Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  Even as Ida kept her smile fixed at the reminder of the difficulties she had been forced to go through to obtain this interview and the increased pressures from the System that now weighed on her, the thought occurred to her that Milla was fishing for information on the nature of the Ananke. Even if Ida had been so inclined or so foolish as to answer, she would have nothing to tell the other woman.

  “The last time you spoke to your son was ten years ago; am I correct?” Ida asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like you to describe the incident for me, if you please,” said Ida.

  “You have it all on camera,” said Milla Ivanov. Briefly, Ida enjoyed the comparison of Milla’s protest to the ones Ivan had been making all week long. “My accounting will not be so detailed.”

  “Even so,” Ida said, and wondered if the mother would have the same flair for storytelling as the son.

  “Leon woke up late,” said Milla. “It was a few days after he had graduated. He came downstairs. I had circled some job opportunities for him in the paper and left it at his place. He read them, said that he had somewhere to go, and left. There is nothing more to it than that. I said nothing to him.”

  She spoke in the clipped, emotionless tones of a woman who had repeated this story many times, reporting with the same bare factuality as a machine. Ida remembered watching the scene from the Ivanov house surveillance. Milla Ivanov had been sitting at the table with her back to the glorious sunrise coming up over the mountains that was visible through the glass wall behind her. She had hardly looked up from the notes in front of her as Ivan came down, looked at the paper his mother had left him, and then stood and watched his mother for a long, silent span of time.

  Milla Ivanov, drumming her fingers arrhythmically against the tabletop, had not noticed her son’s attention. She looked up only when Ivan told her he was leaving and looked at him for perhaps a moment too long—or perhaps that was only Ida reading into what she saw—before nodding tersely.

  Ivan had left, and Milla had gone back to work. She had not even looked up when the sound of Ivan’s ship roared through the house and rattled the dishes he had left untouched. Ida had wondered if Milla regretted not saying anything that last time her son left or regretted not realizing he was leaving, not trying to stop him, but with Milla Ivanov in front of her now, regret seemed like it would be a foreign thing to her.

  “Did you not have any idea your son was leaving for good?” Ida asked.

  “No,” Milla said. “My son has always been very good at hiding what he is thinking, even from me.”

  Ida would not even have wasted a guess on who he had learned that particular art from. “Would it surprise you to know that your son has a series of your lectures saved on his ship?”

  This time Ida was certain that something passed over Milla Ivanov’s face, something like surprise, or grief, perhaps.

  “I know nothing of it if that is what you’re asking,” she said. “Which lectures?”

  “Computer science,” said Ida.

  Milla nodded more to herself than to Ida and for the first time looked away from Ida. It freed Ida to let her mask slip slightly, to let her focus more on the mask Milla Ivanov was wearing.

  “I assume you did not bring me here to ask me about my son’s viewing habits,” Milla said.

  “You have to understand that the recordings were a little suspicious.”

  “Suspicious?” Milla’s expression could have frozen the sun. “The lectures were publicly broadcast. Computer science is his preferred field. And he is my son. There is nothing suspicious about that at all.”

  Ivan’s interest in the subject would make the lectures the perfect method for passing along a message, and Milla Ivanov had to realize that. “Have you ever tried to get into contact with your son?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Ida asked, and when Milla simply looked at her as if the answer to that question should be obvious, clarified, “Surely as a mother you would want to save your son from himself.”

  “Blood will out,” said Milla Ivanov in her chilly distant way. “That is what the System says, is it not? If the parent has…anti-System tendencies, then so will the child. It was only a matter of time before Leon took after his father.”

  The utter lack of emotion briefly stymied Ida. She relied so often on her own relative poise to crack open the people she interrogated along the cracks created by their sentiment, but Milla Ivanov, she was starting to realize, was as impervious as a diamond. She had not expected to be able to break Milla; other investigators with far more time and experience had failed to do so, but now she was starting to fear that neither would she be able to get Milla Ivanov to slip.

