I looked over at her, but if she was smiling it was on the inside.
“Well, in my experience, you can get some real growth and progress out of explosive therapy,” I said. “Had much opportunity to try it out?”
“Not so far, but the prospects are looking up.”
I wondered if her seeing all those clients railroaded by the Varoki had maybe saved my life, made her decide not to participate in one more judicially sanctioned lynching. Sometimes our fate hangs by a strand that slender.
* * *
We dropped our bags at the ammo distribution point in front of the clinic. Zdravkova headed inside, I guess to look for Greenwald and his slivovitz, and I walked over to the communal soup kitchen and dormitory, both of which were still works in progress. I needed to get something to eat and then some rack time or I was going to fold up.
I was surprised to see Nicolai Stal hanging around the door.
“Evening, Sasha. Heard was some excitement.”
“Yeah. Took a few casualties, too, but I don’t think anyone died. What brings you here?”
He smiled. “Oh, couple interesting refugees just come in, look for sanctuary. Do not like dining and sleeping facilities, think should get better treatment because related to very big hero.”
“Who?” I asked.
His grin got broader. “Claim to be father and sister of famous Sasha Naradnyo.”
I just looked at him for a second and then shook my head. “That’d be a pretty good trick, seeing as how they both died twenty-seven years ago on Peezgtaan.”
“Da, and these two look alive to me. Since nobody knows Sasha actually here, or even alive, must have believed was easy lie. Like to come along, see faces when meet real Sasha.”
He led me across the soup kitchen to a table in back and I saw a man and woman huddled with blankets around their shoulders and bent over their soup. As we approached, the man, sitting across the table facing me, looked up, and then he stood up and let the blanket slip from his rounded shoulders. The room seemed to sway from side to side as I looked at him. His hair was gray instead of black, his face more lined, and he’d put on some weight.
“Hello, Aleksandr Sergeyevich,” he said. “Do you remember your sister, Avrochka?”
The woman turned and looked up at me. She was the news feeder I’d noticed earlier, the one named Aurora, now looking dirty and somewhat haggard, but the family resemblance was clear.
No wonder she’d reminded me of me.
* * *
“It could be plastic surgery,” I said, but Doc Mahajan shook her head.
“The DNA results are conclusive. The man is your father. He is also the father of the woman, and the mitochondrial DNA she shares with you indicates you both have the same mother. As near as I can determine, they are exactly who they claim to be.”
“But how? They both died on Peezgtaan in a food riot.”
“How do you know that, Boss?” Moshe asked. He offered me the slivovitz but I waved it away. I was punchy enough as it was. Zdravkova took it instead and downed a swallow. The four of us sat in the cramped privacy of Mahajan’s office at the clinic, which now also doubled as a supply storage room.
I thought back to that day twenty-seven years ago.
“There were food riots all over the place,” I said. “My father, mother, and sister went out to try to find something for us to eat. I don’t remember why they left me in the apartment. Maybe I was sick or too small or something. Hours later my mother came back alone, beat up and in shock. She died in bed a few days later.”
“She told you the other two were dead?” Doc Mahajan asked.
“No, she never spoke again. She never even acknowledged my presence after she came back. I’d always assumed the others were dead. Why else would she go into such deep shock and depression?”
There was something more than that, another reason it couldn’t be them, but I didn’t want to say it. They wouldn’t understand.
“Who knows, Boss?” Moshe said. “People do crazy things. Maybe she really thought they were dead.”
“Then why didn’t they come back? Where have they been all this time? And showing up here the same time I did…that’s too crazy a coincidence.”
“Perhaps,” Doc Mahajan said, “but their being here is not all that unusual. Aurora did several features on Sookagrad within the last year and a multipart investigative series on corruption in the Inter-Arcology Park District. She made a number of contacts here. That she and her father would seek sanctuary here is understandable. Really, Sasha, it is your presence which is the anomaly.”
“Maybe so, but if they’ve lived here in the city for a while like you say, and they know who I am, which they clearly do, why didn’t they ever contact me?”
“Go ask them,” Zdravkova said and then looked at me with those hard, angry eyes. “Or are you afraid?”
I wasn’t about to admit it to her but hell yes I was afraid. If your family’s been dead for almost your whole life, see how you feel if they start showing back up again one day. What do you say to them? “How you been?”
The thing is, I’d actually been dead for a little while, and when I’d been dead there’d been people there—wherever “there” was—who’d welcomed me. All those people had already been dead, including my whole family. It was sort of comforting, and had taken some of the edge off the fear of death since then, knowing that’s what was waiting. What I couldn’t figure out now was how my father and sister could have been there in dead-people-land if they weren’t ever actually dead.
“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet, “guess I’ll go talk to them.”
Moshe offered me the bottle again and this time I took a good slug.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Okay, they tell me you two really are my father and sister. So what the hell happened?”
They exchanged a guilty look.
Zdravkova had found us a private room, not much more than a big closet, with a light, a table, and three folding chairs. It smelled of mold. The man and I sat facing each other. The woman stood leaning against a wall.
