Mari had been right, though. Age lines were encroaching on that full face. The white streak was a trifle wider than it had been a year ago. Jael’s eyes seemed duller, fatigue of the hard-fought political campaign starting to show.
Unconsciously, Todd was comparing himself with Jael. Most of his features and his body structure came from Jael’s side of the family. Was he going to have increasing weight problems, as did Jael, when he grew older? He hoped his nondescript brown hair would gray as attractively as Jael’s had, but that was probably a vain wish. She was the only one of the Hartmans with that particular physical attribute. Pat and Mari stayed handsomely lean, and it was likely they would still be trim and good-looking into their eighties. It didn’t seem fair. They rarely bothered with real exercise and ate and drank as they pleased. Already Todd had to watch his caloric intake and increase his exercise regimen just to maintain his weight and figure. As time wore on, he sympathized more and more sincerely with Jael’s familiar complaints about her health.
“I’m so glad you’ve come to Saunderhome, Dian,” Jael said, offering her hand. She didn’t rush things. That wasn’t Jael’s style.
“The schedules just wouldn’t work out before now,” Dian replied tactfully. The missed connections had been deliberate on her part. Todd wasn’t entirely sure why. He had coaxed Dian to come with him when he flew to the island, ever since they realized, months ago, that what they felt for each other was a lot stronger than an employer and trained specialist relationship. Dian never gave him an answer that was an answer. He suspected the problem lay in the cultural gap. Dian was repressing her U.G.S accent now, very much in her expert translator’s telecom voice—the tone guaranteed to reveal no trace of her origins.
“Well, I’m happy the schedules meshed this time—very happy. It’s long overdue.” Jael shook her head and laughed. Todd saw himself in her once more. That head shake was the same thing he did when he was uncertain of his ground, socially. But why was Jael uncertain? She and Dian had met before, though not often. The major difference this time was where they were meeting, at Saunderhome, Jael’s home territory. It was almost as if she looked at Dian in an entirely new light, as a woman who might be a rival, an invader.
“Thank you, Mrs. Saun—”
“No titles! I hate them. I’ll put up with them in public, but not here among my family and friends.”
Dian resisted for a moment, then said softly, “Very well—Jael.”
“Good! After all, you’re a prospective member of the family yourself, aren’t you?” Jael smiled at them both fondly. Dian raised a slim black eyebrow, but said nothing. Jael wandered around the room, visually assessing the servants’ work. “And Mariette’s young man, did he come?” She tried to make the question sound offhanded. It didn’t work. Todd and Dian both understood that Jael was fully informed on everything that happened here. She already must know that Kevin McKelvey wasn’t among the current guests.
“Uh . . . I’m afraid not. He couldn’t get away.” Todd felt defensive of the man.
“Oh, yes. Of course. He’s been elected governor up there, hasn’t he?” Word traveled fast. How had she known? Todd reviewed his words and actions since he had left Goddard. He said nothing about Kevin’s elevation in rank, but Mariette had, to some techs at Geosynch. Todd didn’t like to think he had spies in his organization. That must be the case, though.
“What’s he like? I mean, is he a good person? I wouldn’t want Mariette to . . . she’s had some very unhappy experiences with men in the past, you know.”
“Very well,” Todd replied with a sigh. “He’s no airboat daredevil or vid-drama type. Not at all like the others.”
“Good. Time she settled down. I wish he were going to be here. I’d so wanted to meet him. You know, I never have. Haven’t even spoken to him on the com. The opportunity never arose. I’d like to meet him in person. You can tell so much more about someone face to face. Don’t you agree, Dian?” Jael asked softly.
Dian nodded mutely, flicking a glance toward Todd. She reminded him of a spooky wild creature, ready to run if danger came too near.
Jael looked out the window. “What’s most important is, you brought Mariette. I knew you would, dear. And sooner or later I’ll get to meet Kevin McKelvey, too. She’s here. Meeting her young man is next.” She walked over to Todd and touched his face lovingly. He caught her hand and kissed it. “You’ve made us a family again,” Jael whispered. “Thank you. So long. So very long since we’ve all been together here . . .”
“Things will be okay.”
