Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  “But he knew that if he left you, you would die. And so he let that little infection turn into a full-blown mess that eventually led to outright sepsis, just so you would live!

  “And now you want to return that kind of favor by sitting back and letting him die because he is happy to go join Liza, you little ingrate?!”

  Miri didn’t know what was stronger, her feeling of helplessness or of her own utter worthlessness.

  It was all her fault.

  It was!

  Yosi would die because of her!

  The thought made her want to curl up on the ground and melt away into nothingness. Her knees started to buckle as Leo put her back down onto the half-frozen mud.

  “Oh no you don’t!” he growled, shaking her hard enough to make her teeth rattle.

  “You get up on your damned feet, girl, and you listen to me!

  “The vendoo root extract is working. It’s ugly, nasty, hallucinogenic poison that sends his homeostasis bouncing around all over the place, but it’s working. We just had to ferment it with eucalyptus gum. It’s the damned cure. The autodoc has got the recipe right, finally.

  “But the stuff is pure torture. The bacteria are dying, but so is he. He’s got to want to live, understand? He’s got to hang on until the infection clears out.

  “I am taking Shin and Patty and going down to the lowland. We need more eucalyptus gum and more vendoo root, not to mention more food.

  “You are going to stay here with Yosi and care for him. You’re going to change the bandages and inject the extract and do everything else that needs to be done, exactly according to schedule.

  “And every time he starts talking to Liza, you are going to answer him instead of her.”

  Miri glanced at the heavyworlder in astonishment, wiping her dripping nose with a sleeve.

  Of all the things she’d expected to hear…

  “Your voice is similar,” continued Leo in response to her mute question.

  “He’s too far gone to tell you two apart.

  “Just don’t speak to him in Zemelsky. Liza had a Yugomori accent you couldn’t copy in a million years. Her folk were fishermen, from Novomorsk. But in Hebrew you don’t sound too different from the way she spoke. Even your vocabulary isn’t that far off.”

  “But… What should I say?” asked Mirabelle hesitantly.

  The whole concept of posing as a dead woman didn’t quite want to fit into her head. It felt… Almost sacrilegious, somehow.

  Was Yosi talking to a real ghost? Did she believe in real ghosts?

  “It doesn’t matter,” replied the Spartan.

  “Say that he’s got to go back to the World of the Living. Say that it’s not yet his time, that he has a special destiny, and whatever the heck else you can think of to make him want to stay right here with us no matter how much it hurts.

  “If you want, tell him that there’s a living girl out here who loves him and that he’s got to go back to her. Tell him that he’s got to go make some babies before he’s allowed to die. That’s something Liza would say.

  “Ultimately, I don’t give a damn what you invent. But if you dare give up and he dies, so help me the Allmother Herself, I’ll strangle you with my own two hands. Got it?”

  Miri nodded, weakly, still sniffling.

  Real or not, she wasn’t going to let some ghost steal Yosi.

  She wasn’t!

  She didn’t know where the resolve had come from, but she felt it flooding over her in an instant, like a tidal wave.

  “Mine!” thought Mirabelle in a sudden flash of rage.

  “He’s mine, you bitch! You can’t have him!”

  Perhaps she’d muttered it out loud, she wasn’t sure.

  “Good!” said Leo, pushing her lightly back in the direction of the cave, “Now git!”

  * 42 *

  Klaus Weinberger was angry and it showed. Around him, the campus executive committee seemed smothered by the palpable waves of rage emanating from the head of the table. Marty Milena looked shriveled up, sunk into her chair, trying very hard not to be noticed. Carmen Denero sat stock-still, looking neither left nor right, as if afraid that a single movement might bring the whole world tumbling down upon her head. Mark Jamesson had that slightly greenish tinge one sees on bystanders’ faces at the scene of a particularly bad traffic accident. Jacques Delavre perched a good fifty centimeters away from the table, eyes focused intently on the blue uniform cap his enormous hands kept turning over and over again without cease.

  In the top cop’s case at least, thought professor Weinberger, it was guilt, not fear, that churned the stomach. Besides the Dean himself, he was the only one here who’d known in advance what this meeting would be about.

  “At four o’clock yesterday afternoon, a bomb went off outside Government House, killing six and injuring twenty-four, all of them innocent passers-by,” said the dean.

  “Simultaneously, four blocks away, on the corner of Boturini Street and Eighth Avenue, a Zin patrol was hit by a roadside bomb and automatic weapons fire. A jeep was destroyed and four soldiers were killed, among them major Khirrg, the Zin liaison with the government. Stray flechettes and shrapnel killed three civilians, including a six-year-old girl.

  “In yet another incident, persons unknown ambushed a police squad on foot patrol, killing all eight officers and taking their weapons. Amazingly, no civilians were injured.

  “What does that have to do with an emergency meeting of the executive committee?” Weinberger continued. “I’ll tell you.

  “Credit for all three attacks was claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself The Crusade for a Free Paradise. Leaflets calling for a general uprising against the Zin and President Sanchez were left at all three scenes.

  “Our crusaders tried to be clever. Neither hair nor DNA nor fingerprints were to be found. Fibers and footprints from all three scenes belonged to common forms of clothing and footwear, providing no leads.

