The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma

by Brian Herbert

22

  Dark Energy and Green Vigor are opposite sides of the same reality.

  —from a secret SciO rite

  KUPI HAD AN uneasy feeling when she entered the Greenpol station and walked down the long corridor. In her pocket, she carried a small slip of recycled paper that simply read “SUMMONS,” along with a brief description of the location where she was supposed to report in the Berkeley Reservation, and the deadline for doing so.

  The legal document contained no information about what the authorities wanted. It was something bad; that much she could figure out, or it wouldn’t involve the cops. Had the GSA government finally run out of patience with her? Had she said something that tipped the balance and put her in trouble? She tried to tell herself it was not that, because if she’d done anything really serious they would have already arrested her. If it involved a complaint against her, it might just be a warning. She’d received those before.

  No telling what these green fanatics were up to. She loathed these eco-cops, with their officious ways, the little power games and mind fornications they played on average citizens, always justifying their actions by claiming they were protecting the environment or the eco-friendly government. It was all a convenient rationalization, one that could not easily be assailed. The cops in Berkeley were pigs, green pigs.

  The summons had been served on her while she was on a greenforming jobsite in the Southwest Territory, more than nine hundred kilometers away. She had considered refusing to report and going AWOL, just vanishing into a forest and ridding herself of the bureaucratic controls that so often irritated her. But something had told her not to do that. They wanted her to report to Berkeley. Joss was still there, and she’d been worrying about him. Hopefully he was OK.

  It was early afternoon now. Two hours ago, with a little time to spare before her Greenpol appointment, she’d tried to get into the hospital to see Joss, but without success. The nurses would give her no information on him, just said they would take her name and someone would contact her later. Standing at the counter, she’d wondered if he had died. Her pulse had raced, and desperately, she’d hoped that was not the case.…

  Now she entered a Greenpol waiting room where a man at the front desk had directed her, and she dropped her summons into a tray, as she’d been told to do. Perhaps twenty other people sat in chairs, looking nervously in the direction of a closed door. Kupi sat with them, and soon found herself looking toward the door as well, because green-uniformed officers would appear there periodically, call out a name, and take that person inside.

  Several citizens were summoned by officers, and Kupi noticed that some of the people, but not all of them, were later released through the same door. What happened to the others, she didn’t know, but it was a grave concern. The Berkeley cops were said to be among the worst and most aggressive, undoubtedly because this was supposed to be the GSA’s model reservation for humans, and the pigs wanted to keep everything in order.

  The door opened, and she was alarmed to see Andruw Twitty just inside, talking with a uniformed female captain. Though Twitty was a Greenpol officer he wasn’t wearing his uniform, perhaps because he didn’t work in this locale. Curiously, he had a bandage over his forehead, and there were scratches and bruises on his face, as well as on his arms and hands.

  Joss’s young roommate saluted the captain with the sign of the sacred tree, then strode out into the waiting room. He spotted Kupi right away, paused near her, and said, “Your little friend did this to me after you left. I’ll bet that makes you happy.”

  “My little friend?”

  “Joss.” He pointed toward the door. “They want you now.”

  Perplexed, Kupi rose to her feet and made her way to the officer. The woman had Kupi’s summons in her hand, and led the way to an inner office, where two officers in starched uniforms awaited her, sitting at a table. Their perfectly polished green helmets sat on the table, next to a small video screen that was dark.

  Both officers were middle-aged men, one heavyset with thick-lens eyeglasses and loose jowls; he had a deep voice, which he used to command her to sit across from them. His companion was Asian, with dark, probing eyes that seemed to absorb their surroundings like a sponge.

  She sat in the only place available, on a hard wooden chair that wobbled. At first she tried to steady the chair beneath her; then she noticed that one of its legs was not quite in contact with the floor. She suspected it had been done intentionally, to keep people off balance.

