The Meek Read online

His mother stood beside his father. She looked a lot thinner, more worn than he remembered her. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she knew he was never coming back. She gave him a slight nod, then turned away and walked out of the holo-image.

  He signed off quickly and went outside, where he found Deirdre waiting for him.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  He looked away. Evening had come and the sky was filled with the twinkling of Filaments. “How many ways can you say good-bye without actually saying it?” he asked.

  Maybe it was something in his voice, or the way he couldn’t look at her, but she put her hand on his arm. He no longer wore his antigravitational suit; he wanted to get used to the gravity as quickly as he could, build up his muscles and coordination. He looked at her. Her eyes were serene but sad.

  “Can you say good-bye to me?” she asked.

  He took a deep breath and his lips tightened. He straightened up, squared his shoulders, gazed at the forest of wartwood covering the hills two kilometers to the north.

  “Explain it to my parents, will you?” he said. “I didn’t have the heart to tell them.”

  Three days later, Axworthy, Deirdre, Jerry, and Claire immersed themselves in pools of dim purple jelly, strapped oxygen masks to their faces, had technicians drug them intravenously with sedatives and muscle relaxants, and prepared to launch themselves back to the solar system’s orbital plane on top of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb. The jelly and the drugs would help ease the terrific gee-force of liftoff.

  Cody visited Deirdre in the command module one last time.

  “They’re going to need someone at Public Works to replace me,” he said. “You should apply. A lot of the pressure walls in Vesta City have to be rebuilt. They’re getting old. You know more about structural tolerances than anyone I know.”

  She reclined naked in her human-size acrylic birdbath full of gee-buffering jelly. Only her face floated above the surface.

  “Do we have to talk about work?”

  He stared at her. Truth be told, he really had no words for this. He was never going to see her again and he was going to have to learn to live with that. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. She smiled. A gentle smile.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can go now.”

  She put her oxygen mask on, closed her eyes, and forced her head back into the jelly. The lid came down, the sedatives took hold, and she floated out of Cody’s life for good.

  Cody and Rex stood at the foot of Builders’ Mound as sixteen carryalls arrived with the first load of space-grown marrow from the Sea of Humility landing site.

  Rex said: The farms are in full operation. I have lander pilots working around the clock to ferry the crop to the surface. We’ve got it all packed in the new polymer. That’s why you don’t see too many Filaments around right now, just those ones up on the Mound. They can’t smell it through the polymer.

  At the foot of the Mound large tents had been erected as temporary shelters. Meek of the orphan line, feeble and skinny, many breathing with their lungs for the first time, lined up to get fresh rations of marrow. Cody tried to sense their thoughts but his talent was growing weaker; he hadn’t eaten any marrow for a while, and Lulu, like others of the human line, had decided to go without as well, hadn’t kissed him with marrow, hadn’t primed his talent with her lips. Their kisses were just kisses now. He saw Lulu now across the square walking with Agatha in the perpetual twilight of a world that was speeding away from the sun. He turned his attention back to the Meek lining up for marrow. If he sensed anything from these Meek, it was patience. They weren’t going to fight over the food the way they might have fought over the best ice deposits in Valles Marineris fifty years ago. The Meek had come of age.

  He watched Meek children eat the new marrow. Immediately they grew less fidgety, less whiny; some even began to play. Human-line Meek in the square watched. After weaning themselves off the marrow the human-line Meek were gaining the flesh tones of normal human skin. Their eyes were shrinking to normal human size and turning green, brown, or blue. Their limbs were returning to normal human length according to the varying degrees of either Lenny Carswell’s rewrite or of Artemis Axworthy’s rewrite. Human-line children ran around the square laughing, playing, shouting, screaming. Children of the orphan line conveyed their mirth telepathically, silently, and Cody was happy to hear noisy children again.

  He turned to Rex. “You realize that what you have here now is really two peoples,” he said.

  Rex gazed around the square with his large violet eyes. He said: We have lived as 26 clans. Surely we can live as two peoples.

