Null States

by Malka Older

  “So, you didn’t know him well?”

  There are headshakes around the booth, with shy smiles from the younger soldiers: why would they know the governor?

  “And your commander?”

  “Of course he knows him.”

  “He was appointed by him.”

  Minzhe lets a few minutes go by, concentrating on the sizable haunch he’s holding. He’s not sure what it is about the barbecue in this region, but he hasn’t found anything like it anywhere else in the world. “I guess the deputy will be taking over now,” he says, when he judges enough time has passed.

  Shrugs and exchanges of questioning looks among the militia; they aren’t clear on the legalities, but it seems to make sense.

  “What’s he like?”

  Unlike when he asked about the governor, this unleashes a babble of conversation and anecdotes.

  “He fought with us before independence.”

  “He helped me get my auntie to Nyala for hospital.”

  “Everyone knows him.”

  “He’s my brother.”

  Minzhe focuses on that last one, a young guard named Yusuf. “How many siblings do you have?”

  “Sixty-eight.”

  “He seems very young,” Minzhe observes. What he is thinking is that the deputy can’t possibly be the oldest of the siblings, no matter how many wives were involved, but they take it as a question about his leadership status instead.

  “He’s been a sheikh since he was twenty-three,” reports the oldest soldier. “Born to it.”

  Minzhe blinks, both because of that assault on his democratic principles and because he’s getting an update. “The forensics team just arrived,” he tells the soldiers, swallowing the last of his tea in a stinging gulp. “Let’s go take a look before I report in to my boss.”

  The forensics team includes two Dinka, a Luo, and another woman whose tribal affiliation is not noted in her public Information but who speaks Kiswahili by preference. Minzhe doesn’t know any of them, and they all seem focused on business, so after introducing himself, he hangs back and watches them set up their tent. The militia take their afternoon prayer, two members waiting on guard and starting their ablutions only after the others have finished. Minzhe considers asking if he can help with the investigation, but he doesn’t know anything about forensics and he should report in, so he heads back to the compound.

  * * *

  Not really much of a team yet, Roz thinks, watching them gather. Minzhe is excitedly briefing Charles about the culinary offerings he’s scoped out at the market, and Charles is responding with praise of the movable feast he’s just eaten, while Maria sits in the back, watching and waiting. Amran can’t even bring herself to sit down and is twisting her hands in front of her skirt and glancing at Malakal looming against the wall by the door. Roz frowns at herself; she’s going to have to resist the temptation to treat Amran as less than a full member of the team, even if she’s not SVAT and quite possibly out of her depth.

  “So. What happened?” Roz asks. They talk it through first: the sound, the spattering debris, the way people ran from the stage, what they saw at the scene. Only after they’ve gotten all their own impressions out does Roz project the feed; it tells them nothing new.

  Except: “It looks like the tsubame slows a little before it explodes,” Minzhe says. “Is that right?”

  “It could be decelerating for arrival,” Charles points out.

  “Was it…” Maria hesitates before finishing her thought. “Is it possible that the explosion was triggered by a line-of-sight device?”

  There is a moment of stunned silence. A line-of-sight trigger would put everyone who was on the platform squarely on the suspect list, and 5/11 of that group are sitting in this office.

  Roz checks her messages, but neither Maryam nor the forensics have checked in yet. “We’ll find out,” she says. “Hopefully soon. All right. What happened afterward?”

  Charles describes the shock of the elderly sheikhs he was talking to on the platform. “Anger as well as shock,” he says. “They thought democracy would free them from political violence.”

  A common misconception. “Suspects?”

  “Sudan, mostly,” Charles says. Sudan no longer exists; they’ll have to translate the accusation into the current administrative terminology to figure out who it’s pointing at. “The surrounding centenals, 888…”

  “Any suspects not related to government?” Roz asks. She doesn’t want to dwell on the 888 suggestion with Minzhe in the room.

  “I asked about personal enemies, but he evaded.”

