The Water Thief (13 page)

I laughed.
“Don’t try to manage my perception. I’ve been doing it a lot longer than you
have. You’re a citizen.”

I heard an
uneasy rustling in the shadows, just out of view.

“Do you know
what could happen, you coming down here?”

“Well,” I said,
dabbing my nose, “I might get a fine, maybe lose a rank or two. Worst case I
could pay it off in about six months.”

“Christ, you
arrogant ass, I mean to us. They won’t be polite, they won’t fine us, and there
won’t be any charges or indictments. They’ll come in here with Tommy guns.
They’ll go floor to floor, spraying automatic gunfire everywhere.
Armor-piercing rounds, they’ll cut through ten people like tissue paper—through
walls, hitting people in other buildings. It won’t matter how many people here
are ‘guilty.’ They’ll mow down children and newborns. They’ll kill everyone;
they’ll call it an uprising. They’ll reclamate our bodies and get a nice bonus
out of it. That’s what they’ll do, Thatcher.”

My first
instinct was to protest, to defend Ackerman. I was going to tell her that they
were a good firm, that whatever they did was in everyone’s best interest. I had
said it so many times, managed so many perceptions, that I thought that way by
rote.

But it wasn’t
true.

Like a person,
the corporation only did what was in its own interest, only without the burden
of consequences or conscience. Somehow I had gone my entire life knowing
corporations were ruthless, soulless paper constructs. I had said as much a
thousand times. But no matter how often I had said it, somehow I never actually
recognized it.

I had found a
den of citizens. But I didn’t care, either as an economic opportunity or for
the novelty of it. I didn’t care who Jazelle was.

“I just want to
see Kate. Please, just once.”

“You could be an
agent, Thatcher. You can’t prove you’re not, and we can’t take the risk.”

“No,” I said. “I
can’t prove it. But I’ve already seen you, this place. It’s not as if I don’t
know who she is. Let me talk to her. I’m talking to you right now. What’s the
difference? I just….”

Jazelle
stiffened. I shouldn’t have tried to sneak in. I should have just waited, or
just rented Jazelle myself. My own impatience was going to get me killed.

“You know,” I
said, “it’s just as possible you’re setting
me
up. I’ve taken a risk coming here too. I just want to talk to her.”

For all she knew
I was a lovesick client. Heck, for all I knew she was right.

“Corporatism
breads paranoia,” I said.

She took in a
deep breath and then nodded.

“All right.
You’ll be blindfolded. We’ll let her make the call.”

They threw me
into the trunk of a car, and drove me around. I can’t imagine a trunk being
comfortable even under the best of circumstances, but bruised and bloodied,
joints stiffening up, it was dreadful.

Believing in government
wasn’t technically a crime. Neither was failing to make a profit. Heck, neither
was being a citizen. You can’t commit a crime without a contract. But it wasn’t
until I had lain there, waiting for them to let me out, that I knew they had
every right to be worried.

They drove for
at least a half hour before I was dragged from the trunk, up a stoop, down a
hallway and into an apartment. They sat me down and, after hearing a few
whispers, everyone appeared to leave.

“Hello?”

A hand grabbed
my hood and pulled it off. It was Kate.

My lips were
swollen, joints and muscles all stiff, and I had bruises and welts all over my
body. Still I couldn’t help but smile with, what I must imagine, was the
goofiest grin anybody has ever seen.

“Oh, Charlie, my
god.”

“Hi Kate.”

“What did they
do to you?”

“Nothing,” I
said, with the smile of a newborn who first recognizes his parents.

“What on Earth
were you thinking? Why did you want to see me so badly?”

“Well, like I
told Jazelle, I didn’t really think it was going to be this hard. And I thought
colleagues were paranoid.”

“It’s
corporations we’re afraid of. Tell me, is there a single colleague you don’t
fear?”

The apartment
was not bad for LowCon. The walls were painted cinderblocks. The table also
rested on cinderblocks. The windows were cracked, but they weren’t missing any
panes. Pipes ran down the length of the walls, all patched and expertly wrapped
in plumbing tape. She even had a television, though it heavily favored the
green range of the spectrum. The place had a quiet dignity to it.

