The Meek Read online

  He stared at her, sensing a whole tapestry of thoughts behind these words, but none of them seemed to answer his questions. Yes, they called themselves the Meek, who knew why, but they remembered who they once were, the orphans. And what were ghost codes? The Meek. They didn’t sound so meek, and he wondered why they would choose that name for themselves. Just how many were there? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? He couldn’t untangle her thoughts effectively enough to find adequate answers to any of these questions.

  He said: What can we do? We have no way to leave.

  She said: Who is Conrad Wilson?

  As if she thought the security ship were a person. He didn’t have to answer her. Her mention of the name triggered everything he knew about the Conrad Wilson, how it would now be here in five days, how they had only three days of oxygen left and were counting on the Conrad Wilson to bring them more, how he had no idea what the security force aboard the Conrad Wilson intended to do once they got here.

  She comprehended all of this immediately.

  She said: Let me go. I will try to bring you more oxygen. When the Conrad Wilson gets here, go away and never come back. This is our home. You can’t take it away from us.

  He felt momentarily affronted. She seemed to forget that the Ceresians had been driven out by the orphans, that 56,000 Ceresians had lost their lives, and that much of the orphan-inflicted carnage had been gratuitous—the killing of women and children just for the fun of it.

  He said: I’m not someone who can make that decision.

  She said: Now I’m sorry about all the killing. She had sensed his thought. But alterations have been made in chromosome three. Twenty-seven million letters have been rewritten. Everything that ever made the orphans violent, everything that ever made them pack together in gangs, made them want to kill, has been recoded with a simple series of pseudogenes. The Meek are a second iteration, an improved version, with an encoding symbiotic to, and in fact, reliant on marrow. We are of this place. We live here in a natural balance created through a minimum of environmental enhancement and a maximum of genetic recoding. The marrow has increased our bodily tolerances to both heat and cold, and we can survive in extremes of either.

  So the marrow changed them from orphans into Meek? he wondered.

  We breathe with the marrow. The marrow increases our ability to survive in a wider range of habitats, in a wider range of temperatures and atmospheres. We of the Meek are sorry about what the orphans did. Believe me when I say we’ve changed. We’re the Meek, yes, and the Meek for a good reason. Her face grew exceedingly grave. For in meekness we find our strength.

  In the morning Cody and his crew sat around the dorm and discussed what they should do in light of Lulu’s warning to leave.

  “Six hundred thousand?” said Ben, his mouth hanging open, his overbite pronounced. Lulu had finally given Cody an idea of numbers last night. “How can there be 600,000? We’ve seen a total of 27, not including the dead one we buried.”

  “She’s not lying,” said Cody.

  “Then why won’t she tell you where they are?” asked Huy.

  “Because that would put them at unnecessary risk,” said Cody.

  “And she wants us to let her go?” said Ben.

  Cody glanced at Ben. “She says she might be able to bring us more oxygen,” he said. “Maybe not our own. But sometimes when they come here to scavenge they find tanks of it. Mostly in Security Detachment Offices. I’ve checked the city plan. There are 63 such offices, a lot when you consider that Vesta City has only 21. But then, Vesta City never had to deal with civil unrest like they had here on Ceres thirty years ago. Authorities kept the extra oxygen for backup in case officers had to patrol on the surface or in certain unpressurized sections of infrastructure. Lulu says she might find enough to last us until the Conrad Wilson gets here.”

  “And then we’re just supposed to leave the asteroid?” said Jerry. He nodded toward Lulu.. “At her say-so?”

  “She advises us to leave. She’s made it clear that the Meek will do whatever they can to make us leave.” Cody raised his palms. “I’m a Public Works engineer. A carpenter by trade. Not a politician. I don’t know what Vesta City’s going to say. My main concern is the safety of my crew. And that means oxygen. Lulu says she’ll try to get us more. I leave it up to Council to make the bigger decisions. In the meantime I’m going to let Lulu go find us more oxygen. I’m going to keep her sister here. As insurance. To make sure Lulu comes back. Peter, Dina, and Russ can go with Lulu. The tanks will be heavy and she’s going to need help. Ben, Deirdre, Wit, Huy, and Wolf—you’ll be coming with me to the Actinium Oxygen Production Utility and the solar-power generating plant. We’ve got to see what we can do about getting that place going again. Just in case.”

