Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  “I can’t believe you speak so to her in general,” Pam said as her expression grew somber. She urged me into the carriage and stepped up afterward. “That was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but she was asking for it.”

  “I couldn’t care less what Mink thinks of me. She’s a beastly little piece of work. But you …”

  “I know. I need her favor. I need everyone’s favor that I can get.” Pam glanced to the window. The good mood I’d enjoyed for all of two minutes faded away.

  I tried to think of something to say to reassure her. “Let me deal with her, Pamma. She’s my enemy, not yours. I’ve been doing this for years … ever since she first tried to get me to be her lackey and carry her books. It’s old hat with me.”

  Pamela nodded mutely. I could tell she was still upset.

  Sensing passengers, the flat screen mounted inside the cab glowed to life. First the date shimmered into focus in scrolling golden letters. Then came the news. The screen took on the appearance of paper, and brown ink lettering began to spill headlines across the page. It was a silly affectation, really; aside from antique books and very official correspondence, everything was digital now.

  “Here,” I said, settling back into the squeaky faux leather of the seat. “News. Confirmation of exterior reality.” St. Cyprian’s was meant to create ladies who floated when they walked, played a little piano, and were otherwise charming and unobtrusive. To that end, it was a sheltered environment. Television was forbidden and access to the Aethernet was strictly filtered.

  Pamela removed her bonnet and took up the screen, pulling it to her lap. “Oh, wonderful!” She was suitably distracted.

  “Enjoy,” I muttered, pulling my digidiary out again and borrowing the carriage’s feathery stylus. I figured I could finish writing my paper in an hour or so, and didn’t want to lose my train of thought. I felt the cab rock slightly as Alencar loaded one of the trunks.

  “Nora—look.” Pam’s hand found the sleeve of my coat. I glanced at her face and realized she was staring at the cab’s screen, where the headlines were still up.

  CONSTRUCTION OF ELYSIAN FIELDS HALTED AFTER

  WATER MAIN DISASTER

  GOVERNMENT IDENTITY DATABASES POSSIBLY

  COMPROMISED, INSIDERS SAY

  And one headline I found of real interest.

  PUNK FORCES MASSING ON SOUTHERN BORDER

  FOLLOWING TERRORIST ATTACK

  I only vaguely registered the fact that Alencar was in the driver’s seat and the embroidered barrier between the front and back sections of the carriage was slowly rising. When the engine turned over, an electrical current charged the windows, replacing my view of the outside world with my reflection in a mirrored, solid surface. I met my own eyes, startled by the change, and saw worry in them.

  The world had apparently gone to hell since I’d been in school.

  I was absolutely burning with the desire to learn about the latest Punk movements, but Pam was more interested in the headlines having to do with panic and plumbing. I let her push the buttons.

  The in-cab NVIC channel was a limited form of service that offered only a handful of current events clips from the last hour or so, along with a selection of the previous night’s shows.

  The topic receiving the most coverage was the rumored security breach of the government databases. There was no evidence that identity theft had actually been committed, but that wasn’t stopping any of the talking heads from ranting about it. Our people, as a rule, do enjoy a good panic.

  The Prime Minister, Aloysius Ayles, had yet to comment upon the matter. I had always considered him fairly useless when compared to the former PM, his father, Lord Harvey Ayles. Therefore, I didn’t read too deeply into his failure to speak out.

  As for the water main explosion—there was little to learn, save that it resulted in hundreds of city workers getting overtime. But, as usual, Pam had to get herself worked up over it.

  “I’m not so sure you should go home, Nora,” she said, pressing the edge of a fingernail lightly, rhythmically, against the base of her thumb as she watched the screen.

  I lived in the Elysian Fields. Generations ago, the New Victorian government started a tradition of granting gifts of land to those who had made great contributions to the nation. But even with the advent of terraforming technologies, land was a limited resource. By the time my father earned his plot, the government had begun building underground sites, constructing housing plots in the vast preexisting shelters from the war years. The Elysian Fields was the largest of these, housing perhaps three hundred families. It was soon to open its second level.

  “That’s silly,” I said. “You know these yellow journalists, they grab onto any rumor and throttle it for ratings.”

  “I don’t like it, though.” Pam looked to her wrist, where, like everyone else, her ID chip had been injected at birth. “And that bit about the identity theft is scary. I mean, you can’t exactly go about life without your chip, can you? Dad says they even keep a log of the readers you pass by, so they know where you are.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll believe it when one of the Ayleses gets on and says it’s true. Until then I have other things to concentrate on.” I shifted my knees, drawing my diary closer to my chest.

  Pamela nodded and fixed her eyes on the show again. After a few moments she asked, “Do you ever talk to Lord Ayles?”

  I kept my eyes trained on my diary. “Not since the funeral.”

  Pam left it at that. By the time I looked up again, the rolling carriage wheels beneath us had lulled her to sleep.

  I used the silence to my advantage, scrawling out my final paper in the shorthand my tutor, Horatio Salvez, had taught me. For all my procrastination, the thing was done rather quickly—like a jab at the doctor’s office.

