I awoke on a bed, my clothes and slate gone, wearing only a simple gown. A slight fogginess floated in my head, but I sat up anyway.
“Move carefully,” a woman with this same curious tan complexion suggested as she came to my side. “Most of the adverse events should dissipate quickly, but a lingering vertigo is possible.”
Wavering slightly as I sat upright, I nodded in agreement and that set the room spinning. She steadied me with one hand, and then examined me with an even, sure competence. The dizziness passed.
“Where am I?”
She gave an apologetic smile. “That is not for me to say.”
“Who are you?”
“Personally? You can call me Shirley.”
Too many of those forbidden films got the best of me.
“Surely, you can’t be serious.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Never mind.”
Shirley finished her examination and stood. “There is no lasting damage. You’re very lucky. You might have died from asphyxiation.”
Memories of the chase and fight arrived. Guilt swamped me.
“Did he die?”
She gave me a quizzical look.
“The man who went over the bluff?”
“No.”
I relaxed. My troubles were far from over but at least I had dodged killing someone.
“He’s quite badly hurt.” Her eyes were cold and I had the impression she treated me with the compassion one might show an injured animal. “You very nearly killed him.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“Well, that is unlikely to matter to a murdered man, is it?”
“It was an accident. I didn’t throw him over that edge on purpose.”
“A child could have reasoned out the danger.” She snorted. “Then again a child would have done as they were told and avoided the fight.”
I stood up, my anger rising with me.
“Listen, Shirley, I don’t know who you people are or what you want, and I’m not about to trust you with my life.”
“Nearly killing him wasn’t your intention.” She turned and headed for the door. “But it is the consequence of your choices.”
She opened the door and I thought about charging out, but a couple of beefy men, again with the same pigmentation, stood ready. I watched as she stepped out, locking the door behind her.
Left alone, I searched my room. For captors they had a rather generous spirit. The room contained every comfort I might possibly need. The food fabricator appeared to be well-programmed with a wide range of options. The same for the utility printer, which was even loaded with the latest fashions, and I wasted no time running off a suit and shoes. In unreasonable optimism I even printed a hat for traveling. I explored fabricating something that I might use as a club, but there my hosts’ generosity ended. A network interface gave me access to entertainment options that included libraries of embargoed material. However, I didn’t have access to the colonial network, or anything beyond entertainment or signaling my jailers.
Whoever these people were they didn’t play by the same rules as the Administration. That did not make them friends. Despite their apparent distaste for violence, they frightened Eddie. The hours passed slowly enough and while the forbidden films of the libraries should have been a powerful distraction, my troubles ruined their entertainment value.
These ‘Tans’ were kind enough to let the network interface display the time so I wasn’t utterly disoriented by my isolation. Sometime in the early evening I received a non-medical visitor – two, actually.
They came in, their skin tone continuing that odd sensation of familial relation, but otherwise they appeared quite different. She was tall, nearly six feet with golden-blond hair, perhaps in her late twenties, and with high stern cheekbones and a sharp long nose. He stood a few inches shorter, with dark brown hair and a rounder, friendlier face. Without their masks it took me a moment to recognize them from the theater as Hardgrave’s goons.
“May we talk with you?” she asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
He smiled a big open and warm grin. “Of course you do. Do you want us to leave?”
“No, I want to leave.”
He looked truly apologetic but her expression remained hard and aloof.
“We can’t allow that,” she said.
I sat on my bed. “That sounds like a threat.”
He started to speak but she got there first.
“You aren’t being mistreated.”
“I’m a prisoner, I’d call that mistreatment.”
She sighed and again asked, “May we speak with you at length?”
I waved toward a pair of chairs. “Go ahead. I’ve got nothing else to do.”
With slight but deliberate bows in my direction, they moved the chairs across from me and sat.
She started the interrogation.
“Mr. Kessler, how did you learn of this facility?”
“Who are you?”
She looked as though I was a misbehaving kid.
The guy tried a friendlier tack.
“Jason, we don’t mean you any harm, but we can’t be certain that you feel the same way.”
“The last time we met I ended up drugged and tied. Now you want me to be chatty but you’re not even willing to tell me your names.”
They looked at each other and a moment of understanding seemed to pass between them as they came to some silent agreement.
“We’ve been impolite,” she said. “My name is Nataya and this is Terrance.”
“And you already know who I am, so I really doubt you’d think I’m much of a threat to anyone.”
