by Scott Mackay
They finally came to a garden at the back, an arbor hung with a profusion of crimson hibiscus blooms. In the middle an old man reclined on a hammock. He wasn’t like the other Meek Cody had seen. He looked a lot more like a regular human being, with his limbs the customary human length, his eyes and ears normal, no bulge above his stomach. His skin had only a vague hint of blue. He had to be at least ninety, looked frail, as if his bones would break under the slightest pressure.
Buster said: This is the Father.
So. Not a god, not a deity, not an article of faith, just a man, not even a Meek man, or an orphan. Just a normal human man, showing only minimal signs of a genetic rewrite. The Father shifted in his hammock, struggled to a sitting position, lifted a cane from a hook on the tree, and stood up. Cody couldn’t help thinking that there was something familiar about the Father, recognized something in him that he had seen somewhere before. His features. A broad shovel-blade of a chin, intense blue eyes, a hawk’s beak of a nose. Cody saw that Kevin was staring at the Father with wide, wondering eyes.
“Dad?” said Axworthy.
He took a few steps forward, no longer needing Annabel’s help and peered at the Father, shaking his head tentatively. His mouth opened, as if he were about to say something, then closed again, his jaw clamping down, like he was bracing himself to withstand the onslaught of a tidal wave. The old man looked at Axworthy, his face showing not so much surprise as resignation. The resemblance between the two men startled Cody.
“It’s me, Kevin,” said the Father.
Had to allow time for a reunion like that, for Kevin to be with his father for the first time in thirty years. Cody met the Father, spoke to him for a few minutes—to the man who hadn’t been murdered and mutilated by the orphans after all—then gracefully made his excuses and left.
Finally Cody had a chance to rest, to be alone with Lulu.
She came to him while he reclined on a bed of moss in a small grotto built into the side of the atrium wall. She brought a plate of fruit, and they ate. He felt the cool wind of her menthol signature waves caress his mind. She didn’t form her feelings into verbal signals, articulated thoughts, just let them flow into Cody as they came. She wore pants. Only pants. He looked at her breasts. At her hips. Felt desire. Emanated desire. Felt his own desire reflected and magnified in Lulu, then felt Lulu’s desire reflected, magnified, like embers glowing in a fire.
He pulled her near, feeling fully and truly alive for the first time since Christine had died. She lay down beside him. He put his arm around her. She rested her cheek against his shoulder. The roof of the grotto flickered with the light of several bioluminescent moths, multicolored like the moons, enough light to see by but not a harsh light, a soft and muted light, evocative, ambient, liquid.
She said: I was once like you. A human. A girl. So was Agatha. Buster calls me Lulu, that’s the name everybody calls me, but that’s a name I was given by the orphans, that’s just the name I go by now, the name they gave me when they came and took me away from my mother and father. Back when I was a girl, a human girl, my name was Catherine. Agatha’s name was Elizabeth. She was four and I was eight when the orphans took us away. Cody felt Lulu’s sadness. We never saw out parents again. Her sadness deepened. Buster saved us from our kidnappers, the orphans of the Chryse Planitia Clan. We lived with the Chryse Planitia Clan in the caves and tunnels around Equilibrium until I was well into my teens. Both my sister and I are older than we look. We were at first used as child slaves. Then we were used as soldiers. And finally we were used as concubines. That’s when Buster came to rescue us. I lie with you now, yet how can I turn my back on Buster? How can I wish to stop being one of his wives? Her sadness modulated into fear. Yet I no longer wish to be his wife.
He sensed a much larger story in her words, not only of conflict between the Ceresians and the orphans but of conflict between the different clans. Of how the two separate lines of Meek got started, one line from the original crèche orphans, which she called the orphan line, the other line from kidnapped human children, from converted prisoners, from human volunteers, which she called the human line, the line that wouldn’t suffocate, only get sick if you took away their marrow. She opened herself. He stepped inside and walked around, explored her thoughts and feelings, dug deep, saw her through and through, learned whatever he could about the clans, her place in them, Buster’s place in them. How each clan named itself after a Martian geographical feature. How the biggest clan, Buster’s clan, was known as the Olympia Mons Clan. How Buster was the leader of all the clans. How for years she had fooled herself into thinking that her gratitude—the eternal thankfulness she felt toward Buster—was actually love, and how, once she had touched Cody for the first time, once she understood his own journey through love and gratitude, and had delved into the depths of his grief for Christine, she had at last realized that gratitude and love were two different things, that the first was but a minor part of the much greater and kaleidoscopic universe of the second. Knew love at last, and in so knowing, had found herself reinvented.
Love.
Desire.
With a blue woman.
Who had violet eyes.
Who now slipped her hand under the mulberry-colored tunic they’d given him to wear. Whose hand was small and delicate, feminine but sure. He felt her love, how she was surprised by it, that it should turn out to be so different from what she had expected, felt her desire, and in so feeling it, quickly reciprocated, turned, kissed.
Not a kiss of blunt practical communication … but one of a deeper intermingling.
They made love.
