Lyon's Legacy: Catalyst Chronicles, Book One

by sandra ulbrich almazan

  “What’s so bad about it? I get the comparisons to the original George Harrison all the time.” He drew closer. “You can change your face and your name, Jo, but you can’t change your ancestry. Why not just accept it and go on with your life?”

  I glared at him. “Because no one expects you to replace Guitar George like the way they expect me to replace my great-granddad.”

  George didn’t sing at all for the rest of the day; when he had to speak to me, he did so in flat monosyllables. I felt like I’d broken more than just a few pieces of glass—like I’d broken the harmony of the lab, or worse yet, the still fragile harmony between George and myself.

  * * *

  The next day I had a session with Wardrobe so they could alter my costumes. The getup they made me wear was ridiculous, all dresses and skirts with sweaters, no jeans or slacks of any kind. At least my outfits weren’t as exotic as Winnie’s. She was staying for a full year in Africa, collecting DNA samples from endangered species. The Wardrobe specialists, a middle-aged woman who favored long scarves and a tall, thin man who reminded me of a crane, argued for ten minutes about which costumes they should give her before the man stomped off to the storage room.

  “How are you going to handle the different languages?” I asked Winnie while the Wardrobe woman rummaged through her storage cabinets for shoes that would fit me.

  “I learned them before I even applied for this mission.” She bounced up and down on the soles of her feet.

  “You must have really wanted the job,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen documentaries of the great animal herds before, but it’ll be amazing to see them in person. And to think I’ll be able to help save them by collecting their DNA.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at her enthusiasm. “Maybe I’ll get to sequence the DNA when you bring it in.”

  “You’re still working in the lab? Do you actually like it there, or is it just to get closer to that guy you’re seeing?”

  Wardrobe Woman returned, carrying an armload of transparent shoe boxes. Most of the shoes were black and brown, but they all had high heels.

  “Don’t you have any flats?” I asked Wardrobe Woman.

  She shook her head. “Women of this era generally wear heels with this type of dress.”

  Winnie craned her neck to inspect my shoes. “That’s nothing, Jo.”

  “It’s still higher than what I’m used to.”

  “Then you’ll need to practice walking in them.” Wardrobe Woman selected a pair and gave the shoes to me. I stepped into them warily. Standing up wasn’t too bad, but I only got halfway to the door before a heel slipped out from under me. My leg followed the shoe, and I had to grab onto Winnie to stop myself from falling.

  “You really do need practice,” she said once we’d sorted ourselves out and I’d apologized.

  “Well, I’m not wearing them to the lab.”

  She winked. “Then how about for George?”

  I didn’t want to tell her about our argument the day before. I didn’t think she’d understand. So I paced up and down the room while the Wardrobe people fussed over Winnie. I couldn’t stop thinking about the argument. How was George able to be so nonchalant about being named after a famous guitarist? He hadn’t grown up being expected to replace said guitarist, so he had no idea what it was like. Still, I envied his serenity. I missed him too.

  I changed into my normal clothes for my next lecture, but I couldn’t stop thinking about George. Finally, I decided I owed it to him to apologize. But I didn’t want to do it in the lab; I wanted to make it something special.

  I returned to Wardrobe and checked out a red, clingy dress that had already been set aside for me. I had a white sweater to wear over it, for modesty, but I decided I didn’t want to wear it. Back in my cabin, I carefully pulled on fragile stockings, a garter belt and the lethal heels, then donned some of my own silver jewelry. I tried putting my hair up, but it was too long to manage. I finally just twisted it over my shoulder.

  “Not bad, Joanna, not bad at all,” I said after viewing myself in my tiny mirror. “I don’t think too many people will compare you to Great-Granddad tonight.”

  That’s when I heard the opening chords of Sean’s “Let’s Rebegin” outside my door. A few bars later, George sang:

  I didn’t think you would take it so hard

  I didn’t know that I’d played my last card

  If you’re an angel, please forgive my sin,

  Let’s take it from the top, let’s rebegin...

