by Corey Furman
Ten
Though the girls had trouble trusting them at first, the Breylin’s had made good on their promise, and the next two years were happy for all four of them. They lived comfortably together, and though they had to be guarded about their relationship with outsiders, the girls often went to work with Mom. They kept on going on excursions in the hills and mountains as a family, even camping out in the dry season, all in the same canvas tent Joss and the girls had stitched together from old surplus equipment from his time in the Marines that he still had stowed in a box in the back of the lift port. Larissa had been after him to clear that old crap out anyway, and this seemed like as good a use as anything else.
The girls still did most of the chores, but Joss and Riss reminded them that, just as their memories confirmed, it was perfectly normal to expect the children of the house to do chores. Mom and Dad willingly took a turn each week, anyway.
To be sure, it was a strange family, but it was one. There were special meals; the girls’ birthday was treated just as importantly as Mom and Dad’s. There were times when the girls chose what to listen to on the radio. They were often allowed to pick the meals, and if there were no chores to do, they could go outside or read from Larissa’s collection of books as they chose. There were times when the girls were a little withdrawn, but Mom and Dad gave them some room when they needed it. The girls were allowed and encouraged to discuss their feelings, even about hard subjects like the implanted memories of their “real” parents. Mom and Dad just treated those memories with respect and as if they were real.
Larissa often read to the girls, especially at night when they laid down in bed. She would read about the animals on Earth, fantastic, sprawling cities that gleamed like crystal in sunlight, and about mythical beasts and the heroes that slew them. Still, the times that she read of the old children’s stories she had fondly acquired were what they liked best, and of those their favorite had been Snow White and Rose Red.
The first time they’d heard the tale, Larissa had come into their room carrying a book tucked under her arm, and holding two small roses, one red and the other a pale ivory, mounted on a thick display and covered by clear resin on its sides and top.
“Oh, look,” Maré said with a small gasp.
Dad came into the room, and he was carrying his holo-recorder. “Don’t mind me,” he said as he walked over to their dresser. He set the recorder down, turned it on, and their eyes followed him as he left the room.
Smiling and shaking her head as she turned back to the girls, Mom held the case down at their eye level and close so they could see the flowers inside clearly. Their stems were crossed, white over red, and they seemed to be fashioned from delicate tissue paper, very like what the perfumed bits of soap were wrapped in that Dad would sometimes bring home for her. They were delicate and crinkled, and when Maré looked closer she could see that the colors were slightly varied in uneven tones that worked perfectly on the twisted stems and whorls of its petals. The white one almost seemed pure yet aged, while the red spoke of love and adventure. There were a few pictures of colorful flowers in some of their books, and Mom had some that she’d drawn in her art pads, but these had a tranquil beauty she’d never seen before.
Their eyes followed her movements as she silently walked around their bed and laid the case on one of the shelves built into the wall above their heads, with the white bud pointing towards Maré’s side, and the other to Luna.
When she sat down on the bed next to Maré, Luna snuggled closer, and Riss pulled the soft comforter up under their chins. She smiled broadly as she tucked them in, so very like the mother of their memories had when they were little girls.
Maré noticed that Mom had a faraway look in her eyes as she stared off at nothing, held the thin book, and the solemn silence stretched. Her fingers moved lightly over its textured pattern of a spreading tree on the cover, almost reverently, and Maré doubted she was even aware of it. It had sunk down the tangled tendrils of its roots nearly as large as the canopy, and etched into its bole was a simpler yet alluring knot perhaps made of heart shapes. It immediately brought to mind the stylized patterns Mom sometimes drew; perhaps this had been their inspiration.
Whatever else this book was, it was also art that had dropped out of time.
Coming back from wherever she’d gone, she took the book, opened it and flipped through the first couple of pages. They could see that the words were hand written on paper that had yellowed with age, the edges brown in places where it had been opened perhaps many times. Mom paused, used her finger as a bookmark and closed the cover again.
“This book,” she said in hushed tones as she ran her other hand over it again, “was given to my mother by hers a long time ago when she married my father. The story, Snow White and Rose Red, is very old and it has many versions. This particular one was my grandmother’s interpretation of it. It’s about a mother and her two daughters.” She paused with her eyes beginning to brim with emotion. Looking down at them, Riss moved to caress their faces. Maré fought to hold back tears at the tenderness in the light gesture, though she could feel Luna’s making her shoulder damp.
“Before she gave it to my mom though…” She smiled a little sadly, and a few tears managed to slip down her cheeks as she continued. “My mother had a sister, and they had been very close, just the way you two are. When they were teenagers, my aunt had become ill, and she perished before her time. It happened years before I was born. My grandmother had died before then too, so I never knew her, either. I was an only child, but when I was a little girl, my mom showed this to me. I knew who my mother’s mother was from the pictures of her scattered throughout the house, but this book in her handwriting was much more special to Mom, more real than anything else. It gave me… a sense of connection to the past. I don’t know how else to explain it, but… maybe you’ll understand in time on your own.
