The Meek Read online

  But it was more than that. The red, blue, and yellow parallelograms, their various sizes, and their sequence led Cody to think that, yes, this might be an abstract mosaic of artistic design, but it also might be a written language. Was this alien cubist mosaic really so different from the alphabet? Visual patterns of any sort could always represent meaning. He wondered if the mosaic described the accompanying design of the green-glass construct.

  Out of the three primary colors had great works, like the green-glass constructs, arisen?

  Cody and Lulu watched Agatha sit on the edge of her cot staring at nothing, looking as if she didn’t know where she was. Cody could sense Lulu thinking about the future of Agatha’s unborn child.

  “The temperatures are a lot cooler now,” said Cody. “That’s given Buster the opportunity to really ration the marrow. He tells me about half the human line have stopped eating it altogether, that they’re trying to wean themselves off it. So Agatha’s not alone.”

  Lulu stared at her sister apprehensively. “I wish she wouldn’t be so stubborn about it,” she said. She had been practicing speech, and at least she didn’t sound like a deaf-mute now. Her words were rough and mispronounced—she hadn’t spoken since she had been a girl—but she still spoke. “Buster said she can have as much marrow as she wants. Her whole system is depleted. She’s never going to code for repair if she doesn’t start eating it again. But what can we do? She refuses. She’s rejecting the Meek. She doesn’t want to be one anymore. She blames them for everything.”

  “We can’t do anything,” said Cody.

  “How’s she going to get better? Look at her. We’re talking about her, and she doesn’t even realize we’re in the tent with her. Yet when you offer her marrow she fights you, opts to eat the traditional staples instead. Have you listened to her thoughts recently? They’re all jumbled. They’re not making any sense.”

  “I have.”

  They sat together in silence for a while. Out the canopy flap Cody saw the northern part of the Ocean of Forgiveness, deep blue, flecked with whitecaps, some Filaments hovering in the breeze. It was getting dark out already. The sun was far to the south. The clan had traveled the final leg of the journey north. They were on one of the islands of A Hundred Second Chances.

  Jerry came into their carryall.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “She’s just sitting here,” said Lulu. “She hasn’t said a word all morning. She doesn’t even realize she’s having the baby.”

  Jerry took out a small flashlight and shone it into Agatha’s eyes. “Agatha?” he said. Agatha didn’t respond. “Agatha, can you hear me?” He shook his head, checked her heart and lungs with his stethoscope, then pressed the cold disk against her pregnant abdomen. “Everything checks out down here,” he said. “And I’ve examined the ultrasound again. The baby’s fine. As for Agatha, she’s out of danger. I’m going to downgrade her condition from critical to stable. But I don’t think she’s ever going to fully recover. Even if we started her on the marrow. I’m not sure she’s going to be able to be a mother to her own child.”

  When Jerry left, Cody and Lulu looked at each other. They communicated in the silent language of the Meek again.

  Lulu said: I’ll look after her child when it’s born.

  Cody said: I’ll help you.

  He had finally made up his mind. He was going to stay with Lulu. Going to stay on Carswell, leave the solar system behind forever. Not go in the rigged lander with the others back to Vesta. What else could he do? He had to be a father to Ben’s child.

  Cody and Jerry sat by Buster’s bedside. Buster was suffering from congestive heart failure, what Jerry called forward failure, with the blood backing up into the pulmonary veins and capillaries of his stomach. Marrow was so scarce now and rationed so strictly that many orphan-line Meek had hypoxia and hypoxemia. Their stomachs mimicked symptoms of pulmonary embolism and chronic lung disease. Such was the case with Buster. The Meek leader was constantly fatigued, and his heart rushed in a ventricular gallop. His level of consciousness fluctuated, and even though he was offered more than his fair share of marrow, he refused it, accepting only the same ration everybody else got.

  “Why is his heart failing when so many others aren’t having that problem?” Cody asked Jerry.

  Jerry raised his eyebrows. “He’s old, Cody. Remember? Original Man. This kind of thing is bound to hit him harder than the young ones.”

