by Gavin Chait
The craft flies up, around the waterfall, its spray wetting them as they pass, and across the lake. The water is brown and tannic and clear, and he can see into its depths. Fish swimming, boulders and plants, rounded pebbles along the bottom. They skim across the top of the water, the city rising ahead. Then they are flying upwards. Joshua gasps at the speed, but he has no sensation of air rushing about him.
‘The craft,’ he asks, ‘what is its power source?’
Nizena grins again, ‘The air, and me.’
They stop outside a wide balcony. An entrance melts in the low wall, and Nizena steps off.
‘This is our home,’ he says, ‘and you will stay with us until you are ready to return. Samara will be healed in two days.’
There are no walls from the balcony into the apartments. The kitchen is in the centre, sofas, chairs and tables scattered over the balcony and inside. A bedroom is to the left and, on the far right, another. Stone walls extend from the back, dividing the three areas.
He leads Joshua to the sofas, indicating he should sit, and settles comfortably himself.
‘Do you wish to sleep, or do you have too many questions first?’ Nizena grins, broadly.
‘I –’ Joshua hesitates. ‘I have many questions. But first, Samara would want to warn you—’
Nizena shakes his head, raises his hands, ‘Many terrible things have happened, and there is much embarrassment. On both sides.’
He looks saddened, ‘You, your people, Samara, have suffered much, and there must be recompense.’
Joshua stays silent.
Nizena continues, ‘The Americans are not always wise. They can certainly be unkind, selfish, spiteful, deluded. But they are not evil. Violent, dangerous, short-sighted. But – what was the definition of evil again?’ He laughs, then looks downcast. ‘What happened is a story of weak men. Criminal men. But there is no danger to Achenia.’
‘But what of Samara? His capture?’
Nizena nods, pressing his hands flat between his knees. He looks up. ‘You understand that until Samara awakes we cannot know all that has happened. It has taken us time to establish even the facts we have.’
He draws breath. ‘You know why they were there, in America?’
Joshua nods. ‘Your people’s independence. All of Samara’s calculations were based on when Achenia would be leaving orbit.’
‘Yes,’ sighs Nizena, nodding. ‘Shakiso contacted me the morning after he disappeared. No matter where he travelled, or how long he was away, they always had their meals together, every day. He had missed breakfast. She was very upset. I spoke with Hollis Agado, one of our chief justices, and she protested to the Americans. They claimed that he was probably enjoying the nightlife. We dispatched three of the Nine.’
Nizena becomes animated, gestures with his hands. ‘You understand, this was becoming a major diplomatic incident? Sending even one of the Nine –’ he is breathing deeply ‘– the consequences are dreadful. We have never sent any of the Nine into war, and here we were threatening one of the largest nations on Earth.
‘They were already over the Capitol when the president himself contacted Hollis. He was terrified, begged her to understand. He claimed they had no idea where he was or what was happening.
‘At this stage we started to wonder if our other representative there, Oktar Samboa, who was also missing, had been captured as well.
‘We demanded that, under the circumstances, the Five would have to lead any efforts to uncover the facts. The president agreed, and Fodiar and Shakiso went down to search.’
Joshua is feeling dizzy. His fatigue is catching up with him, and he struggles against it.
[Joshua may not have eaten, and he is exhausted.]
‘Forgive me, you must be hungry? Thirsty?’
Nizena looks vaguely at the kitchen. A dark, glossy panel dissolves, revealing it to be a refrigerator. Glasses, bottles and other containers emerge, fly on to a tray and float to the sofas. It hovers at Joshua’s knees. He is exhausted, overwhelmed by emotion and amazement, and can do no more than nod gently at such acrobatics.
Joshua gingerly takes a glass, pouring liquid from a transparent bottle. He drinks. It is ice-cold and refreshing: a mixture of fruits he cannot describe. Tangy, bitter, subtly sweet. In a container is a sliced cold shoulder of beef. He realizes he is starving. Another contains raw vegetables he does not recognize. The bread is warm and smells freshly baked.
