The Meek Page 7

  Cody stared down Rhenium Lane. The two women were obviously here in a spirit of goodwill. He was convinced of it. From all he had seen of them, they were gentle. But he was beginning to think that Wit might be right. And he had to admit, he was curious. It might be in their best interests to learn more about these blue people, even if it meant a certain risk.

  “So,” he said to Wit, “we hit them with the lights and then what do we do? Supposing we distract them, blind them, even for a few seconds. What’s your plan?”

  “Huy will go inside and stand next to the window,” Wit said. “The one next to the switchbox that operates the outside floods. We’ll get him to turn off the floods. When that’s done, you, Ben, and I will hide behind some of these crates and hope they’ll come over. It might take some time. Who knows, they might not come at all. They might just go away. But we have to at least try. If they do come, we’ll hit them with the floods. We’ve got that nylon cord there.” He grinned modestly. “Just in case we should have any success at this. It should be strong enough to hold them. Unless the doctor’s strength estimates are completely off.”

  Cody agreed to the plan, but only because it seemed to be the lesser of two evils.

  They hid themselves in various strategic locations around the supply yard. An ambush like this went against his nature, but they couldn’t count on the possibility that the women might bring back the rest of their oxygen. Too many variables, and what they needed were certainties. If Wit’s plan could firm up some certainties, why not?

  They waited an hour before Cody finally saw the woman and the girl emerge from Rhenium Lane. It was the same woman. His friend from the Alice-in-Wonderland chessboard.

  She squinted as she entered Laws of Motion Square. Did even these dim utility lights hurt her eyes, then? She walked with a fluid grace, her steps elegant, her movements precise and sure. She carried the oxygen tanks. The girl walked behind her, her arms free.

  When they got to the middle of the square they stopped. They looked at the spools of optical cable, the canisters of compounds, the racks of laser drills, the shovels, axes, and temperature-resistant piping, the electrical supplies, the fusion cells for the dorm’s portable generator, the tractor, the crane, the backhoe—looked at all this stuff the way kids at a zoo might look at animals.

  They walked down the nearest aisle. Human breath in cold temperatures steamed over, but Cody saw no steam. Their chests remained still. They weren’t breathing at all. At least not in any human way.

  They walked past the backhoe toward the crates of oxygen. Wit raised his hand to Huy inside, giving the signal.

  The floodlights came on.

  The woman and the girl jumped and dropped the oxygen tanks. They turned and ran instinctively, blinded by the light, ran right into a wall of stacked fusion cells. Both fell, and the tanks strapped to the woman’s back came down hard on top of her. Wit jumped out from his spot behind the water tank. Before he could reach the girl, she got to her feet and leaped to the top of the backhoe.

  The woman, still hampered by the tanks, couldn’t maneuver as well. Cody ran out from his spot and grabbed her by the arm. She turned toward him but it was obvious she couldn’t see him in the blinding light. She swung out at him the way a blind woman would, without knowing where anything was, just in the hope she might hit something.

  He wanted to say something to her, to reassure her, but he knew she couldn’t hear him through his pressure suit. He hated having to do this to her, but felt it was better if he was the one who restrained her rather than any of the others. At least he would make an effort to be gentle, to try to make her understand that they weren’t going to hurt her.

  Ben came up and grabbed her other arm. The girl jumped to the ground and tried to help the woman, tried to drag Cody and Ben away from her, but her attempts were short-lived. Witold came up and grabbed her.

  Huy brought out the nylon cord.

  In a sudden move the girl pulled out a knife and stabbed Wit in the leg. Wit cried out. The insta-seal in his suit began to plug the leak. Wit lost his temper, knocked the girl on the back of the head with the butt of his hammer. She went down, stunned but not unconscious. The woman tried to say something to Cody, but through the near vacuum, with no wind to fill her lungs or to power her words, Cody heard nothing, just saw her lips and tongue move in an agonized way.

  With the girl stunned, unable to resist, Huy got the cord wrapped around her wrists.

  “Check them for weapons,” called Wit.

  Cody checked the woman for weapons, found a large knife, nothing else, took it away from her, and helped her to her feet.

