There were scores of dogs, newly feral, that had been abandoned to the streets when people left Dayton. During the Short Times abandoned dogs had been a problem, too, but now the situation was worse, because most members of the Containment Squad were volunteers from the southern—the wealthier—suburbs, and a disproportionate number of those people had found a way out of town. Tuuro had heard that the Containment people now simply shot dogs in the street. As Tuuro ran now he cursed himself for not making the coffin stronger, for not burying it deeper, and he begged God again and again to let the boy’s body be intact. He was so worried about the dogs he never imagined police cars and a van outside the church. He didn’t notice the horde of people, some in uniform, in the garden.
Who is this? Why are they here? Tuuro thought when an arm stopped him. Then, even worse, he spotted the pastor. “Tuuro!” the pastor cried, lifting his hands in the air. “Do you know anything about this?
THE LAWYER’S NAME was Brandon English. He was the color of a peeled potato, stocky, probably fifty, wearing a rumpled shirt and pants it looked like he’d slept in. For Tuuro, who kept himself neat, the attorney’s disdain for his own appearance was puzzling. It might be alcohol, it might be a runaway wife, it might be so much power that looks didn’t matter.
“Mr. Tuuro,” the lawyer said. “Don’t tell me if they roughed you up.” He removed his perc from his pocket, set it on the table between them, then slumped over its tiny holographic screen. He did have power, Tuuro thought: those holo-screens were expensive. After some minutes he looked at Tuuro with an unvarnished weariness and said, “First off, you need to know something: this boy of yours is Nenonene’s grandson.”
Nay-no-nay-nay. The name was somehow familiar. Tuuro ran through his list of neighbors. No. Tuuro said, “Does the boy have a mother?”
“Of course he has a mother!” Mr. English closed his eyes; when he opened them he looked, if possible, even wearier. “Even in our crazy modern world, a child has a mother. But it’s Nenonene’s son that is the father. I don’t know who the mother is. Some woman. The wife of Nenonene’s son.”
Tuuro stared. The boy did have a mother.
“Nenonene!” English repeated. “The general. The African. The one who runs the Alliance from that hotel basement up in Cleveland.”
Tuuro tried to shift his mind from the mother to a famous grandfather, but it was an ungainly process, like an old machine slipping laboriously into gear. Of course Tuuro knew Nenonene! Everyone knew Nenonene. But as a name, a concept, not as a real person.
“My God,” Tuuro said after a moment. “Nenonene is the enemy. What was this boy doing in Dayton?”
English shook his head impatiently. “His parents live here. Nenonene’s son is an American citizen. He has a PhD from somewhere south. International finance or global economics, something like that. He teaches at Wright State. He didn’t keep his father’s name. The son’s name is Norris. Ken Norris.”
Tuuro nodded blankly, trying to take it in. Still, the boy had a mother. “And this little boy, what was his name?”
“Cubby Norris.” A very American name. Not a name you’d expect for Nenonene’s grandson. Maybe the mother had picked it.
“Does Cubby”—Tuuro paused on the name; you could say the boy had been hidden in a cubbyhole; how savage, to make a name into a place of death—“have brothers or sisters?”
“Not currently. The wife is pregnant. Very pregnant.” English hesitated. “I saw her as I came in. She’d just seen the body.”
“The boy was young.”
“Four and a half. He was tall.”
“How is the mother?”
“Devastated!” A look of incredulity; a quick glance around the room. “What do you think?”
“I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to tell her I cared.”
English’s voice turned cold. “How long had you cared?”
“Since I found him! I never knew him alive. I told the policeman everything, don’t you have … ?” And Tuuro waved at English’s holographic screen.
At this, English made the holo-screen disappear. He sat for a moment, considering Tuuro, the sides of his cheeks moving as if he were chewing at their insides. “Let me ask you this straight out: Are you a homosexual?”
“Oh no,” Tuuro smiled. “Never.”
“Why are you smiling?”
Tuuro straightened his face. “It’s ridiculous. It’s something I never considered.”
“You speak well. How far did you go in school?”
“I finished my first year at Sinclair.” The local community college.
“Why didn’t you go on?”
Tuuro shrugged helplessly. “Money.”
“Reasonable. Are you political?”
“Political?” Tuuro laughed awkwardly. “I’ve never voted. I know it’s a duty, but …”
“You didn’t know about the boy’s connection to Nenonene?”
“How could I know? I come across this, this”—Tuuro saw again the boy’s tucked head—“tragedy, this small boy dead in my church, and I picked him up and …” “My” church, he’d said: not something he would say in front of the pastor.
“I’m your lawyer,” English interrupted. “Don’t tell me things I shouldn’t know.” He leaned into the table. “Now,” he said, “it would be absurd to think you hurt this boy to send a message to Nenonene, am I correct?”
Tuuro stared.
“Or to his son. You might be sending a message to his son. But it would be absurd to think that. It was a simple crime of passion, right?”
“A crime? I never hurt this boy. I came upon him, I saw the …”
“You didn’t do it.”
“He was a boy! A little child.”
“No conspiracy. Absolutely no political motive.”
“I went home to get him a blanket, I took a hat for him.”
A light had appeared in English’s eye; he sat up a straighter. “This wasn’t a molest-y thing.”
“It was like he was me!”
“You didn’t do it,” English repeated, wonderment in his voice. “Well, the genetics will take care of that.”
“It’s terrible to find the body of a child,” Tuuro said. “I have a child.”
“Okay, okay, I believe you.” English sighed. His shoulders sank, the spark that had seized him suddenly extinguished. “But damn, you managed to do right by the wrong body.”
lila wakes up (1)
SEYMOUR, LILA’S ASSISTANT, appeared in her office. “There’s a Federal wants to talk to you.”
“You mean State.” The State people were pests. The loss of Cleveland had thrown them into a tizzy. By June 2047, the cavernous lakefront edifice that had been built as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a tracking station receiving information from Canada and Alliance ships in the Atlantic. The BP tower was a pile of rubble called Strike One, the Federal Building was the Centro de Gobierno (the Alliance had let the South American forces name this one), and the former Terminal Tower was a military headquarters, with General Nenonene’s quarters taking