As he eats, Nizena continues, ‘We could find no trace of either of them. Each of them left the hotel on separate occasions and disappeared.
‘Shakiso worked backwards from when we knew Samara was missing, looking for anyone who might have seen him. She found one image taken in a bar in Anacostia the night before.
‘There was a fight, and it looked as if someone was shot in the head. The image was indistinct, but she said she knew. It also explained why he had remained out of contact.
‘After that, we couldn’t find any trace of him. He didn’t turn up in a hospital, or a court record, or anything.
‘The Three –’ he sees that Joshua knows about her. ‘Samara told you? That is a relief. Getting into the details of how our society works can be complex.’
He pinches his forehead with his fingers. ‘Where were we?’
[The Three was looking for anomalies.]
‘Oh, yes, The Three offered to go through every court transaction in the area to look for any anomalies. That turned out to be a disaster. There are nothing but anomalies. Even in the few cases that took place around the same time, nothing seems to connect to actual events. It is a mark of just how –’ his voice bitter with frustration ‘– damaged their society has become that no one protests. Their courts are run by automated computational systems. But the dates don’t match; evidence is manufactured, lost; witnesses are contrivances. It seems that the police can accuse anyone of anything, and your only hope is that you can catch the attention of an actual human ombudsman before you are simply processed.
‘Finding Samara in that wreck was going to take time. We weren’t even sure if he had been processed through the courts.
‘Then, a breakthrough. In the court records, four weeks after Samara’s disappearance, The Three found a woman accused of murdering an unknown orbital resident.
‘We identified the body as Oktar Samboa.’
‘He died? How? I thought—’ begins Joshua.
‘No, we can certainly survive grievous injury, but the Nine alone have such regenerative powers. Oktar is dead. He was a fool. And our shame.’
Nizena shakes his head. ‘Poor Oktar. He was not a good man. He was so sure of his ability to manipulate others. We discovered that he had been seeing this woman every time he went to Washington. She was so certain he loved her and that he would bring her here. He lied. She took up a knife and stabbed him repeatedly.
‘She remained catatonic for days after. When she started going out it was only to buy food and return home. The neighbours complained about a strange smell. Eventually, the police arrived and arrested her, poor woman. She was uncommunicative. Locked in her mind. They couldn’t figure out who she was, or who she had killed. After we identified Oktar and discovered her situation, we sent one of our doctors, Dondé Hélène, to see her. She was able to bring the young woman back for a time and discover her story.’
Joshua clenches his fists, kneading them against the firmness of the sofa.
‘Oktar Samboa left the negotiations – left Samara – and met with this woman. He hadn’t seen her in months. She was very excited. He had promised her that she would accompany him to space. They – it would be too gracious to say they made love – they had sex. Then they went in search of narcotics.’
Nizena looks with distaste at the stone of the floor. ‘They visited a series of bars, drinking heavily, before settling in one in Anacostia. They found a group of men who would sell them something called Sutra. They were policemen who had arrived to sell a large consignment. Oktar and his friend left. Samara must
have arrived a few minutes later.
‘From the images in her memory we were able to identify a few people in the bar. We were looking for the men Samara was fighting with. Witnesses told us they’d seen one of the policemen shoot Samara.’
They sit silently for a few moments.
‘It took more time. Too long. We found the policemen. Fodiar, who you met, interviewed them himself. He retrieved their memories.’
Joshua stirs. ‘How do you do that? See into someone’s mind?’
Nizena shakes his head. ‘It is not a pleasant procedure, but some, like Dondé Hélène or the Nine, can push their symbiont into others’ minds. They can control them or, in this case, recover past events.
‘We believe, now, that we know what happened before Samara was sent to Tartarus.
‘When Samara asked the policemen if they had seen Oktar, they panicked, assuming he was there to investigate them. Samara was surprised by what looks like a random attack, and they took advantage. One of them shot him in the head.
