Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Page 18

  The notion grated against his soul. He was constitutionally unsuited to passivity and resignation. He wanted to know the details, no matter how grim.

  So does Teodor. What do I owe him in this matter?

  The genesmith had ceased to come to Morelon House. Alain hadn't had word of him in weeks, nor had any other Morelon seen him in recent memory.

  Three people I love are in a degree of pain I can't imagine, while I hide every potential explanation for their loss against my breast, for the good of Hope. Am I a saint or a monster?

  He could not decide.

  The breeze swirled briefly around him, ruffling his hair and stirring the chaff that littered the field to the limits of his vision. The sun was dropping slowly toward the horizon.

  I won't do anyone any good just standing here. Time to get cracking.

  He turned and strode back to Morelon House, to discover what anodyne might lie hidden in the work that awaited him.

  ***

  "So you remember her, then?" Teodor Chistyakowski said.

  Arne Stromberg chuckled. "I could hardly forget her. On every visit to my class, she clutched young Morelon's hand as if she were afraid he might get away. A very bright, very pretty girl."

  Teodor felt the familiar spike of irritation. He rose from Stromberg's guest chair, turned away and glanced at the jumbles of papers and journals piled all around him. On one wall of his office hung a woodcut plaque that read EXCESSIVE NEATNESS IS THE #1 CAUSE OF ATROPHY OF THE IMAGINATION. Alongside it was a tidy oaken shelf that bore an assortment of trophies from professional societies. The sociologist was apparently the sort who pursued several projects at once, and put up equably with the clutter.

  Doesn't seem to have hurt him.

  "She's not pretty," he said.

  "Hm?"

  Teodor turned to face Stromberg again. "I'm a genetic engineer. Teresza had the full benefit of my skills. She's near-genius brilliant, about forty percent stronger than other women her size, so healthy, durable, and disease-resistant that there's no standard for comparison, and she could charm the Relic out of orbit. She also has unusual emotional control and a direct sense for sincerity and integrity, which makes it impossible to deceive her. If she has a flaw of body or mind, I've yet to discover it." He snorted. "She's not pretty. She's perfect."

  The sociologist's pleasant expression faded to blankness. "It sounds as if you and your wife were quite fortunate."

  Teodor said nothing.

  "And her death grip on Armand Morelon? Was that a consequence of your planning as well?"

  "It was." The pain, the reaving knowledge that he had indirectly caused her flight, came surging back. He squeezed his fists so tightly that all the knuckles on both hands crackled. "She's not merely a perfect woman. She's also a perfect wife and helpmeet. Her affinity for personal quality caused her to fasten on Armand. She's bonded to him at a preconscious level, in a way that's essentially indissoluble. Wherever he is, I'll find her there as well."

  Stromberg's index finger traced an elaborate curlicue on his desktop.

  "I assume you've tried to trace his movements."

  "Of course. If a more private person has ever attended this university, there's...well, there's no record of him, either."

  "Did his family have any suggestions?"

  "They claim to know no more than I do."

  Stromberg steepled his hands and pressed them against his lips. He stared at the clutter on his desk as if he were contemplating an ethically dubious act.

  "Under normal circumstances," he said, eyes still lowered, "I wouldn't think to help one man track another as you've set out to do. It would feel as if I had collaborated in an invasion of privacy. But I sense that yours is a blameless quest. You don't just miss your, ah, daughter. This disappearance of hers is wholly unprecedented and quite unlike her, new love or no, isn't it? You fear for her -- for them. Don't you?"

  Teodor nodded.

  "The Morelon boy's absence from the class has caused a certain amount of gossip," Stromberg said. "Two or three of my students talked as if they knew more than the others, but in the comments I managed to overhear, they were less than specific." Abruptly the sociologist looked up at Teodor again. His ice-blue eyes filled with decision. "I could give you their names. I'm afraid I can give you nothing else."

  Teodor closed his eyes and breathed once deeply. "It's more than I have at the moment, Professor."

