Null States

by Malka Older

  “You were never here?” Donath asks skeptically.

  “Write me into your paperwork if you want,” Mishima says. Especially if they use her real name; that won’t make any difference to her current job. “Just keep me out of the press.”

  “And if I need to contact you for any reason?”

  He’s already pulled down the antenna, so Mishima line-of-sights him her details. “Can you give me a ride to where you picked me up?”

  “I suppose that would be the hospitable thing to do.”

  He takes her right to the border, and goes so far as to return her knife to her, which shows a significant level of trust even given the barrier between the backseat and the front. “No sign of the vehicle?” she asks before she gets out, in case he’s gotten an update he hasn’t shared.

  “We’ll find it,” Donath says. “It takes some time. We have to go through our vids and all. But we’ll find it.”

  Mishima bites back an impulse to offer to help with the vids and all, given that her organization has a bit of experience with that. She gets out of the car and climbs the slope toward the pines. The black sky has turned blue. She has to be at work soon.

  CHAPTER 19

  Boarding the tsubame to intercept Fatima’s convoy, Roz snaps at Amran. She is annoyed by her oversolicitousness and her inability to get her own work done, and, okay, she’s still nervous about flying in these tsubames, but it’s more than that. Once the hatch has closed her into relative privacy, she takes a deep breath, and then another. She doesn’t want to sit there where everyone can see her so she starts up the air pressurizers. After she is out of Kas and unlikely to see any traffic for the next 150 kilometers or so, she turns her attention to herself.

  The first feeling she identifies is anger: why aren’t there more feeds in Kas, in Djabal, in this whole data-forsaken region? If she only had the intel, she would be able to solve this problem by finding the right vid or, in the worst case, with some slightly more sophisticated crunching. She could be sitting in the office, interspersing the quiet intensity of the search with quick inhalations of every bit of data she can find about the bombing in Geneva, trying to figure out how it will impact the Heritage secession. She wouldn’t be flying out on this iffy conveyance for another useless interview with a woman who hates her. She realizes she’s physically leaning away from the direction she’s going.

  That’s why she’s particularly short with Amran; not only does the woman rub her the wrong way, Roz also blames her for the lack of data. Which is probably unfair. She should look up the original data-collection agreements in the charter, but she’s so stressed and gets so little time alone on this mission that she gives herself a break and watches an episode of Starbright Warriors instead.

  Roz swoops in to land in the compound of Fatima’s cousin, where the candidate will spend the night before covering the remaining distance to Kas the following day so as to arrive in time for the debate. Roz had only an imperfect aerial view of Garsila coming in, but this looked like the largest house in a small town. When she tells the first servant she sees that Fatima is expecting her, she is quickly shown into a large cement room tiled with laminate. If there are any lights, they haven’t been turned on, and the room is shady and dim, which Roz welcomes after staring at semiarid scrublands for the last two hours.

  Fatima grudgingly agreed to meet her, and Roz feels herself tense when she walks in the room, but Al-Jabali’s widow looks more relaxed than Roz has ever seen her: Fatima has a smile resting on her face. It seems campaigning went well today, and indeed, when Roz checks, the numbers for her Garsila rally look strong. Fatima has removed her scarf and cap, and a servant is rubbing oil into her scalp; Roz notes with amusement that Fatima’s hair is shaped into the diagonal oblong known as the Vera, after the Policy1st head of state who popularized it.

  “I’ve investigated Information, as you requested,” Roz announces, after the lengthy greetings. After Minzhe’s report on the interview, she doubts that this is going to have any real impact on Fatima’s belief that Information killed her husband, but it’s a show of good faith and an excuse for coming to talk with her. She shows Fatima the geographical cross-ref she did on regional Information staff and the tsubame. She has prettied it up a little to make it easier to understand: unknotted her personal shorthand, added some explanatory headings. Fatima grasps the concept and doesn’t seem to doubt the data, but she is stubbornly unconvinced. “What does this prove? Wasn’t it a remote explosion?”

  “Yes, but someone had to remove the physical failsafe,” Roz says, and goes through the tsubame diagrams and timeline with her, step by step.

