The Meek Page 10

  “Twenty-two?” he said. “But we’ve cleaned 24.”

  He felt cheated after doing all that hard work and coming up short.

  She shrugged. “Some of the fiber optics on these two panels have been compromised.”

  “But the crew checked,” he said, trying not to whine about it. He was so tired from sweeping that he felt he could whine about anything. “All that cable is fine.”

  “Cody,” said Claire, “the computer’s not going to lie. Obviously you missed something somewhere.”

  He sighed. There was no point in looking into it or trying to fix it now. They didn’t have the time. They would just have to make do with 22.

  “Can we check the targeting again?” he said, feeling he had to nitpick about something.

  “Sure,” she said. “GK 5, display microwave targeting.”

  A 3-D topographical representation of the station appeared on the screen of her laptop. The graphics camera angle drew back, showed the nearest hundred solar panels, the microwave transmission tower, pulled back even further, a kilometer up, two kilometers up, until the open-pit oxygen mine came into view, and finally the mine’s receiving dish.

  Claire keyed in a command. A dotted yellow line connected the transmission tower to the receiving dish. A second yellow line appeared, angling from the receiving dish to a relay tower. Then a third yellow line from the relay tower to the input grids above the Oxygen Production Utility.

  Claire said, “GK 5, confirm targeting.”

  The targeting coordinates were confirmed and all the yellow lines turned red.

  “Targeting confirmed,” said the GK through the open channel.

  Cody took a deep breath, wondered if there was anything else he could do, if he had forgotten anything. He decided there wasn’t. He looked around at the others. Then he patched in to Wit, who was still downtown.

  “Wit, we’re almost ready with this.”

  “I’m in the emergency shelter,” said Wit over the open channel. “I’ve checked the vents. They’re reinforced with titanium, but it’s an awfully long run. We’ll just have to hope that none of it’s been compromised through the years. I checked the GK for the municipal codes, and this kind of venting had to be installed fairly stringently.”

  “Is everyone all right in the dorm?” asked Cody.

  Wit paused. “They’re all right. Ben’s still out cold.”

  Cody again checked Claire’s screen. “Stand by,” he said. He looked at all the panels. All of it so old. All of it so antique-looking. He turned to Claire. “Okay,” he said, “let’s give it a try.”

  Claire issued a start-up command. A bar graph appeared on the screen. The bottom line represented zero kilowatts. The top line represented 1,775,000 kilowatts, maximum capacity. The emergency shelter required a lot, 55,000 kilowatts altogether, first to get the requisite number of robots up and running in the oxygen mine, then to keep the shelter itself properly pressurized, heated, and ventilated. A red bar climbed up the side of the graph, first to 20,000 kilowatts. It stayed at 20,000 for about thirty seconds.

  “This is a fail-safe,” said Claire. “It double-checks the targeting at 20,000 kilowatts. You don’t want to be messing around with the targeting once it goes above that.”

  “Targeting confirmed,” the GK intoned again.

  The bar graph continued to climb. With twenty-two solar panels up and running, the math indicated they should get just over 65,000 kilowatts of power. Which wasn’t a whole lot to spare.

  The bar graph leveled off around 62,000.

  “Why isn’t it going up anymore?” asked Cody.

  Claire shrugged. “We’ve got a bleed-off somewhere. But what we’ve got here should be enough.”

  Cody glanced at the manually operated OPU start-up switch. He felt like he was trying to fly to the moon in a wooden sailing ship. Wit stood by, waiting for him. He reached up, yanked the switch down, and turned to the screens.

  Remote cameras showed a small cadre of robots spring to life in the oxygen mine.

  Cody and his crew gathered round and watched the robots process ore for a while, fascinated, as children might be, by the way the gigantic machines worked. After fifteen minutes a light on the processing panel flashed green. This meant oxygen was ready to pump. Cody threw another switch.

  According to the readouts, the oxygen made its long run to the emergency shelter in Laws of Motion Square without mishap.

  Cody contacted Wit. “Wit?” said Cody. “Anything?”

  “You should see the dust coming out of the vents,” said Wit.