She let her words sink in for a few minutes. When at last she spoke, her smile broadened. “When she would read it to me, she would make it seem like I was Rose Red, so she was my favorite character. I remember wishing that I’d had a sister.” She laughed a little. “It was a silly fantasy, but not having a sibling didn’t take anything away from those sweet times she read to me. Anyway, when I left Earth to come here, my mom gave these things to me in the hopes that I after I married your father I would have a daughter.” A few more tears slipped down her cheeks as she reached to brush the hair from their foreheads. “I was blessed with two,” she said, and Maré finally let herself cry at the warmth spreading through her.
“I think,” Mom said loudly, lightening the mood, “that Maré is most like Snow White and Luna is most like Rose Red.”
“Hey! I want to be the favorite!” Maré said playfully through her tears.
“Quiet, you,” said her Chroma.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to settle, daughter,” replied Mom in the same playful quality as she held the backs of her fingers to her forehead.
“And the roses?” asked Maré. “What about them?”
“My grandmother had fashioned a pair for my mother and my aunt and set them in two small plastic cases. They were smaller than these, and when my aunt passed away, my mother chose to have them placed with her when she was laid to rest, rather than keep them herself. It was her way of saying goodbye. But when she got married, she shaped a new pair in the hopes that she would have a daughter. When she had me and it was time to read the story, she put them both in one case and sat them on my dresser, where I could always see them. Those two that now sit above your heads are those roses. I thought it was fitting, to leave them in that one case for the two of you, as close as you are.”
“They’re beautiful,” said Luna as she sat up and threw her arms around her. “Thank you, Mom.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Maré as she joined the embrace.
“You’re very welcome, girls,” she replied a touch breathlessly. “The case is quite special,” she said. “When
she had it made, my mom wanted it to keep its contents safe for the generations to come, and not just for the roses, but for the book as well. The resin top is shatterproof, fire resistant and airtight. Both may become slightly more aged looking, and the white may look more ivory-toned, but they will always be beautiful and recognizable. The base has a tiny hidden button, and when you push it, a compartment will open up. When we’re done reading the book goes in there.” She paused. “Shall I read the story to you now?”
They laid back down and Mom fixed the blanket again. Opening the book, she began to read. “There was once a beautiful queen who ruled from a grand castle. Near a fountain in the castle’s courtyard was a bright garden, and at the center stood two huge rose bushes, one of which bore white and the other red blossoms. She had two daughters who were like the two rose bushes, one named Snow White and the other Rose Red…”
Eleven
On a Friday at the end of a long week, Riss had taken Maré and Luna to work. She had been running a complex but largely unvaried set of simulations on rock erosions and the related gas exhumations. The commute trips to and from contributed as well; she had been using the time to show Luna how to drive her lift. She wasn’t sure which had donated to her exhaustion more – the pressure at work, or the apparent inability of her daughter to keep her damn foot from mashing the accelerator through the deck of the lift.
She had set up several large magnetic vats down in the basement testing lab. The simulants from several of the gas tap crews had brought in many different samples, lining the bottom of each vat with the material they had brought in, one type in each. Using a mixture of several common chemicals, each day she had soaked the rock samples, charting the emission results, having everything cleaned out and repeating the next day. The smell was awful; they had to turn the air processors up so high that it sounded like they were doing the experiments at the height of one of the wind storms.
Some of the results had been promising as sources of interesting and marketable propellants, but two samples in particular caught the attention of one of the other departments, the biologists. Normally they studied the simple plants that were indigenous to Zarmina, but these samples were interesting because the exhumed gases had shown a few, tiny traces of complex hydrocarbons. Contamination from the gas tap crews seemed unlikely, and they were fairly certain that they couldn’t have been blown in by circulating weather patterns. Much more research would be required, but such might lead to the discovery of Zarmina’s first extremophiles. If that happened, there would be no living with the biologists.
That afternoon, Riss was up on the catwalk above the tanks checking the samples, when she noticed that one of them inexplicably seemed to have turned into a bubbling, sickly yellow foam, filling the vat almost halfway up to the rim. Very strange, she thought. What would cause that?
She called down to the girls. “Maré, please bring me a couple of the special surgical glass vials that the biologists seemed to like, please! And a long fingers!”
“Okay, Mom!”
“What did you say, dear?!”
“I said, I’ll get it!”
“Okay!”
Time to take some measurements. When she turned back to the vat, she leaned over the railing to get a better look at the graduated depth marks on its side, but the lighting was wrong and she couldn’t see them properly. The light was just catching the sharp edge of the laser-made marks, but it just wasn’t enough to quite make it out. Shit, is it 370L or 375L? Righting herself, she moved further along the tank and leaned in again. Still not quite right… but almost…
She went up on tippy-toes to lean out as far as she dared, and that did it – she could finally make it out, 375L. Just as she was making up her mind, there was a loud shriek and a shudder vibrated through the catwalk, startling her. The involuntary reaction caused her weight to shift, the lattice grille beneath her shifted in its frame and her toes lost their purchase. She squealed as she went over the edge. She managed to hold onto the railing, but she went into the froth almost to her hips. The stuff was warm for a few seconds, but it quickly turned to ravenous fire. That was when she really started screaming.
