Null States

by Malka Older

  Roz doesn’t remember crossing the room. She is standing beside him, holding his hand in both of hers. She slides down into a chair and looks down at their clasped hands because she can’t look into his eyes any longer.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come,” he says.

  Roz blinks, bringing up and discarding a quick succession of calendars and maps as she tries to clear away her tears. “It wasn’t easy to get back here.”

  “But you did.” He puts his other hand on hers, holds it tight as though he can’t believe she’s there.

  “Are you okay?” She reaches toward his face. “What happened?”

  Suleyman shifts on the bed. “I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t realize people were that upset. You saw the debate; people were very interested. Yes, some were concerned, but the election was channeling that. And then, as the voting was going on, suddenly there was this anger. ‘What happened to Al-Jabali?’ ‘What are you doing to protect us from our enemies?’” He smooths the sheet over his legs. “I was in my office, but I saw the crowd yelling and pushing on Information, and I went out to try to calm them. Obviously,” he says, and she sees the tear shimmering in his good eye, “it didn’t work. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I should have resigned, or run for head of state myself, maybe—”

  “Did you assassinate Al-Jabali or order his assassination?”

  His eye flicks up at her, startled into alertness. “No.”

  “Then you’re not to blame for this. I’m not sure what’s happening, but it’s not because of you.”

  Suleyman hmphs, and pats her hand, and mutters something that might be thank you.

  “Wait, I’m not done. Did you know about the plastic guns?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew they were illegal?”

  “Of course. But we needed them.”

  “Wasn’t there any way you could negotiate with the people who were attacking you?”

  “With the NomadCowmen, maybe. But there is no way to negotiate with stateless people. They are paid by others to attack us. There is nothing we can offer them.”

  “Are they really stateless?”

  “They are unregistered to any government, or their employers are powerful enough to hide their registration. Or remove it, so that they have no choice but to fight for them.”

  “Who employs them?”

  “Sudan. Or Chad, perhaps. Probably Sudan.”

  Roz feels like banging her head against a wall. “Sudan doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does Chad.”

  “Maybe not. But there are those who wish they did. Who believe their nations still exist, in their hearts if not on the maps.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Information for help?”

  “We weren’t sure.”

  “Weren’t sure we would help?”

  “Weren’t sure what it would cost.”

  Roz lets her head hang for a moment. “You heard that 888 are being punished for the attack?”

  Suleyman nods. “The governor of their Nyala centenal is resigning in the face of the sanctions.”

  Roz waits. “And?” she prompts him.

  “And we hope they won’t do it again.” He smiles at her, strokes her hand again. “I told you before: I believe you are doing your best. I believe you are our best option. We will try.”

  He is still using the plural you, but Roz’s whole body illuminates. She swallows. “So, when can you get out of here?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day. Depending…” She can feel his good eye traveling her face, her body, which should have given her some warning. “Will you marry me?”

  “What?” Roz pulls back, shocked.

  “What?” he echoes, his eye now searching her face, his expression a mirror of hers, as astonished that she is surprised as she is that he asked.

  “I just came to see if you were okay … I’m not staying here!” In her panic, Roz is blunter than she might have wanted.

  “We don’t have to stay here. In fact”—his hand straying toward the bandage—“I’m not sure I have a place here anymore. We can go to … wherever you work.”

  He doesn’t even know where she’s based! “As it happens, I’m probably on the job market myself,” Roz says.

  “You gave up your job to come see me?”

  He is smiling, as if he’s proved something. “I didn’t think it through.”

  “Take your time,” Suleyman says, leaning his head back on the pillow.

  Roz’s comms sound: someone is calling. She doesn’t bother to look. No need to answer if she no longer has a job. “We don’t even know each other that well.”

  He opens his good eye to glance at her but doesn’t respond.

  “Why have you never married?” The question has been pushing to get out of her for weeks.

  “Because I didn’t want to do it the easy way,” he says. “And you?”

  Why hasn’t she? When she thinks about it, she supposes she had a few opportunities to do it the easy way. There was Demetrius at university; he would have stayed with her forever if she hadn’t moved away for work. Landon, at her first posting, seemed committed; she was the one who broke up with him. Guillaume, her most recent serious boyfriend, got as far as proposing two years ago, and that was the end of that. “It never felt right,” she says. “It was never enough.”

  Roz jumps: an alert on her comms, shocking through her nerves. Urumqi, she thinks. She left and now something’s happened, her team is under fire, or trapped by a mob. Laurent, she thinks, with a pounding of guilt. “I have to take this,” she tells him, and he says again, “Take your time.”

  Roz ducks out into the hallway to answer the call. “What happened?”

  “I need you to get to Gori as soon as you can.” It’s Nejime.

  Gori? Roz is so surprised, it takes her a moment to place the city. “The Caucasus? But—did something happen in Xinjiang?”

  “Besides you leaving? No. Nothing’s happened, at least not yet. But I can’t afford to move anyone else out, and I need people on the ground with eyes on Russia.”

  “Russia? Why?”