  “You could be making this up,” Fatima says as the other woman’s hands run gently through her hair.

  “Check it with any mechanic,” Roz says, knowing how unlikely it is that she will be able to talk to one without communicating via Information.

  “I mean the whole thing,” Fatima says, with an impatient flick of her wrist. “The failsafe, all of it! It could all be a cover for an Information bomb.”

  Roz’s anger spurts up again. “And how do I know you didn’t kill him?” That militia interview was a joke, she thinks bitterly. If they had done their job, she could be back in the office, happily sorting what little data there is.

  “I have no knowledge of how to do this thing,” Fatima says, spreading her hands as if it were that obvious.

  “You could have hired someone,” Roz snaps. “I certainly don’t have the ability to reprogram a tsubame for remote access”—well, she could probably manage if she tried hard enough and didn’t mind leaving a trail of search terms—“and you still think I did it.”

  There is a silence, and then with a slight toss of her head, Fatima acknowledges, “Perhaps not you personally. But Information was involved. They are the ones who are able to attack someone this way, and the ones who would want to see him dead!”

  How did it get to this, Roz wonders, that Information is not only hated but is the default bad guy, the one to blame for everything? “Why would we want him dead?” she asks, consciously aligning herself with the organization.

  “Because you couldn’t control him! He wouldn’t do what you told him to do and you killed him!”

  “Why would we care what he does?” Roz wonders how she can explain to Fatima just how little the rest of the world cares about DarFur without alienating her further.

  “If you don’t care, why do you need to record everything we do?” Fatima asks triumphantly.

  “Did your husband feel the same way?” Roz asks, and is surprised when Fatima hesitates.

  “He didn’t, did he?” Fatima says finally. “He let you in. He took your deal. And then he grew angry at your incompetence.” Roz blinks: incompetence isn’t the usual complaint. “Angry about your rules, your insistence on surveillance above all else.” That’s more like it. “And so you killed him.”

  “Was he upset that my team was coming?”

  Fatima hesitates again. At least she is thinking her answers through this time. “He was—startled. He wanted to make a good impression. In the months before you came, he was starting to believe in Information again.” She wipes the corner of one eye and adds, furiously, “I don’t know why!”

  “Look,” Roz says. She is weary of this conversation, this mission. “If you won’t believe that Information wasn’t involved, will you at least believe that my team and I weren’t involved? That if someone from Information did this, it wasn’t an official decision?”

  “It’s possible,” Fatima admits after another disdainful twitch of her head. The woman working on her hair has finished and is lounging by her side.

  “We really are trying to find out who did this, and to protect you,” Roz says. “Please, if you think of anything that could help…”

  “Yes, yes.” Fatima waves her hand. “I will think again. But you, you must also look again on your side.”

  Roz promises and retreats. There is a light breeze in the courtyard, the sun is s
etting, and she feels almost pleased at the thought of the long solitary flight back.

  * * *

  Kei wears the best suit she has to work the next morning to counteract her pallor and lack of energy. The best appropriately sober suit she has, that is. The Heritage building is in mourning. Mishima couldn’t bring herself to check until she got back to the hotel and had Ken’s arm around her: only then did she open the news compilers. The numbers weren’t as bad as she had braced herself for, but with seven people killed, there was far more data about each of them than there would have been for thirty. Mishima read, tears spilling, until she couldn’t stand to know another detail of their lives. She had checked the names, fearing to find Deepal’s among them, then felt bad about her relief: the pain she was saved belonged to someone else. She did find his name among the injured, but his wound is minor, and though he won’t be at work today, he can be expected to return tomorrow.

  Waiting in the security line, Mishima realizes she didn’t have to worry about the shadows under her eyes. Everyone looks about the same or worse.

  None of the news compilers characterized the group at the café as anything other than “Heritage headquarters staff,” and Mishima is still wondering if they were targeted because of their opposition to the secession. She’s convinced it was too well planned to be a random crime, and it seems like too much of a coincidence that an unrelated attack on Heritage would happen to strike the opposition group. Mishima decides that brings the bombing investigation under her purview. It’s all she can think about right now anyway. She snoops on her recorders all morning, but conversations are muted and purposeless, and after lunch, she decides her time is better used by going home early, reporting in to HQ, and giving her narrative disorder space to breathe. Besides, Ken agreed to stay another day. Actually, he refused to leave.

