Lovelock (30 page)

I nodded vigorously.

“But now the hardest question comes. Should I tell her at all? I’ve been puzzling that one out for days. Dolores says definitely not, never, because it will only cause pain. But I say that the very fact that the Mayflower gossip mill has the story suggests that
someone
is going to tell. So, will it be a villager who already resents Carol Jeanne because of her fame and her reputation for aloofness? Or will it be a friend?”

I shrugged.

“So. You don’t want to commit yourself, eh? I gave you credit for more courage than that, Lovelock. You know her better than anyone. Would she rather know the painful truth? Or would she rather live the blissful lie?”

I knew what Carol Jeanne would
say
, if asked that question. I’m a scientist, she would say. I want the truth, no matter how hard it is to hear it. But I also knew that she was more fragile than anyone expected. Her outer toughness was a protective device. She would not cope well with betrayal.

For me, though, the clincher was the fact that she would find out eventually anyway, and the longer it went on before she found out, the more deeply betrayed she would feel—not just by Red, but by all who knew and didn’t tell her.

I nodded. And then, to make the message clear, I reached up and parted his lips.

“So I should open my mouth, is that what you’re saying?”

I patted his cheek and nodded.

“Thank you, Lovelock. I will play the bad guy. Just make sure you’re there for her as she deals with the pain of this. You’ve been off gallivanting around lately—Carol Jeanne knows you’ve been going through a hard adjustment to the Ark, and she hasn’t minded your not being with her as constantly as before. But this time you need to sacrifice a little and
be
with her. Not as her witness, but as her friend.”

I nodded my agreement and then held out my hand. He took it between his fingers and we shook on it. A promise. A deal.

I was lying, of course. Because I knew what Neeraj could not understand: that Carol Jeanne was my master, not my friend. I would pretend to love and comfort her, but in fact I would be with her no more than necessary. In the disruption of her marriage I saw the potential for chaos, and in that chaos I could do a better job of nurturing my betrothed.
She
was the one going through a hard time.
She
was the one who needed me. Not Carol Jeanne.

Neeraj told Carol Jeanne within the hour, while I was struggling once again to get my baby to eat. By the time I got back home, the scene was already under way. Carol Jeanne was watching in icy silence as Red packed up to move out of the house. Mamie was crying bitterly and insisting that it was all a misunderstanding. The children were over at Dolores’s house. Nancy was watching malevolently from a corner—her hatred directed at Carol Jeanne, I noticed, and not at Red. No doubt her sick little mind saw this situation as Carol Jeanne cruelly throwing out sweet, wonderful, wise Red, and all because he had been forced by Carol Jeanne’s cold, unloving nature to seek comfort in another woman’s arms.

“This is nothing to break up a family over,” Mamie was saying. “It’s just idle gossip, Carol Jeanne, Red would never be unfaithful to you.”

Carol Jeanne didn’t so much as glance at her.

“You have no heart,” said Mamie. “You are made of ice and steel. God did not make a woman when he made you.”

Carol Jeanne might seem unemotional to Mamie, but I knew that her silence represented barely concealed emotion. Carol Jeanne dared not speak to Mamie, or she would break down in abject weeping, and to Carol Jeanne that would merely compound her humiliation.

Finally Mamie’s denials began to give way to some connection with reality. “Where will we live, Red? How much of my furniture can we take with us?”

Red looked up from his packing, surprised. “Not
we
, Mother,” he said. “I’m going to the singles’ quarters.”

“You’re not moving in with Liz?” asked Carol Jeanne quietly.

“Liz isn’t about to break up her marriage over this,” said Red coldly.

Mamie was oblivious to anything but her own predicament. “You’re going to leave me here alone?”

“I’ll be here every day while Carol Jeanne is at work, to look in on the children,” said Red. “But yes, I’m leaving you here.”

“With your furniture,” said Carol Jeanne quietly. It was as close to a nasty retort as she could allow herself.

“But that’s silly,” said Mamie. “I’m
your
mother, not
hers
. Why should I stay here?”

“To take care of the children, Mother,” said Red.

“I can take care of them,” said Nancy, from her corner.

“Your counselors and I agree that you cannot handle the stress of child care,” said Red. “In fact, you shouldn’t be trying to handle the stress of this little scene, either. I wish this had happened while you were at school. We’ll have to find another home for you.”

I knew what Nancy was thinking—that she would be glad to set up housekeeping with Red. In your dreams, Nancy.

