The Meek

by Scott Mackay

  Deirdre stood beside Cody gazing at the small rainbow the refracted ice crystals made.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she said.

  He tried to concentrate on the oxygen pop. Before utility contractors had a chance to build proper OPUs, the oxygen pops proved invaluable for extended construction or survey projects on new asteroids, allowed crews to tunnel and excavate without the encumbrance of pressure suits, made labor easier, more productive, and cost-effective. But as much as he tried to concentrate on the oxygen pop, Cody found he couldn’t. He still couldn’t get over it. She liked the way he held a hammer. The thought made him uncomfortable.

  He gestured at the oxygen pop. “This is going to make work a lot easier,” he said. He felt awkward around her now. “How are the building inspections going?”

  She took a moment to answer. He could see she was picking up on what he was feeling about her.

  “They’re all … going to have to be cleaned … down here, downtown.” She looked away. “And the plumbing’s all shot. About half the wiring’s gone.” She turned to him, looked up at him. “But the basic structures are sound.” Could she really read him so easily? “A lot of them were built to the old codes, pressure-resistant. They’ve stood up well.” She looked away again, and he could tell she was trying to ignore the new dynamic between them, trying simply to be a fellow worker. “The decorating … the drywall, the paint, and the trim … it’s all gone. Plus we’re going to need a hundred glaziers working a full year to get all the broken windows fixed.” She put her hands on her hips, shrugged. “As for Planck’s Constant,” she said, “where the heaviest fighting was … we might as well bring in earthmovers and level the place.” In sudden apprehension, she asked, “Ben talked to you, didn’t he?”

  The oxygen pop continued to hiss like a rocket. He cringed inside his pressure suit. He just wanted this to go away. But it was there, a fact now, and conversational smoke and mirrors would only go so far to disguise it.

  “Have you been to any of the residential sectors?” he asked. “Hemholtz or Kepler, or any of those places?”

  She played along. “I was out in Kepler earlier today,” she said. “A working-class and off-campus neighborhood. Three- and four-story walk-ups.”

  “You went inside a few of them?” asked Cody.

  “A few.”

  She reached in a large pouch attached to her tool belt, moved things aside, pulled out something wrapped in cloth, and unwrapped the cloth. Inside lay a piece of varnished pine. She took it out and offered it to him. He peered at her through his visor and saw her smiling, but it was a tentative and apologetic smile, as if she wanted him to understand that he could trust her to do her job as well as she always did, no matter what she happened to feel toward him.

  “It’s a piece of plate rail I found in one of the walk-ups,” she explained. “I thought you might like it. I know how much you like working with wood.”

  He looked at the wood and frowned. She liked the way he held a hammer. The pine she held in her hand had to be worth a thousand dollars, nearly a week’s wages. And it wasn’t just any pine; it was Corsican pine. He loved wood; he wanted to work with this piece of pine, carve it, especially because any kind of pine on Vesta was so rare, but he knew he couldn’t take it from Deirdre, knew he might end up sending her the wrong signal if he did.

  “I can’t take this wood from you, Deirdre,” he said. “I appreciate the offer. It’s a fine-looking piece of wood, but I can’t take it from you.”

  She hesitated. “Okay,” she said. “I just thought you might like it.”

  He sighed. “Because if I take it from you …” He turned away.

  “It’s okay, Cody,” she said. “I understand. But you don’t have to worry. I know how to handle it.” She gave him another shy look. “You’re sure you don’t want the piece of wood though? You’ll have fun with it. I’m giving it to you, friend to friend.”

  He admired the strength he heard in her voice. He admired her fortitude in dealing with this unexpected strain, this sudden feeling she had for him; they were all just human, after all. They’d been sharing close quarters, and in close quarters this kind of thing could easily happen. Yet he couldn’t stop a certain coldness. He couldn’t help thinking of Christine.

  “I’m widowed,” he said. “Is that something you can understand?”

  She paused.

