“Yes?” she began. “Can I help…you…” she stared at me in growing recognition.
All the carefully thought speeches, all the clever or diplomatic comments fled me. All that came out was, “Hello, Mom.”
Her eyes fluttered, and her knees buckled. I lunged, but Maauro passed me in an eyeblink and caught her under the arms.
My mother gasped, as we put her on a bench on the porch, she fought off the disorientation. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Piet, it’s you. You’re alive. Thank God.” She reached toward me as if afraid I would vanish. Maauro let go of her and backed away. I knelt next to her, and my mother hugged me close, wrenching sobs coming out of her.
I could find no words to sum up my emotions. My mother was glad to see me, and I could see more than a decade of pain in her appearance. I should have done this sooner, I thought. What have I done?
I saw Maauro looking at me and knew she did not need a telepathic link to know the pain I felt on seeing my mother. I wanted to say something, but words still avoided my lips. So I just knelt there until her tears stopped flowing, and the drowning person grip on my shoulders lessened.
“I had hoped,” she finally managed, “that I might see you once again in this life, to apologize to my child for not standing with you when you needed me.”
“You?” I croaked out. “God, no. It was my fault. I’m the one who ran. First, from a battle, then from my life.”
“No, no, no,” she said, tears on the aged face. “I was weak. I should have stood up to your father for once. Should have fought for you.”
“Wasn’t your place to do for me what I couldn’t do for myself.” I felt numb now. There was a void into which my emotions had drained as if they had never existed.
“No,” she said, a touch of fierceness in her face. “I knew he was wrong. Wrong to sum up his son in one afternoon. Wrong not to forgive, because he was always so terrified of finding any weak spot in himself.”
“Enough, Mom,” I said, putting a hand on a too-thin shoulder. Was she sick? “I’ve made my peace, if not with Dad or anyone else, then with myself for my failure. There have been other fights where I have done better.”
“I don’t care about any of that! Men and their battles and butcheries, preferring dead heroes to live sons. Damn them. But son, it’s been over twelve years, could you find no time to send word you were even alive?”
I hung my head. “I think I came back as soon as I could, but that seems a poor excuse, no, not even that.”
“After what we all did to you,” she replied, stroking my face, “I can’t say I blame you. God, I am so happy just to know you are alive. You look good, son. You look so young for thirty-two.”
“Life in space is different. It’s hard to explain now, but I know that while it has been twelve years for you, Mom, it has only been five years for me.”
“What? But how? No. I don’t care. You’re here, and my prayers have been answered. I’ve been able to tell you how sorry I am for letting you down.”
“It was my—”
My mother put a hand to my mouth as she had done when I was a small child to end an argument. “No, Piet. Your father was always my weakness. I let him be too hard on you and too easy with your sister. I even let him turn you against each other. I was afraid too, until I had lost everything and had nothing left to be afraid for. I found my courage too late.”
All I could do was give a helpless shrug. “Me too.”
“I can’t regret having you or your sister, but for that I wish I’d never met him. Still, enough of that for now.”
My mother stood on shaky feet and seemed to notice Maauro, who was standing still as only she could. “My, my, who is this young lady? Forgive me, dear, I was so overcome at seeing my son.”
Maauro looked uncertain for the first time in my experience and merely nodded.
“Mom,” I said, taking a deep breath. “This is Maauro, my dearest friend.”
My mother extended a hand to Maauro, who took it as if it might shatter. “I’m delighted to meet you. “What a lovely young lady you are. And so quick too. It was you who caught me when I fell. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“My manners and sense both seem to have deserted me,” my mother said, still gripping my arm. “Let’s go into the house. I’ve made some tea earlier. I’ll be putting some brandy in mine.”
We walked into the house, which was sparsely decorated, but comfortable. A small, friendly dog of indeterminate pedigree came up to me and licked my hand before returning to a cushion in the sun. It ignored Maauro, as most animals did, recognizing her as a machine. I looked around at the simple furniture. The walls were decorated with paintings of the ocean and photos of me, my sister Rena, some children I didn’t recognize, and a man that must be my sister’s husband. There was no sign of my father, or of our old home.
“Come into the front room, it gets the afternoon sun,” my mother said. She practically ran into the kitchen, returning with a tea service and a tray of cookies. She then went to a cabinet and drew out a bottle of brandy and some small glasses I recognized from my childhood. For some reason, the sight of the glasses choked me up, and I had to look away for a second to regain my composure. My mother seemed to feel the same way, and the pouring of the tea became a ceremony to give us all time to settle. The smell of the tea was soothing. My mother and added some brandy to hers. At my nod, she added some to mine. Maauro shook her head.
“I don’t usually drink so early,” Mom said with an apologetic air. “But I feel the need to steady my nerves.”
“A good idea,” Maauro offered.
“Son,” my mother said after a sip of tea and brandy. “We have a past neither of is happy with. It’s too well known to us both. So tell me of your present. Where have you been? What have you been doing? How is it you have lived only five years to my twelve?”
