“For God’s sake, Curtis, I’m fully grown. I don’t have to account to you for everything I do.”
“I guess that depends on what you were doing. I mean, if you found out something that was important to the future of the colony, that would be my business, wouldn’t it?”
“You were listening, weren’t you?”
“Not me personally. But I suppose it comes down to the same thing.”
“So what do you want? A tribunal? Shoot me at dawn?”
He came up on one elbow and dug his fingers into her arm.“Do you have the slightest fucking idea of what’s going on around here or not? Are you actually pretending you don’t know why those people are here?”
“I know what they told me. But I suppose that’s not germane.”
He let her go and rolled onto his back.“There’s a leak, Molly.We have to assume they know everything. Everything.And you know what pisses me off ? What pisses me off is that I don’t think I know everything. I don’t even think I know as much as Morgan’s stooges about what those kids of yours and Dian’s are up to. Now isn’t that a kick in the ass?”
“Theoretical physics,” Molly said.“I could write some of the equations out for you.Would that make you feel better? Because you wouldn’t get anything out of them.”
“Quantum mechanics was a physical theory and it wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.What are they doing out there? What are they building?”When she didn’t answer he sighed dramatically.“You really see me as some petty little Hitler, don’t you? Power crazy.You can’t even trust me with the discoveries those kids are making right under my nose.”
Yes, she thought, that’s true.That just about sums it up. But she didn’t let the words out, afraid they might take on a life of their own, that they might betray her too, just as Curtis had.
“You’re wrong,” he said.“You’re more wrong than you know. I still love you.Did you know that?You’ve made it where it’s almost impossible to get those words out without choking on them.But they’re true.And I care about this colony.The lives of everyone here are my responsibility.”
Was it possible? she wondered. Could it be that he did still love her, that this was all her fault somehow?
Then she remembered Curtis in the sickbay, his hand just millimeters from Lena’s, the sick knowledge that the new woman had aroused his curiosity, that he would pursue her and have her if he could, the way he’d pursued and had the others.
Not for the first time she wondered what the word love meant to him, if it had a one-to-one semantic correspondence to a repeatable phenomenon, mental or physical, or if the word itself was everything, a self-defining verbal gesture. In physics, she thought, the first test is falsifiability. If you can’t prove it wrong, you can’t prove it right, either.
If he could write out the math for her, she thought, then she’d know.
“I believe,” she said slowly,“that you mean what you’re saying. But it’s going to take more than words to convince me.”
“You don’t understand me at all, do you? You’ve got all your feelings so pushed back and under control that you think everybody else is the same way.Well, we’re not.What do you think it’s like for me? Eight years ago we pulled ourselves back from the edge of something that would have killed us all, and the only way we did it was by believing we could be more than some dying ghost town on the edge of space.The next two years were the best years of my life, and yours too, if you had the heart to admit it. Everybody’s.We were all working hard, and we could see the results right in front of us, hold them in our hands.To see those first crops coming in, the kid being born...”
“Yeah, okay. I was there.”
“Yeah.Well, I was there too. Do you think I haven’t noticed how different it is now? Alcohol consumption up about 50 percent every year, every year more Thorazine cases out in the fields, people late to work, people not coming to work at all, almost half the female kids showing some symptoms of anorexia—”
“Right,” Molly said, wanting to hurt him,“and then there’s the people that spend all their time in the isolation tanks, tripping out, running away from the things that scare them.”
“Okay,” Curtis said,“I’m not going to argue that right now. Maybe all this is just inevitable. Maybe it’s the human condition. But that doesn’t make it hurt me any less, make me feel any less responsible for it.”
“Look,” Molly said,“we may be close to something, okay? But we don’t have it yet. It’s going to take a few more months.”
“We haven’t got a few more months.They’re here, it’s happening now.”
“We can handle them,” Molly said.“It’s going to work out.” Come on, she told herself. Can’t you be any more convincing than that? Even if you don’t believe it yourself ?
“It had better,” Curtis said. He turned away from her and was asleep in seconds.
She wished she could escape into sleep that easily, the way she had all through adolescence. But more and more she was turning into her mother, who had roamed the house late at night and then been up again before dawn, always, in Molly’s memory, dressed in a faded blue cotton kimono and clumsy house shoes. Heredity, Molly thought. It’s not even the anger and frustration keeping me up, it’s simple heredity.
She slept fitfully until dawn and then came finally, violently awake as the east mirror rumbled open. Her heart pounded, the noise of the hydraulics sounding this morning like the crack of literal doom, like the shattering of the plastic sky overhead, the end of the world.
She hunched fetally under the sheet, her back to Curtis, telling herself it wasn’t really that bad. But her arguments lacked force.The order of her existence was collapsing—Kane hallucinating and under Morgan’s control, Reese evasive and cold, Curtis convinced of betrayal.
Not to mention the second ship from Earth, a further, unknown disaster, still waiting in the wings.
It’s bad, she thought. Genuinely bad.
She put on a tattered nasa Constant Wear Garment and went into the kitchen,shutting Curtis behind the bedroom door.The light over the counter was on,silhouettingVerb and one of her friends as they ate breakfast.
Empathy again? Molly wondered. Or one of those synchronistic events that her physics is supposed to predict?
“Good morning,” Molly said.The boy was about eleven, apparently normal, just sociopathic enough to prefer living in the cave with the more visibly strange. He was obsessed with electronics, and Molly and Dian used him in the construction of Verb’s devices. E17, she remembered, was what he was calling himself this week.
“Is he all right?”Verb asked.
“Reese, you mean?” Molly said, and the girl nodded.“He’s okay.They used aerobraking instead of rockets, and it was hard on him, but he’ll get over it.”
“I want to see him.”
“He wants to see you, too,” Molly said.Was something up? The boy stared down into a bowl of cereal and goat’s milk, pretending to ignore them. She had Verb’s promise not to talk about her work, and she had to trust her.There simply wasn’t anything else she could do.“Why is it so important to you? You weren’t but two years old when he left. I don’t see how you can even remember him.”
She had wanted to tell Verb that she was related to Reese, but Curtis had opposed it.There was enough gossip, he said, without dragging his own family through it. Molly hadn’t understood why it was so important to him, but she’d given in. She’d spent so much of her life keeping the secret that it had become second nature to her anyway.
“But I do remember him,”Verb was saying.“I remember stuff you wouldn’t even believe. Sometimes I even think I remember being born, just the colors. Is that too weird? But that’s not the important thing. It’s the connections.The connections, don’t you see? That’s what the physics is all about.”