Mara
In Chaireddan, in the hot weather, the day begins long before the light.
In the market square the stalls glimmered with yellow-flaring
lamps, enclosed in mesh against the insects. The women pushed
through the folds, batting them down like swimmers. On their
heads they carried wicker baskets, so that the leaves of their
next dinner hung round their ears like ladies in Airdrossa wore
jewels. The stalls were sparsely set so close to harvest, but still
the crowds were thicker than usual, fingers flicking urgently
among the vegetables. There had been no hint, no clue or
proclamation; no one had said that day out of all others would
be the day. But early that morning the women of Chaireddan
piled their baskets high, then turned their black-coated backs
and hurried away.
It was Na’Stelfia, Ar’Quila’s mother’s friend, who gave her the
first picture of Mara; a threshold gift for when she first went
away to school on Chi!me Two. Mara hadn’t been fashionable
then, but Aunt Stelfia was IntPro, as Ar’Quila had always
sworn she would be when she grew up, and they were always
one step ahead of a trend. When Stelfia wasn’t at home at the
IntPro central office on Zargras, the once uninhabited planet
where the United Planets was based, she was travelling the
galaxy on missions as daring as they were secret. The Office
of Interplanetary Protocols was the enforcer for the United
Planets galactic government; staffed largely with Chi!me, there
was always something thrilling to do.
Once, when Quila was very small, Aunt Stelfia had come
home from a posting with a small, round, burnt hole in the
brim of her hat. She had shown it to her, tipping back her
seat and tossing it to her with an idle gesture, as if she didn’t
much care.
‘Was it a hydrogen blaster?’ Quila had asked, wide-eyed.
‘Did someone shoot you?’
It had seemed unbelievably exciting to her, so amazing, so
lucky.
‘Did someone shoot you?’
Aunt Stelfia had crossed her boot heels on the hearth circle
and laughed.
A picture from Aunt Stelfia was worth casting with respect.
Quila had dutifully given it pride of place on the wall opposite
her bed and, after a while and some appreciative comments
from her age-mates, had even been moved to look its subject
up on her terminal. She had barely heard of Mara Karne
then, though the exports of Benan Ty figured in her galactic
geography lessons all through her years at school. The sparse
information available taught her only a little more. A guerrilla
leader, she read, the daughter of Benan Ty’s deposed president.
A hero or a villain, freedom fighter or murderer, champion
of peasants or destroyer of cities, depending on your point of
view. A thin, white-faced girl with an ancient gun, a skein of
blowing hair; eyes that looked right out of the image at her.
She collected other images where she could, from fan outlets
on esoteric places or in-depth reports on our primitive cousins
in the old Terran space. A shot from a security surveillance
recording, Mara with her hair bundled under her hat, marching
down a corridor deep in conversation with an older man, her
famous old Terran gun slung casually over one shoulder as if
she had forgotten it was there. An old image from an article,
Mara at her father’s graveside, still and straight with a black
lace veil pushed back over her hair. A police photo for a wanted
poster, her mouth quirking at the thought of how she would
shortly fight her way out.
And the last, dubious snippet, from a Terran who claimed
to have been allowed into a ViaVera base, of a camp fire in an
evening field, a blur of faces singing and Mara in the centre in
a long flounced skirt, dancing with a young man as if she was
just an ordinary girl and not a killer at all.
It was the birds that made her late. As she always did in a
provincial base, Terise had gone down to the market early that
morning. The sky was just starting to pale and she was heading
back when she saw them. She knew the animal stalls well;
usually in the narrowest entrance to the market, on bad days
the stench from the frilleh cages would follow her all the way
round the other booths. At least the frilleh sold, they were good
for catching the rats the first human colonists had inadvertently
introduced.
The frilleh always found a buyer in the end; what she had
really learned to hate were the two moth-eaten jeebas that
were brought out again and again and taken away each time
without one. Ladies in Airdrossa, she had heard, would wear
brightly coloured jeebas on their shoulders as pets, but it was
not a fashion people had any truck with in Chaireddan. The
jeeba would reach out with clutching paws as she passed them,
as if they could feel her pity. When it was possible she always
took another way.
