The Meek Read online

  Dr. Tom Minks, looking as if he were suffering terribly from the .5 gees, sagging under the weight of it, nodded to one of the guards.

  “Working on her?” said Cody. The guard unfastened Lulu’s handcuffs and led her away, Dr. Minks following heavily behind. Lulu was too weak to give Cody even a backward glance. “What do you mean, working on her?”

  Axworthy raised his hands. For a man his age he had an exceptionally erect figure. “No need for alarm, Mr. Wisner,” he said. “We’ve been ordered to do some tests. Simple, routine, baseline tests to see where we stand with her. I have nothing against Lulu. I don’t want to treat her like a prisoner, I don’t even want to think of her that way, but she’s … she’s here, we’ve got her, and we’ve got to go ahead with these tests. I have no choice. We’re not going to hurt her. It will be for her safety as much as ours.”

  Cody spent the following two days assessing the damage to the emergency shelter in Laws of Motion Square. Nano-putty holes riddled the structure in 33 different places. He walked around to the south side of the structure and gazed at one of the holes. Deirdre Malvern, in her capacity as structural engineer, was with him.

  “And he wants us to repair the shelter?” she asked.

  “He wants it as backup.”

  “Can he do that?” she asked. “We’re not under his command, are we?”

  “Technically, no. But I think it makes good sense to have the emergency shelter as backup. And besides, Anne-Marie’s received word from Vesta City.” Cody tried to hide his disappointment as much as he could. “Our mission has been temporarily suspended.”

  “It has?”

  He attempted to give the news an uplifting spin. “They’re happy with our preliminary work, the costing and so forth, but … but all these developments have really taken them by surprise, heads are rolling, and certain segments in Council now think the whole thing has been mismanaged from the start.”

  “Really?” she said. “What are they saying?”

  “That they should have sent a security team in first, not us, and that they were too quick to trust their robot and satellite surveillance. That equipment’s sophisticated. There’s no reason not to trust it. The Ceresian Defense Force fried Ceres from the inside out with neutron bombs thirty years ago, then opened all the airlocks. They made the reasonable assumption that everybody left inside was dead. They watched Ceres for thirty years and saw nothing. Why send in a security team first, especially under such tight budget restrictions, if there’s no one here? But the hard-liners are having a field day. In the meantime, we stop. We’ve been asked to cooperate with Axworthy. And that means the emergency shelter.”

  She nodded. She seemed much more comfortable around him. She pointed at the hole in the side of the shelter. “So what about this?” she asked. “The metal’s slowly melting away.”

  “They’ve brought a chemist. Dr. Alex Czaplinski. He’s working on the nano-putty, says it definitely has a biological base and it’ll just be a question of developing the proper cytocide to kill it.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” she asked.

  They were out of their suits again. Axworthy had popped some of his own oxygen and wired fail-safe overrides to all the municipal airlocks. It felt good, to be working with Deirdre. To be concerned about materials and repairs and engineering strategies again.

  “You’re the structural engineer,” he said. “I thought you’d have some suggestions.”

  She took a few steps toward the wall, her breath frosting over. She rubbed her chin with her hand, thinking.

  “We cut around it,” she said. “Take it out the way a surgeon takes out a tumor. We replace it with uninfected plasti-bond, go to a depth of five centimeters. That should hold.”

  “What about the airlocks?” he asked, not because he didn’t have his own ideas about the airlocks—he had a specialty in airlocks—he just wanted to see what she might know, see if they had airlocks in common.

  “The airlocks are going to be harder,” she said. “Pressurized door systems are always complicated, you know that better than anybody. A lot of gears and levers, and as for the airlocks in this building, nothing’s sized to the current standard. None of our replacement parts will fit unless we tool them all in the machine shop.” She shook her head and put her hands on her hips, contemplating the magnitude of the job. “At least it’ll keep us busy until Council decides what it wants to do.”