Visibly, Jael brought herself forward in time. “I know. You’ll make it work. You always do. He has a gift for that, Dian. Have you noticed? He and Ward, peas in a pod. It isn’t that they’re bullies . . . that Ward was a bully or Todd is. It’s just that they persuade you, bring you around, make you see things their way. But I’m sure you know that.” Jael winked lewdly at Dian, startling the younger woman. Then Dian’s face lit in a grin. They reacted one woman to another, dissecting the prudish male under their microscopes.
Todd squirmed with chagrin until Jael’s smile warmed him like Caribbean sunshine. “You were always my sweet-tempered child, my little peacemaker.” He blushed at the compliment, one he had heard ever since he was a kid. Jael was amused. “You are! And I’m counting on you to keep the other kids from arguing this time, too. Lord! If you hadn’t . . . There were times when I came home and expected to see little corpses, Dian. But somehow Todd always broke up the fights. Pat was the oldest, but it was Todd who was my babysitter for the other two. Well, I’d better go see how one of the other kids is doing.” Jael hesitated, then asked, “Do you think Mariette will mind? I don’t want to intrude.”
“It’s hardly intruding. You live here more than she does,” Todd said.
“She whines so about these suites. I can’t understand what she dislikes. We just had to enlarge. The old house wasn’t big enough any more. You know that, Todd.” Jael nibbled on a neatly trimmed fingernail.
“I’m sure she’s just blowing off steam. Ignore her. I do. She’ll have to gripe a while before she admits things aren’t so bad at the old place.”
“Oh, how true!” Her good mood restored, Jael started toward the door.
“Are Pat and Carissa here yet?” Todd called after her.
Jael paused by the monitor array beside the door, expertly scanning the service readouts and messages, “Carissa’s been here a couple of days. Patrick will fly in sometime this afternoon. He’s finishing up a campaign swing through Africa, but he promised he’d be here before supper.”
“Maybe we ought to drop over to Carissa’s suite and say hello,” Dian suggested, still using her very-correct media worker’s voice.
“Oh, she’s resting now so she’ll be fresh for this evening.” Todd was about to ask after his sister-in-law’s health, but Jael rushed on, talking rapidly as she simultaneously reprogrammed some of the service monitors. “If you need anything extra, Dian, don’t hesitate to call Supplies. Todd forgets about little feminine necessities, even if he is a considerate boy. We can’t expect them to know everything, can we?” She winked again, then hurried out.
When she had left, Dian looked at Todd thoughtfully, waiting for him to meet her gaze. “Carissa’s taking a nap? Every other time I’ve been in the same SE area she is, she calls you as soon as you land or pull in.”
Todd clawed at his scalp, scratching a non-existent itch. “Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on there, either. And I’m worried. We agree she looked like hell on those recent ‘casts, and, come to think of it, she hasn’t been showing up on any of the campaign footage recently.”
“Maybe she picked up a virus.”
Todd shivered. “My God! Don’t say that.”
Dian shrugged. “It happens, even today. Mutations are still out there looking for likely targets. Remember, I grew up with the pandemics.”
“We all did. I . . . I just can’t deal with them very welt. Maybe I never will.” He sat
down on the bed, confronting the primitive fear in himself. “It’s a personal hangup. I know the meds found some of the answers, thanks in part to SE Pharmaceuticals and the Antarctic Enclave experimenters. But not all the answers, and not always a cure. I guess it doesn’t matter, if you’re rich enough or important enough. Got a deadly virus? Put the body on ice and the tissue samples in the vault until doctors crack the case.”
Dian’s eyes narrowed. “That again? What is this new phobia about the Antarctic Enclave? You and Mari kept whipping each other about the place all the way down from orbit, and none too subtly. Frankly, the static’s getting thick. Maybe I react because there’s damned little United Ghetto States representation in that Enclave, Oh, I know a few people who are on the watchdog Human Rights Committee, sure, but . . .”
“Sorry. Forget it. It’s a disagreement Mari and I are having.”
“Huh!” Dian’s sarcastic snort would have wilted the drapes if they had been organic fabric.