  “Are you getting any sort of millibar reading?”

  Cody waited while Wit took a reading from his visor.

  “Nothing you can breathe yet,” said Wit, “but there’s a definite rise in pressure.”

  “Are the carbon dioxide scrubbers on-line?” he asked.

  “Just a sec.” Cody waited. “On-line,” said Wit after a few moments, “but not venting anything yet.”

  “Any rise in temperature?” asked Cody.

  “Going up fast. Minus 25 and rising.”

  The readouts on Claire’s screen showed steady at 62,000 kilowatts. Cody looked at the mine monitors where the automated heavy equipment went about its work, then checked the status of the oxygen separator and saw that it was now producing four hundred cubic feet of oxygen per minute, about what they needed to keep the emergency shelter pressurized.

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s head downtown.”

  The emergency shelter was similar in design to the Fernando Junio, the interplanetary cruise liner Cody and Christine had traveled to Mars in to visit his parents just after they had married, with bulkheads, pressure walls, and small rooms with multiple bunks, self-contained like a ship. Cody sat on one of the hard metal chairs, his body aching more than ever. What the shelter lacked was luxury. He could have used a soft chair. The shelter was purely functional, unrelievedly institutional, and painfully uncomfortable for someone who had just spent the last ten hours sweeping. But at least it had air. At least it had heat.

  They camped in the shelter’s control center.

  “So that’s it for the dorm’s air?” Cody asked Peter.

  “Yes. It’s all gone.”

  “And how much tanked oxygen do we have?”

  “Three tanks.”

  “That’s not much of a margin.”

  “It’s no margin at all,” said Peter.

  Cody sat next to Ben, who lay on a mattress on the floor. Ben was conscious but didn’t seem to recognize Cody. Exposure to the vacuum had induced a cerebral aneurysm. At the age of 31, in a society where such things didn’t happen to anybody anymore, Ben LeBlanc had suffered a stroke. His right eye was bloodshot. The left side of his face was slack and distorted. Cody took a cloth and wiped his mouth.

  He turned to Lulu. He lifted his sweater and showed her the bulge over his stomach.

  “What’s happening to me?” he asked.

  She looked away. Cody glanced around the room at the others. Wit was leafing through a thirty-year-old calendar printed on polymer-base paper. Claire studied the last orbital photographs the Gerard Kuiper had taken before it crash-landed in the Angles. Deirdre was staring out the window at the airless square. Cody turned back to Lulu. He wanted an answer. He wasn’t angry or upset; he just wanted to know. Lulu kept her face averted for a few moments, then turned to him. He could tell she was trying to project something. But they hadn’t kissed in 24 hours. Nothing came through. She beckoned. He leaned forward and they kissed.

  She said: The 27 million letters that the Father recoded in chromosome 3?

  This was the first he had heard that the Father had had anything to do with the 27 million rewritten letters in chromosome 3. Who or what the Father was he still didn’t know. It was as if Lulu was afraid to talk about him.

  He said: Yes?

  She said: They were designed to engage host DNA. I kiss you, I have the marrow in my mouth, my saliva reacts chemically with
it, and I produce a genetic catalyst that binds to your own coding. You start to change.

  He said: So I’m becoming one of the Meek?

  She said: Partially. Temporarily. You’ve developed certain of our characteristics. You’ll revert once you’re no longer supplied with the genetic catalyst.

  He couldn’t help frowning. Will I turn blue?

  She said: Given enough coding, yes.

  He said: Why did Buster attack Ben?

  She looked away. The focus of her thoughts blurred. Where Buster was concerned she could never shape her thoughts into words or ideas that he could comprehend. She looked at Ben, then leaned over and kissed him. This startled Cody. Until now she hadn’t kissed anyone else. Deirdre glanced at them, then turned back to the window and gazed out at the square, looking lonely and excluded.

  Lulu said: I will mend him.

  Cody was puzzled. How could she mend Ben? She sensed his puzzlement. She pulled up her thermal undershirt and ripped her bandages away. Nothing. No scar from the hammer attack. No indication of any injury whatsoever.

