“Good,” he said, “but after this insane attack against your shuttle, we have to assume Gaant and his political allies will move at once. The situation becomes unstable, hence unpredictable. Do you believe him—that he is behind the edict?”
Marrissa and I exchanged a glance and I shrugged.
“Sasha and I aren’t certain,” she answered. “He is more inclined to believe the claim than I am. Although I don’t know Gaant well, I have met him several times and seen him in meetings, both large ones and small working groups. He never impressed me as a particularly…deep thinker. He is the sort of glib spokesperson you expect to see on news feeds and giving keynote addresses, a person most comfortable in a holovid, but not actually working hard behind the scenes. You know exactly the sort I am talking about, Gapa.”
Marr had never gotten comfortable calling e-Lotonaa The’On, and so she used Gapa, the diminutive form of his first name, Arigapaa.
“Oh, certainly,” he said, nodding at her assessment of Gaant’s personality. “But that may be a look deliberately cultivated. He moves in the highest levels of society and among many of the e-Varokiim there is a stigma attached to having to work too hard. Whether Elaamu Gaant is a figurehead, or works on behalf of a political faction, or the other e-Traak heirs, or perhaps follows a personal motivation…”
He tilted his head to the side and didn’t finish the sentence. There was no need to. There was no shortage of possible motives for this guy, or for anyone else lining up against Tweezaa and us, up to and including bat-shit-crazy anti-Human. What did their motives really matter? The move itself was important, and what we were going to do about it, nothing else. I’d rather have gone on talking about this Gaant guy all day, but sooner or later we had be adults, had to swallow hard and do what came next.
“You’re sure this will work?” I asked him.
He sighed. “Who can really say? It will throw everything into the courts at first, and not simply the uBakai courts. It will almost certainly end up before the Cottohazz Wat, unless I am mistaken.”
“And what are Tweezaa’s chances there?” I asked. Maybe there was an edge in my voice because Marr leaned over and put her hand on my arm.
“Whatever they are, Sasha,” she said, “they’re better than just taking the uBakai edict as written and giving up.” I knew she was right, but I still didn’t like it. “I’ll still be her fiduciary guardian until she reaches her majority,” Marr went on. “We’ll still be her Boti-Marr and Boti-Sash.”
All that was true, but it didn’t do much for the lump in my throat. I looked over at Tweezaa, the object of this whole exercise, and she looked as miserable as I felt. When she saw me looking at her she looked away, then got up and walked toward the rear of the apartment. After a few steps she began to run and I heard the balcony door slam. The’On’s expression suddenly changed to surprised, and then stricken, color flashing across his skin.
“Oh…” he said, and the word had the sound of despair in it.
“I should—” Marr started, but I shook my head and stood up.
“Nope. Better let me.”
* * *
I found Tweezaa on the balcony, Sakkatto City almost a kilometer below us, sprawling away to the north and east. On clear nights we sat out there and saw the glowing, impossibly thin structure of The Old Tower, the elevator to orbit rising from the southern horizon two hundred kilometers away, rising up and up until it faded into the blackness of the sky. Sometimes we saw the tiny bright light of a capsule climbing the needle to orbit. Now Tweezaa leaned on the railing. She wasn’t crying, but she wouldn’t look at me. Instead she stared out at the circling birds.
“This sucks, Kiddo,” I said in English as a preliminary.
“Why can’t I just change my citizenship on my own?”
“You know why. You aren’t of age, so Marr would have to do it for you, as your guardian. There’s no plausible reason for her to do so except to avoid the effects of the uBakai edict. There’s this thing—deceptive transfer I think they call it. They could void the change. But if The’On adopts you, you take his uKootrin citizenship as a matter of course.”
“They can’t say the same thing about that?” she asked, her gaze still on the sea birds way out there over the water. I turned to face her.