Maré was thinking about dinner later, that maybe she would make some of the thick stew Dad liked, when she heard Mom call for some supplies. She had put the glass vials in the lab coat pocket Mom made them wear, got the long fingers and had just started up the cat walk stairs when she misstepped. She went down on her knees hard. There was a loud squeal as metal gave way, and a few bolts snapped at the top of the steep stairs and pinged off of a nearby vat. The end of the catwalk dropped about ten centimeters, came to rest on the top of the vats, and the whole assembly jerked violently. Immediately, she heard Mom scream.
“Luna, something’s wrong with Mom!”
Luna had heard though, and was already moving towards the bottom of the stairs as Maré reached the top. Mom was nowhere in sight!
Luna dashed up beside her. “She must have fallen in one of them!”
As they hurried down the cat walk looking in the vats for her, they heard her scream, worse this time, from one of the last on the right. They rushed forward. They found her dangling from the edge in some awful stuff, screaming hard enough to freeze their blood. It took both of them to pull her up and out onto the cat walk. Riss lost consciousness as they flopped her down over the railing.
“Luna, get help!”
She ran back the way they had come, crying as she went. Maré realized she was crying herself.
She had no medical training, but she could still see Mom breathing rapidly. What remained of her legs was a horrific caricature with the skin stripped back and much of the flesh eaten away, the smooth, wet extensions of bone showing through in places.
Larissa had survived the incident, though they’d had to amputate both legs to save her. There’d also been a fairly massive amount of injury in the pelvic region. It had taken some threatening, but Joss had convinced the primary doctor to destroy the relevant pain receptors. The trauma would make ongoing care necessary; there was no way he would ask her to endure debilitating agony too.
The night of the accident, Joss had been summoned to the small but sophisticated medical wing in Twilight City. The only thing they would tell him was that Larissa had had an accident, and the simulants that were with her had been detained. He raced his lift down so fast that he was afraid he was pushing it beyond its limits, yet instead of slowing down he pushed it harder. For all he knew she might die, and if that happened before he got there he didn’t care if he were killed in a flaming lift wreck. If she died it would probably kill him, regardless.
When he arrived, she was in a medically induced coma and would be that way for at least the next twenty four hours. They said they thought she might live, but wouldn’t make any better predictions until they did another eval at that time. As to what had happened they wouldn’t tell him much, as if they didn’t really know the circumstances. What they could tell him was that she had been exposed to some sort of super-base. Although the stuff had been extremely potent, it had been lowly concentrated. Had it been any less so, the damage might have been considerably more catastrophic. It was almost as if they thought he should feel lucky, the cold bastards.
He left in a daze and walked the streets for hours, his emotions all tangled up and his stomach churning. At first he was just worried and terrified that she would pass, and if she did he wouldn’t long survive her.
His dark thoughts were strongly influenced by his erratic feelings, and he began to feel guilty for not having protected her from… whatever had happened. I should have been there! Why wasn’t I there?
As he walked the unseen streets, he began to acknowledge that his guilt was irrational, intellectually at first, but then he really started to believe it. But that inevitably lead to blaming her coworkers… and finally the girls.
It was their fault! They were there! They were supposed to be helping her! Why?!
Then he r
emembered that he needed to pick them up from corporate security. It took a minute or two to realize where he was, but he had a general understanding of the lay of the streets and he walked back both briskly and more or less directly.
The security guys were a little better with much needed information. “As near as we can tell, your wife fell into a tank of some kind of chemical crap that burned her pretty badly. Your gabachas,” he thumbed at the holding cell in which they sat, “pulled her out when she screamed. One of them… uh…” he said as he looked at his clipboard, “Luna, it says here, called us – but if you can tell the two of ‘em apart, you’re better than I am.”
“If they pulled her out then why were they brought here?”
Puzzled, the guy looked at Joss. “Huh? They’re simulants – we couldn’t just let them run around loose, Mr. Breylin. We put temp behavior mod collars on ‘em and brought them here.” He held his hands up. “What else were we gonna do?”
The two of them looked pitiful when security released them from the cell. Joss could tell from their puffy faces that they had been crying, and probably a lot of it. Is that how I look?
Maré asked, “how is she, Dad?”
“She’s alive. That’s all I know for now. C’mon, it’s time to go.”
It was a long, quiet ride home with him refusing to talk or look at them the few times they tried to ask questions. He could almost feel their apprehension and he let it build. As he piloted the lift over the contours of the land he set his jaw and brooded, hoping that their imaginations were going crazy wondering what would happen when they made it home.
When they walked in, Joss curtly told them sit at the kitchen table, while he went to his bedroom. He came out a few minutes later and got scissors from one of the drawers. He took the collar remote from out of his pocket, surprising them; it was a thing they hadn’t seen since the Breylin’s had made them their daughters and taken their collars off. He deactivated the temp ones they now wore, then used the scissor to cut them off.