Blue

by Lou Aronica

  Lisa playfully slapped him on the wrist for making her wait and then launched into a story about her weekend. Her peripatetic boyfriend Ben had come home unexpectedly and, from what Chris could glean, they’d spent their time together trying to get through most of the Kama Sutra.

  Chris listened to Lisa’s R-rated narrative with as much attention as he thought was required. Presumably, it wouldn’t take much to maintain the guise that he was hanging on her every word; Lisa seemed fully in the throes of her own story. Meanwhile, his thoughts could wander back to his research.

  Maybe it is some form of Dothistroma—a Tamariskian form. The reason the blight doesn’t act exactly the same way Dothistroma acts here is because of the differences in the ecosystem. If I can identify those differences, maybe Dothistroma will turn out to be the answer. Then I could apply what I know about the differences to identify a way to create a variation on the control . . .

  “Men have gotten drinks thrown in their faces for less, sweetie,” Lisa said sharply.

  Chris looked into Lisa’s fiery eyes. “Huh?”

  “Look, Chris, maybe your problem really is that you’re a eunuch. I dismissed that idea a long time ago, but if you can listen to my daffodil garden story without changing expression, then maybe you really don’t have any balls. Either that or you’re thinking about a much hotter story of your own.”

  Chris reddened. “Sorry. My mind wandered.”

  “You’ll have to explain to me how a person’s mind wanders away from what I was just talking about.”

  Chris arched his eyebrows. “You’ll be very disappointed in me.”

  “Sweetie, if is hasn’t happened up to now, it’s likely it’ll never happen.”

  “I was thinking about something I was doing at work.”

  Lisa threw up her hands. “And they said it couldn’t be done.”

  Chris reached across the table to touch her on the forearm. “It wasn’t a work thing I was doing at work.”

  Lisa leaned forward. “Better.” She smiled devilishly. “Was it a new employee that you were doing at work?”

  Chris laughed aloud. “Not exactly.” Chris’s relationship with Lisa was a full-disclosure one—as evidenced by the details she’d been providing during the past fif-teen minutes. Was he ready to disclose this much, though? “I was working on a problem in Tamarisk.”

  Lisa’s face clouded over. Chris’s first thought was that she was having a bad reaction. Then he realized she was probably trying to remember what Tamarisk was.

  “The fantasy world I created with Becky,” he said to help her.

  Lisa’s eyes widened with recognition. Then they narrowed again.

  “Except it isn’t really a fantasy world,” he said quickly.

  “What?”

  “You are not going to believe how I spent my weekend.”

  For the next several minutes, Chris told Lisa everything about his trip to Tamarisk, about the problems the citizens were having there, and about the work he’d done since he got back. It didn’t register until he’d finished that Lisa had remained uncharacteristically silent the entire time. He took a sip of water and waited for her to say something.

  “You were making up that story while I was talking because you wanted to outdo me, right?” she said slowly.

  Chris smiled. “It really happened.”

  “Chris, I—”

  Chris held up a hand. “Lisa, it really happened.”

  Lisa stared at him slack-jawed. After all these years, I’ve finally stumped her.

  “I obviously haven’t been paying enough attention to you lately,” she said with a hint of sadness in her voice.

  “I realize it isn’t easy to comprehend.”

  “Nuclear physics isn’t easy to comprehend. This . . . this is unfortunately much too easy to comprehend. Chris, you’ve gotten yourself so worked up over your relationship with Becky that you’re starting to have visions.”

  Chris shook his head rapidly. “Don’t go Polly on me here, Lisa.”

  “What does ‘go Polly’ mean?”

  “It means I’ve already gotten the lecture about encouraging Becky’s delusions.”

  “Becky’s delusions? She thinks she can go to Tama-risk, too?”

  “I just told you that a couple of minutes ago. Becky went first and I found it nearly as inconceivable as you obviously find it now. But she kept talking about it and I started to believe her. Then this weekend, I went there with her.”

  Lisa looked over his shoulder for several long moments. “This is Weekly World News stuff, you know.”

  “I realize it sounds that way.”

  Lisa laughed and then locked eyes with him. “You know, I always assumed that at least some of the crap in that rag was true. I mean, you can’t make all of that stuff up, can you?”

  She reached across the table and took his hand. Again, she didn’t say anything for several moments. Chris couldn’t think of a good way to break the silence.

  “And you say there’s a horrible blight there now?”

  “No one knows how to cure it.”

  Lisa wrinkled her nose. “That really sucks.” That was world-class empathy coming from her.

  “Tell me about it.”

  She patted his hand. “My daffodil garden story really happened, too, you know? And I haven’t even told you yet about what we did with the shower massager.”

  Chris chuckled. “I can hardly wait to hear.”

  The second trip to Tamarisk was less disorienting, but only slightly so. The temptation to open his eyes while he floated was strong—he wanted to know where was he traveling and how he got there—but he knew instinctually that this would be a mistake. The visage with the portentous voice didn’t come along on the trip this time. Chris forgot to mention that to Becky to see if it had made an appearance her first time as well. Maybe the thing really was some kind of gatekeeper and had decided he could pass.