“They can try, but The’On’s a pretty big guy in the Cottohazz executive bureaucracy, and he’s been close to you ever since our time on K’Tok.” Close was hardly the right word. In truth, The’On loved her like a daughter. That devastated look on his face, that sense of heartbreak when he thought Tweezaa might not want to be his daughter after all, spoke volumes. Tweezaa hadn’t seen it, and I didn’t tell her now. I didn’t want to just beat her down with guilt or pity. This was her life we were rearranging.
“Besides,” I went on, “he’s been working on the adoption, quietly, for four months. There’s a document trail which predates when they think we learned of the edict.” All of a sudden I knew Gaant and his friends had outsmarted themselves keeping the edict secret. Anything we did after they could prove we knew about it would be deceptive transfer, in reaction to the news. They’d have been better off telling us right away.
“Tweezaa, look at me,” I said.
She hesitated but then turned to me, her eyes defiant and angry, but only in front. Back behind them I knew she was holding back the tears.
“This edict will invalidate your inheritance.”
“Is that all you care about?” she demanded, anger and grief struggling for control of her face.
“No. All we care about is you. Once you’re of age, you can do anything you want with your wealth. Give it all away to charity, buy a planet somewhere and turn it into a sex palace, give it to your worthless shit-head relatives who are trying to steal it from you now—I don’t care. But it’s your decision, and it’s Marr’s job to make sure you get to make it, not them.
“The uBakai Wat can pass all the edicts they want to about the property of uBakai citizens. If you’re an uKootrin citizen before the edict is ratified, they can go pound sand, and it’s as simple as that. The paperwork’s ready, all three principles are here, and we have a secure link open to the Prefecture of Vital Records. All you have to do is walk back in there and say yes, and all the plans your thieving relatives and that Gaant creep, and whoever else is behind this, have been hatching for the last three months, all that goes right into the crapper.”
She nodded and turned back to the ocean, her face under control again.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “Boti-On is only thinking of me. And you and Marrissa will soon have a child of your own—a Human child. Then you can stop pretending to be parents to the little lizard girl.”
The words left me dizzy.
She turned and walked back toward the house. There were only two people left in the world I cared enough about to willingly die for. One of them was walking away from me, and I didn’t know how to stop her.
Chapter Four
Three days later, Marr, The’On, and I considered our options given a rapidly changing political landscape. Well, they considered the politics. My concerns were more personal.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“It’s my decision to make,” Marr answered.
She sat on the living room couch and The’On had settled into a formachair beside it. I paced—should have sat beside Marr on the couch, but I was too worked up to sit down, or even stand still.
I looked out the window. Grey skies overhead and whitecaps on the Wanu River down below. To the north the stark, metallic pyramid of Katammu-Arc looked alien and forbidding, like gunmetal in the overcast, slick and shining from rain squalls which had already scuttled off to the east. Good thing the meeting tomorrow was right here in Praha-Riz arcology, just down about two hundred and twenty levels and over to the south.
Our announcement of the adoption three days ago caught Gaant and his allies by surprise. The news feeders didn’t even pay much attention until about a half-dozen
prominent uBakai wattaaks started screeching as if we’d stolen the crown jewels. First they claimed it was illegal, then that it was thwarting the will of the uBakai people, then that it was a naked power grab by the uKootrin, The’On’s home government. And they’d had a lot of nasty things to say about us.
There were choreographed demonstrations but then things went off-script, turned violent, more than I think anyone expected. There were even a couple full-blown riots, which were nearly unheard-of. Usually Varoki followed the rules pretty well—a habit I figured came from having written most of the rules in their own favor. But now that the factions lined up against Tweezaa’s inheritance—mostly the other heirs in her family and the Simki-Traak upper management, along with some anti-Humanist cranks like Elaamu Gaant—had accidentally unleashed this storm of anger and violence, and it looked as if it might slip out of their control, they wanted to sit down with us and talk. Now they wanted to talk.
“Sure it’s your decision whether or not to go,” I said to Marr, “but I’m responsible for security. Any professional security chief worth his salt would resign before he went along with this. It’s insane. You know I’m not going to walk away, now or ever. So you want to go over the cliff? I’ll be right there with you all the way. But I don’t have to lie to you and say it’s the best idea you’ve ever had.”
