Her sallow face drew tight in fierce consideration, like a fist. She snapped her fingers. “I know you.”
I made myself smile, holding onto the squirming toddler.
“You’re the Cheetah Woman . . . Dr. Undset’s widow.”
“I’m going.”
“Vashti . . .” Moira shook her head as she wiped the remaining gel from the Beast’s torso.
“Mommy, I need that.” Bibi leaned out towards the console where Moira had left the light point.
“Vashti Loren, can you imagine?” Haas wiped her hand off on her jeans and extended it to me. Bemused, I took it. “My nephew has that pic in his cube at MedStation. So many of his co-workers would drop by just to get an eyeful.”
“Stretch marks and all,” I said, feeling my smile tighten a little too much; I slid my hand from her grip. “On display for the solar system, courtesy of our mutual friend.”
“It’s not my fault you wouldn’t get them erased,” Moira snapped.
Haas looked at the two of us, brows quirked upwards. “I have a feeling I just put my proverbial foot into it.”
I wanted to answer her. I wanted to tell her exactly what was going on, to the limit that I understood it. I went so far as to open my mouth, to say words like prison and termination and smuggler.
Bibi, in her efforts to seize the light point, managed to rotate herself upside-down and began to squall. With difficulty I hoisted her back up.
“Ask Moira. It’s her story to tell.” Fighting to keep Bibi’s squirming body in place, gritting my teeth as she wailed directly into my left ear, I strode to the door and over the threshold.
“Dr. Loren—” Haas called. Stupidly, I paused. She touched Moira’s shoulder. “Moira, there’s some protocol I have to complete and I need you here; but give me just a minute.”
I could tell by the tilt of Moira’s head she’d rolled her eyes.
Waiting for Haas, I kissed Bibi’s wet cheek, murmured to her about her bed, her pink blanket, her dolly, told her what a good girl she was; and assessed Haas.
Pugnacious chin, thinned mouth, hazel eyes on a line equal with mine, she aimed herself like a fist at me. “Can I contact you tomorrow?”
I goggled at her. She took a deep breath, as if for a distasteful task, and went on. “Look—I’m sorry I said anything about the pic. That was stupid, I know. I read the paper you wrote on ecodynamics and colonization, and your monograph on reptilian pollinators. I know you’re Second Wave—”
“Was,” I corrected automatically. I shook my head as if trying to clear my ears of tinnitus. “Fine, that’s fine, Dr. Haas. Whatever you like. Chime me in the afternoon.”
“And will I—”
Very rudely my free hand shot up, palm outward. “No. Figure it out. Goodbye.” I pressed the control and the door sealed off any reply she might have made.
Mind and body seething, I cursed inwardly all the way back to my rooms, consoling Bibi by reflex.
Damn you, Moira. Just when I thought I was healing. There was no severance from the past, was there?
Lasse, ya nuri. O my light.
After a few false and whimpering starts, Bibi turned over onto her stomach and went to sleep in her crib. Every time her mobile wound down, I rolled out of bed and restarted it. I feared the silence of false dawn; I listened greedily to the blood pulsing in my ears. I longed for blindness against the painted dark.
Eventually the sensor dimmed the bulb in the hall; receiving no suggestion to the contrary, it shut completely off. The last notes of Bibi’s mobile chimed through the false dawn. I forced myself to remain supine.
Up above the world so high.
Like a diamond in the sky.
The dark rushed in.
Lasse Undset’s bronze voice, the trumpet to which all the Second Wave marched, rang in my head. The first time the pants-wetting hundred of us ever saw him, prowling along our ranks in the hazy dawn of that poor algae rock Theta-12, we didn’t know what to think. At the time he seemed old to a bunch of kids who had barely turned fifteen. He was only thirty, a man of great energy and peculiar morals, who had been offered the unimaginable weight of a whole planet and Homo sapiens’ future.
Second Wave. Good morning.
