Chapter Ten

Finally, Mairin could get a decent drink.

Luna’s grand opening was a busy affair, coming just one day after the President’s inauguration. Mairin took her orders from Colonel Wake and initially he had forbidden them from going. Mairin had heard the speech, or variations on it, many times before: “If you start drinking and socialising, you have no idea what information you might let slip, and to whom. You all need to keep a tight lid, and that means no bar trips.”

Mairin had no idea what information she knew that she could let slip, but that was beside the point – she had had it drilled into her during her training that you never knew what you knew, and simple facts that seem obvious to you might be the key to victory for your enemies. What she could not fathom, however, was who aboard the station might be able to use that information. There was absolutely no way an agent of The Clock or Nox Canister or any other faction could be aboard – these people from other Earths didn’t even have factions, and wars were mostly things of history for them.

But eventually Wake had relented. Mairin had done her part, convincing him that if the other Earths were ever going to work with them (instead of just being terrified of them as they currently were) they would need to make appearances at these things, and loosen up a little. Once he had consulted with the other Colonels, Wake assigned her to lead a “task force” whose purpose was to be seen having fun at the bar launch – a job she was all too happy to take.

Now, sipping her Earth: Edo gin (far, far sweeter than she was used to), Mairin looked out over the low-lit room at her elite team of partygoers. Private Jenks was telling rude stories to a table of delegates in a variety of languages, showing off his translation skills by speaking C-Castilian, E-Russian and E-Japanese, and even a little H-Greek. Every so often she would catch the tail end of a punchline over the thumping music and there would be a roar of laughter or gasp of shock. Sergeant Griffin seemed to be flirting with everything that moved, going from table to table and dropping chat-up lines with practiced precision. Mairin confessed to feeling a little jealousy; Griffin was handsome, and she wouldn’t have minded some of that attention herself. That sort of thing was off-limits too, of course, but to hell with the Colonels. They weren’t here, and even though she took orders from Wake, Mairin still wasn’t a soldier.

Lastly there was Belle, who was talking with the barman intently. Mairin couldn’t figure out if she was flirting too, or trying some other tactic, until suddenly she leapt behind the bar and started pouring drinks. Mairin went over, mystified.

“Belle, what are you doing?” she shouted over the din.

“I have a trial shift!” she yelled back with excitement. “Manny said I could work here!” She gestured over to the barman, who waved happily and returned to his customers. He seemed to be in his element, serving one drink after another in quick succession.

“Belle, you’re a delegate of Audacity and a soldier in the Novus Ordo Seculorum military – what do you need a third job for?”

“It’s fun!” she shouted. Manny had come over by now, so Mairin turned to him.

“Shouldn’t there be Service members working the bar, not delegates?”

“They said they wouldn’t get involved,” he replied, “that if I was going to run this place it had to be by myself. Anything else would look like bias, or special treatment”

“Alright, well, try not to poach too many of my operatives, would you? And I’ll take another one of these,” she said, passing over her empty glass.

“I’ll do that!” Belle reached for the glass. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“What, they don’t have bartenders on Garden?”

“Of course they do. I just mean I never was one.” Belle said.

“Actually, I was wondering about that – you must have, like, farmers and things on your Earth? Librarians, bartenders, artists, all that. Are they still aligned with a faction?”

Mairin straightened up slightly. Belle knew to keep things close, but the conversation was getting close to actual information-sharing. It would at least be useful to remember what she had told him. in case she needed to write it up later.

“Well, they have to live somewhere, so they’re kind of aligned. But they don’t work for us. And most of them don’t know what’s going on most of the time.”

“Unless you happen to need a librarian or a bartender for one of those covert ops, right?” Manny was teasing, but Mairin leaned forward.

“What covert ops would those be?” She was looking at Manny but directing the question to Belle. It was he who answered, raising his hands in mock surrender.

“Hey, don’t worry, I don’t know anything – I know you like your secrets to stay that way.”

