What could have been so important to him that he thought he had to risk that weird machine? Where had Verb sent him? Not back to Earth, that made no sense at all.
Outward, then. Like father, like daughter, both obsessed with the outward urge.
Not that it mattered, because now he was dead. Probably dead the instant he stepped into the energy field, but if not, then he’d be dead at the other end, was now only a probability wave whose value was death, death by explosion, by fire, cold, or vacuum.
She tried to picture it, to use the pain to cauterize the wound.
“Alonzo,” Curtis said.“Get three or four of your people, whoever you can find, and get them to the south airlock.We’ll meet you there.”
Alonzo squeezed between Molly’s chair and the console, his eyes moving expressionlessly past her face.
“Come on,” Curtis said. He pulled at her arm, trying to make her stand up. She stared at him blankly.“Come on!” he repeated.
She got to her feet.“Where...?”
“I’ve had it. Okay? I’ve had it. I’m through fucking around. It’s answer time.”
“What do you mean? What are you doing?”
She followed him down the stairs, stumbling a little in trying to match his pace. It wasn’t until they passed the last row of living modules that she realized where he was taking her.
“We can’t go out there,” she said.“The storm—”
“Fuck the storm,” Curtis said.“We know the way.”
Molly didn’t answer.The danger was not in getting lost, and certainly not in being blown around by the wind, which didn’t have the friction velocity to lift anything larger than a pebble.The danger came from the sheer quantity of fine particles in the air, particles that could clog or abrade the worn, delicate mechanisms of their suits.
Molly stripped off her foolish orange suit and put on a pair of recycled cotton pants and a T-shirt from her locker.As she was getting into the bottom half of the suit,Alonzo came in with three reinforcements: a young woman named Hanai, one of Curtis’s sapping partners named Iain, and Lena.
“She was wandering around downstairs,”Alonzo said.“She wanted to come.”
“Fine,” Curtis said.
Molly watched the thin black woman get into a suit. Kane had slept with her, she decided, feeling a morbid sort of curiosity about it, a slight, illogical pang of jealousy.
They dressed in silence, Curtis ready before any of the others and pacing out his anger in front of the lockers.Then they crowded into the airlock and passed through into the night. Molly kept her head down as they crossed the plains to the cave, seeing only the swirling dust and the rise and fall of Curtis’s boots in the circle of light in front of her.
The cave was spotlit again as they slithered in, two at a time.The vivid, dizzying hologram starfields had disappeared.At the dim edge of one cone of brightness she could see Verb’s transporter gate, a steel door frame connected to kilometers of fiber optic cables. Depression spread through her like a cloud of ink, and only then did she realize that she’d still been hoping to find Reese alive, saved by a blown fuse or a last-second failure of nerve.
No, she thought, not a failure of nerve. Not Reese.
Curtis stripped off his suit as he waited for the others, but Molly left hers on. Insulation, she thought, against the unpleasantness to come. When the last of his people came through, Curtis locked the inner hatch open to keep anyone else from using it.
“Spread out,” he told them.“Just stay out of the way for right now.” Molly noticed a look passing between Curtis and Lena, Lena questioning, Curtis distracted and vaguely irritated. Lena moved off with the others.
“Verb?” Molly said.“Verb, where are you?”
Finally she saw the girl coming toward her out of the shadows, her eyes shining with a joy that was still not enough to transform her face. “I did it, mother, I sent him. He already knew about the machine, I wasn’t the one who told him about it. I didn’t break my promise.”
“I know you didn’t,” Molly said.
“He wanted it, he wanted it so much, and so I sent him.”
“I know,” Molly said. She reached out a hand and Verb took it, carefully, and held on.
Then Curtis moved into the light and Verb pulled away.“So he is here,” she said, as if some dire prediction had just come true.“What
does he want?”
“I want to talk to you,” Curtis said.
“No,”Verb said. Her massive head, on its trunk-like neck, rolled back and forth.“No.”
“You’ve really got yourselves quite a setup,” Curtis said, ignoring her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been up here.Too long. How about a little light, and then you can show me around.”
Verb stared at him in rigid defiance.
“I know where the controls are,” Curtis said.“Either you can do it yourself, or I’ll go over there and do it for you.”
“Crunch, turn on the lights,” she said, and Molly saw that the girl had taken her first step backward, that ultimately she would not be able to resist him.
The lights faded up to the level of a cloudy morning.
“Good. Now let’s have a look at your machine, okay?”
“No,”Verb said.“It’s my machine. I don’t have to show it to you.”
“You’re not a baby anymore,” Curtis said.“Don’t overplay the role, okay? You’re a part of this society as long as you use up our resources, and you’ve used up a hell of a lot of them here. I represent that society and I have the right to know what you’re doing.”
Verb’s head swiveled to face Molly.
Oh God,she thought,this is it.What in Christ’s name am I going to say to her?“He’s right,”she said hesitantly.“I mean,he’s right that he represents the society, and you have to account to him for what you’re doing.” She took a breath and looked over at Curtis, who nodded with a smug self-assurance that infuriated her. She could see a thin, dark line where he’d cut himself shaving his head; he could have used a depilatory cream, she thought, it was crazy to shave your head with a blade...
She turned back to Verb.“But you also have to account to yourself. You’re responsible for what you create, do you understand? If somebody is going to use what you’ve made for something bad—”
“That’s enough, Molly,” Curtis said.
“—that makes you responsible for what they do, too.You can’t let your work be perverted—”
“Shut up!” He didn’t need to raise his voice; the violence screamed from the angles of his wrists and legs. She let herself trail off.
Verb seemed to be physically shrinking, as if the psychological pressure were crushing her body as well. Dear God, Molly thought, the future of the human race may be riding on this little girl.And I think she knows it.
“Listen to me,” Curtis said to the girl.“You care for your mother, don’t you? When she talks about loyalty and betrayal and taking responsibility and that kind of thing, you believe her, don’t you?”
Molly saw it coming and could not get out of the way, like an animal trapped in the lights of a car.
“You trust her, don’t you? You want to believe she’s noble and brave and loving, but suppose she knew something important and didn’t tell you about it because she was afraid it might hurt this project?”
“She wouldn’t do that,”Verb said.
“I think she would. Suppose it was something about you that might upset you so much that you couldn’t work anymore?”
“What?”Verb whispered.“Go on, say it.”
“Ask your mother,” Curtis said, and folded his arms in front of him.
“Well?”Verb said.“Is there something?”
“Yes,” Molly said. Her throat was blocked and it came out as a glottal hiss.
“Then tell me now.”
“We thought...oh God, we thought we could find something.We didn’t want to frighten you...”