Today's Reading
I'd been given enough painkillers to be comfortable but not enough to feel falsely well and do something foolish. In fact, even lying still was difficult. I had my chip play music that seemed beautiful as I fell asleep. I dreamed of car warning sirens. I awoke in the middle of the night and immediately called up a report from the house surveillance system. It had observed nothing suspicious. Police had also installed monitors, so deeply secure that our system could observe no trace of them, of course. Neither could anyone else.
* * *
And you? You returned to your little apartment after work. Two men were waiting at your door. You had seen them before. They weren't police.
"Get your things and come with us." You didn't argue, although you wanted to flee. They watched you stuff some clothing and toiletries into a bag and said, "That's enough."
"My tools?"
"We have our own tools."
Your tools and those tools' memories might have been useful to you in too many ways.
So you left, suspecting where you were going. By morning, in a new location, you got a chance to sleep a bit, and you did—out of exhaustion and despair.
As for me, at breakfast, I sat down and, although Josepha reached to help me, I insisted on pouring my own tea, one-handed and a bit clumsy. I reached for a piece of rainbow bamboo fruit and admired its beauty, pink and translucent, glowing like a bit of sunrise. It smelled like cinnamon. As I did, Opal told me the victim was named Maryam Gubio, was twenty-five years old, and had worked in international shipping. The family had scheduled her funeral for tomorrow.
The name made me pause. I set down the fruit and discovered that knitting my brow was foolish—painful—even though the swelling had gone down a great deal around my eye. Where had I heard of her? I shuffled through my memories. Work? I called up my agenda. Yes. I double-checked. And stopped breathing.
"I had an appointment with her yesterday morning," I whispered, aware of what that might mean.
Everyone stopped, forks held over their plates of breakfast noodles.
"Why didn't the police know?"
"My appointments are confidential."
"What do you know about her?"
"Let me review her application. I like to reserve judgment on applicants until I meet them, then go over it with them. But I can check it now."
"We've offered to come and sing at her funeral," Ngozi said. "The family said they're glad to have us."
"I must go," I said. They gave me odd looks. "I was the last person to witness her alive." I looked at my fruit, no longer hungry. "This might point to a motive none of us suspected. Perhaps she was the target, and I was the accidental victim."
That day, I rested and was visited by three of my grown children, four grandchildren, and two former husbands. I joked that I should get injured more often so they would visit more, and I told them nothing about being in danger.
Between visits, I reviewed everyone I had placed. A few had been refugees. Our government, Nigeria, generally defended our freedom and safety, but some of our neighbors did not, and Europe had been in turmoil ever since a so-called Insurrection a century ago. Recently I'd helped a man from there escape from persecution. Why do tyrants hate poets so?
I'd helped a woman from farthest Siberia who did research into the connection chips in our minds. She was too brilliant at her work, and her country's network controllers urged her to find new work far away. A man I had just helped get clearance to Venus knew too much about specific smugglers.
Then there was Eleazar Darego, a man who had no interest in going off- world. He was a go-between for people who were in trouble and who were desperate for a way out, fleeing from smugglers, warlords, and other criminals. He'd helped the man I'd sent to Venus, and he'd helped Maryam apply.
According to Maryam's application, in addition to her work at the docks, she had been active in a movement to rescue rainbow bamboo, the fruit tree that had come from a planet called Pax centuries ago. Her movement proclaimed that the trees were sensitive to their surroundings and grew better in groups outdoors.
We had one growing in a pot in the living room. If we had cared for it better, it would have been more beautiful. There it stood in front of large windows, as if it were watching the rain outside.
This excerpt ends on page 10 of the hardcover edition.
Monday, March 31 we begin the book Abyssby by Ian Douglas.
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