“I have the best plan,” said Mamie, abruptly putting on her happy little good-idea voice. “Since I’m your mother, and my furniture fills this house, and I’m needed to tend the children, then
you
should stay here, Red, and Carol Jeanne should go to the singles’ quarters.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Carol Jeanne turned to her, fire leaping from her eyes even as tears welled over and spilled down her cheeks. “I’m not the one who broke my marriage vows, Mamie. I’m not the one who went screwing around with my spouse’s best friend. So I’m certainly not the one who’s going to move out and leave my children. However, you are free to take
my
furniture out of here. I never wanted you to bring it and it clutters up the house.”

Carol Jeanne shouldn’t have tried direct argument with Mamie. When it came to snideness, she was out of her league, taking on the queen bitch. “Apparently your petty vindictiveness is so wide-ranging, Carol Jeanne, that it extends to inanimate furniture. Red, dear, be sure to leave your toothbrush so Carol Jeanne can pull the bristles out one by one.”

Red was through packing his clothing and personal effects into two duffels. He carried them to the front door, speaking as he went. “Carol Jeanne will never let me keep the children, Mother. Not that she particularly wants to be a mother—that has never been either her interest or her talent. She simply couldn’t bear the public embarrassment of letting me have them, even though I’ve been their primary caretaker all along.” Thus he proved that even family therapists were not above using the truth as a weapon.

It was now, with his bags at the door, that Mamie pulled out all the stops. No more illusion of rationality: She wept, she pleaded, she hung on him and tugged at his clothing, accusing him of conspiring with Stef to destroy her, of leaving her to languish among people who hated her. Having seen Red cave in to her emotional theatrics time and time again, I kept expecting him to give in, to take her with him into a new household, to do
something
to mollify her. But instead, for the first time since I had known him, he was absolutely stolid. He allowed her to vent her emotions—he
was
a therapist, after all—but not by even a twitch of his face did he show that her pleas were having any effect on him.

It dawned on me that it wasn’t Carol Jeanne that Red was leaving, or not
just
Carol Jeanne. He had no desire whatsoever to take his mother with him.

My whole concept of Red changed in that moment. His kowtowing to his mother over the years was not because he was really devoted to her. Rather it was a survival strategy he must have developed during his childhood: Giving in to Mother meant peace and quiet at home. Giving in with enthusiasm made her so happy that she would allow him a little freedom now and then. It also allowed him to win the competition with his father for power in the house. All the while, however, his inmost self resented her control. He longed to be free, but couldn’t find any way to achieve that. Even marriage hadn’t helped. But now, by breaking up with Carol Jeanne, he had found a way to get free of
all
the women in his life, all the responsibilities, all the emotional demands. I suspected he even wanted to get away from the children. Now he could visit them when
he
wanted to, and then walk away. And he wasn’t walking into a new set of responsibilities, either. Liz had no intention of breaking up her marriage? I would bet that Red had persuaded her not to do it.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Red broke off his affair with Liz right away. It wasn’t Liz that he loved. It was the idea of breaking up his oppressive home life. Now that the affair had served its unconscious purpose, he would lose interest quickly.

Admittedly, I didn’t understand all this as I watched Red cast off Mamie’s emotional grappling hooks. All I really knew at that moment was that Red had far more strength than I had ever thought, and that he was loving it as his mother exhausted herself trying to win his compliance.

I also knew that if he had shown even a fraction of this strength with his mother a year ago, he could have left her and Stef on Earth and perhaps worked out a decent marriage with Carol Jeanne. Maybe he had never wanted the marriage to work out. Maybe he didn’t want to be married at all. Maybe that’s why, in marrying, he had chosen a woman who was unable to be as emotionally giving as he needed. Maybe he unconsciously chose to marry a woman he could walk away from when the time at last came.

In the meantime, Mamie was spewing forth the evidence of her victimization. “This is the bondage of women! Always forced to comply with the will of the
men
in their lives. Telling me where I have to live, forcing me to stay where I’m hated. Women have no choices in this world!” This from the woman who had ruled her home with an iron fist for decades.

It took half an hour, there at the door, for Mamie to wind down and fall silent. She was in the most dramatic possible position, sprawled on the floor, clinging to his legs, sobbing quietly. Red picked up the duffels and stepped over his mother’s supine body as if she were a pile of books or a rolled-up rug. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mother, when I come to see the children. Have a nice night.” To Carol Jeanne he offered no good-bye at all. He just opened the door with the soft whoosh of air that always came, held it open while Pink trotted out, and then he was gone.

The door closed with a soft popping of air pressure. The silence was perfect, except for Mamie’s soft sobs and whimpers. Carol Jeanne looked at the door for a few moments, then went to her bedroom. Before I followed her, I looked at Nancy and saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears. Despite Mamie’s hysterics, I suspected that it was Nancy, of all the women in the house, who would miss Red the most.