  * * *

  It’s full dark by the time Roz gets back to the compound. She sees that Charles is back and Malakal has arrived for the debate tomorrow, and she should go into the office to see them and ideally do some after-work socializing, but she is tired and depressed, and goes straight to her hut. Where she finds a second bed.

  She is still standing there, looking from one bed to the other, when the door opens again behind her. “You’re back!”

  Roz spins around. “You’re here!” She throws her arms around Maryam.

  “I wanted to surprise you,” Maryam says, hugging her back. “I hope it’s okay that I sleep in here? I can move…”

  “It’s fine,” Roz says, wholeheartedly. Maryam doesn’t count as socializing. “Just don’t ask me to talk to anyone else tonight.” She sits down on her bed, ungumming her boots.

  “That bad?” Maryam asks, sitting down too.

  “Just—so hard to get anything done here. Not enough data.” Roz rubs her face with her hands, emerges. “What do you know about the Geneva bombing?”

  Nobody knows much yet, but the two friends build up and tear down conjectures until Roz realizes how hungry she is. “I’m going to sneak out and see if there are any leftovers in the kitchen.”

  “Nah, I got something better.” Maryam shuffles through the leather bag by her bed and pulls out a resealed coconut. She finds the fissure, works a fingernail in, and cracks it, releasing a savory fragrance.

  “Is that from Medeterranée?” Roz asks, her mouth watering almost painfully.

  “Garlic rice soup,” Maryam confirms, prizing the laser-perforated spoon shape out of the top half of the coconut shell and handing it to Roz along with the bottom half.

  “Shukran, shukran. Al hamdu’illah,” Roz says fervently, sending Maryam into a fit of laughter.

  “Wow. Five years living in Doha and it only takes two weeks in DarFur for you to start using Arabic.”

  “More useful here,” Roz says around mouthfuls of soup. “Now I’m trying to learn Fur, though.”

  “From that very attractive governor?”

  Roz sputters a few precious drops of the soup on her bed. “You met him?”

  “I went along with Amran to a meeting this afternoon.”

  “What did you think?”

  Maryam gives her the nod.

  “Doesn’t matter, anyway,” Roz says, gloomy despite the growing warmth of the soup inside her. “Everyone here hates us; I’m sure he does too.” It’s a lie, though. Suleyman might not have been flirting with her, but she has a strong feeling, warmer than the soup, that he doesn’t hate her.

  * * *

  Nougaz is given scant warning before Vera walks into her office.

  “You knew about this Heritage idiocy for how long without telling us?” Vera does not yell, but the way her teeth are clenched might be the only thing stopping her. “A secession? And I find out about it from The Newsest?”

  “It was closely guarded,” Nougaz admits, stepping out from her workspace. “We didn’t want to legitimize it.” Or inspire copycats.

  “And you didn’t trust the Supermajority government to keep quiet about something this important? You’re not going to sell me this bullshit about it not impacting us now. This is something we should have known.”

  Nougaz waits her out. “This is really something you need to talk to Gerardo about,” she starts, but that only ignites Vera further.

  “I did. He told me one of their demands, besides that worm Pressman getting amnesty, is a five-year term. Meaning now. Meaning changing our ten-year term which we won to a five-year term now.”

  Nougaz says nothing.

  “Are you kidding me?” Vera is now yelling. “Do you know what will happen if you shift to the five-year term at this point in the cycle?”

  “Everyone will start campaigning,” Nougaz replies quietly.

  “Everyone will start campaigning!” Vera repeats, not at all quietly. “Including us. Never mind that we will be judged on our first five years—our first four, really—when Heritage had ten to learn the ropes, and then another ten on top of that to cement their incumbency. Do you know how this has worked out historically?” Vera throws up a data-visualization projection. It was clearly prepared beforehand, and Nougaz wonders how long Vera has been expecting this conversation. “Japan 2009–2012. Mexico 2000–2012.” She clearly has more prepared, but Nougaz cuts her off.

