Chapter 50
My throat is raw and my nose stings. I appear to be in Leanne’s box.
Standing in front of me is my mother. I know it is her. She looks just like she did on that day she left me—cold and imperious. She is older now, there are flecks of grey in her hair, and creases lining her face, but she looks so like me it is embarrassing—more like an older sister than a mother. If my mother is Gaia, like Scud claims, she looks nothing like the statues, except for the gold mask dangling from the tips of her fingers. Perhaps the statues are meant to be allegorical rather than literal.
The pipes and tubes once inserted into Leanne’s mouth and nose dangle from my mother’s other hand, just ripped out of me, which is what brought me around with such a start. She is staring at me with a puzzled expression.
Beside the box I can see a stretcher, with a clean white sheet covering a body, the sheet Fernando originally placed over Leanne. From under the sheet I see strands of auburn hair. How come I’m in Leanne’s body? Am I dead?
I reach up to my own hair and realize I am wearing a wig, a blond wig. Of course I’m not dead. Memories come rushing back: the map room, the Reaver raider, something hitting my head, and finally, dizziness.
Trent. Everything snaps into place. He must have knocked me out cold then switched me with Leanne to make it look like I was dead. Which would explain why I’m wearing only my underwear. At least he left me that decency. Perhaps he thought the Reavers would overwhelm the Shonti and take me alive.
I look around, hunting for Trent. We appear to be in a large cavern. The sun, shining in through the mouth of the cavern, is lighting up the rock in a soft pink glow. Wind blows in from the entrance stirring up the thick desert sand into dust devils. At the back of the cave, stone buildings rise in narrow terraces; steep stairways connect narrow streets on each level. This is obviously some sort of settlement—my mother’s secret hideaway Trent hoped he would find by following me. I trust he is satisfied.
There are no airships in the cavern, just people. A lot of people. All looking at me seated in a coffin in my underwear. Behind my mother are a group of black clad ninjas, armed to the teeth. To my left are constables holding my crew prisoner, together with Trent, Jack McGraw, and one other constable. To my right are Borker and the remaining constables.
I clear my sore throat. “So you are Gaia?” Not much of a greeting after a lifetime away, but I’m still trying to find my voice.
“Hello, Nina.” She could be greeting me in the street. “I hoped you wouldn’t make it this far.”
“Oh”
“But now you are here, it is good to see you alive.”
“I nearly wasn’t, thanks to your tame assassin.” I glare at Borker, who glares resentfully back. Perhaps he really does believe I’m a risk to Gaia. “My knight in shining armor,” mother called him—it is hard to imagine Borker as anyone’s knight.
I am aware of the whole group watching and listening. Let them. This is between me and my mother. I want to leap out of the box and give Eve a hug, but she shows no signs of affection, so I stay where I am.
“You could have come visit me at any time.”
“Not really.” Eve replies stiffly. “I was meant to be dead. And you were safe on New Frisco. This is no life for a child.”
“No life for a mother, either.” Then the accusation I’ve been suppressing for so long wells up and explodes. “You abandoned me. I was six.”
“I stayed as long as I could.” Is that regret in her voice? “But Gaia was calling. The healing earth needed me more than you. And you had to be hidden away somewhere safe.”
I was expecting some sort of emotional apology, not reasoned justification. “How can you call yourself my mother?"
"Technically speaking, I’m not your mother. I gave birth to you, but actually you are a clone of me. I was part of an experimental Microtough breeding program—the pinnacle of generations of carefully selected pairings. An attempt to eliminate the infertility of our race—an unforeseen consequence of genetic alteration. As a rebellious young lady, engineer Smyth decided to reduce the risk of losing me by making clones: You and Leanne.”
Clones, breeding programs, genetic alteration, experiments? I want to stand up and confront her, but I’m aware of everyone watching. Besides, I’m not exactly dressed for confrontation. “Is that all I am to you, just an experiment?”