He addressed our shivering lot with his hands behind his back, immaculate in dress greens, beret ruler-straight across his brow, the spiral insignia of the Novus Rangers above his left eye. Not a few of us jumped when he spoke.
Did you enjoy yourselves last night?
Murmurs of yes; and, of course, no.
I hope you had a hell of a time, since the Integral was paying for it. I hope you went dancing in the Box with your crew. I hope you drank too much, I hope you laced some Silk, I hope you got laid. I hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as you could without going to the medbay.
Some grins, scattered laughter.
I hope you had a good time. Because last night was the last night of your life. This morning, your life is mine. For the next year, it is mine. For the next ten years, it is mine.
He ignored the mutters and fidgeting. You know that for centuries the military and the profiteers have gripped exploration in their fists.
He lifted his own in illustration, searching each one of us with his iron gaze. We had an idea of what was coming, and we yearned to hear it. For centuries those fists have squeezed the resources from our home, Earth. You and I have seen pics and vids of Earth. You and I have learned how it turned from paradise to abattoir. And you and I can look about ourselves on Theta and see how once those on Earth discovered another habitable planet and the technology to get there, they fell back into their own shit.
He turned his hands upward and opened them, palms facing the sky. No more.
No more, we murmured.
We’ve found paradise again. For thirty years the Horus has been studying a planet in the Virgo system. A planet with a G5 star, with twenty-five percent oxygen, with gravity only slightly less than Earth’s, a good deal less than Theta’s. For ten years the First Wave of the Integral has lived on that planet, doing nothing but exploring and reporting.
The Integral is not cutting down trees. The Integral is not sinking wells. The Integral—and he held his fist up again—is not raping the planet and filling her womb with monsters.
Again the open hand. No more.
You are here because you, or your parents, do not believe in the closed fist. You are here because you believe in the open hand. You are here because you believe in the Integral. Some of you are technicians. Some of you are scientists.
All of you, he said, each of his words dropping like stones into a well, are explorers.
I peeked out of the corner of my eye at the girl next to me. Her lips were parted, her pupils huge in rapt attention.
Some of you won’t be able to do this. Some of you will come to hate me, or hate your WaveMates, or get too homesick to continue. Some of you may turn from the Integral to the comfortable life of a profiteer.
Softest grumblings of dissent, heads shaking negation. The corner of his mouth quirked.
You will go to Ubastis. You will be hungry, and wet, and dirty, and ill; you will spend days digging to send strata samples back to Theta, or searching for one particular lobe of the night-blooming mericanthus, or catching cracx in a bedsheet. I will prepare you for that; I will teach you how to live there.
He stopped pacing. He looked at all of us, and I could have sworn—I could swear now—that he looked at each one of us, each snotty shaven idealistic kid, right into our hearts. His voice, though it still carried, had dropped. You will die on Ubastis. That I cannot prepare you for. That is your sacrifice. And your sacrifice is nothing without your consent.
Will you reject the fist that gives nothing? Will you take the open hand?
He reached out to us with his open hands, his arms wide. Will you come with me to Ubastis?
Everything in my life had come easily to me until that day while I listened and realized that whatever I reached for from that
moment on I had to win for myself. The word earn took on a new taste in my mouth.
To go from being my parents’ darling to a mere one in Lasse’s litter of a hundred shocked me for months. And not just one, but an odd one. Ceaselessly, I compared myself with the other Second Wave girls. Enhanced, every one of them, or chosen for the genes that would prompt them to grow tall and willowy or charmingly petite. It seemed to me they all had breasts like hard little oranges and flawless skin in shades of luxury. So I buckled on the armor of competition.
On the two-year journey aboard the Fram I sweated to place first in my classes. I woke myself up at night reciting theories in my sleep. During exercise I programmed the computer to increase the weight until it shut itself down. When we finally arrived, I became worse. On bioblitzes I hustled to log more species than anyone. It was not until the months we learned hang gliding that it finally dawned on me what I was doing. It was not enough that I equal or dominate my WaveMates; I must match or best our teacher as well.
