War World X Takeover

POLITICS OF MELOS




By Susan Schwartz



It is desirable to be free if you can. It is natural that the stronger power will subject the weaker. These are not matters of right or wrong but of logic, cost and benefit.

The Limits of Empire, Benjamin Isaac (Oxford University Press, 1990).


2078 A.D., Earth


Maenads’ shrieks from Lilith, dedicating a song to “brothers, sisters, and citizens!” tore through Wyn Baker’s lecture yet again.

“You must think of the Fifth Book as more a dialogue than a history,” she said. “Think of two speakers, a voice of Melos and a voice of Athens.”

“Equality now. EQUALITY NOW” brayed from a bullhorn in the square below.

Eight thousand students disentangled themselves from bottles, borloi, and each other to bellow agreement. Then electronic guitars and keyboards clamored, and Lilith shrieked once more.

A few note takers, clustered near the front of the hall, recorded her statement. No doubt they were intent on grades, on winning scholarships they hoped would lift them from Citizens status to a post like hers: visiting scholar and Personage. Wyn was too well controlled to wrinkle her nose. She had, she knew, her tenured chair because her family had endowed it generations ago, long before people were divided into Taxpayers and Citizens. She had been born near the top of her world and had dutifully thanked God for that, for good health, and a powerful mind.

People like her might teach in a university in taxpayer country, fiscal and intellectual aristocrats. These days, the best a Citizen-turned-scholar might hope for was a position as major domo, a kind of nanny for adults who wanted culture on the hoof. And did she do well to encourage them?

“Awright, bros and sisters. We’re gonna bring you a golden oldie from way-way-back-when. ’Be true to your school—’ For the People’s University of Los Angeles!”

Another orgasmic scream from the students lying on the green four floors below. Hell of a way to have to teach. Her mind fleeted longingly to the dark wood and stained glass of Harvard’s Memorial Hall.

Her colleagues would laugh at her if she gave up and went back in mid-semester. “What did you think, Wyn?” That you could pretend you were doing settlement work? This is LA, not Phillips Brooks.”

No matter. It was her duty to teach them, and no Baker or Winthrop (her father had wanted two sons) shirked duty. “Think of it as Tri-V, in which two characters…”—she had wanted to say “disclose and reveal themselves” but she revised fast—”tell you how they feel.” Her voice sounded reedy even to herself, lacking all conviction against Lilith’s passionate intensity.

“Two voices,” Wyn had lectured. “The voice of Athens, harsh, authoritative.… ‘For we would have dominion over you without oppressing you, and preserve you to the profit of us both.…’ and the voice of Melos, a lesser state threatened with war unless it paid tribute…paid a bribe not to be attacked. ‘But how can it be profitable for us to serve?’”


Outside, an amplifier malfunctioned. The bleeding electronic scream forced a groan from the protestors. The students nearest the window flinched.

That did it. Never ceasing her practiced flow of speech, Wyn stepped down from her platform, stalked to the window—her soft-soled shoes and long, jogger’s stride eating up the distance—and reached for the catch, which hadn’t been closed (or cleaned) in years. In the grim surface, she confronted herself: tall, with what would have been a scholar’s stoop if she permitted. Cropped, pale hair and an old suit that firmly resisted the Angeleno craving for the new and violently colored.

Wyn exerted the strength that forty summers of tennis and sailing had built into her arms and forced it closed. Amps, Lillith, and protestors faded to the sea-roar of a conch shell held to the ear.

She thought of black ships, armored Athenian marines landing at Melos and ringing it. Hopeless, hopeless, as the Melians knew; hopeless to lecture at these students; but she read out the passage anyhow. “Men of Athens, our resolution is none other than what you have heard before; nor will we, in a small portion of time, overthrow that liberty in which our city hath remained for the space of seven hundred years since it was first founded.”—And more hopelessness in their counteroffer—”But this we offer: to be your friends, enemies to neither side.”

To her surprise, the students nodded. But then, they knew from gang warfare: to be neutral was to be dead.

“Think of it as if it were today,” Wyn said, her voice falling out of the trained, platform speaker’s cadence she had learned almost as soon as she was allowed to join her parents at the dinner table or their friends when they sat at night and argued. “Of the people out there, who is Athens, and who Melos?”

The Sovworld? The CoDominium with its marines and its expatriates and its weight of distrust? Or her own life in the rearguard of privileged Cambridge? Answer that yourself, she ordered herself, and came up with no answer. She wondered what answers her students might have, if they dared to speak, or bothered.

Heads raised from the desks, and the note takers laid down their styluses and recorders. Attention flashed to the windows, then back to Wyn.

“I made a mistake shutting the window,” Wyn told them. “You don’t study history by shutting out the world. Go and open it again. Look out there, listen—and tell me! Who is speaking with the voice of Melos now?”

She saw the way their eyes kindled with hope, Am I doing this right? Does this all mean something that I can understand?

The boy nearest the window sprang up to obey her. Wyn felt a shiver as she always, did when her instincts told her she had caught a class’s attention. The shiver deepened. The boy cried out in Spanish and leapt back as the window shattered and the building shook.

“Are you all right?” Wyn had run for years, but she had never moved as fast as she did then, brushing glass from her student (hers! how dare anyone touch him?) and blotting the blood on his hands with her scarf despite his protests that she’d ruin it. She comforted him in the Castilian she’d learned traveling with her parents.

Smoke and screams poured in the window. Beyond the square, a black column of smoke rose: the gate-control shack. Again, the building shook. Bomb or an earthquake?

The door opened, slamming against the wall with such force that two people cried out. Apologizing to the boy she held, Wyn strode toward the university rent-a-cops. Real police muscle stood behind them.

“Taxpayer…” An imperious flare of her eyebrows drew a snicker from one student and made the rent-a-cop correct himself. “Professor…”

“Ms. Baker,” she identified herself crisply. In her world, everyone was a Taxpayer, and so many people were professors or had some such title that it was vulgar to use any of them.

“Begging your pardon, but we…”

“We’ve had a bombing. We’re evacuating the building and moving our own forces in,” said the policeman behind University Security, such as it was. He snapped up the dark visor of his helmet long enough that she knew it for a salute, then pushed it down over his eyes again. His riot shield and stick hung over his arms and belt.

“My students?”

“All right, any Taxpayers here…we’ll see you out of the building.”

“All my students, officer.”

It was hard to stare down a black visor. She managed. “Where you want ’em to go, lady?” asked the cop.

“To their homes, of course.”

A bark of laughter told her what the man thought of that.

“Then I will assume personal responsibility for them,” she announced. She turned to face the students. “We are being evacuated,” she told them. “I will see that you get home safely.”

She walked between the policemen and her students out the door and to the stairs. Down and down and down the spiral stairs of the emergency exit they went. The Taxpayer students, fit from their exercise classes in garish health clubs, pressed at her heels. The Citizens, less fit and less well fed, panted. In the half-light, their eyes started and bulged with fear.

But I said I would assume personal responsibility, Wyn thought.

Troops—she could not think of them as security or police—waited at the vaulted ground floor and the great arched double doors, forming a cordon of flesh and armor. Flanked by security, the Taxpayer students were led quickly, in one direction.

“Se ora,” whispered the boy whose face she had wiped when glass had struck him, “You get the girls to safety. My friends and I…”

This was no time for a lecture about the backwardness of “women and children first.”

“We all will leave safely,” she told him. She edged up to the helmeted man.

“Do you have an escort for us?” she demanded.

“Will someone tell me why this overgrown pain in the ass thinks she’s a privileged character?” he muttered at the rent-a-cop. “All I see is another Prof. Taller than most; snottier than any. Give me one good reason why.…”

The man’s eyes popped again. “Guest faculty. Professor Winthrop Baker from Harvard.”

“Big…f*ckin’…deal. Got an attitude out to there.”

The rent-a-cop hissed, drew him slightly to one side. As clearly as if she had a mike turned on them, Wyn overheard. “My God, do you know who her brother is?”

Her brother, Putnam, or as he liked to be called, “Put & Call” Baker, who managed her family’s money and a good chunk of her university’s.

The helmeted man shook his head. “Jeez. Just this once…just this once.”

“Fire! Look!”

