Authors: Craig Alan
One wall had been decorated with an enormous photo of the final signing of the Treaty of Jerusalem. The other was lined with computer screens crawling the most popular news channels. A retrospective from the
Nile
on political violence within the Global Union helpfully informed her that this had been the most dangerous terrorist attack since the Union Day bombings of 2137, when a pro-independent group back home had attacked the Concordia building in the capital and killed over five hundred people.
Public Affairs steered Elena past the inviting leather chairs and sat her down in front of one of the mirrors. A makeup artist approached and came perilously close to having his arm broken when he tried to apply foundation to her face. Across the room, Vijay smiled and shook his head, and Elena allowed the makeup man to continue. Public Affairs babbled in her ear all the while.
Someone was shouting two minutes. Public Affairs badgered Elena to her feet and took her to a door opposite the one she’d come in through. She stood by the edge of the stage and refused to look past the curtain. She could barely breathe, and could see herself fainting the moment she stepped into sight. There was a wave of applause from outside the room, and then Vijay was at her side, his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t want to leave. Her face was frozen.
He gave her a small kiss on her cheek, and that got her to smile.
She walked out onto the stage, and the applause grew to a roar. Elena glanced the audience and saw that it was filled with press, officers, and politicians. Last week none of them had known her name, if she was lucky, but now they were standing and cheering. The clamor was so loud that it ran together into a dull rumble that vibrated in her ears. The stage itself held more Flag Officers and Deputy Directors than Elena had seen in the flesh in her entire career.
The Director of the Global Space Agency was the only person there who looked like he wanted to be someplace else more than Elena. She shook his hand and took a seat as he walked to the podium. He began to orate, but Elena listened only to the thundering of the blood in her ears.
The speech was over before she had heard a word, and suddenly it was quiet. Everyone was looking at her. Elena stood as tall as she could get, shoulders squared, and strode to the podium. The Director, smiling through his teeth, opened a velvet-lined mahogany box, took the medal from it, and pinned a silver circle above a golden ribbon to her dark blue jacket. It was official. Elena Gonzales Estrella was a Hero of Earth.
This time she couldn’t shut the noise out.
She sat in the green room a little more than an hour later, holding her wounded right hand by the wrist. Vijay stood guard by the door to the stage in case any well wishers tried to get in a final word. Most of the men out there, and some of the women, could have fit both of her hands in one of theirs, but that hadn’t stopped them clamping down on it as if they had been dangling from the side of a cliff. Vijay had brought her a bowl of ice and a towel as the Public Affairs officers hovered excitedly and uselessly. She sank into it with a sigh, and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the room was empty. Elena sat up in her chair. Vijay and Public Affairs were gone, and she hadn’t even heard them leave. She was alone.
The door to the corridor outside opened, and a tall woman in a dark suit stepped inside. In one hand she held a wand, and the other a pad. She swept the room quickly and professionally, and ignored its occupant completely. Elena watched the stranger work from her chair, and soon she was done and out the door once more. But she left it open.
He was shorter than Elena expected. She knew that people said that about every famous person—they almost certainly said it about her—but it was true. He was broad shouldered and deep chested, and he looked big on camera, but in the flesh he was no taller than the average South African male of his generation, which was to say he was only a few centimeters taller than Elena herself.
“Don’t get up,” Jacob Erasmus said.
“Did I look like I was about to?” Elena asked the Prime Minister.
“I’m sorry. A few days ago the people around me, people I’ve known and worked with comfortably for years, even decades, developed the strange habit of standing whenever I enter the room. It makes me feel silly, so I in turn have developed the habit of launching a pre-emptive strike every time I open a door. How’s the hand?”
Erasmus pulled a chair across the floor to sit before her, and when he bent down she was left looking at the snowy expanse of his full head of hair. It was swept back from his forehead and somewhat askew, despite the complete lack of wind at Solstice. He reached for her hand, and she pulled it from the ice.
“It’s fine. You didn’t actually open that door. And ‘pre-emptive strike’ was a poor choice of words.”
