Princess of the Void 5.5 - Re-education

“Aokan. Hey.”

Aokan grunts and rolls over, dragging his thin, pilled bedsheet over his face.

“Aokan. Wake up, man.”

“Fuck off,” Aokan mumbles.

“Dude, up. Come on.” This is Xulo, his cellmate. “I told you yesterday. Gotta get to the mess hall early before all the stekkai’s gone. I’ve been saving my tokens. I need your feet.”

Aokan groans and rolls out of his bunk. He blinks blearily at the cool pre-dawn light coming in through the cell window. “What time is it?”

“It’s 0600.”

“You’re lucky it’s your fuckin’ nameday, Xulo.”

“Yeah. Living the dream. Put your paint on and let’s go.”

Aokan uncaps his paint marker and draws a long scarlet stripe across his arms and legs, a great big X on his chest, a line along his forehead and down his nose. He zips his mint-green re-education suit on and steps into his shoes. At the edge of the cell, in front of the portrait of the Empress, are two glowing sets of footprints. Xulo’s already standing on one, bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet. Aokan takes the other and genuflects. The microphones are in the floor and insensitive, so you have to bow low for your voice to get picked up.

“I begin my day with my pledge.” He speaks it in chorus with Xulo. “By my own effort, I will remove the stains of disobedience and dishonor from my name, that I might once again become a citizen. I thank Empress Zithra XIX for her mercy. I thank Princess Sykora of the Black Pike for her mercy. I will demonstrate my gratitude. I will not waste the chance that I have been given.”

The pneumatic door of cell 12-zule hisses open, and its occupants step out into the yard, past the tables and the weight racks. This early, the ring of cells surrounding the yard are mostly dark, their occupants enjoying a final half-hour of shut-eye. Must be nice.

Aokan nudges Xulo and passes him a chip of pink plastic. “Happy nameday, dipshit.”

Xulo gives him a gap-toothed grin and pockets the token. “Thanks, Aokan.”

“You get enough for a cake?”

Xulo shakes his shaggy mop. “I’m spending it on stekkai.”

“Don’t do that.” Aokan frowns. “That’s terrible return. It’s like five tokens for one stek.”

“I don’t care. I miss them so goddamn bad. My nameday, my pick.”

Around the mess table with the guys from zule block, Xulo chatters happily away about the latest call from his mom and stuffs his face with intolerably overpriced stekkai.

“What’s up, 12-zule?” Dorvin slaps Aokan’s back as he arrives at the table and clacks a token in front of Xulo. “Happy nameday, kid.”

Lark fakes a grab. Xulo hisses and tugs the token away.

“He’s just gonna waste it on stekkai,” Aokan says.

“It’s not a waste,” Xulo insists.

“This one’s got a bruise on it.” Lark prods a rind.

“You coming to drydock?” Dorvin asks.

“Not until 1100,” Aokan says. “I’m on Pek’s schedule while he’s in the infirmary. It’s reflection and rec for me, boys.”

Uncomfortable glances volley around the table. “Weeping Wula’s been on the sevenday reflections lately,” Dorvin says.

Aokan sighs. “God dammit.”

Xulo holds up the token Aokan gave him. “You want this back?”

“No, keep it.” Aokan lifts another bite of cardboard-scented nootch onto his fork. “I got plenty. It’s your nameday.”

He finishes breakfast and exchanges a token for a bottle of zaikem juice up at the commissary. He sips from it as he enters the main facility. The painters and cameras track him through the increasingly-crowded halls. Shakami Re-Ed is waking up.

He nods to one of the anticomped guardsmen outside the communicator banks. “Aokan Lilek here for recompense.”

“You’re not on today,” the guard says.

“Let him in, please,” a woman calls from the other side of the door. “Schedule change.”

The guard steps silently aside and Aokan saunters up to the bulletproof kiosk in the antechamber. “Morning, Lina.”

Officer Kulina glances up from her video puzzle. “Morning, darlin’. You know how Pek’s doing?”

“He’ll be up again soon,” Aokan says. “Guy did it to himself. He wasn’t eating enough. Everyone could see.”

