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I let the chimes that announced the call finish their chimey thing, and
finished my mid-morning syn-caf while I waited for the vidwindow on the
phone to open. I switched off the ‘cast which had been droning in
the background, something about protesters on the steps of the Council
Chambers. I was office-assistant-less on Mondays.
“Slater Consulting Services,” announced the
slightly-bored-but-totally-professional vox I’d bought for my
screener. “Please listen closely to the following menu, as our
options have changed. Press One if you are a new client; press Two if
you are an existing client who wishes to make an
appointment; press Three if you know the extension with which
you’d like to speak; press Four if you already have a case number
from the Bureau of Public Health; press Five for questions
regarding your account; press Six to hear these menu options
again.” The old Option Six had been for emergencies. I’d
gotten rid of that. Everything had been an emergency. Even
retirees soliciting for charity drives had used it.
The caller pressed One.
The vidwindow, as I expected, opened onto a canned background--tropical
birds this time--but the voice was definitely not canned; it was
female, middle-aged, slightly nervous, and utterly respectable. She
wanted something personal to come through; the likelihood
that this would be a private-pay case, rather than Bureau work,
certainly did.
“My name is Citizen Nedra Madour,” the voice began. “Your
services were mentioned to me by Worker Lasseter at the Health Bureau’s
Family and Child Welfare Department.”
I pressed a button and the call was ‘forwarded;’ I let it buzz
three times and picked it up.
“Slater here,” I said, as her vidwindow opened up what I knew would be
a rather lighter, airier, and prettier version of my office. Her
‘paper was probably a statement of some kind, or a gesture of
modesty; her face was not strange to the ‘netcasts. “Sorry,
I was on another line. Now, what seems to be the matter?”
She repeated what she had said before, and continued: “It’s about
my daughter, Irina. She’s been under treatment for tobacco
smoking. Now she’s disappeared.”
I sat up. No wonder she had sounded nervous. Tobacco, of
course, usually called ‘nick,’ was a highly controlled
substance—totally illegal in Libria since the revolution, as it had
been under Equilibrium before, except for a brief, experimental period
in the first few years. It showed the depth of the woman’s
concern that she was willing to even mention a nick problem over the
phone.
“Private treatment, of course,” I ventured, watching a macaw preen
itself on the branch of a giant mahogany tree.
“Naturally. We couldn’t afford to have her classified in public
records with a tobacco problem. How would she be placed in the
University, or ever get a decent job then?”
I murmured agreement; I had to. “Where did the FCWD come into
it? I mean—she is, of course, registered, like every child has to
be. They have to be protected,” I said, repeating the mantra we
all heard a hundred times a day, and it was her turn to add some
subvocal assent. “Lasseter was her Worker, then.”
“Yes. I know Vonnie Lasseter; we were at at school
together. I didn’t pull any strings to get Irina assigned to
him. It may have been pure chance that Irina’s case fell to him
after her old worker retired, or perhaps Lasseter took care to make it
happen. But so it turned out. He knew, naturally. A
Worker can hardly not know. But he could see to it that as long
as Irina’s treatment was completed normally, that the flags wouldn’t
come up on the usual college and employment reviews.”
“Yes. When did you last see Irina?” The macaw had
finished, and a toucan began working on a nut.
“About a week ago … it would have been three days before the kalends of
March. She’d been acting up at home. We brought her up so
well, and then she turned sixteen, and I don’t know what
happened. Her grades plummeted. She began staying out, and
was seen a couple of times over in Soho with her boyfriend at some of
the protein bars there. Well, you know, citizen, Libria is not a
very large place, and she had been out overnight before, but always
came back in a day or two. Then the holiday, and then the
weekend, and so I only got in to see Lasseter this morning. I
called you straight away.”
“We’ll need an appointment. I … umm …” –here I sat back,
pretending to check my PDA, personal digital assistant—“have a
cancellation in the morning. Would ten-thirty be good?”
“And where is your office, citizen?”
“By surface, not transport?”
“Yes.” I could hear her little smile.
“Thirteen-hundred Sims, fourth floor. Take the X-way to the
Willow exit, keep on straight by Fillmore Plaza, second right, three
down. There’s validated parking across the street. In the
meantime, can you ‘net me some information on Irina? A good
picture, a voiceprint, some biodata? Just the essentials. I
have a secure service.”
“She left her school ID here. The biodot on it has all
that. Retinal patterns, too.” The screen panned out into a
misty morning vista of a rainforest hillside.
“How can you ‘net that to me?”
