The Seeds of Time (19 page)

His eyes were open now. He looked at Clio. “I don’t want you as a prisoner, Clio. God knows I don’t want that.”

“Then let me go, Teeg. I want to go home. I don’t want to be here.”

“You think you don’t want to be here. That’ll change. People can get used to all kinds of things they thought they couldn’t stand. Like me and Recon, the Service. I love to fly, but I hated to take crap from people. The rules and regs, the yessirs. Watching stupid people give orders. But I got used to it, so it was a way of life. Same as this, it’s a way of life. Take some getting used to, that’s all.” He paused, as though expecting a rebuttal.

Then he continued. “See, the thing is—and you don’t know this yet—it’s not safe for you, back there, Clio. You never knew it, but you were a marked woman in Recon.” He grinned, seeing her eyebrow flick up.

“Brisher was on to you, woman. Could have hauled you in at any time, but I talked him out of it. He thought you were a menace. You and your pills, jeopardizing the missions. Yes, pills. Your little secret just wasn’t very secret, you know? You were watched every minute. Brisher made sure of that. He didn’t like you, Clio, if you didn’t know. But I spoke up for you. Me. And Biotime held off. See, I’ve been watching you. Biotime’s had me watching you for two, nearly three years now. It’s just a little something extra I do for them. They figured I was the only one on the crew they could trust to keep an eye on you. Russo’s too dumb. Hillis, biased, of course. Posie, too obvious. They needed somebody neutral, somebody sharp. And I enjoyed it. You’ve sort of been my hobby for a long time. And
Brisher paid me real good. Of course, it’s not Biotime that cares what you do, so long as you can Dive. It’s DSDE cares what you do. That night you went to Zebra’s? Pretty stupid. DSDE picked Zebra up last time you saw her. DSDE has got hold of lots of people through you. See, I watch you and report to Brisher, and he reports to DSDE. Biotime and DSDE are scratching each other’s backs. DSDE let Biotime keep you on the theory that eventually you’d lead them to your friends. They know you’re no lesbo, no underground freak. But they know your family was. Sooner or later you were bound to make contact. But damned if I ever saw when you did. Maybe I’m just a lousy spy. Or maybe you were innocent. Anyways. Doesn’t matter now.”

He clambered up, walked to the edge of the rock shelf, and took a long piss into the river.

Nausea welled up into Clio’s throat. DSDE was watching her. Had been, all these years. She started to shake.
Get a grip, girl. Now, more than ever, get a grip
. She eyed the rifle where Teeg had left it. Teeg turned around, buttoning up, and laughed a little.

“Go for it, girl. I’m just waiting for you to give me a good workout. I don’t want to hurt you. But if you give me a reason, see, I’ll beat the shit out of you. Pay you back for a few things. I should pay you back anyway. But I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t enjoy hurting women. But I’ll do it if I have to, by God.”

Teeg walked back to the rifle. He leaned against the rock, stared off at a point above Clio’s head, summoning up his story, her story, the rest of it.

As bad as the story was, the thing Clio hated the most was hearing it from Teeg. Hated his calm, storytelling voice, shredding up her life. Hated hearing it from Harper Teeg.

And he went on: “Your father, Kevin Speery-Hall—who wasn’t really your father, as we all know—took you in, gave you his daughter’s name. So your name isn’t Antoinette Speery-Hall. They never told me what your real name is. Anyway, this Kevin is just null. A minor player. Doesn’t know anybody. But your mother, now. She was a ringleader.”

He paused long enough to a make her look him in the eye. He wanted her to watch him while he said the next part, Clio knew, which is why she avoided looking at him. To prevent him from saying it. But finally, she had to look at him, had to hear.

He nodded at her. “Oh, yeah, we know all about your mother. And what-was-her-name, her lesbo lover. Elsie. In a way I feel sorry for you, growing up in that kind of place. They killed hundreds of people, you realize that? They spread the Sickness with every fugitive they brought in. Those people belonged in quarries. Only thing that keeps the epidemic under control. You get all those infected people scurrying through the underground, contacting dozens of people along the way … it just spreads it everywhere. And you thought they were heroes.”