“Why’s that?”

Aokan shrugs. “Question for the psych, I guess.”

“Poor thing. Okay. Give me a second.” Kulina rolls her wheely chair over to a wall of open filing cabinets. “Aokan Lilek. Where are you… here we are.” Kulina slides his spiral bound workbook through the cubby. “Finish that or toss it, yeah?”

Aokan holds the bottle out. “Do you want it?”

“No, thank you. I have a thing about backwash.”

He takes two final swigs and tosses the rest into a trash chute on the wall. “All right. Flash me.”

Kulina taps the glass. “Step up.”

Aokan moves to the edge of the divider and meets Kulina’s eyes.

Her eyes flash. “Proceed to cubicle forty and make calls until you have a half-score of completed responses. Take notes. Then report to reflection.”

Off he goes, with the satisfied stride of a man on a mission. Kulina’s compulsion is clean that way. Some of these correctional officers, it feels like your brain is shoving you along with a nightstick.

He walks through the cubicles, full of men in mint murmuring into handsets, and sits at the stool before cubicle forty’s communicator. He punches in the first number. It picks up on the second ring. “Hello?”

“May I speak to Sarna of Penn?”

“This is she.”

“Miss Sarna, I’m Aokan of Lilek, calling from the Shakami Men’s Reeducation Facility on Ptolek II. I’m required to disclose to you that I’ve been found responsible for the coercive delays and diverted shipments that negatively affected you from Hecto 7751-Deca-7 to Hecto 7752-Deca-2.”

“Oh. Shit, uh—hold on.”

There’s a rustling on the line.

“Are you calling on recompense?”

“I am, ma’am. If you have the time, I hope to hear how your life was affected by my actions, and to understand how I might make recompense.”

“Uh. So. You’re at re-ed?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why did you do all that?”

“I was acting in what I thought at the time was the best interests of my union, ma’am.”

“Well.” The sound of air whistling between teeth. “I guess I can understand that. Look, it was annoying. I won’t lie. But I haven’t thought about it in a while. I had a few crisis meetings about it, some personal stress. Uh, I got a merit or two figuring out how to close the output gap. So that was nice.”

Aokan twirls his pen between his fingers. No need to note the good things. “Glad to hear it, ma’am.”

“So it’s not—it didn’t really—I guess I forgive you, I’m saying.”

“Thank you, ma’am. How would I be able to make recompense?”

An uncertain pause. “I don’t know if I really need recompense.”

“I’m required to inform you that if you choose, I can pay you back through labor,” Aokan says. “With my wages garnished to award you penalties.”

“Oh. Oh, I mean… I wouldn’t say no, I guess. What would you be doing?”

“I do maintenance on exo drones, ma’am.”

“Now do you like doing that?” Concern is evident in Sarna’s voice. “Or I guess—how long would you be working if I said yes?”

“It’s fine, ma’am. It would be a full workday on my end, and you’d be awarded two hundred Ptolek credits.”

“They don’t pay you so much, huh?”

“This is after fees, ma’am. But no, not so much.”

“Okay. Then I guess I’ll take that. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s not. I’ll note that down. Thank you for your time.”

Aokan hangs up on Sarna’s tepid “Oh thanks—” and checks the default workday in the box next to her name.

A few more calls, some missed connections, some modest venting, and two more default penalties.

Aokan’s beginning to feel as though he might get out of the day relatively unscathed as he dials the next number. “May I speak to Rushar of Clan Fanik?”

The voice on the other end has the fuzz of an interplanetary call. “Speaking.”

“Mr. Rushar, I’m Aokan of Lilek, calling from the Shakami Men’s Reeducation Facility on Ptolek II. I’m required to disclose to you—”

“You’re the guy who fucked my barge?”

“Yes, sir. That’s me.” Aokan swallows around the lump forming in his throat. That doesn’t bode well. “If you have the time, I hope to hear how your life was affected by my actions, and to understand—”

“How my life—” Rushar speaks over him. “I’ll tell you how my life was affected. You fucked me.”

