The Water Thief (17 page)

I shook my head.

“Never tell the
same lie twice. Lies have to be fresh, constantly changing. You cheat on your
spouse, come up with a new excuse every time you’re home late. Don’t, and you
get eaten.

“I don’t mind
you lying to me, Charles, I expect it. But for God’s sake, change it up a bit.
You’re certainly finding something interesting, and it’s not me.”

“I’ve been
thinking about… Have you ever heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma?” I asked.

“Of course,
Nash’s theory. I’m not a complete dolt. Is that what’s bothering you?”

Whatever answer
I had expected, this wasn’t it.

“God, you’re
white as a sheet. Is everything okay?”

“I... well, I
guess I wanted to know what you think of it.”

“Oh, genius, of
course, every word of it. It’s basic economic theory; we’d be living in caves
without it.”

“The Prisoner’s
Dilemma?”

“Yes, Charles!
What’s wrong?”

“I guess...
well, I guess I don’t understand it. Could you please explain the theory to
me?”

“Of course. Nash
was a philosopher who discovered that people who work together do better than
those who don’t. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two thieves are caught and
threatened with jail time. If they work together against the police, they each
get less time than if they don’t.”

I gulped down
the last of my coffee and ordered another one.

“Charles, did
you get hit in the head? Are you sure you’re all right?”

“And you’re okay
with that?” I said. “What Nash said?”

“Of course.
Aren’t you?”

“But I thought Nash
was a mathematician, not a philosopher? Are we talking about the same guy?”

“Of course we
are. Those are just labels. Call him what you like. He
was
a mathematician. But Darwin
was a biologist, and he is the father of the social fabric of society. These
people changed how we look at the world. I think it’s wonderful that you’re
learning Nash, but look at you, you look like you’re about to jump out of your
seat.”

“But how do you
reconcile cooperation with modern society?”

“What do you
mean? It’s the foundation of modern corporatism; that’s what we do, we work
together.”

I became
lightheaded, my heart began to flutter, and my chest tightened. The next coffee
arrived, and I downed it even faster than the first.

“Jesus, you’ll
give yourself palpitations. That has a lot of caffeine. Listen to me, I want
you to slow down!”

I wiped my mouth
on my sleeve and looked around the room for relief.

“What’s wrong
with you? You’re acting very strange. You’re quite bothered by this. Is it the
idea of cooperation that troubles you? Look at you; you can barely sit in your
chair!”

“Nash wasn’t… He
didn’t talk about… he was talking about common interests!”

“Oh, of course
he wasn’t. There’s no such thing as common interests, Nash knew that.”

I fell back into
my chair. I could see him now, as I had seen Beatrice on the night she left. I
could see Linus with the clarity he himself possessed.

I had thought
that if I tried hard enough, since Linus was a bright guy, I could win him over
with the strength of my convictions. But we weren’t even speaking the same
language. We knew the sounds, the grammar and vocabulary, but the words all had
different meanings.

Linus already
knew all the arguments; he had processed them all. But instead of expanding his
own understanding or worldview, he simply integrated each new fact into his
previously held beliefs, supported by the impenetrably circular argument that
competition was superior because it had beaten cooperation in a competitive
match. Those were the rose-colored spectacles through which he saw the world,
the system of weights and measures he used to judge life and call it fair.

Kate never
denied the need for competition. But it wasn’t the entirety of all life. It was
a system among many—each of which had to be applied in a constantly evolving
and changing mix by people engaged in the system. That was the key—even the
best of republics degenerate when trusted to the leaders alone. That
complacency had killed the republic, a refusal to invest in the work of both
finding and then staying on top of that mix. That same blind faith would kill
the corporations just the same.

I was now,
irrevocably, a citizen.

Kate had said I
should keep a low profile. But I couldn’t straddle the line any longer. I was
Sarah Aisling, incapable of hiding my contempt for the system. I’d spent my
life doing nothing, just letting the system do whatever it wanted so long as it
didn’t trouble me any. I kept quiet and cloaked myself in the lie that silence
wasn’t an endorsement.

