Lovelock (33 page)

“I’ll admit that he said it. But I’ll also strongly recommend against letting the old bastard’s last vindictive act poison my mother’s life and her standing in the community.”

Carol Jeanne slapped his face. “I won’t hear you speak that way about Stef. If you were half the man your father was, we would still be married.”

“What you mean is, if I was half a man, like my father was.”

She slapped him again.

“So we see that at heart, you are the violent one,” said Red. “I’ve never laid a hand on you except in love, but now I say things you don’t like—talking about
my
father, mind you—”

“Your father, but my friend!”

“It was always his way. To play the victim, and enlist people’s pity and sympathy. Brave Stef, staying with that bitch of a wife no matter how she bosses him and humiliates him, all for the sake of the boy. What a good man. How we admire and love him. Well, I believed that crock, too, until I was about sixteen years old and it finally dawned on me that if
I
could resist Mother and get my way sometimes, so could he. But instead he did what he’s doing now. He let her do what she wanted, and then relished the moral superiority it gave him.”

“And will you say that at his funeral?” asked Carol Jeanne. “Do you carry honesty that far?”

“I don’t think honesty is appropriate when one is burying one’s parent,” said Red. “I will say how much I loved him. How much I learned from him. And it will all be true. It just won’t be…complete.”

“No,” said Carol Jeanne. “Nothing about you is complete.”

“I won’t argue with that one,” said Red. “Because it’s true. You, of course, are the image of wholeness. But in your moral perfection, dear, sweet, compassionate-for-the-dead Carol Jeanne, I do hope you won’t turn my father’s funeral into an instrument of revenge against me or my mother. Whatever you may think, we are both torn apart by his death in ways you could never understand because you didn’t grow up in that house.”

“I understand more than you think.”

“And a great deal less than
you
think,” said Red.

“Don’t worry about my behavior at the funeral. If it goes the way Mamie and Penelope are planning it, I won’t be there,” said Carol Jeanne.

“That’s exactly what I meant,” said Red. “But suit yourself. I’ll be there, with my daughters. And if you’re not there, everyone will conclude that you couldn’t be bothered to attend the funeral of your children’s grandfather. Whether they chalk it up to arrogance, apathy, or spite, it won’t be me who looks bad.”

“And that’s what matters, isn’t it?” said Carol Jeanne. “To you, image is everything. Well, get this. I actually loved the old man. Reality, not image. I admired him. What you saw as weakness, I understood as patience. I kept waiting for you to grow into a man of his strength. So while you and Mamie are spouting lies about a man you never understood and secretly despised, I’ll be there too, to show respect to the man Stef really was.”

“Believe what you want about him,” said Red. “I don’t really give a shit what you choose to do or think or feel.”

They glared at each other for a long time in silence.

“I’m sorry I slapped you,” Carol Jeanne said at last. “I never do that.”

“No,” said Red, “you never
did
that. But now you
have
done it. So now it is definitely on the list of things you do.” He turned and left the room, left the house.

And I, in my infinite compassion, my generous unselfish nature, I realized at that moment that Stef’s death gave me a chance to do something that I had been unable to figure out a way to accomplish. If Faith died before Stef’s funeral, I could dispose of her body along with his. That way her little corpse would go into the recycling system, to be broken down into unrecognizable chemicals. Her desiccated bones would never be found in some obscure corner of the crawl spaces. Her body could never betray me then.

It was then that I decided to act. My immobility was ended. I had reached no moral conclusion. I had simply decided to do what my own survival demanded. I no longer had an unconscious wish to die. And if that meant I had to take the life of one who loved and trusted me, then so be it. I might be a monster, but I would be a living one. Guilt might torture me forever, but I would be alive to feel the guilt.

I went to Mamie’s room, climbed to the top shelf of her cupboard, and took down her little canister of Dalmane tablets—the ones Mamie got to help her sleep after Stef left. The active ingredient, flurazepan, was in human-sized dosages. One pill helped Mamie get drowsy. One quarter of a pill would put Faith to sleep in minutes, and she would never wake up.

I closed the container and replaced it on the top shelf, exactly where it had been. I would have to remember to tell Carol Jeanne that it might be within the girls’ reach, especially if one of them decided to become a climber. Then, carrying the pill in one hand, I left the house and headed for the wall.

In one sense, it was the easiest thing in the world to do. I dissolved the pill in the formula mix. First I cracked the pill against a metal pipe. Then it took a little stirring, but it finally crumbled and disappeared into the fluid. Nothing beyond the ability of your average chimp. Your average capuchin couldn’t do it, of course, but I’m enhanced, which puts painless murder within my reach.

