Julie nodded, her breath going in and coming out heavily. In a sense, Ardith had been through this four times already. Goddamn it all, she thought, I am a Martian! I’ve defeated whole planets, both Earth and Mars. No matter how hard this gets, it is not going to break me. “And you’ve lost a brother-in-law—an individual you liked and respected.”
“That’s—”
“But what you can’t live with,” Julie told her, “what I came to talk to you about, is the sheer joy—the unspeakable ecstasy—you feel that it wasn’t your husband. A kind of survivor’s remorse at one remove.”
“Julie!” Ardith struggled to sit up—and failed.
The older woman—who appeared at least ten years younger than her daughter-in-law, but in fact was twice as old—reached out to pat Ardith’s hand where it lay weak and helpless on the hospital coverlet.
The fact was, she’d never had a daughter, and she couldn’t have loved this young woman any more—Ardith was thirty-eight years old—if she had happened to be her own. Adam had chosen well despite the couple’s many later difficulties. And it was never, ever too late for love.
“It’s true, sweetheart, and I’ve got to make you see it. I’m certain he didn’t want to die, but do you think Lindsay would want you to destroy yourself this way because you’re glad that Adam is still alive?”
Ardith sniffed back tears. “N-n-no.” Now she felt about four years old—a dizzying descent from the hundred and four she’d felt only a few minutes earlier. Despite her own energy and apparent youth, Julie Ngu had that effect on other people. She’d been born to be somebody’s grandmother.
Ardith was grateful that Julie was here for Llyra and Wilson. Both of her own grandmothers had died when, under a new “scorched earth” policy, the East American Drug Enforcement Authority had bombed and razed an entire town in Connecticut because one resident, it had been alleged, was observed by an informer manufacturing the illegal drug nicotine. It was the main reason her parents had decided to come to Pallas.
Julie said, “They tell me that when they found you unconscious on your laboratory floor, you were in pretty bad condition, suffering from mild malnutrition, severe dehydration, physical exhaustion, and shock, that last probably from the incomplete news you’d seen on 3DTV.”
Ardith shrugged and shook her head. There was little she could say. She couldn’t remember any part of it after she’d switched on the pulverizer. She hoped somebody had remembered to switch it off. She wondered briefly why the hospital administration had seen fit to give Julie all that information about her—and then realized exactly why. Here and now, her mother-in-law was her nearest—if not next—of kin.
Julie nodded at the devices either side at the head of the bed—twin intravenous saline drips, one going into to each of Ardith’s arms—that were practically the only medical equipment visible in the room.
“Not to mention a light dose of radiation poisoning. They’re saying that your Drake-Tealy Object is doing some very peculiar things.”
“Peculiar things?” Ardith was shocked at how uninterested she was.
“Yes, it’s begun to pulse. Your people say it’s emitting energy on all known wavelengths: heat, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, radio, X-rays, alpha, beta, gamma, and anything else I forgot. The energies involved are very low and don’t endanger Pallas. Most likely it was that old spacesuit that nearly got you killed. Two hours’ backbreaking labor without water? I tracked it down, dear, and had it burned.”
Ardith grinned. “Unlike my son and husband, I’ve never owned or even worn a proper envirosuit. But with a Drake-Tealy Object the size of a house doing odd things, I guess I’d better invest in one, hadn’t I?”
“Then let the Drake-Tealy Museum pick up the tab, dear,” Julie told her. “In fact I’d like to have you appointed Associate Curator, if I may, and put that damned thing out there totally in your hands. There’s something important about it, I appreciate that much, at least. I take it that the jaw you just dropped onto the bed indicates ‘yes’?”
“It certainly does, Julie!” There it came, the old energy. Not only did she feel like a kid again, Ardith suddenly felt exactly as if it were Christmas. And in a way, it was. She’d just been given—in an academic sense—what might well turn out to be the most important archaeological artifact ever found in human history. “When can I start?”