  Chapter 26

  Victoria had thought she could bear it. She'd said so to herself over and over, for six endless months. She'd been wrong.

  "Why can't you geniuses come up with some kind of screen for it?" She struggled up onto an elbow. "You turned me into a Goddess with two months of practice and half a dozen shots!"

  Ethan raised his face from his pillow and gaped at her in the dim light of the bedchamber. It was fuel to her fire. She'd seen enough of his suffocating-fish expression to last a lifetime.

  "I am not spending the next fifty years locked into this prison. If you and the others won't stir yourselves to find a way for me to go out and about, I might just work up some incentives for you."

  He squeezed his eyes tightly shut "Terra --"

  "Victoria! My name is Victoria Peterson!" She raised herself all the way up, the better to shriek at him. "You do not sleep with a mythical divinity! You do not sleep with the soul of a planet in exile! You sleep with a woman! Who is getting very tired of your mortal uselessness!"

  "Please, Vicki," he whispered, "I'm not supposed to do that." Tears leaked from beneath his eyelids. He pressed his fists against them as if that would dam the flow. "You know what you are. I know what you were. We all do. But the sacrifice you made is crushing even at best. It will become unbearable if you keep pretending that you're still..."

  She waited, temper still rising.

  "...human."

  She seized him about the waist with telekinetic tentacles, lifted him clear of the bed and pinned him against the ceiling, suspended helplessly in mid-air.

  He did not struggle against her invisible grip. He seemed no more upset than before, despite the implied threat. The face that looked down at her held nothing but sadness.

  "What do I have to do," she hissed, "to get you to take me seriously?"

  "I've always taken you seriously," he said, almost too softly to hear. "You're the most important person in the whole world. Maybe the whole galaxy. The radiotelescopes in the archipelago haven't picked up a transmission from Earth in centuries. Hope might be all that's left of the human race. And you keep it alive. How could I not take you seriously? Victoria," he said, once again in a whisper, "I would die for you. I'd give my life and all that I have to keep you alive just one more day. But I can't break the laws of physics, and that's what I'd have to do for you to have the thing you want."

  His gentleness was more than she could endure. The scream that had been building in her broke free of all restraint. It overtook her completely. She let Ethan fall to the bed and screamed with all the power in her body. She screamed and screamed until it seemed to have soaked into the chamber walls, until her lungs had no strength left to scream, until her throat could pass no further sound. When she could scream no more she beat her fists against the bed, the headboard, and finally against her lover's chest, until there was no force left in any part of her. At the last, with all her muscles gone slack, her vision veiled in red, and darkness a blanket over her brain, she felt Ethan, stronger than he looked and than she'd ever suspected, gather her in his arms and press her to him in a loving, futile gesture of comfort. And she passed out.

  ***

  Ethan lay quite still. Terra's sleep had been fitful for weeks. He did not want to deprive her of whatever rest she could garner from her faint. She needed it too badly.

  He'd wrapped his own sufferings tightly and thrust them into the deepest cellar of his being. He didn't think of them unless forced. They throbbed with exquisite torment whenever he allowed himself to peer beyond the moment.

&nb
sp; Chance had entrusted him with an infinitely precious burden. Terra was the protector of all Earth life on Hope. With Armand Morelon vanished, humanity would survive her demise by perhaps two months. Even if the Morelon boy were to reappear a decade hence, the prospects for his reinsertion into the program would be poor. In all probability he'd have aged beyond the point at which the brain chemicals would work the wonders upon which apotheosis depended.

  Magnusson was near to certain that psi power had been bred out of humanity. If he was correct, then Terra wasn't merely indispensable for the near future; she would be the last of her office. The longevity of Mankind would be bounded by the longevity of its unknown, unseen Goddess. Her life and sanity had to be preserved at any cost.

  Ethan would have done that in any case. He loved her.

  She would not believe it. She was in too much pain at the loss of her freedom, something every moment of her twenty years had told her was her inalienable right. She could think of nothing else. But it was so.

