The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  “But the neighborhood…” Spence ventured.

  Sula went to the window and looked down into the busy street. The sounds of the crowd floated up to her, hawkers crying, music playing, friends hailing each other, children running and shrieking.

  It was like going back in time.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “You can disappear into a neighborhood like this.” She fished in her pocket again and came up with a couple septiles. “Here,” she said to Macnamara. “Take this to the liquor store across the street and get as many bottles of iarogüt as this will buy. The cheapest stuff you can find.”

  Macnamara took the money with reluctance. He returned with six bottles, all opaque plastic with labels pasted on, some crooked. Sula put one bottle on the shelf, opened five, and emptied them into the sink. The harsh bite of the liquor filled the air, the uneasy mixture of grain alcohol and herbal extracts. Sula put the empty bottles into the bag that Macnamara had brought them in, then put the bag with the bottles outside the door, in the hallway, for trash pickup.

  “If any of our neighbors have questions about us,” she said as she stepped back into their apartment, “this will tell them all they need to know.” She tilted her head back to look at Macnamara. “You’re on bottle duty till further notice,” she said. “I want anywhere from three to five empties put in the hall every night.”

  Macnamara’s eyes widened. “So many? For just the three of us?”

  “A serious alcoholic can drink three bottles of hard liquor per night, easy,” Sula said. A fact she remembered all too well. Through the memory she forced a smile. “We’re only partly serious drunks. Oh,” she added, as another thought struck her. “You know some of that hashish-scented incense? We should buy some of that. The smell wafting under the door will only add to the verisimilitude.”

  “By the way,” Spence said, “how do you do that with your voice?”

  “My voice?” Sula was puzzled.

  “You’re talking in some kind of local dialect. It’s like you’ve lived here for years.”

  “Ah.” Surprise tingled through her. She shrugged. “I’m a good mimic, I guess. I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

  She remembered amusing Caro Sula with her accents, pretending to be her identical sister Margaux, from Earth. She hadn’t done her Earthgirl accent in a long time.

  She’d spent the last seven years imitating Caro Sula instead.

  The next few days Team 491 spent adding to their wardrobe and painting and cleaning the apartment. They bought food from stands on the streets and began to learn the neighborhood.

  The apartment was finally arranged to Sula’s satisfaction, everything painted or scrubbed, the carpet cleaned, the stove gleaming, the toilet and other bathroom fixtures fresh-scented marvels of modern sanitation. It didn’t look like a place inhabited by alcoholics, but Sula couldn’t bring herself to live amid squalor.

  She had once. She wouldn’t again.

  Sula bought a spider plant in a large cream-colored epoxide pot, one that would show clearly through the window overlooking the street. She went to the south window and put it on the right-hand side of the windowsill.

  “This means no one’s here, be cautious.” She moved the pot across the sill to the opposite side. “This is someone’s here, and it’s all clear.” She placed the pot on the right side of the northern windowsill. “This is immediate meeting.” Moving the pot to the opposite side of the window meant message waits at mail drop. She turned to look at her crew. “If the pot’s not here at all, or if it’s in the kitchen window, that means Unsafe. Use safe procedure to reestablish contact.” She looked at them. “If it looks as if you’re going to be arrested here, try to break away long enough to knock the pot off the sill. Make it look as if you’re trying to jump out the window.”

  Macnamara and Spence nodded. “Very good, miss,” Spence said.

  “From now on,” Sula said, “we use this apartment only for meetings. We each get our own place, one that none of the others knows, and we use another set of ID there.”

  Her two team members gave each other uneasy looks. “Does the new place have to be in this neighborhood?” Spence asked.

  Sula had to think about her answer. “Your new place needs to be someplace completely anonymous. It needs to be private. It needs to have more than one exit. And you need to pay your rent with cash.” She gave them a thin-lipped smile. “If you can find a setup like that in a better neighborhood, then by all means.”

  “What’s our budget?” Macnamara asked.