  She turned and looked at him through the reflective visor of his helmet. The fear left her face when she saw who he was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him.

  She nodded. Nodded as if she had heard him as plain as day.

  The woman and the girl tolerated the increase in temperature and pressure inside the dorm well, with no untoward side effects, just as they had tolerated the previous oxygen pops to the whole city. To be on the safe side, Jerry ordered a slow cycling of the airlock before they came in to protect them from any possible pressure-related conditions.

  When Peter and Ben finally escorted them into the dorm, the two women were fine. The young one actually looked older than fifteen or sixteen, now that Cody saw her close-up, maybe in her mid-twenties. The two of them were a little bewildered, still squinting in the bright light, but … but both enchanting, like creatures out of a fairy tale—both pretty, graceful, like a pair of sprites.

  “Do we have anything they can wear?” asked Cody. Both women were naked from the waist up.

  Dina and Anne-Marie nodded and went to their bunks. They opened footlockers and pulled out thermal undershirts.

  The women put them on. They stared down at the garments with great curiosity, felt the fabric, acted as if they were familiar with the notion of shirts but obviously didn’t wear them that much. They also seemed fearless now that they realized they were more or less captive. They both stretched their arms; the shirtsleeves were too short for their long limbs, and their wrists extended a few centimeters beyond the bottom of the sleeves. Once they were comfortable, the younger one reached into her pants pocket, pulled out some lichen, stuck a bit in her mouth, then gave some to the older one. The older woman wolfed it down.

  Everybody just kept staring at them, getting used to their strange but not unpleasant appearance.

  “Jerry,” Cody called through the door into the small infirmary, “how’s Wit doing?”

  “He’s going to need a half dozen stitches, but otherwise he’s fine.”

  Cody walked over to the bench and sat down next to the older woman.

  “Remember me?” he said. “From the lake?”

  She hesitated but finally nodded.

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  “She’s beautiful,” said Wolf.

  Cody was feeling what he had felt before. The peace. Like he no longer had to worry about anything at all.

  “How do you communicate?” he asked.

  She tried talking again, but again sounded like a deaf woman, that moaning and half-formed way they have of speaking. He raised his hand and shook his head, stopping her. He lifted his E-pad from the table and typed the following words: “Can you read?”

  She nodded. She took the E-pad from his hand and typed the following: “Kiss me.”

  His eyes widened and his face reddened.

  “What did she write?” asked Deirdre.

  Cody stared at the woman. Why a kiss? What special significance did it have? If she wanted a kiss, if kissing was the right thing to do, then so be it. Yet he couldn’t kiss her without some gesture of tenderness. Instinctively, he raised his hand, touched her hair with the back of his hand, couldn’t even think of kissing her without a romantic reflex. Her hair felt remarkably soft. She smiled at him. He looked at her pretty white teeth.

  “What
are you doing?” asked Deirdre.

  “She wants me to kiss her,” said Cody.

  “Why?” asked Deirdre.

  Cody leaned toward the woman. Stiffly, self-consciously. Like he was in a play and had only just met the actress.

  He kissed her. She slipped her tongue into his mouth, something he wasn’t prepared for. He nearly backed away, but quickly realized she meant nothing sexual or romantic by it, that there was nothing here but the necessary mechanics of communication.

  Her tongue tasted sweet. He remembered. The lichen. From the lake. How she had tried to kiss him with the lichen in her mouth.

  He now felt a cool breeze blowing through his mind. I know who you are, Cody. His eyes widened. The coolness. Like a vaporous layer of menthol surrounding his mind. A physical sensation that was at once mildly irritating yet pleasurable and peaceful. My name is Lulu. Her name. Rising out of her multilevel thought-cloud, focused and clear, like sunlight through an icicle. He pulled away, breathless.

  “Lulu?” he said.

  Her violet eyes glimmered with relief.

  “What happened?” asked Deirdre.

  Cody didn’t immediately answer. He still felt it, not as strongly now, but he still felt the manifold strands of her various thoughts, the tapestry of the human mind working on its many different levels, the cool wind. He looked around at his crew. Many of them had open mouths, were gaping at him in curiosity. Deirdre’s face was red. He swallowed, felt bewildered by what had just happened.