  She said: With marrow, chromosome 3 codes for repair. The Father added this function. After the evacuation everyone was damaged in one way or an other. After the bioextermination, radiation was seven times the lethal level. Parts of chromosome 3 were coded specifically to repair radiation damage. We soon found that it repaired a lot more.

  He was at first bewildered by what she was telling him, that the marrow should work as a panacea. Then came relief. She was going to mend Ben.

  He said: Thank you.

  She grinned and said: We have learned to help. We have learned to care for our brothers and sisters.

  Claire called him over to her screen.

  “Look at these photographs,” she said. The photographs, four in all, showed the surface of Ceres. “These were taken from the Gerard Kuiper 22 kilometers above County Hypotenuse seven minutes before Joe crashed. Look at the coordinates.”

  Cody looked at the coordinates. “Right above where we found that telescope.”

  “Right,” said Claire. “I’ll box in the exact location. You’ve got a lot of shadow. The sun is setting so it’s hard to see what I want to show you. Take a look at the first shot. I’ll magnify. This was taken three minutes before the gravitational disturbance started.”

  Magnification showed no change from reference photographs.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Right,” said Claire. “Now look at this one. This is ninety seconds before the gravitational disturbance.”

  Cody leaned toward the screen and had a closer look. “A roof or something is opening,” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Now look at this third photograph. This coincides with the start of the gravitational disturbance.”

  “It’s fully open,” said Cody.

  “And I don’t think it’s a telescope, Cody,” said Claire.

  Cody glared at Lulu. Her brow was set in a half frown. She was blocking intensely. Cody couldn’t get through. She wouldn’t look in his direction.

  “What about the fourth photograph?” he asked.

  “It’s essentially the same as the third photograph. But I’ve done a spectrographic analysis. I’ll switch to full motion.” She keyed in some commands, the picture unfroze, and the disk, the telescope, whatever it was, slid quickly to the east as the Gerard Kuiper sped by. “Here it is with the spectrograph.” She keyed in another command.

  Cody saw a whirlpool of color—the colors of the spectrum, only in reverse order—being sucked down into the disk. In other words the gravitational pull from the thing was so intense that, like a black hole, not even light could escape it, and in fact, was being drawn toward the thing’s event horizon.

  Claire cast a sideways glance at Lulu. But Lulu still wouldn’t look at either of them.

  Lulu said: They think I did it.

  Cody sat next to Lulu. Jerry sat at Claire’s laptop monitoring the OPU. Everyone else was asleep. Cody felt Lulu’s pain but he had no idea how he should respond to it. She wouldn’t volunteer any information about the gravity disk—or whatever it was—out on the surface, so naturally everybody thought she was at least partially responsible for Joe’s death. Nor would she say anything about the eighteen large structures situated in various sites around the asteroid. She blocked. And he found it frustrating.

  He said: Lulu, I’m tired.

  She looked away. She said: I’m sorry.

  And then she was quiet, as if she understood he wanted the privacy of his own thoughts. The cool wind of her mind faded and he was left alone to think about the gravity disk, and how it might or might not have been responsible for Joe Calaminci’s death.

  At three in the morning the vents stopped pumping oxygen into the emergency shelter. The sudden silence woke him. He found Lulu curled up next to him with her head on his chest. The air smelled stale, dusty. He eased Lulu’s head gently onto the mattress they had dragged in from one of the bunkrooms. Claire, Wit, and Jerry huddled around Claire’s laptop. Cody pushed himself up and joined them. The lights were out and they were using guidelights. Anne-Marie Waddell sat at the radio quietly trying to raise the Conrad Wilson.

  “What’s going on?” asked Cody.

  “We’ve lost power in the Actinium plant,” said Jerry. “We’ve dropped below 20,000 kilowatts. And Anne-Marie’s having problems raising the Conrad Wilson. It’s like something’s scattered her ability to receive. We’ve lost monitor access to the oxygen mine so we have no idea what’s going on up there. Wit spotted a transom valve malfunction on the screen while Claire was having a rest, and right after that we had this decrease in power.”

  “Do we have anything coming into the emergency shelter?” asked Cody.

