“They’ll be back,” said the hostess. “Soon.”
“They?”
“My husband and your friend.”
Washen lay inside an open autodoc bed, her new body dressed in a blackish goo of silicone and dissolved oxygen and a trillion microchines. This was how a soldier was reborn—too fast and clumsily, flesh and bone made in bulk while immunological functions were kept to a minimum. Quee Lee sat on one side of the bed, Locke on the other. Her son was dressed in a passenger’s colorful garb, his flesh darkened by UV light, his lovely thick hair grown long enough to make a golden stubble, hands and broad bare feet lashed together with standard security cord.
Quietly, anxiously, she asked, “How long has it been?” He didn’t respond.
Quee Lee leaned forward, saying, “One hundred and twenty-two years. Minus a few days.”
Washen remembered the explosive blows and the sensation of being yanked out of the leech habitat, tumbling and tumbling as her flesh froze and her mind pulled itself into the deepest possible coma.
When the nausea passed, she asked, “Did you find me, Locke?”
He opened his mouth, and he closed it again. “Pamir rescued you,” said Quee Lee. “With your son’s help.”
Again Washen glanced at the black security cords, then managed to laugh. “I’m glad the two of you have become good friends.”
Embarrassment bled into a chilly anger. Locke straightened his back, then forced himself to explain. “It was an accident. I went to the alien house. To see if the captains, or anyone else, had been there. And that ugly man stumbled over me.”
Pamir. Sure.
Her son shook his head in disgust, bare toes curling and uncurling in the black earth. What would a Wayward make of this rich soil? And the impossibly green trees? And the monkeys? And what about the ornate song of that little rilly bird that fell on them from the highest branches?
Finally, with a massive sadness, Locke admitted, “I was weak.”
“Why?” asked Washen.
“I should have killed your friend.”
“Pamir’s difficult to kill,” she responded. “Believe me.”
Again, Locke clung to his silence.
Washen took a deep, thorough breath, then sat up in bed, the black goo clinging to her baby-smooth, utterly hairless flesh. When the worst of the pain subsided, she looked at Quee Lee and said, “One hundred and twenty-two years.” She sighed and said, “Circumstances have changed while I was sleeping. That’s my guess.”
The woman flinched, then smiled shyly.
“What’s happening?” asked Washen. “With the ship-?”
“Nothing has happened,” said her hostess. “According to our new Master Captain, the ship needed a change of leadership. Incompetence was rife. And now, according to her, everything is the same as before, except for what’s better, and we’d be fools to entertain the tiniest concern.”
Washen glared at her son.
He refused to blink or look at any face.
Then to herself, in a soft angry voice, she said,’Miocene.”
And she turned back to Quee Lee, adding, “That’s who she sounds like.”
The apartment’s AI spoke with a firm authority, announcing, “Perri is approaching. With the other one, he is.”
It said, “They seem to be alone.”
Then it asked, “Do I allow them inside, Quee Lee?”
“Absolutely”
Three more days had passed. Washen was six hours out of her bed, dressed in a simple white sarong and white sandals, and she had just eaten her first solid meal in more than a century, the endless fatigue turning into a nervous energy. She stood beside Quee Lee, waiting. The apartment door opened, its security screen in place, and out in the wide, tree-lined avenue, there was no one. What should have been a busy scene on any normal day was unnaturally quiet. Suddenly two men strode into view. The smaller man was handsome, smiling with an unconscious charm. The other man was larger and simple-faced, and Washen made the obvious mistake. Once the door was closed and locked by twenty means, she said to that larger man, “Hello, Pamir.”
But the simple face peeled away, exposing a second face identical to the smaller man. Pretty in the same way. And charming. And most definitely not Pamir.
“Sorry,” said a laughing voice. “Try again.”
The smaller man was Pamir. He peeled away his disguise, and the rumbling deep voice explained, “I got an autodoc to peel away thirty kilos. What do you think?”
“You look wonderful anyway,” she allowed.
Pamir’s face was rugged, like something hacked from a block of dense dark oak, an asymmetric tilt to the rough features and his dirty, badly matted hair tilting things even more. The man looked as if he couldn’t remember when he last slept. Yet the bright brown eyes were clear and alert. When he looked at Washen, he smiled. Looking anywhere else, his expression grew distant, distracted. To no one in particular, he said, “I’m famished.” Then his gaze returned to Washen, and the smile swam up from the massive fatigue, and with a familiar bite, cynical and wise, he said, “Don’t thank me. Not yet. If these grandchildren of yours find us, you’ll wish that you were still at the bottom of that hydrogen sea.”
Probably so.
Yanking off the rest of his disguise, Pamir asked, “Where’s my prisoner?”
“In the garden,” Quee Lee replied.
“Has he grunted anything important?”
Both women said, “Nothing,” in the same breath.
A bare hand pushed through the dirty hair. Then Pamir allowed himself a smile, and he confessed to Washen, “I wanted to be with you. When you came back to us. But I had to see to this and to that first. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“Then I won’t,” he grumbled.
Quee Lee asked her husband, “What is happening out there?”
The pretty man rolled his eyes and thrust his tongue into one cheek.’In a word?” he said. “It’s awfully and weirdly and relentlessly quiet.”
She asked, “Where did you go, darling?”
The men glanced at each other, and Perri said, “Darling,” as a warning.
Then Pamir shook his head, saying, “Food first. I want my thirty kilos back.” He peeled away the false flesh on his hands, saying, “Then we’ve got to go somewhere. Just us, Washen. I’ve got a trillion questions, and barely enough time to ask ten.”
Pamir was clean and wearing new clothes. He and Washen were inside a guest suite. The suite’s floor diamond was inlaid with sun and holo generators. Looking between their feet, they could see into Quee Lee’s garden room, and in particular, they could watch the blond-haired man who sat in the largest clearing, who never yanked at the restraining straps, and who carefully watched each motion of every bird and bug and half-tame monkey.
“Tell me,” Pamir began. “Everything.”
Nearly five thousand years were crossed in what felt like a single breath. The false mission. Marrow. The Event. Children born; Waywards born. The rebirth of civilization. Washen and Miocene escaping from Marrow. Then Diu caught them and brought them to the leech home, and Diu explained that he was the source of everything that had happened… and just as she was about to finish the story, she paused to breathe, and nod, telling Pamir, “I know what you’ve been doing these last days.”
“Do you?”
“You were trying to decide if I was genuine. If you could trust me.”
He took a last bite of half-cooked steak, then watching her, asked, “How about it? Can I trust you?”
“What did you find out?” she pressed.
“Nobody mentions you. Nobody seems to care. But Miocene and your grandchildren are searching hard for him.” Pamir pointed at the floor. “They nearly found him, and me, inside the fuel tank. But don’t let his glowering silences fool you. Locke told me enough to narrow our search site enough…”