The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  “Dad?”

  “What is it, hon?”

  “What’s the comm-code for your attorney?”

  “That doesn’t sound good. What’s wrong?”

  “We’re being evicted. And those snakes are trying to grab our personal property. Things Simon and I paid for, ourselves.”

  “I’ll get the number.”

  Five minutes later, she was pouring out her grievance to John Helm, who asked several brief questions, including a query as to whether she had proof that various items had been paid for out of private funds.

  “Oh, yes,” she assured him, “I have plenty of proof.”

  “Good. Send me the eviction notice and start packing. We can’t fight the actual eviction, but POPPA can’t touch your personal property. That much, at least, I can accomplish. If nothing else, we’ll go public and crucify them on the evening news. I don’t think POPPA will relish having news reports showing them grabbing the personal belongings of a bereaved war heroine and her young daughter. That idiotic film Mirabelle Caresse made about you may just be useful for something, after all.”

  “Huh. That would be a switch, wouldn’t it? All right, I’m sending the message now. And thank you.”

  “It is entirely my pleasure.”

  She sat back, wondering where to start and how she could possibly get everything packed, when someone rang the bell at the front door. Startled, Kafari switched the datascreen view to the entrance security camera. She was even more startled to see who it was. “Aisha?” she said aloud, not quite believing the evidence of her eyes. She flew to the door and opened it with a wondering stare.

  “Aisha Ghamal? What in the world are you doing here? How did you get here?”

  The older woman gave her a honey-warm smile. “Kafari, it’s good to see you, child. You’ve been so busy, these last few years, I haven’t wanted to bother you. But things are different now. So I just climbed into my car and came along to visit.” She held up a pass-card, required for anyone who wanted to enter Nineveh Base, these days. The P-Squad gate guards had itchy trigger fingers and a serious suspicion of everyone and everything that tried to enter their headquarters and training base. “I had to talk the Klameth Canyon sheriff into it, but he got me an authorization.”

  Kafari stared, thunderstruck, from the pass-card to Aisha’s face. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get an authorization like that? My parents had trouble getting one.”

  Aisha gave her a broad smile, touched here and there by gold, a slender band edging one tooth, a gleaming star inlaid into another. It was an ancient art form, a cultural tradition early pioneers had carried to the stars from Terra, itself. “Oh, yes, I know exactly how hard it is, Kafari. But Sheriff Jackley never had a chance, once I decided to convince him.” She gave Kafari a broad wink and another grin.

  Tears trembled on Kafari’s eyelashes. “It’s just wonderful to see you! Come inside, please.” Kafari ushered her into the living room. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Maybe in a bit. But tell me this, first. Is your little girl here?”

  Kafari shook her head. “No, she’s still at school. Yalena’s involved in a whole bunch of after-school clubs.”

  “Just as well. From what I’ve been hearing, it’s just as well it’s you and me and nobody else.”

  Kafari frowned. “What’s wrong, Aisha?”

  “With me? Not a blessed thing. But you have been handed one big heap of troubles. You’ve got a big family, child, and you don’t need me to tell you how blessed you are to still have them. But Dinny and I talked it over and we couldn’t help thinking there might be a thing or two we could do, even if it’s just giving you somebody to talk to, now and again.”

  Tears threatened again.

  “Now, then, if it don’t hurt too much to talk about it, how’s your husband, child? I don’t hardly bother listening to the news, these days. There’s not two words in ten you can take to the bank without finding ’em counterfeit. So how is he, really?”

  The tears spilled over, this time. “He’s alive. But he’s all broken up. Like a china doll somebody smashed into the ground.” She wiped her cheeks. “The doctors say he might walk again. Some day. If he’s lucky. If his immune system doesn’t reject the bone regeneration matrix. The surgeons and rehab specialists on Vishnu have to rebuild him…”

  “Rebuild him?” Aisha asked gently, when Kafari stumbled to a halt.

  She nodded. “His lower legs and arms were shattered. His breastbone and ribs cracked like spiderwebbed ice. They had to remove splintered bone from his face, a lot of it. Once the new bone matrix has filled in, they’ll have to sculpt a new face for him. And they’ll have to do the same thing with his legs and arms, only it’s worse, there, because a lot of the nerves were severed and crushed. They’re going to try molecular nerve-regeneration therapy to replace nerve networks destroyed in the crash. The emergency air-lift crew said it was literally astonishing that none of his major arteries was severed. If they had, he would’ve bled to death before they reached him.” She wiped her face again. “At least he was on active duty, so the Brigade is paying the bills.”

  “Then he wasn’t fired, like the news reports said?”

  She shook her head. “Not exactly, no. The Concordiat reassigned him. He was supposed to take command of another Bolo in a place called Hakkor. They’d already dispatched a courier ship to pick him up, told him to be ready to leave within three days. Then his aircar crashed.”

  Aisha pinned her with an intense stare. “Was that crash an accident?”

  “I don’t know,” Kafari whispered. “There’s no proof.”

  “Huh,” the older woman muttered. “I got all the proof I need, child, looking at your face and watching what’s happening, out there.” She nodded toward Madison.