She would have done so today, but the song called her. Just
the littlest thread of a tune, a little high piping her grandmother
had once said would be the music of the gods, if only it weren’t
for free. She hurried over, pushing through the clouds of mesh
with the flats of her hands. There on the biggest stall, taking up
almost all the room, was a cage of tarnished metal and inside,
perched all in a line on a single loop of dead branch and singing
their hearts out as they had always done, were six pietera.
The dawn light caught their dark plumage into purple and
gold like the definition of beauty. At home they had nested
in the trees all around the village; the girls had collected their
discarded feathers to wear in their hair. Such small, round birds
they were, with their purple feathers and bright eyes and no
good eating on them at all. No one would ever harm a pietera.
Looking at them now she thought she could buy one for
Ladyani. He was from her village, the only other in the inner
circle who was even from the east coast. They could listen to it
sing together, remember all the things from their shared childhood
they could not speak of to anyone else, and when they
had heard enough, they could open the cage up and let it go.
He would like that, she thought, it would be a poetic gesture
and a fit one for a revolutionary. More importantly, it would
be theirs alone. She tried to find things to have with Ladyani.
She prodded one finger at the bars of the cage and one of the
birds bounced along the branch towards it, cheeping hopefully.
They were so friendly, so lacking in predators that they were
always sure of their welcome. She saw Ladyani thinking of their
village, his thrust-out lip and hard, red-rimmed eyes as clear
as if he was standing before her. The bird fluttered up to her
finger and cheeped again.
‘Would Madam take a bird this morning? A nice little bird,
very cheap, for pet or food? Come all the way beyond Camino,
these do, I do you very good price?’
The stallholder was almost as mangy as his jeebas, another
one in this poverty-stricken province hanging on beyond the
point when there was nothing left to hold on to. Every time
she came to the market she was reminded of how much the
people needed them, even if they didn’t know it. She wriggled
her finger out of the cage, dislodging the bird.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not today.’
The carriers edged along the narrow streets of Chaireddan lower
town, their engines straining at the slow speed. Ahead of them
the crowd of dark, carapaced figures pulsed and shifted, full of
scurrying motion. In the first carrier, the police chief sniffed
at the faint bitter smell, the suggestion of fuel cell catastrophe
building somewhere beneath him. It was as much as he could
do not to accelerate and sweep them all out of the way; in
moments like this, even the inevitable criticism seemed almost
worth it. Almost, but not quite. He had always been good at
controlling himself, it was what had got him where he was
today. Self-control and hard work, against those who knew
the meaning of neither.
Once they were out of the warren around the market, the
road was clearer, climbing between dust-hued walls up the
hill to the old town. Fewer people lived up here; the rambling
buildings on the summit were mostly a motley collection of
religious missions, student hostels and sinking, threadbare
charities. All sorts of organisations had a forsaken outpost in
this forsaken outpost of a town. The police chief squinted into
the rising sun. The tower of the building called the Adicalan
Charitable Mission rose ahead against the skyline. He felt
himself beginning to smile. There was only one woman with
them now, a short, black figure climbing up the street ahead.
For a moment he stiffened, but it was all right; everything this
morning, he knew suddenly, was going to be all right.
He stood up in his seat, noting with surprise how his legs
seemed to tremble beneath him, and gave the signal. The carriers
behind him stopped. The men leapt over the sides and
fanned out around the sides of the building. From his own
carrier, his crew got out the heavy equipment. It had been years
coming, this moment, years when he had planned and schemed
and ignored everyone who had said it couldn’t be done, years
when he had been laughed at and worse and only endured it
because he had known one day it would be different.
There was nothing worse than to be powerless, despised. He
had learnt that, and today was the day he was done with it.
There were all sorts of organisations up here, any number of
which might be other than they seemed. Yet for them the law
was nothing, ruling by violence they were themselves inviolable.
There were many like that, many fronts for the teeming multitudes
of his enemies, but after today, one less. One less. Petrus
Desailly, the youngest chief the Chaireddan police had ever
had, tasted the phrase on his tongue and waited for his battle.
It was fully light and she was halfway up the hill when Terise
heard them behind her. She knew, sickeningly, that there was
only one place they could be going. She wanted to run, but she
couldn’t. Couldn’t run, couldn’t shout, couldn’t do anything,
not even reach into her robes for her communicator to say
goodbye. If she had been closer, close enough for a sprint to
take her to the gates…They would not even know who she was;
in her traditional black dress and head scarf, she could have
been anyone, just another townswoman dragging her shopping
home.
