Before Gaia

by Francine Pascal

  It’s going to get worse, he realized, standing in the dark living room, gazing down on his sleeping brother. A lot worse.

  But it was something else, too.

  I’ve done this before, Tom thought as he looked down at his brother, looking so pale and almost sickly in his undershirt under the blanket. And it was true. He had done this before. It was completely familiar….

  1973

  He was the first one to say the word, to mention death. And he was so sorry to have said it.

  Antiseptic and Right Guard

  “WHAT’S WRONG?” TOM CALLED OUT. “What’s wrong with Olly?”

  They all looked at him and the doctor looked at his parents, and Tom flinched, expecting them to yell at him, to tell him to go back to bed. But his father had held out a hand, beckoning him, instead.

  “It’s all right,” his dad told the doctor as Tom ran over and pressed himself against his parents as if he were a little boy again and not a thirteen-year-old kid. “Go on, Doctor. This is Oliver’s brother, Thomas. He’s old enough to hear this.”

  The doctor looked down at Tom—up close, he smelled of antiseptic and Right Guard—and then smiled. His glasses flashed as he talked. “Hello, Thomas. Your brother is very sick. He has a rare blood disease called metastatic immune syndrome. And I’m afraid the prognosis is—well, it’s not very good.”

  “Is he going to die?” Tom asked.

  He could tell from the way his mother reached out and clutched him, that he was the first one to ask. And he was so sorry to have said it—the adults were being so careful not to. But he had to know. He had to.

  “There’s no known cure, I’m afraid,” the doctor said finally. He spoke very carefully. “I’m sorry, Thomas. We’re going to do everything we can, but the truth is that he probably will not make it.”

  Tom’s mother was crying now—he could feel her hand shaking on his shoulder—and just as his own eyes blurred, he broke away from her and pushed past the doctor with his Right Guard and his glasses and ran into Oliver’s room.

  Oliver’s room was neat as a pin as always, his schoolbooks and board games neatly stacked, but the bed was surrounded by unfamiliar, strange objects now. There was a tube coming out of his nose and boxes of medicines and pills all over the place and a strange machine that made frightening noises as if the machine itself was breathing. There was a horrible smell of medicine that made Tom gag as he came right up to the bed, and he wanted to cry out in shock because Oliver looked so thin and small. He was breathing slowly, his eyes closed, the IV connected to a bruised patch on his frail-looking arm.

  Tom couldn’t bear to look—but he came closer, brushing Oliver’s hair away from his face. Tom realized that he would do anything, anything at all, to make his brother come back. He would let him win at chess, he would give him his Star Trek action figures—even Mr. Spock—anything at all.

  If he dies, Tom thought, I’ll die, too.

  “I’ll save you, Olly,” Tom said, wiping his eyes. “I promise.”

  “Tom, that’s enough, dear,” his mother’s voice came from the corridor. “He’s very weak now.”

  But Oliver’s eyes were fluttering a bit—just for a second it seemed like his brother was awake and could see him.

  “You just sleep now,” Tom whispered, brushing Oliver’s hair from his forehead. “I’ll take over from here.”

  T O M

  My dad had a mainframe—an IBM 1130, I think. Nothing like today—this was before the Internet, before floppy disks, before color screens. The computer system was in Dad’s office, and we weren’t allowed in there at all. But I snuck in there late that night after Mom and Dad had gone to sleep.

  The whole thing made lots of noise, but fortunately Dad had taken that into account when he set up his office, and the walls were soundproofed. The computer itself was the size of an elevator car or a meat locker, and you had to use these stacks of punch cards to program it. But I got the hang of it, actually. I kept thinking about Mr. Spock, on Star Trek, and how he could always master a strange alien computer after about ten minutes of examining it. If Spock could do that, I thought, I should be able to handle a measly twentieth-century Earth computer.

