by Judith Tarr
“345 days, give or take,” I said. “Only 330 to go.”
“Give or take,” said Dr. Kay. She gave Bonnie one last pat and me one last smile, and packed up and drove off to her next appointment.
Lunch was also our weekly Skype with Aunt Jessie—live from beautiful Luxor, as she liked to put it. The only reason I even did it was because Mom trapped me.
Mom showed up at the barn just before I was about to take off with Cat and Kristen. I couldn’t very well not show her the rest of the ultrasound pictures, or refuse to let her love on Bonnie and tell her what a wonderful, amazing, miraculous horse she was.
Then Mom said handed me the car keys and said, “You’re driving home.”
Bribery works. Cat grinned at me. “See you tonight,” she said.
“Turtle time,” I agreed.
Mom didn’t gloat. That wasn’t how she operated. She kissed Bonnie’s nose and fed her the last carrot in the bag.
I had the car started and the A/C blasting by the time she tore herself away from Bonnie. “When I grow up,” I said, “I’m moving to Iceland.”
“Not Antarctica?”
“No horses.”
“Point,” she said, strapping herself in.
I drove carefully, minding my driver’s education manual. I swear the road got rougher every time I went down it.
Mom was quiet. Dozing, I noticed. She did a lot of that these days.
I thought about slowing down even more, but my back teeth were already rattling out of my head. Mom only flinched at the worst of the bumps. By the time we reached the blissful smoothness of the paved road, she was sound asleep.
I’d exhausted my worry quota months ago. I told myself she was doing this to wear me down till I gave in about Egypt. I really couldn’t go now, could I? Dr. Kay was coming back in a month. Somebody had to be there for that.
We had lunch with Aunt Jessie—virtually. It was dinnertime over there. We put my laptop at her usual place at the table and ate our ham and cheese while she ate her chicken and veg.
I didn’t have much to say. Mom was all full of Bonnie and the ultrasound and the baby.
Finally she stopped pushing it and picked at her sandwich, which she’d eaten a whole quarter of. Aunt Jessie in Luxor was mopping the bottom of her bowl with a chunk of bread.
I peeled my dessert orange piece by piece.
“All right,” Aunt Jessie said to me. “So that didn’t go well, did it? Still hate surprises?”
“Hate,” I said to the pile of orange peel. “Not coming. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not sorry,” she said, “and yes, you’re coming. Check your email. There’s a shopping list. You’re good on shots—while you’re getting your hate on, hate Dr. Meldrum, he gave you one or two last month that weren’t on the school list for fall.”
That didn’t surprise me at all. “Is that even legal?”
“Minor child,” Aunt Jessie said with complete lack of remorse. “Parental discretion. It’s for your own good. Once you get here, you’ll love it. Or I’ll be working you so hard you won’t have time to hate it.”
“What if I just won’t get on the plane? I’ll show up with a gallon of hair gel and a riding whip. Raise a stink in the naked scanner.”
“Get arrested. End up on a terrorist watch list. Get hauled off to juvie. Is that what you still call it?” Aunt Jessie grinned. Even through the blurry, jerky screen I could see how much fun she was having. “As long as you’re going to spend your summer in durance vile, you might as well spend it here. The food is better and the doors unlock from the inside.”
“You’d better hope I don’t spend my time learning ancient Egyptian curses. I’ll put one on you.”
“I’ll curse you back,” she said cheerfully. “And I’ve had ’way more practice. See you next Friday. I’ll meet you at the airport.”
She shut the call down from her end. I stared at the empty screen. My own face reflected back at me. I put a mental caption on it. POWERLESSNESS: It’s What’s for Lunch.
“It’s just for six weeks,” Mom said. “You’ll still have a month to spend with your friends before school starts.”
“But not with Bonnie.”
“Bonnie will be perfectly fine. I’ll check in on her. You know your friends will. You can check in on her from online. She’ll be the most checked-in-on horse on the eastern seaboard.”
