War World X: Takeover (51 page)

People like her might teach in a university in taxpayer country, fiscal and intellectual aristocrats. These days, the best a Citizen-turned-scholar might hope for was a position as major domo, a kind of nanny for adults who wanted culture on the hoof. And did she do well to encourage them?

“Awright, bros and sisters. We’re gonna bring you a golden oldie from way-way-back-when. ’
Be true to your school—
’ For the People’s University of Los Angeles!”

Another orgasmic scream from the students lying on the green four floors below. Hell of a way to have to teach. Her mind fleeted longingly to the dark wood and stained glass of Harvard’s Memorial Hall.

Her colleagues would laugh at her if she gave up and went back in mid-semester.
“What did you think, Wyn?” That you could pretend you were doing settlement work? This is LA, not Phillips Brooks.”

No matter. It was her duty to teach them, and no Baker or Winthrop (her father had wanted two sons) shirked duty. “Think of it as Tri-V, in which two characters…”—she had wanted to say “disclose and reveal themselves” but she revised fast—”tell you how they feel.” Her voice sounded reedy even to herself, lacking all conviction against Lilith’s passionate intensity.

“Two voices,” Wyn had lectured. “The voice of Athens, harsh, authoritative.… ‘For we would have dominion over you without oppressing you, and preserve you to the profit of us both.…’ and the voice of Melos, a lesser state threatened with war unless it paid tribute…paid a bribe not to be attacked. ‘But how can it be profitable for us to serve?’”

Outside, an amplifier malfunctioned. The bleeding electronic scream forced a groan from the protestors. The students nearest the window flinched.

That did it. Never ceasing her practiced flow of speech, Wyn stepped down from her platform, stalked to the window—her soft-soled shoes and long, jogger’s stride eating up the distance—and reached for the catch, which hadn’t been closed (or cleaned) in years. In the grim surface, she confronted herself: tall, with what would have been a scholar’s stoop if she permitted. Cropped, pale hair and an old suit that firmly resisted the Angeleno craving for the new and violently colored.

Wyn exerted the strength that forty summers of tennis and sailing had built into her arms and forced it closed. Amps, Lillith, and protestors faded to the sea-roar of a conch shell held to the ear.

She thought of black ships, armored Athenian marines landing at Melos and ringing it. Hopeless, hopeless, as the Melians knew; hopeless to lecture at these students; but she read out the passage anyhow. “Men of Athens, our resolution is none other than what you have heard before; nor will we, in a small portion of time, overthrow that liberty in which our city hath remained for the space of seven hundred years since it was first founded.”—And more hopelessness in their counteroffer—”But this we offer: to be your friends, enemies to neither side.”

To her surprise, the students nodded. But then, they knew from gang warfare: to be neutral was to be dead.

“Think of it as if it were today,” Wyn said, her voice falling out of the trained, platform speaker’s cadence she had learned almost as soon as she was allowed to join her parents at the dinner table or their friends when they sat at night and argued. “Of the people out there, who is Athens, and who Melos?”

The Sovworld? The CoDominium with its marines and its expatriates and its weight of distrust? Or her own life in the rearguard of privileged Cambridge? Answer that yourself, she ordered herself, and came up with no answer. She wondered what answers her students might have, if they dared to speak, or bothered.

Heads raised from the desks, and the note takers laid down their styluses and recorders. Attention flashed to the windows, then back to Wyn.

“I made a mistake shutting the window,” Wyn told them. “You don’t study history by shutting out the world. Go and open it again. Look out there, listen—and tell me! Who is speaking with the voice of Melos now?”

She saw the way their eyes kindled with hope,
Am I doing this right? Does this all mean something that I can understand?

The boy nearest the window sprang up to obey her. Wyn felt a shiver as she always, did when her instincts told her she had caught a class’s attention. The shiver deepened. The boy cried out in Spanish and leapt back as the window shattered and the building shook.

“Are you all right?” Wyn had run for years, but she had never moved as fast as she did then, brushing glass from her student (hers! how dare anyone touch him?) and blotting the blood on his hands with her scarf despite his protests that she’d ruin it. She comforted him in the Castilian she’d learned traveling with her parents.