“Well, you’d better get healthy, first. Look, I understand your not wanting to take the mood elevators and anxiety suppressors they want you to. I wouldn’t take them, myself. All they do is postpone what you eventually have to work through, anyway, and make it harder later.”
Ardith said, “It’s amazing how much alike we think.”
“Yes, well, there’s a reason for that most wives don’t want to hear.”
She shrugged. “They remind their husbands of their mothers?”
“Ardith, I’d like you to take the vitamins they have for you, and the medicines specifically for the physical illness you’re suffering. I’ll instruct them myself, if you like, to leave out the doubleplus goodthink pills. If they mess with us, the way they will sometimes, I’ll take the wing of this place that Billy and I paid for back to Mars!”
Ardith actually laughed, and there was a bit of color now in her cheeks. Now for the hard part, the principle reason she’d come all the way from Mars, and why the hospital staff were all grateful to her for coming.
“I hate like hell to bring it up, but did you hear about Wilson’s girl?” Julie worried that this could be the last straw for Ardith, the evil icing on her birthday cake, the rotting cherry atop the sundae, the …
“He messaged me yesterday on my personal phone. He doesn’t know where I am, and I don’t want him to. I can’t believe what’s happened, but when I get out of here, Null Delta Em and the Mass Movement will be—”
Julie burst into laughter, herself. “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m very sorry for my only grandson. It’s a horrible way to grow up. Like any red-blooded 19-year old, up to this point, all he really wanted—or even thought about much—was to get laid. But at least he has the suicidal decency to believe he has to be love with the girl who does it for him. He may outgrow that in time, but something in me hopes he doesn’t.”
Ardith said, “But—”
“But I’m as proud as I can be,” Julie went on, “to be a member of this family—your family, dear Ardith. An indestructible, resilient family that we both married into to begin with, but in which neither of us was ever particularly content to be mere ornaments on a family tree.”
Ardith did manage to sit up this time. “I feel brokenhearted for Wilson, too, and I wish I knew how to help him. He was all over us, all the time, about that Amorie creature, ‘Amorie this’ and ‘Amorie that’. I realized Fallon O’Driscoll might really be the one, when he hardly ever said a word about her. But Julie, we’re about to have something else in common. Poor Fallon was pregnant. I’m going to be a grandmother!”
“Boy or girl?” Julie asked automatically.
Ardith replied, “It’s going to be a little girl. They—he and Fallon’s father, Terence O’Driscoll—have decided they’ll call her Tieve.”
It also made Julie a great grandmother, of course, but she’d been mentally and emotionally prepared for that for a long time. As long as she managed to stay young, everything could be fun. Someday she would try to talk her Ardith into DeGrey regenerative therapy. To let such beauty, both on the inside and the outside, fade away, would border on the criminal.
“Tieve Ngu. No stranger than Julie Ngu. Shall we break out the champagne?”
Ardith sighed. “Guess we’d better make it Jell-O. I actually feel hungry! Pulsing on all wavelengths, you say? Why would it want to do that?”
***
“Strange,” Adam told his brother Arleigh. “Here we are, headed back to Pallas to bury our brother, and all I can think about are my kids.”
The gravelly hiss, like frying bacon, of the ship’s constant boost fusion drive
permeated its structure, but by now, they were used to it. Adam pulled his pipe out of his jacket pocket, opened the little screen that prevented it from spilling coals in zero gee, and filled it.
“Not so strange,” Arleigh replied. He opened a red plastic box of dark brown cigarettes, oval in cross section, and slipped one into a holder.
The brothers sat on jumpseats locked into the deck either side of a long metal canister that had been manufactured yesterday by one of the construction shops under the Ceres dome. It was painted a smooth, lustrous metallic charcoal gray, with a red double racing stripe along its upper surface. Ingrid, whose idea the racing stripe had been, was forward, giving the brothers some privacy, occupying the righthand seat, learning what she could about conning a jumpbuggy from the pilot. She’d told them ten minutes ago they were twenty minutes from turnover.
