by Mark Alpert
He shook his head. What the hell was it? What did I miss?
He had no fucking idea.
PART III
FOUNTAIN
TWENTY-SIX
The journey in the truck was miserable. A dozen guardsmen and Rangers crowded the cargo hold, sharing the space with stacks of trunks and boxes. The exhausted men and women sprawled wherever they could, each trying to get some sleep as the truck rumbled down an unseen highway. The cargo hold had no windows or peepholes, and the only light came from a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. There was no place to wash up or go to the bathroom, either. John smelled so bad, he disgusted even himself.
There was little conversation. No one wanted to talk about the destruction of Haven or the murder of Cordelia. And everyone was careful not to disturb Ariel, who’d shrouded her aunt’s body in a canvas tarp and kept vigil over it in the far corner of the cargo hold, hidden behind several stacks of boxes. John wanted to console her, but the others stopped him. For the Furies, mourning was a strictly private affair.
He was just as exhausted as everyone else, so he found a place to lie down and sleep. When he awoke a few hours later he realized that the truck had come to a stop and its rear doors were open. Standing up, he saw a square of night sky and felt a cold breeze. The truck had stopped in a dark field in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Wisconsin, John guessed, judging from how long they’d been driving. Two vans and four large SUVs were parked nearby, and the guardsmen were busy transferring boxes from the truck’s cargo hold to the vans and cars. This was a rendezvous point, John realized, a place where the Furies could disperse for greater safety. It was more prudent to travel in half a dozen vehicles than in one.
John needed to take a piss, so he stepped down from the cargo hold and hurried to the edge of the field. After he finished, he turned back to the truck and saw two Rangers holding Cordelia’s shrouded corpse. They carried it to one of the vans and placed it inside. Then they got into the van themselves and drove away, presumably to bury her.
The other van drove away too, and so did the SUVs. By the time John returned to the truck, most of the guardsmen and Rangers had departed and only Ariel was left in the cargo hold. She stood near the rear doors, looking up at the stars. John sensed she didn’t want to talk yet, so he stood beside her, silent. The sky just above the eastern horizon had started to brighten. It was maybe half an hour before dawn.
After a minute or so, the tall Ranger medic who’d treated John’s shrapnel wounds came to the back of the truck and handed him a paper grocery bag. “Here’s some food and water,” she said. “We still have three hundred miles to go.” Then she shut the rear doors, locking John and Ariel inside. Half a minute later the truck’s engine restarted and they began moving again. The truck jounced up and down as it crossed the field, but the ride leveled out as soon as they returned to the paved road.
John sat on one of the trunks remaining in the cargo hold and opened the grocery bag. He pulled out two plastic bottles of water and handed one to Ariel. She opened it, took a long drink, then poured the rest of the water on her head. This turned out to be a mistake. The water washed the dirt out of her hair, sending muddy rivulets down her forehead and into her eyes.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered, raising her hands to her face. “Hand me another bottle, will you?”
He gave her another bottle of water and a fistful of napkins. She cleaned herself more carefully this time, splashing water on her face and using the napkins to wipe away the dirt. Then she took off her backpack and cleaned her neck as well. John did the same, lifting his shirt to wash his underarms. Afterwards, he smelled a little better—not great, but not putrid, either. Then he looked in the bag to see what else was there. “We got some sandwiches,” he reported. “Roast beef and cheddar, it looks like. You want one?”
Ariel shook her head. “No, I’m not hungry. But don’t let me stop you.”
“I’m not hungry either. I feel a little nauseous, actually. And kind of weak.”
She stepped closer and looked him over. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. The Fountain protein put you on a roller-coaster ride.” She sat down beside him on the trunk and pressed two fingers to his neck to feel his pulse. “How long did you feel its effects?”
“I definitely felt it in the train tunnel. It was like the world’s biggest adrenaline rush. But it faded after that. I started to feel normal again when we reached the warehouse.”
She unzipped her backpack and removed her Treasure and a pen. Then she turned to a fresh page in the notebook and started writing in the strange runelike alphabet that was her family’s first language. “What about psychological effects? Did you feel any extremes of rage? Any inability to control violent impulses?”
“No, I was lucky. The protein was out of my system by the time I tackled Old Sam.”
Ariel frowned at the mention of the traitor’s name. Furrowing her brow, she scrawled a few more runes in her Treasure. “I wish I’d had a chance to examine you in my lab. Without any data, all I can do is make guesses. The Fountain protein may have interacted with your other biochemical pathways. Maybe the sudden injection of so much Fountain into your system triggered an overproduction of the Upstart protein to compensate. That might explain why we don’t see these effects in women, because they don’t have the Upstart gene.”
“But why would there be psychological effects?”
“The brain is the most sensitive organ in the body. Any change in biochemistry is bound to influence the signaling among the brain cells. And when their signaling changes, the cells establish new connections.”
John squirmed. A disturbing thought had just occurred to him. “Do you think any of the changes in the brain might be permanent?”
She didn’t say anything at first, which made him worry even more. She took her time, thinking it over. “In your case, probably not. But I won’t risk giving you another dose. The brain is quick to establish new pathways in response to chemical stimuli. Nicotine is the perfect example. The addiction response starts to develop after just a few cigarettes.”