  It was good to be up on the scaffolding doing construction and repair work again. Cody sprayed plasti-bond around the edges of his precut hole. Working with his hands was a good way to stop thinking. To stop brooding. He slung the applicator over his shoulder, lifted his lock-sheet, placed it against the plasti-bond, and watched the chemical reaction suck the sheet into place. He gazed down Calculus to Subtraction Street. The street here was cobblestoned with a likeness of Albert Einstein playing the violin. He liked working with his hands to stop brooding, only he couldn’t stop thinking of Lulu, how they were recording her brain-wave patterns, how they were testing her for various allergies, taking blood and bone marrow samples.

  He looked at his lock-sheet, saw that the seal was now complete, took out his caulking gun, and beaded a line of plasti-bond around the edges. The air smelled like burning leaves. Axworthy was destroying all the marrow with a special defoliant within the city limits—in the interest of establishing a defendable perimeter.

  Bruder came up to him.

  “We’re locking down now,” said the security officer. “We’re going to release the tracking microgens.”

  Cody descended the scaffolding carefully. Even after nearly a month on Ceres he still felt the extra weight and wasn’t about to risk a broken ankle by a careless climb down.

  He followed Bruder into the bunker. Everyone else was there. At least everyone in his own crew. Platoons 1 and 3 of the security team were deployed on the surface investigating the various structures. Second platoon was out in the eastern suburbs ready to deploy the tracking microgens. Outside, two security officers sprayed the bunker with a special chemical that would repel the microgens. Cody had been swallowing tablets of the exact same substance for the last two days, to repel and destroy any microgens that got anywhere near him. The tracking technician didn’t want to get any false readings.

  Axworthy spoke into the radio. “Santiago, this is Axworthy. Everyone’s inside. You can go ahead any time you’re ready.”

  Everyone waited.

  By and by, a red fog enveloped Laws of Motion Square. The color was gruesome, reminded Cody of blood.

  Axworthy looked at Cody. “Why so quiet, Mr. Wisner?”

  Cody didn’t answer, just continued to stare at the red fog.

  “You know, I wish you’d take a more sensible view toward this,” said Axworthy. “I’m sorry about Lulu, but what do you want me to do? They’ve murdered two of your people and destroyed a two-billion-dollar municipal spacecraft. I have to take action. I have no choice. Those are my orders.”

  Cody motioned at the red fog. “Will this stuff hurt them?”

  “Not at all. This stuff gets into their system, they spread it to others like a common cold, but they don’t have any symptoms, and there are no long-term side effects. It just helps us know where they are, and that’s important, especially since they hide so well.”

  “So you track them?”

  Axworthy nodded. “For their own protection,” he said. “And for ours. Everybody will be a lot safer if we know where they are all the time.” He turned and looked at a special screen. Small green dots appeared on a superimposed street map of Newton. “What have we got, Azim?” he asked the tracking specialist.

  “Several encampments in the Edison Foothills Habitat, Commander,” said Azim, “with 623 individuals infected so far in seven different areas.”

  “How are they reacting to the deployment?” asked Axworthy.

  “They’re moving. Heading east away from Santiago and his men.”

  Axworthy turned to Cody. “
They see the red fog and they’re running,” he explained. “We make it red because we want them to run from it. It quickens the vectors of contagion.”

  “Sir?” said Azim.

  Axworthy turned back to Azim. “What is it, Azim?”

  “Look at this.”

  Azim gazed at the tracking screen in mystification. Axworthy got up and went over. Cody craned.

  Axworthy’s impressive brow furrowed as he inspected the movement of all the little green dots on the screen.

  “That’s impossible,” he said.

  “What is?” asked Cody.

  Axworthy pointed to a jagged green line at the eastern edge of the city. “This is solid rock,” he said. “We’ve checked the eastern bulkhead thoroughly. There’s no way to get through. We checked every square inch. But they’re going right through it like a knife through butter.”

  Danny Vigo reported back from first platoon. He and his men had managed to penetrate one of the eighteen gigantic finlike structures on the surface. After excavating with heavy equipment they blasted their way in with a particle beam cannon, shaking the alloy apart molecule by molecule. What they found inside surprised even Cody. A holo-image of Danny Vigo appeared above the communications panel in the control room of the pressurized bunker.