  Like I said, there was no Internet in those days, but there were database networks. You could push the phone receiver into this machine with rubber cups, and there would be this faint squealing noise as the computer talked to its cousins—very slowly. My biggest fear those nights was that one of my parents would wake up for some reason and try to use the phone and hear that high-pitched scream of primitive digital communion.

  So I looked at the university’s database—my father’s main modem connection—and began finding ways to explore other databases, too.

  It took me five nights to even get in the right ballpark—to find the primitive medical library resources that existed at that time. But finally one night, just as I was about to turn the massive machines off (since the warm machinery would give me away the next morning), I found something.

  A clinic. The Institut Pasteur in Paris. It was the only medical center in the world actually doing research on Oliver’s disease. And I had found it.

  My mother and father were angry at first, thinking I’d just been snooping around Dad’s office. I remember Dad had started to scold me when Mom suddenly grabbed his sleeve and wordlessly pulled him over to the big green screen, where they could see what I’d found. An actual clinic with an actual treatment… albeit an extremely experimental treatment.

  But they got excited. Truly, truly excited as they peered at the green words on the screen and scrambled madly for the phone, explaining what I’d found to Oliver’s doctors.

  My father took a hiatus from work, flew with Olly to Paris, and checked him into the clinic for five weeks. I remember my father’s ashen face as he took Mom aside to make the decision. I had read all the reports on his computer—I knew that the risks of the treatment were tremendous—liver and lung damage, possible mental disorders later in life, and even the potential for permanent sterility. But my mother just nodded silently, accepting the risks. Because we all knew it was either take those risks or let him die. And we all hugged. And that was that.

  I never did tell Olly about all the potential side effects. And I don’t think I ever will—I mean, the important thing is that he emerged unscathed. His gratitude was so pure when he was discharged, smiling at me from the infirmary chair—why cloud it?

  So I learned about computers, of course, but more important, I learned about hope—about never giving up. It’s probably the most important lesson I learned as a teenager. It helped me time and time again in the Green Berets and as a grad student. Never give up—there’s always a way. I’d proved it. And I’d never risk losing Oliver again. Never.

  1983

  Tom was silhouetted against the bright blue sky, like a Roman statue of a gladiator, his musculature backlit.

  The Hangover Gods

  WHERE THE HELL AM I? OLIVER thought vaguely, trying to stay asleep and failing. What time is it? What’s that noise?

  And then, with the sound of stumbling footsteps, it all came clear. His brother’s apartment. He was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in Tom’s messy living room, on the sofa. With one beauty of a hangover.

  And the phone was ringing. That was the terrible sound that had awakened him. It was like an air-raid siren, and Tom was wincing at it, too. “All right,” Tom whimpered, and Oliver resisted an urge to smile. Finally Tom had managed to fumble the phone to his ear, stopping the siren in midwail, and the blessed relief of that was almost enough to counteract the terrible expanding pain in Oliver’s head.

  “Hello,” Tom said into the phone. His voice was scratched and fuzzy with sleep. “Tom Moore.”

  Without moving, Oliver found himself straining to hear the other end of the conversation—but it was no use. His CIA training included listening techniques—he was tuning out the traffic noises from Morningside Drive, out the window, and the sudden hissing
steam of the radiator—but he couldn’t hear a thing.

  “Oh—good morning,” Tom said. He had shifted the phone to his other ear. “Is it morning? Just barely.”

  And that was the funny thing. Oliver could always tell, from Tom’s tone of voice, who he was talking to. Not exactly who it was, but whether it was a man or a woman. It was something in Tom’s inflections—he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  But this was clearly a woman.

  “Of course I know who this is,” Tom said. He was keeping his voice down—he glanced over at Oliver to see if he was still sleeping. Definitely a woman on the other end of the phone, Oliver thought. The headache got worse as the details of the previous evening flooded back, and with a sick feeling he realized which woman it was.

  “No, no—I was awake,” Tom was saying. Oliver had his eyes closed again—he had closed them instantly as Tom had glanced over—but he could tell from Tom’s voice that he was grinning.

