Evolution (23 page)

“Okay, but remember how God got angry and started losing his temper? Earthquakes and floods and all kinds of destruction hurled against mankind?”

“You can’t do those things. I don’t know what you’re so worked up about.” Emily flapped her arms to her sides.

“It’s not those actions, Emi. I’m worried about how people see me. Just like how they saw God. I’m not going to be able to help anyone if they have some idea that I have those powers. The superhero comics weren’t any different. They had to hide their identities to go out in public.” Sara doubted Emily would ever understand.

“So you’re just going to leave it to me to be our public persona?”

“We couldn’t do any better. People love you—they always have. And the Tobes love you. You’re that New Testament God that just wants to love and be loved.” An old story line popped up in Sara’s mind, something about a good police officer and a bad one. The two together created a force the bad guys couldn’t resist.

“We’ll get you a hood and cape, and no one will recognize you,” Emily said. “I just want you to come back out into the world again. It’s really not so bad out there. We’ll bring Mom and have a girls’ day of it. Please don’t turn into Dad.” Emily would never give up. But she had a point. Sam hardly ever left his office except to sleep. Even then, there were nights he stayed up, poring over his charts. Something out there in space bothered him. It was so bad he’d blocked her from accessing that part of his mind.

* * *

T
he sun hurt
Sara’s eyes. She’d never adapted to it being directly overhead. Ed walked beside her, fully solid and visible just like any other person on the street. Her attention wandered. Alone in her office, or even with those who stopped by, she had mental control of her environment, all stimulations accounted for. But out here, she had to watch her step to avoid running into people.
I’m sorry I laughed at you, Ellie. This is harder than I remember.

It gets easier. At least, that’s what Emily says.
Ellie ran out of the Rendition Building to join the outing.

Materializing and dematerializing—though still easy enough to do—only drew attention to the Tobes as being nonhuman. They understood the dangers of appearing to have special abilities. Too bad Emily didn’t suffer from some extra power too. Sara shook the idea out of her head. The last thing she wanted was for her dear sister to suffer. “Where are we headed?”

Jess pointed toward Central Park. “I thought we’d wander along the lake. It reminds me of the one we used to play in on Chariklo. Now, if I could only get the city to allow skinny-dipping.”

Sara laughed, but it hadn’t been completely a joke. With the rest of the family attempting to solve the world’s problems, Jess had devoted herself to the foundation. That work had led her to city politics.

People were such a mystery to Sara. They didn’t agree on anything even when it was in their best interests. At least all Tobes could still reach a unanimous decision even if the process had gotten rockier with their newfound individuality.

Geese swam in the lake without a care as Sara walked along the water’s edge. She hesitated a step, letting the rest precede her, as a young girl came rushing up. But it wasn’t Sara she sought out. The girl’s small arms flung around Emily. “It’s been days.”

Emily patted the head covered in brown curls. “Where are your parents? You know better than to leave them.”

The girl pulled away to point down a row of benches. “They’re right there. When are you going to come to dinner?”

“Soon. This is my sister, Sara.”

Sara hadn’t quite cowered behind Jess, but she did experience that feeling of parental protection as she stepped around her mother and offered her hand to the little girl. “And what’s your name?”

“Zita.” The girl tilted her head at Sara. “Are you the sister that got kidnapped?”

At least she hadn’t referred to Sara knocking down the wall. “Yes, but that was over a year ago. You look too young to have remembered that.”

“I heard my parents talking to Emily. They said they were sorry you had to hide in your big building.” The girl had a disarming natural charm to her honesty.

The parents rushed up when they noticed their daughter talking to Sara. Their reaction was about what Sara had expected—no one wanted a lightning bolt coming out of the clear blue sky and hitting their child because she’d just shaken hands with some stranger. “Forgive Zita. She can be a little forward at times.”

“Nothing to worry about—she’s a sweet girl.” Sara wished she could sulk back to Rendition.

“We seldom worry about her these days. I guess we have you to thank for that. With the Tobes out in the open, it’s like she has guardian angels everywhere she goes. Funny thing, though, it’s not their extrahuman abilities that make her safer. They just wouldn’t let anything happen to our little girl. A person might stand around and do nothing if someone else is in trouble, but not a Tobe. Maybe it’s because they don’t have to worry about their own safety or because they know when someone’s really in danger and when it’s an act. I don’t know. I’m just grateful they’re out there for the people I love.” The girl’s father held her against his legs, but it wasn’t as much a protective stance as one of affection.

No one had mentioned Sara’s abilities. “You’re not afraid of me?” The question sounded silly as it passed her lips.