Smoke and screams poured in the window. Beyond the square, a black column of smoke rose: the gate-control shack. Again, the building shook. Bomb or an earthquake?

The door opened, slamming against the wall with such force that two people cried out. Apologizing to the boy she held, Wyn strode toward the university rent-a-cops. Real police muscle stood behind them.

“Taxpayer…” An imperious flare of her eyebrows drew a snicker from one student and made the rent-a-cop correct himself. “Professor…”

“Ms. Baker,” she identified herself crisply. In her world, everyone was a Taxpayer, and so many people were professors or had some such title that it was vulgar to use any of them.

“Begging your pardon, but we…”

“We’ve had a bombing. We’re evacuating the building and moving our own forces in,” said the policeman behind University Security, such as it was. He snapped up the dark visor of his helmet long enough that she knew it for a salute, then pushed it down over his eyes again. His riot shield and stick hung over his arms and belt.

“My students?”

“All right, any Taxpayers here…we’ll see you out of the building.”

“
All
my students, officer.”

It was hard to stare down a black visor. She managed. “Where you want ’em to go, lady?” asked the cop.

“To their homes, of course.”

A bark of laughter told her what the man thought of that.

“Then I will assume personal responsibility for them,” she announced. She turned to face the students. “We are being evacuated,” she told them. “I will see that you get home safely.”

She walked between the policemen and her students out the door and to the stairs. Down and down and down the spiral stairs of the emergency exit they went. The Taxpayer students, fit from their exercise classes in garish health clubs, pressed at her heels. The Citizens, less fit and less well fed, panted. In the half-light, their eyes started and bulged with fear.

But I said I would assume personal responsibility
, Wyn thought.

Troops—she could not think of them as security or police—waited at the vaulted ground floor and the great arched double doors, forming a cordon of flesh and armor. Flanked by security, the Taxpayer students were led quickly, in one direction.

“
Se ora
,” whispered the boy whose face she had wiped when glass had struck him, “You get the girls to safety. My friends and I…”

This was no time for a lecture about the backwardness of “women and children first.”

“We
all
will leave safely,” she told him. She edged up to the helmeted man.

“Do you have an escort for us?” she demanded.

“Will someone tell me why this overgrown pain in the ass thinks she’s a privileged character?” he muttered at the rent-a-cop. “All I see is another Prof. Taller than most; snottier than any. Give me one good reason why.…”

The man’s eyes popped again. “Guest faculty. Professor Winthrop Baker from Harvard.”

“Big…fuckin’…deal. Got an attitude out to there.”

The rent-a-cop hissed, drew him slightly to one side. As clearly as if she had a mike turned on them, Wyn overheard. “My God, do you know who her brother is?”

Her brother, Putnam, or as he liked to be called, “Put & Call” Baker, who managed her family’s money and a good chunk of her university’s.

The helmeted man shook his head. “Jeez. Just this once…just this once.”

“Fire! Look!”

Adrenaline spiked, leaving Wyn calm and observant. She threw out her arms in a warding gesture, as if she could shield her students. Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it, Santayana had said. You can tell and tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much. Well, she was a Harvard woman, and these were her students, and no one was going to tell her she wasn’t going to protect them.

Least of all a rent-a-cop charged with getting them all out safely.

Amps and instruments twanged as musicians raced to shut down their equipment and escape. A blue tide of security, bearing the university president in its wake, flowed out from patrol cruisers onto the green. Bullhorns blared and interrupted each other. The president’s eyes bulged. His cheeks puffed as he tried to make himself understood. Beads of sweat stood out on his bald head.

The building rocked from another blast. Across the green, flame shot from windows, licking the pink marble facade black. From the roof a man jumped. There was fire equipment nearby, but none in place to catch him. Wyn heard the crack as his bones broke. Behind her, a student dropped retching to his knees.

