John Barnes - Directive 51

Bambi saw a couple of small muscle twitches, but it looked like Ysabel was going to remain conscious. “Tell me more.”

“Don’t you get it? More fishermen drown in storms, more days with no fish because they don’t find a school, if the wind’s not right it could be three hours to get out in the morning and three hours to get in at night and no fishing in all that time, and maybe a third of their days on shore hand-fixing a hemp net that rots, because their nylon one fell apart—that’s if anyone even remembers how to make the hemp net. More work for less fish! They’re gonna starve , Bambi, that’s what me and Daybreak did to them, those fishermen are gonna starve!”

Ysabel’s sobs were terrible, wracking sounds, as if she were being punched in the gut on each one, but, Bambi thought, as she rubbed the girl’s back, there was something strangely healthy there, like the bursting of a boil.

After many long minutes, not looking up, Ysabel said, “When Daybreak had my head, I couldn’t see that that was what it was about .”

“About what?” Bambi asked.

“Daybreak was about killing the fishermen. It wasn’t an accident at all, it was deliberate. Daybreak was about killing the fishermen and their families to punish them for liking what they liked and wanting what they wanted. I wanted to force those fucking fisherman bastards to stop having time to sit around and watch old American soap operas and drink German beer, like they wanted to, and not to send their kids to school to become all engineers and lawyers and shit, because that was like a plaztatic life, and they were supposed to reject it and hate it, like I did. It was their, like, job , they were peasants , they owed it to me to be peasants, all close to the Earth and in harmony and everything, not… not… I needed them to be real .”

Ysabel’s fists were sunk deep and knotted in the couch cushions. She was breathing shallowly and fast, pupils dilated, and then she sagged, all at once. She sat with her head down in her hands. After a few seconds’ pause, she said, “Right there, did you hear that, I slid right over into being all Daybreak again. It just grabbed me. Now, here with you, isolated from it, I came right out of it, but back when I had Internet, I’d’ve plugged in, and the Daybreak newsfeed would’ve fed me like fifty stories that hit me right where I most hated the Big System, and all my friends would’ve been there yelling, yeah, that rocks, and I’d’ve been moving deeper into it, thinking more about how the Big System had to come down and death to the plaztatic people, and telling myself it was because I loved the peasants so much. See? That’s what hits me when I have the seizures, only it hits so hard and fast I can’t tell you about it… but I guess I just did.”

She looked drained and exhausted, and Bambi said, “I should write this up and send it to Arnie Yang; are you okay?”

“Okay? Yeah. Maybe for the first time in a few years. I gotta sleep, though, I really do.”

Bambi left Roth tucked in, with a nurse/guard from town watching, and went to talk things over with Larry Mensche. She was going to miss the FBI agent—he’d be headed north to the Coffee Creek prison, to try to find his daughter, Debbie, and make sure that she was all right. That was his real mission, as far as Bambi, Larry, and Quattro were concerned; officially, he’d be gathering intel about the Castles between here and Canada, how they actually leaned politically, how much they had taken over their regions, whether they were still just well-prepared rich nuts, or a base for the temporary national government to organize from, or a nascent enemy to be suppressed.

Between his official and his unofficial duties, she wanted his thoughts about Ysabel. He’d said he loved backpacking in the old days because it gave him time to think things over; perhaps a week of walking north would give him time enough to see into this riddle, and maybe he’d find a way to send her the answer.

Bambi’s report on Roth’s interrogation was on Heather’s desk when she came in. Oh, man, this is going to be another report where Roth’s interrogation turns up results not consistent with anything except a system artifact, Cam isn’t going to like that, he’s going to think Bambi’s leading her into that instead of pursuing the information about the enemy —trying to head off trouble, she scribbled a note that it looked like even a medium-high-level member of the conspiracy like Roth must have been carefully kept away from any knowledge about who she was actually working for.

Yeah, that ought to keep Cam off her case; she didn’t need another fight with him. Cam said he talked to Graham daily, so I bet he’s getting an earful. Wish I could be there, but I understand, if Cam’s afraid that there will be a nuclear attack again, he’s got to keep the President hidden.

She tossed her hand-scribbled memo into the out basket, grimacing at her childish scrawl. It still beat the manual typewriter they’d assigned her, despite the bottle of Lock-Ease she’d applied to the ancient contraption.

Okay, what else have I not done in weeks? Maybe on my calendar—

Well, there. She hadn’t torn off a calendar page; she had never really used a paper calendar before Daybreak, but when she and Lenny had started talking about having a child, she’d tried to start tracking her cycle. And then they’d realized that from a fertility standpoint, there’s no benefit to knowing the fertile days if you have sex every day anyway, so—

Hold it.

The calendar was still reading November 11, the date she’d taken it from its box, here in her new office, and hung it. She tore back through the pages to make sure—

Hunh. Her heart leaped up.

They hadn’t had long to try, but she and Lenny had really tried. (The memories made her smile so much.) And since her teen years, Heather had always gotten her period right on time, bang, set your watch by it. But in the frantic environment of DRET, with so much going on all the time, she’d lost track. She’d been overdue by ten days on the day Lenny died… and I’m about to be overdue for the next one.

She thought about running to the infirmary but wasn’t sure whether you were allowed to run in… “my condition.”

She walked, briskly, to the infirmary.

The first non-medical person to hear the news, besides Heather, was Sherry, which just seemed right; this particular infirmary liked her as a gofer, so she was frequently their runner and gradually picking up nursing, record keeping, and all the other things that might make her useful, to add to her old social-work skills. When Heather saw her rocketing by the door, she just stopped her and told her.

Sherry grinned. “Wow. And you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t get morning sickness, but I now know that a lot of people don’t. And I’m a big girl, as you may have noticed; Lenny was small because of his condition but he said his whole family was short and skinny, so it’s probably not a real big baby, and even if it is, there’s plenty of room anyway. I might not even start to show for another few weeks, the doctor says. But he had enough working gadgets to be able to tell me, yep, I’ve got a healthy little person inside me.”

The younger woman hugged her. “Heather, I know for you it’s probably a pain in the ass—”

“Or somewhere around there. Eventually.”