~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Buckman continued to watch the trial throughout the day. He had to admit, Charles was being very entertaining, and it seemed to be having an effect. Any time a judge asked him a question that would lead him in some way to incriminate himself, he would bring them back. Essentially, like the interrogations Buckman had been through, the questions all became a version of the same thing. They seemed to be filling time, because a trial of that importance was scheduled to last a certain amount of time, in this case four hours.
Buckman watched until the end. Commentary was run in a split screen, with people guessing the probable outcome. When the trial was over, the broadcast ended. The three judges would return a verdict the next day. When dinner came that evening, Buckman ate, but he kept the viewer. He wanted to be that sure the same guard who brought it got it back. The next morning, the guard brought his breakfast, and Buckman thanked him and gave the viewer back. About an hour later, they came for him for his transport back to Earth.
28
Buckman was loaded onto a rudimentary ship to take him back to Earth. To his surprise, he was not alone in the hold. There were six other people making the trip, and as everyone belted themselves in, there was an uneasy quiet amongst them. Nobody looked at anyone else, and as the ship bounced away from the Queen, everyone stared at the wall or tried to sleep. There was a guard in the hold who seemed more interested in the remote viewer he had rather than watching them. It was just as well, since all the harnesses were remotely locked into place, and none of the prisoners could have escaped if they tried.
The ride smoothed out once they had accelerated to cruising speed. The engines were powered back, and Earth’s gravity would take them the rest of the way in. Buckman eventually fell asleep, and he awoke when the first wisps of atmosphere buffeted the ship. The buffeting increased, and the ship shook and creaked until they had decelerated enough to come in for a landing. From what little Buckman could see out of the tiny window, they were coming in over a large arctic area, with no discernible civilization.
The transport landed at a windswept security station, and the prisoners were split up into different awaiting carts. Of the six prisoners brought back from the ship, one of them went with Buckman in the cart. Once they were situated, the cart moved out, and the guard was once again engrossed in the remote view pad.
“What are you in for?” his fellow prisoner asked.
“Illegal ID stick,” Buckman said.
The other man laughed. “Certainly a devastation to humanity.”
“And yourself?” Buckman asked.
“Some kind of tax problem,” he said. “I guess they think if you live all the way across the galaxy, you have to still keep up with your taxes.” The guard looked up for a moment and was about to say something, but shook his head and went back to the view pad. “Hey, I heard Bents don’t have to pay taxes.”
“Not really. Well not too much anyway. We don’t make anything and don’t have much to spend it on.” The prisoner did not react. Buckman went ahead and asked him the thought he had on his mind as soon as he stepped onto the transport. “You have any idea what reeducation means?”
The prisoner blinked a couple of times. “Don’t know. I’m sure it won’t be like college.” He looked at the guard. “Got any idea?”
The guard looked up again. “Nope.”
For the next two hours, they bumped along over the snow, ice, and rocks, not saying nothing else to each other. The cart had windows, and Buckman could not see anything other than a frozen flat landscape as far as he could see. There was still snow, though Buckman knew this was considered summer. The heating in the back of the cart was barely adequate to keep up with the cold, and all three of them were slightly hunched over to conserve heat. Buckman would have guessed it was well under -20°C outside, judging by the location. They bounced along until the road smoothed out and then ran along an enclosed tram line. During the next two hours, only one tram came by. The brief glimpse at the passengers showed they were much more comfortable than they were.
The complex began to appear far off in the distance. There was nothing else around. Buckman had never seen such desolation except out in space. The land was completely flat, with no trees, hills, river gullies, or anything from horizon to horizon. Nothing but gray skies that blended seamlessly into the gray land. The prison just started growing off in the distance at the end of the road. As they continued, Buckman reminded himself that he had made peace with the fact that he would not see the outside world for the next year. At first, he was concerned with this, but then he realized he had often spent six months away from home, working on various ships. True, he had more freedom when working a job, but he had still been severely restricted in his movements.
However, as they passed through the outer fence, he thought security looked light. The guard must have picked up on his thoughts. “You try to escape, you’ll be frozen stiff in an hour. Nothin’ for 300 kilometers either direction.”
From what Buckman could tell, the entire place looked like a collection of windowless buildings built to retain heat and hold back the cold. There were no people or vehicles around that he could tell. Despite the light-looking gate, he had the impression the guard was exaggerating only a little about what he would face if he were outside for any period of time. The prison looked to be cut off from any outside contact. Maybe he would get one visit every six months from his family, but the sense of isolation set in as soon as the gate closed behind the cart.
He would be spending the next year with people the Straights had deemed a deterrent to their controlled society. Those were the terms one of the judges said when he heard the sentence. There would be people like him and the other prisoner in the cart; people not trusted to conform to the conventions established. That was how crimes were generally described. Buckman could only imagine what they would be putting Charles in at one of the floating penitentiaries scattered around the solar system. The idea of what reeducation was began to take shape. Remove any remnant of what they were about and replace it with what the courts thought he needed. Buckman felt this would conform to what Straights saw as an efficient punishment. It would appear clean and orderly, and easy on people’s conscience.
The cart pulled into a building, and they were shown into a plain room, where they were sat down and lectured. No fighting, no complaining, and efforts to escape would be punishable, though they were reminded again that escape was not really possible. The message was clear. Be quiet, serve your time, and leave. The man giving the lecture referred to the guards and staff as organizers. Nobody was guarding anyone else; instead, they were organizing the sentences. The lecture continued for about an hour, though Buckman was not able to tell if there was anything useful communicated. No questions were allowed. The lead organizer finished talking and walked out of the room. A group of organizers then escorted the new prisoners to their cells.
Buckman’s cell appeared to be like hundreds of others he saw in the building he was in. The door was solid metal that slid into the wall. There was no lock, knob, or peephole anywhere in the surface. There was a view screen on the outer wall that showed what was inside, and as Buckman passed the various other cells, these screens all showed men sitting or lying on a bunk. He stepped into the room, and the door slid shut, leaving him in absolute silence. The walls must have had some kind of insulation, because when he tapped them, the sound did not seem to go anywhere. What he had was a tiny living space, about as wide as he was tall, and twice as long, very clean, and furnished with a bed, toilet and sink. No mirror. The walls, ceiling, and floor were stark high-gloss white. The only light was coming from a fixture embedded in the ceiling. The isolation was total and immediate. Buckman had no possessions on him other than the prison-issued clothes. He stretched out on the bed and began fully to understand what reeducation would involve.
A panic started to set in, wh
ich he was able quickly to push back. Claustrophobia was never one of his problems; it was more the thought of sitting in a tiny cell for a year, not being able to hear anything other than your own voice, or seeing anything. The lead organizer said there were three meals and three recesses a day, so he would not be locked up the full time. Buckman felt his heart rate increase, so he closed his eyes and did his best to steady his breathing and think of something calm, anything: walking through a park, swimming. After several minutes, his heart began to slow down to big, heavy beats, and he opened his eyes. Embedded in the ceiling light was the small camera. He stared at this and wondered who was, or how many were, staring back.
Buckman soon lost track of time and had no idea if he fell asleep or had been awake, but he heard a loud chunk at the door and guessed it had been unlocked. The door slid open, and he stepped into the hall to see the other prisoners out with him as well. A bell rang, and they began walking down the hall to an outside courtyard. The small area must have had some kind of heat source, maybe in the ground, which kept it habitable. The yard was small, with a few benches and couple of rubber balls. The ground was gravel that looked as though it had been recently raked. There were about thirty men in the courtyard.
He stood there a moment, when someone said, “Hey, new guy, just going to walk out and not introduce yourself?”
29
The bus ride took Parren, Celirna, and the GoodShare board to the border crossing where they had prearranged clearance. They drove down a restricted lane, passing dozens of other people on foot waiting to cross. Transports normally ran to the border from both sides but were not allowed passage. Typically, everyone had to disembark and cross on foot, except Parren had worked through diplomatic channels ahead of time to arrange from them to be driven across, much like a cargo truck would have to do. As they waited for the credentials to be approved, everyone on the bus stopped talking and looked at the long lines of people, most of them laborers either coming home or going to work.
Celirna, who had been sitting in the back with the rest of her group, then came up to the front and sat next to Parren. Since the two of them were sponsoring the trip, they needed to step off the bus for a moment to verify the documents were correct. They handed the official their identity sticks, which were scanned and returned. As they were standing in the guard shack, waiting for everything to be approved, Parren took a moment to look a few feet away at the line of people moving through.
“They are dusty,” he said.
Celirna glanced in the same direction. “They’re desperate,” she replied.
Everything was approved, and they boarded the bus and continued. An hour later, they were at the hospital being greeted by the chief surgeon, Plymer.
Parren and the GoodShare group were ushered into an unadorned conference room, where Plymer introduced the staff. He then started a presentation about the collaboration between the hospital and GoodShare, and the benefits they had seen. As he went through pictures of shiny but used donated equipment, interspersed with smiling children’s faces, Parren was reviewing the background on Plymer.
A few weeks earlier, he had asked Gryman to gather information on the people he would be visiting, particularly Plymer. With some grudging respect, Parren had to admit the man had made something of himself after a difficult start. He had been born into a Straight family but was surrendered at birth because of his Bent identity. Once he had come out of the orphanage, he worked his way through college and med school. Commendable. The rest of the staff were run of the mill above average Bents. The presentation ended, and they started on a tour.
“This is one of our labs for performing body scans,” Plymer said, opening a door into a room full of controls and screens. Inside the examination room, a man was lying on a bed as a detection arm was robotically running over his body. An image came up on the screen, and the operator intently viewed the man’s intestinal system. “This man had been claiming of abdominal pain for some weeks. With the help of the equipment, we can examine him in about an hour and provide a prognosis the next day.”
Parren moved to the side as Plymer continued to talk. There was an identification plate on the controller, and the date of manufacture was twenty years before. He knew this kind of exam could now be done in seconds with an immediate diagnosis and treatment downloaded to the person’s medical guidance procedures. “This is very old technology,” he said.
Plymer put his hands together. “Yes it is. However, with the help of GoodShare, it’s been refurbished with the latest software. Mechanical repairs were done as well. The processing time for this machine is about a fifth of what it was when first produced. It cost us a tenth of the cost of a new machine.”
“How many of these do you have here?” Parren asked.
“We have three total. The other two are in adjacent exam rooms,” Plymer said.
“I thought five were delivered to this facility,” Parren said, noticing the wear to the finish on the equipment cabinets. These electronics boxes had seen years of heavy use.
Plymer put his hands in his pockets and furrowed his brow for a moment. “Well, I certainly wish we had five here,” he said. The rest of the group laughed at the light joke. Plymer ushered them out of the room, and into a recovery area, where more of the donated equipment was being used: monitors, crash carts, computer servers with medical charts. “We still used paper up until fifteen years ago,” Plymer said. Nurses and doctors went about their business as they meandered through. The group followed Plymer as he talked and pointed out features of the hospital.
Parren began to hang back until he found himself apart from the rest of the tour. He when into a restroom for a moment and came out to find the group had moved on. Years ago, he had spent a few semesters at college in Pre-Med, thinking he wanted to enter the profession. His short exposure to medical work cured him of that desire, but he had learned enough to know his way around a hospital.
Parren thought there was a reason the tour was keeping to two floors in one building. He went down to the ground floor and walked through a passage to an adjoining building, where he came out into a hallway. Unlike the brightly painted facility he had come from, this one had poor lighting and drab brown colors. The people moving from room to room ignored him. There was an unrelenting smell of over-applied cleaner fluids. What other smell or contamination were they trying to contain?
He knew not to go into the examination rooms, but he did step into one of the recovery areas. At first, he thought he was in the wrong building. The room was big, with at least fifty men and women; some were in beds with IVs attached, while others were sitting in chairs reading magazines or books. The beds were simple metal frames, each placed within three meters from the next. A data com was attached to the bed frame. Parren glanced at a few as he walked through, knowing he was dressed well enough to pass as an interested doctor. He nodded and kindly read some of the diagnoses. Tuberculosis, Hodgkin’s, Dysentery, Influenza. He was puzzled. Though some of the illnesses he saw were serious, they had long since been easily curable with a few treatments. Rarely did anyone need hospitalization, and certainly nobody got to the state some of these people were in.
Parren quickly went to another floor, where he was able to peer through the windows of some of the labs. There he did not see any of the equipment shown earlier. Almost none of it was automated, much of it decades old or rudimentary even for a first year pre-med student. He had been away for about half an hour, so he called Celirna. “Dear, I appear to have become lost. I visited a restroom and the group had progressed out of sight.”
“Oh,” she said. “We’re in the east wing of the third floor. Same building.”
Parren turned around to catch up with them, but as he walked, he pulled up the itemized list of equipment that had been sent to this location. The model for the examiner he had seen earlier was listed, but in fact, six had been delivered. The list was long, and he was puzzl
ed. He stopped when he started looking at the quantities of some of the smaller items. There were five hundred refurbished personal monitors listed. These were standard small units assigned to each patient when they came in. Plymer said earlier that they had room for about six hundred beds, but he saw very few of the monitors being used. Parren shoved the com back into his pocket and caught up with Celirna and the rest of the tour.
30
Parren was in his private office, well buried in the mansion he and Celirna had called home all the time they were together. Even before her death, though, Celirna had long since become an occasional visitor. As was usual after a trip back, he needed a day to catch up with all his messages and make plans. The morning had been a series of meetings with his staff and review of his multitude of business investments. It was now the afternoon, and he came out to the anteroom of the office, where Morgan was seated on a large leather couch, watching a news broadcast.
“Are you surprised at the outcome?” Parren asked. The broadcast was covering the results of Charles’s trial. Unlike Buckman’s, which was over before it began, this one lasted an unheard-of eight hours. Then there was a full day to reach a verdict.
“It took an eternity for them to convict him. I don’t know what the judges were thinking.” Morgan continued to watch the reports.
Parren changed the channel to another analysis, where they were going into all aspects of the event, from Celirna’s background a Charles’s various run-ins with the law. They were talking to people who made no sense at all but offered a viewpoint nonetheless.
“Interesting,” Parren said. He recognized information Morgan had managed to leak to the media that, along with Gryman’s help, turned into all kinds of side investigations and negative information on Charles in particular and Bents in general. “Are you surprised he was given two years?”
“No. But I think he deserved more,” Morgan said. Parren eased himself into another leather chair where they both could see the screen. “The man is a hazard and a disgrace. He admitted to being in the scene where she was. Oh, I’m sorry.” Morgan said, looking back at the screen.
Parren raised his hand. “Apology not needed. That was what he had done. He was there but still claimed his innocence. Caught in the act as it were. His behavior. Totally out of control.” They watched some more scenes of Charles in the trial. Standing on his chair, pounding the floor with his hand, crying huge tears. “I think anyone watching this would understand my efforts are not in vain. These are exhibitions we will use for our benefit. He deserves everything he receives, and his behavior will paradoxically encourage even more support for continued separation.”
“The Generators were truly divine in their wisdom. Their theories prove themselves over and over again,” Morgan said.
Parren had brought a folder with him. “They were visionaries in the purest sense.” Parren placed the folder on the small table in front of them, and reflected on the history of the separation. Morgan eyed the folder but did not move. Parren turned off the sound on the broadcast. The room became silent, as he liked it best. “It’s poetic justice how she came to support our cause in such a way.”
His cause was just. Parren went deep inside his conscience for a moment. He had been doing this more of the last few years and repeatedly found an antagonism that drove his very being. If he were to bare his soul to do what he really wished, he would wipe out every Bent on the planet. He came back out of his reflection and handed Morgan the folder.
“What’s this?” Morgan asked. The only reason for paper records, especially hand written ones, was for extreme confidentiality.
“Read it. Gryman and I have tried to keep this out of the public as long as we could. By law, it has to be released ten days after the convictions are final.”
Morgan held the plain brown folder in his hands for a moment before placing it on his lap and pulling five sheets of paper out. He began to leaf through them but then stopped and went back through them again, and then another time. “I don’t understand.”
“What does it say?”
“I’m not versed in medical matters, so there must be a mistake,” Morgan said, still reading the report.
“We both know enough. There were reviewed and approved by experts in the field. What does it say?”
“Celirna was a Bent. This must be a mistake.” As if on cue, a picture of Celirna appeared on one of the screens. Parren turned the sound back up.
“‘I love spending time with these children at the schools,” she said. Shown on the screen was previous news footage of her visiting a border school she had helped set up that allowed Straight and Bent children to interact. She was standing in a doorway with her arms around two kids, on one either side. Her smile was fetching. Parren could not look away while the camera played on her face and a breeze blew her blonde hair around. “‘This is the best outcome I could have imagined from all the hard work we put into this.’“ A school administrator, a Bent educator, came over to her side as well. Parren turned the screen off all together.
“But how?” Morgan asked.
“There are people in our society who do not possess the proper belief system. If they are smart and devious enough, and have the resources, they can fool the results,” Parren said. “Celirna’s father had built a massive fortune in the mining business, exploiting the rights to explore and excavate on distant planetary bodies. She had the means to afford and maintain this charade.”
“I thought her identity was in doubt due to her condition,” Morgan said.
“They had to rely on extensive and expensive chemical examination. Only a few facilities have the capability to do this, but I insisted. Even still, if you will notice, the certainty is only up to 73%.” Morgan picked the folder up again and confirmed what Parren had said. “They are always conservative in their estimates, but I’m certain it is true.”
Morgan put the folder back on the table and stared at the empty screens. The office and anteroom were deep in Parren’s residence and only a select few had ever been allowed to visit. Only a handful of people had been given this level of trust. Morgan was one of those few. “Clearly,” Morgan began. “These people are so deviant that they will stop at nothing, even to the point of working into the highest levels of our culture.”
“I was completely fooled.” Parren stood and walked over to the bank of screens and faced them with his hands behind his back. He turned around. “If this could happen to me, imagine the consequences.”
“Bents could be throughout our government, police force, anywhere. People will understand the danger. They will understand how everything they have lived and wished for is in peril.”
“Exactly.”
“Undoubtedly, there are powerful forces at work. Bents could destroy this nation. I honestly think they are a bigger threat than any terrorist we have ever faced. They are terrorists. If left unchecked, this could drive us back to the times of endless war and killing.” Parren had books on his shelf and pulled down a collective history of the how the Generators came to be, The Rationale of Genetics. He put the book back.
“Let’s get to work,” Parren said. They went over a number of ideas that Morgan could work on and prepare for ahead of the coroner’s report release. Throughout that afternoon and into the early evening, they worked various strategies of what would be given to the public. At some point, Parren would need to perform a public address, at which time he would express shock and dismay. They drew up a list of people they could pull to their side and others whom they would be suspect. Added to the list was Celirna’s family and especially her father. Swaying public opinion required a deft and agile touch, something Morgan was capable of. Rogef would be another matter and would require further planning. Parren decided to keep that action to himself.
31
Buckman looked around and saw a group of three men sitting on a small set of bleachers. The one who called to him w
as waving him over. Buckman walked over, and as he did, the man who spoke stood up.
“Hey, new guy, what’s your name?” he asked. The man was completely bald, not a hair anywhere on his head besides his eyebrows, which, contrasting his light skin, were thick and black. As Buckman approached, the bald man ran his hand over his head, seemed to find a tiny hair, and then pulled it out.
“Buckman,” Buckman said
“Buckman, eh? I’m Durel. This is Niveo and Aveno.”
“Good to meet you,” Buckman said.
“‘Good to meet you.’ What the hell does that mean?” Durel said while searching for another hair but not finding it. He smiled. “We’re in prison, son.” They all laughed.
“Where you from?” Buckman asked.
“Does it matter? Straight, Bent, whatever. You’ll learn no one in here gives a shit what you are or where you’re from. Do your time and get out. I’m a Straight if you give a damn, and you’re a Bent.”
“Right,” Buckman said.
“See? We got that over with and it didn’t make a craps worth of difference,” Niveo said, before wandering off. Aveno followed him.
Durel watched them for a moment. “What’d they get you for? Farting in Public? Everyone knows all them Bents coming over here and farting up the place,” Durel said with a straight face. Then he broke into a cackling laugh and searched for another hair.
“No, nothing like that. Fake Stick,” Buckman said.
Durel studied Buckman’s face. “I don’t really believe that, but it don’t matter, I guess. You can tell me some other time.”
“Yourself?” Buckman asked.
Durel shifted around and leaned against the bleacher. “Well, I don’t know. I never hurt no one.”
Buckman wondered if he had over stepped some sort of prison rule. He tried to change the subject. “What’d you do for a living?”
“I never saw the point, really. Breaking your neck so someone else gets all your money, tells you who to screw. Why do that?” Durel paused again, long enough to make Buckman start to feel uncomfortable. He searched for another hair. “Actually, I was, still am, a bookie.”
“A bookie?” Buckman said. “That’s illegal.”
Durel looked back at Buckman. “Prison makes you a genius, I see. I’m in prison because I’m a bookie. Don’t Bents have bookies?”
“Sure, I mean,” Buckman started to say. Where he was from gambling was legal, and being a bookie, especially a good one, was a way to earn some real money. Many of the bookies were even Straights operating in Bent territory. However, he had no idea a Straight could go to jail for it. That was assuming Durel was telling the truth.
“Come on. Bents love to bet. They were my best customers. That’s what you fart blowers live for over there.”
“Sure we gamble. Darts, horses, animal fights. Anything.” Buckman had been to so many events where money changed hands it was just part of their life. He did seem to have much more self-control than most others he knew.
“Darts, sure. I could run a dart game like you wouldn’t believe. I could keep all the side bets in my head and run the odds. A good evening’s work would set me up for a month.” Durel’s eyes lit up when he said it.
“Darts’ my game,” Buckman said.
Durel came around in front of Buckman. “Hey listen, we don’t have Darts, but we play something like it. See them over there, that’s what they’re doing.”
Buckman looked where he was pointing and saw five men watching another one toss rocks into a grid drawn in the gravel. “What do we have to bet?”
“Anything. Buttons, food,” Durel said.
Buckman watched the game for a second. “I really don’t have anything to bet. I never really put that much on the line.”
“Aw, never mind,” Durel said. He searched for another hair. “We’ll talk later.”
“What do we do out here?” Buckman asked. As he looked around, a few were jogging around, and some were standing in one place, squinting at the bright sunlight. Others seemed to be engaged in games of some sort. Then he noticed another group simply sitting on a set of bleachers at the far end. Their heads were down, but Buckman could see bruising or maybe some other kind of damage around their foreheads. “What happened to them?”