Linus saw
competition everywhere he looked, as the very fabric of nature. But he saw it
that way because he chose to see it that way, to live in that world.

I’d love to have
said that he’d die a lonely, miserable man because of the humanity he
sacrificed. But it wouldn’t have been true. Linus would die a very wealthy man,
an executive, maybe even CEO. He was already happy, fully enmeshed into the
system. He derived pleasure from the system, fed off the lies he told and the
people he outwitted. He would die happy because in the end he believed the most
important lie, the one he told himself: that he was the greatest colleague in
the world. There’s no bridge between you and a man who can invent an entire
reality.

“Are you okay?”

I smiled and
relaxed my shoulders. “Yeah, of course. You were right, too much coffee. I’m
sorry, I should stop taking advantage of these prices.”

“It’s tough,
they’re at record lows. You know, you are an odd duck, Charles,” Linus said,
sipping his coffee. “You need to play.”

“I’m not going
to play.” I said.

“What?”

“I’m not going
to play.”

“You’re just off
the map today. What has gotten into you? Is it your contract grade? Everyone
has fears and doubts. You’re just lazy, undisciplined. You need to learn to
control…”

Linus’ voice trailed
off. He was still holding the coffee nearly to his lips, eyes fixed out the
window, but the smile fell from his face.

I turned to
look, and then I heard a loud crack. The café became quiet. A man in a tan
trench coat had just passed the newsstand. He staggered towards us, a look of
surprise on his face. Blood began seeping through his coat, and a renewed
determination overcame him.

Another shot
rang out. His shoulder lurched forward as he was struck, and he tumbled to the
ground. Linus dropped his coffee and threw himself on top of me. As he did, the
man outside exploded, wiping away the newsstand in a single stroke. A deafening
wave of nails, ball bearings, and shattered glass washed over us.

I was back at
Allenhurst. The building lay on me. I couldn’t see or hear anything.
So this is it. This is how my life ends.
I wasn’t breathing. But if that were true, how could I smell the burnt flesh
and sulfur? I couldn’t feel my leg; I couldn’t feel anything, except water
trickling down through the rubble. That was how I knew I was alive—the cool
wetness of ruptured water pipes. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the math
was easy—the risk to workers wasn’t worth rescuing anybody. Just bring in the
bulldozers the next day and begin clearing the rubble.

I wasn’t at
Allenhurst. I remembered, then, that I was in a café, in the middle of Capital
City.

I shouldn’t have come back. There’s nothing
left for me at Ackerman. You were silly—silly to worry about anything. Reports
to your bosses, meetings with Linus, the games with your colleagues, they’re
all distractions. You should have married Kate, had children, watched them
learn and grow, explored the ruins of NullSec and stolen water. You should have
done things differently.

I realized that
I was being crushed, not by a building, but by the weight of the former rugby
champion. And in a flash, the weight was gone.

I sat up. The
air was filled with dust, but the café was brighter than I had ever seen it.
The posters were tattered, the blinds had been ripped from the windows, and the
floor was littered with metal and glass. A loud, shrill siren going off
somewhere in the distance. At first I thought it was an air raid warning, but
it was just my own ears.

I eyed what
remained of a booth—splintered and shredded, with the stuffing blasted out of
it. My hand was wet. I glanced down to see that it was resting in a growing
pool of blood. As the ringing subsided I could make out moaning and screaming,
though it was hard to tell where it was coming from. I thought I had better
check myself for injury, and half-heartedly patted myself down, though I could
have had a dozen broken bones and wouldn’t have noticed.

I stood up and
tried to brush the glass off. Blood had matted the smaller pieces to my
clothes, making them tough to wipe off. The air looked dusty, cotton bits
floating in it like dandelion seeds. Bodies were slumped on the tables and on
the floor. Some people were dead, others were clutching their wounds.

I looked around
for someone to help me. I wasn’t sure what anyone could do, or even if I needed
help. Maybe I could just walk out of there. I hadn’t tried walking yet. Then I
became vaguely aware of my name being shouted. I tried to concentrate. Yes, it
was my name. Someone was calling me.