  Ethan's life had been normal and adequate. It had contained a full measure of parental love. He'd never felt neglected or deprived. Yet he'd managed to reach the twenty-sixth year of his life without feeling affection other than the filial. The young women he'd known, all pleasant, all intelligent, all at least moderately attractive, had never sparked from him the passionate gift of self, the willing surrender of personal prerogatives and autonomy that were required to conjure love. But that was before Victoria Peterson.

  Perhaps she didn't love him. Perhaps to her he was just the best of a cruelly limited set of options. Let it be so. It probably was so. It didn't matter. He was hers. He would care for her and nurture her until one of them should die.

  He no longer had a free man's latitude of action. She might not love him, but she needed him, needed his presence, his attention, his continuous silent reminder that she had the love of a man who knew of her sacrifice and grasped its awful extent. If his renunciation had to match hers, then let that be so as well. He would not look back.

  He no longer had the work he'd once loved. One love had given way to another. It was necessary. There was no point to regretting it.

  She was a murderess. She'd done the deed while he watched. Yet there had to have been a justification. Her courage and strength of will were too obvious, and too great, for her to have surrendered to petty malice. No one willing to forsake all the opportunities and pleasures of a normal life to guard the rest of the unknowing world could possibly be as evil as that. No one Ethan Mandeville loved, at any rate.

  He wondered if it might someday be too much for him to bear any further.

  ***

  Dmitri Ianushkevich remained at the monitors, but he'd turned off the sound pickups in Terra's apartment. For the moment he could take no more of Terra's tantrums. They would have tried him sorely even had Ethan Mandeville not been the target.

  The boy -- even though he was

  Inner Circle, Ianushkevich could hardly think of him as an adult peer to himself and the others -- had stood for more abuse than the parapsychologist had ever seen a human being accept without lashing back. Watching him lying in the darkness, Terra unconscious in his arms, brought mingled feelings of gratitude for his period of relief, and agony over how much more he could absorb before he broke. Terra had blamed him for everything that displeased her about her lot, yet none of it was his fault. He'd waited on her like a body slave from the day of her apotheosis. He'd made her every whim into a personal mission, and had rarely failed to deliver on anything she'd demanded. He'd all but exhausted himself trying to satisfy her sexual hunger. But the things she wanted most were not within his control, or anyone else's.

  Terra had decided to test what she'd been told about her sensitivity to random psi currents. She'd made several forays beyond her apartments. Each time Ethan had had to carry her back, shrieking from the excruciating pain.

  Ianushkevich knew, as they all did, how completely his youngest colleague loved the Goddess. His devotion to her blended passion, commitment, and admiration for her strength, flavored throughout with a unique sort of reverence. Anyone could see what her sufferings cost him, but Terra would not give up. She was no more willing to accept the verdict of her experiences than she'd been to accept the warnings from her watchers and caregivers. And she needed someone to blame.

  It wasn't only the sallies from her chambers. Terra had been exhibiting the willfulness of an undisciplined toddler, and a degree of irrationality more often seen in a God's final year than in his first. She'd shown no sign of instability before her elevation. If the apotheosis itself had done this to her, perhaps in combination with the hormone-accelerated evocation of her powers, those powers had come at a terrible price...a price the Cabal would have to pay for her, for a half-century to come, for the good of Hope.

  It was difficult to believe. Physically, she was an ideal specimen of young womanhood: beautiful, strong, vibrantly healthy and resilient. Her effectiveness as the guardian of the life of the world surpassed all their expectations; the proto-blights that began as Tellus failed had all been quenched within days of her apotheosis. On both continents of Hope, the life of Earth overflowed with vitality. Terra's malady was entirely behavioral.

  It could be adjustment trauma. Being immured in an apartment two hundred feet below ground, no matter how lavish, takes some getting used to. Especially when one's been told that the term of confinement is one's whole life.