  “Our final count is 24,” said Vigo. “Twelve six-megaton and twelve one-megaton. The structure seems to be a silo, Commander. At least that’s what it looks like to me.”

  Axworthy reached up, pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger, and closed his eyes. His shoulders sank, he took his hand away, and he looked at Cody with weary resignation.

  “Why do you suppose they’re stockpiling nuclear weapons, Cody?” he asked, using Cody’s first name for the first time.

  It was a question he knew the man wasn’t expecting him to answer.

  Cody sat in the infirmary with Jerry and Dr. Tom Minks. Lulu lay semisedated on an examining table, held down by restraints.

  “I guarantee,” said Minks, “this is harmless. If there were any other way … but now that the situation’s changed, now that they have all those silos out there, we have to go ahead with this.”

  Cody glanced at Jerry. He knew what Jerry was thinking, could sense wisps of it emanating from Jerry’s mind, realized that the recoding was still with him, at least to some degree. Jerry thought Cody had been co-opted by Lulu through prolonged exposure to marrow. But Cody knew his opinions about the whole situation hadn’t been co-opted in the least.

  “Cody,” said Jerry, “you have to do this. I don’t like it any more than you do. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  Cody focused on Jerry, tried to smile, knew that Jerry wanted to trust him, and that he was trying to deal with his mixed feelings as well as he could. Cody turned his attention to Minks.

  “What I object to is that we have to do this to Lulu,” he said. “Why should we penalize her when all she’s ever done is help us?”

  Minks looked at Jerry. Jerry leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and nodded with an effort at understanding.

  “Cody,” he said, “I wouldn’t characterize this as penalizing Lulu. We’re not penalizing anybody. We just have to find out about this. No one in the whole solar system stockpiles weapons this large anymore. These people do. These people were once orphans. When the Ceresians threatened them with bioextermination way back when, they didn’t negotiate. What kind of people don’t negotiate when they have a loaded gun pointed at their heads? That’s not to say we can’t trust Lulu. I have no problem trusting Lulu. But at this point we need information, and she’s the only one we can get it from. You seem to have the best link to her. All we want you to do is find out why they’re stockpiling these weapons.”

  “I realize that,” said Cody. “And I know we have to go ahead with this. I recognize the threat. I know we have to find out what we can about it.” He turned to Dr. Minks. “But are you sure she’ll be okay?”

  “These drugs I’m giving her are perfectly safe,” said Minks. “Just extract whatever you can. She won’t be hurt, there’s no pain involved, there’s no fear or anxiety or nausea. The drugs will sedate her and prompt a free association of ideas. That’s all. I imagine you’ll be collecting a lot of raw data. You can steer her toward the question of the weapons with your own input, and we’ll hope she’ll freely associate about them from there, but there’s no guarantee. Just go in there. Be as kind as you can. Everyone likes Lulu. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  Cody turned to Jerry, again sensed the doctor’s concern about whether he had been co-opted or not. He decided he had to set Jerry straight. “You can trust me, Jerry,” he said.

  Jerry’s eyes narrowed. Cody could feel the old trust coming back. “I know I can,” he said.

  Cody nodded. “Then let’s get it over with.”

  Cody leaned over and pressed his lips to Lulu’s. He kissed her, and he had to wonder if she had indeed co-opted him in some way, made him oversympathetic to her cause and the cause of her people. Her mouth tasted faintly of marrow. He tried to sense what was going on in her mind but the cool menthol wind of her thoughts blew faintly, brought only that customary and welcome feeling of peace.

  He lifted his lips away.

  “I’m not getting anything,” he said.

  Minks squeezed a few drops of marrow solution from an eyedropper into her mouth. Then Cody kissed her once again, tenderly, forgetting that this was, for all intents and purposes, an interrogation. With the marrow solution in her mouth her menthol mind-wind blew stronger. The room dimmed and he felt as if he were surrendering. His whole body felt cool, rubbing-alcohol cool. He felt as if he were sitting in a great forest at night. He lifted his lips, looked around …

  He sat in a tree. In a nest of moss. And the moss glowed blue. Where was he? Somewhere inside Lulu’s mind? Beyond all the barriers she had erected? Deep inside her subconscious? He wondered if back at the bunker in Newton he was still kissing her.

