Andrew moved quickly. He darted toward Karim and seized his arms; the taller man shook him off. Andrew grabbed him again. Karim turned, lifted him gently, and flung him to the ground. Andrew got up, dazed but apparently unhurt. Karim began to run, his head and shoulders bobbing above the grass.
“Come on,” Andrew said. “We’ve got to stop him. We’ll go after him in our craft and put him in suspension until we can get him to a Citadel.” Merripen did not move. “Come on.”
“Let him go.”
“But he could die out there.”
“Let him go. It’s what he wants. Death is part of it. In that world he loves so much, creatures die all the time.” He remembered the look on Karim’s face as he had turned away; he had seemed lost in joy. He envied the other man suddenly. Karim would roam the deserted land, at peace. Earth would sing to him. He might live a long time. He wondered if Karim could live forever that way.
Andrew said, “It’s affected his mind.”
“Perhaps it has. But he chose it.” Merripen gazed over the plain at the retreating figure, which grew smaller until it was hidden by the grass.
Merripen, riding in Karim’s hovercraft, had finished scanning the man’s records. He felt depressed rather than illuminated. His journey seemed an exercise in futility. Everything he had seen convinced him that he should never have left the Citadel; if he went back now, he would want to tear it down, little by little, leaving only the walls as a warning. He thought of Karim roaming the plains, of Jorah digging through bones and ruins, of Eline and Domingo, of the burned husk of Harsville. All of it was, at least in part, his legacy; his actions long ago had helped bring it about.
The sun was low in the violet sky. Eline’s craft, far ahead, suddenly veered and turned north. Merripen sat up. It had reached the shield. He took over his craft and drove more quickly, catching up with Andrew, and tried to signal to him. The screen stayed blank; something was interfering with it. Andrew looked toward him and motioned at his own screen.
They rode on until their vehicles met the shield, bumped against it, trembled, and then veered north.
By nightfall, they had circled the barrier completely, but had seen nothing inside it except scrubby land, dotted by shrubs and small trees. The vehicles now sat silently in the dark, noses against the invisible shield.
Andrew punched out supper. The two men ate in their seats, keeping their lights low even in the darkness. Merripen finished eating, then poured more wine.
“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know. We don’t even know what we’re waiting for. We can hope that they’ll notice someone’s out here and come out to check. Maybe we should hope they don’t see us at all.”
Andrew waved a hand at the bottle of wine that sat on a ledge behind their seats. “Don’t drink too much of that. One of us should stay awake while the other sleeps.”
Merripen nodded. Andrew brooded for a few moments, then said, “Do you think you can sleep now?”
“Yes. I’m very tired.”
“Good. I’ll stay awake, then. I know I can’t sleep.”
Merripen put down his seat, trying to get comfortable. The inside of the craft darkened. Andrew stirred in his seat, touched Merripen’s arm gently, then withdrew.
Someone hidden by the darkness came to stand at Merripen’s side, watching him silently. He was afraid to move. A warm wave rippled over him. He threw up a hand and cried out. He broke into wakefulness; Andrew was holding him.
“You felt it,” Andrew said. “I felt it, too.”
“I think they know we’re here.”
“Lie down. Try to get some sleep.”
A hand touched Merripen. He opened his eyes; it was light outside. He sat up and looked at Andrew. “You didn’t wake me.”
“I couldn’t have slept.” Andrew was sipping tea. “I thought for a moment that there was something on the other side, but I couldn’t see, and I was afraid to get out and look. There’s nothing now.” He put down his cup. “I think I can rest now. Give me a couple of hours.” He lay down on his seat and closed his eyes.
Merripen leaned against his door, then forced himself to open it and get out. He undid his pants and pissed; the stream arched over the grass and bent as it met the barrier. He walked toward the shield and stood there silently, wondering how long he would have to wait. He could live here for a long time, waiting. It might be a good way to live, waiting, never meeting his goal. He pressed his hands against the shield and pushed; his palms tickled. “Come out of there,” he said to the air. His voice was hollow. “Damn you.” He was slipping. He would lose himself and Andrew would have to take him back to the Citadel. He kicked the shield and his toes tingled.
He looked up. There was a bulge on the horizon. It grew larger and became another hovercraft, traveling toward him. He stared at it for a time, then whirled around and ran toward his craft. He jumped in. Andrew sat up.
“Someone’s coming.”
Andrew raised his seat and looked out. The strange craft, its dome opaque, was still moving in their direction. It stopped just behind the shield. Andrew was pale. Merripen leaned forward, ready to back up and hurry away if necessary, trying not to think about whether he could actually escape.
The craft faced him. He began to wonder if there were anyone inside it after all. He thought of hovercrafts and computers and mechanical devices going about their business, with no one left to guide them. Then the craft’s door opened. A woman in blue pants and a white blouse stepped out; she shook back her long black hair.
“Josepha,” Merripen whispered, and he was outside again, running to the shield. “Josepha.” He put out his hands. She came to him and opened her mouth and he thought he saw her lips form his name. She went back to her craft and leaned in, then stood up.
