The Seeds of Time (62 page)

Ashe moved closer, and put his hand on her shoulders. “I know.”

“He saved my life.” Feet still glued down, Ashe still pulling on her arm, pushing her toward the door.

“Maybe he did. He’s still poison.”

“No.”

“Yes! He’s used and betrayed everybody who’s come in his path. You, your brother, even his own wife for godsakes.”

Clio turned around, eyes snapped wide. “What do you mean? That wasn’t his fault. He grieves for her, he worships her.…”

A beat. Ashe was looking at her. “Jesus, Clio. Is that what he told you, that he worships her?”

Something about that look in Ashe’s eyes. Clio stared back.

“Is that what he told you?”

“He told me that there was an assassination attempt on his life—the Old Greens, or someone.” Still, Ashe was gazing at her with that cold, dark silence.

Clio stammered on: “Only she was in the car, not him.”

“That’s bullshit. Suzanne Tandy wasn’t killed by a car bomb. I thought you knew what he did to her.”

Clio stepped back from him, but Ashe closed the gap. “You’re going to listen to this, by God. You listen: She had a nephew, secretly gay, he was getting by with it. He contracted the Sickness, and Suzanne somehow got him to the underground rather than see him shipped to a quarry. She found a contact in the underground and the nephew made it. Suzanne didn’t.” Ashe looked at her beneath his dark brows. “Your Colonel Tandy found out and flew into a rage. He beat the truth out of her. Then he personally drove her to a quarry and interred her there for betraying him. Afterward, he expunged every last trace of her possessions and personal history from private and public record.”

“You can’t know that! How could you possible know that?”

“Clio. We have a dossier on most of your VIPs. Like I said, it’s war.” He moved in close, gripped her upper arm, told out slowly: “She was a fragile woman. She died within six months.”

Clio pulled her arm away, backing against the cabin door. “I don’t believe you. He adores her.”

He snorted. “Talk about a fantasy. He murdered her. She went renegade on him. It nearly cost him his career. He was finally cleared of charges stemming from the nephew’s quarry-dodging. But he never saw her again.”

Clio closed her eyes, trying to absorb it. “He flew into a rage …”

“And beat her into a confession.”

“He put her in a quarry …”

“Took her straight to the Issaquah Quarry, not even a smaller, more humane facility. Took her to the camp of death you know so well.”

“She died there …” Clio squeezed the words out, looking at them, hanging in front of her.

“Like a bird in an oil spill. A nasty, dirty death. Do you want the details?”

“No.”

Clio stared past Ashe to the bulkhead behind him. The rivets marched along the panels in lockstep, holding the cabin in place, stitching the ship together like Ashe’s words stitched together his telling. It was the plain truth. Tandy’s story was a fantasy. No, a plain lie. Just your average, daily, evil lie.

“He lied to me,” she said. “All lies, all of it.” She closed her eyes, trying to cool them, trying to stop them from leaking. To be made such an utter fool of, to be such a pathetic, foolish thing. “God, what an utter fool.”

“He’s a master, Clio. Don’t kick yourself.”

“He never loved her,” Clio said, opening her eyes to gaze at the ship bulkhead, that simple, predictable, physical thing.

“Why does it matter so much, Clio?”

Clio turned to look at Ashe, into his eyes. “It doesn’t. Anymore.”

She could feel emotion draining from her body through a hole in her side, like a boil subsiding from a lancing. She felt the warmth trickle out.

“Are you OK?”

“We don’t have time for this, Timothy.”

“No. But are you OK?”

“Yeah.” She turned toward the door, but he spun her around to face him.

“Can you go through with this?”

She took in a cleansing breath. Remarkably, her lungs
held it, despite the tatters of her insides. “Yeah,” she said. “I can do it.”

Ashe raised an eyebrow.

“I can do it. I’ve put my mind to it. OK?”

Ashe nodded. “OK. Then let’s hurry.”

Clio looked at her watch. Ten minutes. Still time. They pushed out the door and into the corridor, headed for the bridge, in slow motion, as in a dream of doomed escape. Ashe leaned heavily on Clio’s arm, stomping his feet to find the deck plates, while Clio steered him down the long, long crew deck, stretching like taffy to the tiny hatch to mid-decks.

