The Meek Read online

  “It says I have a body temperature of 32 Celsius,” he told Jerry. “Isn’t that five degrees below normal?”

  Lulu was now kissing Claire.

  “I’m the same,” said Jerry. “I should be shaking. My speech should be slurred. But it’s not. We’re perfectly fine.” Jerry watched Lulu kiss Claire. Cody did the same. So odd to see Claire without her helmet on when temperatures like these would ordinarily freeze her nose in seconds. “This chromosome 3,” said Jerry, “these 27 million rewritten letters … this is … it’s miraculously advanced genetic science. For it to happen so quickly like this. Far more advanced than anything we have. The kind of genetic transplants we perform on Juno are primitive compared to this.” He gestured toward Lulu. “It doesn’t seem possible that the Meek could develop such sophisticated techniques … for her coding to bind with our coding … to start changing us in minutes, so that we can actually withstand killer cold like this.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Cody.

  Jerry nodded, a cumbersome movement of his head inside his helmet. “They seem like such a simple people. Look at her. I don’t know how she and her people could have done what they’ve done when theoretically they should have all been fried from the inside out by the bioextermination thirty years ago.”

  Cody stared at Lulu as she kissed Claire. He looked at the small flowers embroidered into her pants, the idiosyncratic pieces of reflective thread, the haphazard arrangement of the decoration. She seemed such a natural creature, the antithesis of a technological being. Where did she live? The Edison Foothills Habitat? He certainly couldn’t picture her living in a place like Vesta City, with its neat gridwork of streets, its drab office blocks, and its conventional suburbs. Or even in a place like Newton, which, though more fanciful and architecturally interesting than Vesta City, lacked the naturalness he sensed within her.

  That’s what he wanted. A new naturalness to his life. Maybe that’s what attracted him to Lulu. That’s why he was here, on Ceres, using his clout as number-three man in Public Works to land this project for himself in the first place. To get out of the boardroom. To get back outside. To regain some of the naturalness in his life that had disappeared when he finally found himself behind a desk. Not only that, he wanted to get away from Vesta, where there were just too many memories now, immerse himself in a megaproject, let his job take over.

  He turned his head as if through half-frozen jelly. He observed. Observed Lulu. Observed this room. A confining space. Lulu didn’t belong in a room like this. A desk, a chair, the control panel, a narrow glass vase with some fake flowers, a metal wardrobe with one of the doors tom off, some plastic hangers hanging from hooks inside. She belonged outside. He shifted his guidelight to the far wall. A bulletin board. Some thirty-year-old maintenance schedules pinned to the bulletin board. Some postcards from Earth, one showing the Grand Canyon, another showing Niagara Falls, and still another showing the crumbling ruins of the Coliseum in Rome, printed on that pixel paper, the stuff that could animate the postcard, a novelty thirty years ago but today just so much kitsch. He didn’t want to die here. When Kevin Axworthy and his crew finally came would they find him frozen to death in here? Would his own corpse become part of the tragic corpse motif of Newton?

  He felt like asking Lulu to take him to the Edison Foothills Habitat. At least out there his death would be more natural.

  He took a deep breath, just to convince himself that he could, and rolled his shoulders twice. Lulu moved to Dina, kissed her. He was so cold that he couldn’t wait until Lulu got to him. He felt the cold as a biting ache all over his body. He had to do something to take his mind off it. He lifted his half-finished cat. Deirdre watched him. He picked up a piece of sandpaper, started sanding, his hands awkward in the big pressure gloves. Lulu gave him a sideways glance as she continued to kiss Dina. He sanded some more. He liked to work with his hands. When he worked with his hands he always felt better about everything, even about freezing to death in a city that had no heating system.

  Three hours later, when the temperature reached minus 60 Celsius, Cody heard a big bang. He rose sluggishly to his feet, again with the sensation that he was moving through half-frozen jelly, his bones seeming to creak and moan inside his body. He joined Claire at her laptop. And heard another bang. Then another. And finally another. Not an exploding bang, more of a bursting bang. Atmospheric pressure started to drop and a faint breeze stirred the frigid air in the control room. He leaned closer to the laptop’s voice-command input.