  Kupi attempted to hold the chair steady, with some difficulty. Reminding herself to be calm, she placed her right hand on a copy of The Little Green Book that was thrust in front of her and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Then she clasped her hands and put them on top of the table.

  “You serve on a J-Mac crew with Joss Stuart?” the first officer said. He wore a nameplate identifying him as G. Edrok, and she noticed now that his companion was W. Yama.

  “Is he all right?” she asked.

  “Answer the question,” Edrok said.

  “He’s our crew leader on Number 129 and other rigs. Don’t I have a right to know if he’s OK?”

  “Your sharp tongue precedes you, Ms. Landau,” he said. “We intend to control this interrogation.”

  “I’m sure you have a dossier on me, and that doesn’t matter, because I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “That may or may not be true, but we are not here to inquire about that. It seems that Joss Stuart caused a bit of trouble at the hospital, so we must ask certain questions. Just as we asked his roommate.”

  “I would strongly suggest that you double-check everything Andruw Twitty said, because he has it in for Joss, and for me. The pathetic little man will say anything to advance his own career.”

  Edrok smiled a little, then stiffened. His Asian companion, stone-faced, switched on the machine on the table, showing an audiovisual recording of Joss’s room, with him lying on the bed, being attended to by nurses. The screen fast-forwarded, then slowed to normal speed. Kupi watched in amazement as Joss came out of his coma and tore the room apart, finally shattering the clearplex of the viewing area where Andruw had been standing. So that was how he got his injuries.

  “What’s wrong with Stuart?” Edrok asked. “How did he do that? It looked like he fired Splitter rays out of his body.”

  “Out of his fingers, to be precise,” said Officer Yama. He turned off the screen.

  “His roommate says that Joss has been acting suspiciously for some time now,” Edrok said.

  “Suspiciously? What did he say?”

  “Have you noticed unusual behavior, too?”

  “Certainly not! What did that little worm say about Joss?”

  The officers just stared at her in response.

  “Where is Joss now?” she demanded.

  “Under close guard,” Officer Edrok said. “You saw the video. It’s obvious why.”

  “So he’s been moved from the hospital, and put into police custody?”

  “My, but you ask a lot of questions,” Yama said, with a hard smile. “Would you like to apply to be an officer?”

  “No, thanks.” She grimaced, couldn’t picture herself dressed as a green storm trooper, strutting around officiously.

  They asked Kupi a few more questions, seemed to be on a fishing expedition. She continued to press them for information on where Joss was, and when she could see him, but they deferred the matter to higher-ups, saying that was not for them to comment on. That much, at least, sounded true to her.

  Kupi left feeling unsettled, even more than when she arrived. She didn’t like what she saw on the video or the way Twitty was here, obviously trying to elevate himself at the expense of Joss. She didn’t worry about herself and what the … she smiled to herself … what the little twit tried to do to her. But she did care about Joss, and wanted to do whatever she could to protect him. She’d done that in the interview, though it had not been much.

  As she walked the few bl
ocks to her hotel, she caught a glimpse of a man following her—undoubtedly a Greenpol plainclothesman.

  I’m one of the Berkeley Eight! she thought, feeling indignant anger, an emotion that had not surfaced during the interrogation session. She considered whirling and confronting the police tail, but reconsidered. That could only make matters worse, by making it look as if she were trying to hide something.

  But it was also a perplexing tactic for Greenpol to use. They had satellite tracking devices and computer chips implanted in the cerebral cortexes of GSA citizens, so they could determine exactly where people were all the time anyway—assuming a person didn’t avoid getting a chip implanted, or find a way to disable it. She was too well known to try anything like that, but she had friends who had safely gotten rid of the devices.

  With the police surveillance technology, why were they physically following her? It was strange and irritating. As she considered this, she realized it must be their intent to annoy her and see if she would do anything impulsive and disloyal. Her words had not been enough to get her into trouble, but actions could.

  She felt as if they were out to get Joss, and her.