  We are the children of a new Golden Age, I began. The world has been assaulted by both fire and ice, and we are still here. We, as a people, have chosen to survive.

  A hundred and fifty years ago the world was a terrifying place.

  A long list of horrors had assaulted the human race by that time. The poles of the earth had disappeared once more beneath deadly mantles of ice, and winters had become long and hard for an increasing number of nations. Humanity was forced to migrate in massive waves toward the new temperate zones along the Equator. Entire countries were wiped off the face of the earth by catastrophic storms. Cuba, Indonesia, England, Japan. Gone.

  The entire planet suffered, but the Americas, I think, faced more than their fair share of disaster. Refugees from Canada brought with them a new strain of influenza that killed one out of every four people it infected. Famine followed. And then the Second American Civil War, and its nuclear destruction.

  No one won that war. The United States ceased to be. Survivors took shelter wherever they could, banding together in new tribes that were not based on race, or class, or nationality.

  But the worst was still to come.

  It was the eruption of the supervolcano under Yellowstone that finally emptied the U.S. In a last desperate bid for survival, several of the strongest tribes united and decided to strike southward. They were my ancestors.

  The fathers of my tribe were a ragtag lot. The remains of the American and Canadian military. Conservative religious sorts, their women dressed in long skirts and their children educated from books that most of mankind had long ago forgotten about. Mexican militia men. Survivalists, hardy men and women who still flew the flags of their dead countries. Basically, whoever had managed to live.

  My forebears rode into Central America like the army of Genghis Khan, inspiring the people they conquered to join in as they pushed farther south. They gave everyone the same goal—expansion.

  It worked well, for a while. In the ensuing Settlement Wars against the Latin American tribes pushing their way north from Bolivia and Brazil, my forefathers managed to carve out a nice swath of land from Mexico down to the northern hump of South America. But after a few years they had gone as far as it
was possible for them to go. By the time the Treaty of 2055 was signed, all of the armies involved were on their last legs. Survival had become more important than supremacy.

  So, we got the lands that came to be known as the Territories, and the tribes to the south agreed to carve up what was left. My people watched the tribal infighting that followed, watched the smaller wars that erupted, and the message became clear: they had to work together.

  And thus the Territories found peace. My people settled down and began rebuilding. This they did extremely well. As the years passed, they revived technologies thought forever lost, like the ability to produce and use biofuel and solar power. They established trade routes and sent expeditions to the north to search for resources and antiquities. But their society was still a primitive one, and their country was still not completely united. It was a tangle of villages and small towns populated by farmers and artisans, governed and protected by the military. After the first generation had put down its roots, the leaders of my people began to speak about the need to create a true government and a true nation.

  And as they talked, life in the villages went on.

  It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a fad or a craze. But my people, being conservative as a general rule, had never forgotten the past. While the tribes to the south envisioned shining, futuristic Utopias for themselves or fell into disorganization and squalor, my people became more old-fashioned. Long dresses for ladies became the norm. Etiquette became a national pastime. Violence and crude behavior were frowned upon. Respect for one’s superiors was expected, as well as an understanding of where you happened to fit into society.

  Within another few decades my people had officially fastened onto the Victorian era as a model of civility, order, and prosperity. When it came time to ratify our Constitution and name our country, the people voted overwhelmingly for “New Victoria.”

  Why? Scholars have been kicking that one around for decades. My theory is that people knew just enough about that time period to see it as a sort of Golden Age. They didn’t see its ugly side. And that’s what they wanted—what they needed. A new Golden Age. History without a dark side. Even the First American Civil War seemed gentlemanly and refined in comparison to the Second.

  Having beaten so hard and so hot for so long, the heart of my people wanted to be calm. It wanted to know tranquillity and stability. It wanted to know beauty.

  And so my people chose to create it.

  For a time everything was peaceful. Trade flourished. Technology became plentiful and cheap. The culture grew in leaps and bounds. Traditions were established that continue to this day.

  And then the Punks came along.

  At first they had many voices and no name. In fact, they refused to name themselves, forcing their enemies to do it for them. Really, I think “Punks” is fairly boring, but my forefathers thought it would do.

  The Punk movement rejected the new aristocracy that was slowly arising from our strict social order. For them, no title could elevate one man above another. As the cities grew, they longed for political power to remain in the small farming towns and villages—in the hands of “the people,” as they saw them. They railed against our society’s increasing use of computers, arguing that reliance upon “thinking machines” would cause the nation to go intellectually soft. They spat upon the mass-produced goods our factories churned out, and praised the individual artisans who still made things with their hands.

  But it was the rebirth of holographic technology that truly set them off. The man who would become their leader, Jeremiah Reed, called it, “The pretty lie that will steal the real bread out of the mouths of the stonemason and the bard alike.”

  In their eyes, our society was repeating every mistake every society had ever made—creating an upper- and underclass, dominating the less privileged, chasing after shallow comfort and luxury.

