“My colleague,” Rita was saying, a hand pointing back at Ganesh. “This is only a mock inspection; no notes will be kept, no citations issued. You remember me, right?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Nice to see you again.”
“I’ll want access to corridor S13, right? I have the old code for the door; it should have been changed – not good if it hasn’t been.”
“Changed on schedule ma’am.
“That’s good to hear. I’ll need the new code.”
The man was thinking of his orders. “I can’t just —
“Tell your officer. By the time he okays it, we’ll be at the door. Join us there with the mew code.”
“Got it.”
Rita strode away, Ganesh following with the backpack, which had somehow become his responsibility. Seconds later, they were riding a transporter that was taking them through the dome in a complicated tangle of pipes and cables that Rita seemed to recognize as old friends. The trip was longer than he expected, made so by twistings around construction materials and half-finished walls and ceilings. He tried to imagine what was intended here – some kind of bland look of serious business, maybe, although why that was needed in a place not meant for the public, he couldn’t see. He thought then of the face of the man on the skene – bland until he had got angry, bureaucratic, a mask to hide what? But these walls and ceilings would not be deceptive in that way: they would mean something like We did our job well.
The construction materials gave way to finished walls and ceilings, undecorated, clean, smooth, meaningless. Rita said, “Here we are,” stepping down from the transporter. Ganesh managed to get off, too, but said. “Here we are where?” She pointed: a door, barely visible only because of its recessed handle and code panel.
“Where’s our man?”
“He’s coming,” and with that he appeared far down the long corridor, riding the transporter toward them. When he came even with them, he stepped down, apologized for taking so long, said to Rita, “There’s a message for you at the command desk.”
“For me? But—” She glanced at Ganesh, a look that said, How? She said to the other man, “I’ll pick it up outside; I remember how poor reception is here.”
“Yeah, well,,. uh, they’re doing their best. You want to me to flash a ‘received’ message to the sender?”
“Oh, don’t do that! I’d rather that …because I don’t know who it is, that they, well…” She smiled. “Sometimes you don’t want certain people to know where you are every minute of the day, right.”
“Isn’t that the truth!” He was entering letters and numbers into the code panel. He looked sheepish and a little flushed. “My officer told me to put the code in myself. In case this is part of the inspection and you’d log a security issue.”
She opened the door. “I told you, no records are being kept – no log.” She waved at Ganesh. “Let’s get moving, Raul.” When the door hissed shut behind them, he said, “Raul?”
“I’m just being careful. Nobody should know I’m here, but if that brute from Assignments is really tracking us, he might have… You know, some sort of blanket search.”
He made a face, part worried agreement, part doubt, the belief of all citizens, Things like that don’t happen here. What now?”
“Feet. This a short cut, but we have to walk.”
When they had walked about half that, he stopped, said, “Why are we doing this?”
She had been walking ahead; she turned quickly. “We just went through it!” She was annoyed, but something else, too. He said, “I mean why. What’s the big reason?”
“You want to get to the Colloquium.”
“No, deeper than that. Why are we playing spooks, lying to the guard, using this short-cut, Nonno’s bug.” She stared at him. Before she could say anything, he said, “Fear.
She reacted by leaning against the wall and squeezing the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “We don’t feel fear.”
“Of course we do! What did you feel when part of a dome started to fall n you?”
“That was different; that was—”
“All I meant is we’re capable of feeling fear. We’re animals; we need fear to run away from threats. But we’ve always said we have no fear of our self-government. We boast about it. We say, ‘Not like Before.’ But now, you and me—”
“All right we’re playing spookies. Because we’re afraid. It isn’t the government; it’s one piddling—”
“Not piddling. And they’re part of our self-government. Somehow”. He took her arm, pulled her to him. “The last analysis of the three pieces of genetic tinkering by the Founders showed in newborns two years ago a three percent incidence of failure – that’s everything: partial failure of one, two or three, total failures of all three.” He exhaled a kind of rattling sight. “Five years ago, the figure was less than one percent. Fifteen years ago, none.”
“What are you saying.?”
“I don’t know. It may mean nothing. Some people think we’re trying to become … Before.”
“That’s crazy. That’s crap! Why haven’t I ever heard of this?”
“We discussed it in Colloquium. It was public, as always. We got the same response as when we discussed the height of doorways in public buildings.”
“Like, it isn’t important?”
“We decided to gather more data, focus on it if it goes above five percent.” She pushed away from him, then said, “Why tell me this now”
“One more data bit: when we were discussing it, response came in scattered across the colony – except from Mars. Solid red, packed together, many more than from anywhere else.”
“Marsers are independent; I sure learned that while I was there. They say they’re the Old West’ They’re pioneers. So what?”
“One of that asshole’s “demagogues” was on Mars.”
“Oh, crap! You’re making a big something out of nothing!”
He looked at her, shrugged, muttered, “I hope so.” They kissed.
Five minutes later, they reached another featureless door. Their side of it needed no code but opened easily on another bland corridor that in fifteen feet offered a transparent door through which they could see a street, people movers, traffic. “Where are we?”
“Inside the dome, a hundred meters from the taxi rank. The engineers put it here so they’d have quick access to the city. Come on.”
The stepped out. At once, a mover no bigger than the front third of Nonno’s bug curved out of the traffic and stopped next to them. Ganesh said, “Does that seem like too coincidental? Like he was waiting for us?”
“They’re conditioned to seeing us – convenient for us and them. Don’t be – what’s that old word – paranoid.” She and Ganesh were in by then. The driver said, “Where to?” and it was Ganesh who responded, “Colloquium Hall, the members’ entrance.”
She frowned at him. “That’s first place they’ll be watching.”
“You’re paranoid.”
Leave a Reply