She was being reasonable. I didn’t want to be reasonable. I wanted to pitch a roaring fit.
A year ago I might have done it. Too bad I had to grow up enough to have some impulse control.
I cleared the table instead, and tossed the leftovers in the disposal and the dishes in the dishwasher.
“We’ll go shopping tomorrow,” said Mom.
“Do I get to pick my own prison uniform?”
“As long as it’s on the list.”
“Pith helmet? Sword cane?”
“Possibly even goggles,” she said, “and a white silk scarf.”
That was our old joke. When I was little, we were going to fly around the world in a biplane, and spy on Dad wherever he happened to be that week.
“Dad’s not in Egypt,” I said. “Is he?”
“Not that I know of.” Mom stood up and stretched. “I have a little work to do still. Then we’ll go out for dinner. Celebrate Bonnie’s baby.”
I opened my mouth to say no thanks, I wasn’t celebrating anything today. Damn impulse control. What came out was, “Fine. Whatever.”
Mom kissed me the way she did when I was six, a flying swoop on the forehead, and went off to do her judge thing. I had the house to myself and an afternoon to kill, and a few people to contemplate killing.
So I did what any self-respecting writer type does. I holed up with my laptop and killed off a bunch of characters. Bloodily. With lots of screaming.
Chapter 6
The gaps in the force field were closing. The oldest sector of the old city was almost out of reach. Meru fought her way through crowds so thick they seemed to have been put there deliberately to stop her.
That was impossible. The web was the same as ever, no mention of anything in the old city, though Meru ran search after search while she struggled to get to the oldest sector before the field walled it off completely.
Up above them all, the starwing circled slowly, invisible against the darkness and the starlight. As Meru’s desperation mounted, it began to feed on the field.
This time it fed slowly. It skimmed the edges of the surging energy, drawing off just enough to slow the field’s advance.
Meru reached the wall just ahead of the hum and flicker of the field—a handful of nanoseconds before it closed. She dived through the broken gate, tripped and fell and lay winded in a street as empty as the one outside had been full of people.
There had to be people here. The web said there were, and the starwing could see and feel them, sparks of warmth inside the cold walls of brick and steel and stone.
There was no one in the street. The air smelled strange. Meru had never been sick or known anyone who had, but some deep part of her knew what this was. Blood, vomit, and worse: bodies breaking down, voiding and bleeding and dying.
These were the sparks that the starwing had passed to Meru through the web, with an undertone of jangling wrongness. For every living thing it found, there were a hundred that had been living once. The walls around her, the houses that lined the street, were full of the dead.
The web refused to acknowledge them. When she searched with those parameters, it said, Not found, or else gave her yet another news report about a plague on a planet a hundred light-years away. There was no plague on Earth. The web said so.
But it was here. She could smell it. She knew.
Meru began to run.
Anyone sensible would have run away. Meru ran toward the place where Jian had been. Her thoughts were empty of anything but the need to be there, to see. To know. And then—
Then nothing. She could not think past it at all.<
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The place she ran to was near the heart of the sector. There, finally, were people: men and women sealed into space armor that sent off the signal of Consensus.
The starwing passed through the force field with no more than a shiver and a tingle as the energy fed its strange substance, and wrapped its wings around Meru. Inside that insubstantial shield, the starwing told her deep inside her mind, far below the oblivious hum of the web, she was invisible even to Consensus’ sensors.
That was a disturbing thought, but the message that had brought Meru here was much worse. She slipped through the cordon of the Guard. The door to the tall grey house was open, and for a priceless few instants, no one guarded it.
It was dim inside. A lightstrip ran up the stair, shedding just enough pale green glow to guide Meru’s feet. The landings along the way were deserted, the hallways dark. They smelled of the sickness, and of something heavier and sweeter.
That, she realized, was the smell of death. Her stomach heaved; she stumbled. There was a word in her head now, a simple word, the only word in this nightmare world: No.
