Here, to help introduce you to The Brangus Rebellion and some of its characters, please find Chapters 2 and 3 of the book. These immediately follow the Prologue (alias Chapter 1), which occupies an earlier post on this blog.
These chapters have been edited to obscure strong language.
The Mayor
Lani hunched in the main refectory of Township EEE and muttered a curse. Lately, her attention acted like a scared rabbit, dashing from one bad refuge to another. With a sigh, she surveyed the room, then dragged her eyes back to the screen of her computer deck, jammed now with notes for her course at the Uni. It was near the end of serving hours for the refectory’s second seating, and latecomers hurried in to catch a meal before the kitchen closed. Already a group was rearranging seats down near the stage for a meeting, and card games had started in another corner. Poirot, the township’s bloodhound mascot, slouched around the food pickup line, hoping for a handout, or at least for dropped crumbs.
The room had terraces and a stage so that it could be used for performances. Displayed above stage center was the township’s full name, in relief, in large golden letters:
“Equality Environment Evidence.”
The sign reminded anyone who needed reminding that the function of the township (whose name was usually abbreviated “twp EEE,” and pronounced “toop Triple-E”) was to protect and defend these fundamental pillars of the Union: Eapy Fox’s “three E’s.” A dozen years earlier, when she was adopted into the twp, Lani had found the words inspiring. Lately, they only made her feel weary and depressed. Fine, the twp had special status as a kind of highbrow national police force. But at bottom, it was just a bunch of cops.
On the rare occasions when the mayor called for a meeting of the whole twp, the entire six-hundred-plus membership—all of its twple— would crowd into this space. Indeed, while Lani watched from her seat in the back corner, the mayor herself bustled in with a couple of aides, probably on a break from some long-running meeting.
Half a dozen kids, freshly released from the discipline of table manners, played a furiously fast game of tag up and down the aisles. This griped Lani for reasons she couldn’t have explained, so she buried herself further behind the screen of her deck and tried to concentrate on schoolwork. She had picked an empty corner of the refectory for her hangout. For classwork, the lack of near neighbors suited her, and it saved other twple the trouble of actively avoiding her.
It was a surprise, then, when the mayor slid her tray onto the table next to Lani, sat down, and gave her a cheery smile. “Hello, Lani. How’ve you been?”
Lani looked at her with suspicion, concealed as best she could. She had no recent reason to dislike the mayor, but they had not spoken since Lani’s hearing a year and a half ago. For her to turn up out of the blue had a sour smell to it.
“Can’t complain, luv. Super, really,” she replied with her own perkiest smile. She had to wince at herself. She was overdoing the bonhomie, she knew, looking like a marketer and a fool.
“Good, good.” The mayor subsided and let the silence linger. She poked at her bowl, which was full of one of the twp kitchen’s signature dishes—big chunks of various root vegetables swimming in a spicy fish broth. “Twp soup,” she said.
Lani cringed. If the mayor was forced to haul out rhyming puns for three-year-olds right at the start, this conversation could turn very bad indeed.
After a moment, the mayor tried again. “Classwork?” she offered, craning to get a look at Lani’s screen. “Math? How’s it going?”
“Hmph. Tolerable, I guess.” Actually, Lani was having quite a good time with second-year calculus. She had always liked math, though she was not unusually good at it. It was reassuringly definite, with right and wrong answers and a feeling of stability that came from deep foundations. More than that, going to class meant getting out of the twp campus, which was fine with her. That made math class the high point of many days. But she was not dim enough to say such a thing to the mayor.
The mayor wasn’t saying much either. She just sat there looking matronly and worrying a tough crust of bread, but her eyes were on Lani with an attention that never let up. The story was that she had been a tough cop in her day. Maybe every conversation was an interrogation to her. But then she surprised Lani with a quick girlish grin.
“How is it, being a movie star?” she asked.
Lani snorted. “Luv,” she said, “if you mean The Hendrikson Raid, you’re confused. I hear there’s a kid in it who plays a character with my name and does some things that I did back then. And also lots of things I didn’t. That makes her the movie star, not me. Potwee Evans, her name is. From twp Inuit-ion.”
“You hear?” the mayor asked. “It’s been featured on the Daily Drop for weeks, and everybody’s talking about it. But you haven’t even watched it?”
