by F P Adriani
“I’ve been worried about YOU,” I said, breaking off the hug. “Where the hell have you been? You disappeared. Nell’s been looking for you for me. Are you in trouble over an interrogation or something?”
He shook his head, pulled a little face. “Not particularly. I just wanted to kill someone. The sleazy reporters who printed Hu’s…message seemed like good candidates.”
“YOU wanted to kill someone? Why?”
He avoided answering my question; he pulled a side chair closer to my bed, and I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I looked like shit, especially up close. I’d made the mistake of checking my face in a mirror earlier and found myself staring at a pale unhealthy-looking stranger, as if much of the blood-life inside me had been drained in less than two weeks. No matter my being a Sander, how fragile my animal body still was….
Tan was staring at me now as he said, “I finally followed a lead, or what I thought was a lead but turned out to be nothing. A dead end to finding you. I was on the other side of Diamond by then when I got the message that you were released. When will you be out of here?”
“Tomorrow. But I’ve got physical therapy over the next few weeks. I’ve also got some other stuff to take care of.” I looked at him, hard. “Hu told me some things.”
He waited, and when I didn’t add more, his brow lowered and he prompted, “Yeah? Such as?”
“I did not mean about you. I never spoke about you. You think I’m nuts?”
“I didn’t say you did—”
“But you thought it.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. And then I said, “I did speak about my parents, and Hu said the UPG killed them.”
There was another silence while he straight-faced stared at me.
He finally said, “And you believe her?” his mouth turning ironic.
“Her purpose in lying about this specific thing would be what exactly?”
“Pia, when you’re in captivity, eventually you start trusting the people holding you. It’s the way the brain works when captors are providing for your survival, such as it is.”
“I didn’t say I trust her. But she’s got me wondering. She’s given me some info. I’ve gotta use the Records Area computer.”
“What could this possibly reveal—do you really need to know this to move on?”
“Yes. I do.”
He sighed. “She’s a liar, a crook, like you’ve reminded me repeatedly. Now you’re taking her side?”
“Bullshit!”
“And my understanding is you were drugged—can you trust your memory about the past week?”
He had a point there.
But, right now, I needed someone on my side. “Why are you acting like this, Tan? You won’t help me then?”
He sighed a second time, moved closer to me. “You have any idea what this past week has been like for me? First The Festival’s a mess—two factory personnel were killed. And then you disappearing—the statement said you’d be released unharmed. But how could anyone know that was true? You know how many times I’ve hated myself for not helping you? You were right then. I should have listened to you.”
“Tan, there wasn’t much you could do. You didn’t know anything.”
“Well maybe I could have asked questions, I could have pressured people to find out more, some contacts I had. I resisted helping, I behaved like an ass all along.” His head lowered, so did his voice. “I don’t know why I’m still at this. What do I achieve? Nothing. The same shit year in, year out. It never changes. I pushed you, I pushed my friend, I push everybody here. And that pushing gets people hurt.”
“You do this job because you’ve got to!” I said. “It’s just got to be done.”
“Well, right now, nothing’s being done. No mining. A mining moratorium for at least a few weeks till we make some changes. Hu released another statement today saying it’s time to renegotiate the mining operations.”
My heart was pounding hard again. “Well? Will anyone listen?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve heard they’re acting like they’re willing to talk.”
“So maybe this will all wind up with a good ending?”
His eyes fixed on mine. “Pia, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. It’s a start. Maybe. That’s all. In the meantime, I’ve been rethinking my life.”
“Join the club.”
“So…what will you do now?”
I didn’t respond at first. Then I said, “I want to know what happened to my parents. That’s priority Number One.”
“You may never know,” Tan said.
“Still, I’ve got to try.”
“And then what?”
“I’ve got to make a report, to James. I’ve never failed at a job before. I guess there really is a first time for everything. …So will you help me? You didn’t before and then you regretted that. If you don’t help me now, maybe you’ll regret that someday,” I said, my questioning eyes on his brooding ones.
*
Five nights later we met outside the Records Building.
The day after my operation, I had gone back to my hotel, but I still had to make a daily trek to the hospital for my therapy sessions, which sucked. But I was getting better quite rapidly—sleeping half the day and eating right and bathing regularly was helping. In other words, being a normal human being again was helping.
Tan had called me only once to see how I was doing and to set a time for the Records meeting, but I hadn’t seen him since that day in the hospital—truthfully, I hadn’t wanted to see him because I wasn’t much up to primping myself for a man. And, anyway, where had we left off before all that Festival mess? It seemed as if everything had fizzled out between us. Or maybe what we had hadn’t been much to begin with?
Still, in the cave when I’d thought I’d be killed, I regretted never getting closer to him. I regretted never getting close to anyone, period.
On that fifth night, we were alone when I reached the outside of the Records Building and Tan let me inside. We walked through the dark halls, then Tan punched in a security code, and, this time, together we entered the room we’d entered separately that night he’d caught me in there.
Tan turned on the same overhead light, eyed my face, and said, “You look better.”
