Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  “Then I’ll fight them with you,” she said.

  The steely determination in her voice made him smile. Quite the little tigress, deep down, wasn’t she?

  “You’re my kind of girl, you know that?” chuckled Yosi.

  * 26 *

  “A Red Pin,” thought Mirabelle into the darkness, “He’s a Red Pin!”

  She could feel the Leaguer’s back against her own, on the other side of the partition.

  He wasn’t asleep either. She knew that, somehow. And he was sad again, wasn’t he? And angry, for some reason. Angry at her?

  It was all her fault. She’d disturbed… whatever it was. Now it wouldn’t go away for him, the way Brandon’s screams wouldn’t go away for her, when she thought about… that.

  And Annie, and Mom and Dad…

  Annie. Hesus Christos, what they did to Annie! What they would have done to her, if she hadn’t…

  Suddenly the fear was back. That paralyzing terror she’d felt lying there, in her hiding place, listening to the screams and the moans and the thumps and the wet crunchy sounds…

  The way Annie had begged…

  And Mom…

  And the way they had laughed, and made them scream more…

  Mom had begged them for Annie. Had begged them to do things to her instead…

  The whole time, until the end. Not for herself. Not once, for herself.

  Mirabelle felt tears welling up in her eyes.

  And then she was in the basement again, watching the man with the pears. The way he ran from the others. And all she could think about were the pears in the bag. That if he tripped, one might fall out, and roll her way. She had wished for him to trip. Had prayed for him to trip. And he did trip.

  She could feel the slick wetness of the muddy pear against her lips. The sweetness of it on her tongue.

  And in the darkness inside her eyelids the man’s brains splattered out of his shattered skull over and over, as the bricks and rebars rose and fell, rose and fell…

  And then she was back in the clearing, with that other Leaguer. The one who just appeared out of thin air and threw her down onto the ground without so much as saying a word and smashed her across the face when she’d tried to resist.

  He was looming again over her, tearing at her clothes… And he would… He would…

  But he didn’t! He didn’t because…

  “Yosi!” she sobbed, “Yosi, please!

  “Please don’t be angry at me! I’m sorry! It’s all my fault! Please, please don’t hate me!”

  The sobs broke free in a flurry, like a flock of sparrows taking flight all at once, one after the other until she could hardly breathe. The darkness dissolved into tears and flashes of green light.

  And then his arms were around her, pulling her out of the wet, terror-filled blackness.

  She could feel the warmth of his skin against her. He was kissing her and stroking her hair, and the terror receded from his presence.

  “Shush, honey,” he said, “Shush, it’s all right.

  “It’s not your fault. I don’t hate you. It’s all right, don’t be scared, I won’t hurt you.”

  Mirabelle hugged him back, burying her face in his chest.

  “I’m not scared of you,” she sobbed, “I’m just scared.”

  “Don’t be,” he replied.

  “I’m here. I’ll keep you safe.”

  He would. She knew he would.

  The sobs died down as suddenly as they came, and her heart stopped fluttering in tune with them.

  If he was there to hold her, then she was safe. She knew that, somehow.

  The sky was blue, the sun rose in the East and if Yosi was holding her then she was safe and all would be well.

  But what if…

  “You’re a Red Pin, aren’t you?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “You were really twelve?”

  “Yes,” he replied soothingly, stroking her hair.

  She could feel the tenderness radiating from every stroke, like a soft, warm, calming wave rippling down her body.

  It made her feel so safe to be held like that. But what if tomorrow his wounds got worse? What if he died?

  She couldn’t make it on her own the way she was now, she knew that. But…

  Was it possible? If he taught her… If she could learn… If there was time enough to learn…

  “As small as me, really?”

  “A little bigger, maybe, but not by much. I was pretty scrawny as a kid.”

  He was so good to her, she thought.

  But he was so… weird.

  He wanted her, but he wouldn’t take her, and she didn’t really know why. And he felt guilty about wanting her.