  “That is what the System believes,” Ida said. “Is that not what you believe?”

  “It has proved itself true,” said Milla Ivanov.

  Ida leaned on her elbows.

  “Come now,” she said. “Tell me what you think, Doctor Ivanov.”

  One white eyebrow arched up.

  “I wish that my son had stayed on Earth,” Milla said. “I wish that Leon had lived a peaceful, safe, successful life in harmony with the System instead of being hunted down like an animal.”

  It was spoken with what sounded like honesty, or at least as much honesty as so cold a woman could display, but it was exactly what Milla Ivanov was supposed to say, and so Ida waited a moment longer, searching Milla’s face for a lie that was not there to see.

  “Did you ever notice any signs,” Ida asked, “when your son was living with you that he might be taking after his father?”

  A brief silence.

  “His father was also occasionally stricken with melancholy,” said Milla in what could only be a deliberate misunderstanding of Ida’s question.

  Ida gave her a condescending smile. She expected that to annoy Doctor Ivanov, but if it did, she could not see it. “I meant delinquent behavior.”

  “No,” Milla said. “I noticed nothing.”

  “And how about revolutionary sympathies?”

  “My son never took after his father that way,” said Milla, her words very short, very clipped.

  Ida lowered her tone.

  “He has told me,” she said, “about how he was taken to see Saturn when he was very young. About how deeply that upset him.”

  Milla’s gaze was boring holes through her skull.

  “Did you never realize,” Ida asked with a delicate lance of disbelief in her voice, “that he felt so bad for them? That he didn’t truly appreciate the necessity of the System’s decision? Did you truly never notice that he blamed the System, in the smallest of measures, for the atrocities he saw?”

  “As I said,” Milla Ivanov told her, “my son is very good at hiding his thoughts, even from me.”

  Ida made a show of hesitation, of thinking, and then spoke as if she were sharing information that she was supposed to keep to herself. “The System has great reason to believe that your son is involved in revolutionary activities.” All of Milla’s attention was visibly on Ida, but her face remained impassive. Ida said, “Once this comes to light, it will call into question certain aspects of your parenting and your obedience to the System.”

  “It may be questioned,” Milla said. “The answers will remain as they have been for thirty years.”

  “And if signs are found that you failed to recognize at the time…”

  “Signs of what? There were no ‘signs,’ Miss Stays. And my son would not be so foolish as to involve himself in any revolutionary activity.”

  “No?”

  “No,” said Milla. “Leon is individualistic. To be in a revolution requires a loss of the self to something more. My son would not be able to tolerate such a thing.”

  “Doctor Ivanov, we have evidence…”

  “Then you have misread it,” said Milla Ivanov. “Perhaps you are simply wrong, Miss Stays.”

  For a long moment Ida sat perfectly still.

  Then she said, “For seven years y
ou did not have the faintest idea that your husband, the man with whom you shared a house, a name, and a bed, was involved in attempting to sever the Saturnian system from the solar system. Your husband was attempting to pull off the largest rebellion in the past two hundred years. And you did not have the faintest inkling of what he was doing.”

  Milla Ivanov said nothing.

  “And you would have me believe,” said Ida, “that a woman so intelligent as you, so adaptive, wouldn’t learn to keep an eye on the kind of signs that she claims to have missed in her husband? You would have me believe that you would not be on your guard for them to appear in your own son?”

  Milla Ivanov’s expression was as cold as the far reaches of space, where the sun was just a star, colder than ice, as cold as the hollowness of the void. Ida said, “Or is this one more instance of such convenient ignorance?”

  In the silence that followed, only the distant groans of machinery could be heard. And in that silence Milla spoke.

  “Let me explain to you what you are,” she said. “You are but one in a long line of interrogators to think you can make your name by unmaking me. You are nothing more than a gear in a machine I am well familiar with, and you are saying and asking the same things I have been told and asked for thirty years. The System has only ever proved my innocence. Do you think to succeed where thirty years of others have failed?”