“So even though the antiaging effect goes away when you stop taking Fountain, the psychological effects might continue?”
Instead of answering, Ariel looked down at her Treasure. She flipped through the pages until she found one in the middle of the notebook. Then she squinted at the runes. “The only other test subject was Sullivan. I gave him daily injections of the Fountain protein for a week. He didn’t report any side effects, so I kept dosing him until I ran out of protein.” She looked up from the page. “But now that I think about it, I see he had a reason to lie to me. He wanted us to develop the antiaging treatment as quickly as possible. And he knew we’d have to do additional research if there were any unusual side effects. So in all likelihood he decided not to report them.”
She closed the notebook and looked straight ahead, staring at the rear doors of the cargo hold. John leaned closer to her. “You think the protein might’ve messed with Sullivan’s brain? Might’ve affected him permanently?”
Ariel raised her hand to her forehead, as if trying to calm the thoughts churning behind it. “He was always arrogant and cruel, even as a child. But until he started his rebellion, he never broke any of our laws. Maybe his conscience restrained him. Or maybe fear of punishment.” She grimaced. “Something changed, though, after I gave him those injections. He ignored the restraints and acted on his impulses. And maybe Fountain had something to do with that.”
She fell silent. Moving mechanically, she put her Treasure back into her pack. Then she removed the medicine case and unlatched it. Inside were the nine vials of Fountain protein, each nestled in foam padding, and the syringe. She rested the case in her lap and stared at the glass vials. There was nothing inside them but thick yellowish liquid, but she examined the stuff intently, narrowing her eyes, as if she could glimpse the microscopic proteins floating in the fluid.
Several seconds passed. Ariel seemed frozen, entranced. John grew n
ervous. “Look, whatever happened to Sullivan, it wasn’t your fault,” he argued. “You had no idea this could happen.”
She didn’t respond. She kept staring at the vials.
“You were trying to help,” John added. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.”
After a few more seconds she let out a long breath and closed the medicine case. She returned it to the backpack and pulled out something else, a small black box. John hadn’t noticed it before, perhaps because it was only two inches wide. Ariel held the thing in both hands and opened it. Inside was a gold ring with a jewel-encrusted ornament shaped like a butterfly. The insect’s body was a line of six tiny diamonds. Its wings were spotted with rubies and sapphires.
“Aunt Delia made this for me,” Ariel said. “She loved butterflies.”
“That’s right.” An image came to John’s mind, a recent memory. “There was a butterfly carved on her wooden hand.”
“They had great meaning for her. She used to say, ‘The flapping of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other. That’s what makes it so difficult to predict the future.’” Ariel removed the ring from the box and held it up to eye level. Its stones sparkled even in the cargo hold’s dim light. “But it has another meaning, at least for me. People are like butterflies. We’re lovely and fragile. And in the long run, we’re powerless. The wind is stronger than us.”
She fell silent again. John, worried she’d go into another trance, pointed at the ring. “It’s beautiful. You were close to Cordelia, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “Yes, especially when I was young. After every argument with Mother, I ran to Aunt Delia.”
“When you say ‘young,’ what do you mean exactly?” John smiled. “Less than a hundred years old?”
“I mean the seventeenth century, the late 1600s. Mother was especially rigid after we came to America, and I was especially defiant. Delia didn’t always take my side, but she stood with me on the most important things. She agreed that it was our duty to inoculate the Ojibway against smallpox. And she stopped Mother from executing Running Cloud after I brought him back to Haven.”
John recalled his conversation with Ariel in her laboratory, the one that had ended so abruptly when the evacuation alarm sounded. He’d pushed it out of his mind during the confused hours since then, but now it struck him with its original force. Running Cloud had been Ariel’s Ojibway paramour. And he’d gotten her pregnant. “Why did you do that? Bring him back to Haven, I mean?”
She fiddled with the ring in her hand, idly turning and fingering it. “When our family lived in Europe, the women found husbands in the nearby villages. We swore the men to secrecy and they became Furies. But after we came to America, Mother insisted that we live in isolation, so she established the rules for taking paramours. If you wished to become pregnant you had to travel far from Haven to find a man. And as soon as you were with child you had to leave your paramour and return to the family.” She frowned. “My cousins and I hated the rules. It was an unnatural way to live.”
John nodded. “I have to agree with you there.”
“I met Running Cloud while we were inoculating the Ojibway at Chequamegon Bay, about three hundred miles west of Haven. We were posing as French missionaries, but the tribe’s chiefs had encountered churchmen before and noticed we were different. We didn’t harangue them so much about God, for one thing. For another, we had both men and women in our expedition, and the women were young and looking for partners.” She closed her hand on the ring and shook her head in wonder. “I was only thirty-two years old. I was curious and willful and eager to fall in love. And Running Cloud was even younger. Twenty summers, he told me. That’s how they measured time, by the number of summers they could remember.”