  “Nothing,” said Jerry. “And the heat’s off-line too. The temperature’s dropped three degrees in the last half hour.”

  “What about the scrubbers?” asked Cody.

  “They’re out too,” said Claire. “But so far there’s been only a marginal increase in carbon dioxide.”

  Cody put his hands on his hips and thought. “Anne-Marie, you’re not getting anything from the Conrad Wilson?”

  “Just the occasional positional readout,” she said. “But I’m not sure I trust it. The signal’s constantly breaking up.”

  “At a rough guess, how long is it going to take them to get here?”

  “About seventeen hours,” she said.

  Cody turned and stared at Lulu, whose skin looked purple in the dim light of the guidelights. They were trapped in a bubble of air with no new air coming in. He did the math. They would probably make it through the seventeen hours till the Wilson got here, with plenty of air to spare. After all, the shelter was as big as a stadium and fully pressurized, and ten people breathing normally would take two weeks to get through it all. What made him nervous was the cold. Without any new source of heat they would freeze to death. There was nothing to burn. Everything in the emergency shelter was, naturally enough, noncombustible. Heat for their pressure suits depended on special intersuit biotherms, but their biotherms were gone. And while the pressure suits were insulated, without the biotherms they couldn’t be expected to provide any long-term protection against the killer cold that would inevitably insinuate its way into the shelter.

  So …

  So … they would have to ask Lulu …

  He turned to her, said: Can you keep us warm?

  She said: I can keep you warm. The marrow codes for increased temperature tolerance.

  He said: Then let’s do it.

  He had to argue with his crew about this. While some were willing, others, particularly Deirdre, had to overcome the cultural, romantic, sexual, and gender associations that were part and parcel of his plan to save them from freezing to death. In fact he couldn’t convince Deirdre at all, and she gave in only after the temperature reached minus 23 Celsius.

  At that point their continued existence and survival became a surreal nightmare.


  Cody stared at Lulu kissing Dina on the lips, Dina sitting rigidly in the cold while this beautiful blue woman provided the cold-resistant genes of chromosome 3 to her. Then Lulu moved to Peter, then to Wit, then to Jerry, and it was easier for the men than it was for the women; at least the orientation was going the right way. When Lulu finally got to Deirdre, both women kissed stiffly, arms at their sides, and Cody knew that Deirdre was fighting to overcome her aversion, forcing herself to sip, so to speak, the cold-repelling elixir from Lulu’s lips, but also struggling to finally accept Lulu, to understand that maybe this blue woman had found a special place in Cody’s life. All so surreal, Lulu kissing Claire, Anne-Marie, Dina, then Deirdre again, an erstwhile male fantasy—all the men watching with red-rimmed fearful eyes—but performed in the most harrowing life-and-death circumstances, with everybody shivering, with their breath crystallizing and all the furniture creaking as it contracted in the unspeakable cold. Lulu wasn’t cold at all. She moved from crew member to crew member like she was on a tropical beach in a warm breeze, regurgitating, like a mother bird, the stuff that would keep everybody alive.

  This went on for hours. Lulu exhausted herself helping them. She went to Peter, Ben, Jerry, Wit, Huy, and finally back to Cody again, in the dark, with only the beams of their guidelights piercing the gloom. Like it was never going to end. Lulu giving each one of them enough of a genetic rewrite with the superscience of the marrow to survive. And they all endured. One way or another, as the temperature got colder and colder, they all stayed alive …

  CHAPTER 10

  After eight hours of genetic recoding in the freezing cold Cody experienced periods of apnea—his lungs shut down for one or two minutes at a time. He shook himself; it was the only way he could get his lungs to start working again. Even when his lungs stopped he didn’t feel the slightest need for air. He stretched his arms out in front of him. They all wore their suits and helmets, but the warmth the suits provided was negligible. He let his arms sink slowly to his lap. His body felt sluggish. He tried to form his hand into a fist, but he couldn’t move his fingers, couldn’t even feel them. He thought he must be freezing to death. His body temperature was down—he saw the data on his biofeedback indicator, a small display projected onto the lower right corner of his visor—but other than temperature all other life signs were normal.