  Buster, like an old man in the clutches of senility, grew excited when Cody brought up the subject of the Filaments.

  Buster said: How are we going to stop them from razing our crops, Cody? They’re thieves. His waves were weak from lack of marrow. Cody reminded Buster that the orphans were also thieves, but this seemed to make no impression. Not only will they take our marrow, they’ll take our grain, our orchard fruit, our cattle and sheep, our garden vegetables, everything we grow and raise. I’ve got to deploy the virus. I can’t wait any longer. Unless we come up with a solution in the next twelve hours, I’m going to have to go ahead with it. We’ve got to stop these hoodlums.

  Cody asked, “Could we not just wait a little longer?”

  Buster shook his head. The migration’s over, Cody. Ceres has been sent to the middle of the galaxy. The clans are choosing their settlement sites. It’s time to start the business of farming.

  He knew Buster was right. Time was running out. The Meek had to plant their marrow and plant it fast. Cody told Jerry what Buster had just said. Jerry shrugged, not knowing how to respond.

  Cody said, “Just a few more days, Buster.”

  Buster said: I’m afraid I can’t, Cody. The equation is simple. Either we plant now or we die. We’re out past Mars. I’m sorry but I’m going to have to go ahead. Tomorrow morning I release the virus.

  Cody sat alone on a hill for several hours after that struggling to come up with a solution. The weather was remarkably calm and the clouds thin, so thin that he could actually see the setting sun, which appeared as a small murky white ball through the mist, reminding him a bit of the sun as seen from Mars. In the distance he saw some of the Meek burying casualties of the marrow famine, tiny black figures in the vast rolling landscape, performers of an age-old task. As the sun kissed the tops of the farthest hills he saw two dozen Filaments flock down from the wartwood forest and fly to the burial site.

  That got him thinking.

  Fly.

  The Filaments landed at the fresh burial site, looked for milkberries, made the mounds white with the juice, and had burial scribes etch scrawls.

  Then they flew away.

  Flew.

  That’s when Cody finally came up with a solution.

  CHAPTER 26

  Buster licked his fingers and touched them to Cody’s lips to strengthen his ever-weakening emanations.

  Buster said: What makes you think they’re going to help us now? How are you going to negotiate with them when they think you’re a turncoat?

  Cody was distressed by how sick the Meek man looked. Buster wheezed badly now. His lungs, having never taken breath, spasmed as his blood fought to get as much oxygen as it could.

  “I’m not going to be the one to negotiate,” he said. “Kevin Axworthy is.”

  Buster frowned. He still views us with suspicion. He still thinks we took his father away from him.

  Cody shook his head. “I’ve convinced him that my solution will work. I know the infrastructure and support system on Vesta, and I’ve had Claire go over the orbital trajectories of Carswell, Vesta, and the seven proposed farms. Council would have a standard solar week to move the old ice and equipment transports into orbit around Carswell. I’ve had Annabel go over current marrow inventory. If everyone in the human line stops eating it, and we treat the withdrawal casualties as they come, we can extend the supply for another nine days. We’ll have a two-day margin. It’ll be close but I think we can make it.”

  Buster shook his head weakly. He said: But Kevin Axworthy is a VDF commander. W
e killed many such men thirty years ago. How can you expect him to help us?

  “It’s because he’s a VDF commander that I want him to speak for you,” said Cody. “His word will carry weight with Council. No matter what old grudges he might have, he’s a reasonable man at heart, he understands the situation clearly, and he wants to do what he can to save the Meek and the Filaments. Give us this one last chance, Buster. Spare the Filaments from extinction.”

  An hour later, Kevin Axworthy donned a biofeedback garment—a truth gown, as the Meek called it—such as Cody had worn for his broadcast to Earth, and prepared to talk to Council. Technicians of the clan established a com-link to Vesta City.

  Axworthy began by telling Council about the loss of Benjamin LeBlanc and expressed his sincere regret to the family. He said nothing of Ben’s child; he didn’t want to complicate matters. Cody, sitting off to the side, gave Axworthy an encouraging nod.