Durel glanced up for a moment. “How long you been in your cell?”
“A few hours,”
“Find anything to do?” he asked.
“I can barely turn around in there. Nothing to read or look at.” Buckman had only a small amount of time to adjust to his surroundings.
“A person goes nuts in here. Stare at a wall for months on end, and you lose it. At least banging your head against the wall gives you a blood stain to play with.”
It was then that he noticed other injuries. There were bandaged hands and feet, not to mention bruises on heads and arms.
“These shits dig into your head. Can’t do that without some side effects. For whatever reason, a person starts to punish themselves. That’s when the drugs start. They have to keep you calm to stop you from hurting yourself. Pretty slick, if you ask me. They never lay a hand on you. You do it all yourself.”
“Impossible,” Buckman said, trying to understand how this could actually happen. The truth was right there, though, assuming what Durel said was true.
“That’s the real punishment. It’s fast. That’s how they solved prison overcrowding. Have the inmates voluntarily bash their own heads in. Forced Depravation, FD, that’s what it’s called. No sound, nothing. Drug ’em up, then the bastards put their own god-damned thoughts in your head and, well,” Durel said, as he reflexively searched for another hair.
“Come on, how can that be? Get into your thoughts and change them?” Buckman said. He was still skeptical that anyone could do such a thing without surgery.
“Because they can. Hell, I’ve been here for a month and I already forgot what pussy feels like,” Durel said, with no sign of humor. “They make you forget everything, or at least shove it all to one side.”
Durel kicked his foot on the gravel and began to wander off. “I wasn’t bald when I came in here. You want in on that game, let me know.”
Buckman watched him for a moment and then went over to the game being played. He overheard one of the players refer to the game simply as Stones. A considerable crowd had gathered, and as near as he could tell, the game was down to two players. Buckman came to the conclusion the game had fairly simple rules and had to do with tossing one stone into the grid as a marker. The lead player would toss the marker and then toss a second stone to see how close he could get. The second player would then toss a stone. Whoever was closest to the marker was the winner of that square and won the points. The furthest away squares on the grid must have been worth more points. He was starting to figure out how the points worked, when a short blast sounded, and the players began to break up. They erased the grid and spread the gravel around to make it look like nothing had occurred. The organizers brought rakes, and everyone smoothed out the gravel in the yard.
The group started to file towards the door, except a few of the men with the bruises to their heads. Two organizers came over to them and pulled out their stun sticks. The men slowly stood and wandered over to the door, staying away from the others.
32
Three days after Morgan left, the news of her examinations were released and swept its way through the media. Parren had asked Gryman to come by his office and discuss how they would deal with the expected onslaught they would be hit with and what actions they could take. Parren knew the results of the examination left many things in doubt. The two overarching points of discussion and argument were whether this really was Celirna, and whether the woman found was a Bent. The statistics made the determination difficult and fed the debate over her identity. A 73% certainty left many questions unanswered and left him with plenty of room for manipulation. That was
why he needed Gryman. Parren was fine with letting arguments rage on, and they could work on adding fuel to the fire.
When Gryman came into his office, he was the first one to fire off a question. “What happened, Parren?” Gryman asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Parren said, though he had an inkling it had to do with how he could have a relationship with a Bent woman. Gryman’s hate for Bents was well known.
“How did you get fooled? Celirna was a Bent,” Gryman said. Parren thought Gryman was the perfect lawyer: pugilistic, repugnant, mean, ugly to look at, and very smart. He had one dark eyebrow that made a severe streak across the top of deep-set eyes.
“You read the reports. 73% is not legally binding. There is plenty of room for misjudgment and mischaracterization,” Parren said.
“Nonsense,” Gryman said, wrapping his hands around his knees and leaning back in the couch. Parren had a hot cup of tea brought in for Gryman. Gryman ignored the offer and left the cup on the table beside him. “Celirna has disappeared, and a body was found in that hold. There’s a much better than average chance it was her, and that’s what people will think.”
“Do you abhor Bents?” Parren asked.
“If I could turn that entire race into groveling slaves, I would do it,” Gryman said without a moment’s thought.
Parren was not sure if Gryman knew he was the one who had initially made the request she be eliminated. He did, however, know that Gryman was the one who had planned it out or at least set the plan in motion. That was how Parren had started it. Parren funneled an anonymous request and evidence to Gryman, saying Celirna was a Bent and had worked her way into the highest levels of Straight society. One of the most dependable and complete ways to get action from a person is to access their deepest hate. Parren knew Gryman would take the irrefutable information fed to him and carry out the request. And he did, spectacularly. Parren also kept in mind that the exclusive knowledge he had of Gryman’s involvement gave him a powerful advantage. But that was for a later time, if he needed it.
“As do I. I detest them as well,” Parren said, walking over to the window face the lake. His lake. “However, I can’t really describe it. The allure. It was blinding.”
Gryman cleared his throat. “It’s one of their most insidious traits. I’ve seen the damage they can do. This, this, physical tendency is one of their most powerful weapons. Can you imagine the danger? It will eat away at everything the Generators had so carefully planned.”
“See how it worked on me, of all people,” Parren said, turning back around. “I don’t know if there is some kind of organized effort to use this advantage, but this incident could clearly give them ideas.”
Gryman seemed lost in thought at the last comment. “It’s doubtful they have the structure and intelligence to accomplish an orchestrated subversion, but the implications are clear. I’m sure there are others who have worked their way into positions of influence.”
Parren sat down at his desk. He pulled open a drawer where he kept a picture of her. He pulled it out and set it on his desk. The image was taken during a happenstance moment about eight years ago at a party they were attending. Her smile was illuminating. “You have to admit, she was stunning.”
Parren looked over at Gryman and saw the unruly eyebrows close together a degree. The man was struggling with his honesty because Parren knew what he said was the truth. He needed to hear him agree, though. “It was apparent to all who met her. She used this to her full advantage, which is admirable in a way.” Gryman drank about half of the plain hot tea in one gulp. “Clearly, you miss her. You still have feelings you need to deal with.”
He took a deep breath and put the picture back in the drawer. “It’s a private matter. Very private. But yes. One cannot lose a spouse and be left without feelings of displacement. Even if she did manage to deceive me. You’re married, correct?”
“Yes. We both faithfully followed the process and have seen the expected results,” Gryman said.
Parren knew what that meant. He toyed with a pen on his desk. One of the few he had, which he used to make handwritten notes rather than use a view pad. The solitude and secrecy of writing on paper had a strange fascination for him. “Gryman, you may not understand the passion involved with our relationship.” He suddenly felt he had said too much.
“Personally, that aspect of life holds little interest to me. It gets in the way of clear thought processes and occupies time that is better spent elsewhere. However, if I may advance the subject, your affection for her is admirable. Your confusion of the relationship and her manner of coercion will fuel the debate. I would advise you not to make this a secret.”
“Why is that?” Parren asked.
“That is the reason this kind of problem is so dangerous. That is the message. You yourself know how disruptive base human emotions can be.” Gryman finished the last of the tea in another audible gulp.
Parren doubted if the man even tasted what went through his mouth. That tea was very expensive and rare, being a blend of leaves from disparate parts of the world. “Obviously,” he said. “Let’s get to work. We need to decide how we present our belief this was actually her.” With that, he set aside any emotion he had for her and began to describe the plan he had laid out for how to deal with this.
“I disagree with part of that,” Gryman said. “We have to stay with the science, the data. Anything else is assumption unsupported by the facts. There is doubt supported by the mathematics, but we use that doubt to keep this question alive.”
Parren saw the advantage in this approach but had his reservations. “I don’t like the uncertainty. I’ve never been one for partial measures, so being indecisive on such a grave matter will be seen as a departure from my normal reaction.”
“But listen to what I am saying. We can work this both ways. Let’s be blunt here. She took advantage of you. If she had been caught, she could have been stripped of all standing and any of her wealth, possibly incarcerated. It is that serious of a matter. If you believe it was her, and I think you do, that plays into everything you want to achieve. However, the danger is that you could be seen as complicit in her deception.”
Parren saw where he was going and appreciated the idea. “But other people can keep the doubt alive and keep the matter in the news for months, if not years.” This way he would not be presenting a false face to the public. The conflict would be there, them being married, but being tricked. Her being a member of a prominent family. “How does her family play into this? Her father will be pulled in and we have always had an adversarial relationship.”
“Rogef will undoubtedly defend himself. His greatest asset and liability is his pride,” Gryman said. He pulled out a data pad and came to a short biography of Rogef. He linked it to one of the view screens in the office, and pointed out some facts. “Look, he built a tremendous business but has repeatedly been sued, and lost, for his trade practices, property violations, labor abuses, an endless list. There is a constant disregard for anything that restricts what he wants. His entire life is about him, and his ego will not allow him to abide by common laws.”
“So the question is if he was aware of her genetic status,” Parren said, though he knew the answer.
“Of course he was. She would have been tested two weeks after her birth by law. But that gave him time to fix things if he needed to.”
Parren never liked Rogef, but had to admit that was partly due to trepidation of what he was capable of. He had anticipated this, but would have to work his way through to be sure Rogef was taken care of.
33
After the first few weeks, Buckman fully understood how the reeducation worked. Their lives became a strict routine. Every day the men were awakened at the same time and taken to the cafeteria. They had exactly fifteen minutes to eat, so very little conversation took place. Then it was outside for an hour and back to the cell for the morn
ing. Lunch and dinner were essentially the same routine. The meals were always an unidentifiable meat with vegetable and bread. Once a week, they showered. There was no contact with the outside world. Buckman began to play some of the sports the prisoners made up, just so he would get some activity. They might kick one of the balls around, or play a game where teams tried to move the ball from side to side with passes.
Buckman noticed the prisoners had found ways to communicate that the organizers either did not notice or chose to ignore. If someone won a game or bet, the two sat the same table and the loser had to give up his desert to the other man. This was one of the few things they had to trade. Durel made sure to tell him this was a serious matter, and if the loser failed to pay up, physical consequences could happen. At one point, this did happen, and two inmates began to get into a scuffle. One of the organizers hit them both with a jolt from their stun sticks, and the fight ended quickly.
Still, despite any sense of social activity, going back to his cell was getting harder every time. He did his best to explore every millimeter of the tiny cell. The only furniture was a mattress on a concrete slab built out of the wall. The mattress had one blanket and one sheet. There was a toilet with toilet paper and a small sink with a small bar of soap and a towel. The walls were some kind of smooth, poured concrete painted glossy white. A single overhead light was set in flush with the ceiling. It took a methodical search, but he finally found the camera in the ceiling, which was only evidenced by a tiny pinhole in the corner. He had stepped off the size of the room by placing his heel to his toe and walking the width and length. One direction was twelve foot-lengths and the other was seven. The only sound in the room was a quiet hiss of air coming through the ventilation ducts. The walls carried no sound. As near as he could tell from the inmates, they were in a center area of the compound.
Buckman learned and was told that the inmates tended to not gather in large groups. A few times, when he saw a group of more than three or four, an organizer would come over and break it up. As a result, there was not much interaction between them. Even Durel started to become quieter and more reclusive in the yard. He could see the changes as the weeks went by. The newer arrivals were chatty and communicative. As time passed, they became quieter and started to show strange tics and movements, and they avoided eye contact. Buckman knew he would try to resist this, but realized it was inevitable.
As a way to cope, he decided to try his best to keep his memories alive. Every day, he made it a point to mentally run through the faces of his family and try to recall every detail of their lives, what they look liked, how they sounded, anything. He did not move on to the next person until their face was clear in his mind. Eventually, this would lead him back to his parents.
For the first few years of his life, he was not sure who his real father was. His mother would be visited by numerous men from time to time, and he slowly began to figure out these were the various fathers of his various brothers and sisters. When he was around nine or ten, the man who was his father became clear. He was in and out of Buckman’s life over the next few years, but eventually he faded away and never came back once his mother became sick and died.
Buckman did his best to remember what his father looked like, but there was not much detail for him to grasp. Somewhat tall and blond, like himself, but not much on his personality or habits. His mother was clear in his mind because she spent the most time in his life. Her life had been, like many people’s lives, an almost nomadic existence that was limited to their general region. It seemed every few months she would take a new mate and move Buckman and his siblings a few miles down the road, maybe returning a few months later. He was young when she died, twelve. Day after day, he would come into her room, and she would reach a tired hand over and pat him on the arm. Whatever disease she had and the resulting treatment for it caused her hair to become coarse and her skin to be continually dry. Relatives were always present to sit with her. There were occasional visits from a Doctor. A supposed specialist came by one time, a Straight Doctor who worked across the border. All Buckman could remember from the conversations was a mention of lymphoma. Finally, one day, he came into her room, and the hand did not come up to his arm. A few hours later, she died. Buckman did his best to remember her freckles and bright blue eyes, and how much he wished he could see them again that day she died. He left the room before they came to take her away for cremation. That part of his childhood became a series of showing up on a relative’s doorstep, helping around the home, and having meals and place to sleep for a few weeks. Then it was on to the next relative. He lived with various aunts and uncles until he was in his late teens, but did not see this in any way unusual from others his own age.
Buckman thought through these images and sensations every day, bringing up remembrances of places he had seen and people he had known. It was surprising, the detail he could remember. About five weeks after being locked in, he had become accustomed to the routine, but he was feeling the anxiety he had seen with some of the other inmates. In his cell he had begun to pace back and forth; his conversations in the yard with other inmates had become short and uncomfortable. He began using the tiny bar of soap to draw pictures on the walls. The images were difficult to see unless he angled his head just right to catch the glare off the lights. In a way, the drawings became a kind of secret he thought only he knew about, since only he could see it.
As if on cue to his growing anxiety, he was approached by one of the lead organizers, Ollie, during a Stones game in the yard. “Follow me,” Ollie said, leading Buckman towards a door.
Buckman stopped. He heard Durel yell from the other side. “Hey Ollie, you gonna suck his brains out?” The men around him laughed.
Ollie said, “We need to run some tests.”
“They’ll take your Bent brain out and give you a nice shiny Straight one,” Durel said.
“Really, what do you need me for?” Buckman asked.
Ollie put his hand on the stun stick attached to his belt. “You’re in no position to ask. But we need to run some mental tests, nothing more.”
Buckman knew he had no other choice but to follow him, and if he were to admit it, a small part of him wanted a break from the monotony. Ollie began walking towards the door again, and this time Buckman followed him.
They stepped into a hallway he had never seen before, though it looked similar to any of the others he had been down. “How long have you worked here?” Buckman asked.
“Long enough. Pays the bills. Keeps the wife and kids happy.” Since Ollie worked the yard during their daytime release, all of the inmates knew who he was. There was nothing else known about him, except he did what he did and knew how to use a stun stick.
“Pay the bills, feed the family. Sounds like my job,” Buckman said.
“That’s the way it is. Not real surprising, is it?” Ollie said. This was the first time Buckman had been this close to Ollie. He looked older and was probably close to retirement. Like Terrial months ago on the train, Buckman guessed, well knew, that this was the only job he had held in all his adult years. No chance for advancement. From the start he had been locked into place, virtually guaranteed a profession for the rest of his life. “You worked on some kind of salvage ship?”
“I fixed ships toilets and plumbing,” Buckman said.
“Sounds like a Bent job,” Ollie said, with no hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Got you off the planet, though.”
“It did, though I never left low orbit.” They turned down yet another hallway that still looked like all the others. If Buckman had to find his way out, he would be hopelessly turned around. The cold and snow on the outside were never visible nor felt, as there were no windows down any of the halls.
“My wife wants to travel. She wants me to leave here and spend more time with her,” Ollie said.
“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” Buckman said.
“Maybe.
One more year and I’ll be eligible. Here.” They had finally come to a door that was identified by nothing other than “12,” logically located between doors 11 and 13. Ollie opened the door and escorted Buckman into a small room, before locking the door behind him.
There was a stool in the room, and, assuming this was for him, he sat down. One of the walls was glass, and within a few seconds of sitting, a light came on from the other side. A man and woman walked into the room.
“Buckman Carter?” the woman asked.
“Yes. Can I ask what you’re going to do?” Buckman asked.
“You’ll know in a few minutes,” the woman said. “You’ll see a screen projected onto the glass.”
A rectangle appeared in front of his face on the glass with a series of questions inside. “Let me guess. You need me to fill these in.”
“When we ask you to,” the man said. “First, you need to stand and face the back wall.”
“What?” Buckman said.
“Comply, please,” the woman said.
Buckman sighed and did as he was told. “What are you trying to do, train me to take orders? I can stand here all day, I guess.”
“When you turn around, you are to start the test. There is a time limit for each page, which will be displayed in the upper left corner.”
“If I pass, do I get to go home early?” Buckman said.
“No. However, if you do well and cooperate, you will be afforded restricted use of a view screen,” the man said. “Turn around and begin.”
At first, the test was almost insultingly easy: How many eyes do you have? Draw a circle with your finger. As the pages flipped by and the minutes passed, the questions started to come quicker, but he was able to keep up. They gave him a short break, and then he started again. This time they became harder, and the time in the corner became shorter. Finally, he could only get to a few questions per page before it flipped to the next one. “Come on. What’re you doing? I can barely read this.” Just as he would begin reading the second or third question, the page would change. He became frustrated with trying to keep up. The pages stopped and the glass went blank.
“That portion is complete. Please sit very still and stare at the red spot in the back room through the glass.”
“Is there another test to follow, or do you have other things to do?” Buckman said.
“Quiet please. Continue to stare.”
As he stared at the light, it started to change in intensity until it finally disappeared. It suddenly flared to a painfully bright spot. “Ah!” he yelled, turning away, temporarily blinded. “What was that for?” Buckman blinked and thought he had totally lost his eyesight. Stars started shooting across his vision, and a sharp pain lodged into the back of his head. He breathed hard, bent over on the stool, and covered his eyes with his hand. A few seconds later he heard the door open behind him and pair of hands lift him up from the stool.
“What the?” he mumbled. He knew this was Ollie helping him back through the halls, but a wave of dizziness and lack of sight kept him from really paying attention to where they were going. “This happen to everyone?”
“Only a few,” Ollie said. “Each treatment is tailored to each person.”
Buckman stumbled back to his cell, and for the first time, he looked forward to being able to lie down and being quiet for a while. His vision had come back, but it was still painful to be in the stark white cell. If it had not been for that final light, whatever it contained, he was fine with what they did. The test was annoying but not much more than that, but he knew enough to understand that the real object of what happened was in the light. This was the mental reconditioning, reeducation, whatever they liked to call it. This was where it really started. The daily regimen was only a method of getting him prepared. With some effort, he began his mental exercise, though the overhead light kept aggravating him. After what seemed to be several hours, the light dimmed, and he was able to settle down. His mental faculties were exhausted, and he fell into a nervous, dreamless sleep.
34
Rogef had told Parren that he intended to make Celirna’s memorial service a private affair on the family estate. The results from the lab tests regarding the identity of the body made this into a much debated event. However, Parren knew when the results came in that it was she. With that knowledge, he agreed with Rogef to have the memorial service before matters got out of hand.
The memorial service was to be a quiet affair, much as Parren had wanted it. He originally wanted the service held at his estate, but Rogef objected. In retrospect, Parren was comfortable with the decision and had only objected out of a sense of how it would look for her memorial not to be on his property. Considering the circumstances of her heredity, he knew his ancestors would agree.
The grounds of the estate fit a man of Rogef’s stature. Large, manicured rock gardens were spread around the area. There was a small lake (smaller than Parren’s), a wooded area, and formal gardens. This was in addition to the massive stone house. Parren had to admit, though he held a deep disrespect for the man, the home was breathtaking. When the transport came in to land, Parren tried to remember the last time he had stayed there. It was difficult, but he seemed to remember it was at least five years ago. One of her cousins was getting married, and the entire family had shown up. That was around when they had started to drift apart permanently, so his time with her became sporadic and unmemorable. Since then, he had made plenty of reasons not to visit.
The service was short. A simple ring of flowers was placed on a headstone, though there was no body to put into the ground. Since official identification had never been established, her remains could not be released. The reports still had her missing. Rogef had chosen the ring of flowers himself; a collection of different colored roses, with the thorns still intact. Most of the non-family members left right afterwards, while everyone else stayed for lunch. Afterwards, people were invited to wander the grounds at their leisure, which Parren was glad to do, hoping to be alone with his thoughts. This also gave him the opportunity to stay long enough to make this look appropriate.
Parren walked to the opposite side of the lake to a spot that was hidden away in a small cove. The house from this vantage was not visible, and not too many people would wander into that area. There was a stone bench where Celirna had led him to many years ago as they were going through their marriage reviews.
“This is my favorite spot. I played here often as a child,” she had said when they sat down.
“It is quite beautiful,” Parren had replied. The woods were very thick and in many places ran all the way down to the water. If anything, the woods were now more tangled and impenetrable than when they had sat there so many years ago. There were many places for a youngster to hide and play. Ravines, trees, scrub. They kissed, not for the first time, but this was the moment he knew they would pass their reviews and be married. Her parents then welcomed him in, as he came from an established family.
“We used to play games here, my cousins and I,” she said
“Were you often in trouble?” he asked. Stories had come out in the reviews. Celirna had shown little fear of confrontation and there were many conflicts, some questionable, she had become involved in. She was a complete opposite from him in this regard, but he had found this refreshing and surprisingly exciting. Passion was a quality he had never had in abundance.
She laughed at the question. Parren had forgotten that laugh, as he had not heard it in a number of years. A full laugh, deeper than one would expect from her. “I was always in trouble. I played tricks on the servants, rolled in the mud, climbed trees. We built a raft over there once. We made it to the center of the lake before it fell apart. Neither of us could swim very well, so we hung on and yelled for help. Daddy was very upset. It was just lucky one of us didn’t drown.”
She sat on the bench, her hands on the stone seat as if she were going to jump up at any mome
nt. When they first met, her hands fascinated him. Despite her feminine demeanor, her hands had rough areas and a few scrapes on them. At that time, she still liked to play games, climb, and hike. Parren had been hesitant about this and wondered if he could keep up with her in such endeavors. His life to that point and since had been one of intense study, without an excess of physical activity. They stayed there for an hour or more, he could not entirely remember.
A duck splashed down in the lake not far from him and brought him back to the present. A shuffling sound started to come down the path, and he turned to see Rogef coming towards him.
“Sir, you really shouldn’t be walking these paths,” Parren said.
“Nonsense. I own the place. Doctors can’t tell me where to go. I can’t climb down into a mine with an air tank on my back, but I can walk a dirt path.” Rogef settled onto the bench beside Parren. He did his best to catch his breath, but clearly the walk had been an effort for him.