  “But they were neither policemen nor soldiers. Among the things they did not know were two vital items.

  “One: All legally-manufactured explosive is impregnated with nanomarkers which allow one to identify the batch and lot number of every stick.

  “Two: All military-grade small arms are designed to timestamp and mark each flechette they fire.”

  Across the table from her favorite professor, Carmen Denero’s face went white as a bedsheet, throwing her black hair and eyes into stark relief.

  “The rifles used in the attacks are still in the campus armory, surprisingly enough,” continued the Dean.

  “None of them has been assigned to an officer. They are all part of the emergency reserve, all the way in the back of the secondary storage room, where no one goes, except to do the weekly inventory. This is probably why our crusaders felt comfortable putting them back into the racks. So comfortable, in fact, that they didn’t even bother to degauss the barrels.

  “However, three thousand rounds of ammunition are missing.

  “The explosives used in the bombings came from the second production lot of the Ferreira Chemical Factory in Northside, which Mark’s people put into operation last week. The entire lot was delivered to this campus and earmarked for a variety of construction projects currently in the works.

  “Carmen,” said the Dean.

  Carmen Denero jumped. There were tears in her eyes now. Her whole body shook.

  “I have graded enough of your papers to recognize that you wrote the leaflets yourself.

  “Your friend Emilio was on duty at the armory last night and the night before last. It is strange for someone to pull two night shifts in a row, isn’t it?”

  Across the table, Carmen nodded weakly. She knew that she was a dead woman. The knowledge was written plainly upon her face for all to see.

  “Emilio’s old girlfriend Lucia was on the night shift at the construction warehouse three days ago. That’s when you stole the explosives.”

  “Dean, please…” choked out Mark James
son.

  The dictator of Polytechnic University silenced his underling with a single glance.

  “How could you be so stupid, Carmen?” he asked quietly.

  “How could you endanger this campus, everything we’ve built here, for the sake of a meaningless gesture?

  “Do you honestly believe anyone would follow your naive calls for a general uprising? That a bunch of civilians with a few small arms could stand a chance in a toe-to-toe fight against two divisions of Zin mechanized infantry and armor with their orbital and air support?

  “Fool child, did you even think it through? Did you even imagine what it would mean, what this city would look like when the Zin began to level whole neighborhoods with fire from orbit? If you thought the Collapse was bad…”

  The sound of the Dean’s palm slamming on the table cracked across the room with the force of a gunshot. His voice snapped against the walls like a whip.

  “When you called on people to attack the police and take their arms, did you realize what you were writing? Do you think that the Zin give us the same rifles they carry themselves just because the ammunition is the same and the damned things look identical?!

  “These are police firearms! Every single one of them has a built-in locator beacon, a biometric scan package, a passive RFID tag and an inertial navigator! Every single one can be turned off remotely at the push of a button!

  “This very morning I signed arrest warrants for every single one of your idiot friends who touched every single rifle from the moment they left the armory to the moment they were returned! And they are the lucky ones!

  “Because your other cell stashed the weapons it captured at its hideout off campus, the Federales and not the Campus Police are right now arresting everyone involved in that fiasco! And since that cell is the one that killed Major Khirrg, the Federales are going to turn right around and hand the prisoners over to the Zin!

  “Not only did you and your buddies act like complete morons and accomplish precisely nothing, but for every Zin soldier you killed, you also killed two innocent bystanders and wounded six others! How dare you?!”

  “How dare you, Dean!”

  Carmen’s face flushed as blood poured back into it. She had nothing to lose now.

  “How dare you!

  “You toady!

  “You grovel before that butcher, Sanchez. You cooperate with his private army of thugs. You speak on the radio every week about the great achievements of the collaborationist government. You counsel submission to the Zin.

  “You! The man who led the demonstrations that toppled the Palmer Regime. The man who spent a decade in prison for advocating democracy and freedom of speech!

  “You were my hero, believe it or not. When I was growing up, I wanted to be just like you. To make a difference. To stand upon the fucking barricades and wave the fucking banner of freedom!

  “What happened to you?”

  Carmen’s voice broke. She sobbed.

  “What happened to you?” she whispered.

  “I noticed,” calmly replied the old professor, “that after we were done throwing headless corpses off balconies in the name of a better future, we actually had to build said future. Preferably without burning down our own cities, shooting half the planet’s population, starting a civil war, or collapsing the ecology in the process. And by the time we were done with the building, the same people who had always run things on this planet were inevitably running them once again. And then I grew up, and learned that slogans, no matter how loudly shouted, do not override objective reality.

  “I am Minister of Infrastructure. It is my job to keep the people of this planet fed and clothed, not to tell them fairy-tales and fill their hearts with false hopes.

  “Barring an invasion by a Great Power, the Zin are here to stay. We have to live with that. Neither you nor any other young fool is going to change anything by setting off a few bombs.”

  A silence hung in the air like the sword of Damocles. Only the air conditioner hummed quietly to itself.

  “Tell me now who the others are,” said Dean Weinberger, “and I’ll make sure you die quickly, without pain.”

  Carmen shook her head silently.

