The Informant
By Raven Green
The Triangulum Galaxy…
Sometime in the 427th century…
It’s different now. But when I was just a kid, we
weren’t all workers. There were different kinds of people, back then. There
still are, but we’re all supposed to be equal now. That wasn’t always so. We
used to take it is a given that equality could not exist. That to force it was
to rob our freedom. It was confusing. Especially for me. I knew I wasn’t like
other people.
It’s hard to explain. Even for me, and I remember
it. What I remember was their laughter. Not that you always heard it. They were
too polite to laugh in public. But there was a dry, sardonic tone in their voices
when they appealed to us like we were brothers, before reminding us that rent
was due, and if we didn’t have it for them, we’d be without a roof and walls
and beds.
There aren’t any more of them. They either
defected, to our side, or they were killed when they proved there was no such
thing as neutral. It was war, and war was different.
War was easier. There were rules, and if you didn’t
follow the rules, you were dead, or useless, and they’d send you home. I was
good at staying alive and being useful.
It’s just hard to get used to things changing. But
if you keep your mind open, sometimes, you find help where you don’t expect it.
The constable who came to the building to meet with
me last week was not happy to get another call from me about the same matter.
“I thought we talked about this,” he said, in
thin-lipped grimness, while seated at the wooden table I’d made for my kitchen,
affably drinking the tea I had steeped and mixed with thick, warm cream.
“Oh, but, Constable… you said it wouldn’t be an
issue anymore,” I reminded him. He did
say that last time he was here.
“No, that’s not what I said,” said the Constable.
“I said, ‘it’s not an issue.’”
“I thought that meant you’d do something about it,”
I said.
“In fact, it meant the opposite,” the Constable said.
But I did not understand. I looked at him with my mouth open in shock.
“They are violating our laws,” I said. “You’re
police. You’re supposed to stop them.”
“Do you drink, Leonid?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. The last time I had alcohol,
I was just a young kid. New meat, a green soldier, too fresh, trying to fit in
with the hardened brothers and sisters in my unit. This was different. This was
supposed to be a community. I didn’t like the drink then, when I took it to be
like my comrades, and now that I lived alone, I had no reason to try it again.
I didn’t understand why my neighbors did it. It interfered with love, and work-
not that I knew much about love. But I knew it wasn’t healthy. It didn’t show
respect for the body, and if you weren’t respecting yourself, that usually
meant you weren’t respecting other people. They taught us that in the Army of Our
Collective Liberation. Officially, the New Order didn’t approve of alcohol.
Officially, they didn’t want to be lifestyle police, either. They’d seen how
other planets tried it- the repression, the reactionary tendencies seeping in
to where they couldn’t be managed- and the same old violence, again and again.
So, they limited the alcohol content of liquor to under four percent. But
people wanted more than that, which was why there was so much bootlegging. I
knew they wanted it stronger, that was why they made it themselves, but I
didn’t understand why they wanted to be drunk all the time. I never wanted to
be drunk again.
The Constable caught me in silent thought. He had
not said a word as I processed all this, merely leaned back and sipped more
tea, then pressed his lips together in a warm but toothless smile. I’d like to
think that my father would have smiled at me that way, if he had lived, but the
town where I was born no longer existed. When the New Order made the
landholders cede us the property, they threatened them, said they’d hurt them
if anything happened to the workers on the land. But then, satisfied with their
intimidation, they left, and the former owners decided, if the land couldn’t be
theirs, then it would belong to no one. My father had sent me for milk that
morning. I was pedaling the bike that pulled the jug cart over the Little Creek
Bridge when I saw the flames rising from the black, charred remains of our
cottage. My father was a bootlegger, in those days, when only the richest had
money for liquor. He kept a still in the house. It must have exploded with the
firebombs. I could smell the burn of ethanol in the air as I rode, horrified,
to the ruins of my childhood home. I remembered… almost. I shut it out. I
returned to the moment, to the table, and the Constable, and his tea.
“Please don’t leave yet,” I said. “Stay with me?”
The Constable chuckled warmly, and he reached his
hand across the table. He laid his palm on mine and pressed down, giving me
that sense of tension and pressure he knew I needed sometimes.
“My husband would worry about me,” he said. “He
hates to sleep alone, too. I’m asking that you not call the constabulary again
unless someone is getting hurt, or abandoned, or mistreated. Some things, you
don’t need police for them. You work it out as a community, and if no one gets
hurt, it’s okay. It’s really
okay.”
“They’re hurting themselves,” I said.
“These people have jobs. They have families. If
their lives were falling apart from drink, I’d know. I’d be getting calls from
this building, not just from you. Do you understand me, Leonid? They’re making
a choice and it’s theirs. It’s not yours. You don’t get to decide how they
cope.”