  Nejime sets her mouth. “They see what is happening at these negotiations. They want in. To be honest, that was always the plan: improve treaties with all of the null states, work toward something global. But in what I can only assume is an effort to improve their bargaining position, they are pushing the South Ossetia border.”

  Roz feels herself twitching into professional mode. “Pushing how?”

  “We have previously ignored minor incursions, but over the last few days, they have been essentially moving the border, pushing people out and taking over their land, and last night’s case was egregious, five hundred meters.”

  “What do you expect SVAT to do about that?” Roz asks. “You need military out there.” She is looking through the window to Suleyman’s room. With his sealed eye facing her, it feels almost like spying on him.

  “There will be backup; don’t worry,” Nejime huffs. “YourArmy. LesPros are strained in Xinjiang.”

  “It should be the other way around,” Roz points out.

  “It should,” Nejime agrees. “The point is, I want nonmilitary support for our centenals out there.”

  “To do what?” Roz asks, her voice bitterer than she means it to be. “Convince them it’s okay to be annexed?”

  “No. To humanize the other. What Information is supposed to do.” Nejime sounds weary, but then her voice sharpens again. “And if you don’t think that’s a worthwhile use of your time, you shouldn’t have walked out on the most important conflict in the world.”

  “I didn’t think I was still employed,” Roz says after a brief pause. In a way, she wishes she wasn’t, wishes she hadn’t picked up this call. She can still walk away, but she thinks she may have used up all of her rebellion.

  “You had something you needed to do,” Nejime says crisply. “But now we need you back. Roz, you haven’t taken a personal day in three years. Your timing is sensationally bad, but person
al matters rarely take global politics into account. So, you were reassigned for urgent duty in South Ossetia and in the interim saw an opportunity to resolve the situation in DarFur. It is resolved, is it not?”

  “It will be,” Roz says.

  “Good. Your background packet is on the way.” Nejime signs off before Roz can reconsider.

  She stares in through the window for a moment, then shakes herself and walks inside. This is her life. If he can’t deal with it, now is a good time to find out.

  “I have to go,” she tells him.

  “Where?”

  “Gori.”

  He shakes his head. “I’ll look it up. And where do you live?”

  “Doha.” She says it almost reluctantly: Doha seems too easy.

  Suleyman considers. “Doha is not far. It is Muslim. I understand something of the culture there. But I have heard”—watching her face carefully—“that they are not always fair toward Africans.”

  Roz nods. “Yes.” She has experienced rudeness, condescension, subtle clues that she doesn’t belong. “You will find that anywhere outside of Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa. But I have friends and colleagues I trust.” She rubs her forehead. Doha no longer seems easy. “I didn’t choose to live in Doha, you know. It was a work assignment. I could ask for a transfer. I could move.”

  He waves his hand, probably because it hurts too much to shake his head. “Doha is fine, until you’re ready to go somewhere else.”

  Roz tries to picture the sheikh in her apartment and succeeds only in transposing the image of him in Kas, white robes flowing against the background of her bright yellow walls and woven hangings, a paper cutout of a prince inserted into her mundane life. “I don’t know.”

  He takes her hand again. “Don’t worry. Go do your job. Just call me when you get there. Please. I will be waiting to hear your voice again.”

  * * *

  Nejime has prevailed upon the Nyala mini-hub to lend Roz their crow, so she’s able to travel to Gori in reasonable comfort, privacy, and speed, but she has one stop to make on the way.

  Abdul Gasig has been under subtle house arrest since the election. They couldn’t have done anything more stringent without more evidence, but seeing him in his airy salon, legs propped up on cushions with a carafe of date juice at hand, gives Roz flashbacks to standing outside Minzhe’s dank cell and fills her with fury.

  It is some consolation that Abdul Gasig starts violently when she enters. “You’ve come,” he whispers.

  Roz strides over and pushes her anger right into his face. “What did you do?”

  Abdul Gasig shrinks, his bravado gone, but he’s still ready to obfuscate. “Nothing, I did nothing, I know nothing…”

  “I do not have time for this,” Roz tells him through clenched teeth. “I have to go manage Russia now; do you understand? A great big null state is threatening our borders, and I don’t have any time to waste. You tell me what happened, and you tell me now.”

  He doesn’t have much resistance left in him. “I never meant to hurt him,” he whispers. Roz almost shakes him. “They approached me last year. Pointed out how my business interests were less spied-on than most.” Roz manages not to roll her eyes “They asked if I’d like to keep it that way, maybe even get some position in the government.”

  “And all you had to do…” Roz prompts when Abdul Gasig stops, gazing into his regrets. It makes his face look old, and Roz suddenly remembers that he’s nearly seventy.

  “All I had to do was fiddle with some dials on the governor’s tsubame. The energy management settings. I looked it up; there was nothing dangerous about it at all. So I did it.” He takes a deep, shuddery breath, like a toddler about to let lose a wail. “How was I supposed to know they intended to kill him in that very tsubame?”

  “Who were they?” Roz asks, scenting blood.

  He stares up at her, his eyes big behind his dark lenses. “I thought they were you. I thought they were Information.”

