Now he stood there in the darkened hallway, swaying slightly, his fists not even clenched. It had been years since he’d raised a hand against his children.
So what am I afraid of? Achilles wondered, his stomach knotted.
He knows. He knows. I’m afraid he knows...
The corners of his father’s mouth tightened by some infinitesimal degree. It wasn’t a smile. It wasn’t a snarl. In later years, the adult Achilles Desjardins would look back and recognise it as a kind of acknowledgment, but at the time he had no idea what it meant. He only knew that his father simply turned and walked down the hall to the master bedroom, and closed the door behind him, and never mentioned that night ever again.
In later years, he also realised that TheraPal must have been stringing him along. Its goal, after all, had been to attract customers, and you didn’t do that by rubbing their faces in unpleasant truths. The program had simply been trying to make him feel better as a marketting strategy.
And yet, that didn’t mean it had lied, necessarily. Why bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity; what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring.
Odd, though.
You’d have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two in the years that followed.
Bedside Manor
Gene Erickson and Julia Friedman live in a small single-deck hab about two hundred meters southeast of Atlantis. Julia has always done most of the housekeeping: Gene gets notoriously twitchy in enclosed spaces. For him, home is the open ridge: the hab is a necessary evil, for sex and feeding and those occasional times when the his own darkdreams prove insufficiently diverting. Even then, he treats it the way a pearl diver of two hundred years past would treat a diving belclass="underline" a place to gulp the occasional breath of air before returning to the deep.
Now, of course, it’s more of an ICU.
Lenie Clarke emerges from the airlock and lays her fins on an incongruous welcome mat laid to one side. The main compartment is dim even to rifter eyes, a grey-on-grey wash of twilight punctuated by the bright chromatic readouts on the comm board. The air smells of mould and metal; more faintly, of vomit and disinfectant. Life-support systems gurgle underfoot. Open hatches gape like black mouths: storage; head; sleeping cubby. An electronic metronome beeps somewhere nearby. A heart monitor, counting down.
Julia Friedman steps into view.
“He’s still—oh.” She’s taken off her diveskin in favor of a thermochrome turtleneck that mostly covers her scars. It’s strange to see rifter eyes atop dryback clothing. “Hi, Lenie.”
“Hi. How’s he doing?”
“Okay.” She turns in the hatchway, sags with her spine against the frame: half in darkness, half in twilight. She turns her face to the darkness, to the person within it. “Could be better, I guess. He’s asleep. He’s sleeping a lot.”
“I’m surprised you could even keep him inside.”
“Yeah. I think he’d rather be out there, even now, but…he’s doing it for me, I think. Because I asked him.” Friedman shakes her head. “It was too easy.”
“What was?”
“Convincing him.” She takes a breath. “You know how much he loves the outdoors.”
“Are Jerry’s antibiotics helping?”
“Maybe. I guess. It’s hard to say, you know? She can always say he’d be worse without them, no matter how bad it gets.”
“Is that what she’s saying?”
“Oh, Gene hasn’t talked to her since he came back. He doesn’t trust them.” She stares at the deck. “He blames her for this.”
“For being sick?”
“He thinks they did something to him.”
Clarke remembers. “What exactly does he—?”
“I don’t know. Something.” Friedman glances up: her armored eyes lock onto Clarke’s for an instant, then slide off to the side. “It’s taking a long time to clear up, you know? For a simple infection. Do you think?”
“I don’t really know, Julia.”
“Maybe ßehemoth’s mixing things up somehow. Making things worse.”
“I don’t know if it works like that.”
“Maybe I’ve got it too, by now.” Friedman almost seems to be talking to herself. “I mean, I’m with him a lot…”
“We could check you out, if you wanted.”
Friedman looks at her. “You were infected, weren’t you? Before.”
“Only with ßehemoth,” Clarke says, careful to draw the distinction. “It didn’t kill me. Didn’t even make me sick.”
“It would have, though. Eventually. Right?”
“If I hadn’t got my retrofits. But I did. We all did.” She tries a smile. “We’re rifters, Julia. We’re tough little motherfuckers. He’ll pull through. I know it.”
It’s not much, Clarke knows. Reassuring deception is all she can offer Julia Friedman at the moment. She knows better than to touch; Freedman’s not keen on physical contact. She’d endure a comforting hand on the shoulder, perhaps—even take it in the spirit in which it was intended—but Grace Friedman is very selective with her personal space. It’s one of the few ways in which Clarke feels a kinship with the woman. Each can see the other flinch, even when neither does.
Friedman looks back into the darkness. “Grace says you helped get him out of there.”
Clarke shrugs, a bit surprised that Nolan would give her the credit.
“I would’ve been there too, you know. Only…” Friedman’s voice trails off. The hab’s ventilators sigh into the silence.
“Only you think maybe he’d have been better off where he was,” Clarke suggests.
“Oh, no. Well, maybe partly. I don’t know if Dr. Seger’s as bad as they think, anyway.”
“They?”
“Gene and—Grace.”
Ah.
“It’s just, I didn’t know…I didn’t know if he’d even want me there.” Friedman flashes a rueful smile. “I’m not much of a fighter, Lenie. Not like you, not like—I just kind of roll with the punches.”
“He could have been with Grace all along if he’d wanted to, Julia. He’s with you.”
Friedman laughs, a bit too quickly. “Oh, no. That’s not what I meant.” But Clarke’s words seem to have perked her up a bit.
“Anyway,” Clarke says, “I guess I’ll leave you guys alone. I just wanted to stop by, see how he was doing.”
“I’ll tell him,” Friedman says. “He’ll appreciate it.”
“Sure. No problem.” She bends to retrieve her fins.
“And you should come by again, when he’s awake. He’d like that.” She hesitates, looking away; chestnut curls obscure her face. “Not many people come by, you know. Except Grace. Saliko was by a while back.”
Clarke shrugs. “Rifters aren’t big on social skills.” And you really ought to know that by now, she doesn’t add. Julia Friedman just doesn’t get it, sometimes. It’s as though, scars and history notwithstanding, she’s a rifter in name only, an honorary member allowed past the gate on her husband’s credentials.
Which begs the question of what I’m doing here, she realizes.
“I think they take him too seriously sometimes,” Friedman says.
“Seriously?” Clarke glances at the airlock. The hab seems suddenly, subtly smaller.