  Lulu came up to them and stood beside Rex. Cody could see that the difference between the two was now marked. Lulu was indeed reverting. Her hair had darkened to the color of coffee, her face was getting broader, her eyes changing into human eyes, and her ears losing some of their fairylike pointiness.

  But …

  But, like the Father, she retained a faint blue tint to her skin. He smiled at her. Always lovely, she was lovelier still with green eyes, full lips, and a more womanish, less girlish cast to her face.

  As they left the square and walked toward their tent, Lulu said, “Should I go back to calling myself Catherine?” She pulled a blanket around her shoulders; her tolerance to heat and cold had diminished. “That’s my human name.”

  “Catherine?” said Agatha, out of the blue, startling both of them. They looked at her, then cautiously resumed their conversation.

  “It’s up to you,” said Cody. “I like Catherine. I also like Lulu.”

  Down in the valley he saw Filaments squabbling over some apparently edible lichen, their headwands flashing contentiously.

  “I met you when I was Lulu,” she said. She took his hand. “I think of myself as Lulu now. I’ve lived most of my life as Lulu.” Agatha began to wander away and Lulu pulled her back. “I feel like Lulu. I am Lulu.”

  They walked on in silence. Her menthol wind was faint now, just a presence, a sensation, something that warmed him from time to time. Lulu. That’s the name he would use. This was the new language he spoke. He had once spoken the language of Christine. But not anymore. From now on, Lulu would be the language he spoke.

  Six months later Cody and Lulu sat by Agatha’s bedside in the new village infirmary. Agatha had given birth to her child the day before. She lay on her side, staring at nothing, a sheet pulled over her hip, the baby—a boy named Benjamin—suckling at her breast. She didn’t seem to realize the baby was there. She had her arms tucked under her head, didn’t hold the baby, didn’t even acknowledge it. Benjamin didn’t seem to care. He suckled fiercely without his mother’s help.

  Cody looked at Lulu’s abdomen. Lulu was four months pregnant and starting to show. Down the corridor he heard the sound of hammers and saws. He wore a hard hat, work boots, and a tool belt. He had to get back to work soon. They were building the west wing of the infirmary now, and he was chief architect. Chief carpenter. Chief sawyer. Chief builder. The infirmary was made of sturdy wartwood planks. Wartwood cured straight. Far straighter than wood. It didn’t split—there wasn’t any grain. In fact, its unique cellulose gripped the nail once the nail was driven home. It was the consummate building material. And it grew fast. He gave Lulu a kiss.

  “I should get back,” he said. “Did the doctor say he was going to discharge Agatha today?”

  “Yes,” said Lulu. “Physically, she’s fine.”

  Just then, Agatha seemed to realize she had a baby at her breast. She looked at Benjamin, gripped him with both hands, and pushed him away. He fell off the edge of the bed. Lulu jerked forward and caught him before he hit the floor. Agatha flung the sheet aside, and, with a complete disregard for modesty, got up, leaving the bloodied pad exposed on her bed, walked past them, kept going even when Cody tried to stop her, shook Cody’s hand away, and left the maternity ward.

  “Let her go,” said Lulu. “She wants her chair.” Cody had built a chair for Agat
ha, and she had grown extremely attached to it. “It’s the only place where she feels safe.”

  So they let her go. Cody went out to the nursing station and spoke to the nurse.

  “Could you have someone follow her?” he asked. “Just to make sure she gets home okay?”

  The nurse nodded, speaking to Cody in the difficult way the orphan-line Meek spoke to the human line now. “She is our sister,” said the nurse, the words badly formed, ugly. “We will look after her.”

  Cody returned to the small maternity ward to find Lulu rocking Benjamin in her arms, smiling sweetly at the baby. Benjamin had some infant acne and cradle cap but he was still the most beautiful baby Cody had ever seen.

  “I guess he’s going to have to depend on us now,” he said.

  Lulu’s smile dimmed but didn’t disappear. “I just hope he understands when he’s older,” she said.

