The Meek Page 15

  Cody contemplated the commander. “For someone who was born on Ceres you sure talk like a Vestan.” He rubbed his split lip, an injury from the violence of Buster’s kiss.

  “My job here is to protect you,” said Axworthy. “How can I do that if you decide to do things like this?”

  “They’re going to depressurize Newton again,” Cody said. “Buster wants us to leave. He expects an answer in ten hours.”

  Axworthy’s face remained motionless. “He feels he’s in a position to make demands?”

  Cody’s eyes narrowed. “You know Buster?” he said.

  Axworthy looked at Cody steadily. “I know a lot more than you think,” he said.

  Cody tried to sense emanations from Axworthy, but he got nothing; Axworthy had never been kissed by Lulu or anyone else, hadn’t had any long-term exposure to the marrow, and under those circumstances Cody simply didn’t have the skill to probe.

  Cody finally nodded. “Buster says the whole asteroid is booby-trapped,” he said. “If any of your men stray to any of their critical sites they’ll end up like Vigo’s men.”

  Axworthy’s face looked as hard as concrete. He picked up a computer disk and tapped it absently against his desk a few times. “And he knows that Ceres rightfully belongs to us?”

  Cody took a deep breath. “It wasn’t that kind of conversation, Commander.”

  “Call me Kevin. Let’s not let formality get in the way of understanding each other.”

  “In fact, it really wasn’t much of a conversation at all. It all happened …” He thought about it, then tapped the side of his head. “It all happened up here. And when it happens up there, it’s multistranded.”

  Axworthy nodded. He put the computer disk down. “How are they going to depressurize Newton?” he asked. “We have all the municipal airlocks wired to our own mainframe, guarded by automated antipersonnel units, and watched day and night by surveillance robots. If you were able to wander freely inside his head—”

  “Sabotage.”

  “I’d like to see him try.” Axworthy looked thoughtfully at the door. “Still, we’d better take some precautions. Can you scale back your crew at all? How many do you realistically need to get the emergency shelter up and running again? That’s a priority now that the Meek have threatened us with this depressurization.”

  “It depends on how fast you want it up and running.”

  “How long do you think I can stall Buster?”

  Cody shook his head. “No,” he said. “It can’t work like that. Not with Buster. He can walk right through your mind. You can’t lie to him. You can’t try to flimflam him. There’s no hiding anything from Buster.”

  Axworthy lifted his hands. “I need a crew of eighteen. We have an oxygen pod in case they get lucky and succeed in depressurizing Newton. It’s old, but it can support twenty-four people for 24 hours if it has to. For emergency use only. We still have lots of tanked oxygen left. We’ll put the pod in the emergency shelter, make it harder for the orphans to attack it that way, and I’ll post automated antipersonnel units everywhere in the vicinity. When the Meek try to force us to leave Newton, we’ll use the emergency shelter as our first fallback. If we have to, we’ll go to the oxygen pod, not only for air but for protection. That pod’s built tough.”

  Cody’s eyes widened. “You mean you’re not going to leave?” he said.

  “My orders are to stay,” he said. “I’m to secure Newton. Or at least hold it until reinforcements arrive.”

  “Yes, but what’s the latest population count?” asked Cody. “Have you been checking the tracking microgens?”

  “Six hundred and twenty thousand,” said Axworthy. “Most of them out in Torque. Some out in the Angles. Some around Equilibrium.”

  “And you think you can defend Newton against that many Meek?”

  “We don’t think the count’s going to go much higher.”

  “But 620,000, Kevin,” said Cody.

  “We have a lot of ammunition. And if they want to play with poison, we have a lot of that too. We don’t want it to get to that, but if it does, we’re ready. Those are my orders.” Axworthy grinned but it was a melancholy grin, and Cody could see that Axworthy regretted the whole situation. “I’m afraid the tracking microgen does more than just track. It targets. Figuratively paints a bull’s-eye on every Meek’s back. That’s why I hope things don’t get much more escalated than they already are. You’re right, we’re only forty recruits, eighteen when I scale it back, but we’re weapons-rated for a full-fledged siege of Newton with all this automatic and remote-controlled equipment we have. We can hold the city against a hundred thousand if we have to, now that we’re all set up.”

