She focused on the crumpled piece of paper in Simon’s white-knuckled hand, with its social-engineering mandate, and realized with a sickening sensation that it was already too late to fight that particular legal battle. If she or anyone else tried to protest, they would lose their children. And their children, trapped in POPPA-run daycare centers and schools, faced a brainwashing campaign of terrifying proportions. How many others had received letters like hers? The number had to run into the millions, at a minimum. Economic woes and stunning tax increases had forced Jefferson’s middle-class families to become two-career couples, with spouses taking any job they could find, even menial labor, just to remain solvent. Those families couldn’t afford to lose a second income, not even to shelter their kids.
And now the Santorinis were holding a gun to parents’ heads. She should have seen it coming. It was a natural outgrowth of legislation that had outlawed home schooling, forcing parents to turn over their children to POPPA’s indoctrination machine. Now they’d widened their net to snare preschoolers, as well, giving them complete power over children at their most critical formative stage, inculcating belief patterns that would last a lifetime.
She wondered with a sickening lurch in her stomach how many of the business owners filing lawsuits to overturn POPPA legislation would find themselves embroiled in custody battles for their own children? On the grounds of “improper emotional support in the home"? She shut her eyes for a moment, but couldn’t blot out a mental picture of Jefferson’s future that was so ugly, her breath froze in her lungs. She didn’t know what to do. Literally didn’t know what to do.
“Kafari?”
She opened her eyes and met Simon’s gaze. His eyes were dark. Scared.
“I don’t know what to do, Simon,” she whispered, wrapping both arms around herself. “Jefferson needs psychotronic engineers—”
“Yalena needs her mother.”
“I know!” Even she could hear the anguish in her voice. “Even if I resign, we’ll gain only a couple of years. She’ll have to start kindergarten when she’s four, like it or not.”
“All the more reason to idiot-proof her now.”
“Can you idiot-proof a child whose teachers are part of the problem? Which they will be. The educational curriculum was practically the first thing they went after. My cousins are already fighting to undo the garbage their children are being taught, particularly the little ones, kindergarten and early primary grades. They come home from school and announce that anyone who picks up a gun — or even keeps one in the house — is a dangerous deviant. Farm kids are being told that killing anything, even agricultural pests, is tantamount to murder.
“Ask my cousin Onatah to show you the school book her little girl is using. Kandlyn’s only seven. She already thinks that everything alive has the absolute right to stay that way. Even microbes, for God’s sake. The older farm kids know enough from direct experience to realize how stupid that is, but the younger ones and practically all the city kids are gobbling that crap down like candy.”
A muscle jumped in Simon’s jaw. “You’re starting to see the enormity of this thing. There are a whole lot more children in cities and towns than there are on farms and ranches. A few years from now, nobody below the age of twenty will realize it is stupidity. That’s why I want you to leave, now. Before it’s too damned late.
Since you won’t do that, at least consider this. Jefferson’s need for psychotronic engineers won’t vanish just because you quit your job now. You’re one of the most employable people on Jefferson. We can make do with my salary for a couple of years. It’s sacrosanct and comes directly from the Brigade. If they try to revoke it, they’ll end up with a Concordiat naval cruiser in orbit, on-loading the three of us and Sonny, while Gifre Zeloc signs a repayment check bigger than they can afford to hand over. They know they can’t antagonize the Concordiat, no matter what their propaganda says to the contrary.
“Men like Gifre Zeloc and Cyril Coridan in the House of Law, women like Fyrene Brogan in the Senate are smart enough to know the difference between the swill they feed subsistence recipients and what they can actually do. You’ll notice that nobody’s come knocking at our door to demand that we actually shut Sonny down. Or that we ship him out on the next available transport. That would ring alarm bells all the way back to Brigade headquarters at Central Command.”
“But—”
“Kafari, please. We don’t need your salary. But we do need you, at home, until Yalena’s first day of school. Give Yalena those two years.”
He was right. Absolutely and utterly right. At least until Yalena was old enough to enter school. “All right,” she said, voice hushed. “I’ll give notice.”
The worst of the tension drained from her husband’s rigid stance. “Thank you.”
She just nodded. And hoped it was enough.
II
Kafari was fixing Yalena’s breakfast when someone knocked at the front door. Loudly. Startled, Kafari sloshed milk onto the counter. Nobody ever came to their house without calling ahead, first, to make sure Sonny wouldn’t shoot them as an intruder. Not even Kafari’s family. And with spring planting taking up everyone’s time, nobody in her family would be calling on them this early in the day, anyway. Simon, who had just strapped Yalena into the toddler seat, exchanged a startled glance with her.
“Who — ?” he began.
“Trouble, that’s who,” she muttered, wiping her hands on a towel and striding purposefully through the house.
She opened the door to find a tall woman with pinched nostrils and a prune-shaped mouth, whose socially correct skinny frame was all hard angles and jutting bones. She was staring down at Kafari from a pair of steel-rimmed glasses of the sort preferred by POPPA bureaucrats. It was part of their “we’re all just people” persona, which dictated that no one on the government payroll was better than anyone else and therefore should not look it.
With her was a hulking giant whose intelligence looked to be on the simian level, with muscles capable of breaking a small tree in half. He definitely did not subscribe to the “thin is in” mentality sweeping the civil service and entertainment industries. No, she realized abruptly, he’s the enforcer. Just what were they here to enforce, at seven a.m. on a Tuesday morning?
“Mrs. Khrustinova?” the woman asked, her voice as warm as a glacier.
“I’m Kafari Khrustinova. Who are you?”
“We,” she jerked her head in a gesture both abrupt and menacing, “are the child-protection team assigned to Yalena Khrustinova.”
“Child-protection team?”
“Trask, please note that Mrs. Khrustinova is apparently in need of mechanical augmentation, as her hearing is plainly substandard, which directly jeopardizes the welfare of the child in her custody.”
“Now wait just a damned minute! I heard you, I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What are you doing here? I’m a full-time mother. You don’t have jurisdiction.”
“Oh, yes we do,” the woman said, eyes and voice frosty and threatening. “Didn’t you read the notice sent to every parent on Jefferson last night?”
“What notice? What time, last night? Simon and I checked the messages just before bed and there wasn’t any notice.”