by F P Adriani
A picture of Hu filled the screen, a picture very reminiscent of the first one I’d ever seen of her face. The news report continued….
“…Yesterday Hu herself sent this statement to a Daily Sentinel reporter: ‘Some of the laws are unjust, some are just. I’ll be doing my time because of the just ones. Then when I get out, I might run for office.’
“The newspaper published Hu’s statement early this morning, and then the afternoon edition published this response from a local resident, ‘What a surprise: crooks are just politicians in training.’
“But Channel Eight has determined that Hu continues to hold a lot of support. Already ‘Free Arlene!’ signs have begun mushrooming in public places.
“Earlier today, our government analyst Mildred Simms had this to say: ‘The Council needs to proceed carefully. If it punishes Hu too harshly, I think the martyrdom blowback will be severe.’
“The latest off-world shipping news will be up next. But remember: Channel Eight always keeps you up to date on the latest-and-greatest of Diamond….”
Tan got up and turned off the TV. He was sighing when he came back to the couch and sat right beside me, his left bare thigh pressing against my right.
I said then, “If she runs, I bet she’ll win.”
“You know it,” Tan said. “Stranger things have happened in the Universe…and now you know that too.” He rolled his eyes, and they stopped on my face.
“I love you,” I said seriously then, staring into his deep dark eyes. And he pulled me into the warmth of his arms.
*
A few days later, I got a letter from Hu.
It had been slipped beneath MSA’s front door. When I first saw the bit of paper on the floor, I pulled my gun and called to Tan, who was standing by his car.
I’d come to my office intending to start up my business again; I even had a call to return about a possible new security job.
But now my heart pounded as my eyes quickly scanned the area…and found no signs of anything untoward inside. Just the letter and a very flat metal key inside the letter’s envelope.
Tan walked up to me as I was opening it. He frowned down at my hands. “What is it?”
I began reading the letter. “It’s from Arlene….”
Pia:
I thought you’d want the disk waiting at a friend’s Jersey Bank deposit box Number 620. You’re expected there. You’ll need to show ID.
As I write this, a Council-based army’s being set up solely for guarding the locations. This will mean more non-mining jobs will be created. And Diamond will have to think twice about how it uses the resources here. Now that the nature of the strength-force here is known, I’m sure a measuring device will be constructed so we aren’t dangerously “digging in the dark” anymore.
Two days ago I had my operation. Today I’m notifying the press about the Diamond danger and that I was instrumental in protecting Diamond. This, as I’m sure you know, will help me politically. And it will also help lighten my sentence.
I have not and will not mention you. I will leave that to your discretion, though at some point you’ll probably be required to testify on something. See the disk. I will warn you though: a murderer of multiple people only needs punishing for one murder to get either a life-long sentence or a death sentence. Keep that in mind.
My own sentence will begin in two weeks. But maybe we’ll meet again someday. Life is funny that way: you never know what will happen tomorrow.
Arlene Huston
(P.S. As you can see, I took your advice.)
“What’s with the Huston?” Tan asked, peering over my shoulder.
“That must be Chuck’s last name and hers combined—they got married,” I said as I closed the letter.
Tan’s eyes slowly widened at me; then he shook his head just as slowly. “She’s a piece of work.”
The front door opened and Nell walked in, saying a cheerful, “Hi! I’m so glad you’re both here….” Her voice died as her brown eyes went back and forth between our probably-too-somber faces. “Is something wrong?” she asked fast.
Then I was equally fast in reassuring her because I knew this whole situation had taken a toll on Nell’s nerves. Like Diamond, Nell had always been more fragile than she seemed. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Good news actually! I finally heard from Hu. She said The Council’s setting up an army to protect the locations.”
Nell’s worried face turned into a grinning face. “Well, that is good news. And I have some more—I mean, if you both agree to it. Last night Derek and I talked and decided to move up the date—to next week. We want to get married then!
“I know this is such short notice. But now I see that life really is so short. If we wait too long, what if something bad happens before then? Why wait when you know something is right?
“But if it’s too short a notice to have the wedding at your house….”
“No way—no! It’s not,” said Tan, smiling widely at her.
“I agree,” I said. “You must have it there. I’d be so unhappy if you didn’t. All through this mess I’ve had a vision of you and Derek in my head on that day….”
*
The next week was a busy one as the four of us made the many arrangements for Nell and Derek’s wedding. We had so many things to buy and so much furniture to move and so many people to call and so much food to plan—we didn’t have much time to think about anything bad, which was good.
However, the day after I’d received Arlene’s letter, I finally retrieved the disk.
Later, sitting alone in Tan’s black living room, I slipped the disk into the TV’s player.
Ronin’s image appeared on the screen, and I immediately noticed that he didn’t look too hot, probably as hot as I’d looked while Arlene held me in that damn cave. And now I realized that I’d basically helped deliver Ronin into the same situation I had been in.