  Cody realized the man was serious, that he was talking war. Axworthy saw the look on Cody’s face and shook his head.

  “Cody …” Axworthy took a deep breath and folded his hands on his desk. “Cody, while you were gone, out to talk to Buster, I knew what Buster was going to do. I knew he was going to give you an ultimatum. That’s what I remember about the way the orphans worked. They were always full of ultimatums. So I contacted Vesta City and I told them what was going on, and they quickly cobbled together a counteroffer, something, in fact, that they’ve been looking at for the past several days. They’re mostly hard-liners in Council, you know that, but they’re not unreasonable men and women, and they’re willing to give the orphans a chance. They don’t want to see bloodshed any more than you or I, but if it comes to that … especially with the orphans …”

  “They call themselves the Meek now.”

  “Yes, but they’re essentially still the same. You’re not going to get any of those Council members believing otherwise.”

  “They’re human beings.”

  “I agree with you,” said Axworthy. “And when I lived on Ceres, when I went to college here, nothing infuriated me more than when my friends or fellow students, even my professors, characterized the orphans as … well, as … you know. As thieves. As con artists. As killers.”

  “Isn’t that a bit harsh?” said Cody. “That’s not what I get from Buster at all.”

  “Buster … he’s going to leave certain parts out. In fact, I bet he left out half of it. Maybe I should give you a little background.”

  “What about Vesta City’s counteroffer?” asked Cody, anxious to know about it.

  “In a minute,” said Axworthy. “I think this is important. I think you should know about this.” It sounded more like an order than a suggestion. “I believe in persuasion, and I think you need some persuading.” He sat back, got his thoughts in order. “You see, my dad tried to help the orphans, like I was telling you before, and I was always around them, and I liked them, at least at the beginning.” He nodded at the recollection. “I knew Buster and a few of the others personally. My father was a compassionate man. He wanted to help them.” Axworthy peered at Cody as if he somehow had to decipher him. “Whatever Buster told you … about how it all began … but Buster … I don’t trust him to give you an unbiased picture. Do you know much about how it all got started?”

  “I know a bit about Carswell.”

  Axworthy nodded. “In the early days, when I was a child, my father was in constant contact with Leonard Carswell, was a good friend of Lenny’s. My dad was a pioneering geneticist in his own right. Before he was killed, he was a leading agrigeneticist in the Belt. Everything we eat out here, he had a hand in. So naturally he was interested in the orphans. He thought he might be able to help. You could do a lot with genetics on Mars back in those days. You didn’t have the same kind of strict legislation there that you had on Earth. You got to try new things on Mars. Murray City became known for technological and biological innovation. They had no laws against making humans in test tubes as long as it could be shown that such practices might benefit the Martian community as a whole. Lenny went ahead and made all these orphans, tampering with chromosome 3, the chromosome that controls pigment, respiration, skin growth, intuition, and survival instinct
s. He wrote suspicion right into it. Suspicion goes with survival. So do fighting skills. So does bald-faced lying. In other words, he made them tough.” Axworthy shook his head. “But he went too far, Cody, and he made them criminally tough. He made 423 of them, raised them in the crèche till they were in their late teens, then sent them out onto the surface. They bred. In ten years there were 3,000 of them. They’re designed to hit puberty around the age of nine. Three thousand quickly became 15,000. Except for the original 423, what you had out on the surface was a society of kids having babies. And they didn’t like living out in the cold.”

  “I wouldn’t think they would,” said Cody. “I’m surprised they could even survive.”

  Axworthy leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling, thinking about the whole thing. “They could survive, oh, sure, they could survive,” he said, “but there’s a big difference between surviving and living. That was the basic flaw in the whole scheme. Lenny was a brilliant scientist but he was really simplistic in a lot of ways. He forgot one important thing. People demand the right to live wherever they choose, even ones specifically engineered to populate a certain ecological niche. The orphans didn’t want to live out in the cold. They wanted to come inside where it was warm. Buster negotiated for fifteen years. You don’t know how surprised I am to find him still alive on Ceres. He must be well into his eighties, my father’s age if my father were still alive.”