  Cody and his team stood on the surface of Ceres as the sun shot like a thousand lasers from the east over the vista of solar panels.

  “Ben and I hypothesize that if we can get this plant to generate some power,” said Cody, “we might supply the emergency shelter in Laws of Motion Square with enough oxygen to keep us going until the Conrad Wilson gets here. The emergency shelter is a self-contained unit, airtight. It can remain pressurized even if the entire city is in a vacuum. We think we can get enough power on-line to get some air in there.” He paused. “I’m sorry it’s come to this. I’m sorry we have to spend all our time on survival. We should be fixing Newton, completing our survey, then moving on to Equilibrium. But things haven’t worked out that way. Ben and I are going to check the oxygen mine to see how many of the robots still work. You four can start a survey of the underground cable with your wands.” He gestured at all the solar panels. “This is old. It uses underground fiber optics to carry raw sunlight to the microwave transmission tower. See how the ground is pitted? This place has taken thousands of hits since it was decommissioned 75 years ago. Some of the cable is bound to be ruined.”

  “Why can’t we hook up one of our own fuel cells to get the air we need?” asked Deirdre.

  “Because our fuel cells can’t generate nearly enough power to get those old robots up and running in the oxygen mine. Have you seen the GK’s archive record of those robots? Have you looked at the schematics for the mine? It’s the one just east of here, the oldest in the Belt. Those robots lift tons of carbonaceous rock at a time into the oxygen separator. We need a giant plant—like this solar-power generating station here—to get them going, not our tiny fuel cells. Ben estimates we have to get it running up to at least four percent capacity to fill the emergency shelter with air.” He looked around at the others. “And that means we’ve got to find some working panels.” Cody pointed to the panels. “That’s why we’re here. We might as well get started. Mark the viable solar panels with yellow crosses. You’ve got six hundred solar panels out there, each ninety meters square. To get four percent power, we’re going to need at least 24 of them up and running. Once we find 24 viable panels, we have to clean them.”

  “So we … we sweep them clear?” asked Deirdre.

  “That’s why I have all these brooms out here,” said Cody, grinning at the innocent tone in her voice.

  “At least we’ll feel as if we’re doing something,” said Wit.

  “My thought exactly,” said Cody.

  Many of the robots in the oxygen mine were no more than automated pieces of heavy equipment; backhoes, front-end loaders, dump trucks, cranes, carriage-mounted pneumatic drills, bulldozers, and road-graders. The huge open pit, kilometers across, was like a museum. Most of the equipment was over a hundred years old. Cody remembered accessing pictures of this kind of equipment as a boy, recalled how he had marveled at the size of such machines, how foreign they seemed compared to the current generation of micromachines—robots no bigger than a fist working at incredible speed in swarms of a hundred or more.

  A microwave relay antenna rose like a monument before them. The sun shone directly overhead, small but angry. Slag heaps—black and unsightly piles of unneeded carbon—blighted the far
rim of the open pit like a small mountain range.

  The inspection of the oxygen mine took them most of the afternoon—afternoon, of course, being set by an arbitrary schedule. They checked one of the pneumatic drills first, a piece of equipment twenty times as tall as Cody, white, with a red logo of an oxygen atom along the side, tires as big as a house, made out of a compound that could withstand minus 275 Celsius temperatures. A power grid rose from the drill’s control console, ready to capture power from the microwave relay antenna. Cody climbed the ladder to the maintenance platform and was gratified to see that after all these years the little orange light was still flashing, that the machine was in standby mode. He took a data scanner out of his tool belt, established a link to the robot’s main program drive, and discovered that only seven percent of the application data had been corrupted, an excellent ratio, considering the drill’s prolonged exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. He was able to effect repairs on the corrupt data quickly.

  The drill was typical of the many pieces they inspected. The cold and vacuum had actually acted as preservative agents in most cases, and they didn’t have to do too many repairs.

