Interzone 251 (10 page)

Borrn was waiting not far from the cable terminus, looking nervous and unhappy. When he spotted them, he visibly took a deep breath, then intercepted Fari as her teammates split off to head towards the Men’s chapel.

“Fari,” Borrn said. “After Worship, report to medical. The Rep wants a full checkup on you.”

She barely kept from exploding. “What does this Rep have against me?” she snarled.

“You’re a woman doing a man’s job, and doing it well,” Borrn said. “Figure it out. And when you do, keep it to yourself.” He turned and hurried after Mer and Huj without giving her a chance to form a response.

She walked to the Women’s chapel, bowed her veiled head to the minder as she entered, and knelt on the cold tile floor in front of the golden icon hanging at the front of the room bathed in warm light. There were a dozen women already there, lined up in a unified front, finding some small safety in numbers. She could not, would not ever belong to their group; to a one, they all hated her for escaping their common fate.

Beside her, one of the brothel women nudged her with an elbow, the faintest of contacts, deeply forbidden.

“Mer comes to me, now.” The words were barely breathed, but each one was like a knife. “Now that you don’t meet his needs.”

Fari gritted her teeth, her fists clenching against the floor. She could remember the feel of Mer’s arms around her the night before, the unspoken understanding that that was what they had now, since Leor, since… It had seemed enough. “Good for him,” she managed to hiss back. “And not my problem.”

Whatever response the woman had hoped for, that must not have been it, because she did not speak again. In the silence they were each left to contemplate their failures and resentments at the feet of the tortured figure mounted brightly upon the wall.

At last, the Caller came in and began the Women’s worship, exhorting them all to resist their sinful natures and find their way to God through hard work and submission, and if he saw the contradiction in giving that lecture to women held working in a brothel, it was lost in the fiery sermon. Fari kept her head low and let herself be carried away by the man’s words, exchanging unbearable hurt for familiar hatred instead.

When it was finally over, she slunk out the door ahead of everyone else, half-way back to the cable terminus before she remembered Borrn’s instructions. Anger and anxiety mixed uncomfortably in the empty pit of her stomach. In the years the previous Rep had been here, he only did medical checks for the annual report.

When she walked in the clinic door, the company doctor and the Rep were both there.
Oh, hell no
, she thought, barely managing not to say it out loud. “I have a right to privacy,” she said.

“You have no such thing,” the Rep said, “unless you have the sixty-five thousand, two hundred and eleven credits needed to redeem yourself from your contract.”

“I do have a right to have a woman present, to insure
propriety
,” she said, hoping she said the word right.

She must have, because the Rep shrugged. “Of course,” he said. He went to a side door and opened it, and the prostitute who had been beside her during Worship walked in.

“You will be witness during the proceedings, such that you can lawfully attest that no improper behavior occurred during this routine exam?” the Rep asked her.

“Yes, sir,” she said, bowing her head.

“Then you will find fifty credits towards your account, to compensate you for any inconvenience,” he said. “Thank you.”

She turned, walked back out of the clinic, and he shut the door again behind her. Fari stared. “She has to stay,” she said.

“She will swear that she did,” the Rep said. “Now get undressed, and get up on the table. I want the full physical workup.”

“I don’t—”

“If you speak again, there will be a thousand credit debit to your balance,” the Rep said. “I expect you to remain entirely silent unless and until I ask you a question. Is that understood?”

Tears burned at her eyes. “Yes, sir,” she said.

He smiled. “Then we have an understanding,” he said, and took a seat down at the foot of the examination table.

The doctor’s face was impassive and closed, no sympathy there at all. Numbly Fari took off her boots and then slipped out of her pants and tunic and stood there. The Rep pointed and shook his head, and with shaking fingers she took off her undergarments as well and, trying to compose herself, folded everything up and set them neatly on an empty chair, naked in the chilly room.

The doctor led her to the table and gave her a hand up, and she lay back and tried to shut her mind down as he listened to her heart, ran a scanner over her body, checked her eyes and ears, and began working his way down.