He put out his hand again, and this time the shield was gone. “Merripen,” she cried.
They sent all the hovercrafts inside before the shield was raised again. Josepha was laughing and clinging to his hands, then backing away with the familiar worried look on her face, a tense mouth and a line between her eyebrows. He took her arms and rested his head on her shoulder for a moment, then introduced her to Andrew.
He was staring at her, head tilted to one side. “What’s the matter?” Merripen asked.
“It’s nothing.” Andrew turned toward Josepha. “I thought you looked familiar. It’s nothing.”
Merripen took Josepha’s hand again. “Your children—are they here?”
“Everyone’s here. All the parents, all the children. We’ve been here for a long time. This shield is their doing. That, and other things. How far did you travel?” She did not wait for an answer. “It must have been hard. I can see it in your face.”
Merripen let go of her and stepped back. “A long time. And in all that time, you didn’t ask me to join you.”
“I guess we thought you wouldn’t want to come. I don’t know. Your part was over. No one had seen you for so long.”
“I see. What happened later didn’t concern me. And maybe you didn’t want me here, judging the results.”
Josepha was silent. Then she said, somewhat coldly, “Follow me. I’ll take you to them.”
He and Andrew got into their craft and followed hers. “She’s one of the parents,” Andrew said.
“Yes.”
“I’m sure I’ve seen her somewhere.” Andrew turned slightly in his seat. “You’re hurt because they came here without you.”
“I guess I am.”
“You shouldn’t be. I don’t think you ever quite understood how others sometimes felt about you biologists.”
“I certainly did,” Merripen replied. “I hid in the Citadel, didn’t I?”
“I wasn’t talking about that. I meant before. I don’t quite know how to explain it to you, Merripen. You were the artists, we were the paintings. Even people like me, who never had anything more than minor changes, were made by you. You made the lives we had possibl
e. You gave us long life, and then you gave us elves and trolls and giants and other creatures, and we got used to your being offstage, letting us have the illusion that our lives were our own. It’s disconcerting to have you reappear onstage after that. Do you understand?”
“No,” Merripen said, afraid that he did.
“I don’t think anyone here meant to hurt you.”
“It doesn’t matter whether they did or not. They have. And it doesn’t matter what we made. It’ll all disappear.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I went through a long, useless journey that only shows me how pointless this trip was.”
“Maybe the struggle was worth it. You don’t know yet.”
Merripen lowered his eyes. He was afraid to look up, afraid of what he might see. Would eyes accuse him silently as he passed? Would they turn away from him? Would the children have become something he could never comprehend? No, Josepha was here, with the other parents; perhaps that had kept his children at least a little bit human. He covered his brow with his hand.
“Look,” Andrew said. Merripen did not move. “Look.”
He forced his head up. The flat land dipped here, giving way to a giant crater. Now he knew why he had been unable to see anything from outside the shield. The crater’s sides were smooth and grassy, covered with shrubs and trees. The houses below had been built of wood and stone and brick. There seemed to be no order to the settlement; the roads were uneven and twisted, the plots of land unmarked by boundaries. Near the edge of the town, he saw three houses in a cluster; toward the center, one long wooden house was surrounded by a flower garden.
As they drove down the slope, people gathered in the roads. They did not crowd together, but stood in pairs or small groups along the sides of the paths. As Merripen’s craft drew nearer, he began to recognize faces. Gurit Stern was near a trellis, still with crow’s-feet around her eyes and lines etched near her mouth. Kelii Morgan’s ample form was partly hidden under a long shirt; his chubby brown face glowed. Edwin Joreme seemed impassive; Chen Li Hua, with her gray tunic and clipped hair, was ascetic. He recognized them all, surprised that he could, and yet they had changed in some way. They held back from his vehicle; they did not approach it, they did not wave or shout greetings.
Josepha stopped in front of a gray wooden house with a porch and got out. Merripen drew up behind her, and he and Andrew followed her to the door. Chane Maggio stood there with his child Ramli and a small, dark-skinned child whom Merripen did not know. Merripen looked around quickly. Other young children had entered the street in front of the house; two held up their hands solemnly while the others watched him without moving. In the distance, near a stone house, he saw two men with infants in their arms.
He turned to Josepha, unable to speak. His eyes stung. She came to his side and took his hand. He looked back at the children in the street, who drew their eyebrows together as they stared back.
“Whose are they?” he managed to say. “Yours?”
She shook her head. “Theirs. Teno’s, and Ramli’s, and Yoshi’s, and Aleph’s, and all the rest. Theirs.”
Merripen tried to smile. They had children. But his satisfaction was tainted; they had brought their replacements into being, just as he had. He gazed at the child with Chane, suddenly conscious of the skull under the thick dark hair and brown skin, and thought of death.
VI
Merripen walked with Josepha through the settlement. From the edge of the bowl-like depression, the place had seemed disorderly, but here, the hidden order emerged. Each building seemed close and accessible while at the same time private; he could walk to each house easily along the roads, but would then meet with stone steps through gardens, tree-lined paths, or lawns covered with mazes of shrubbery, before reaching the doors themselves. A few of the younger children wandered after them as they walked; they were subdued, as their parents had been at that age.