  “No, no, don’t worry about that,” Tom continued. “That was fine. You were tired—I understand.”

  Oliver wanted to fall back asleep, now. His dream had been awful, but it was better than this. The headache and the bright sunlight and the queasiness, and the fact that Tom was on the phone with Katia, right in front of him. The more he woke up, it seemed, the worse it felt.

  “Well, this isn’t”—and again, through his eyelashes, he saw Tom glancing in his direction—“this isn’t the best time to talk about—what? Tomorrow night?”

  Let me fall back to sleep, Oliver prayed to the hangover gods. Please.

  But the hangover gods didn’t listen. Oliver was too inexperienced to know that they almost never did. The most you got out of the hangover gods was a bottle of water in the fridge—if you were lucky.

  “Tomorrow night is fine,” Tom said. “Yeah—I’ll see you there. Eight o’clock—perfect. Bye.” And he hung up.

  Oliver tried to remain motionless, but it was impossible. He was too tense.

  “I know you’re awake, Olly,” Tom said.

  Oliver opened his eyes, wincing in the glare. Tom was silhouetted against the bright blue sky, like a Roman statue of a gladiator, his musculature backlit. “Morning, Tom,” he said hoarsely. “Sorry about last night.”

  “You never could fool me with that fake sleep routine,” Tom said. “Come on—we need showers, and then you can let me buy you some breakfast.”

  “I heard the conversation, Tom,” Oliver said, sitting up. “I know that was Katia. I know what you’re doing.”

  “All right.” Tom sat down in his easy chair. “We’re both sober, so let’s talk.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “No—listen to me, Olly.” Tom leaned forward, elbows on knees, a terribly earnest expression on his face. “Obviously you and Katia have become—have become friends.”

  “I don’t like this already.”

  “You’ve become close. So maybe she told you that we met a month ago, she and I, in the Waverly Bookshop.”

  “Tom—”

  “A month ago, Olly. And last night was the first time I’d seen her since then. Honest. I would never try to steal a woman away from you. You know that, Olly. I would never go behind your back.”

  Oliver was rubbing his eyes, trying to take this in. His left side ached terribly, and he realized he must have fallen onto cement more than once while staggering uptown the previous night. “I know, Tom. I mean, of course I know that. You’d probably swear it on the Bible.”

  Tom made a Green Beret salute. “On my honor as a soldier, Oliver. I swear. Nothing happened between us since we met. She just called now because, well”—Tom shrugged maddeningly, as if he were saying, Hey, it’s not my fault I’m so damn cute. “She just called because she called,” Tom concluded.

  “All right,” Oliver said. All he wanted was to get out of here—to get away from Tom and his earnest, bare-chested confessional. He rose to his feet, leaning on the edge of the couch to steady himself. “All right, I understand. You don’t have to say anything else.”

  “So everything’s cool?”

  Oliver forced himself to make eye contact—he stared for one hateful moment into Tom’s ice blue eyes before he had to turn away.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine. Thanks again,” Oliver said.

  “Where are you going?” Tom said as Oliver got his coat and stumbled toward the door. “Wait—have coffee. Stick around.”

  “Thanks anyway, bro. I’ve got to get back downtown. I’m sorry about all this.”

  “Oh, anytime, Oliver,” Tom said expansively. Now that I’ve got what I want, Oliver imagined him thinking. He couldn’t get out of the apartment fast enough. “Anytime at all.”

  The apartment door slammed shut behind Oliver—he winced as the noise slapped his eardrums—and he stumbled down the stairs, thinking crazily that he never wanted to come back to this place again.

  1983

  For a moment there, he had actually felt more connected to a self-proclaimed terrorist than he had to his own twin brother.

  Alphanumeric Resequence

  “TOM!” AGENT RODRIGUEZ SAID. HE was leaning around the corner, waving at him. “Come on in.”