“As we discussed, sir, this employee had a miscarriage about four months ago, out on the rock,” the doctor said. “She was just at the start of the third trimester. Spent a tenday out on the rock – we all assumed we’d lost her – before she stumbled back in and got medical attention.”

“Any indication that the miscarriage wasn’t accidental?”

“No, sir.”

The Rep got up, came over, put one hand against her knee. “Does there appear to be lasting damage, such as would imperil future child-bearing?”

“None that I can see,” the doctor said.

“Good.” The word hung in the air.

The Rep turned, grabbed his chair, slid it up beside the table. “Fari, right?” he asked, and she could only nod an affirmative. “My understanding is that you had physical relations with Leor, which is what resulted in your pregnancy. Is that correct?”

“He beat and raped me,” she said.

The Rep shrugged. “Men have needs, and here you are working and living among them? I think we both know you wanted this sort of attention. This is not my concern,” he said. “However, your supervisor, Borrn, asked me to take a second look at your records, said that you were the most skilled of all his workers. I suspect he was trying to sway me to restore to you a man’s share of work credit. Despite that, Borrn seems to be a sensible man, so I checked your records. And what do you know? Your aptitude scores are top of the charts. The Representative delegated to this shit-hole back when you were a kid spotted you playing some sort of ball game in the tunnels and recommended you for aptitude testing, and you scored higher than anyone else. An affinity for machines and an excellent rock-instinct – he put you on the maintenance crew until you hit your majority, and from there you managed to get placed on a mining team. Both are unprecedented assignments, but from what I can tell, ones you entirely earned.”

He reached out, ran one finger lightly down her abdomen. The One has gifted you with very talented genes,” he said. “We intend to expand that resource. Leor, for all his bluster and crass attitude, is not entirely unskilled, and since you’ve already paired, it would mitigate the stain of sin on you to do so formally. We will credit you both for any living children produced.”

“No,” she said.

“I didn’t ask a question. One thousand credit demerit.”

“No,” she said again. “He nearly killed me.”

“Two thousand credits. He has been made to understand that the company considers you a valuable asset, and has agreed that he will not commit any further harm to you, except in matters of routine marital discipline, if you submit yourself fully to him as wife. So we’re pairing you.”

“No,” she said.

“Four thousand credits demerit,” he said, and stood up, scowling at her. “I think you’re now in negative numbers, yes? And you would still choose to keep this stain on yourself, rather than be wedded to Leor?”

“I would rather die,” she said.

“Well.” He stood there contemplating her for a long moment, as she lay on the bench, shivering. “Most men are nothing more than livestock,” he told her, his gaze wandering her body. “You breed them to try to enhance specific talents or desirable qualities – strength, endurance, compliance, not too bright – to make them better workers. Give them the minimal education they need to do their jobs and nothing more, put them to work, provide prostitutes for them to spend their frustration on, and it’s a stable, profitable system. Women aren’t even that much. Women are vessels, with no purpose other than to make the next generation of workers. I am no more concerned about your opinion on how we make use of your body than I would care what a jar thought about whatever I wished to fill it with. Nod if you understand that.”

She nodded.

“The only true joy for women is in submission. Now, remember who’s in charge, and how much you have to lose, and do not speak again.”

***

Borrn was waiting
for her as the doctor led her out of the clinic, and whatever he saw in her face, he said nothing as he helped her to the cable terminus, got her in a car, and sent her alone back towards Rock 17.

Mer and Huj were both at the far end, holding onto a terminus post and joking together about something she couldn’t quite hear. When the cable car door opened and they looked her way, whatever it was died on their lips, and they both pushed off and tumbled forward.

“What happened?” Mer asked, reaching her first.

She opened her mouth, the pressure of the words to come almost unbearable, and then she remembered the feel of the prostitute’s elbows in her side, the sharp cut of her words. Wordlessly, she propelled herself out of the cable car and past them. Huj reached out, caught her hand. “Fari,” he said. “You can trust us.”