“What’s it been like here?” he asked.
“You’d probably find it quiet.” He thought of the moribund Citadel, and smiled. “We teach the children, we learn. We put up the shield for protection. We felt that we needed it.”
She led him to the end of the curving road. Ahead, set in the grassy slope of the bowl, he saw a large, flat, metallic surface; an entrance slid open, and a figure emerged. “An underground city?”
“No.” She drew him to the slope, and they sat on the grass. “You made them, Merripen. They don’t live the way we do, they don’t think in our way. I’ve lived here all this time, and maybe in some ways I’m more like them than like the woman I was.” Her face seemed to contradict her words; she drew her eyebrows together and frowned. “But even now, I find that they’re opaque to me, that I can’t quite sense their motivations except intermittently. If they have a passion, it’s curiosity—if they have an overriding motivation, it’s the use of their reason. They want to seize everything, gobble it up, but with their minds, not with force or guilt or anger. And they don’t work or learn as an escape from anything or as some sort of compensation—they do it for itself. Their motivation is pure. With us, something always pulls us back or sullies the accomplishment.”
He nodded. “But then why are they hiding here?”
She leaned forward. “They’re not really hiding. They’re preparing.” She waved a hand at the metallic rectangle. “That is our gateway, Merripen. If you walk in there, you’ll find yourself inside a large asteroid out beyond Saturn.”
“A materializer,” he said, thinking of the implications.
“No, a transformer. It takes the matter of our bodies and alters it, then beams it to the asteroid, where it’s restored to its original form. It’s your atoms that it reconstructs, not a duplicate with your memories and form. The transformer is mostly their work, of course. A few of us assisted them.” There was an edge to her voice.
“Are they going to live in the asteroid, then?”
“Eventually, they will. Earth is finite, while their lives are open-ended. Only the universe will satisfy them now.”
“I see,” he said, and to himself: I was right. The sky above was darkening, growing purple in the dusk; he looked up at the dark blue clouds. “They don’t have our limitations.”
“No, but we can follow their example. They’ve been our mentors. Teno sometimes acts like a parent, while I’m a child. If an example is worth following, can’t we follow it, however frail and fallible we are?” She sounded as though she were asking the question of herself.
“I suppose we can. Are you going to live with them in their asteroid?”
“Of course.” Josepha sounded oddly defensive. “We haven’t discussed it, but it’s understood. We’ve changed—we’re happier living with them. What we value isn’t really that different.”
We and they. Us and them. The dichotomy was in her words, even as she sought to minimize it. Below, four youngsters were strolling toward a house. They all had the same androgynous bodies; their loping gait was neither an aggressive stride nor a dainty walk. “When did they start having children?” he asked.
“Very recently. They’re biologists, too, along with everything else. They used the lab for some of them, and had others naturally.” He started. “They called it testing the equipment, and said it was a rational thing to do. Oh, they did some work on the zygotes, made sure no defects were present before carrying them to term. Teno had two that way, one as father and one as mother. They said they just wanted to be sure that they weren’t dependent only on the labs, but maybe there was more to it than that. I was with Teno during the delivery—I saw the look of satisfaction when it was over. Teno nursed the baby, too.” She gazed at the houses below, now black shapes with lighted windows. Her face was shadowed, but he could still see the frown and the line between her brows. “I don’t know. Maybe I imparted more to it than was actually there. It’s hard to tell. They said they would use the labs from now on because it’s safer, but Teno said it had been an instructive experience.” She brushed back he
r hair. “You’ll be glad to know that they bred true—they didn’t have to make those alterations.”
She had said that she was happy here; she had told him that she and the others wanted to stay with their children. Still, she frowned, and talked of barriers, and wore her anxious look. She had not changed as much as she thought.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come here,” she said in a low voice.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “I went through too much to get here.”
“We all did. But that wasn’t what I meant.”
He drew her to him, and lay with her in the grass. He smoothed her hair and cupped her breast until she reached for him. They were still for a moment.
She said, “You’ve changed.”
“Not really.”
“You’re warmer.”
“I always had to control my feelings.”
“I refused you twice, Merripen.”
“That was a long time ago.”
He felt her gentle hands under his shirt. He thought of the nearby houses and the closeness of the road, and then she sighed in his ear and he thought only of her.
A child was watching them when he awoke. Merripen sat up, rubbing his eyes. The sky was already gray; it was morning. The child stared, saying nothing, and sat down by the road; he thought he saw something of Josepha in its eyes. He rummaged awkwardly for his clothes, pulling them on under that steady gaze.
He was lonely. Being with Josepha had not dissipated the feeling. She had been gentle and then fierce, conveying unspoken demands. He had not known what she wanted, earthy wrestling or erotic spirituality, and he had had the sense of a woman struggling to keep certain things under control. He wondered if living here, going about her life under the calm, unemotional gaze of her child, had done that to her, or if she had always been that way. He remembered his first visit to her —the isolated house, the emotional distance she had kept. He sighed. He had trouble understanding her; what must it be like for her, trying to see into the minds of his children?
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