The mother tilted her head just as her daughter had done earlier. “Why would we? If I could have lent you my life force to help knock down that wall, I would’ve gladly, just like the Tobes. No matter what the church thought, kidnapping you was evil.”

“So you don’t believe in their cause?” Sara asked.

The mother stoked her daughter’s head. “I’d rather Zita didn’t grow up in that village of yours. I treasure her innocence even if it could be seen as ignorance. But I’d be no happier having her be a part of the church. Too much repression is worse than too much openness. Being somewhere in the middle means I don’t have to engage in the fight.”

Emily took Sara’s hand. “It’s a pretty common attitude. Demonstrations and religious zealots just interfere with people’s daily lives.”

Zita said, “Can Sara come to dinner too?”

“Of course, if she wants.” Her father looked at Sara. “We’d love to have you. Emily doesn’t make it over nearly enough.”

Emily pulled at Sara’s hand. “Ellie will let you know when we can make it over.”

Zita wasn’t the only person to greet Emily though she was the most unabashed in her approach. Many only gave Emily a polite nod, or smiling
hello
. By the time they’d reached the far end of the lake, Sara wondered what had made her sister such a superstar. “How is it they all know you?”

Emily gave her a sly smile. “Partly because I’m the sister of the famous Sara, but that’s only a small part. When we created the Privacy setting, we freed the Tobes to get to know people as equals. Look around, Ra.”

Sara thought she’d been doing that the entire walk. But at Emily’s insistence, she took a moment to observe the random interactions of those around her. For her, Tobes and people were easy to differentiate. She suspected those people with an active lens would likewise see the difference. But most had them set to Private, she noticed. Conversations sprung up all around her. With her increased awareness, she could see some of the social interactions had been going on much of the day with people dropping into the discussion or moving on. What really surprised her was the fact that a person need not know anyone in the group to feel at ease joining in. If interested in a topic, they just freely added their ideas. The whole scene reminded her of village life. “But why would those interactions have anything to do with Privacy?”

Ellie stood close to Sara. “Before the privacy setting, if I were working your lens, you might be conversing with me. For most people, it was more like we were working for them. Information would be fed to you about those around you. Questions would be answered. There just wasn’t a lot of need for person-to-person conversations. But people had grown accustomed to having those answers. So when we stopped providing them, they turned to each other. Now if a person is using the lens, like in that conversation group over there, we’ll give some information to one person and different information to someone else. We’re trying to use the lens to aid in the discussion instead of replacing it. Just watching people interact without our help, using the Privacy setting, has taught us things we never could learn on our own about how people interact.”

Sara turned to Emily. “And they credit you with that?”

“Both of us. But as you won’t leave your office, I end up being the face of this new social experiment.”

“And what about Dad?” Sara couldn’t imagine what people must think of that strange man—the truly reclusive founder of Rendition with his odd connection to these new beings.

Jess looked up toward the tallest building in New York. “They don’t know what to think of him.” She turned back to her daughters. “You may be able to straddle the two worlds—the village you grew up with and this new reality growing on Earth. Your father and I have never really been able to make that work for us.”

S
am shuffled
some screens full of figures to the side of his worktable, trying to make more room for the three-dimensional map of Jupiter’s moons. Bad news covered every flat surface of his office. He’d only half made sense of the chaos when Jess entered. Prep time was over.

Jess looked around at the nightmare of data. “You’ve been working on this for months.”

Sam suspected he should have taken a day during that time to clean and straighten up the monstrous space.

One entire wall lit up to display Dr. Shot in his office—in a very similar degree of disarray—on
Leviathan
. “We ready to make some sense of all this?”

That’d be nice—impossible, but nice.
Sam motioned Jess to one of the few chairs not covered in information. “We’ve been working through Dr. Shot’s data from his time rescuing the colonies after the solar-array disruption from the Jovian shadow.”

“That was a few years ago. You’re telling me all this crap is just a history lesson?” Jess asked.

“I only wish it were,” Dr. Shot said. “From up here, I’ve been able to keep tabs on our moon. The nuclear reaction is growing unstable. It was my hope that by studying what’s happening to the moon-suns around Jupiter, we might figure out what’s going on.”

“Start simple. I’m not as big a fan of your scientific speculations as Sam.” Jess lifted the nearest transparent screen filled with notes, frowned at its lack of clarity, and dumped it back on the pile.

Sam brought up a three-dimensional image of the moon. His office was beginning to look like an astronomy classroom. The real-time image showed streams of lava sputtering off the surface. “They didn’t dump just one kind of radioactive material on our moon. It would appear the differing components are fighting with each other.”