They sat there for several moments. Parren knew that Rogef had followed him out there. Possibly Rogef knew Parren would walk over to this spot. He had a suspicion he had played into Rogef’s plan to get him alone for a few moments. “Celirna said this was one of her favorite places,” Parren said.
“She always thought she could hide out here, but I knew where she was. She was a handful. Turned into a real force, though. Made me proud.” Rogef had a walking stick he carried around with him these days. He had it carved out of a hickory branch he found many years before.
“That was she,” Parren said.
“We need to talk about the news that was released,” Rogef said, turning his old, smart, steady eyes toward Parren.
“The data is unclear. If it’s true, I’m totally taken aback,” Parren said. “I had no idea.”
“Let’s be honest for once. We’re grown men with strong opinions and influence. Despite what the scientists say about this percentage or that percentage, we both know she was a Bent. Wouldn’t you agree?” Rogef said. The eyes still had not softened.
“The data is the data, we can’t refute the level of doubt,” Parren said, though he knew this would irk Rogef.
“Bah!” Rogef said, his voice echoing. “We both know.”
“We both know what?” Parren asked.
“We both know what would have happened if she had been discovered at birth,” Rogef said.
Parren could recite a long list of implications, not to mention the illegalities. He decided to play it safe. “It would raise difficulties.”
Rogef stamped the walking stick into the ground. “Difficulties? What does that mean? She was my daughter, my only child. What choice did we have?”
“This was your choice?” Parren said.
“Of course it was. Don’t be silly. I know you’re smarter than that. We could not take the chance when she was born. The tests started when her mother was pregnant. We knew what was coming.” A pair of ducks landed in the lake not far from the shore. Rogef watched them paddle about.
Rogef had broken one of the central tenets that had existed for generations. The taking of Bents out of society had to be followed lest they fall back to the previous warring times. “You realized the gravity of what you were doing?”
“Gravity? At the time, that’s what I thought. I thought once she started to mature, I could find a way to change her, I guess. Make her a Straight. Masking is terribly difficult and expensive. It requires a custom formulation for each individual, changed as they mature. But I’m sure you know that.” Rogef adjusted where he was sitting on the bench.
“But how?” Parren asked.
“There is no how, only why. I could not risk losing my only child. I believed everything about the tenets. I lived by them every day. I studied the history in school. When she was born, I sought out ways to change her. At that time, I thought my sheer force of will could make her anything I wanted her to be. But as she grew, I changed my view. There was no denying her true nature. There was also no denying the astuteness and charisma. Doubts crept in about what this, I don’t know, this false structure, misguided belief system, we’ve put into place. For years, I was willing to harbor a faith in the logic and find some way of rationalizing it away.”
Parren was amazed that a man as influential as Rogef would even admit such things. “What finally changed you?”
“She matured. She took me to one of the border schools. One where children of Straight parents are brought into Bent society. I realized as soon I stepped in, the barbaric measures we have allowed ourselves to develop.”
“Barbaric?” Parren could not believe what he had heard. “The Generators knew what had to be done. My great-grandfather led the first set of edicts, with the science to support it. They had to do it. The fighting had raged on for years. There was no other choice.”
“At the time, yes,” Rogef said, a bare hint of a smile coming across his face. “They achieved a purpose, but now, look at the cost. Times change, and we can’t tie ourselves to outdated laws and motives.”
“You, sir, have been a major benefactor of the order they created.” Debating the basic framework of the way the lived was one of the few things that Parren was passionate about. Within a couple of decades of the agreements, there was such a flourish of technology and standard of living that these men were immortalized. “Can you imagine if Bents still had the freedom to live among us?”
Rogef’s small smile returned. “Bents like Celirna?”
Parren realized he had been drawn into an argument. “She was the exception.”
“Bah!” Rogef said as he did before only quieter. “Think about it. All DNA does is indicate a tendency. There are other ways to nurture behavior. What we’ve done is allow our predictions of tendencies to prove themselves. We set it up that way.”
“No, what we have is right. It is just,” Parren said, hoping the old man would topple off the bench and onto the ground so he could leave him there.
“Look, I’m as much a part of the problem as anyone.”
“Problem?”
“Let me put it this way. You and people like you are highly regarded. This has let you come to think of yourselves as privileged. Chosen. To be direct, you think of yourself as a deity.”
“Of course I’m special. Look at the order I belong to. This is not an accident, it is the result of careful planning set forth by the wisdom of the Generators,” Parren insisted. All his life he knew intellectually he had towered over nearly everyone he met. Subjects that others struggled with came easily to him. How could that have happened purely through happenstance?
Rogef stood from the bench. “Parren, I’ve come to realize there are no gods, and you certainly are not one. If we remain fixated with upholding outdated notions, we are doomed to destroy ourselves. All you’ve managed to do is replace the religion of the past with the religion of the new. The same old problems are still there.” He started to walk away. “I need to look into what happened to her a little more.”
“What?” Parren asked, still trying to deal with much of the discussion.
Rogef stopped his slow walk and turned towards Parren. “I don’t know why, but what happened doesn’t make total sense.”
Parren looked out over the lake. Rogef’s smart eyes became hard and set, but Parren said, “The matter is settled. The guilty are serving time. I don’t think I could stand to have this drawn out any longer.”
Rogef set the walking stick on the ground and turned away. “You might be right. Then again, you might not.”
The shuffling sound of the old man faded away as he walked into the woods. Parren stayed on the bench for some time, thinking about what to do next with what he just heard. His choices were limited. Rogef was of an age and stature that he could say whatever he wanted and people could not touch him. Legalities would take years to work out, and there was no telling if Rogef would even live that long. Parren knew he was not welcome t
here any longer and could never return. Within an hour, he was on his transport, lifting off from the grounds. He left a short note saying he had an emergency he needed to resolve.
35
Twice a week, they took Buckman to the same room and performed the same tests. He knew the routine and could almost predict when Ollie would approach him in the yard. A few times he resisted, and Ollie called over another organizer who approached with the stunner ready. They took him to the room, where he now knew to turn away from the glass wall until told to turn around. He punched in the numbers and tried to get through the questions. The only change was that if he did better, he did not get the light. If his score was worse, they gave him the light. If he tried to resist, two organizers would come in and stun him in the back of the neck so he could not close his eyes even if he tried. Either way, he was going to suffer a blinding headache for a few hours to follow. He almost looked forward to getting back to his cell and closing his eyes.
Buckman was sitting against the wall in the yard. He had his head down, trying to avoid looking into the unusually strong sunlight that morning. The storms had stopped, and the light was blinding, made all the worse by the treatment he had the day before. A ball hit him in the side and knocked his elbow off his knee.
“Hey, some help here,” someone said.
It took a moment, but he slowly righted himself and brushed some dirt off his coveralls. “What?” he managed to say. There was a group of three or four men standing on the other side of the yard, looking at him.
“Toss it back,” one of the men said. Buckman was not sure, but he guessed the man was one of the new inmates. The newer ones still had a tendency to chat and interact more.
“Toss what?” Buckman said. Buckman kept squinting and trying to figure out what they were talking about.
“The ball, you Malovian worm.” The man came over and bent down close to Buckman. “What’s wrong with you? All of you. Can’t you hear?”
“I can hear,” Buckman said.
The man pushed him over and started kicking him in the side. Within moments, others came over and pulled him off and held him back. They started talking excitedly for about a minute. He heard the words, “only two months,” and “brain test,” mixed in with the conversation. They pointed to others around the yard like Buckman, the ones in a stupor or with self-inflicted bruises. The man who delivered the kick glanced around from person to person, and like Buckman two months or so, before seemed to conclude that they were to be left alone. He picked the ball up and rejoined the group on the other side of the yard. The small circle re-formed, and they began kicking the ball back and forth again. Between kicks, Buckman saw the man could not stop looking at those who were debilitated. Buckman went back to putting his head between his knees. A few minutes later, Ollie came to take Buckman back for his tests. Once in the room, he stood as always, facing away from the glass.
“We have a change in the test today,” the woman said. He was not sure, but he thought this was a different attendee from the one he had heard before. Buckman did not really care, but when he heard a familiar voice behind him, he turned back around.
Marie’s image was on the glass. The image was clearly recorded, but he could not remember ever seeing anything so wonderful in his life. His mouth hung open in amazement, and he looked at her image. Every detail of her came back. The way her wild red hair framed her face and her green eyes. The freckles across her eyebrows. The thin nose and how that one wrinkle came out when she was really upset. She looked drawn, tired, though. The image must have been taken since he left home. Without shame, tears rolled down his cheeks. He wanted to touch and be touched so badly, his hands trembled.
“Would you like us to play the message?” the attendant asked.
Buckman shook his head. “Yes, of course.”
The image blinked a moment and then started. “Bucky, they gave me a few minutes to record a message for you. I hope you are doing well, and we miss you terribly. I’ve been able to hold the family together and have made repeated attempts to see you, but they won’t let me leave Eastern. Your brother is having some problems, well, I don’t want you to worry about that. Your aunt comes by often and asks if we have heard anything. I don’t want you to be concerned with us, just take care of yourself and get out as soon as you can. I talked to Charles’s family, and they are having the same problems as me. His case was all over the news. I’m not sure where he is or how he’s doing. But—oh.” She stopped and looked down and pushed her hair back. “I only have a few moments.” The image stopped.
“We need to run through the test,” the attendee said.
“Can’t I see the rest?” Buckman asked, still mesmerized by her image on the glass. Her face disappeared, to be replaced by the rectangle.
“After the test. Turn around.” Buckman tried to imagine her face inside the rectangle, but as instructed, he turned around until told to take the test. The test started and he ran through is as he had been doing for the past couple of months.
When he finished the last questions he asked, “Can I see the rest of the message?”
The test rectangle went away and Marie’s face came back. “We miss you and love you, and want you to come home as soon as you can. I talked to Reg, I think is his name, and he is fine.” She stopped again and looked to the side of the camera. The small wrinkle came across her nose for a second. “He said he’s doing fine and found someone interesting to talk to. We had to move out of our home; the rent was getting to be too much. I moved everyone a few kilometers away. It’s not as nice, but I was able to keep everyone together. My sister found a job, so that’s helped. I really think—” The recording stopped. Her face was still for a few seconds until Buckman realized she was no longer talking. The image faded away and Buckman found himself looking at the red spot on the back wall. His thoughts were still on her when they hit him with the light.
He slapped his hands over his eyes and the front of his face. “What are you doing to me? I can’t take this! The light!” This had always been painful before, but this time he fell off the stool and curled up on the floor. He tried to breathe in a regular rhythm, but he could only do so through clenched teeth. Spittle rolled out of his mouth as he lay there, waiting for the red splotches in his eyesight to go away and for the room to stop spinning.
After a few minutes, the door opened and a hand pulled him off the floor. Ollie gently guided out of the room and into the hall. “We can walk slow.”
They stopped and Buckman had to sit on the floor with his back against the wall. “It always like this? For everyone?” He asked.
Ollie knelt down and looked closely at Buckman. He had one knee on the floor, and his hands were resting in the other. Not quite sitting with Buckman, but not standing over him either. “Yes, seen it time and again. You have to let yourself recover. Don’t push it. The harder you resist or act like you’re tough, the more it hurts. That’s how it works.”
Buckman stood back up, and they continued down the hall until they reached a bench conveniently placed in the middle of nowhere, right where he needed to sit down. “Understand.”
They made several more stops on their way back to his cell. “Take your time. Don’t be ashamed. This happens to everyone,” Ollie said. “Here’s the best thing. Get plenty of rest, drink water, and eat whatever they give you. Walk around on your time outside, no matter how much you don’t want to.”
Buckman nodded as Ollie helped him onto the bunk. Buckman fell back and curled up on the corner of the mattress. The door closed, and the ringing in his ears started to subside.
36
His recovery from the tests was now taking several days. During that time, when he was in the yard, he would wander around in a kind of stupor, not wanting to engage in any conversation or even raise his face towards the sun. Being outside was only a minor escape from his cell. Once he was locked up in the cell,
the headache did not allow him to sleep, except fitfully, for a day or two, until exhaustion took over.
This went on until, one evening after coming back from dinner, Buckman looked at the calendar he had been drawing on the wall with the soap and saw he had been getting treatments for about twenty days. His body had gotten soft and restless from all the hours of nothing to do. That evening, he began his nightly mental exercise of trying to pick out a time in his life and remember every detail he could pull up. He thought of his mother preparing dinner for a family wedding, but he was having a difficult time remembering what she looked or sounded like.
He stretched out on the bunk and tried to run through the exercise again. Sometimes faces would come up, and sometimes names. He was not able to mentally match them up. There were events that he could remember and people involved, but he could not put it all together. There was something there. A person. A funny, annoying man he had spent considerable time with. Buckman turned on his side, took the bar of soap off of the sink basin, and began tossing it into the air above his head as he lay back on the bunk. The bar flipped and spun as it went up and down. He was able to control the motions with small adjustments with how he threw it. Flipping and turning, flipping and turning. He tossed the bar until it hit the ceiling light and fell onto his stomach. How the hell could he have forgotten? It was Jack. How could anybody forget Jack?
He threw the bar of soap at the wall, where it hit with a splat and fell to the floor. They had made him forget Jack, of all people. The camera was watching his every move. Over the past few days, he realized that those kinds of memories were getting harder to bring back up. His daily mental exercise had become frustrating and tiring. They had even made thinking difficult. Buckman looked at the ceiling and picked out the tiny hole where the camera was. He began to pick absently at a hangnail on his thumb. The air was always dry, and his skin had become flaky. He pulled the skin back a little. They, them, the people behind the camera had made him forget. The face of his mother was on the verge of slipping out of his memory. The day before, he had trouble remembering his home address and com identification. Buckman continued to pull the skin and failed to realize his thumb had started to bleed freely. His home, the street, the neighbors, all these faces with no names popped up in his thoughts. All these people he could not figure out, but he knew they were familiar.
“Jack,” he said.
“What?”
Buckman stopped picking at his thumb. What was that voice?
“Where are you?” he asked.
“It’s Jack. You know me. C’mon, let’s toss some darts, I need the money.”
Buckman looked at his thumb and saw blood was pouring down his hand from the loose strip of skin. Blood was on his arm and pants. He took his slipper off and threw it at the camera. The flimsy rubber object just bounced off. Getting to his feet, he stood on the bed and looked at the camera.
“You watch me when I sleep,” he said quietly.
Then a little louder. “You watch me when I sleep and when I eat.”
His breathing began to pick up. He thought the pin-hole for the camera began to light up.
He started yelling. “You watch me when I sleep, when I shit. You watch me when I jack off! You watch me when I piss every morning!” Buckman was yelling so hard he started to step forward until he stepped off the bunk, twisting his ankle. He did not notice.
“You watch me!” He started pounding on the wall with his bloody hand leaving red splatters every time his fist hit. A bone moved in his wrist, but he continued to hit the wall, barely noticing the pain.
“Jack! Jack!” He starting hitting the wall with both hands. The lights went out, and he slumped down on the bunk holding his aching wrist. The lights had never been completely turned out and the small cell was completely dark except for a thin sliver from beneath the door. The wrist was now excruciating and slippery with blood. A moment later he saw shadows of feet in the sliver of light just before the door flew open. Two men rushed in through the blinding light of the hallway and stunned him. The pain only lasted a moment before he was unconscious.
Buckman woke up and found himself strapped down to a cold metal table in a room he had not been in before. His wrist was in a cast of some sort and hurt every time he tried to move it around. The images and sounds in the room slowly started to come back into focus, and he became aware of other people in the room.
“Where am I?” he tried to say. His voice came out in a series of short grunts.
“Where am I?” he asked again. This time he realized there was something in his mouth. Something rubbery. With a jerk of his head, he tried to spit it out but only succeeded in getting saliva on the side of his face. Whatever it was had a strap running around the back of his head, holding it in place.
A man in a white coat came over and shone a light on and off in his eyes several times. “He’s coming back. You didn’t have to hit him so hard. He was out for two hours.” Buckman was not sure who was talking, but there was obvious disapproval in the man’s voice.
“He was giving us problems,” an answer came from the other side.
“Hm. I’ve heard that too many times. We wasted all this time waiting to proceed. I have other things to do besides sit around for him to wake up. Go on, get out of here.” A door opened and closed.
“What are you going to do?” Buckman tried to ask. Apparently the man was used to talking to people with rubber mouthpieces in, because he seemed to understand the question.
“We’re going to continue with your treatment. To answer your first question, you’re in the realignment center. You’ve arrived at a critical juncture in your reeducation. This is why you are here.” Another person moved around from behind him; a short stocky woman holding a pair of metal paddles with wires leading off. The man who was talking smiled back at Buckman. “This is when the true improvements begin. Everything up to this point was preparation.”
“How do you know what I’m saying?”
“I do this ten times a day. I’ve seen this work over and over. This treatment is specially programmed for you based on the tests you’ve been taking. Relax. There will be a momentary flash, and then you’ll wake up back in your cell.” The man disappeared from view.
“Wait, what’re you going to do?” Buckman asked, turning his head around as far as he could to see what was going on. Whatever they were setting up was just out of his view. There was a whirring sound, and then his head was being forced back around by what felt like a giant pair of hands. The force was soft but powerful, and he was not able to resist the movement. Once his head was back around, he was not able even to move his body. All he could do was stare at the ceiling above.
“Now?” he heard the second man say.
“Proceed,” the woman said. The paddles, two on his temples and one on his forehead, were pressed into place with adhesive. “This will take about two minutes to charge and begin.”
“Charge?” Buckman asked. “Begin what?”
They secured a mouthpiece in his mouth. “We don’t want you to bite your tongue or break your teeth. We’re going to administer wave patterns into your brain,” the man said. “This will be painless if you don’t struggle. At first, you will feel a slight disorientation. You might have some slight shudders, so we put the mouth protector in. Relax. Those thoughts that have caused you so much trouble will be taken away. Relax.”
“What thoughts?” Buckman asked around the mouthpiece.
“The thoughts that put you here in the first place,” the woman said. “Those thoughts that make you misbehave. None of us like those thoughts, but in your case they were overpowering. We’re going to take care of them for you.”
“Numerous treatments will be required, based on your analysis. Eventually you will come to look forward to being in here. In the end, we’re all better for this,” the man said.
The woman came into his vie
w. “Buckman, we care for your well-being, and only want the best result. This has been proven time and again to calm feelings of violence and lust. Those base emotions are an impediment to all of us. This is a proper application of science to support our faith in the true purpose, making us all better. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Buckman had no idea what she was talking about, and was trying to form a response. Violence and lust? Science and faith? What kind of kind of mixed up ideas were they trying to force on him? The paddles began to vibrate against the skin on his head. He brought up an image of Marie into his mind and tried his best to think of everything he could about her. Her looks, sounds, smells. What she tasted like. But that image began to shimmer and started to be replaced by an uncanny, highly detailed review of his life in reverse. Despite his best efforts, he was not able to stop the images as he went back to his time on Bertie, finding Celirna and pushing her in, his trip on the transport, the bus, and finally back to the apartment. He remembered his family as the years roared by, brothers, sister, mother dying. Dirt and poverty of his youth. He became younger and younger until he realized he was looking up from his crib as a baby, and then nothing.
The lights came on and Buckman was back in his cell. These were the morning lights, and Buckman felt like he had slept for hours without moving. All his joints were sore. There was a dull ache in the back of his head. If this was morning, he had been there for over twelve hours, since they had picked him up right after dinner the day before. His wrist was bound in a blue bandage, and though it no longer hurt, he vaguely remembered what he did to it before. He eased his way off the bunk and tested all his limbs. Everything worked, and he started to feel slightly better as blood began to flow to all his muscles. Balance was off when he stood, but he was fine. The door opened and he stepped out into the hall.
The prisoner in the cell next to his looked him up and down. “Where you been?”
“Wha?” Buckman asked, trying to remember the man’s name. It started with a “D.”
“Thought you were gone.”
Daniel. That’s who he was. “Gone. I ate breakfast yesterday.”
“No you didn’t. Haven’t seen you for a couple of days.”
An organizer came along. “Shut up and start moving.” Daniel turned around and Buckman began to follow. Out for a full day and a half. He had been unconscious for that long. Buckman suddenly realized how powerfully hungry he was and how badly he needed to urinate. “I have to pee real bad,” he said to the organizer next to him. It was the longest fifteen minute breakfast he had ever eaten.
After breakfast and having a chance to relieve himself, Buckman was leaning against the wall in the yard when Daniel came up to him. Though they were in adjoining cells, they had rarely talked to one another. There had been no reason to.
“How are you?” Daniel asked. A month ago, Durel had been the first person he had really talked to. Durel was gone. Others had come and gone as well. There was no chance to establish any kind of social hierarchy amongst the prisoners.
“I hurt all over,” Buckman said.
“Heard that’s what happens. What’d they do?” Daniel was a quiet man to start with. Small. He had been picked up on some kind of swindling charge. Buckman had since given up and figuring who was Bent or Straight. It no longer mattered.
“No, well kind of. They, uh, had me restrained, and they.” Buckman did his best to figure it out, but there was a problem he could not get around.
“Come on,” Daniel urged him. He was rubbing his hands together. He knew this was coming to him soon. “Come on, you have to remember. You have to.”
“It was just another room. My head was held in place and they hooked me up.”
“I’m next,” Daniel said. “I don’t know if I can do it. They’ve been hitting me with the light and it’s starting to go away. I can’t quite remember certain things. What’d they do next?”
Buckman tried to remember the three people in the room with him. Or was it two? After several minutes of remembering small images from the procedure, he remembered the last thing he thought of before they began. Marie and his family. Daniel had sat down on the gravel and Buckman struggled to pull these thoughts together. What was there to tell him? “They try to take away everything that’s important.”
Daniel looked up at him and pulled his knees to his chest. Buckman tried to describe what happened and realized he was repeating the same thing numerous times. He stopped talking, and they were quiet for several minutes. The time in the yard ended, and they were taken back to their cells.
37
After two very long days, Parren and Celirna finally had the dinner he promised. The plan to go out the evening before had fallen through when a skirmish happened a few kilometers away, resulting in long lines and increased security. Shots were fired, and threats were made. This was enough to bring inspections at the border to a near standstill. What the previous day had taken thirty minutes instead took three hours, as their travel became severely restricted. Everyone was tired and hungry, and only wanted to relax.