“Can I?” she asked. “And you, Mer?” She met his eyes, not for long, but long enough for his face to redden and for him to turn away.

“I don’t…” Huj started to say, looking between the two of them, and Fari pulled her arm free and kicked off for the tunnel to her room.

Behind her, Huj made to follow, but Mer put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words just reaching her as she turned, half-blinded by tears, away from them, as if she could run away from everything.

Once she was behind a locked door, she turned on the shower, but the water wouldn’t turn warm.
Insufficient credit
, the cracked display informed her, so she took it cold. Once she’d dried off, she wrapped herself in the warm cocoon of her hammock and stared at the ceiling, shaking, for a very, very long time.

***

In the morning,
it was Huj who tapped at her door. “Fari?” he called, sounding unsure of himself. “I’ve brought you food. I… Mer and I talked for a long time last night. We… He guessed that one of the brothel women spoke to you? He’s sorry, he didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Then why isn’t
he
here apologizing?” she called out, still buried deep within her hammock. It was Green Team’s day off, and she didn’t intend to leave her room, or her bed, for anything or anyone.

“I guess Leor bought a sick day, because the Rep sent Mer over to sub for him,” Huj said.

Sick days were costly. Too costly – Huj had once worked with two broken ribs because he didn’t want to take the hit to his balance, and Leor didn’t have nearly the same cred. She felt her stomach drop another notch. “Huj,” she said. “Leor might be coming here. He’s going to remember yesterday.”

“Why would he come here?”

“The Rep wants to marry me to him, to remove my
sin
.”

There was a long pause. “Fari?”

“I said no,” she said, then with more bitterness than she imagined she could still have left in her, “the Rep
doesn’t like
‘no’.”

“You stay in there, okay? I’m going to go check the cable line for incoming traffic, just in case. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you again.”

“Huj…”

“Yes?”

“Check in when you’re done, okay?”

“Will do.”

She listened to Huj’s boots trudging away down the corridor, almost drowned out by the loud thumping of her heart in her ears. It took several minutes before she became aware of a vibration coming through the walls, growing in pitch and intensity.
Someone’s landed a rocket bike
, she realized; Rock 17 was dense enough to conduct sound from the exterior well down into the tunnels.

Pulling herself out of her hammock, she suited up as quickly as she could. There wasn’t anyone she could think of that would come here that way, unannounced, that wouldn’t be trouble. She had no intention of waiting helplessly in her bunk.

She activated her boots long enough to walk over to her door, set the intercom to two-way open, and then she opened the door a crack, slipped through it out into the hallway. Reaching in and around the door, she placed her motion device on the floor just behind it, then shut and locked the door. It wouldn’t go off unless someone forced the door open and hit it; if that happened, she’d know a lot more about the intentions of whoever was here. Done, she grabbed a wall bar in the corridor, deactivated her boots, and, pushing off lightly, floated silently down the corridor, alert for any sounds above the hum of the air handler systems.

The terminus was at the far end of Rock 17 from her rooms, with a veritable maze of old mining tunnels surrounding the habitat. She pulled her helmet on and sealed it, turned on her suit heater, and took one of the airlocks down into the old tunnels.

Her thinking had been to hunker down in the tunnels until she heard Huj, over the intercom, tell her everything was okay. Once in the tunnels, though, she found herself drifting towards the old safety retreat, a century abandoned, at the far end of the maze.

She could feel the creak of the old airlock as she opened the first door, slipped inside, and pressured up the lock. The inner door groaned and strained, but just as she was about to panic it began to grind its way open, spilling her out into the small quarters.

It was a small space: a medical bay, a comms office, and a toilet room, meant to be a retreat and central response point in case of a mine disaster. Lights flickered slowly alive as the long-disused systems responded to her presence. She watched her suit readout until the oxygen mix hit breathable levels, then popped off her helmet and stared around the retreat. She saw no signs of the tenday she’d spent here four months ago, which was good. She didn’t want anyone else stumbling on this place and retracing her steps.