Null States

by Malka Older

  Mishima cautiously lifts her head up above the polished, oblong conference table and immediately sees a pile of colorful cloth perched on the windowsill across from the door. She ducks down as the door of the room she is listening in on closes, and crawls to the middle of the table, which should be the spot least visible from the door, the windowsill, or anywhere on the path between them. She hears another creak, but the door of the room she’s in stays closed.

  “… I understand what they meant,” the first voice is saying. Cool, polished, just slightly petulant: Cynthia Halliday, no doubt. Without waiting for the cost-benefit analysis, Mishima scrambles out from under the table, her fingers finding the T-29 model recorder in her pocket and shoving it into the folds of cloth, jamming it into a gap in the thick weave. She dives back under the table, breathing deep to slow her pulse.

  “Of course, they don’t want to go through with it. They see everything as a bargaining chip, a little jockeying within the status quo. Just like Pressman.”

  Another idea: Mishima scrabbles in her pocket and pulls out a tiny vid recorder, arranges it on a chair arm where it should just cover the entrance. It’s a risk, which is why she hasn’t left vid recorders everywhere: though miniscule, the camera must necessarily be line-of-sight, and while the lens is treated with anti-reflectors, it may under the right conditions wink. She’s counting on the late visitors to this room being distracted and hurried, and visual confirmation of their identities could be very useful.

  “But they need to think bigger. They needed someone to think bigger for them. That’s why…” The scarf still elusive, the door closes and the voices fade. Footsteps approach in the hall. As Mishima arranges herself in the deepest shadow of the table, the lights go out. Eight o’clock. A second later, the door opens.

  The lights flick on again, and Mishima watches a doubled vision of the room: from her hiding place, she can see two pairs of legs from just above the knee; from her video feed, she sees the top halves of Cynthia Halliday and her aide Leticia. Halliday is talking and frowning, but her face lights up as soon as she sees the other side of the room. “—which is why I have to take drastic action. Look, there it is.”

  Mishima doesn’t want to risk tracking her with her vid recorder, so she watches feet only as Halliday marches across the room and snaps the scarf from the windowsill. She does have a good view of Leticia’s impassive face and brief glance at her (unnecessary, conspicuous, and doubtless Swiss) wristwatch. Then they leave, the door shutting behind them. “What kind of restaurant is it? No more fucking Swiss food, please. I can’t take any more cheese and potatoes. It’s so heavy. And that raclette last night gave me terrible gas.” The voice whines on in Mishima’s ear along with their footsteps, the elevator doors opening and closing, the quiet hum as they descend, the doors again. Louder footsteps on the polished lobby floor, then the outside doors, and wind. “Where’s the fucking driver got to? Oh, there he is.” The noises fade as the car drives out of simultaneous listening range, and Mishima lets her breath out. It was a silly gambit, really. The T-29 is the smallest recorder they have, the size of a ladybug egg, which is why its range is so short, but it is studded with burr-like micro-hooks that should keep it safely snagged in that scarf. Maybe she’ll have a chance to collect the data someday if Halliday keeps wearing that scarf.

  The lights in the conference room have gone off again. Mishima uncurls—blinking in the sudden illumination—and stashes her recorders. She hovers by the door. The lights in the corridor are out, so no cleaning crew on this wing yet. She slides the door open and slips out, triggering the lights, nips into two more rooms to pick up the last recorders, and makes for the stairs.

  CHAPTER 15

  Roz has been waking early every morning since she arrived in DarFur, the heat driving her from her bed around dawn, and the day after meeting Suleyman in the market, she makes a point of walking out to the café again. Always good to develop informal channels, she tells herself. Besides, she wants to see the latest cartoons; she’s curious as to how much, if any, of this Heritage thing is leaking into public knowledge.

  The governor isn’t there when she walks up. She’s pretty sure she’s early, anyway. Coffee. Coffee and cartoons. She studies the latter while waiting for the former.