He was paler than I’d ever seen him, and more bruised than I’d last seen him. But I could tell he wasn’t drugged because his eyes were too alert, and his attitude still oozed his same sociopathic hate, even while confessing to his crimes. Clearly, he didn’t regret a fucking thing he’d ever done. He actually seemed quite amused by it all.
A muffled voice not visible on the screen asked him, “Did you set the Royal South Mine explosion in The Carbon District?”
He smiled coldly, shrugged his big shoulders. “Yeah, I admit I did it. And so what. No one will ever do anything about it. The UPG will take care of that, just like it did the last time when it hired me to do the job.”
“Why did they want that particular job done?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know, I don’t care. That’s what the UPG does. Business-as-usual. Maybe the mine was just business-as-usual. No particular target. Maybe the people inside the mine were a thorn in someone’s side. So the UPG hired me to take out the thorn.”
There it all was, in concrete unambiguous form…. But now that I’d seen it that way, I understood what Hu meant in the letter: Ronin would be punished for at least one murder, but not for my parents’ murders.
It was too late for me to ever get the UPG; something even more important had happened now because of Amy’s discovery. While Hu might use this video as a blackmailing-incentive for The Council to reform itself, I now saw that, partly because of that, there was probably no way for Hu to let that info out publicly and protect herself—or protect Diamond either then.
Generating even more political chaos at this time would be too dangerous. An out-and-out war starting between Diamond and the UPG would be too dangerous. The Council wasn’t perfect. But the UPG was even worse, was too unscrupulous. I didn’t want to even think about what could happen if the UPG ever got its hands on the diamond-sphere locations….
There was more in the Ronin video, another confession; The Festival bombing this time. Then the video abruptly cut off.
The blank screen blurred before me in a wet haze….
I pushed the TV remote
’s off-button.
“Pia,” came Tan’s soft voice as he walked into the room. Earlier, he’d wanted to watch the disk with me, to support me, but I told him then that I wanted to see it alone the first time.
Now I said to him, “You were listening all along, weren’t you?”
“Couldn’t help it.”
I was still crying. “Guess I’ll never get total satisfaction there.”
“Guess not,” said Tan in a sad voice. “But then some is still better than none.”
*
The day of Nell and Derek’s wedding turned out almost like my vision: Nell wearing an outfit in her favorite lime green and Derek wearing a purple outfit—that had been my vision because lime green and purple were my favorite color combination.
However, in reality on their wedding day, they both wore lime green, which equal-colors were even better than my vision.
In the almost-twilight of the setting Sun, they stood before Magenta Mountain, the increasingly purple sky hugging the beautiful mountain behind them. They said their vows, and they both looked so happy and so beautiful, I felt my eyes mist over. It seemed just about everyone there looked misty-eyed. Nell’s family, Derek’s family, Roberto, Mike, Lori, Julianne—even Jamie looked both happy and sad. He held his silent fiddle against his thigh….
Nell and Derek finally kissed, and then Jamie immediately started his exciting fiddle-playing while Tan and I hugged and congratulated our friends the newlyweds. Everyone else began hugging and kissing and even lightly dancing around.
Now I really did cry. I moved off to the side alone, wiping away my tears so no one would know they’d ever happened. Then I went back into the house, into the kitchen to check the caterer’s progress, who then asked if I wouldn’t mind helping him arrange the food platters in the dining room.
As I moved around doing that, I rubbed at my slightly-sore-but-healing-well wrist; that ridge fall had actually caused a hairline fracture, which the diamond sphere apparently hadn’t cured. I was now back to my normal Diamond strength—and weaknesses. The increased-strength effects hadn’t been permanent….
I now wondered if just like with the planet Diamond as a whole, the diamond-sphere’s strength effects were time-dependent: the longer you remained near the sphere, the longer the effects would last—and, at some point, they could possibly become permanent.
I also now saw that this would be a safety issue, and I hoped both Hu and The Council had realized this because no one guarding the locations should probably be near them for very long. The army personnel would need to be rotated, or else they could become way too strong and might then get ideas….
I was sighing inside the kitchen when Julianne found me.
“Can we talk alone?” she asked, smiling at me.
We went into Tan’s study and I shut the door.
Today Julianne’s excited eyes beyond her glasses and her cherry-red cheeks finally looked something close to happy—and healthy. “I forgot to give this to you the other day,” she said as she handed me an envelope.
I frowned down at it, but when I finally opened it, my frown faded. Inside I found a check for the remainder of that nice large sum she’d quoted to me that very first day.
“But, Julianne, I didn’t finish everything—”
“You did almost everything I asked. And you’re only human, aren’t you? A Sander, but not a Supersander. No one is, no one should be.”
I looked at her, smiling and nodding a little.
“I saw the news yesterday,” she continued. “It’s coming out now—my mother’s work will finally be known. The news talked about ‘a scientific discovery of great significance to Diamond’s geological history has forced the creation of a new army’. That’s what they said, ‘great significance’. That was my mom: great.”
Tears finally flooded her dark eyes. I took her in my arms and held her, and, for a moment, it felt like I was holding myself.