Tonight I’d made sure my hair was brushed and I had some color in my face, both real and artificial. It seemed to have paid off because he was staring at me with a bit of his old look, the one where he wanted me and was thinking about having me.
He, too, looked better, not so thin, and there was that youthful pinkness in his cheeks.
“I feel better,” I finally replied, walking further into the room and pulling out the e-drive from my pant-pocket. At that moment, Tan passed me and marched over to one of the computers, began firing it up.
I stood on the desk’s other side. His fingers apparently punched in a password or something, then he said, “There you go,” stepping back from the desk and staring at me.
“And what will you do now?”
“I’ve got some work to finish. I’ll leave you alone.”
“Don’t,” I said, surprising myself, and him too apparently. He’d started to move away and now he stilled and stared at me again, waiting.
So I continued, “I’m not sure what I’ll find. And don’t you want to know what that is?”
There was a tense pause. Then Tan finally said, “Sometimes stirring up the past dirties the future.”
“Well, frankly, I don’t know that I have a future anyway,” I replied, and then his mouth moved as if he wanted to say something, but then his mouth stilled as he apparently decided against speaking.
This time, I moved: my legs. I walked to where he stood and then to in front of him, to finally sit at the computer. The polymer keyboard was built into the desk’s wood top and only light tapping at the keys was required. But with Tan’s being so close behind me and possibly the truth of my past also being so close in front of me, I was nervous, to be honest, so my fingers ke
pt fumbling and hitting the keys too hard, making the screen freeze-up.
“You want help?” Tan’s soft voice asked.
“Yes.” I slid my chair sideways to the right a bit, pushed in the drive Hu had given me, while Tan bent forward and carefully punched the keys.
The screen shot back pages and pages of…stuff. My eyes quickly perused through the whole, but it was a mess of info, many of it scans of financial-transaction records, and all of which probably couldn’t be absorbed in one sitting even by someone who knew what the hell she was viewing. And I wasn’t that someone.
I went back to the beginning and read the first few pages of scans carefully, but when I turned up nothing about my parents, hot blood started pounding in my face.
“What the hell is all this?” I said then.
“I told you not to trust her.”
“You think they look valid at least?”
His left forefinger touched the bottom corner of one of the images. “See this shaded area and that faint number there on every screen? Those are official seals. Most things-computerized can be hacked, but I’ve never heard of that being faked. It can only be generated by the official approved user’s fingerprints on the keys.”
I looked up at his face. “So that was her digital seal?”
“That’s correct,” he said, nodding. “I’ve seen it before.”
“When?”
“It’s not relevant. It has nothing to do with this. I just noticed it back then when…I was at her place once.”
“Oh,” I snapped, my fingers hitting the keyboard again, this time with more purpose. “And you still remember it after all these years?”
“I just really think it’s real, Pia.” His eyes were on the screen now. “She took these with her for whatever reason. And now that I’ve seen this, I wonder what else she’s got….”
I scrolled through the pages again. “What does that matter? I wanna know what I wanna know! And I feel like an idiot now. She fucked me over. But what did I expect from her? She’s just a thug….” As my mouth uttered the thug word, my eyes caught sight of something interesting.
But my angry fingers had quickly scrolled past the interesting part faster than my brain had totally registered the interesting part. Now my fingers had to scroll back, and when they quickly did, Tan asked, “What is it? You see something?”
“I noticed blacked-in words on some pages, and—look—” my right forefinger pointed at the screen “—here’s another one. Only this one has the first letter left in, after the first black blank. Blank Gblank. A man with the last name beginning with G, seventeen letters in his whole name. This keeps showing up—I’ll search the drive for other last names with a G.”
I did as I’d said, but the computer spat back nothing. However, when I searched with blacked-out text for a first name and a G as the first letter for a blacked-out last name, I got back a bunch of scans listed. They were internal links to the whole; I hadn’t come across them during my earlier perusal.
I began clicking through each, heard Tan say, “She seems to have given you a puzzle.”
“Mmph,” I grunted in agreement, my eyes rapidly reading the screen. I didn’t see anything obviously relevant until I hit the second to last scan listed when the word “explosion” jumped out at me. Beads of sweat dampened my upper lip as I silently read….
“3/7/30/2370: A Summary of the Royal South Mine Explosion’s Post-Event Analysis, Political Ramifications, and Cost Analysis. This is LEVEL 5 CLASSIFIED INFORMATION. Reading this document without proper clearance is a FELONY OFFENSE.
Post-Event Analysis:
Commander Blackedout Tblackedout testified in private that Blackedout Gblackedout is who he had seen fleeing the main but closed North Exit of Royal South Mine right before the explosion went off on the South end. When Commander Tblackedout chased and caught up with Gblackedout, a partially-torn label for the liquid explosive eventually identified as used in the explosion was fused to Gblackedout’s boot bottom.
