Legacy (Eon, 1) Page 10

  The children gathered around me when they were finished welcoming their father. They asked where I was from and whether I was married and had any children, and why their father had brought me home with him. Randall answered the last question by saying, “He's a researcher and he's our guest. He's not used to a lot of company, so please give him some room until after dinner at least.”

  The two older boys stayed to hear Randall's stories, but the younger girls went with their mother and grandmother into another room down the hall. I heard other voices in that room: a communal kitchen. Men from another family in the triad were cooking today. “Nothing fancy,” Raytha said as she walked down the hall flanked by her girls. “But it's food.”

  “More gray piscids and flockweed paste,” Randall said when she had left, and confided another grimace. He led me into a room he said was his own, and his alone, but he did not object when the boys followed. This tiny cubicle had a window high in one wall to the outside, through which a cool evening breeze was blowing. A small electric lantern hung in one corner, casting a dim yellow light over shelves packed with crudely bound books.

  “Father, what happened at the river?” the older of the two boys asked as we settled onto woven fiber chairs. “The teacher dismissed us early today and went to the river ... He said he was joining a committee.”

  “There was a fight,” Randall said, lines growing deeper in his face. He did not like describing this to his sons.

  “Did anybody get killed?” the younger boy asked. He reminded me of the boy I had saved by breathing life back into him. His eyes danced with intense interest. My stomach knotted with the remembered love and hate all over again.

  “A lot of people were killed, mostly pirates,” Randall said. He did not volunteer information about the children in the boats. A bell jangled near the alleyway door and Randall got up to answer it. After a conversation of several minutes, during which time the boys sat in the room alone with me, biting their lips and staring at each other for support, but saying nothing, Randall returned.

  “A representative of the citizens rank, welcoming me back,” Randall said. “Thomas radioed them from upriver. They will indeed expect us tomorrow.”

  “Any more news?” the older boy asked.

  “Ser Olmy, let me name these chatty ones for you,” he said, patting their heads. “This is Nebulon, and this is Carl. Carl is a year and a half younger than his brother.”

  “I made my mother a little sick,” Carl said. “That's why our sisters are so new and we're not.”

  “There's more news, yes,” Randall said, eyes half-closed with exhaustion. “Go help your mother and grandmother. I'll tell you later.”

  “Now!” Carl insisted, but Randall gently and firmly packed them out of the room and drew the curtains once they were down the hall and out of hearing.

  “There were thirty-seven children on the boat,” Randall said. “Thirty of them were saved. We had most of them in our boat. Twelve of the Brionists died and twenty were wounded. Sixty are in custody. Nobody knows what to do with them. They'll probably be sent to Athenai for Lenk to decide. We can't afford to keep them here.” He took a deep breath and lifted his arms. “Pardon me. I'm acting as if we're old friends.”

  “We've been through a lot,” I said.

  “But I don't know you. That's unusual around here. Most people know each other along the Terra Nova.”

  “I've been a loner most of my life.”

  “Because your family was proscribed?”

  I put on an air of ignoring this, and Randall assumed he had touched on a sensitive issue.

  “You showed real courage on the river today,” he said. “Even more than Shatro. You seem accustomed to this kind of incident.”

  “I'm not,” I said, truthfully. “And I wouldn't call it courage.”

  “Um.” Randall muttered and sat down in his chair, stretching his legs out in the small, close, brown, and shadowy room. “Still, you impressed me. What prospects do you have, what plans, if I may continue this ungrateful prying?”

  “I need to get to Athenai at some point,” I said.

  “How soon?” Randall asked.

  “I'm not sure.”

  “I'm asking because my partner, Captain Keyser-Bach...” He paused to gauge my reaction to that name. I pursed my lips and widened my eyes, and that seemed to satisfy him. “...And I ... are about to begin a very ambitious journey by ship. We've overcome many difficulties and many kinds of reluctance, both to get this journey financed and approved, and to find the right people to go with us.”

