by Paul McAuley
The sex wasn’t all that. Every time reminded me of my first, quickly over with Keever breathing hard in my ear. But as far as he was concerned, sex wasn’t really the point. He got off on dominating people who were physically stronger than him. It was part of his apex predator guano. He liked to get into the faces of bull cons, men bigger than me, all muscles and mods, scars and tattoos, and talk trash to them. He paid cons to fight each other, talked about setting up a darknet channel where people could bet on them like horse races.
Sometimes, he’d stand in the door of his room and howl like a demented dog. You didn’t know what to say to him when he got like that. When his ice-cold control slipped. Or when, maybe, because everything he did was calculated, he took it off for a moment, like you or I would take off a mask. His control was the mask he wore to hide what he really was.
But he could show a sweeter side too. He loved to fuss over my feet, for instance. Loved to massage them, trim and file my nails, smooth away calluses. ‘He only does what he does for himself,’ Paz warned me, but I didn’t care. I liked that he paid attention to me.
And that’s how it was until Keever’s past caught up with him. This was in February, the end of our short summer. The bridges over the river delta had been completed, the first trains had been run across them, but there was still plenty of work to do. Painting kilometres of steel and ceramic, fixing the decking, installing a signalling and control section, planting the embankments with tough grasses and shrubs to stabilise them, so on. In the middle of all this, with plans for the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Independence Day beginning to be drawn up, news sites reported that the Australian government wanted to extradite Keever on an old murder charge.
It dated from a visit he’d made after a business deal had gone badly wrong, swindling him out of several million dollars. He’d kidnapped, tortured and killed six people in retribution, and now one of his former associates had been arrested and was putting him in the frame in exchange for a plea bargain. The peninsula’s new government was happy to agree to the extradition request because of Keever’s links with the old regime, he was looking at serious time, maybe even the death penalty, and because the Ministry of Justice was fast-tracking his case he’d quickly run out of options in court. That was why he had cooked up his escape plan, and now he wanted to promote me from a bit part to a major role. He told Mike Mike to put ice under himself for a minute, and when we were alone he pulled my feet into his lap and began to unlace my sneakers.
‘When your long-lost uncle comes here, he’ll bring journalists with him,’ he said. ‘That’s how the man works. And there’ll also be a media crew reporting on the ceremony to big up the government. Putting it out live. So when you do what I want you to do, Honourable Deputy Toomy will have to give you a fair shake.’
‘A fair shake about what?’
Keever eased off my right sneaker and dropped it on the floor, started to unlace the left. ‘Alberto Toomy is a rising star in the National Unity Party. Maybe the next president, if the NUP gets back into power. Why not? He’s handsome, he’s rich, and he has the kind of tragic past that makes a great story. His wife and son having died, so sad, in some kind of skiing accident in the back country.’
‘It was in the Eternity Range, five years ago,’ I said. ‘They were wild skiing and there was an avalanche.’
Sue me and send me to hell, but when I’d heard about that I’d felt a small glow of satisfaction, felt that the world had punished the Toomy family for their arrogance and the hurt they’d done to me and mine.
‘You really have been keeping up,’ Keever said.
‘It isn’t difficult. He’s all over the feeds.’
‘Isn’t he just? The young widower bringing up his two daughters on his own, seen with a string of glamorous girlfriends. The present one a Chilean novela star, accompanying him at charity balls, parties, first nights at the theatre and the opera … Will he marry her? Will there be a fairy-tale ending? But wait,’ Keever said, ‘who’s this? A long-lost relative. A poor little orphan working as a corrections officer in one of the work camps that contribute to the Toomy fortune. In short, you.’
There it was, like a pit opening up at my feet. I put up token resistance, pointing out I already had a part in his plan, but he hushed me, said he had plenty of people who could make sure his ride was ready and waiting in the transport pool, but only his big girl could cause the kind of commotion that would distract everyone at exactly the right moment.