Adrenaline spiked, leaving Wyn calm and observant. She threw out her arms in a warding gesture, as if she could shield her students. Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it, Santayana had said. You can tell and tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much. Well, she was a Harvard woman, and these were her students, and no one was going to tell her she wasn’t going to protect them.

Least of all a rent-a-cop charged with getting them all out safely.

Amps and instruments twanged as musicians raced to shut down their equipment and escape. A blue tide of security, bearing the university president in its wake, flowed out from patrol cruisers onto the green. Bullhorns blared and interrupted each other. The president’s eyes bulged. His cheeks puffed as he tried to make himself understood. Beads of sweat stood out on his bald head.


The building rocked from another blast. Across the green, flame shot from windows, licking the pink marble facade black. From the roof a man jumped. There was fire equipment nearby, but none in place to catch him. Wyn heard the crack as his bones broke. Behind her, a student dropped retching to his knees.

“Someone hold his head,” she ordered in an undertone. She had to watch. Police cruisers landed, the whirring of their airpads shrieking, then quieting as they touched down. More blue and armor marched onto the green, wielding nightsticks with a passionless precision that made her think of martial arts and weapons practice. Two techs stood a cruiser, hoses at the ready.

A civilian in bright clothing—”Target!” screamed some damn fool and hurled a bottle that a policeman deflected with a blow from his shield—climbed to the roof of the cruiser and began to read.

“We got to get out of here,” muttered one of Wyn’s students.

“May they leave?” she asked the policeman quickly.

“What about you?” one student, astonishingly enough, asked her.

“I’ll be fine. And we’ll have class next week. I’ll post a…

“Outtahere!” the policeman jerked his chin. The girls in their midst, they fled.

The students on the green screamed down the negotiator, tried to rush the cops, and found themselves pushed back, back toward electrified barriers set up on two sides of the square.

Wyn saw her students caught up and engulfed. “No!” She cried, “No! Help them!” A nightstick came down on the head of the one with whom she had spoken Spanish. He toppled, blood pouring from his nose.

Wyn grabbed the policeman’s arm. It was like grasping an industrial robot. “You promised they’d be safe! Go help them!”

“Go out in that, lady, and no one can help you. Sorry.” He wasn’t.

Four technicians drew hoses from a cruiser. As the police advanced, they shot foam, gray and slimy over their heads. It splattered on the feet of the advancing rioters. Where it fell, so did the protestors.

Again, clubs rose and fell. Wyn pressed forward. “Get her out of here,” ordered the cop.

“Come on lady. Move it, Professor.” Forming a wall between her and the battle on the square, they forced her out a side door. She was breathing in gasps, forcing herself not to weep, not to swear. She had seen blood on the faces of students. Her students.

And she was powerless to help.

Around back, she saw President Kerr-Truman, still sweaty, pale now as he realized that his East Coast trophy had damn near been a casualty in this stupid private war of his.

They bundled her into a van, carefully unmarked with the University’s crest. It sped down side streets, careful to avoid the press.

She waved away the offer to go straight to University Health or straight to LAX and back to Boston-Logan Airport and the refuge of her Cambridge home.

All she wanted was a bath, a drink, and a chance to do some thinking.

Even at dawn, blood and smoke still tainted the air. Jogging in place, Wyn Baker glanced about, surprised at her own wariness.

The gray college Gothic buildings of Los Angeles University’s central square looked as if some inept army had tried to fight a rearguard action and lost.

Splashes of paint stained the walls, the bars, and the shattered glass of the narrow windows. Lower down were splashes of slimy white foam and other things she preferred not to remember.

Hard to believe how silent the square was now, the quiet broken only by the high whine of bugs and birds on a May morning that would kindle into torrid noon. Charred earth and blackened grass marked where students and trespassers from the nearby Welfare Island had kindled yesterday’s bonfire.

She had come out prepared to fight. Around her neck hung her panic button. All she had to do was press it, and a signal went out, alerting a private security force that charged a no-doubt sizable fee for being at the beck and call of security-conscious Taxpayers like her brother, who had insisted she wear it. Her account statements revealed a hefty monthly charge for its use. Studying it, she saw other companies bought into her account: McDonnell-Nomura, Kennicott Metals, tax-free municipals from some government resettling organization or other (they all sounded alike). She supposed she had the prospectus for it somewhere. She was more interested, though, in the balance her statement showed: enough and more than enough in the month’s income statement to sustain her for a year. She could well afford to post bail for her students.

Statement, ID, and debit card lay in her beltpouch along with a map, the location of the police station carefully circled. Best go in now, she thought, post bail quietly and get her students out. She had some notion of bringing them back to her on-campus house for breakfast.

Better not, she told herself. She might as well tell her colleagues and her dean, accept the escort of however many university lawyers they would probably unleash, and, dressed in her most formal suit, drive ceremoniously to the station. Where, no doubt, things would take forever if they happened at all. She had suspicions that the lawyers would express “grave reservations” and other such language designed to stop her from doing what she thought was right until her brother could be called.

A campus cruiser whirred slowly toward her. Jogging alongside was a cleaning crew in coveralls and sun visors. Workfare recipients? she thought. They ran in step, without the sloppy individualism of the Welfare Island denizens. Almost, she thought, as if they were programmed. Their coveralls bore the University seal. One lifted his visor to wipe his brow. His face was very young, his eyes blank. Students had an ugly word for the maintenance squads: campus nulls. No one knew where LAU found so many of them. Student myth insisted they had defaulted on their loans.

She ran by them, noting from the corner of her eye the rent-a-cop’s surprised look. Damn! He’d probably call that in. She turned a corner, looking down as her running shoes sent broken glass cracking and scattering, and scuffed through stained, torn paper. Legs and feet assumed the rhythm of a thousand morning runs on the streets by the Observatory or on the beach by the big old family place at Manchester. The smells were painfully different—urine and fear instead of clamshells and the salt sea.

She began to perspire, and her thick old gray sweatsuit settled into its familiar folds. She passed a broken shard of glass and saw the same lean woman she had seen reflected yesterday in the helmet of a hoplite’s riot gear: sandy-colored, rather than vivid, but wholly resolved. The street narrowed here. The station…that turn, or the next?

She stopped and drew out her map.

“Yo!”

Wyn crumpled her map with one hand. With the other, slowly, she reached for her panic button.

“Not gonna hurt you, lady. “It was a boy’s voice, reedy despite the tough street cadences. “What you doin’ here? Ain’ no place for you.”

“I’m trying to help out some friends,” she answered before she thought. Don’t let him know you have money, not him, and not whatever friends he’s got with him. “They were…got caught in the riot yesterday.”

“You the teacher?”

“What?” She jumped at the voice and unfamiliar presence that questioned when she had expected threat. Something about its tones reminded her of her student she had come out to rescue, and she replied in Spanish.

“Speak Anglo, lady, por favor. I need to learn it good and blow this f*ckin’ Island like hermanito mio. An’ I don’ understand your kind of talk.”


“Your brother?” Eyes and voice and face flickered as the boy rose from behind a scribbled-over, rusted dumpster.

“In your class. How you think I know you?”

“Want to go with me to the station?” Wyn asked. “He was arrested in the riot, defending some of the other students. I’m going down there now to bail him—”

“No WAY!” cried the boy. “You stay clear. He’s gone now, you gotta think of him as gone.… I’m telling you the truth. Get outta here fast.”

“It is the law,” Wyn said firmly, “that a Citizen—not just a Taxpayer, mind you—but any Citizen may post bail and be released unless he’s done something for which bail is, denied. It is the law.” Echoes—we honor the laws, and we honor the laws that are above the laws—rumbled like thunder in her mind. Or maybe that was the junker that clattered by on malfunctioning airtreads, forcing Wyn and the boy against a stained wall.

“Law don’ work for us.” The street-crawler’s whine came back into the boy’s voice.

“There is always law.”

“For you, maybe. Rich lady. WASP lady. You go and talk, and maybe they give you coffee, maybe they call you ‘ma’am.’ But it won’t do no good.” The boy scrubbed a fist across his face. “They’re gone. Gotta think of it that way. Even our mama, and she cry all the time. Don’t go, lady. You don’t want them to know who you are.”

“He’s your brother,” Wyn said. Her voice went high and reedy. It nettled her: here she was, prepared to go bail out her students, and this child warned her away. His own brother, for pity’s sake.

