The vice regent talks about all the achievements of Xiosphant since our great-grandparents’ time, when the Fourth Age of Beauty began. We were falling into decadence, our society was collapsing, all our resources were dwindling. But then we severed contact with Argelo, we stopped tolerating disruptive elements, and we renewed our Xiosphanti values, thanks to the Circadian Restoration. Now we’re truer to our ideals than ever. And yet, we’ve made sacrifices—like all the people who just journeyed past the Northern Ranges to find more arable soil for the farmwheels, steering lorries across thousands of kilometers, with only their timepieces to tell them when to sleep.
The vice regent puts on his most comforting voice. “Thanks to these brave souls, and our hardworking farmers, I’m delighted to announce an increase of two percent in the supply of food dollars. Alas, at the same time we are still facing … certain resource constraints. And thus, the supply of both water tokens and med-creds is being reduced by ten percent each. I’m sure we’ll all make the best of this challenging situation, because we’re Xiosphanti, and we—”
Everyone roars. I don’t hear the end of that sentence, because the mob is rushing forward again, this time charging straight at the vice regent’s plinth, in front of the Council Building. A woman standing next to me has a moldy radish that she must have brought just for this moment, and she flings it at one of the riot cops in front of us. People chant slogans, but I only hear vowels. The vice regent tries to restore order, but the officers have clubs and shields raised.
I have no choice but to run toward a line of police, who wear the same murky faceplates as the figures in my worst memory. They’re raising weapons and clubs, and I feel myself blank out as the people in front of me crash into the wall of the Council Building. We speed up as we hit. I have to close my eyes for a moment. They’re going to clutch me, I’m trapped. When I look again, the people closest to the front are crushed between the mob and the police shields, and I hear them scream. The police bring their clubs down.
The calm part of my mind takes over, the same part that figured out how to communicate with Rose the first time. I pull back and look at this whole situation as if from far above. I stop staring at the mob and the armored cops, and search instead for a way to survive. I don’t let myself look at the helmets and guns, or think about how close they are.
The woman next to me snarls and hoists another vegetable. Then the whip-crack sound of a gun, and she’s gone. Just … vanished. I don’t even think to look down at first, and then I see her. A red mess has replaced most of her head, but the people around me trample her body.
I’m still not letting myself feel any of this. The crowd has broken. People shove each other in all directions. Someone pushes me and I nearly fall in the path of more trampling feet. But I recover, and then I spot the golden statue of Jonas, and I dodge the flailing limbs and angry faces to reach it. I pull myself up into the hollow underside of Jonas’s shimmering All-Environment Survival Suit and hide. I hear shouts, falling bodies, and more gunshots.
The noises peter out, but I don’t leave my hiding place. A few times, I’m about to make a move, when I hear the police making another sweep or, later on, the aggrieved cleanup crew trying to mop all the blood and dirt off the spangled paving stones. But at last they all decide to knock off and get some gin-and-milk, so I risk slipping away.
* * *
I reach the Parlour with just one bell left to shutters-up, and turn the brass doorknob three times left and four times right, as I was taught. Five people with severe windburn and ill-fitting Xiosphanti clothes are sitting in the entry lounge, with Cyrus sneering at this invasion of his cozy space, exposing his lower incisors. One of these strangers has a spiky haircut that covers only the middle of her scarred head, and another has metal sticking out of his face. I almost turn and leave again, because these people don’t look like clients. The images of the police shields and helmets, the gunshot and the headless woman are still seeping into my mind, and I can already tell they’re going to replay in my dreams.
But Hernan appears and waves one arm. “Sophie, come on in. These lovely people are the Resourceful Couriers, and they’re visiting from Argelo. They won’t be staying long. I’ve done business with them in the past, and this time they’ve brought some great delicacies, including genuine cat butter.”
I can’t help gawping. I’ve never even met any foreigners before. The Resourceful Couriers nod at me, and one tall man with a large black mustache and neat beard does a little bow. They’re all staring at me, and the need to get away from all these people is almost overwhelming. But I’m curious, too.
“I was worried about you,” Hernan says to me. “I thought you might have gotten caught up in the … unpleasantness at the Founders’ Square.” He measures his syllables, as if to remind me that, inside the Parlour, we do not rush.
“Some unpleasantness, yes.” The leader of the Resourceful Couriers, the man with the dark whiskers, laughs. “People here are not accustomed to seeing economic disputes settled with guns, but every economy runs on bullets, one way or another.” Omar’s accent sounds like nothing I’d ever heard, and his syntax keeps slipping from polite to familiar.
“In my experience,” says Hernan, “absolutely everyone can pretend to be a pacifist, just so long as there’s enough money to go all the way around.”
I want to keep listening, but without anyone paying too much attention to me. So I fetch a pot of lukewarm coffee and load up a tray with tiny cups.
The youngest Resourceful Courier is a woman named Yulya, close to my age, with long dark hair and skin that looks less windscarred than everyone else’s. Yulya believes her ancestors traveled in the Zagreb compartment, just like Hernan’s, and she stares at every little item and decoration. “I can’t believe you managed to build all of this. In Xiosphant, of all places,” she says, with worse grammar than Omar. “I wish my father could see this place.”
“I always heard that Zagreb didn’t put in its fair share when they were pooling resources to build the Mothership,” says the large man with the metal piercing his face. I think his name is Kendrick.
“That’s what they say, when they talk about it at all,” Hernan says.
I’ve heard Hernan’s version of the story a few times now. By the time the great city-states of Earth were building the Mothership to escape a ruined planet, Zagreb was in steep decline from its worldwide supremacy back at the start of the Brilliant Age. But you still couldn’t call yourself cosmopolitan if you hadn’t spent time there, so all the other cities made concessions to allow Zagreb to have a compartment on the ship. In return, the Zagreb contingent made sure to bring everything from musical instruments to cooking spices to beautiful handcrafted furniture to great works of literature—everything you’d need to re-create true civilization.
But after the radiation leaks, the explosive decompression, the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, and all the tiny wars, the Zagreb stock ended up ruined. They arrived with nothing. All anybody remembered about Zagreb was that they didn’t contribute as much as all the other city-states, but we let them come along out of charity.
Hernan grew up believing he came from a long line of beggars. He and all his extended family lived on the bright edge of town, where the shutters conducted heat and you felt like you were cooking alive in the dark, and he hated every one of his relatives. Until Hernan somehow discovered a long-forgotten book about the salons of Old Zagreb. That’s why he opened the Illyrian Parlour, although he had to pretend that it was just a beautiful coffeehouse, and downplay any Zagreb connection, or else they’d never have let him accept food dollars instead of just luxury coins.
Some of the other Resourceful Couriers pipe up with their own theories and stories about things that happened to their distant ancestors on the Mothership, during the journey, or after planetfall. This conversation has strayed into territory that would get all of us arrested, at a time when the city has already set about eating itself, and then I realize the smugglers are amused by my discomfort, to varying degrees. Which makes me more uncomfortable.
Thank goodness everyone realizes the shutters are about to close, and the conversation ends. The Resourceful Couriers leave the Parlour in a hurry, looking flustered, almost like proper Xiosphanti.
* * *
Four of us sleep in a tiny room, even smaller than I used to share with Bianca, with two rows of bunks. I’m sleeping above Jeremy, who thrashes when he dreams about whatever drove him away from his comfortable old existence. All Jeremy has told me about his past is that he was doing an extended course in geophysics, hoping to help solve the great riddle of our world: how the climate can be so stable, with fire and ice so close together, and whether it’ll stay that way. But there was some scandal, an improper romance, and he had to flee.