“Nope, and not going to. I didn’t like that story when it was happening. I don’t like dwelling on it now. Not my idea of a good time.”
The mayor sat and considered this as if trying to decide if her wrist had been slapped. For her part, Lani assumed the mayor was working around to something, and she was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be pleasant. In principle, Lani could stall and wait her out; there must be someplace else the mayor needed to be. But Lani had never been good at the waiting game.
“Something on your mind, luv?” she asked at last.
“Well, yes, dear, actually there is. How much longer does your probation have to run?”
Lani had been suspicious. Now she was angry. “Six months. Which you know perfectly well. You recommended the sentence.”
“Yes. Too bad how all of that worked out. Everybody knows it wasn’t entirely your fault, dear. Bad luck, really. But you know…”
“Of course. The Council can’t let twps slide when one of their own kills some outsider for no good reason. Especially not Triple-E. Undermines the twp’s reputation and all. Somebody’s got to pay.” She slapped her deck shut in hopes of making a quick escape. But the mayor wasn’t done.
“Dear, I don’t think you quite understand how seriously that business was taken,” she said. “At the highest levels, too. We did the best we could for you. You’re lucky you didn’t get cashiered. But we had a good advocate.”
“So here I am for two years, sitting at a desk counting duck feathers.”
“Yes, Lani. Here you are. I know it’s the shits, and I don’t mind that you’re resentful. But remember that at the end of your probation, you come up for review. The panel won’t necessarily let you back on the streets just because you’ve done your time. You’re a smart kid, Lani. Smart and tough, and you can handle yourself. We need you. But I’m worried. I don’t like the stories I’ve been hearing.”
“What stories?”
The mayor managed to look unhappy. “You know. Burning the candle at both ends—and the middle as well. Spending all your free time partying. And outside the twp to boot. Drinking too much. Never a good sign, that.”
“People are mad because I like to party?”
“Of course not, dear. But people say you’re sleeping around. Easier to count the folks you haven’t boffed than the ones you have.”
“‘People’ say, huh? Who are these ‘people’? Anyway, I’m twenty-four years old. I can manage my own ****ing love life, thank you.”
“The point, Lani, is that such behavior means you don’t respect yourself. And if you don’t respect yourself, nobody else will. Certainly not the panel who will hear your case in six months’ time.”
“Thanks, luv. Wizard advice. Anything else? Ways I can improve? Live up to expectations?”
“I hear you’ve been missing therapy sessions. You could start again.”
“That ****!” Lani snarled. “I knew that sanctimonious turd was ratting me out all this time!”
The mayor seemed genuinely shocked. “He would never! That’s really not done. Honestly, Lani. I’m the head of a twp full of the best cops in the world. You think I don’t have other sources of information? You get serious about things. Straighten up. Keep your nose clean. For six lousy months. Then you can carouse all you want. In the meantime, don’t do anything stupid.”
She drilled Lani with a stare from under her eyebrows. “I think we’re done here.”
“Damn straight,” Lani said, snatched up her deck, and stalked out.
Day of the Dude
Like many urban twps, EEE spread its people across a number of rented apartment buildings and other residences, loosely concentrated in the neighborhood of the refectories and the other main twp facilities. Some of these buildings were shared with other twps, and some were not, but the EEE twple tried to keep themselves segregated by floors at least. Because of its uncommon emphasis on physical conditioning, twp EEE had chosen a location some distance from the center of Trenton to give it ready access to parkland and athletic facilities. These were nominally shared with other citizens, but in practice, the semi-military nature and the grim fixity of the EEE twple’s training tended to intimidate and discourage other users. The twp leadership made a public display of downplaying this kind of distance between themselves and regular folks, but in truth, they cultivated it.
Lani’s room was a couple of blocks from the refectory, up four flights of stairs. A good location: she stayed in shape, and the less fit riff-raff stayed away. She walked in, tossed her deck on the bed, picked her small deck off the desk and stuck it in her pocket, and walked out. After a quick stop in the washroom down the hall to sluice water on her face, she was off.
Three minutes later, she pounded on her friend Evar’s door, a few buildings away. “Open up, Eve!” she shouted. “I need you!”
