Sorrows of Adoration (73 page)

“Possibly,” Don
clarified.

Trish blinked at them
and then said in a loud whisper, “You can’t be serious!”

“I’m always serious
about Gaia,” Jason said.

They showed her Don’s
research, but she was immediately skeptical. “Okay, so you’ve found
a bunch of crap that might mean something, but it doesn’t mean she
or anyone else is down there. You’ve got no evidence that any of
these things are related.”

“It’s not a big
company,” Don protested. “They’ve got three lead researchers, one
of whom they just hired and has been churning out plenty of work on
the projects they’re supposed to be doing. But look at this Dr.
Noreen Steele: she’s got a brilliant CV except for these repeated
ethics violations.”

“What’s she done?”
Jason asked.

“Looks like a string of
improperly filed requests to use human test subjects, some
violations on how she had people sign disclaimers, and …” Don
read for a moment before adding, “and a couple of accusations of
not obtaining proper informed consent, but those weren’t
substantiated enough to do anything but note them.”

“There’s a long stretch
between not getting your paperwork done right and locking someone
in a basement for years,” Trish said.

“Not necessarily,” Don
said bitterly. “Some of us take care to do things properly because
it matters in the validity of the end results. Also, she had a
fairly consistent pattern of her own publication credits for years,
then there’s a big gap that coincides with a reference in a later
publication that’s been redacted. Since then, she’s only cited as
an adjunct on stuff published by the other two Hamdon leads.”

“So what, one redacted
thing, and you think she’s doing secret military work?” Trish
scoffed. “More likely she took time off to vacation or party or
something and then just got boring.”

Don replied, “The gap
was a year and a half. Most scientists don’t like to interrupt
their research that long.”

“By ‘most’ you mean
you. Just because you’d never backpack and party your way through
Euro-clubs doesn’t mean she didn’t. Or, duh, maternity leave?”

“She’s officially
single with no kids. And don’t tell me someone with this CV is
content playing second fiddle to her colleagues for the remainder
of her career. She’s doing something she doesn’t want publicly
noticed.”

Trish gave him a
conciliatory shrug.

“Regardless of Dr.
Steele’s personal life, there’s enough weirdness at Hamdon for me
to want to know what’s going,” Jason said, “even if they don’t have
anyone locked up.”

“So phone them and
ask,” Trish replied. “You own enough of the company to warrant
sticking your nose into their business.”

“And if they are up to
something nasty, they’ll cover it up if he comes poking around,”
Don warned.

“Not everybody thinks
like an evil scientist,” Trish said with a roll of her eyes.

“I’m not evil,” Don
said defensively, clearly still annoyed at her previous assertion
about ethics.

Trish sighed. “Yeah, I
know, sorry. Mostly.” She smiled at him, but he’d already turned
back to his computer and didn’t notice.

“You could get me a
look in there,” Jason said to Trish.

“Well, yeah, but if you
want to talk ethics, hacking into their video security system isn’t
exactly playing nicey-nice. Besides, you’re supposed to be my role
model for going straight.”

“My role in that regard
has been over for some time. Can you at least find out if there’s a
camera down that shaft?”

Trish narrowed her eyes
at him but then rolled them and sighed. “Fine, but only because
that sounds more entertaining than what I was doing anyway. Be
right back.” She left his office and returned a short time later
with her own computer. She set herself up at a table in the corner
and began typing as earnestly as Don, who was still tracking down
links and occasionally citing more potential evidence.

While his closest
friends worked, Jason sat back once more in his chair, his hands
clasped and index fingers bumping lightly on his mouth. Two years
ago he thought he’d found Gaia after Don had put some other
elements together: an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality
report of unexplained, out-of-season plant growth in what was
supposed to be a protected area, plus satellite photos of what
appeared to be a small shack nearby. The government investigation
had concluded a nearby illegal logging operation had been using
some kind of unknown, undetectable chemical element to spur tree
growth and it had gotten out of their control. But Jason, Don, and
Trish all knew Gaia could make plants grow as if by magic, and
they’d surmised she might have been trying to erect a barrier
against incursion by the loggers.

