She saw it before I had even moved towards her. I threw my arms around her and kissed her as if she were the first woman I had ever met. By any measure I knew, she was. I kissed her as though we were the only human beings alive, as though the universe itself existed only inside that tiny apartment. She was love, life, all of the things I had never known. She was the antithesis of everything I had been taught. And at that moment love was something stronger and more passionate than I had ever imagined.
Chapter 11
When I was six, I caught one of my teachers having sex in the school bathroom. I told my parents, who sold their silence to her for several thousand caps. Years later my mom sold me to Ackerman. My first real girlfriend hacked my work account, stole my reports, and was promoted for it.
I couldn’t even trust my own wife.
I lay in Kate’s arms, naked, on her trampled mattress. I’m sure I was a terrible sight with gashes and scabs on my face. But she ran her fingers through my hair like it didn’t matter. No money was to be had, no profit in any measurable sense. But I was happy.
She could have been Retention, the entire rental office nothing more than a front to catch wayward colleagues. And I could just as easily have been one too, come to ferret out pockets of resistance to corporate theology. There was no way to know, so we just accepted what we had.
No doubt Kate had other suitors, men of her world—LowCon born and educated—who were predisposed to principles of cooperation. Common sense said that’s where her heart should lie. But those men hadn’t ever been on the other side. It was one thing to rail against things you could probably never get anyway. But I came from MidSec. I had lived in Capital City. I knew the alternatives. Like Sarah Aisling, I was there by choice.
As we lay in bed, she found the scar running down the length of my right leg. She ran the tips of her fingers down it. I recoiled.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
I wanted to be perfect for her, no scars or disfigurements. She just nuzzled me closer.
“What happened?”
The room was dark, too dark for me to feel comfortable telling the story. I reached for my pills before remembering that I had thrown them out.
“It’s okay; you don’t have to tell—”
“I was up at Allenhurst, on an interview for a job in one of the maintenance buildings. Nothing fancy, I wasn’t skilled, and only an Epsilon at the time. I’m at the front desk waiting with maybe a dozen or so other applicants, and an Alpha comes in. His terminal is on the fritz, he’s put in a bunch of petitions to get it fixed, and he’s sick of it. He wants to know why he can’t get anybody on the phone.
“Well, the methane generator had sprung a leak. I’m passing him to go to the interview, and it blows. The whole building comes down on everyone.
“I wake up, I can’t feel my leg—honestly, I thought I must have been dead. I couldn’t see or hear anything. After a few minutes I recognize the sound of dripping water—some burst pipe somewhere—and I realize that I’m alive, my leg crushed under a beam. Then I hear digging.
“Well, I can’t figure out why they’re bothering with any of us. Then I realize that the Alpha is buried right underneath me. He’s worth a hell of a lot, so they triangulated his ledger and started digging like crazy. But they can’t get to him without cutting out the beam, and when they do, I get out.”
I took a deep breath.
“Besides the Alpha, nobody else in the lobby was worth rescuing. I guess if you’re going to get blown up, doing it next to an Alpha is the way to go.”
She rubbed my leg once more, and put her head on my chest.
As the days passed, I spent more and more time in LowSec. When someone asked where I was going, I ignored them. They assumed that I was going to LowSec, rebounding from my divorce with thrills both perverse and cheap. I always used the underground, paid cash, and never took my ledger with me.
While Kate trusted me, her friends were another matter. She had a clique of them, like Jazelle, Spag and the other two who beat me, the bald man at the rental office and a few more. None of them liked me, and they made no effort to hide it. They would come by at odd hours of the night, whispering quietly between them. Her apartment turned out to be just a block from the warehouse. They’d hold meetings, which would end abruptly when I arrived. I never asked about these machinations, and she never volunteered. She had gotten them to agree to let me see her, and that was enough.
She began teaching me to survive, how to spot dangers and keep from being seen, how to collect and distill rainwater and how to trap and skin rabbits. She even began teaching me how to cook.
My job became unbearable. I couldn’t work for Ackerman anymore, much less in Perception. My colleagues did nothing but squabble, preen, and gripe, and I wondered how I had ever tolerated it.
“People used to live to be eighty—like, average people.” Bernard would say.
“That’s a lie,” said Corbett
“It’s true. Study history.”
“Any society where the average person can live that long has real problems. If it is true, no wonder they collapsed.”
“It’s true!”
“You just want me to spend five caps looking up something that doesn’t mean anything anyway.”
“It’s true.”
“Go to hell, socialist.”
“Because I know history I’m a socialist?”
“No, it’s just one of the reasons. You’re a weak commie bastard, and I look forward to watching you get your ass handed to you.”