  I saw that the name of Captain Keyser-Bach was meant to impress me, but though he had mentioned it once before, I knew nothing about this person. I decided to behave as if I were impressed. “A journey to where?” I asked.

  “A circumnavigation,” Randall said. “We hope to finish the voyage Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago never completed. To Jakarta first, then to Wallace Station to pick up Ser Mansur Salap and more researchers, then across the Darwin Sea northeast to Martha's Island ... That's just the beginning. A circumnavigation from east to west. We'll end up in Athenai, but it might take us three years.”

  I felt my chest tighten. “That's a grand voyage,” I said. “A scientific expedition?”

  Randall cringed, and I realized my mistake too late. “The captain uses that word much too often, and in the wrong company,” he said. “For us, it is always research, and we are researchers. But it amounts to the same thing. We've studied Liz enough for the time being. She's a wonderful ecos, peaceful and nurturing, once we knew her ways, but she's a little bland and uniform for our tastes. It's time to make comparisons and draw broad conclusions. Otherwise, both the captain and I firmly believe, in time Lamarckia is going to kill us.” He lowered his voice. “We came here ignorant and unprepared, and it has taken all these decades to even begin to climb out of the hole.” Now he stared at me earnestly, large liquid eyes penetrating, measuring, still more than a little doubtful.

  “Whom will you report to,” I asked, “when you've finished the voyage?”

  “To Able Lenk himself,” Randall said.

  I stared at my hands, almost too tired and numb to realize my fortune. Ry Ornis had truly put me at a locus of extreme interest.

  “If it fits within your plans, you're welcome to interview with the captain, and I'll back you up. But no need to answer right away. We both need rest. And you have to testify tomorrow.”

  “The offer is very interesting,” I said.

  “That's enough for now,” Randall said, lifting his hands from the arm of the woven chair. “We should wash ourselves before dinner. We deserve a brave meal and a few glasses of wine.”

  As I splashed water on my face from a ceramic bowl in a cramped washroom, I saw clearly again the Brionist soldier on the flatboat, kneeling and taking careful aim at the rescuers in their canoes and dinghies. His expression haunted me more than his death, which I did not witness. He seemed perfectly content to be killing people, even those who were not trying to kill him. He squinted one eye and aimed his pitiful rifle, as if it might be the most powerful weapon in the universe.

  For the people he killed, of course, it was.

  But I had seen weapons that could scour a million hectares and reduce matter to blue-violet plasma...

  I looked up at the little unframed mirror on the wall and wondered just why this thought had occurred to me. The soldier on the flatboat had become a tool and this man, this dead man, had been content to be such a tool. He did not think whether it was right or wrong to shoot men and women in boats trying to save children he himself had kidnapped.

  I wondered whether there was not a little of him in me. What would I do with this anger, this wish that I myself had put my hands around the man's neck and strangled him, watching his flat, contented eyes go blank and slack as the eyes of the boy in the bottom of the boat?

  “Not your job,” I whispered to the image in the mirror: black hair, sharp eyes, sharp nose, large lips that seem
ed a little insolent even to me. “Just learn what you can, get the clavicle, go home.”

  The eight of us sat down at a long lizboo table to ladle helpings from several bowls of flockweed paste and baked piscids from the river: gray-skinned mouthless fishlike creatures with translucent fringed tails, three black eye-spots, and a body about twenty centimeters long. They consisted almost entirely of ropy muscle-like proteins that were nourishing but tasteless. Various sauces concocted from a private herb garden added some zest to a very bland meal.

  It was apparent within the first few minutes of dinner that Ser Kaytai Kim-Jastro thought she was the head of this branch of the triad. Randall and his wife treated her with quiet deference, and the children did likewise; but it was obvious that nobody treated her quite as well as she thought she deserved. As we settled down to eat, she picked at her food with sad dignity, like deposed royalty dreaming of past feasts. This did not seem to bother Raytha, who had not cooked the food this day, taking the family's share from the communal kitchen.