The carriers were drawing level now, she could feel them
at her shoulder, breathe their fumes. She kept her eyes on
the ground, bending her head as the local women did when
they didn’t want to be seen. She reached the top of the hill as
they passed her and took the left fork around the front of the
mission building. She was still walking but quicker now, the
bones in her calves aching with the effort of inconspicuousness.
Just a woman hurrying home with her shopping, just a woman
with the sweat springing under her black coat and her breath
hoarse against the edge of her headscarf.
A little way along there was a passage on the left-hand side,
a set of steps leading steeply upwards to a cluster of houses
perched on the escarpment above the mission. She turned into
it, sprinting. Halfway up the steps, a path led off to the right
into a garden. Gracious once, it was overgrown and neglected
now, a riot of shrubs and tall, dry ferns lining the wall above the
road. She flung herself down and wriggled along through the
undergrowth until she was overlooking the road. She couldn’t
see anyone. She ducked back down into the bushes and pulled
the communicator out of the waistband of her skirt.
‘Mara? Can you hear me? Mara?’
No reply but the hiss of static.
‘Mara?’ Come on, she breathed to herself, please answer.
The communicator crackled, too loud. She slapped her hand
over the speaker to muffle it and, at last, heard the voice she
was waiting for.
‘Hi, Terise,’ said Mara Karne. ‘Trouble?’
Even then, it made her smile. ‘Trouble. You’ve seen them?’
‘Two carriers out the front, nothing else. How many more?’
Terise parted the leaves in front of her face.
‘There’s five…no, wait, six men coming round the west side
now.’
‘Weapons?’
‘Only that Espada crap, I think, I can’t see any Chi!me
blasters.’
Espada was the Ty weapons company, the official supplier of
the government, whose blasters were so liable to jam or explode
in your face that Mara said you might as well throw them at the
enemy and duck. ViaVera favoured Gargarin hydrogen rifles,
which were cheap and easy to source when they couldn’t get
Chi!me, but even Terran guns were better than Espadas.
‘There were more of them, but I couldn’t stay to watch.
I expect they’re working round the other side. They’re not
making a perimeter, my guess is they’ll wait till they’ve got
enough grouped, then storm front and back.’
‘Hmm.’ There was a pause as Mara digested this. ‘Who are
they? Army or CAS?’
The CAS paramilitaries would have been the worst, Army
perhaps what they would have expected. This was almost
embarrassing. ‘They look like police. The locals.’
Mara snorted. ‘Like being savaged by a flower. Alright. This
is what we’ll do. I’ll get the ship underway, that gives us twenty
minutes to hold them off and get to the roof when it comes
in. You said they don’t have Chi!me blasters? You don’t think
they’d have anti-aircraft?’
‘I can’t see any. I don’t know what’s in the carriers, but I
don’t see why they would. They don’t know we have the ship,
after all.’
‘Or so we hope. We’ll assume the ship can take care of whatever
they throw it; we don’t have a lot of choice, anyway. Where
are you, you in the garden?’
‘Opposite the kitchen window.’
‘OK. You stay there, keep watch as long as you can. I’ll pass
you over to Michel, you can talk to him if you see anything.
Give it 15 standard, then get yourself up to the roof. You should
be able to take the side escape stairs if they’re not cordoning
the place, but if that changes, let Michel know. Can you do it?’
Terise had her doubts, but she wasn’t going to share them.
Below, another three policemen thudded past.
‘Course I can,’ she said, brightly. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Well, don’t miss the flight. You know I can’t do without you.
Who’d nag me to eat and sleep like my old granny, if not you?’
‘I only do it for the appreciation.’ With an effort, she kept
the fear out of her voice. ‘See you later, then,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ said Mara. ‘Here’s Michel.’
A buzz of her voice, receding: ‘Shut up, you lot, we’ve got
trouble…’ Drowned out by Michel, tense with excitement. He
had been with them two years, but by the Terran reckoning
they still used on Benan Ty, he was only seventeen. Terise pulled
herself together.
‘Michel. What do you need to know?’