  “GK 1,” he said, surprised by how low and faint his voice sounded. “Exterior cameras.”

  The screen filled with a night-vision view of Rhenium Lane. Outlined in ghostly green, nine or ten Meek climbed the side of the emergency shelter, packs strapped to their backs. He heard two more bangs. The Meek were using their nano-putty to breach the hull of the shelter. Atmospheric pressure began to drop quickly. The screen switched to a new view, showed four of the Meek applying nano-putty to the main airlock. Cody lurched from the screen, his legs so numb he could hardly feel them, and closed the control room’s pressure door, twisting the seal tight with the manual closing wheel. It seemed as if the Meek were really intent on killing them, that they had simply been waiting for them to weaken, to become unable to fight back.

  Wit got up. So did Peter. Both were moving as if they had stiff cardboard shoved down the sleeves and leggings of their pressure suits, their faces slack, showing not so much alarm as a dull, cold apathy, as if they were too frozen to care about what the Meek were doing.

  “They’re outside,” said Cody, forcing himself to speak louder. He swung his arm as if in slow motion and pointed at the screen. “You can see them on-camera.”

  Wit and Peter looked at the screen. The Meek, outlined in the phantom green of the camera’s nightscope vision, moved as if through a murky beryl sea up the side of the building, planting pats of nano-putty here and there, climbing with the ease of monkeys. Cody felt distant from it all. He felt like a man who was already dead, a ghost marveling at the antics of mortals who would try to kill him a second time. He knew he wasn’t thinking right. Was he experiencing some of the confusion of hypothermia?

  He sat down. His legs felt weak. Lulu came and sat next to him. He began to take off his helmet, thinking she was there to kiss him, to warm him, but she shook her head, and he sensed she was too tired, that it had taken a lot out of her to keep everybody alive for this long, that she needed a rest. He heard the squeal of the air outside as it seeped out the nano-putty holes, like the sucking sound water made as it drained out of a bathtub. Huy looked at him, his usual coppery complexion nearly white through the visor of his helmet. Peter looked at him. So did Wit. So did Dina. They wanted him to come up with a plan. But he had no plan.

  “Let’s everybody sit together,” he said. “Let’s sit on the floor. We might keep warmer that way.”

  So they all sat on the floor. Warmth was a relative term when the temperature was minus 60 Celsius. But it was good to sit on the floor close to everybody just the same. It was good to be part of this group. He felt like they were all grade-school kids sitting on the floor in class. Far in the distance he heard Lake Ockham cracking. His mouth, his sinuses, and his throat were dry—desert-dry. Every last molecule of moisture had been frozen out of the air. This was death. None of them panicked. It was too cold to panic. Cody checked his biofeedback monitor again. Heart rate was 28 beats per minute. Zenlike. The Meek destroyed his precious bubble of air, and he found he simply didn’t care. All mortal concerns seemed distant and unnecessary.

  Cody sat on the floor beside Lulu. She stared at him, her violet eyes glowing in the dim wash of light coming from the guidelights.

  She said: They’re not going to come in.

  He said: They know there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

  She said: They’ll wait till you suffocate. They fight against their ghost codes. They will not use out-and-out violence if they can avoid it. They will let the cold
ease you away.