  CHAPTER 27

  When Catherine was eight and Benjamin was nine, and Builders’ Mound had grown from village, to town, to city, and everyone realized that Carswell wasn’t going to get much colder than 5 degrees Celsius, Cody heard a strange sound outside his window. Like the sound of a thousand sheets flapping on a clothesline. And suddenly, miraculously, alarmingly, there was light in the sky.

  He and Lulu hurried to the window. Thick beams of white light arched right up into the clouds, coming from the five constructs near Builders’ Mound, connecting them with bows of brilliant luminosity. The beams lit the surrounding countryside uniformly, brightening the dark recesses of the various valleys and ravines, bringing color to what had been a world of twilight grays. The river in the valley showed up a spectacular blue-green, the nonphotosynthetic grasses on the distant hills shone a flaxen gold, and even the constructs themselves glittered like fresh-cut emeralds. Cody felt revitalized by the light. He was surprised by it, bewildered by it, had a dozen questions about it, but also derived some answers from it; about who the Builders were, how they were physiologically equipped, and why they had decided to light this world. This, it seemed to him, as he stood there with Lulu’s hand in his, proved that there must be at least one commonality between humans and the Builders: They liked and needed light; their optical structures, as evidenced by the primary-color mosaics, were equipped to interpret light; and they had worked hard to supply this dark planet with light.

  “That settles it,” Cody said to Lulu. The children came to stand next to their parents, peering up at the bright sky in wonder. “The Builders didn’t originate on Carswell.” Agatha sat in her chair, oblivious to everything. “They came from somewhere else. A place with a sun. Why else would they build an apparatus like this? They built a civilization here. They left these lights … but then they … disappeared.”

  That’s what Cody found so unsettling about the whole thing. That the Builders were gone. Were they extinct? Had they died out? And if they had, was the cause of their extinction to be found here on Carswell? As a family man he didn’t like to think about it. He wanted Carswell to go on forever. He wanted his children to have children. The Builders were the ghosts of this place, a reminder, at least to Cody’s mind, that extinction could happen to anybody.

  He put on his jacket and walked over to the Civic Center. Meek had come out onto the street from their homes—no more tree-dwelling for the Meek, they lived in sturdy woodframe homes built from wartwood, homes that could take some weather. They were looking up at the beams of light in hushed awe. Far off in the distance above the western hills rain slanted down from the clouds, catching the light, breaking it into the colors of the spectrum, creating a rainbow. Cody stopped short and stared. He had never seen a rainbow before. They had never made any rainbows on Vesta. Color. One of the things that made life worth living, he thought. And now the Builders had given it back to them.

  At the Civic Center he talked to Rex, who had become one of his closest friends over the past nine years and who spoke fairly fluently now.

  “We don’t know where the power is coming from,” he said. “We’ve been monitoring the constructs ever since they began producing this light an hour ago. You can see it here on this screen. Nothing suggests anything remotely related to the kind of energy we might use to power the constructs, no electromagnetic waves, no radioactive decay, fission, or fusion, nothing that suggests a conversion of heat into light, no subsurface sources of energy detected. We’ve scanned the light and there’s nothing harmful in it, no gamma radiation, a bit of minor ultraviolet, but that’s it, nothing the orphan-line Meek can’t survive, nothing the human line can’t deal with.”

  “Have you received communications from any of the other settlements?” asked Cody.

  “We’ve received communications from all over. The light extends all the way to A Hundred Second Chances, down to the Bay of Redemption, and to both the east and west coasts of the Ocean of Forgiveness.”

  “Has it affected Filament activity at all?”

  “There have been reports of increased aerial dancing,” said Rex. “That’s it.”

  “And have all constructs continent-wide been activated?”

  “Yes.”

  Rex and Cody decided to have a closer look at the nearest construct, locally known as the Tower of the Helping Hand. They didn’t use a carryall to get there, even though the distance was well over five kilometers; they walked because they wanted to see the colors in the fields, the small mushrooms—purple, turquoise, and yellow—growing up through the brown fungus grass, a profusion of color such as neither of them had seen since Carswell had left the brighter regions of the solar system years ago.

