Kafari rose from her chair, taking her pistol with her, and touched Attia’s hand gently, beckoning her to take Kafari’s seat, then she stepped behind a partition that afforded privacy for a mobile toilet used by the crew in the command post. There was a video system in place, covering the interior of the command post, with its video feed tied into her battle helmet’s visor. It gave her a full, unobstructed view of the tableau unfolding out there.
Attia sat down, watching silently as Dinny removed Mr. Girishanda’s blindfold.
He blinked a couple of times, then his gaze came to rest on the slender girl opposite him. He sat up so abruptly, the manacles bit into both wrists. He spoke, jaggedly, something she didn’t understand. Kafari didn’t speak Hindi. She didn’t have to. The naked shock in his face was all too eloquent a translation.
“My name’s Attia,” the girl said in a rough, ruined voice. “I turned fourteen three months ago. In Hanatos Camp.”
Girishanda was trying to swallow. The sound was ghastly in the frozen silence. Red Wolf, an unobtrusive presence behind Girishanda’s shoulder, had taken out a belt knife and was jabbing the point into the arm of the chair he sat in, mechanically, with fixed concentration.
“Have you ever heard of Hanatos Camp?” Attia asked in a harsh voice.
The gunrunner shook his head. He was still trying to swallow. Kafari gave him credit for guts. His gaze stayed on Attia’s face. What was left of Attia’s face.
“Ever hear of Professor Mahault?”
Again, he shook his head.
“She wrote a book. The True History of Glorious Jefferson.”
Girishanda was frowning. “What does a professor have to do with…?”
“She rewrote our history,” Attia said harshly. “Wrote a book full of lies to prove that Grangers had altered the history of our world. Her book gave POPPA the ‘proof’ they needed to classify Grangers as a subversive sub-culture. One that existed to destroy true civilaztion.”
“That’s insane!” Girishandra gasped.
“You’re damned right, it’s insane,” Red Wolf growled.
Girishanda’s eyes tracked towards Attia, who spoke again in that ruined, harsh voice. “Yes, it is. But there was no one to stop them. Not even the Commodore could stop Jefferson’s House of Law and Senate when they passed legislation outlawing Grangerism. Our whole culture, itself, is now a crime. Against humanity, decency, and planetary security. Anyone caught practicing Grangerism is arrested, convicted, and shipped out to the nearest ‘work camp.’ Once there, we become slave labor. We de-terraform ‘raped areas’ to allow nature to reclaim its own. Or we’re sent into mine shafts to work ’round the clock shifts. It’s too expensive to pay miners actual wages, when convicts can be forced to do the work. All that costs is money to buy the guards, ammunition, and just enough food to keep the slaves on their feet and working. And sometimes,” she added harshly, “not even that.”
Girishanda’s eyes flicked across Attia, whose skeletal pallor had not faded in the mere two days she had been free and would not fade for months to come. If she didn’t get killed fighting to free others. There were still prisoners in far too many work camps.
Mr. Girishanda met her gaze, once more. He didn’t speak for long moments. Then he asked very quietly, indeed, “Would you tell me, please, what happened to you? I’m trying to understand.”
Attia’s copper-fire eyes searched his face for long moments. “You’re from off-world. Vishnu?”
“Yes. I am from Vishnu.”
“Are you selling us guns?”
“I am trying to,” he said gently, flicking a glance at the partition between himself and “Commodore Oroton.” “It seems that the sale is contingent on hearing what you have to say.”
She scowled, which pulled the scar tissue in hideous directions. “All right. Then listen up good, ’cause I don’t want to relive this out loud, ever again.”
Kafari knew exactly what was coming.
Mr. Girishanda only thought he did.
III
Phil is an hour late returning from lunch when he finally enters my makeshift maintenance depot, a sheet-metal barn topped by a metal canopy that barely accommodates my bulk. The entire, flimsy affair threatens to become airborne each time a storm sweeps in from the ocean west of Madison. Phil is, as usual, swearing.
“You won’t believe what happened last night! Those goddamned freedom fighters hit the food distribution centers! Three of ’em! My sister Maria found out this morning, when she went down to collect the week’s groceries from the warehouse. I hadda take her to see a guy I know, who wouldn’t sell direct to her even if she told him I sent her. It took my whole damn paycheck to get anything for the kids t’ eat, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot he had left, neither. Not at any price.”
“I am sorry to hear that, Phil.” I find it interesting to note that Phil no longer calls the Granger rebels by the term “terrorists.” This is the only descriptor used by the POPPA leadership when referring to rebels who routinely shoot corrupt POPPA officials in their driveways, ambush police patrols, and execute outspoken broadcast propagandists in their houses — admittedly clean executions that never touch a family member or innocent bystanders. “Terrorists” is not, however, the word drifting through the streets, where food riots have been crushed just as brutally as Granger protests were during the early stages of POPPA’s rise to power.
“And that’s not the half of it,” Phil continues to rage, with his nano-tatt blazing in a blood-red swath across half his face, pulsing in time to his elevated heartbeat. I find the rhythm distracting. “You know what the shit-for-brains Minister of Urban Distributions did about it? Did he tell the P-Squads what he oughta be telling them? Which is what I’d tell ’em, if I was in his shoes. ‘Find those bastards or go hungry!’ Did he say that? Oh, no, not him. He just went and cut the rations again, that’s what! Another unholy, unbearable twenty percent! How’n hell are kids s’posed to grow without nothin’ to eat? I ask you, do those POPPA bigshots look like they’re goin’ without dinner? Hell, no. There ain’t no such thing as a skinny cop, let alone a skinny politician.”
Phil wipes sweat from his nano-tatt with a hand that is actually unsteady.
“I dunno what my family’s gonna do, Big Guy. If Maria loses any more weight, she’s gonna collapse. She’s nothin’ but skin and bones, now. And Tony, that no-account oldest boy of hers, that goddamned little idiot got himself hooked on snow-white and lost the only job our whole family had, except mine. D’you know what’s it like, Big Guy, t’be the only person in a whole damn family that anybody respects? Five sisters, I got, all married,” he adds with justifiable pride, given the informal methods of procreation practiced by many subsidy recipients, who are desperate for any increase in the baseline payments, “an’ all five of ’em has kids, twenty-three kids, all together. And the little ones look up t’ me. They say ‘I’m gonna be like Uncle Phil when I grow up. I’m gonna have a job!’ I ain’t smart, Big Guy. I got nothin’ much t’ be proud of, I know that, and God knows I ain’t the sort a kid oughta be lookin’ up to, to decide what t’ do with his life.”
His eyes film with suspicious moisture and his voice assumes a bleak, nearly despairing tone I have never heard from him. “And what chance have they got, anyhow, to be like Uncle Phil? To have a job, I mean, and somebody’s respect? There’s no jobs now. The trash they’re learning in school sure isn’t gonna teach ’em how to get one. It’s worse now than it was when I was in school, and man, they didn’t teach me nothin’. If things don’t change pretty soon,” he adds, “they won’t need to worry about growin’ up like anybody, ’cause there’s no damn food t’feed em, anyway.” His voice turns savage. “Sar Gremian needs me, don’t he? T’keep you running? So I eat, while them kids starve. It ain’t right, Big Guy, it just ain’t right. We never signed up for this kind’a stuff, when folks voted POPPA in, all those years back.” He pauses, then adds in a puzzled voice. “How’d it get t’be so bad in such a short time, huh? Seems longer, t’me, but it’s just nineteen years since POPPA took over. Spent my whole schooling, just about, in POPPA classrooms, and not one a’ them teachers ever told us it could get like this so fast.”