  “So, that’s an assumed yes,” Roz says. She looks at Amran, but the field lead avoids her eye, and Roz decides to come back to her later. “I had a similar impression talking to the sheikha; she said something about—” Roz replays the conversation to be sure. Most people don’t record their every interaction—there are fraught legal issues as well as storage concerns—but it is standard procedure for SVAT teams in the field. For them, the legal issues run the other way: they want protection against accusations of Information manipulation and a digital witness in case of violence. And storage is not a problem for Information. “She said ‘those who are against the governor’ instead of ‘against the party.’ But I couldn’t confirm either.” Roz wonders briefly about the timing of Suleyman’s intervention but decides that’s paranoid; how could he have known what questions she was asking? She turns to Maria. “Anything from the masses?”

  Maria glances at Amran. “We talked to twenty-three respondents, of whom fifteen were women and all but one were Fur, with an age spread of twenty-four to thirty-nine.” Sounding very much like a pollster now, Roz notes, and smiles as a three-dimensional pie leaps up into the middle of the room, shiny and beveled with the latest textures. “As you can see from the results, while 35% felt shock and 12% felt grief, the most predominant emotion, at 44%, is anger. That does not bode well.”

  “It’s a good reminder,” Malakal says from the wall, “that our immediate mandate here is twofold: supporting the investigation and smoothing the transition to whatever is next. The peaceful transition.”

  There is a pause. “Minzhe?” Roz asks. “Anything to help us with either of those?”

  “Well,” Minzhe says, stretching out a little as he talks. “I got to chatting with some of the militia. Nothing like a long, boring wait to get friendly with people.”

  “Just a second,” Roz raises her hand, updates flashing against her eyes. She meets Malakal’s gaze, his nod. “The forensics team can confirm that the body is that of Abubakar Ahmed Yagoub, known as Al-Jabali; they’re still working on the second body, presumed to be his bodyguard Adam Khaled Mohamed. They have 93% certainty the tsubame was sabotaged. We’ll have more soon.” She refocuses on Minzhe. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  He nods, the swagger evaporated. “As expected, I suppose. Anyway. As I said, I had a long wait with the militia, and it turns out I know some of their relatives in Nyala, so I got the gossip.” Probably all of it available on Information, if only they knew where to look. Or perhaps not. Roz looks at Amran again, wondering when she should call her on the appalling lack of intel. “To start, everyone thinks it was the Sudanese, or just possibly”—he’s working back up into storytelling mode—“the Chadians, trying to get the Sudanese blamed for it. Same old stuff that’s been going on for decades. I left that and kept them talking. Two things came up. First: Al-Jabali has—had—a wife in Djabal, but he kept a woman on the side here, too.”

  “Why didn’t he just marry the second one?” Charles asks. “This government allows men to marry multiple wives, right?” He glances at Amran; her eyes are on her hands in her lap, but Information has confirmed at everyone’s eye level before he finishes speaking.

  “The militia guys had all sorts of theories, most of them inappropriate to this more polite setting,” Minzhe says. “Basically their assumptions boil down to: his wife wouldn’t let him.”

  “Meaning she probably wasn’t res
igned to the idea of a mistress, either,” Charles nods.

  “So, there’s that. The other thing.” He pauses for effect. “They said there have been skirmishes at the borders.”

  That gets the attention of everyone in the room.

  “Skirmishes? What does that mean, actual battles?” Charles asks, as Malakal says, skeptically, “Skirmishes that Information doesn’t know about?”

  Roz is done giving Amran a pass. “Were you aware of this?”

  Amran, startled into looking up, squirms. “There have been rumors of fighting, but nothing I could confirm.” Roz bores into her with her eyes, but she doesn’t say anything else, and Roz eventually turns back to Minzhe.