  Greenpol, she thought, with contempt. The organization that cultivated the wormlike, conniving Andruw Twitty. Undoubtedly it had others like him.

  * * *

  CHAIRMAN RAHMA NEEDED to spend some quiet time with his departed comrades, to commune with them. In particular, the body of Glanno Artindale—one of the greatest heroes of the revolution—lay in the Shrine of Martyrs ahead of him, growing nearer as he strode across the grass toward the domed building. Rahma had seen the hubot Artie a couple of hours ago, had looked into Glanno’s salvaged eyes and thought of his long-lost friend.

  The GSA leader was not a religious man, but in the shrine he always felt the presence of his comrades, their spiritual presence. It had nothing to do with any belief in God, because in Rahma’s view there was no God. Rather, it had everything to do with the paranormal realm of heroes that the fallen fighters occupied now, a region that had no relationship with any conception of heaven or hell.

  Dori Longet walked at his side, carrying an electronic clipboard in place of the VR heads-up display she usually preferred. Having already gone over his daily schedule with him, she said, “We should have more on Joss Stuart later today. Greenpol is interviewing people who are close to him, collecting information on his background, and on what he did in that hospital room.”

  They had both seen the video recording of Stuart’s strange outburst, his frightening display of violence. It had been stunning, and they had watched it over and over, in disbelief.

  Rahma cleared his throat. “Under any other circumstance, I might think that SciO lab explosion was an act of sabotage, ordered by Corporate elements who want to avenge SciO’s involvement in their defeat. But with the effect of the explosion on Stuart, that tosses out sabotage as a possibility.”

  “It does seem to do that,” she agreed.

  They parted, and he went alone into the shrine, through the wooden entry door. Inside the lobby, he stood beneath a silvery dome that provided solar-generated illumination to the interior. Crypts were visible through heavy glass in the floor, all tightly arranged and side by side, as if the dead soldiers were ready to rise from the dead and surge into battle.

  He was about to walk toward a marble bench across the lobby when he stopped suddenly, shocked at the sight of a bloody lump on it. Had an injured animal gotten in here and died? But as he neared it, he saw to his horror that it was a bloody human fetus, with a printed note next to it.

  Almost gagging, he leaned down to examine the note, saw it was addressed to him. Without touching it, he read:

  “Chairman Rahma, this fetus, ripped from a mother’s womb in one of your ‘family guidance centers,’ is a true martyr of the revolution. Because I honor life, I will not harm you physically, except to ask how you can consider yourself a man of peace when you kill your own people in so many ways. You have stolen all human dignity; you have turned the American dream into a nightmare.”

  Rahma felt a surge of rage. This sacred place had been violated by a right-wing lunatic, whose narrow-mindedness dripped from the words on the page! Aborting unwanted children was not only a woman’s right; it was good for the planet, preventing overpopulation. But whoever wrote those words would never understand that, would never have the brain power (or the compassion for the Earth) to understand.

  He looked around. How had the wacko gotten in? Was it an outsider, or someone who worked with him on the game reserve? The latter seemed possible, perhaps even likely, because he—or she—had slipped through layers of security to bring the fetus from a guidance center. Or was that part a lie? Had one of his own women aborted the child and left it here?

  He would order a full investigation, including fingerprints, DNA tests, everything—and an immediate increase in security.

  * * *

  THE LAB REPORT arrived just as Rahma was getting ready for bed. It appeared in the form of a high-priority holo-net transmission that beeped and then floated in the air by him, a signal that homed in on the Chairman via the identity chip implanted in his body. The report’s audio feature was off, so the information was in visual mode, red letters against a white background.

  He read quickly, then switched it off in disgust. No fingerprints or other evidence to identify the perpetrator. Even the fetus, which did provide DNA, was of no help, because the genetic information was not in the national database—meaning the fetus had not come from one of his family guidance centers. Whoever did this had to be off the grid, perhaps among the fugitives living in the forests of the Green States of America. Or a foreign agent.

