Three #2
Isako jerks backward. What the hell is her client doing here?
He told her he wasn’t coming to watch. Otherwise, she’d have security measures in place, bodyguards and electronic monitoring well positioned.
She and her longknife would be near him at all times.
Greves is the reason two hundred people are out of work.
Desperate freelancers, angry relatives, violent anti-Company agitators—any of them might take a run at him.
Isako is personally responsible for her client’s safety and she’s up here on the watchtower too far away to do a damned thing.
“Shit,” she hisses under her breath. “Asshole. What does he think he’s doing? ”
Greves reaches the group and starts shaking hands and speaking with people. He lays a hand on Dew Loren’s shoulder, claps another man on the back, smiles and says something to an old woman. His dark suit mills incongruously through the robes of bright blue.
Isako turns to push through the crowd and run for the stairs, but Greves’s voice stops her in her tracks.
“Citizens of Tenacity.” His amplified words ring out over the surrounding area.
Isako spins back around. How did he manage to get onto the AV network? Is he broadcasting across the whole cityhab? Without bothering to clear any of it by her first?
“Since the journey of our ancestors aboard the Great Ships, the Astrocommunications division has been a voice to the heavens.” The director steps away from the wagefolk and stands alone so that cityhab cameras will capture him defiant in front of the airshield posts.
“It doesn’t matter if space is silent. It doesn’t matter if our calls go unanswered.
The Great Silence is our society’s test of faith.
One day, it will end, and when it does, our descendants will judge us.
They’ll ask: Did we continue to seek connection?
Or did we retreat into isolation and fear?
Were we bold dreamers or cynical cowards? ”
Greves always was good at getting attention, and he’s certainly doing it now.
“Astrocommunications isn’t a large division, but we’ve always safeguarded a sacred link to our origins.
We represent the hope for a future when we are not alone.
For the division to be deprioritized and eliminated is for us to turn our backs on that hope.
It’s a failure of foresight and judgment on the part of the Executive and the Board that I cannot—and will not —stand behind.
“As director of Astrocommunications, I resign in protest.”
Greves turns on his heel and strides for the airshield posts.
The fourteen former Astrocom workers surge after him, rushing for the end of Easthatch Boulevard as if they can’t wait to get there.
The Mother in Chains beams down on them as they pass.
Unseen sentries drop the first set of doors at the gate.
The entire group passes into the transparent airlock that’s big enough to handle shuttlebuses and field cars and heavy equipment.
They look small in there, like children walking through a vast and empty stadium.
Greves doesn’t stop and doesn’t hesitate.
He keeps walking, and his people follow.
Isako feels as if she’s trapped in a fucked-up dream.
Client service dictates that she should’ve either talked him out of this, or been down there with him. Instead, after nearly three decades of contract work, of being one of the very best atiers in the business, she’s failing. Publicly and spectacularly.
The airshield falls in front of the resignees. To those watching, it’s noticeable only as a momentary shimmer in the air, a visible distortion in the invisible barrier that contains and protects human life from the planet’s unforgiving conditions.
To those inside the airlock, it’s an instant precipitous drop in temperature and oxygen.
Several of them sway and fall. Colleagues help them back to their feet.
With effort, they keep walking, away from warmth and life, into the bleak Vastness.
Blue robes flap in the subzero wind like the wings of a flock of colorful birds from some mythical tropic clime.
Forest Greves leads them onward.
The first man to collapse does so roughly six hundred meters from the airshield.
He stumbles, stiff fingers clutching his chest, gasping for scant oxygen, shoulders heaving before going still.
His colleagues pause only long enough to make the blessing sign of the Mother over him before continuing their trek across the black gravel.
“Thank you for your bequest.” A chorus of soft murmurs rises around Isako. She mouths the words reflexively, but her mind is spinning with senseless confusion and shame.
The resignees pass the desiccated, skeletal lumps of those who trod before them. Worn and faded bits of blue fabric cling to the dry corpses, temporary markers of their final resting places. Another woman falls and is left behind. “Thank you for your bequest.”
It’s rude to leave partway through, no matter when the person you came to support finishes their journey.
So everyone stays the whole twenty-six minutes that it lasts.
Applause rises when the remaining five people make it past the last visible bit of blue fabric on the tundra.
They’ve gone farther than anyone else before them.
The environment beyond the airshield is deadly, but less deadly than it was a year ago, ten years ago, a hundred or three hundred years ago.
Each year, the cold abates a little, the oxygen rises a bit more.
Everyone who takes the final walk is visible proof of progress.
The figures who’re still moving are difficult to see now, but Isako’s distance vision is still sharp.
Dew Loren’s outlasted just about all the younger wagefolk, tough old coot that he is.
Athletic genes or strong lungs maybe, or just an iron will.
When he finally sits down, exhausted, he stretches out his legs, lies back, and looks up at the sky like he’s reclining across a picnic blanket on a sunny day.
“Fuck Earth,” Tessa cries out.
“Fuck Earth,” others shout in support.
Greves makes it another dozen impressive paces.
When he can go no farther, he turns around to face Tenacity.
With the dramatic showmanship he was known for all his career, he raises his arms in triumph, then kneels and falls forward, rests his forehead on the ground, and dies.
He looks as if he’s bowing in supplication.
Perhaps paying final respects to the colony that he strived to take to the stars, or maybe in subservience to his fate.
One day, they’ll build something important in his name.
When the cityhab expands all the way out to where Greves lies, his dry, mummified remains will be buried and memorialized at the spot he fell.
Ordinary wagefolk like Dew Loren and the others might get a street or a business or even a school named after them.
Directors often get a hospital or a university or a big public park.
Greves wouldn’t care for that, Isako thinks blandly.
He’d like to be entombed under a train station or a satellite tower, something slick and cool and high-tech, when he comes back under the airshield.
On the billboard across the boulevard, the KPI numbers and headlines disappear and are replaced by the smiling photographs and names of the resignees scrolling across the screen. In proud memory of esteemed colleagues who made way for others: Aloe Aditi, Canyon Truong, Crane Otto, Dew Loren…
The witnesses drift away, descending the watchtower, off to gatherings where they’ll remember their loved ones in private.
Isako stays until she’s the only one remaining.
She stares at the distant spot where Greves lies bowed on the Vastness but can’t wrap her mind around the idea of him being gone.
She saw him just a few days ago, spoke to him about the future.
Yes, he’d been upset at Astrocom’s demise and despairing of the Company’s direction, but he was a director .
One of the elite, destined to live twice as long as regular folk.
She never imagined him coming to such a drastic decision.
She’s crushed by what that means.
After twelve years of service, she didn’t really know her own client.
It’s been a long time since a director resigned in protest. The shocking news will reach the Executive in the Sweetsea.
There’s going to be damage control, repercussions, public statements.
Shifts in power. Pundits will make declarations on the Companynet.
A huge blow for the reunionists and a great victory for the terraformists, they’ll say.
None of that’s Isako’s concern anymore. Her client’s gone to his death. At age fifty, she’s a contractor without a contract. A ronin.
What the fuck does she do now?