  “She spoke to me,” he said. He felt as if he had just stepped off a tall building and had survived the fall. “Spoke to me with her mind.”

  Comments, exclamations, questions, skepticism, amazement, wonder, and he didn’t hear any of it. He was looking at Lulu again. Because he wanted to feel it again. That joining. That perfect communication. Looking at Lulu, he could hardly fathom the nature of what had just happened. He moved closer and pressed his lips against hers a second time. He again felt the cool wind, but instead of hearing her voice this time, he saw visions—visions conveyed to him through Lulu’s mind: a field of lichen, catamaran-like machines hovering noiselessly above the field, blue people eating lichen. She said: I need lichen to live. He understood. He pulled away. He turned to Peter Wooster.

  “She needs lichen,” he said. “She needs it to live.”

  Peter went outside and got some.

  Needed it to live. Was that entirely true? Needed it, yes, but now he sensed she wouldn’t necessarily die; she would just get sick if she didn’t have it—these thoughts conveyed to him by Lulu, even though he wasn’t kissing her now.

  “Did she say anything about any others?” asked Wolf.

  “I saw an image. Four of them in a floating machine above a field of lichen.”

  Peter came through the airlock with a bucket of lichen.

  They all watched Lulu and the younger woman eat. The two of them grew less restless while they ate. They finally stopped eating, then looked at each other. And it seemed as if they were having a conversation, using the animated gestures and motions of two women talking excitedly, even though no words came out of their mouths. Finally they settled down. The younger one looked at Ben. Then yawned. Then the two of them waited for a bit, as if they were wondering what was going to happen next. But everyone just kept staring at them, mesmerized by how different yet similar they were to human beings.

  Then, to everybody’s astonishment, the two females curled up like cats on the hard metal bench and went to sleep, as if it didn’t bother them at all that they were prisoners.

  CHAPTER 7

  Cody climbed a pile of rubble—a tangle of prefabricated acrylic planks, pipes, wiring, broken glass—all half buried under chunks of igneous rock, the glittery stuff that made Vesta shine so much in the sun. The flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles cast eerie shadows over the destruction. The air was thin but getting thicker, now that the insta-seal had ballooned over the rupture, and a pervasive charred smell hung in what was left of Residential Sector 5. He saw a 3-D picture sitting in a broken frame, he and Christine at their ski chalet in the Chillicothe Alpine Habitat in tuques and sweaters with the artificial sun shining brightly on the snow in the hills, both of them looking young, vital, with the rest of their lives ahead of them. Built the chalet himself. Always good with his hands. But now his hands didn’t seem to be moving fast enough. No matter how much rubble he cleared, there always seemed to be more.

  He pulled a piece of drywall up and saw Christine’s hand. Covered with dust. Limp. With a deep cut along the base of her thumb. Saw the ring on her hand, emerald, not a wedding ring but the ring he had given her a year before they got married. Purchased from a jeweler, an actual Earthling he had met on the asteroid Davida while on business there for the Public Works Department. You didn’t find emeralds on Vesta. A beautiful stone. But on a hand that was now so pale …

  He opened his eyes.

  He stared long and hard at the ceiling of the pressure dorm. His body was rigid. He turned his head. Saw Lulu sitting in the chair next to his cot, her hands and legs now loosely bound, the stray light from outside illuminating her violet eyes. He took comfort in her nearness. The dream, the same old dream, receded. Lulu gazed at him with concern. You saw? he said, only he realized he didn’t say it, that the words were already there, plucked from his mind by Lulu’s enormous talent.

  She nodded. I saw, she said.

  He turned away. He never talked about it. He felt no relief that she should know. He felt like crying.

  He said: I built the chalet for her. And realized that he didn’t have to provide Lulu with context because it was already there for her, painted like a background on a stage set, easy for her to see. I used cedar paneling in the bedroom because she loved the smell of cedar. Have you ever seen a cedar tree? Have you ever smelled one?

  No.

  He imagined the smell of cedar, with its fresh rooty zing, the sense that when you smelled cedar you were somewhere far away in a forest at peace breathing the cleanest air anywhere, air that had the intoxicating scent of planet Earth.

