Lovelock (3 page)

“There she is,” said Carol Jeanne. “Lovelock found her.” As if any one of the others understood how much it meant to her to see Irene this last time.

With me sitting on her shoulder, of course, Carol Jeanne was as easy to spot from a distance as Irene was in her habit. We hadn’t gone two steps toward her when Irene stood and raised her arm in salute. At that, Carol Jeanne lost all restraint and ran toward her. I knew enough to climb down from her shoulder and cling to her back, out of the way. Out of sight. Carol Jeanne and Irene would be more free with each other if I was invisible. But I could see and hear
them
, for this was one of those moments I was there to preserve.

A big, showy embrace—and then the two of them were suddenly shy. Neither knew how to say farewell. Neither was willing to be the first to cry.

“Come with me,” Carol Jeanne said. “We can find you a place.” I knew that she did not expect Irene to change her mind. It was her oblique way of begging Irene to forgive her for leaving.

Irene only shook her head.

“I know your covenant is for a lifetime,” said Carol Jeanne, “but don’t you think you can serve God out there, too? Don’t you think people will need you there?” And then, her voice breaking a little, she added the words that were hardest to say. “Don’t you think
I’ll
need you?”

Irene smiled wanly. “I’m going to live the years that God gives me, in the place where he put me.”

I could see that Carol Jeanne took that hard, as if it were a criticism of the colonization voyage itself. I knew Irene well enough to understand that she didn’t mean it that way, but that was how Carol Jeanne heard it because of her own sense of guilt about leaving her sister. “If God created a universe where relativity works,” said Carol Jeanne, “you can hardly blame us for traveling to the places God put within our reach.”

Irene shook her head. “I know you’re doing what you were born to do, Jeannie. Just because I can’t bring myself to leave doesn’t mean that when I’m old, I won’t be glad to think of you out there somewhere, still young and happy and looking forward to your life’s work. Maybe God meant you to stretch time and travel to the stars and live for centuries after I’m dead. Maybe I just don’t want to put off my climb up Jacob’s ladder.” She made a try at laughing, but it was a feeble chuckle that fooled no one. And because Irene had actually mentioned death, Carol Jeanne finally lost her composure—not completely, but enough that tears started to flow.

Irene raised her arm and put her left hand on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder. The flowing sleeve of her habit looked like an angel’s wing. This was the last time the two sisters would touch each other, or see each other, or hear one another speak.

“After all, Jesus himself chose not to cheat death,” Irene added.

Irene had meant this innocently—hadn’t she tied her life to Jesus?—but again, Carol Jeanne interpreted her words as criticism. “We aren’t
cheating
death, Irene.” Her voice sounded hesitant and unconvincing. “My life will be no longer than yours. It will only seem longer to me because you could have gone with me and you didn’t.”

Irene looked away for a long moment. When she faced Carol Jeanne, there were tears on her face, too.

“Don’t you think I
want
to stay with you?” she asked. “You’re the only people I love—you and Lydia and Emmy. Even Lovelock—in a way, he’s family, too.”

That was nice.

“But my work is here. And as crazy as it sounds, I feel as if God is here. Even though I know that he’ll be with you too, I wouldn’t know how to find him out there. I can’t leave God, not even for you.”

Carol Jeanne answered quietly. “It was unfair of me to ask.”

“But I’m glad you did,” said Irene. “It will comfort me when I’m lonely for you, knowing how much you wanted me with you.”

They embraced, so suddenly that I couldn’t get my tail out of the way. In a way, then, Irene’s arm included me in the hug. I looked at her face—only inches away from mine, now—to see if she noticed me. She did: She opened her eyes, and despite her tears managed to wink at me and smile a little.

I put my hands on her cheeks and gave her a wide-mouthed kiss on the lips. She kissed me back, squeezing her own lips together as though she were kissing a small child. Then she lifted her arm enough that I could pull my tail out of the embrace.