  Cody’s eyes widened. “He’s that old? He doesn’t look much past my age.”

  “Carswell’s design,” said Axworthy. “The orphans are long-lived. A survival strategy. I bet Lulu is a lot older than she actually looks too.”

  Cody took a few moments to digest all this. Then he said, “So they finally gained the right to live inside?”

  Axworthy nodded. “Buster knew how to agitate. Or, if you want to take a cynical view, he knew how to con a lot of left-leaning Martians into sympathizing with his cause. But it didn’t happen overnight. Like I said, it took him fifteen years of negotiating before the Martians finally let them come inside. Most of them were between fifteen and 25 years old by that time. Except, of course, the original group, who were a lot older. They struggled to assimilate. And for a while it worked.” Axworthy laid his hands flat on the desk. “Lenny was against the assimilation right from the start. The whole point of the orphans, he said, was to begin the adaptation of humans to life on the Martian surface, a way to spare Mars all the ecologically destructive terraforming they were going to do. If you read the transcripts of the communications he had with my father you see that he’s bitter about the whole thing. He thinks Buster betrayed him. He expected Buster to help him form a kind of Martian utopia on the surface. He really believed in that. It was quite an issue at the time. You’re too young but I remember endless coffeehouse discussions about the orphans, how they were called the New Solution, the Genetic Answer, the only alternative to the ecological wrecking ball of terraforming. God, I’ve never heard so much hot air in my life. Carswell and my father were at the center of it all. They believed it was wrong to destroy the Martian ecosystem for the purpose of turning it into an Earth-like habitat for humans. Why change the planet when it made better sense to change humans, adapt them genetically to the new environment? Expand the habitable zone not through expensive and grandiose terraforming projects but by the relatively inexpensive route of rewriting some of the code in the human genome.”

  Cody shook his head. “This was all before my time.”

  Axworthy shrugged. “I remember Carswell came to Newton once to give a lecture. My father took me. As I listened to the lecture I could sense that Lenny was a true visionary. As a genetic engineer he was unsurpassed. The eco-freaks loved him. They mobilized for him. He had money pouring in hand over fist. You might know his famous Kansas speech: ‘The only way we can truly inhabit the galaxy is not to change every place into Kansas, but to change ourselves into Munchkins.’ ”

  Cody nodded. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Lenny said that.” Axworthy drummed his fingers on the desk. “At the time, he was developing a technique that would allow genetic metamorphosis, a genetic overwrite program. He no longer had to engineer orphans from scratch in a test tube. That was a real breakthrough. The genetic overwrite program could bypass all that expensive infant and child care and churn out full-blown orphan adults ready for the surface.” Axworthy raised his finger in the air, stipulating. “As long as he had volunteers who were willing to pioneer out on the surface as orphans, all Lenny needed was his genetic overwrite program to change them.”

  “And did he have many takers?” asked Cody.

  “Like I say, he was a little simplistic. He thought people would jump at the chance. He really believed that almost everybody would want to go out to the surface and join the orphans in their Martian utopia. But not even the orphans wanted to live there. They were forced to live there. The legislation that allowed Lenny to make his original 423 orphans mandated that they be placed in the Marineris Commune, as it was called, by the age of eighteen. What Murray City legislators should have done was forbid Lenny’s work in the first place. All he did was create a genetically altered underclass who had no place in Martian society.”

  “So Carswell had no volunteers?” asked Cody, now curious about the whole thing.

  “He had a few. Somehow a rumor got started that the genetic transformation was painful. That scared a lot of people off. But it wasn’t painful at all. All you had to do was eat the windbloom.”

  “So the volunteers ate the windbloom and they became orphans?” asked Cody.

  “Essentially, yes,” said Axworthy.

  “Because me and my crew, when we ate the marrow, we developed certain Meek characteristics.”

