Nobody spoke for a moment. “You think somebody did it deliberately?” I asked.
Sean nodded. “We checked the equipment a hundred times and everything worked.”
“Who would have done something like that?” Oliver asked, horrified.
“Somebody,” Sean said. “Keep the students together. This isn’t over yet.” He turned to face me, suddenly focusing. “Take a message to Gretyl. Tell her she was a goddamned fool and I love her madly.” He bit into the words goddamned fool as if they were a savory cake that gave him great satisfaction. I had never seen such a join of pain and bitter pride.
I nodded.
“Tell her she and I will take the reins again and guide this mess home right. Tell her just that.”
“Guide the mess home right,” I repeated, still under his spell.
“We have a larger purpose,” Sean said. “We have to break this planet out of its goddamned business-as-usual, corrupt, bow-down-to-the-Triple, struggle-along mentality. We can do that. We can make our own party. It’s a beginning.” His eyes fixed on each of us in turn, as if to brand us. Felicia held out her splayed fingers and Sean lifted his free arm to awkwardly press his hand against hers. Oliver did the same. Charles stood back; too much for him. I was about to raise my hand and match Sean’s. But Sean saw my hesitation, my change of expression when Charles stepped back, and he dropped his hand before I could decide.
“Heart and mind, heart and mind,” Sean said softly. “You are… Casseia, right? Casseia Majumdar?”
“Yes.”
“How did your family fare in all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They’re fixed to prosper. The Gobacks will do well in the next government. It was funny, Connor thinking we were Gobacks. Are you a Goback, Casseia?”
I shook my head, throat tight. His tone was so stiff and distant, so reproving.
“Show it to me, Casseia. Heart and mind.”
“I don’t think you have any right to question my loyalty because of my family,” I said.
Sean’s gaze went cold. “If you’re not dedicated, you could turn on us… just like whoever broke the timer.”
“Gretyl handled the charge,” Charles said. “Nobody else touched it. Certainly not Casseia.”
“We all slept, didn’t we?” Sean said. “But it’s irrelevant, really. That part’s over.”
He closed his eyes and licked his lips. A cup came up from the wallmount arbeiter and a stream of liquid poured into his mouth. He sucked it up with the expertise of days in the hospital.
“What do you mean?” Felicia asked in a little voice.
“I’ll have to pick all over again. Most of you went home, didn’t you?”
“Some did,” Felicia said. “We stayed.”
“We needed students to occupy and hold, to take the administration chambers and dictate terms. We could work from the university as a base, claim it as a forfeit for illegal voiding, claim it for damages… If I had been there, that’s what we would have done.”
I felt like crying. The injustice of Sean’s veiled accusations, mixed with my very real infatuation and guilt at not serving the cause better, turned my stomach.
“Go talk to Gretyl. And you two…” He pointed to Charles and me. “Think it over. Who are you? Where do you want to be in ten years?”
Gretyl was less severely injured, but looked worse. Her head had been wrapped in a bulky breather, leaving only a gap for her eyes. She had been laid back at forty-five degrees on a steel recovery plate as well, and tubes ran from mazes of nano clumps on her chest and neck. An arbeiter had discreetly draped the rest of her with a white sheet for our visit. She watched us enter, and her silky artificial voice said, “How’s Sean? You’ve been to see him?”
“He’s fine,” Oliver said. I was too unhappy to talk.
“We haven’t been allowed to visit. This hospital shits protocol. What’s being said outside? Did we get any attention?”
Felicia explained as gently as possible that we really hadn’t accomplished much. She was ready to be a little harder with Gretyl than with Sean; perhaps she was infatuated with Sean as well. I had a sudden insight into people and revolutions, and did not like what I saw.
“Sean has a plan to change that,” Gretyl said.
“I’m sure he does,” Oliver said.
“What’s on at UMS?”
“They’re moving in a new administration. All the Statist appointees have resigned or been put on leave.”
“Sounds like they’re being punished.”
“It’s routine. All appointments are being reviewed,” Oliver said.
Gretyl sighed — an artificial note of great beauty — and extended her hand. Felicia squeezed it. Charles and I remained in the background. “He thinks the charge that blew up was tampered with,” Oliver said.
“It may have been,” Gretyl said. “It must have been.”
“But only you and he handled it,” Charles said.
Gretyl sighed again. “It was just a standard Excavex two-kilo tube. We didn’t pay a lot of money. The people who stole it for us may have tampered with it. They could have done something to make it go off. That’s possible.”
“We don’t know that,” Oliver said.
“Listen, friends, if we haven’t attracted any attention yet, it’s because — ” She stopped and her eyes tracked the room zipzip, then narrowed.
“I have new eyes,” she said. “Do you like the color? You’d better go now. We’ll talk later, after I’m released.”
On our way out of the hospital, in the tunnel connecting us to Time’s River Station’s main tube, a hungry-looking, poorly-dressed and very young male LitVid agent tried to interview us. He followed us for thirty meters, glancing at his slate between what he thought were pointed questions. We were too glum and too smart to give any answers, but despite our reticence, we ended up in a ten-second flash on a side channel for Mars Tharsis local.
Sean, on the other hand, was interviewed the next day for an hour by an agent for New Mars Committee Scan, and that was picked up and broadcast by General Solar to the Triple. He told our story to the planets, and by and large, what he told was not what I remembered.
Nobody else was interviewed.
My sadness grew; my fresh young idealism waned rapidly, replaced by no wisdom to speak of, nothing emotionally concrete.
I thought about Sean’s words to us, his accusations, his pointed suspicion of me, his interview spreading distortions around the Triple. Now, I would say that he lied, but it’s possible Sean Dickinson even then was too good a rabbler to respect the truth. And Gretyl, I think, was about to pass on some sound advice about political need dictating how we see — and use — history.
When we returned to our dorms at UMS, we found notices posted and doors locked. Diane met me and explained that UMS had been closed for the foreseeable future due to “curriculum revisions.” Flashing icons beneath the ID plates told us we could enter our quarters once and remove our belongings. Train fare to our homes or any other destination would not be provided. Our slates received bulletins on when and where the public hearings would be held to determine the university’s future course.
We were arguably worse off than we had been with Dauble and Connor.
Charles helped Diane and me pull our belongings from the room and stack them in the tunnel. There weren’t many — I had sent most of my effects home after being voided. I helped Charles remove his goods, about ten kilos of equipment and research materials.
We ate a quick lunch in the train station. We didn’t have much to say. Diane, Oliver and Felicia departed on the northbound, and Charles saw me to the eastbound.
As I lugged my bag into the airlock, he held out his hand, and we shook firmly. “Will I see you again?” he asked.