  “Of course,” she finally said. He heard her breath through the com-link. “But that shouldn’t stop you from taking this piece of wood, should it?” She placed the piece of pine gently in his hands, as if it were indeed a peace offering. “Here,” she said. “Do something nice with it. Carve something that Christine would have liked.”

  She gave the wood a pat and walked away.

  Cody followed Huy Hai through the main water trunk under Isosceles Boulevard up toward Decimal Place. With the oxygen pop completed, the crew had released the biotherms. All the water in the filtration systems had melted. Huy Hai strode ahead of Cody. Lake Ockham had melted. The temperature in Newton was now a balmy plus seven. The water in the fifteen reservoirs had melted. So had all the water in the mains and sewers. This was making Huy Hai’s job a lot easier, helping him pinpoint leaks and fractures in the city’s water delivery and drainage infrastructure with much greater accuracy.

  The diminutive Chinese man eased his pace, waited for Cody to catch up. Cody held up his guidelight, glad to be out of his pressure suit. The strange lichen covered the sewer walls like oak leaves, clustered in colony after colony. He picked some off and looked at it. It seemed to be growing well in these moist conditions, just as it did in the freezing-cold vacuum. How could it be so adaptable? The biotherms, engineered organisms designed to produce heat much the same way bioluminescent organisms like fireflies produced light, fought for a toehold, clinging like a fine white dust on the walls over the clusters of lichen.

  A trickle of water ran down the middle of the trunk. It fell down a giant crack at the juncture of the next crossway, at Subtraction Avenue.

  “Here’s another one,” said Huy. “I’m going to try and plug it. We’ll see if we can get the water to drain over this crack so we don’t get any subsurface frost pushing up on the general structure and making it worse. It’s got to flow to that vertical drain down there,” said Huy, waving his guidelight toward the juncture at Decimal Place. “That drain’s the second-last run before the used water reaches the recycling plant. If we can get this downtown grid working before the cleanup and construction crews get here, they’ll have an extra source of water as backup.”

  Huy took a large caulking gun from an array of leak-stopping tools, aimed, and fired. A fine gray polymer issued from the end of the tool. As the polymer touched the crack it expanded the way shaving cream expands, sealed the leak in a matter of seconds, then shrank to a perfect fit, the nanogens in the compound guiding the fit so that the polymer ran contiguously with the adjoining sides of the damaged sewer. This allowed the water to drain properly, without any damming, toward the downspout up ahead. The water found its new route and flowed toward the drain.

  “Let’s check it,” said Huy.

  They walked to the drain and looked down.

  “Help me set up the pulleys,” said Huy. “I don’t think we should trust those rungs. They’re rusted right through.”

  Over the next ten minutes they set up two pulleys. They hooked in two lines, one for each of them, and descended the drain, rappelling along the sides like rock climbers descending a cliff. The temperature dropped. The rungs had icicles on them. The strange lichen thrived everywhere, now reminding Cody of bunches of leaf lettuce.

  At the bottom, they found another corpse lying on a ledge next to the main channel. Not an orphan corpse. Not a human corpse. A corpse like none they had ever seen.

  This corpse was blue.

  The first thing Cody thought was that maybe the oxygen pop had killed the thing after all, that the new atmospheric pressure and warmer temperatures had indeed prove
d lethal to the creature. But then he saw that it had the same mummified look that the orphan corpse had had. It looked as if it had been dead for a long time.

  “Look at its leg,” said Cody. “The way it’s bent like that.”

  Huy Hai looked at the leg, then peered to the top of the drain. “Maybe he fell,” he said. He turned his attention back to the corpse. “His leg looks broken.”

  Cody nodded. “He fell down here, broke his leg, and dragged himself to this ledge to get out of the water.”

  Huy Hai brought his guidelight closer. “It’s human, isn’t it?” he said.

  The creature certainly looked human, at least in its basic configurations, with arms and legs, a face with two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and hair on top of its head.

  “I think so,” said Cody.

  “But he has much longer arms,” said Huy, “and much shorter legs. Like an orphan. And his torso’s not exactly bilaterally equal. Look at that bulge on the left side, below the rib cage. What could that be?”