‘Well…,’ he began, and the world dissolved into noise. Terise
found herself face down on the ground. She raised her head,
gingerly, and saw that where the main gate of the mission had
been, there was now only white dust.
‘Fuck! Michel! Michel, can you hear me? Michel?’
The communicator sang in her hand.
‘Terise? You there? That was the main gate, and half the
front with it. All the windows have gone and the wall in the
mess hall’s shot. It got Çeru, he’s still here but I don’t think
he’s going to make it. Jesus, Terise, you should see his leg, it’s
gone, it’s just…’
She kept her tone level, cutting across his panic. ‘Where are
you now?’
‘In the salon, above the courtyard. We can hold them off
here, they’ll have to come through one at a time, the way it’s
fallen. We can hold them.’
‘Of course you can.’
‘Of course we can. Of course…’ His consolation ended in
a yelp. ‘They’re coming through! There’s one!’
A crackle of rifle fire drowned him out.
‘Michel? Michel? Come in!’
His voice in the background was jubilant.
‘We got him! We got the bastard!’
Another crackle. She heard him shouting into the room.
‘Take that, you fucks! Cesna, give me that charge pack.
Come on!’
‘Michel? What’s happening?’
Belatedly, he remembered he was supposed to be talking to
her. He breathed heavily into the communicator.
‘I can’t fire a rifle one handed. I have to go.’
‘But…’
There was a clunk as his communicator fell to the floor.
It was fair enough, she couldn’t tell them anything. She
couldn’t help, couldn’t do anything except sit safe in her grassy
hideout and listen to the shouts, the bursts of rifle fire and the
deeper thuds of the blasters coming from the wrecked, burning
building that had been their base in Chaireddan. Counting
down the minutes to their rescue, ten minutes, five minutes
now. She scanned the sky for the ship, fixing her hope on every
dot that might be a bird, or might not.
Mara shouted something, too far from the communicator
for Terise to make out. Footsteps crossed the floor towards it.
‘Terise?’
‘Michel? Are you alright? What’s happened?’
‘We’re pulling back,’ he gasped. ‘You have to get to the roof.’
‘OK, shouldn’t be a problem. But tell Mara I don’t know
where the other policemen are, they might have got up the
back, might be on the roof. I can’t see from here.’
‘I’ll tell her. I have to go. Get to the roof.’
‘Wait, Michel, where’s…’ The line clicked off. ‘Ladyani,’
she finished to the empty air. He would only have laughed at
her anyway.
One of the dots was coming closer, definitely too big for a
bird. The firing was at both gates now, but the policemen didn’t
seem to be watching the sides. Terise slipped down the escarpment
into the road and ran, bent double, across to the door to
the fire escape. In the stairwell, the blasters were louder and
the air was hazy with distant smoke. She could hear shouting,
but nothing very close. If she met a policeman coming down
she knew she didn’t have a chance, but neither would she have
one if she were left behind. Terise pulled her headscarf over her
nose, breathed once or twice into the folds for courage, and
galloped up the stairs.
She stopped at the top and peered out round the door. The
ship was just coming in to land, wings folding, bolts richocheting
off its armoured sides. A group of four policemen, one
with a leader’s red trimmings in a fringe on his shoulder, were
sheltering behind the power cell block on the west side of the
roof. They were doing most of the firing. The crew of the flyer
opened up on them, but the cell block was proving to be good
cover. The main stairs from the building came up on the east
side of the roof, slightly further along than the power cells. On
these stairs, Terise guessed from the firing, the surviving group
members were gathered, holding off more policemen following
them up from inside. No one, it seemed, had seen her, yet.
After a minute, the fire from the ship increased in intensity.
The policemen on the power block cowered back into cover
and, in that moment, Michel sprinted across the open space
and galloped up the flyer ramp into safety. He was followed
by Cesna, Çeru’s brother, his shirt flapping open and bloody.
After him came Marius with something tied round his thigh
and scorch marks all down one side of his jacket. Lander went
with him, taking the left side so that Marius would have a
better chance, firing one-handed while Marius leant on him.
A bolt grazed his upper arm; he staggered, but kept on going.
Terise watched them cross. The need to shoot someone was
so strong, she had to dig her nails into her palms to contain it.