An investigation of Blackedout Gblackedout’s identity has revealed Earth-based citizenship and a two-year tie working with the Unified Planetary Government (UPG) in covert operations. Before he was turned over to the UPG on 2/7/20/2370, Gblackedout repeatedly stated that he was working under UPG orders in planting the explosives. As this falls under Earth jurisdiction, under Article 56 of the Diamond Constitution regarding interplanetary high crimes committed by noncitizens of the crime’s location, The Diamond Council could not prosecute and had to turn over Gblackedout to The Earth Council. Blackedout Gblackedout’s status since is unknown.
Political Ramifications:
The UPG has been sued for violating planetary Constitutional rights and for causing planetary damage on five separate occasions. On all these occasions, the plaintiff planets did not win. The UPG has been accused of repeatedly changing tactics to keep itself intact. Causing planetary damage that would later require UPG financial resources to repair, thereby gaining control by financial investment, has been a common accusation against the UPG. The Royal South Mine explosion is possibly the first Diamond-based evidence of this.
However, given that, technically, the UPG subsidizes the Diamond mining operations, if the public found out the UPG not only did this subsidizing with The Diamond Council’s approval but also that the UPG might be behind the Royal South Mine explosion, more striking and rioting might ensue, and the stability of Diamond and The Council would be threatened further. Article 75.8 of the Diamond Constitution does state that outside government subsidies of native planetary resources are forbidden. For expediency, The Council attorneys had extensively examined the article and had drawn up a plan to work around it and still allow the subsidizing, but it is believed that public scrutiny of this work-around would be disapproving.
It is recommended that The Council privately demand compensation from the UPG for the damages and that The Council publicly condemn the Royal South Mine explosion as being the work of angry former mine employees with the Mine Workers Union. There is, after all, not enough proof that Blackedout Gblackedout is who he claimed he is, as the UPG has denied any knowledge of him. And he had been living on Diamond for nearly a year before the explosion so could have been affiliated with the Mine Workers Union.
Cost Analysis:
See the attached nonclassified Documents 127 through 145 for more detailed calculations. The cost of the Royal South Mine’s destruction combined with the repair estimates (See Document 136) will push the 2370 Council budget into a deficit for the first time in five years….”
I couldn’t read anymore; I finally noticed the tears that had been stinging my eyes.
“My parents’ murders reduced to burdensome financial expenses,” I said in a dead-sounding voice.
“I’m so sorry, Pia…” Tan said, his hand reaching toward me, but I shot off my seat and rushed away from the desk.
I spun back around and punched the desk’s top, then spun around again, shaking my fists at the air, shouting, “Goddamn this fucking planet!” Then I stopped, began crying, my head hanging down, my eyes on the swimming-with-tears gray floor.
Tan said quickly, “Look. Just stay right there. I’ve got to wipe this clean—what we did.”
He sat down at the desk, his fingers flying over the keyboard while I stood there and silently cried till I was too tired to cry anymore. All these years—my life had been a huge, huge lie….
Tan finally stood up and yanked the e-drive from the computer. He walked over to me, handed me the drive.
“I fucking hate them,” I said then.
“I know. But it’s done, Pia. It’s over—you shouldn’t torture yourself over it. And you can’t fight it all.”
My eyes shot to his. “But look what they did—what they do—and I help them! So do you!”
“We’ve all got to survive, and we can’t always make the best choices then. Most of us are stuck here.”
“That’s the kind of cowardly thinking that started this shit. That’
s how people get corrupted—because they’ve got basic needs they’ve always gotta address, so they go along to get along. Look at me: I’ve never liked me for what I did, but I did it anyway. I liked the money. Hu said we’re the same breed. I thought her comment sick then, but she has a point.”
His face hardened. “There you go again—listening to her.”
I flashed him an even harder look, then shook the e-drive at the air as I said, “Tan, the fact is: this needs to get out.”
“And then what? I bet there are many people doing what you do. They’ll all be your enemy then. You think you can fight the UPG behemoth, with all its money and manpower?”
I looked down at the e-drive lying in my palm now. “Maybe that’s why Hu never went public with this.”
“Oh yes she did. What do you think she’s been doing all these years with the sabotage? Smears about the UPG abound—the smears increased when she started running around making trouble.”
“Apparently, they’re not simply smears….” I raised my head again. “And why the hell are you resisting doing something once again?”
His lips shook as his words shot through them: “Because I’m worried about you! About us!” Now, his voice softened, and he asked, really surprising me, “You ever been in love, Pia?”
I shifted my weight on my feet. Then I said a flat, “No.”
“I thought I was once but only recently realized the relationship wasn’t what I thought.”
“I’ve heard love always seems that way…like each new time makes the old one disappear in significance, makes it seem smaller.” I stared at his face, at his sad, soft-brown eyes. “So who you been in love with since then?”
He didn’t answer my question. “You should go back to Earth—it’s where you want to be. Chase your new bogey. It’s always about the chase, isn’t it?”
Now, I didn’t answer his question. Instead, I said, “Tan, you were in love. You loved her and she disappointed you.”
There was a long pause while he stared at me.
His head finally turned away a bit as he said, “Yeah I loved her.” And then he looked at me again, his mind through his eyes seeming more open than ever as he added, “And now I love you.”