Todd didn’t respond. Mariette’s suspicions, and the promises she had extracted from him—they weren’t going to go away. She would call in the debt, eventually. Other things wouldn’t go away, either—the suite; the magnificent view; the ominous new construction, sufficient to repel an invasion; Jael’s hand-patting tactics; questions about Carissa’s health—and, most of all, the little case lying on the bed beside him. He was on the edge of a precipice, and very soon he would have to jump, or be pushed.
Dian tried to lighten his mood. “That was a cute little phrase: ‘Mariette’s young man.’ Almost as cute as ‘prospective member of the family.’ Is she hinting we ought to take out official papers and start breeding little Foix-Saunders?”
“She certainly is. Jael’s a demon for generational continuity. Old traditions. She’s funny that way, considering how she kicked her family in the shins. They wouldn’t have minded if she had just had an affair with Ward. But, my God, marrying him? Official papers and quaint old legal customs and all. If that wasn’t bad enough, she deliberately had three kids. Believe me, it isn’t because she was crazy about motherhood,” Todd said with some bitterness. “We were another way of flaunting her family and spitting in their eyes, a positive embarrassment . . .”
“Hey! Don’t cut her down. She’s my kind.” Dian added coyly, “Why do you think I transferred from university global coordination linguistics to ComLink? It wasn’t just because I was frantic to experience sex in free fall . . .”
Todd grinned lasciviously. “But that figured in.”
“Heavily!” Dian sobered. “She’s family-strong, your mother. I hear it when she mouths those old-fashioned terms. Wyoma Lee was like that, too. Only her kids all died, and I was the only grandkid who didn’t.”
“We’ve been lucky,” Todd said, feeling guilty again. “Jael runs scared. She watched that happening all around her. Put that together with the old-line philosophy she was raised with, and you get a woman who wants the kids to have grandkids and so on and so on. Continuity. For her, it’s all tangled with Ward and how she felt about him and his being killed before all their dreams came true.”
Dian locked her hands behind his neck, resting her forehead against his. “As I said, wonder woman.”
“Not quite.”
“Huh! See her set that servo board? Took it in at a blink. She’s a top tech.”
“Yeah, she helped Ward remember to eat when he was concocting his inventions, and she nursed them through patents and financial deals while he kept coming up with new ones. Saunder Enterprises is a joint effort, but she did the dirty work, then and now. Sure she’s expert. She knows how to use all those crazy devices Dad kept coming up with and taught us kids how to use them, too, But she’s still ‘Mom’! God help us if we ever call her that, though.” He had accepted Jael’s dual nature all his life, yet it was refreshing to see his mother through someone else’s eyes, friendly eyes. Plenty of business competitors had expressed their opinions of Jael, “that soft-voiced, throat-cutting Saunder bitch.” But Dian’s attitude was part heroine worship and part wariness of Jael’s wealth and power and social status.
“We’ve got an afternoon,” Todd said abruptly. “Let’s forget everything for a while. Want to swim?”
Dian was agreeable. They hadn’t brought swim gear, but hadn’t needed to. Everything was supplied; all they had to do was take the private elevator down to the cabana. Todd carried the case along, reluctant to leave it in the room, even though he knew the staff was completely trustworthy.
The cabana, Dian commented, was fancier than all the places she had called home when she was a kid, and warmer than most of them. The little shelter was fully automated, offering remote control to deploy giant umbrellas farther down the beach, summon lifeguards, dispense cold drinks and snacks, or inflate a liquid-filled basking mattress under a tanning canopy. A high fence separated them from other cabanas and sections of the beach surrounding the house.
No one intruded. No one paged them on the com or knocked at the fence gate. Dian reveled in the luxurious isolation. Geosynch, ComLink’s planetside offices, and company-supplied apartments—all came with a necessary amount of elbows-in-the-ribs contact with other people. Population growth was still matching the worldwide losses fairly well, and humanity tended to bunch up in certain convenient locations where they had to live in one another’s pockets, Enough wealth, however, could still buy that precious commodity—room. Saunderhome was a mere dot among Earth’s national communities. But it was special. Untouched by war or pandemics or other devastations, Saunderhome combined mankind’s most up-to-date equipment with unspoiled natural beauty. Here, on this island, the frenzied pace of life in 2040 couldn’t touch Todd and Dian.