  If he didn’t want a lover, why was he being so nice to her?

  Was she supposed to be… his daughter? His granddaughter? How old was he?

  “When?” she asked, “Where?

  “You fought the Omicronians…

  “You can’t have fought in the First Omicronian War. You’d be two hundred by now.”

  “It was an Incident. Hope Colony. Almost seventeen years ago. It might have made the news here on Paradise when the Navy finally came in to rescue us, but you would have been less than a year old when that happened.”

  “God,” said Mirabelle, “I thought you were old enough to be my father. Some kind of commando, on leave from the Joint Mission, or something.

  “My textbooks said that there was no large-scale ground fighting in the Second Omicronian War, but I thought maybe the raids, you know…”

  Then what he was saying sunk in.

  The shock of it pierced her to the bone, like a bolt of lightning in the darkness.

  He wasn’t lying, she knew he wasn’t, but…

  A colony? How could the League not go to war over a colony?

  And, wait! There was no League colony named Hope!

  She knew her astrography, she’d gotten straight fives across the board since fourth grade!

  Quickly, she ticked the League worlds off on her fingers. The core systems were Sparta, New Israel, Haven and the Serpent Swarm. The colonies were New Helena, Volantis, Timon, Hadassah and Bretogne.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  “Why wasn’t there a war, you mean?” he replied bitterly.

  “Because our parents were perverted heretic scum no one wanted to have anything to do with, that’s why.”

  The way he said it made her skin crawl. How could anyone talk about his parents that way?

  “I will not judge, I will not judge, I will not judge!” thought Miri, clenching her teeth to swallow the rebuke that threatened to somersault off the tip of her tongue and fly crackling through the air like some weird, poisonous species of grasshopper.

  She’d made fool enough of herself this afternoon, hadn’t she? And he wouldn’t speak to her since. Nothing but one-word replies and basic instructions, from that moment until now.

  “It’s not common knowledge,” continued Yosi, “but there is a terraformed world just off Timon. No general solution for a jump to that system has ever been found. No refugee ship from the End Time War ever managed to reach the place. It’s all just wild critters and wilderness, as pristine and remote as an inhabitable world can get. If you do a partial solution jump from Timon, the trip takes about two hundred standard days one way.

  “The Omicronians had an outpost there, but after the war they ceded it along with Timon. Nobody really wanted to go settle the place, what with Timon just opened up. Once you figured in the fuel costs of the partial solution run, nothing made out there could possibly be worth shipping anywhere else, so there couldn’t be any regular commercial traffic. Nobody really wanted to be six and a half months away from civilization, with naught but an annual federal mail run to connect them to the outside universe. Except our parents. They wanted to be someplace remote. Someplace where normal people wouldn’t point fingers and call them filthy perverts. So they pooled their funds and
finagled a commercial outpost charter.

  “An official colony charter would have meant a fed viceroy. They didn’t want one of those. Not that anyone would have let a bunch of damned Pacifists have a colony charter anyway.

  “With a commercial outpost charter you can run your own affairs, more or less, as long as you pass the periodic inspections and don’t go bankrupt. They incorporated in the Serpent Swarm, of course, so the inspection regime would be as loose as possible to begin with, and on top of that the belters would be officially responsible for inspecting them.

  “They figured that, once every five or six years, some minor officer from the Serpent Swarm Corporation would show up in orbit and use a telepresence bot to amble around a town or two for a couple of days and sightsee in the name of due diligence. Maybe, if he was feeling particularly dutiful regarding the Common Code, he’d spot-check the school records and the Civil Defense caches before he left.

  “They were right.

  “The moment they had their charter, pretty much every Pacifist in the League sold everything, got on a ship, and came to their new peaceful paradise to hope and dream of a better universe where everyone joined hands and sang together for peace with flowers in their hair.

  “For twenty-two years everything went swimmingly. And then the real world caught up with them.”