  * * *

  The night before the talks end, with the K-stans so neatly tied up you could put a bow on them (the war won’t end that easily on the ground, Mishima knows; they never do), the second-in-command of the Chinese delegation slides into a seat next to Mishima at the bar. Mishima has been drinking shōchū with her alcohol neutralizer in, pretending it works anyway, and the short Chinese woman buys her another glass.

  “We’ve been watching you,” she says, voice low against the chatter of other delegates sitting a few meters away.

  “You and the rest of the fucking world.”

  “You’re not a figurehead,” the woman purrs. “You have essential skills.” A pause while Mishima declines to answer. “We don’t see it as a disorder, you know.”

  Mishima finally turns to look at her, the room swimming as though the alcohol had pickled her brain.

  “Your talent. It’s something we value very much.” The woman clucks her tongue. “Shocking that your bosses would expose you by suggesting it to us while you were undercover.”

  Oh yes, Mishima thinks, Because China is well known for prioritizing the safety of their agents. But she can’t get her tongue to push the words out.

  The Chinese woman’s face is softened with middle age. Not where people expect to see power, even now. “It’s a shame Wu Jing was not more polite, but he was angry. Not many people get as close as you did.” She taps in her payment and slides off the stool. “I’m sure we could find a very interesting position for you in our public service. Please keep that in mind, should you ever be in the market for such an opportunity.” And then she is gone.

  Mishima drinks, uselessly.

  * * *

  Roz puts in a request for an InfoSec team, or, since they’re probably still shorthanded, some Information backup to support Ken and Minzhe with the interrogation of Abdul Gasig. She doubts they will learn much, since he swore that he never saw the assassins in person, but maybe they’ll identify some useful technical detail. As soon as she is in the air with the course set for Gori, she calls Maria.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew about the guns?” Roz asks.

  “Guns?” It isn’t that Maria is trying to stall; after a week in Xinjiang, the idea of guns has taken on a whole new meaning, and it takes her a moment to realize what Roz is talking about. “Oh. You mean in DarFur.”

  “Yes, in DarFur! You saw what happened to Minzhe; why didn’t you say something? Not to mention the risk to the rest of us.”

  Maria speaks carefully, as if she’s making an effort to keep her voice steady. “I reported it to Information, as anyone should have.”

  “And what about Minzhe?”

  “Minzhe?” Again, Maria is at a loss. “Wait—is that why they arrested him?”

  “They assumed he reported them, because he worked with the militia and had access to the intel.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “From some of our surveys.”

  “You didn’t realize that’s why Minzhe was in jail?”

  “I heard it was for treason. Nobody mentioned the guns! Besides, I made that report ages before he was taken in, at least two weeks. We got the tip when we first arrived.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Roz asks. She remembers the gun she thought she saw in the market, the first day, before Al-Jabali was killed.

  “I didn’t want to jeopardize our investigation. I didn’t think there was any direct danger to us. The guns were for use against outsiders in battle. No one was waving them around threatening us, or anyone else for that matter. I was really conflicted about telling anyone, but in the long run, it’s a very dangerous trend. So I reported up the chain the way I was supposed to, and I said very specifically that there was no immediate danger, and no action should be taken until the ongoing mission had been completed.”

  Roz sighs. “Makes sense. I wonder who fucked it up.”

  Maria absorbs the profanity, unexpected from Roz, who always seemed fairly buttoned-down as a tea
m leader. “I thought the anonymous-tip function was unbreakable.”

  “As far as I know, it is. But I was looking through the vids from when Minzhe was arrested. You said you thought you heard shots.”

  “I was almost sure I did.”

  “There were no shots there, nothing that even sounded like shots.” Maria must have been terrified of those guns.

  “I’ll call Minzhe,” Maria says. “Man. I feel terrible.”

  “I think he’ll be relieved he’s not going to lose his job for espionage,” Roz says. “Maybe you should call the governor, too.”

  “You don’t want to tell him yourself?”

  There’s an awkward silence, then Roz brings herself to laugh. “All right, I guess I could. But he should hear it from you.” She pauses, but she’s really curious. First Minzhe, now Maria. “Were we that obvious?”

  “Nah,” Maria says. “I doubt it. I’m told I have a good eye for these things. And that eye was turned on Sheikh Suleyman quite often because he is very pleasant to look at.”

  Roz can feel herself blushing. “Um, yeah.” She finds herself thinking of the conversation with Minzhe, his complicated something with an unnamed soldier, maybe or maybe not and definitely not allowed. What right does she have for this to work out? “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “When I left DarFur”—the first time, she doesn’t say; no need to get into her desertion right now—“the governor said something to me about autonomy, and I didn’t understand. Is it—Do people think Information threatens their autonomy? I mean, I can understand privacy as a concern, but autonomy? Governments can do whatever they want with their centenals.”

  There’s a long pause, and when Maria answers, it’s with a patient tone, the one Roz uses when she’s explaining, say, that being from the Great Lakes region doesn’t mean she knows anything about West Africa. “Privacy is part of autonomy. Deciding what is reported and how much you spend on reporting it is part of governing.”