“Where to start?” I said.
“How about with a pleasant and easy one,” she offered. “Tell me about Maauro.” She leaned back raising a teacup to her lips.
Easy! I thought. “Ok, let’s start with Maauro because without her, I wouldn’t be standing here, I’d be dead in an alley on Kandalor and likely deserving to be.”
“Maauro,” I continued, reaching across the table and taking her hand in mine, “take off your sunglasses.”
“Yes, dear. Are you sensitive to light?” my mother began, but her voice trailed off as she saw Maauro’s huge aquamarine eyes, larger than any human’s.
“Most of what I am about to tell you,” I continued, “will be simply incredible to you, and all of it is classified. What you learn, you must keep secret.”
She stared at me in incomprehension, but nodded.
“I’m an officer in Confederate Military Intelligence now.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “That is incredible. Might well kill the old bastard when he finds out.” She turned to Maauro. “I meant—”
“I know who the old bastard is,” Maauro said.
“He won’t find out,” I reminded her, “but that is the least part of it. You see, eight years ago your time, I discovered Maauro on an abandoned asteroid base—”
“Were you marooned there?” my mother asked.
“Yes, over 50,000 years ago.”
My mother looked at the tea cup as if its contents might suddenly contain some bubbling, mind-altering drug.
“Maauro is an android, an artificial intelligence created by an alien race that disappeared from space while humans lived in caves. But she is not a mere machine. She’s self-aware, intelligent and alive.”
“Oh,” my mother said.
Maauro raised her other hand and white plasma fire glowed on it, warming the room up. The dog yipped and raced out the pet door.
“I can do that with both hands now,” Maauro said, “now that my left arm has been replaced
.”
“Replaced?” my mother said in a small voice.
“Yes, it was torn off when we were shot down on Kandalor.”
“Shot down?”
“We both were. Wrik was flying.”
“Why do you call him Wrik?”
“I’ve been Wrik Trigardt since I left Retief.” That seemed to focus her.
“Well, you are my son and as entitled to use Trigardt as Van Zyle. Wrik is your middle name; I choose that for you.”
“Do you have a last name?” she ventured with Maauro.
“No. I selected Maauro as my name shortly after Wrik recovered me. Before that, my only description would have been Model 7 combat android and a serial number, even that would have been in a language never heard by your species.”
“You were made to fight?”
“Yes.” Maauro looked at herself as if considering her remarkably unwarlike dress. “This is not my original appearance.” Her eyes sparkled and suddenly there was an image on the table. Maauro as I had first seen her, black with a pale rudimentary face, onyx panels for eye and a mouth speaker.
My mother jumped and even I found the image disconcerting after all this time.
“I was originally nine feet tall and weighted over 900 pounds,” Maauro continued, switching off the image.
“Did you go on a diet?” I couldn’t tell if Mom was being ironic or was merely dazed.
“No. I was blown up and lost 44.8% of my mass during the initial attack on the asteroid.”
“Oh dear, that must have hurt.”
“After a fashion,” Maauro nodded. “It was mostly ablative material and sections that were designed to absorb blasts. I repatterned myself after an image in Wrik’s computer, unaware at the time it was a game simulation, not an actual image of a human female. Originally, I could not again change my appearance, now I have become rather used to my face and am disinclined to change it.”
“The important part,” I said, in an effort to regain control of the conversation, “is that finding Maauro is the best thing that ever happened to me. I had gone very far down a hole before that… doing things I don’t want to, but have to, remember. After I found Maauro, life began again. Because of our …friendship…and her special abilities, we acquired a starship, started a business called Lost Planet and were commissioned in Confed Military Intelligence.”
My mother looked simply overwhelmed, but she gazed at us holding hands and asked. “And you two are?”
We looked at each other. “It’s complicated,” we said simultaneously.
“Are you consorts?” mother asked. “I’ve heard of that.”
Before I could say anything, Maauro responded. “No. Wrik’s consort is a Nekoan female named Jaelle Tekala.”
“Nekoans,” Mom said faintly. “Are they the ones that look like cats?”
I sighed. “Yes, mother, the ones who look like cats.”
Maauro obligingly zapped a holo of Jaelle on the table top, her tall, athletic form with its golden eyes and tail, looked real enough to jump off the table top.
“She’s very pretty,” mother said.
“Yes, and mostly in my past now,” I said. “I screwed things up with her because of all the lying. Hiding who I was had become so ingrained I could never come clean with her.”
“Then there’s me.” Maauro had evidently decided that if we were telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that it would all hit the table at the same time. “My love for Wrik drove a wedge between them that widened over time.”
“You love Wrik?” the dazed look returned to my mother’s eyes.
“I would say with all my heart but I do not have one.”
“Do you love… her, Piet?”
“Yes, I do. We are still not sure what that actually means for us, but it is so self-evidently true that there is no denying it.”