  Ida stayed frozen in place, conscious of the way that without moving, by speaking only just loudly enough to be heard, Milla Ivanov had taken the power of the situation from her.

  Milla said, “I assumed that this interrogation had some relevance and was not intended to discuss thirty-year-old rumors.”

  For a moment Ida wanted, with keen desire, to tear apart Milla’s son before the mother’s eyes.

  It was only the thought that eventually she would destroy Ivan that gave her the strength to continue the interrogation.

  —

  Hallway, hallway, hallway; control room, hallway; the very end of the hallway, the very base of the ship’s spine; hallway, a room where Ida Stays sat across from white-haired Milla Ivanov. Althea paused in her flipping through the working cameras’ feeds to watch just for a moment.

  She flipped away.

  Hallway, hallway, storage room; hallway, the core with its rays of plasma arching away from its dark heart, hallway, the white room—

  Althea flipped back immediately. The cameras in the white room had not been working before. For an instant she saw the scene from high above: Ivan sitting pale and chained in place and Gagnon leaning over the table saying something to him.

  It took the sound a moment to catch up with the video. Gagnon was saying, “…her alone.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Ivan said with precision, and an angle to his jaw that spoke of defiance.

  “You’ve been talking to her,” said Gagnon.

  “And is it a crime to talk?”

  “I want you to leave Althea Bastet alone.”

  “And if I say no? What, will you tell Ida?”

  Althea’s heart jolted under a sudden rush of adrenaline, but Gagnon seemed to realize that he couldn’t tell Ida, either. “I’ll keep you away from her,” he threatened.

  Ivan laughed, and Althea realized how small and how weak Gagnon’s threat had been; it was not even a threat, nothing more than a protective impulse. Her humiliation and her anger that Gagnon would talk to Ivan about her were humbled in the face of that impulse, and she knew that she could not possibly confront Gagnon about it.

  “Go ahead,” Ivan said. “Try to chain me up some more.”

  Althea would have listened longer, but the feed abruptly cut out, and she could not bring it back again.

  It did confirm one thing, at least. The computer was receiving the feeds from the nonfunctional cameras. It simply wasn’t sharing them with her. She also suspected that from now on she would find herself scheduled for shifts that coincided with times when Ivan was being interrogated so that she could not guard his door while she worked.

  She was not certain whether she was relieved or disappointed.

  To her right, on the wall against the door, the perpetual System broadcast was playing.

  This time it was a man on the screen. He was handsome, but he did not have blue eyes.

  “At 200 Earth Standard Time this morning, System forces suppressed another destructive riot on the Neptunian moon Galatea, restoring order,” the subtitles read while his lips moved soundlessly above. Althea did not need the sound on the display to be on to hear his Terran accent. “The gathering began as an apparent protest regarding System efforts to supplement the moon’s agricultural output.”

  The screen changed to a grainy surveillance camera view of the riot. On the dirty ice surface of Galatea, barren and gray, people crowded together, shouting and wild. They looked vicious. They looked dangerous. The camera cut back shortly to the handsome man, the image having lasted only long enough for anyone watching the news to witness the violence of the rabble, its inhumanity.

  “Its true nature as a terrorist plot became apparent when the mob attacked the residence of System Governor Enrico Boltzmann, a decorated servant of the System, and murdered him in his home. After his death, the System intervened, ending the hostilities with a blow to the greenhouse enclosure.”

  A blow to the greenhouse enclosure meant breaking the enclosure, allowing the trapped atmosphere and heat to rush out, suffocating the rioters in the sudden thinness of the air. Althea swallowed and did her best not to show what else she thought. The camera in the piloting room was still operational and broadcasting Althea’s image live to the System.