  Cody touched the bulge in and around the stomach.

  “We’ll get Jerry to perform an autopsy and find out for us,” he said.

  Back in the small infirmary adjoining the portable office, Jerry and Cody examined the corpse carefully. The victim, a male, might have had a human design but certain features looked positively alien. His eyes, for instance. Nearly three times the size of normal eyes: beautiful doelike eyes, neither brown nor blue, but violet. Then there were his ears, large and slender, twice the size of human ears, shaped like a fairy’s, delicate-looking, with a translucent porcelain quality, dim blue but showing red veins underneath.

  The doctor ran his hand over the creature’s bare abdomen.

  “Feel that skin,” he said. “Even taking into account the corpse’s mummification, the skin somehow feels … reinforced … I don’t know … with mesh.”

  Cody felt the creature’s skin. His flesh did indeed feel tough, with a gridlike texture that wasn’t readily discernible to the eye but could easily be felt.

  “What about his stomach?” asked Cody. “The way his abdomen sticks out on the left side like that?”

  Jerry shook his head. “If this were an ordinary human corpse, I might suggest a tumor. But really … who knows? Look at his hands. Fingerprints, just like you and me. Fingernails. Four fingers and a thumb. He’s wearing a ring. I’ll admit his fingers are a little longer than our fingers, but all in all his hands look like human hands. Same with his feet. They look just like human feet except for the longer, stronger toes.”

  “What about his hair?” asked Cody. “Blond?”

  “Too white for true blond. I don’t think the hair has any pigment one way or the other. Reminds me of albino hair.”

  Over the next few hours Jerry performed an autopsy on the unusual corpse. As expected from the clinical examination, he discovered an extra layer in the epidermis, a tough gridwork made of a material resembling cartilage. He quickly concluded that the victim had to be a genetically altered species of human.

  “Which means he must have originated in the five or six places—the Moon, Mars, etcetera—where genetic legislation is lax enough to allow for this kind of thing,” said Jerry.

  Even though the creature derived from a human model, there were major differences. As the autopsy continued, they discovered a highly developed sylvan fissure in the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for intuitive functions; a stomach roughly twice the size of a human stomach, with a lining of unidentified cilia; three sets of extra muscles in the calves, and two extra sets in the thighs.

  “He could jump, that’s for sure,” said Jerry.

  Cody stared at the creature, wondering about it, in awe of it, nervous about it, but also feeling sorry for it, the way it had died, falling down that drain, breaking its leg, not being able to get out, most probably starving to death.

  Jerry was most interested in the victim’s stomach. Especially the cilialike growths.

  He lifted the stomach onto the small-parts dissection table, made an incision, and sliced a patch of cilia away.

  “I’ll make a slide of this,” he said.

  “Look at the size of his lungs,” said Cody. “Human lungs aren’t that small, are they?”

  “No,” said Jerry. “His lungs are roughly half the size of human lungs.”

  “Genitalia are similar, though, aren’t they?” said Cody.

  “There’s no difference,” said Jerry. “He has human genitalia.”

  “But no pubic hair,” said Cody.

  “No pubic hair,” agreed the doctor.

  Cody squinted in puzzlement. “Is he a child, then?” he asked.

  “No,” said Jerry. “If I had to guess, I’d say he’s about twenty-five or thirty.”

  Twenty-five or thirty, thought Cody. A young man. Too young to lose his life. To die all alone. Cody shook his head, feeling as if he had had enough.

  “You finish up,” he told Jerry. “I’m going outside to get some air.”

  Cody sat in his small office holding Deirdre’s piece of Corsican pine in his hands. His office was crude, no more than a cube fashioned out of riveted metal, a far cry from the opulently furnished space he had left behind at the Public Works Department. He was tired, having spent most of the day conducting safety inspections, walking from building to building marking with yellow crosses the ones that had to be torn down, spray-painting fluorescent orange crosses on bridges that had to be rebuilt, filling out checklist after checklist on more than a hundred different items. Real work. Physical work. Work that mattered. He turned the piece of plate rail over a few times. He thought of Deirdre Malvern. He wasn’t going to think of Christine anymore. He wasn’t going to brood about her. He wasn’t going to pity himself for the way she had died so young. Just like that young man who had fallen down the drain. He was through with brooding. He was going to get on with his life. He was going to move on …

  He shook his head.