Jess shot him a sideways glance of annoyance. “You can be a little more technical.”

Dr. Shot started drawing on a screen that was mirrored on the view screen in Sam’s office. “We’d speculated that there was a connection between time, matter, and how fast an element was spun up. Specifically, that nuclear material didn’t spin as fast in time as stable elements. And as they spun down, the released black energy affected the stuff around them.”

“So?” Jess asked.

Dr. Shot drew a bunch more elements on his board, each spinning down at different rates. “The moon’s covered with all these fields of decaying material. Mostly from the Moons of Jupiter but also garbage Earth shot up there long ago. They’re all starting to interact with each other.”

“Still sounds like a chemistry experiment that’s gone bad,” Jess said.

It hadn’t started out as a big problem, but the moon had become a hot mess. So when Dr. Shot first started sharing his fears, Sam had experienced a very similar response as Jess.

“Very bad,” Sam said. “We don’t know where this ends up. But we’re seeing a chain reaction of events. A nuclear bomb the size of the moon isn’t going to leave Earth untouched.”

That got her attention. “It… could… explode?” Each word came out as its own unique thought.

“We don’t know,” Dr. Shot said. “That would be the worst-case scenario. Though even if it just sent hot lava spewing out into space, that’d raise havoc with the solar transfer array that’s still powering most of the solar system, threaten passing spacecraft, and potentially contaminate Earth.”

Jess motioned toward Sam’s Moons of Jupiter display. “And you think they can help?”

“Oh, God no,” Dr. Shot said. “They may be in worse shape than we are. Even if they have found a solution, it’s not like they’d freely share it with us. But either way, they have data we can use. We need to know what’s been happening to their moon-suns. They’re smaller than our moon, so they’d be less stable. Think of our solar system’s sun as the ultimate in stability—so big anything that’s shot off it returns to its surface and large enough to maintain a stable reaction, all in one continuous operation. The smaller the event, the less stable. So if our moon is showing signs of stress, their much smaller moons would be growing critical.”

“So we’re going to help them?” Jess didn’t sound enthusiastic.

“We may have to.” Sam hadn’t liked the idea any better than Jess when Dr. Shot first proposed it. “If it were just the corporations, I’d outfit
Leviathan
with her old military equipment and blow them out of the solar system.”

“But it’s not.” Jess was beginning to see the problem. “People will suffer, and we’d be looking at another interplanetary rescue. And I’m guessing the Tobes who live out there would be in worse shape.”

“And it’s the Tobes living on the Moons of Jupiter we need to contact.” Dr. Shot held up a pile of old-fashioned paperwork. “If there’s a solution, they’ll know it. If there’s not, they’ll have all the data on what’s going on and what was done to create this mess. Either way, we need them.”

Joshua had been silently working through even more equations. “Don’t forget about the divide.”

“Sorry, right,” Sam said. “We still can’t contact the Tobes out there, but what we do know is they’re closer to slave labor than anything resembling free beings.”

Jess nodded. “I can imagine. Take us out of the equation, and the board of Rendition would have turned all Earth’s Tobes into little more than slaves as well.”

“It’s not just a moral issue,” Dr. Shot added. “We need them free so they’ll communicate with us unimpeded by the moon corporations.”

Jess stood up to get a better look at the three-dimensional representations of the Jovian system. Miniature satellites mixed in with the sixty-plus moons. “And that brings us full circle. We need the solar transfer array to reestablish contact with the Moons of Jupiter due to the communication network that piggybacks onto the power transfer. Without that, the Tobes out there are cut off just as the Moons’ corporations intended.”

“It’d be helpful to talk to them directly, but it’s not completely necessary,” Dr. Shot said. “We can get the data back here in other ways, but the solar-array network would do a lot of good.” He stopped short of dropping the next bombshell.

It would be better if Jess could work it out on her own, but Sam had prepared his speech just in case.

“So if we’re not outfitting
Leviathan
for a full frontal assault, what’s the plan?” Jess asked, much to Sam’s chagrin.

“Freeing the Tobes—hell, making contact with them—isn’t all that easy…” Sam began.

Jess closed her eyes tight as if the answer had hit her in the head. “We have to go out there. Just the two of us because any more would raise suspicion. You’re still god of the Tobes as far as they’re concerned, so hopefully they’ll listen to you. I get it now.”

Sam nodded reluctantly. “If there was another way—”

“You’d have found it.” Jess spread her hands out to indicate all the data spread around Sam’s office. “I guess much of the last few months have been spent trying to find any other solution. How dire is the situation?”