  “That’s fully 70 percent of the equipment still operational,” said Cody when they were done. He gestured around the open-pit mine. “It’s hard to believe all this rock is potential air.”

  Ceres, rich in carbon compounds—many of those compounds filled with oxygen and nitrogen—had plenty of the raw materials needed for the production of air. Virtually every stone contained at least some atmospheric component. The mine’s job was to unglue the oxygen and nitrogen atoms from the carbon by feeding raw ore into a chemical separating plant.

  And luckily everything looked good to go.

  CHAPTER 8

  Cody sat in his office working on his Corsican pine, tired from the day’s work. Slowly but surely, with the small kit of carving tools he had brought along, he was shaping the ungainly piece of plate rail into a cat. Why a cat? he wondered. He looked at the cat’s eyes. Big. Leaf-shaped. Like Lulu’s eyes. He glanced out the pressure window and saw Wit, Peter, and Russ standing guard over the equipment. Lulu was sleeping in the dorm. Outside his door, Agatha sat on the bench, nervously nibbling a piece of marrow. They didn’t keep her tied with yellow cord anymore. He sensed no intent from her to escape. As long as Lulu was here, sleeping, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  He thought of the day’s progress.

  By the end of the day, the search crew, having investigated forty-two of the sixty-three Security Detachment Offices, had failed to turn up any extra oxygen tanks. Those on his own OPU detail had had better luck, having found twenty-four working solar panels and marked them with yellow crosses. Finding and identifying the panels had been long hard work, and they still had to sweep them off now. Everyone was tired. Everyone needed a good rest.

  Agatha was worried about Lulu, he could sense it. She turned to him and said: Why is she so tired?

  His eyes widened, surprised by the clarity of the communication; it possessed none of the background noise Lulu’s communications did.

  He said: She covered a lot of ground today.

  Agatha turned away as if she hadn’t heard him, as if she couldn’t hear him, as if, after no kiss from Lulu for so long, he had faded out, had become, at least to Agatha, a deaf-mute.

  Deirdre appeared in the doorway. She didn’t say anything. She glanced at Agatha then turned back to Cody.

  “You’re talking to her?” she said.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of her tone. Challenging? Yes. Deirdre was always challenging. But he also detected a note of concern. He held up his cat.

  “I’m making something,” he said.

  She looked at the half-completed cat. Her face softened.

  “Everyone’s a little concerned about you, Cody,” she said.

  He was surprised. “About me?” he said. “Why?”

  She pressed her lips together. “Because some of us think that whatever Lulu did to you with that kiss …” She cast an anxious glance toward Agatha. “That whatever she did to you … that it might not have been a good thing … that it’s made you more sympathetic toward them than you should be.”

  He frowned. “She didn’t do anything to me,” he said. “She talked to me. That’s all. She didn’t change me. She didn’t make me feel more sympathetic. She didn’t co-opt me in any way. I’m still the same old Cody.”

  Deirdre sighed. “You really think that’s true?”

  “Deirdre, we’re communicating with them now. Isn’t that what we want?”

  “I just wonder … if we shouldn’t be more careful.” She took a deep breath, lifted her chin. “I just worry, that’s all.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  He fell asleep in his chair. He had another dream.

  He dreamed that Agatha stabbed him in the leg just as she had stabbed Wit. Stabbed him in the thigh out on the surface next to the carbon slag heaps of the oxygen mine. So odd to see her standing out on the surface, in a vacuum, in the cold, with no protection whatsoever, no pressure suit, bare from the waist up, wearing only a pair of pants.

  Stabbed him, and the blue insta-seal sputtered around the gash in his suit, attempted to block the leak, but his suit was covered with dust from the carbon slag and the insta-seal reacted chemically with the carbon slag, wouldn’t bind properly, simply dripped to the ground like blue wax. He tried to catch it, struggled to stuff it back into the gash, but his hands were dirty with the carbon slag, and the insta-seal just got runnier, and he felt needles of cold biting his leg. He looked up at Agatha. She was gone. He was alone. There was no one around to help him.

  He woke up …

  And discovered Agatha pressing her lips against his.

  He tensed.

  Nearly pushed her away.