She looked at me hard for a moment but there was thoughtfulness behind the look as well. “You believe this meeting is a set-up?”
“Could be. Even if not, it’s a hell of an opportunity for anyone pissed off about the adoption. There were demonstrations in all seven of the arcologies and riots in parts of the Sakkatto slums. Bad riots, Marr—people killed over an adoption. That was yesterday and they haven’t even got the damned fires out yet.”
“That’s why we have to meet with them,” she said.
“Yeah, I get it, sort of. Sit down with the sponsors of the edict, see if we can work something out to avoid further violence. Except we know we’re not going to work anything out.”
She sighed impatiently. “No, probably not, but we cannot leave ourselves open to the charge we were unwilling to at least try.”
“Okay, but it is criminally irresponsible to put you and The’On, both of Tweezaa’s guardians, in the same room on neutral turf without a platoon of Mike Marines in powered armor with you, along with a couple gunsleds for top cover and extraction. Not to mention you’re pregnant with our son, which means it’s not the same deal as when we were cutting our way through the jungle two years ago on K’Tok.”
“The Munies have guaranteed the security of the meeting,” she said.
“Guaranteed it with what?”
She looked blankly at me.
“Come on, you’re the economist, Marr. A guarantee is backed by something—replacement of product if it fails due to design defect, double your money back, free trip to Zamboanga—something. Otherwise, ‘guarantee’ is just another empty word bureaucrats use. No offense, The’On.”
He shook his head but didn’t speak, which was smart. This was not a fight he needed to take sides in.
It was Marr’s turn to look out the window. “If it is that dangerous, how do I ask someone else to take my place?”
“Why send anyone?” I said. “If they want to talk, we can talk by holoconference. There’s no need to put meat in a room.”
“Ah, but there is,” The’On said, “and I think you know it, Sasha. If we are in the same room, our embedded commlinks can all be jammed locally, which means no virtual record of the meeting can be made through our sensory feeds. It is the only way to speak in private.”
“If they’re ashamed of what they’re going to say, the hell with them,” I said, but I knew he was right. Record what a politician’s saying and he starts speaking for posterity. You want to cut a deal for today, you need to do it in the dark. I shrugged.
“Okay, face-to-face it is. But not both of you. Marr, if you aren’t both there, it won’t be as dangerous for whoever you send in your place, or for The’On. Not as inviting a target. Besides, I’ll go along.”
Her eyes snapped back to mine. “You? Why? Gapa has Borro for security and if I send someone from the Sakkatto office they can bring a security specialist with them.”
“The’On is Tweezaa’s adoptive father. I’m not going to let him go in harm’s way and not be there to do whatever I can. If something happens to him, and both you and I sit it out, Tweezaa will never forgive us.”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure she would anyway. She’d hardly spoken to us since the adoption. But letting The’On walk alone into hell and not come back would cap it. Not to mention I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about myself afterwards.
Marr’s eyes softened and after a moment she nodded. “I’ll have Gaisaana-la attend. She assembled all of the briefing files anyway. She knows who we’re dealing with and as much of the legal background as she needs to.” She raised her hand to me and I sat down on the couch next to her. She touched my cheek with her finger tips. “Please be careful,” she said.
“I am happy to see you both in agreement again,” The’On said. “But…where is Zamboanga?”
I shrugged. “Some place where the monkeys have no tails.”
Chapter Five
Borro, The’On’s bodyguard, turned to me in the private autopod the next morning. “Where exactly is the meeting?”
“Chambers of some supposedly neutral counseling house,” I answered. “Good-Soul they’re called, right here in Praha-Riz, Level Four, South Tower. We’ll stop at Marr’s office suite on Level Nineteen to pick up Gaisaana-la.”
“Why would they consider your home arcology neutral ground?”
“Well, it’s a pretty big place and we don’t get along with all our neighbors. The wattaak from Red Forest Twenty-one is the lead speaker on the new edict.”
“Ah,” he said and nodded. “And you question whether the counseling house is actually neutral?”