She handed me
two painkillers and a cup. I tasted the water; it was fresh.

She has a solar still.

“I’m sorry.
They’re really worried. I’m not licensed. You could be the police, or even
Retention.”

“What would
Retention want with you? You’re not even Ackerman.”

“I was filling
in for a friend who was arrested a week ago for stealing water. It’s not a huge
deal, but it was Ackerman’s water. Now she’s gone, and nobody knows where she
is or why. If Retention took her, they could make her say anything. It won’t
matter what the truth is. They’ll perceive whatever gives them the most profit
in perceiving. If they’re looking for more thieves—or worse—they’ll start by
sending scouts. Someone like…”

“Was she a good
friend?”

Kate nodded.
“She was my best friend.”

My chest
tightened. It had been an incredibly bad idea to come.

“I just wanted
to talk to you,” I said. “You know me, I’m not a spy. I was just so happy to
have met you.”

“I met you after
the arrest. You could be anybody.”

“I’m a Delta from
Perception.”

“Maybe. It’s
sweet that you wanted to see me, Charlie, but what are you doing here?”

I wished I could
tell her that I had thought that far ahead.

“I guess I just
wanted to know more about government.”

“Government? Couldn’t
you have just gone to the Galt? They have everything you could want to know
about it. Coming out here, at this hour, it’s insane.”

“You’re right.
I’m afraid of every colleague I know, everybody. Except for you. You’re
different. I guess I wanted more of that,” I said, looking at my shoes.
“There’s nothing at the Galt. You know it, you’ve lived it.”

“I’m not a real
citizen, Charlie. I’ve never actually
lived
in a country or republic. Honestly, what do you need to know so badly?”

I didn’t know. I
had lied to her—even with the baseball bats and the beating, I’d still have
come. And I had no idea why.

“I guess I
wanted to know if they were… were they happy?”

“Oh my god,” she
said. She slumped into a chair. “Oh my god, Charlie.”

“Were they
happy?”

“Do you know
what could happen to you if you get caught?”

“I don’t care.
Just tell me, were they happy?”

“I don’t know,
Charlie. I think they were, but people can adapt to just about anything. Some
people are happy in corps and others sad under governments. No matter how good
things are, people will find things to complain about; they always do.”

“But you must
know if they were happy.”

She sighed.
“Compared to people now, yeah, I think they were happy. Republics caused
problems, too, but for the most part they were an impartial third party that
protected people. They had laws—rules nobody could break no matter how much
money you had, and a system to enforce those laws. And people did cheat the
system, but enough power was left to the public that you couldn’t leverage the
whole thing. At least that was the theory of it all.”

“I have a
mentor, his name is Linus. He says people broke laws all the time, hardly ever
got caught or brought to justice.”

“Sometimes it
happened. Like I said, no system is perfect. If that’s what you’re looking for,
good luck, I’ve never seen anything that makes me think a perfect system
exists.”

“How can you
know that they were happier?”

“Well, I’m not
sure how to define happiness. But if I had to, I’d say it’s the variety of
things you can do, and the amount of time you have to do them. A prisoner may
have all the time in the world, but nothing to do with it. A colleague might be
able to afford almost anything, but spend all his time acquiring and defending
his wealth.”

“But competition
is natural. It’s a universal constant: stars compete for hydrogen, planets for
carbon, and solar systems for space. All resources are limited. Isn’t
competition the fairest way to distribute it?”

Kate smiled. She
stood and walked over to the stove. “When was the last time you ate something?”

I shrugged. She
took out a small petroleum burner and lit it. “We haven’t had gas in this
building for about twenty years. It’s slow, but this works.”

“You cook food?”

She nodded.

“Isn’t it safer
to…?” I stopped myself. She couldn’t afford anything processed or sterilized. I
wondered if they killed their own food out here. I thought about the terrier.