  Axworthy nodded. “The marrow that grows here, Czaplinski’s had a look at it and he says it contains many of the components of Lenny’s original windbloom, his original rewrite program, plus a lot of other stuff Czaplinski’s never seen before. But there’s one big difference, and he’s proven this by taking blood samples from your crew. The transformation wrought by the marrow reverses itself by up to 95 percent if you stop eating it. You revert to your original genetic profile. So you have nothing to worry about, Cody, you’re going to turn back into a human being. The original rewrite program, the stuff in the windbloom, once you turned into an orphan, you could only revert by 50 percent. There was no going back.”

  Cody shook his head. “What kind of person would do that?” he wondered. “Eat the windbloom, become an orphan.”

  Axworthy scratched his head and glanced out the window, watching two of his recruits install an antipersonnel unit at the foot of Isosceles Boulevard.

  “Mostly people who had a reason to get away from Murray City any way they could,” said Axworthy. “Usually criminals. And that didn’t help matters at all. You have a population with a genetic predisposition to felony and violence, and then you get society’s outcasts swelling their ranks. And get this. For two years the penal authorities from the Tharsis Bulge got permission to take their most troublesome inmates, change them into orphans, and send them out to the Marineris Commune. A lot of them, even the worst, were turned into slaves by the orphans the minute they reached the settlements. Some of them formed their own clans. A recipe for disaster if there ever was one.”

  CHAPTER 14

  At this point Axworthy got up from his desk, went to the coffeemaker, and poured two cups of coffee. Cody now saw even more reasons why Council had chosen Axworthy to head this particular security effort; the man knew the historical and political situation intimately. Axworthy put the coffee cups on the desk and sat down.

  “When the government in Murray City found out what was happening, how the orphans out in the Valley were turning the new volunteers and the exiled convicts into slaves, it quickly legislated an end to Lenny’s genetic overwrite efforts. In fact, it closed the whole program down and, at Buster’s instigation, outlined measures for a slow assimilation of the existing o
rphans into Martian society. That’s when the basic faults in orphan genetic code became obvious. Some of the orphans, once they moved inside, tried to get legitimate jobs, but the few who did never lasted. They just weren’t built for the nine-to-five mainstream.”

  “Why not?”

  “They would work their way in good with some company or corporation, gain its trust, and then bilk it. It was just another con for them. They had absolutely no respect for authority. To make matters worse they pirated Lenny’s genetic overwrite program. Children began to disappear. Hundreds of them. Investigation proved that the orphans were kidnapping regular Martian children, turning them into orphans with the genetic overwrite program, then forcing them to be slaves. This was too much. There was a general roundup, and the orphans were put into camps. A lot of liberals were voted out of office, and a lot of hard-liners replaced them. These hard-liners wanted to get rid of the orphans once and for all, and they had a great deal of public support. Banish them from Mars completely. It wasn’t good enough to send them all back out to the Valles Marineris again. The hard-liners wanted them right off the planet.”

  “So that’s how they wound up on Ceres?” asked Cody.

  Axworthy nodded. “Ceres … well, you know Ceres … always so liberal, a bastion of humanist causes and beliefs. My father explained to the municipal authorities in Newton that he was developing his own genetic rewrite program. He convinced Isosceles Boulevard that he could rehabilitate the orphans. He told them he was in contact with several of the clan leaders, and that the clan leaders had agreed to give it a try. What other choice did they have? Of course there were detractors—there have always been those who oppose immigration, even in the name of political asylum—and there was a lot of clamor about the kids in Newton, how if the kids in Murray City had begun to disappear, what was to stop that from happening in Newton? But Ceres was built on democratic and liberal beliefs, and those beliefs outweighed what public opinion and legislators concluded, rightly or wrongly, was a relatively small risk. I remember Buster coming to our house once—by then they’d all adopted the standard costume of pants only. In walks this man with skin as brown as coffee, long black hair, fiery brown eyes, and a large knife sheathed to his belt. I remember his arms because his arms practically hung down to his knees. I remember how candid he was with my father.”