  He slipped into bed, and felt very alone in his thoughts and troubles. And very vulnerable.

  23

  After Europeans arrived in the Americas and stole the land by murdering and enslaving the native inhabitants, the two continents were held for centuries through the expert application of violence—and more than anyone else in modern times, corporate moguls were the beneficiaries of this dark heritage. Against such ruthless oligarchs, we had only one way to take the land from them and begin to restore the Earth. We needed to kill as many of them as possible, and drive the rest out.

  —Chairman Rahma Popal, remarks to a biographer, October 19, 2052

  JOSS WAS NO longer in a hospital room, though medical personnel came and went in the thick-walled security cell, taking skin and blood samples from him and performing an array of scans on his body—all the while using video recorders and other devices to keep a detailed log of everything they did, and every movement their patient made, every word he uttered.…

  To get him there they’d injected him with sedatives and strapped him to a gurney, then transported him across the Berkeley Reservation by ambulance. He’d been conscious all the way, had just lain there watching the doctors and medical research assistants assigned to him, two of each. When they saw that his eyes remained open and his pulse actually accelerated with additional sedative injections, they’d become alarmed and whispered among themselves.

  “I don’t know why the drugs have an opposite effect on me,” Joss had said to them, “but you don’t need to worry. I don’t intend to resist; I want to know what’s happening to me as much as you do.” His words were very rapid, as if linked to his amped-up pulse.

  One of the assistants had moved closer to him in the ambulance, and she’d smiled at him. “That’s good,” she’d said, “because we only want to help you.”

  Joss had smiled at her in return, and nodded. He’d considered asking her to remove the restraint straps, but knew she wouldn’t do that, because they’d think it was a trick on his part. Maybe he could remove them himself anyway, but he hadn’t wanted to try because he feared injuring or killing someone, or upsetting people even more.

  The raw violence he’d displayed in the hospital room suggested that he had some variation of SciO Splitter power, and he might employ it to get free.
But first he needed to understand more about controlling the power, if that was possible, and more about his altered body. So, for the rest of the ambulance ride he’d fallen silent and tried to calm himself, taking deep and regular breaths. After a few minutes he’d heard the research assistant saying that his pulse was slowing, returning to normal.

  They’d wheeled him into another building, this one gray and bleak, and down to what appeared to be a series of windowless, bombproof bunkers. They passed white-robed men and women in the corridors and rooms, along with heavily armed SciO security officers in white uniforms. The obvious SciO presence gave Joss a sinking sensation, and a realization that the mysterious organization was undoubtedly more concerned about the leakage of its secrets than it was about him.

  As he’d thought about this, he’d realized that maybe it didn’t matter so much who had taken him into custody. Whatever happened in the ReFac explosion needed to be figured out, and who was more qualified to do that than the SciOs? After all, Chairman Rahma trusted them, and Joss revered the man. Yes, Joss decided, he would cooperate because his beloved Chairman would want him to.…

  After getting him into the security cell, the original doctors and medical assistants had not reappeared; instead, the patient had been handed off to another set of medical personnel who wore SciO robes.

  Then, tending to him for an hour, taking their samples and such, the new group left and a tall man entered the room, wearing a white robe with gilded trim. He had glittering blue eyes. “I am Dr. Mora,” he said, “Chief of the Dark Energy research division.” He leaned over the gurney and spoke in a low tone. “You know what Dark Energy is?”

  Joss felt his pulse quicken, and his words came quickly, as if linked: “Only in general. I’ve heard that’s the SciO term for it, and I’ve seen Kupi Landau use it on jobsites.”

  “Ah yes, well, we seem to have an interesting situation here. We’ve analyzed the audiovisual records of your … event in the hospital, shall we call it? Yes, your event. It seems, Mr. Stuart, that you have captured some small amount of Dark Energy in your own body. To be honest with you, we aren’t certain how that could happen. You’d like to know yourself, wouldn’t you?”