The boy looked down. “He’s gone. And you’re off your turf.” He shifted from foot to foot, uneasy.

“People coming?” she asked, arching one eyebrow up. “If we stand here too long.”

“Walk me to the station,” she suggested. The longer she stood here, the less she liked the walls with their smeared graffiti and windows covered by broken boards or the way they pressed in on her, or how old-style dumpsters provided the sites of a hundred ambushes. “Get me there, and then take off.”

He thought about it, glanced around with a sentry’s wariness, then nodded as if he were making an enormous concession. “Part way,” he grudged. “Gotta get home. Don’t want them to see me.”

He turned his face away, but not before Wyn saw a dark flush of shame.

She was used to precinct houses that aped the Georgian brick of her university, to police who nodded to her and called her ma’am. She was not used to the boy’s unease at approaching a police station or at the bunker that squatted between a garage and a locksmith’s; and she did not approve, either of the fear or the reasons for it. Booths heavy with Plexiglas and metal loomed up before it, well before it. The men and women in them stared down, not out. Wyn’s guide hesitated. “They know we’re here. Sense our body heat or something like that.”

His feet shuffled, a strained, uncomfortable dance.

What would be the point of giving him a reward? They were being watched: if not by the police, then by his friends or his enemies. No point.

“I’ll be fine from here,” she said over a deep breath that made the lie believable.

“They’re coming!” The boy’s voice cracked. At Wyn’s gesture, he vanished more quickly than she would have believed.

“He bothering you, lady?” The officers who edged up to her wore gear only slightly less formidable than the visored helmets and shields of their riot equipment. One held a bell-mouthed weapon Wyn identified with some amazement as a sonic stunner: For me?

“He was giving me directions. He was trying to help.” She raised her voice, hoping the boy would hear her.

Their eyes raked her suspiciously. She wished for the protection that a car, a university escort, or the careful panoply of a dress suit might give her. She held her hands prudently away from the pouch at her belt.

“I’m from the University. Wyn…Professor Baker, on leave from Harvard.” She managed not to wince as she brought out the seldom-used snobberies. “Classics department. Some of my students got caught up in yesterday’s disturbance. I came to bail them out.” And, seeing their disbelieving eyes on her gray sweatsuit and tousled hair, “I have ID and credit on me.”

They gestured her to precede them into the stationhouse, a move that had everything to do with caution and nothing to do with courtesy. Her shoulder blades prickled every time she thought of the sonic stunner, of being clubbed down by a wave of inaudible noise, blinding, sickening dizziness.

She was sweating as if she’d run the Boston Marathon by the time she moved through the metal detectors and stated her business, first to a uniformed receptionist, whose flat eyes blinked, once, skeptically at her, then widened as she produced ID and platinum card. The sudden respect in her voice made Wyn tighten her lips, and tighten them further as the officers who had brought her in escorted her past the barrier. Her show of money and ID made them more respectful, but only slightly.

A flickering monitor and a bored officer faced her as she stated her business. She knew her voice had taken on its most glacial New England snap as she stated her business.

“All students who claimed Taxpayer status have been released to their parents. Unless, of course, they face additional charges.” His stubby fingers hit the keyboard with bored efficiency.

“And the Citizens?” Wyn asked. “Several of my students had Citizen status only. I have their names and IDs.” She laid her list, culled from student records, on the man’s desk. He gestured it away.

“Lady…” at her indignant eyebrow-lift, “Professor Baker,” he corrected himself, “don’t waste your time. All these…Citizens have been remanded to the proper authorities.”

“Who are these ‘proper authorities’?” she, asked, her voice frosting over.

“The Bureau of Relocation,” he told her. “They’ll be supplied with jobs, new homes, outside the urban infrastructure. It will give them new purpose and productivity.” His jargon came out pat, by rote, designed to reassure and, if not to reassure, to intimidate. She might not know much about BuReloc but she recognized a pacifying-the-tourists spiel when she heard it.

“They were my students,” she insisted quietly, “They had perfectly appropriate jobs and purposes in life. I wish to restore what they had. How much?”

For a sick instant, she feared the duty officer might take that as an offer of a bribe.

“They’re out of my jurisdiction, Professor. Why don’t you go on home?” Go back to your library, Wyn heard. She flushed with anger.

“I understand. Very well, then, officer. How do I contact the Bureau of Relocation?” she asked.

“Lady, you don’t. And you don’t understand what you’re letting yourself in for. Now, you look like a nice person who just doesn’t understand the rules. So, I’m telling you: go home. Smith, Alvarez! Lady here can’t go back to campus on foot; it was crazy a thing to come out here at all. Give her a ride back, will you?”

She could just imagine turning up on Faculty Row in a patrol car and having to apply CPR to half the cowards on campus.

“I’d rather have you escort me to the Bureau of Relocation,” she told them.


“Lady…” One man laid a hand on her elbow. She jerked it away.

“Professor, you’re upset; you’ve had a scare; you’re not used to this. Why don’t you let us take you to a doctor.…”

A nightmare vision of an outside physician, a diagnosis of nervous, over-privileged woman, a regimen of too many tranquilizers, blunting not just her anger but also the keenness of her mind, tore through her thoughts. She was afraid, more afraid than she had been as she jostled through the wrecked streets.

She spun away, backing against the wall. They came at her as if they were trying to tame a spooked horse. Their out-raised, weaponless hands… she remembered hands like that on clubs, hurling her students down, hauling them here, then tossing them to the Bureau of Relocation….

“Stay away from me,” she demanded.

They kept advancing. Her back touched the wall. Her fingers touched the poli code and, as their hands fell upon her arms, she jerked one hand free and pressed the panic button.

She had just exchanged jailers, Wyn thought as she sat in the soft leather First Class of what she considered an unnecessarily luxurious LAX/Logan shuttle. Muscle from the private security firm her brother had engaged to protect her—or keep her from making a fool of herself—sat guarding her. A woman sat on one side; across the aisle was a male guard.

Even now, she didn’t like to think of the scene that she had caused by pressing the poli code. A jurisdictional war between private security and the LAPD was only the least part of it. As the lawyers screamed, she had been hustled out of the station and back to campus. The dean’s hysteria, her brother’s outrage at what he called her recklessness, a veritable feeding frenzy of reporters…in the end, packers had been called in, and she had been whisked off-campus and onto the first available transport for Boston.

Her brother had wanted to charter a plane. For once, she had managed to overrule him on something. But a car would be waiting. She winced at the expense, at the needless, ostentatious care, as if she were some rock star or new rich who needed a vulgar display of paranoia to establish her importance. Her male and female companions seemed more captors than companions, and they muttered about her brother with the respect that a priest might use for a captious deity.

Glancing over at her escorts for what was, essentially, permission, she reached into the carryall they had allowed her to bring with her. A few books, some tapes…there was her financial statement. She pulled out the prospectus for the BuReloc bonds and began to read.

A very important and long-lasting anger smoldered within her. “Go back to your library.” Most recently, her brother had reinforced that order, which was right out of her infancy. “Don’t play with the children in the street. Stay in your own garden.”

But there was blood on the roses. Even if she’d thought lifelong she wasn’t good for much else, she had to wash the blood off those damn roses.

She looked down at the transaction record on her statement, found one of her guards watching, and turned the paper over.

Something about those bonds…a name on the prospectus…surely she had seen that name before. She turned to the description of a limited partnership, of which her brother had made her a silent, but voting partner. Sure enough…she recognized one name as a judge, another as a congressman. She remembered a dinner table conversation about a few court cases; that is, she remembered hearing a few names—Bronson, Niles, Tucker—before she had turned her attention from what she had always thought sarcastically of as Important Business Affairs to faculty gossip.

Foolish, wasn’t she? Her lips formed a silent whistle, and she recalled what one of her keepers had said. “It’s a wonder they let her out without a leash.”

A wonder indeed, if she wandered about with her eyes and ears sealed by ancient history. What was that sanctimonious stuff about law she had told the street kid?

The kid had known enough to run. But she wasn’t a scared kid, she thought. In that case…if she could find a conflict of interests, a bribe or some knowledge of inside information, which (she now recalled) had dealt one of the blows to the world’s economy from which it had never recovered…It would never occur to Putnam to think she would know that.

