Eric had never felt a closeness to his absent mother, had never felt a need to contact her. Besides, he’d reasoned, the distances made the relevancy of any message he might send pointless. The events of the past week, however, had made him rethink his reasoning.
It would still take several years for the message to reach her; in fact, it would probably be intercepted on the return trip. It didn’t really matter, though, as she would most likely be in cryosleep when the message was received. It would greet her upon her awakening when she reentered Sol system, as would each of the periodic recordings that would follow this one.
He tapped the keyboard lightly and the display disappeared, then quickly keyboarded the sequence to set up a holographic recording. Soft lighting came up around the flatscreen as the system prepared to record, and a low chiming told him when it was ready.
“Record.” The glow changed subtly as the recording process started.
“Hello, Mother,” he began. “Let me tell you about myself.”
PART FOUR
To Reap the Whirlwind
Chapter Seventeen
The Old Man is talking to his son, Amasee Niles thought as he watched the huge moon rise. It glowed a brilliant orange, matching the dying glow of Pallatin’s K-2 star. With the sky not yet dark, it looked as though there were two suns in the sky: a brighter, sinking one in the west; another, seemingly only slightly dimmer, climbing the eastern sky. He smiled, remembering the children’s tale his mother used to tell him on those occasions when the moon’s orbit was just right and both objects were in the sky at the same time.
“The sun doesn’t go down until the moon rises,” she had told him, just as countless other mothers had told countless other children. And like those others, he had listened wide-eyed and believing. “He waits there, seeming to hang forever on the horizon until his son appears. For a while, when they’re in the sky at the same time, he tells his son of his day: what happened on the world below him and what the little people were doing. He tells him to look after the little people, and sometimes…” She had paused then, he remembered, and lowered her voice as if imparting a secret meant only for him. “Sometimes, he picks out one little boy or girl and tells the moon to be especially watchful over that one, and to bring good luck. And do you know how to tell if you’re the one? Well, you keep watching the moon and think good thoughts, and if your thoughts are good enough and you look very closely, you’ll see him wink at you. Just at you and nobody else.”
He remembered lying awake that night as long as he could, staring at the moon, hoping the big face he imagined there would wink just for him. And again the next time the orbit brought it to the same position two months later, and the next. But he always fell asleep.
How many years ago was that? he wondered, surprised at how well he remembered it all. He gazed steadily at the moon, nearly half the size of Pallatin itself. Rugged craters covered its surface and many of them could be easily identified without a telescope, but for just the briefest of moments he tried to imagine the face he remembered from childhood. He squinted and stared, and for a second his mind let go of the reality that what he saw was merely a pattern of craters and mountains, and he thought he saw the face. But then the rational part of his mind intruded once more, and the pattern became just ordinary empty craters again.
Amasee Niles stood at the lower edge of his farm, leaning forward on his elbows on the low strand-metal fence that circled his property, and gazed quietly at the rugged landscape spreading out below his homestead. He’d located the house halfway up a gently sloping ridge, and from where he stood he could see the entire countryside to the east for dozens of kilometers. The bare, exposed sheets of gray rock that had been thrust violently upward in the Big Quake stood out sharply against the soft green of the surrounding grassland. Here and there the hardy bioengineered grasses had managed to establish a foothold on the bare rock, and even at this distance Amasee could pick out several spots of green among the now-silent gray slabs.
He looked closely, trying hard to pick out the site of the original Westland colony, but the surface features had changed so much, so drastically, that the location of the once-familiar landmark—a scattering of small houses, civic buildings and meeting hall surrounding a circular town green—was impossible to spot. Even the cracked and broken concrete of the obsolete landing strip, the largest structure there, was nowhere to be found. He gave up with a troubled shake of his head. The main city of Dannen, reestablished several kilometers to the west more than two hundred years ago, had experienced severe damage; thousands had been left homeless and many had been hurt, but there was, miraculously, no loss of life caused by the earthquake almost twenty years earlier. But at first light following the tremors the residents were stunned to find that Pallatin’s original settlement of Dannen’s Down, maintained and preserved as an historical village, had disappeared, swallowed whole by the turbulent ground. The loss of life was minor in number—only the live-in caretakers and historical roleplayers signed on for the season were in residence when it hit—but devastating in its completeness. His sister Katie, her twin sons, Zack and Toma, and twenty others; all friends, all gone, killed in minutes as Pallatin’s restless geology reached up and took them inside.
Twenty-three people, he thought, reminding himself for the hundredth time that Dannen had been lucky. Although few were killed in the eastern portion of Pallatin’s only major continent, nearly three thousand people had died throughout Westland; Chesterton, less than twenty kilometers to the north, had suffered more than two hundred deaths—almost a fourth of its population—and other settlements, ranging in size from small towns to major trading and industrial centers, had all experienced losses far greater in proportion to their population than had Dannen. So why do these twenty-three haunt me?
He heard a rustling in the tall grass behind him and recognized Marabell by her gait. Without turning around, he said, “I know, I know; I’m going to be late if I don’t leave before sunset.”
There was a soft, high-pitched chuckle behind him and he felt delicate hands slip around his waist. She leaned her head softly against his back, and as an early evening breeze came up behind them it brought the scent of lilacs to him. Without looking, he knew that Marabell had picked a handful of the fragrant flowers from the bushes behind the house.
“You probably thought I was sneaking up on you again, didn’t you?” Her voice was light, although behind her teasing lay an understanding that her husband was troubled.
“And weren’t you?” he asked, laughing. He turned around in her embrace, leaning backward against the fence, and pulled her to him. He held her silently for a moment, staring over her shoulder at the house. The kitchen lights glowed warmly. Clint was nowhere to be seen, but their youngest son, Thad, occupied himself happily on a play set beneath the iron oaks to one side of the house. “Where’s Clint?” he asked. “I was hoping to see him before I left.”
She smiled up into his eyes. “Am, he’s eighteen. Where do you think he’d be about now?”
“The Anderston girl again?”
“Not ‘again,’ Am; still. You refuse to see him growing up, don’t you?” As before, her words were light and airy.