Celirna filled the second day with meetings with her board members, while Parren essentially did the same remotely with the Council. Both were able to get a full day’s work in, and now, after everyone had left, Parren and Celirna had time to themselves. The pilot had remotely programmed the transport to the destination Parren requested. They were allowed to travel alone for short distances on automated pilot, as long as the actual pilot was able to remotely take control in case a problem arose. Everything went smoothly, and within a few minutes, they were setting down in a small grass lot outside a private villa. As soon as they emerged from the craft, a man appeared, offered them drinks, and said they could place their orders. They both did and said they would be ready to eat in an hour, which gave them a chance to walk the grounds.
Neither of them said anything to the other as they took a path that led away from the plantation style building into some of the formal gardens. They walked, both enjoying the quiet after a stressful few days. There were others doing the same, and whenever they passed another couple everyone said a polite hello, and then they went about their stroll.
The sun was beginning to dip to the horizon, casting a warm hue over everything. Parren had even removed his tie, intending to relax as much as he was capable. Celirna had a tendency to run her hand over every object she passed. A park bench or a tree trunk, it was a tendency Parren had noticed she had done for year. He often wondered if this was a sign of a form of autism, but always decided it was best just to let her do it. Besides, it was more of light subconscious brush of her hand, rather than an obsessive grab. They came to one of the gardens populated with huge flowers, most over two meters tall. “Lovely isn’t it?” Celirna said, reaching out to run her hand over the sunflower.
“Yes, a simple flora, but visually appealing,” Parren said.
“Parren, please. We’re alone,” she took his rather stiff hands and pressed them between both of hers, and lightly kissed his fingertips. “No one will hear you here. You can drop the formality.”
“Yes, you’re right. Of course you are,” he said. Many times, she had provided gentle coaching in being more approachable, lessons he tried to remember but found very frustrating. Years ago, he had taken one of the many classes offered for people genetically prone to thixophobia, the fear of being touched. It did not work, agreeing with his knowledge that he could not correct his genetic tendencies.
“Dear, I think it may be time to sit down. Service should begin soon,” he said, leading her out of the garden. They went back to the house and were shown to a semi-private table that had been set up for them, complete with an uncorked bottle of wine and hors d’oeuvres.
Celirna took an oyster and poured each of them a glass of wine. “Um, what a week, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, yes I do,” he said, helping himself to a cracker with pâté. r />
“I’ve been setting this up for months, and we got so much done,” she continued.
“You did a marvelous job,” he replied. He had his questions, but they would come out soon enough.
“After years of putting this program together, going out and finding funding. I don’t know how many businesses we visited for support, I forget, fifty, a hundred, before we signed on the first partner.”
“Sixty-three, I believe. Western Systematic was the company. They had a vested interest in moving a collection of older data servers.” Parren remembered her elation when the company finally agreed. He was afraid she would never be able to control her emotions long enough to find any more donors.
“Once we had them, others jumped on. Even companies that had passed us up came back.”
In fact, he had marveled at how she had done the fundraising. Many times, he had seen her enter a room of business leaders and work them with a natural skill, and an understated persistence. “I remember how you kept finding ways to address Parlock, the President of Cerlon software.”
Celirna threw her head back and laughed. “I kept showing up at trade shows, stock holder meetings. I bought ten thousand shares of company stock so I would get the invitations. I had enough voting rights to sit on the board.”
Parren had to laugh himself. Her creativity was interesting to watch. “Parlock finally called me to ask how he could get rid of you, and I said to have him donate.”
Celirna smiled and looked out over the immaculate grounds. “And to think what this has grown to. Now we have training programs started, health initiatives that are showing real results. That’s what we did. Now we have the real data to back us up. Kids and parents who don’t have to worry about malnutrition. Did you see that? People getting the help, the information they need, in hours, instead of weeks or never at all. See, this can work. Bents and Straights working together. Making a change in people’s lives. My goodness, there was an entire family about a month ago who were caught in a house fire. They had severe burns, smoke inhalation. Kids barely survived. They were released from the burn unit a week ago. To think, a year ago they would’ve been lucky to be alive, even then they’d be impaired for life.” She shook her head. “It all started with getting people to donate a few pieces of unused equipment. Simple, when you think about it. Common sense, really. One of the things we talked about while you were away was how to bring this into making greater change. Real political change for both sides.”
Parren took a few bites of the first course they had just been served. “There’s something I think you need to know about,” he said wiping his mouth and looking past her to the hills beyond. “When we were going through the hospital…remember when I asked how many scanners they had?”
“Sure. It seemed like an odd question, but something I would expect you to ask,” she said with a wink.
The sarcasm did not register with Parren. He never would understand how such humor worked, since to him it always sounded like an odd insult. “I just had a memory that the number was not right. I checked the log and indeed he was off by a few.”
Celirna let her fork hover over her plate for a few seconds. “Certainly there is an explanation, I can have the accountants check into that,” she said, the fork not moving, the words rushing out. “It’s a complicated system. We have to work out of several warehouses and distribution points.”
“Well,” Parren continued, again looking at the faraway hills. “I think you need to perform that inquiry. It can be a daunting task to account for a large number of items all over the world, I can understand that. However, I believe you will find the records to not be in order.”
Celirna went ahead and took a few bites. She chewed, swallowed, and did not take her eyes off Parren. “Are you casting distrust?”
“I certainly don’t mean to,” he said, hoping it sounded sincere. It didn’t.
She put her fork down. “Come on. Tell me. You are incapable of lying. Your eyes get big, your pupils dilate. You sit back just a millimeter. What did you do?”
Parren regretted even trying to use clever hints. She knew him too well, and when provoked, she could be painfully pointed and incisive. A skill no doubt inherited from her bastard father. “Well,” he said, putting the utensils down and placing both hands on either side of his plate. “I checked, and there were numerous inconsistencies in the quantities.”
“As I said, we can have it checked. Certainly there is a logical explanation. That’s what you want isn’t it? Logic? An explanation that fits your logic?” Parren could see there was going to be no way to safely breach this problem besides telling her what he had found out in the two days since he first stepped into the exam room.
“I had Gryman contact the accounting firm. They did some work, and the inconsistencies are there.” Celirna put her hand on her forehead and then went back to eating her dinner. “Please understand what I’m saying. If there is a problem, it needs to be dealt with.”
“Is there a problem? Is there really? Sounds like you’ve gone ahead and made your conclusion. Do you know why the numbers don’t add up? How much have you really looked at this? I mean, you walked through the hospital and counted three machines, instead of five.”
“Six were delivered. Gryman had a private investigator find one of the missing three. There are only a few in service, so it was not hard to find. It was set up in another hospital three hundred kilometers away. It has to be registered to operate properly.” Parren thought it was best not to mention the other equipment that was being found at other locations.
“We’ll look into it,” she said, returning to her meal.
“Dear,” Parren said. “There could be a perfectly good explanation.”
“I said, we’ll look into it. And I don’t like you doing this without my knowledge,” she said, quickly cutting into a piece of chicken.
“I’m—it’s just—let me put it this way. There is a black market for this kind of equipment, and I don’t want you to be misled into feeding that element.” Parren knew this was common knowledge. Bents who were smart enough, and there were a few, had found ways to profit handsomely by exploiting the needs of the many.
“How dare you even imply that! How dare you even think that Plymer and his staff would participate in that kind of operation. You saw the kind of change, radical improvement they’ve made. The burn unit’s only one of many.” She too put her fork down.
Parren knew this was not going to be an argument he could effectively win, so he changed tactics. “You might have a point. Yes, I see, I see. I should not jump to conclusions” He knew, felt really, that what GoodShare was inadvertently doing was shipping equipment with entirely good intentions, but then when it arrived, some went out one door and some went out another. Cash exchanged hands for these transactions, and Plymer would be wise enough to know he could make a considerable amount by doing this. Maybe his intent was altruistic and he was putting the money back into the hospital, but it was still illegal.
“Okay, fine. I agree, there could be a problem. I don’t know. But please, please include me and my staff in these investigations. I think, well I know you’ll find this is all a misunderstanding. Maybe a bookkeeping error. I don’t know.”
Anyone watching them would have seen two people with both hands on the table, looking at each other, quiet and intense. They might not have guessed they were in a closely guarded argument, but both Parren and Celirna had been like this many times before. Neither of them used public displays of deep disagreements, but they often came to a stalemate that required both of them to simmer down and agree to discuss matters in private. Rogef had taught her to save her natural expressiveness for the right occasions. Difficult as it was, she had learned to quell her Bent tendencies and instead turn it into focus. To let the emotions subside and work out the difficulties in a more constructive manner. Her breathing slowed, and she felt her back r
elax. “Can we finish our meal, maybe talk about something else besides work? Parren, it’s been a stressful month for me, please let’s not get caught up in such a discussion.”
“Agreed,” he said. They continued with their evening. They talked about a few other matters but were more content watching the sunset and stillness settle in. When they were done, they flew back to the house, where they spent the night in the same room, in the same bed. Parren never slept well when she was in his bed, as she had a tendency to rustle the blankets into an uneven arrangement. Celirna was asleep as soon as the lights went out.
38
Gryman stepped out of the transport and onto the landing pad of the prison airlock. The change in gravity temporarily disoriented him, causing his eyes to lose focus for a moment. Hand railings were always available for departing passengers, but he hated to show his weakness by grasping for one. He did anyway, since falling over would have been worse. He had traveled well away from Earth to an asteroid called Ceres, where a remote prison had been set up. Originally the infrastructure was built as a resort, but that had turned into a much publicized financial failure. When vacationers began to say looking into the vastness of space was agonizing rather than relaxing, the property and infrastructure was sold at a huge loss and eventually became prison.
Gryman hated making these trips, traveling in state-owned transports and staying in bare, cramped quarters, eating pre-fabricated food. However, this was the only way he could visit Charles and check on his reeducation process. Gryman knew this was really a generic way of saying brainwashing, but that was what it really was. Replacing thoughts with other thoughts and beliefs was a science that had been perfected over the years, and it was one that had been put to good use.
The need for the trip had been clear about six weeks before after another meeting with Parren. Gryman and Parren had been trying many legal avenues to obtain the interviews with Charles since he had been convicted.
“This man is a troublemaker, and we must know what he is saying,” Parren had said in his characteristic monotone, a vocal inflection that at times Gryman simply tuned out.
“Yes, he clearly caught the public’s attention with his implications. This is still causing ramifications. I get questions about once a week on this,” Gryman said. People liked to hear about cover-ups and conspiracies. Straights were, if anything, analytical people who liked to dig into details. Gryman hated this, and wished there was a way to stop the meddling masses.
“I’ve tried,” Parren said, putting his hand to his mouth and thinking for a moment. “I’ve tried to ask through governmental channels to obtain the transcripts and recordings of the interview but have been rebuffed at every turn.”
This was not a response Parren was used to or would graciously accept. Gryman knew Parren assumed a privilege in matters of access. This was a privilege Gryman had had to fight for all his life, and he felt this would always continue. Parren was born to position whereas he had to scratch for it. “I’ve been able to gain some insight into this. I submitted a request to the magistrate overseeing that sector and was sent a summary report.”
Parren slowly nodded his head. “I am going to surmise that the summary provided insufficient information.”
“The data and details are always where the true information lies. I have exhausted my options. This is considered private information, and short of breaking laws, I cannot obtain the full reports.” Gryman knew he could find a way to force people to give this to him, but that would raise suspicions and was not needed, yet.
“What can I do to help?” Parren asked.
“If I can be allowed to visit the facility and review the recordings firsthand, I can learn how his treatment is progressing,” Gryman said. He knew that restrictions prevented him from making copies of anything; however, he believed he could view what he needed firsthand, possibly interview Charles in person.
“I think that can be done. One thing to keep in mind is that science and time are at our disposal. If we deem the progress less than satisfactory, we can submit a request for more information, but that is a long process,” Parren said sitting back in his seat. Gryman could tell by the tented fingertips and crossed legs that Parren was warming to the idea of being able to direct Charles’s incarceration from a remote distance.
“If you can get me out there, I can make an assessment.” Parren had agreed and made the arrangements.
Gryman spent the day in his room, resting and reviewing some of the documents he had been given. The section of the property he was in still had the illusion of being a well-appointed retreat, except all the luxury trappings had been removed. The bed was rudimentary, and the bathroom had the nicer equipment replaced with plain white plastic units. The view from the room, however, looked out into the vastness of the solar system and beyond. Gryman could not imagine how anyone would come here to relax without going stir crazy. A perfect place for a prison, but otherwise, what the hell were they thinking when they built the resort?
After a few hours of sleep, Gryman went down to the recordkeeping room to view some the interviews with Charles. The doctor in charge of the Psychiatric staff wanted to talk to him first, but Gryman insisted on watching the recordings to form his own opinion. He would have lunch with the doctor later that day.
Gryman checked in with the clerk and left all his personal electronic equipment in a locker. He was permitted only to view the information, not take any of it with him. Even paper was forbidden. This was told to him prior to his visit, but he still let the low-level clerk know his displeasure by berating the man for several minutes for the lack of appreciation for his purpose. He knew his abhorrent behavior would be transmitted to the rest of the staff, which was part of his intention. All these people knew was fear, and he was adept at exploiting this inclination.
Once situated, he turned on the screen in the viewing booth and pulled up the first interview with Charles. The picture came on before the sound, and Charles was already animated and red faced. The organizer in the corner had the stun stick at his ready, though they seemed receptive on letting him rant.
“I didn’t do a damn thing. Not a freakin’ goddamn thing,” Charles said once the sound caught up with the image. “We seen her down there. Her head was all bashed in. A shame it was, a beautiful woman like that to end her life there. I learnt more about her since I been locked up. She was murdered for what she believed. She did good work and they killed her. Why ain’t they looking for who did it, instead of putting a fuckin’ plumber out on a rock in space? Know why? Cause this is a cover-up.”
“What evidence do you have this is a cover-up?” the interviewer asked. The person doing the interviewing was a middle-aged man who appeared to be less than engaged in the conversation. Gryman thought he likely had been instructed on the questions to ask and the line of reasoning.
“I seen it,” Charles said, his face getting redder. “I seen how she was put there to be found by us. The shit valve was screwed up on purpose. The tool marks were fresh. I junked up a bunch of valves in my day and I know what one looks like.”
Gryman stopped the recording and played that part back again. This was the first he heard they had actually seen her down there. He did not have all the transcripts from the trials with him, but he did not remember them actually seeing her down there. This put them right at the scene and not reporting what they had found. Tricky little bastard. Charles knew what he had found and how this would play out. Good thing the man was serving time for the murder. Gryman was not sure how to handle this right now. If this were public knowledge, it could be used against Gryman and Parren. Either way, it was best that Charles never see the light of day again.
He continued listening to the conversation where he had left off and then skipped ahead a few weeks. This time there was a different interviewer, an older woman who talked in a low, quiet voice. She was good. Quiet, inquisitive. She asked good leading questions. She
encouraged follow-up conversation rather than more routine questions. Charles sat still and gestured with his hands occasionally, rather than pounding on the table and jumping around as he did in last interview Gryman watched. The tests and reeducation had begun, and Gryman quickly looked at the test results. Charles did not have much in the way of analytical skills, but was adept at spatial relationships. He also seemed to have a remarkable memory. This began to raise a suspicion as he went back to the interview.
The interviewer did not appear to be going down a list of questions.
“Tell me what you know about the victim?” she asked Charles.
“Not much, really,” Charles said. Gryman suspected the presence of an older woman had a calming effect on Charles. That, plus weeks of confinement, had taken much of the vitriol out of him. “Somebody gave me something the other day. It talked about her. Stunning woman. A real looker. Dang if she didn’t do a whole lot of good.”
“Good? How do you see her activities as being good?” she asked. Gryman was surprised to hear Charles had been given any information about Celirna. He thought this kind of outside contact was restricted.
“Look at all that work she did with them children. At the schools. I mean, goddamn, who does that kind of thing? Especially a Straight woman with looks and money. Dang it. You know anyone else from that order who did anything like that? Can’t imagine how a pin-dick like Parren fetched her as a wife.”
The woman made a few notes in the database. Charles continued to sit quietly, something Gryman found inexplicably fascinating. “Do you believe, or had you seen, evidence of the work she had done?”
Charles thought for a long time. “Not directly. I mostly seen it, you know, in the reports they give me. I been to some of them schools and hospitals, though. On the border.” He rubbed his head and bit his lip for a moment. The interviewer had paused in writing anything down, turned the sound off for moment and said something to him. Charles relaxed again, and the sound came back. “It’s just that, them places are hell. How’s a kid supposed to learn when there ain’t no decent books or food? She tried to fix that. Don’t see nobody else doing that. Least nobody like her.”
“Explain that, nobody like her.”
“She was so dang pretty. If she went to a school, whole town would show up. They’d take pictures of her. She had a fund or whatever. Put her own money into it, since she couldn’t get donations. Built classrooms, bought stuff.”
“Did you finish your education?”
“No. Had to quit when I was twelve. Barely had hair on my crotch, and I had to go earn money.”
She continued to ask questions that allowed Charles to talk in a natural manner. There was no confrontation or challenge to anything he said. Gryman was impressed. In this way, Charles revealed both his life story and his true personality at the same time. What bothered him was that anyone who saw this would question Charles’s guilt. It was too obvious that a change had been made in the treatment regimen. The interviewer was also doing something he had not noticed before. She was not only recording the interview through the data pad but also hand writing notes into a notebook. This had not happened with the previous interviewer. The book was mostly turned away from the camera, and he found no amount of enlarging the picture was going to reveal anything. Gryman knew she had positioned the notebook so it could not be read by anyone reviewing the recording. The hair on the back of his neck went up as he began to realize someone had beaten him to Charles, and that they were likely at opposite means.
Gryman skipped ahead to the next interview recording and saw the interviewer had been changed. Again, he quickly forwarded through it to the next and then the next, and he saw a remarkable difference in Charles’ demeanor. His face was drawn and he answered questions robotically. Any sign of extraneous movement or expression was gone. The drug treatment must have started. Gryman checked the date and saw it was about a month before the present.
A half hour later, Gryman was sitting down for lunch with the prison Lead Psychiatric doctor, Dr. Horglist. Before arriving at the facility, Gryman had read the man’s biography and found there was a pattern of remarkably little achievement other than successfully moving through the system.
Gryman was already seated when Horglist came into the room. The man was big around the middle with small shoulders, clearly not a physical specimen of any repute. There was curt hello, and they were served a meal consisting of meat and noodles covered in a cheese-like product, and garlic bread covered in butter. The prisoner providing the service left the serving bowl on the table in front of Horglist, who continued to heap more onto his plate. Once the mound of food was sufficient, Horglist asked, “I trust your trip was uneventful?”
“Yes,” Gryman said mildly astounded at the man’s gluttony. “I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want to take a lot of your time.”
“Of course,” Horglist said, though by the way he looked down at his plate, Gryman guessed taking time was what he did best. “How can I be of service?”
“I’m here to review the progress of Charles, the prisoner convicted of the murder of Celirna,” Gryman said.
“Yes, that was outlined in your visit request,” Horglist said, slowly working his way through the meat and noodles on his plate.
“I reviewed most of the interviews conducted to date and noticed some interesting changes in his behavior,” Gryman said. He was aware that although he did not have much regard for Horglist, he needed his cooperation and he needed to appeal to his professional sense.
“Before we go any further, let’s address behavior for a moment. This is a prison, and there is a certain level of respect that has to be observed at all levels. You will not talk down to or scold my staff when they are simply following proper protocol. If you have a problem with any of their actions, you come to me.” Horglist continued to eat and drink for several beats in the conversation. Gryman was not sure if Horglist was a smart man playing the part of a fool, or the other way around. He would play him as a man who needed to have his intellect appeased.
“My apologies. Long distance travel makes me uneasy. I have difficulty with space travel in general. A bad ear or something. Nevertheless, as far as Charles is concerned, within a matter of a few weeks he went from abhorrent to completely controlled. How does that happen?”
Horglist went through the process of how the interviews and treatments work together. The prisoner was evaluated both mentally and physically, and then a program was designed for that person. Thoughts were introduced through subconscious manipulation early on. Once a drug regimen was designed based on the prisoner’s genetic makeup, this was included in the treatment. Though rather more technical than Gryman typically cared for, he was impressed with the precise nature and dependable results. Horglist had warmed to the subject, clearly indicated by how he spoke quietly and provided scholarly answers to Gryman’s questions, like a teacher speaking to an inquisitive student.
Gryman was a fast eater and did his best to slow down while Horglist made his way through his meat and noodles. Much to Gryman’s annoyance, the man seemed to be savoring each individual noodle, but then he realized Horglist had him pegged. He was eating slow to aggravate Gryman and to establish his control. A rather juvenile approach, but it was about what he expected. “Can you give me some information on the interviewers?”
“Why do you ask? Wait, let me put that differently. You’re not asking that out of curiosity. What is your specific inquiry?” Horglist had stopped eating when he realized he had figured Gryman out. Then he started again.
“I was reviewing the recorded interviews, and there was a woman brought in for a short period. Only two interviews. Who was she?” Gryman asked.
“Again, be specific. What do you really want to know?” Horglist said. He had put his fork down.
Gryman was getting impatient, but did his best to hide it. People simply did not grill him like t
his. “Her style was different. More inquisitive. The interviews were not scripted. Is she on your staff?”
Horglist slowly waved his right hand over the eating utensils and chose a spoon. “No she isn’t. She was sent in by the Psychiatric Bureau, level 5. And before you ask, this is unusual but not unheard of. She was doing research, and he is an interesting subject.”
“Research into what?” Gryman asked.
“That’s really off limits, and I’m not going to give you any more information on her. That is a private matter. A person’s mental evaluation is not a subject for public discourse.” Horglist began to eat the pie a la mode that was placed in front of him. He eyed Gryman’s, since Gryman was not interested in his.
Gryman stared back at the man, aghast at his insolence. Clearly Horglist did not have the proper respect for Gryman’s position and acumen. Gryman had spent a lifetime tearing down men like this, but at the moment, painful as it was, he needed to play along. “I understand. Thank you for the lunch. I’d like to sit in on the interview now.”
“Very well,” Horglist said. “You know we’re isolated out here. The turnover, as you might, expect is rather high. Contrary to that, I enjoy the serenity. I have infinite patience. I enjoy my work and am quite good at it. However, there is only so far I’m willing to go. I know better than to question why she was sent or who sent her. She was very good, and I wish she had stayed on the staff. Similarly, you’re here on a court order, so I had to allow you in.” Horglist crossed his hands across his mushy belly. “Once the interview is done, do you plan to leave soon after?”