Carol Jeanne must have taken that release of pressure as a sign that the embrace was over; she started to pull away. But I could not let that happen, not so soon. I scrambled to their shoulders and held them together, my hands firm on their shoulders. They laughed at me as they renewed the embrace, but I knew how soon their trembling turned from laughter to silent weeping.

I held them together there until I could see Mamie bustling over, no doubt to “cheer them up.” I knew Carol Jeanne would not want to be caught so emotionally exposed, so I chattered softly. She took the cue—probably without even realizing I had given it—and pulled back, drying her eyes on her sleeve. Irene, of course, had a handkerchief. She was prepared for emotion; Carol Jeanne was always taken by surprise.

Then I turned around on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder and glared at Mamie. She looked at my bared teeth and for a moment seemed to catch on to the idea that her intrusion might not be welcome. At least she paused in her headlong rush.

Oblivious to Mamie, Carol Jeanne spoke again to Irene. “I guess I can’t expect you to write.”

“I can, the whole time you’re in solar orbit. And I’ll pray for you, too, all my life. Of course, a few weeks into your real journey, I’ll be dead of old age. Then you’ll be on your own.”

“On the contrary. Then you’ll watch over me. Then I’ll know you’re taking care of me, protecting me.”

“It’s the saints who get to do that,” Irene said. “But wouldn’t it be wonderful if I
could?
I’d watch over you, and Lydia, and Emmy, and even Lovelock, until you joined me in heaven.”

I chattered at that—the particular sound that I knew they interpreted as laughter.

“God knows you,” Irene said to me. “Don’t you doubt it.”

I had my own ideas about what God, if he existed, must think of
me
. If he had wanted creatures like me to exist, he would have arranged for it himself. There was no one like me when Adam was naming the beasts. If there was anyone like me in the mythical Garden, it was a certain talkative snake.

“Light a candle for me,” Carol Jeanne said.

“I’ll light enough candles for you to keep the church warm in winter.”

Mamie, of course, was suffering greatly, being in the presence of a connection between human beings that she didn’t control. “Oh, you two mustn’t be so sad,” she said. “You can talk to each other for
months
by phone, until the voyage actually starts.”

They gave no sign that they heard her.

“Good-bye,” said Irene. “God bless you.”

“I love you.” Carol Jeanne barely whispered the words, but I knew that Irene felt them, even if she didn’t hear them.

By now, Stef and Red had brought the girls along, and Mamie seized the opportunity. “Your pretty little nieces want to say bye-bye to Auntie Irene,” she said. “You mustn’t make them sad, now, with all these silly tears.”

Only then did Carol Jeanne and Irene pay attention to the rest of the family. Irene hugged Lydia and Emmy as Mamie thrust each of them toward her; despite Mamie’s orchestration of the scene, Irene’s love for the girls was real, and they had always adored this strange creature who had no children to love but them. Irene’s embrace of Red was more clumsy, but only because
he
felt so awkward hugging a nun; she genuinely liked Red, and he liked her, too. Then she shook hands with Mamie and Stef.

“You’re such a dear thing,” said Mamie. “We’ll all miss your little visits so much.”

Stef said nothing, but nodded to Irene as he shook her hand, as if to say that he understood her grief and approved of the strength of her commitment, even if he didn’t share her faith.

Irene turned again to Carol Jeanne. But, having said their goodbyes, neither said another word to the other. They only embraced once more and silently broke apart. Irene raised her fingers in farewell as the rest of us moved away from her and headed for the tram that would take us out to the spacehopper on its extra-long runway.

Carol Jeanne stoically refused to look back, but that’s what I was for. I sat on her shoulder, my hand in her hair, and watched Irene every moment until she was out of sight. I knew that in a few weeks or months, Carol Jeanne would ask for the memory. I would have long since stored the scene on the Ark’s master computer, exactly as I saw it; she would play it out on the holographic display of her terminal, zooming in for a close-up of her sister’s face. Then she would see what I had seen: Irene smiling, waving, then bringing her hand to cover her eyes as she wept.