  “The rest of us are fine,” said Axworthy. “The Meek have designed a return vehicle for us. Launch is five days away and we’re expected to make rendezvous with Bettina in three weeks. Meanwhile the Meek suffer. Meanwhile the Meek die.”

  He then went on to talk about Carswell.

  “It is perhaps a mark of the Meek’s technological prowess that they discovered Highfield-Little a full 25 years before we did. They instantly recognized it as an opportunity. They knew that we would someday come back to Ceres. Once they found Highfield-Little, they began making sincere efforts to vacate Ceres so they could give it back to us. The first thing they did was change Highfield-Little’s orbit so it wouldn’t fall into the sun. Using the grav-core, they successfully moved the planet into a higher orbit.”

  Kevin then explained the unforeseen consequences of modifying the grav-core, how it acquired matter from who-knew-where, how its event horizon had slowly gotten bigger and bigger, and how the Meek had finally had to jettison Ceres to the center of the galaxy for the safety of everybody in the solar system.

  “Can we forgive them for that? I think we can. In altering Highfield-Little’s collision course with the sun they saved a race of intelligent beings, the Filaments.”

  At this point clan technicians transmitted some visuals while Kevin continued with a voice-over. The visuals showed the Filaments: Scar carefully picking some milkberries; a group of Filaments performing one of their nighttime dances; two of them having a conversation with their headwands; a burial, with scribes turning the mud white and etching dark scrawls on the grave; finally, a flock of 500 descending on a colony of marrow, devouring it in seconds, then flying off, leaving the ground bare behind them. Kevin recounted their problems with the Filaments.

  “The pesticide approach seemed the most reasonable, at least in the beginning,” he said. “But unfortunately it didn’t work. Their unusual metabolism makes them immune to every poison we’ve tried. We’ve tried light. Sound. Indoor gardening. Even beating them off with sticks. Nothing works. Now the Meek are faced with the deployment of a virus that would wipe out in a single stroke every Filament on the face of the planet. And they don’t want to do that. It goes against everything they’ve strived to become.” He turned to Cody, then turned back to the com-link. “We are indebted to Cody Wisner for coming up with a better solution.”

  He explained how the Filaments, though intelligent, lived in a primitive, nomadic, hunter-gatherer society, with no means of leaving their planet, and, because of the nearly perpetual cloud cover, probably no concept of outer space.

  “Why not use the space transports as vast floating farms?” asked Kevin Axworthy. “If we grow the marrow in space the Filaments will have no way of getting at it. I know you won’t have much sympathy for the Meek, but you were going to give those space transports to them anyway for the purposes of shipping them to Charon. Why don’t you now offer them as farms? The Meek can’t use their own transports because they were designed as one-time entry vehicles. We’ve already sent you the refit specifications. Some trays and some dirt—any damn dirt will do. You’ve got the marrow I sent back with the Conrad Wilson. The stuff grows like wildfire. You can get the crop started. By the time it reaches us in seven days there should be enough to stop all this suffering. The Meek can then ferry the crop down to the surface in their landers. As long as it’s properly crated the Filaments won’t be able to get at it.”

  Here clan technicians showed Bigfoot, Ears, and Tumble trying to break open a special polymer-based crate, a recent innovation designed to deal with the current storage emergency. The Filaments banged away with their crude metal hand axes; the three couldn’t even make so much as a dent in the crate. The visuals shifted to a storage shed made out of the same material. Axworthy explained how eventually huge indoor farms would be built from the same polymer.

  “So you see, indoor farms will work, now that the Meek have devised a Filament-resistant material. But it’s going to take time,” he said. “The Meek are going to need those seven transports to supply them with marrow for at least the next three years.” Kevin leaned forward and his eyes narrowed. “I know there are many hard-liners in Council,” he said. “I know some of you are going to argue against the expense of sending these seven transports.”