Mairin switched to G-Novan to talk to Belle without Manny understanding. “What have you told him?”

“Nothing,” she protested, still mixing Mairin’s drink. “He’s just joking.”

“Hey, come on,” said Manny, “That’s not fair. I learned a whole language for you guys, don’t make me do it again!”

“Sure,” she said, giving up and switching back to Gaean. “It’s fine – you two have fun.” With that she took her drink and found an empty table in the corner.

Belle was right, of course. But Mairin had been trained well enough to know that information leaks were most often exactly that – leaks, rather than bursts. Slow trickles of details and clarifications that would eventually paint a picture of what it was like on Garden. It was very important to the Colonels that that picture remain under their control.

She listened for a while to a pair of delegates on the table opposite, who seemed to be arguing about a continent. One man was wearing a comfortable cardigan, while the other she recognised as a machine called Hej, who she had met during the campaign. Hej was broad and blocky, like a squat fridge, and unusually for a machine, she had a gender.

“Well, what do you call it?” the cardigan man was asking.

“i don’t know,” Hej replied. “which one is it?”

“It’s west of Europe, north of the equator. Here, I’ll draw it.” Cardigan pulled a pen out of his pocket and grabbed a napkin. He started drawing an irregular shape, and Mairin (rising a little from her seat to look over his shoulder without either of them noticing) recognised it quickly as a continent from her own planet, albeit not one she had ever visited. Os Cavaleiros controlled almost all of it currently, but back when it was Novan they had called it Skywater.

Hej was watching the man draw, still not getting it, until he connected the lines and turned it around to show her. Then something happened to the machine that Mairin didn’t immediately understand. She became very still, except one of the implements that represented her hands began to vibrate slightly, enough to cause the table to judder.

“yeah, I know that one. We call that the greater continent. It had another name, but… we don’t like to say it.”

“Why?” asked Cardigan. “Did something happen to it?”

“you haven’t read your briefing document?”

“It’s like five books long. I’ve read the highlights, but I don’t know about the ‘greater continent’. What happened to it?”

“sort of. something happened on it. i don’t know, it was before i was made, but… it isn’t safe there anymore. Parts of the eastern seaboard are okay, but not the kind of place you’d want to live.”

There was a silence between the two of them. Finally Mairin stepped away, not wanting to spy over their shoulder any longer. She had been away from her drink for about a minute and a half, which her training would tell her meant she should throw it away, but she was pretty sure nobody had been near her corner. And again, the Colonels weren’t here, so what the hell.

Disappointingly, the episode with the continent had caused the two she was watching to lapse into silence, leaving little to eavesdrop upon. On the other side of Luna, however, there seemed to be a more interesting argument going on, so she made a move. There were no free tables on this side so she was left standing – luckily there was a little crowd gathered around the table of interest that she could blend into. The two participants seated were from Herald and Edo, as indicated by their brightly coloured sash and their corporate-sponsored jacket respectively. The Herald woman was sipping a large glass of white wine, while the Edo man shouted and gesticulated over a whisky cocktail of some kind.

“I’m saying it is unconstitutional, because the President has to be elected!”

“The King was elected, and he’s putting the role of the Vice President into law – what’s the problem with that?”

“He’s trying to say that if he isn’t available then the Vice President becomes the President, right?”

“She will assume his duties, but -“

“But that’s the thing!” he cried, clearly a few drinks deep. A few of the onlookers murmured assent. “If he goes off and she becomes the President, then the President was not elected. She was chosen by the old President, who didn’t deign to tell us – by the way – that any of this would be happening.”

“Well, then we get into this question,” the Herald woman responded coolly. “If the Vice President assumes the duties of the President, is that the same thing as being the President?”

“In all but name, I think so,” he said.

“Is the name not the thing that matters? After all, the Constitution doesn’t say anything about an Acting President, and whether they would have to be elected or not.”

“But that’s because there’s no such thing.”

