Sorrows of Adoration (75 page)

“They got her down
there somehow,” Don said, “so presumably she can at least be
temporarily made unconscious with enough damage, same as you.”

“I will do what needs
to be done,” Jason declared, crossing his arms in such a way as to
not have to see his hands.

“I guess that’s that,
then,” Trish said. She looked at the clock. “Holy crap, it’s after
midnight. Bedtime, especially for you old men.”

Jason nodded. “I’ll see
you two in the morning,” he said before heading back to the
gallery.

Once there, he gazed at
the portrait again. It depicted a somewhat Rubenesque woman in
Victorian dress, a pleasant smile upon her face as if someone
beloved had recently made her laugh. Despite the smile, however,
her green eyes bore a certain sadness that had captivated Jason
ever since he’d acquired the work. He hadn’t seen her eyes closely
enough in real life to discern their colour and had often wondered
how much was artistic interpretation versus reality.

After all, his own old
portrait across the room was hardly a photographic representation.
It matched well enough that, if he stood beside it, an impartial
observer might glean a familial resemblance between the two tall,
brown-haired, hazel-eyed, strong-jawed, muscular men. However, the
late-seventeenth-century styling had rendered his eyes and
expression in a flattened way that Trish said didn’t do justice to
how handsome he truly was, when she was in a conciliatory mood.

“I’m sorry for being a
bit of a bitch earlier,” Trish said as she came into the gallery
behind him, clearly in such a mood at the moment.

“Hmm? Were you?”

“You know, deflating
the two of you when you were so excited.”

“Oh, that. No, you were
raising entirely pertinent questions. I rely on you for that. No
apology necessary.”

“You okay?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He turned to
look at her and saw she was unconvinced. “I am, really. This is a
good thing.”

“I know what this means
to you. I know what she means to you.”

Jason nodded.

Trish patted his arm.
“I’ll leave you to your brooding, then.”

“I’m not brooding.” She
gave him an incredulous look, so he admitted, “Not as much as
usual. There’s hope now, and I’m clinging to that.”

Trish walked out, and
Jason sat on the small couch to stare at the portrait for a long
time before finally heading to bed himself.

WHEN TRISH ARRIVED in
the dining room the next morning, she found Don eating in front of
his computer. “Where’s Jason?” she asked.

Without taking his eyes
off his reading, he replied, “Gone to the office already. He was on
his way out the door when I came down.”

“How did he seem?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t
give him a psych eval.”

Trish sighed as she
served herself from the heated platters. “I meant was he all cranky
and slow or—”

“No, no, he was zipping
around the place.”

“Smiling or scowling?”
Trish turned to see Don holding a fork in the air, dripping egg
yolk in front of his open mouth. “What? What’s wrong?” she asked
quickly.

“Huh? Nothing! Craig
over at Truitt Filter just sent me an email that he’s got great new
results on lowering the flow resistance on the—”

“Shit, I don’t care
about that! I thought you’d found more about Gaia!”

“No, I’m trying to
catch up on other stuff, and you should care about this because it
could mean—”

“Just tell me, was
Jason smiling or frowning?”

“Um, neither, really.
He didn’t seem upset. No, wait, he did smile when he said he’d see
me at work. Happy?”

Trish sat down to eat
as she said, “Yes. Good.”

* * *

Trish set her things in
her office and then went directly to Jason’s, where she found him
pacing while on the phone. He held up a finger to indicate he was
almost done.

When he hung up he
said, “It’s a good day already. It turns out there’s a small
sustainability conference in Seattle on right now, and they’d be
thrilled to have me pop in for a quick panel discussion right after
we arrive.” He closed his door and continued more quietly, “That’ll
give us a reason for being there, or me at least, and still leave
us plenty of time for our real mission. Plus it’s small enough that
it won’t make any significant press.”

Trish began to speak,
but he interrupted her. “Ah, ah, I know, you’ve come to nag, but
you don’t need to. I’ve been a good boy and done all the stuff on
my list. And you’re going to love this! I’ve found the perfect way
to swap us between the two vans without you having to hack in to
falsify the GPS record!”