Carol Jeanne hadn’t gone to her bedroom as I expected. Instead she was in the office, sitting before the computer. I came in and perched beside the monitor. She looked surprisingly calm. She looked at me and gave me a grim little smile. “He’ll never breathe a word of it, I’m sure, and neither will I,” she said, “but I can tell
you
, Lovelock. I didn’t tell him to leave. I didn’t even ask him to leave. In fact, I asked him to stay.” She gave a harsh little laugh that had one good solid sob in it. “The story will go through Mayflower village that I threw him out of the house, cold unfeeling bitch that I am—Mamie will see to it that that’s the story that’s put around. But the truth is, he wanted to go. He wanted to go.”

So she had seen it, too. Red was a complicated fellow after all.

Carol Jeanne sat there for a long time, saying nothing. Finally I realized that she was really working on the reports and analyses she was calling up on her computer, not just pretending to work. This was the solace she wanted right now. Still, I stayed with her, even though I wanted to go see my betrothed. I sat on her shoulder, grooming her, stroking her neck, and she must not have minded, because she didn’t send me away. For a while, physically close to her like that, I could almost pretend that I was her friend, and not her servant.

Later, after she had cleared the most important work, Carol Jeanne logged off and leaned back in her chair. “Lovelock, I want you to be present during all of Red’s visits to the house when I’m at work.” Then she got up and went to the bathroom.

She didn’t explain her reasons. I knew what they were anyway. She needed me to make sure Red didn’t turn the children against her behind her back.

To me, though, it meant that I would have a lot of chances to slip away and visit my own baby.

My betrothed. My beloved-to-be. Someday the mother of my children. That was the day that I finally decided on a name for her. Given what had just happened between Red and Carol Jeanne and between Carol Jeanne and Liz and between me and everybody else, the name was definitely ironic, but also intensely appropriate, I felt. Because the one thing I would never do, I was sure, was betray
my
mate as Red had betrayed his.

I named her Faith.

Faith was not thriving, and I didn’t know what I could do about it. When I came to feed her, she was listless; the panic and desperation had now given way to a kind of resignation that frightened me. She ate little. She clung to the hugger and to me, but there seemed little comfort in it, for either one of us.

But what could I do about it? The cause could be the discomfort of the lower gravity so far up the wall, but could I move her down into the areas where humans were far more likely to go? Or it could be the loneliness and lack of physical comforting, but how could I spend a moment more with her than I did? Or it could be some disease, but I couldn’t very well take her to the veterinarians on the Ark, could I? They weren’t in business right now anyway, except for the ones who were on call for sick or injured witnesses. I couldn’t very well show up with a sick baby capuchin. It was my life on the line, not just Faith’s.

So I kept on, doing my best to get away and spend time with her, and there were times, as she made feeble attempts to groom me or to play, that I felt a bit of hope that, hard as her infancy might be, she would prove resilient, would recover the natural ebulliency of young primates, and would eventually become, not my ward, but my mate.

Mate. Not wife. For she would always be a capuchin, unenhanced and therefore incapable of true communication with me. As for our children, they would prove whether this work was worthwhile. If they inherited even a portion of my enhancements, there was hope for us to survive as an independent sentient species on the new world. If I could keep us alive on the Ark till then. If I could find a way to get us to the surface of the planet.

Was Faith’s despair contagious?

One afternoon I came to Carol Jeanne’s office to find Neeraj and several other top scientists just arriving. They quickly gathered around Carol Jeanne’s computer, where she was explaining something.

“The databases are still separate, and require a separate log-in,” she was saying. “Your old log-in will work until six o’clock tonight, so get in and change your passwords to fit the new protocol. If you miss, it will be a lot of bureaucratic rigmarole to get you access to the secure databases, and you’ll have to give a written explanation of why you didn’t sign in to change your log-in. Remember that you will now have two passwords, a primary and a secondary. The secondary is used for encryption and you’ll be asked for it at random intervals. You’re also required to change both passwords at least every ten days, which means a lot of trouble memorizing them, I know, but it’s worth it to have the convenience of having all the databases accessible from the main network. Any questions?”

I had a few, but I suspected it wouldn’t be wise for me to mention them. Secure databases? I thought all the databases were secure. But apparently there was an important secret database that all of these people knew about, but which Carol Jeanne had kept secret from me.

Secret! From me!