I looked them over. The woman was dressed as I’d first seen her on the vid, four days ago, stylishly but also practical for going out in the streets and looking for news. Four days—it seemed longer than that but that’s all it was. The man was dressed expensively, a suit with inset iridescent panels that were popular in the business world these days. It was soiled and one shoulder seam was torn open showing the lining, but he’d clearly had some money before everything went to hell.
“How much do you remember?” the man said.
“The three of you went out. Only mother came back. What happened?”
“What did she tell you?” he asked.
“Just tell me what the hell happened or start looking for a different sanctuary.”
“For God’s sake, tell him,” the woman named either Aurora or Avrochka said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, and he rubbed the palms of his hands across his face, either momentarily overcome by emotion and fatigue, or stalling for time, getting his story straight.
He was shorter than I remembered, but all adults look tall to an eight-year-old. He’d become portly, about a hundred kilos, and his hair was thinning on top. He looked scared, scared of me, his son. Of course, if he knew enough about me to claim me as a relative, he knew enough to be scared of me.
“I received word there was a position for me, here on Hazz’Akatu,” he said. “You remember, I am a biochemist, a genetic researcher. That is why AZ Tissopharm hired me originally, brought us to Peezgtaan. Now someone else had need for…well, there was a position. But the times were very bad, the riots, so many people trying to get off Peezgtaan after Tissopharm collapsed. There was only passage for two. Later the other two could come, but at first just myself and one other. I chose your sister. She was older, could look after herself while I worked. It was better. Your mother…she and you would come later.”
My sister looked
at him and I saw contempt in her eyes. Why, I wondered? Maybe just because he’d turned out to be a shitty father, but possibly because he was lying and she knew it. It wasn’t all a lie, but something wasn’t right. The way he knit his brows, as if in pain, as he told it, the way he wrung his hands, all shouted liar.
“Why didn’t you send for me?” I said.
Energy flowed into his body and his face lit up, thinking this must mean I believed him.
“Oh, I did, Sasha, I did! But they told me your mother had died and there was no sign of you, not in any of the institutions, no record anywhere. You know how many orphans died, Sasha. You must know better than anyone! They all told me you had to be dead. I’m sorry I believed them.”
I believed he was sorry, but more for the fix he was afraid he’d put himself into than anything else. I told them about mother returning home beaten and distraught, how she had never spoken again, gone to bed, and simply died a week later, probably of dehydration since she refused to either eat or drink. The man looked relieved when I told the part about her not talking.
“But you must have figured out I was alive at some point,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have claimed to be my family when you got here.”
Again they exchanged a look and the man nodded vigorously.
“Yes, Sasha, we heard about you…oh, it must have been just two years ago, when the story of how you saved that Varoki heiress was suddenly everywhere. There were stories about your background, how you were an orphan, survived alone on the streets. We both knew then you must be our lost Sasha.”
“That much is true,” my sister said, as if to affirm that eventually he’d managed to tell something that wasn’t somehow a distortion or outright lie. He shot her a warning frown, quickly replaced by an ingratiating smile as he turned back to me.
“But you didn’t contact me then, either. Why not?”
He colored and looked at my sister, then down at the floor. “Yes, you are right. We should have. But…we were afraid it would have compromised Avrochka’s journalistic credibility to be the brother of so famous and…controversial a figure. This was especially true when your association with the e-Traak heiress became permanent. A highly political arrangement, you must realize that.”
“My credibility?” Aurora nearly spat. “You made me swear not to contact Sasha for fear it would compromise your position at AZ Kagataan!”
“What do you know?” he shouted. “You know nothing! It was for you. Everything I did was always for you!”
“Tell him the truth!” she shouted, her voice rising toward a scream. “Tell him the truth or I will!”
He jumped up, raised his arm as if to strike her, and I saw her cringe just before I grabbed his belt with my left hand and yanked him back against the table. He lost his balance, fell against the table, it splintered and collapsed and he sprawled across the floor, crying out in surprise and pain. Aurora took a step forward, towering over him.
“You won’t tell him?”
When he said nothing in reply she spat on him and then turned to me.
“This is why you were left alone that day. This is why our mother returned home beaten and distraught to the point of suicide. There were not two places on the ship, Sasha; there were supposed to be three. Then when there were only two seats, this thing, our father, drove the thing that was our mother away with curses and blows.
“They had already decided to abandon you!”
She looked at me and the anger slowly drained from her face, replaced by a deep bitterness, but not directed at me. She flopped into a chair as if much of the life had drained away from her body as well. The man pushed himself up until he was sitting but did not try to stand up. He looked down at the floor.
I sat unmoving, not really thinking about anything, just trying on all this new information for size. Reality had altered, and I was wondering how I felt about that but hadn’t really figured it out yet.
“What will happen to us now?” he finally asked, his voice trembling.