Clio’s eyes were locked on his now, waiting for the words to keep coming out, for the story to spill out. The whole story. Now she would know the whole story. God, even if it was from Teeg, she wanted to know.

“They’re dead, Clio.”

Clio was shaking her head, even as the words came out of his mouth.

“Yes, and they deserved it. You might of loved them, but they betrayed you.”

A lie. Now he would say any monstrous thing. She was shaking her head. No.

“That night that you killed the DSDE agent—or your brother did, they never figured out which of you—that night, they killed Elsie and your mother. They tortured them to get information, and they spilled everything they knew, eventually. They betrayed you, they betrayed everyone they could think of. And when DSDE was finished, they killed them. That was a mistake. Because it later turned out they gave made-up names, and it all led nowhere. And then it took four years for DSDE to find you, after they lost you that night in the field outside of Granville. Well, when you signed up with Biotime, they were on to you from the beginning. Waiting for you to lead them to bigger fish. Which you never have, Clio. A big disappointment. So after this
mission, Brisher was going to hand you over. You’re burned out, girl. You were dog meat, after this mission.”

Clio turned toward the rock wall, the tears coming fast now, gritting her teeth to cry silently. “And Petya?” she asked.

“Your brother? The half-wit? That’s the funny part. He’s the only one that got away. They never found him. That I know of.”

He left her alone then. She curled up into a ball on the warm rock shelf and let Teeg’s story sink in. The further in it sank, the more pain she uncovered, and the more her tears welled up from her chest. She cried until her throat was sore, cried as though it was twenty-seven years of crying all coming at once, which maybe it was. Finally, when her body was empty of moisture, she curled tighter into a ball and hid her face in the shadow of the rock.

An hour might have passed. Teeg was sitting beside her, his arm over her back. She stirred, and he offered her his canteen. Then he left the rock shelf for a few minutes. When he returned, he had taken off his shirt, and carried it in a bunch in his hands. It was wet. He began cleaning off her face, pressing the cool cloth against her eyes, rubbing her neck and bare arms. She let herself be bathed.

Teeg spoke gently. “That world is gone now, Clio. DSDE will never follow you here. You’re not worth it, not to them. That world and its sickness, its ugliness, its rules and little games they made us play, they can’t control us anymore, babe. We’re free. We’re in charge here. This is our world. You can be a queen if you want to. I’ll treat you like a queen. And the others, Posie, Meng, and the others, they’ll do what you say, because they’ll do what
I
say.”

He spread out his shirt to dry. “We lost Shannon. That’s really tragic. Now we’ve just got two women. I could kill Liu for that. He deserves to die. But we need everybody we’ve got. You and Meng, you’ll be treated like queens. Your babies will be the most important things in the world. Literally. They’ll be the start of a new people, a new society. We won’t need DSDE or Biotime or any other bureaucracy, just ourselves. Like it was meant to be.”

Clio got up and walked into the cave to shut off the
spewing of Teeg’s words. Within a few yards the light bled away, leaving her sightless in the dark. It felt good. Like pulling the covers over your head when the world pressed too close, when senses were too keen, when your brain picked up the static of events, when the world just kept on grating inside your head.

Here it was cool and black. She turned her back on the bright gash of the cave opening, faced the dark. Teeg had said the cave went far back, farther than he knew. You could walk a long way back, perhaps down as well. They said that rivers carved caves like this, wending their paths through stone, pulled by forces of the planet. Stand still enough and you feel it yourself, tugging at your limbs, pulling you downward. A destiny of sorts. It was gravity that Clio felt now, standing in the great cave. A force of the natural world, the prime force, or one of them. In the face of that, her own motives hardly mattered, were, in fact, puny. Had chased her all her life. Hide. Hide, they told her. Hide what you are. We’ll hide the window in the closet, hide the closet door behind the great chest of drawers, hide the sick ones, hide their graves.

