“By the power invested in me through the Justi-Center of Icaria-5, I pronounce you legally married.” The older man announced then nodded to them. “You may kiss.”
Daniel took Julie’s hands in his and for a moment they simply grinned at one another. Were they thinking of their initial vows in the wild heath, wondered Angel. Then Daniel took Julie’s face in trembling hands and whispered something to her that only Angel could hear: “This is for keeps, my angel. You can’t run away anymore.”
“Okay,” she whispered back.
Daniel gave her a look of challenge and Julie returned him a lopsided smile. “Trust me,” she said.
He grinned at her words, then he kissed her gently on the lips. Julie closed her eyes and wrapped her bare arms around him. Then she promptly collapsed.
Stricken, Daniel seized her limp body before she fell to the floor.
“Mom!” Angel cried and rushed beside her father who’d kneeled down with her mother’s prone figure in his arms. “What’s the matter with her, Dad?”
“I don’t know,” he said, echoing her shivering voice with a frail one. “She just passed out.”
Victor, Carl, Manfred and Zane and others crowded in on them as Angel studied her mother’s strangely peaceful face. “She looks asleep...” Angel trailed.
“Like the time she went into that ecstatic trance in the A.I.-core,” Victor finished for her.
Daniel threw a pointed glance at Victor then his gaze flickered to Carl. “Do you think...”
“You were kissing, and she did look pretty ecstatic,” Carl offered. “Let’s get her to the Med-Center where she can be comfortable and I can examine her.”
Daniel hoisted her up in his arms and followed Carl, with Zane tagging behind.
“I’m coming with you!” Angel cried and scrambled behind her father.
Daniel glanced over his shoulder. “Of course you are, honey.”
Manfred fell into step beside Angel and gave her a weak, conciliatory smile. It looked lame but she appreciated it.
“What do you think is wrong with her?” she asked him as they followed Daniel, Carl and Victor to the Odum Mall Med-Center.
His attempt at a smile grew into a grimace and he shook his head, swallowing instead of speaking. Was he thinking of the mother he’d lost and never known? Was her mother dying? You’re getting dramatic again, Angel, she’d have said. Angel shut out the dark thoughts that interfered with her ability to help. But that was just it there was nothing she could do, except watch and worry. She’d just gotten her mother back and didn’t want to lose her again.
Manfred’s comforting arm was suddenly around her shoulder as they followed along.
***
Julie awoke in Daniel’s arms well before they’d reached the Odum Med-Center. As he wove his way through the crowd in the mall, hardly noticing the curious faces around them, Daniel felt her stir in his arms. Still walking, he looked down to see her peering up into his eyes with a odd look on her face. “I know it’s customary to carry your new wife across the threshold but it seems an awfully long threshold.”
He grinned and stopped, not noticing his party stopping with him. “You passed out during the best part.”
She looked genuinely distressed now. “You mean we aren’t married?”
He chuckled and gently set her back on her feet, keeping his arms around her. “No, sweetheart. We’re married all right.”
She tilted her head and gave him a crooked smile of inquiry.
“My kiss,” he explained. “You missed it. Our first kiss as a married couple.”
“Oh, that!” she said, her smile opening to a broad grin. “Well, we can remedy that easily enough.” Folding her arms around his neck she kissed him full on the mouth in front of the whole mall crowd. Daniel stiffened briefly in surprise, thinking her action overly brazen, then threw his cautious ideas of decorum aside and enjoyed his second kiss as a legally married man.
Several people in the crowd cheered and clapped, recognizing that they were just married or perhaps even who the bride and groom were. Daniel felt her smiling through the kiss at the appreciative crowd.
When they pulled away from each other, Carl cleared his throat to get their attention. The others joined him in a circle. “I still think I should examine you, Julie,” Carl said, looking serious. “You did pass out for no obvious reason.”
“I agree,” Daniel said quickly, sensing her resistance to the idea. Julie glanced from him to Carl and then to Angel and Manfred behind them.