By the time this
information had come to them and they’d gone to the site of the
shack, however, it had been severely damaged and appeared to have
been abandoned several years before. Jason suspected that something
terrible had happened to Gaia, since the area had strange, twisted
growths, and the wrecked state of the shack looked to him as if
violence had occurred. Plus, he’d found an overturned box of
trinkets and mementos that had no apparent value, which led to the
conclusion that they were sentimental items and thus not something
anyone would willingly leave behind.

“Okay,” said Trish.
“I’m in their system, mostly because they’ve been stupid and are
using default settings. If they have a camera that looks at that
elevator or what’s down in the hole, it’s not on here.”

“Damn,” Jason said.

Trish closed her
computer. “I think we should continue this at home. It’s going to
be time to go soon anyway, and if we head out early we’ll avoid
some of the traffic. That way we can poke around before Henriika
has dinner on the table, and she won’t tell us off for letting it
get cold while we ‘do ze dilly-dally viss ze compoota’.”

“Fine,” Jason said. “We
can speak more freely there anyway.”

“Well, it’s not like
your office is bugged,” Trish said. “I did sweep it last month, and
you’re not that intriguing to most people.”

“I know, but when this
topic comes up, I worry about someone coming in. It’s best to avoid
questions.” He grabbed his keys from his desk as he rose.

“I’ll drive,” Trish
said.

“No, I came in my own
car today,” Jason said with an edge to his tone.

“I know, but you
shouldn’t drive when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

“You know,
distracted.”

“I’ll be fine. What’s
the worst that can happen?”

“Gee, I don’t know,”
Trish said with her hands on her hips. “Maybe you could get into a
car accident and a hundred people around you with cell phone
cameras could watch your splattered guts heal up in a matter of
minutes. That’d put an end to your big fat hairy secret pretty fast
and make you a lot more intriguing, wouldn’t it? Then again, that’d
make it more plausible for you to walk on into Hamdon’s lab and
demand—”

“Fine, fine, point
taken. I’ll go with you if you’ll shut up about it.”

Trish grinned at him.
Then she went to Don, patted him on the back, and said, “Come on,
doc, you can keep reading in the car as always.”

“Hmm?” Don said, not
taking his eyes off his screen as he picked up the computer and
followed Jason and Trish down to the garage.

* * *

As Trish and Don set
themselves up at their respective desks in the parlour, Jason
picked up a small remote from the end table beside his favourite
chair. He clicked it, and the house-wide music system Trish had
built for him as a Christmas gift several years before powered up.
It was automatically set to a large mix of his preferred classical
music—a term he found amusing since he’d attended the London debut
performances of several of the songs in his collection.

The first song that
came up was Chopin’s “Minute Waltz”, the opening notes of which
made him frown. He was not in the mood for a waltz, even a brief
one. He pressed the skip button and peered at the small screen. It
read, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No. 13 In F Major, K. 112:
II. Andante”. Mozart always settled his mind. He’d often wondered
if it was a mystical power of the mad genius, perhaps not unlike
his own strange abilities.

Jason regretted never
having taken the time to travel to try to meet the great composer.
Then again, some of the notable figures of history he had known
were far less impressive than their stories would later indicate.
Perhaps he would have been disillusioned by Mozart as well.

He set the remote down
and eased into his chair, feeling useless as he watched the other
two tap away. Usually he read while they were on their computers,
but his mind was too scattered to focus on words on a page.

Gaia: the only other
person he’d ever known to have a healing power like his own, and
he’d never even spoken with her. It wasn’t her real name, but he
didn’t know what that was. After he’d first seen her and
accidentally witnessed her arm heal from a terrible wound in
seconds, he’d learned she was Lady Rose Davidson, a well-to-do
London socialite who owned a fashionable boutique. But by the time
he’d worked up the nerve to visit her, she’d sold her home and
business, set up a trust fund for a girls’ school, and disappeared.
That was in 1899.