“I was afraid of something like this, so I had someone I know scan and
format it a few months ago. I can have it to you in ten minutes
if you give me the link and codes.”
“I’ll ‘net them to you right away. I guess that’s all until
tomorrow, citizen Madour.”
“I will be there. Good-day, citizen.”
I said my farewell and hit the end button.
Citizen Nedra Madour, whom I knew by reputation, had given me something
to think about. Missing persons were rather rare in Libria these
days. As she had said, it wasn’t a large place, and there were
few others to go to unless you boarded a transport; and all
persons were accounted for on a periodic basis. I had handled a
fair number of MPs in the first few years after the fall of
Equilibrium; that was probably why Lasseter, whom I also knew,
had recommended me to Nedra. The girl’s disappearance smacked of
planning. She had gone three days before a scheduled school
break, which would last two weeks. That would give her eighteen
days before she failed to turn up for school. If she failed to
turn up.
One thing was certain; if Irina had meant to leave Libria, she
would have done it already. Then it would be a Section Five
matter and out of my hands. I stretched out; I was a bit
sore from the morning at the gym. Some of the people working out around
me were half my age, and it wouldn’t do to try to keep up with them all
the time. Even some of the group of young women who did their own
brand of calisthenics together looked like they could give me a hard
few rounds with the gloves or sticks. I ‘netted my server info to
Citizen Madour, and then dug some leftover tofu stir-fry out of my
cooler for an early lunch.
It would soon be time to do a little research.
My first call was to an associate in the operations division of
TranspoLibria. With Irina Madour’s data onscreen, I
established that no one answering her description had tried to leave
Libria in the last week. My second call was to another associate
at ConSec, with which I was contracted, the prosperous firm which
handled much of Libria’s ordinary security and law-enforcement
administration. No one like Irina had been detained for any
offenses. I thought as much; someone with Nedra Madour’s
status would have been notified already. My third call,
therefore, was to Worker Lasseter’s office at Family and Child Welfare.
The Health Bureau of the Social Affairs Ministry of Libria called them
‘workers.’ It was a better, more innocuous name than “officers,”
which would have made them sound like police. Which is what
they actually were. Every Librian citizen had one, myself
included. Since the Council had made the MSA the sole official
provider of all health-care services—free to all—the Ministry had
assigned citizens, grouped according to age, occupation, and various
other criteria, to ‘Workers’ who were, in theory, responsible only for
maintaining all the paperwork; hence the title. Since
nothing was available without the proper authorization, Workers
effectively controlled everything to do with an individual’s health
care. And with so many of its workers in chemical products of
some sort, health care was a very very deep concern of the Ministry,
and of the Council. In the first days after the fall of
Equilibrium, everyone had gone off the hated ‘dose;’ most
willingly, though some problem cases had had to be persuaded.
The results had been chaotic, accompanied by thousands of severe
withdrawals, and the widespread occurrence of what old textbooks called
‘neurosis.’ The banning of Prozium had resulted in its
replacement by a variety of therapies and treatments designed to help
people cope with differing degrees of mental and emotional
difficulty. Some were benign; many were useless; some
were downright dangerous. The Council, with a crisis on its
hands, had vested the MSA with the power to investigate and regulate
these, and it wasn’t long before all other health care had come under
its aegis. Worker Vonnie Lasseter had been there longer than
most, for whom the job was simply a rung on the ladder—hopefully--to
privileged jobs at the Ministry. He had always said he was happy
where he was. But if Citizen Madour had been at school with him,
she would know that he had once been a Sweeper for the Tetragrammaton,
a good one. Some had spoken of him as missed Cleric
material. As such, he was fortunate to have the mid-level job he
held. Ex-Tetras—those not so powerful as to have carved
themselves out privileged positions at the very first, like the
once-sainted John Preston—were not in demand for government jobs in the
new Libria. The few score of old Sweepers and handful of
ex-Clerics left had mostly been pensioned off.
My Bureau contractor’s ID got me as far as I needed to get, which was
the Department cafeteria. Worker Vonnie Lasseter, as befitted his
rank, had a table to himself in the corner, while a few pairs and trios
of younger clerks, programmers, DEPs, and receptionists chatted at the
bigger tables here and there. Anyone higher than a Worker took breaks
upstairs at the management lounge. A Worker of his
seniority probably could, as well, but help like me wouldn’t be very
welcome there. My presence would remind them that they, too,
failed once in a while.
I made may way toward him, eliciting a few glances from the others, and
he stood up to shake my hand, an undistinguished, balding man in brown
with a short, neat, grey-flecked beard, without which he would have
looked like nothing at all. “Citizen Max Slater,” he said. “And what
brings you out of your accustomed orbit?”