That was the routine, day in and day out. I worked tiny, nuisance reports, nothing more vicious than typos and the occasional dangling modifier. At night I’d make my way into LowSec, browse the shops and pick up a little lavender oil or paper tablecloths. It was all there once you knew where to look. Sometimes we’d move the dining table aside and just eat on the floor. We talked about citizens, and about governments and republics, or about ancient literature, culture, and history. Sometimes we just talked about the weather. We talked about colleagues like Corbett and Linus, friends like Jazelle and Sarah, and the family neither of us had seen in ages. She’d crank up the turntable and I’d listen to songs that I imagined hadn’t been heard in a hundred years. She showed me around LowSec, showed me old buildings, bombed-out aquifers—even a transmitter which she said had once broadcast television for free. She took me to an old flood-control channel. A sign over it read “World’s Oldest Ditch (500 years).” I wondered by what right they could claim to know that, and found myself fighting the urge to find some small, obscure place to fill it in a bit.
And there were solar stills everywhere, thousands of them. They were hidden under tiers, behind tarps or on back porches. Everybody had at least one, and most people had four or five. A funnel would capture rainwater and dump it into a plastic-wrapped bucket or can. The sun would evaporate the water, which would condense and collect on the plastic and eventually drip down into another bucket as clean, drinkable water.
“So everybody’s taking water?”
“Yep, right out of the air. You have to, no water comes into most of these buildings, and the sewer systems are four hundred years old. They used a split pipe back then, water on one side and sewage on the other. You’d get sick if you drank it.”
“If everybody’s doing it, why was Sarah the only one to get arrested?”
“That’s a good question. We hide the stills and we’re usually not worth the bother anyway. I don’t know who turned her in. Maybe someone didn’t like her, or a neighbor needed a few caps to keep from starving. I don’t know.”
I was an outsider in both worlds. Finding Kate had put me in considerable debt with Ackerman, and I wasn’t doing my job in any meaningful way anymore. Like Eric Forestall in cubicle 721, I had creditors I’d have to stay ahead of. But I couldn’t simply vanish into LowSec; I needed Kate’s help. But her friends hadn’t come close to accepting me. And why should they? For all they knew, I was an agent, and even if I wasn’
t, Ackerman would come looking for me.
Then, one night, the light in cubicle 721 went out.
Chapter 12
A number of colleagues had gathered in the cantina, though Bernard was not among them. Corbett sat drinking coffee and going over his day’s literature.
“Quiet today,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, any day Bernard isn’t here is a quiet one.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Trying to find a new kid to mentor or something. How that fat man gets anyone to pay for his time is beyond me,” Corbett said. He picked up his coffee mug and gave it a sour look. “You know,” he said, “with all this Kabul business, you’d think that coffee would be better—at least until they get rid of the ragheads.”
“Add some chicory,” I said. “It’ll add flavor. Heck you can make coffee out of chicory if you need to.”
“Chicory? What the hell?”
“It’s a plant.”
“I know what it is. Why the…? How do you know you can put it in coffee?”
“I… well, I’ve been learning to cook,” I answered. “It’s actually fun, and you have a lot more choices if you cook for yourself. It’s fresher than anything you’d get in here, that’s for sure.”
“Oh my god, Charles! It’s bad enough you ride that deathtrap into work every day. Now you’re learning to cook? Do you know how that looks? You do realize that you’re supposed to go up in rank?”
“Cooking is not some LowCon thing; anyone can do it.”
“It’s LowCon. Face it, they’re the only ones who can’t afford processed food.”
“Alphas have private chefs. They eat the real thing.”
“Yeah, and the chefs are all LowCons, I guarantee it.”
“You always say that knowledge is power,” I told him. “So why not learn everything you can? Like how to cook?”
“I’m not going to cook. You’re just pissed that someone suckered you into learning crap like this and now you’re trying to get me into it. It won’t work.”
“It’s fun,” I said. “Cooking actually takes skill—”
“Whatever,” he answered.
Weeks passed, and I hadn’t received a payout for my Aisling report. It was a bad sign. I was starting to suspect that Sarah Aisling had actually been a person of consequence to Kate and her friends. I became sadder and sadder, keeping this secret from Kate. She was getting sadder too, and I wondered if it was about Aisling.
One night we sat in Kate’s apartment, talking about my new favorite subject, the republic. The power was out again, it was raining, and the building shook with nearby strikes of thunder. The windows all leaked and puddles formed on the floor.
“You know,” she said, “man has walked the earth for sixteen million years. But only in the last two million did we develop language. We can choose what we see, Charlie. People say Darwin believed in competition. But he believed in evolution too. Compassion exists, and Darwin himself would say that was proof that we benefited from it. The corporatists will tell you that compassion is like a vestigial tail. Why is it such a leap to think it might be an evolution, like language, something that allows us to do more together than we ever could apart? It’s been proven, mathematically, that trust is essential to success. But corporations don’t breed trust, they kill it.”
She’s talking about trust. Does she know something?
“How do you prove trust is good?”
“A mathematician named Nash did it. Before him people said that the best outcome occurs when everyone works in their own best interest. But he showed that self-interest was only half of the equation. The best outcome actually comes from people thinking of themselves and the group equally.”
This is a message. She knows. She’s testing me.