  Axworthy took a sip of water and cleared his throat.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Through lax and possibly dangerous legislation on Mars several decades ago, the Meek, in their first iteration as orphans, came into being. We made them. We are their parents. We should shoulder our responsibility for them as their parents. We shouldn’t abandon them. They’re different from us but they’re still of the human family. I won’t say they’re blameless. They’re not. Most of you in Council fought in the Civil Action on Ceres thirty years ago, and there were atrocities committed there that will live in your memories forever. But now the Meek find themselves with a chance for redemption. If you offer the seven space transports as farms you’ll not only be saving the Filaments, you’ll be aiding the first group of human star travelers. You’ll be the first to receive the observations and discoveries that such a momentous voyage is bound to produce. You’ll be the first to know what is truly out there. And that, my friends, is something you simply can’t put a price on.”

  Kevin leaned back in his chair. Cody was impressed by his performance; Kevin was giving them a moment to think about all this. Then his eyes narrowed further, with the shrewdness of a veteran poker player.

  “I know that this won’t be enough for some of you,” he said. “Those transports are expensive. You’ve already lost Ceres. Why throw good money after bad? I’ll tell you why. Right from the start we were all astonished by the Meek’s technological ability. They subverted our surveillance satellites. They subverted all the sensory equipment aboard the Conrad Wilson. They hid a population of 600,000-plus for twenty-five years. They survived the first bioextermination. Now we learn they can move planets around and turn asteroids into spaceships. The list goes on and on. The Meek are willing to share their technology in return for those seven space transports. It won’t be good money after bad. It will be the investment opportunity of a lifetime.”

  Axworthy glanced at some notes on his E-pad.

  “I’ve been authorized by the highest-ranking members of Olympia Mons and the other clans to grant Vesta and the Belt complete control over any of the technology the Meek send you, a technology you’ll be able to sell to Earth and Mars and the colonized moons. This technology translates into economic power, into the ability for Vesta and the other asteroids to revitalize themselves, and into the resources needed to come up with an effective solution to the juvenile-gravity problem. In aiding the Meek, you’ll be aiding yourselves. And because the Meek will be traveling to the stars you’ll not only be aiding yourselves but all humankind. I don’t think you’re going to get a better deal anywhere.”

  * * *

  Buster died two hours later. The clan buried him, as they had buried the Father, out in the soil of the new world, and the Filaments came to whiten and inscribe hi
s grave. Lulu cried. The clan had lost their leader. The Meek had lost their visionary.

  Rex assumed leadership of Olympia Mons and, provisionally, of all the Meek. The first thing he did was make Cody a ranking clan member.

  Rex said: I want you as an adviser. You are the one who saved us from a second bioextermination. You are the one who brokered this life-or-death deal with the Vestans for the seven space transports. You’re the man who convinced us that the Filaments are indeed intelligent. You’re a man who cares, not only about the Meek, but about everyone.

  Three hours later word came of the Council vote. Cody conveyed the news to other humans. “They’re going to send the space transports,” he said, “pending the first transmission of technological data from the Meek. Rex assures me this will be immediately forthcoming. The deal is as good as done.”

  The next day Cody received a holo-transmission from his parents on Mars.

  “We saw your broadcast to Earth,” his father said, “and heard how you defended Ceres against the Conrad Wilson.” His father didn’t look too pleased about this. “Now we understand that Highfield-Little is outward-bound toward Pluto and points beyond.” His father paused, his bushy eyebrows rising interrogatively. “You’re not going to go with these people, are you, Cody?” he asked.

  Much to his surprise, Cody could see that his father was alarmed at the thought of losing his son forever. Cody was also surprised to see how much older his father looked, with most of his hair gone, the flesh under his neck sagging, his eyes unsure and red-rimmed.

  Cody smiled but his eyes were misty. “I’ll be coming home in the return vehicle,” he lied.

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell his father the truth. He didn’t know whether he was being kinder or crueler. He just felt that after so many good-byes in the last while he couldn’t bring himself to deal with yet another.