And for once, she would have a weapon in her own hands. She thumbed on her hand comp. It was a small unit, more used to writing than to database searches. She had always been a good researcher. By the time she landed at Logan and was hustled into a waiting car and the indignation of various family members, she had what she thought was a clue, a weapon and an end to her naiveté.

Over iced tea and poached salmon, her brother lectured her on discretion, security and what she owed the family. Wyn disagreed.

May sunlight shone through the familiar, beloved ugliness of Memorial Hall’s stained glass windows. It stained the old floor, hollowed by footsteps, with the color of blood; and blood was in the air.

In the year since her eviction from Los Angeles, Wyn had been through enough Welfare Islands to know when someone was being stalked. The pack was gathering; the hunt was on; and she was their prey.

She shrugged one shoulder, adjusted the strap of the old-fashioned green book bag, and entered Sanders Theatre. Briefly, the smell of the ancient, polished wood overpowered the scent of blood. For more than a century, someone had taught the introduction to ancient literature here. She wondered how long it would take Harvard and the Department to name her successor—or if they would bother. Already, she had heard rumblings that the subject material was not just irrelevant to learning how to run a business or treat a cancer, but subversive. Look what it did to Mad Wyn Baker.

This sort of thing happened in the best of families. They used to shut the strange ones up in attic rooms, or let them rove about the big old country houses. Now, of course, there were drugs and rest homes.

She wondered what excuse would be found when whatever was planned actually happened. Because no threats had been made, no protection orders could be issued. “They don’t mean squat!” one of the women in the Dorchester Project had assured her about such orders.

It had been a mistake to inquire about her students, now long vanished. She knew that her inquiry had been reported where it would do her the most harm, in those carefully, lavish offices where her brother and his aides compiled a dossier on Professor and Doctor Winthrop Baker and her troubled state of mind. Did she seem…composed when she pressed her police call button? Did she perform her duties in a satisfactory manner upon her return? Would you call Professor Baker’s involvement in the Literacy Programs at the Welfare Islands characteristic behavior? Did you notice any…uh, behavioral quirks when she was arrested on charges of civil disobedience?

Even her housekeeper had been questioned: Does Professor Baker appear cheerful? Does she keep irregular hours? Has she ever said…? The poor woman had reported the questions and her answers to Wyn. When she realized how her answers might be used, she had broken down in tears, and Wyn had to dose her with her best brandy.

She suspected they would use her as another example of how professors shouldn’t interfere in business, much less politics. Probably the excuse would be the usual one for a woman and an intellectual. She was working too hard, poor thing. And then she started poking into business and wasn’t up to the stress. What could you expect?

Actually, she figured her brother would try to prove her incompetent. That meant a rest home—a country club with guards for wealthy, neurasthenic, or otherwise inconvenient people. She hoped the one they’d probably park her in would have a decent library. Maybe tranquilizers wouldn’t be too strong, or she could spit them out.


Well, the rest home could just wait. She had one last lecture to give.

Wyn climbed the platform, arranged notes she knew she would not use, and looked out at the students waiting for her to speak. Faces pink and assured, with the familiar chin or browlines of distant cousins, come to hear lecture or scandal as they absorbed the academic airs and graces suitable for the heirs of rulers.

There were ghosts in the room, too. Floating above empty seats at the back (which were the places they would probably have chosen) were other faces, the olive skin and dark eyes of the students who had vanished because they were Citizens, to be engulfed by BuReloc. What would they have made of Sanders Theatre and this university Wyn had called home for most of her life? Could they see it for the tainted thing it had become?

Her voice rang out over the room with its pine and sun scented echoes. Aristocrat speaking with aristocrats, she could invoke references and languages that would have lost and shamed her LAU students. “We have been reared,” she told them, “to admire Realpolitik. Consider, for example, the ways of Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan. But must life, as he formulated it, be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ to be considered ’real’? I find it interesting….”

There, she had used first person; that ought to bring her students’ heads up. They must know: she would be detained today, taken away, whatever euphemisms they chose. No wonder Sanders had filled the way it did when elder professors were retiring.

“…that Hobbes chose to translate Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, which contains Pericles’ funeral oration. That speech is perhaps one of the most moving formulations of belief in an ideal code that we have from the ancient world, and the Melian Dialogue…Book Five, which is a debate between such an ideal code and a rather cynical realpolitik.

“I cannot quote Hobbes to you at this point. The book is out of print and I”—Wyn paused to let the irony sink in—“lost my copy in California last year. It is strange, however, how one recalls phrases in and out of context. For me, the most chilling phrase from Book Five comes not from Hobbes but from another translation. For all I can recollect, it may have been one of my own, done many years ago. ‘For the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.’”

She could see the smiles, evoked by her mention of the California riot that had brought her back prematurely to the East Coast, altering to nods of approval. “We are used to agreeing wisely with such statements. To disagree, these days, marks us as naive, foolish, sentimental, especially those of us who plan to enter the more active fields of law and commerce. And yet, to have these words spoken by a people who had earlier declared that they honored the law and they honored the law that was above the law is to hear a chilling moral progression. Or, as I see it, a moral deterioration.

“As students, we are not just entitled to make such judgments.”

She paused.

“We are required.” Shock on those scrubbed, smug faces. Had she ever looked so sure, so jolted out of her composure? Memory shocked her: the day before the riot.

Disappointed at hearing ethics when they had hoped for scandal, her class was glazing out again. Perhaps only a riot outside the windows would convince them of what she had seen. But no such riot would taint the Yard if she could help it. More than enough blood had been shed on any campus.

“Why you goin’ back there if you knows they gonna take you?’ Her brother had been very, very right. Social work, settlement house work hadn’t been the answer. But students in Harvard’s “adopted” schools in the Dorchester and Mattapan Welfare Projects had received her. Primarily, because they had no choice. No Citizens turned down help from a Baker from Harvard. Then once the newsgrids had shut up and the Welfare rumor mills had a chance to spread the word, they had bothered to listen. Warily at first: like all the people who came into the Projects when anyone in her right mind knew the only thing to do was get out as fast as you could, this professor had to be crazy. But maybe, just maybe, she was their kind of crazy.

And maybe, just maybe, she was theirs.

It had been strange at first to teach basic reading rather than Linear B or Homer. It had been stranger yet to make home visits to grandmothers younger than herself but pregnant once again. And strangest of all to find herself learning more from them than they could from her.

Abandoning generations of “keep it in the family” she had asked their advice; and they had warned her. “They’d never do that!” she had protested to faces, black, white, and brown, old and young, all wizened from the same street wisdom and the street fights that erupted when that wisdom failed.

Was she expecting trouble? What kind? Given tough licensing laws and the penalties for illegal weapons, she’d better not pack a weapon. So her book bag held books and papers, nothing more dangerous. A first-aid kit rode in one pocket. She had even sewn some simple jewelry and coins into the seams of her bag. With luck, the nurses in whatever rest home she was bound for could be bribed.

“You’re pushing it, Wyn. I’m warning you.” Sure enough, Wyn could hear the minatory singsong in her brothers’ voice. For years, it had been second nature in the family to yield to him when his face turned red, and he waved his finger at her as no teacher beyond the elementary grades had the ill grace to do.

She had held the statement out to him, the statement of her holdings and the records she had found. Saying nothing. Letting the record speak for itself.

“So, you’re blowing the whistle? Do you want to disgrace us all?”

“This illegality has done that already,” she had retorted. Tactical blunder. She should at least have looked as if she were ready to deal.

She had tried to hire a lawyer the next day—not a Family member. The lawyer had sweated, hedged, gabbled of consequences that made him sweat through his shirt until even the silk of his tie hung limp. Ultimately, however, Baker money—even after it was besmirched by old Put & Call—convinced him to accept a retainer. And her instructions. She wondered if he’d stand tough if…when…she disappeared.

Subpoenas were delivered; the newswires went ghoulish with “need to know” and the implication of famous prey. But “you haven’t heard the last “her brother had promised. The elaborate contra-dance of bail, hearings, and indictments began.

So did the careful, cautious “it’s for her own good” of her brother’s people’s investigation.

Carry money and small valuables. Wyn’s Welfare Project friends warned her. Don’t stick to fixed habits. Watch yourself.