“Good of you to come down for me, citizen,” I said. “I know
you’ve got to be busy with all the shake-ups going on. I didn’t
think Citizen Macrae was the type to push all that through.”
“Aah, he’s the Chair of Social Affairs on the Council. He
represents the Ministry, he’s ultimately responsible for it, and he
nominates the Bureau Secretary. But you know as well as I do that
Secretaries are ones who really run things. It all rolls downhill
from there. But you didn’t come about that.”
“No. It’s about Nedra Madour.”
“You mean Irina Madour? Nedra didn’t waste her time.”
“People who can still afford to drive these days seldom do,” I
observed. “And, no, I don’t mean Irina. I mean Nedra.”
“You want some tea?”
“I’ll take some syn-caf,” I told him. He grimaced. Coffee
had not been actually outlawed, but the Ministry, still concerned with
its effects on citizens, had taken care to highly regulate its sale,
including laying a tax on it that took it safely out of the hands of
most. The masses had to make do with a grain-and-bean concoction
that resembled the real thing about as much as aspirin had resembled
Prozium.
He set down the brown plastic mug and napkin. “I know very few
people that drink this stuff other than to try to impress their
superiors,” he said. “And none,” he added, as I raised the
beverage, “that take it straight but you.”
“So, to business. You are familiar with Irina Madour’s records
and history. You know what was going on with her.”
“I do.” The tone in his voice was
plain.
“That’s why I came to talk about Nedra,” I told him. “You’re
Irina’s Worker. Even under the colour of official business, you
can’t tell me anything about her I don’t already know from her
mother. But you know Nedra. She said you two were at school
together.”
He looked down at the plastic tabletop. “So to speak. But
we belonged to different groups. Her parents were solid citizens,
well-connected meds in the Prozium business, and she was the privileged
wild child. Mine were drones. You know my story.” I
did. His father had worked in a warehouse and his mother had been
an automat attendant, and both had been arrested for
sense-offences. His mother had been treated and released. His father’s
treatment had failed. Everyone knew what that
meant. Vonnie had joined up after that, to compensate for his
parents or something. I’d once cleared up an official matter for his
fiancee, now his wife of eleven years.
“So Irina’s like her mother was,” I ventured. “What makes you
think she won’t show up safe and sound in a couple of days, and play
the—“ I reached for a word I’d once read in a religion book—“the
penitent, and cry and make up, and everything’s all good again?”
“Because Nedra was a little wild,” he said, accenting the
‘little.’ “Nedra carried on a bit but she basically had her act
together. Irina’s skated on the edge--parties, protests, running
around, you know--but she’s not really bright enough to always see
where the edge is.”
“And you think she went over it in a big way. What about her
father?”
“Authier Madour?”
“Doctor Authier Madour,” I gently added. “Assistant director of
biomechanical research at the University Hospital.”
“He’s in New Rio for a conference,” said Lasseter, after a sip of
tea. “Presenting a paper about something. Left on
Wednesday.”
“With his daughter gone missing?”
“With his daughter gone overnight, and likely to show up on the morrow
as she had done before,” he said. “I’m sure Nedra’s handling that
side of it. He’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Nedra’s well and truly shaken,” he said. “There’s more to this
than she’s told me, a lot more. There’s things she and I can’t
talk about with me having to do my job. You’re different. You don’t
have the disclosure regs that I have.”
“Because they can just take away my license, void my contract, and hang
me anytime they like,” I said, putting down the mug. “That’s the
risk I take for the privilege of quietly taking care of the unofficial
stuff. The dirty stuff.”
“I was a Sweeper once,” said Vonnie Lasseter distantly. “The old days
at the Tetra … you remember, citizen. Now I shuffle files. You take
care of the dirt. You sweep, I clean.”
At ten-oh-two the next morning, my thrice-a-week pool girl from LibMed,
the public health insurance entity, was in the outer room behind her
desk, to add a whiff of … something to my office; the latest
brand of artificial guaranteed hypo-allergenic scent that the
vidstar of the moment was endorsing. Formally, I myself was a
retired LibMed employee, a claims adjuster bought out under a reorg
scheme a few years back, and then hired back as a consultant, with
outside contracts with ConSec and the Bureau of
Health. Unlike most of her predecessors, this one, a
redhead—well, red/purplehead--whose name was Jakklyn, or however they
were spelling it these days, kept up with her work.