The shuttle was just like the suborbital space cruisers that ran the one hour intercontinental express routes. The same fetishistic cleanliness. The same simple opulence that made you think you were flying to meet God instead of just going to another conference. Except that this time, instead of rising up out of the thick part of the atmosphere only to descend later over New Delhi or Zanzibar or Porto Alegre, we would go all the way up to Grissom Station.

People took the shuttle to Grissom Station for only three reasons. Half were tourists with so much money that they thought it was worth the expense of this flight just so they could look down at Earth from a window in space instead of the much larger and clearer view through a two-meter hi-def on the wall at home. They got bored in a few minutes and spent the week till the next shuttle getting drunk or laid or underfoot.

Most of the others were serious people bound for the moon or Mars or the asteroids—scientists, engineers, or half-crazy high-tech manual laborers who would work in low gravity for five years and come home with enough money to pay cash for a Tokyo apartment or a Pacific island and they’d never have to work again as long as they lived, which might not be all that long after the damage that the time they spent in low gee did to their bodies.

And then there were the people like us, the craziest of all, collecting ourselves at Grissom so we could take the long voyage out to the Ark, in its perpendicular orbit, now only a few months away from its launch point at its farthest point from the planetary orbits. We arkoids, as they called us on Grissom, were the ones who were going to leave the solar system. If we found a habitable planet and established a colony, we’d never come back. And if we gave up and headed home, relativity would have made centuries pass on Earth—we’d come “home” to a planet that had passed through so many changes we’d probably recognize nothing at all.

Two hundred years ago Britain was still trying to wipe out the African slave trade, Spain had just lost her American colonies, and Russia and the Ottoman Empire were still maneuvering for control of the Black Sea. Ships were still made of wood, steam was the hot new technology, and no one in the world had yet heard the triumphant sound of a toilet flushing. What would Earth be like two hundred years from now?

Maybe they would have found a way to give speech to people like me. Maybe, in the name of progress, the world would be filled with mentally-enhanced capuchins, baboons, possums, pigs, and dogs, all eagerly and obediently doing everything their creators demanded of them. All the work of the world being done by brilliant little beasts; all the information creatively stored in our oversized genetically-engineered brains.

Two more centuries, and humanity would finally have got what they coveted all along: slavery without shame. No, they were
enhancing
the lives of their little beasty servants.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My thoughts didn’t go that far at the time. I was naive; my real education was still before me. All I noticed as we boarded the Grissom-bound shuttle was the way the other people looked at us. Rich tourists and serious travelers alike, they sized us up immediately: a family with two small children, a couple of old people, and a monkey. None were particularly happy to see us. I knew what they were thinking: The children will cry, the old people will jabber and whine, and the monkey will probably pee on somebody.

How right they were.

We started out well enough. Lydia was sitting with Red—to my relief. The child was so odious to me that I even preferred sitting next to Emmy and watching the inevitable diaper changes. Human feces, especially baby ones mashed into a diaper, are so repulsive. There’s nothing you can
do
with them, they stick to everything they touch, and they stink. Besides, at three years, the child should have been toilet-trained long before. I suspect her “accidents” were only attention-getting devices, oft repeated because they were so successful. But despite the attendant odors, at least Emmy had her pleasant moments; Lydia was a spoiled, petulant creature whose every breath was more offensive than a thousand of Emmy’s diapers.

With Red and Lydia sharing one another’s company, Mamie and Stef were left to sit by themselves. Pink was nowhere to be seen—she had been sedated through her little piggy snout and placed in the cargo hold, which was where she belonged. Red had tried to trot her up the gangplank like a regular passenger, but the shuttle crew banished her to the hold like a pet. I knew Red resented the fact that Carol Jeanne got to keep
her
witness and he didn’t. But then, Red was no Carol Jeanne. And Pink was no
me
.

Carol Jeanne and I had flown on suborbitals—subbos—a dozen times before, and I had the routine down pat. There was always a little bit of fuss at the gate, as they examined her letter from the ISA authorizing her to bring her witness inside the cabin; they were always impressed that somebody (never
us
) was paying full fare for my seat. Then I’d coast into the cruiser on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder, hop down when we got to our seat, and put myself in place on my seat. The attendant would bustle up, inspect my harness, and then attach it to the human-size lap-belt. They always made sure that the fasteners were all where I couldn’t reach them—as if it wouldn’t be enough just to
tell
me to keep them fastened.