But what about her life?

“Lucky if you keep it.” She had herself seen the boy who had been set on fire when he refused to run borloi; the woman whose boyfriend had slashed her face; the ex-gang member whose brothers stayed with him, as if on guard—and those were the lucky ones, who got to go on living.

“You stay here. We hide you.”

She assured them she was protected, that she played a game circumscribed by law.

“You step on his turf he get you. You stay here.”

She hadn’t listened. And she hadn’t run. She had no great faith in her ability to hide, in any case. And some bravura notion of being arrested at her work, taken from her classroom had pushed her back from the Welfare Projects to Cambridge and this final lecture.

After all, it was her students in California who had vanished quite literally off the face of the Earth, bound—as she knew now—for interstellar Devil’s Islands like Tanith or Haven. They couldn’t afford the luxury of grandstanding: she could.


He sayin’ you crazy, her friends from Welfare, her students there, had told her. Gonna put you away. Even after two girls had dressed up like cleaning crew and raided the dumpster behind her brother’s lawyers’ office for shredded transcripts, Wyn had found it hard to believe that he would turn on her.

You turn on him!

She never had persuaded them of the difference between crime and revenge, had she? But, assuming he said she was crazy and tried to have her committed, she was hardly the first over-privileged woman to be that way for the crime of disagreeing with her family. How bad could a rest home be, after all? She had meant to ask her aunt Dorothea, who had spent twenty years of her life in and out of them. Old now, and lucid on the days she bothered to stop drinking and dress to come downstairs; Dorothea had watched her as ironically as the women in Mattapan.

No point in thinking of that now. What’s done is done.

Where was she in her lecture? That was right. Shake them up a bit with their own weakness. They only think they’re safe, prosperous: what if someone stronger comes along and decides to take what they have?

“…It is a sign of our own deterioration that we need to ask ‘who are the weak?’ Are they, those who live in Welfare Islands, those who have turned their back upon our nation and our world for the dubious loyalties of the CoDominium? Or are they, those who do not ask? The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not living. And we have failed to examine our own lives.

“It is thus we who are the weak…” Wyn let the statement drop gently into the sunny, civilized theatre.

“…For we have forgotten. And we have forgotten to ask.”

She had not forgotten, she protested as she moved into the final section of the class. A century or so ago, there had been a great classicist, a Jew, who had fled Germany. He came to a checkpoint and was stopped by a young soldier who searched his baggage. With the instincts of the hunted, the scholar knew that the soldier recognized him, knew him for a Jew and a fugitive. He waited for the man to lay his hand upon his arm and shout the words that would herald the start of his arrest and death. The soldier indeed spoke. “You have a copy of Horace in your bags Herr Professor.”

And so the professor had spoken of Horace, had lectured, risen on the wings of fear and eloquence till he taught as he had never taught before. And when his mouth dried, his voice broke, and his throat almost closed with weariness, the soldier again. “Danke schon, Herr Professor,” he said. And stamped his papers and sent him on his way to freedom and to life.

Heads turned to stare out the blurred glass of the theater’s windows. Wyn’s head went up. Again, the copper spoor of blood dimmed the air.

“Prowl car,” muttered one student to his seatmate. His ruddy face paling. “It’s white.”

Psycops? No security but Harvard’s own has ever set foot in the yard. Were they going to make her out to be a dangerous lunatic?

Wyn’s belly chilled, and her mouth dried. Her voice went hoarse, but she forced breath up from her diaphragm, and her voice rang out with a strength that surprised her. Could she turn back? she wondered. Even at the last, Antigone had been offered a choice: recant, retreat. She had not—and she had died. Too rigid, people called Antigone these days.

Like Antigone, Wyn had a brother who had betrayed his family. That had to be set right as best she could.

Perhaps Wyn should have been more discreet. She could not have been less foolish. Not when she knew. And she knew other things too: that there was always a payment for knowledge.

Now, she spoke to the kids who would never see this over-civilized room. The faces that she saw only in her imagination—the blackened eyes and bloodied mouths—seemed to relax as she spoke, then fade as if they were ghosts she had assuaged. Then, to faces leached by unaccustomed fear of their confidence, she spoke of the students they would never meet.

“They were dispossessed, you see, being weak; being only Citizens. You say that you are safe, being Taxpayers? Taxpayers you are; Taxpayers we are; and yet I tell you, when a government like that of Athens turns first upon its principles and then upon the people who still espouse them—as if ashamed before them—anyone can become the weak. And in that situation, one may only hope one has the strength to endure. If you take one thing from today’s class, I suggest it be this: the Gedankenexperiment… Einstein’s term, which translates as thought experiment…. Assume that you have become ‘the weak.’ What will you do now?”

Pause to draw a long, much-needed breath and meet the eyes that challenged hers.

“You’re quite right, of course. The question cuts both ways. What would I do?”

She looked down into those faces and nodded, a minute bow of conclusion.

“I should hope to be equal to the ordeal.”

For a moment, she stood, catching her breath, assembling her papers and stowing them in her book bag. To her astonishment, the students cheered her as if she were Lilith. Their red, opened mouths reminded her of students in the first riot she had seen and how their mouths bled as they fell.

She forced a smile and a rueful, modest headshake. Then, with a last look around the wooden vaults of the old theater, she slipped out a side door. Memories died as quickly as the sound of old applause. She wondered who would forget first: her students or the kids from the Welfare Districts.

It took all the strength she had to leave Mem Hall and begin her usual leisurely stroll toward the Yard and her study in Widener Library.

“Professor Baker?” Outsiders, then, not to use a social title. They didn’t call her “doctor” either: that would be reserved for medical types. So it was the rest home, was it? And so soon! She turned and eyed the two men and one woman as she might size up freshmen. Their tailoring was good enough to let them pass for Taxpayers, yet loose enough to let them move freely. She wondered if she could outrun them; she was certain it wasn’t worth trying.

She inclined her head, then continued on her way. “Could we talk with you?”

“I have office hours in the Library.”

“We would prefer some place more private.”

She kept on walking. Quick steps sounded behind her and someone laid a hand on her arm. Wyn spun around, the arm holding her book bag coming up in pathetic defense.

Two students strolled past. More emerged from the iron and brick gates that opened into the yard. Could she appeal to them?

The woman in the group had a hand in her breast pocket. Wyn wondered if she would produce sedatives or a weapon.

“Not here,” she said. “And not in front of them.” She gestured with her chin at her students.

They nodded, relaxing visibly now that she was proving reasonable. That should be in her favor at a sanity hearing.

“This way,” said the man in the lead. His voice held the deliberately soothing tones of a psychiatrist, though Wyn had never met a shrink who moved as if he led katas every morning. He took her arm—just a friendly meeting, wasn’t this; and smile for the innocent kids, why don’t you?

Past the Science Center. Past Mem Hall again. Past the dreadful ersatz Georgian of the Fire Station and onto the street. A white van, bare of logo, idled. Psycops indeed, Wyn thought. Might as well announce in the Freshman union   that she had run mad. The door was opened for her.

“I suppose,” she said cautiously, “There is no point in talking you out of this?”

“Please get in.”


No students were on the street. Wyn spun on her heel, preparing to run into the street, to shout; but the hand was on her arm again, urging her toward the car. And a lifetime of civility, of restraint blunted her willingness to make the scene that might have saved her. We are the weak.

The door whined shut. There was no release mechanism on her side of the vehicle. The car rose on its hoverpads and sped down Cambridge Street, out of the city, beyond Boston into the manicured exurbs where only the wealthiest Taxpayers lived. No one spoke to her.

“Damn!” the exclamation forced a grunt of surprise from the man who sat beside her as lights and sirens erupted behind them.

“Why dint y’stay inna the speed limit?” he slurred as he hit his chin on the Plexiglas dividing driver from passengers.

“I did,” protested the driver.

“Keep on going.”

“You keep on going, Taxpayer.” The driver said, “It’s not your license they’ll lift, and then what do I have?” A quick trip to a Welfare District.” He pulled over.

A prowl car pulled up. “You have custody of Professor Winthrop Baker? This warrant authorizes us to demand her release.”

A flood of warmth, of gratitude, washed over her. Bless her lawyer and his timing!