John shifted uncomfortably on the trunk. The tone of Ariel’s voice—soft and wistful—made it clear that she still had feelings for Running Cloud, despite the passage of so much time. “So you wanted to defy Elizabeth,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You wanted to challenge her rules.”
“I just wanted to live with the father of my children, the same way Mother had lived with Arthur, my father. Running Cloud was willing to leave his tribe and join our family. We waited until I was four months pregnant, and then we canoed the three hundred miles back to Haven. When we arrived I told Mother she had a choice: either kill us or marry us.” With a fond smile, she slipped the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. “While Mother agonized over the decision, Delia made me a wedding ring. Some of my cousins helped her with the metalwork, but she designed it.”
Ariel extended her arm and admired the ring on her hand. She was still smiling, but John knew her story wasn’t going to be a happy one. She’d already told him, back in her lab, that it hadn’t ended well. “How long were you married?” he asked.
“Three years. We built our own house on the family farm, a small cabin thatched with birch bark. Running Cloud finished building it the day before I gave birth to our daughter. She was a happy little girl, always laughing. She loved to walk in the woods.” Ariel stopped smiling, just as John had expected. “I thought the three of us would be enough. I thought we could form our own little world. But it wasn’t enough for Running Cloud. He missed the world of his ancestors.”
“What happened? Did he go back to his tribe?”
“I woke up one morning and he was gone. And so was our daughter.”
“Jesus. What did you do?”
“We organized a war party. We had only ten men and twenty women, and Running Cloud’s tribe had twice as many warriors. But we had guns, flintlock muskets. Not an accurate long-range weapon, but effective for close-quarters combat.” Ariel lowered her head and stared at the floor of the cargo hold. “We reached Chequamegon Bay just two days after Running Cloud did. I convinced Mother to let me try talking to the chiefs first, so she and I walked into the tribe’s camp, unarmed, while the rest of our soldiers took positions in the woods. We found the chiefs in the wigwam and presented them with peace offerings, but they threw the gifts in our faces. They called us Mi’tsha Midé. That was their word for witches.”
“Where was Running Cloud?”
“The chiefs had already killed him. They said we’d corrupted his spirit, so he had to be burned. As soon as I heard this, madness took hold of me. I screamed, ‘Where’s my daughter?’ and charged at them. One of the chiefs lifted an ax, a heavy iron ax we’d given the tribe a few years before when we first made contact with them. But before he could bring it down on my head, Mother stepped in front of me. She knocked the ax handle aside, but the blade hit her face.”
John winced. So that was how Elizabeth got her scar and lost her eye.
“Then it was chaos,” Ariel continued, still gazing at the floor. “Our soldiers heard the screaming and rushed into the wigwam, firing their muskets. The gunfire terrorized the Ojibway. We slaughtered them as they ran for the woods. Afterwards, we found my daughter in a ditch they used as a trash dump. The chiefs had burned her, too.”
Ariel had begun to cry as she told the story. Her tears slipped down her cheeks and nose. One of them dripped from her chin to the floor of the cargo hold. John slid across the trunk, closing the distance between them, and put his arms around her. He felt her trembling. “I’m sorry, Ariel,” he murmured. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He held her close and gently rubbed her back. She went on crying for a minute or so, her rib cage quivering under his hands. Then she raised her head and rubbed her eyes. The stones in her ring flashed and glittered. “No one challenged Mother’s rules after that. She expected me to learn something from the tragedy and become a more dutiful daughter. But the lesson was too harsh. Whenever I saw that scar on her face…” Her voice trailed off. Instead of finishing the sentence, she pulled the ring off her finger and returned it to its box. “In the end, I decided to leave Haven for a while. Aunt Delia wanted to know what was happening in Europe, so I volunteered to be her spy. I traveled east to Quebec with a
purse full of gold coins and bought passage on a ship heading across the Atlantic.” She put the ring box in her backpack and zipped it up. “For the next twenty years I gathered information for Cordelia. I attended parties in the royal palaces in London and Paris. I met King William of England and King Louis of France. I also met Isaac Newton, who was much more interesting. I saw the beginnings of the scientific revolution, and it inspired me. By the time I returned to Haven I was committed to the ideal of bettering the world. I’d found my purpose in life, and it’s sustained me ever since.” She turned to John and looked him in the eye. “But I’d lost something, too. I didn’t seek another paramour. For the next three centuries I had no interest in lovers or children. I lived my life as if I’d outgrown the need for them.”
John still held her. She leaned into him, pressing her shoulder against his chest. She wasn’t trembling anymore, but her body seemed unusually warm. “So what changed?” he asked. “Why did you walk into that bar in Greenwich Village and pick me up?”
“Because of Sullivan, believe it or not. Or rather, because I was afraid of his rebellion.” Ariel gave him a sober look. “I saw how dangerous it was, how it threatened all of us. For the first time it seemed possible that our family could be destroyed. And that thought filled me with an unbearable urgency. Before everything ended, I wanted to have another child. I wanted to sleep with a man again.” She allowed herself a smile. “But it couldn’t be just any man, of course. Not after I’d waited for so long. So I asked Delia to help me. Although she hadn’t ventured outside Haven in hundreds of years, she had information about billions of men in her computers.”