“I’m alright,” she said. “I feel fine. Really,” she insisted, rather defensively, he thought. “I came out of it on my own.”
“This time,” Daniel pointed out. “You’ve been tired lately. Don’t think I haven’t caught you yawning in the middle of the day and grabbing for a chair.”
“Look,” she began sharply then gave him a conciliatory smile, “I’ll submit to a physical tomorrow after we figure out what to do about these kids and Proteus. Whether I stay behind for a while.”
“You mean when you decide you’re going to stay,” he said somberly.
Julie’s eyes flashed with mixed emotions. She threw a swift glance at their daughter, who watched with interest, and firmed her jaw. She said in a hushed voice, “That’s a decision we—you and I—will make later. Right now,” she grinned, all teeth, “we have a marriage to consummate.”
49
Daniel joined Julie on the couch with two fruit drinks he’d brought from the kitchen of their luxurious suite. The suite was located on the top floor and resembled Julie’s old one, with extensive skylights, indoor plants, and comfortable but elegant furniture. It even had an aquarium with goldfish like her old one. Victor had given them the private suite to celebrate their wedding night in privacy.
Julie, dressed only in a bathrobe, reclined on the couch with her bare feet stretched out, ankles crossed, in front of her. She hadn’t bothered to comb her hair and it tumbled in damp waves behind her like a turbulent brook. Her face still glowed from the recent consummation of their marriage. They’d showered together afterward and while she was still drying herself, Daniel had made the drinks in the kitchen.
Julie reached for her glass as Daniel sat down beside her and gave him a loving smile. As he gazed at her beautiful face an incredible sadness washed over him like a tidal surge and he choked on his sip of his drink. Julie nuzzled up next to him and was about to lean her head against his shoulder, when he blurted out, “You know I can’t stay.” He’d turned to look at the lit aquarium but watched her through the corner of his eye.
He felt her stiffen and she edged her body away from him as she too now focused on the aquarium, glass poised in her hand. Lips tight and eyes expressionless, Julie reflected his grave face with a stony look. He knew it capped a well of emotion that threatened to erupt. They’d not yet discussed her staying behind, even though both were thinking of it and he knew she’d already made her decision, despite her insistence that they would decide together.
“I know Angel wouldn’t mind staying,” he went on. “She’s quite enamored with Icaria’s glitter and all the people. But I just don’t belong here, Julie. I’d get bitter...” he trailed. Their eyes met and they shared a mutual pain.
“Oh, Daniel,” she whispered, her eyes gazing into his in a kind of sad embrace. “I know I can’t ask you to stay with me. But I do have to stay to finish what I started, when my father—” she swallowed, choking down what she couldn’t say. She took a couple breaths, then she continued in a more controlled voice, “This was my home, once yours too I owe them...”
“Owe them?!” Daniel scoffed. “Julie, they wanted to kill you, remember? They slandered your whole family, then killed them all off! You were teased and hated all our life as a veemeld; the government used you, even this time, then they screwed you over.”
“Just Gaia and the Head Pol “<
br />
“And the entire Pol force and the Vee-radicators and the
scientists—”
“They’re still my people,” she said quietly. “Icarians.”
Daniel leaned back with a long exhale. Ironic, he thought, how she who’d always been fiercely independent, basically a loner from when he’d known her, felt so connected to this place and its people. He knew then that he couldn’t argue with her, that this was about much more than he could fathom. It was a biological, visceral thing for her. Icaria lived inside of her. She needed needed to stay and do this for Icaria...like the Monarch butterflies returning north to the warmth of home after a long winter away.
“I know you understand,” Julie went on. “I also understand that you have to go back and take Angel with you to the heath. That’s...home now.” The last words came out strangled.
She’d called the heath ‘home’. Yes, it was his home. Was it still hers?