“Things aren’t that bad,” I said.
“They’re getting better,” he agreed. “I believe
they’ll keep getting better. It’s good to see young people having pride again.
We didn’t have that when I was your age.”
I was twenty. He must have been forty-five, or
more. But we’d both been discharged from the Army of Our Collective Liberation
only a little more than a year ago. He had been a policeman before. He went
back to the constabulary after discharge. I became an assistant clerk at the Hall
of Records. I was good at keeping track of facts. For a year, I’d had what they
called “normal life.” An apartment. A job. The same maglev ride every day to
the beautiful city center, with its spires rising like spears of glass, that caught
the glints of two red suns looming overhead. I liked going to the city center.
It reminded me of the virtual trance technique they used to put us through in
the Army, where we could walk in Paradise, a respite from the sound of guns.
Paradise looked like this: smooth, sharp crystal towers of a promised future
rising over the barren plains and murky swamps of the past.
I still remembered, with pride, the transmission we
heard around the world, when our allies’ warships finally arrived in the sky:
“The people of this planet have
spoken. We have answered their call. They tried democracy your way. It failed.
Now you will try democracy their way. And history will be your judge. You have
forty-eight hours to begin an adequate program of wealth redistribution and
agro-industrial collectivizing, or we will bombard every military facility we
can identify on our scanners with high-speed railgun projectiles. And then, we
will target your financial institutions. There is your choice. We’ll be back,
either way. We’re watching.”
The world had changed that day. Just a little, but
it was enough. A crack of the door, letting in the light.
But the Constable said, “It doesn’t change all at
once, you know. Old habits die hard. You can’t expect people to divorce their
past with a clean slate overnight.” He shrugged. “It was a complicated and
messy relationship. So they drink, because they’re not as certain as you and
me, Leonid. They didn’t go to war. They didn’t fight for the revolution. They
had to stay behind, run the factories and farms while young people like you
were dying. So they hate themselves, you see? They think they didn’t do enough.
We should try to understand their faults instead of punishing them. After all,
they’re not the problem, not really. The bootlegging is just the symptom of a
disease. I went to Food Distro yesterday, Leonid, and there was meat in the butcher’s window again. Real meat. The good times are coming back, but this time,
they’re for everyone. Not just the people on top. You have to be patient. And
try to make friends. Be part of this. Be a good
neighbor. And if you need to talk,
you know where to call me, but I don’t want to hear about what’s going on in
the apartment next door, or above you, or down the hall. I do want to know what’s going on with you.”
He finished the tea and slid the ceramic vessel my
way.
“Thank you,” he said. “For being my host tonight,
comrade.”
“Thank you for… just thank you,” I said, still not
understanding much of what he’d said. I would have to think long and hard about
how it all applied. But I knew I wasn’t abandoned. He would be there for me if
I needed him.
He was more than twice my age, but we had a bond,
ever since we’d stepped off different helicopters, same day, same landing pad.
Same hometown, at least, the closest town to the burned homestead where I was
from. The Uleks, the former landowners, had been driven out while I was a
continent away. I never went back there anymore. It wasn’t my home now. There
was nothing left there to cherish or remember. Nothing personal. Just the
grey-orange sky and the green-brown fields rolling off into a horizon dotted by
tiny, distant bushy sticks. I didn’t want the memories, if they were still
there. It was best to stay away, to focus on the future, not on what was taken,
and could never be regained. In the five years I fought, I never thought of
home. I convinced myself it no longer existed, and that I was fighting for
something else- for a piece of the enemy, like a smear of blood, or a torn and
muddied piece of uniform. Some token to prove the struggle was real, that it
wasn’t all just a horrible dream of marching and falling to the ground, and
listening, with my eyes closed, while my comrades died around me.
He was right. My life was here now. I had to relax
and be a good neighbor.
He glanced at his wristie. It must have been late.
I wasn’t wearing mine, but I could feel the lateness of the hour. I yawned; my
eyes ached for rest.
He put on his thick grey coat and closed the door
behind him. Through the door, I could hear him moving on the floorboards
covered by the thin carpet, toward the ancient, creaking, cage of an elevator
in the building’s south wing. He was gone now, and I had to find something else
to focus on, or all the other sounds would become too overwhelming: Comrade Likush
in 5A, tapping his pipe clear on a metal ashtray; Comrade Ilya, Apartment 4B,
strumming her quarter-lyre; the children, in 4C, arguing with their mother over
bedtime. All the sounds I couldn’t shut out conspired to keep me awake for
fitful hours until finally exhaustion won out and I slept for a mere two before
the alarm clock on my bedside buzzed me awake. It felt like no time had passed,
like I’d simply closed my eyes, and opened them again. But the twin red suns
were above the horizon, their light filtering through the particles of the
atmosphere to make day.