In the rush into Dive, no one had cleaned up the remains of Licht’s bloodstains on the bulkhead. Now Clio and Ashe stumbled toward this blotch outside medlab like sacrificial heroine and hero to the labyrinth of the minotaur. Licht rose up to prevent them, tissue-thin in the way of ghosts, warning them of the futility of their venture.
Doomed
, he said.
Doomed, Clio. Like me, like me
. He reached for them as they clattered past, but Clio set her jaw. “Out of my fucking way, you Nazi,” she said, bursting through his insubstantial form, and his prophecy, all at once.

“He’s dead, Clio,” Ashe said, noting her glance at the bloodstains.

“No, he’ll never be dead. He’s eternal, like Tandy. They endure, they reincarnate.” She helped him to negotiate the hatch ladder. Ashe’s feet fumbled to find the rungs. “Hurry,” she prompted, clambering down after him.

They plunged down mid-decks, down past the galley, then up, up the ladder to flight deck and officers’ quarters. Clio went first, then reached down, giving Ashe a hand.

The Klaxon screamed through the dead silence.

Clio’s scalp rippled under the searing blare. Coming out of Dive, oh holy shit. “God, Timothy,” she said. “We’re not going to make it.”

“Yes we are!” He struggled up, hauling himself to his feet. “Run for it, Clio!”

She raced down the short corridor to Tandy’s cabin,
then stopped short and softly opened the door, closing it as softly, and moved to the sideboard.

From behind her, she heard: “So it’s you, Clio.”

She turned, and Tandy was there, his form dark but recognizable, the trim build, the quiet rootedness of him, even in the dim lens of her eye and the darkness of the room. Clio’s tongue clogged her throat, barring her answer.

“I’m glad it is,” he said. “How did we do?” He turned up the lights and went back to the sleeping nook. Clio heard water running. She darted to the sideboard, opened the smooth, black drawer, and withdrew the gun, stuffing it in her pocket. Tandy came out again, hair neatly combed.

“If you mean who tried to break in,” she managed to say, “I saw no one.”

Tandy gazed a moment at her, head cocked a fraction to the side. “Good,” he said. “That’s good. Then we’ve ditched our Nianist spy in the jungle, eh?”

“Yes. Home free, looks like.” She locked her knees to keep them from trembling.

Tandy crossed the room, passing her, and poured himself a drink at the sideboard. “I don’t for a minute think we’re home free,” he said, “not for a minute.” He tossed off the drink, then turned and leaned against the sideboard, empty glass held in his hand, carefully, as though still savoring the bouquet. “You won’t let down your guard, Clio.” A statement.

“Nosir.”

“They will be relentless.”

“They’ll follow us. You expect a fight.”

“Yes. One of them may even be on board this very minute. I trust no one.”

But you trust me
seemed to hang in the air between them. The gun bulged in Clio’s pocket, surely visible, weighing down her flight jacket. She kept her eyes firmly on Tandy, her lips tilted in what she hoped was a relaxed half smile.

He seemed to pick up her thought. “Not entirely true, eh? I gave
you
a gun, didn’t I? And, in fact,
you
could be the
Nian.” He emitted a silent laugh. “Clio! That was a joke. A poor one. I apologize.”

Her taped-on smile must have fallen off her face. Now she waited for him to turn his back to her, to give her a chance to pull the gun out of her pocket without catching it on the fabric of her flight suit.

“The Nians are alien, Clio. They look like us, but they are not like us. They are composed of an unnatural biology—as is their ship.”

“Their ship?” Clio said, stalling.

“Yes. The ship is theirs. The crashed ship. Harper Teeg told me that it wasn’t being invaded by jungle, Clio. It was composed of the jungle in the first place. It was a Niang creation. Wherever the Nians come from, they are the most dangerous of alien races. They pass for human, but they are not human and they can destroy us.” He walked to the great curved viewports, gazing out. “I saw one of them kill Captain Pequot, Clio. It sickened me.”

He was quiet a moment. He turned to face her. His eyes darted to the gun in her hand.

The look on his face. Wincing, as though warding off a blow. “Oh Clio,” he said. “Not you. Not you.”

“Feel betrayed, do you?”

He started to speak, stopped. Shook his head slowly. “Oh Clio,” he said again. “How did they get to you? What did they have to offer?” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his voice was steady. “You always loved Niang. I should have known.”

His face had fallen into a deeper tracery of lines, making the forehead wave of his hair seem a mimicry of youth. “Where are your accomplices, Clio? Your vested, crystal-studded Nians with the killing hands? Where are they, Clio? Or are you alone on this ship?”