She turned to stare absently at the fish in the aquarium again. “I just don’t know how long they’ll need me. How long it’ll take. Weeks, months...years.” She looked back at him with hope in her eyes. “We can visit each other in the meantime, can’t we?”
Daniel heaved a sigh. This was torturing her. Julie had practically clung to Angel since they’d been reunited, hardly letting her out of her sight and taking advantage of every opportunity to be with her, to touch her, hug her, and kiss her. As much as he knew she’d miss him, it was separating herself from Angel that would devastate her. Was she afraid she’d miss some momentous milestone in her young daughter’s development into a young woman? Was she simply worried about being a bad mother or being left out?
“Maybe Angel should stay here with you,” Daniel offered. “Here she’d have some formal education. It might do her some good.”
She stared at him for several seconds. “No,” she said rather sharply with a forward jerk that almost spilled her drink. He wondered what fear had prompted that response. Meeting his inquiring gaze head-on, her face softened into sadness and she clasped his free hand. “You’re so sweet, Daniel. I know you’re thinking of me. But she belongs in the heath with you. It’s not that I don’t trust the people here. Victor is a just mayor and Aileen runs the Circle with practical wisdom. I’d be worried that Angel would get so caught up in all this,” she threw her gaze around the room to indicate Icaria’s dazzle, “that she wouldn’t want to return to the heath when the time came.”
Daniel laughed sharply. Julie winced and let go of his hand. To her expression of exasperated bewilderment, he explained, “You’re the one I’m worried about when it comes to that.”
She gave him a lopsided smiled and nudged him with her shoulder. “You still don’t trust me...”
“And you still don’t trust Angel.”
“Should I?”
He remained silent, eyes drifting again to the fish.
“You shouldn’t be out there all by yourself, Daniel,” Julie went on. “The two of you can look after each other until...” her voice caught and she swallowed hard. “...Just remember to visit me on our birthdays, okay?”
Daniel squeezed her back. “I’ll do better than that.” He suddenly smiled to her plaintive look and after draining his glass in a swift gulp he pulled her sash and her robe spilled open, revealing her splendid body. He drew in a long appreciative breath and leaned forward to stroke her face and neck with his hands. Then he let his hands glide down her shoulders, sliding her robe off her. She responded with a pleased laugh and had his robe off within a heartbeat.
They stared at one another in silence and he realized she had more to say. When she spoke he saw the pain she was trying to hide in her face, “You don’t have to worry about me not coming back to the heath,” she said in a voice that warbled with emotion. “My longing for Icaria was based on a fantasy—old memories—but mostly an overwhelming biological call from a virus wishing to join with me. Now that I’ve done that, I’m left with the fantasy.” She sighed. “I’ve changed. This isn’t home for me anymore, Daniel. We’ve made our home out there, in the heath.” Her eyes looked deep inside him to where his heart trembled for her. “And while I’m here, living in this sterile indoor environment, I’ll be missing the things I’ve come to love out there: the scorching heat of the sun baking down on my back, the sweet music of the birds, the smell of the earth after a rainstorm, even the howling of the biting winter wind...but mostly I’ll miss your beautiful smile, your wonderful smell and your arms curled around me...home is where our family is.”
Like a candle to a moth, the liquid fire in her eyes drew him forward and he buried his head between her breasts, the way he’d done the very first time they’d ever touched and kissed. The heady scent of her body enveloped him as she wrapped her arms around him to comfort him, like that first time. In that moment, as he realized how she really felt about the heath and about him, he discovered that she’d never left him, and he could never lose her. They could be parted for years and still be together, two souls beating as one heart. Overwhelmed, he raised his head to look into her eyes. They shone like precious jewels and he saw her face pucker with painful yearning and sadness. The sadness of a lonely child who needed to be strong, as only she could have been and still was.
Don’t cry, he wanted to say, I’ll always be with you in your heart!