  In the panel right in front of her, the recognizable shape of China is given the appendages and tweaks necessary to make it into a mother hen. Its wings prop up a dozen synecdochical 1China centenal-chicks around it, using them to block the shrapnel falling from the battle between two central-Asian soldiers, their helmets labeled KYRGYZ and KAZAKH. In the corner, the artist has sketched another mother hen, this one sheltering her chicks under her wing. A practice drawing? Or a depiction of the natural way of things to provide contrast?

  Either way, the piece reminds her of the K-stan conflict, which she has almost completely ignored over the past few days. She pulls up some recent stories: the fighting has continued at a low level, but there is some interesting analysis of the impacts on Eurasian trade flows, and she starts to wonder how the war is interacting with the Heritage secession.

  “Good morning.”

  Busy plotting the approach for an economic analysis, Roz hadn’t even noticed the governor walk up. “Sabah al-khair,” she manages in careful Arabic.

  “That’s very good,” he says. “But you really should learn it in Fur.”

  “Tell me,” she says, gesturing for him to sit. “And then, after you’ve polished off Kiswahili…” He looks at her questioningly. “You can start learning Sukuma.”

  Suleyman laughs fully, head back and eyes closed. “Yes! Enough with these colonialist languages that won the population game. Let us practice our small home languages.”

  So he is a revolutionary after all. Roz warms to him, but as SVAT team leader, she keeps testing. “That’s what micro-democracy is all about,” she tries. The governor gives her a steady look that makes her think he doesn’t buy it. “What? Don’t you know micro-democracy is there to protect the marginalized?”

  He looks at her, serious now. “I believe,” he says, “that you’re doing the best you can.” The plural you, according to her auto-interpreter. “And so that is what we will work with.” He lets the smile creep back. “Now, try: Ef camo.”

  “Ef camo,” Roz repeats. She has to admit, she has a weakness for tiny, endangered languages of limited usefulness. “It’s amazing being here,” she says, locating the feeling of strangeness that has been tickling at her all morning. “Just ignore that”—she nods over his shoulder at the low dome of the evaporation plant—“and there’s no way of knowing we’re even in this century.”

  “Remove Zeinab’s and a few of the subtle details in the manufacturing of my clothes, and we could be any time in the past thousand years, two thousand maybe.”

  His response is so smooth, Roz imagines he must have heard her observation before, from other foreigners who have passed through without leaving a mark, but then he goes on, with an addition that seems tailored to her.

  “You would have to remove the feed cameras as well, of course.”

  Roz can’t stop herself from glancing around, although without knowing where the tiny cameras are she doesn’t catch so much as a glimmer. Automatically, she blinks through the feeds, cycling across three different views that include their small table, but she flips through quickly; Roz hates watching herself.

  “From your perspective, is it a good thing or a bad thing, this timelessness?” she asks. “It’s interesting and exciting for me, but I don’t have to live here.”

  Suleyman straightens slightly, not quite a wince, at have to live here. “You mean would I prefer progress or tradition?” he asks.

  “Sure.” It was a spontaneous question, but now Roz remembers Charles’s report from Djabal. All of the infrastructure projects mentioned in Al-Jabali’s final meeting are in more or less the stage of progress suggested in the minutes. What surprised her was the number and scope of the projects: a small solar farm; a man
ufacturing complex, with specialized printers and room for the related auxiliary workers; water purification; a sewage system, still in its infancy. They are definitely thinking about progress.

  The sheikh leans back, arranges his ebony walking stick in his hands. “It is not either-or. Of course, if the question is Do we build an evaporation plant? then it is: either we do or we don’t. But for our lives as a whole, we must answer yes to some types of progress, no to others, so that we can keep what we need and improve what we can.”

  “And how do you know where to draw the line?” Roz asks.

  “In a micro-democracy, don’t the people decide?”

  Roz opens her mouth for a long-winded explanation of how each centenal determines its specific mode of micro-democracy, and while some use referendums on every important subject, many trust detailed decisions to the—and then she catches the teasing edge to his voice, and smiles instead. “I’ve been meaning to ask about the electricity. Why are there so many blackouts?”

