She stares at him for a few seconds, her mouth ajar. “I hate you!” she finally says. “You don’t have the right to leave us!”
She begins to weep sourly and runs away.
Edda is in her room, sitting on the desk by the window, tending the potted cactus with a cotton gauze. No blooms. Her thoughts flow unimpeded to Ximena, as she inspects the hard, spiny surface of the plant. She’ll ask Isabella for some nitrates, maybe that would help. Dad made a good catch when he proposed her for a dowry bond, she admits. The Zegers are a good family.
Edda’s attention is caught by Willem passing by on the sidewalk with a baby stroll chair. She can barely see Hans’s light-brown hair from the distance. She follows them with her eyes until they move out of sight.
Edda sighs. Why can’t Dad see how important he is to them? She is not ready to manage the family alone. Okay, yes, a poor excuse. She can sure as Dem manage anything on her own. And she’s not alone. Bram might be her little brother, but he can hold his own as well as anyone.
Edda sighs again, puts the gauze in the desk drawer, and moves the pot into the daylight. She smiles sadly to herself. What a pitiful thing she has become. So psychologically dependent on her father. Yes, so what? Friends and lovers come and go, come and go, but fathers… they only go, don’t they? She scoffs and tries to repress the pinch of self-pity behind her eyes.
Fathers—and mothers—they only go.
She remembers Mom, so solid, so powerful, so warm. Then she remembers her look that day, the last time she saw her. It’s just a flash, more a sensation than an image, but it is enough to... Ximena’s own stomach seems to contract at the sudden pain. Goah, it has been two years already, and is still so vivid, so… No, Edda shakes her head, trying to dispel the memory. She can’t afford to lose herself in that rabbit hole again.
Dad is so naive. For her he plays the role of the brave Elder—family first and all that—but he is not as strong as he thinks, and surely not as much as her mother was. Goah’s Mercy, he even admitted to having doubts. Mom never showed any doubts, and yet…
The familiar bite of fear crawls up her spine. And this time it’s not her usual fear of being left alone and parentless. This time she’s terrified that Dad will not make it. At the end, it is only dignity that you take to aws Embrace, and Edda fears that Dad will not be strong enough. Mom wasn’t.
Edda takes a deep breath and blinks her eyes clear of threatening tears. Dad needs to see that his life is too valuable to sacrifice in the altar of aws Head’s power game. No regime is worth his life. She’ll make him see how corrupt they really are. She’ll make everybody see. Then, perhaps, he’ll reconsider. Yeah, but it has to be something big. No, not big. Huge. Something that resonates way beyond Lunteren, beyond the whole fucking Geldershire. Something that sows doubt—and resentment. Edda knows her history. Empires have fallen for less than doubt and resentment.
Six
Sex and Collapse
“Okay, wakey, wakey, people.” Miyagi chuckles at the overused permascape joke. “Q&A time! I want to hear your thoughts, especially,” he waves a finger across the section of the amphitheater where Ximena’s fellow GIA students sit, “from our new friends from the New World—you people are being way too shy. Shoot!”
A few hands raise, but none of them from GIA students. Miyagi ignores them and keeps his smile locked at the sea of white-and-blue robes. Finally, a brave hand rises slowly.
“Ah great, er, Cody.” Ximena knows Cody O’Higgin well. He’s in one of her classes. Smart guy. Ambitious. And always a kind soul. “Please, go ahead.”
Cody stands. “Thank you, Professor. Sorry if the question is a bit, er, superficial, but I was wondering how old Edda van Dolah and Aline Speese were in the sections we just watched?”
“Aha, good question, Cody. People, don’t be shy about your questions, all right? There are no boring questions, nor stupid questions. It is the wildest thoughts that usually start the most fascinating discussions. Now to your question. They were both sixteen. But don’t be fooled by their youth. A century ago, when a person reached your age,” he drives a finger across his audience, most in their upper twenties, “they would have accomplished a basic education, learned and perfected their family profession, ordered two babies at aws Womb, led a family as an elder, and died.”
He paces the stage in silence to let that sink in. Ximena is twenty-seven herself. She would have been killed already if she were born four generations ago. Goah, how did they manage? There was no time to pursue any meaningful life project. She wonders… Perhaps they were indeed happy while it lasted? Free of the worries of career and uncertainty?
“A person entered adulthood at ten,” Miyagi continues, “as they reached sexual maturity. Fun fact: did you know that at the end of the golden age, right before the first collapse of the 2080s, humans matured at least two or three years later than we do now? Yes, an unexpected side-effect of the Dem-Pandemic of the twenty-second century was the natural selection of humans with ever earlier sexual maturity. Can anybody guess why?”
Ximena scoffs. It’s obvious. But nobody raises a hand.
“Go ahead, Ximena,” Mark says. “Answer that.”
Ximena shakes her head, blushing—oh she hates her compulsive blushing, even in dreams she cannot control it.
Mark grabs her hand and raises it shamelessly. “Here, Professor,” he yells.
“Ah, please…” He points his finger at Ximena and reads the name that pops up over her head. “Oh Epullan, so happy to have you in this seminar. Loved your take on raw power in that Post-Columbian paper you published. People, this is