He’d done his best to
trace her history through the shop’s ownership documents filed in
the dusty, bureaucratic halls of the British government. It seemed
that, like him, she’d changed her identity from time to time when
the decades failed to age her appropriately. She might have been
known as Anna Yale, the cousin of Rose Davidson, and before that an
aunt named Flora Yale who maintained the London shop from various
addresses in Scotland, and before that another aunt named Melantha
Yale. The latter founded the shop in 1775, so his trail ended
there.

In 1775 he’d been Jason
Caldwell III, hiding out on the continent intermittently to avoid
being drawn into the war in America. He’d still enjoyed battle at
the time but had no desire to go beyond France for it, and another
skirmish with France was always on the horizon back then. He’d also
been doing what he suspected Flora had done: maintaining an estate
from afar so he could return as a relative who looked astonishingly
like one from a previous generation who had died unseen abroad. It
was tedious, but it was the best strategy to avoid questions.

When Rose Davidson left
England, she appeared to have left that name behind too. He found
hints of her being called Anna again as she went through Europe on
her way to India. He had not known what name to use for her until
he discovered her amazing ability to make plants grow. They had
called her Annapurna in India, but his love of Greek mythology
inspired him to think of her as Gaia. Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis
several decades later made it seem all the more apropos, as Jason
had become fully engaged in environmental research and industry by
that time, in no small part as an attempt to get her attention.

It hadn’t worked. He’d
grown ever more wealthy and done much toward his other goal of
keeping a world he’d likely have to live in forever clean and
tolerable, but his persistent dream of Gaia showing up one day to
applaud his efforts had never come to pass. He had no reason to
believe she’d ever heard of him, and since he’d kept his
immortality and other nefarious power so well hidden, he really had
no reason to expect her to appear.

Ah, his other power. No
growing flowers and food for him. What Gaia could give, he could
only take. He looked at his hands, and his heart sank as dark
memories began to surface.

Quickly, he clenched
his fists and stuffed them between his legs and the chair’s arms.
He’d done that so many times over the years that they slid into
perfectly fitted indentations.

In an effort to keep
memories at bay, he looked back and forth at Trish and Don some
more.

Trish was fairly slim
and quite attractive. She often referred to herself as a “nerd
goddess” since she was a hacker-turned-CTO but could have easily
pulled off any career where being pretty counted—though Jason
pitied anyone who was foolish enough to suggest that to her. She
kept her dark hair short less for style purposes and more to not
have to fuss with it unless she felt like it.

Don, by contrast, was
entirely average to look at: a round face with plain glasses
beneath a receding line of sandy-blond, short, always-askew hair.
He wasn’t obese, but he was comfortably soft from so many years
spent sitting in labs or behind computers. His warm smile and
slightly rumpled clothes gave away exactly what he was: a kind,
gentle, friendly scientist.

The two of them were as
close to him as anyone had ever been. His cook and his housekeeper
knew there was something odd and secretive about him, but as
befitted loyal and well-paid servants, they kept their noses out of
his business. It was only Trish and Don he trusted with the secret
of who and what he was. Well, not entirely what he was. He had
admitted to Trish that he had been a monster in his past, but even
she had no idea to what dark depths he’d taken his power. And even
though both of them shared his excitement at potentially finding
another of his kind—if indeed he was a kind of anything—they could
not possibly fathom the depth of his need to no longer go through a
potentially endless future alone.

As Jason sat letting
his heart grow heavy with such thoughts, Don suddenly winced and
said, “Oh crap, that’s not good.”

“What?” asked
Trish.

“Uh … yuck.” Don
groaned as he appeared to be battling between reading further and
squirming away from the text.

“What?” Trish
repeated.

Don looked at Jason
apologetically. “Don’t get mad at me, but I think we need to
re-evaluate the wisdom of setting whatever’s down there free.”