  Tom bounced to his feet and followed, not wanting to look too eager. He needn’t have bothered: Agent Rodriguez had already continued on. Tom had to sprint to keep up as the agent led him through a buzzing security door and then around corners into a small briefing room. Tom took the seat that Rodriguez had gestured toward.

  “First, here’s your badge,” Rodriguez said, tossing a leather case across the table. Tom caught it, trying to seem bored, fingering the leather case. “Go ahead—take a look,” Rodriguez added. He seemed amused. Tom unsnapped the case and looked at the CIA badge. He had seen Oliver’s, of course—he knew what they looked like. But now he finally had his own.

  “Thank you,” Tom said. He slipped the badge into his pocket.

  “Not at all; congratulations on your thesis.” Rodriguez was looking at his watch. “Was there something else? You had requested a personal meeting.”

  “Yes,” Tom said, leaning forward nervously. He had been rehearsing this in his mind since watching his brother pass out as he complained of losing everything—the girl and the job.

  The question of Katia wasn’t something Tom could help his brother with. He knew that in his heart. But the job. Tom was pretty damn sure he could do something about the job. Then at least he would be helping to relieve some of Oliver’s pressure. And judging from earlier this morning, Oliver very much needed for some of the pressure to be relieved.

  “It’s about my brother,” Tom said. “I know that he’s been struggling a bit lately with this one particular code—an intercepted correspondence from the Organization?”

  “That’s true,” Agent Rodriguez said. He was squinting at Tom, and Tom had to take a deep breath and work up the nerve to continue.

  “That happens from time to time, you know,” Tom went on. “Sometimes even the greatest minds can get blocked on something for no particular reason. It doesn’t mean that they’ve lost their ability; don’t you agree?”

  Rodriguez looked utterly bewildered and perhaps a little impatient. “I’m assuming there’s a point here, Moore.” Rodriguez smiled. “And I’m assuming you’re going to make it now.”

  “Yes, sir, there is,” Tom said. He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper—the paper of Oliver’s that he had found on his desk the day before. Tom had taken a red pen and written in the decoding algorithm he’d come up with. “Sir, the thing is… that code that’s been tripping up my brother, well… I think I sort of accidentally solved it last night.”

  Now Tom had Agent Rodriguez’s attention. His eyes widened slightly and his posture straightened as he reached out his hand for the piece of paper Tom was holding. Tom handed the page to Rodriguez, who put on a pair of reading glasses as he peered down at the red writing.

  “That’s the decryption,” Tom explained. “S
omething about ‘the first principle’ and ‘winning her back,’ although I don’t understand what—”

  “You solved it?” Rodriguez asked. He was staring at the page incredulously.

  “Yes, well, it was a total accident, sir,” Tom assured him with a self-deprecating laugh. “Just one of those sort of freaky flukes that comes along every now and then, but… what I was hoping, sir, was that now that this particular code has been solved… I hoped that maybe you might be able to finally move Oliver on to the next assignment. Something fresh, you know? I know that this particular code really got under his skin and bogged him down, but with a new assignment—a new code, that is—I think you would see the old Oliver back in action. I think freed up of all the stress from that code, he’d be poised and raring to go for the next challenge.”

  Okay, Tom, relax, you’re talking too much.

  “‘Winning her back,’” Rodriguez murmured, staring at the paper. “Son of a bitch—you’re right. An alphanumeric resequence—incredible.” He suddenly looked at Tom. His expression was both surprised and pleased. “Good work, Moore. A fantastic job.”

  “Well, thank you, sir, but really, I don’t even know how I solved it. It just hit me all together in one moment. But about Oliver… do you think you could move him on now to the next assignment? Let him put this one snag of a code behind him?”

  “Well, of course, Moore, of course,” Rodriguez replied, deeply engrossed in the encryption. “Why would I keep him on a code that was already broken?”

  “Exactly,” Tom agreed, breathing out a long, relieved exhalation. This was exactly the reason he had come, and now he was very glad he had. He had just successfully made life a little easier for his brother, and he was feeling awfully good about it.