Lois Bujold - The Flowers of Vashnoi

Ekaterin wished she didn’t understand this so very clearly. She struggled to put it in terms everyone here would grasp. “I suppose… she thought we were trying to take her family away. And she tried to take you back in the only way she knew how.” Murder, suicide, and a pyre all in one swift, final, defiant denial.

“That’s crazy ,” whispered Ingi. Though Ekaterin thought Boris and Vadim saw, at least a little. Enrique stood back, as sober and polite as a stranger at a wake for none of his own. But Ekaterin bet he was taking it all in.

“It was a mistake,” Ekaterin went on. “We didn’t intend any such thing, necessarily. We could have talked it out. I should have been more clear…”

Through his smoke-smudged faceplate, Enrique’s brows twitched as if to argue this last, but he made no comment aloud.

Ekaterin sat on the ground with a jolt, cross-legged, and commenced to digging out her wristcom from under her suit sleeve. The trouble with emergency buttons was that when you were in the middle of the dratted emergency, there was no time to go for them. All you had time for was, was, grabbing a stunner and shooting. Which, she supposed, was why Miles kept making her take those self-defense-course refreshers every dratted year.

God . Whatever else this day wanted from her, she had nothing more to give it.

Three tries with her shaking finger, and she managed to stab the screamer button. The response, at least, was gratifyingly instantaneous.

“Armsman Pym? I want backup .”

Ekaterin was grateful that she actually had time to finish her bland hospital dinner before Miles boiled in. Even he had to suffer a forced delay in the hallway, as the nurse on duty ushered the visitors into their required protective garb. Armsman Roic in his brown-and-silver duty uniform leaned over to half-salute-half-wave at her through the lead glass in her door, his smile anxious. She waved back in a good simulation of cheer, which seemed to comfort him.

After final inspection by the nurse, Miles was at last allowed to enter, Enrique trailing amiably. Ekaterin was relieved to see the two wore only standard disposable gowns over their clothes, with medical-style face masks and gloves, the simplest level of protection from contaminants. If Hassadar General’s experienced radiation unit wasn’t panicking about her, no one else needed to. Miles had left his cane in the hallway with Roic, which slowed his rush to her bedside to a mere limp. She could feel the heat of his hands through his oversized gloves as he grasped her own, any more expressive oh-god-you’re-all-right hugs thwarted by her—temporary, she trusted—quarantined state.

“Have you been home?” she overrode his beginning babble.

He shook his head. “Not yet. I’d have been here sooner, but there were people. In lines. Well, more climbing over each other. Eventually I channeled my Inner Piotr to shake them off.”

Enrique nodded, looking vaguely impressed.

She could just picture that—a useful trick, if sometimes startling. “I fielded a call from Aurie and Nikki before dinner. Nikki was a bit frantic, but I think I talked him down. You need to go home—no, first you need to stop wheezing. Then you need to go home and calm them, too.” She added after a moment, “Though Aurie says the twins are pretty oblivious, so far.”

“Right. Right.” He drew a long breath through his mask.

Enrique seemed more put-together—he’d evidently had time for a shower and a change of clothes since their return from the zone, and maybe a meal, or more likely a food bar shoved into his hand by Martya in passing. He had a meditative air, which was just the look one wanted on one’s expensive imported scientist, although on what track his train of thought would exit his labyrinthine brain was often a surprise. But it appeared he’d had time to debrief his eyewitness account directly to Miles.

“What’s going on out there?” she asked. “Did they put Ingi, Jadwiga, and Boris together in one room as I’d asked?” Whatever would follow tomorrow, tonight the traumatized little family needed to be together. Save one , she was reminded.

Miles nodded. “Not quite procedure, but your argument prevailed, given their similar levels of exposure. I haven’t had a chance to meet them yet, though I did glance through their window. Sitting in their beds and eating their dinners, it looked like.”

That did sound reassuring. “And Ma Roga?”

“They have her in a private locked room with a Hassadar guardsman stationed outside the door, regulation when treating an arrestee. She’s recovered from the stun all right. Seems to be silent and surly rather than combative, the nurses say.”

Ekaterin hitched up the sagging neckline of her unflattering hospital gown. “She hasn’t actually been arrested yet, has she? Because we need to think about that one.”

“The radiation isolation is enough to keep her locked down for the moment.”

“All right.” She rubbed her forehead. “Miles, your district is exhausting .”

“Yes,” he sighed, “I know.”

“Have you figured out yet why that, that encampment was allowed to go on for so long?”

He grimaced. “I’m going to be having words about that with my rangers tomorrow, once I’m sure I have the full story. It’s… almost a legacy problem, I suppose. In several senses.”

Hiking himself onto the side of her bed, he tapped his fingers on his paper-clad thigh and continued, “The zone boundary has always been more permeable in practice than in theory. In that first generation after the destruction, a lot of people who’d survived in the outlying areas kept trying to sneak back into their homes. A dedicated ranger cadre didn’t yet exist, so it was handled erratically by the district guard, military police and squads, and village speakers.

“Neither side was happy with the other, needless to say. Shooting people to keep them from dying had logical flaws obvious to everyone. At one point it was proposed to burn the standing homesteads, to block people going back. I’d call it a major row, except that in the shadow of Vashnoi, people had a new definition for major.”

Ekaterin nodded understanding. Enrique listened intently.

“Finally, Piotr ruled that anyone over age sixty could return, if they refused to be talked out of it. No children or young people allowed in. There was this weird little geriatric community around the edge of the zone for a while.

“The problem settled down—I suppose it would be too cruelly accurate to say died down —in a few years, well, decades. Younger people had no memory of the places and no desire to go back in. Plus the more sensible majority who wouldn’t go back on a bet. That phase was pretty much all over by the time I came along.”

“Not quite, it seems,” said Ekaterin.

“Yeah,” Miles agreed ruefully. “But it meant that however much it was against the later rules, once there were rules, it was established custom that old people on the fringes of the zone were left alone. So that dispensation Ma Roga claims Piotr gave her had precedent. It is not, mm, totally unreasonable that the newer rangers felt she was, so to speak, grandfathered in, even though she lingered there long past the time she… should have.”

“She could have come out ages ago,” said Ekaterin, considering that ghastly graveyard behind the hut-on-stumps. At least seventeen years, if not thirty . “And maybe saved more of those foundlings. Even if, in her isolation, she didn’t realize it, someone should have. Though, really, she doesn’t seem to have been in anything like a total news blackout. But she did try to take care of the abandoned kids, tried to save them. It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all.” Ekaterin frowned into her lap. “I’m wondering if we should run DNA identifications on those bodies buried under the posts.”