  “We have limited options.”

  “You what? You have all the options! All the power you are keeping from the Supermajority, you maintain for yourselves!”

  “Not so,” Nougaz says. She has noted the plural and hopes more urgently than she would like to admit that this isn’t personal, that it’s not going to impact their cautious little personal relationship. “But please. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. No one is giving in to any demands yet.”

  Vera waits, arms folded and eyes narrow. When Nougaz does not continue, she asks, somewhat more calmly, “You are planning something?”

  Nougaz shrugs. “It would set a poor precedent to give way to this sort of blackmail.”

  “Something invisible, then, a bit outside the rules, perhaps?” Vera chuckles. “Remind me never to get on the wrong side of your organization. Or at least not to underestimate you when I do.” She draws in her breath suddenly, leans back. “Not the bombing?”

  “Of course not,” Nougaz says, disgusted.

  Vera exhales in relief. “Good. Because the moment I find out you did something like that, we are done.”

  Nougaz exhales in relief but much more quietly and only when Vera has turned away.

  * * *

  Mishima’s semi-virtuous plan of catching up on sleep and getting some distance from the problem only works for about half a day. When she wakes up groggy in the late evening, Ken is already asleep, and she is anxious to do something. She looks into what is known about the bombing (everything) and what is available on the Swiss component of last evening’s excitement (nothing). The bomber, who has been identified as Andrej Xin Lanover, threw the bomb into the café without slowing his run and didn’t stop until he crossed into Swiss territory. Every step of that
run is meticulously documented; what happened after is a blank. No news compiler is even willing to confirm that he was killed in the null state, although there are rumors to that effect. Mishima wishes she’d insisted on seeing the body.

  She tries following the data on Lanover into the past, but it turns out, unsurprisingly, that there are Swiss-based gaps there, too. Annoyed, she decides to hack into the Swiss vid system. How hard could it be? But she gives up three hours later, unsure whether it was the sophistication or the unfamiliarity of the encryption that defeated her, and no closer to understanding who ordered the hit on Heritage’s anti-secession movement.

  CHAPTER 20

  Deepal is in the office when Kei gets there the next day, sitting at his workstation staring at a projection or at nothing. Mishima says good morning, quietly, and gets to work. An hour or so later, when she gets up to lay her bugs, she offers to get him a coffee, and he shakes his head, not moving his eyes. When she gets back, single coffee cup in hand, he’s in the same position. His hands—one of them bandaged from a burn on the wrist—are shaking.

  Mishima walks over. She wants to tell him that it’s okay to be upset, that she’s been there herself. Hell, she’s still there sometimes. She wants to put her hand on his shoulder or maybe even offer him a hug. It’s so hard to tell what will help someone and what will make it worse. But as she approaches, a cautious “hey” on her lips, he recoils.

  “Stay away from me!” Deepal hisses, disgust and fear on his face.

  Mishima nods and turns away, walking back to her workstation in as close to a normal pace as she can manage.

  It’s understandable. But she’s going to have to get what she needs fast or find another access point. Her time is running out.

  * * *

  The debate is held in a massive pop-up tent brought out from the government warehouse and unfolded with some ceremony: a prized asset, apparently, not to be worn out in showings of projected vids every night. It is white, floppy, and so large that Roz is concerned they won’t be able to fill it, and the debate will be lost in its emptiness; Maria’s surveys haven’t shown high levels of enthusiasm for the campaign. But perhaps she forgot to reckon with the lack of other entertainment in a place where most people still don’t have personal projectors, or maybe democracy is still new enough to be valued sui generis, because on the afternoon of the debate, the people file in and keep filing. Roz feels fully justified in having asked Maryam to come out, solely for the tweaks she made to the sound system. She set up a rack of feeds algorithmically scattered throughout the tent to allow generous broadcasting (and recording) of each of the speakers, the moderator, and almost the entire audience. A thousand conversations are going on, in at least (Roz’s struggling auto-interpreter tells her) four different dialects; without Maryam’s system, it would be impossible to hear the debate.