Eve sighs. “We are all experiments, Nina—everyone of us. We were created by the Gaia foundation to live at altitude, away from the ground. Immune to the Gaia plague released on the surface.”
“You killed the earth’s inhabitants?”
“Not me personally, Nina, but one of my predecessors, leader of the Gaia foundation. The Earth was dying, choking under the weight of billions of people. Humans had become parasites, a plague on the Earth. Gaia decided to fight one plague with another. Only those living at altitude, engineered to be uncomfortable on the surface of the Earth, were spared.”
Scud was right then about the number of humans living on the surface. “Gaia killed billions? And you are comfortable with that?”
Eve doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed at the actions of her foundation. “Humans were engineering their own extinction—drastic action was needed to save both the Earth and the human race. Our species needs to be controlled.”
“What about the Village of the Damned?” Scud calls. I had almost forgotten anyone else existed.
“Damned indeed,” Eve replies, as if I’ve asked the question. “Immunization—their reward for helping Gaia develop the plague. Besides, a small stock of original genes is useful as future insurance.”
“But you still punish them, by taking annual tributes?”
“They need culling. And I need some way to buy off the Reavers—another unfortunate side effect of gene alteration. But one I will soon fix.”
Eve shows no sign of emotion as she admits her crimes. The more she talks, the more I realize she believes her own delusions. “So that’s what you do, is it? You cull villagers, make deals with Reavers, kidnap Microtough experiments, destroy any sign of industrial advancement, and ignore your children?”
“I have no problem with industrial advancement,” Eve snaps. “Provided it is channeled in an environmentally sustainable way. And as for my children.” She indicates her entourage. “I have many.”
All of them? No way. I study the ninjas. The masks of some have slipped, revealing their faces. They are certainly not clones, but they do bear a family resemblance. In my surprise, I end up saying the first thing that comes into my mind. “But you are so slim.”
Eve laughs, uproariously. Despite being her clone, I hope I don’t laugh like that, but I catch the smirks on my friend’s faces—I guess I probably do.
“Another use for the tributes,” Eve explains. “Surrogate mothers. I may be Gaia, the Earth Mother, but I’m damned if I’m going to repopulate the skies by myself.”
My mother isn’t just deluded, she’s evil, but not in a psychotic way. She is so caught up in achieving her grand plans she has lost sight of her own humanity. Even when she was with me, before she left, she wasn’t really with me—she spent all her time working—obsessive in achieving the goals of New Frisco. As a Mayor with a civic duty, it is laudable, but now she’s applying the same thoroughness and determination to the questionable goals of the Gaia Foundation.
Unable to see the moral dubiousness of her objectives, she ploughs on blindly, her team pulling together around her, triumphantly validating each other as every milestone is achieved. She has become a moral slave to the necessities of a project that is inherently evil: the project itself has sucked the life from her soul. Somewhere down the line, she made a small moral decision of questionable judgment, then another, and another. Maybe it was the decision to leave me behind, maybe something else; whatever it was, it launched her down a path from which she cannot now retreat.
“So if you have all these fertile children, why do you need Leanne and I??
??
Eve looks me square in the eye for the first time. “The Microtough experiment failed. I now possess the only truly fertile women in the world. Do you know how much power that gives me? How much control I have over the future direction of humanity? With this weapon, I can finally, and permanently, achieve Gaia’s goals. But I am ageing—my genes are mutating and corrupting, so I need a fresh supply of perfect genes.”
There it is: the true reason Eve wants me. Not for the love of a daughter, nor for the love of a child; she loves my genes. She loves my perfect, fertile, genes.
“Which is why,” Borker growls, “we should have eliminated her the moment we got hold of the White Woman.”
From the corner of my right eye, I see a flicker of movement. I know it’s Borker without even looking, and I know, instinctively, what he is doing.
I throw myself flat in the box. A shot rings out and a bullet ricochets off the wood. Borker is trying to shoot me and I’m lounging helplessly in Leanne’s box in my underwear—weaponless. I’m a sitting target.