  Once they arrived, he couldn’t help glancing around the room while others spoke. So many things here seemed at once familiar and unutterably strange. Even the air felt different. It was crisper and clearer and even a normal breath seemed as cleansing as if he’d held and expelled a lungful.

  We did a good job with this place, Beck. Except for that little thing about the devastating blight.

  As the first time, there was a group of Tamariskian officials gathered in the conference room. Were they here all the time now? When Chris and Becky arrived, they were in the middle of a discussion about the son of the vice chancellor of the Thorns, somebody Becky had met, as it turned out. Miea suspected the Thorns had had a hand in creating the blight, but now this boy had walked into the Government Office in Tamarisk City and requested asylum. Miea ordered him held for questioning. They’d decide what to do with him after that.

  When they finished that conversation, they turned to Chris to ask about what he’d learned. Unlike the first time, Thuja, the minister of agriculture was considerably more talkative, quizzing Chris on his findings over the past few days.

  “Yes, it’s a possibility,” Chris said to a question about the Dothistroma blight. “It will be impossible to say without further analysis on this end.”

  “If your ecosystem is different, that would certainly be necessary.”

  “The real issue is that I don’t know how different our ecosystems are. They could be extremely compatible or completely alien to each other. It won’t be easy to determine because I can’t bring any machines with me, your machines are calibrated to your world, and there’s only so much you can learn by looking.”

  While the last point was valid, Chris longed to get outside. For one thing, he was visiting another world and yet all he’d seen so far was this room. More important, though, simply talking about the makeup of the planet was little more than an intellectual exercise. He needed to touch the plants, feel the dirt, and understand the way the wind blew and the clouds moved. Any of this could offer him clues and give him a reference point with which to work. It mi
ght never be enough without the proper machinery, but it would be something more than he had now.

  A trip outside was going to have to wait, though. Thuja seemed bent on asking him dozens of different questions, all of which underscored the fact that, as far as science was concerned, they were speaking very different languages. In addition, there was the issue of time. Chris had no idea how long each visit to Tamarisk could be. Becky knew that some kind of “pull” announced the end of their stay, but she couldn’t figure out how long it was before the pull came. She said that sometimes it felt as though she could stay there for hours, while on other occasions she felt like she had far less than that. Was that just a relative thing based on how she felt about what she was doing? Or did the allotted time in Tamarisk vary based on some combination of factors neither of them knew? Did those factors change now that there were two of them traveling here? Just a few simple answers would be nice to have along with all the dazzling things.

  A young man seated next to Thuja leaned toward the minister. “We can charge a full team of analysts with the task of breaking down the composition of the environment in a variety of ways.” He looked at Chris. “Perhaps if you can figure out a way to do the same on your end we might be able to come to some common parlance.”

  Chris nodded. “That will take time, but it might be worth it.”

  “Time is becoming a very precious commodity,” Miea said. As during the first meeting, she’d said very little up to now.

  “Your Majesty,” Thuja said, “we have few options.”

  “Time is not one of them,” she said sharply. “I certainly don’t need to read your damage reports back to you, do I?”

  Thuja looked down at his papers, but Chris could see he was glowering. Unfortunately, both of them were right. If the reports were accurate, the blight was advancing increasingly quickly. Food supplies were withering. More insects and small animals were dying off as a result. It might only be a matter of months before Tamarisk would have trouble feeding its citizens. At the same time, though, no one was offering an alternative better than an exhaustive comparative analysis of the ecosystems.

  “I’ll be back in four nights,” Chris said. “I’ll do as much as I can from my end and maybe your analysts can do the same.”

  “Is there any chance you could come back sooner?” Miea said.

  Chris shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Becky won’t be with me again until Saturday and I can’t get here without her. I tried.”

  “You did?” Becky said, shocked. This was the first thing she’d said the entire meeting.

  Chris turned to her and smiled. “Does that surprise you?”

  Becky smiled back. “No, I guess not. But maybe there’s a way to get you here.” She turned toward Miea. “Can you, I don’t know, open another door for my father?”

  Miea nodded sadly. “Becky, I didn’t open the first one. I’m not sure how that happened. It was providence, or a remarkable accident, or something else entirely. I do know, however, that it wasn’t me who opened the door. I don’t know any way to recreate this.”

  Chris glanced from the disappointed expression on his daughter’s face to the disappointed one on the queen’s. He was certain his expression looked the same as theirs. It would have been a welcome use of his nights without Becky to come to Tamarisk to help them solve their problem. Sadly, it didn’t seem likely to happen.

  “Chris, would it be possible for me to speak with you outside for a moment?” Miea said.

  Chris got up and followed her out of the room.

  “I won’t pretend to understand the way things work in your world. Becky has told me a little bit about your divorce and the arrangement you have with your former wife, and she has mentioned that things are contentious between the two of you. Therefore, I realize what I have to ask is problematic, but is there any possible way you could get more days with Becky?”

