Liberty's Heirs

Chapter 7

"You can't go, Blion!"  his mother cried as she clasped onto his arm.  "We'll find another way."

"What other way?" he snapped back.  "I tried all your friends.  I tried every Master in Tataviam.  Even the ones with weird jobs.  Choreography!  Can you imagine?"  Despite Blion's begging, the Masters had all turned him down.  Almost as if they had been intimidated into it.

"I know you did, son," his father replied sadly.

"Have you forgotten?  I'm not your son!" Blion replied venomously.

"We raised you from infancy," his mother scolded, her face red with tears, "if wiping your poopy bottom isn't motherhood, I don't know what is."

"Didn't the robot do most of the wiping?" Blion said only half joking.  He saw his mother was truly hurt. "I'm sorry.  I love both of you very much."  He hugged her.

"Please don't go, Blion" his father pleaded.  "There's got to be something else we can do."

"There isn't."  Blion said matter of factly.  "I've tried everyone else three times and now I am going to find Mac Spencer."

"He's a crazy old man.  Like something from the time before.  It's not safe,"  said his mother.

"When I was a boy, my grandfather told me about a time in the camps when an elderly mad man came up to the fence from outside.  He spoke only English.  One of the other residents translated as he spoke to a bunch of them through the fence.  He had lived alone for decades in the mountains.  His parents had grown up in a defunct bunker that their parents had owned before the war.  He said he wanted to surrender to the Aye.  All of a sudden he pulls out an Ancient weapon, I believe called a gun, and uses it to kill a woman and injure several others.  The robots came and took him away.  Mac Spencer may have the robes of an Advocate but he lives in the mountains and clearly isn't in his right mind.  I don't know why the other Advocates haven't cleaned this mess up, but it's definitely unwise.  When the Advocate lady comes back this afternoon, I'm sure she'll have a solution to this instead of putting us under discipline.  Even if there was discipline, I'd rather live the rest of my life that way than lose you, Blion."

"I've made up my mind," said Blion, undeterred.  "I'm going to find Mac Spencer and accept his offer.  Whatever happens then, happens.  If he's a crazy fake Advocate, then I'm sure he'll be in a lot more trouble than us.  Stealing an Advocate's robes would get you sent to Hawaii for sure." The beautiful island was the site of the world's prison system.

Whenever using a vacikarce, Blion had always just given it a destination and the device had decided how best to get him there.  For the first time, Blion asked it to travel a specific path without a destination.  Even if he found Mac Spencer's peculiar building, it was not certain that the vacikarce would let him get out.  It usually let Blion off at a landing pad near his destination.

Blion went out into an unusually drizzly late spring morning.  It wasn't enough to truly water the plants but still moist enough to give good returns on the condensing pyramids, taller-than-human black tetrahedrons that were used to provide water for houses and surrounding landscaping.  He got into the vacikarce and it rose into the gray sky.