Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(72)
A flicker of something in her manner caught my attention. “Why?” I asked.
“You said he’s mixed, right? Racially, I mean.”
“His grandmother is Lani,” I said, “though you might not know that to look at him. Does it make a difference?”
“To the Glorious Third? I’d say so.”
I gave her a quizzical look.
She munched on her pasty for a moment, then shrugged. “Every Feldesland regiment was racially integrated within forty years of the Settlement War.”
“So?”
“Not the Glorious Third,” she said. “It took them another one hundred and fifty, and when they did, it was through the creation of a colored company—Lani and Mahweni—that was kept separate from the rest of the regiment. Effectively, they were a separate unit created to appease the tribal council and the likes of your boss man’s father.”
“Willinghouse?”
“Willinghouse senior, yes. Led the charge to break up the region’s last whites-only regiment after reports of racially motivated beatings and imprisonments during citywide police actions.”
There it was again, that sense of the girl accessing some unthinking storage region of her brain. But it was different this time. Her voice was edged with bitterness.
“This was all in the papers?” I said.
She shook her head. “Bits of it, cleaned and polished for polite society reading, perhaps, but the guts of it, no.”
“So how do you—?”
“My uncle was one of the first enlisted into the colored unit,” she said, framing the word in a way both snide and a little sad. “Thought he was doing his part for Bar-Selehm’s race relations.”
“And?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “Equal parts discretion, pride, and fear, I’d say. But I’ll tell you this: they made his life a misery. I don’t know the details. I think my mum knew more, but she wouldn’t say anything.”
“Could I talk to him?” I asked.
“You got some special Lani way of crossing over the River of Souls for a cup of chai and a chat?” she asked.
“He’s dead?”
“Two years now,” she said. “Took a head wound during—wait for it—peacekeeping operations during a Mahweni protest over food prices. One of his own people threw a paving stone at him. Didn’t seem bad at the time. Had it all bandaged up, and he was walking around. Making jokes about it. Two days later, he collapsed. Never regained consciousness.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“To the stars we are as flies, and they do not note our fall,” she intoned, one of the bleaker Mahweni phrases. She smiled mirthlessly and turned to watch a vervet monkey squabbling with the ibis. “Well,” she concluded, “this was cheerful.”
I grinned. “Has anyone ever written about it?” I asked.
“Like a newspaper piece?” she asked. “No. Some things are still too hot to touch.”
“For some people, perhaps,” I said. “Maybe one day, you could do it.”
“When I’m living off my column inches instead of how many papers I can flog?” she said, unable to keep the grin out of her face.
“Why not?”
“Well, the Bar-Selehm Standard isn’t the Glorious Third,” said Sarah, “but you won’t find many of my color—or yours, for that matter—turning in stories to delight and inform our ever-expanding readership. One day, perhaps, if we survive whatever the Grappoli have in store for us.”
“You think there might be war?”
“Wars have been fought over less,” she said. “I think the disappearance of the Beacon is unlike any other kind of theft we’ve ever experienced. It’s like our heart. And it’s spectacularly valuable, which makes things dangerous. Whenever you have an international dispute over something valuable, things get dangerous. But in this case, you’ve also got a potential war over a commodity that most of the people who will do the actual fighting could never afford.”
People like her father, she meant, and all the other Mahweni who would be conscripted to protect the Crommerty Street merchants with their NO COLOREDS signs.
“Fight for Bar-Selehm? Sure,” she said. “For liberty, for principle. But for luxorite and those who trade it? I think we’d tear ourselves to pieces long before a shot was fired at the Grappoli.”
I stared at her, registering for the first time the depths of our divisions and the peril Willinghouse had glimpsed on the horizon, barreling toward us like a rogue bull elephant.
“I suggest you find that Beacon,” she said. “And fast.”
“I think I know where it is,” I said, “but I don’t know who paid to get it. What if it really is the Grappoli?”
“Then run,” she said grimly. “And don’t stop till you reach people who have never heard of luxorite or Bar-Selehm.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Now, how do I get into the library’s storage facilities?”
“That,” she said, getting to her feet and brushing crumbs from her dress so that one of the nearby ibis came strutting over, “is your department. Thanks for the pasty.”
*
MNENGA SMILED WHEN HE saw me climbing up through the cemetery. He wanted to talk, and brandished the little milk bottles with the rubber teats as if they were a special prize I had won. He started telling me about a dream he had had, in which I was standing down by the river like some water spirit risen from the depths—