The night they buried Lenny Holt, and Petya had finished off the grave with pebbles and brush, Elsie cried. Lenny had only been with them for three weeks, but Elsie cried like she always did. And Mother, like always, didn’t
.
Quiet, Mother always was at the burials. She never believed in the afterlife. There was nothing after life. Pie in the sky bye and bye, was what Mother had to say about religion. So she was quiet most buryings
.

But as they stood over Lenny’s grave, watching Petya make it invisible, she said, looking at Clio, “Don’t put me in the ground. Just scatter me somewheres. It’ll be up to you, someday. Just don’t put me in the ground.”

This was the closest Mother ever came to admitting that anything mattered, after death. She looked over at her mother, where the moonlight brightened half her face. Clio felt like saying, But if you’re dead, you won’t care, right? Then she caught Elsie’s quick look. She aimed an impish
smile at Clio, saying clearly, Leave it be, leave it be. Clio smiled back
.

Then Petya said, “Nobody can tell, can they?” And he stepped back and looked at the secret, rocky ground
.

Clio turned back to the hole of light, squinting. She didn’t have to go out there, to Teeg, to his vision of the world. She could turn and walk now, follow the cave back into the womb of the world where it was quiet, dark, embracing. Buried from view. The third choice, after DSDE and Teeg’s world. It was still death, like the other two choices, but it had the advantage of immediacy. And it was clean, like gravity.

But she had assisted at too many burials to add her own. Something about the ease of it, the giving in. Not her heritage, giving in. Mom and Elsie, they had their secrets, but they kept on fighting. Going underground was about resistance, not running. All these years it was their lesson, the one they never spoke, and it had taken her this long to learn it.

She walked out onto the hot shelf of rock.

Teeg looked startled to see her. “I was just getting worried about you. Try to get out the back way?”

“Yes,” Clio said. “There isn’t any.”

He raised his eyebrows. “How far back did you go?”

“Pretty far.”

He watched her a while, frowning. “Well, I should be upset with you. Trying to escape.”

Clio held his gaze, feeling calm, utterly calm.

“But you came back. So I give you credit for that.”

“Yes. I’m back.”

He looked at her, watching for something. Tears, perhaps.

“Well, let’s get going, then. We’re going back for the others.” He stopped, still watching her. His eyes narrowed. “You ready?”

A small smile edged at the sides of her mouth. Small, but genuine. “Yeah, Teeg. I’m ready,” she said.

A heavy mist sifted down around Clio and Teeg as they thrust their way along a narrow animal path winding through the forest. From the jungle crown, water streamed down the ropy vines in fast-motion stalactites. The rain on the canopy set up a roaring percussion that reverberated around them, as though the forest itself were a vast drum.

There was no talking over that noise, not even for Teeg. This gave Clio a chance to think. To plan her strategy. The one stupid thing Teeg had done was to bring his guns. He didn’t need them. But she did. Getting those guns became her sole purpose. Get them before they arrived in camp. Do it soon, in the jungle; maybe her only chance. Of course, he would expect her to try to escape. He would be alert, paranoid as hell, every minute.

Paranoid. Clio knew what that was like. Before every Dive. Your eyes so wide open, it feels like your eyelids are torn off. Clio’s hand went to her vest pocket. They were still there. Her pills. Make you paranoid as hell.

She patted her vest pocket again.

The decision was easy. The most important decisions of her life, she had always made spur of the moment.

“I’m hungry, Teeg.”

“Don’t lie to me, Clio. I can tell when you lie.”

“I haven’t eaten since last night. I’m hungry.”

He looked at her a few moments, searching her face for lies. Finally, he said, “OK, then. Food for the lady.”

Teeg slipped the pack off his back and rummaged.

“Water,” Clio said, holding out her hand for the canteen.

He tossed it. Then he pulled out some meat tubes and his knife, concentrating on his task.