Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (10 page)

The eight-year-old nodded without speaking. Paul and Jimmy were silent, too. When Liz asked what they'd seen or heard on the lake path, they just shook their heads.

“The lady you gave the flier to, the one who threw it at your daddy, did you see her on the lake path?”

Nicki and Paul shook their heads again.

“Were you together the whole time?” Liz asked idly.

Nicki gasped, as if Liz had guessed a secret, but Lucy said, “Of course they were together the whole time.”

“I thought you stayed up by the yacht where the fundraiser was,” Liz said. “What did you see, Nicki?”

“I didn't see, I couldn't see, there was a fog,” the younger girl said, breathlessly. “I thought I lost Paul but he was right next to me the whole time. I started to cry, I mean, I almost started to cry.”

“That's right. You're a big girl and only babies cry,” Lucy said.

Liz tried to probe, gently, sure she'd seen something that frightened her, but Lucy kept answering for her sister, until one of the adults said the children had been through enough. No more questions.

Now, in the Internet café, Liz tried to think it through. The child had seen something, but what? Had she run away from her brother, the way children do—geese, seagulls, boats, all more interesting than one more abortion protest in a life that had clearly been filled with them—and been scolded? Or had she seen her father's assailant?

It was eleven p.m. now. Liz tried to fight down her panic. Think, think, there's a clue in here someplace. Her own notes—the woman who'd discovered the body had said she thought she heard a child crying.

Nicki, Liz thought. The little Culver girl who thought she'd lost her brother in the fog. She'd started to cry when she was supposed to be cheerful. What an abominable way to treat a small child!

Panic, and now anger. Two bad companions for a detective. Liz unplugged the flash drive and went back into the night.

She drove back to the crime scene, but it was too dark to see anything. Liz's brother owned an apartment downtown; he'd given Liz a key when he left for Denmark. She crossed the park and let herself in, slept a few hours in his guest bed, but as soon as the sky began to lighten, she went back to the bench where Culver's body had been found.

The wind had shifted in the night; the fog that had shrouded the city for the last week was finally gone. Liz paced restlessly around the lakefront and the harbor. The benches were filled with the homeless, their possessions carefully laid beneath them to avoid midnight predators. Liz checked each man she came to for a sign of life, but she didn't try to waken them, not until she'd covered a quarter of a mile and found one of them with a pale-blue blazer folded under his head.

Finchley himself drove out to La Grange with his detectives and the jacket. He let Liz join the team, but told her she was still on probation; she was not to say anything.

When Mrs. Culver came to the door, Finchley showed her the jacket. “We think your son, Paul, lost this in all the confusion on Monday, ma'am, but we want to make sure it's his before we send it to the lab for tests.”

In the background, he could hear the children, the oldest girl, Lucy, explaining an arithmetic problem to a small child just out of his sight; a Spanish lesson streaming over the Internet in a corner of the living room. The children were so used to adults coming and going at all hours that they didn't pay attention to the police, until Nicki, passing by with a peanut butter sandwich, screamed, “Paul, they got your jacket.”

The doorway was suddenly filled with children; as in
Peter Pan,
they seemed to tumble from every doorway, every piece of furniture. Mrs. Culver looked around her in bewilderment.

“Paul, is this your jacket? Did you lose it at the protest on Monday?”

The boy's face was very white. He stared at it for a minute without speaking, then his face contorted into sobs.

His mother frowned at him. “We don't cry in public, Paul, we control ourselves for the sake of Jesus, who died for us without crying.”

“I'm tired of Jesus!” Paul shouted.

His brothers and sisters gave a collective gasp and shrank from him.

“I don't want to be a show child, I don't want to be in court so everyone can see you had a million children and never used birth control, I don't want to go to marches and clinics, I want to play football and have a life like other guys my age! I told you this a million times, I told Dad, but neither of you ever gave a damn about any of us! We were just props to you, props you could show off in public. He sat there on that bench starting to lecture me on my duty to the unborn and I said, ‘What about your duty to the born, to us, your children,' and he hit me! He hit me one time too many.

“I picked up that sign, that stupid picture of all those bleeding babies. He worshipped those bleeding babies but it didn't matter how many times he made us bleed! And you, you just said, amen, praise Jesus to whatever he said, so I hit him, I wanted him to see how it felt, and I just kept hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. Then Nicki started to cry because there was blood on my jacket. So I dropped it in the harbor and took her for an ice cream, and the rest of you can go kneel down and say your rosaries but my only prayer is, ‘Thank God that bully can't hit any of us again.'”

Back at the station, Liz asked Finchley what would happen to Paul.

“He's still a minor. There's a lot of psychological stress. If they get him a good lawyer he might have a chance.”

“Whoa, that mother!” Billings said. “She'll skin him and fry him herself if the state doesn't do it.”

“Yeah, that was my impression, too,” Finchley agreed. “Marchek—what were you doing at the crime scene this morning, when I'd given you a direct order to stay away from the case.”

“Uh, sir, I couldn't sleep, I was taking a walk” What did the Torah say about an incomplete truth that resulted in a lie? Liz couldn't remember.

“Marchek, if I was Mrs. Culver, I'd hand you over for disciplinary action. I am even less merciful than she is—I'm putting you back on the street with Billings. But if you ever again have private contact with a witness to a crime, whether you run into them sleep-walking or meet them in your synagogue, and you tell me about it first. Or you give me your badge. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.” Liz saluted and left the room.