‘Just by talking to Alberto Toomy?’
‘By confronting him. By telling him, with all the world watching, how your grandfather – Alberto’s father – cheated you out of your rightful inheritance. How it drove your mother crazy. How you have nothing and he has everything. You do it right, and I know you will, it’ll make quite the scene.’
By now, Keever had taken off my left sneaker and both my socks, was massaging the soles of my feet. Digging in with his knuckles. It tingled all the way up my legs to the base of my spine.
‘Picture it,’ he said. ‘There’s Honourable Deputy Alberto Toomy, with his wealth and power. And then there’s you. His long-lost niece, cheated and wronged, trying to atone for some bad life choices by working as a corrections officer. And even better, you’re a husky. One of the genetically polluted whose very existence is, according to Alberto’s party, an affront to God. The feeds will go wild on it.’
‘But they already know about my side of the family,’ I said. ‘It came out years and years ago, after my grandfather sold out the free ecopoets—’
Keever had knuckled a nerve in my foot, firing a sharp snap of pain up my leg and spine, straight into the base of my skull.
‘Are you listening to me?’ he said. ‘Do I have your attention?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Because I want you to understand what you have to do.’
His dark brown eyes. You couldn’t say warm. Mr Snow didn’t do warm. His barely there smile. He didn’t sound angry. Apart from the times when he took off his mask, he never sounded angry. Even when he was getting in the face of the biggest con he could find, trying to goad the guy into taking a pop at him, he sounded as reasonable and patient as a surgeon explaining why it was necessary to cut you open.
‘The point isn’t to make news,’ he said. ‘The point is to cause a fuss. You’ll tell him how wretched you are. You’ll accuse him of stealing from you. Of causing your mother’s death. You’ll get in his face and make as much noise as you can, create a diversion that will pull badges away from the main population. Which means that my little show will have a better chance of succeeding. You see?’
I saw, all right.
‘I’ll be arrested,’ I said. ‘Sacked, thrown in jail—’
Keever laid a cold finger on my lips. ‘I know that I’m asking a lot. But you agreed to help me and I know that I can trust you to do it. I can trust you, can’t I?’
He used his malign massage fu to dig into that nerve again. Pain rocketed up my spine and exploded in my head like Independence Day fireworks. He was gripping my ankle so hard that if I’d been an ordinary girl the bones would have cracked.
I nodded again. I didn’t dare speak.
Keever relaxed his grip, just a little. ‘You get to confront your long-lost rich uncle. I get an extra diversion, space to do what I need to do. And who knows? Maybe Alberto will take pity on you. And if he doesn’t, if you have to do a little jail, it isn’t like you haven’t done that before. And when you come out I’ll set you up for life. OK?’
‘OK.’
I don’t have to tell you that agreeing to go along with this mad, bad plan was the last thing I wanted to do. But when Keever Bishop said jump, you pulled on your jumping gear and got to it.
‘Swear you’ll put on the best show for me,’ he said.
I swore.
He pulled me close, told me I was his big strong girl.
‘Now why don’t you get out of these clothes so we can celebrate this happy turn of even
ts?’
3
I should explain why I didn’t tell Keever about you. Why I didn’t tell him that I was carrying his child. After all, he made no secret of the fact that he had six children by five baby mothers – the kind of harem a true apex predator deserved. Ordinarily you and I would have been just one more example of his reproductive fitness, stowed away in an apartment in Esperanza, allowed a trickle of credit, visited now and then by his lordliness … But, this is the, what do you call it, the crux of the matter, there wasn’t anything ordinary about the situation. First, Keever was planning to say goodbye to all that. To everything in his former life. Second, I was a husky, and taking a husky for a prison sweetheart was one thing, but maintaining her and her mixed blood kid outside the wire was something else. And while Keever didn’t care that everyone in the camp knew that we were an item, it wouldn’t do for a con to get a CO pregnant. The commandant had given Keever a pass on most things, but even she wouldn’t have been able to ignore something like that. That was why he’d made sure that I’d been fitted with an implant, but the damn thing hadn’t worked, perhaps because it was designed for mundane women rather than huskies, more likely because it was a bootleg injected into my thigh by a disgraced doctor who was serving an eight for supplying fake nanobiotics.