That consisted, mostly, of monitoring routine computer reviews of
citizen mental fitness evaluations conducted by employers covered by
LibMed, which is to say all employers. We looked for profiles that
suggested problems that officially didn’t exist any more, but which
everyone—right up to the Council level—knew still cropped up from time
to time. Child abuse topped the list, followed by sexual
predation, self-mutilation, suicidal tendencies, and a variety of other
matters that Libria, for one reason and another, couldn’t solve with
either its doctors or its cops, but which couldn’t be afforded the
dignity of being formally outlawed. When my office located
possible examples, it flagged them and sent them on to LibMed for
consideration by a panel, and possible referral to appropriate
authorities. That constituted my day job. Once in a while a
case potentially problematic because of ConSec’s disclosure
requirements would be referred back to me. For the record, I
dealt with them by counselling, and I was indeed a licensed
counselor. Usually, that was was all it took. It sometimes
took methods that couldn’t go on the record. It had, on occasion,
involved a bullet in the gut for the really hard-core cases who
couldn’t be persuaded any other way and turned violent. The
authorities both at ConSec and the Bureau had procedures available for
taking care of a body now and then, and LibMed was spared some high
liabilities.
Jak’s predecessors hadn’t lasted because—whatever the excuses they
gave, and they were many and varied—most of her generation couldn’t
live day in and day out with the notion that such atavisms, which they
were carefully taught in school had been stamped out by the health
authorities long ago, still stalked the streets once in a while. There
were a couple of others like me. Sometimes I wondered what
the MSA would do when the last one retired. I doubted they’d
bring back Prozium. In a way, though, we were still living with
it. Librian expertise in pharmacology and chemistry, acquired for
Equilibrium, had been applied since then to a variety of fields, from
synthetic fabrics to eros-enhancement meds, whose export paid the
bills. At least so far.
I walked in the door with my gym bag over my shoulder—I’d started
training at five-thirty—and set down one of Jak’s favorites on her
workstation: a corn muffin with real, actual chocolate chips
baked into it, not the carob syn-choc that had passed for the real
thing since about the time she’d entered school. Training at the
Ministry gym had its privileges. “Honey, I’m home,” I
bantered. “Any messages?”
She smiled up at me, a nice smile even though it made her lip rings
spread apart like the palps of a spider rearing back for a bite. “Hi,
Dad,” she bantered back. “You have a vidmeet at one-fifteen
with Officer Roy Roy from ConSec’s Substances Division, and a call from
Mister Douglas about a review.” ‘Mister’ was the title now
accorded to what used to be called lawyers. She had risen from
her seat, her broomstick skirt swishing while her old Sweeper’s combat
boots clunked incongruously on the floor, and turned and handed me the
mug of syn-caf. “Here’s your, er, beverage,” she said. ‘Er,
beverage’ was what she’d decided to call it. A whole month on the
job with me, with her sense of humour intact. I liked that. “Here you
spend the morning at the gym, come out with a glow on, and
then you down a cup of that stuff.” She shook her head slowly in
mock bafflement.
“It keeps me humble,” I said. “That and the sticks with
Jonesy. The day will come when I can’t go ten rounds with him
anymore.”
She picked up a scanning wand and prodded me in the midriff. “The
hair down there may be going grey, but it still covers a six-pack.”
“Which is used to take two hours a day to maintain. Not
anymore. Some of those girls could probably take me down. Fortunately
for me they stick to their own routine, that BCI or
whatever it is.”
“Biocardial integration,” she said. “They pick it up at the
University. There’s men that do it, too. Not for
me. There’s meditation and everything that goes with it. I
didn’t have the time.”
“Speaking of time. Any visitors?”
“She’s not here yet,” said Jak. “But she hasn’t called to say
she’d be late. I have a small batch of reviews for you to look at
while you wait. Nothing really set off a profile flag, but I just
had a … a feeling about them.” I smiled a bit myself. That
word, even now, carried some freight in Libria. “I transferred
them to your private inbox. Plus one.”
“Thanks, Jak.”
“Just doing my job, citizen,” she said, seated at her workstation
again.
I went in to my office, hung my felt hat on the hat rack, dumped the
gym bag in the corner, and sat down at my desk, a genuine pre-War desk
made out of oak, with drawers and everything. on top of which my ‘net
terminal sat, suiting it about as well as a gas mask on a ballerina,
with its ungainly wiring tied in a bundle, sprawling to the
floor. It had been made by ‘Standard Furniture, Scranton,
Penna.’ I adjusted my blinds—yes, blinds, not UV-polarized tinted
filmscreen like every other window in Libria had—and switched on the
terminal. The usual ‘netmail garbage had to be cleared out, a few
routine things I could have Jak take care of, and then opened up the
casefiles she had flagged for me.