  “As you wish,” replied the minister.

  He motioned.

  Suddenly, the room was full of policemen.

  * 43 *

  Mirabelle opened her eyes.

  From the murky half-light in the cave, it was late morning outside. The fire had gone out. Her breath smoked in the air as she ordered the poncho shelter to recede from around her face. It had probably snowed again overnight.

  Yosi’s body was warm next to her, and, for once, he wasn’t shivering with fever. His temperature had plunged out of control again last night, and she had finally ordered her poncho to meld together with his, wrapping herself around his icy, naked body in a desperate effort to keep him warm. For a while she’d feared that his heart would stop again and she’d have to pump at his chest to restart it, but the rhythm had picked up, on and off, and finally steadied out. She had fallen asleep sometime late in the night, listening to the calm, steady beating and hoping that it would last.

  She didn’t really want to get up, but the fire needed to be relit, and she had to make some food while there was a chance. The leftover porridge from last night would do for breakfast, but she needed to split more wheat and set it simmering so that there would be something for lunch.

  It would have been nice if she could set the grain soaking overnight, but with the cold that wasn’t practical. Instead she had to settle for breaking it up into chunks and simmering it until it softened. Leo had even bagged a deer, so there was, for once, plentiful meat to add to the pot. The final result, though it apparently needed onions, garlic and pine nuts for full authenticity, had reminded Leo of a dish from back home, something called jadrenka.

  The wheat had lifted everyone’s spirits. Barring some unforeseeable disaster, no one was going to go hungry again for a good long while. If she hadn’t been so hungry most of the time, thought Miri, she would have surely gotten heartily sick of wild turnips, bits of scrawny rodent, and occasional handfuls of dried blueberries stolen from chipmunk caches.

  Leo and the gang were gone again, off to get more grain from the ruined hacienda. They’d come in two days ago, rested for a little bit, and hurried right back out. Leo wanted to get as much grain up here to the cave as they could reasonably store without undue spoilage, before the weather turned bad again. Also, someone else might discover the buried treasure, and carelessly spoil most of it in an effort to get some out.

  The place had been fought over, hard. The manor house had burned down, and the workers’ barracks had been stripped to the cement. Whoever had done it had cooked the dead bodies and split the bones for marrow, but they had left behind a whole bunker silo full of polywheat.

  Perhaps, Leo had theorized, the hacendado had had an unusually large amount of algae paste stored up. Or perhaps he had managed to get his algae tanks repaired and had fed his people from that, leaving the valuable organic grain in reserve in the hope that things would settle down in a bit, and he’d find some way to make a profit after all. From the amount the man had stored, either he’d devoted his entire cropland to polywheat during the last growing season, or he’d dabbled in the commodities trade, as a grain wholesaler. Either way, he would have been loath to sacrifice his investment. And the stupid ghetto rats who’d murdered everyone and looted everything before moving on had probably never figured out what the silo was, or else didn’t have the means to get inside the earth-covered plascrete structure.

  The EMP had frozen the outer machinery and sealed the access points. It took Leo’s unexpectedly useful familiarity with bulk grain storage techniques, quite a bit of elbow grease, several minutes’ careful cutting with vibros, and the use of Yosi’s interface cracker to get the inner machinery to dispense the grain.

  According to the silo AI, there were almost four thousand tons of irradiated polywheat in
there, stored in an oxygen-free, moisture-free environment kept at exactly ten degrees below freezing. Enough to feed thousands of people, for years. And it would keep almost forever.

  Leo and the gang had dragged in nearly two hundred kilos of the stuff, and were hoping to get another two hundred or so into the waterproof storage bin Leo had constructed by reprogramming the camo shelter Yosi had packed for their camping trip. Four hundred kilos would easily keep them all going for a good three months, even if something happened to the hacienda. Double that if they rationed it.

  The grain was the biggest lucky break they’d had all winter. For the first time in two months, they weren’t one or two unlucky hunting trips away from outright starvation. Even if they lost Leclerk’s escape pod for some reason, polywheat was a whole-diet crop. They would just have to eat some of the grain uncooked, in order to get their vitamin C from it.

  The men had been all agrin about their discovery, but Patty had sat quietly, staring moodily into the flames as she mechanically spooned porridge into her mouth. Miri had asked her about it afterward, when the opportunity arose to pull her away from the two laughing foreigners over by the fire. It turned out that, before Leo had lobotomized it, the silo AI had asked for authorization from a señor Ortiz. A señor Manuel Ortiz.

  Patty had gone to school with a Carmen Ortiz, a hacendado’s daughter from Angeles Province. Amid winter and ruin, arriving on foot from the mountains instead of by aircar from the coast, she hadn’t, until that moment, recognized the place.

  Just last summer, for a few days, she’d been a guest in that manor house. And now there was nothing left of that kind, shy girl, her friend, except for a pile of cracked bones on the floor of the workers’ barracks. Carmen Ortiz and her whole family, reduced to meat for a bunch of savages.

  Mirabelle shivered.

  It was a new world out there. And there were far, far worse fates in that new world than being stuck in a cold, dank cave, in the woods far above the toxic line, with a bunch of strange foreigners.