“Go away!”
The tapping stopped. A few minutes later, it returned. “Mom? Are you okay?”
“No!”
“Do you need a doctor?”
Kafari tightened her fingers through the bedding to stop herself from flinging the door wide and throwing Yalena out of the apartment by the seat of her fashionable pants. She finally mastered the blind rage sufficiently to open the door. Yalena hovered outside.
“Do you need a doctor?” Yalena asked again, voice faltering under the stare Kafari leveled at her.
“What I need is a daughter with a brain. Unless you can provide me with one, I strongly suggest you take yourself out of my way for the next few days. Is that simple enough for even you to understand? Or do I have to spell it out in barracks-room language?”
“But — what did I do? All I said was to cut the onions under running water.”
Yalena didn’t know. She honest-to-God didn’t know. Kafari was in far too dangerous an emotional state to enlighten her. “The less I say right now, the safer both of us will be. I would suggest that you do your homework. You might start by trying to discover what really happened today at the Hancock Family’s barracks.”
“This is about Grangers? A bunch of crazy deviants who massacred fifteen innocent boys just because they were staging a protest? Those boys were my age! Not even in high school, yet. My God, Mom, I know you’re a Granger, but how could you possibly defend that pack of murdering farmers?”
Kafari — remembering a boy with a broken arm and a shotgun, shooting into a barn full of Deng and Asali bees, remembering a woman who’d flung open her door in the teeth of Yavac fire, risking her life to offer them shelter when it would’ve been safer to just run for the cellar — clenched both fists. Kafari was so violently angry, she was literally shaking with the need to contain it.
Yalena, correctly reading the threat in her eyes, hissed, “You wouldn’t dare lay hands on me!”
It was a close thing, very close, to homicide.
Yalena misinterpreted her hesitation and started to laugh. “You’re so pathetic, Mom. You and all the other pig farmers—”
Kafari slapped her.
Hard enough to bruise. Yalena’s eyes widened in shock. She lifted one hand to her cheek in stunned disbelief. “You — you hit me!”
“And you damned well deserved it!”
“But — but — you hit me!”
The “why?” hadn’t even formed, yet. Her mind was still too stunned by the abrupt reordering of her reality.
“I should’ve turned you over my knee years ago. It’s high time you got off that bigoted, lazy little backside of yours and learned some civilized manners. Not to mention a few critical lessons in reality.”
“Bigoted?” Yalena shrieked. “I’m not bigoted! I’m a member of POPPA! Have you even bothered to read the Manifesto? It’s filled with beautiful ideas like economic justice and social parity and respect for the civil rights of living creatures! It’s built on the latest, most scientifically advanced social science in human space! And I believe in it, I live by it! How dare you accuse me of bigotry?”
“Because you don’t have the brains God gave a radish! Let’s just take a look at those high and fine-sounding ideals, shall we? Then I’ll explain to you a little thing called reality. The POPPA Manifesto preaches equality and respect for everyone, doesn’t it? On page after page. Vittori Santorini’s little masterpiece gushes endlessly about everyone deserving love and happiness. That everyone’s entitled to their fair share of the planet’s wealth, that nobody is better than anybody else and nobody should be allowed to harm others. Tolerance and fairness for every man, woman, child on Jefferson — unless they’re farmers!”
The whiplash in her voice was so sharp, her daughter actually jumped.
Then her eyes widened with the dawning realization that she had not, in fact, accorded farmers the same social rights she thought everyone else deserved. For the first time in her life, Yalena was staring into an undistorted mirror. Given the look on her face, she didn’t like what she saw. It was rarely pleasant when one heard an ugly little truth about themselves, particularly when they couldn’t justify it under their own rules of conduct.
Kafari shoved the mirror a little closer to Yalena’s face. “I have watched you spend hours defending the rights of leaf-cutting caterpillars, but by God, let a human being disagree with you on anything and you label them as subhuman deviants. Where’s the tolerance in that nasty little game? If someone dares to hold a different opinion, you treat them like animals. Worse than animals, which you’ve put on a pedestal and all but worshiped as gods, while behaving as though people who grow food are unfit to go on breathing. I dare you to deny it. I don’t think you can.
“But what you pulled out there,” she jabbed a finger at the living room, where Pol Jankovitch was still jabbering away on the datascreen, “was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen you do. You sat there and gloated over the arrest of people you’ve never met. People the government has turned into literal, legal slaves, forcing them to work without pay on government-owned land, growing the food on your dinner plate! If they refuse or even complain, they’re thrown into prison. You want to show me where to find the equality, respect, or fairness in that? I don’t see it. And I don’t think you do, either, because it’s not there to be seen, not by you or me or anybody else.
“And let me make one other point, lest you think this is merely an academic exercise in rhetoric. I wasn’t chopping onions when you walked into the kitchen. Two of those ‘pig-farming deviants’ you despise so much are dear friends of mine, with more courage and integrity than you will ever possess. When Dinny Ghamal was only twelve years old — twelve, damn you! — he watched Deng troopers murder his father and brothers right in front of him. His mother risked her life to open her front door so President Lendan and I could run to safety in her house. We’d no more than skidded through the doorway when the Deng shot out the front wall, ripping Aisha’s back open with flying debris. We jumped into their basement while Yavacs literally blew the house apart on top of us.”
Yalena’s mouth fell open.
“The broadcasters haven’t mentioned any of those facts, have they? You want to know why? Because misbegotten, silver-tongued snakes like Pol Jankovitch aren’t telling you. He makes his living lying through his teeth and lining his pockets with POPPA’s cold, hard cash. And of course a good little POPPA puppet like you wouldn’t dream of signing onto the datanet to find out the truth for yourself. That might require actual work. If you can be bothered to work up a sweat, check the Granger datachats, starting with Anish Balin’s. But be damned careful if you do, because you just might learn something.
“I suggest you bear one final thing in mind. POPPA can guarantee your right to say what you like. But that sword cuts both ways. When you’re talking to me, you may be damned sure that bigotry will always get what it deserves. If you don’t like it, go live somewhere else!”
Kafari stalked out, too furious to care that she, herself, was risking prison time and a “reeducation” sentence. She slammed her way out of the house, not even sure where she was going until she found herself in the aircar, heading for home. The only home she had left. Her mother, recognizing the car as she set down on the landing pad, took one look at her face and said, “You finally belt that brat like she’s been needing?”