The starwing’s purr steadied her. She pulled herself upright. One more flight. One more landing. One last corridor, and a battered and broken door hanging half off its track.
The man who stood inside was not Jian, but Meru knew him as well as she knew her mother. He was her uncle, after all.
He saw her, which she had not expected. “Meru! What are you doing here?”
“Vekaa,” she said, still stupid from the shock of what she had seen and smelled and sensed. “What—”
He moved to block the doorway. “Go now,” he said. “Just go.”
Meru would dearly have loved to do that. More than anything, she did not want to know what was in that room. But she had come all this way. Jian had called her. She had to know.
The starwing brushed Vekaa with the edge of a wing. He snapped back as if he had been struck with an energy bolt.
Meru wasted no time staring. She slipped past Vekaa, and stopped.
Jian was dead. Her face was empty. So was the web where she had been. The message was gone, the last synapse fired, the mind and consciousness dissolved.
The light was dim and Meru’s sight kept blurring, but there was no mistaking the glistening red of blood that had trickled from ears and nostrils and eyes. Her hands were clenched into fists, her knees drawn up in a knot of pain.
Meru felt nothing at all. Not a single thing. There was so much to feel that there was no room in her for any of it.
Vekaa’s body moved between them. This time the starwing let him be. Meru stared blankly up at him.
He looked like Jian. They all did in the family. He was Jian’s brother; he had been the closest to her of any, except for Meru.
Meru could see no expression in his face. His eyes were sad, maybe. It was hard to tell. He was a scientist. He had been raised and trained to be coldly clinical.
She had been raised and trained to be a scientist, too. That was part of why she had gone so perfectly quiet inside.
She was observing, recording. Processing. Keeping a wall between herself and the tidal wave of feeling that would, eventually, drown her.
Her mother was dead. Something impossible, something no one could ever have planned for, had killed her.
“People don’t get sick on this planet any more,” Meru said. “They just don’t. How did you let it happen?”
Vekaa made no effort to defend himself. “We don’t know what it is,” he said. “We do know that it’s virulent, and powerfully contagious.”
“She’s not even supposed to be here,” Meru said. Her walls were cracking. Her voice was trying to. “Why would she—”
“Please,” Vekaa said. “I understand. When there’s time, I’ll listen, and mourn with you. But you have to leave this room. The Guard will take you to decontamination.”
No, thought Meru. Oh, no. Absolutely not. She shook her head. “I’m already contaminated. I’m not leaving her.”
“Every human being who has contracted this disease has died,” Vekaa said. His voice was flat. “This sector has been sealed off with all who are in it, living or dead. Do you understand, Meru? You can’t leave the sector until the seal is dissolved.”
“Then I can stay here,” Meru said.
“You can’t,” said Vekaa. Was his voice trying to crack, too? “You’ll die.”
The starwing hissed. Vekaa stiffened. So did Meru, who had never heard such a sound from it before.
The sound had meaning. Meru burst out with it before she stopped to think. “It says I won’t die. It’s protecting me.”
Vekaa ignored her, or maybe he had not heard. Two large members of the Guard loomed on either side of her. They had weapons—here, Earthside, where weapons were banned.
She had not been thinking of all that this meant, only that her mother was here, and she was dead, and Meru could not—all the way down to the bone could not—leave her. Now understanding began to dawn, slow and brutal.
The web streamed knowledge of plagues on Earth and off, as far back as Meru could stand to go, overlaid with laws and defenses and restrictions that had kept Earth from enduring any such thing in over a thousand years. The laws were clear and uncompromising. Any plague that touched Earth, from any source offworld, was to be sealed off and eradicated without hesitation and without mercy, before it could spread beyond the spaceport where it began.
That was law. Reality was this tiny, dingy, antiquated room and the body abandoned in it. That dead thing had been Meru’s mother, who should have been light-years away, safe and healthy and exploring an alien city.
The Guards moved in closer. Meru stilled the starwing before it tried something any of them might regret.