  “I think it might be easier for you to find another door. ‘Contentious’ barely begins to describe what my relationship is like with my ex-wife these days.”

  The queen lowered her eyes. “I’m worried that we’ll never get an answer in time if you only come here twice a week.”

  “Your worries are justified, and I wish I could do something about them. Trust me; I would do anything to help you, especially if it meant spending more time with Becky as well. That may not be feasible, though.”

  Miea nodded sadly. “I understand.”

  She seemed incredibly vulnerable at that moment, so much more like a confused young woman than a queen. Chris wanted so badly to be able to help her. What could he say to Polly, though, to convince her to give him more nights with Becky? Was there anything in the world—especially given their last few exchanges? It was hard to imagine.

  “I’ll try,” he said. He meant it, though he had no idea what he meant by it.

  Miea looked up into his eyes and touched his arm. “It could make every difference in the world.”

  “I promise,” he said, clasping her on the shoulder. “I’ll try to the best of my ability.”

  16

  Philip Keller’s opinions were literally making Becky nauseous. The conversation about women’s suffrage in history class had turned into an all-out verbal brawl after Phil announced that it was a mistake to let women have the vote. Becky took a minute to put her eyes back in her head while some of the other girls pounced on him. Predictably, the boys in the class— most of whom were nice kids one-on-one—joined in behind Phil. Except for Cam Parker, whose soul was obviously as beautiful as the rest of him, and who managed to make a good point about the need for suffrage and call Phil “a Neanderthal” in the same sentence. That was impressive.

  Still, Phil persisted. He said some pre-Neanderthal stuff about “founding fathers” and women not being “properly equipped” to make decisions about government, and Becky found herself getting so worked up that she actually thought she was going to vomit. The queasiness—she’d never had this reaction to a classroom debate before—actually kept her out of the exchange. Until Phil went over the line.

  “The reality is that since women have been allowed to vote, the country is in much worse shape than it was before. You do the math.”

  Becky sprung from her seat. The room lurched and her stomach tumbled, but she couldn’t let that last comment pass. “Are you kidding me? Since women got the vote, we’ve had the civil rights movement, the end of communism, the information revolution—”

  “—All done by men! I mean, what have women done with their votes anyway?”

  Becky felt as though she was ready to leap from her body. She was so angry that she felt light-headed and had to hold on to the corner of her desk for support. “We’ve kept cavemen like you from blowing up the entire world—that’s what we’ve done!”

  Phil actually laughed at her. “You obviously haven’t checked your facts.”

  Suddenly, Becky flopped back into her chair. Not because Phil Keller had bowled her over with his logic. Not because she was too worked up to continue. But because she literally couldn’t stand any longer. Her head was throbbing and she felt hot and cold at the same time. She realized that what she was feeling had nothing at all to do with the classroom battle.

  Becky’s head rolled sideways of its own accord. She saw Lonnie kneeling next to her.

  “Beck, are you okay? You’re white as a ghost.”

  Becky tried to sit up. There were other people standing near her desk now, but she could only see the edges around them. She reached a limp hand out to her best friend.

  “I’m not okay,” she said with nearly all the energy she had.

  Then her body gave way.

  It was hard to believe they were talking about staff cuts again. How could the idiots in executive management have screwed this up? Chris’s department had somehow escaped the layoffs four months ago, but office morale was still awful and it was about to get worse. Chris had never gone to business school, but even he knew that if you were going to downsize, it
was better for the emotional health of the company to cut too deep rather than to not cut deep enough and have to cut again. The staff that survived would walk on eggshells for years after this.

  Meetings such as these made him hate his job exponentially more than he normally did. How many people could he save if he stood up right now, called the COO a blithering buffoon, and got fired? If they were doing their jobs, they’d realize they didn’t need to replace him and could therefore keep some people who were truly doing something. In fact, if they really wanted to make changes that would have a permanent positive effect on the company, they could eliminate three-quarters of upper management and let the rest of the staff get on with their work.

  It was times like these when he regretted turning down those other jobs. Yes, they were too far away. Yes, he would be subject to cuts such as these rather than be the one making them. At least in those jobs, though, he wouldn’t feel as though he needed to spray himself with disinfectant every time he left the conference room. What made him think he’d ever be suited to this kind of career? For the hundredth time, he vowed to address this issue soon. Even if it entailed a big pay cut, he needed to get out of a management spot.

  As the comptroller prattled on about “surgical precision” and outsourcing options, Chris’s thoughts wandered back to Tamarisk. Miea had seemed so desperate last night. So certain that they needed a solution to the blight soon or it would be too late. She was right that progress was going to be slow if he only helped twice a week, but he still hadn’t thought of any argument that would convince Polly that Becky should spend more nights with him. If he could talk his parents into coming up to visit, he’d get some extra time out of that. Polly still loved them and always let Becky be with them when they were around. That was a short-term solution at best, though. His parents had never stayed for more than four or five days and he couldn’t imagine anything that would make them visit longer.