Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (6 page)

"Understood."

My ears were burning, and even though I hadn't meant to, I glanced at the men. One of them was the operations manager for the Scoundrels, which is a protection firm on Lib. I recognized him because he puts up a lot of ads. People call the Scoundrels the Cut-Rate Bastards behind their backs. The other guy I didn't recognize, and to my relief, he looked at me blankly. "Hey, girl," he said. "You planning to go to the big funeral tomorrow? Are all the kids going to be there?"

"I'm sorry," I said, in Russian. "I don't speak English."

He shrugged and turned back to the Scoundrel. "Payment will be in cash. Since your job is to keep people
out
of something, I was going to suggest a base payment with a large bonus that goes
down
for every citizen and dependent who's missing afterward.…" When I heard there was a list of citizens they were to make
particular
effort to keep away from the funeral, I decided I'd been out in the rain long enough. I might be on that list. My picture might be on that list. Hopefully they wouldn't look at my ID photo and recognize the damp, bedraggled Russian teenager who had been standing right by them.

I'd listened long enough to know that they were planning to do something horrible at the funeral. I had to tell someone! But Miguel was dead, and I had no idea where Debbie was.

After dithering as I walked across the bridge from Pete, I went to the church where I'd gone to meet Miguel. Miguel said the priest had noticed me, and had wondered if he should talk to me about my faith—since he knew Miguel, maybe he'd be officiating at the funeral. Maybe he'd have some idea what to do.

The church was open and less crowded today. I looked for Debbie but didn't see her. I didn't see the priest, either, but there was a door at the far end and I thought it might lead to an office. I tried knocking, and when no one answered, I tried opening it. It led to a hallway, and one of the doors off the hallway was labeled "Fr. Timothy Esposito."

It occurred to me he might not be here. Priests sometimes got called out to visit sick people, didn't they? And…actually, I had no real idea what priests did all day. I knocked. The door was opened by a middle-aged man in a black suit and one of those weird white collars that goes straight across. "Oh," he said, surprised. "It's you. Rebecca, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I said, and wondered if I was supposed to add "Father" or if only Catholics were supposed to do that. "I want—can I talk to you for a minute? Mr.…Father…Mr. Esposito?"

He opened the door a little wider and gestured for me to come in. "You can call me Tim."

Tim. Okay. I took a deep breath and entered.

Tim's study was crammed full of books—old-fashioned bound books. Some of them were Catholic, or at least religious, but as I looked around I noticed he also had
Lord of the Rings
, the complete works of J. K. Rowling, and
The Secret Garden
.

"Have a seat," he said, gesturing to a chair, and sat down across from me. I'd sort of expected him to sit behind his desk, but he had two visitor chairs and he sat in one of them.

"I'm not here to talk about my faith, just so you know," I said. "I'm a rationalist."

He gave me a slightly quirked smile. "That's fine."

I was waiting for some sort of religious sales pitch; it didn't come. After a minute of expectant silence I realized he was waiting for me to go on.

"Okay," I said. "I'm coming to you because I think you were Miguel's friend and might know what to do. I heard some people talking an hour ago, over on Pete. One of them was the guy who runs the Scoundrels, and the other I don't know who he was. They're planning to do something horrible at Miguel's funeral. I don't know if they're going to blow up the church, or what, but it's going to be bad."

Tim's brow furrowed. "The funeral isn't going to be here," he said. "They're holding it on the sea platform that was built by the network for their reality show. Apparently, instead of selling it to Amsterdarn, as originally planned, Janet handed it over to the bond-workers who'd performed on the show."

"Oh.
Oh.
" Well, that explained why they thought they could destroy it without sinking part of the stead. "Tell them not to! I mean—
can
you? Can you warn them?"

Tim pondered this. "Given this information, I might be able to persuade people to move it here. They'd have to put it off for another day or two, though, while I negotiate with my neighbors for some additional space. Part of the reason it's being held on the sea platform is to enable more people to attend. The other reason is because Catholic funerals aren't set up to allow for speech-making." He shrugged. "I can turn a blind eye to that, but there's a limit to how many people you can fit in here. The biggest church is the Methodist church, which is a level up from here and about four times the size. Whether they'd be willing to host—who knows?"