She was supposed to leave in two tendays—less than that, now: ride up the cable to the spaceport and then get on board a starship to the school for starpilots. She had devoted her life to getting there, and built all her hopes on it—and she had been accepted: one of only two on all of Earth this year, and one of a hundred from the known worlds.
It all seemed terribly remote now, and terribly unimportant. Meru had wanted the stars since she first began to remember—and much of that wanting was wrapped up in her mother.
Her mother was dead.
She reached out to the web and crashed headlong into a wall. She could see it, hear it, sense it through the implants that made her part of it. She could even detect the signal that was Yoshi, pinging and pinging again. But she was invisible and inaudible.
Then even that was gone. The silence was enormous. Meru was alone inside her own head.
While she talked to Vekaa, Consensus had finished locking down this whole sector and everyone in it. Meru cried out to her uncle with voice and data stream, but no answer came.
Every link, every connection, was cut off. The very root of it, the warm and constant presence that was the collective mind of her family, had vanished. Where it had been was nothing. Utter void. Absolute emptiness.
The shock was so great that it shut down her mind. She forgot how to resist. She could barely remember how to move.
The Guards herded her away from her mother’s body, down the long flights of stairs and out into the bleak and empty street. She came to herself a little there, enough to eye paths of escape. But the starwing had gone dormant. Everywhere she turned was an armored Guard.
They meant this. There was no pleading they would hear, and no logic that would convince them. The only logic they knew was the order that sealed the plague away from the rest of Earth.
Chapter 7
Holy crap.
I’d fallen asleep with my laptop in my lap. The clock by the side of my bed said 5:24. For a long few seconds I couldn’t remember what the numbers meant.
That wasn’t a dream. That was memory. I had lived that night and day.
My throat was tight and my stomach wrenched with grief for someone else’s mother. I’d been that someone else, living a life somewhere
on the far side of time. I knew what death smelled like, and what a starwing was, and what it was like to feel the whole of the worlds-wide web inside my head.
How could I be remembering something that must be hundreds of years in the future? Memory only works one way. Everybody knows that.
Alternate worlds. Rick would say that, if I worked up the guts to tell him how far around the bend I was going. Bubbles floating in a cosmic sea. Sometimes they touch. And when they do, for a few instants we can see. We can know…
“Horse puckey,” I said in my stuffy little room, where the air conditioning never really worked right, and the ceiling fan could whip up a gale. “I’m suffering from writer’s psychosis. That’s what it is. Stories gone bad. Taking over my head. Mom will say I’d do anything to get out of going to Egypt.”
And then she’d make me go anyway. Mom doesn’t give up once she makes her mind up to something. I could be straight-out barking crazy and she’d just shovel me through security in my nice white coat with the nice tight straps.
I didn’t feel crazy. I felt gutted, because I’d just seen my mother dead and lost everything I—the other I—knew. But my mind was clear. Everything around me, now I was wide awake, made sense. Or as much sense as anything ever does.
I skated along over the top of the dream or memory or whatever it was. I got dressed up, went out, ate rock shrimp and fried grouper and hush puppies, and Mom didn’t ask me if anything was wrong. I wasn’t that good an actor. Was I?
By the time we got home I was almost back to abnormal. Cat and Rick were waiting on the patio with flashlights, armed and ready for turtle watch. Rick was texting with Greg as usual. Cat was stargazing, also as usual.
Sometimes Mom came, too. Tonight she said, “I’m too full to move. You go, do us proud. Happy counting!”
I swapped out dinner clothes for shorts and a tank and my beach shoes, caught a drive-by Mom kiss and headed for the beach.
We do turtle watch for the community college every summer. In May and June we go down to the beach after dark, when the sea turtles come up out of the surf. They dig their nests and lay their eggs, and we count them for the community college. Then in July and August when the eggs hatch, we go back again and count the ones that survive, and watch as the tiny turtles make their bound and determined way toward the ocean.