  “We get our electricity from the Sahara solar farm,” he answers. “The problem is the connections. It is a long way to get here, with many suboptimal transfers along the way, and many branches to other small cities. And, I’m afraid, many opportunities for theft.” That explains the plans for the solar farm in Djabal. She wonders if they’re planning one here, too.

  Suleyman pauses for a sip of coffee and continues. “And you?”

  “And me?”

  “Progress or tradition?”

  Roz looks at her hands, arranged on the edge of the tiny table. It makes it easier that he already knows about it, no exposition necessary. “My room was on the third floor. My childhood room, I mean. The water came up above the second floor. We could row out there, careful not to splash any of the water on ourselves or into the boat, climb in through the window”—they had to break it, she remembers: a gloved hand wrapped in cotton cloth—“and remove all my old things, the ones I had left in my parents’ house while I lived elsewhere. Of course, everything below the third floor was lost. The chemicals in the water ate away at the building. They put more chemicals in, to try to neutralize them, but it made it worse. The fish…” She stops, raises her eyes, and offers a grim smile. “I’ve seen how progress can have unintended consequences, so you can understand if in principle I come down firmly on the side of tradition. Although I have to admit that since being here I’ve learned I still enjoy a bit of progress and convenience.” Climatization, for one thing, which uses energy. A wider variety of food, which requires transport.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he says. “In any case, I find it interesting that you think of this as the past.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Suleyman gestures, drawing her gaze over the shacks of organic material, the sand-and-scrub wasteland, the distant evaporation plant, the images painted on brick that provide intel and entertainment. “This could just as easily be the future.”

  * * *

  “I can tell you the oil came from Abyei,” Minzhe tells Amran, “which the militia naturally take to mean that the Sudanese were involved.”

  “How did you get this?” Amran asks, scanning the file he sent her. “I asked Commander Hamid for this report twice!”

  “The trick is not to ask the commander,” Minzhe says, and then glances around the tea shack, embarrassed he said that aloud. He’s a little too proud that he managed to get that file, especially considering how little sneakiness it took. AbdelKadir shrugged and tossed it to him when he asked. After looking through it, Minzhe is less surprised about this: the militia’s minimal investigation turned up very little besides the origin of the oil.

  “The barrel could hardly be transported all the way from Abyei already rigged to blow up at the precise time the governor was nearby,” Amran says, and then, because these professional SVAT agents seem to know about all kinds of tech she’s never heard of, “Could it?”

  “Seems unlikely,” Minzhe says with that reassuring smile of his. Sometimes, when the angle is right, he looks just like Rajesh Kohli, one of her favorite Bollywood stars.

  “Nothing on the trigger?” Amran asks.

  “They found fragmentary materials that seem inconsistent with spontaneous combustion, but they might be foreign matter from the warehouse or the outside of the barrel. Nothing actually suspicious, you understand. And they don’t have any testing facilities in the DarFur government, so they’re languishing in an envelope in the extreme heat of the militia barracks storeroom.”

  “Could you have them sent to Information forensics? There’s an associate lab in Nyala that might do, or if not then the Juba Hub.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Minzhe says, wondering how he’s going to talk the commander into that.

  “Nothing else?” Amran asks. She sighs. “If this were an interactive, there would be a clue there, waiting for us to see it.”

  Minzhe does his best to ignore that naïveté. “It might have been just an accident after all.”

  Amran is determined not to mess this one up. The love story of Al-Jabali and Amal, an assassination attempt foiled by Amal’s competence: it’s all just too romantic to be untrue.

