The Meek Read online

  “In what way?”

  “Candid about the way he was. About the way he wanted to change, and about the way his people wanted to change. He said he didn’t want to fight anymore, that he was tired of fighting, and tired of not being able to stop himself from fighting. He said he had long believed that it was just a matter of his own willpower, that he could acquire a peaceful nature if he only tried hard enough. But now he knew that wasn’t true. There was nothing he could do to change, he said, not unless he got outside help. My father believed in them. He trusted Buster. He helped Buster.”

  Axworthy stopped. Some color came to his face. Cody saw that this was no longer a dispassionate account of orphan history. Axworthy’s feelings about his father had now penetrated the matter.

  “Buster really wanted to change,” said Axworthy. “He hated the way he was. He hated living every single day of his life feeling angry. My father really tried. Everyone on his staff tried. Schrödinger U was able to get some money from the government, and my father was actually making headway, identifying those letters in chromosome 3 that, while allowing the orphans to live in the harsh conditions of Valles Marineris, also made them fight.

  “He started with a test group. The test group showed definite signs of improvement. The orphans you ran into on campus you knew you didn’t have to worry about. Buster mobilized support among the orphans, and the government supplied transportation to and from campus clinics, offered a small honorarium as incentive. At first the numbers were small, 10 or 12 a day, but those soon swelled to 20 or 30. You can see the improvement in the crime statistics. Many orphans started finding legitimate employment and didn’t try to scam their employers. My father won the Dr. Francis Collins Award for Excellence in Genetic Research. Everything was going great. He was really helping them a lot. What pleased him most was that they were just generally a happier people once they’d undergone his genetic rewrite.”

  “So how did everything turn bad?” asked Cody.

  Axworthy took a deep breath, slouched a bit in his chair, and lowered his chin toward his massive chest. He seemed to shrink, as if the emotion of a moment ago over his father, that flicker of grief, had collapsed like a star into a hot and smoldering kernel of anger.

  “Someone in the Ministry of Health thought it might be a good idea to add an extra digit to the health code numbers of those orphans who had refused to submit to my father’s procedure. The orphans didn’t like that. They reacted strongly against it. You’d have thought we’d asked them to wear yellow stars or the scarlet letter A. That’s how crazy they got about it. All it was ever intended to do was alert the physician. Lenny’s orphans, the ones who didn’t have my father’s rewrite, showed an allergic predisposition to certain prescriptions. The extra digit was meant to tell the physician, in a simple and easy way, that he had an orphan who hadn’t undergone the rewrite, and that therefore he should be careful about what he prescribed to that orphan. The extra digit was never meant to brand unrehabilitated orphans. But the police and the Ceresian Defense Force latched on to it as the perfect tool. That’s what triggered the initial protests. Then … you get thousands of unrehabilitated orphans in Laws of Motion Square all at the same time, and you’re bound to get violence sooner or later. The thing that makes me maddest of all is that Buster joined the protests. You can’t imagine how hurt my father was. He felt as if he’d been betrayed.”

  Axworthy looked away, too angry for the time being to say anything more. Finally he got control of himself.

  “That’s when I quit college,” he said. “That’s when I joined the CDF.” He shook his head. “The violence escalated. The recoded orphans didn’t come for their treatments anymore. They reverted. You don’t know how happy I was when the Vestan Defense Force got involved. There’s something to be said for right-wingers and hard-liners in time of war. Didn’t do much good in the end, but we were still glad to have them.”

  “Why did the recoded orphans stop coming for their treatments?” asked Cody. “I thought you said they were a happier people when they had your father’s rewrite.”

  Axworthy nodded. “Certain of the uncoded orphans believed my father was the biggest enemy of all. They said his procedure was nothing but a snow job to drug the orphans into submission. They threatened the recoded orphans.”

  Axworthy stopped, looked away, and lifted his hand to his mouth as his eyes grew glassy. For several moments he just sat there, his hand clenched in a fist, his knuckles pressed to his lips, but finally he eased his hand away, slowly, as if it took great effort, and looked at Cody with eyes that were at once stalwart and shaky.