During our gliding lessons one day I took it into my head to soar above the ceiling that Lasse set. I stayed up there, my lungs laboring, for over thirty minutes. When I landed, still high from oxygen deprivation and convinced I had seen the curvature of the planet, he took me aside from all the others. He chose a ledge and we sat, legs dangling over an alarming drop. Some of us had let our hair grow once we were fairly sure Ubastis would be none the worse for a few shed strands. He kept his close-cropped so that it stood up from his scalp like plush. Endlessly tempting to the hand.
The sun was climbing down the sky, drenching both of us in bloody light. Pterahedrons and their smaller kin, the yellow-throats, were riding the thermals, scooping up the evening insects. I watched them while he told me the story of Daedelus and Icarus.
Of course I knew it. The father inventor, his proud child who dares to fly higher than the sire, so high that the sun’s heat melts the wax necessary to the wings’ construction.
And so Icarus tumbled down from the sun’s heat into the cold embrace of the Hellespont and drowned. Daedelus was blind with tears. But he held his course and flew to safety.
He related the story in his usual low tone, pitched so that his audience had to pay attention. After he finished, he did not say anything else.
I hear your words, I said after the silence forced my tongue. But I’m not sure I’m perceiving what you are telling me.
Am I telling you that you shouldn’t try to do better than your teacher?
I thought about this. I had to look away from him to do this, because his nearness, his focus on me unsettled me thoroughly.
No. You’re not, I said, sneaking another look at him. Of course his gaze was still on me, and I blushed.
I’m not. I chose that story because today’s activities suggested it to me. I’m not going to ask you why you’re doing this.
Doing what? I said stupidly. We both knew I was being obtuse.
Why you seem hell-bent on putting your competitive foot on everyone’s neck. I don’t want you to get hurt. He caught himself at that, and choked out a laugh. Considering why we’re here, that sounds like a singularly stupid thing to say. Let me try again: I don’t want you to fall into the Hellespont before you’ve even begun your work.
This was not the expected lecture. I stole a look at him, wondering when he was going to start the cant on cooperation, harmony, teamwork. Hell, everyone knew that the good of the group was sovereign over the desire of the individual. If you didn’t live by that rule, you were a filthy egoist profiteer.
He placed his hand over mine. Can you just try to pace yourself, Vashti?
I’ll try, I said, lying. How could I, a Natch among the Enhanced, ever rest? But I did take a little more care in weighing the risks.
I had reasons to live.
My WaveMates and I got along well enough. I sinned more than I was sinned against, but I did not see that very well at the time. I viewed myself as grim and cold next to their vivacity. My aegis became my skin: my passion for the everyday work and the ultimate goal. But beneath the encumbering armor I was as soft as—softer than—my sisters. The infatuation of student for teacher, soldier for commander is as old as sandal-stirred dust.
Our home base, comfortable after a year, stood on the edge of the Big Tawny, near the settlement recently named New Albuquerque. Under Lasse’s auspices twenty of us had moved out to the Cassene, the massive tropical biome. We were on a recon about fifty kliks from the river’s source. Wild country, the deepest into the arboros any had yet ventured. Not a one of us stirred without a sidearm, which Lasse had taught us how to shoot; ancient, futile gesture, as no one was certain what we might come across. We scanned, we shot pics, we dictated together—at our work we became a Babel. If our recorders hadn’t been voice-keyed, our notes would have been so much trash for the recycler. I spent three-quarters of my days intoxicated over the work and the rest of the time sick for Lasse.
The supply ship from Theta had docked at New Albuquerque a few days ago. A couple of gliders had brought in necessaries and unnecessaries, and an impromptu party had sprung up, fueled by strawberry liquor and soy beer. We set up a line of webbing near the river’s edge and played mud volleyball. As one of the team leaders I played against Lasse. To my dazzled eyes we were the only ones facing each other through the net. My concentration suffered, and I twisted my ankle diving for a save. As luck would have it, I also plowed up a faceful of mud.