  My cheeks grew warm. It wasn’t one of my favorite Sean songs, and George omitted a few notes, but that didn’t matter. George was singing an apology to me. I pressed myself against the door so I could listen.

  After the chorus, George stopped playing and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Jo. I guess it was a stupid idea to sing you one of Sean’s songs when you hate him so much. It seemed like the right thing to say...”

  His voice trailed off. Had he left? Sudden fear made me scramble to open the door, but my fingers trembled on the panel. By the time the door slid open, George was walking toward the vator. “George, wait!” I called.

  He turned, then stopped, gaze fixed on me. I couldn’t help returning the favor. He had spiffed himself up too, with a haircut and neatly pressed white shirt and gray pants. Traces of his musky aftershave still lingered by the entrance. Clipped to his DNA-patterned tie was a white flower from the hydroponic gardens.

  “You’re beautiful,” he blurted out. Milliseconds later, his face was bright pink. I think mine must have matched it.

  He tried again. “I’m sorry, Jo. I wanted to apologize for making you think I was comparing you to your great-granddad, but I guess I can’t even do that without bringing him into the picture.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I was going to apologize to you too, for snapping at you.”

  We stared at each other for a few more minutes before he said, “You really do look wonderful. Did you dress up for me?”

  “Yeah. And...did you dress up for me?”

  “Yeah.” He paused. “May I take you out to dinner then, at our lavish, five-star mess hall?”

  “I’d be delighted,” I said.

  “The pleasure is mine. Do you mind if I leave my guitar in your room?”

  As long as he didn’t expect me to play it. “No, that’s fine.”

  “I wasn’t sure what’d you think,” he said as he set his guitar inside the door. “Oh, and this is for you.” He unclipped his flower from his tie and attempted to fasten it to my dress with his tie clip. I tucked it behind my ear.

  Since it was past the supper rush, the mess hall was mostly deserted. There wasn’t much of a selection: a few hard rolls, cooling vegetable soup, wilting salad, meatloaf, and a few pieces of cherry pie. I helped myself to everything but the pie and followed George to a corner table with a starscape hanging above it.

  “Watch the floor,” he said, “it’s wet…”

  With impeccable timing, the stupid shoes slipped. I almost did the splits as I fell onto my tray. China crunched under me.

  “Damn it!” I yelled. “I wasn’t this clumsy before I came onboard!”

  George hurried towards me. “Jo? Are you all right?”

  I rolled off the tray and surveyed the damage. My leg muscles felt strained, but not badly. What food I wasn’t wearing was completely inedible, and George’s flower was floating in the soup. The front of my dress was sopping wet, a carrot had wormed its way into my bra, and ranch-flavored lettuce was clinging to my face.

  George started picking up the scattered pieces of china. “Are you all right, Jo?” he asked again.

  “I won’t be,” I said, brushing noodles out of my hair.

  “You won’t be?”

  “Yeah. When Wardrobe hears about this, they’ll expect me to fix my clothes. And I sew like I walk in heels.”

  He tilted his head back and laughed. I glared at him, then threw a soup noodle at his face. It clung to his
cheek, but he was laughing too hard to brush it off. Finally, I started laughing myself. I took my shoes off and brandished them, spiky heels first. “Let Pluckenreck come after me! I’ll poke her eyes out!” George’s face turned bright pink, which made me laugh harder. We sat there for a couple of minutes like that; every time one of us started to calm down, we’d look at the other one and crack up again.

  I don’t think I’d laughed like that for a long time.

  When we could breathe normally again, we cleaned up as much of the mess as we could. Then we went back to my cubicle, my shoes in one hand and my other one on George’s arm. We never did eat dinner that night. Instead, we made love for the first time.

  George wasn’t the first guy I’d slept with, nor—to be honest—was he the most skilled. But he was loving, and he was unexpectedly sensual, and he made the physical act of sex into something more, a private celebration made more joyful by its spontaneity. As we lay there afterwards, trying a new contortion every minute as we struggled to fit two people into a half-person cot, I decided I wouldn’t mind having him around for the next forty years or so.