Aokan sighs and adds a line below Rushar’s name to expand the notes box.

“Your little protection racket bullshit destroyed my career,” Rushar says. “I got shitcanned because of you. The only job I could get after you was pushing paper on Ramex. And my great-great-grandma wasn’t well enough to make the trip, so she stayed on Ptolek II, so guess who wasn’t at her bedside when she passed, shitheel?”

Aokan grits his teeth as his hand mechanically notes all this down—job lost, relocation, missed death of great-great-grandmother. None of this is his fault, he wants to say. Rushar should blame whatever skinflint bastard thought he deserved to be sacked for things beyond his control. But that’s not how this goes.

“And how would I be able to make recompense?” he asks instead.

“I’ll tell you how.” Rushar’s hoarse. “You go fuck yourself.”

“Sir, if my recompense officer determines your request isn’t eligible, we’re going to default to the basic monetary penalty of two hundred—”

“I don’t want credits. Here’s what I want. I want you to take two steps back, and shove whatever communicator you’re using up your ass and fuck yourself with it. And you can fucking rot.”

Click.

Aokan huffs an unhappy laugh as he observes the notes he left next to Rushar’s name. “Dickhead,” he mutters, and moves on to the next name on his list.

In this manner, Aokan harvests his half-score of calls. Then he rises from his cubicle, notebook under his arm, and returns to Kulina’s kiosk. The woman sips her thermos and slots the glass open. “Hey, darlin’. How were the phone banks?”

Aokan shrugs. “Couple hard cases. Most of them just want the money.”

Kulina clucks her tongue as she goes down Aokan’s list, clacking her stamp against each entry. She pauses on Rushar’s name. “This gentleman wants you to fuck yourself.”

“With the phone, he said.”

Kulina snorts and crosses the recompense field out. “Let’s call that one the default, then.”

“Appreciate that,” Aokan says.

“Bet the cubicle custodians will, too.” Kulina taps her pen on the default column. “These work days. You want your share in escrow, or tokens?”

“You know me, Lina,” Aokan says. “Tokens every time.” The credit take-home after the fees and the penalty payments is miserable. And Aokan isn’t afraid of needing money once he’s out. He was there for the union. The union will be there for him.

“Is it true that Wula’s on the reflection chair today?” he asks.

A cloud of something like pity crosses Kulina’s face. “Mmhmm.” She pushes Aokan’s workbook through the slot in her kiosk.

He sighs and takes it. “Great.”

“Just get it done, darlin’. This list isn’t so bad.” Her eyes flash. “Go on.”

Easy for her to say. She’ll never know what it’s like.

Aokan shuffles back through the yards toward the reflection building. It’s an overcast day today, with the chill of the summer’s departure infusing a crispness into the air. But the sweat is building under Aokan’s arms. Why did stupid Pek have to go and do some kind of stupid hunger strike?

He moves through the washed-out lights of Reflection Intake, where they pat him down and make sure there’s nothing on him he could hurt himself with. Then into the unventilated heat and cheap incense smoke of the main chamber. An irregular ring of crannied easy chairs, overstuffed and threadbare. Aokan fills a cup with cold-brewed tea—the tea is very good, at least; they want to keep you physically comfortable during this part—and approaches the center of the room, where his torturer waits on a high scaffolded seat, a stopwatch in one claw. The other reaches down.

“Workbook,” she says, in a low monotone.

Aokan hands it over and listens to the rustle of the pages turn. A strident beep emerges from Wula’s stopwatch and she climbs from her seat, into the shivering dark. He watches her lift the chin of an inmate, scanning his glistening eyes and his choked sobbing with the appraising detachment of a food critic. Her eyes flash at the man. “Two more minutes,” she says, and releases her grip on him to drop him back into his sorrow.

Aokan squares his shoulders and watches Weeping Wula return to her station. She climbs back into her seat with his workbook under her arm. Here it comes.

Flash. “Begin your reflection period.” Wula holds the book out. “Twenty minutes. Ponder the harm you have caused. Imagine yourself in the place of the people you hurt. Do not turn away yet.”