  In a much quieter voice he said, “A gang of them came for him one night.” His face hardened. “They killed him.” He sat up straighter, and his eyes regained their hawklike intensity. “How’s that for gratitude?” He flipped his palms over, trying to explain it to Cody. “He spends six years trying to help them, believing in them, having faith in them, and then they come in the night for him, and they take their knives to him … and … it’s always overkill with the orphans. Mutilation comes naturally to them. I don’t mean stabbed fifty or sixty times. I mean stabbed literally hundreds of times. They cut off his face. They cut off his testicles. They severed his hands and feet. They cut out his liver. How’s that for gratitude?”

  Axworthy opened his drawer and took out a bottle of pills. He swallowed a few with his coffee, then seemed to realize he had spittle on his chin. He took a silk handkerchief out of his uniform pocket and dabbed it away. He glanced at Cody, regained some of his composure.

  “You know,” said Axworthy, “joining the Defense Force was the best thing I ever did. I really wasn’t cut out for a college career. I guess you and I have that in common.”

  Cody asked, “What about this counterproposal? The one I’m to take to Buster.”

  Axworthy nodded. “Council says they’re willing to help the Meek leave Ceres,” he said. “We’ll need a workforce, though, and we’ll expect thousands of orphans to volunteer, maybe even tens of thousands.”

  “Why will you need a workforce?”

  “To refit some of Vesta’s larger machine and ice transports into passenger vessels. We’ve got seven decommissioned ones orbiting in their own Kirkwood Gap not far from Pallas. That’s upstream about eighteen million klicks. It wouldn’t take much to rendezvous. These old ships are huge. If we bunk the Meek seven high, on sixty levels, we should be able to ship them all.”

  “Ship them where?”

  “To Charon.”

  “Charon?”

  “Pluto’s moon,” said Axworthy.

  “I know what it is. You can’t send them there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because not even the Meek could survive there.”

  “We don’t mean them to survive on the surface. We’ll give them the means to burrow. We’ll support them for a year. They can build their own damn society, like we’ve built ours here in the Belt.”

  “But Charon is too remote. How do you expect them to conduct any commerce with us?”

  “We don’t. They’ll have a year and that’s it. They’ll be on their own then. We’ll give them fusion, we’ll allow them to go comet-fishing, but otherwise Charon will be guarded round the clock by hunter-killer satellites. The way Vesta City phrased it, the orphans will be in quarantine.”

  “So you’re going to force them to live out in the cold again,” said Cody.

  “They’ve done it before; they can do it again.”

  “But like you say, there’s a difference between living and surviving.”

  After his talk with Axworthy, Cody spent some time at the GK—the unit had been moved into the VDF bunker. He found an image file of the Ceresian Civil Action, thousands of stills, plus a subsidiary file of ten- and twenty-second clips. He concentrated on the stills, feeling a profound disquiet about the whole thing now. Axworthy was at the weapons console with Azim checking the readiness and interface coordination of all the automated weaponry his recruits
had set up around the city. Cody went through the images one by one. Thirty years ago. It seemed like a long time ago now. One image showed three Ceresian Defense Force soldiers squatting next to an overturned and gutted maglev car, rifles held loosely at their sides, eyes wide, the whites clearly visible, accentuated by their grimy faces, as if the whites of their eyes were the whole point of the photograph, all three looking in the same direction, waiting for something to happen.

  He looked up, saw Axworthy staring at him. Axworthy turned back to his screen, his prominent features sharpened into relief by the screen’s glow.

  Cody went to the next image. An orphan girl, no more than three, standing all by herself in a rubble-strewn street, her big brown eyes streaming with tears as she stared up at a burning building, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a rictus of terror, her tiny body odd-looking to Cody, her short legs protruding from the bottom of her tom pink dress, her long brown arms held out at her sides, fingers splayed, looking as if she were about to push something away. Cody shook his head. It had been war. And now it looked as if it weren’t over. Now it looked as if a new chapter was about to begin.