He bounded over to his
computer and pointed to a satellite map on the screen. “There’s
this shallow creek bed here which shouldn’t be a problem for us to
cross. On this side is a defunct tree nursery, so we can park in
back of it, and nobody will see us go down the hill to the creek.
On the other side is an open meadow, and just beyond that is this
mall,” he said, opening a browser window, “which happens to be
owned by Popucorp, which we’ve been courting for two years to get
them into our Green Consumer initiative. That’s a perfect excuse
for us to have been down there from Seattle and for me to have
brought you two along, because on the chance that anyone bothers to
trace our movements we can claim we were checking out the mall for
business purposes! Why are you looking at me like that? I thought
you’d be happy.”

“I’m worried about
you.”

“I don’t know why. I
haven’t felt such hopeful anticipation for years!” He started to
sit at his desk but then exclaimed, “Oh yeah!” and leapt back up to
cross the room to his bookshelves.

“That’s exactly it,”
Trish said, following him. “Jason, stop for a minute.” She put her
hands on his arms and made him turn to look at her. “Come on, stop
for just one second.”

“But I need to—”

“Stop. Take a breath,”
she ordered.

He crossed his arms and
raised an eyebrow at her.

Trish lifted her hands
and said, “I get that you’re excited. We all are. But you need to
be realistic about this.”

“I am!”

“No, you’re not. You’re
acting like a boy about to pick up the puppy he’s wanted for as
long as he can remember. It might not work out like you
expect.”

“I have no intention of
treating her like a pet.”

“But you have this
mental image of her as being a certain kind of person. You’ve
scrounged up tiny bits of information over a century and used that
to create a character in your head that might not exist in real
life. You really don’t know much about her.”

“I don’t need to. It’s
not like I’m marrying her—I just want to know her.”

“What if it’s not
actually her? Or even if it is, what if she doesn’t want to know
you?”

Jason’s mouth opened to
speak, but he remained silent as he contemplated that latter,
horrible thought.

“What if she doesn’t
want to know anybody?” Trish continued. “You went through a time by
yourself when you didn’t want anything to do with anyone.”

“That was different. I
had become a monster,” he replied in low whisper. “I needed to find
my humanity again without risking anyone else.”

“And she was living off
by herself in the woods when someone grabbed her and stuffed her in
a hole for about a decade. What kind of mood would you be in?”

His jaw set and his
brow furrowed deeply.

“You’d want to kill
someone. It’s okay to admit that. I’d want to,” she said.

He tried to look away,
but Trish put her hands on his cheeks and forced him to maintain
eye contact with her. “Jason, I don’t want to upset you, but I
can’t stand the thought of you getting a broken heart over this.
You don’t know who or what is down there. I hope it is her and that
she’s a great person, but we can’t go in there assuming that.
You’ve got to go in with your head, not your heart.”

He raised an eyebrow.
“Why does that advice sound familiar?”

“Because I’m quoting
you, and you know it.”

“Did you listen to me
at the time?”

Trish snorted. “Hardly!
I was a stupid teenager, and you were bumming me out. But you were
right.”

He pointed at her and
demanded, “I want that in writing.”

Trish threw her hands
in the air dramatically and went to the desk. She grabbed a piece
of scrap paper and a thick marker and wrote in block letters,
“JASON WAS RIGHT”.

When she handed it to
him, he said, “I’m going to keep this, you know.” As he tucked the
note into his wallet, he admitted, “I understand what you’re
saying, and you’re probably right.”

Trish seized the marker
again and thrust it toward him.

He rolled his eyes and
said, “Put it away,” but she just grinned at him so he snatched it
out of her hand and tossed it onto the desk. “I promise to try to
keep a level head, okay?”

“It’s not your head I’m
worried about.”