  * * *

  The council of governors and ministers sets the debate to take place in Kas in seven days, which puts it in the middle of the campaigning period. As soon as it is announced, the candidates begin to converge. Sheikh Abdul Salim from the centenal in the south near Mukjar arrives in Kas, and another sheikh named Omar Ahmed is due in next week from Jebel Marra in the north. Fatima, Al-Jabali’s widow, announces she will be leaving immediately for Kas, but whether from fear of more sabotage, because she no longer has access to government tsubame, or because of its folksy appeal, she is coming by road. She’s following a caravan of traders so she can stop in every village along the way on its market day “to allow the people to pay their respects to my departed husband.”

  “And, incidentally, campaign like crazy,” Minzhe translates. Polling is going slowly, and Maria is bringing in Information stringers from the more far-flung DarFur centenals for some training, but what data they do have puts Fatima in the lead, with the Kas sheikh Abdul Gasig in a close second. Al-Khadri has dropped out, citing health reasons, although Minzhe suggests it might have more to do with Fatima’s influence, and the local stringers Yagoub and Mohamed agree. Hamid Mohamed, the Kas militia commander, has declared. A crowded field, but that’s what happens when a leader dies suddenly with no clear successor. Charles hasn’t been able to speak to Fatima again, but he is going from Djabal to Jebel Marra to interview Sheikh Omar Ahmed, so for the moment, Roz concentrates on the suspects in Kas.

  Abdul Gasig is fat, wealthy, and unapologetically garrulous, an embroidered cylindrical cap on his head and a gold-tipped walking stick swinging by his side. No, he tells Roz, he didn’t have any quarrel with Al-Jabali; they were united in their hopes for the resurgence of the Fur people. Yes, the government taxed his business, but within reason and for good purpose. Yes, he’s running for governor now, but it was not something he would have killed for. He had barely considered it before this opportunity arose, and he’s still not sure it’s the best move for him. After all, his businesses keep him busy. Of course he’s ridden in a tsubame before, but he doesn’t own one of his own; he doesn’t travel enough to make it worth it. Yes, he has ridden in the governor’s tsubame, several times for various official functions in other centenals, but he has no way of knowing if he rode in the tsubame that exploded or a different one in the fleet. Anti-Information? He’s pro anyone who will help his business interests, and so far, Information has been excellent for business. Roz is pretty sure he winks at her from behind his dark glasses.

  Commander Hamid Mohamed is a far trickier proposition. Compact and dry, his face reminds Roz of movie stars from the 1930s, with wide cheekbones and a neatly trimmed mustache. Roz probes as gently as she can about the state-militia relationship but gets only monosyllables. She starts to push harder.

  “Al-Jabali ap
pointed you,” she notes. “Were you close?”

  “It was on the word of the deputy governor.”

  Naturally. Suleyman is everywhere in this investigation. “So, you didn’t know him well?”

  “We worked closely once he was governor. Before that, no.”

  “Why are you running for governor?”

  “Because I don’t like any of the other choices.”

  “You don’t like Fatima?”

  The commander frowns. “I don’t know her well enough to like her or dislike her. Certainly not well enough,” he adds in a lower voice, “to know whether she killed her husband.”

  “Did you like Al-Jabali?”

  “Our relationship was not the kind for like or not like. He wasn’t a bad governor.”

  Not exactly high praise. Although maybe it is for this guy. “Did he command you directly or through the deputy governor?”

  “Directly, although if he was out of the centenal, the deputy governor often took over.”

  Roz feels like there’s something he’s avoiding, although she’s not sure exactly what. “Did Al-Jabali know much about military tactics, security…”

  The commander’s expression is the equivalent of a shrug with no body movement. “He was involved in the independence fighting, but I don’t think he saw much action.”

  “Did he listen to your advice?”

  “Yes, usually.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “Probably the Sudanese,” the commander answers without hesitation. “Maybe the Chadians.”

  Roz changes the subject. “I hear there’s been fighting on the borders.”

  The commander’s expression doesn’t change, but he is suddenly still, tense. “We defend ourselves,” he answers.

  “From whom?”

  “There are those out there,” he says, with admirable dryness, “who don’t trust your rule of law.”

  Is he talking about the attackers or himself? “Why haven’t you asked for help?”