This time was no different, except that instead of it being only me and Carol Jeanne on the two-seat row, Emmy’s presence forced us to sit on the three-seat side. Emmy had the aisle seat and Carol Jeanne was between us. There was no window on the wall next to me—there was so much white heat on reentry that giving the passengers a view would cause panic on every flight.

My harness held me tight enough against the seat that I couldn’t reach the in-flight magazine. Carol Jeanne remembered, though, and handed it to me. An attendant noticed it.

“He’s acting just as if he were reading,” he said, delighted at my antics.

“He
is
reading,” Carol Jeanne said.

“But he turns the pages so fast.”

“He reads about two thousand words a minute,” she answered.

I looked up at him and grinned. Humans always think my smile is cute, until they see how sharp my teeth are. He went away.

Takeoff was takeoff. It felt like we traveled three kilometers on the ground before we finally shambled up into the air. And then, once we were aloft, the pilot laid us on our backs and climbed straight up—or so it felt. I could see across the aisle where Mamie and Stef were both gripping the armrests—they’d never flown on a subbo and the harsher movements were unnerving them a little. I knew something they didn’t know—that the initial climb was nothing.

When we reached twenty thousand meters, the pilot came on the loudspeaker and warned us to face front and not to attempt any movements during the boost. I usually follow instructions to the letter, if only to win Carol Jeanne the tiny reward of having the flight crew tell her at the end of the flight that I was such a
good
little flier. This time, though, I couldn’t help a moment of disobedience—I had to lean forward and steal a glance at Mamie and Stef. Sure enough, her eyes were pressed shut and tears were squeezing out of the corners. Mamie Foxe Todd was having a new experience, and she didn’t like it a bit.

“Sit back, Lovelock,” muttered Carol Jeanne.

She had been checking on me. It was nice to be reminded that she was looking out for me almost as carefully as I always looked out for her. And she was right, too. Leaning forward and turning my head to the side hadn’t been a good move. It gave me a queasy little ache at the back of my head. The genetic enhancements that enlarged my head enough to hold my expanded brain and the digital interface weren’t fully matched with enough extra strength in the cushioning and support mechanisms of my neck and skull. I get headaches fairly easily, and with the stress of the climb out of the atmosphere, moving and turning like that had given me an instant nausea headache. And because we were boosting clear up to orbit, the stress went on and on. Smart move, Lovelock, I thought. A little bit of gloating at Mamie’s fear, and now you get to feel icky for the rest of the day until you sleep it off. My arms were so immobilized that I could barely hold the magazine, so there was no way of freeing my hands enough for me to pinch the pain away with acupressure.

In the seat behind us I could hear Lydia complaining about not being able to play during the boost. For once Red was actually being firm with her—he did firmness about once a year—so with luck she’d hold still and we wouldn’t have to put up with Lydia sick, which was even more annoying than Lydia healthy.

Finally the boost let up, and we went from sharp acceleration to free-fall in an instant.

I could hear the panicked whimpering from across the aisle. I didn’t even have to look.

“It’s just low-gee, Mamie,” said Carol Jeanne. “You get used to it in a few moments.”

“We’re falling!” Mamie insisted.

“That’s how it feels,” said Carol Jeanne.

“We’ll be just fine, dear,” said Stef. “People do this all the time.”

“This is just awful,” said Mamie. “They ought to do something about this. People like us shouldn’t have to put
up
with this.”

If only I had a voice, if only I could make words, I would have answered. These are laws of physics, Mamie, and even the bodies of people with genteel upbringing react to the sudden absence of gravity. The only way to spare you the discomfort would be total anesthesia, and most travelers prefer to arrive at their destination awake. But for
you
, Mamie, total anesthesia is more of an aesthetic statement than a medical procedure, and we’ll be glad to provide it whenever you request.