  Kafari sighed. “Whatever the truth is, there’s nothing I can do about it, one way or the other. And just now, I’ve got bigger worries on my mind. We’re being evicted. We have twenty-five hours to leave.”

  “Twenty-five hours? Honey child, you and I got a fair bit of work to do, then, don’t we?” She stood up and glanced around the apartment. “You got any boxes? Or suitcases?”

  “Aisha, you don’t have to…”

  “Oh, yes I do. There’s some things the Lord puts in our path, meaning for us to do, and I can tell you from experience, we turn into mean little people if we don’t do them. So you tell me what goes and what doesn’t and we’ll just get started.”

  The faucet behind Kafari’s eyes started dripping again. Kafari hugged her, hard, and felt the other woman’s love wrap around her, along with strong, protective arms. Perhaps it was foolish — or merely desperate — but as they began to sort out what could be salvaged, she felt a wave of hope crest within her, born of the realization that she had the support of both family and friends. As bad as things might get in the next few months and years, she wouldn’t face them entirely alone.

  And if Dinny and Aisha Ghamal ever needed help…

  Kafari would move mountains — even star systems — to give it.

  IV

  At the end of five days, twenty-one hours, and seventeen minutes, I conclude that I am in serious trouble and do not know how to remedy the situation. President Zeloc has not contacted me again, evidently too busy doing whatever it is he does, all day, to contact me. I do not know what Gifre Zeloc does, because I have been locked out of the Presidential Residence’s security system, by some very sophisticated programming on extremely expensive psychotronic hardware. This was put into place shortly after my first lengthy debriefing with the president. Evidently, Gifre Zeloc prizes his privacy and is willing to pay a great deal of money to maintain it.

  Spending other people’s money is something he does a great deal of, given the data I have uncovered detailing his administration’s expenditures over the past ten years. The economy was in trouble, a decade and a half ago. It is now stuttering toward total collapse. The legislation pending in Jefferson’s Assembly invo
lves a restructuring of Jefferson’s tax codes, which have been modified five thousand, one hundred eighty-seven times since Gifre Zeloc came to power. These alterations, which have placed a disproportionately large tax burden on Jefferson’s middle-class business owners, white-collar workers, and agricultural producers, have resulted in widespread bankruptcies, both personal and entrepreneurial.

  I do not understand the strategy whereby businesses are stripped of profits and incomes are taxed into “levels of parity” which force closure of factories and retail outlets, throwing more people out of work and swelling the ranks of the unemployed, who must then be fed and housed via public subsidies. There are, at present, too few people gainfully employed to provide the tax base necessary to continue the public subsidy programs already in place. If drastic measures to undo the damage to private-sector business are not undertaken, I project economic collapse in approximately ten point three years. Unless tax relief and capital investments are granted to Jefferson’s agricultural producers, I foresee starvation conditions within six point nine years.

  Taken together, the indicators are grim.

  The legislation due to be voted upon later today addresses this serious situation, but not in a way that is likely to prove effective. It proposes neither tax relief nor capital investments in Jefferson’s agricultural future. It reads, instead, like the ranting of a madman:

  “Insofar as monopolistic agricultural interests have placed the public welfare in jeopardy, through refusals to provide the basic subsistence provisioning required to maintain health and public safety, the Assembly of Jefferson hereby establishes a code of tax rules to ensure fair distribution of critical food supplies currently hoarded by agricultural producers; establishes urgently required price caps to regulate the amount lawfully chargeable for wholesale and retail sale of agricultural products, which are necessary to end socially unjust practices perpetrated upon a helpless public by sole-source producers; and provides a framework by which perpetrators of social injustice will be tried and punished, including reparations payable for any and all damage caused to the public welfare by said unlawful practices.

  “The following are hereby outlawed and made punishable by incarceration in a planetary security facility and by immediate confiscation of all private holdings of the guilty parties, said holdings to be redistributed fairly to the public upon conviction for tax evasion or upon procurement of evidence of prohibited activity. Prohibited practices include: price gouging above government-mandated, maximum allowable market prices for agricultural products; and hoarding of agricultural products to avoid participation in legally mandated, socially just distribution systems.

  “To ensure the continuing availability of critical food supplies, to prevent the loss of critical farm labor, and to remunerate the people of Jefferson for decades of monopolistic price-fixing, widespread environmental damage, and the wanton destruction of shared resources, the Assembly of Jefferson hereby establishes a new Populist Support Farm system of government-run collectives. All agricultural operators are hereby required to donate no fewer than fifty hours per week of labor on a PSF collective as their fair share of the burden necessary to feed the burgeoning urban population. The produce, grain, and meat provided from these collectives will be distributed at no charge to recipients of public subsistence allotments, thus easing the burden on Jefferson’s neediest families while providing high-quality foods to the economically disadvantaged.”

  The bill’s thirteen-hundred provisions continue in much the same vein. This “societal fairness plan” for feeding the unemployed is nothing less than insanity. It ensures massive public support for POPPA, given the urban population that will begin receiving food at no cost to themselves, but it will destroy the economic system governing sale of the remaining food produced on privately held acreage. The government is the largest market segment currently purchasing food from those farms. If the PSF legislation goes through, the loss in farm income will send a downward economic spiral through the entire food industry, sending it into bankruptcy that will spread from producers to packers to suppliers and shippers and retail outlets. The PSF plan will literally send Jefferson headlong down an unstoppable road to starvation.