  “The militia were quite proud that it hasn’t shown up on Information—or at least gotten picked up. I suspect if we looked hard enough at feeds and satellite photos, and the conversations in certain plazas, we might see something. But you have to understand this region is not like … anywhere else you’ve been. Right now, where we are now, is probably the least observed any of you has been in your lives.” He pauses to let that sink in, and to let them remember that he grew up out here, before it was even part of micro-democracy. “Information only started installing the feed infrastructure a couple of years ago, and given the extreme lack of population density, they haven’t put in very many. There’s not a lot of geopolitical linkage—almost all the governments here are tiny locals or megacorporate outposts.” Like 888 and Heritage, which both have centenals nearby. “The only people who care what happens here are the people caught up in it, and they care passionately, insanely you might even say.”

  Roz blanks for a moment, caught up in an uncomfortable thought. If all this is true, then Minzhe must be the least documented person in the room. And he’s caught up in it, isn’t he?

  “… definitely battles,” Minzhe is saying when she tunes back in. “But minor ones.” He rolls his eyes up, checking his notes or replaying the conversation. “Seven killed in a fight last September. Three in an ambush in January. And five just last month.” His gaze returns to the room. “Those numbers are only the casualties on the DarFur side; the militia don’t know how many the other side lost.”

  “Who are the other side?” Maria asks. “And where are these battles taking place?”

  Roz glances at Malakal. His eyes are heavy-lidded and darting back and forth: he is scanning as much recent intel as he can find about this place, she guesses, or looking for the right puzzle pieces to contextualize Minzhe’s story.

  “There have been a variety of adversaries: DarMasalit in September, NomadCowmen in January. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me who attacked in the latest incident; they said ‘stateless people,’ an old term, obviously, which I think we can take to mean ‘not an official centenal force.’ They said it derisively, which is how they talked about this whole issue. They either believe, or are pretending to believe for the sake of their pride, that this is nothing to be concerned about, that it’s normal.”

  A brief, appalled silence. “Normal to have fighting between centenals?” Charles asks.

  Minzhe nods urgently; the strain of trying to get them to understand what is so obvious to him is starting to show. “Low-level conflict has been going on here for decades. I’m not sure whether they think of it as conflict over territory, because they see the centenal borders as changeable”—out of the corner of her eye, Roz sees Malakal look up—“or whether they think of it as … something that just happens, not really to try to win land so much as to express their abilities, their loyalty.”

  “Doesn’t sound like they have such great abilities if they’re losing that many people each time,” Charles points out. “How is it possible that we don’t know about battles with so many casualties?” Twisting around in his chair to look at Malakal.

  “Like I said before”—Minzhe grabs his attention back—“there just aren’t that many feeds. It’s not some big conspiracy. Let’s not get caught up in the fact that we didn’t know about this, and start thinking about the plan for addressing it.”

  “Did the militia think the assassination might be related to any of these … incidents?” Malakal asks.

  Minzhe shakes his head. “As I said, they barely take them seriously—which is why they were willing to talk about them with me. But here’s the thing: there are a lot of potential enemies here. Did you know, in one of his early speeches, Al-Jabali compared DarFur to the state of Israel when it was established?” He holds up his hands. More than fifteen years since Israel and Palestine acceded to the election system and ceased to exist as territorial entities, their history remains contentious. “I’m not saying it’s a reasonable analogy, but that’s how they see themselves. Anyone with an agenda could seize control of the narrative of this event to direct the resulting conflagration.”

  Roz bites her tongue not to ask Amran for a briefing on who might want to do that. She’s remembering what Minzhe said: Amran has a lot less intel to work with than the field leads they’re used to dealing with.

  “Is the militia going to investigate the assassination?” she asks hopefully.

  “I’m not sure they even have an investigative function,” Minzhe says. “I asked, and they didn’t seem to know what I meant. Mind you, these were, shall we say, beat cops. Their commander might know if it’s in their charter; I would guess even if it is, they’ve never used it.”

  “The commander didn’t come to the site of the assassination?” Charles asks.