  He stood up. Trees stretched as far as his eyes could see, reminded him of the rain forest trees of the Pedro Cabral Amazon Habitat back on Vesta. Every tree was hung with the blue glow-moss. Was this where Lulu lived? The air was warm here. He felt wind on his face. He smelled flowers—juniper, hyacinth, rose, and azalea. Heard music, ringing and clear, a haunting melody that sounded as if it were played on crystal chimes. Five moons hung in the sky, each one patterned with its own distinct tattoo of craters, each a different color, ranging from green to pink. Artificial moons, he realized, maybe even holo-images, but so lifelike, so palpable and substantive, that they looked as real as the moons of Jupiter.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw hundreds of Meek in the trees nesting in piles of moss, eating marrow, children playing with children, adults sitting around in groups, communicating in their silent Meek way, at peace with this place, a part of this place. He couldn’t sense one cruel thought in any of them.

  He nudged Lulu. Why stockpile nuclear weapons?

  Her answer came in disturbing fragments. Because we can’t live here anymore. Fragments that did nothing to reassure Cody. Because after we leave, we’ll need a new home. And then some dream images floated through his mind. Of this new home. A world with an open sky, a cloudy sky. The image shifted, blurred, solidified, and he saw a group of Meek walking single file, some of them brachiating like apes along the rim of a lava-filled caldera. He felt heat. Smelled sulfur. He felt the dampness of a tropical atmosphere. Was this Earth? He’d never been to Earth. Got nervous whenever he thought of such a large, open, and unpredictable matrix of ecosystems, one competing against the other, a place with so many billions of people and with a gravity he would find crushing. Earth had volcanoes. Did the Meek have designs on Earth? Was Earth this new home Lulu was speaking of?

  He felt light, untethered, as if he were floating. The image of the Meek walking along the rim of the volcano disappeared. He now saw Buster. Standing in front of a large sheet of cellophane. In an amphi
theater. With stone bleachers rising all around him. Hundreds of Meek filled the bleachers. Buster sang at the large sheet of cellophane as if to serenade it, sang in a way Cody had never heard anybody sing, not in the tones and halftones of the well-tempered diatonic scale such as was so commonly heard in the popular music of Vesta, but in quarter-tones and microtones, a melody full of glissandi and implied dissonance, a song that at first sounded out of tune but that, like an unfamiliar spice, soon became palatable. Lines started to appear in the cellophane. And he realized that this wasn’t a sheet of cellophane at all but a living organism of some kind, one that could translate and interpret Buster’s melody into representative symbols and language.

  In the dusky purple ambience of the amphitheater Buster etched bright blue lines depicting what at first looked like several concentric circles but soon broadened and flattened to show the elliptical paths of the solar system’s planets around the sun. Parts were magnified. Ceres jumped out in luminous pink, Earth in turquoise. Buster sketched their orbital paths in yellow. As Earth and Ceres approached closest opposition, Buster evoked a complicated mathematical equation that described a decrease in Ceres’s speed: Ceres slowing down, figures representing a flagging momentum, a growing inertia, a braking force, all the variables of orbital mechanics showing up on the cellophane. A new trajectory was drawn, representing the orbital decay of Ceres, showing how the new trajectory would eventually intersect with Earth’s orbit.

  Ominous. As if Earth were indeed the new home Lulu had spoken of.

  Lulu objected.

  She said: We are not orphans anymore. We are the Meek. We keep our ghost code under control. The Father taught us the ways of peace. He taught us the meaning of the words, Our Home. He taught us that even though we are a people of many clans we are also a people united. He taught coexistence and cooperation as a means of survival. He taught us the philosophy of eternal peace.

  But she said nothing of Earth.

  The liturgical resonance of her thoughts puzzled Cody. She spoke of the Father as if he were a deity, not a mortal man.