  They passed a few indoor marrow farms, oval-shaped, rounded, made of the tough Filament-resistant polymer. The construct itself glowed like L. Frank Baum’s legendary Emerald City. The technology behind the construct was daunting, God-like in its gargantuan proportions, and awe-inspiring in its capabilities.

  “It makes me feel small,” said Rex. “We think we have a sophisticated technology, but we’re cavemen compared to the Builders. Look at the structural lines of these towers. They’re architecturally impossible. They should fall over, but they don’t. They go right up through the clouds. They’re like out of a dream.”

  “Something’s going on inside,” said Cody.

  The venous arterial network inside was indeed buzzing with activity, the delicate nerve endings twitching, the larger, aorta-like structures glowing with a faint pink luminescence. White light whirlpooled within the tubes, spinning upward, looking gelatinous and viscous, as if it were a solid, not an intangible.

  “I wish there were some way we could get inside,” said Cody.

  But the green outer structures had proved impervious to everything, couldn’t even be scratched. Cody and Rex climbed onto the base of the nearest tower. They felt a faint hum. For some reason Cody started smiling. So did Rex. Cody realized that the tower was making him feel happy in some way.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked.

  Rex frowned, but smiled in spite of his frown. “I feel it,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.” He rubbed his hand against the tower. “But we’re going to have to do some more testing, that’s for sure, to find out what’s causing it.”

  Which they did. They tested volunteers from all walks of life—old, young, teachers, doctors, farmers—and all professed to an overwhelming sense of well-being whenever the lights were on and they were near the constructs. Human line, orphan line, it didn’t matter. The construct made people feel better, gave them a place to go for a cure-all.

  The lights stayed on for thirteen hours. Then they went off. They stayed off thirteen hours, then came back on. For another thirteen hours. On and off in endless thirteen-hour cycles. No one knew why the lights started working when they did. But now that Carswell was way out past Pluto, well on its way to the Oort Cloud, the light was more than welcome.

  * * *

  Over the next several weeks, testing continued.

  “We’ve detected no detrimental effects,” Rex reported
to Cody. “People picnic out there when the lights come on and they always come back feeling great. People who go there are moderately healthier and happier, and there have been zero side effects.”

  Cody shook his head. “I still find it unsettling,” he said.

  “What can we do about it?” asked Rex.

  Cody shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

  “It’s perfectly benign,” Rex assured Cody. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Cody hoped it would stay that way: mild, benign, and innocuous. Feeling good because there was light was one thing; feeling good because of something you couldn’t see, identify, or understand was quite another.

  Life went on. A month passed. Another month passed. Some grain seed somehow got loose and spread quickly. Not an environmental catastrophe, but certainly an event that made the existing flora compete more fiercely for survival. Up through the fungus and spore-grass, wheat and barley could now be seen.

  For the most part Cody was happy. When he felt sad, he didn’t resort to a trip to the Tower of the Helping Hand, he just dealt with it himself. He continued to have concerns about the spalike qualities of the constructs, but gradually he got used to the idea, and sometimes he picnicked out there with his family. He always enjoyed himself, always came back feeling refreshed.

  What bothered him most, and what he again found himself brooding about, was the disappearance of the Builders. What had happened to the Builders? He bundled up Catherine and Benjamin and walked with them to Wartwood Forest. The forest loomed before them, the trunks and stamenlike branches casting wild shadows all over the ground in the light coming from the constructs. Some Filaments flew by. If the Builders could disappear, if something on this world had made the Builders disappear, then what was stopping the same thing from happening to the Meek?

  “Daddy, will the Builders ever come back?” asked Catherine, squinting up at the white bows of luminescence.

  “Of course they won’t, stupid,” said Benjamin. “The Builders are gone. And besides, the Builders are great big hairy beasts. Who’d want them back?”