I’m trying to explain why, after my fone told me she had noticed changes that indicated I might possibly be pregnant, after I’d missed my second period and my breasts grew tender and the morning sickness kicked in, I decided that I couldn’t keep you. It’s hard, admitting that. But at the time there didn’t seem to be any other way out. If I let nature, as they say, run her course, the service would come down hard on me because of who the father was. Disciplinary proceedings, a custodial sentence for me, one of the state orphanages for you … Worse than that, Keever would have considered it a betrayal, and I knew what happened to people who crossed him, knew that I wouldn’t be safe wherever I was sent, whatever protection I was promised. Keever had a long reach, and was relentlessly unforgiving.
He liked to tell stories about how he dealt with those who had disappointed him. I remember one in particular because of its flamboyant savagery. A business associate went on the run with a slice of Keever’s credit and Keever tracked her to Singapore, kidnapped her, and tortured her to death in the ruins of a flooded shopping mall. She gave up where the stolen credit was cached soon enough, but Keever refused to grant her a quick merciful release. Instead, he sliced her face and hung her upside down over a pool infested with moray eels specially trained and starved by their keeper.
Keever relished the gory detail. How his men had lowered and lifted the woman over and again so she wouldn’t drown. How her blood had driven the eels into a frenzy. How they’d gone for the eyes and tongue. How they’d thrashed as they ate their way into her face and torso. The woman thrashing too, the water turning bright red. How she’d looked, raised out of the water with a garland of living ropes hanging from her.
‘The thing about those eels,’ Keever told me, ‘they have mouthfuls of needle teeth that all point backwards. Once they bite, they lock on. The only way they can get loose is to take a big bite of flesh with them. I made a nice little movie of it. Showed it around. Anyone who saw it, I never had a spark of trouble from them afterwards.’
So I was in a tight spot. I couldn’t tell my friends about you, tap them for advice, because I couldn’t be certain that it wouldn’t leak back to Keever. My fone was no help either. When I asked her what I should do she told me to follow my heart, which was about as profound and useful as a greeting card message. She presented as a wise older woman, my fone, with a handsome face and long grey hair and a star burning on her forehead, an image I’d got up after I’d been given my first fone at age eighteen and hadn’t changed because of nostalgia or laziness (sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other). But like all AIs quickened after last century’s killing sprees and net wars she wasn’t much brighter than a dog, was throttled by legal and ethical constraints, answered serious, life-changing questions with platitudes. So I had to figure out what to do all by myself, and could see only one solution.
By the time I knew absolutely and definitely that I was carrying you, the ribbon-cutting ceremony was only a couple of weeks away. If Keever’s escape plans worked out, he’d soon be gone. If they didn’t, he’d be thrown in some high-security hole until he was extradited to Australia. Either way I’d never see him again. All I had to do, I thought, was take a couple of days off after the ceremony, travel to Esperanza and get what I thought of as my problem fixed, and never ever tell anyone what I’d done. It wouldn’t even cost me anything. Thanks to a hateful bit of legislation the new government hadn’t gotten around to repealing, huskies could obtain free abortions from a special clinic, a nice neat way of keeping our numbers down.
That was my plan, such as it was. Shameful as it was. And then the news about Alberto Toomy muscling in on the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Keever’s idea about having me confront him, threw a shitload of sand in the goddamn gears.
Keever had a script for that confrontation, and we rehearsed it like a play. Mike Mike playing Alberto Toomy, me playing myself, Keever stepping in whenever he thought I’d deviated from what I was supposed to say and do.