“What was that about?” Oliver demanded.

“I was showing off,” she said to Oliver. “He didn't like it.”

G'neivat daat,
that was it. Theft of the mind. She'd just told another half-truth. Maybe quarter truth. She'd tell Grandpapa the whole story tonight and see whether he thought the Torah gave her any wiggle room.

Kim Stanley Robinson

They were very near the center of the moon, Jakob told them. He was the newest member of the bullpen, but already their leader.

“How do you know?” Solly challenged him. It was stifling, the hot air thick with the reek of their sweat, and a pungent stink from the waste bucket in the corner. In the pure black, under the blanket of the rock's basalt silence, their shifting and snuffling loomed large, defined the size of the pen. “I suppose you see it with your third eye.”

Jakob had a laugh as big as his hands. He was a big man, never a doubt of that. “Of course not, Solly. The third eye is for seeing in the black. It's a natural sense just like the others. It takes all the data from the rest of the senses, and processes them into a visual image transmitted by the third optic nerve, which runs from the forehead to the sight centers at the back of the brain. But you can only focus it by an act of the will—same as with all the other senses. It's not magic. We just never needed it till now.”

“So how do you know?”

“It's a problem in spherical geometry, and I solved it. Oliver and I solved it. This big vein of blue runs right down into the core, I believe, down into the moon's molten heart where we can never go. But we'll follow it as far as we can. Note how light we're getting. There's less gravity near the center of things.”

“I feel heavier than ever.”

“You are heavy, Solly. Heavy with disbelief.”

“Where's Freeman?” Hester said in her crow's rasp.

No one replied.

Oliver stirred uneasily over the rough basalt of the pen's floor. First Naomi, then mute Elijah, now Freeman. Somewhere out in the shafts and caverns, tunnels and corridors—somewhere in the dark maze of mines, people were disappearing. Their pen was emptying, it seemed. And the other pens?

“Free at last,” Jakob murmured.

“There's something out there” Hester said, fear edging her harsh voice, so that it scraped Oliver's nerves like the screech of an ore car's wheels over a too-sharp bend in the tracks. “Something out there!”

The rumor had spread through the bullpens already, whispered mouth to ear or in huddled groups of bodies. There were thousands of shafts bored through the rock, hundreds of chambers and caverns. Lots of these were closed off, but many more were left open, and there was room to hide—miles and miles of it. First some of their cows had disappeared. Now it was people too. And Oliver had heard a miner jabbering at the low edge of hysteria, about a giant foreman gone mad after an accident took both his arms at the shoulder—the arms had been replaced by prostheses, and the foreman had escaped into the black, where he preyed on miners off by themselves, ripping them up, feeding on them—

They all heard the steely squeak of a car's wheel. Up the mother shaft, past cross tunnel Forty; had to be foremen at this time of shift. Would the car turn at the fork to their concourse? Their hypersensitive ears focused on the distant sound; no one breathed. The wheels squeaked, turned their way. Oliver, who was already shivering, began to shake hard.

The car stopped before their pen. The door opened, all in darkness. Not a sound from the quaking miners.

Fierce white light blasted them and they cried out, leaped back against the cage bars vainly. Blinded, Oliver cringed at the clawing of a foreman's hands, searching under his shirt and pants. Through pupils like pinholes he glimpsed brief black-and-white snapshots of gaunt bodies undergoing similar searches, then blows. Shouts, cries of pain, smack of flesh on flesh, an electric buzzing. Shaving their heads, could it be that time again already? He was struck in the stomach, choked around the neck. Hester's long wiry brown arms, wrapped around her head. Scalp burned,
buzzz
all chopped up. Thrown to the rock.

“Where's the twelfth?” In the foremen's staccato language. No one answered.

The foremen left, light receding with them until it was black again, the pure dense black that was their own. Except now it was swimming with bright red bars, washing around in painful tears. Oliver's third eye opened a little, which calmed him, because it was still a new experience; he could make out his companions, dim redblack shapes in the black, huddled over themselves, gasping.

Jakob moved among them, checking for hurts, comforting. He cupped Oliver's forehead and Oliver said, “It's seeing already.”

“Good work.” On his knees Jakob clumped to their shit bucket, took off the lid, reached in. He pulled something out. Oliver marveled at how clearly he was able to see all this. Before, floating blobs of color had drifted in the black; but he had always assumed they were afterimages, or hallucinations. Only with Jakob's instruction had he been able to perceive the patterns they made, the vision that they constituted. It was an act of will. That was the key.

Now, as Jakob cleaned the object with his urine and spit, Oliver found that the eye in his forehead saw even more, in sharp blood etchings. Jakob held the lump overhead, and it seemed it was a little lamp, pouring light over them in a wavelength they had always been able to see, but had never needed before. By its faint ghostly radiance the whole pen was made clear, a structure etched in blood, redblack on black. “Promethium,” Jakob breathed. The miners crowded around him, faces lifted to it. Solly had a little pug nose, and squinched his face terribly in the effort to focus. Hester had a face to go with her voice, stark bones under skin scored with lines. “The most precious element. On Earth our masters rule by it. All their civilization is based on it, on the movement inside it, electrons escaping their shells and crashing into neutrons, giving off heat and more blue as well. So they condemn us to a life of pulling it out of the moon for them.”