She recognized Dinny Ghamal, recognized his new bride, Emmeline, a sweet girl who thought the sun rose and set in her husband — an opinion that was, in Kafari’s opinion, fully justified. Dinny rushed to his mother’s side. Aisha was alive, but badly injured and lying in a spreading pool of blood. Someone was shouting “Call the police! Call for ambulances!” while others got the children out of the killing zone.
One of the Hancock women, her face more dead than alive, crouched over a child who wasn’t moving. Another woman was talking to her, trying to get her to let go of the child. She stood up with an abrupt, jerking motion and reloaded her pistol. Then administered head-shots to every rat-ganger still twitching on the floor. When she tried to turn the gun on herself, one of the Hancock men wrestled the weapon out of her hands and led her out of the room.
There wasn’t that much more to see. The first police to arrive were local beat-cops used to patrolling in Port Town. They seemed inclined to help the Hancocks dig trench graves and bury the perpetrators without any further fuss. Then the P-Squads arrived and the situation slid off the edge of a cliff. The officer who stood out in Kafari’s mind, blazing like the neon in far-away Vishnu’s Copper Town shopping arcades, was a cold-eyed brute by the name of Yuri Lokkis. He ordered the arrest of every man, woman, and child on the farm, then spoke to the press while P-Squad vans transported the prisoners — including those critically wounded — off-site, presumably to one of the P-Squad interrogation centers like the main Intelligence Office on Nineveh Base.
Lokkis, his crisp uniform pristine in the afternoon sunlight, told a host of press cameras, “The so-called Hancock Family is nothing more than a militant and subversive cult masquerading as a legitimate organization. This cult preaches selective hatred, teaches helpless, innocent children that violence is a viable solution to disagreements, preaches opposition to the just and fair distribution of critical food supplies, and has just demonstrated utter contempt for human life.
“Fifteen promising young boys, trying to pull themselves out of grinding poverty, were conducting a legitimate social protest, trying to bring attention to the deplorable conditions rampant in the spaceport’s environs, trying valiantly to point out the cruelty the agrarian interests have displayed by building lush farms with plenty of food literally within sight of starving children. Those promising young boys were murdered, executed in cold blood. Why? For daring to express their civic outrage at the injustice of flaunting wealth and plenty in front of those who have been hardest hit by the economic injustices endured by our citizens!
“I will never forget the brutal loss of these boys. I will not rest until the perpetrators of this ghastly crime have been tried and convicted for their brutality. Good citizens everywhere need to remember one thing: these agrarian terrorists are cult fanatics at heart. They are agri-CULT-urists. And they will not rest until they have destroyed our urban heritage and our precious right to live as civilized beings.”
She had to switch it off. Kafari was shaking so hard, she could barely control her fingers. This was wrong, it was monstrously wrong. Surely people would realize POPPA had gone too far, this time? The Hancock family had been attacked without mercy, abandoned by the police, left with no resources but their own. They had rescued elderly women and babies under the age of two from hardened criminals. Surely even the Subbies, who expected someone else to feed them and pay for their every whim, would understand that?
She got her first glimpse of how unlikely that was, when she got home to find Yalena glued to the datascreen, watching the news coverage instead of doing her homework. Kafari stood in the doorway of their Madison apartment for long minutes, watching her daughter’s face. Yalena was clearly avid for the so-called “facts” the mainstream press was handing out. Watching the child she and Simon had made together, a child POPPA had enslaved like so much chattel, Kafari didn’t know how much longer she could bear to remain here.
Yalena looked more and more like a lost cause. At fifteen, there wasn’t a single bone in the girl’s body that didn’t belong utterly and irrevocably to Vittori Santorini. She wore her hair the way Nassiona Santorini did. Wore the kind of clothes Isanah Renke had made so wildly popular. Wallpapered her bedroom with pages of the POPPA Manifesto. Listened to POPPA musicians and watched every film that had ever been made by Mirabelle Caresse and Lev Bellamy, the hottest movie stars in Jefferson’s history, who made more in one film than most Subbies would see in a lifetime.
Mirabelle, a long-legged, wafer-thin beauty with a sultry voice, graced the talk-show circuit with such profound pronouncements as “anyone who thinks it’s all right to pick up a weapon clearly needs psychiatric adjustment” and “eating is not only a social faux pas, it’s the grossest insult possible to the poor and disadvantaged of this world.” Most of the poor, of course, weighed two or three times what the actress did, since eating was their second favorite pastime, right after making little carbon copies of themselves. Leverett Bellamy was her favorite leading man, who’d made his reputation and fortune portraying tough urban war heroes, fighting the Deng street to street in Madison, in films that bore no resemblance to the actual war or the people who’d fought it.
Kafari closed the apartment door and locked it, then walked quietly into the kitchen and started their dinner. Yalena could not be cajoled, coerced, or persuaded into doing anything so menial and disempowering as performing manual labor like cooking or washing dirty dishes. She was too busy raising her consciousness and communing with her friends over the “in” cause of the week. Her fingernails were perfect, her ability to quote the Manifesto flawless, and her brain resembled a well-used sieve, totally devoid of content.
The day Yalena turned eighteen — relieving Kafari of any further moral obligation to provide housing, food, and clothing — she was putting herself onto the next freighter to Vishnu, even if she had to smuggle herself aboard as cargo. It galled, to admit such utter defeat, but she had tried everything. She and her family had wracked their brains, thinking up things to do, and none of it had made the slightest dent in the girl’s misguided, ill-considered, unholy convictions. I’m sorry Simon, she found herself saying over and over as she pulled bags and boxes out of the freezer, very nearly blinded by the saltwater pouring down her face, I’m sorry, hon, I’ve lost her and I don’t think anything will ever shock her enough to get her back…
When Yalena bounced into the kitchen for a glass of soda, she looked at Kafari and said, “Sheesh, Mom, why don’t you peel the onions under cold water, or something?”
Kafari bit down on it. Held the rage in her teeth. Gripped the frying pan and spatula in her hands so hard, the bones creaked and the spatula’s handle bent. When the danger was mostly past, she turned and hissed, “Dish it up, yourself, when the timer goes off. I’m not hungry enough to eat in the same room with you.”
Yalena actually recoiled a step, meeting her gaze with wide and stunned eyes. Kafari stalked past, peripherally aware that her daughter scuttled sideways, out of her way. Kafari slammed her bedroom door shut and twisted the lock, then threw herself onto her cold and empty bed and wept from the bottom of her aching, broken heart. When the worst of the long-suppressed storm had passed, she heard a tiny tapping on her door.
“Mom?”