Wordless, I could only save up my comments for the next time Carol Jeanne and I were alone together. She’d shush me, of course, but not until she laughed. Carol Jeanne found Mamie almost as funny as I did. She did not understand how deep my feelings about Mamie really were. So I never mentioned to her how much I looked forward to Mamie’s funeral. Carol Jeanne was too kind-hearted to feel genuine malice toward anyone, no matter how they deserved it. I’ve never had that deficiency. Malice is one thing that even wild stupid capuchins do fairly well, and I was the enhanced model.

I didn’t wish Mamie dead, actually. I just wished her
gone
. But since there was no chance of her ever letting her dear boy out of her sight for more than a few hours at a time as long as she had a breath in her body, death seemed the only way we’d ever be rid of her.

Mamie was absolutely transparent—to me, at least. She pretended to be so well-bred that she hardly noticed Carol Jeanne’s international renown—fame was just another burden that people of “our” class have to bear. Yet she clung to every scrap of reflected glory that she could get hold of, all the while resenting the fact that it was her Catholic-born daughter-in-law and not her dear little white-bread boy who earned all the attention. So she was always sniping at Carol Jeanne, even though everything that Mamie valued in life came because Red had married so well.

In the seat behind us, Lydia was talking again. “Is this free-fall? Can I fly now?”

“Not till we get to the Ark,” said Red.

“And probably not even then,” said Carol Jeanne. She was unfastening her seat belt and getting up.

“Mommy’s getting up!” cried Lydia. “Why can’t I?”

“Because Mommy’s been in low gee often enough that she knows how to move around without smashing her head on the ceiling or putting her elbows into other people’s faces,” said Carol Jeanne. She was standing in the aisle now, holding on to the handgrips, her feet hooked under the edge of the seat. “I thought I saw Dr. Tuli in the gate area,” she explained to Red. “If it’s really him, he’ll be on his way back to Mars and I’d like to talk to him.”

“You haven’t seen him in years,” said Red. “It’s not as if you’ll have a chance to get the friendship going again
now
.”

Red was right, actually. Since we were leaving the solar system and never coming back in anybody’s lifetime, why bother performing friendship maintenance with people who were staying behind? It was as pointless as visiting people with terminal illnesses. But human beings do
that
, too.

So Carol Jeanne went forward, hand over hand on the seat grips, as smoothly as the attendants, her legs trailing behind her gracefully.

“Mommy’s flying!” cried Lydia in delight. “Emmy, can you see that?”

Emmy, of course, was not interested in whether or not Mommy was flying. She only noticed that Mommy was
gone
, and so of course she began to cry. This was perfectly understandable. After all, Emmy was not yet a sentient being. She could hardly be expected to understand that Carol Jeanne would soon return.

“Emmy’s crying,” said Lydia.

There was no one within three rows who was not keenly aware of this, of course. But then, Lydia’s own hold on sentience was none too firm.

“I know she’s crying,” said Red. “But her mother will be back soon.”

I knew Red. He had no intention of doing anything to quell Emmy’s noise. He thought it was perfectly all right. If he let the crying go on, Carol Jeanne would hear and come back and deal with it. Even though he was better equipped for motherhood than Carol Jeanne, he was perfectly willing to let the kids jerk her around when it made things go his way. I had seen this pattern a thousand times. A ringing phone, a doorbell, the stove timer going off, a crying child—if Carol Jeanne was anywhere near, Red would simply pretend that he didn’t know anything was happening until she dropped what she was doing and came to handle it.
Then
, when the situation was well in hand, he would say, “Oh, I can do that.” To which Carol Jeanne would always respond, “Don’t worry, dear, I’ve got it taken care of.” It was a marriage made in heaven. Carol Jeanne never even realized she was being had. After all, Red did all these things whenever she was away, which was more often than not. But her absence made her feel guilty, and I think in a way she really
was
glad to have a chance to do those little jobs that made her feel as though she were as connected to her family as a traditional stay-at-home mother.