  “Remember, we want anonymous.” Sula considered. “I’ll go above three a month for someplace that’s got a lot of advantages, but otherwise try to stay within that.” She gave them each ten zeniths in change. “Remember, you can’t whip out a ten-zenith piece and just hand it to someone. People don’t carry that kind of money in cash, not if they’re…the kind of people who are above suspicion.”

  She sensed resistance in Macnamara as his hand closed over the money.

  “Yes, Patrick?” she said.

  His tone was stubborn. “I don’t like the idea of you being alone in this neighborhood,” he said. “Or, uh, Ardelion, either.” He used Spence’s code name, presumably because he’d lost track of which alternate ID she was supposed to be inhabiting at the moment.

  Sula laughed. “We’ve just been through a combat training course,” she said. “It’s the rest of the neighborhood that has to watch out for us.” And as his troubled expression didn’t fade, she patted him on the arm. “That’s a good thought, Patrick, but really, we’ll be all right.” And then, as she felt the powerful muscle in his arm, another thought occurred to her. “You grew up in the country, yes?”

  “Well. A mountain village. But yes, more or less.”

  “Did you learn any handicraft skills? Carpentry, say, or plumbing, or…?”

  Macnamara nodded. “I’m a fair carpenter,” he said. “And I can stick pipes together.”

  Sula smiled at him. “So you can build, say, secret compartments.”

  Macnamara blinked. “I suppose I can,” he said.

  “Good,” Sula said. She looked around the apartment again, this time with a new eye.

  Perhaps they weren’t done fitting out this place after all.

  The old and new apartments soon boomed to the sounds of saws and hammers, and the air was laden with the scent of glue and varnish and fresh paint. Useful items were secreted here and there, in furniture, in cabinets, and under floors, where Action Team 491 could lay hands on them at need. Sula, who was not so filled with the majesty of an officer that she disdained the use of her hands, learned some useful carpentry skills.

  In another couple days Sula found her own apartment in the new neighborhood, a small room with a toilet, a shower, and an alcove for her bed. She subjected the room to the same merciless regime of scouring and painting that she had the other places, and carried to it some furniture that Macnamara had modified. In the furniture’s hidden compartments she hid the same useful items she had stored elsewhere.

  On the first night, as she lay on her narrow, newly purchased mattress, her neighbors obliged her by having a screaming fight. Through the thin, prefabricated walls she heard the sounds of bellowing, of shrieking, of furniture being hurled against walls.

  How many nights, she wondered, had she lain awake as a child, and listened in fear to the shouts and screams and rage in the next room? The thunder of a chair being smashed into the wall, the crack of a shattering bottle, the smack of fist against flesh? Now in the darkness she listened to those childhood sounds again, and found her heart strangely calm.

  Physical violence no longer frightened her, and it wasn’t because she’d just spent the better part of two months learning how to disembowel people. It was well before the course at the Villa Fosca that she had learned how to deal with that particular fear.

  She had dealt with her fear by smashing him in the head repeatedly with a chair leg, then having him tied to a heavy object an
d thrown in the Iola River.

  It wasn’t violence that frightened her now. What she feared was failure, and exposure, and the truth. The truth that lay in those samples of human DNA in the Peers’ Gene Bank, and the truth that had been in the print of her right thumb before she’d burned it off—the truth that her name had once been Gredel, and that she’d grown up on Spannan, in a prefabricated apartment building just like this one, where she had lain in the dark and listened to violence thunder against the fragile wall between herself and her own fear.

  The next day she left to meet her team at the other local, communal apartment. As she stood on her building’s stoop blinking in the morning light, she heard a suggestive voice at her elbow.

  “Hello, beauteous lady.”

  She turned to find a young man lounging against the wall of the building, a catlike smile on his face and a crumpled velvet hat on his head. He had the most brilliant, liquid, suggestive black eyes she had ever seen, and she decided there was no reason she shouldn’t bask in their attention for a few moments more.

  “Hello, yourself,” she said.

  He straightened slightly. “I haven’t seen you here before, beauteous lady.”

  “I’ve just come down from the ring.”

  “You lost your home then, hey?” He sidled toward her and stroked her hand in what was supposed to be sympathy. “You need One-Step to show you around Riverside, don’t you? I’ll take you to all the nice places, buy you some pretties.”