“Isn’t there?” she said. “Because until yesterday I seem to remember that we had an Acting President in Speaker Evanson, who was not elected. Was that unconstitutional?”

The crowd gave an ooh, and those who had been standing behind the Edo man murmured between themselves. He licked his lips, preparing a response, but Mairin didn’t care quite enough to hear it, so she moved on. Similar conversations had been happening all over the station for the last day as people tried to establish Powell’s role. Mairin had voted for the King as part of their joint operation, but she didn’t have much respect for Colonel Powell, and it wasn’t much different to her whether he role was constitutional or not. She had stood too, mainly for the chance to give a good first speech, but she should have guessed that the Garden leadership would be too caught up in games to support a serious candidate.

She surveyed the bar. Sergeant Griffin had vanished, taking at least one other person with him, the jar of contraceptives by the door noticeably diminished. Jenks still had a crowd around him, and hadn’t run out of stories yet. She remembered how much he’d struggled with Gaean on the journey to the station, and now he was holding court like a pro. And Belle was taking orders and delivering them around the bar, apparently in her element. Her task force, she thought. It could be worse.

The music shifted and a song she recognised came on. That was a surprise – she hadn’t recognised any of it thus far, and she didn’t know any music from other Earths. It was an arrangement she had never heard, and it didn’t have words, but it was definitely a familiar melody. She began to hum along under her breath, remembering the words. It was an old song, and she had no idea how she knew it. As far as she knew, there wasn’t any Novan music included in their media package, and the bar certainly shouldn’t have had access to it. She began to move back to the bar to ask Manny how he had gotten a hold of it when her ears picked out another table talking:

“I love this song!” said a man. Mairin recognised him from the chamber the day she had given her stump speech, watching her from the Carmen benches. “You know it?” he said to his companion, who she didn’t know.

The other man shook his head, but then noticed Mairin watching them. “Ms. Hanmer,” he said, smiling. She was taken aback, not used to being noticed, let alone recognised. “Join us?”

Mairin sat, looking between the men. “You know this song?” she asked the Carmen man. “It’s a Garden song originally.”

He shook his head and gave a grin that she could only interpret as condescension. “No, this is from Carmen. From Spain, in fact – I added it to our media archive when we sent it over. The barman -“

“Manny,” the other man interrupted.

“Right, Manny – he must have added it to the rotation. Funny that it sounds like a Garden song, though.”

Mairin wanted to correct him – it was a Garden song. But she held back, because she was more interested in talking to the other man, the one who had recognised her. He had distinguished features and the best-tailored suit she had ever seen, as well as a nearly empty glass of red wine.

“You know who I am?” she asked.

“I remembered your speech. I thought it was interesting that you didn’t have a title. You’re not a Lieutenant, or a General, or…”

She scoffed. A General would never take a position on Audacity. They were too busy locked away back on Earth, kept safe where they couldn’t break anything. “No, no rank.”

“What are you doing here, then?” the man asked.

“You haven’t told me your names,” she said in reply, breezing past his question.

“Dr. Cristian Muñoz,” the first man said.

“And I’m Arthur. Arthur Meridian.” said the other, the one who had recognised her.

“Very nice to meet you both. Can I get you more drinks?”

Arthur looked down at his wine. “I did say I would go after this one, but if you’ll stay for a little while and have a talk, I won’t say no.”

Was he flirting? If he was, he was not the smoothest she had met, but she wasn’t in a position to deny him. “Deal. Dr. Muñoz?”

“Cristian, please. And I’ll have a Carmen pale and a water, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.” She stood again and returned to the bar. The music had changed again by now, but she asked Manny to check where the previous song had come from. He consulted a smaller device he had hooked up to the room’s speakers, and informed her that it was indeed from Earth: Carmen. She furrowed her brow.

“I’m sure I recognised it.”

“Me too,” chipped in Belle. “It’s a song from back home, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I thought, but the Carmen guy over there says it’s his. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

“Big coincidence.”