Linus was on his
knees amidst the carnage, leaning over a badly injured woman. He tore his shirt
into strips and began bandaging her wounds. He grabbed a steak knife and cut
the pant leg off a dead colleague and fashioned a sling. He shouted my name
again. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but gathered that he wanted me to
come over. He pointed to her neck, where a severed artery was already rapidly
soaking through the bandages. I tentatively grabbed her throat.

“Press hard!” I
heard.

I pressed
harder.

“Hard, dammit!”

“I’ll choke her,”
I protested.

“If you don’t
choke her, she’ll bleed to death!”

Pressing down
hard, I felt her larynx under the flesh of her neck. She looked up at me,
gurgling as she struggled to breathe. Her eyes were alive, pleading, as if she
really believed that there was something more that I could do.

“You got it.
Reconstruction will be here in two minutes. Let go and she dies!” Linus jumped
up and moved on to another victim.

The woman was
older, maybe in her mid-fifties. She was dressed like a HighCon, but her skin
was old and wrinkled—the signs of a Delta or even an Epsilon. Even as her eyes
begged for life, she began clawing at me—trying to wrench me off her. I clasped
my hands even more tightly around her throat.

At Allenhurst I
had been on the other side. Now, at the café, I wanted to save this woman. As I
clasped my hands around her throat, I begged God to let her live. Let me save
this one life—not because it meant anything to Ackerman, but because it meant
so much to her.

By the time the
medics had arrived, she still had a pulse, but her eyes had closed. I sat on
the floor of the café for a few minutes, bodies slumped at the tables as the
reconstruction team tried to figure out how best to put the place back
together.

When I stood up
I felt a stabbing pain in my left calf. A large shard of glass was sticking out
of it. I ignored it, keeping my weight on the other leg as I limped out.

Linus sat on the
far side of the intersection, past the remains of the newsstand, facing the
back of the rotunda. I sat beside him. After a few minutes of silence Linus,
who hadn’t smoked in ten years, asked me for a cigarette.

“I quit.”

He nodded. “I
suppose that’s good. Hell of a time to do it, though. You know you should get
that leg looked at.”

“Yeah, I can’t pull
the glass out until I get to the clinic or else it’ll just bleed worse. I know
a good place that’ll take care of it.”

Linus reached
for a pack of cigarettes that lay in the debris of the shattered newsstand. He
put one in his mouth and lit it. “Don’t mess with some third-rate bull,” he
puffed. “You can write it off if you let Recon do it. They’ll want to control
the perception, so you should get a good deal.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Suit yourself.”

I could smell
the tobacco through the burnt gunpowder and detonite, and I suddenly needed a
smoke too.

“Kabul?” I
asked.

“Yep.”

It wasn’t right.
It wasn’t wrong. Kabul hadn’t committed a crime or done anything immoral. It
was simply a part of the negotiation, placing their thumb on the scale—forcing
Ackerman to pay so much to drive Kabul out that it might just be easier to let
them compete. A suicide bomber just cost less than doing nothing.

“How’d they get
him?”

“Snipers,” said
Linus. “There’s at least a dozen snipers covering the square around the clock.
With so many HighCon assets here, it’s a tempting target… Our boys did their
jobs, we’re all good.”

In the
background I could hear the perception team. Corbett had already arrived, and
was haggling over how to best shape the incident and who should get credit for
what. Already they had come down to two intriguing but mutually exclusive
possibilities—they could laud Ackerman security forces for stopping the bomber
before he reached his target, or argue that he could’ve been stopped sooner if
MidCons stopped bellyaching about unfair security tariffs.

“Maybe,” said
Collin’s young voice, “we should have the reconstruction team rebuild the café
exactly as it was, pretend like none of this happened.”

“What? And
ignore this opportunity! That’s criminal!” shouted Corbett, pulling out his
ledger and writing up an impromptu report.

I closed my
eyes. Corbett was right, he’d own this noob before the year was out—if the kid
didn’t end up in prison first.