“Absolutely,” Gryman said. He was not sure how he was going to figure out who sent in the woman interviewer, but he knew there were ways. “I won’t waste any more time here.”
39
“What’s the point of these questions?” Gryman asked the interviewer. The interviewer that day was monotonous. This was a problem he had noted with innumerable cases like this. Once he got down to a certain level, the people he had to work with were simply dull. No imagination or something. He had to admit this was a flaw in the genetic planning, leading him to think straights were becoming an insipid race of people. This man stared back at him.
“I’m here to ask questions. To gather data,” he said.
“But why this list? Why these questions?” Gryman wanted to try again. Questions like, “What did you have for dinner yesterday?” and “How tall are you?” This was a waste of time.
“They are generated to provoke a response. These are computer generated, based on the inmate’s progress and drug therapy.” The man was entering information into the database as Gryman continued to review the questions. He planned to interject a few of his own.
“What is the goal here?” Gryman asked.
“To ask questions,” he said, still entering data.
If Gryman thought the man had a sense of humor, he would have taken this as a sarcastic joke. Since that was not the case, he gave up. They waited about five silent minutes before Charles was ushered in.
At first Gryman did not recognize the small man they brought in. His hair was shorter, and his dark skin was several shades lighter than he remembered. There was puffiness in his face that was not there in the last recorded interview he saw. For a brief moment, he thought he had made a mistake, and this visit would be a waste of time. Still, he knew Charles was clever and might say anything off the top of his head. Charles did not seem to recognize him, but then a few seconds later a cloud seemed to lift from his face.
“Liar, criminal!” Charles yelled. “You’re a criminal motherfucker!” As quickly as the outburst started it stopped. The room became quiet again as both Gryman and the interviewer watched Charles.
“Is that the treatment working?” Gryman asked the interviewer.
“Yes. As soon as the root cause of deviant behavior is activated, that memory center is shut down and the emotional response eliminated,” he said as if this was common knowledge.
“Fascinating,” Gryman said. For centuries, people had tried to control behavior, criminal and otherwise, through all manners. Gryman was a student of torture and even included in his master’s thesis case studies of how the proper application of physical and mental stress could produce positive results. Torture had been illegal, but medicine and science had devised a method that went to the core of the problem while still staying acceptable in the eyes of the law and the general public.
Charles was losing focus before his eyes. “I’m cold, damn it,” Charles said, and slumped slightly in his chair.
The interview started. “How tall are you?” was the first question.
“What?” Charles said perking up for a moment. “You asked me that stupid question last time.”
“How tall are you?”
Charles settled down. “164 centimeters.”
“Where were you born?”
Charles blinked a couple of times. “North province, section 23.”
The questioning continued in this vein for several minutes, and Gryman began to understand how this was working, even if the interviewer did not. The idea was to try to provoke him and to raise inciting memories. A few times it happened, but they were tamped down. Brilliant. The process seemed to work on probing all the areas of his memories to elicit a response. Scans had long proven that certain memories would activate parts of the brain, shown by increased activity and blood flow. The drugs must be attracted to those areas when this happens. The questions became more personal.
“Why did you fight with your brother?” the interviewer asked.
Charles clenched his teeth for a moment. “He raped a girl. Got her pregnant. Cocksucker,” he said in a calm voice.
The interviewer was entering some data, so Gryman took the opportunity to jump in. “Did you have feelings for this girl?” Gryman asked.
The interviewer looked at the list of questions and, seeing this one was not on there, began to say, “Hold on.”
However, Charles began to wring his hands. His lips moved several times. “She was pretty, real pretty. Great set of tits. Big ass. I wanted her.” They both watched him for a moment, then Charles yelled out, “But the bitch didn’t do nothin’ but string me along.”
He became quiet, and his shoulders started to twitch enough that his head was moving around. “You don’t understand,” the interviewer said. “This has to be done right, or there will be consequences.”
Gryman was only partially listening to the interviewer. He was more interested in what was going on inside of Charles, and the agony that one question caused him. “What kind of consequences?”
“He’s in a controlled mental state. If we push that too far, he could end up hurting himself or others. People have been known to become physically violent and begin self-inflicting wounds to make the agony stop. Aneurisms are not unheard of. “
All Gryman could think about was having a person become their own torturer. An elegant device if there ever was one. The interviewer continued.
“The house you grew up in, can you describe it, please?” he asked.
Charles did not answer for several moments. “Thyra, that was her name. I ain’t thought of her in years. My dick got hard just seeing her walk.”
“The house, Charles, where you grew up?”
Again, Charles did not appear to hear the question. “Did your brother steal her? Did he rape her or steal her to make you upset?” Gryman said.
“No more questions,” the interviewer said to Gryman. However, Gryman was fascinated by the response his last inquiry was causing. Charles’s face was turning red, and he began to foam at the mouth. If Gryman were to guess, he also had an erection.
“I wanted her,” Charles yelled, spit flying out of his mouth and landing on the table. “I wanted her so bad, but the cunt wouldn’t even say hello. I wanted her, but he had her. Stuck his vile pecker in her and had her. He didn’t even care. He l
eft her. He didn’t even care. He took off and left her.”
“Quiet, both of you,” the interviewer said in a vain attempt to regain control.
Gryman knew, however, that the meeting was now his. “You beat up your brother for her sake and she still did not care about you.”
“Guards!” the interviewer said, pounding a button on the table. Charles’s eyes looked to be popping out of his head, and he started jumping around in his chair, but he was awkwardly held down by the magnetic cuffs on his wrists and ankles. He grunted, yelled, and shook uncontrollably. Fluids came out of his mouth and nose, soaking his shirt. A few seconds later, a guard came in a side door, wrapped his arms around Charles, and pulled him out of the room. There was a brief scream before the door closed and cut out the sound.
The interviewer grabbed his data pad and left the room. Gryman was elated. He couldn’t wait to tell his wife about this. He had never been part of such a procedure, and he made it a point to figure out how he could in the future. Gryman left the interview room and went back to his quarters, where he spent the next fifteen minutes making notes in his data pad and figuring out how he would be able to exploit this new information. When he finished, he packed his belongings, because he knew they would be kicking off him the facility at any moment. There was a knock at the door as soon as he finished gathering his things. Horglist and two guards came in.
“We have arranged for transport immediately.” Horglist turned and left. That was the last time he saw or heard the man. The guards took him back to the dock, where the transporter was already running and ready to go. Gryman gladly took his seat, and they did not even wait for him to buckle in before they lifted off. This was one of his better business trips.
40
Rogef was a man of his era. He fully appreciated the technology of the day and the staggering advances this brought humanity, but he knew this came at a cost. He was ridiculously wealthy because of how he had applied, some would say exploited, these capabilities. His private transporter was a work of beauty, with every option installed and enough power to outrace all but the fastest military machines. Still, as he rode out to meet Sariposa, the woman he had sent to interview Charles, he knew no technology could replace a face-to-face conversation. His meetings with Parren over the com link reminded him of this every time he spoke to the man. Rogef knew there were others in the room sitting outside the range of the camera or that the man was being coy and trying to obfuscate. Whenever he met with Parren in person, these kinds of behaviors were hard for him to disguise. Rogef had known talented liars, was one himself, and Parren had a face like a big puppy. The man was brilliant but not capable of telling a lie, though thankfully he believed he was.
He arrived at one of his remote offices and was going over some of his investment holdings when there was a knock on the private entrance.
“Good morning,” he said, letting her in.
“It’s actually afternoon, sir,” she said. Rogef had met Sariposa only a couple of times before but found her company intellectually stimulating. Her perception and honestly were uncanny, and when he needed to send someone to evaluate Charles, he knew she was the right person.
“Sorry to meet like this, but I’m sure you appreciate the need for confidentiality,” he said.
“It’s a family matter, I understand,” she said, coming over to the conference table where Rogef had sat down. On the shelf beside the table was a picture of Celirna he had put there years before. She picked it up. “She was certainly an impressive woman, both in looks and ability. I would have enjoyed her company. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. You would have found her an enlightening person. I’m sure the two of you would have had much to talk about.” He tried to not let his travel fatigue get in the way, but it did, and he had to admit at that moment he felt all of his years. “I’m an old man. Tired. I’ve done twice as much as most men, but she was my dearest thing. Imagine that. All that I have today, what I am capable to possess, and it all is inconsequential to losing her. To the matter at hand, I trust you registered your report with the Bureau?”
Sariposa sat down. “I did. It was official and included a full psychiatric analysis of his condition.”
“Had they started the drug therapy?” Rogef knew this was standard treatment for violent offenders and had read the sentencing that outlined the extent. His hope was that Charles was not too far gone before she had a chance to talk to him.
“They had just started,” she said. “However, he was still in good control of his thoughts when I talked to him.”
“I watched the trials, and he is a repugnant man. Loud, uncouth,” he said, stopping, wondering for a moment how much he wanted to say.
“But?” she said, not missing even a hint of his hesitation.
“I have my doubts,” he said. His eyes naturally rested on the picture. “I needed to learn more about him. I’m fearful the truth may never be known. They have a way of wiping it out.”
“And the possible injustice,” she said, finishing his thought as he guessed she would.
“Of course,” he said, taking a deep breath, wanting to concentrate on the matter at hand. “Generally, how would you describe him?”
“Let me say at the outset, I’m not in the business of assigning guilt or innocence. That’s for the legal system to decide, however you may disagree with the outcome. When I met Charles, he was understandably calmer then when he was on trial. Still, he was emotional, with little control over his reactions. His answers were always straight and to the point. No duplicity.”
“How would you rate his intelligence?” he asked.
“I read his evaluation before I talked to him. Reviewed all his tests. Pure analytical intelligence, he is about average. His has an aptitude for spatial intelligence. Decent rudimentary mathematical skills. His profession as a lead plumber makes perfect sense, and from all I could gather, he was quite proficient. His career placement in this role was apt.”
“Hardly the architect of a well-planned murder,” Rogef said, though after saying it, he regretted letting his judgment be known.
“Again,” she said, “I’m not in the legal business, but it would seem to be unusual. However, my time with him was limited, and I could not say that for sure. Then again, there did not appear to be any psychosis or psychopathic tendencies.”
“How did he react when you asked him about my daughter?” he asked.
“I would describe it as empathy. He knew who she was and was aware of her reconciliation work. He didn’t appear to have been told of her genetic makeup.” Sariposa glanced over at the picture. “I have to say, he seemed moved by her loss. His exact words were that nobody deserved to die like that.”
“She was a Bent. I can’t deny that now.” Rogef knew that Sariposa understood that the case was already closed. Overturning a conviction on a hunch, with no actual evidence to back it up, was next to impossible. The legal and investigative procedures had become so proficient that the system was rarely even questioned. “Empathy is a good description. Is it possible he has the capability to, I don’t know what term you would use, separate his feelings and emotions from what he may have done?”
“To perform a heinous crime and express honest empathy would take some kind of pathologic disorder, which does not show up in any of his evaluations.”
Rogef had read some of the accounts of Charles. “He is capable of violent outbursts, correct? That was shown repeatedly in the media. Jailed numerous times. Fought in skirmishes.”
“All true, but those events were almost all spontaneous, spur of the moment reactions,” she said. “He is capable of violence and misconduct, but none of those previous events were premeditated.”
Rogef knew she would never tell him that Charles did or did not perform the crime. He had to admit, he did not think Charles did it, but it was simply a guess. “The crime was quite involved. Planned very
precisely.”
“If that was the case,” she said, again finishing his thought, “I doubt he was acting alone.”
“His motivation?” he asked.
Both of them knew this was the key to a conviction. Rogef watched her carefully as she turned the question around in her mind. This question bridged the gaps between technical legality, psychology and emotion. He had purposely waited until she had talked herself to the point where her actual feelings rather than professional judgment started to show. “I couldn’t detect how he would benefit from this crime. Certainly not material gain. Psychotic outbursts are unpredictable, however.”
Rogef felt his chest begin to sink. This was a sensation he had felt over the past few weeks. A feeling of impending exhaustion. He knew his time with Sariposa was limited, and he did not want this to get in the way of what he needed to find out.
“Assume he did it,” he said. “I know you’re not in a legal position, but let’s say he did do what he was charged with. From everything you said, do you think he possibly could have done this alone?”
Sariposa thought about this. Rogef knew that she was a renowned expert in personality evaluation. Her essays were part of the canon in psychiatric study. “I’m not an expert in criminal methods, but he isn’t an intricate planner. His method, as shown from his life pattern and during the interview, is one of constant impulse. He is a clever man, though, and had knowledge of the area he was working in.”
“My daughter was alone on the Merchants deck. Security has her tracked to entering a clothing store and not coming out. The store shares a wall with a secure emergency passageway that leads to the recycling hold. He would have had to defeat the security software in the store and the passageway. His whereabouts were recorded fairly well, except for a few gaps in his location right before that time. The records are a matter of public access, though not very easy to find.”
They looked at each other for several moments. Rogef knew her silence was her thinking through all he was implying. He was not a lawyer or criminologist either, so he did not care about proving anything beyond a shadow of a doubt or circumstantial evidence or any of that kind of data. This just did not make sense, and he knew she saw it the same way. “That would have required an unprecedented level of access and planning. There is nothing in his profile that suggests he would even know how to do anything like that.”
“So, let’s look at what kind of person would have that kind of access. A person of technical skill, correct?”
“For sure,” she agreed.
“Someone who could change or delete security records,” Rogef said. He had given this considerable thought and had made enough inquiries to support his suspicions.
“It would certainly look that way. Sir, if I may say, you’re going down a path I’m uncomfortable with being a part of,” she said.
“Right,” Rogef said understanding he was getting more emotional than he realized. “I’m thinking aloud. Pardon me. Let’s talk about Charles some more. Is he the type to take orders well?”
“Up to a point. He would be agreeable until he thought he knew better. Then his impulsive behavior would take over. Generally, once on a task he would finish it. His ratings as a worker were above average. This correlates well with his genetic makeup.” Sariposa watched Rogef as he looked across out the window. “Sir, you look very pale and tired. Are you feeling unwell?”
“This is an exhausting situation.” He looked down at his hands folded in his lap. “There are always people, factions sometimes, who prefer to have such a narrow focus they cannot see the truth.” He knew this was an odd statement to make, one that she could take in many different ways. “You have to understand that I have strong opinions about this matter. Ones I have to be cautious about expressing.”
“You think these men were wrongly accused?” she asked.
“More than that. I’ve never been one to believe conspiracy theories, but if they did it, they did not act alone. If they didn’t do it, they were set up. Either way, larger, very careful, forces were at work.”
“You will need to consult with someone who is more versed in criminal methods. But I agree. That would require very sophisticated coordination, something Charles is not capable of.”
“Charles,” Rogef said, rubbing his hand across his face. “Did he mention any associations with Straights?”
“The closest thing I heard was a relationship with a low level supervisor.” Sariposa scanned through some of her notes. “A respectful relationship, on both sides. There didn’t seem to be any kind of personal interaction from the reports I read.”
“Where is this supervisor now?” Rogef asked, thinking aloud.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“What about relationship with the other man, this Buckman?”
“Well,” she started. “They were friends. It was more a mentor-student relationship. The second man was an apprentice plumber and Charles was a master specialist. They often put the two of them together.”
There was not much more to get out of her on what Charles did or did not do, but he was still curious about the treatment he was receiving. “This drug therapy he is being subjected to, how effective is it?”
“Very. I’m afraid he will emerge a changed man, with little recollection of the event.” He tried to judge her reaction to such a treatment, but her face was not giving up any details.
“It’s a cruel method. I can’t imagine we have stooped to such measures,” he said. He had expressed this to others, not caring what they thought of his opinions.
“It is. But it’s also terribly effective. He will still be a productive citizen when he returns,” she said.
“I doubt that. Doubt if he’ll be anywhere close to the man he was when he went in, but,” he said, needing to finish this, “that is a discussion for another time, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” she said. She stood up. “Sir, you look very tired and drawn. Please take care of yourself. Get some rest before you travel back.”
After she left, Rogef told his assistant not to disturb him for an hour, as he fully intended to get some sleep. He stretched out on the leather sofa and began to think about the problem of Charles, Buckman, and whoever else might be involved. He would talk to Buckman himself, since he was in a medium security facility he could access. After a few moments, sleep took over, and he drifted off thinking of his dear daughter. When she was in her mid-teens, she began to turn into a beautiful young woman, full of energy, humor, and intelligence. Somewhere in that time, he could not remember if it was one moment or a slow understanding, he knew he was never going to change who she was, and more importantly, he would not do so if he could. By that time, his wife was gone, and he explained to Celirna about the treatments and how she would have to live with the secret all her life. That was the image he wanted to keep of her, but too much had happened. He did not want to ever see the pictures of how they found her, but the descriptions were vivid and frequent during the investigation and trials. Try as he might, he was not able to replace this with his thoughts of when she was alive. He fell into a deep sleep and only awoke when his assistant came into the office and vigorously shook his shoulder. Rogef sat up and forced himself to stand, his cane barely able to steady him. He boarded the transport and flew off back to the estate.
41
The Superōrum quarterly meeting drew to a close with a review of the funding for various projects. A line for support of border schools was towards the bottom, and at first Parren had planned to object. They had more important matters to attend to, and this was one item added at the insistence of Celirna several years ago when he first sat on the Council. The budget was sent out a few weeks earlier, and each member read it over and provided comments. Parren always had the final overriding vote for each item; however, most of the members agreed with his decisions. There were usually minor disagreements, but since the members were handpicked based on gene
tic predispositions, there were never any serious objections. They read and voted on each item. Not all were unanimous. They came to the border school funding.
The speaker read off the tally. “Twenty-five in favor and three against.” There was a moment where everyone looked around the room. There were twenty-nine members present. Finally, they all looked at Parren.
At first, he considered voting against to kill the line of funding. He almost did. However, since this was the only item discussed that related to Celirna, he knew this would look peculiar. “I wonder,” he began. “I wonder if you could find the total budget requirement for this initiative. From all sources. I believe this is public information.”
The secretary began searching the databases and found a number. “It looks like we support about 25% of their total budget.”
Parren pretended to give this some careful thought, though he had already knew it was 24.7%. “Can we increase it to 30%? I believe there were some funds that came available from her unfortunate death. She wanted it donated to such a cause. I will make the proper arrangements.” He had planned to tie her insurance payout with his funding to the Council, which would serve the double benefit of helping his initiatives and avoiding a substantial tax payment that was otherwise due. Rogef had secured the remainder of her assets long before they met and had jealously guarded them, though he did acquiesce to the enormous insurance policy Parren had taken out on her when they married. Parren was the largest beneficiary at 69.71%, with 30.29% going to her remaining family. The budget was agreed to in total, and the meeting was adjourned.
Parren was exiting the meeting room when he was approached by the Secretary for the meeting, Polum. Polum was a good man, one who was faithful to all their causes, and had worked hard to be an efficient organizer for the Council. He also came from an extremely influential family of Realty magnates. “Sir, I’m sorry to hear your father-in-law has taken ill.”
Parren had not heard this. Since the meeting with Rogef at the estate, he had ignored nearly all communications from the family. “I was not aware of this. I have been preoccupied with pressing matters.”
Polum’s eyes darted back and forth several times. “That’s understandable. You have been through a great trauma these past couple of months.”
“Yes,” Parren said. “Rogef has a deteriorating arterial heart condition, a problem that medicine can only repair so much.”
“Rogef, from what I understand, I’ve met him a few times, is a driven man. Certainly rest is in order for him,” Polum said.
“The old fool does not listen to Doctors, let alone any other voices of logic and reason.” Parren recalled how infuriated he was when Rogef tottered away after they met at the pond. Rogef’s lingering ambition, in an old man well past his prime who could not stop meddling in business affairs, was going to kill him. Polum was staring at him, and Parren suddenly realized how his remark sounded. “Certainly my comment sounds strident, but I worry about him. He still works hard, way too hard, and now the stress of the recent tragic events. We have pleaded with him to slow down, but he will not heed our cries.”
“Certainly, certainly. I assure you, I speak for everyone here in wishing him a full recovery.” Another Council member walked by to exit the room. “Excuse me. I need to have a word him before he departs.”
Polum turned and walked quickly away to catch the other man, leaving Parren standing by himself. Rogef’s condition was an unexpected turn of events. An encouraging turn, though Parren knew this was not the first time Rogef had been given medical treatment for overextending himself. He would likely recover enough to continue being an aggravating presence in Parren’s life. The old man simply would not die as he was supposed to. He had survived countless health scares, injuries from climbing adventures and mining accidents. Rogef had a string of mistresses before and after his wife’s death that would have exhausted and ruined most men. What a profound embarrassment to his race, yet he continued to survive. Parren retreated to his transporter, excusing the pilot so he could make a private communication.
“Morgan, I was just informed of my dear father-in-law’s health condition,” Parren said. Parren had no intention of visiting the man, though he knew that some form of concern was required. Morgan was skilled at this.
“Yes sir,” Morgan said. “I just heard the news. One of his cousins contacted your office. Is there any way I can help?”
“Since you mentioned it, yes you can. I’m tied up with a legislative race of great importance. I need to work to ascertain this man’s victory to the upper house. I would be most appreciative if you could drop in on him. I can make the arrangements. I will make the X1A available to you.” The transporter was the fastest and most well-appointed one he had. It was smaller than the one he normally used, and he only kept it for certain runs.
“I can be ready in about four hours. I need to complete a press release before the afternoon news cycle.” They made arrangements and signed off. Parren called the pilot back, and he left to go back to his home. He could work from there as needed and not worry about Rogef any more than he needed. Still, he would contact Gryman to keep an eye on the old man.
42
Morgan was apprehensive about getting between Parren and Rogef, because he knew they had been at odds for years. The circumstances of Celirna’s death did not help matters, especially considering the revelation that followed. Since he had learned she was a Bent, her general behavior now made perfect sense. Well, he told himself, at least he thought it did. The transporter was small but fast, cutting the travel time to Rogef’s almost in half, but he still had plenty of time to think. He knew Rogef had been defending his position on why he hid her instead of giving her up as he was supposed to. Morgan thought his reasons were understandable, while most of it was, well, unsettling. Rogef had a genuine love for his only child, and Morgan, though not married, at least in part understood this.
Rogef issued a few statements to this effect, how his love for his daughter made him go to extreme measures to ensure she would not be taken away. The odds of him having a Bent daughter were very slight, but it happened. This was usually detected immediately at conception, and the parents were given a choice of either keeping the baby and giving it up or terminating the pregnancy. Most chose termination, and a few delivered the baby and gave it up. Rogef took another path by finding illicit sources to cover her true genetic makeup. He had since detailed how he and many others had done the same thing.
