conspiracy.”
Erno folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t know where he is. There is no conspiracy.”
“Do we have to show you images of you and him together during the Oxygen Warehouse riot?”
“I never saw him before that, or since. We were just hiding in the back room.
“You had nothing to do with the smartpaint explosion?”
“No.”
The tall woman, who still had not spoken, looked worried. The blond interrogator leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table. “Your DNA was found at the access portal where the device was set.”
Erno squirmed. He imagined a sequence of unstable nucleotide triplets multiplying in the woman’s cells. “He asked me to help him. I had no idea what it was.”
“No idea. So it could have been a bomb big enough to blow a hole in the dome. Yet you told no one about it.”
“I knew he wasn’t going to kill anyone. I could tell.”
The interrogator leaned back. “I hope you will excuse the rest of us if we question your judgment.”
“Believe me, I would never do anything to hurt a cousin. Ask my mother.”
The tall woman finally spoke. “We have. She does say that. But you have to help us out, Erno. I’m sure you can understand how upset all this has made the polity.”
“Forget it, Kim,” the other said. “Erno here’s not going to betray his lover.”
“Tyler’s not my lover,” Erno said.
The blond interrogator smirked. “Right.”
The tall one said, “There’s nothing wrong with you being lovers, Erno.”
“Then why did this one bring it up?”
“No special reason,” said the blond. “I’m just saying you wouldn’t betray him.”
“Well, we’re not lovers.”
“Too bad,” the blond muttered.
“You need to help us, Erno,” the tall one said. “Otherwise, even if we let you go, you’re going to be at risk of violence from other cousins.”
“Only if you tell everyone about me.”
“So we should just let you go, and not inconvenience you by telling others the truth about you,” said the blond.
“What truth? You don’t know me.”
She came out of her chair, leaning forward on her clenched fists. Her face was flushed. “Don’t know you? I know all about you.”
“Mona, calm down,” the other woman said.
“Calm down? Earth history is full of this! Men sublimate their sexual attraction in claims of brotherhood-with the accompanying military fetishism, penis comparing, suicidal conquer-or-die movements. Durden is heading for one of those classic orgasmic armageddons: Masada, Hitler in the bunker, David Koresh, September 11, the California massacre.”
The tall one grabbed her shoulder and tried to pull her back. “Mona.”
Mona threw off the restraining hand, and pushed her face up close to Erno’s. “If we let this little shit go, I guarantee you he’ll be involved in some transcendent destructive act-suicidally brave, suicidally cowardly-aimed at all of us. The signs are all over him.” Spittle flew in Erno’s face.
“You’re crazy,” Erno said. “If I wanted to fuck him, I would just fuck him.”
The tall one tried again. “Come away, officer.”
Mona grabbed Erno by the neck. “Where is he!”
Come away, now!” The tall cop yanked the small woman away, and she fell back. She glared at Erno. The other, tugging her by the arm, pulled her out of the room.
Erno tried to catch his breath. He wiped his sleeve across his sweating face. He sat there alone for a long time, touching the raw skin where she had gripped his neck. Then the door opened and his mother came in.
“Mom!”
She carried some things in her hands, put them on the table. It was the contents of his pockets, including his notebook. “Get up.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just shut up and come with me. We’re letting you go.”
Erno stumbled from the chair. “That officer is crazy.”
“Never mind her. I’m not sure she isn’t right. It’s up to you to prove she isn’t.”
She hustled him out of the office and into the hall. In seconds Erno found himself, dizzy, in the plaza outside the headquarters. “You are not out of trouble. Go home, and stay there,” his mother said, and hurried back inside.
Passersby in North Six watched him as he straightened his clothes. He went to sit on the bench beneath the acacia trees at the lava tube’s center. He caught his breath.
Erno wondered if the cop would follow through with her threat to tell about his helping with the explosion. He felt newly vulnerable. But it was not just vulnerability he felt. He had never seen a woman lose it as clearly as the interrogator had. He had gotten to her in a way he had never gotten to a matron in his life. She was actually scared of him!
Now what? He put his hand in his pocket, and felt the notebook.
He pulled it out. He switched it on. The GROSS file was still there, and so was the address he’d written earlier.
A Dream
Erno was ten when his youngest sister Celeste was born. After the birth, his mother fell into a severe depression. She snapped at Erno, fought with Aunt Sophie, and complained about one of the husbands until he moved out. Erno’s way of coping was to disappear; his cousin Aphra coped by misbehaving.
One day Erno came back from school to find a fire in the middle of the kitchen floor, a flurry of safetybots stifling it with foam, his mother screaming, and Aphra-who had apparently started the fire-shouting back at her. Skidding on the foam, Erno stepped between the two of them, put his hands on Aphra’s chest, and made her go to her room.
The whole time, his mother never stopped shouting. Erno was angrier at her than at Aphra. She was supposed to be the responsible one. When he returned from quieting Aphra, his mother ran off to her room and slammed the door. Erno cleaned the kitchen and waited for Aunt Sophie to come home.
The night of the fire he had a dream. He was alone in the kitchen, and then a man was there. The man drew him aside. Erno was unable to make out his face. “I am your father,” the man said. “Let me show you something.” He made Erno sit down and called up an image on the table. It was Erno’s mother as a little girl. She sat, cross- legged, hunched over some blocks, her face screwed up in troubled introspection. “That’s her second phase of work expression,” Erno’s father said.
With a shock, Erno recognized the expression on the little girl’s face as one he had seen his mother make as she concentrated.
“She hates this photo,” Erno’s father said, as if to persuade Erno not to judge her: she still contained that innocence, that desire to struggle against a problem she could not solve. But Erno was mad. As he resisted, the father pressed on, and began to lose it too. He ended up screaming at Erno, “You can’t take it? I’ll make you see! I’ll make you see!”
Erno put his hands over his ears. The faceless man’s voice was twisted with rage. Eventually he stopped shouting. “There you go, there you go,” he said quietly, stroking Erno’s hair, “you’re just the same.”
On his way to the East Five tube, Erno considered the officer’s rant. Maybe Tyler did want to sleep with him. So what? The officer was some kind of homophobe and ought to be relieved. Raving about violence while locking him up in a room. And then trying to choke him. Yes, he had the GROSS file in his pocket, yes he had hit Alicia-but he was no terrorist. The accusation was just a way for the cop to ignore men’s legitimate grievances.
