I ain’t no hacker, hon.”
He looked skeptical. “You’re just a simple little expendable scout roaming the outside world? Is that it?”
“I wouldn’t say expendable.”
He patted her shoulder. “Of course you wouldn’t. Everyone is, for the right reasons.”
She thought about the man she was about to observe die. What really disturbed her was knowing that Rakesh would also see the man who’d been his leader, the one who’d led the mailmen to freedom, fall before an assassin. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a murder, Maybe General Dehn was about to have a fatal heart attack or stroke. There was no definitive proof of how the man had died. She was here to find out and bring back historical fact.
Frannie showed her wrist again. “What can I get for you?”
“Medicine,” he said promptly. “I want the formulas for cures, vaccines that I can get to chemists.”
“There aren’t any chemists outside the enclaves.”
“Who do you think does the processing for the drug cartels?”
She shrugged in acknowledgment. “There’s no cure for the zombie plague,” she said. Not in this time, and anything she gave him would have to be from this era.
“Give me the AIDS vaccine, aspirin. Anything to keep people alive.”
She appreciated his desperate need to help, and kept silent about everything she’d been taught about overpopulation being the cause of civilization’s downfall. The Elect even called what was going on in the world right now the “hinning of the herd”. But the Elect didn’t come out of their enclaves to witness the horrible process in action. She believed her ancestors would have had more compassion if they had.
“Medicines,” she said with a decisive nod. “I’ll get you what I can.”
Would giving away a few formulas be breaking the rules? She suspected Rakesh’s compassionate request would only lead to an intensification of the drug wars that raged along with all the other wars infecting the planet. Rakesh believed he could do some good, and her admiration for him was such a strong, burning emotion that she suspected it was more than admiration.
The plane landed in Newark. It had been a very bumpy landing, but not much rougher than one into Newark she’d experienced on a 1990 observing trip. The difference now was that the airport wasn’t officially operating anymore. The jagged ruins of the New York City skyline were visible in the distance.
None of the bridges linking New Jersey to New York still stood.
“Almost there,” Rakesh said after they climbed down the ladder that got them to the ground.
“Almost,” she told Rakesh. They paused long enough to smile at each other. She was going to miss him when she was gone. They held hands. It was becoming a habit. “Let’s head to the ferry dock.”
The boat was approaching the Battery Dock when Frannie’s mission log kicked on. “Your GPS indicates you have reached physical objective. Stand by.”
She blinked and sat up straight. She’d been leaning against Rakesh, warm and relaxed, enjoying the ride. All of a sudden she was back in her real world.
“Francine,” her scholar’s voice spoke inside her head. “If your controller has done his job correctly you have traveled from Paris to New York in the company of one of General Dehn’s commando force. As you are already aware but do not acknowledge, your controller is a member of the Starshine Group. What you do not know is that I am also a Starshiner.”
Frannie gasped.
Rakesh asked, “What’s wrong?”
Her scholar went on speaking. “I arranged your assignment, not because I want you to observe a murder, but because I want you to prevent one. The Starshiners want to save General Dehn from the assassin sent by the Elect to kill him. You have a sense of justice that you try to hide. Use that sense of justice. Stop a murder. Help the people. You have spent the last several days traveling through a blighted world that your own ancestors did a great deal to create. You have witnessed first-hand the damage the Elect fostered to achieve the world you and I and your controller live in. You have been taught all your life that the residents of the enclaves were neutral, that they hid themselves away and did no harm to anyone, other than to fend off attacks from the outside. Lies.”
Did her scholar think he was surprising her with that revelation? They’d had the right to defend themselves from attacks. Did the Starshiners – her own scholar – really believe the Elect had been murderers as well?
She was surprised at his political sympathies – which could get her in a lot of trouble. “You’re one of the Elite, too,” she said.
“What?” Rakesh asked.
He turned her to face him. She looked through him, her attention on what she was being told by her mission log.
“The history you know states that General Dehn died while he was giving a speech. This fact is a tiny footnote in what we call the Ruin Times. We claim to have very little information about the time you are in. Because, after all, the Elite were closed up in the enclaves while the world burned around them. Have you noticed how few missions have been sent back to this era? Because the Elite would love to place the whole era under interdiction, but that would rouse suspicions.”
She’d assumed scholars just weren’t that interested.
“I have evidence that Dehn will be killed to keep him from organizing a movement that could become dangerous to the Elects’ policy of letting the world go to hell until it is time to come out of the enclaves and take complete power themselves. I want you to save Dehn. His movement might not be able to save the world, but I think anyone who tries to help in the Ruin Times deserves a chance to try. You have to make a choice now, Francine. Let Dehn die or save him. That is all,” the mission log ended.
“Oh, fuck.”
“Francine?”
She found herself looking into Rakesh’s worried face.
Anyone who tries to help in the Ruin Times deserves a chance.
She put her hand on his cheek. It was warm, faintly rough with new stubble. Alive. Real. He was so alive and real and – good.
Damn it! She hated using that word. She was cynical, jaded, just a little corrupt. She was an observer, not a doer.
She hated having witnessed how this one mailman’s acts of kindness had added to what passed for civilization back here. She hated that she remembered these acts with fondness, and pride. She tried telling herself that he wasn’t doing any good, really.
But he wasn’t the only mailman out there, was he? They hadn’t started out as peaceful couriers, had they? What was Dehn planning for them? Would they follow?
Could he change the world? Save it?
“Do you want to save the world?” she asked Rakesh. “Do you really think you could?”
“I am saving the world,” he answered. “One delivery at a time.”
“You’re saving your soul,” she spat back at him. “You’re trying to make up for your mercenary past.”
“That too,” he agreed. “What are you doing to save your soul?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Her own words took Frannie completely by surprise. She’d been so set up, and she knew it. It hurt.
Instead of making her angry, it hurt. Pain stabbed all the way through her, from her head to her heart and all the way down to her toes. And why didn’t she doubt for a moment what her scholar told her? She’d always had a nagging belief that her ancestors were callous about the chaos outside the enclaves. Their writings had claimed there was nothing they could do to save the world but what they did. She’d believed their sins were of omission not commission. Now she’d had her nose rubbed in that lie.