Rift (59 page)

She nodded. “Only way I could work outside, in full view of the monitors. I pulled rank, using Gabriel’s suit. It earned me a minute or two extra before Station ops got curious. It was enough.” She sneered at Reeve’s expression. “Neither of you has the guts to do what’s needed when the chips are down. Neither of you.” She wandered over and sat on the edge of Bonhert’s cot, looking a little lost. “But I’ll tell you this, Reeve, for all that you think I’m a monster. I loved you. I did it for you as much as for me.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about
love
. Don’t.” He wanted to say more, wanted to strike out, but he stood immobile, trembling.

She went on: “Your father cast you adrift all your childhood, and I tried to help you grow up. I was the only mother you ever had. You don’t have to like it, but I was. You can hate me now—I don’t expect any better. But I always loved you.”

“Shut up!” He charged forward and then stopped as Bonhert rose.

Bonhert was smiling. “Just give me an excuse. Any excuse.”

He wanted to have at it with this man. But Bonhert was armed, and in his full strength. And he still had his job, the job he’d come to do.

He backed off. In a hoarse, small voice he said: “Why can’t you people just leave? Leave on the big ship. Why do you have to kill everything that stays behind? The ship is coming. So go!”

Bonhert snorted. “I don’t have time for this …”

“Let him finish this, goddamn it,” Marie snapped. “You owe this to me.”

A huge sigh from Bonhert. “Reeve, Reeve. Yes, the ship is coming. But they’re
interested
in Lithia. You know what that means? They haven’t yet found a home. It’s been hundreds of years they’ve been wandering. So maybe Lithia looks pretty good to them. And they have new technology. They’re talking of reterraforming.”

“Then let them try! Maybe it could work.”

Bonhert shook his head and smirked at Marie. “A chip off the old block. A wishful thinker, just like your father.”

“Don’t you mention my father.” He said it quietly enough, but murder bubbled inside him again.

Bonhert held up his hands in mock defense. “All right, all right. But understand this. Nothing can terraform this planet. It’s reverting. Even if they have powerful new technologies, it will take hundreds of years, if ever, for this world to come around. Generations! That means a miserable, grubbing existence for you and your children and your grandchildren. Is that what you want?”

Reeve spoke softly. “That’s hardly the point, is it? The point is what
you
want. You want to escape, and you’ll take the whole planet apart to do it.”

“It
will
happen,” Bonhert said. “You can’t stop this, Reeve. It’s bigger, much bigger than you. Everyone in this dome is working for the same thing, and there’s nothing you can say that will change their minds. And no way you’re getting anywhere near that cannon.”

Reeve considered telling him about Loon. But instead, he made for the door.

“Come with us, Reeve,” Marie said, her voice thin and carping. “Lithia is lost to us, one way or another.”

He looked at her like she was an insect grown large. “You’re the one who’s lost.” He threw open the door and strode out.

Marie was after him in an instant, following him out into the dome. “Please, Reeve …”

He plunged toward the center of the dome, shaking off her attempts to restrain him. “Think of me when you press the button,” he hissed at her. “It
will
be you, won’t it—the one with guts—who blows us to hell and gone? Think of me then,
Mother.”

As he made his way to the center of the main room, he saw Loon standing there, as though she’d been waiting for him. She turned to face him, and his heart surged with relief.

“Stand by me, Loon,” he whispered, as though she needed to be asked. He stood there gazing at the Stationers, nodding at friends and acquaintances, trying not to think of what they had done, but only of Lithia, only of the future. Gradually, people left off what they were doing and gathered around.

“Stationers,” he said. It was time to say what he’d come here to say.

More people set aside their work and wandered over to stand in clumps, people he knew: Mitya, Val Cody, Liam Roarke, Gudrun, Tenzin Tsamchoe, Koichi …

Meanwhile, Bonhert had emerged from his room and, seeing this, Marie hurried to him, placing her hands on his chest, stopping him from barging forward. They argued in fierce whispers, Bonhert never taking his eyes off Reeve. Marie was arguing for him, it seemed clear, though he couldn’t thank her for it.

“Stationers,” he said again, pumping up his voice to reach everyone. “I’ve come a thousand miles to say this. So hear me out.” He took Loon’s hand for strength, and her grip was adamantine. “I know what you hope for. It’s what we’ve all hoped and prayed for for five hundred years. To live. I know that you think you don’t have any choice but to ruin this planet and force the ship to travel on, taking you with it.