This was where Morgan became confused. Rogef had become adamant that what he did was proper, and that it should be a third option. He pointed to his daughter and a few other examples of how their actions resulted in a positive influence. After Rogef made his confession, there was a small but growing number who came forward and denounced the genetic divisions as ill-applied science. Morgan had known Celirna well, and he found that in some sense he agreed with Rogef. Parren, however, had been such an influence in his life, he looked up to the man as a force of intellect, that there had to be truth in what the Generators had decreed. Centuries of unchecked prosperity and advancement. All this was at risk if Rogef were allowed to break down the carefully erected barriers. Bents were unpredictable when allowed to gather and had a tendency to form into an unruly hoard at a moment’s notice. Unscripted violence often resulted where an intelligent negotiation would have sufficed. Morgan was thinking about this for the rest of the trip. Maybe that was only a perception. Maybe not.
“Approaching, sir,” the pilot said. The borders of the estate began to show themselves as the ship came down out of the atmosphere: a large wooded area, with an enormous manicured garden surrounding an equally impressive house. As they slowed to landing speed, Morgan felt the auto-land take control and start bringing the craft in. A figure in a dark blue robe came out on a balcony of the house and waved when they were within a few hundred feet of the ground.
Despite his fee
ble condition, Rogef came out to greet Morgan. The craft was shut down, and as Morgan stepped out, another unfamiliar man joined Rogef. “I see,” Rogef yelled down in his booming voice from the sculpted structure above the estate entrance. “I see Parren could not trouble himself to visit in person. He sent his messenger. No disrespect, Mr. Morgan.”
“No,” Morgan said, knowing Rogef would never have been fooled by Parren’s attempt at propriety. “I am a messenger by trade. A very good one, I may add.”
“You most certainly are. Come on in. I appreciate your company.” Just then, a buxom young woman appeared beside Rogef.
“Sir, please, you must be careful,” she said gently guiding him with an arm hooked around his.
“Nurses,” Rogef said over the side. “I love ’em.” She led him away inside the house.
Within a few minutes, Rogef and the second man greeted Morgan in the entry of the house. The nurse was now gone, and Morgan had his first good look at the man he had come to visit. The old man was pale and drawn, and Morgan briefly thought he wished the nurse were there in case Rogef crashed to the floor.
“This is Reg,” Rogef said to Morgan.
“Pleased to meet you,” Morgan said. “Do you work for Rogef? I don’t remember seeing you before.”
“At the moment,” Reg said.
“We’ll get to that in a few minutes. First, it’s been a few years since we’ve met. Have you been here before?” Rogef asked as he led them to an elevator and up several floors. They chatted comfortably as Reg followed behind them, not joining in on the conversation. Morgan had been there once, about five years before, when Parren attended a fundraiser. He had only been there several hours, however.
They stepped out of the elevator and into a hallway. Rogef stopped. The chatter was now over. “We can dispense with any formalities. I know why you’re here. There is little secret of the strained relationship between myself and Parren, but he is wise enough to know he had to do something. So here you are.”
“Sir, to be honest, I don’t want to be caught between two men I greatly admire.”
Rogef smiled and opened a door into what looked to be a private viewing room. Reg entered the room while Rogef held Morgan back with a hand on his chest. “You peddle shit like the professional you are. Drop the act or I’ll send you packing, young man.”
“My apologies,” Morgan said. Anything else said would have been a problem, though Morgan knew Rogef really wanted him there but needed to put him in his place. Sending him away was not what Rogef actually wanted to do. They sat down in a couple of seats in the viewing room.
“I hired a production company to put together a documentary on my murdered daughter’s life. She will not be forgotten. She was a great human being, and her life will not be wasted. Her purpose both in life and in death must continue forward. This is a rough cut, so there are some areas that need some work. Shut up and watch.”
Rogef pushed a button on the arm of his chair, and lights dimmed. The video started on the wall in the front of the room. The beginning was brief, and being that it was a rough edit, the credits and opening statements were simple text that looked to be placeholders.
The documentary started with describing her as a youngster, mostly told by Rogef and several other family members. The picture that was created was of a rambunctious girl who turned into an equally mischievous young woman. Morgan had never seen her at this age, and when he saw these images, he felt a strange pang in his midsection. He suddenly realized where this came from. For years, he had always looked forward to when she would accompany Parren, and they would break away to have time to talk. During those moments, he now understood how he felt when Parren came around to escort her away. It was jealousy. Pure jealousy. As he watched the video chronicle her life, this was now apparent. Parren was a great man, and Morgan admired him, so he had somehow not seen his own feelings. Morgan looked at Rogef a moment, but Rogef appeared interested in the story playing out on the screen. He composed himself as best as he could, since Rogef would undoubtedly be gauging his reaction.
The marriage was handled in a neutral manner. They were married, and then the story went into her activities with the schools, how she became involved with reconciliation work and GoodShare. The producers of the documentary painted the results of her efforts in much more successful terms than he remembered them. However, they went into detail on the positive impacts of the schools and other exchange work she had done. Then the video suddenly stopped.
“The story is still being written,” Rogef said. His voice echoed through the room for a moment.
Morgan tried to hold the last image of her, the last time they met. “With all due respect, how will you handle what happened?” he asked.
“I’ll tell the truth, something that’s difficult for so many people to hear,” Rogef said, staring at the now blank wall, pursing his lips.
Rogef knew something or believed he did, but he was not telling. Morgan was not sure which. “You’ve said many things in the past few weeks that have provoked very influential people.”
“Influential? Scared is more like it. Scared of having to admit they created and lived a lie they must at all cost perpetuate.”
Morgan had to respect the man’s courage. “You can say anything you damn well please.”
“I can and I will. What can anyone do to me now?” Rogef said, his voice calm and confident.
“Tell me then, how does the story end? I have a feeling you have a good idea,” Morgan said.
“Celirna was murdered. It was arranged, and she was murdered. I don’t know who arranged it, but they found convenient criminals in those two men.” Rogef turned the lights in the room back up to their full brightness.
“How can you say that? They were convicted by a court of law, given as much leniency as allowed,” Morgan said, though even as he said, a hint of doubt crept in.
“This man,” Rogef said, referring to Reg, “was the direct supervisor for the two convicted men. He has intimate knowledge about them and how they worked.”
“Neither of them had anything to gain from this,” Reg said.
“Certainly that is not proof of anything whatsoever,” Morgan said.
“Please,” Rogef said. “Let him finish.”
“These two men had worked for me for numerous years. I knew them well enough to judge their capabilities. All my performance reports are filed and available if you want to see them.” He waited for a moment, but Morgan did not respond. “Very good workers, little in the way of discipline problems.”
“Again, all good to know, but this doesn’t prove or disprove a thing,” Morgan said.
“They were framed,” Rogef said. “This was a complicated arrangement. I will at least admit that they could have been involved, but neither of them has the smarts to put this together. I sent a professional to talk to the plumber before his brains are turned to mush. An able man, but not capable of the machinations this took. The other man...well, I’m scheduled to talk to him in a few weeks.”
Morgan saw this possibly as being a man grieving and not wanting to believe the truth. “What you are talking about would be devastating. A conviction has not been overturned in decades. The methods of detection and rehabilitation are technically sound.”
Rogef turned towards him and placed his big knuckled veiny hands on the armrest. “Don’t you understand? We’ve been conditioned to think that. We’ve been bred and raised to accept everything as it’s presented. Think for a moment. Think. How can a plumber, a man who can barely spell his name, work out the codes to fool the security system, go into a restricted area, find her, well you know the rest.”
“But he had access. He knew his way around.”
“You must understand,” Reg said. “Guest workers’ movements are tracked at all times.”
“Certainly there are ways around that,” Morgan said.
“Let go of your rest
rictions. Think. Listen to what this man says,” Rogef said. “Go on.”
“A Bent’s movements are tracked at all times on a ship like that,” Reg said. “Their location is logged and saved for years. He would have to defeat that system and a dozen others. Charles is a clever man, but he didn’t know anything about software or an integrated security system.”
“Still, he could have been helped,” Morgan said.
Reg rubbed his leg and stared at the front of the room. “I guess one could say that. The timing could’ve been made out to look that way. But I just can’t imagine either of these two having anything to do with this. Either way, even if they had a hand in it, much bigger forces were at work.”
“Where were they before they first went onto the ship?” Morgan asked.
“We were in lockdown. Nobody could go over until all the systems were stable and the two ships were synchronous. In fact, we had a delay of about an hour before Charles first went over. Our orders were confused, and we didn’t have access to the filtration plant. I had to improvise his schedule at the last moment and send Charles into the hold a day early.”
Morgan took a deep breath. If that were true, then he could have been set up. A small sleight of hand to get the worker into the hold at the right moment. “This is...it’s just...”
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Rogef said.
Morgan had watched, known, and read enough to understand the men had the bare minimum of education, but what Reg and Rogef were saying had tremendous ramifications. “That flies in the face of everything we stand for. Can you imagine what would happen? Who do you think really did it?”
“Well,” Rogef said turning back around to face the front of the room, “that is a question. I have some ideas, but I’ll keep them to myself. But just think for a moment: Who would have so much to lose? Many people come to mind.”
“I’m not a detective, but a reason always has to be established, I suppose,” Morgan said. He had to admit, there were many people that would be threatened by her actions. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ve made arrangements to talk to this other man. I’ve already been able to intervene in his treatments, barbaric as they are.”
“Barbaric? The reeducation is a hallmark achievement,” Morgan said. He knew this would elicit a response, but he wanted to hear what Rogef said nonetheless.
Rogef exhaled. “I’m too old to go on a tirade, but forcing a person through medical and psychological, I don’t know, brainwashing. No, it’s more like brain canceling. It destroys people. It’s a lobotomy without the ice pick. Different method, same result.”
Morgan was not sure. “But it’s legal and been tested in the highest courts.”
“It’s the same thing, don’t you get it? It’s the same as sticking a knife in someone’s head and removing a part of their brain. It’s the same, except for some reason people see the nonphysical method as humane. Same result, but no blood.”
Morgan had no response to what Rogef said. There was one thing he had thought much about, ever since Celirna’s genetics were exposed. “Do you think she was going to reveal herself to the public?”
Rogef thought about this for a considerable amount of time. “We talked about that on occasion. I encouraged her, but she was reluctant. How she kept this to herself, I have no idea. Obviously looking at how she led her life, her causes, she was finding a way, so to speak. Eventually she would have. She would say, ‘There will be a time when I can.’ Maybe it came before she knew it.”
“Do you think she told Parren?” Morgan asked.
“I don’t know. He’s a gutless wonder. The epitome of everything we have created. However, she did tell me she knew he was taking samples, running tests. Two can play that game, you know. The drug therapy is not perfect, and there will be times when a person is vulnerable. So in a sense, she let him find out.”
Just then, as if monitoring his vitals from a distance, the nurse came into the room. “Sir, you really must rest for the afternoon.”
Rogef smiled like he did when Morgan first landed. “How can I refuse such an insistent young woman? Please lead me away.” He turned to Morgan as the woman helped him out of the seat. “I’ll be in contact. I want you to visit that man with me. You’ll see what I mean.”
She led him out of the room, with Reg following, Rogef appearing frailer than Morgan knew he was. He leaned against her in apparent support, finding a way to slip his arm around her waist. Morgan had to laugh as he walked back outside to the transport craft. He was an old man, but he was still very crafty. Morgan knew Rogef had done his best to manipulate his thoughts, and he had to admit the old man had done a good job. He looked forward to meeting this Bent who was supposedly involved with the murder. Supposedly. An hour before, Morgan would not have used that word.
43
Buckman was in the yard when Ollie and another organizer he had not seen before came over to him. They stood next to him for a moment. Buckman was sitting on a bench, gazing at their boots. “You have a visitor,” the unknown organizer said.
He looked up. “A what?” Visitors were not unusual, but they were also not a common occurrence. The prison was remote, and it was only accessible a few days a week, when the Tram came.
“There’s someone here to see you. Follow me, please.”
The organizer led him away out of the yard and into the all-too-familiar hallway. Only instead of turning to go back to his cell, they continued down numerous other passages until they came to an area he vaguely remembered. This was the location in the complex that he had been in many months before, when he was checked in. Nothing had changed that he could tell. They led him into a room that had no windows and numerous tables and chairs. Other prisoners were in there, and he suddenly saw there were women as well.
“Buckman.” A familiar hand came to his shoulder, and Marie wrapped herself around him.
They stood, held each other, and cried together for almost five minutes. Buckman kept running this hand through the wild red hair that was as crazy as it had ever been. She kissed his face and head as he tried to do the same to her. She held his face in her hands. “What have they done?” she said, looking him in his eyes.
“I can’t explain it,” he said. He was not sure what she meant, since he had not seen himself in a mirror since the day he entered. However, he had seen other men go from lean and taut to soft, fleshy and pale. There was no way not to have this happen with the regimen they went through. They sat down at a table next to each other.
There was a funny silence between them, like they were teenagers meeting for the first time. “I don’t know where to start. So much has happened,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“Tired, confused,” he said. He wiped his face dry with the back of his hand. “They try to take everything away from you here. Any sensation, any memory.”
“I’ve heard. I’ve gotten some updates, but not much,” she said.
“How did you get a visit?” he asked.
“Well, you remember Reg? He’s a good man, and he came and found us. He said there was someone he was working for now, but did not say who. He told me what you told him about what happened that day on the ship,” Marie said.
“Reg. I hadn’t thought of him in a while. I explained the whole thing to him. What me and Charles found.” The scraps of his memory were having problems putting it together.
“We talked for a long time, and he went into great detail about that day. The police interrogations. He doesn’t believe either of you did it, but it’s hard to reverse something like this.” She held his hand. Buckman could see the change in her face as well. The lines around her eyes were more pronounced, and there was a hollowness to her cheeks.
“How’s the family?” he asked.
“They’re going to be fine, but look, there is more I need to tell you,” she began.
“How’s Charles?” he
asked.
“Two years. It doesn’t look good. He’ll get the full reeducation. Please, I have to pass this along. Reg told you about his daughter being a Bent. Turns out this woman, Celirna, was a Bent also.”
Buckman looked at her for several moments, not sure if he had heard her right. “How? I mean, how can they know that? I know what that stuff does, that’s why we pushed her in.”
“There were some questions at the autopsy, and they weren’t sure. But her father came right out and admitted it. She was on drug therapy or masking or whatever. Turns out this has happened before.”
Buckman had lived with prejudice his entire life and had seen, experienced, and lived with the consequences. Even his now-altered mental faculties knew what this meant.
“My God,” Buckman said. “Whoever killed her knew this. That’s why. We never talked about the hand. The mark that would be on her thumb after marriage. They tore it out. I told the attorney, but it never came out in the trial.” He remembered that first image of her draped across the beam, her hand all ripped open.
“Reg thought it wasn’t random. He said that. We talked for some time about why this all happened.” Marie held his hand even tighter, as if what she was about to say would be painful for him to hear. “He thinks there’s a real chance you were targeted. Both of you. They must’ve known the schedule when you and Charles went in there.”
The bits of memory came together for a moment. Buckman knew his therapy had been stopped several weeks ago without explanation, while others continued. Now this made sense. He had to remember. “But it was an accident. I found the leak by accident and only found her because I had to get the meter.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Either way, Reg scheduled out your work weeks in advance. Maybe it was just chance you actually saw her.”
“How’s this work?” he asked, thinking of Celirna, the images of her alive and then in the hold. “I mean, how did she pass off as a Straight?”
“You know how it is. If you’re rich enough, you can buy whatever you want. Her father paid for injections or something to mask her DNA. Others have done it. I couldn’t explain it to you.” Marie looked around the room, the knot of lines between her eyes becoming more pronounced.
Buckman rubbed her hand between both of his. He tried to grasp the enormity of this, but having been out of touch for so long, he struggled. “Didn’t Parren know this?”
“Look,” she said leaning in closer. She slipped her arm around his waist and pulled him in closer. “Reg wanted you know. Charles may not be recoverable. It looks bad for him. You’re the only one to see her there, the only one who remembers. You have to take care of yourself.”
Buckman knew what this meant, having heard this his entire life. Everyone he grew up with lived by this thought. Her concern was genuine, and he kissed the side of her head. There was no need to answer, they both knew. They stayed like that for several minutes, knowing the silence between them was enough to communicate everything. There was a tap on his shoulder.
“I’m timing you,” the organizer said.
“Leave us alone,” Marie said. The organizer took a step back and moved his hand to the stunner. Buckman knew Marie had a tendency to let emotions over take her.
“Five minutes,” The organizer said. He moved over by the wall.
“How are you?” Buckman asked. “How have you been coping?”
“It’s a struggle. It’s constant turmoil, always people in and out of the house. I don’t know who they are half the time. They eat our food, and I never see them again,” she said. There was a slight smile on her face, but he felt her slump after she said this.
“You. How are you coping?” Buckman asked.
“I’ve found ways to take care of my needs. I’ve been with a few other men, but I’ll always love you. Wait for you,” she said.
Buckman was glad to hear this. Physical separation was difficult for both of them, but he knew she had physical needs to take care of. This was common when he was away. Most Bent men and women did this when their mates were gone for long periods. “Good,” he said.
She buried her face into his shoulder and neck. “I still need you.”
For the next few minutes, they talked about home and family, until the organizer came up and placed his hand on her shoulder. She stood up until she was eye-to-eye with the man. Buckman saw the other prisoners and visitors snicker at the scene she was creating, and he realized how lucky he was to have a companion like her. She joined the other visitors as they were escorted out of the room. A few moments later, the prisoners were searched and sent back to their cells. Buckman sat on his bunk and knew he only had a few months left, and he began doing the mental exercise he had stopped many weeks before. He vowed to put everything back together as best as he could. There were gaps, but maybe with time they would fill in.
44
Parren had been working out of his office for the past several days and had arranged for a meeting with Gryman and Morgan to discuss what each of them had learned on their visits. He had spoken with each of them separately but had not brought them together for several months in a private meeting. Gryman, uncouth as he could be, was a willing soldier and very skilled in legal matters. He had an unwavering belief in the separation. The two of them were perfectly aligned in this, except Gryman was never reluctant to publicly speak his mind.
Gryman he was not worried about. Morgan was another matter. Parren had concerns when he sent him to visit Rogef, and in their subsequent conversations, Morgan was indirect in his answers. Morgan described the documentary that Parren knew was being made, but he was unclear on the details of what was shown. This was very unlike Morgan, who always seemed to have an answer to every question. The producers had sent him a release form that he continued to ignore, so he had to be prepared to file a lawsuit as soon as the documentary was released. Both men were waiting in separate offices downstairs. He called both of them up.
“We’re all short on time, gentlemen,” Parren said as they entered the room. “Let’s get to what we came here for. Morgan, can you please describe your visit to Rogef?”
“Sure. As you might expect, I found him frail but still with the same restless mental energy,” Morgan said.
“Mental energy, what the hell does that mean?” Gryman said. They had spoken privately about Morgan’s visit. Gryman talked for some time about how Rogef and the support he was getting as a result of his actions was an impediment to societal progress. His disapproval for Morgan’s visit to Rogef was expressed in a profanity laced fifteen minutes. Parren had always known there was mistrust between the two men, and he had never told them this, but this was by design. One naturally kept track of the other and often informed Parren what was going on. However, he suspected this arrangement might be coming to an end.
“Rogef is still a formidable man,” Morgan said. “Mentally, he can engage in any argument. Physically, he has trouble moving about.” Gryman sat back down and took in this last comment.
“How is his health, his condition?” Gryman asked both of them.
“Rogef suffers from a congenital circulatory defect that can only be treated so far.” Parren had acquired Rogef’s full medical history in a rare moment of triumph over the man. They were discussing estate planning several years ago and Parren through Celirna had impressed upon Rogef the need for seeing his medical records. It was a goldmine of personal information. “Medical technology has astounding capabilities, but it is still unable to replace person’s entire vascular system.”
“Projections? Give me a life expectancy,” Gryman asked.
“That’s difficult to judge with these types of diseases. He could go at any moment or live for another five years.” Parren was no medical expert but had learned enough through the years to understand the principles.
“He’s an amazing man who has accomplished a great deal,” Morgan started to say.
“Who,” Gryman yelled from the opposite side of the table, “is now intent on destroying everything we have worked for. Generations have worked to create the greatest society ever to grace this planet.”
“I have to agree,” Parren said, hoping to cut Gryman off. “What he has done is inexcusable. He is only a few steps away from returning us to the pestilence the Generators put a stop to.”
“Certainly you can see his point,” Morgan said. Gryman came forward with his hands on the table, glaring at him. Morgan continued. “I understand what you are saying, as I’m one who has benefited from the wisdom of the Generators. We’ve enjoyed an unprecedented peace and advancement since the principles were instituted. But he loved Celirna. She was everything to him. He was afraid that if she was not born, he may never have had another chance of having a child.”
Parren knew from the medical records that Rogef was nearly sterile. He had remarkably low odds of fathering a child. Parren even saw where there were repeated tests to be sure she was his, and they always came up positive.
“Still,” Gryman said, “look what he has done. Others have come forward. I regret he will likely not live long enough to see the results of his actions. Parren, excuse my blunt honesty, but there it is.” Gryman did his best to settle back on the chair.
“You’re correct. I didn’t hire you to be accommodating, and your belligerence is your most fundamental trait,” Parren said. “Still, Morgan, did he say anything else about his plans to continue this disruptive behavior?”
“No. Other than the documentary, he did not divulge anything further.” Gryman continued to stare at Morgan for several moments.
“I think you’re lying. I think he told you more than you’re passing along. I know for a fact he sent a Psychologist to interview the one murderer. A man doesn’t go to those lengths if he does not have a definite plan.” Gryman stood up and paced the room, often walking behind Morgan who remained seated.
“True, he’s obsessed with her death, but as far as further information, he didn’t allow more than what I said,” Morgan said.
“Please,” Parren said. “You have to understand we’ve been doing work of our own. We’ve learned Rogef’s political manipulations have quietly been working in the background. He managed to gain access to the plumber by the means of a woman respected in Criminal Psychology. Her access and the interviews between her and the murderer were stunning. Certainly her conclusions were given back to him. Rogef has managed to reduce the treatments for the other man, treatments he sorely needs. That in itself is criminal, denying a man medical assistance he has been proven to require. He has been very secretive about all this, and undoubtedly there is more we haven’t figured out. My wife died a tragic death. Those responsible need to be disciplined accordingly.”