  There was little talk of the action on the river. Instead, Raytha asked her husband about the journey upriver and what they had found. Randall described twelve previously uncataloged scions. “Not new ones—they don't have the marks of prototypes or test cases—but we've just never observed them and recorded them at the same time. We made a great many oxygen measurements. No signs of a fluxing.”

  “Was it worthwhile, as a trip?” Raytha asked.

  “I think so. Not nearly as worthwhile as the big voyage, of course ... But good exercise.”

  “My husband gets restless if he spends more than a few days a month at home,” Raytha said to me cheerfully.

  Randall smiled and inclined his head, as if showing modesty at some compliment. “My wife gets restless if I'm underfoot,” he responded.

  “We like having Da home,” the youngest boy, Carl, said. Carl was eating very little. I found the children's faces mesmerizing. The girls in particular were enchanting—little mimics of the adult women, lisps and childish accents like music. The children in the river had affected me more deeply than I realized.

  “Why are you staring at us?” the oldest girl, Sasti, asked after a few minutes.

  “I've been out in the silva for so long...” I said. “Not many young, beautiful faces out there.”

  “Our children are very attractive,” Raytha said proudly. “Not well-behaved all the time, but attractive.”

  “Thank you, Mima,” Sasti said primly.

  “Would it be polite to ask about your work?” Raytha asked me.

  “Much like Ser Randall's, only less educated and much less directed. Largely a waste of two years, actually.”

  Randall gave a quick warning look to Raytha, who caught it and redirected her line of questioning. “And your present plans?”

  “I need to find work. I thought I would go to Athenai.”

  Raytha's mother shook her head. “A snobbish town if ever there was one. Everybody bows to Able Lenk. I came here from Athenai to be with my daughter when her children were born. My husband is still there.”

  “Kaytai's views are a bit harsh,” Raytha said. “She lived close to the throne too long.”

  Randall said in an undertone, “Be kind. Remember, we have the funding and approval.”

  “Yes, well, it took Good Lenk seven years to give it to you,” Kaytai said. “I don't fear spies. I know Lenk doesn't go in for them, for one thing—this is not a police state, and I give him credit where it's due—and besides, Ser Olmy does not have the look of an informer.”

  “I wouldn't know who to talk to,” I said. “I don't know much about politics in Athenai.”

  “It's a political town, but that's hardly abnormal,” Kaytai continued. “Few criticize Good Lenk, even when there is much to criticize. If more criticism had been given at the beginning, perhaps we wouldn't have experienced so much hardship and tragedy.”

  “The crossing through the Way was very difficult to arrange,” Raytha said with a hint of piety. “So I understand, of course. I hadn't been born.”

  “Tell us more about Thistledown and the Way, Granmee,” Nebulon said, but she ignored him. “I was an adult,” Kaytai said. “I should have known what I was getting into. But living in Thistledown was a dream of luxury and we weren't prepared. Nobody knew what to expect. Least of all did we know we'd be turned into baby machines.”

  That phrase again.

  “Law of nature,” Randall said dryly.

  “Easy for men to say,” Kaytai continued, warming to her subject. “And for Lenk to expect of us. And we agreed! It sounded dramatic and powerful, to become mothers to a new and cleaner society. But what happened on the river today—was that clean or honorable?”

  “What the defenders did was honorable,” Raytha said, cheeks pinking. She glanced at Randall, but he was used to his in-law, apparently, and was studiously taking no offense.

  “Did you see all bravery and no foolishness, Ser Olmy?” Kaytai asked.

  “I saw bravery and a lot of foolishness,” I said.

  “A lot of foolishness, that's true enough. We need to be brave with so much foolishness.” She sat silent for a while, and we finished the dinner with little but the chatter of the children. Nebulon described Thistledown and the Way for me, and Carl added telling details. They thought it was a fabulous place, full of cold pounding machines and people who no longer looked like people.

  Kaytai picked up where she had left off as herb tea was served. “I remember Thistledown well,” she said. “Nobody else here remembers it at all.”

  “I was three years old,” Randall said. “Not very clear memories.”