Then I took Faith into my arms and held her. She was reaching for the bottle, making sucking noises. She wanted it. But I couldn’t give it to her. She became quite impatient with me, but still I held her. Felt the warmth of her, the way her muscles and bones moved against my belly and arms. Studied her face, which, sick as she was, was full of life. Before I kill you, my first child, I have to make sure I remember you. I will not blot you out of my memory. I will not pretend you never existed or you didn’t matter. I will be able to conjure up your face at any time. If ever, in the future, I have a moment of happiness, I want your face to appear before me in my mind so I will remember who and what I really am.

Only when she became desperate and angry with me did I finally bring the nipple to her lips. It was right that she should be angry at me in the last moments of her life, even though she would never understand the real reason why I deserved her rage.

Her hands were so small.

She sucked and sucked. Vigorously. Strength was coming to her at last. Despite all the loneliness and terror, her will to live was strong and she was recovering. Which is not to say she would not have been felled by the ordeal of launch. But I knew, even as she drank the poison, that even in a cage high on the wall of the Ark, the will to live could flourish, could overcome terrible odds.

Finally the sucking relaxed. She was sleepy, her eyes heavy-lidded. She looked at me, letting her lips relax away from the nipple. I wanted to see accusation in her eyes. But I knew that what I was seeing was peace and comfort. I was seeing love. She loved me at the end.

I held her limp in my arms for an hour. She was cooling, stiffening a little when I finally laid her down. Just a body now. Not Faith at all. I sat there in the near-darkness, looking at the dark shadow of her fur against the cage floor. I don’t know how long. Thinking the same thought, over and over again. I have done murder. I have killed an animal that loved and trusted me, to suit my own convenience. Now I am a human.

The funeral was just as Mamie ordered—and just as Stef had feared. I would have found it marvelously amusing, really, except that I couldn’t stop thinking about what was tucked below and between Stef’s legs, up near his crotch. It hadn’t been easy, moving his legs to make a space for Faith’s body. In fact, getting her down the wall hadn’t been all that easy. She didn’t cling to me this time. And the whole way from the wall to the morgue I kept expecting someone to see me and wonder what it was I was carrying wrapped in toilet paper. But people are all so busy getting ready for the launch that they’re either working frantically or they drop off to sleep wherever they are. Literally. People are taking naps everywhere.

Like all coffins for those cultures that display the dead, Stef’s had a split lid, and the top was open. The mortician was doing his hair and makeup and so I hid behind a stack of papers on top of a filing cabinet until she left the room. I was afraid she might close the lid or turn off the light, which would have made things a lot harder for me, if not impossible. But I think she was just going to the bathroom, because she left the lid open and the light on and I was down inside the coffin in moments. I pulled Faith’s body under the little white lacy curtain that hid the lower half of the body and was a little shocked to discover that they didn’t even bother dressing the bottom half. It made sense, in a way—everything he owned was going to be given away, except the clothes he wore in the coffin. Those would be destroyed and put back into the biosystem, because there were too many people with tabus about wearing graveclothes. So why waste a perfectly good set of pants and underwear, shoes and socks? That’s why the split coffins were used, probably. Even that was a concession—there were those who thought any display of the corpse was vulgar and wasteful.

They don’t know vulgar and wasteful, unless they can imagine my prying one of Stef’s naked legs up and away from the other far enough that I could slide Faith’s body into the gap between them. Her little body, laid to rest in the most intimate place of shelter on Stef’s body. In a way it was comforting and appropriate. But when I looked at it another way, it made me sick to think of disposing of her body that way.

But it was just a body. I had to remind myself that Faith, whoever and whatever she was, was gone now, and all that was left was slowly decomposing tissues that, if found, would lead to my destruction.

It was almost as hard to get Stef’s leg back down. But once I did, Faith was completely hidden.

I lingered there for a moment. Too long a moment. The mortician came back and I heard her bustling around in the room.

I almost made a run for it, but I couldn’t be sure which way she was facing. If she saw me emerge from the coffin, she would be curious about what I had been doing. She would search Stef. She would find Faith.

But if I stayed in the coffin, she might never leave the room again until she was done, and then she would close the lid and there I’d be, trapped. Carol Jeanne would lead a search for me within hours, probably, but I doubted anyone would conceive of looking in Stef’s coffin. Even if I didn’t suffocate, even if somehow I got back out later, there would be questions. Where were you? What were you doing?

She finished his makeup. She did his hair. The spray nearly suffocated me. I didn’t sneeze—I felt like that was an important accomplishment at the time.

Finally she turned away, carrying the comb and hairspray bottle. I knew that this might well be my last chance. I scrambled out from under the little veil concealing the lower half of the body, quickly made sure it was hanging vertically, swung up onto the closed lower lid, and then dropped down behind the coffin, hanging on the brass rail that went all the way around the box. I did it all in only a few seconds, and almost soundlessly. It helped that the mortician was humming—the silence wasn’t absolute. I hung there from the rail, hidden between the coffin and the wall, while she reached up and lowered the lid and locked it in place. Then I climbed underneath the coffin and, when she was busy putting things away, slipped out of the room.