  Axworthy left the weapons console and stood behind Cody. As Axworthy gazed at the little girl his face settled into an expression of pity and regret.

  “Giving yourself a history lesson?” he said.

  “I thought I might,” said Cody. “I never really looked into this.”

  He accessed the next image. A picture taken from the ninth or tenth floor of a skyscraper. It showed a hundred orphans swarming Ptolemy Square in the uptown suburb of Kepler, maiming and killing Ceresian civilians.

  “This is what they did,” said Axworthy. “They’d come out of nowhere. Out of the sewers. Jump from the ledges of tall buildings. Somehow infiltrate our defensive perimeters, God knows how. They constantly surprised me with their guerrilla tactics. They’d strike right at civilians, murder them in broad daylight. As a terror tactic, it achieved its aim. It forced the evacuation. But it also resulted in their own bioextermination.”

  Cody focused on one particular woman caught in the mayhem, running toward a shrubbery garden carrying a baby, one shoe off, one shoe on. He wondered if she ever made it. He began to understand some of the bitterness certain Council members must have felt about the whole thing. How could the orphans be so cruel? He remembered Axworthy’s words. It’s always overkill with them. He glanced up, saw Bruder come into the control center and talk to Azim in low urgent tones. What now? he wondered. He looked at the still again. I don’t mean stabbed fifty or sixty times. I mean stabbed literally hundreds of times. Several civilians lay on the ground. The square’s paving stones were smeared with pools of blood. In the middle of it all a bronze statue of Ptolemy stood in a flower bed holding up a crystal sun.

  Bruder came over. He gave Cody a stony glance, as if because of Cody’s connection to Lulu he now somehow blamed Cody as a coconspirator in the death of his brother; then saluted Axworthy.

  “Sir,” he said. “Dr. Minks’s pressure suit has malfunctioned, sir.”

  Axworthy looked at the recruit, as if at first he didn’t understand. “Malfunctioned how?” he said.

  “Sir, his chloropathoxin unit accidentally triggered itself, sir. I don’t know how. The unit has three fail-safes, sir.”

  Axworthy’s bushy eyebrows rose a notch. “You mean he’s dead?”

  “Sir, I’m afraid so, sir.”

  For a moment, Axworthy seemed lost, didn’t know what do. “And was he still out at the site of the massacre?”

  Bruder gave Cody another cold glance. “Sir, yes, sir. I’ve got the tape, if you want to see it, sir.”

  Axworthy looked bewildered. “I guess I better.”

  Axworthy and Cody followed Bruder to the medical monitoring section of the bunker. Cody looked at Bruder’s broad muscular back, trying to sense his thoughts. Bruder had only one thought: to somehow convince Axworthy that this new fatality, though ostensibly an equipment failure, was unequivocally the work of the Meek.

  They gathered round the screen and watched the footage from Dr. Minks’s visor-cam. Bruder rolled it forward to the pertinent segment.

  The visor-cam footage showed one of the dead security officers. Minks was leaning over the man. The name patch on the man’s Vestan Defense Force pressure suit read

  EVENSEN.

  “Sir, that’s Jorg, sir,” said Bruder. “He was a fine officer. Sir.”

  Cody sensed a sudden sentimentality from Bruder, registered half a dozen clichéd aphorisms about a soldier’s duty, and recognized that Bruder wasn’t a particularly original or bright man; he simply took orders and rarely thought for himself.

  Cody turned his attention to the footage.

  Minks looked at Evensen. Then, through the speaker, Cody heard a soft ping-ping-ping sound, an alarm going off in Minks’s pressure suit. Cody had to interpret Minks’s actions through the viewpoint of his visor-cam, like a quick sketch in hand-held cinematography, the camera swinging up as Minks got to his feet quickly, a jerky and constantly shifting view of the rocky gray terrain as he stumbled forward, a shot of the small unit patched to his belt, a red light flashing on the unit, Minks’s hands coming into view as he fumbled wildly with the gadget, two red lights now flashing, a desperate clawing at the gadget, then three red lights flashing. The visor-cam lifted, did a quick sweep of the surrounding terrain, as if Minks were looking for someone to help him, and another recruit came into view; they always traveled in pairs when they went out onto the surface.