  “Oh, he was there, but he was dealing with the sheikhs and doing the brunt of the crowd control, so I couldn’t talk to him beyond pleasantries.”

  “Minzhe,” Roz starts. She’s not sure if this has ever been done, but she needs a close link to the government. “How would you feel about embedding with the militia, or whoever they find to investigate this?”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Minzhe says, trying not to look thrilled.

  “We’ll need to clear it with the authorities first, of course. Amran?” Her head snaps up. “Who is in charge now? Is it the deputy governor?”

  Fortunately, Amran doesn’t have to pause to look that up. “Yes, according to the government code, the deputy governor automatically becomes centenal governor in a case like this. There will probably be a ceremony of some kind over the next few days, but technically, he’s already empowered.” She hesitates for a moment, then adds, “The more complicated situation is in the DarFur government as a whole. There’s no statute for who becomes the new head of state. I guess … I guess they will have a new election.”

  Guessing is something that rarely happens in Roz’s world. Elections, on the other hand … Roz represses a sigh. “We’ll talk to the new governor tomorrow, then.”

  “He’ll be at the funeral in Djabal,” Charles points out.

  “So will we,” Roz answers. “That tsubame came from Djabal. Al-Jabali’s wife is in Djabal. We need to check it out, and it is only appropriate to show our respect at the funeral.” She’s been thinking about this since the governor told her he was going. And it’s ceremonial, so rank is important. “Malakal and I will handle that. Amran, I want you to prepare a new briefing file based on this event.” She’s letting her off easy, but now is not the time to get into it in front of everyone. “Maria, try to get a sense of the biggest threats to public equanimity—without exacerbating any of them, please!” Maria nods with what looks like offended dignity. “And Charles, start looking into these conflicts with the neighbors—quietly—and get to work on initial compilation and distribution. Keep it general and neutral to start, but let’s remind people why they joined micro-democracy and why they were happy about it. Both of you, take into consideration DarFur’s other centenals. Al-Jabali was the governor here, but he was also head of state for the whole government, and the assassination attempt may have its roots outside the centenal borders.”

  As the team files out, Roz taps Amran on the elbow, and the young woman startles, making Roz wonder if the light touch was inappropriate in som
e way. “Can you stay for a moment?” she asks her as courteously as she can. Malakal hangs back with them.

  “Is something going on?” Roz asks, once the door has shut behind Charles, the last one out. “You seem upset, and I wanted to give you a chance to talk about it more privately.”

  Amran presses her palms to her face. “I should have known it,” she whispers, chin bobbling. “I should have known this was coming!”

  CHAPTER 4

  The assassination of a head of state for a government holding thirty centenals, even a popular, photogenic one, is small news on the world scale. It makes some but not all of the global compilers, and where it does appear, it’s a blip. No one has time to read everything that happens.

  In her corner office at the Paris Hub, Nougaz dismisses the assassination as soon as she has signed off from the call with Roz. She hears Roz is quite competent, and Malakal is eminently capable of taking over if necessary. She has other things to worry about. Shepherding a new Supermajority into their role has been more challenging and time-consuming than she expected. Nougaz has already suggested instituting a longer handover period for any future Supermajority changes, but Policy1st is balking at announcing anything that will make them look bad, so it will have to wait until they are a little less sensitive. In any case, an extended handover was hardly feasible after the debacle of the last election, with the outgoing Supermajority under criminal investigation and the urgent need for stability and decision.

  It is a cool autumn day in Paris, the leaves still green on the ancient chestnuts lining the avenues. The building where Nougaz works, the Paris Information Hub, is lovely if you like the city pieds-à-terre of an ancient aristocracy, but a little old and cramped for a twenty-first-century global oversight and transparency agency (the latest restyling of the Information mission). Nougaz has been toying with the idea of doing away with the mythical equality among hubs and opening a more centralized headquarters, maybe in a purpose-designed building like the one Policy1st has in Copenhagen.