“And just in case any of you are wondering,” said Carol Jeanne, “we take security so seriously that I have never allowed my witness to see my passwords to the secure databases. In fact, I’ve never allowed him to watch me log in, and I know Neeraj has been equally discreet. That way nobody can get the information from our witnesses’ electronic memory. Do likewise. Never log on in front of another person, even someone who has full access to the secure database. In other words, never log on even in front of
me
. You never know when someone might have their log-on taken away from them, and you certainly don’t want them to be able to get into the system using yours.” She looked around at them. “Any questions?”

“We can just use our regular computers now?” asked one man, dubiously.

“We won’t be maintaining two separate systems anymore. The locked rooms will now be open, just like any others. We’ll be moving people into those spaces so our offices won’t have to be so cramped. That’ll make it worth the pain of changing passwords all the time. Any other questions?”

“Just one,” asked a woman. “Does this mean we can launch now?”

“The announcement will be made officially in the villages tonight,” said Carol Jeanne, “but the rumor’s going to fly much faster than that. Launch is set for two weeks from today, at noon. Which means that we must be moved into our launch compartments by midnight the night before, and all work in all departments except crew and life support will cease as of noon the day before launch. So anything you need from Earth, get it now. And I mean
now
. They’re going to be swamped by last-minute requests from everybody. We’re supposed to have been ready to leave at a moment’s notice, but I have a feeling everybody here is going to think of at least one massive report or database or record that you just can’t live without.” If Carol Jeanne had smiled during that last remark, it might have been taken in good humor. But she didn’t smile, and so it sounded like she was accusing them of being nervous fools. I could see a few of them clenching their jaws or looking away. Poor Carol Jeanne. I knew she meant nothing by that remark, that in fact it was a kind of joke about human nature, but no one else had a clue.

Except Neeraj. He chuckled in response to what she said. But Carol Jeanne didn’t want to hear his warm laughter. With her family collapsing around her ears, she didn’t need to be reminded that she
might
have had him in her life, if she had been just a bit less correct in her behavior. It was her turn to clench her jaw and turn away. “All right, that’s it,” she said. “I urge you to go to your terminals and
immediately
change your log-ins on the secure database. Otherwise you’ll get busy and forget.”

Again, some of them seemed to take it as an affront. What does she think we are, idiots?

Well, yes, actually. Brilliant, but idiots. It’s not as if she didn’t have plenty of evidence of absentmindedness from every one of them.

But not from me. She knew I paid attention. She knew I noticed things, that I remembered them, that I followed through. And during all our time on the Ark till now, she had managed to conceal from me the very existence of the secure databases. Now, of course, all those assignments she had given me while she left the office to “check up on things” made sense. The work I did had been real enough, but it was also a way to keep me occupied while she went to a locked room and used a computer on a different network.

Well, Carol Jeanne, you sweet trusting thing, you, I won’t be
needing
your password anymore, if my sleeper did its job.

I was dying to get off by myself to check out the new network, but it was two hours before I could slip away from Carol Jeanne. In fact, I engineered my departure by typing her a note on the clipboard computer she had set up for me on top of the filing cabinets, and sending it to her via the network.

Carol Jeanne, have YOU changed your log-in?

I knew her very well. She read the message the moment it popped up on her screen, and she blushed. “I ought to follow my own advice more often,” she said. “Lovelock, I’m not allowed to do this in front of anybody, not even you. Would you mind leaving the room?”

Mind? Would I
mind?

I typed my answer. “Why don’t I go home and look in on the girls?”

“Excellent idea, Lovelock.”

Ten minutes later, having ascertained that it was naptime for the children and that Mamie was entertaining Penelope with tales of her suffering as a babysitter for her ungrateful coldhearted husband-castrating daughter-in-law, I was alone with Carol Jeanne’s computer.

Before I tried my sleeper program, I opened up Carol Jeanne’s computer and checked it for new electronic snooping devices. The old one was there, with my bypass maneuvers still in place. I almost took that as a sign that the security people had given up, but then I remembered Van Pell and Mendoza’s expressions of blank determination, and so I also opened up the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse and the printer, and sure enough, they had installed devices in all of them, so that they would get a complete record of every keystroke typed and every character displayed on the screen or printed out. I didn’t try to finesse these as I had the first snooping device. I just removed them, broke off all the breakable parts, and laid them on a white sheet of paper on Carol Jeanne’s desk. Let her fight it out with Mendoza and Van Pell.

With the snoops gone, I typed my access and, sure enough, my sleeper came up. I wasted no time. I went straight to the password system and found out Carol Jeanne’s primary and secondary passwords. While I was at it, I also got Neeraj’s and the special passkey codes that Van Pell and Mendoza had. It wasn’t easy to get them, of course—they didn’t just keep a file somewhere listing them all. They were encrypted, but I had complete control over the system, and so I got it to do what even Van Pell and Mendoza couldn’t have done—decrypt the passwords without my knowing either of them. My sleeper worked perfectly. The system was my slave, and I felt exultant and powerful. It was an unaccustomed feeling, and I liked it. But it didn’t last long.