“I promise to keep my
heart out of it as best I can too. Now please go tell Don that I’m
about to send both of you an email about my panel discussion and
suggest we check out this mall. That way it’s in the record, but I
don’t want him wondering what the hell I’m talking about and
sending me a suspicious reply.”

Trish groaned. “He
probably would, too. Fine. I’m going, but you calm down. If you’re
acting too giddy someone’s going to notice that too.”

“Fair enough.”

Trish left, wondering
petulantly why it should fall to her to have to manage the
emotional whims and social foibles of two such bizarre men.

* * *

By the night before
they were to leave, Jason’s mood had flipped back to worry and
desperate longing. He’d told Trish and Don to get lots of sleep but
failed to take the advice himself and instead went to the gallery
to sit gazing at the portrait some more.

Not long after he
arrived, Trish came in and said accusingly, “I thought you were
headed to bed.”

“By and by,” he said
quietly. Then he recited,

Longing is like the
Seed

That wrestles in the
Ground,

Believing if it
intercede

It shall at length be
found.

The Hour, and the
Clime —

Each Circumstance
unknown,

What Constancy must be
achieved

Before it see the
Sun!

Trish sat beside him.
“Who wrote that?”

“Dickinson. It seemed
apropos. She ought not to be trapped there a single extra moment,
let alone a day, before she can come forth to see the sun
again.”

Trish laughed. “‘Ought
not’? And ‘by and by’?”

“Hmm, what?”

“I can tell your head
is in the past when you get into the poetry and old-timey
talk.”

He tore his eyes away
from the portrait long enough to give Trish a puzzled look.

“Whenever you tell your
old stories or look at that picture or think about Gaia, your
British accent creeps back a little bit and you say things like
‘ought not’ instead of ‘shouldn’t’.”

He shook his head and
returned his gaze to the green eyes as he muttered, “Rubbish.”

“Sure, that refutes
it.”

“It’s perfectly
acceptable Queen’s English,” he protested.

“Sure, but which
queen?”

“I haven’t the foggiest
idea of what you’re on about.”

Trish laughed again,
patted his arm, and rose. “If you say so.” She left, calling, “Good
night!” behind her as she went.

Jason let out a long,
slow sigh. He rose as well, moving to stand directly in front of
the portrait. He caressed the brass nameplate that said, “Lady Rose
Davidson, 1894,” with his fingertips, lightly and
reverentially.

Please be her,
he thought.
Please.
He pressed his fingers against the name as if he
could thus send his thoughts to her.
I am coming for you, and I will make
everything better, I swear it. Be her and be all right.

There he remained until
he heard the grandfather clock in the library next door chime
eleven o’clock. Then he went upstairs for what he knew would be a
sleepless night.

* * *

They arrived in Seattle
without incident, and Jason appeared on the discussion panel to
great appreciation by the attendees, since he was well-respected in
the field but not commonly seen in public. That was deliberate, of
course; the fewer people who noticed his lack of aging, the longer
he could continue as Jason Truitt.

They spent the
remainder of that day preparing for their adventure and then went
to bed as early as possible as to facilitate a speedy start in the
morning.

The sun had only been
up for a short time when Don dropped Trish and Jason off in their
semi-disguised forms near a corporate vehicle rental facility
several miles away from the Hamdon site. Don went to park at the
mall and wait for them while Trish walked down the block to pick up
the second van. Once she had it, she drove back to the bus bench
where Jason sat waiting, looking like a dishevelled medical
resident. She then drove them to a strip mall that backed onto a
small field, on the other side of which was Hamdon BioTech.

When they were certain
nobody was watching, they slipped down the embankment and hurried
to the scattered trees at the side of the field. They made their
way as carefully as possible to a grove of trees behind the
research building’s closed loading dock. After analyzing the
company’s purchase habits and looking up their typical courier
schedule, Don had determined that this morning between 9:15 and
9:45 was the least likely time for anyone to be back there.

While hidden in the
trees, Trish used a phone they’d purchased anonymously for this
event to access the Trojan horse she’d set up in Hamdon’s
network.