"Were you going to be there on the platform?"

"Yes." He raised an eyebrow. "So apparently the gentlemen you overheard on Lib consider me entirely disposable. They may be hoping the next priest will be more willing to dance to their tune."

"But you'll tell people," I said.

"Yes, I'll try to get the word out."

"Okay," I said, standing up. "Do you think there's anyone else I should tell?"

"Feel free to warn anyone you like, although rumors of danger may only make people more stubborn. It's hard to know."

"Thank you."

"Thank
you
." He stood up. "Feel free to come by and talk anytime. About anything. Rationalists are welcome here; I'm a Jesuit, after all."

I smiled, although I didn't really get the joke, and went back out.

I wasn't sure whether I could trust the priest or not—I didn't know if he'd actually try to get the funeral moved, and for that matter, I didn't know if he actually had the necessary influence. Maybe, I thought, I should spread the word, too. Although, I wasn't sure how to persuade people to trust me. Debbie would, but I had no idea where to find her.

I passed a dining hall; the lines coming out were unreal. The sandwich shop I'd planned to buy dinner at was just as bad. If I went to Clark's, I could warn people, and surely they weren't actually organized enough to poison me under the circumstances. I went back down to the locker-room level and got in line.

"Miguel's funeral's been delayed," said the man in front of me. "Pass it on."

Well. Apparently the priest
was
the guy to go to.

Clark's, when I finally made it in, was crammed full of people. Instead of chairs, the tables had long benches, and people sat shoulder-to-shoulder. I took a plate and held it out to the servers, who gave me four scoops of…stuff. There was a scoop that looked sort of like animal protein, but I couldn't tell what kind. The second was beige, like mashed potatoes. The third was green and on inspection I thought it was broccoli. The fourth was brown and was ice cream. To go with all that I got a small glass of water. I looked around for somewhere to sit; I didn't see any spots. But a man saw me looking and scooted over, making a small space, and I sat down. I was hungry enough that it all tasted okay.

"Miguel's funeral's been postponed," I said. "Pass it on."

He grunted. "I know."

The staff here didn't appear to have slowed down—or maybe it was just that customers were expected to do more of the work. We had to carry our own food to the table and bus our own dishes. The dishes went through an automatic washer, but the person who put in the last dish had to give the rack a shove toward the sprayer. I copied the people around me and made my way back to my locker. My gadget's battery was almost drained; I needed to find somewhere to plug it in.

But when I got to the locker room that night, I was locked out of my unit. There was a notice of eviction taped to the side. I pulled it off, blinking away tears of frustration and bewilderment. The letter said that because I was a
dependent
, and neither a citizen nor a guest-worker, I was not legally permitted to engage in commerce my guardian had forbidden. The money I'd paid—for the locker, the mattress, the blanket, all of it—had been refunded. To my guardian.

I felt like screaming and kicking the side of the locker. Or throwing up. I knocked on locker six, because I still owed her money. She slid the side up; she'd been watching TV on her own gadget. "I'm
not
passing you in again."

"No, I don't need you to. I just want to pay you back for this morning," I said. "I couldn't wait, you see.…" I held out the letter of eviction. My throat was already closing.

She took it from my hand and looked at it. "Well, isn't
that
a load of boiled shite," she said. "He took your money, and now he's saying it's not good enough? What, he couldn't tell
looking
at you that you're a teenager?"

"I don't know," I said. "The lighting in here's pretty bad. Maybe he couldn't tell."

She handed me the letter. "Don't worry about paying me back for the water, kid."

"Can you tell me… do you know if there's anyone who wouldn't care? Who'd let me stay? I'm tired," I said, and my throat started closing again. "I just want somewhere I can
sit
."

The locker door by my ankle slid up and another woman looked up at me. "I'll tell you," she said. "Keep going down."