  As long as we got a bigger bed.

  * * *

  A few days later, I was catching up on my messages from Earth over breakfast. In my normal clothes, the mess hall floor presented no hazard, and soon I was hunched over my handheld, skimming messages between bites of a bagel and yogurt blended with fruit. Winnie and a couple of other travelers waved at me as they came in. I waved back and returned to my messages.

  There was a short note from Mom asking how my trip was going, without mentioning anything about her life.

  I checked out of messages and skimmed the month-old news stories. At first, they all seemed the same as always: more political battles between the Fundie and PC parties, more physical battles in the MidEast, more environmental devastation in Africa and Asia. Then a flagged story picked up by my personal search engine caught my eye: “E. coli Outbreak in TransAIDS Long-Term Care Clinic; Deliberate Introduction by Extremist.”

  Oh my God. Mom….

  My hands shook so badly I had trouble scrolling the story. Police had picked up an extremist Fundie woman claiming to be the Wrath of God, sent to Earth to purge it. She’d managed to penetrate the quarantine surrounding the clinic where my mom was. Before she’d been caught, the dammed Fundie had infected the water supply with a virulent strain of bacteria. By the time the article had been uploaded, over ninety percent of the patients and staff had been infected. There was no word in this story on deaths, but I knew they were inevitable. One of Mom’s friends at the clinic had died of simple food poisoning; something like this would probably wipe out the entire clinic.

  The yogurt suddenly tasted bitter, almost noxious, and the coffee only made it worse. I clutched the warm cup tightly and stared into the coffee, wishing it could show me Mom’s face. I set my handheld to chime the millisecond messages or updates on the story came through, then went to class.

  Chapter Four

  The message came that evening, while I was studying a gene sequence that looked more like alphabet soup than a protein recipe. I’d kept my handheld next to me on the benchtop so I could grab it in a microsecond. Even so, the chimes blended in with the plaintive duet coming from Ferdie’s own handheld. I grabbed my handheld and opened the message, hoping it meant Mom was OK. Instead, I read:

  Dear Ms. Lyon,

  It is with deepest sympathy that we inform you of the death of your mother, Cassandra Wells-Lyon…

  I couldn’t help it; I screamed. Halfway through, I changed it to a more acceptable “Fuck.” Then I couldn’t stop myself: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…”

  “Jo, stop that.” Lizabeth looked up from her microscope, eyes narrowed in irritation. “Whatever went wrong, you can always do the experiment over again.”

  “No, I can’t.” I laughed; even to me, it sounded brittle, forced. “If only it was just an experiment gone wrong.”

  George stopped at my bench, a rack of test tubes in his hand. “What happened, Jo?”

  “My mom…my mom….”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence; it would have made the whole thing real, not just another piece of downloaded news. My throat felt like it was swollen shut. I pushed my handheld over to George. Lizabeth craned her neck, and they read the message together.

  Lizabeth reacted first. “Oh, Jo, that’s so awful. And telling you by message—maybe I’m TwenCen about this, but I think bad news ought to be delivered in person, or at least over the cel. Guess that’s hard when we’re so far from Earth.”

  Lizabeth’s rambling was preferable to what George did. Murmuring “I’m here for you, Jo,” he pulled me into his embrace, smothering me in bleach-scented lab coat and the warmth of his body. Smothering me in comfort, tempting me to be vulnerable.

  Don’t cry, Joanna.

  I was stiff in his arms; I didn’t even know how to let myself relax. I wouldn’t have dared to even if I could; I didn’t want George to think me weak.

  “Jo? Joanna? It’s alright.” George stroked my hair from the crown of my head to the small of my back. “Lizabeth’s not going to mind if we hold each other here in the lab, right, Lizabeth?”

  “Of course not. Just don’t make a habit of it.”