In the stairwell, she spotted thankful tufts of Ladyani’s red hair
as he fought to give them time. He was next to go, sauntering
across the roof so slowly she would have hit him if she had been
able to reach. Only Mara to come now, only Mara who had
naturally insisted on being the last, and Terise herself should
be making her move. Tensing her shoulders against the blaster
bolts, she ducked her head and ran towards the ship.
She pounded in under the folded wings, swung herself round
the rail on the side of the ramp. Ladyani was crouching at the
bottom with one of the flyer crew. Then Mara came up the
last step and started to run. Terise stopped, one foot on the
slope. She saw the sweat on Ladyani’s upper lip as he shot,
the way his fringe got in his eyes because he would not let her
cut it, felt the reverberations of the ship beneath her feet, the
engine noise filling her head so that even the fury of fire from
Ladyani was silent.
Mara was almost halfway across now, shooting over her
shoulder as she ran, laughing, her hair flying out behind her
like the sun trailing clouds. The man with the red trim on
his shoulder stood up. Ladyani went on firing, bolts droning
insectile past the man’s head. Mara turned. The red-trimmed
man lifted his blaster. Ladyani took one, half step forward, his
hand stretching out as if he could touch her. Terise let go of
the rail. Mara opened her arms out wide, like greeting an old
friend, and the man fired.
The bolt took her right in the chest, lifting her up and back
with the force of it, crumpling her into a heap of old clothes, a
charity not worth the trouble of keeping. No one could survive
a hit like that, no one who did not have the armour that cost
money that could be better spent on weapons. No exemptions,
no special protection. No one could survive it; not even her.
Terise thought for a moment that she saw her hand flutter,
then there was no movement but her hair, blowing in feathers
around her face.
It was very quiet. From the trees beyond the rooftop, birdsong
flickered above the crackle of the flames. The red-trimmed man
stood still, staring at them, while the fringes on his shoulders
ruffled in the breeze. Behind his head, the sun hung crowned
in smoke. Everything was frozen; there seemed no reason why
any of them should ever move again, why they should not be
held in that moment forever. Then, slowly, the man lowered
his blaster, and Ladyani started to scream.
It was Terise who pulled him back, Terise and the crewman
who got the rifle off him and pushed him up the ramp.
‘You know we can’t lose both of you,’ she cried, shaking him.
I can’t lose both of you. ‘She told us what to do, we have to go
on. No gestures, no throwing yourself away for nothing. We
have to go on. Nothing else matters, not even revenge, not even
for her. You know that’s the first thing she’d say.’
He knew she was right; he must have done, or he would
never have allowed her to force him on board. He knew she was
right but, all the same, as Terise watched his face in the gloom
of the hold, she wondered if he would ever forgive her for it.
The image of Mara dancing was always Quila’s favourite, even
though she never cast it up with the others. It was Terran and
sentimental, probably faked, inappropriate for a political figure.
Still, in the nights after she heard Mara had been killed, it was
that picture she cried over, shielding the light from her ring
terminal with her palm. It was such a personal image; it was as
if they had been friends, as if she had known her. For a few days
she walked the halls pale-faced, her age-mates shadowing her
as if she really had been bereaved. Then, when the mourning
period finished, it was important that she should not seem to
be holding on to it. She stopped casting all save the first of
the pictures.
She was getting too old in any case for heroes. Any aspiring
IntPro recruit had to know that the galaxy was too complex
than that. At her first Academy interview, they asked her if she
thought the idolisation of other planets’ terrorists was a healthy
trend among the Chi!me young. She managed an acceptable
answer and took the warning for what it was. In her Aunt
Stelfia’s day, ViaVera had been the cause with which the young
and daring would flirt. It had fitted, then, with a form of IntPro
politics. The war on Terra changed that, as much as ViaVera
themselves. So you had change too. IntPro was a life-filling
commitment. If you were serious, you couldn’t prepare yourself
too soon.
She would still call her pictures up sometimes at first, in the
rare moments when she could count on being alone; run her
fingers along the contours of cheeks and chin as if by doing
so she could make them unlock some mystery. But she never
did. Half a cycle after Mara Karne died in Chaireddan, Stelfia
went into seclusion on faraway Herantive. Quila was accepted into the Academy and put the last picture away.
