The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (10 page)

Despondent and inconsolable, Onaka had made arrangements to return home for the funeral services. Days and weeks passed after she left, and then months. At first her letters had contained financial and other excuses for not coming back to the Green States. Then, gradually, her correspondence had stopped entirely, and he'd lost touch with her. He hoped she was happy, that she'd found a way to continue her life, and even that she'd found someone to love. But losing her had been a crushing blow to Joss, and he'd been a long time recovering. He wasn't sure if he ever would, not entirely. She'd been the love of his life.…

In the back of his mind, Joss heard one of the dinner guests talking, and Kupi's voice, describing an aspect of her daily work schedule, and the important environmental restoration work she and her fellow crew members were doing.

Kupi said something to Joss, and he nodded, coming out of his somber, drifting thoughts. The diners had grown quiet, and were looking at him.

“I am indeed fortunate to manage my particular J-Mac team,” he said to his table companions. “As a boy, before this marvelous technology was known, I had no idea I would ever hold such an important position.” He dipped his head in reverence to Rahma Popal. “It is my goal to never disappoint my Chairman or my country.”

“Don't worry about that,” said one of the wealthy men at the table, “just don't disappoint Kupi in bed.”

Joss found the comment irritating, but Kupi raised a wineglass beside him and said, “That can never happen. Trust me, it can't.”

“That is not what we are here to discuss,” Joss said, scowling for a moment. “And, though Kupi's descriptions of our daily duties are eloquent, she has often told me that nothing can take the place of actually being there.” He looked at the maître d', asked, “Our Janus Machine is ready?”

“It is, sir.”

Joss and Kupi led the way outside and down a lamppost-illuminated walkway that led to the bank of the seaway. A barge was tied there in the dark water, with their own Janus Machine No. 129 secured to its deck. The two of them stepped aboard and donned their owl-design helmets, then put on their goggles and climbed up to the wide turret platform. Other members of the crew were already at their stations.

“We're like circus performers for these progressive dandies,” she said to Joss, out of their earshot. “But instead of animals doing the tricks, it's us.”

Joss nodded. Her choice of words was often harsh, but he had to agree with her this time.

Almost everyone from dinner had followed them down, even some of the serving staff and the lifelike virtual image of Chairman Rahma Popal. Members of the J-Mac crew moved a clearplex barrier into place to protect the observers, and specialists cleared raccoons, deer, and other animals from the grounds with sonic devices.

A short distance downshore, the target had been marked with orange paint—a series of old cabins on the riverbank where the staff of the club used to live. Kupi fired up the Splitter, causing the black barrel to glow along with a low, mounting roar—and then she cut loose with waves of black energy particles, splitting and melting the structures into gray, gummy masses on the shore. Moments later, Joss swung the platform around and let fly with his greenforming Seed Cannon, spewing cartridges into the air and detonating them with sparkles of green in the night, scattering seeds that would soon begin growing a native ground cover.

Behind the observation barrier, the dignitaries clapped and cheered.

As Joss finished, he joined Kupi on the turret platform and they waved to everyone, while the applause continued. “These are a bunch of limousine liberals,” she said to him, “unscrupulous people who have used the Green Revolution to line their pockets with cash. Rahma only accepts the new elite grudgingly for the sake of green manufacturing and services, and I know he's tried to rein in the excesses. But he's changed since the revolution, lost some of the idealism I remember in him.”

“That's understandable,” Joss said. “He's getting old.”

“Maybe we should split and greenform this whole stinking group,” Kupi said, “to remove bad elements from the human gene pool. Our Chairman is always talking about creating a more perfect, unselfish human being. Well, we can give him a boost in the right direction, and greenform the pile of slime that's left over.”

“That would
not
be a good idea,” Joss said.

The auburn-haired woman looked at him, her eyes feral and sensual, in a way that he recognized. “All right,” she said, “I have a better idea anyway.”

 

9

Eco-crimes are worse than any others, bar none. Compare them with the rape of a person, for example, or murder—or any number of other traditional crimes. But all of them pale in comparison with the rape and murder of a planet—and that is what eco-crimes are, causing the destruction of a beautiful, sacred thing. This is the worst sort of crime, ravishing the Earth Mother who gave birth to human life. What can possibly be more contemptible, and what penalty must mankind pay for this?

—Commentaries, Charter of the Green States of America, March 17, 2043

DYLAN BANE STOOD
at the center of the command bridge of the great machine, watching the bright purple webwork of light around the hull as it bored through the mantle of the earth at more than seven hundred kilometers per hour, passing through all types of rock and soil as if they were not obstacles at all, and then closing the tunnels behind. He heard the faint, high-pitched keening of the process.

Around him, silver-uniformed officers and crew members worked the controls of the subterranean craft, using powerful ground-penetrating radar to guide the way—making course corrections based on this, while taking into account the ground-mapping data they had accumulated from prior journeys. This voleer machine could pass through earth, rock, underground springs, and even magma, though the pilots made efforts to avoid the latter because high ambient temperatures expended more fuel in the cooling process.

Bane had eighteen of these great machines now, all of them a clever adaptation of the secret splitting and greenforming technologies that the SciOs guarded so closely, and upon which they based their power structure. Like a huge underground submarine with no conning tower, the voleer was a tube as long as ten soccer fields and as high as a three-story building. From his vantage on the forward slope of the hull, he not only had a view outward, but inward as well, through clearplex decking to the huge, mostly empty cargo hold.

He smiled to himself, certain that he would eventually bring the loathsome SciOs crashing down, along with Chairman Rahma Popal, using secret machines like this one to transport troops and war equipment. But he had to implement his guerrilla plan precisely, based on exquisite planning. There was no room for mistakes, such as those made by others in the attacks on Bostoner and Quebec. Those were small-time military assaults, no more than bee stings on the corpus of the Green government that were soon healed. When Bane finally made his move, it would be much, much bigger.