“What do you mean, ‘not so strange’?” Adam asked his brother. He closed the screen, found his lighter, and put flame to the pipe tobacco.
Arleigh lit his cigarette and said, “Plenty of folks, when they stare death in the face, feel an urgent need to have sex, afterward. It’s supposed to be a confirmation—more like a reassertion, I guess—that they’re still alive. I think this is the same thing, really. Kids are what sex is all about, after all, theoretically. Lindsay dies, you want a confirmation that life is going on somewhere, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” He wondered if Arleigh could be right. First, last, and always, he was an engineer. Psychology—except for whatever it took to run a major engineering project—had never been his long suit.
The younger brother exhaled smoke, which was immediately drawn into the purification system. “That’s all. I’ve never had any kids, myself—at least none that I know of. Guess I was afraid to, when you come down to it. I had a professor in college who talked about having kids as ‘giving hostages to history’, and it kind of stuck with me.”
“What a cheerful notion.” Adam drew on his pipe and thought about it, then said, “You know, Arleigh, when the kids were younger—I seem to recall that Wilson was about fifteen and Llyra about eleven—I used to be pretty concerned about the two of them, having to grow up out on Pallas in a little one stop-sign frontier municipality like Curringer.”
“Some folks go out of their way to bring their kids up in a small town, rather than some big city,” Arleigh said. “We grew up that way, Ad, when Curringer was even smaller. Fishing, hunting, swimming and boating and diving in Lake Selous. Doesn’t seem to have done us much harm.”
Arleigh immediately began twitching and making distorted, hideous faces, his tongue hanging out. It was an old joke between them, and he’d done it out of sheer reflex. Adam didn’t laugh this time—it was a joke they’d shared with Lindsay—or even grin, so his brother stopped.
Lights began blinking on a panel set in the bulkhead between the flight deck and where they sat. Having assured themselves that the coffin was properly secured, both brothers fastened their four point seatbelts.
Adam nodded. “It was about that time that Llyra came to me, very diffidently, mind you—I don’t know if she had the same talk with her mother; we were starting to have real problems then—to reveal certain spectacular ambitions of her own which, given her character, I decided to take very seriously. Remember, she was only eleven years old.”
“The ice skating thing,” Arleigh said, inhaling smoke. “Most grownups I know have considerably less resolve than your daughter does.”
Adam shook his head. He’d forgotten his pipe and it had gone out. Now he relit it. “Not just the ice skating thing. She’d been doing that on her own at the Brody ever since she was about four. Her mother used to take her there a couple times a week. No, I mean the ice skating on Earth thing. She meant not only to skate on Earth, but do something important there, win a big competition or something like that.”
Arleigh shook his head. “In twenty times the gravity she was used to. That’s a pretty tall order, even for her, and a damned dangerous one.”
“That’s it, exactly: bones, growth-plates, internal organs. I immediately started looking around for somebody to help her—or maybe talk some sense into her. That’s when I heard that my dad’s old friends from the Mars rebellion, Mohammed and Beliita Khalidov, had a daughter only a few years older than Llyra, who was also a figure skater.”
The lights on the panel changed. Turnover would be coming quickly now.
“So that’s how that happened,” Arleigh said. “I always sort of wondered. Uncle Brody used to talk about the Khalidovs. She’s a nice kid.”
“She’s a very nice kid,” Adam nodded enthusiastically. “Jasmeen’s been absolutely perfect, as a teacher and as a companion, and I knew better than to interfere any further than I had, even when it turned out that Jasmeen thought Llyra could actually do it. But I’ve been worried ever since, that Llyra might destroy herself, physically or mentally, pursuing something that isn’t really any part of her fondest dreams.”
Arleigh raised his eyebrows. “This is news to me. What do you mean?”
He sighed. “I mean that for some perverse reason, kids often feel responsible when things go wrong in a marriage. They think maybe they can repair the damage. It hurts me deeply to think that my little girl might be doing herself harm in an effort to fix something she didn’t break.”