“The latter two of those three statements are true. In place of the first, which is a lie and you know it, let us add to them that before I was Prime Minister Erasmus, I was Doctor Erasmus, and a simple case of politician’s hand is not beyond my abilities.”
Elena held back.
“I understand,” Erasmus said. “I’d be afraid of the pain also.”
Elena rolled her eyes and held it out, slowly. She tensed herself, unwilling to flinch in front of him. But he took her by the wrist instead, and ran a fingertip lightly along her carpus. He clucked his tongue.
“Aren’t officers allowed to wear gloves to this sort of thing?”
“No one told me I should.”
“Amateur,” Erasmus said.
“I’d have worn my spacesuit if they’d let me.”
“Oh, that would have been a sight,” he said. “I haven’t noticed a single one so far.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Are they as uncomfortable as they look?”
“You get used to it.”
“People keep telling me that,” Erasmus said, gently rubbing the flat of her hand with the pad of his index finger.
“So how’d a guy like you manage to spend two days in a spaceplane without the press noticing?”
“This is a time of, as my new Security Minister told me when we first met a week ago, ‘heightened concern.’ Which is his way of saying that I must keep my head down, lest a member of my own Space Agency lob a missile at it.”
Erasmus softly stroked her lifeline.
“No one knows I’m here. If I’m to live with this security theater of the absurd, I will at least make good use of it.”
“You don’t think there are people out there who’d like to kill you?”
“Just a few more than usual, really. I may have never served, Captain, but that wasn’t the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at my head.”
“Metaphorically.”
He didn’t answer.
“Well,” Elena said, “I’m flattered that you’d risk your imminent death to fly all the way out here and see me get a piece of metal stuck to my jacket.”
“It’s not wise to be impudent towards those who can cause you a great deal of pain,” Eramus said, massaging her bruised bones gently. “It must have felt good though. An entire roomful of your colleagues and superiors, all praising your name.”
She wouldn’t admit that.
“Not as good as winning worldwide elections, I bet.”
“It wasn’t worldwide,” Erasmus said. “And it was the first election I ever won. It’s the first time I ever stood, as a matter of fact.”
“Beginner’s luck?”
For the first time since he’d entered the room, the Prime Minister looked her in the eye and held it.
“Luck, was it?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Nor did I.” He turned back to her hand. “What a pair of happy accidents we must look.”
“Not the adjective I’d use.”
“Would you rather have been cashiered? The Director has taken quite a dislike to you, I’m afraid. It’s endearing.”
“So it was you.”
“Yes, I have been me for longer than I care to admit.”
“You called off the dogs.”
“Oh, that. Yes, I suggested that their investigatory efforts be directed elsewhere. And that the Director could do better to protect the reputation of his beloved Space Agency than to crucify its greatest heroine since Captain Muller.”
He dipped her hand back into the melted ice, and withdrew. When she pulled it out, the pain was gone.
“Ask me how I did it.”
“Heroine. Is that what they’re calling me?”
“Oh, yes. Well, mostly. The opinion is not universal. You have, for instance, been burned in effigy in Trafalgar Square. You don’t like the word ‘heroine?’”
“I was just doing my job.”
“Not many job descriptions include the phrase ‘averting world war’ among its responsibilities.”
“Yeah, that’s actually not anywhere in my job description.”
“Which is?”
“Kill outsiders.”
“A lot of outsiders on
Victory
, were there?” he asked.
“Va chingate,” Elena said.
Erasmus didn’t react, and for a moment Elena wondered if he knew what those words meant. Then he rose slowly from his chair, and made his way to the mural on the wall.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “What do you want with me?”
“Do you recall your first memories of childhood?”
Her mother and father beside a bonfire on a Pacific beach, fingers intertwined, orange light playing on young faces.
“What the fuck? No. Who does?”
“I do. I’ll never forget them. My family owned a farm in the bush west of Bloemfontein. The Storm had hurt us less there than in some other corners of the world, and my mother and father and their family and their hands did well for a time, growing wheat and raising goats behind our fences with our guns. There was an old township less than ten miles away, where the black fellows lived. My family never set foot there, and they knew better than to come anywhere near our home. We were entirely white on the farm, of course. So it was quite a shock when a man calling himself Dr. Mbeki arrived one morning and waited, completely unarmed, at the gate. He was the township’s only healer—or the only one who had actually seen the inside of a medical school, at any rate. And he had come on a mission of mercy.”