  At first he didn’t know who she was. Startling, to wake up and find someone you don’t know kissing you.

  But then he felt her innocent reassurance filling his mind.

  She said: I would never do that. I would never leave you out on the surface like that.

  So. She had been watching his dream.

  She continued to kiss him, her tongue slipping into his mouth to allow for the free flow of marrow. This kiss: He sensed in Agatha a youthful enthusiasm for it. What was it? She was finding pleasure in this? An illicit thrill? A young woman’s thrill? In kissing him? He was too old for her. She pulled away, looked at him, her big violet eyes searching and keen, full of feeling but with nothing at all articulated in her thoughts, just a surprising and uncanny affection toward him.

  She said: You won’t let the girl hurt me, will you?

  He was puzzled. What girl? he asked.

  She said: The girl with the orange hair. Deirdre.

  “I’m sorry we have to keep you like this,” he said. She squinted, as if to her Meek ears words pronounced vocally were a rare phenomenon. “But our situation is … is not the best. I’ll make sure Deirdre doesn’t hurt you.”

  She said: Deirdre wants to kill Lulu.

  This took him by surprise.

  “No,” he said, “she doesn’t.”

  Agatha said: She does. She’s not right. She pretends she’s right. But she’s not. She always has to know where you are and what you’re doing. She’s always thinking about you. And now she wants to kill Lulu and hurt me.

  Cody knew what was going on. He had to make her understand that when people thought, they thought on many different levels, and the level she had chosen to probe in Deirdre—Deirdre’s feelings toward him—was just one level out of many, perhaps a subconscious expression of Deirdre’s jealousy and frustration, but not something that she or her sister should worry about in any substantive way.

  “I won’t let Deirdre hurt you,” he said again. “And I won’t let her hurt Lulu.”

  She said: You like the curve of my waist.

  Of the several thoughts going through his own mind, this was certainly
one of them. But that she should pick this particular thought to examine under her particularly clear, noise-free scrutiny bothered him. Certain thoughts should remain private. He felt as if she were trespassing.

  He said: I like the curve of your waist. If she wanted candidness, he would give her candidness. But I’m not sure I like where you go with your mind.

  She said: I like you. I knew you were different the moment I saw you.

  He said: You dig too deeply right now. I know you’re young, but you should try to learn what’s appropriate. Lulu stops herself from digging too deeply. She knows how to be polite. You should learn how to hear only the thoughts people wish you to hear. I like the curve of your waist, but it’s inappropriate for me to express that, and it’s inappropriate of you to probe for that. Is there no mechanism the Meek use to stop unwanted probing?

  She looked away. We block, she said. But I have a special talent. I can get through most blocks. Buster uses me that way sometimes. To get through blocks he can’t.

  He said: Will you stop? You invade my privacy. As for Deirdre, you invade hers too. She won’t hurt you. She won’t kill Lulu. You don’t have to worry about her. She might have those thoughts, but she might not know that she’s having those thoughts, so just leave her alone.

  She said: You’re scolding me. She was upset now. Just like Lulu does.

  He decided the best thing he could do was change the subject. He said: Buster uses you?

  Agatha said: Buster knows I can tiptoe through a mind like a ghost. It’s my scent, you see? It’s like pine. Not many have a scent like that. And me of the human line. He wasn’t at all sure what she meant by this, the human line; he just picked up on it, saved it for later. We all have scents, at least that’s the closest thing we can call them, but some have stronger scents than others, and I have a strong scent. I smelled pine a long time ago. There used to be gardens here, and sometimes the sap would run, and I’ve always remembered that smell, and that smell has made me strong. When I use this scent I’m like a ghost. I can see everything, and no one knows I’ve been for a visit. The only drawback is I don’t have a filter. I see everything. And sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes I’d rather not. Sometimes I even see things that the Father has seen. Unlike Lulu, he didn’t have the talent for dredging up context, couldn’t see the background like a stage set, had no idea whom Agatha was talking about, only knew that she wasn’t talking about her own father. And the Father has seen a lot of awful things in his life, she concluded, without any further explanation, leaving him with just the brief impression that the Father was a leader of some kind.