  “It was not what Lenk portrays, nor what Carl and Nebulon make up. It was not a corrupting place of technological hubris. It was wonderfully comfortable and fulfilling. I did not realize it at the time. I was a young idealist. My husband was a devoted follower of Good Lenk. Everything my husband believed, I believed. And for his sake, I crossed. Three of my children died in the first three years. I bore those children in misery and pain and they died. On Thistledown their births would have been much easier, and they would not have died...”

  “The price we paid was high,” Raytha said softly, sipping from her ceramic cup and staring at the top of the table. “But we've gained a beautiful world, a young world.”

  She seemed embarrassed by her mother's talk, but was not going to cut it short. I wondered how much she agreed with it—and how much Randall agreed, and how much the general population of immigrants resented the difficulties of the past few decades.

  “How many worlds have been opened in the Way by now? Almost forty years! We might have each found a paradise...”

  Kaytai thought that time passed on Thistledown as it did here.

  “But we hated the technology. We feared it. We feared it so much we left most of it behind, even the machines that would have kept our children alive. Everything fell upon the women. Making babies and watching them die. The old ways, forgotten by all of us. We were not prepared for them. I remember.”

  “The Way was monstrous,” Raytha said.

  “Lenk used the Way, didn't he?” Kaytai said.

  “Mother, our guest has had a very difficult day ... And so has Erwin. We should find other things to talk about.”

  “The day's difficulties are part of what I ... I can't even begin to express. Someday it will all be set right, but I do not know how. I apologize, Ser Olmy, if I've upset you.”

  “Not upset at all,” I said.

  Kaytai gave me the first smile I had seen on her face. “I'd like to tell you about Thistledown, sometime,” she said. “You're much too young to remember, and there's so much distortion of the facts. I remember the way it really was. When I was a girl, before I met my husband...”

  Randall and Raytha prepared a cot for me in the study. “Feel free to consult the books,” Randall said.

  “We often have scholars stay with us,” Raytha said. “Randall likes to show off his library.” />
  “Not many as good outside of Athenai or Jakarta,” Randall said. “Almost everything known about Lamarckia.” He shook his head ruefully. “Obviously, there's a lot left to learn.”

  The family retired a few minutes later, and the apartment fell quiet. My exhaustion had passed, and I sat up on the cot, wide awake. I had the entire evening ahead of me while the family slept.

  Fingers tapped lightly on the frame beside the drawn curtain. I pulled the curtain aside. Kaytai stood in the hall, fingers to her lips, gray eyes glistening in the dark. “You seem sympathetic,” she said. “I get so little sympathy here. Oh, there's much love, but nobody seems to understand.”

  Irritated that I might have less time to study the slate or the books, I pulled the curtain aside and invited her in.

  “I do feel I have something to tell,” she said stiffly, glancing at the walls of books with no interest whatsoever. “Erwin will take you away tomorrow and I'll probably not have another chance.

  “You spent two years in the silva. I have no doubt you found it fascinating and maybe even beautiful. It is beautiful, I can't deny that. But on Thistledown, there were chambers filled with terrestrial forests, animals, insects ... Rich and dense and complete. When I was a girl we would spend weeks in the forests, and unless we looked up into the sky, we could pretend we were back on Earth ... Lovely, lovely places.

  “My husband told me Lamarckia would be a paradise. He assured me Lenk knew everything, and that we would live in pristine wilderness never visited by humans. I don't think even he understood what that would mean. Lenk told us to procreate. I spent the first ten years here having babies and watching most of them die. Raytha was my fourth, and the first to live. The soil was poor in cobalt and selenium and magnesium. None of our crops grew properly. We didn't know which things to eat on Lamarckia. The food was wrong. Adults became sick as well, but not as often as the children. Their little bodies didn't seem to know how to fit in. Those were terrible times ... We suffered diseases never known on Thistledown. We were not prepared.”

  Raytha stood in the doorway. “Mother,” She said gently. “Please. Our guest is very tired.”