  She said: Oh.

  And he knew she now understood what cedar smelled like.

  He said: So soft, so easy to work with.

  She pulled these words from his mind like she was struggling to get a deaf man to speak.

  She said: Cody, you have to leave.

  He wondered why there wasn’t so much background noise in her mind now. She seemed invigorated by her sleep. She leaned forward, like she was going to kiss him again. He reached up and stroked her hair with his fingers. She glanced at his arm, grinned ambiguously, then shook her head kindly, as if to let him know that the kiss, such as it was, should be construed only as a means of communication. She pressed her lips against his. And again she had lichen in her mouth. As if the lichen, chewed up and soaking in her enzymes, constituted a way-point between them. He allowed some of it to seep into his own mouth. He felt the menthol breeze of her thoughts again.

  With the lichen working on him strongly this time, he experienced sensory overload, as if Lulu were trying to say too many things to him and make him understand too many ideas all at once. She filled his head with visions. He saw faces. Blue people. He saw the face of a young woman. Not just any young woman but the woman who had stabbed Wit in the leg. This is my sister, said Lulu. Agatha.

  Lulu made him see the face of a man with a fine blond-white stubble on his blue chin, with eyes more slanted than Lulu’s, more streamlined, as if fashioned by a strong wind, his lips smaller, purplish, his cheekbones more defined. He sensed that Lulu was afraid of this man in some way. His hair was shoulder-length, parted in the middle, blond-white but dyed with bright magenta streaks. This is Buster, said Lulu.

  She then tried to convey a whole series of complicated and important ideas. But they came too fast. To Cody it was like trying to sort out a big tangle of wires. He picked up only a broad outline from her—he was new at this. He didn’t have any control over it,
didn’t know how something like the lichen could allow him to read her in even this minimal and mixed-up way. But from this broad outline he sensed that if such a thing as a hierarchy existed among the blue people—and the way she defined the term was a lot different from the way he did—Buster would be somewhere near the top.

  She then reiterated.

  You must leave this place. Leave Ceres.

  He interrupted her: How can we leave?

  She reacted with surprise. She said: The Gerard Kuiper.

  That she shouldn’t know what had happened to the Gerard Kuiper exonerated her. He tried to convey the crash to her. He thought of the wreckage on the surface, of the twisted scraps of metal and Joe’s frozen corpse. He immediately saw her expression change.

  She said: Oh.

  He said: You read my mind with lichen?

  She said: You’re fading. Without more … you call it lichen?

  He said: Yes.

  She said: We call it marrow.

  Marrow. The pith and inner substance of a thing. The best, essential part of a thing. A name that gave Cody some idea of its importance. He swung his feet out of bed and walked to the bucket of … marrow, lifted out a leaf, and chewed. Bland, spongy, dry, with a bit of tartness. He glanced around at the sleeping crew members. Wolf was awake, staring at him. Cody waved. Wolf waved back, smiled encouragement, then turned on his side and went to sleep.

  He said: Kiss me again.

  They kissed. She let her hands sit in her lap loosely bound by the yellow cord, approached the kiss with clinical detachment, while he, oddly stirred after five years of celibacy, put his hands on her shoulders and drew her near.

  You have two days, she said. Three at most. Buster won’t wait any longer. She pulled away, her lapis lazuli lips moist, inviting. He won’t let you upset our plans. She said: We call ourselves the Meek. But we also remember who we once were. We were orphans once. But we changed. This surprised him, that they had been orphans once, but now that the answer was revealed he couldn’t help remembering how closely orphan DNA had matched Meek DNA when he and Jerry had sorted out the genome of the corpse. Yet how could they have changed themselves? We know how to fight if we have to. That’s why you must leave. We know how to call on our ghost codes when we have to. I don’t want to see anyone get hurt. Try to find a way. Buster is determined. We’ve been waiting too long for this. We’ve worked hard for it. We knew you would come back. But you’ve come too soon. We’ve been hiding. But now you’re going to find us. And when you find us you’ll try to stop us. All we want is a home. Is that too much to ask?