*
When I went back into the kitchen, Tan was in there alone; he was using a spoon to pick at one of the buffet’s rice dishes. He looked slim-and-fit gorgeous in one of his favorite all-black outfits.
But I said “Hey!” as I walked up to him and lightly smacked his hand from the platter.
His beautiful pink lips pouted at me. “Come on—just one bite.”
“All right,” I said, and my head moved forward to gently nibble at his right earlobe. He got distracted enough that I was able to snatch the spoon from his hand.
“Hey!” he repeated to me now. But I was laughing hard.
He tilted his head in the patio’s direction. “You know, that Jamie really can play.”
“No kidding.” My hands adjusting the errant square neckline of my pale purple dress, I moved over to the rented refrigerator to get some more booze to bring out into the dining room.
But when I closed the fridge door, before I could walk away, Tan came up behind me and put his arms around me.
“Pia, I think you like it here. In my house, being here. Am I right?”
Since we’d come back from the trek, not once had we talked about or even made reference to our relationship. Until this moment.
I knew what he meant. My living here was only supposed to be temporary. But would it actually wind up being temporary?
I was about to respond to him, but before I could, the doorbell ringer went off.
Tan walked away, then the next thing I knew his parents were standing in front of me. I’d been expecting them, just not so early. But now here they were, and for their first look at me—my arms were filled with beer bottles. I could feel sweat coating my upper lip, and an unruly lock of my hair hung in front of my eyes, the end of which sat stuck inside my gaping mouth.
Tan’s mom Cookie smiled up at me beneath a head of gray-peppered black-brown hair that reached straight down to her small chin. All of her was petite, short; so was her husband, Tan’s stepfather Richard, a wide-framed man with a gigantic half-gray handlebar mustache and a mop of brown head hair. They were quite a sweet-looking couple. But, then, what had I expected?
I finally dumped the bottles onto the counter, and Cookie took my hand. “Pia, I’m so happy to finally meet you!” She pulled me into a hug. And now I felt embarrassed, especially because a smiling Richard and a grinning Tan were behind her and could no-doubt see my terribly flushed face.
“Same here,” I said warmly to Cookie, giving her a squeeze. Then she pulled back and looked between me and Tan.
“Could I trouble you or my son for a glass of water? We were in such an excited rush to get here, we didn’t want to stop for anything….”
“Of course you can have water!” I said, moving over to the fridge. “And when you’re ready, I’ll take you to meet my—our friends.” I grinned at Tan.
*
A few hours later we were all out on the patio. Jamie sat back on one of the loungers, taking a much-needed rest from his fiddling, while Tan turned on the stereo. Then Tan and I quickly moved a bunch of chairs from the patio’s center toward the edges.
People began slow-dancing beneath the stars and the moons and the mountain. Nell and Derek moved in the very center of the crowd. I watched them as they lovingly smiled into each other’s faces; then I watched both Nell’s parents and Tan’s parents as they too danced. Then I looked beyond all of them, at the mountain again, then to the distant Diamond sky, to the purple-black where the stars shimmered in their special silvery way.
I thought of those other mountains. I thought of what I’d learned and what I’d never learn.
Life here was risky. But, as with anywhere, life here also came with rewards.
Tan walked up to me then, pulling me back against him; he slowly moved behind me, his body’s rhythm in time with the song playing. I hugged his warm arms to me as we swayed and stared at our friends and our family, and the stars.
“So…have you thought about what I said before in the kitchen?” blew Tan’s soft voice near my ear.
“I love yo
u,” I said, leaning back into him more. “And this is my new home—our home.” His arms quickly tightened around me.
And I smiled in happiness because I realized then that, sometimes, life is good.
Diamond Deception
I was lying on my living-room couch when I learned that someone wanted to kill me.
I’d just spent a long busy day at my office putting the finishing touches on an agreement for a huge security job, and I’d been looking forward to getting home and falling back on just this couch. But I’d made the mistake of taking my mail with me to my resting place.
I’d picked up the mail from the high-security building at the post-office center in Sapphire Lake. Months ago I’d had both my mail and my boyfriend Tan’s mail go to a special safety mailbox there—and that included all the mail from my business, Miscellaneous Solutions Associated. Operating both my business and my life that way was safer. Of course, having to pick up mail at the post office at least several times a week was also more out of my way. And keeping that box was also more expensive, a lot more expensive.
But, considering all the events of my past and that my work was often in security itself, I had become increasingly security-minded about my life, all while trying to lead a more upstanding life—a curious balance of working on being a better person while constantly having to remember I’d been a much worse person. Some days I wondered if I was successful at that balance.
Today was one of those days.
I’d been yawning when I first opened the normal-looking white envelope. Nothing on the outside could have alerted me to what the inside contained. I’d received many similar envelopes in the past. Proposals from potential clients, invoices from current clients, checks from previous clients, tax forms—these were what Normal White Mailing Envelopes should contain.