  Old clichés weren’t going to work.

  He rubbed his hand along the grain of the Corsican pine. Was he going to go through the rest of his life as a widower? He thought he might. What Deirdre felt for him scared him more than it pleased him. He took out a piece of sandpaper and sanded the splintered edges of the plate rail. What did he really know about Deirdre? This morning, while walking from building to building with him, she had been professional, appropriate, focused. But … but somehow too careful, her voice at times strained, as if she felt she had to walk on eggshells around him. He stopped sanding and looked at the edge of the plate rail. Beautiful. Like the smooth curve of Christine’s hip. Sex. Maybe that was his problem. Maybe that’s why he was having such a tough time with Deirdre. When he looked at Deirdre he sometimes looked at her in that way, like she had smooth curves that needed to be stroked, caressed.

  It bothered him.

  He didn’t want to think of Deirdre that way. Not if he couldn’t feel some sincere affection for her.

  He put the piece of wood down. He needed a shower. A cold shower would do him good.

  In the shower stall he let the cool water pepper his back. He let his head hang down so his chin touched his breastbone. He held up his hands and looked at his calloused palms, hands that loved to work, to build things, but most of all hands that had once touched Christine. He wondered if those hands would ever touch Deirdre. He was thirty-nine, past the point where he believed in love at first sight; he knew that love was a uphill battle, something that had to be worked on.

  He was just thinking how unfair things could sometimes be when he slipped to the floor of the shower stall and hit his hip hard. He was surprised to find himself on the floor. It was as if suddenly his whole sense of balance had given out on him, as if the weight of his feelings about Christine and his ambivalence toward Deirdre had caused a crazy malfunction in his inner ear. He felt his heart beating. He couldn’t figure it out. It was as if a great hand were pressing him to the ground. Holding him there. It took him a full minute to
finally realize that it had nothing to do with his state of mind. He now recognized this great pressure as an actual outside physical force—gravity, lots of it, too much of it, an avalanche of it.

  His whole body hurt.

  The water from the shower spout, rather than dropping on him like a gentle rain, shot at him like bullets. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t. He lifted his arm and felt as though he were lifting 100 pounds. He heard Anne-Marie calling from the dormitory outside the shower room door, realized that she too had fallen to the floor. He heard a distant rumble from outside, then a big bang. The dormitory shook for a few seconds, then stopped.

  He had to get out of this shower. The water hurt so much. He forced himself to his hands and knees and crawled out of the shower, then carefully lowered himself to the tiles. He heard Anne-Marie calling again.

  “Just hang on, Anne-Marie,” he answered, barely able to get the words out through the crushed feeling in his throat.

  Three gees, he wondered? Five gees? He thought of the grav-core deep in the center of the asteroid. That little piece of black hole the Ceresians had so artfully contained in its own self-sustaining control pocket was playing a trick on them. He felt his heart working hard to pump his blood against the crushing gee-force. He wondered if anybody had been up on a ladder. He hoped everyone had been wearing their hard hats.

  He thought it was never going to end. But then, after five minutes, he found himself breathing a little easier. He pushed himself up, broke into a sweat, felt as if he had 250 pounds of bricks sitting on his shoulders. The load lightened again. He crawled to the bench, struggled to a standing position, inspected the big bruise that was forming on his hip, then felt the load lighten a third time. Lighten so much that, taking a step toward his dressing gown, he actually left the floor and floated a bit, as if the little piece of black hole had suddenly switched off, leaving this 700-kilometer-long chunk of an asteroid with no more pull than what it derived from its own meager mass, .07 gees, which meant escape velocity was down to around 25 kilometers per hour.