There was no hurry now.
TWENTY-SIX
EARTH, 2154 AD
Jared Schenck was orphaned two days before his seventh birthday. The call came for Rekka at 7:32 in the morning, while Jared was asleep in her guest room, no doubt with his chocolate-brown teddy-bear in his arms. She was already up, even though it was Sunday, her limbering-up asanas complete, and about to drink her one and only espresso of the day.
‘No,’ Rekka told her wallscreen. ‘They can’t be dead. Not Randolf. Not Angela.’
She put down the tiny cup.
‘I’m so very, very sorry.’ Google Li, on screen, looked shocked herself. ‘It was only a short passenger hop, but they’re saying everyone on board was killed.’
Rekka stared at the door to Jared’s room.
‘Oh no.’
‘Do you want me to come over?’
In the seven years that Rekka had worked in Singapore, Google Li had not become a friend, but there was no real enmity. Google Li cared only what UNSA management thought of her; and provided you took that into account, you could at least deal with her as a colleague.
Jared’s door clicked open.
‘Auntie Rekka?’
He was holding the teddy bear.
‘Oh, honey.’ She turned to Google Li. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Do it any time. I mean any time.’
And then there was the stomach-wrenching task of telling a young boy that his parents were gone. It was one of those things you see on holodramas and hope never to have to do yourself; one of those dealing-with-tragedy procedures you don’t get to rehearse in advance, and wouldn’t want to.
‘They’re gone away,’ she told him. ‘Gone to . . .’ But she did not believe in heaven, because a single copy of software does not survive the immolation of the hardware it resides on; and she had a deep distrust of education founded on the concept of lies-to-children. ‘They don’t exist, Jared. Dead means gone for ever, and there’s never any way to—’
But then the sobbing took hold of her, and she crushed Jared to her, as he in turn hugged the bear, and he cried because she did, for he surely could not understand what she was telling him, not yet.
It would be Randolf and Angela’s continuing absence over the years and decades to come that would render meaning to untimely death.
Of course Jared’s biological parents were Amber and Mary. Amber was committed to her life as a Pilot, and deeply unhappy during her times on Earth, for her eye sockets were metallic I/O interfaces linking her to her ship, her occipital lobes and visual cortex having been nanovirally rewired for that purpose during the procedures that turned her into a Pilot.
Mary, absent from Jared’s life since before his first birthday, had contributed the rest of the DNA; and she had also stolen fractolon infusions from the long-preserved Ro McNamara cultures, so that Jared might be a true Pilot. That had still required Amber, who carried Jared inside her, to spend the final months secretly in mu-space, there to give birth to her beautiful, wonderful obsidian-eyed boy.
Jared’s legacy would be a golden universe unimaginable to ordinary humans, and yet he would be fully functional on Earth: a child of two continua.
Rekka was technically, legally, a friend of the family, still seeing Amber and shunning Mary, who had eloped with Rekka’s partner Simon. Randolf and Angela had been Rekka’s friends, and Rekka had introduced them to Amber and facilitated their adoption of Jared.
Until now, it had worked out perfectly.
As the month progressed, legal processes crept into action.
Given that Rekka had exactly zero rights where Jared was concerned, you could say that UNSA did everything right. The shocking thing was her own ambivalence: love and obligation on the one hand, against a deep conviction that she would be an awful stand-in mother. After all, had Rekka’s own mother not tried to kill Rekka along with herself? Was she not an accidental survivor of a Suttee Pavilion? And what kind of legacy was that? But she needed to know that Jared would be safe; and perhaps the UNSA welfare psychologists who talked to her picked up on that: Rekka left those meetings feeling reassured, without ever understanding what had been accomplished.
Perhaps, in retrospect, the same psych specialists were equally adept at manipulating Amber and Mary. Legally, it was the biological parents whose wishes counted now.
‘Zurich is supposed to be the best,’ said Amber, sitting in the tropical garden at the back of Rekka’s apartment block. ‘With Karyn McNamara in charge.’
It would be a long way for Rekka to visit; but the point of a residential school was that you saw children only on holidays, wasn’t it? She had no right to tell Amber what to choose.
It was now three weeks since the memorial service.
‘But I told the welfare people,’ Amber continued, ‘that Switzerland was too far for Auntie Rekka to travel to, and Sue, that’s Dr Chiang, told me that Kyoto is excellent. Better in some ways than Zurich.’
‘Oh.’
‘And you can come with me to check the school out. I mean without causing problems work-wise.’
It was the UNSA culture: if they decreed that an employee was to spend time on some UNSA-approved human welfare task, that employee’s line managers had better show enthusiasm, or they were in trouble. Often Rekka thought that the organisation was too involved with people’s private lives, though her own solitary existence was unaffected; but at times like these you could take advantage of the corporate parental attitude.
‘Of course I’ll come with you,’ she said.
‘Good.’ Amber picked up her iced lemon tea, then put it back down. ‘Am I a terrible person, Rekka?’
‘No.’ Rekka took hold of her hand. ‘You are the very best, and Jared is proud of you.’
‘He’s my son, and so very young.’
On Earth, Amber saw herself as a cripple in several ways – those metal eye sockets were incapable of shedding tears – while in mu-space she soared, like a ballerina or gymnast or perhaps a dolphin in her natural element. However much Rekka thought secretly that Jared needed a full-time parent, she could never even hint that Amber might wrench herself from life as a Pilot. A bitter, half-insane mother would be worse than none at all.
‘The only family I’ve got is an aunt in Oregon.’ Amber sounded miserable. ‘But a stranger, you know? Wouldn’t even know Jared’s name.’
She sounded so empty.
Rekka squeezed Amber’s hand and said, ‘You will make the best choice for your son, and I’ll be there to help.’
‘I love you, Rekka. You know that, don’t you?’
Rekka was straight and Amber wasn’t, yet there was nothing awkward in the moment.
‘We’re family,’ said Rekka.
The family that you choose, you make, which need not be the one you were born with.
‘Yes, we are.’
But all families have the power to screw up children’s lives, and their decisions over the coming weeks would affect Jared for ever.
*
Zen gardens in the heart of the city, silence punctuated by children’s laughter during the breaks, gleaming polished halls and classrooms, laboratories and gymnasia. Rekka, her hand on Amber’s arm to guide her, walked through the school premises, increasingly impressed.
‘We are teaching freedom and self-discipline, respectful of but not constrained by the local culture,’ said a recorded holographic Frau Doktor Ilse Schwenger at the start of the tour. ‘While much of the teaching is in English and Nihongo, we also deliver lessons using Puhongua, and the advantages of that are obvious.’
One of those advantages was that knowing Puhongua – still ‘Mandarin’ to the uneducated – made it easier to use Web Mand’rin online.
‘Excuse me, ma’am. Pilot,’ said a young boy with black-on-black eyes. ‘I’m Carlos Delgasso and I’m nine years old. Would you like to see an aikido class?’
‘We would, thank you.’
Rekka’s sole physical discipline was yoga, and other stuff bored her; but aikido and Feldenkrais body-awareness training had been part of Amber’s initiation into Pilothood. Any mugger who laid a hand upon a Pilot, including those who were blind in realspace, was likely to find their face smashed into concrete, and their shoulder dislocated, or worse.