When she breathed, air entered the cold of her breast. All cold inside. “I’m not alone,” she said. “I have plenty of help. Just now I have a job to do and I’m in a hurry.”

“What did they offer you, Clio?”

She shook her head pityingly. “My freedom, for starters.”

“Where can you possibly be free among them? Freedom is a state of mind, Clio. Which of us is free to do exactly what we please?”

“You are.”

“Clio. I’m a colonel in the U.S. Army. Who is less free than a link in the chain of command?”

“You are free to be in the army or not. To travel where you will. To openly oppose your enemies. I’ve had none of those things. See the difference?”

“Clio, I …”

She stopped him. “Problem is, you don’t use words to say anything. You use them to be sure nothing is said. I’m tired of your words.”

Softly, he said, “What did they offer you that I couldn’t?”

“You don’t listen, Tandy. Listen now: Freedom. My freedom. And the truth.”

“The truth?” he said.

Clio stepped backward to the table by the couch, snatched the silver-framed portrait and tossed it carelessly to Tandy, who caught it. “The truth about your wife who you murdered.”

He peered at her out of narrow eyes.

“Why did you let me Dive this ship, Tandy? Why did you rescue me from the quarry? Was it your way of making amends? Put one in, take one out? Only it doesn’t work that way, you can’t even things up like that. The one who died there, your wife, she
mattered
. And Rita and her baby mattered, who you shoved aside like they were nothing in your grand scheme of things.”

Very quiet now, his voice barely a murmur above the muffled hum of the ship: “She mattered to me. More than you’ll ever know. I loved her. I love her still. You don’t understand how it was, I don’t know what they told you …”

“The truth.”

“The truth! Their version.”

“I’m not interested in
versions
. I’m not interested in
your spin on this, Tandy. You murdered her, betrayed your own wife, then kept her picture on display for sympathy. You disgust me.”

“Not true, not true. I keep her picture to remember how she was, before she threw me away for Robert—her nephew. They told you it was her nephew? He was dying, Clio, you see? He was beyond help, yet she threw me away for him. She searched my private papers, my private files for information on the underground, then took him there. All behind my back, without the least trust that I would have helped her …”

“Helped her!”

“Helped her, yes. Helped her to see the larger good.”

“Your good …”

“No, the
larger good
. It’s what I’ve tried to help you see, Clio. To see beyond the individual, beyond personal loss. We all have losses—you think I haven’t had losses?—but to rise above them, that’s our duty, Clio. Don’t you see?” He was beseeching her now, but his words slipped from her icy brow. Ice, all ice now.

“I thought you saw,” he finished in a whisper.

“You know what I see? I see a petty tyrant, spouting ‘the end justifies the means.’ ‘The stars are the future!’ For the
stars
you were willing to exploit a down-on-her-luck Dive pilot. For the
stars
you yanked my brother from whatever peace he’d found and held him hostage against me. For the
stars
you left Rita and her child to the revenge of the quarry guards. Where are they now, Tandy? Ever do a follow-up call?”

“The stars are your calling too, Clio.”

Clio nodded. “Maybe they are. But Earth matters, Tandy. That’s the part you don’t get. Earth matters. You can’t pick and choose. What’s here is what matters, you can’t talk your way out of what’s here, what’s in front of you, what’s in your care. She was in your care. I was in your care. You used us.” She couldn’t stop the torrent of words. His betrayals were many, she had to list them all. “And the antidote to the Sickness …”

His eyes flicked up to meet hers.

“Yes, I know about that too, how you all give out the cure to your favorites, and keep it from the rest. Guess I was a favorite for a while, huh? Those little red ‘vitamin’ pills that you had me take. Because I’m infected, aren’t I? From the quarry, I’m infected.”

“Clio, we’ll save you. It’s not too late. The pills …”

She interrupted. “I don’t care about your freeping pills, Tandy. Keep your antidote.”

He remained silent for a long few seconds, a small, dismissive smile poking the side of his face. Then he said: “I was wrong about your name, wasn’t I, Clio? You never saw greatness in yourself, like the Egyptian queen. I had you all wrong.”

“Yeah, you had me all wrong.”

A wistful nod. “Not like Cleopatra, then.”

“Cleopatra to your Anthony?” She had seen the old flat-movie too. “No, not like her. And not a fallen angel, either.”