Sula lay in the darkness of the cockpit, afraid to sleep. She had managed to function throughout her evaluation of the situation onMidnight Runner, the return to her own pinnace through the airlock, and her brief report to Operations Control. She had done well as she ungrappled, shifted the pinnace to provide a better purchase on the yacht, engaged the grapples again, and fired the main engine.
Midnight Runner, out of control and with its crew dead, had been boarded by a Fleet vessel. That made it salvage, Fleet property. Her duty was to bring it to Zanshaa, where it would be sold, or—very possibly—turned into personal transportation for some high-ranking Fleet commander.
Sula began with a very gentle acceleration while monitoring the magnetic grapples carefully, and was pleased to discover that two vessels could maintain an acceleration of half a gravity before any strain on the grapples became apparent.
Half a gravity was something she could maintain very well, easy on the bruised bones and kinked muscles that still ached from her earlier, more brutal accelerations. So she plotted her course with half a gravity in mind and began the long, long burn.
It would be thirteen and a half days to the halfway point, where she’d turn and begin a half-gravity deceleration burn for another thirteen and a half days. Twenty-seven days altogether, alone, in this little room.
Once everything was plotted on the computer and the torch began to fire, she had nothing to do. It was then that the cold, slow, nightmare tentacles of memory began to enfold her mind.
The worst part was that she knew what was happening. She knew that the asphyxiated body of Blitsharts had brought forward the memories she most dreaded, the past she’d tried her best to bury, bury deep in the innermost frozen ground of her self…bury there like a corpse.
It would be twenty-seven days to Zanshaa. Days spent in the night of space, alone with a dead man and live memories. Of the two, the dead man was preferable company.
Sula considered giving herself something to help her sleep, but she dreaded the moment before the drug would take her, the darkness enfolding her consciousness in its dark wings, followed by the surrender to the tide of night…
It was too much like smothering.
She ran ship diagnostics over and over, finding nothing wrong but hoping the repetition would lull her to dreamless sleep. It didn’t help, of course. She was condemned to the memories.
Memories of the girl called Gredel.
Gredel’s earliest memories were of cowering in the darkness while violence raged on the other side of the flimsy door. Antony screaming at Nelda, the sound of his slaps on Nelda’s flesh, the crash of furniture as it was broken against other furniture or against the walls.
Antony was very hard on furniture.
Unlike many of the children she knew, Gredel had actually met her father, and her father was not Antony. She’d met her father twice, when he passed through the Fabs on his way to somewhere else. On both occasions he’d given Nelda money, and Nelda used some of it to buy her a frozen treat at Bonifacio’s in Maranic Town.
Nelda looked after Gredel because her mother, Ava, was usually away. When Ava came, she usually brought Nelda money, but Nelda didn’t seem to mind when Ava didn’t.
Ava and Nelda had been to school together. “Your ma was the beautiful one,” Nelda told her. “Everyone loved her.” She looked at Gredel and sighed, her hand thoughtfully stroking Gredel’s smooth cheek. “And you’re going to have that trouble too. Too many people are going to love you, and none for the right reasons.”
Nelda lived in the Fabs, the many streets of prefabricated apartment buildings, all alike, down the Iola River from Maranic Town. Poor people lived in the Fabs, though everyone at least had money for rent. People with no money at all slept in the street until the Patrol picked them up and shipped them off to the agrarian communes that covered most of the land surface of Spannan—though the Patrol didn’t sweep through the Fabs very often, and sometimes people lived on the streets for years.
Gredel’s mother Ava had spent time in an agrarian commune—not because she had no money, but because she was involved in some business of Gredel’s father. He wasn’t arrested, but he had to leave the Fabs for a long time. Nelda explained to Gredel that her father had “linkages” that kept the Patrol from arresting him, though the linkages hadn’t worked for Ava. “Someone had to pay,” Nelda said, “and people decided that person was your ma.”
Gredel wondered who decided such things. Nelda said it was all very complicated and she didn’t know the whole story anyway.
Nelda worked as an electrician, which paid well when she was working. Usually, however, there was no work, and she earned money by hooking people illegally to the electric mains.
Antony, the man who bellowed and roared and hit Nelda, was her husband. He wasn’t around much because he wandered from town to town and job to job. When he returned to the Fabs, it was because he didn’t have work and needed Nelda’s money to pay for liquor. And when he was drinking, it was wise to stay out of his sight.
When Ava returned to the Fabs from her sentence in the country, it didn’t look as if she had suffered very much—she was beautiful, with the same golden hair and creamy skin as her daughter, and with large blue-gray eyes. She was dressed wonderfully—a blue blouse, with the upswept collar that turned into a glittering, gem-encrusted net for her hair, and a skirt that wrapped around her twice and showed her figure. Her hands had long, curved nails painted a glossy shade of blue-gray, to match her eyes. The scent she wore made Gredel want to stop and just inhale. Ava had already found someone to take care of her.
She took Gredel on her lap, smothered her with kisses, told Gredel what she did in the country. “I processed food,” Ava said. “I roasted grain for Naxids, and I processed soy curd for Terrans. It wasn’t hard work. It was just boring.”
Most of the work on the farms was automated, Ava said. Not many people were needed in the country, which was why most of the countryside was empty and all the people were packed into the cities, most of them in places like the Fabs.
Gredel adored her mother, but never had the chance to live with her. The men who took care of Ava—and there were several over the years, all “linked” in some way—didn’t want children around, and when Ava was without a man, she didn’t want Gredel with her because it would make a man harder to get.
Gredel thought she didn’t miss living with Ava that much. She had a place with Nelda, and Antony wasn’t around often. Nelda had two children of her own, a boy and a girl, and a boy named Jacob she was looking after for another friend. She just liked having children around, and made sure they were fed and clothed and attended school.
School was something Gredel liked, because she could learn about places that weren’t the Fabs. She spent hours on the display terminal, both at home and at school, working with the instructional programs connected with her class-work, and often simply looking up things on her own.
There were advantages to working with the terminal. If she was quiet, Antony wouldn’t notice her.
Once, she stumbled across a picture of the Arch of Macedoin, with its triple towers. She was struck by the sight: the Arch’s ornate, eerie architecture was so unlike the Fabs. It was even different from Maranic Town. She shifted the display into three-dimensional projection and looked at it more intently, seeing towers crowned by pinnacles that looked as if they were made of white icing, and in the niches the Colossi of Macedoin.
The Colossi, she was surprised to discover, were all Terrans. Louis XIV, she read, Henry VIII, M. Portius Cato, Shih Huangdi, V.I. Lenin, Alexander son of Philip, Mao Zedong, Marcus Aurelius, Kongfuzi…All heroes of Earth, she learned, who before the arrival of the Shaa had striven to bring into being something like the Praxis, which of course was the most perfect form of government possible.