“Even if there’s no one left to remember?”
She pressed her lips tightly together, contemplating the image of the obelisk. Then she nodded. “Even so.”
Knowing the pain of waiting, she sent a message of assurance to Destiny Colony before anything else. Then she instructed the synth and the beetle cart to renew their work, but this time in reverse: the synth would unlink the fiber tiles beginning at the top of the obelisk and the beetle would carry them down.
After an hour—after she’d traded another round of messages with a grateful Tory Eastman and begun to lay out a shelter based on a standard Martian habitat—she got up to stretch her legs and relieve her bladder. It surprised her to find Nate still in the living room. He stood at the front window, staring out at the mist that never brought enough moisture into the forest.
“They’ll be alone forever,” he said without turning around. “There are no more missions planned. No one else will ever go to Mars.”
“I won’t tell her that.”
He looked at her over his shoulder. “So you are willing to sacrifice the obelisk? It was everything to you yesterday, but today you’ll just give it up?”
“She drove a quarter of the way around the planet, Nate. Would you ever have guessed that was possible?”
“No,” he said bitterly as he turned back to the window. “No. It should not have been possible.”
“There’s a lesson for us in that. We assume we can see forward to tomorrow, but we can’t. We can’t ever really know what’s to come—and we can’t know what we might do, until we try.”
When she came out of the bathroom, Nate was sitting down in the rickety old chair by the door. With his rounded shoulders and his thin white hair, he looked old and very frail. “Susannah—”
“Nate, I don’t want to argue—”
“Just listen. I didn’t want to tell you before because, well, you’ve already suffered so many shocks and even good news can come too late.”
“What are you saying?” she said, irritated with him now, sure that he was trying to undermine her resolve.
“Hawaii’s been under quarantine because the virus can be latent for—”
She guessed where this was going. “For years. I know that. But if you’re trying to suggest that Tory and her children might still succumb to whatever wiped out Red Oasis—”
“They might,” he interrupted, sounding bitter. “But that’s not what I was going to say.”
“Then what?”
“Listen, and I’ll tell you. Are you ready to listen?”
“Yes, yes. Go ahead.”
“A report came out just a few weeks ago. The latest antivirals worked. The quarantine in Hawaii will continue for several more years, but all indications are the virus is gone. Wiped out. No sign of latent infections in over six months.”
Her hands felt numb; she felt barely able to shuffle her feet as she moved to take a seat in an antique armchair. “The virus is gone? How can they know that?”
“Blood tests. And the researchers say that what they’ve learned can be applied to other contagions. That what happened in Hawaii doesn’t ever have to happen again.”
Progress? A reprieve against the long decline?
“There’s more, Susannah.”
The way he said it—his falling tone—it was a warning that set her tired heart pounding.
“You asked me to act as your agent,” he reminded her. “You asked me to screen all news, and I’ve done that.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” he agreed, looking down, looking frightened by the knowledge he had decided to convey. “I should have told you sooner.”
“But you didn’t want to risk interrupting work on the obelisk?”
“You said you didn’t want to hear anything.” He shrugged. “I took you at your word.”
“Nate, will you just say it?”
“You have a granddaughter, Susannah.”
She replayed these words in her head, once, twice. They didn’t make sense.
“DNA tests make it certain,” he explained. “She was born six months after her father’s death.”
“No.” Susannah did not dare believe it. It was too dangerous to believe. “They both died. That was confirmed by the survivors. They posted the IDs of all the dead.”
“Your daughter-in-law lived long enough to give birth.”
Susannah’s chest squeezed tight. “I don’t understand. Are you saying the child is still alive?”
“Yes.”
Anger rose hot, up out of the past. “And how long have you known? How long have you kept this from me?”
“Two months. I’m sorry, but…”
But we had our priorities. The tombstone. The Martian folly.
She stared at the floor, too stunned to be happy, or maybe she’d forgotten how. “You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“And I… I shouldn’t have walled myself off from the world. I’m sorry.”
“There’s more,” he said cautiously, as if worried how much more she could take.
“What else?” she snapped, suddenly sure this was just another game played by the master torturer, to draw the pain out. “Are you going to tell me that my granddaughter is sickly? Dying? Or that she’s a mad woman, perhaps?”
“No,” he said meekly. “Nothing like that. She’s healthy, and she has a healthy two-year-old daughter.” He got up, put an age-marked hand on the door knob. “I’ve sent you her contact information. If you need an assistant to help you build the habitat, let me know.”
He was a friend, and she tried to comfort him. “Nate, I’m sorry. If there was a choice—”
“There isn’t. That’s the way it’s turned out. You will tear down the obelisk, and this woman, Tory Eastman, will live another year, maybe two. Then the equipment will break and she will die and we won’t be able to rebuild the tower. We’ll pass on, and the rest of the world will follow—”
“We can’t know that, Nate. Not for sure.”
He shook his head. “This all looks like hope, but it’s a trick. It’s fate cheating us, forcing us to fold our hand, level our pride, and go out meekly. And there’s no choice in it, because it’s the right thing to do.”
He opened the door. For a few seconds, wind gusted in, until he closed it again. She heard his clogs crossing the porch and a minute later she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel road.
You have a granddaughter. One who grew up without her parents, in a quarantine zone, with no real hope for the future and yet she was healthy, with a daughter already two years old.
And then there was Tory Eastman of Mars, who had left a dying colony and driven an impossible distance past doubt and despair, because she knew you have to do everything you can, until you can’t do anymore.
Susannah had forgotten that, somewhere in the dark years.
She sat for a time in the stillness, in a quiet so deep she could hear the beating of her heart.
This all looks like hope.
Indeed it did and she well knew that hope could be a duplicitous gift from the master torturer, one that opened the door to despair.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” she whispered to the empty room. “I’m not done. Not yet.”
We Who Live in the Heart
KELLY ROBSON
Here’s an intense and vivid adventure that tells the story of malcontents who grow tired of living in underground colonies on an alien planet that consists mostly of vast oceans, and who opt instead for a more adventurous and much more uncertain life by taking control of and moving into what amount to immense organic submarines, enabling them to roam the seas at will—but also meaning that they must live in constant danger of losing control of their “ship.”