“Oh…yeah. Well, you are Human refugees and we don’t turn Humans away. You will get the same food and shelter other refugees get. If it’s any consolation, I sleep in the common dormitory and eat at the soup kitchen myself. Your accommodations will be every bit as good as those of your famous son and brother.
“Now, I’ve been awake for over two days and I gotta get some sleep or I’m going to fall over. We’re done here, right?”
* * *
I remember when I first told Marr about that day I lost my family. Her reaction to my mother giving up and dying was to call her a worthless bitch. It shocked me at the time, but Marr always was a more demanding judge of character than I. At least in this case she was apparently a more accurate one as well.
I kept expecting to feel something really big and important—you know, after finding out my parents had made the affirmative decision to jettison me, an eight-year-old boy, leave me to my fate. I wondered why they did it. I could ask the old man, but I didn’t think I could believe anything he said. Had I done something horrible when I was a child that made them suspect what I might grow up to be?
My childhood memories were disorderly fragments, more so than most people’s because the brain damage associated with my death two years ago had sort of scrubbed away random bits of the past. I do not recall being particularly happy or particularly sad when I was a boy. I remember being anxious, a reflection I suppose of the constant anxiety of my parents. I don’t remember torturing small animals or anything terrible like that, and I don’t think that fit my personality anyway. No, I had no clue why they decided to just walk away from an eight-year-old boy.
How did I feel about it? Maybe it was the fatigue, maybe the distraction of the world coming apart around me, or maybe it was just something important missing from inside of me, I don’t know. But I didn’t feel that different. I mean, I felt surprised, and I felt pissed off, but I didn’t feel wounded.
All my life I’d thought my parents died back in 2102 Earth Time. Then it turned out they may as well have, but one of them was still walking around.
Huh.
* * *
Moshe shook me awake saying something about ammo and attack. It took a couple minutes before the scrambled synapses of my brain finally started coming back into alignment. I’d left word to wake me in three hours but they let me sleep for five. I think Moshe and the folks who knew what was going on felt sorry for me, which was sweet of them, but we needed me to get the ammo distribution thing squared away before an attack, not during it.
The common dormitory consisted of three really big metal shipping containers welded together side-by-side with wide doors cut connecting them. There were more people sleeping there than when I’d gone to bed, more cots and some folks on the floor wrapped in a blanket or two. Moshe and I had to make our way carefully through the narrow aisles and over tangles of arms and legs.
Outside the sky was beginning to turn from black to gray. I started toward the clinic but Moshe steered me to the soup kitchen, ignoring my protests.
“It’ll just be a second. I put in an order on my way to wake you up.” One of the cooks was waiting at the door, pushed a plastic cup of hot tea into my left hand and gave a greasy paper bag to Moshe. “Rice balls,” he explained as we headed to the clinic.
The tea was sweet. I normally take it without sugar but I probably needed the extra boost.
“Open up,” he said and popped a small rice ball into my mouth. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I bit down on it. I tasted some fish oil in the center, maybe on a little tofu, and a delicious piece of pickle.
“Damn, that’s good!”
“Ought to be,” he said. “Dolores Wu found out the sous-chef from Pinnacle came in with his daughter, looking for a place to hide. Now he’s the head line cook for the soup kitchen.”
“Pinnacle? That Human restaurant over in Arc-Jannu?”
“Yeah. Wait till you taste his faux crab bisque. We could rename the soup kit
chen the bisque kitchen, maybe attract a classier clientele. What do you think? Open up again.”
He popped another rice ball in my mouth. “Here’s another joke I remembered. Two atoms walking down the street. First atom says, ‘Hey! I lost an electron!’ Second atom says, ‘Are you sure?’ First one says, ‘I’m positive!’” He laughed.
“I’m positive, get it?”
“No,” I said, still chewing the rice ball.
“Oh, Boss! I mean, that’s actually kinda sad.”
Maybe so, but two rice balls later I felt like a new man. We were just about to the clinic and central ammo resupply point but I still hadn’t heard any small arms fire or seen much frantic activity.
“Where was the attack?” I asked.
“Oh, it hasn’t started yet. Dezi’s put together a striker squad she’s going to use to surprise one of their observation posts, maybe pick up some extra hardware.”
“Dezi?” I said.
He looked at me. “It’s her name, ain’t it? Look, you want another rice ball or you want to play wisenheimer?”
Zdravkova waited in front of the clinic with a dozen others, about half of which had RAGs, so it must have been a picked unit. She nodded curtly to me and smiled at Moshe.
“Good, you’re finally here,” she said to me, and stuffed a paper into my jacket pocket. “That is my new squad list with weapons and their main assignment areas, so you can rework the ammo resupply points. I tried to keep similar magazine types in the same area.”
“Thanks. That’ll help. Got a party planned?”
“Yes, and we must go before it grows too light. We will be back in an hour if we come back at all.”
She waved her squad up and they moved off to the west.
“Treat ’em rough, Killer,” I called after her, and then Moshe and I watched them disappear into the shadows. I felt a rain drop, another, and then it began raining softly.
Come the Revolution - eARC Page 17