‘They assumed – correctly as it happens – that murdering an Achenian might attract too much attention for them to manage. They decided to hide what they thought was his body by sentencing him to solitary confinement in one of the high-security jails. They manufactured witnesses, filed their own statement. They created an entire story from scratch. The court is automated, a simplified machine intelligence. Easy to manipulate. Samara had only an automated representative.’
‘And his ears?’ asks Joshua.
A look of pain for Nizena. ‘One of the policemen is a psychopath. Decided he wanted a souvenir of the Achenian he had killed and cut them off with a pocketknife. He had no idea that this would hide Samara.
‘Samara was declared a murderer and a danger to society, but the record we found didn’t specify where he would be sent. It seems it is left in the hands of some dispatcher and is completely random. It is barbaric, but their system assumes that anyone sentenced to these special prisons is never coming out and so there is no need to know where they are.’
Joshua looks appalled. Nizena, having lived with the search, looks drained.
‘Getting this far took us over a month. Fodiar and his team have been looking through the various prisons for him. There are almost two million prisoners in solitary confinement in lights-out institutions with no human operators. We had to collate so much information, get prison officials to go into these places and send us images of their charges.
‘All we could do is search and hope for the best. The Nine have been ready to move the moment we knew where he could be. When you entered the exclusion zone around the elevator, they scrambled.’
Joshua has stopped eating.
‘Samara’s suffering, it has no meaning?’ he asks.
‘Yes and no,’ says Nizena. ‘The Americans are horrified at how easy their justice system is to manipulate. They say so, anyway. Some of the tragedies we revealed hidden in so many cells,’ he sighs. ‘Many cases are being reinvestigated. Their systems are slow, and much is going to have to be done by hand. It will take a long time, but some will find justice. If they don’t lose interest after we have left. The policemen have been apprehended, although that feels a scant victory.’
Joshua is overcome with exhaustion. The unfairness is overwhelming.
‘Rest now, we will talk again in the morning,’ and, as Joshua’s eyes close, Nizena shifts his thoughts, raising him into the air and settling him gently on the bed in the guest room. The air shimmers and glass encloses him in privacy.
Joshua sleeps.
42
‘I’ve spoken with Ortega,’ says Hollis.
‘He must be relieved.’ Nizena does not sound as if he is overly concerned about the American president’s state of being.
The two are walking along Lake Samudra’s shore. Lights from the cliff-city of Tswalu glow gently in the distance on either side of them.
They began as rivals. When Nizena was building the infrastructure for the new city, Hollis was writing the rules that would govern it. Nizena had been convinced that Hollis was attempting to bring the worst of Earth’s laws to space. Hollis had been just as certain that Nizena refused to understand the dangers of his new technology.
Both learned and mellowed. Sometimes all that is needed for opponents to become friends is the time to see the outcomes of their ambitions. A chance realization that neither appreciates the Achenian fashion for projecting their symbiotic intelligences as visible companions had cemented their rapport.
They have been friends for well over a century.
‘You must be more relieved,’ says Hollis, her gender fluidly transforming. He grips Nizena’s shoulder. ‘To lose Samara as well would be cruel.’
When Hollis was a child, and even with the sophistication of transitional biology, he struggled with the notion of having to pick a persistent gender. The development of the symbionts brought him and a small number of other Achenians a longed-for and whimsical freedom to change gender at will.
Light ripples on the water. Nizena knows it is not the real moon, but he enjoys the tranquillity it brings to the nights. The stars are those viewable from outside. Achenia maintains its Earth day–night and seasonal cycle, but the night sky will always be that of the universe as they travel.
A nightjar calls in the woods. The sound haunting and beautiful beneath the trees.
‘Thank you,’ says Nizena. ‘I know how much you have all put in to keep the Americans engaged.’