“Say two crooks are working together. They commit a major crime that carries five years in prison. But the police can only prove a smaller crime that carries two years. So they separate the men and offer each a deal—rat your partner out, and we’ll drop the lesser charges on you.
“Now, if one of them takes the offer, he goes free, while the other gets seven years—two for the lesser charge and five for the greater one. But both guys know this. So what do they do? They each rat other out. So now each gets the lesser charges dropped for cooperating, but gets five years on the testimony of the other.
“Now, capitalists will point to this and say ‘See, each of these men did the best they could for themselves. Each knows the other will rat him out, so they cut a deal to get five years instead of seven, which is an improvement.’
“But here’s the thing; if they both kept their mouths shut, they’d only get two years. It’s not freedom, but it’s a lot better than five. The reason they talk is because they’re in competition. They’re each so busy trying to protect themselves from the other guy that they damage each other. Competing for the best possible outcome, no time in jail, prevented the worst outcome of seven years, but it also prevented the better outcome of two years. If they had both agreed to shoot for the two years, they would have gotten it. If they could trust each other, they’d be a lot better off.
“And this kind of situation isn’t rare—in fact it’s the norm.”
“But that can never work,” I said. “How could you trust the other person? I mean, if he rats you out, he goes free? How can he resist that temptation?”
How can you trust me?
“That’s the rub. The men must both trust and be trustworthy. It requires long-term thinking, something corporations de-incentivize and are notoriously bad at.”
“But all it takes is one person gaming the system,” I said. “If even one person betrays that trust… How can it ever be sustained? You’ll never get everyone to be trustworthy.”
“Well, yeah, that’s the problem. If one person breaks the trust and goes free, others see that betrayal is rewarded. So they begin doing it too. Soon everyone will betray everyone, and greed becomes a virtue. Then everyone is back to getting five years, shouting ‘Thank God we betray each other, or we’d be getting seven.’ And then the worst option is to trust your colleague, because you’ll be taken advantage of.
“In Zino’s Bible, every capitalist implicitly trusted every other capitalist. They were simply good people. And if that was always the case, capitalism would work exactly as Zino predicted—a perfect libertarian utopia. But it’s not. Without a strong third party to regulate, destruction and short-term thinking are rewarded; entire generations live at the expense of their grandchildren, and Zino is turned on her head. You need a system of laws and an entity capable of enforcing those laws—common rights and guarantees, regardless of wealth or power.”
“The leviathan…” I said quietly.
“No, Charlie, government. Your colleagues call it the Leviathan, the great whale from the Jewish Bible. But that’s not where we get the name from. Leviathan was the name of a book written by Thomas Hobbes. He defined the ‘social contract,’ saying that without sacrificing some freedom for the common good, life was ‘cold, nasty, brutish and short.’”
“That’s not communism?”
“God no. Even Nash said that the best actions were the ones that equally balanced the needs of others with the needs of the self, balanced selflessness and greed. Greed is exactly half of Nash’s equation. The criminal isn’t expected to sacrifice himself for his cohort and say, ‘I confess to the crime, I’ll take the seven years so my partner goes free.’
“What a good government does, what a republic does, is moderate competition; allow the tug of war, but never let one side walk away with the rope. They also establish rule of law, and a safety net below which people cannot fall. Everybody can vote, everybody can share power, no matter how rich or poor. Everybody has rights, and the republic is strong enough to enforce those rights. Police, health, mail, education, the things that everybody needs are guaranteed. Corporations can compete, but they are kept reasonably honest and not allowed to over leverage and risk people other than them
selves. People will abuse the system, some corps will get away with crime, but the distribution of a minimum amount of power and resources to all people hedges the damage. And it forces the wealthy, not to be slaves to the poor, but to have a modicum of concern for them, because they can vote.”
“Do you trust me?” I asked. I was glad the lights were off.
“Of course.”
I wished she had said no.
“This is about my friends, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Well….”
“You hardly ever see them. They’re always sneaking around, calling and slipping me papers, coming by at night. They don’t trust you. I know that. You can’t blame them. I know you’re not Retention or Acquisitions, but I have to respect their concerns. You arrived just after Sarah was caught. Earning their trust will take some time. And she was a person of some importance around here.”
“Importance?”
“Well, she was our—well—leader, for lack of a better word.”
Dear god. I crafted a perception of Sarah as the head of a seditionist organization just to make a quick buck. But I was right.
“Do you know what ever happened to her?”
“No. Her ‘crime’ probably wouldn’t have been a big deal, but she’s stubborn and not all that pragmatic. We were willing to chip in for an advocate. She said no. I thought she meant she could afford one, but instead she just stood there and told off the judge. I don’t know why she thought that was a good idea. He actually didn’t seem to be too bothered by it, but her case was escalated anyway. We haven’t heard anything. Maybe they somehow thought they could get more money from her. We don’t even know if she’s alive.”
“Why would she fight with the judge?” I asked.
The Water Thief Page 11