  But Ianushkevich had lived through ten other elevations to the Godhood. This one was different. He was sure of it, without having any slightest clue as to why or how.

  I should talk with Ethan.

  That, too, would be difficult. Mandeville was hardly able to get away from Terra for five minutes at a stretch. She demanded that he remain with her waking and sleeping. She seemed to fear to let him out of her sight, as if once he'd passed beyond the vault door, he'd break for freedom and never return. Ianushkevich could hardly quiz Mandeville about Terra's mood swings and rages in her presence.

  A thousand Earth legends told of couplings between a mortal and a god, always to the mortal's ultimate sorrow. On Hope, it was the God who was more surely the mortal...but it appeared that the hazards of such a liaison to an ordinary man were no less for that.

  Chapter 27

  Despite a terrible desire to have the thing over and done with, Alain forced himself to walk through the cornfield at his usual pace. His grandnephew Yves accompanied him in silence.

  The tour of the Morelon farm had consumed four hours. Alain had done his best to sell the farm on its merits, to present a complete and attractive portrait of the business, and to refrain from speaking of his immense need. Nature had cooperated by presenting them with mild spring weather and bright sunshine. The clan had had a pleasant day in which to prepare the fields for the first crop, and to answer Yves's questions about operations, marketing, and the prospects for the coming year. But Yves had had few such questions, and Alain had despaired of eliciting others.

  Yves had spent none of his fifty-four years engaged in any sort of agriculture. For nearly two decades he'd made his living by operating a small bindery. When Alain had first approached him about taking over the management of the farm, he'd been more polite than enthusiastic. But no one else in the clan had a scintilla of management experience, and Alain would not trust a complete novice to run a ten square mile, twelve hundred year old farm that raised millions of dekas worth of corn each year. Not his farm.

  Neither of them spoke again until they were seated in the farm office at the back of Morelon House.

  "Is there anything else you'd like to see?" Alain said.

  Yves shrugged. "Is there anything else I ought to see?"

  Alain pursed his lips.

  Yves lacked any distinguishing qualities. He was of medium height and build, had ordinary features and an ordinary voice, and moved and talked in an unexceptional way: the perfectly, forgettably average man. Were it not for his black hair and eyes, he'd have had
nothing to mark him as a Morelon. His business achievements were modest at best. He'd exhibited little enthusiasm for the prospect of running the Morelon farm. Despite the great financial rewards that would accrue to its managing director, he seemed to regard the opportunity with indifference.

  Armand would leave him in the dust.

  But Armand was likely two hundred feet beneath the Genet Center, protecting a hundred million unsuspecting people from heavy-metal poisoning. Perhaps two dozen people would know of his importance, or his existence, until he succumbed to the terminal throes of the Godhood.

  "The responsibility is great," Alain said. "I'd be available to assist you at need, but I'd expect you to be more self-sufficient than not. I'd hardly be willing to pay you a managing director's wages if I were still running the operation."

  Yves nodded slightly.

  "Might you be interested?" Interested enough to contribute a few words to this conversation, at least?

  Yves Morelon steepled his hands and looked off into the corner. Alain struggled to keep his impatience in check.

  "I have to review a great many factors," Yves said.

  "About the farm?"

  "No, about my personal situation." Yves smiled faintly. "The farm is well organized, and your workers all seem dedicated and able, but we both know that a new hand on the tiller will mean changes. It will be quite a demanding position, at least for a year or two. I have to assure myself that it won't conflict with any of my other involvements."

  Alain automatically leaned forward. "What other involvements?"

  Yves flipped a hand. "The bindery and my social life, mostly."

  "You would continue operating the bindery?"

  "Why not? I've put nineteen years into it. You'd hardly expect a man to abandon an enterprise after investing that much of his life in it. Besides," and he smiled again, "I'm a single man. I have to leave a few hours free each week if I'm ever to change that, not so?"

  Alain realized that his hands had curled into fists. He thrust them behind his desk and forced them open while reciting an old mantra for calm.