“I have actually urged him to consider a variety of human females as possible mates, at least for the prospect of progeny,” Maauro added in a conspiratorial tone, “but that has not worked except with—”
“Ah, no need to go into that,” I said, raising a hand.
My mother gave me a wry look. “She sounds like a man’s idea of a perfect girlfriend.”
“There are some additional issues,” I said dryly.
Mom looked at me then at Maauro. “Can I touch her?”
“Don’t ask me. She’s her own person. Ask her.”
“Of course,” Maauro said. She remained perfectly still as my mother reached out and put her palm against the android’s smooth cheek.
“I felt the strength in your arms when you caught me,” my mother said. “And you were standing on the far side of Piet, yet you reached me first.”
Maauro nodded. “I am very strong and fast.”
“You feel so alive. Your skin is soft and warm to the touch. Wait a second! You said you weighed over 800 pounds, and now you are forty percent smaller. Why isn’t my chair crushed?”
“I am not actually sitting on it. I’m merely folded into this posture and balanced; with my body that is not a difficulty.”
Mom laughed. “So long as you don’t cross your legs.”
Maauro nodded. “That would be the end of the chair.”
“So if I have this right,” Mom said, turning back to me. “You are a secret agent for the Confederacy, with your own starship, consort to a beautiful alien and in love with a deadly, if adorable, 50,000 year old, alien combat android, and I can’t tell any of this to my bridge club?”
It was my turn for a ragged laugh. “Well there is an edited version. Maauro is classified as a human mutation and has Confed citizenship under the name Aurelia Toyama. I am not sure how much play the story has gotten out this far, but Lost Planet discovered the Lost Colony and rescued Shasti Rainhell’s grandson on Seddon.”
“News is slow to reach Retief,” my mother said, “and slower still to get out of the capitol. Nor do I pay much attention to it these days. If it didn’t happen in Glen Cove, then I likely never heard of it.”
I sat back and attended to the tea, brandy and cookies while Maauro gave a quick summation of our voyage to Seddon to my mother. Having a holo scanner in her eye sped up the process.
“Enough,” my mother said, after she watched the record of Maauro and me fighting the Destroyer, “or my brain will simply turn to jelly and pour out my ears. I feel like I have lost my mind and wandered out into a world of dreams. If the proof wasn’t simply sitting here at this table with us, I would have long ago called for an ambulance. It’s all too much for one day: too many shocks, too many emotions, too many memories, too much strangeness, even if it is a good strangeness.
“What I needed to know, I now know. My son is alive. Are you happy, Piet?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Yes, I guess so. I’m happy to have my self-respect back. I’m happy to be facing things that had crippled me before. I finally realized the wounds would not heal until they were finally cleaned all the way out. Mostly, I am happy I have Maauro.”
“As I am to have you,” she said.
“This trip is only beginning,” I said. “I have a lot of people to see yet.”
Mother’s lips thinned. “Your father?”
“Already done, that was the worst one, and the one that had to be done first.”
“No need to tell me how that went.”
I shook my head.
“You saw…” she hesitated, eyes downcast.
“The headstone, yes, I saw it.”
“What?” Maauro asked.
I sighed. “The grave-marker my father put up for me. I told you that he said I was dead to him. He did it very completely, headstone and all. The date of my death was the day I deserted my squadron.”
Maauro’s eyes went black, lid to lid, and her face became a blank mask.
My mother froze, and even I was taken aback. Maauro put down the teacup in a delicate gesture. “That will not be allowed,” she said, in a voice gone flat and mechanical. This was utter rage in Maauro.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, patting her hand.
“It does matter, and I will not tolerate this. I have promised not to use violence against any of those you are seeking reconciliation with, but this is the limit. Were this anyone but your father, I would tear him limb from limb for such an offense.”
“It’s not important anymore. Really.” A threat by Maauro to tear people limb from limb had to be taken seriously and literally.
“It is to me,” Maauro stated. “I will deal with this when I deem it appropriate. Because I love you, I will honor my promise to neither kill nor injure, but it will not be allowed.”
“Ok, ok,” I said putting an arm around her shoulder, “problem for another day.”
The gentle pacific green eyes reappeared, and her expression changed back to its normal calmness. “I do not like it when people are cruel to you. Those who know of me do not dare it.”
“I like you, Maauro,” my mother said. “I understand virtually nothing of what I have heard today except for what I saw in your face moments ago when you learned of the stone. You do love my son.”
“I do. Though I am not sure it is good for him. I worry about that. There is much that divides us and maybe things we will not fully share, but I love him nonetheless.”
“We’ve been talking for hours and cookies aren’t food,” my mother said, rising. “Do you enjoy food, Maauro?”
“I do. I have a fondness for sweets and I can cook.”
“Excellent, you can help me prepare dinner. Piet, or do you prefer Wrik now?”
All the Difference Page 11