I read through about nine of them. File Number One, actually file
number L39985/39N, was typical. He was a thirty-three-year-old
male named citizen Conrad Kemp, employed at Premier Industries as an
account technician. His review had been on the occasion of
recommendation for promotion to team chief, having completed his
required certifications. I scrolled down … he’d been a good
worker but had some absenteeism on his record, which he’d ascribed to
family reasons. Losing weight recently, but his physicals checked
out; latest one six months ago, signed off by Doctor Jared Wasson
of LibMed; his Worker was D. Cannon—must be a new one. Blood pressure a
bit low, proteins normal, certain enzymes
elevated, UA results showed cannabinoid count which exceeded permitted
norms. Retest scheduled. Married nine years, one child … a
possible nick abuser as well. I set him aside.
There were more. Citizen Madison Walters, a medtech at Campus
Three, the cancer section, of Libria General, the central hospital,
treated for theobromine addiction. That was common enough; there were
several organizations devoted solely to that field. Citizen Richard
Kane, a recently demoted ConSec officer, suspected
abuse of steroids. Citizen Isaac Turner, once treated for
caffeine problems, a transpo pilot--pilots had exhaustive files. I
skipped a bit, and then scrolled back up. Citizen Keef Herzog,
security officer for TeleLibria, the communications monopoly that
everyone loved to hate, reviewed for promotion and turned
down. Unmarried; living alone. That was
unusual. Had been unemployed for almost a year previous to being
hired. That was also unusual. Positions were usually
guaranteed for every graduate.
This was so because Libria was a greying society. From the
introduction of Equilibrium—well before my time—Libria’s birthrate,
flat or worse since its founding in early post-cat days, had started a
definite decline. At first, no one worried much; it was
assumed that the ending of violence and war would compensate for
that as the deathrate fell. Nobody had bought the idea that
deathrates never really fall, because time ultimately kills everyone,
and people don’t have babies when they get to a certain age. And
the compulsory ‘dose’ had led to even further problems; passion
for war and destruction was not the only passion it had banked
down. Women began to lose touch with their cycles, and menopause
started occurring at an earlier age, sometimes as young as the early
thirties. The availability of artificial means had not helped,
because most people simply didn’t want it. Sense-offenders tended
to have more children, but since families of more than two were a good
way to identify sense-offenders, many people who were willing and glad
to be parents had gone to the Hall of Destruction, sometimes with their
children. And the invitation of immigrants was not really an
option; the few willing to make the long relocate from other
surviving societies such as Amazonia, Arabistan, or Koguryo either had
to go on the ‘dose’ themselves, or became sense-offenders, with the
usual results.
The end of Equilibrium came too late to halt the trend. The
average citizen at that time was already over thirty, and with the
revolution, many of them had more immediate agendas than starting
families for the sake of dear Libria. Young people were strongly
encouraged to marry and have large families; subsidies and free this
and that were promised, but you know how young people are, and
those who took up the deal found that, on the one hand, the goodies
didn’t always stretch as far as planned—especially when they were cut
due to deficit problems—and that, on the other, the amount of work
required in order to keep up with the taxes that financed the older
generations’ needs greatly reduced time available for family. The
average Librian was now about thirty-five, and citizens were retiring
in greater numbers every year. Students in school, therefore,
were carefully evaluated and channelled into predetermined career
tracks well before they graduated. Jakklyn, for example, had
known she was going to ‘grow up to be an office assistant’ since she
was twelve. She was in her mid-twenties, and already
twice-divorced. And that was the final problem, the one nobody
talked about. There were few, if any, people who even knew
anything about family life and how to manage it. She had nothing
to pass on. Her children, in their turn, would know no more about
parenting than so many laboratory mice. Keef Herzog here
certainly didn’t show it. But why, in this labour-starved
society, had he been unemployed for ten months? That, too, was
something to think about.
I read three or four more—retired citizens with past theobromine
problems, on routine reviews for pension benefit adjustments. There
were a lot of those these days. And a female citizen whose
profile suggested she’d had an illegal termination, meaning termination
of pregnancy, within the past month; that practice was highly
regulated by the birthrate-conscious authorities. The last file
belonged to a fifty-three-year-old female named Citizen … Nedra Madour.
The buzzer, as buzzers do, went off at that point. “Citizen
Slater, your ten-thirty is here,” said Jak’s voice.
“On the way,” I said, hit what I’d once heard called the ‘boss button,’
and went out to meet my new client.
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