Aokan had begun to peel off. He refocuses on Wula’s face in time for another massive pulse of red.

“Concentrate especially on Rushar Fanik,” she says. “Go now.”

Fucking asshole, he thinks, gripping so tight on his tea that he’s bending the soft silicon cup. But his steps are already faltering as he finds his spot. The first foreboding wash of remorse finds him as he sits in a vacant chair.

He opens the workbook across his lap. There’s Sarna of Penn first. That’s a mercy. He imagines fraught meetings in offices after hours, crumpled papers, canceled plans. He thinks about all the times Sarna didn’t come home until it was dark outside, because of what he did. The merits and the promotion slide through his mind, and he scrambles for purchase on them. But Weeping fucking Wula’s compulsion is like a freezing river, like black ice, and they spin away on the treacherous tide.

And here comes Rushar. Aokan curls his head between his knees like he’s bracing for a crash. The despair slams into him. The letter of severance, the uprooting. Everything in boxes. How many friends will he never see again? How many places did he promise himself he’d go? How many futures foreclosed on? He thinks of a woman breathing her last in an unlit room, of farewells and parting secrets and final assurances of love, locked away from this life forever by tyrannies of time and distance.

His hands shake. His eyes screw tightly shut. My fault. I did all of this. It’s my fault. He tries to shake it off, tries to move on, but his mind stays stuck in it, in an unnatural feedback loop, like a hand being held to a hot stove, trapped in a spinning typhoon of guilt and grief and Rushar’s inherited rage against himself.

Then, with one deafening final exhale, the gauntlet squeezing his mind releases and he opens his eyes. He shakes his head and glances further down the page, blinking the sodden sorrow out of his tearducts.

“Stop.”

A crisply cuffed hand lands on the page. He looks up. Wula is standing before him. Has it already been fifteen minutes? He glances at her stopwatch. God, it’s only been four.

Flash. “You haven’t pondered Rushar long enough, I think,” Wula says. “Two more minutes. Then your timer starts again.”

She pads back to her seat.

***

Usually, it only takes a few minutes on the drydock to cure Aokan of his reflection mood. He likes working on the gear, powerwashing the grit and swapping the modulars. It’s the sort of stuff he used to do on the outside, and hopes to do again. But the pall hanging over him after Weeping Wula is harder to penetrate, and only half-shaken off by the time the shift buzzer calls them back to the cell blocks.

He sees the knot of guards and his feet instinctually crave to take him across the avenue or down a different street or into shelter. But there’s none of that here. There’s only the one road, and they’re already looking at him and pointing him out to one another. So he does what he did the first time a bunch of guys grabbed him and shuttled him away; let them bear him and imagine himself by the ocean, somewhere far away.

They take him into a bare interview room. He’s been in one of these plenty of times. Investigators checking his story or some such. Always the same shell chairs, the same table, the same camera in the corner.

The huge pink alien is new.

“This is him?” the alien asks, in flawless Taiikari. Implant maybe.

“Yes, Majesty.”

“Majesty.” Aokan intends it as a question, almost, but it comes out too tight and full of disbelief. Bow, idiot. He bows.

The giant smiles through the fur growing on his face and extends his hand. “Prince Grantyde of the Black Pike. You know my wife already.”

A curt nod from the woman standing next to him. Aokan registers her for the first time. Oh, God.

“Aokan of Lilek,” she says. She is not smiling. “We are here to give you a choice.”

“We’ve asked the Shakami facility managers,” Prince Grantyde says. He looks—shaken? Fidgety. Like he doesn’t like what he’s seen of this place. “And they report that you’ve been a model prisoner. Even if you were uncooperative during your original internment. Which I’ll mark down to loyalty to your union, and excuse.”

The Princess of the Black Pike—the actual fucking Princess Sykora—exhales through her nostrils at that and glances away. Aokan thought maybe there was artistic liberty being taken with the picture of her on the wall, but no. If anything, she’s more attractive in person.

“You have the option of finishing your term at Shakami,” Grantyde says. “Or, at your discretion, you can depart and serve the rest of it in indenturement.”