“Certainly,” Morgan said almost too quietly for either man to hear. “How do we correct what he has done?”
“There is no correction,” Gryman said, flipping his com pad onto the table. It skidded about half a meter, spun once and stopped. All three of them looked at it. “We can only work from here forward. He…”
Gryman stared at Parren. They both were very still for several seconds before Gryman continued. “He is a very influential man. And I’m sure he cares for his daughter deeply. I can understand how a father might react, but he may be losing perspective.”
“Yes, having known him for many years, I can attest to his powers of persuasion, both through charm and force. I too believe he may not be working with a full appreciation of his actions,” Parren said. That second where Gryman looked at him was a realization they both came to. Though they had not discussed it to great extent, Morgan had become a person they could not trust. Gryman must have been convinced in that one moment, and he had made a subtle change in tactics. Morgan would certainly sense this, but this could be useful. Morgan could be manipulated to work for both sides in this debate. Parren still paid him an enormous amount for his services, and the removal of that money could be crippling. Morgan liked his nice clothes and expensive apartments, an attribute that was a weakness to be exploited.
“There is the real possibility this will die out. Rogef as an influence has diminished. People will see that and begin to ignore his statements,” Gryman said.
“Possibly,” Morgan said. “My sense is that there are forces who will keep this issue alive. A few people have come forward, though their actions were illegal. There are undoubtedly others who are not speaking.”
“If containment is no longer possible,” Gryman said to Parren. “Maybe we need to engage Rogef on a direct level, to see where he is headed with this.”
“I’ve spoken with him. He did not divulge any further plans,” Morgan said to Gryman
“Parren, do you have any influence with him?” Gryman said.
Parren had given this extensive thought in his private moments. He had tried to conjure up a method on engaging him to learn more, but their experience together had always been uncomfortable. There had always been mistrust between them since not long after the marriage arrangements. “No, this requires an intermediary. Our relationship has degraded to where trust is not assumed. I hate to be so contemptibly honest and hurtful, but this needs to be said.”
“His public actions can be easily tracked. The initial press reaction was tremendous, as you might expect,” Morgan said. “Seldom does this level of interest maintain without something to push it along.”
“Parren,” Gryman said, “do you have any legislative contacts that are interested? By that, I mean there are legal problems with what he is doing, and there has to be a committee that works with this. There are always laws being altered. Is anyone on Rogef’s side or at least listening to him?”
“I’ll give that some thought,” Parren said. “Most everyone conforms to the prescribed view. They don’t get elected otherwise. But there are a few who are willing to listen, or pretend to listen, to these contrary opinions.”
“Look, I know how the press works, and I seem to have a connection with him, even if it is tenuous. I’ll stay in contact with him,” Morgan said. Parren knew Morgan had come to this conclusion ever since he asked him to visit Rogef.
“Put together a list of contacts who may be engaged with Rogef on this matter,” Gryman said to Parren. “I can visit them on your behalf. I should be able to draw some conclusions.” Gryman stood up from the table and put the data com pad back in his coat pocket. “Forward it to me, and I’ll get to work.” Parren agreed and Gryman left the room.
“Well,” Morgan said. “As for me, I can stay in contact with Rogef and determine his mindset and maybe his strategy,”
“Yes, please keep in contact with him,” Parren said. “That will be of useful assistance. Keep aware however, he will try to influence you as he has tried me. I invested in some of his business ventures years ago at his insistence, and they did not pay off. He has done this to many others. He can be both generous and spiteful in machinations to achieve what he wants. A great man for sure, but never one to be trusted.”
Morgan stood to leave as well. “I’ll get back with you if I hear anything further.”
“Yes,” Parren said, not standing or extending his hand. He never shook hands and had no intention of starting. “Your service is always appreciated, and I respect your input.”
45
The investigation took most of a year, and the following report another six months. All was extremely thorough and detailed; a job to be proud of. Gryman had led the investigation, something he was being paid to do, and he enjoyed every minute of it. He dug into all the details of each equipment purchase, overhaul, and transfer of ownership. They traced individual objects across the border and to the warehouses where they were stored. At that point, the picture had become murky, but by subpoenaing records and sending investigators into the field, they were able to track where the missing pieces went. The money trail was
where the real trouble began.
“That is absolutely ridiculous,” Celirna said after she read the report and met with Parren and Gryman. They allowed her to read it prior to public release. “I’ve known this man for fifteen years. I cannot fathom that he would be even inadvertently involved in laundering money.”
The man in question had been a long time member of the board of GoodShare and was found to have ties to various blocked bank accounts that were not on the official records of the organization. The equipment was donated and tracked to its contracted warehouse. From there, most went out to the proper locations, but about a quarter were diverted to other storage centers. Some were food warehouses, farming equipment dealers, and a myriad of other buildings that had nothing to do with medical supplies. The tracking codes were altered several times, until the point of origin was lost. Serial number plates were changed. What they had not counted on were encrypted software codes that contained the serial numbers of the equipment and items that only the original writers could access. Much of what Gryman was able to do was confiscate enough of these to have them analyzed and identified. The money for the black market transactions was tracked backwards from the accountant’s private account, through several other financial institutions, eventually to a Bank in the Northern Province where someone, they could never identify who, was making cash deposits.
“It’s all there,” Gryman said, stabbing his hairy index finger at the screen of the data pad. “The man had been doing this for years. He made a fortune off of you and others he worked with.”
Even before the report was published, information was released and donations dropped away, until the only one left was Council Superōrum. Celirna saw everything she had worked for evaporate in a couple of months. All their records were confiscated, and they had to close their offices, until it came to the point where she had very little to do with her life. The report was published about a week after she read it, and further, unrelated, allegations came forward. One particularly vexing one was that Plymer was not only moving equipment and supplies on the black market but also involved in an adoption scheme. Straight couples could adopt children who tested Straight but had Bent parents. However, there was a more sinister practice of falsifying the records so a Bent child could pass as Straight long enough for money to exchange hands. This investigation was just starting.
A few days after the report was released, Parren was preparing to address his board from his office. Celirna knew she had to talk to them directly, since this was her last hope of continuing her work. They had argued about this for hours, but he finally relented and allowed her to address the council. They were both seated at his desk, and prior to his opening remarks, she was allowed a few minutes before the official agenda was started.
“Good afternoon,” she started. She had known all these people for years. However, rather than the smiles when she had talked to them months ago about GoodShare, many did not even look into the camera. When they did, it was only a brief glance. “I understand you have all read the report and are aware of the problems I am facing. I assure you this is difficult juncture for the organization but one we can take measures to correct. In fact, we already contacted a service that specializes in background checks.”
“Why didn’t you do that before?” someone asked.
“Well, we did, but this time we plan to use multiple services to cross-check the sources,” she said. “Now, even with what happened, we achieved a great deal of progress, and I would like to present some of the data we gathered.”
“But isn’t a cross-check standard practice? What’s to ensure there are no other places where organization can be exploited?” And so it continued. Celirna would try to present her plans and what had been accomplished, only to be diverted by detailed questions she could not answer. She knew she was beaten, but she continued for the full fifteen minutes she had been allowed. She thanked them for their time and left.
With her part of the meeting complete, she stood up to leave and walked around the desk, where she could see Parren but be off the camera. He continued with the first item on the agenda and seemed to ignore her. In fact, he did not even look away from the screen.
Celirna left the office and quietly closed the door behind her. Though she knew GoodShare was done, this final blow was difficult to take. All these people on the council she had just addressed had been acquaintances for years. Some had gladly come on board when she started to get the organization running. Parren was the force behind the council, but she had somehow hoped they would stay on her side. She returned to her office and sat down on a couch along the window. For several minutes, she stared out over the expanse of woods and fields to a few large homes a kilometer away. Her life had been good as one of the privileged few of a privileged people. “Who am I to complain?” she said aloud to the room.
Her next thought, though, was what use were resources and access if a person did not do something with them? Too many people she knew only went from vacation to vacation, not really trying to make a change in the world. A world that, sadly, a part of her had helped create. What a waste if a person with her means did not at least try to make a change.
She took the remote control and started running through some of the promotional videos they had released in the past few years. Yes, something had gone terribly wrong, and she had not known about it. People would go to jail, as they should, and money never to be recovered went to greedy hands. As she sat through the images and data, she began to realize that despite the horrible ending to her organization, a great amount of good had been achieved. People had food and medicine they otherwise would never have had access to. Lives were changed for the better, changes that could impact generations. She watched all of this, knew the effort had not gone to waste, and yet a person very close to her brought it all down with relative and efficient ease. Had the man no conscience? Neither he nor that hairy bastard lawyer could any longer be trusted.
Celirna loaded the videos onto a memory card and went back to Parren’s office. She stepped in, knowing she was off camera but able to see him. Parren barely glanced over to her coming in; the discussion on water rights was too engrossing to interrupt. There was a view screen a few meters to the left and behind the one he was using. She plugged in the memory card, brought up the videos she had been watching, and set the machine to play continuously. Parren was trying his best to stay on the conference call, but his attention was drawn to what he was seeing. Images of sick people receiving care. Bounties of food for Bent children. She stood beside the screen and saw his attention divided between the meeting and her. Someone asked if he had heard what they had said, and he asked them to repeat it for him. They did, and he did his best to rejoin the conversation. She stood by the screen longer, knowing even his powers of focus were fallible. Parren’s eyes darted back and forth, a mannerism no doubt seen by those on the other end. The video reached the end and started over. This time she turned to sound up just barely loud enough to hear but not quite understand. Parren had to keep asking people to repeat questions. The meeting limped along. Celirna left the room, knowing this was the end of their life together.
46
Buckman stepped out of his cell as he had done every day over the past seven months. The lights had come on in the cell fifteen minutes before, and by now his body was timed and conditioned to know when the cell door was going to unlock and he would step out into the hall. The light had come, he relieved himself in the small toilet, and now he was standing in an empty hall with two organizers. “I don’t understand. Where is everyone?”
Typically, all the prisoners would step out and be escorted, as a group, down to the cafeteria, where food would be waiting on the table. Buckman had read books and seen movies from long ago where a prisoner was escorted to his death just in this kind of scenario. The death penalty had long since been abolished, but there were still methods of punishment everyone feared. The sur
gical lobotomy was still discussed. “Come with us. You’re going to take a shower.”
The organizers led him away by each taking one of Buckman’s arms and guiding him down the hallway. They typically had showers once a week in a communal room. The last one was two days before, so this was very unusual. The previous months had taught him that further conversation with the two organizers was useless. He had come to understand that not only would they refuse to answer why they were doing this, but they also probably did not even know or care. They had an order to take him from here to there, and that was what they were doing. They went through various bleak halls until they came through a locked door and stepped into a communal area. There were other prisoners, but they were lounging around. Some were playing pool, others board games, but they looked different. They had facial color, and their bodies were not drawn and out of shape. Everyone stopped talking and turned to look as Buckman and the two organizers passed through. The room even had a window viewing the outside. It was a stark, snow-covered tundra as far as he could see, with what looked to be a tunnel leading out to the horizon. Snow was whipping fiercely. The three of them continued until they came to another door. “In here. Take a shower. You have five minutes.”
Buckman found himself in a private shower stall, with soap, a washcloth, and a towel all set out for him. He hurried through and came back out into the hall. The organizers led him once more. They were in a portion of the prison he had not seen before. The halls were more like an office building, even though the rooms were clearly for prisoners. The doors were open, and men in prison garb were walking in and out of rooms. Organizers were present, but there was none of the apparent mental torture he was used to. He was never even aware that this part of the prison existed, or that there was a lower level of security. A few minutes later, they left him in a room and closed the door. It was supremely quiet, and out of habit be began his mental shuffling as he had been doing since the treatments stopped. The door opened again. The Warden, whom he had seen once, came in, followed by a younger man and an older man who walked with the help of a cane.
“Sir, I’m not sure why you requested this meeting,” the Warden said, “but I can assure you there are much better circumstances under which to talk to him.”
“Warden, trust me. This will work fine,” the older man said. His face looked familiar, but not so familiar that he could put a name to it. Not someone he would have known, but someone he had seen somewhere.
The Warden adjusted his ill-fitting suit. If Buckman had to guess, he would say that the Warden had worn the brown, lumpy suit to impress his important guest. “Sir, I advise to have an organizer in the room at all time. You are in the room with a convict. We can review the records in more agreeable surroundings.” The Warden patted down his combed over hair to little effect.
“Please leave us alone. And he’s not in here for murder,” the older man growled. The man said these few words without looking at the Warden. The Warden stood still for a moment until he got the message that it was best for his career if he left the room. He did, and the older man continued staring at Buckman.
“Who are you two?” Buckman asked. He had not seen outsiders since Marie had visited. His curiosity got the best of him.
“Young man, my name is Rogef, and this is Morgan. An explanation is in order. I am the father of the woman who was murdered. We’ll get to that in a moment.”
“I was convicted of false identification,” Buckman said.
“Correct,” Morgan said. “However, the association with the murder is undeniable. You were present when the body, I’m sorry, when Celirna was discovered.”
Rogef, though clearly feeble, sat with his back straight and his head tilted up. He was waiting for an answer. “I was there.” Rogef’s eyes looked familiar, and it came back to him. She had the same eyes. The same color he saw that morning in the hold when she rolled off the beam. Her eyes, that sky blue color, were the last thing he remembered of her as she sank into the liquid.
“Ah, you do remember,” Rogef said, his voice a harsh whisper. He had to know their conversation would be monitored and recorded. “That’s what I want to talk about.”
Buckman was not sure what else he should say. As he looked from the wrinkled face of Rogef to the manicured one of Morgan, fragments of his time on the ship floated around in his memory. There were Charles and Reg, and Celirna on the beam, but he was not sure how he got there. The wrench. He dropped the wrench. No, it was a meter or monitor.
“Having problems?” Morgan asked.
“Yes. I can’t remember it all, or at least I can’t put it all together.” Buckman was still dazed that he was sitting with Rogef, her father. “I’m sorry sir.”
“For what?” Rogef said.
Buckman realized he may have sounded like he was apologizing for killing her. “I’m sorry for your loss. I don’t got kids, but I have family.”
Rogef considered what Buckman had said. “It’s very difficult, as I’m sure you understand. I know about your wife, well, your mate, as you might say, and your relations. I even know how your mother died. Thank you for your concern.”
“May I ask a question, sirs?” Buckman said.
“Certainly,” Morgan said.
“I heard, please excuse me if I’m wrong. But I heard she was a Bent.” There was no expression for a moment from both of them. Morgan leaned back so he was out of eyesight of Rogef.
“Yes, she was. Her death and my admittance of that fact have sparked considerable debate,” Rogef said.
“To be honest, you may not understand this, but your and the other man’s actions have led to people questioning our form of governance,” Morgan said.
“Don’t talk down to him Morgan,” Rogef said.
“Well, by this, I mean you have been locked away for months, and this discovery and Rogef’s admission have had profound effects,” Morgan said.
“I did an illegal act, I admit,” Rogef said. “But I’m old and unimaginably wealthy and could die at any moment, so I don’t give a shit.” He turned towards Morgan. “You understand, right? It was illegal, but it was right.”
“I can’t go into the ramifications for or against,” Morgan said. Buckman had no idea what was just said, but he knew this was a defensive statement of some kind.
“You have an opinion, but you have no courage,” Rogef said. He turned back to Buckman. “Tell me exactly what happened that day. I’ve seen the trial tapes many times. I’ve had people talk to Charles, but I want to hear it from you.”
“Charles? How’s he doing?” Buckman said.
“Not well, I have to tell you. Let’s focus on you, shall we? Tell me what happened from the time you entered the hold,” Rogef said.
Buckman began to recite what had happened, starting from the time he entered to perform the recharging process. The memories came back in sudden jolts, and he had to back up several times to correct himself or to add more information. Morgan became impatient and even left the room for several minutes. Rogef stayed in place and barely even blinked through the entire time. Rogef asked a few questions that seemed to be more related to why and how he did his job. These questions prompted more memories, and even Buckman sensed the questions were as much for curiosity as to help him. Buckman came to the moment when he first glimpsed her.
“Sir, do you want me to continue?” he asked. The actual discovery was gruesome and at times still woke him up at night.
“Don’t spare any details,” Rogef said.
Buckman hesitated and then continued on. “I bent down as far as I could, and when I looked to my side, I saw something. Something shiny. It sparkled. I called, no, I think I waded over to where I saw it, the sparkle. There she was.”
“Don’t stop.” Rogef bent forward. “I have to understand. I have to know what happened. What did she look like? How had she been treated?”
“She was lying on the
beam, chest down. Her hair was just hanging down into the liquid. She was the same age as Marie and my sister. I came around the other side and pulled her hair away and saw who it was.” Buckman had to stop as the image of her deformed head came slamming back.
“What was it?” Morgan asked. Buckman was surprised, but he realized Morgan looked even more concerned than Rogef.
“Her face. It didn’t, you know, look right. It was her for sure, but I can’t say,” Buckman said.
“They smashed her head in,” Rogef said.
Buckman nodded. “It was her left hand also. It was, they ripped it apart. The place between the thumb and finger was gone. The marriage mark was ripped out. She bled. A lot.”
He had to stop. Rogef had been stoic throughout the entire story until he got to that last part. The man shifted in his seat, put his head down, and placed his hands on his face. He then reached across and placed a hand on Buckman’s arm. They stayed like that for several minutes.
“I hadn’t heard that before,” Rogef said, his head still down. “In a way, it was my fault. I constructed the lie about her identity. Her identity.”
“Still, that’s no reason to do this. You can’t blame yourself,” Morgan said.
The comments surprised Buckman. Rogef raised his head and looked at Morgan.
“Exactly. How can people treat each other like this?” Rogef said. He sat back up and let go of Buckman’s arm. “She was discovered, and they took retribution. Cowards. We’ve created a society of cowards. We can’t deal with the real problems, so we make up imaginary ones to fight.”
“Continue with the story. What did you do then? We know at some point you pushed her in,” Morgan said.
Buckman told them how they went back to the parts room and discussed it, how they came to the conclusion they did. “We made a choice, and I regret it. I sincerely regret it.”
“It was the only thing you could do,” Rogef said. “You were set up. They were going to find her, and the two of you would have been caught and convicted.”
“We could have reported her,” Buckman said. He had replayed this in his mind so many times.
“Don’t even think that. Dammit,” Rogef said, breaking his control for a moment. “They had you no matter what. Think of it this way. If you hadn’t done what you did, the autopsy would not have happened, and the questions would not have started. I wouldn’t have admitted to what I and thousands of others have done. It was a commonly known but never discussed secret. Now it isn’t, and we’ll never be the same.”
Buckman could not grasp the enormity of what had happened since he had been locked up, but he got a sense of it. “Okay.”
Rogef chuckled. He said to Morgan, “He changes the world and says ‘Okay.’ Let me put it this way, we will never live the same way after what you and I did.”
“The hand. Don’t know why, I guess it’s important, but I don’t think it was talked about much,” Buckman said.
“You don’t understand,” Rogef said. “Marriages are arranged. An identification chip is inserted there and a small marking, a tattoo really, is put over it. Usually it’s only a dot and every woman’s looks the same. My dear daughter, in her flamboyant manner, made it an elaborate vine and flower. Very intricate. Very unique. Whoever did this knew who or what she was. That was the one outward symbol she was a Bent. That was the specific target.”
Buckman knew of the custom but never thought of it as any kind of symbol or marker. Many people he knew had tattoos, and many women who pledged to one man did the same marker in the same place. It was nothing to him until Rogef explained the significance with Celirna. “I’m sorry, sir,” was all he could think to say.
“Tell me about what happened next,” Rogef said.
“Not much to tell. We came back down to the hold, waded over. We each put a hand on her and rolled her off.” Buckman paused a moment, that familiar image coming back. “I just, we just, felt terrible to have her go like that. She didn’t do nothing bad to anyone to deserve that. We both felt that way. Honest. We didn’t do nothing to her, and felt terrible. I’m sure Charles feels the same way.”
The door opened and an organizer stepped in. “Time.”
“I believe you,” Rogef said, struggling to his feet. “I believe you. Take care of yourself. I think you get out in two months, and you’re the only one with reliable mental faculties who saw her. I arranged to upgrade the remainder of your stay here. Be well. Whatever you do, remember who you are.”
Morgan stood as well and looked at Buckman a moment before leaving the room with Rogef. An organizer came in and escorted Buckman back to the prisoner area he had walked through earlier to a room with an open door and people to talk to. For most of that day, he stayed in the room out of habit and conditioning. He was afraid to walk down the hall to the common area, but eventually he did. Buckman stood at the big window for several minutes. The sun was not discernible in the gray snow-swept sky, but he knew it was there. The tunnel had lights on the inside, and he saw a vehicle pass through it. His eyes followed it as far as he could until it blended into the horizon. That might have been them in there, and at first he was glad. Then a chill went through his spine. He knew what had happened to her and that this was not a game. Buckman turned around, looked at the other men in the room, and wondered what their stories were.
47
Morgan had never visited a prison before. The thought of incarceration petrified him. He knew how prisoners were treated, and he had seen films since in elementary school. These were required viewing since almost before he could read. Buckman was the first prisoner he had ever talked to. The man, though rough and minimally educated, seemed to be decently behaved person. The review of his record before they interviewed him showed he was a model prisoner, with only one disciplinary incident.
The tramway ran by itself through the tunnel. The ride back to Rogef’s transport was going to take about four hours. They would have flown out there in 30 minutes, but in the winter, the weather was too severe. He could see out of the windows and through the sides of the tunnel. Snow was piled most of the way over the top in a few places, and he had been told that it would be ten feet deeper by the time winter peaked. For now, it was just the two of them, riding on a maglev track, with only the hum of a motor somewhere pushing them along. Rogef had fallen asleep almost as soon as they left the prison. Morgan picked up his com pad and began to check and send messages. He stopped and looked out the window again. The sun had barely lit up the gray sky a few hours ago and was now quickly fading away. He put the com away.
Rogef had reclined his seat fully and was probably not going to wake up for at least an hour. Morgan knew what the old man was doing. He knew Rogef wanted him to see his cause and side of the story. The problem was that it seemed to be having an effect. Morgan had spent a career doing the same thing to other people, so he knew how this worked. The technique was simple and almost second nature for him. Bring someone into your sphere of knowledge. Have that person in close personal contact and provide a steady stream of information. Have them become part of the decision-making process, or at least lead them to believe they are. The other side of this is that Morgan knew what was going on, and now he realized he wanted it to happen.