  “The System suspects that this riot was also instigated by the Mallt-y-Nos, as with the riots on Titania, which are still being subdued,” said the handsome man, whose eyes were as blank as those of the other newscaster, as guarded as Ivanov’s had been in the picture in his file. “But rest assured, the System will do anything to protect its citizens.”

  Althea turned away. She no longer wanted to look at the earthscape behind the newscaster’s head, the verdant greens of Earth, the perfect blue of its sky unenclosed by any greenhouse. She turned back to the Ananke and flipped through the working camera feeds one last time, pausing on the tableau of Milla Ivanov, seated like her son, with Ida leaning on the table across from her.

  Althea closed the program, but she could not stop herself from thinking.

  —

  “Where are we going?” Milla asked as Ida gestured for her to walk with her down the hall, farther away from the docking bay.

  “We have one more stop to make.”

  Nothing Milla had said had caught Ida’s attention. She would check it all, of course, but everything seemed to be in order: Milla’s story seemed true. In any case, whether she could have Milla Ivanov arrested was less important than here, than now. Ida wondered what Milla’s reaction to her son in chains would be, if that at last would draw something from the doctor.

  Ida wondered how Ivan would change when he saw his mother.

  When they reached the doorway to the white room, Milla Ivanov stopped. “My son is in there,” she said. It was not a question.

  “Yes,” Ida said. She pushed open the door.

  Domitian was standing beside the table in the precise center of the vast, bright room, a few steps away from the figure in the chair. The chains on Ivan’s arms were visible even from the door, and the cloth of his shirt was so thin that it fell loosely and followed the shape of his body, as if he were exposed, uncovered, trapped, and vulnerable. His back was toward the door.

  Without a word, Milla Ivanov headed for the table and her son. Ida followed, the sound of her heels ringing out, filling the vast empty space with echoes.

  Ivan said, “Ida?”

  “No,” said his mother in her quiet voice, and Ivan jerked his head around just as she stepped into the range of his vision.

  For a long moment mother and son simply looked at each other.

  Iv
an, Ida saw, was afraid, and while Milla Ivanov looked at him—at the dark shadows beneath his eyes, at the chains around his wrists—her jaw grew tight. Their focus on each other was so complete that it was as if Ida and Domitian were not in the room at all.

  Ivan said, “They brought you all the way out here?”

  “Apparently,” Milla said, “they had some questions for me that couldn’t possibly be answered at an outside facility.”

  A moment of grim understanding passed between the Ivanovs. If Ida had not had to school her expression, she would have smiled.

  Milla Ivanov shifted position, the first overt display of discomfort Ida had seen on her, crossing her arms across her chest and drumming her fingers without rhythm on the sleeve of her jacket. Her customary nervous tic.

  “How are you doing?” Milla asked abruptly.

  “Great,” said Ivan, with a special sort of sarcasm that did not seem to know whether it wanted to be sarcastic. “Really fantastic. How about you?”

  “Very well,” said Milla. “I got tenure.”

  “That’s good.”

  What Milla’s ironclad accounting of her movements had not done to convince Ida that mother and son had not spoken in ten years, witnessing the stilted and awkward nature of this interaction was doing. They truly had not been in contact, at least not for a long time.

  “Did you miss me?” Ivan asked. His fingers were twitching against the arms of his chair.

  “No.” Milla paused. “I got a dog.”

  After a beat, Ivan grinned. It was not like the smiles Ida had seen him direct her way. This was the kind of smile she saw directed at Matthew Gale in the surveillance footage she had watched: wide, honest, as bright and brilliant as his eyes. At the sight of that smile, Milla’s expression softened, but Ida thought she was rather close to weeping.

  “I wish you could’ve met Constance,” Ivan said, his grin fading away. “You would’ve liked her, Mom.”

  Milla let out a breath and looked away, in the opposite direction from Ida and Domitian; when she turned her head back, her eyes were dry but she might as well have let herself weep, because Ida could see the grief on her face.