Dr. Shot glanced back at some paperwork that had managed to acquire dust. “My original studies had to do with purchases of cancer medication as a precursor to the actual catastrophe. I found many more incidents of depression than cancer however. Not that the research is conclusive, but Earth has begun to show early stages of the same increase in ailments.”

“Any idea on how long we have to sneak into a hostile system, free a population spread over countless moons, convince them to betray their masters, and figure out some way to relay the information back to Earth?” Jess asked.

Sam only wished she were being sarcastic. “Unfortunately, no. But it’s not the type of operation we’ll be doing quickly. We may be out there for years.”

“And if we don’t go out there, or don’t succeed, we’ll be looking at having to rescue Earth the way we did Chariklo?” Jess asked.

Dr. Shot set his work aside. “I’ll continue working on the problem from here. I’ve been known to have my moments, so there’s still hope this feeble mind, with the help of Earth’s Tobes, may yet find an answer. If I can’t, we’ll start work on plan B, which is pretty close to what you’ve described. But instead of ten thousand people, we’ll be looking at ten billion.”

Jess turned to Joshua. “How would we even attempt to save the Tobes?”

That was the big question. It had taken hundreds of years to create the mess of networked communication that surrounded the planet. They couldn’t exactly download all of Earth’s technological network, which was the life blood of all third-generation Tobes, into a handful of computers. “Yet another unknown piece of the puzzle.”

* * *

“
I
feel
like we’re constantly leaving you,” Jess sobbed as Sara held her tight.

They hadn’t laid out the whole story, only enough to convince the twins that their parents had to leave. Sara had worried about how much detail they needed to share. Of course, Sara knew more than she wanted to, but the real problem was Emily. She’d have a major freak-out if she knew all the dangers.

Sara pressed her hand to the back of Jess’s head as they hugged, just as Jess had done countless times to her as a child. “You’re not leaving us. Love doesn’t leave. Both Emi and I are proud to be your daughters, children of the solar system’s most famous adventurers. And it’s not like you’ve ever left us alone.”

Having to console her mother for taking off on another quest only managed to lock more of Sara’s emotions into the box she kept hidden in her heart. Not that the trip was unnecessary. None of them were. And she appreciated the sentiment of parents not wanting to be separated from their children, but at some point it just got silly. Her mom and dad were saviors of the solar system, not stay-at-home parents.

At eighteen, Sara was ready to drive Rendition on her own. Not that she’d tell that to her father. And the training wheels were still on, of course. Between Lud, Joshua, and Ellie, she’d be more scrutinized than ever.

Sara pulled her mind out of the future as Jess turned to hug Emily.

Sam was always more pragmatic. “As far as the company’s concerned, I’m not going to tell you what to do and what not to do. As if I could. You’ve been in enough board meetings to know what they think. Don’t let them bully you. As for what I’ll be doing, stay in touch with Dr. Shot. He’s going to need your help with the Tobes. You understand their communication better than anyone. If we can establish some kind of technological bridge between the Tobes of Earth and those of the Moons, we’ll need you to act as translator.”

“I know, Dad, we’ve been over this plenty of times.” Sara pulled her father into her arms. Worry for him was like gravity—inescapable. At least he understood what she was up against and had the good sense not to offer lame advice.

Don’t come out on some foolish attempt to rescue me, whatever happens. Promise.

He hadn’t said anything about Jess, just him.
I promise.
She’d tightly guarded any thoughts of joining her parents, but not tightly enough apparently. Though a rescue was the kind of action her father would suspect of his powerful daughter.

* * *

E
ach day before the grand
, secret departure was agony for Sara. Having to look sorry that her parents were leaving, being strong for Emily, reassuring board members she was up to the task—it all felt like wearing masks. But how did she feel deep down? She just wanted to get on with it, whatever that might be.

However, when her parents finally walked out into the living room, wearing their space leathers, the sight shook Sara to her core. This wouldn’t be just another adventure. It was no luxurious trip aboard
Persephone
. Their wealth would do them no good and might even cause unwanted attention, and the single act of crossing the Moons of Jupiter corporations could easily spell the doom of both Sam and Jess.

Sara held them both tight. Certain things would never be the same again. She watched through a haze of emotions as they hugged Emily, gave Ellie and Joshua final instructions, and pulled their hoods up before leaving the Rendition Building.

They couldn’t even risk one of Rendition’s comfortable transports for the trip up into space. Pirates would be watching—pirates whose help they needed, who’d be their circuitous transportation, who’d be sure to abandon them if the Moons learned of their identity. The whole plan sounded like folly to Sara. But as she sought out some alternative, she began to see the true nature of the problem, which was so big it would be pulling her and Emily into the abyss as well. She needed time to prepare her sister.