Because, having once armed myself with their passwords, I began looking into secret places that I had never been able to see before. Van Pell and Mendoza had a very large file on me—much larger than their file on Carol Jeanne. My previous impression was wrong. They didn’t think I was a harmless monkey, doing only what Carol Jeanne told me. Their reports and memos made it clear that they thought Carol Jeanne had lost control of me, and they had already filed several recommendations that I be destroyed, if it could be done in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

“Should be easy enough,” said Van Pell’s latest memo. “He’s off by himself a lot. He could ‘fall’ from the wall. Not good to have anybody with his computer ability at large, especially since he is clearly pursuing his own program.”

And here I thought I already knew what fear felt like.

When I was calm enough to think straight, I realized there were a couple of nice things. They might be deciding whether or not to kill me, but at least they called me “he” and used the term “anybody” in reference to me. And they had no clue about Faith. They didn’t know I had been stealing materials to build Faith’s nest. I realized then that they were merely observing me from a distance, and only now and then—enough to know that I was away from Carol Jeanne a lot; and as for their knowing my computer abilities, I had blithely demonstrated them myself.

The answer was obvious. Stick to Carol Jeanne like glue. They’d never dare to kill me in her presence.

Trouble was, I couldn’t do that if Faith was to have any hope of thriving.

I had been at it for a couple of hours, and it was time to check in on Faith and then get back to Carol Jeanne. My dilemma was now worse than ever. And the worst thing of all was that with the launch coming up, the nest would have to move. The obvious reason was that when we launched, the rotation of the Ark would cease, and instead acceleration would provide our artificial gravity. At that point, the “wall” where I had built the nest would become the floor. All the soil would fall from where it now was down onto the floor, completely burying all the pipes and ducts and wiring.

But we had to move much sooner than two weeks from now. Because the maintenance people would naturally inspect every inch of every pipe and conduit on the wall. It would probably take them a couple of days to get started—I had already researched their routines and they could do a full inspection of the wall in six days. That meant they wouldn’t need to rush into it tonight. But the most I could be sure of was a day in which to move the nest.

This was the time I had dreaded all along. The human population of the Ark would be crowded, four to a room, into the tiny cubicles that now provided the singles’ quarters. Nobody would be out in the villages. All the substantial trees and bushes would have their roots balled and be moved from the surface down into warehouse space that was currently empty. In other words, the entire Ark would be a maelstrom of activity, and there would hardly be a cubic centimeter that someone wouldn’t see, let alone inspect carefully, during the next two weeks.

Somewhere in all this I had to hide Faith.

Worse, I had to do it knowing that Mendoza or Van Pell or another of their hypertrophied clan might be looking for a chance to off me in some accidental-looking way. Oh, we’re so sorry, Dr. Cocciolone. Your witness seems to have been crushed to death under a giant rootball. Your witness seems to have been electrocuted by current running through a wire that hadn’t had any current in it before. Your witness seemed to be carrying a large metal box down the wall, and he fell. We’re so sorry for the inconvenience. Perhaps your next witness will be a more docile animal. A pig, for instance. Or perhaps a guppy. You carry it around in a plastic cup like a urine sample. It never goes off on its own, dismantling security devices.

Not that they could come up with a new enhanced animal for Carol Jeanne. Perhaps when I was dead they’d co-opt Pink. After all, it would be ludicrous for Red to have a witness when Carol Jeanne didn’t.

What a morbid line of thought. But death seemed like a real possibility to me as I went up the wall to Faith’s nest. She didn’t even look at me as I came in, and for the first time I realized that her hair was falling out. There were a couple of little hairless patches. She was famine-thin, too. But if somehow I got her unnoticed off the wall and down into the underground, perhaps the higher gravity would help her. She could still recover.

Of course, there would be that long weightless day or two as they stopped the spin of the Ark and began the acceleration. How would she respond to
that?
I would have her strapped down, but I wouldn’t be able to visit her—they’d have
me
strapped down somewhere, too. I had always known that when the launch came, she’d be left with nothing but water for the launch itself, but I had always thought that she would be strong and healthy then. And older. I thought it would take longer before the launch and she’d be old enough to deal with it better. Now instead of the launch being a single trauma in an otherwise-happy infancy, it might well be the final straw. I imagined her in the terror of dark weightlessness. Sensory deprivation. Hungry, with only a nipple of water to suck on.