‘They’re certainly not pleased to learn that their treasured justice system and most popular jail are a tad broken. They’ve also asked us to keep quiet about Samara escaping from it.’
Nizena laughs. ‘Because just anyone can fall 35,000 kilometres in an escape pod, open to space, and survive? Who do they wish to fool?’
‘No, not like that. They’re more worried that their people will find out that the Nine can.’ He is smiling, too. ‘I agree. It’s silly, but we’re leaving, and we can keep the events of the last few weeks to ourselves. Ortega wants to win re-election.’
‘Before their economy falls apart again?’
‘Oktar’s final joke on them? No, I don’t believe it will be that bad. They’ve survived worse.’
Nizena takes off his shoes and stands with his feet in the water. He likes to wiggle his toes and feel the sand between them.
‘I hear you’ve received another spurt from Ullianne,’ says Hollis. He looks for a place to sit on a nearby log. Nizena can be a while once he gets his feet into the lake.
‘It’s about a year old. She says they are a third of the way to Gliese now. The transmitters they fire are taking longer and longer to reach us.’
The Allegro quantum navigation team is the furthest out. They have an early version of the faster-than-light system that Nizena and a group of other engineers have been working on. Ullianne Vijayarao promised to send back reports as to how they are getting on.
There are three stars in the Gliese system, all red dwarfs and smaller and colder than Earth’s sun. There are, however, numerous potentially habitable planets in the system, and it has become the first waypoint on various planned tours of the galaxy.
Allegro is small, only 250 people on the ship, and they have promised to join Achenia at Gliese. Ullianne, though, is determined to get there first. She and Nizena have made a bet. She believes that older technology and an eighty-year head start will give her victory. Nizena hopes that his refinements will allow him to pass her. Last one there buys the other lunch every day. For one hundred years.
They have agreed, in the interests of each other’s sanity, that they do not need to have those lunches together, whoever wins.
‘You think that drive of yours will really work? Spending two hundred years getting to Gliese will be, perhaps, dull if it doesn’t.’
Nizena grins. ‘Would you like another lecture on the difficulty of doing this?’
‘Please, no,’ says Hollis, laughing. ‘You put me to sleep for a month the la
st time.’
‘Well then, you’ll find out like the rest of us.’
A wolf howls somewhere in the hills above the lake, insects chirp, and two old friends – one up to his knees in the moonlit waters of the lake – stroll along the shore, laughter floating in the glittering night.
43
‘Has the president heard?’
‘Yes, Ma’am. Alvarez let me know,’ says Major Jim Dervish, his exhaustion present in his yellow and bloodied eyes and the grey and limp flesh of his face. He rubs nervously at the dwindling hair on his head.
He has spent an unsleeping month slumped inside his workstation, along with the rest of his team. Their single task was to find Samara before the Achenians in the hope of salvaging the Watchers’ reputation. Losing him has been humiliating, and they know that President Ortega will want a sacrificial token to redeem himself with the public should this story become unreasonably popular.
General Marilyn Graham deliberately slams her console on to her desk in the hope it will break. It does not, and she flings it across the room in disgust. A tiny cleaning drone scuttles across the floor to retrieve it. She scowls and stomps from behind the desk and over to the windows, kicking the drone as she passes. It rolls back and forth, righting itself, and restores the console to the desk.
Graham’s office is at the apex of the glass crest on the north end of the complex. It is stark: a clean white desk and white walls with no adornment or personal images.
Graham looks out across ten acres of parkland to the glass wall on the other side, seeing nothing but her own disappointment.
New Pentagon is formed like a crown of water rising in response to a stone dropped into a still pond. Glass ripples flow back behind the central ring mimicking the original structure, but the name jars with its shape: tradition winning over form.
She hates this building. Too much glass, too bright, too open. More than forty-five thousand personnel, almost a tenth of the US Armed Forces, work here. The two divisions of the modern military – the Watchers and the Operators – are about secrets and shadows, not this facade of transparency.