“You know who’s neutral, Borro? Dead people.”
He smiled his agreement and I settled back to clear my mind.
Praha-Riz arcology—the Red Forest—housed most of the corporate chambers of AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar and two other large merchant houses, but I’d have chosen it as a home anyway, just based on looks. All of the other arcologies in Sakkatto, regardless of the material or design, looked alien: conceived by alien minds, rendered by alien hands. Praha-Riz, on the other hand, looked like an enormous topiary shrubbery, with glass and metallic bits showing here and there from the interior.
The news feed earlier had said the last of the fires from the riots were being extinguished this morning, but from the balcony before we left I saw a lot of smoke still rising from the slums, particularly the Human Quarter south of Katammu-Arc, and this was after rain. The towers of smoke had provided a forbidding backdrop to our upcoming meeting. Borro must have thought the same thing.
“I wonder if the riots have subsided,” he said.
The’On’s concentration had been on his viewer glasses but now he looked at us and shook his head. “They seem to be spreading.”
Ah-Quan, the fourth passenger in our pod, belched.
* * *
Gaisaana-la, Marr’s senior executive assistant, was a tall, middle-aged Varoki female. Despite a first-class education, she was unprepared for the high-level politics and economics of running an interstellar trading empire—or trying to get a hand on the tiller when the rest of management was trying to make Marr and her staff nonfunctional ornaments. Well, nothing could prepare a Varoki female to deal with a room full of males born to wealth, power, and entitlement, especially since they had also been raised to think of females as not much more than domestic servants. So nothing had prepared Gaisaana-la for this life, but she’d taken to it anyway, somehow. I think some people must just be born to punch above their weight class.
“Executor e-Lotonaa, it is an honor to see you again,” she said to The’On with a slight bow. To be honest, she didn’t look all that
happy to see him.
“And I you, Madame Gaisaana-la. I see you are well,” he answered but his smile did not draw one in reply. Instead she turned away to me.
Usually folks liked The’On; he had a way about him. He’s never run for elective office, which I thought was odd since he would have been a natural at it. Instead, most of his jobs had been bureaucratic, rising steadily through the ranks of the Cottohazz Executive Council’s administrative and quasi-diplomatic positions. He was what my late Ukrainian father would have called an aparatnyk. Maybe that’s what Gaisaana-la didn’t like about him.
“Mr. Naradnyo,” she said to me as we shook hands and she smiled. “Madame Marfoglia told me you would be along as well. I will feel safer with you here.”
“I’m unarmed,” I said, “so I’m mostly here to spot trouble coming. How’s it been this morning?”
She frowned. “Perhaps a third of the staff did not report for work. Many of them are from other arcologies, and transportation has been problematic. Some are afraid.”
“Afraid to be caught hanging around us when things get ugly?” I asked, and she tilted her head to the side.
I turned to ah-Quan, who had mostly been absorbed by his own viewer glasses, which were linked into a Munie security feed.
“Do we know what’s up with the demonstrations?”
“Riots outside spreading,” he said, “farther north, not here. Ground access locked down. Hard for riot spilling over by maglev, air shuttle.”
Yeah, if they really were spontaneous, I thought, but ah-Quan continued.
“Municipal constabulary gave access to video feed South Tower Atrium, nearest hub to chambers Good-Soul Counselors. Peaceful demonstrations there yesterday; no demonstration today, but limited information precludes reliable assessment.”
“South Tower Atrium. Is that in the Red Forest Twenty-one Wat District?” I asked.
His eyes lost focus as he concentrated on his viewer for a moment and then he looked me in the eye. “Yes. Is that significant?
“Probably not,” I said, but it was hard to know. Ah-Quan was right: not enough information to make a good guess, and that made me nervous. There was a time when I’d gladly charged into dangerous situations with less data than this, but ever since I died I’d become more cautious. No matter how bad things get, most people never believe deep down inside they’re really going to die. Once it actually happens to you, you know better, and that knowledge changes you.
Come the Revolution - eARC Page 3