And he could tell it was different for Lulu, that she had never felt this fevered level of desire before. The reason was simple. The reason was so elemental even a child could understand it. Yet it was something Buster had never grasped. Her desire was so heartfelt and passionate because she had Cody’s undivided attention. For the first time in her life, he thought, she was the center of someone else’s universe, wasn’t simply there for the purpose of performing the biological function of sex, to scratch an itch, to ease a frustration, or to soothe the anger of the day’s slights, such as was typical for Buster. She was there as Cody’s sun. She was there as his sea. And he gloried in her.
When it was over, when they had spent themselves not once, not twice, but multiple times, she collapsed in his arms, some pink showing through the blue of her cheeks. He pulled her near, hugged her, felt Christine’s blessing, knew that he had finally rebuilt that part of himself he had lost under the rubble of Residential Sector 5.
He talked to the Father—Artemis Axworthy—the next day.
They sat in the Father’s garden under the artificial light of the holographic Saturn, the light brighter today, nearly as strong as “daylight” on Vesta, like late afternoon, dusk, with shadows collecting on the lavender flowers that bloomed through the grass on the lawn in front of them.
“They started calling me the Father about twenty years ago,” said Artemis. “I was surprised at first.” Artemis’s snowy eyebrows arched as he smiled at the memory. “But I see no harm. I think of them as my children now. As for Kevin …” Artemis looked momentarily puzzled. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about him. I’m sorry I had to do what I did. I was his father, and I abandoned him. I abandoned his brothers, and I abandoned his mother. I tried to explain it to him yesterday, but I don’t think he understands. He always was a child with a limited imagination.”
They sat on a bench. The bench was made of pine, a rarity in the Belt because land use had to be so restricted. Cody couldn’t help pressing his hand against it.
“So he’s all right now?” asked Cody.
The old man raised his eyebrows. “I wish I could say he is. I should have been more attentive to him as a boy. I failed to recognize just how much he looked up to me. I spent too much time at the university. My head was always full of my work. You go along, you’re thinking your own thoughts, you’re just fighting for the things
you believe in, working for them like anybody else would, and you don’t stop to think about how other people are looking at you, or how the things you do or say can have such a lasting effect on their lives. When your kids grow up, you realize you hardly know them. I’m sorry about Kevin. I really am. I neglected to see how I really … well, how I really meant a lot to him.”
They listened to the sound of the nearby waterfall for a while. A few bright birds flew by and disappeared into the hanging vines.
“So where is he now?” asked Cody.
“He’s resting. It’s going to take him a while. He must hate me as much as he hates the orphans. I hope he can learn to like me again. And I hope he can learn to like the Meek. I don’t think I’m going to survive until we get to Carswell. I’d like to get it patched up before we leave.”
“Carswell?” said Cody.
“Highfield-Little,” said Artemis. “The Meek call it Carswell. After Lenny.”
“Does Kevin understand why you did what you did? Faking your own death and so forth?”
“I told him Chryse Planitia would have killed me for real if I hadn’t had Olympia Mons do something about it,” he said. “I was their number-one target, the adulterator of their blood, the man with the rewrite codes, the man who wanted to brainwash them into being model citizens. They didn’t seem to understand I just wanted to help them. They were a tormented people. And some of that bad code—no matter what you find in Lenny’s papers he really wanted all that bad code in them. Make them paranoid. Make them angry. Make them understand the value of the pack, how there’s strength in numbers. Lenny wrote all that into his engineered chromosome 3 because he knew they would need ruthless survival instincts if they were going to live on the surface of Mars with a minimum of life support.”
“So they wanted to kill you?” said Cody. “Chryse Planitia?”
The old man nodded sadly. “And I told Kevin that they wanted to kill him, and that they wanted to kill his mother and his two brothers, and that the only way I could protect them was to have Buster come in with a corpse, mutilate it beyond recognition, coerce the investigation, corrupt the pertinent death documents, infiltrate data banks, and fake some of my DNA so the inquest would be satisfied with the pulpy mess they found in my bedroom.”
A few children walked by, curious, waved to them, and disappeared toward a Tuileries-style fountain full of carp. Cody thought of his own father, as much of an academic as Artemis Axworthy but not as open, a snob unable to accept his son because his son had turned into a man with a hammer. The estrangement between Artemis and Kevin had more to do with the exigencies of war. Cody and his father had more or less abandoned each other. Artemis, for reasons that were mortally pressing, had abandoned Kevin, nothing mutual about it. He just left behind a twenty-seven-year-old officer in the Ceresian Defense Force, grief-stricken for the next 30 years over a father who had never really died and whom he never really got to know.
“I had to do it,” said the Father, his voice now plangent with regret. “We were making a society out of the orphans. Buster and I, and all the various ranking members from the various clans. I don’t know whether I made the right decision. You reach a point in your life and you realize that despite your best intentions, all your best efforts, maybe you shouldn’t have been a father and a husband after all. I spent no time with my family. I spent all my time with the clans. Buster and I worked together right from the start. Lenny came up from Mars.” Artemis shook his head. “Buster was so resourceful,” he said. “And really committed. He helped us all survive after the first bioextermination attack. He had shelters everywhere on the asteroid. No more than tunnels and caves, really, special ones lined with protective materials. He had supply and food caches. He believed in what I was trying to do for them.” The Father shook his head one more time. “The sad fact of the matter is, Buster’s more of a son to me than Kevin is.”