The woman in six started to say something but the woman in the lower unit shook her head. "You really think she ought to go home right now? Go down. Dodge the authorities. And don't piss anyone off." She slid her door shut again.

 
GO DOWN. Dodge the authorities. Don't piss anyone off.

A good portion of stead is actually below the waterline. The old cruise ships generally have a draft of about thirty feet, Lib's freighter is closer to forty feet, and to provide stability, there's actually fifty to sixty feet of stead underwater for the main sea platforms that make up Min and Rosa. Some of this is used for habitation—a lot of the locker rooms, for instance, are in the underwater portions of the sea platforms—but the farther down you go, the more it's utility stuff, like generators and desalinators.

I'd never been below the locker rooms, but I knew the stairs kept going, even if the elevators didn't.

I shouldered my backpack, glad that I hadn't left any of my possessions behind to be confiscated and given to my father. I had a blanket, a snack, and a flashlight.
Everything I really need.
I found the stairs and started going down. Below the habitable levels, the doors were supposed to be locked, but when I got to the bottom level, I found that the door's latch had been taped open. Around the edge of the door frame someone had taken permanent marker and scrawled
welcome to the free land, the glad land, the fair land, the no-man's-land, the lost land, the you-and-me-and-thee land.
It was a song lyric I recognized, from a stateside musician, about a guy being locked up in a hospital after murdering a bunch of people.

I was under a desalination plant. It was cool down here, and damp. I could hear water dripping and hoped it was condensation rather than a leak. There were supposed to be alarms for things like leaks, but there were also supposed to be locks on doors like the one I'd just come through. Dim lights shone through a tangle of wires and pipes overhead and the ceiling was low. I had to duck a lot to pass under low-hanging pipes and I'm not actually that tall.

Dodge the authorities. Don't piss people off.

I had no idea where I was going, but I kept walking for a while. Presumably if you were near the door, you were more likely to be found by the authorities. If they ever actually came down here. I wasn't sure they did. Surely they'd rip the tape off the latch if they came down.

And then, off to the right, I saw a brighter glow. I followed it, only to be stopped with a blast of brilliant, dazzling light in my face. I flung up one hand and flinched back. "I'm sorry!" I said.

The light left my face. "Not a cop," someone said.

I couldn't see anything but spots. "No," I said. "I'm not a cop."
Don't piss people off.
Too late, I wondered if I should have tried harder to sound friendly.

Someone grabbed my arm. "Over here," the voice said. "You can sit down. You'll be able to see again in a minute. Next time don't sneak up on us."

"I wasn't trying to
sneak
," I said. "All I knew was, if I went to the bottom level I might find somewhere I could stay. I rented a locker but got evicted, because.…" Should I tell these people I was a dependent? They could probably guess. "Because the guy was an asshole."

I was sitting on something hard, but it wasn't the floor. I patted it with my hands and concluded it was a concrete block. I could smell food cooking, and as my vision slowly returned I looked around.

Yes, there were people living here. I could see blankets spread on the floor, marking out beds. Someone had a little stove going: they'd cut into one of the wires running past our heads and added a spliced-in makeshift outlet. It looked like a fire hazard. I could see the dripping water now: it was dripping from one of the pipes, and being caught in a bucket. One of the men got up to swap in a fresh bucket, and carried the full bucket over to the circle. He ladled water into cups. "Do you have a cup, kid?" he asked.

I had a water bottle in my backpack. "It's fresh?" I asked.

"Straight from the desalinator."

"Do I need to pay you?" I asked a little nervously.

"Yeah," he said and held out his hand. "In advance. In
gold
."

"Shut up, Leo," the woman next to me said, laughing. "I think she believes you." She turned to me. "It's free as long as you're down with receipt of stolen property. You could get a pretty hefty fine for taking that water, you know."

"But they'd fine you just as much for being down here at all," someone else added.

I held out my water bottle and Leo filled it.

"My name's Kat," the woman said. "The water boy is Leo."