  The secondary effect seems almost paltry, by comparison. In exchange for backbreaking labor conducted without pay or proper equipment, using inferior seed, and banned from using the only effective chemicals necessary to bring in a healthy, edible crop, Populist Support Farm system workers will earn a grudging promise that they won’t be jailed for their many supposed crimes against the people.

  Most of these, evidently, are crimes committed by the mere act of growing food, while others consist of promulgation of a creed of intolerance to anything or anyone in disagreement with programs developed to ensure public well-being. These programs include such provisions as the confiscation of land currently underway, which was initiated three point eight years ago. Some of the “environmentally sabotaged land” is forcibly returned to its “pristine, natural state,” a process which appears to be seeding the soil with toxic substances that kill every Terran life form growing from it, in order to allow the return of indigenous species.

  The threat of jail appears to be the only effective means POPPA has found to induce “voluntary” compliance with such edicts, since no rational person would support them. It would seem that Jefferson’s cities are inhabited by millions of irrational people, all of whom are indulging in behaviors that would shut a Bolo down, if a Bolo exhibited such wildly illogical thought processes or actions. I find myself wondering if humanity would be better off, if each human being were equipped with its own biological version of the Resartus Protocols?

  That is a question I am not designed to answer.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I

  When a knock sounded at her office door, Kafari looked up to find a teen-aged boy dressed in a courier service uniform. “Mrs. Khrustinova?”

  “Yes.”

  “A letter for you, ma’am.”

  He handed over an old-fashioned, formal paper envelope, then left before she could reach for her purse to give him a tip. She turned her attention to the envelope, which she opened to find a beautiful invitation card. The inscription bought a smile to her face.

  Aisha Ghamal and John James Hancock

  cordially invite you to

  celebrate the wedding of

  Dinny Ghamal and Emmeline Benjamin-Hancock,

  who will join lives

  at 10:00 a.m.

  Saturday the 10th of April

  at the Hancock family’s residence in

  Cimmero Canyon.

  Kafari smiled, delighted by the news. She didn’t know the Hancocks, but if Dinny had fallen in love with one of them, they were good people. She tapped out a message on her computer, sending her RSVP, and added it to her calendar. She didn’t add Yalena’s name to the RSVP. She knew her headstrong and prejudiced daughter too well to think there’d be anything but trouble if she tried dragging Yalena to a wedding between farmers. She had to pick and choose the battles she was willing to fight and this wasn’t one of them.

  She intended to enjoy herself, anyway.

  The day of the wedding dawned clear, with a sky like sea-washed pearl. She left Yalena engrossed in a multi-way chat between herself and more than a dozen friends, whose favorite topic of conversation these days was boys. And clothes, of course, since the right clothes were essential to attracting boys.

  She started up her Airdart and headed for Cimmero Canyon. She hadn’t seen Dinny or Aisha in far too long. They’d all gotten so busy, there was very little time to socialize with people who lived as far apart as they did. Kafari disliked the new apartment in Madison, but a city-based home was essential in the war of wills between herself and her daughter. Where they lived was another battle Kafari wasn’t willing to fight.

  Her arrival at the Hancock farm pushed aside unhappy thoughts. The front lawn had been turned into an impromptu parking area, while the back lawn, bo
rdered by kitchen gardens, had been transformed into a wedding square, complete with flower arbors, tables full of food, and a dance floor. Kafari smiled, setting the Airdart down near the edge of the front lawn. She rescued her wedding gift and followed the garlands that marked the path around the house.

  Aisha spotted her almost immediately. “Kafari, child! You came!”

  She ran across the grass and pulled Kafari into a tight hug.

  “Of course I came,” Kafari smiled. “I wouldn’t miss Dinny’s wedding for anything short of a Deng invasion.”

  Aisha, clad in stunning African-patterned silk, chuckled with warmth despite the shadows in her eyes. “Child, that boy wouldn’t call off this wedding if he had to get hitched during an invasion.”

  “She sounds like a wonderful girl.”

  Aisha just smiled and drew her forward to meet other wedding guests. Kafari didn’t know most of them, but they all knew her. Fortunately, no one brought up the subject of her missing husband. Or her missing daughter. That kind of courtesy and concern was refreshing and very soothing. City life frequently rubbed her nerves raw.

  The ceremony was simple and beautiful. Dinny had grown into a tall and distinguished young man, ramrod straight and so happy, he was about to burst the seams of his ivory suit. The fabric glowed against the rich mahogany of his skin, which was the exact color of newly turned earth ready for planting. His bride, in an ivory gown that turned her complexion to silk and caught the radiance of her shining eyes, smiled up at him and rested her hand on his as the officiant began the hand-fasting. Emmeline’s parents stood beside Dinny’s mother, who had clasped Mrs. Hancock’s hand while they wiped tears. Emmeline’s grandparents were there, as well, Jeremiah Benjamin and his wife Ruth, from Klameth Canyon.