“Maybe not. I mean, how many songs can there possibly be?”

Belle rolled her eyes. “Trust you to ask a question like that.”

When Mairin returned with the drinks even more people had vacated the bar, apparently done for the evening. Manny took his cue and brought the lights a little lower, and turned the music down. It was officially after-hours, whatever that meant in the context of a free bar on a space station with an artificial sense of time floating in an interdimensional void.

“So, you had questions.” she said to Arthur.

“I did,” he replied. “But I doubt you’ll answer any of them.”

“Try me.”

“What’s your job here on Audacity? I mean, you’re a delegate, but what are you doing for your faction?”

“I can’t answer that,” she raised her drink in toast, and took a sip. Cristian burst out in sharp laughter, while Arthur rolled his eyes.

“This is pointless,” he said. “You’re really content to stay a mystery like this?”

She shook her head. “We’re honestly not that different from you. The things you assume about yourselves, we probably share in some capacity.”

“There hasn’t been a war on Earth: Edo in over a century. As far as I understand, on Garden, there have been no less than a dozen wars in the same period.”

“Not quite – it’s all one war, but it has its chapters. That I can tell you. It’s the same struggle.”

“But what for? What are you fighting over that could propel such a war? Religion?”

She gave a laugh. “No. Some of the groups have their religion, and we – well, we leave them to it. But what we actually disagree on, in the big picture, is a kind of philosophy.”

Cristian nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere. I can deal with philosophy.”

Arthur said “So, what’s the philosophy of Novus Ordus… your group?”

“Novus Ordo Seculorum,” she corrected. “And I can’t really give you the details – we consider that stuff classified.”

“I am wholly shocked,” he said.

“But I can give you some broad strokes. We think that life is unpredictable, and any attempts to shackle it into patterns is doomed to fail. That’s why our opponents are bad at governance. They meddle and try to form predictions for the future, and it always comes to nothing.”

She became aware that she was speaking for longer than totally necessary and decided this would be her last drink. Arthur and Cristian were exchanging looks, and she was sure the Carmen man was resisting the urge to reach for the notebook in his coat.

“That’s a big idea to stake a lot of death on, Ms. Hanmer.” Arthur said.

“As I said, that’s just the basics. But if you’re suggesting that there might be another way to solve the dispute – diplomatically, or some such – then we’re way past that point. People have tried and failed, and we have to deal with it properly now.”

“That’s actually not what I was suggesting. Tell me, is there any extent to which your philosophical differences might just be a… a smokescreen?” he pronounced the last word without certainty, putting the neologism together from Gaean terms he knew. In any case, Mairin didn’t quite understand, so he continued.

“Where I come from, there are whole industries devoted to not saying what you mean. A long time ago I was to be the Director of Advertising for Intracore.” Seeing her and Cristian’s blank faces, he added “That would be a bigger deal if you knew who they were, but never mind. The point is, I know a thing or two about obfuscation. And if I wanted to launch a campaign to persuade people to fight and die for me – not that we do that sort of thing on our planet – but if I did, I would need a really, really strong brand. I wouldn’t say that’s what I wanted. I wouldn’t say I was scared of the opposition or that I didn’t have enough power and I wanted more. I would create a reason. And philosophy is as good an excuse as any, would you say?”

Mairin didn’t know whether to be offended or to laugh in his face. In the end she just said “And you wonder why we don’t share more with you. You have no frame of reference for your reality.”

Cristian was silent, watching them stare each other down. “Listen,” Arthur said, “We’re miles and miles away. I don’t know anything about your war, but come on – all this, over free will? Really? I just don’t buy it.”

“Good, ‘cause we’re not selling. It’s our war, and you were right the first time – you don’t know anything.” She stood to leave. “And for the record – ah, never mind. It’s not my job to explain this to you.”

“How do we know?” Arthur said, standing too. The bar was quieter now. “You won’t even tell us what your job is.”