“That’s not a good idea,” replied the psychiatrist. “She needs medical intervention…” His voice, so assured when dealing with Wyn, trailed off as he saw the sonic shockers that the newcomers held. Now he was “the weak.” She wondered what punishment he would face?

He took the papers, leafed through them, and exclaimed before he could control himself. “But we—”

“Apparently, someone had second thoughts about security.”

The psychiatrist eyed Wyn. “For her?”

Both men shrugged. “Whatever else you can say, he’s thorough.”

The man from the prowl car gestured at Wyn. “Out.” The door opened. Wyn slid out. Her book bag lay on the seat. When she bent to retrieve it, someone waved a shocker at her.

“Let her have it”

Wyn seized its strap before anyone could countermand that.

“Whatever she’s got in there, she’ll need it where she’s going.”

The prowl car pulled round. Now Wyn could see the panel on its door. Bureau of Relocation.

She had been out-plotted and outfoxed. Her fingers rose to her throat, tightening convulsively on her poli code that would call out to a force of her own choosing.

“Cancelled. Get in.” The absence of even a pretense of civility chilled her. Dispossessed and disenfranchised like her students. And now she would learn what they had endured. She heard an appalled whimper, flushed with fear and shame, and began desperately to run.…

A wave of sound rolled after her and struck her down.

Antiseptic and old pain were in the air. Wyn turned her head on what felt like a paper sheet on a too-worn mattress. I am not going to ask “where am I?” she vowed. She knew she was some place medical: had to be, seeing that her last memory was of taking a sonic shock.

You have been to the wars, haven’t you? she asked herself, astonished.

She was determined to sit up and was astonished at how weak she felt. What felt like the grandmother of all migraines glittered and stabbed in her eyes.

“Coming around?” asked a man in a white coat so worn that even the red staff and crossed serpents of his profession were frayed. RYAN said the badge on the coat. His eyes were blue, and his hair was graying. His face bore the reddish patches of skin cancers, cost-effectively (if not aesthetically) removed. To her surprise, Wyn heard a South Boston accent. A contract physician? He was a long way from home. The tones were efficient, kind and blessedly familiar. She felt her eyes fill as he propped her up and handed her a disposable cup.

“As soon as you can think straight, I have to talk you. There’s not much time.”

She gulped the bitter analgesic. The spikes into her brain seemed to withdraw, and then diminished to a bearable level. Light from warped overhead panels: no windows.

Damn all, had they taken her to a state institution? She’d never be found, much less sprung from one of those rat-holes!

“I don’t have time to break this to you,” the physician told her. “You took a hit from a sonic stunner. You’re at the BuReloc station in Florida. When I finish processing you, you’ll be put on the first ship out.”

If she started laughing, she knew she would never stop. Emigrants, forced or voluntary—wouldn’t do for them to die in droves aboard a star-ship, now would it? And what was she doing here?

“May I make one call, please?” she asked. Her lawyer…her family… could she reach their Senator’s staff? It would be a waste of breath, even if she could. They probably all knew and assented.

“What good do you think it would do?” Ryan asked her gently. “Records have you down as a political.” His hand went up, blocking Wyn’s sight of the scratched data screen.

Wyn allowed herself to chuckle once, briefly. “So the son-of-a-bitch got to his Important Contacts, did he? Got named guardian of his crazy sister, the dangerous radical. No civil rights. And off she goes.”

She shook her head to clear it of the ghosts that threatened to storm her sanity: Hecuba wailing before the black ships; Andromache in a cart; Melos burning, the men dead and the weak led away into slavery.

“Nothing I can do?” She couldn’t take that. She jumped to her feet, looking for the exit. She was taller than Ryan, stronger, probably, from years of all that good Taxpayer nutrition and exercise. She could push her way past…

“For Christ’s sake, don’t try it, Ms. Baker!” The sincerity in that shout brought her around.

“This is kidnapping,” she told him. “You know that.” She paused to catch his eye, to underscore his awareness that they shared a hometown.

“In the name of God,” she whispered, “could you make some calls for me?”

It was hopeless. Already, he was shaking his head. Wyn met his eyes. I’m not throwing my life away the way you did. Astonishment and fear that she had had chances he could barely dream of, yet had blown them all showed in his face. He was half afraid of her, half angry.

“Sure, you’ve been shafted.” He spoke too fast, his face now turned away. “Ms. Baker, five more years, and I reach Taxpayer status, and my kids with me. We’ll never have what you threw away, but we’ll get by. You think I’m going to risk that? We’re just little people. Look: I can make sure you’re fit to ship out. But I’m not ruining my kids’ lives for you.”

He paused, and his face, already pocked with the scars of skin cancers flushed dark. “I’m sorry, Professor. But it wouldn’t do either of us a damn bit of good.

“And you can hate my guts all you want. Damned if I care. I don’t have to do this, you know. There are people out there who’d be grateful if I spent more time with them.”

Wyn bowed her head, fighting panic. I’m not equipped for this, she thought. Read, listen, stay at home; why join the rat race? She’d been told all her life. Her family was too old for people like her to go haring around the universe. Space travel—she tried to recall what she knew of it and was embarrassed she knew so little.

She wasn’t going to live through this, she thought abruptly. But other exiles had survived. If she were weak, if she let her life slip away, she only let her brother and his trained slaves win that much earlier.


Listen, remember; try to keep alive.

“Now, you’ve one hour, one hour before you ship out. It’s going to be rough. And if you’re as smart as your records say”—incredulous headshake—”you’ll help me prepare you to survive.”

I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it. She shook her head, waving away the offer of a trank. This was one nightmare for which she had to be conscious.

“Go ahead, Doctor,” she said in the crisp voice she would use with her own specialists. “Maybe you could start by telling me what I face.”

“First, Luna Base, then out-system. Tanith, maybe, or Haven.” Coerced, perhaps, by her tone, he tapped in an inquiry on the computer, muttering under his breath as it beeped and sputtered. “There’s a ship bound for Haven scheduled to leave Luna Base. Cold weather world. I can make sure you’re not dropsick, that your immunizations are up to strength and that your circulation is in as good a shape as it can be.”

I’ll live, Wyn vowed to herself. Living well—living at all—is the best revenge. And I’ll get back….

He shook his head. Compassion replaced his earlier defensiveness. “Something else,” he said. “I need your permission to inhibit your fertility.”

Wyn burst out laughing.

“At my age?” she demanded. “Whom—or what do you think I’m going to meet on Luna Base….”

“Lady, you listen to me. You’re still at risk. And there’s damn few contraceptives on board ship, and those’ll go to the younger women—if they’re lucky. If they’re damned lucky. You don’t want to be pregnant when a ship Jumps, believe me. Not with what they’ve got for medical care on board if you miscarry….”

Wyn raised her eyebrows at him. “Doctor, I am not sexually active.”

He shook his head at her. “Dr. Baker, you’ve got to understand. This trip’s long. And it makes steerage look like a yacht. You won’t be Dr. Winthrop Baker on board a BuReloc ship. You won’t be much of anything except a female body. I can’t tell you what to do with your own body. But if you’ve got any sense, you’ll take the implant. It’ll suppress menstruation, too. And believe me: you want that.”

Ultimately, she did. Feeling vaguely queasy, she slid down off the examination table and dressed in the coverall he handed her, a coarse thing of greenish gray. Ship issue? she wondered and wondered even more to find herself curious.

“Better move it,” said the medic. “But before you do…” he handed over her book bag. “Your things are packed in it. I wouldn’t let anyone handle that, if I were you. I added a few more medical supplies. You’ll need them.”

“Why?” she asked bluntly. “And how much?”

“I haven’t sunk that low. Yet.” He flushed, and the scars of his surgeries for skin cancer flushed darker than the rest of his face. “Guard this stuff; it’s all you have. Your money’s been impounded, you know,” he told her. She hadn’t. She was not surprised. “God bless. It’s time.”

She drew herself up and walked to the door, then whirled back to shake Dr. Ryan’s hand. She forced him to meet her eyes, to see the respect—reluctant but genuine—in her own. She was glad his face brightened a little at it.

“Good-bye, Doctor,” she said. “And thank you.”