  “That’s Cormier, sir,” said Bruder. “He’s not back yet.”

  The visor-cam swung away from Cormier. Far in the distance, Cody saw the poisoned silo. Then the visor-cam swung back down. Minks’s hand banged frantically at the unit. Cormier’s hands came into the picture. The red lights stopped flashing. The screen filled with a fine blue mist and two seconds later Minks toppled into the dirt. Faceup, according to the visor-cam viewpoint. Cody saw a few stars through the blue mist. An overlay of Minks’s dead biofeedback lines appeared on the screen.

  “What’s chloropathoxin?” asked Cody.

  Bruder turned to him, and Cody felt a sophomoric sense of superiority emanating from the man. “Every soldier needs a suicide option, Mr. Wisner,” he told Cody. “Especially out on the surface. Better chloropathoxin than the vacuum.”

  Cody went to the solar-power generating station on the surface by himself. Axworthy wanted to send two security officers with him, but he refused. Why risk three lives instead of one? Alone on the surface, he was again reminded of the walks he and Christine had taken on Vesta. He listened to his own breathing. He looked at his shadow stretching far ahead in the gray dirt. Patches of lichen grew here and there—the Meek’s telegraph poles. He squatted and touched the surface of the asteroid. The soil was as fine as powder.

  He sensed a sudden vibration and stood up, looking toward the microwave transmission tower, where he saw what appeared to be a giant insect skimming over the surface around it. The insect came toward him. Not an insect, but a vehicle. Open, like a dune buggy, propelled and kept aloft by an unconventional drive utilizing what looked like a particle pulse technology. Two seats, Agatha in one of them, her hands around a single control—a tiller—the other seat empty.

  She said: Get in.

  He got in, found the seat small, had to loosen the harness, but finally got settled. A few patches of marrow grew on the floor. The plant would pick up the electrical emanations of his thoughts and emotions, and amplify them for Agatha. She swung the tiller in a wide curve. The skimmer turned around, the frequency of the pulses increasing, and they headed east.

  They left the solar-power generating station and the oxygen mine behind, skimming the surface of the asteroid, never more than two meters off the ground. Cody estimated their speed at two hundred to three hundred kilometers per hour, a speed that would have blown him out of his seat in an atmosphere. In the vacuum, things seemed just as tranquil and silent as they did standi
ng still.

  She said: He’s not going to like it.

  She was right. Buster would hate this, hate it in a way only an orphan could hate it.

  They covered a hundred kilometers in just over twenty minutes. Agatha swung the skimmer up, then brought it down, nose-first, straight into the ground. Cody’s heart jumped. They dove right through the ground, into a large tunnel. A substance the color of a ripe pear coated the walls, and indeed, the tunnel looked as if it were more a product of agriculture, grown, not built.

  Agatha said: How’s Ben?

  He said: Recovered.

  She said: How old is Ben?

  He looked at her, grinned, said: He’s 31.

  After another twenty minutes they exited the tunnel. Down below Cody saw a rain forest with blue glow-moss hanging on the trees. In the sky he saw five moons, all different colors. Far in the distance, bathed in the moonlight, stone buildings rose out of the forest. A river snaked its way through the trees, and 20 meters below a flock of red birds flew in formation.

  Agatha said: This is the Forest of Peace and Understanding. This is where I live. That city over there, that’s the City of Resolved Differences.

  The Forest of Peace and Understanding. The City of Resolved Differences. Names that had a reason, names that emphasized the orphan struggle toward rehabilitation, reminders to all who lived here that the feuding was over. He checked the atmospheric and temperature readings on his visor. The atmosphere was breathable, nitrogen and oxygen, with a pressure of 750 millibars. Temperature was 17 degrees Celsius, shirtsleeve weather. He cycled the air in his pressure suit, swallowed against his popping ears, and took off his helmet. Agatha, now moving much more slowly, glanced at him to make sure he was all right.