Terrance answered, “I wish we could be sure of that, Jason. I really do. This entire affair is very – distasteful. However, people can often be quite surprising with hidden talents for violence. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded but said nothing. Nataya returned to the interrogation.
“Tell us how you knew about this facility.”
“You tell me why you have Eddie Nguyen so scared.”
At Eddie’s name their faces betrayed a moment of shock, maybe even fear. Who was scared of whom?
“We can’t answer that,” Terrance said.
“And I can’t answer any of your questions.”
Nataya started to say something, but I refused her the chance. “I mean it. I’m not answering anything until I know what’s going on here.”
I crossed my arms and stared at them, ignoring their questions until they finally left.
* * *
Nataya and Terrance didn’t return for the rest of the day and I wasted Tuesday afternoon fretting. They knew who I was, they knew who Eddie was, but they seemed ignorant about recent events. Maybe they’d built Forge but God knows how and why.
The Tans had gone to a lot of effort building this base. The sheer logistics staggered my imagination. The Governing Council watched inventories and individual fabricators so closely that as a teenager when I had printed a single condom they knew it. How the hell had these people slipped out the materials for a small settlement? I couldn’t estimate the number of people hiding out here in the bush. If most of the buildings were barracks it could be hundreds, or there might only be a few dozen. I needed to know more and they weren’t going to tell me.
By the late afternoon I’d returned to the interface and scanned through the entertainment options again. They wouldn’t tell me who they were, but they left clues. Mass media is a reflection of the people who consume it.
No one on Nocturnia made any new media. We were too busy making the colony and colonists. We did consume it though, and what we consumed, and were allowed, told you a lot about our messed-up society, our obsessions over family life, a God-fearing population, and everyone’s roles. Anything even slightly subversive to the Admin’s perfect order was banned.
The Tans’ selections revealed a very different set of concerns. They accessed a lot more of the Ark’s archives, though their libraries were far from complete.
Where the Admin banned anything that even suggested sex was for anything other than procreation, the Tans’ library burst their directories with every sexual, romantic, and sensual title I could remember. More than just that, I opened a few files of titles I didn’t know and sexually pornographic images greeted me.
I stood and stretched. The hours working the interface had played havoc with my spine. Pacing back and forth in the cell, I tried to work out how they had kept themselves hidden. Granted their skin tone was different, but if you passed one on the street you wouldn’t give them a second look. It was only when they gathered in groups that their uniformity stood out. With only a few hundred or fewer scattered among Nocturnia’s four million they blended in, but that didn’t answer the big question. Who the hell were they?
That uniformity suggested genetic manipulation, a simple enough effect to produce but a thoroughly banned procedure. The Administration embargoed everything about genetic manipulation except what we needed for health and reproduction.
True to our mission, we preserved the ethnic populations from the United States in their recorded ratios. Changing ethnicity was a crime against colonial objectives. Before Old Earth’s ruin that had not been the case and by the time of its destruction some people had abandoned their native ethnicity. The Tans, however, were something different. They displayed no single racial look. Someone was producing these unusual raceless people right under the Admin’s nose.
I sat down and searched more of the entertainment files. No doubt these Tans were a hell of lot more sexually accepting than anyone else. They even considered same-sex intercourse normal and not a sinful aberration. For a moment I wondered if Pamela was one of them. Her sexual appetite and adventurism matched but her pale skin contrasted too greatly with theirs.
Slowly I noticed the taboo in their mass media – violence. They allowed very little of the rough and nasty sort of film I had discovered during the later twentieth century’s exploitative genre. Nocturnia’s issues were with sex and theirs were with violence.
So far they had treated me fairly, but I also hadn’t given them what they wanted. I wouldn’t want to bet my life on their goodwill after I surrendered all my leverage.
I shut down the interface and noticed it neared midnight. My stomach growled from my inattention and I fabricated a quick meal. As I ate, I tried to fit the pieces together, but the puzzle refused to take shape. Even if these Tans were as nonviolent as they acted, how had they gotten involved with someone like Eddie?
I threw the refuse into the recycler and stripped for sleep. Climbing into bed, I envisioned Pamela. Her long black hair, her dazzling smile, her seductive eyes, all reminded me I wasn’t the only one with a lot to lose. We had to find a way out of this mess, and a way to escape Eddie, the Tans, and the damned Administration.