She turned to leave, then thought better of it. “You want to know what it is I do?” she said. “I’m an agent from the Novan Special Decision Department. I advise top leaders in key positions about the appropriate actions to take as pertains to the Novan way of being. In other words, I’m a philosopher.”

“Oh.” said Arthur.

There was a pause. The two of them stared each other down. Mairin tried not to crumple – she really shouldn’t have said that. “So don’t try and tell me…”

But she couldn’t finish her thought. A wave of panic came over her and she fled Luna, leaving a startled Arthur and Cristian in her wake. As she half-strode half-scrambled, she heard her own words ringing in her ear. She had tried to gain the higher ground in an argument, and had let crucial information slip. She was no better than Powell thought, after all.

She couldn’t go back to the Garden dorms – not yet. Word would spread fast, if the two men cared to share what they knew. She didn’t want to be easily found when that happened. The problem was, there were no hiding spots on this station worth a damn. Without realising it, she made her way to the observation deck. This room had a reinforced glass bottom and huge windows that stretched up, creating a panorama of the rift. There were a few people in here most times, enjoying the spectacular view of fractured nebulae and distant glinting stars from other universes, overlaid on each other like celluloid film. She took a seat near the dome, trying to ignore the glances from other station residents as she entered. She wondered how she must look to them – not the calm, composed soldier that they expected of her planet. Not the soldier that Powell and the other Colonels wanted her to be.

After a few minutes her breathing began to slow. She was just formulating a plan to deal with the issue when she saw Arthur enter the room. He approached her with care, as though she might lash out. Cristian hung back in the doorway, tagging along but doing his best to not eavesdrop. Arthur sat down by her side.

Neither delegate looked at the other. She wasn’t going to be the one to talk first – she wasn’t sure what she would say. Finally, Arthur broke the silence.

“I wasn’t telling the whole truth earlier,” he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear. “When I said that Edo had been at peace for a century. Like a lot of our lies, it’s a technical truth, but people still kill on our planet. Most of our wars are fought through marketing, and we use profit margins instead of casualty rates, but people still die. I’ve personally been assassinated twice.”

Despite herself, Mairin let out a laugh. Arthur looked puzzled. “What?”

“Your Gaean isn’t getting much better,” she said, still smiling. “You just said that you’ve been killed twice.”

“Oh. Oh!” he said, laughing as he realised his mistake. “Yes, I’ve been…tried to be assassinated. Is that better?”

She waved a non-committal hand. “Good enough. I understand. I would’ve thought that sort of thing wasn’t legal in your world of contracts.”

“Of course it isn’t,” he said. “But I know for a fact that there are hitmen who have worked with PR firms, both hired by the same megacorporation, to cover up some nasty ‘accidents’. My point is… we’re no better than you. We’re worse, in some ways. Now I know why you’re here, I believe you – you’re fighting for something. When people on my planet fight and die, they do it for a paycheck.”

“I can’t have what I said getting out, Arthur.”

“Oh, that?” he replied breezily. “I’ve already forgotten. Don’t even worry about it – I won’t tell a soul. Or any of my more senior colleagues, either.”

Mairin’s eyes flicked over to Cristian, still doing his best to appear casual by the doorway. Arthur followed her gaze. “Neither will he. Will you, Cristian?” he called.

“Will I what?” the Carmen man asked.

“Tell anybody. What Ms. Hanmer told us.”

“I was barely listening,” he said.

“See?” said Arthur. “We don’t care. Well, I mean, we care, but -“

“No,” said Cristian, walking over to join them, “you were right the first time. I don’t care.”

“There you go,” Arthur gestured to Mairin, who was beginning to breathe easier. “I bet you feel better already. And, for what it’s worth, it makes me like you more. To know that you’re not all soldiers.”

She nodded. “I need another drink.”

“Luna still has another hour.” Standing, Arthur extended his hand, and she took it.