Aokan’s stomach divebombs. Indenturement. He refocuses on the Princely giant. “To you?”

Prince Grantyde shakes his head and steps to one side. The interview room door swings open again. The calcified shell Aokan grew over his heart cracks in half and crumbles away.

She came for him. Corska came for him.

“Howdy, soldier boy,” she says.

His legs wobble.

The room swells into him as he loses his steadiness. He’s caught and helped into the plastic shell chair in front of the interview table. And Corska is here, Corska Ondai, who has come for him, who has fulfilled her promise. Her arms thrown around him, her scent.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s okay. I’m here. My brave soldier. You’re mine. You’re coming home, Aokan.” Her breath tingles the skin of his neck. “I’m here to take you home.”

***

He’s in a landcar, now, with a black bracelet welded around his wrist and a change of clothes in his lap. The sun has dipped beyond the great mass of Ptolek. A red subsurface-scattered light paints the countryside.

“You’ve got a lot of people excited to see you,” Corska says. “Everyone knows what you’ve done for them.”

“It was all for you,” he says. “Just you, Corska.”

“I know, Aokan. I know.” She glances from the road. “And I’m so fucking proud of you. We are going to have such a goddamn rager for you tomorrow.”

“Tonight I just want to sleep,” Aokan says. “In an actual goddamn bed, not an elevated bunk with a towel on it.”

Corska nods, eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. He listens to the whoosh of traffic in the opposite lane, like the tide. He watches the stripes of highway light filter across the woman who saved him.

“That was Prince Grantyde, huh?” he asks.

“That was him,” she says.

“I heard he was handsome but dim.”

“I did, too.”

“What do you think? Is he?”

“I think it’s a useful reputation for a man with a face like his to have,” Corska says. “The firmament loves a handsome dunce, and he seems to know it. He’s one of the organizers on Qarnaq’s exo ring.”

“What’s Qarnaq?”

Corska chuckles. “You really have been out. Qarnaq is the fucking key, is what Qarnaq is. Qarnaq’s what saves us.”

Aokan clicks his tongue. “So we can control him?”

“Not openly and not brazenly,” Corska says. “And not easily. He has advisors and he isn’t as naive as he looks.” She takes a hand off the wheel to squeeze Aokan’s knee. “But I got him to let a jailbird like you out. If we play our cards right, that alien is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”

He’s been so wrapped up in what she’s saying that he doesn’t realize she’s taken an exit until the wheels chunk onto the lowland road. “Where are we going?”

“I told you,” she says. “I’m taking you home.”

He glances at the unfamiliar lights in this neighborhood. “This isn’t the way to my apartment.”

“Well, you’re indentured.” She grins. “My property, remember?”

He scoffs. “Come on, chief.”

She stares at him with a funny expression on her face. She kills the engine. “Do you want me to take you home?”

“Do you…” He looks out his window, at the apartment block she’s stopped in front of. Looks like one of the studio prefabs. Shared kitchens, single beds. “Do you even have a bed for me?”

“Mine,” she says.

“What?”

“I have my bed for you,” she says.

“And you take the couch?”

She steps out of the car and moves around to his door. She unbuckles his seatbelt. “Come on, Aokan.”

Aokan’s stomach flutters. “You said—”

“I know what I said.” Her hand slides across the black indenturement bracelet that’s been sealed around his wrist. Her forefinger curls around it. “I’ve thought about it. What you told me when you went inside. I’ve thought about it every day. Did you think I was using you?”

“I didn’t care.” Her touch sends prickles of electricity along his fingers. “If you were, I wouldn’t mind. I told you that.”

“I was,” she whispers. “I was using you, Aokan. And you let me.” Her fingers interlace with his. “You ate shit for all of us. A score of people and you didn’t say a thing. You let us all be free. I used you.”

She gives a gentle tug. He steps from her car. He’s moving as if in a dream. The sure steps of a compelled man, without the flash.

“Come upstairs with me.” Corska pulls him to the threshold. “Use me back.”