“Someone hold his head,” she ordered in an undertone. She had to watch. Police cruisers landed, the whirring of their airpads shrieking, then quieting as they touched down. More blue and armor marched onto the green, wielding nightsticks with a passionless precision that made her think of martial arts and weapons practice. Two techs stood a cruiser, hoses at the ready.

A civilian in bright clothing—”Target!” screamed some damn fool and hurled a bottle that a policeman deflected with a blow from his shield—climbed to the roof of the cruiser and began to read.

“We got to get out of here,” muttered one of Wyn’s students.

“May they leave?” she asked the policeman quickly.

“What about you?” one student, astonishingly enough, asked her.

“I’ll be fine. And we’ll have class next week. I’ll post a…

“Outtahere!” the policeman jerked his chin. The girls in their midst, they fled.

The students on the green screamed down the negotiator, tried to rush the cops, and found themselves pushed back, back toward electrified barriers set up on two sides of the square.

Wyn saw her students caught up and engulfed. “No!” She cried, “No! Help them!” A nightstick came down on the head of the one with whom she had spoken Spanish. He toppled, blood pouring from his nose.

Wyn grabbed the policeman’s arm. It was like grasping an industrial robot. “You promised they’d be safe! Go help them!”

“Go out in that, lady, and no one can help you. Sorry.” He wasn’t.

Four technicians drew hoses from a cruiser. As the police advanced, they shot foam, gray and slimy over their heads. It splattered on the feet of the advancing rioters. Where it fell, so did the protestors.

Again, clubs rose and fell. Wyn pressed forward. “Get her
out
of here,” ordered the cop.

“Come on lady. Move it, Professor.” Forming a wall between her and the battle on the square, they forced her out a side door. She was breathing in gasps, forcing herself not to weep, not to swear. She had seen blood on the faces of students. Her students.

And she was powerless to help.

Around back, she saw President Kerr-Truman, still sweaty, pale now as he realized that his East Coast trophy had damn near been a casualty in this stupid private war of his.

They bundled her into a van, carefully unmarked with the University’s crest. It sped down side streets, careful to avoid the press.

She waved away the offer to go straight to University Health or straight to LAX and back to Boston-Logan Airport and the refuge of her Cambridge home.

All she wanted was a bath, a drink, and a chance to do some thinking.

Even at dawn, blood and smoke still tainted the air. Jogging in place, Wyn Baker glanced about, surprised at her own wariness.

The gray college Gothic buildings of Los Angeles University’s central square looked as if some inept army had tried to fight a rearguard action and lost.

Splashes of paint stained the walls, the bars, and the shattered glass of the narrow windows. Lower down were splashes of slimy white foam and other things she preferred not to remember.

Hard to believe how silent the square was now, the quiet broken only by the high whine of bugs and birds on a May morning that would kindle into torrid noon. Charred earth and blackened grass marked where students and trespassers from the nearby Welfare Island had kindled yesterday’s bonfire.

She had come out prepared to fight. Around her neck hung her panic button. All she had to do was press it, and a signal went out, alerting a private security force that charged a no-doubt sizable fee for being at the beck and call of security-conscious Taxpayers like her brother, who had insisted she wear it. Her account statements revealed a hefty monthly charge for its use. Studying it, she saw other companies bought into her account: McDonnell-Nomura, Kennicott Metals, tax-free municipals from some government resettling organization or other (they all sounded alike). She supposed she had the prospectus for it somewhere. She was more interested, though, in the balance her statement showed: enough and more than enough in the month’s income statement to sustain her for a year. She could well afford to post bail for her students.

Statement, ID, and debit card lay in her beltpouch along with a map, the location of the police station carefully circled. Best go in now, she thought, post bail quietly and get her students out. She had some notion of bringing them back to her on-campus house for breakfast.

Better not, she told herself. She might as well tell her colleagues and her dean, accept the escort of however many university lawyers they would probably unleash, and, dressed in her most formal suit, drive ceremoniously to the station. Where, no doubt, things would take forever if they happened at all. She had suspicions that the lawyers would express “grave reservations” and other such language designed to stop her from doing what she thought was right until her brother could be called.