Presently the door opened. Lani took one look, shrieked, and jumped backward with arms flung wide. “Crap!” she gulped gleefully. “What have you done?”
“Come on in,” Evar whispered, pantomiming a survey of the dorm hallway. “Nobody else knows.”
She closed the door behind Lani and did a slow pirouette, her hands over her head. “It’s a costume,” she said.
“No lie,” Lani agreed. It was a scarlet sheath with swirls of orange, topped with a headpiece that had cheekbones like a centurion’s helmet and puffy feathers—red, yellow, and orange—on top. The thing was cut away in back, nearly to the place where a long, furry tail, reaching almost to the floor, sprang from the base of Evar’s spine.
“Need to let out the seams a little. The dancer who wore this was a stick. Also paint on the face, hands, and shoes. I think a yellow background, with black swoops back from the eyes and blood-red lipstick. Will it work?”
“Great God, it’s shocking. Of course it’ll work. Nobody will wear Union issue ever again.”
Lani herself was in Union issue, as almost everybody was, almost all the time. Provided for free, everywhere, the Union white cotton shirt and street-dirt-gray pants had no aesthetic appeal, but their tent-like fit was practical in the hot climate, and their interchangeable absence of style was a point of pride among the militantly possession-averse Unionites. When luvs wanted to dress up, they would dye their hair or wear a fancy belt or a colored scarf. By this standard, Evar’s dress hailed from many light-years away.
“Where’d you get it?” Lani asked.
“That dance studio on Leghorn. Cast off. Something to do with the new artistic director.”
“What? Is the dancer’s twp reorganizing again?”
“Wouldn’t know. I only root in their trash.”
“Great. So what’s it for?”
Evar twisted around and posed, then posed again, stretching to gauge the effect as best she could in her little doorway mirror. She didn’t like the picture, so she spun over to her desk and set her server deck’s camera and the big monitor to self-view.
Evar was the deputy chief communications guru for twp EEE. Three years back, she had authored a popular text on communications. This got her noticed and, ultimately, recruited from her twp at a Canadian university to join the EEE cops. It had worked out well for everybody but her, as she fought through endless battles with her much older, underqualified boss. Her oversized place was crammed with routers and other hardware, including a giant screen that would have been declared unnecessary and excessive if she had any other job. The bright, high-res view of her own flouncing pleased her.
“Halween,” she said at last. “I’m going to a Halween party.” She struck another pose. “Say, the beau’s gonna like this.”
Evar’s partner, whom nobody at EEE had ever seen, lived someplace far to the north. Their joint life was conducted through the mail, and in person during week-long vacations, three or four times a year. Presumably, this lifestyle had influenced the choice of topic for her current book, which had the working title, Action at a Distance: Modern Love by Rail and Post.
Lani asked, “What’s Halween?”
“Old pagan holiday. Honors the dead or something. Got appropriated by the Christians and then by the corporate consumptionists years before the Collapse. People spent fortunes on costumes.”
“Hmph. We don’t have fortunes these days. Good thing we have friends. Speaking of which, I could use one.” Lani’s tone was pleading.
Evar stopped her preening to pay attention. “Something wrong, kid?” she asked.
“Nothing much. Just got reamed by the mayor herself, is all.”
“Oof. She can peel your paint for you. I know. I’ve spent too much time in her office explaining myself. What did you do to rile Her Honor?”
“Never mind. Point is, I gotta get out of here, right now. Going downtown, place I’ve heard of. Can you come with me? Back me up? Drag me out if I need dragging?”
Evar hesitated for a long time. “Aw, ****, Lani, I can’t,” she said at last. “Got work to do. And seams to rip. Any other night. Except tomorrow; that’s the party. Hell, I’m so, so sorry. Forgive me?”
Lani stood up straighter and gave herself a little shake. “Sure, Eve. I’ll manage. It’d be better with you, is all.”
“Okay, Lani. Drink before you go?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Evar produced two glasses and a bottle of vodka. Put a gurgle worth in each glass. Lani raised hers in Evar’s direction, drained it, put it down. “Thanks,” she said, reaching for the door. “Gotta go.”
“Okay. Have fun. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Why,” asked Lani, “do people keep telling me that?”