“My father
taught me how to cook. It’s good to know how to, and it really is a lot of fun.
Takes a lot of skill to do it right.”

I had never
thought of cooking as a matter of skill. It was, as far as I had heard, little
more than putting slabs of meat onto a hot surface.

“Cook something
too long,” she went on, “and it becomes tough and hard to eat—the flavor and
nutrients are all gone. But not enough and you can poison someone. And there’s
a lot you can do to make something taste really good. I grow onions out back.
An hour on low heat with a little lard, and they caramelize—they’ll make
anything taste great. Timing is important too. If you throw something on too
early or too late, you’ll ruin the whole thing.”

She pulled out
an iron skillet and put a dab of tallow onto it.

“Love, true
love,” she said, “is cooking on a cast iron skillet.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. They’re hard
as hell to clean, and they’re heavy, so nobody uses them. But to this day
nobody’s invented a better cooking surface. They hold heat perfectly;
distribute it evenly. My father always said that the number one ingredient in
food is love. I thought he was just being cute, but it’s true. Love is a cast
iron skillet.”

I watched the
tallow start to soften.

“They’re good,
too, for whacking Ackerman agents that come through the door.”

I went to the
window. I hardly needed to pull back the curtains—they were so thin I could see
through them. The alleyway behind her house was barely wide enough for two
people to walk shoulder to shoulder, and trash was piled so high that the bins
were buried under mountains of it.

“So where are
your parents?”

“My mother,” she
said, dicing up a few potatoes, “died of cancer. Dad raised us, my sister and
me.”

“So you learned
about the government from him?

Kate didn’t say
anything, and for a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me.

“He was a
library clerk,” she continued. “He’d bring us books when he could. The rare
stuff, the republic stuff. These were books from actual countries, philosophers
and writers talking about economics and government. He used to read to us by
candle-light every night.”

Her voice
trailed off. She was tossing a thin meat of dubious origin onto the skillet,
trying to hide the fact that she was crying.

“You loved him,
didn’t you?”

She shook her
head. “No, I didn’t.”

She tossed the
mixture, then put it back onto the flames.

“I wish to God I
did. But I hated him. I thought he was weak. He’d read those books, and all I
could think was that he was using them to excuse his own failings, to justify
why he was nothing more than a clerk. He worked ninety-hour weeks, and I
thought he was lazy. Can you imagine that? Every argument he read about the
superiority of a republic made me hate him more. Brooke, my older sister, ate
it up. We’d fight all the time; I called her a communist, looter, plunderer,
lazy, disloyal… I hated her even more.”

“What happened
to them?”

“The corp got
her. She hadn’t done anything, but they said she violated the ‘interests’
clause of her contract. Who gets to decide that? Christ, the term is so
ambiguous, come to work ten minutes late and technically you’re violating it.

“Anyway, there
was so much money against her that the judge went the company’s way. She was
tried and convicted. Dad sold everything we had to get her out, but it wasn’t
enough. They took it all anyway and then tried him on bribery charges. Brooke
was reclamated. And Dad,” she said, “he was sold to a medical company for his
organs.”

I grimaced at
the tallow in the pan.

“Oh, God no,”
she said. “We don’t buy lard or soap on the open market. A friend of mine makes
it from deer and squirrel suet.”

Still, I didn’t
think I could eat it. I looked back out into the mud-brick alleyway.

“Did you ever
find out who turned your sister in?” I asked. She didn’t hear me.

“Anyway, that
was it. I was done. I left and came here. I made a life as best I could. I hunt
deer and cook, and that gets me by. I have some of my dad’s old books; my
friends and I share and talk about the republic. We go into NullSec every now
and then, to hunt or to try to find old libraries or records.”

“You go into
null security areas?”

She nodded. “A
few times a year.”

“Aren’t they a
wasteland? With cannibals and stuff?”

“Yep. There are
roaming tribes of people; they’ll eat anything they can—even you. There’s about
a billion bodies out there too, if you believe the history books. Most of the
city is buried under thirty feet or so of ice.”

“The city? You
mean New York?”