They swam, splashing and frisking like kids, beach sand clinging to their wet skin. It was easy to forget there were glaciers and political upheaval and a thousand other worries. Free to do as they wished, they became children for a while, children with adult desires, Laughing, they sought the shade of the tanning canopy, their bodies still glowing after the exertion of the swim. The floor was a floating cushion, lulling the tired swimmer, or encouraging lovemaking. They tried both, in reverse order. Teasing laughter and sexual intensity mingled. Dian compared the sensations to sex in null grav and declared it a tie, Todd agreed, his mouth and hands busy.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that he had done this before. Many times. This setting, these sensations, though not recently. There had been days and nights of such sensual pleasure. A woman he had met as a result of ComLink’s media outlets, a casual acquaintance made at a shuttle terminal or in business dealings. When he was much younger, the woman was likely to have been one of the staff at Saunderhome. He had always made matters plain. No strings, and the women had felt the same way. Pat had gotten himself into some sticky messes when the arrangement wasn’t mutual. But for once, the second son had lucked out. No strings . . .
This was different, Todd floated away in a daydream of contentment, the filtered Sun gently warming his face as it sifted through the canopy.
A persistent engine noise woke him sometime later. He listened, deciding the sound was a flier circling Saunderhome, lining up for a landing, as he had earlier. Curiosity satisfied, Todd closed his eyes and blanked his mind, shutting out the distant thrumming noise, letting the mellow sensations bear him away once more.
He was unsure how long he had been catnapping. He woke without opening his eyes, aware of a third presence close by. No instinctive alarms went off. Instead, be felt a comforting familiarity. What had waked him? A sound half heard? Perhaps it was a scent, though he wasn’t conscious of any odor which hadn’t been there when he dozed off.
His thoughts drifted. Did the species which made the alien vehicle have Homo sapiens’ five senses? Or did they learn about the universe in other ways? Everything now seemed to pull his mind toward speculation about the aliens.
“Come on, kid. I know you’re in there. Wake up.” Sand showered over Todd’s bare feet in a gritty rain.
Sandaled toes scratched his legs. He jerked away and rolled over, looking up. Pat stood arms akimbo. He wasn’t alone; four bodyguards lounged near the fence, discreetly looking elsewhere, trying to blend in with the scenery. Pat was wearing trunks and a shirt, unfastened, protecting his back against sunburn. Sunlight shot red glints through his black hair. “Count on you to loll on the beach with a beautiful woman when you should be tending chores.”
“Have a heart. I’m on vacation. I’m entitled, bully boy,” Todd said. He stood up, teetering unsteadily on the liquid-filled mattress. Dian woke and propped herself on one elbow, watching them.
Pat bowed like a courtier. “Hello, Dr. Foix. You are indeed entitled. But this lazy kid here. . .” The tone grew challenging. Pat had shucked out of his politician’s guise along with his natty clothes.
Without warning, he launched himself, tackling Todd around the waist. They rolled out onto the beach, making a noisy show of pummeling each other. Todd yelped as the hot sand contacted his naked buttocks, and he struggled to get on top of the impromptu wrestling match.
A hard punch, slammed into his midriff and another clipped his jaw, making his vision spin. Todd quit the act, bringing up his arms to pick off the blows, going under them and striking back.
“Hey!” he shouted, then jerked aside as Pat threw another wild jab that slid past his ear. He countered with a fist that connected, making Pat grunt from the force. Hastily, Todd wriggled out of reach and jumped to his feet. The bodyguards were watching, expressionless, not about to interfere.
The sand burned his soles as he leaned forward, arms out in defensive posture, not knowing what to expect. Pat sat on the sand, massaging his stomach, squinting at him. “You look pretty damned stupid, kid, standing there mother naked like that.”
“What the hell is going on?” Todd demanded. Warily, he straightened up, backing away to the shade of the canopy. He hopped around awkwardly as he pulled on his trunks and sandals. Pat was making no effort to move. But Todd was sure he hadn’t hurt him with those punches. They had traded plenty far worse than that when they were both younger and less inclined to pull punches.
Tomorrow’s Heritage Page 15