I limped from the field, trying to laugh in that game fashion everyone knows is a cover-up for embarrassment, and retreated to my muddy laurels in my tent. At that moment I believed I had reached the absolute nadir of my life. Lasse’s image burned in my mind’s eye like the sun one sees after shutting one’s eyes on a bright day. I whipped off my clothes. I poured the day’s allocation of water into the basin, not allowing myself to heat it, and washed. With every soapy caress I tensed, trying to deny myself that simple animal pleasure, so entangled was it with the idea of Lasse’s hand and not mine on the sponge.
I eventually slipped into my hemp robe, lay down on the cot, and let my fingers continue their work of quenching the fever they’d helped to light.
I lay in abandon, wide open, one knee angled up, one foot on the floor, left hand knotted in the sheet, when I rolled my head to the side and my eyelids flickered open.
Lasse stood in the doorway of the tent.
I whirled off the cot, snatching my robe closed as I turned my back to him. I thought my knees were going to buckle. My heart kicked so hard I felt it not only in my poor cheated cunt but in my fingertips, my lips. To complete my mortification, I began to cry. Jagged sobs tore up from my chest as if on a fishhook. I shoved the heel of my shaking hand against my teeth to muffle these awful sounds; I caught my own scent on my fingers and cried harder.
At the touch of his hands on my shoulders, I cringed. I would not look at him; I could not bear even the suggestion of revulsion or pity on his face. The expression he had worn when I caught him—when we caught each other—I did not know then how to read.
He began rubbing my arms in long, light strokes. Very quietly, so that I felt as much as heard his words, he said, Vashti. Don’t cry, Vashti. Please don’t cry.
I could not summon up the spine to tell him go away; I did not want to extrude my being even that much.
Vash . . . I heard him swallow. I can’t say for sure what’s going on inside you. I do know our perceptions of what just happened are very different.
Those soothing caresses and his voice, coupled with my thwarted physical hunger, only fueled my spin through this awful nebula of emotion. Desperately I sought a port of dignity. Perhaps your perceptions are faulty.
Were you were brought up to believe that what you were doing is wrong?
Wrong in front of you.
Now he turned me gently around; I let him. Wrong in front of me, Vash?
I looked up at him, at the straight brows drawn in ever so slightly by a single short line, at the subtly dimpled c
hin, the stubbled jawline, the secretive mouth. I looked into his eyes, set just slightly crooked. Gray should be a cool color, but the gray of his eyes always burned. With luminal speed, memories flickered through my brain. Lasse teaching me how to shoot. Lasse teaching me how to dart a luft in flight. Lasse teaching me field surgery and Greek and how to feed a juvenile charcharas with seeds held in my teeth. Hadn’t he taught others with the same patience, the same humor, the same pleasure when they succeeded?
I’m ashamed.
He took my hands and lifted them. My robe swung free, exposing my body. Why are you ashamed?
Look at me, I hissed. Look at me! I’m ugly! I’m a clod! I’m a Natch!
Don’t ever be ashamed. He closed the space between us, looking down at me, still holding my hands. Your body’s not made for being a decoration on a shelf. It’s built for the work, the good work, of being a human being.
I had no words. I looked up at him, drowned in tears and bewilderment.
The corners of his mouth quirked up. Vash . . . I’m a Natch too. Didn’t you know? I hope you don’t think I’m a clod.
Bitterly: You know I don’t. And I bet you never paced yourself a day in your life.
No. I never did.
Gently he drew my wicked right hand to his face, inhaling as if he held lilies. He kissed each finger, letting his tongue play over my skin. Now my knees did tremble; tumblers in my belly clicked into place.
I taught you everything else. I want to be the one to teach you this.
His mouth on mine. Terror and exaltation. I remember the feel of his hands cupping my skull, the press of his thumbs just along the outer edge of the orbital bone.
All the years together he played my flesh as consummately as a virtuoso his violin, a man with no fear of the human body or mind, or of their needs.
Why did you come back? I asked him once.
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