Elena could see Erasmus leaning close to the mural and turning his head from side to side, as if he were trying to look each figure in the eye. That was impossible—Tel Aviv had been destroyed only fifty years before the picture had been taken, and the winds had carried the fallout south to Jerusalem. That dead and deserted city had been as hot in 2098 as it was in 2152, and each of the Treaty’s signatories wore a bulky radiation suit and helmet.
“We knew from the radio that the black commandos were on the rampage in the east, that Pretoria and Johannesburg had been burned to the ground. But that had seemed all so far away, until they struck Bloemfontein. Mother put me to bed before everyone gathered around the radio that night, and so I didn’t hear what happened. But the next morning there was a column of black smoke rising against the sun.”
Erasmus turned away from the mural, and sat down in his chair across from hers. He steepled the long fingers that had soothed her hand.
“We still held out hope that they would pass us by. The commandos were a jumbled lot, wandering to and fro as they pleased, and as our farm was off the main highway there was a good chance that they would never see us, that they’d move on to Kimberley in the north. But Dr. Mbeki told us how wrong we were. The black townships still maintained their ties, one to another like a chain across the country, and word had been passed along. A band of dozens, hundreds, was on its way, and they would arrive within a day or two. The doctor had taken a jeep and a few liters of the township’s petrol, and driven to our farm to offer us refuge on the other side of the river. The blacks there had guns themselves, far more than we, and were prepared to burn the bridge to keep the commandos on the far bank. There were only a score of us on the farm, and defending it against determined attack was a forlorn hope. Dr. Mbeki had come to offer my father salvation.”
Erasmus was quiet for some time.
“What did your father do?” Elena asked.
“What do you think he did? He called Dr. Mbeki a kaffir and spat in his face. Then he stuck a rifle in that face and ordered him off our land. The next day my mother took me into the big house just before sunset. There was a crawlspace beneath the sitting room floor, and she took up the boards and placed me inside with a few bottles of water and some dried beef. She kissed me on the forehead and stroked my hair before closing me in. She told me to be quiet, as quiet as a little mouse, or she wouldn’t let me out for supper. She was crying. I remember that.”
Elena didn’t know if she was supposed to look away, or not. Eramus continued as if he hadn’t noticed.
“I was the youngest. My brothers and my sister were old enough to fight, but my mother wouldn’t hear of me doing the same, so she tucked me away. When my father came and pried up the boards, I assumed it was to pull me out and put a gun in my hands. And he did. But he didn’t send me out. He picked me up and laid me back in the hole. He showed me the safety and how to move it. The pistol was loaded, and there was a round in the chamber. I had only to flip that switch, and pull the trigger. The gun would do the rest. My father told me that if anyone lifted the boards without calling my name first, I was to point the gun up and out of the hole, and shoot them.”
He unclasped his hands to look at them. Elena tried to imagine a time when those fingers had been tiny.
“He put one big hand on my head, and looked at me. I don’t think he said anything else. I can’t even remember what he looked like now. But I remember how blue his eyes were. Then he put the boards back, and he was gone. I never saw him again after that long night. There were gunshots and screams, and I could see a red light through the cracks. At one point the crawlspace filled with smoke, and I was so ashamed of coughing that I cried silently afterwards, afraid that mother would leave me in there until morning, because I had broken my word to her. Then I heard the door to the sitting room bang open, and my sister Sonja, and some other voices. These were not my uncles or the hands. They were men that I didn’t know, and they were laughing. Sonja was screaming and crying, and I wondered why they were being so mean to her, to make her cry like that. She didn’t stop for hours. Then the voices left the room, and everything was quiet. And I mean everything, even the guns. I stayed in my burrow, determined to stay so silent that mother would have no choice but to come for me, and Sonja too. I stayed quiet even when something wet and nasty began to drip between the boards and onto my face.”