  Claire got up and went to the computer. Everyone looked at her. Cody sensed their vague curiosity. But he also sensed their delicious and dangerous apathy, the apathy of those who were about to freeze to death. Anne-Marie got up and tried to raise the Wilson on the radio one more time. He sensed thoughts coming from Anne-Marie, but they were faint, weak, and he could hardly make out what they were, could only sense an unarticulated determination. In fact, he now sensed faint emanations from everyone, their apathy jolted by Claire’s move to the computer, by Anne-Marie’s move to the communications console. He sampled these emanations one by one. Jerry watched the laptop screen, the creatures climbing the sides of the emergency shelter; from Jerry came medical and professional admiration for the genetic reality and superiority of the Meek. From Wit, a hot spark of anger, a need to go out and show those fuckers they couldn’t push him around. From Huy, a nagging worry about water supply, whether the ten liters left, now frozen solid, would last them. From Russ, a visual image, a field of daisies on Perseus, a feeling of peace, of acceptance, as if he realized he couldn’t do anything about their present situation. From Dina, an image of her mother making cranberry sauce at home, the sound of words, English words but so flavored by the Perseusian dialect Cody could hardly understand them. From Peter, a professional thought, a hope that the Meek outside wouldn’t take any more of their equipment. From Claire, a focused effort to reboot the OPU in Actinium by checking for any damaged software. From Ben—too fuzzy from his stroke to make out much of anything, just a vague image of a country road at night somewhere out in the Great Plains Growing Region of Vesta.

  And from Deirdre … from Deirdre came a huge and daunting sadness. Such a big sadness it seemed to fill the whole room. He turned to her, startled, so big was her emotion. He found her staring at him, her eyes wide and green and moist with tears, tears that would not freeze in the bitter extraterrestrial cold, not when they ran with the juice of the marrow.

  He realized she had finally given up on him.

  That she had finally disengaged her emotions from him once and for all.

  She was different, he could sense it; a much calmer person, even in her current misery, now that she wasn’t ruined by her love for him. A sensible person, a likable one, not someone he had to be uncomfortable around anymore, someone he could call his friend. He gave her a tentative smile. She smiled back.

  She said: I’m sorry.

  He nodded. He understood.

  Then his ears popped as he heard the vacuum suck on the control room’s pressure door, heard the pressure door knock against its seal as it was pulled outward by that dreaded airless specter of the Belt. They were in a precious bubble of air, and soon the carbon dioxide would thicken. Would the marrow help them breathe? Or would the superscience of the Meek fall short? He thought that Buster had to be out there, and that Buster would know if the marrow would help them or not. Buster also had to know that Lulu was in here with them, no matter how hard she tried to block. Cody got to his feet. How far was Buster willing to go? The air in the control room looked misty—the nitrogen was freezing out. Would Buster simply wait until Lulu exhausted herself? She looked ready to collapse. Would Buster let the vacuum kill them? Cody joined Claire at her laptop. She was running a scan on some of the old disks. He could only hope that the Conrad Wilson would get here before their air ran out.

  He turned to Anne-Marie. “Any contact?” he asked.

  Anne-Marie turned to him slowly, as if moving in a dream. One of the guidelight beams pierced her yellow visor and he saw her face clearly, her dark eyebrows standing out against a preternaturally white face, a face whitened by the extreme cold. She was frowning. “I’ve got a strong positional signal,” she said, her voice low, cracking from lack of moisture. “The Conrad Wilson’s somehow hacking through all this strange interference.”

  “And where are they?” he asked.

  She turned back, double-checked the signal, and with a flicker of hope in her voice, said, “They’re in orbit.”

  PART TWO

  VESTA

  CHAPTER 11

  Kevin Axworthy, at 57 years of age, was a formidable-looking man with a hawk’s beak of a nose, a square chin, a massive forehead, penetrating blue eyes, and thick white hair that swept back in an impressive mane. As Cody watched him walk around Lulu, examining her, evaluating her, looking as if he were trying to come to a conclusion about her, he felt both relieved and alarmed by the man’s presence. Cody had his life back. He wasn’t going to suffocate or freeze. Sixteen hours had passed since that dire moment in the emergency shelter when they had first learned that the Conrad Wilson was in orbit. He was safe in this portable military-style bunker, and the vacuum outside in Laws of Motion Square couldn’t touch him. What alarmed him was the change of dynamic. He glanced around the room. Uniforms everywhere. Men with weapons. And outside, a supply yard full of automated weapons waiting to be set up. These men were soldiers in an armed camp, ready to fight, and the unpredictability and potentially disastrous consequences of the situation unnerved Cody.

  Lulu sat in a chair, her hands cuffed behind her back. Two guards stood next to her, grim-faced men, human pit bulls, dwarfing the diminutive and fairylike Meek woman. Axworthy stopped circling Lulu, put his fists on his hips, gave her one more probing glance, then looked at Cody.