Her brows furrowed with a deep longing and her lips closed fiercely over his as if to capture his essence. He pulled her with him, reclining so that she lay upon him. Then, with all the tenderness of a first romance, he gave her the gift of his unending love.
50
Zane, his left arm still in a sling, pointed out details on a comp-generated animation of the lifecycle of the Proteus virus on a holo-screen with the cursor. Julie and Carl stood facing him in Carl’s lab at the Odum Mall Med-Center. Carl and Zane were debriefing Julie in advance of their first class with fifteen Darwin children.
“So, Vogel made Proteus to interact symbiotically with a human and the A.I.s of the city,” Zane lectured her happily. “His intention always was to create a new species.”
Julie nodded solemnly.
“This new species was meant to be proficient and highly capable of interacting and flourishing among its viral-human-machine parts. A super-being, so to speak, capable of incredible machine speed and logic, possessing human intuition, problem-solving capabilities, a spiritual conscience and the ability to correct itself, to evolve and change rapidly in incremental ways through its viral counterpart. Imagine,” he sighed with an expression of awe. “Imagine getting sick. The virus would pick it up, diagnose it using your A.I., and then help you fix it. An efficient self-regulating, self-correcting autopoietic system.”
Carl said, “The irony is, with this symbiotic relationship, we wouldn’t need a lot of those very drugs that are causing the infertility problems in the first place.”
Zane nodded vigorously. “This is Vogel’s gift to us: Our future. The future of humankind. Basically...you, Julie,” he ended smugly. There was that annoying manic grin again, Julie thought.
“The virus,” Zane continued, “immediately opened a door for you to the A.I. world hence the machine voices in your head. Proteus was created to learn and had only rudimentary communication skills in the beginning—the insect sounds you heard along with the A.I. machines.”
Zane flicked his control and the holo showed the two pathways of communication. “As the virus learned though its interaction with you and the A.I.s—mainly SAM—it was able to communicate directly with you. But you weren’t receptive except during REM sleep, dreamtime.” He flicked his control and another image added to the first, showing the sleep equation in Proteus communication. “But in veemeld, mediated by SAM once you were back within its range, you could talk to Proteus while you were awake. It was only when you ‘joined’, which we interpret as you fully and consciously opening yourself to the virus, that you freed up the ‘channels’ o
f complete communication.” The holo demonstrated this pathway, via the hippocampus and secondary sectors of the brain. “Your whole body is a symphony of rhythms and Proteus is a viral Mozart a genetic genius.”
Julie ignored Zane’s usual hyperbole and considered the essence of what he said with a thoughtful nod. “So how far do you expect these kids to go? Only some of them are veemelds like me. The pathway you’ve shown there doesn’t account for non-veemelds.”
“That’s right,” Carl added. “But we only really need them to understand what they’re already doing, if they hear Proteus’s non-verbal communication the first level of communication shown on the holo. That’s sufficient for their bodies to counteract the nano-drugs and other effects of Icaria’s environment. The rest what you and Angel can do with them is simply a bonus.”
“Okay,” Julie said, folding her arms across her chest. “But—”
“So, the question is,” Carl went on, anticipating Julie’s challenge, “whether, by making them open to Proteus, we can encourage that 80% of non-veemelds to hear Proteus too. It’s a gamble but we’ve got to try. If we’re successful with these children, we and they can teach the adults.”
“I see,” Julie nodded.
“But first things first,” Zane interjected. “The children are our future, after all. If we’re successful with them, we save Icaria, otherwise...poof!” He slapped his hands together to emphasize his point and gave Julie one of his best toothpaste-ad grins. Same old Zane, she thought, with his flare for the dramatic.
Perhaps more to deflate his drama than out of practical logic, she challenged, “You do have other means to propagate, though? The DP’s been doing it for years.”
Carl shook his head. “That’s not practical and certainly not viable in the long term. It’s giving up on what we are as a species. If we accept that we have to rely on artificial means to reproduce our kind, we’re accepting our own extinction.”
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