The description of Celirna was haunting, and Morgan kept going back and forth between Buckman’s description and whether he believed him. The man truly looked devastated. He went with this thought for a few minutes. All the transcripts of interviews with him basically were the same. If what he said was true, that would implicate a much stronger force at work rather than a crime of anger or impulse. The hand was interesting. There was something deeply wrong with how this all happened, and it extended beyond the crime. The system of separation could be called into question, validating years of protest and skirmishes. Morgan had a good life, as did countless others, but this and Rogef’s actions could put it in jeop
ardy. Maybe that was what the old man had in mind.
Rogef woke up and looked at Morgan. He smiled. He was tired, but the smile was genuine. “Do you have the guts to imagine who really did it?” he asked.
Morgan had always been the one to come up with the answer. He always had the words to make things happen. Now he just did not know. Men convicted of crimes they did not commit. Another punished for simply doing his job and being in the wrong place. “I don’t know if I do,” Morgan said.
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said since I’ve known you. There’s hope for you yet.” Rogef readjusted his position on the seat and fell back asleep.
Morgan was not sure how he was going to be able to go back and talk to Parren. He would need to be sure Gryman was not around. The thought crossed his mind that Parren was involved. Her murder was not random, leaving the obvious question of who would gain from this. Morgan knew Parren well enough to understand he was a master at reading people and getting them to do his bidding. That was why Parren hired him. Any direct path back to Parren would be difficult at best to establish, assuming he was involved. The man had many contacts who would be embarrassed by her. Not damaged really, but embarrassed. Parren had the most to lose by her being a Bent, her actions, and what seemed to be her coming admission.
After about thirty minutes, Rogef woke up and brought his seat back upright. “Doing some thinking, are you?” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“There are a number of possibilities,” Morgan said.
“Are there? I don’t think so,” Rogef said.
“What are you trying to do?” Morgan asked. “Is it simply her death you want to resolve, or is there a greater cause?”
“Both. They can’t be separated,” Rogef said. He stood up from the seat and got a drink of water from the sink in the corner of the car, splashing a little water on his face in the process. This seemed to refresh him somewhat. He watched the sides of the tunnel go by, the piles of snow the same as those seen miles back.
“You want to change everything we’ve achieved,” Morgan said.
“How can this be right? What we’ve done. Sure, there have been great accomplishments, but at what cost?” Rogef said.
“We haven’t had a major war in a century,” Morgan said. “That’s unprecedented in human history.”
“Certainly. I agree. Monumental. However, we’ve traded one form of death for another. If you look at the numbers of children dying of starvation and disease, petty skirmishes killing people, it’s about the same. Whether a thousand people die in one day or one a day for a thousand days, it adds up to the same thing. One leads off the news, and the other is mentioned after the weather report.” Rogef sat down again.
“All we’ve done is sanitize it,” Morgan said. He was surprised he even said this.
“Exactly,” Rogef said. “I have to say, I believe the Generators had all good intentions in mind, but we’ve come this far, and it’s not working. Order was supposed to rule the day. Everyone had a place. A purpose.”
“You want to change all that. You think this can be corrected. What’s the answer? Certainly you have some ideas,” Morgan said. Plans were everything. The only way to make substantive change was through careful analysis and approach.
“I have no idea. Not a clue. It’s such a fundamental change that there is no guide to follow,” Rogef said. “It terrifies me, but it has to be done.”
Morgan could only imagine the efforts it would take to reintegrate. Actually, it was difficult to think of the ramifications, and to Rogef’s point, there was no way to predict an outcome. “It’s going to happen regardless.” He asked the obvious question. “Who did this?”
Rogef laughed. “Parren. Well, he is certainly knowledgeable of what happened, but too remote and passionless to be directly involved.”
Morgan blinked a few times. The admission was such a shock; he had to think about how best to respond. “I agree he has much at stake, but to submit to this level....”
“Maintenance of the Order is everything to him. He’s a direct descendant of Dr. Loomis, one of the architects. Parren has taken some perverted secret family oath to defend the work of the Generators,” Rogef said, with a single hard laugh.
Morgan had heard this but had seen not proof. “How do you know this?” Rogef looked at him. Morgan fully understood whom he was talking to. “What do I say to him next time we meet?”
“Whatever you want. He and his gorilla lawyer already hate me. They know I suspect them. Your being here is part of the plan, so go ahead and tell them everything.” Morgan was in awe of the old man’s courage.
“Then what?”
“You can either work with them to defend the indefensible, or you can quit and come work for me. But if you work for me, there’s no turning back.”
48
Parren had been sitting in his home office for several hours, alternately holding remote meetings and watching news broadcasts from around the country. Since the revelation of what Rogef had done, others had come forward, even though this was still against the law. Parren had spent the last week working with legislators to increase enforcement of the principles. There was talk to prosecuting some of people, though the proper method of doing so was not clear. People like Rogef were almost immune to this type of threat. The effort now was to target the doctors and practitioners who allowed this to happen. Gryman became involved in interpreting the laws and meeting with the judges in several cases. Real prosecution was several weeks off, but this was a good start.
Morgan would be stopping by, supposedly to work on a media release to foretell where this would inevitably lead. There were a number of protests and clashes centered on reduced restrictions and a more transparent border. Parren had had his librarians find the original documents and studies that formed the foundation of their society. He had read these over many times and knew the basis of every proposal and plan put forward. Study after study supported what had come to pass, with projections of what would happen if they were not followed. While Parren had to admit that not everything turned out as expected, much of it had. There was too much gained and too much to lose if this were reversed.
“Have you seen this?” Parren asked when Morgan came into his office. There were constant reports of an increase in skirmishes and violence in border areas. At least there was enough there to use for his purposes.
Morgan watched the report of a police action where a group of Bents broke into a store and ran out with clothing and food. “Where is that?” he asked.
“A border town. Doesn’t matter where. It is happening at an alarming rate,” Parren said. Morgan took a seat across from him, where he could see both the screens and Parren.
“What prompted the attacks?” Morgan asked.
“I can’t say specifically,” Parren said. “Unrest is a difficult reaction of define. Generally, we both know. This is continuing evidence of intrinsic behavior.”
Morgan watched the broadcasts for a few moments. “What’s your next step?”
“It’s complicated,” Parren said. “When everything began, her murder, the convictions, and then the revelation, I thought it would be a brief outburst and then die back down. I fear, though, this may take more effort to contain.”
“Do you think it can be contained?” Morgan asked.
Parren swung around in his seat and faced Morgan. Morgan started slightly at this unusual directness from Parren. “Interesting question. What do you think?”
“We have to look at all possibilities. On the one hand, these people are stealing food and clothing. On the other, their actions strain relations and cause further problems.”
Parren stared at him as he stood up. He went over to his desk and picked up a thick, bound document he had been reading. He came back and handed it to Morgan. “Do you know what you’re holding?”
“I’ve seen this many times. Read great parts of it
in school.” He leafed through some of the pages and came back to the front, ran his hand lightly over the signatures, and felt the indentation in the pages. They were real. This is the first of five signed original copies. The foundational document. “Is this it? This is the Book of Proofs? I’ve read copies of it since childhood.”
“That is my great-grandfather’s signature at the top. Copy number one. The document you hold is the underpinning for the separation. The twenty men who signed it are the Generators. They conducted the studies and proposed the laws we live by today. Everything we have worked for and achieved is based on the document you hold in your hands.”
Morgan carefully paged through the document. It was organized by details of the science and statistics in the front, and then the ensuing laws to back it up. Chapter after chapter of proof, which were followed by the legal decrees, each with a detailed explanation. “I never knew this was in your possession.”
“Few people know this. They think the original is on display in the archives, but that is a replica.” Parren took the document back from Morgan. “Everything in here is indispensable. Written by great men, each of whom had insight and wisdom we only dream about today.”
“This is true,” Morgan said. He stood and looked at the screens on the wall. “Did they predict this? And if they did, how would they have dealt with it?”
Parren turned to a page and began to read. “‘There will be times when the natural order established will be challenged. As with any system, equilibrium can be disturbed, but then it will settle down with the proper restraints and adherence to the principles of separation. When these times arise, history has shown that proper enforcement and controls will restore order. Organization during these times is of utmost importance. Those who are unable to align their efforts will be restrained and brought back to order. Equilibrium will be naturally maintained by strict compliance to the separation.’”
“Equilibrium,” Morgan said, quietly. “Is that what this is all about?”
“Absolutely.” Parren put the book back on his desk.
“But things change. We have to make changes too.” He looked at the screens again, and the continuing reports of unrest.
“Small adjustments, sure. However, the overriding principles are unquestionably secure,” Parren said, his voice rising some. Morgan looked up. Parren rarely became agitated by anything, but he had an idea Morgan’s convictions were in doubt. “Did you learn anything on your visit with Rogef?”
“It was very interesting. The man we visited, Buckman, is a typical Bent. Crude, low education. Manual laborer,” Morgan said.
“He claims innocence. I’ve read his interviews. Honestly, what do you think after meeting the man?”
Morgan hesitated on answering. Parren had seldom seen Morgan lack for a proper response. “I have to admit, in person he is convincing. The details he espoused were riveting. He admits to being there, and seeing, if you’ll excuse me, your wife’s body.”
“How can you trust a man like that?” Parren said, practically spitting the words out. “The system has decided. There is no question of his involvement, his and the other man’s—the plumber. Both of them together. What do you make of them? What does Rogef think?”
“Rogef,” Morgan began. “Rogef is a man of conviction. By that, I mean he has his doubts about what happened, and he cannot rest until he finds out.”
Parren slammed his hand down on the book. “How can he say such a thing? Does he have no shame? Look what he has done. He has and continues to desecrate everything this sanctified edict has set forth. There seems to be a demonic lust, a determined cruelty to tear this up and return to days of wars and killing.”
He came away from the desk and walked over to the screens. “See this?” Parren said, waving his hand across the wall. “Can you imagine if this were allowed to fester and grow? Can you imagine? You know your history and what this can turn into.”
Morgan clasped his hands together. “Parren, please. You clearly are under tremendous strain over this. Please sit down.”
Parren did and leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees. “The problem I’m having is that I see my life’s work, my families work, at risk of unraveling. Look what I have been a part of.”
Morgan took the controller and flipped through various other channels. The sound was off on all the channels, but he knew what was going on. “Times change. These people, the ones you see running around. That’s simply a small minority. Most Bents are living their lives day to day. That’s all they want.”
Parren stood back up again and walked over to the screens. “Morgan, what are you saying? That we engage them in this conversation?”
“In a way I am suggesting this. The man we met with was a decent person caught up in a sordid scheme.”
Parren went back to the book and turned to various pages, carefully smoothing each one out with his hand. “This is a book of guidance. Prophecy, really. The facts are clear.” He went through a few more pages. “No. Not unless they understand and agree with what is in here. I’ve had this discussion many times. You have been in some of those talks.”
Morgan looked off to the side. “I don’t know anymore. I believed that for most of my life, but now I have doubts. My life has been remarkable because of that, but is it right for one group of people to be rendered to such conditions?”
Parren came to the front of the desk. “Rogef is not a man to be trusted. He’ll treat you like he has dozens of others who have crossed his path. Keep that in mind as you become closer to him. I ask that you not return here. You’ve been of good service to this point. It is sad you have lost perspective of the purpose we serve. What I do, and what you were doing, was for the betterment of everyone. If you no longer wish to be a part of that, please go.”
Morgan stood. “Consider where this is headed. What you see on these screens has been happening for years. Now you’re focused on it. It’s time to solve this, not apply stronger versions of what caused it in the first place.”
Parren raised his voice. “I asked you to leave.” This was something he rarely did, and it felt unnatural. Direct confrontations were difficult. Morgan had nothing left to say, but he stood across the room from Parren for a moment. At first, Parren thought he had overstepped his bounds and Morgan would try something. This was not the case. He turned and left the room to be escorted off the premises.
49
Agitation was difficult for Parren. After Morgan left, he ignored the remainder of his work for that day and concentrated on the reports coming in. Eventually another report on the incident that triggered all this was presented. Parren watched with the sound off, as he had heard this all before. They showed pictures of his wife, Charles, and Buckman. Buckman’s mate, a wild-looking woman with red hair, was interviewed as well. Parren turned the sound up and listened as she repeated the injustice of it all. In her words, of course. A mate. Why can’t they marry properly like civilized people? Celirna was the rare example. Most possessed addled minds, barely competent enough to function on a level to even feed themselves. Control of such deviant behavior was at the very core of what had been built. The human race would forever be moribund if they allowed people like that, those Bents, to mix freely and be a part of them.
The debate would rage on, and despite what he had told Morgan, he knew this was going to be drawn out. The signs had been there for years, but he thought he was able to make changes to contain the problem. He paid politicians and had enough influence to effect law. This had worked remarkably well. If it hadn’t been for her, this would have been controlled. Parren turned all the screens off and sat for a moment. He turned one of the screens back on and switched it over to some saved images of Celirna. He looked at it and then deleted the file. He went through the entire list of images he had of her until he came to the last one.
The image lingered on the screen for a
full five minutes. He could not take his eyes off her. She had betrayed him, tricked him. Despite this, other memories came back. Them on vacation together, social and business functions in which she mingled with adroit ease. A trait he was often jealous of, but was able to use nonetheless. Moreover, he wondered about her. She was dangerous, and all the ramifications since her death proved this. Had she revealed her identity while she was alive, this would have been many times worse. Sometimes a person has to be stopped.
Parren deleted the file and knew he had to work to erase her from his life. He sent all the staff home and went around the estate, gathering all the evidence or he could find. Ever since he had moved back in after her death, he had found it difficult to remove her belongings. Now that he started, he could not stop. He picked up every article of clothing and tossed it into the roaring fire in the back sitting room. Every photograph of her was gathered up and burned. All her makeup bottles, toiletries, souvenirs, small personal items, he put into boxes. He kept the jewelry and anything of true value. One by one, he carried the boxes down to the boat they had in the lake. It was dark by then, and he motored out to the middle and tossed each box in, watching each one disappear into the black water. That was where she deserved, and was supposed, to be.
Parren came back into the house and went up to his office, where he found the reports. These were unusual paper copies of anonymous tests he had performed on her. He had long since erased the electronic copies. Over a period of a couple of years, he had performed DNA tests on her to see if he could detect a pattern. Whenever they had sex, he would go into the bathroom, swab some of her vaginal fluids from his penis, and have this tested. Since an unannounced blood draw was not possible without raising suspicion, this was the best source for testing he could find. Labs would perform anonymous tests and send results back. A pattern began to emerge. The agent used to mask the results had a limited duration. As the effectiveness wore off, the percent certainty of the test would drop. Then it would go back up for a few months and drop off again. A person’s DNA does not vary enough to cause this amount of uncertainty. Twenty tests. He plotted out the results and saw the pattern. Though he was never able to determine where she received the treatments, each time before the number went up, she would take a trip to a function or vacation spot.
Parren took the reports down to the fireplace, where the fire had died down. He used the poker to rearrange the logs and put another one on. Within a few minutes, the fire regained strength. The first file was about five years old. He leafed through it and then tossed it on the fire, and continued to do this with each of the twenty. The data showed a pattern, but he kept repeating the tests to increase the probability of correct results. After he had received the results of the last test and had that final argument with her, he knew what he had to do. Then, as these problems must work, certain things were said to certain people, and a sequence was started.
His name was never connected, but he knew Gryman had put everything in motion. All he knew was that she was to disappear. Completely. Only now there was an error of timing. If she had been in the material long enough, all the evidence would be gone. If they had caught the Bent workers before they pushed her in, she would have tested as a Straight. The masking agent works on bodily fluids and areas where samples are normally taken. The flesh of the body is not impacted. The test results on her remains were inconclusive as a result, and this started the whole mess.
Parren watched the last of the files burn up in the fire. After sitting there for several more minutes, he felt very tired. It was late, and he was not used to staying up until the early morning hours. He laid his head back in the chair and wondered what was her point in doing all this. Why had she married him? She had been seductive and had totally infatuated him. This was different from other women he had known to that time. Deceitful, really. He felt like a fool, he was a fool, for not noticing this sooner. There had to be a larger reason why she would do this besides some concept of love or attraction. Someone had put her up to this as part of a plan. Parren knew who he needed to talk to and where to start looking.
50
Morgan walked into the dining hall of Rogef’s mansion and immediately saw a woman he had never dreamed he would meet. Tayden was a Bent agitator who for years had made headlines for leading protests, rallies, and other salacious, newsworthy events. Morgan almost turned around and left, but instead, he made his way around the outside of the room and introduced himself to several other people he vaguely knew. Rogef had invited Morgan once he agreed to work with him. It only took a few minutes to tell Rogef he had stopped working with Parren. Morgan was well off, but he needed a job, and Rogef gave him a good offer. When he came around to Rogef, Rogef pulled him over to the side.
“Glad you could make it,” Rogef said.
“Thank you for inviting me, but I have to ask about the company you are keeping,” Morgan said.
“Where do you propose I start?” Rogef said. “Most of those here have been through the same ordeal as I have. They have either lost children or gone to the same measures as I did.”
Morgan looked around the room again. Many of the people were of the same status as Rogef. The news that Rogef revealed had brought them forward with the ugly specter of deporting their now adult children. “I understand that, but you’ve been talking to Tayden. You understand what she has done. She has a history of protests that turned violent.”
“Who doesn’t know that?” Rogef said, standing as straight as he could in front of Morgan. “I have to reach out to the other side. She cares deeply about the causes she fights for.”
“‘Fight’ is the right word. You know, ten years ago, she was involved in the Harden uprising.” Harden was a young man run over at the border by a police vehicle. Some said it was an accident and others intentional. Tayden organized a group of protestors who blocked a major thoroughfare for a week before the clash turned into a volley of rocks and then crude grenades. When it was all settled, five Straight solders were dead, along with twenty protestors. Tayden was tried, but could not be convicted, for inciting a riot.
“I know all about that.” Rogef looked around the room and saw her talking to a group of men in the opposite corner. “Well, let me say this. You have to hear her out. To me, she only cares about her people. Sometimes passion can lead a person in the wrong direction and to make mistakes. But she’s matured since then. Her ideas make sense.”
Morgan put this together quickly in his mind. “Did Celirna know her?”
“They met on several occasions. Neither of them made an issue of it, since they knew how that might look. If they were planning something, I don’t know about it. Look, you called me and told me what Parren said to you. You know what they are and what they want to further. Be on the right side of history.”
Rogef put his hand on Morgan’s shoulder and guided him back to the table in the center of the room. “Can everyone take a seat, please?” he said to the group. On cue, three people came in, served a light meal, and then quickly left, closing the doors behind them. “I want to welcome you all here. I wish it were under better circumstances, but we can’t always choose the timing.”
Tayden was the first to speak up, as Morgan had expected. “Let me be the first to say, I’m deeply saddened by your loss. She was a great person; I had met her several times. It’s ironic how this has brought us together. I never dreamed I would be sitting with this company.” There were a few nods, but not much more. A reserved acceptance was how Morgan saw it. He had never seen her up close, but she lived up to her pictures. A decent-looking woman with dark hair flecked with gray. It was her eyes he remembered most, black, penetrating, now with some wrinkles to add emphasis.
“Thank you,” Rogef said. “I appreciate that. Now, I wanted to get all of you together to talk about where we go from here. Most of you followed my same path with your children, and you understand the deep
problem we face. Legally removing a child from their parents is unthinkable.”
“How did we end up here?” one man, Chrima, asked. Morgan knew him as an investor who earned his fortune making huge leveraged buyouts of companies. “How did we get to a point of removing common sense from our public discourse? I suggest we go around the room and briefly talk about why we did what we did.”
One by one, the ten attendees who lost children or took other measures talked about what happened. Each story was similar. Early in the pregnancy, a determination was made. By law, a test was required; however, most had a private test done ahead of the publicly disclosed test. Some took measures to quickly falsify the official test or had an abortion. Two women carried the baby to term and gave it up. Morgan and Tayden were the only two who did not have a similar story. Most of the others had difficulty getting through the description of what they went through, and after the last person spoke, there was silence for about thirty seconds.
“Thank you,” Rogef said, his baritone voice soft and echoing in the large hall. “For years, I thought I was alone. I worked through channels many of you are aware of. Now, the immediate problem is that we think, well, we know we are right. However, the law is still against us. I think a few of you have been served notices.”
“I received mine yesterday,” a woman said. Morgan had not met or even recognized her. “Are they planning to start rounding us up like loose cattle?”
There were a few snickers around the room. “That is the question. They already pulled my doctor in for questioning. His license is suspended indefinitely.”
“Who’s behind this?” Tayden asked. There was no answer as everyone looked from face to face. “I think that’s the first order of business. Find out who’s doing this and go after them.”
“It isn’t as easy as that,” Rogef said.
“Of course it is,” Tayden said, challenging Rogef. “We have to move while this is still in the public eye.”
“Please,” Chrima said. “This is a long term problem that will take years to correct. It’s deep in our system.”
“I once changed a work permit law in a week. It can be done,” Tayden said.
“A work permit is not nearly as involved as our genetic laws,” Chrima said, addressing the protestor directly.
“We can’t go down this path,” Morgan said. “Both of you, all of us will need to work together. Yes, Tayden, we need to find out who is behind the threats. And yes, Chrima, we need to proceed with care.”
The conversation continued for about another forty-five minutes. Rogef was able to guide them to a loose set of actions. Plans were made to contact sympathetic lawmakers and judges. Each case would need to be fought individually for the time being, until enough momentum could be built. They established which legal channels they should work through to keep themselves out of trouble. Each had a pressing cause to be there, and they knew if they could get their cases resolved in a positive manner, it would build a string of precedents. They took a short break, during which time Morgan again pulled Rogef aside.
“You need to give Tayden something to do, or she’ll only cause trouble,” he said.
“I’m counting on it. That man we visited is going to be released in about a month. I’m going to ask her to be there. I’m sure she can make herself known without any help from us.”
Morgan knew Rogef had planned this out carefully. It was his nature. “You have this all worked out, don’t you?”
“Everyone gravitates to their natural tendencies, right? It’s what this is all about. Each person invited brings specific talents to the table,” he said. “To be honest, you and she are in the same business. Creating a public image.”
Morgan had not thought of it in that way, but it still made him uneasy to think of himself in those terms. “You want me to work with her?”
“That’s what I want. It makes sense to me. Talk to her about it. Get her engaged in his release.” Rogef moved back to the table and the meeting continued.