As soon as an additional twenty-seven voleers were completed and fully tested, he would have forty-five great machines back at his base camp in central Mexico, filled with armaments and fighters—enough to attack and retreat in numerous places, disappearing into the ground at will. It would drive enemy commanders crazy trying to figure out a way to retaliate, and before they could respond, all of their forces would crumble into dust, along with the vile hippie government.

And none of them would understand how it had happened. Though he had been raised in a well-to-do Corporate family, in his youth he had refused to follow in his father's footsteps with Bane Enterprises, a company that manufactured plastic bottles. He'd loved his parents, but had seen the environmental damage caused by plastic, and didn't want to earn money from that source. As a result, he'd pursued his own interests and developed his own talents, going to work for a laboratory in California and earning his way as a research scientist.

For years Dylan Bane had gone to work every day, staying with the laboratory when it was taken over by the post-revolution SciOs, and ultimately becoming one of their most trusted researchers. This résumé had served him well later when his family came under attack for their activities. He alone had survived among them.

Now he glanced over at Marissa Chase as the young officer approached him. “Within three hundred kilometers of the Buenos Aires Reservation for Humans,” she reported, with a crisp salute. “Making our final course correction to Delta Fifty-seven.”

Bane grunted, looked away. He had no time for his customary thoughts about the attractive woman. Moments later, the ship came to a grinding stop inside a large underground cavern that was quite deep and high, considerably larger than the voleer.

As hatches slid open he heard a buzzing over the rumble of the idling voleer engines, and saw the inside of the Delta 57 cavern, an expanse that was full of shipping containers that hovered in the air like giant bricks, each of them remote-controlled and self-propelled. In the midst of these containers flew tiny, black, bumblebee-shaped guideships, each with a human operator inside, for the purpose of air-traffic control and loading efficiency in the confined airspace.

Looking at the black chrono embedded in the skin of his wrist—a mechanism that had the appearance of a tattoo with the numerals in motion—Dylan Bane set the timer on the multifunction device for eighteen minutes, which sent a transmission throughout the ship and cavern, synchronizing the loading operations. He needed to get loaded and be on his way quickly. This was not just a practice maneuver, though that was part of the reason for the trip to the Argentine Territory of the Green States of America. He had another purpose in mind as well, one of equal importance. His operatives in this region had been accumulating essential materials, soldiers, and military equipment.

On missions such as this one over the past several months, using a number of voleer tunneling machines, he'd been making clandestine trips to obtain assets that he needed for the war effort—taking military personnel and matériel back to Michoacán. His far-flung martial operations were completely underground and electronically veiled, in multiple locations linked by vanishing tunnels, bases that could be reached quickly by machines that regenerated rock and earth behind them, leaving no apparent tunnels in their wake.

Around the sides of the immense vessel and on top of it, cargo hatches slid open and containers sped aboard, stacking and interlocking themselves in the holds, sometimes adjusted by the pilots of the tiny guideships. A number of the self-propelled containers held soldiers who had passed through Bane's stringent security-screening procedures and selective memory wipes—and these troops were loaded into a separate cargo hold, where they could leave the boxes and move into more comfortable quarters. But first, they had to be loaded aboard quickly and efficiently.

It had not been difficult to obtain conscripts from disaffected people who had been forced into adverse conditions by the radical GSA government and its severe environmental and human-relocation policies. The trick was to get the right people under the right circumstances, and put them to the best possible use. Though Bane had his own harsh methods, at least he valued
people
and what they could contribute—unlike the fascist Chairman and his animal-loving, tree-hugging legions.

He watched the minutes and seconds pass, then saw yellow lights flash in the cavern, indicating that they had only two minutes for all outside personnel and equipment to get clear of the vessel before it relaunched. A mad scramble of guideships and unloaded containers ensued—bumping into one another as they tried to pull back to the perimeter of the cavern, not nearly as smoothly as Bane had seen in other secret caverns he had in the Americas.

At precisely the eighteen-minute mark, the immense voleer closed all exterior hatches and surged ahead, leaving the cavern behind and intact, except for those guideship and container occupants who didn't get clear in time.

For those who survived, he would order more drills.

 

10

For reasons of patriotism, children are encouraged to report their parents, relatives, and friends for violations of the law. Throughout history certain governments have understood this, and so shall we, when it comes to dealing with criminals. Children, hear me! The state is your family, and I am your true father.

—Chairman Rahma Popal, remarks to the First Assembly of the GSA on Earth Day 2043

AS JOSS CROSSED
the continent by train from the Quebec Territory, he scanned a holo-net card from his Uncle Trig asking him how he was doing, and when they might get together—a message that had been delivered to him by an automated system that lowered it from the ceiling. Uncle Trig Stuart lived alone on the Salt Lake City Reservation, his wife, Gertie, having died the year before. Joss spoke in a low tone to the card that hovered in front of him, watched his own words appear in the reply section. Just a few comments about where he'd been and how he didn't expect to be in Salt Lake City for several more months. He didn't say so, but it could be even longer than that; his important job was keeping him very busy, and he didn't want to interrupt his career by asking for too much time off.

After completing the message, he watched it seem to melt into the ceiling, for transmission back to his uncle. It was after dinner, and daylight was waning, fading like a ghost into the approaching darkness.

He tuned out the conversations around him, watched the scenery whir by outside. Joss couldn't recall ever having seen so many pristine mountains, lakes, wetlands, and evergreen trees as there were on this route. Truly, it was stimulating for him, and gave him some hope for the future of what the Chairman called “the wounded planet.”