There was blood in the air. And the stinks of sweat, of packaged food gone rancid, sickness and babies too long left unchanged assaulted Wyn, backing her against the stained white concrete walls of the processing center. She gagged, drew a careful breath, and then another.

Two CoDominium Marines walked by, careful of their weapons and of the crowd of families awaiting processing as if they were criminals instead of willing immigrants. They walked right by her, their glances dismissing her: a middle-aged woman, tired, scared, and shabby—in other words, no threat and virtually invisible. Given the wailings and babblings all about her, she doubted if they’d even hear her.

Cold from the concrete spread into her back as she stared at the panels in the ceiling. Past her flowed the crowd: with screaming children; brothers and sisters huddling together; here and there a solitary man swaggering toward the ship that would take him into exile; the occasional woman, blowsy or terrified, shrinking against the walls: people angry, frightened or numbed by what they faced.

Dr. Ryan’s shabby office seemed like a paradise of reason and care by comparison. Hard to believe she had ever sat in a chair, been treated and thanked someone like him in a cool, civil voice as if she had a right to care, without appreciating the privilege.

“Move it, sister.” A trusty gestured to her.

Wyn moved it; her book bag with her pathetic few supplies and her clothes, the jewels still sewn into the seams, bumping on one shoulder.

It was really happening. It was happening to her. Ahead of her, someone sank to his knees, moaning and was shoved back to his feet and on ahead. No: no use in collapse, then. She walked toward the wire cages that held interviewers enthroned behind battered metal desks for processing. Her footsteps took on a rhythm that, gradually, she recognized. One of the Herald’s speeches, she thought: March to the ships of the Achaeans whenever the commanders of the army sound the shrill note of the echoing trumpet. March into exile. March into slavery. Euripides had written that after Melos; and all the Athenians, blood upon their hands, had wept. She would have wept if she could find her tears and if they would do any good.

“Baker,” said the trusty seated at the desk. His coverall, the same gray as the guards wore, was too tight and stained by food. He glanced down at the screen built into his desk. “Political.” Wyn drew breath to make some sort of last appeal.

“Move it.”

She stared at him. What about the records checks and the checks for medical clearance—?

“Move it, traitor bitch, or I call the guards.”

He glared and gestured. A Marine ambled over, the bell-shaped muzzle of his sonic stunner gleaming, Wyn moved it.

The trusty pushed a button. A door opened in the wall and Wyn went through, into a maze of narrow white corridors and then into the blinding yellow sunlight she would never see again. She drew a deep breath of air blessedly free of the taints of blood, filth and old sweat. Moored at the end of it wasn’t after all one of the black ships out of a Greek tragedy, the blue eye warding off evil at its prow, but a huge-winged landing ship.

Ahead of her stretched a narrow gangway, crowded with guards and transportees. “Get a move on it,” muttered a guard, gesturing at her with a prod and a whip. “Haul ass!”

Wyn moved it. Five more steps and she would be at the end of the gangplank where it fed into the ship. The Florida sun was warm, almost a benediction on her aching back. Before she entered the ship, she turned and took a hasty, hungry look at the violent crimsons and golds of the last sunset she would ever see on her world.

Moments later, the hatches clanged shut. She was shoved onto a padded shelf and secured like merchandise. The screams of the other transportees rose about her. Then the shrieks of the ship’s engines drowned them out and seemed to hurl them all on top of her.

Wyn staggered in the unfamiliar, blessed weight of Luna Base’s one-seventh gravity. Not much, but it would suffice to anchor the vomit, assuming her fellow prisoners had anything left in their stomachs. From acceleration to zero-G, the trip to Luna Base had been a horror. Not just the stinks and the slime, but the closeness. She had never thought of herself as overly fastidious and had daily worked up a good sweat running, but now she realized how much she needed space. Here, instead of elbowroom, she had cubic room. And precious little of it.


And this was the dream of space that she’d heard a few old-time physicists lament? Still, there had been that one glimpse of the Earth from space.

They’ve taken the dream and broken it. And it should have been ours, she thought. She had never cared to think much about it before.

Plato, she knew, had written of space, as had the Neo-Platonists. Dream visions, all of them. All out of fashion. In the last gasp of this century, intellectuals had made it a fashion to spurn the idea. Her too, though she had never considered herself as subscribing to fashions in thought. If you surrender control of something, someone will seize it, she told herself. Of all her sins of omission and commission, she feared that abandoning the dream of space, the control over the ships that flew through it, was one of the things that had brought her to Luna Base a convict, rather than an eager student.

Unsteadily, she walked down the corridor of this new prison, painted the gray-green of Luna’s rock. An intercom crackled over the straining air vents, ordering groups to this side and that. She saw a crowd of men young enough to be her students herded in one direction. Then the order subsided. Indecisive, the crowd from the shuttle milled. A few sat on the now-filthy bundles they still carried with them.

Their faces as expressionless as if they wore bronze helms with only slits for eyes and nose; the CD Marines in blue and scarlet stood guard.

Enlisted men. Wyn met officers at this dinner or that. If these men had been officers—what makes you think they wouldn’t tell you that you got precisely what you deserved?

The crowd waited so long that even the CD Marines began to shift from foot to foot. Finally, the intercom crackled to hasty life.

“ALL HAVEN-BOUND…” Static drowned out the rest of the message, but not the shouts that followed. “Rest of you, down there! Step lively, now.”

Trusties in gray coveralls emerged from side doors. They had sonic tinglers; not as bad as the stunners, but nothing Wyn wanted to be hit with. Swearing, waving their weapons, with orders blaring so loudly overhead that it too felt like an assault, they herded Wyn and the other prisoners from the shuttle into a huge room, subdivided into pens. Doors—no, a port—began to slide shut as motors whirled and whined, building up to.…

Was this the ship? No processing, no questions, no explanations: Had they just been herded on board?

She closed her hands to conceal the trembling in them. She had hoped that Dr. Ryan was wrong. Around her rose the cries and stinks of poorly tended children. It was like something out of the Trojan Women: herded onto the black ships, helpless and afraid.

“You come in with us, honey,” came a voice. Wyn nearly wept for gratitude. Men, women and children, thugs and citizens they might be, all lumped together. She had hoped, at least, that convicts would be separated from…from what? Law-abiding citizens? Wyn, she told herself, up here we’re all convicts.

Then, the screaming started.

A girl, her mismatched skirt and jacket almost shredded, darted through the narrowing port, pursued by red-faced trusties. Unused to the gravity, she stumbled and fell, still screaming in two languages.

“They put him out! They threw him out the lock! Out there!” Her sobs doubled her over, and she gagged and retched.

Wyn started forward, but not before a shorter, much plumper woman grabbed the girl, raised her, and smacked her face sharply. “Quiet! You want to follow him? You want it all to be wasted?”

She gulped, drew breath for another scream, and the woman slapped her again. “Shut up! Or we’ll all be in for it.”

Wyn threaded through the crowd and knelt beside them. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s it to you?” The woman’s eyes were ancient, suspicious, though her face bore the too-taut look of many plastic surgeries.

“We’re not rats in a trap,” she snapped back. “Was she…?”

“Probably,” said the older woman as she soothed the hysterical girl with the absent skill of too much practice. “Someone tried to protect her. They put him outside.”

And when Wyn’s face went blank, the other jerked her thumb. “Out the airlock.”

Air bubbling, lungs bursting, blood freezing and boiling. Wyn fought to breathe and not to gag.

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna be sick on me, too. Keerist, I thought at least I’d stopped baby-sitting.”

She bent her head, murmuring over the girl. “You’re called Nina? Pretty. Come on, little girl, you gotta show us you got guts, you gotta make sure the bastards don’t get you, you can live through this, I’ve seen a hundred girls like you, and they all ended up rich and sassy…you’ll see.…”

She glared at Wyn. “Do something!” she hissed.

Like what? She could see the men who had chased Nina into the hold, pushing this way and that. Only the crowds kept them from finding her thus far.

Wyn rose and forced herself to draw a deep breath.

“All right, you over there. Hide them!” Her coverall was stained. She needed a bath more than she had needed anything in her life, probably including air. And here she was, snapping orders.

Incongruously, people obeyed. “You—” she gestured with her chin at a compact man surrounded by his family… “See if you can’t get the attention of the Marines.”

His wife raised an immediate protest.