CHAPTER 20
The Meek supplied Cody and the rest of his crew with a conference room, a place of soft chairs, hardwood tables, potted plants, and a view overlooking the square. It was a conventional room modeled after staunchly Vestan antecedents. Lamps lit the room—not holographic replications of heavenly bodies. To Cody it was like the many meeting rooms he had used in Vesta City when he had occupied the number-three spot in the Public Works Department. They were here to talk about their situation. Cody glanced at Axworthy. Axworthy sat there staring at the middle distance, not paying any attention, a man whose mantle of authority had melted away like ice on a spring pond, who was still shocked by meeting his father after all these years. Deirdre kept watching Cody. He sensed a continuing love, a selfless love that expected nothing. Ben, fully recovered from his brush with the chloropathoxin, was restless, oddly detached, and kept glancing at the door as if he expected someone to come in. Jerry was talking.
“Has Buster or the Father confirmed any of Claire’s data?” he asked. “Are they using this gravitational field device to maneuver Highfield-Little away from its collision course with the sun?”
“Yes,” said Cody. He turned to Claire. “And your calculations for the orbital trajectory are for the most part accurate, Claire. The only difference is that the Meek are now going to try to maneuver Carswell into a higher orbit as it transits the sun. To avoid the hot temperatures. But even in the higher orbit, the temperatures are going to be searing.”
Jerry considered this, rubbed his chin, then peered over the rims of his glasses at Cody. “And the Meek are then going to leave the solar system for good?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Jerry frowned. “Then where does that leave us?” he asked. “How are we going to get back to the Belt?” Jerry took a deep breath, sighed, looked at the potted ficus next to his chair. “I just want to go home, Cody. I’ve got my wife and children back on Juno to think about. I’ve got my practice. And I’m getting really homesick.”
Cody didn’t have an answer for the doctor. “I’ve made Buster aware of our concerns and he’s looking into possible solutions to the problem,” he said.
Claire spoke up. “What’s going to happen to Ceres?” she asked. “Once they abandon it, what are they going to do with it? Just let it crash into the sun?”
Cody shook his head. “They can’t do that, not with the tiny black hole in the middle of it. The sun would just feed the grav-core, with potentially disastrous consequences. But they have to get rid of Ceres somehow. In modifying the grav-core to tow Carswell, the Meek ran into some unexpected problems. To put it simply, the grav-core is eventually going to destroy Ceres, and the Meek have no way to stop it. Their original plan was to give Ceres back to the Vestans once they were through using it. But they can’t do that now.”
Kevin Axworthy lifted his eyes, seemed to show some interest. “Why?” he said. “What’s happening with the grav-core?”
“Well, rather than lose energy over time, the way a minuscule black hole like this one should,” said Cody, “it’s actually gaining energy. The only way it can gain energy is through the addition of mass. And it’s gained mass. A lot of mass. The particle physics involved are complex, but the way it’s behaving is something they never expected. The mass isn’t coming from Ceres. Or from anywhere in the solar system. When they view signature spectrographs of various elements through the black hole they get crazy readings. Cesium, for instance. Cesium has an atomic weight of 140.12. But the cesium in the black hole has an atomic weight of 138.2. They think the extra mass is coming through the black hole from a place where the atomic weight of cesium might actually be 138.2.”
The unspoken implication of an alternate plane was clear.
Claire’s eyes were wide, wondering. “So what does that mean in practical terms?” she asked.
“One of three things,” said Cody. “All this extra mass will make the black hole so strong that the Meek will no longer be able to contain the grav-core at its current .5 gees and the asteroid will be ripped apart by intense gravitational tides. Second, the black hole’s
event horizon will balloon in one sudden jump and surround the asteroid, forming a wormhole, and cast the asteroid to another part of the universe, maybe millions of light-years away. Finally, the asteroid could conceivably be catapulted into a different time. No matter what happens, Ceres is dangerous. Once the Meek get through with it they’re going to use a final firing sequence—and they’ve just completed an extra silo for this purpose—to send it to the center of the galaxy, where theory suggests energy emissions are too great for any kind of life to survive and where the asteroid can’t harm anyone.”
The Tycho Brahe Observatory stood on Mount Pendulum in the County of Angular Momentum. Two-and-a-half weeks had passed. They were well on their way toward Earth.
Cody was out here with Lulu and Deirdre. Deirdre didn’t say much these days. She seemed intimidated by the whole situation, liked to stay near him whenever she could; not, he sensed, because she still hoped, simply because she felt safe with him. Lulu stood beside him.
He pressed his eye to the eye-piece of the 300-centimeter refractor, and in the distance he saw a small blue ball: Earth. The Moon, still too far away to take on the contours of a disk, hovered beside it, not a finger’s breadth away, like a fragment of gold.
Lulu said: Ben and Agatha love each other.
Cody smiled, thought of Ben. Never any girlfriends in his life, but always yearning for one. Thirty-one years old, seemingly too old for a young woman like Agatha. But Agatha was older than she looked.