  Even her light tone couldn’t make me react.

  “I think you’d better take Jo to her cubicle, George.” Lizabeth whispered, but I still heard her. “She’s in shock. Call the med lab if she gets worse. I’ll tell Ferdie not to expect her to work for a few days.”

  George led me out of there, still in our lab coats and safety glasses. When we got to my cubicle, he helped me take them off, then my shoes and the rest of my clothes, finally tucking me in. All the while he talked softly to me or held my hand. But though I let him strip my body, he couldn’t uncover my heart.

  * * *

  “God damn it, Jo.” I flinched just as much from his words as from his sharp tone; George almost never swore. “Stop acting like you’re made of computer chips. I know there’s a human inside of you somewhere; why won’t you let me see her?”

  It had been two days since I’d heard the news. I’d spent them in my quarters, mostly staring at holos of Mom or reading her old messages. George had been there whenever he could, and Winnie and some of the other travelers had stopped by as well. Even Pluckenreck had sent condolences. I was getting sick of putting on a brave face for all of them, getting sick of staring at my holo of Munch’s “The Scream.” Helping George secure the lab equipment before the Sagan passed through the wormhole had seemed like a good idea—until he started ragging on me.

  “You should know by now I’m human,” I said. “You’ve seen me break enough glassware.” I zipped my microscope into its padded case and placed it in a cabinet, next to the others.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  Pipette tips scattered as I knocked over a bag. I swept the dirty ones into a cleaning/sterilizing unit. “Speaking of glassware, how do we protect it?”

  “We’ve got padding to wrap around the flasks and beaker. It’s in the closet—don’t try to change the subject, Jo. I’m worried about you. I don’t believe you’re taking your mother’s death as well as you want me to think you are.”

  I walked away from him. “So not everyone wails and caterwauls when something bad happens. At least I save the money on tissues.”

  I dug around in the storage closet until I found several sheets of crumbling foam rubber, probably old enough to be TwenCen. Sometimes Ferdie took reuse to extremes. I bundled them up and turned around.

  George was standing right in front of me, arms crossed, his blue-eyed gaze fixing me in place. With most of the equipment already shut down, the lab was unnaturally silent.

  We stared at each other for several seconds before George spoke, quietly but with emphasis. “You really are just like your great-grandfather, you know.”

  I clutched the padding closer to my chest. It was too late; the shot had alrea
dy gone home. “No, no I’m not.” My denial was as flimsy as the padding.

  “You are. It’s not just your face, or your name, or your wit. You’ve got the same tough-guy—or tough-girl—pose, but it’s all a sham.” He paused. “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder—”

  “Wonder what?” I asked when he didn’t finish.

  He bent down, his eyes inches from mine. “Sometimes I think you do model yourself after your great-granddad, despite all your talk about not wanting to be like him.”

  “You don’t get me at all, if that’s what you think.”

  “Then why are you on this ship? Why do you want to see him?”

  “I don’t.”

  George’s eyes widened, and he stepped backward. I took advantage of the distraction to slip past him to stand between benches, shredding the padding.

  He shook his head. “Why would you give up a year of your life to travel to another universe and see someone you don’t like? It doesn’t make sense.”

  I tried to smile, hoping he didn’t hear how fast my heart was beating. He still didn’t know why Uncle Jackass had sent me on this mission. “It wasn’t much of a life anyway.”

  “But you wouldn’t have left your mom unless you had to.”

  I stared down at the padding and ripped it up even faster.

  George glided over to me and put his hand over mine. “Jo, whatever’s going on, I’m on your side. You can trust me. Why can’t you tell me, and we’ll face it together?”

  Would he let me explain everything, or would he think I was as crazy as Jackass and abandon me? I didn’t want to risk that.

  George sighed. “Does it have something to do with your uncle?”

  I looked up at him, then realized that was an answer. Too late, I dropped my gaze. George let the silence build. Finally, when I’d finished shredding the padding, I asked, “What do you know about my uncle?”