

  “My wife and her mother are members of a lower caste. Don’t deny it, Mr. Tann,” Dolen said as Tann opened his mouth to object. “You’ve already had your security team search us for weapons and recording devices. There is no need to continue the façade.”

  Tann smiled. “Well spoken. Very well, I agree. Shippies are a hated underclass.”

  “No, sir. Not an underclass. Class implies fluidity. Shippies will remain hated and despised no matter what they do. They are a caste—a social group from which there is no escape.”

  Tann bristled at the correction but said nothing. Dolen continued. “In such a situation, no single action by any member of the lower caste can result in respect from the upper caste. Our family’s surrender will only confirm what the argie caste already whispers among itself—that the shippies are not fundamentally human. They are monsters who give up their babies in a vain attempt to placate the masses.”

  “You’re saying that if we had kept Yallia, we might have avoided all this?” Kuarta said.

  Dolen looked at her with kindness. “No, Kuarta. Anything we did would have been twisted to put us in the worst light possible.”

  “You mean shippies, don’t you, Dolen?” Jene said with unconcealed bitterness. “You’re argie. You won’t be tarred with the same brush.”

  “Jene, you know as well as I do how the argies will treat me. I’m the worst of all possible cases—someone who was once human who chose to become subhuman by marrying a shippie. You can be pitied. I will only be hated.”

  There was silence for a moment before Tann broke it. “I won’t lie to you anymore. I think Professor Verdafner is right. The best you two can hope for is pity,” he said, indicating Jene and Kuarta.

  “We’d rather be hated,” Kuarta said.

  “You won’t get the choice, I’m afraid.”

  Again, Kuarta knew Tann was right. She looked at him and spoke in a steady monotone. “You said you will not lie to us. Will you then tell us the truth about what you did to us? To the shippie women twelve years ago?”

  “I see no reason to do that. We are not living in the past.”

  “You know we will continue to fight you. We’ll spread news of what was done to us twelve years ago. We will tell everyone of your actions during the crisis, and we will never stop. The rest of your political career will be an ongoing battle to keep the truth hidden. If you try to silence us, we will shout louder.”

  “Silence you?” Tann chuckled. “My dear Doctor, of course I would not try to silence you. I’m sure your husband can find dozens of examples of regimes that tried that foolhardy strategy of silencing dissenters. No, Doctor, I shall do much worse. I will let you speak. Oh, yes, your movement will grow in power and stature for a few years, but eventually it will die of its own familiarity. You will be in a public relations war that I will not fight. And I will win as a result.”

  Tann stood up and walked around his desk to stand directly in front of Kuarta. “Your husband is quite correct, shippie. You are subhuman. Every time you look out of the Dome, remember your daughter and the others of her ilk to follow.” Tann glanced at Dolen, then looked back at Kuarta, his calculatedly urbane manner dissolving in venomous rage. “You came here thinking you could take for free what we and our descendants built over the course of thirty-six years. I want you to remember what happened when you tried to make your daughter one of us.”

  Tann and Kuarta stared at each other for a long moment. Dolen broke the stalemate.

  “I want to live with her.”

  Tann smiled slightly, his composure regained. “I’m afraid, Professor, the Dome cannot afford to support you, your wife, and whoever else decides they wish to live at public expense while producing nothing in return. The price of socialism, sir, is participation in the whole.”

  “We will be allowed to visit her at will?”

  Tann continued to look at Kuarta for a moment before walking back to his desk. “Yes, Professor. Subject to environmental conditions, of course. You’ll have full access. Plus we’ll arrange for electronic conferencing at your request.”

  “And how far away will she be?”

  “Dolen,” Jene said, “we’ve been through this before.”

  “I know. But I want to hear it again. I may have forgotten to ask something.”

  Tann answered Dolen’s question. “The atmospheric testing station in the Green Valley is even now being expanded to house a permanent staff for the child. It’s about sixty kilometers to the east and one kilometer lower in elevation.”

  “What about the other children?” Kuarta asked.

  “Other children?”

  “There will be others, Tann. There are others right now, but their mutations haven’t manifested themselves yet. Will you send them to the same facility?”

  “We shall make that decision when the time comes. I expect we will, but I cannot confirm that at this time.” He looked at all three adults. “If
there is nothing more, I imagine you will want to say goodbye to her. She is scheduled to be transported in a few hours.” Tann spoke dismissively, and the family members understood the message. All rose wearily from their chairs.

  Dolen and Kuarta supported each other as they exited the office, hands on one another’s shoulders. Tann called to Jene as the Commissar was about to step over the threshold.

  “Commissar Halfner?”

  Jene turned.

  “You may be interested to know that the Assembly is contemplating a vote regarding your future as a member of this government. I have it on good authority that you will no longer be a Commissar in fifty-two hours. Perhaps you had better begin preparations for career reassignment. Gengineering specialists will be in demand, no doubt.”

  Jene stared at the floor as she spoke. “I underestimated you, Mr. Tann. Even in my utter distrust of government, I never believed any government could be so driven by hate to plan the forced genocide of a group of people it hadn’t even met. You had this planned since before our arrival.”

  “Certainly, but you give this administration, and the one of twelve years ago, far too much credit, Commissar. The government did not plan this—well, I hate to call it genocide; perhaps we should say, reorganization of caste—in any way. I did. I used the talents of Doctor Karin Onizaka, then a promising young gengineer, and set my plan in motion without the government’s knowledge.” He smiled at her. “We both distrust government, Commissar. You think it perpetrates evil at every step through draconian action against its citizens. I distrust government because it seldom acts with decision in critical moments. Our society has been building to a crisis over the shippie immigrant issue since before your arrival. I merely found a way to end the crisis before it could do any real damage to the colony.”

  Jene considered this. “No. That’s too easy. You’re making yourself too altruistic, too concerned with the public good. If you were truly concerned with the welfare of the colony, you would have donated your gametes for reproduction.”