  He was so angry about it, thought Mirabelle. It burned inside him like a pool of acid. A bubbling cauldron, aching to dissolve anything that touched it. He said the word “pacifist” as if it were a curse. You could feel the loathing in every syllable, as if he was talking about child molesters or some kind of disgusting insects. Was wanting peace such a crime? Every time she thought she understood him…

  “The new Archduke wanted revenge, see?” he remarked with barely-controlled calmness, “Just a little nip, to prove that his regime could hold its own against us. And he had all these inconvenient holdovers from his father’s day, always muttering behind his back about his youth and inexperience, and how the old Archduke was a greater führer and all that. So he decided to kill two birds with one stone.

  “The Navy and the Shock Corps killed his old mutterers for him. The few who survived, he could accuse of sabotage and shoot. The Aryan Girls harvested the seed, so the genes weren’t wasted. And he could thump his chest in triumph and boast about holding a League world for nigh-on two years, never mind that it took the League eight months to find out he was holding it in the first place and almost a year to get the troops out there in order to kick him out.”

  There was a bitter resignation in Yosi’s voice now, a strange mixture of resentment and agreement the likes of which Miri had never felt before.

  “After it was all over,” he concluded, “we kids were heroes, but our parents were still scum. Just dead scum, now. And no one wants to start a full-up war over dead scum.

  “There were two thousand, nine hundred and sixty seven of us. Two thousand, nine hundred and sixty-seven survivors out of an original population of ten million. Two thousand, three hundred and fifteen of us got Red Pins. Thirty-two got Silver Circles, including three adults. But for all that, we were still Pacifist seed. The politicians made some fine speeches, the VR directors made some nice immersies, and they finally passed a Common Code law to protect children from Pacifism.

  “But after all the pretty air-shaking and public tearjerking was done with, the average Shimon on the street still didn’t want his children anywhere near us.

  “You can tell people all you want that Pacifism is not entirely heritable, but everyone knows that there is an inclination. And most people would rather their child turn out to be a pedophile than a Pacifist. At least for pedophilia there are treatments…

  “And besides, we were all damaged goods. We’d been brought up by perverts, and then lived through hell. Nobody believed that any of us were truly sane, and we lived up to the expectations. In the first year alone there were twelve suicides. Day-and-night watch by medical AIs, hospital confinements, personal medbots on standby, none of it mattered. Living hurt; and when we decided that the pain of it wasn’t worth bearing anymore, all the Heavenly Host assembled wouldn’t be enough to keep us from killing ourselves.”

  Wolves, thought Mirabelle. But not the way dad had imagined them, were they? If you were supposed to be a wolf, but your parents had tried to raise you as a rabbit, wouldn’t you hate them? Wouldn’t the other wolves suspect you? Wouldn’t they always suspect you?

  You would never fit. Never ever, no matter how hard you tried. They wouldn’t let you.

  “Like a blanco among herdeiros,” flashed suddenly through her mind.

  She knew a little something about that, didn’t she? Not fitting.

  The only girl in the classroom with white skin and blond hair. The one whom everyone wanted to copy the homework from, but nobody wanted to sit with at recess.

  Except Corazon, of course. But that, too, was mostly because of the homework, wasn’t it? That, and sheer curiosity, and the gleeful pleasure Corazon had always taken in being just a hairsbreadth shy of scandalous, even as a little girl.

  Wasn’t it funny how, when Corazon copied the literature assignments almost word for word, she always got fives, but the girl with the white skin and the funny name never got above a four?

  With math and physics and astrography the teachers couldn’t do that. There was an objective right answer. She got her fives there. And still they would come up to her after the tests and ask her how she’d cheated. And they wouldn’t believe her when she said that she didn’t. She was a sneaky blanco. Sneaky blancos always cheated. Even Corazon believed that.

  Always alone, even in a crowd. Oh, yes, she knew a little something about that.

  “So, Sparta…” asked Mirabelle.

  It never made sense to her when he talked about serving a Spartan duke. But if he had no family, nowhere to go… No pack, right? A wolf needed a pack.