‘There’s only two things you need to get across,’ he said. ‘Number one, you and Alberto are blood relatives. Number two, his side of the family stole what should have been shared with your side. You’re living proof that his fortune, everything he has, everything he’s done, is founded on selfishness and injustice. The feeds will eat it up. They’ll rip him apart and make you a hero.’
Mr Snow. Cool, languid, all-knowing, sitting on his bed in his blue gym shorts while Mike Mike and me went through the corny scene one more time. I had to play along, even though I knew that it didn’t have anything to do with providing a diversion for Keever’s escape. He already had that covered. And it didn’t have anything to do with justice or revenge, either. Like I already said, my family’s relationship with the Toomy clan was old news dug up by my grandfather’s enemies long ago, an attempt to create a scandal that never gained any traction. Even Mama hadn’t been able to revive it, and I was damn sure that Keever knew that nothing I said or did would make any difference.
No, the little drama he’d cooked up was all about tidying away a loose end. He believed I was stone in love with him, didn’t want me chasing him after he escaped, and was too sentimental to deal with me in the usual way. I guess I have to give him that. I have to take that away from our relationship. Instead of having me spiked, he was going to let the service deal with me. If his little drama worked out, I’d be thrown in a hole for disobeying orders, assaulting an important visitor, so on, and when I came out after two or three years, no job, no future, I’d be no danger to him.
So there it was. If I didn’t co-operate I’d be on the sharp end of Keever’s displeasure. But if I did, I’d be arrested, pretty soon the evidence of my liaison with him would become undeniable, and I’d be in a worse kind of trouble.
Meanwhile, preparations for the ribbon-cutting ceremony gathered pace. Everywhere in the camp smelled of fresh paint. Cons filled potholes, shifted heaps of construction materials out of sight, washed and polished construction machinery, erected flagpoles along one side of the apron of freshly laid gravel where the VIPs’ helis would land. My string was put on landscaping duty, planting the approach to the bridge with carpets of cultured mountain avens, purple saxifrage, and marguerites. The force-grown plants probably wouldn’t survive a week, let alone last out the coming winter, but sue me, I felt that it was a little like ecopoet work, and while I was out in the weather, watching the cons set out swirls of flowers, I could forget for a short while the impossible knot of my troubles.
The cons were given extra rations and promised time off during the ceremony, but after spending the day supervising their strings COs had to attend security briefings and practice drill. We polished our boots and belts until they were blac
k mirrors, cleaned every piece of our kit. Late in the evening the buzz of conversation in the mess was muted and I could pass off as exhaustion my preoccupation with Keever’s plan.
By then, everyone in the camp knew that Honourable Deputy Alberto Toomy was coming to stir the shit. And my friends knew all about my connection with him because I’d told them the whole sorry story during one of those stupid bonding sessions.
Paz wondered if Alberto Toomy already knew about me. Knew that I was working there. Maybe, she said, he’d had a hand in moving me from guarding the transport pool to the VIP security detail. ‘Maybe he’s planning a surprise meeting. A surprise reconciliation with his long-lost niece. A terrific human interest story with a happy ending.’
It was Keever who’d swung my move, of course, but I couldn’t tell Paz that. It was the eve of Independence Day, the day before the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and although there was still no sign that Alberto Toomy and his people had found out about me, I was still hoping that they would, that they’d ask the commandant to remove me from the security detail or transfer me out of the camp. Anything, so long as I didn’t have to go through with Keever’s plan. I’d even thought of reaching out to my uncle, telling him hey, guess who’s working at Kilometre 200, wouldn’t it be lovely to meet up, so on, but the risk that Keever would hear about it was too great.
I told Paz that as far as I was concerned I’d be happy if I never had to lay eyes on the Honourable Deputy. ‘His side of the family have never shown any interest in mine, and it was his party that set up the pass laws, all the rest of the shit we have to put up with. Not to mention they were talking about sterilising us if they won the election. Ending the husky problem once and for all. What good could come out of meeting someone who thinks like that? Nothing, that’s what.’