  “You’ve got a job, then?” Sula asked.

  One-Step narrowed those remarkable black eyes and held out both hands in protest. “I’ll spend my last minim on you, beauteous lady. All I want is to make you happy.”

  “Why’s this neighborhood called Riverside? I haven’t seen a river.”

  The young man grinned and tapped the pavement with one platform sole. “River’s under our feet, beauteous lady. They built the neighborhood over it.”

  Sula thought of cold, slow water moving in shadow beneath her feet, dead things rolling in pale silence on the turbid bottom, and she gave a shiver. If she’d known about the river she might well have heeded her team’s doubts about the neighborhood.

  One-Step sensed her change in mood, and once again stroked her hand. “You’re from the ring, hey, you don’t have any rivers up there, I understand. Don’t worry about falling in the water, everything’s safe. Flood happens, they blow the tocsin.”

  Sula smiled and liberated her hand. “I’ve got an interview,” she said.

  “Well hey, I’ll walk you to the train.”

  “I know where the train is.” She spoke the words with a smile, but with finality. One-Step gave up his attempt to recapture her hand.

  “Good luck with the interview, then, hey,” he said. “You want me to show you around, just come here to my office any time.” He threw out his hands to indicate his piece of pavement.

  “I will. Thanks.”

  Sula felt herself relaxing as she moved down the streets that had become almost familiar. You can disappear into a neighborhood like this. She could disappear into what she had once been, and forget the long, grinding impersonation that had been her life.

  Early on Martinez’s first morning aboard Illustrious Perry arrived with a breakfast of salt-cured mayfish, fruit pickled in a sweet ginger sauce, and a fresh muffin. He had worked out an arrangement with Lady Michi’s cook: the two shared the squadcom’s kitchen and the duties of cooking for both officers. As he lingered over his coffee, Martinez called up the tactical computer and began creating an exercise for Chenforce based on encountering an enemy force at Aspa Darla.

  The exercise, run the next day, was a success. However obscure the workings of his mind, Fletcher knew his job: Illustrious performed throughout with efficiency and precision, and so did the rest of the squadron. Martinez found himself envying Chenforce’s trained, disciplined crews, and wished he’d had these people aboard Corona when he was in command.

  Of course, Chenforce was composed of crews that had already won a victory, on the day of the rebellion, in the vicious battle waged at point-blank range with antiproton beams by ships mostly in dock. It gave the crews a certain grim esprit, and a confidence that whatever they encountered next, it couldn’t be as bad as what they’d already overcome.

  Chenforce also employed the new looser tactical formations that Martinez had developed, and with apparent success. Do-faq, Michi Chen confided, had sent her a complete recording of the experiments he had conducted, and she’d begun experimenting with them on her own.

  Buoyed by this expression of confidence, Martinez created a more elaborate experiment for the following day. Chenforce again performed well. The third day there was no exercise, since Captain Fletcher chose the day for a personnel inspection so comprehensive that it took most of the day. Martinez, who was not under Fletcher’s command, was not subject to the captain’s keen eye; but that night, with his meal, he received a report from Alikhan, who had been present when his own compartment was visited by the captain.

  “The lord captain’s quite an enthusiast for musters and inspections, my lord,” Alikhan said. “Illustrious is given a full inspection every six or seven days, and one department or other is mustered and examined on a daily basis.”

  “Does the lord captain find much?” Martinez said.

  “A surprising amount, my lord. Dust in corners, untidy personal gear, bits of his murals getting chipped off…he’s very thorough.”

  “I imagine the chipped murals must annoy him.”

  Alikhan was quite expressionless. “He keeps a painter on his staff, my lord, to make repairs.”

  “Upholding his dignity,” Martinez muttered to himself.

  Alikhan raised an eyebrow. “My lord?”

  “Nothing,” Martinez said.