  “His Excellency Prince Doctor Professor Nikolai Freeman, Crown University Hospital,” sighed her companion, “The League’s foremost expert on sytoxin poisoning.

  “I had sytoxin circulating in my blood. I secreted it. It was in everything – blood, sweat, tears, mucus, urine, every bodily fluid. If it came out of my flesh it was pure poison. Even dead skin, or hair clippings or fingernails. There is always a little bit of sweat, or a little bit of blood…

  “And sytoxin is stable, it’s tough. Keep it out of direct sunlight, and it doesn’t degrade for years. It doesn’t matter that it’s dried sweat, or dried blood. It doesn’t matter if there’s only a microscopic amount…

  “No one could touch me with bare hands and live. No one knew how to treat me. There were no real treatments for sytoxin poisoning back then, anyway. Normally, people would just die. Quickly from a large dose, slowly from a small dose. If they had some kind of immunity and the dose was small enough, they’d recover. Otherwise, they’d just die slower. I got a huge dose, but I didn’t die and I didn’t really recover. Nobody had ever seen the like, so no one knew what to do.”

  “But he did, right?”

  “Yeah,” chuckled Yosi, “He did.

  “Doctor Nick’s a prick, but he’s a truly brilliant prick. I was just a lab rat to him, but he thought that he could cure me.

  “It was a mess. Custom nanites, custom antibodies, all kinds of treatments to filter my blood…

  “Hurt like the dickens, most of it, or made me puke my guts out, or both.

  “He just wouldn’t quit, you know?” said Yosi with a tinge of grudging admiration.

  “Whenever something failed, he’d try something new. Dropped everything, even his Grand Rounds. I was his only patient for two and a half years. He had forty people working under him full time, doing nothing else.

  “Not for my sake. He couldn’t care less for me as a person. He did it all for the science of it, and the fame and the Crown Prize.

  “I hated his guts by the time it was all over, but he figured out how to cure me, in the end. Well, mostly, anyw
ay. They say what’s left will slowly go away over the next five or six decades.”

  “So, this Doctor Nick, his dad’s a Spartan duke, right?” guessed Mirabelle.

  “Your duke… The same duke, right? Duke Freeman.

  “He took you in because you had no family? Nowhere to go? Because Doctor Nick asked him to?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. But Nick didn’t ask him. Doctor Sandra, Nick’s wife, did, and her son, Leo.

  “Nick didn’t want anything to do with it, matter of fact. Tried to argue Duke Reginald out of it for years, afterward. That didn’t go so well.”

  Yosi chuckled at the memory. The way Nick had sputtered, that final time around.

  The Duke had this knack, to make every word crack like a whip even though he barely raised his voice. You could hear the master of Castle Freeman all the way upstairs in the study, where Yosi and Leo had been pretending to play chess, hiding out of the way while their elders screamed at each other.

  Well, Nick did the screaming. Duke Reginald just talked, calm as you please, though every word hit like a ten-kilo brick dropped off the old keep’s observation spire.

  “Boy’s a hero,” the old Duke had said, “He’s a hero twice over, and more of a man than you’ll ever be, even if you tried.

  “While you were busy getting sozzled with your Separatist buddies and stuffing whatever teenage wenches you could get your dick into, he was bleeding out on Miranda with a fistful of shrapnel in his gut, trying to save your only son’s life. If you’re so scared to live under the same roof with him – there’s the door. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.”

  He was smiling all of a sudden. Miri couldn’t see it in the darkness, but she could feel it. It made her want to smile back for some reason.

  It all made sense now, she thought. A strict Gaian walkabout in the Dourados for four months? Yes, off-season. Yes, above the toxic line. But how much would you have to pay to get a permit to kill all the beavers and horn’s lizards you wanted? Normal people got charged fifty pesos for breaking a single bamboo shoot on a nature hike. She would know, dad had grounded her for a week. But the final bill didn’t matter, did it? Duke Reginald Freeman could afford it. Probably out of pocket change.