“Why…”

“Shut up!” snarled the woman who comforted Nina. “See what happened to her? It can happen to you family broads, too. Raped and your man breathing vacuum… All right, you men, turn your backs on the poor kid. She don’t need to have men staring at her. Listen to the lady. She told you to get moving.”

“Just do it,” Wyn ordered. And when the man hesitated, “Please…if we don’t hang together, they’ll hang us separately. It could be your wife, your daughter….”

The man went. Wyn turned back to Nina. One filthy hand fumbled in a pocket and drew out a phial.

“Good stuff,” approved her ally, recognizing the brand of trank. “Save it for emergencies.”

“What do you call this?”

“A real pain in the ass.” She took the drug anyhow and fed it to her patient, “Now swallow, or I’ll rub it down your throat like I would a dog,” she threatened, but her hands were gentle.

Nina obeyed. Wyn wasn’t surprised at that or when the strong sedative hit her like a sandbag at the base of the skull.

Wyn looked up at the people who stood between Nina and the men searching for her. “You have to stand up to them,” she told them. “This time it’s her. Next time, who’s it going to be? You? You? The little boy over there?”

“You think you can take care of your own family?” the other woman asked to mutters of “puta” and other words Wyn didn’t catch. “When they have stunners, and you have what? Good hearts? Better you should have brains.”

“We have to work together,” Wyn repeated. “Make a start now. Even trusties have to sleep sometime, and they know it. And if there’s a riot, they won’t be trusties for long.”

That drew feral grins from the men standing about. As if glad to turn their attention away from the girl now dozing on the deck, they formed a ring about her, their wives, their daughters, and the three women in the center.

A stir in the crowd announced the arrival of CD Marines, the bells of their weapons shining as they were pointed in Wyn’s direction. In their center marched a midshipman, barely old enough for his freshman year, but a man and an officer already.


“What’s going on here?”

The group opened up, looking at Wyn. I won’t speak from my knees like some wretched Hecuba! But already, she had learned wisdom: she held her hands away from her body and rose, carefully.

“This young woman was raped by two of your…two of the trusties,” Wyn said. “They followed her in here. She claims they, spaced someone…”

“My father!” wailed the girl, much to everyone’s surprise.

A fierce scuffle broke out too close to where they stood. “I’ll get you all, you bastards!” someone shouted thickly, as if he spoke through a mouthful of blood and teeth. The midshipman gestured, and two Marines fanned out. Shortly thereafter, the whine of a sonic stunner made her flinch.

A freshman would have blushed and looked down: not this young officer. He took names, numbers, what details he could extract from Nina, to whom he spoke with such detachment that the girl could reply without sobbing. Then he turned away.

“Sir!” Wyn called at his back. He pivoted and faced her, impatient, but polite about it.

“What will be done now?”

“I’ll have them in a pen before they’re an hour older,” he said. She could see the “Why am I bothering to answer her?” take shape on his face and pressed in with her next question fast.

“And the girl? She needs medical attention.”

He shook his head. “Ma’am”—the title slipped out—”this isn’t a passenger liner.”

She held her eyes and raised a brow. He had the grace to flush. Behind her came fearful murmurs, and she looked away. What if he checks my records? God only knows what sort of thing my brother’s put into my files.

Deliberately, she let her shoulders sag, lowered her head, just like most of the other women present. One of the crowd. Just another convict. Don’t notice me. Please.

His eyes went back, the interest, the respect extinguished. Then he was gone. The pen doors slammed shut.

“We made ourselves some enemies,” a man said. “We better stick together and watch out.”

There were nods all around. A few men patted each other’s shoulders, then turned, reassuringly to their families. The women murmured agreement.

“Hoo-boy, that does it!” announced…? Wyn looked in vain for a name on the woman’s coverall. She looks like a pro, Wyn thought.

“First time decent family types have done more than spit at me. Usually, they throw out the loners. This might not be so bad. Well, I always was up for new experiences.”

Wyn raised an eyebrow and gestured. The woman laughed extravagantly.

“Well, not this, exactly, honey. You political?”

Wyn nodded, mildly shocked. She had supposed that prisoners would consider it…well, ill-mannered to discuss how they came to be on board one of the BuReloc vessels.

“Lady, aren’t you? From back East.”

“Boston.” Her voice almost broke on the name. “I’m Winth—”

“Don’t have to give me your name. ‘Boston’ will do fine. Call me Ellie. You get in wrong with some political stiff?”

“My brother.”

“If it’s not money, it’s men. I’ve seen enough of both in my life.”

The pause drew out, and Wyn knew she was supposed to ask about the person she was talking to. She thought she could guess. The silence grew demanding.

“What about you?” Wyn asked.

The woman sat back on her heels and laughed. “Boston, honey, you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m a political too. Didn’t pay taxes on my…if you want to be nice, we can call it an escort service.” She wiped at her eyes. “Tax evasion! I’ve been pushing it, or watching my girls for twenty years, and they get me on lousy tax evasion.”

To her surprise, Wyn laughed too. At Ellie and at herself, all New England righteousness companionably chatting with a madam. Ellie watched her narrowly.

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Even here, you’re a lady and I’m…well, what am I?”

“Brave, I’d say,” Wyn retorted. “Besides, it’s happened in the best of families.” Hadn’t one of the Philadelphia Biddles made a vulgar stir and dined out on it for years?

Again, Ellie laughed. “Boston, you kill me, you really do.”

“God, I hope not, Ellie,” Wyn found herself saying. “You’re the first person I’ve met since the world caved in on me who hasn’t bored or scared me to death.”

“Shake on it?” asked the ex-madam. “It’s not like I’m asking you to work for me, you know. I mean, you do know?”

Wyn laughed again and held out her hand for a brief handshake that Ellie broke off to warn Wyn about not showing off whatever it was she had in “that tacky green bag.”

Wyn never learned the name of the ship. Once it had been a CoDominium vessel—the Gdansk, she thought from seeing the name stenciled on a bulkhead. Now, decommissioned, turned over to BuReloc, it might as well be called the Botany Bay. Or, she thought, the ship of fools.

The days turned into a litany of grumbles. “Clean” became a myth; Wyn looked back even to visits to Welfare Islands as trips into a vanished Eden. Even the rickety bunks were scarce; the younger men traded shifts, so that the narrow beds, in stacks of four, were always in use. That provoked a rude snort from Ellie that Wyn ignored. A few people showed signs of gambling away bunk time: A meeting of the people in their bay stopped that and instituted a schedule of regular cleanings for their deck and for the inadequate refreshers that served them and, for all they knew, half the other convicts. After all, you couldn’t expect Marines to clean up after prisoners.

It was like, Ellie announced one day, perpetually having cramps and PMS—and you didn’t even dare scream or throw things. Not even Nina, who turned thin, silent, and jumpy. Every day Wyn expected her to burst out screaming so the Marines would come and remove her, but she never did.

She didn’t bleed either. In these close quarters, they’d have known if she had. Ellie’s question, too blunt to be embarrassing, brought the answer: the medics had worked on her before she left Earth. Wyn was profoundly relieved.

What the women did who had not inhibited their fertility, Wyn didn’t want to think of. She struggled against a claustrophobia that threatened to drive her frantic. Given no space and no activity and the bulky starches of convicts rations, she felt herself sagging. Even the isometrics she began to work at with almost a religious fervor brought her little relief.

Day after day, the ship sped toward Jupiter. Day upon day was a nightmare of heavy gravity, bearing down upon the rickety welded bunks until, one ship’s “night”, some buckled, trapping a family beneath them.

The bunks were cut away, and Wyn tried not to retch at the stink of burning flesh when someone was less careful about the cutting than he might have been. Then the people beneath them were taken away, too.

She never saw them again. And when she tried to ask a Marine, Ellie—whom Wyn had privately considered nerveless—flashed her a glance of such fear that she shut up. When a few men slipped out on work assignments about the ship and returned with steel pipe to reinforce the bunks, she helped them conceal it from the Marines.

From the one broadcast Wyn had watched years before while recovering from the flu, she knew that Alderson Jumps were instantaneous; transits from point to point were what occupied the days and weeks and months a ship actually spent going from one star to another. They had not yet left Earth’s system, and Haven was more than a year away. Wyn wondered how she would stay sane that long.