  The movement grew. They attacked factories, burned politicians’ houses, took to the streets. It came to a head in the Reed Massacre, where a hundred Punk protestors stormed a shirt factory to destroy its computerized machinery and were fired upon by the New Victorian military. Three days of violent civil unrest followed as the Punks were purged from our lands. They were driven south, to die or eke out their own civilization—whichever came first.

  They didn’t go quietly, though. Fighting continues along the Border Zone to this very day. The only reason we haven’t annihilated them is because, deep down, they’re still our brothers. Flesh of our flesh. That and, as my one teacher used to tell me, “We outnumber them ten to one, and it’s cheaper to kill them one at a time. Makes us look better to the other tribes as well.”

  The end.

  I rewrote my paper in longhand and sent it wirelessly to my teacher’s school address. After I touched the Send button, the hour hand on the little watch icon in the corner of the screen hit 5. I’d just made the assignment deadline. Satisfied, I reached into the pocket of my black woolen coat, fished out a cookie from its wax paper wrapping, and popped it into my mouth. Work, reward. Timeless values.

  I then leaned forward and disconnected the cab’s screen from its clip. I brought it into my lap and turned down the sound before letting my fingertips flick through the stories. I’d behaved myself while Pam was awake, knowing she wasn’t apt to like the footage they’d probably show. She got sick at the sight of blood. Some of the other networks aired special news programming for ladies, devoid of anything “indelicate,” but NVIC wasn’t one of them.

  How did I happen to know this?

  My dark, secret, unladylike vice is watching war documentaries and news footage.

  It was something I had shared with my father.

  “Military insiders reported this morning that Punk forces have been seen organizing along the border of Brazil and Bolivia. Despite a strong offensive by our troops, their number appears to be growing, causing analysts some concern. This follows the terrorist attack on the town of Shaftesbury on December 15th.”

  Shaftesbury was a rural Victorian hamlet in Ecuador that contained all of two hundred people. Why would they attack it, if they had gotten that far into our territory? Why not pick a bigger target?

  The screen glowed before my eyes, showing a map of the skirmish and a shaky home video of the fighting in the streets between the Punks and the town’s citizen militia. No matter their politics or the actual blood that spilled every day at the border, part of me couldn’t help but admire the way the Punks did battle. Their clothing was piecemeal and ratty, their machinery naked and primitive—but those strange rag and bone men of the desert went in with wild cries and obeyed no rules. They’d hide in the water, in the trees. They seemed capable of creating war machines out of absolutely anything—tanks that walked upon massive metal legs made from parts of rusted-out trains, bombs crafted of junk wrapped around anything that would explode.

  It was fascinating. It was oddly thrilling. It was nothing a girl should be interested in.

  It was my narcotic of choice.

  As I watched, though, I began to realize that the Punks didn’t seem to have a plan of attack. They were simply lashing out, aiming their weapons at anything that moved. They didn’t act like men with a mission.

  They were absolutely enraged.

  I watched in shock as they engaged in direct hand-to-hand with the Victorian villagers. In fact, few of them seemed to have weapons. They just went right in, grabbing and punching. I even saw one man try to bite another. The villagers were shooting at them, a positive hailstorm of bullets, but only a few Punks fell down. The rest just kept running straight for the militia.

  The broadcast switched to footage from the border itself, where the Punks were launching similar attacks, throwing themselves and whatever they had at our forces. I’d never seen so many Punk soldiers in one fight. I could see their homemade bombs going off, sending burning shrapnel in wide, fatal arcs close to their own lines—stupid, to say the least. I thought they were wild before. I’d never seen them so intense. />
  “What has you guys so angry?” I whispered to myself.

  The other news clips didn’t provide much more to go on. The general opinion seemed to be that we just had to deliver them a firmer spanking than usual and send them back to their lands to think about what they’d done. There was no discussion about why they were suddenly stepping up their attacks or what they hoped to accomplish.

  I leaned back again and slid my hand behind my neck. Weird. Just weird. The screen went black from lack of activity, and I found myself gazing at my own reflection in the low light of the electric lamp mounted on the ceiling of the cab.

  I despise my face, and think I always will. My features are so little and childlike that I sometimes fear I’ll never look like a proper adult, even though I’m almost seventeen years of age. I have pale skin, brown almond-shaped eyes, and black hair the length of my hunched-up shoulders that likes to form itself into thick ringlets, even though I constantly try to teach it not to.

  Mostly I hate the fact that mine isn’t the face of a girl who studies war and history instead of hem lengths. It’s not the face of a girl who’s top of her target-shooting class. It isn’t the face of a girl who can stand up for herself, who’s lost almost all of her defenders and doesn’t want any more—who just wants to be left alone to slog it out as best she can.

  But it’s all I have.

  Aunt Gene was very fond of mirrors and liked this feature of the Model V. Further proof that she was out of her mind.

  Rather than dwell on her, I let my head roll onto Pamela’s shoulder and did my best to join her in slumber.

  I dreamed of him.

  When I dream of my father, I always dream of that ugly, noisy day when his life ended—of that day when nothing stood between him and death but a few hundred more painful breaths. Odd, pronounced veins had spiderwebbed across his face by that point, and his lips were blue. He drew away whenever I came near.