Remember to circulate this message as widely as you can.
Remember that the secret government is in more places than you know. Know that we are always working against the enemy, and on your behalf.
Remember that our victory is assured.
Sula glanced once more over the text. She bit her lip as she read through some of her more preposterous declarations—“the secret government is in more places than you know”—and she wondered how many lives her words would claim.
Her own misrepresentations aside, she had far less confidence in the legitimate government than her message alleged. So far they had bungled everything, and any success the government could claim was the result of a few individuals lucky enough to be in the right place, and talented enough to be able to act effectively against the enemy. And—come to think of it—those individuals were so few that she knew most of them personally.
Her newsletter was intended to encourage citizens to act against the Naxids, though she suspected that few would. And of these, many would fail, and be arrested or killed. Most of the rest would probably be totally ineffective.
Even so, she thought she had little choice. The secret government and almost all its military had been tortured to death. Her task, assigned by the government in which she had little faith, was to mobilize opposition to the Naxids. She couldn’t mobilize soldiers, and so civilians would have to do.
If they died, they died.Human warmth not my specialty.
Sula turned to Spence, who was looking at the text from over her shoulder. “Can you think of anything we’ve missed?”
Spence shook her head. “I think it’s marvelous. It’s everything we could think of.”
“The newsletter still needs a name.”
Macnamara, who was in the kitchen pouring out bottles of iarogüt into the sink, called out, “Our last bulletin wasThe Loyalist. ”
“That title’s bad luck,” Sula said.
“‘The Staunch,’” Spence offered. “‘The Anti-Naxid.’ ‘The Faithful.’”
Macnamara, carrying three reeking bottles in a sack, passed through the room on his way to the front door. “You could just call it ‘What We Owe,’” he said. He tossed a sheet over the bomb to hide it from anyone in the corridor, then opened the front door and placed the empties in the hall for pickup.
Sula’s plan for discouraging the neighbors’ questions was to give them the answer to a question they hadn’t asked: the bottles placed outside the apartment every day marked them as alcoholics unworthy of further curiosity.
“‘The Fighter,’” she said. “‘The Clarion.’”
“‘The Tocsin,’” said Spence.
“That’s good,” Sula said. The last time the population of Zanshaa had heard the sound of the tocsin was when the accelerator ring had been destroyed.
Macnamara closed the door and sat with crossed legs in front of the disassembled bomb that sat on the small table in front of the sofa.
“‘The Bomb,’” he said.
The Saboteur,Sula thought. “‘The Anarchist,’” she said, and laughed. “Why not? That’s what they callus. ”
She looked at the text again, her eyes skimming words in search of inspiration. “Ah,” she said. “Hah.”
At the top of the text she called for a larger font, and added the single word“Resistance.”
The first copy ofResistance went to Spence, just to see if Sula’s program still worked, and the copy arrived on Spence’s hand comm a half second after Sula touched the icon marked “Send.”
The next ten thousand copies were sent to citizens chosen randomly, by a sorting program Sula had written, from among those who had done business with the Records Office within the last three years. The program rejected the recipient if he lived outside of the Zanshaa metropolitan area or if his species was indicated as Naxid.
Sula sentResistance in mid-afternoon, at the peak of Records Office activity, on the assumption that a slight delay on the broadcast node would less likely to be noticed than if she sent in the dead of night. The entire broadcast took less than twenty-five seconds.
It had occurred to her, as she prepared her message, that if her program removed the code that identified the Records Office broadcast node as the point of origin, she could as easily substitute another code. She’d looked through Rashtag’s correspondence and found a note from a colleague at the Hotel Spartex, a building in the Lower Town, near the funicular, that had been requisitioned by the Naxids to house their constabulary. The code for the hotel’s node was easy to pinch and insert into all ten thousand copies ofResistance as the newsletter’s point of origin.
She smiled as she thought of the Naxid authorities turning the Hotel Spartex upside down in search of the minion of the secret government. Especially as every possible suspect was a Naxid.
Sula rewarded herself with a cup of tea while she monitored Rashtag’s incoming messages. Nothing alerted him to misuse of the broadcast node, and she began to feel a certain impatience. After all her hard work, the actual experience of sendingResistance had been anticlimactic. She wanted the enemy to panicnow.
Ten thousand copies, she mused, wouldn’t go far among Zanshaa’s three and a half million population, not to mention the further three million in the metropolitan area. Perhaps another ten thousand were in order.
She sent fifty thousand copies before her nerve finally gave out. There were no alarms flashing in the Records Office, but she had begun to feel exposed, and she decided that the experiment had run enough risks for the day.
She shut down her desk computer and rose. Spence was working on assembling the bomb with Macnamara’s help.
Sula walked across the room and leaned out the window with her hands braced on the sill. The street swarmed below her, and the air was scented with the aroma of cilantro, garlic, and hot pavement. Her muscles tingled with the release of tension. She searched the crowd carefully, but nobody seemed to be reading their displays. She wanted to demand of the crowds below,Did I just change the world or not?
She turned to the rest of her team. “I declare a holiday,” she said.
Spence and Macnamara stared at her. “Are you sure?” Spence asked, in a tone that meantAre you sure you’re feeling all right?
Sula had never showed an interest in holidays before.
“Yes. Absolutely.” Sula shut the window and moved the spider plant to the right-hand side of the windowsill, the position that meantNo one’s here, approach with caution. “Clean up your homework, get on the streets, have some fun.” She reached in an inner pocket and handed them each a few zeniths. “Call it a reconnaissance. I want you to take the pulse of the city.”
Spence seemed dubious. “Can I leave as well? Because—”
“You walk well enough until you get tired. So see that you don’t get tired—take cabs everywhere.”
Spence gave a yelp of joy and leaped to her feet. Bomb components vanished into hidden compartments that Macnamara had built into the furniture, and everyone changed into clothing more suitable to a night on the town. At the door to the apartment, they separated like the flying fragments of one of their own explosive devices.
They had been in the same small room far too long.
Sula went toward the entertainment district along the old canals below the High City. She visited a series of clubs and cafés, sitting at the bar where she could encounter people, or at a table where she could overhear others. A number of men wanted to buy her drinks. She sipped mineral water, let them talk, and tried to steer the conversation toward the Naxids.
All showed prudent caution about the topic—one never knew who might be listening—but alcohol eventually loosened their tongues. Several had new Naxid supervisors, but said it was too early to know how that would change things. One man had been demoted, his place in the Transportation Ministry taken by a Naxid: he was on his sixth or seventh drink and in the midst of a deep melancholy. Most were eventually willing to admit they were furious that the Naxids had taken hostages.
“But what can we do?” one said. “We’ve got to cooperate. The whole planet is hostage now.”
None seemed to have encountered the first issue ofResistance, let alone absorbed the wisdom Sula had so hopefully packed into it. By now she herself was depressed, and her steps brought her to a derivoo club, where she could be comforted by the existence of folk with worse problems than hers.
The derivoo singer, face and hands whitened, stood straight beneath her spotlight and sang songs of sorrow. Betrayal, shattered hearts, death, violence, accident, suicide, horror—the derivoo’s palate was cast entirely in dark colors. The point was not so much that these griefs existed as that the derivoo was still able to sing about them. Oppressed by every imaginable catastrophe, weighted down by every fearful memory, the derivoo still stood straight and broadcast a message of defiance to the universe.I am beaten, I am bloody, but still I stand…