“Some of you, though, may not like the idea of huddling in a big metal ship for the rest of your lives, hoping for a new world … a new world that this
ship obviously hasn’t yet found, in all its searching. Maybe if there was some other choice, you’d take it.”

Val Cody’s face knotted into wariness. People shifted, but stayed. Bonhert shook off Marie’s restraints and pushed his way forward, closer to Reeve.

“OK, I’m bringing you that choice. So far it’s only an idea, but maybe it’s one worth working for. An idea about staying here, and … getting used to this place.”

Stepan, standing toward the front, shook his head. “Walk around in space suits? No thanks.”

Reeve put his hand on Loon’s shoulder. “This woman doesn’t need a space suit. She doesn’t need a dome, or a breather. She’s adapted. To Lithia.”

A murmur at that, a wave of skepticism through the crowd. Bonhert looked at Loon, his eyes loaded.

It was time for Loon to be known; though it brought her to the attention of new enemies, it was time. Reeve told them, then, the story of Loon and her parents, and how the orthong had altered the fetus to survive. It wasn’t salvation for those in this dome, he said. But if they were willing to change, it might be salvation for their descendants.

They looked at her then. All eyes were on her, but instead of curiosity or hope, the undisguised look on their faces was disgust.

Reeve pushed onward, growing desperate. “She’s strong. She thrives in what Lithia is becoming. She’s the new breed of people, our hope for a future, a real future.”

“She’s retarded!” someone shouted.

“Can’t even talk,” Stepan mumbled.

Reeve turned to Loon. “Tell them, Loon. Tell them what it’s like—to be free, and healthy. To live here.”

Loon hesitated. She looked out at the faces of the Stationers. The pause grew very long, and finally into a profound and disturbing silence. She said nothing.

“Loon!” Reeve whispered. “Tell them, something!”

But still she was quiet.

“Loon … please.”

A few people turned and walked off, Stepan and Val and Koichi and Gudrun … and then a few more.

She looked up at him, and her eyes looked trapped in her face. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

“Pathetic,” someone murmured. And then the crowd was dispersing, and finally they were alone, only Marie and Bonhert standing by. Marie stared at the floor as though embarrassed for him. She hadn’t believed a word of it. Shaking his head, Bonhert took her by the arm and led her away, back to his quarters.

It must have been several minutes, but at last Reeve looked up and saw Mitya standing in front of him. He held two heavy jackets, and handed them to Reeve and Loon.

“You have to go now,” he said. “Leave, while they still let you. OK?”

Reeve was too stunned to move. But he took the jacket, staring at it. He had thought they might listen, and perhaps they would have. But Loon’s voice was gone. Perhaps, on that long trek up-valley, she had traded her voice for orthong strength, or alone with an unconscious man, she had at last forgotten the way of speech.

Mitya handed him a canteen of water. “We don’t have any food to spare. Koichi wouldn’t let me pack you any food. I’m sorry.”

Then Reeve took Loon by the hand and trudged to the air lock. Mitya walked with them, as Reeve’s former friends and companions on Station turned away from him, ignoring him for their more pressing duties.

“Do you think the orthong would? Help us?” Mitya asked.

Reeve whispered, in a daze: “Worth a try. Better than living cooped up in a metal cage.” He’d never thought of a ship, or the old Station, as a cage. But
somehow, over the last few weeks under the open sky, his thinking had changed.

He turned to go, but Mitya said: “Reeve? Is she retarded?”

Reeve turned back to him. “No,” he said quietly. “She’s the smartest and best of us.”

They passed through the air lock and walked into the foggy clearing around the dome. It was evening, and a neon-purple sunset washed the horizon, bringing a Lithian tint to Loon’s face. As they walked to the perimeter wires the guards let them pass, and they walked away from the dome, heading east this time, breaking pattern with all their previous days.

They were several miles away before Reeve slipped his hands into his jacket pockets and discovered a liberal stash of breathers that Mitya had collected for them.

15
 

1

Day seventy
. They had entered a great forest of blackened trees that sucked up the daylight, permitting only twilight by day and utter blackness by night. Since leaving the dome two days before, Reeve and Loon had wound through the deeply folded hills, surrounded by conifer trees clasped tightly by a new Lithiaform bark. Slick and hard, the black skin shone with ruby highlights. At first Reeve thought that these were Lithian trees, but soon it became obvious that the black growths were Lithian coverings of Terran trees. They adhered to the trunks, shoring the dead trees upright. Occasionally the black skin of the trees glistened in a stray bounce of light, bringing random slashes of sunlight to the forest without relieving its deep shadows.