  “You’re lucky to be alive, Mr. Wisner,” he said.

  Cody nodded. “She helped us,” he said. “I don’t see why you have to handcuff her like that. Why don’t you let her sleep? She’s exhausted.”

  A crease appeared in Axworthy’s forehead. “We just want to make sure she doesn’t run away, Mr. Wisner, that’s all,” he said. “She might have useful information. I’d certainly like to find out about that putty they use. That’s going right to the top of the list as far as I’m concerned. If it can breach your dorm, who’s to say it can’t breach this bunker?”

  “She needs marrow,” Cody told Axworthy. “She gets sick if she doesn’t eat it.” Axworthy looked at him in mystification. Lulu squirmed on the edge of her seat. “They breathe with their stomachs. They need marrow to breathe.”

  “Marrow?” said Axworthy. “That lichen stuff that’s growing out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “The stuff that glows?”

  “No, the other stuff.”

  “She won’t die, will she?”

  “She won’t,” said Cody. “Some of them just get sick. She’s one of those.”

  “But others die?”

  “That’s what I’ve learned.”

  “She needs it?” said Dr. Tom Minks.

  Cody turned to the slim blond doctor. Even he wore a uniform. “She needs it to breathe,” he told Minks. “She’ll start having withdrawal symptoms if she doesn’t get it.”

  Axworthy spoke to one of the guards. “Bruder, go get her some lichen. Let’s lay in a supply.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  Bruder left the infirmary.

  Axworthy stared at Lulu again. His massive brow sank close to his eyes. Lulu was looking up at Axworthy nervously. Cody moved next to her and put his hand on her shoulder, comforting her. She tried to say something, struggled to convey a complicated series of thoughts, but all he got from her was that she was afraid. Axworthy looked up from his meditation on Lulu.

  “You know who my father is,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “I spent a lot of time around orphans when I was growing up.” He took a moment, as if he still hadn’t come to a decision about whether the experience had been a good one or a bad one. “A lot of people who live in the Belt blame my father for the orphans. He just tried to help them. That’s what gets me so mad about the whole thing. The original orphans came from Mars. I don’t know whether you knew that or not. My father had nothing to do with them when they were there. People forget that. Leonard Carswell made them in the closing decades of the last century on Mars. Ever heard of Carswell?”

  “Some,” said Cody.
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  “They gloss over Carswell in the textbooks,” said Axworthy. He smiled sadly about this oversight. “And my father’s part was really small. He tried to help the orphans, that’s all. When they came from Mars to Ceres. I grew up around orphans because of my father’s interest in them. I know orphans. That’s why Council picked me for this particular assignment. Lulu here, she might be blue, she might be pretty, she might be smaller, she might call herself one of the Meek, but she’s an orphan just the same.” He looked at Lulu, his eyes narrowing. “I know,” he said. He pressed his hands flat against the table and scrutinized Lulu. “I can see it in her eyes.”

  Cody felt irritated by this. “So what exactly are your orders?” he asked.

  “My orders are currently under review by Vesta City,” said Axworthy. “The situation has changed since our last communication.”

  “What were your original orders?” asked Cody.

  Axworthy walked to the end of the table, double-checked his com-link, then said to Cody, “Our initial orders were to secure and ascertain the nature of the eighteen installations on the surface. Once that was done, we were to secure and determine the nature of the differing nineteenth installation—the disk, the telescope, the gravity well, whatever you call it. We’re also here to guarantee the safety of your work crew. Finally, we have orders to secure and maintain a defendable perimeter around Newton. Those orders still stand.”

  Bruder came back with a container full of lichen.

  “What are you going to do with Lulu?” asked Cody.

  Axworthy glanced at Lulu. “That’s where the first of our supplemental orders comes in,” he said. “I’m glad you kept this woman, Mr. Wisner. You did the right thing.” He turned to Dr. Tom Minks. “Dr. Minks, you can take the detainee to the infirmary and start working on her.”