A buzzer sounded. They braced themselves for a turnover they never really felt. They didn’t learn until later that Ingrid had been at the controls.
Adam unfastened his seatbelt and stood up. He had to relight his pipe again. “I think it’s time for an adult beverage. You want beer or tequila?”
“Most definitely,” Arleigh said, standing up and stretching, “tequila.”
***
“But Mom, Wilson promises he can get us there on time in his own ship.” She wasn’t used to hearing Llyra whining at her through her nose.
Ardith shook her head. This was insane. Two burials in the family—well, almost in the family—within a day of one another. Lindsay and … what was her name? Oh, no! Why couldn’t she—Fallon! That was it, Fallon! Her baby son’s lost love had been named Fallon. Fallon Tieve.
Something made her want to throw her computer at the wall and then hide under the bed. She didn’t know how much more of this she could take.
Then she noticed Julie, sitting in the shadows in a corner of the room, in a straight-backed chair pushed against the wall, crocheting something ugly and grotesque out of coarse blue yarn the color of a robin’s egg. She seemed to be scrutinizing every move Ardith made, every word she said. She also seemed to be pulsing on all known wavelengths.
Her Martian mother-in-law still insisted on coming here to the hospital to visit her, as she had every single day since her poor, poor daughter-in-law had collapsed in the laboratory. Ardith wasn’t certain, from moment to moment, whether that was such a good thing or not.
Probably not.
True, she felt much better physically, now, but she also still felt like screaming, throwing things, and tearing her hair in double handfuls. What a splendid picture that would make for Adam to compare with that gorgeous, picture-perfect, predatory Japanese assistant of his!
What the hell was her name again?
What was her name?
Through the window, she could just make out the planet Earth, where all three of her children lived in the Moon now, so far, far away.
“Sweetheart,” she told her daughter, trying to control a pathetic, teary quaver in her voice. “You tell your brother for me to take care of his responsibilities down there on the Moon. I know that he’s got to be feeling terrible about what happened to … to … But if he’s going to keep the baby, there are preparations to make. I’ve read that the reclamation process leaves them with all kinds of deficits. I want you and Jasmeen to stay down there with him and help him, will you, please?”
It was so strange to think of Wilson being pregnant.
Llyra apparently thought it over, and then said, “Where are
you, Mom? You’re not at home, are you? That doesn’t look like anywhere in the house to me. Are you somewhere else? Where are you? Where are you, Mom?”
“Where are you, Mom?” demanded Wilson.
“Where are you, Mom?” demanded Jasmeen.
Julie woke with a heart-wrenching snap, breathing hard, sweating. She looked around the room. The blinds were drawn, so she had no idea what time it was. Nobody else was there in the room with her at the moment.
Her personal computer, about the size and shape of a man’s pocket watch or a compact makeup case, lay quiet and unused on the bedside table.
She knew she’d been dreaming. Transmission lag to the Earth-Moon system was almost an hour now. She couldn’t have been talking to Llyra. She realized that, at some level, she felt that Julie was … what? Spying on her? Violating her privacy or her need for personal space?
She didn’t know, exactly, but the whole thing made her feel horribly guilty. To be truthful, she’d always felt closer to her mother-in-law than to her own mother—who in any case was with her father at the moment, in a half-built O’Neill habitat, orbiting the planet Jupiter. That seemed more like a dream than reality, but it was real enough. What was the transmission lag to Jupiter, a couple of centuries?
Come to think of it, if she squinted just right, she could just make Jupiter out, as well as its four Galilean moons, and a big red Budweiser sign on the habitat. She could also hear her mother saying the fateful words she’d sworn she’d never say to her own kids: “You never write!”
No, that was the dream again. She must have dozed off for a moment.
Fundamentally, Ardith was beginning to realize, everything made her feel guilty. She would remain in this damned hospital bed—at least mentally—fighting off the implacable purveyors of happy medicines, until she could find some way to deal with that and other things.