  The fourth day, after another successful exercise, Martinez was the supper guest of the wardroom. The lieutenants were eager for a description of Corona’s escape from the Naxids on the day of the rebellion, and of the Battle of Hone-bar, and Martinez—who’d had a degree of experience in these anecdotes by now—obliged. Fulvia Kazakov, with a new pair of ivory chopsticks thrust through the knot of hair behind her head, was a meticulous hostess, satisfying her lieutenants’ curiosity without giving Martinez the sense he was being overwhelmed by a pack of eager juniors. Chandra Prasad, to Martinez’s surprise, was quiet—he remembered her as boisterous in gatherings. When he permitted himself to look at her, he saw her studying him with her long dark eyes.

  Toward the end of the supper, Chandra received a page from Lord Captain Fletcher, and quietly excused herself. There followed a moment of awkward silence, in which the lieutenants scrupulously avoided one another’s eyes, and then the conversation continued.

  When he and Chandra had met, Martinez reflected later, they had shared the same problem: neither had any patronage in the Fleet. Martinez had found himself benefactors in the Chens, but he suspected Chandra hadn’t found anyone to take this role—no one, perhaps, except Senior Captain Lord Gomberg Fletcher.

  While there was no outright regulation against relations between a captain and one of his officers, service custom was dead against it. Aside from concerns about sexual exploitation, everyone dreaded a captain who played favorites among his subordinates, and a sexual relationship was favoritism of a particularly tangled kind. If an officer couldn’t do without companionship for the length of a voyage, he or she was usually at liberty to bring a comely servant on board for the purpose.

  Well, Martinez thought charitably, perhaps it was love.

  He decided to forego video and wrote letters to Terza daily. In order that she might know what to expect at her destination he wrote his reminiscences of Laredo, where Ensenada was bound, along with descriptions of his parents, their homes, and the history of his family. He hadn’t seen Laredo in nearly twelve years, but the memories rose to his mind with surprising clarity: the summer home Buena Vista on the lower slopes of the Sierra Oriente, surrounded by the maples th
at turned to flame in the autumn; the palace of white and chocolate marble in the capital, with its water gardens; and the tall fieldstone home set in the subtropical delta of the Rio Hondo, where the family spent its winters, and its magnificent alley of massive, twisted live oaks on which Martinez climbed as a child. His father, an exuberant man with a collection of custom aircraft and cars, and his mother, who read romantic poetry aloud to the family at night.

  The letters, transformed to digital images, took days to reach Terza through the wormhole relays, but once she started receiving them she began responding in kind. Through her neat calligraphy he learned of her harp teacher Mr. Giulio, with his sharp nose and heavy knuckles; the pyramid-shaped Chen villa in the Hone Reach, built by the first Chen to reach convocate rank; and her reaction to an old Koskinen drama, a recording of which she’d found on Ensenada. She spoke of her pregnancy and the changes that were embracing her body.

  Martinez pictured her on the love seat in her room, bent over a notebook with her hair thrown back over her shoulders and a calligraphy pen in her long, graceful hand.

  He wrote that he missed her, and that she shouldn’t be concerned if his letters suddenly stopped for a while. That didn’t mean a battle, necessarily, that just meant he was busy or the squadron was moving.

  He wrote Love, Gareth at the end of his letters, and found that the words didn’t seem awkward. He was surprised at that, and then, as one letter followed another, the surprise began to fade.

  Martinez finally rated a dinner with the captain, though this was in the context of Lady Michi and her entire staff being invited to dine. The murals in the captain’s suite had actually been painted on, instead of being mounted like wallpaper. Fletcher was a gracious host, and kept up a flow of light conversation for the entire evening. Chandra Prasad was not in evidence.

  Martinez dined with Michi regularly, and was a frequent guest of the wardroom. He began to feel that he should return this hospitality, and received the squadcom’s permission to use Daffodil. He invited Lady Michi, and then the lieutenants, and finally the lieutenants along with their captain. Espinosa and Ayutano stood by the docking port with white gloves to help the guests onto the yacht. All but the captain praised Perry’s cooking, but even Fletcher praised the wine, the vintages that had actually been shipped from the Chen cellars by Terza, and which Martinez had blindly loaded aboard without even looking at the labels.