by Selina Rosen
"I'm sorry, RJ, I'm being very selfish. The truth is I don't really care about your pain. I just want to go fight because that's what I want." Gods, did I really say that out loud? What do I have, a death wish? "I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I am being selfish, but it's not like I don't care about your pain. I do, I just meant that I wasn't actually thinking about the way you felt, and I'm very sorry to have bothered you." Baldor turned and ran across the wall and back through the door.
Dax looked at him. "Well?"
"I suck!" Baldor said in an astonished whisper. "I have never felt so utterly and completely stupid in my entire life."
Dax smiled. "Don't be so hard on yourself. It's hard to talk to someone when they don't even seem to know you're there."
Just then Mickey showed up carrying something in his arms. "Get the door for me," he ordered, and Baldor and Dax nearly tripped over each other opening the door.
"What have you got, Dad?" Dax asked.
Mickey turned to look at the young men. "You can come with me, but only if you promise to be quiet."
Intrigued, both Baldor and Dax nodded silently and followed Mickey through the door.
Mickey walked up to RJ's back. "RJ . . . I have something for you."
To Baldor's surprise, she turned around, and the look on her face startled him. She looked lost, her cheeks were drawn in, and her skin was an unhealthy, almost green hue. Mickey held the bundle in his arms up to her.
"That won't help, Mickey," she said sadly. "It will just die, and then I'll be alone again."
"No, it won't die, RJ. Because he's truly yours. Your DNA, yours and Gerald's," Mickey said. "He's the child the two of you would have had, if you could have had children."
Her face immediately changed, her features transformed. She reached down and took the bundle from Mickey's arms, uncovered the newborn's face, smiled and held him to her. She kissed his cheek and then knelt down and kissed Mickey's. "Thank you," she whispered. "It's a little cold out here, I think I better take my son inside." She walked past them all into the building.
Dax was the first to find his voice. "Dad . . . How? Why?"
"How is easy. She and Gerald left DNA everywhere, and we have a group of the best genetic engineers in the universe in our employ. Why should be obvious. She's my friend, my best friend. Except for you and your mother I have never loved anyone more. I knew he was dying, we all did, and I knew she was going to take it hard. She needs someone to love who will love her, who can't die, or she's going to go crazy, and what the New Alliance never needs is a crazy GSH at the helm. She needs him, and more importantly, she deserves him."
"How did you know having a baby GSH would help her?" Baldor asked.
"Because when mom died RJ tried to find Topaz's formula. She wanted to make all of us immortal," Dax answered. "Gerald said the only thing she truly feared was being alone."
Baldor pretended to understand, but he really didn't. How could a test-tube-built, vat baby replace her man? How could a tiny baby of any kind return RJ to the warlord the New Alliance needed to finish the war? It just made no sense at all to him, till three weeks later, the baby strapped on her back, RJ announced that they were going to the planet Sheows to fight a pocket of Reliance resistance there.
The baby sat next to RJ in a special seat during take-off.
They were all silent till they had made it through the jumpgate, then the baby started crying. As soon as the ship had leveled out, RJ got up and took the child out of the seat. She talked baby talk to him, which made Baldor think that perhaps she had lost her edge as a warlord.
"Have you named him yet?" Baldor asked, because when last he had heard a week ago, she still hadn't chosen a name for him.
She nodded and said over the baby's head as she rocked him back and forth, "I have decided to call him Pete."
"Pete . . . what does it mean?" Baldor asked.
RJ shrugged. "Nothing I guess."
"Then why did you name him that?"
"Why did your father name you Baldor? Because it meant something to him. Well, Pete means something to me."
"What?"
"It was where my redemption began, and Pete is another beginning for me."
Baldor pretended to understand, but he had no idea what she was talking about.
When they landed on Sheows, RJ strapped Pete on her back and carried him with her into battle.
Now Baldor knew that it had been a tradition amongst his people to carry their infants into battle, and he knew that RJ had adopted many of his people's ways. In fact, most of the time she acted more like a Fourer than he did, but he was still shocked to see RJ fighting with one hand and pushing a bottle into the infant's face with the other.
He didn't care what his people's heritage was, it just seemed wrong to carry a tiny baby into a battle, even if he was a GSH. By the end of the first day of fighting poor Pete had picked up his first battle wound. He was scared, but not really hurt, and RJ comforted him as the wound closed in—by Baldor's watch—under two minutes.
Baldor had also suffered his first wound that day when a laser blast clipped his right arm. It had landed him in the ship's infirmary.
The day's fighting had been brutal, but they had managed to shove their opponents back by several miles and put them into a poor strategic position, so that now the ship's cannons were finishing them off. Jessica cradled her son close to her. He smiled, his earlier mishap completely forgotten, and she kissed the top of his head.
Jessica had enjoyed ripping the heart from the chest of the man who had dared to nick her son.
Someone rang her doorbell, and she frowned at the interruption. "What is it?" she growled as she moved to open the door.
The doctor stopped, fidgeting with a medscan unit in his hand. "Yes?" she asked impatiently when he just stood there.
"It's Baldor, RJ, he's . . ."
"Is he all right?" she asked quickly, all animosity suddenly gone. "I didn't think he was hit that badly."
"He's going to be fine, but . . ." He handed her the unit.
She shifted the baby so that she could take it. She read the information on the screen, then stared at the doctor. "This can't be."
"But it is," he said. "His cells are even regenerating faster than a normal Fourer's, faster than any hybrid on file. He's carrying your DNA. Genetically altered DNA."
Jessica handed her son to the doctor. "Watch Pete," she ordered. The doctor nodded and took the baby. RJ took the medscan unit and headed for the infirmary. When she demanded to know where Baldor was a nurse told her, and she marched to his room and burst through the door.
Baldor awoke from a drug-induced sleep to see RJ standing at the end of his bed.
"What the hell are you?" she demanded.
"Excuse me?" Baldor said. He was in quite a bit of pain, his brain was foggy from the painkiller they'd given him, and he half thought he was still asleep and dreaming. But as his thoughts cleared he realized she was really there.
"You heard me." She slung the unit at him. He picked it up off his belly and looked at it, it was some sort of chart, numbers and things that made no sense to him at all. He shrugged. He had no idea what she was talking about.
"I'm sorry, maybe it's the drugs, but this just looks like a bunch of gibberish to me."
"Are you going to lay there and tell me that you don't have any idea how you got her DNA? Because it sure as hell isn't mine. She was different from me. Did Stewart make her so she could have children? That's it, isn't it? You're her kid, aren't you? Hers and David's, and he knows I'm not her, and he's sent you here to spy on me, or . . ." She trailed off then. "Only you're a Fourer. Maybe she had an affair with a Fourer, but no, she wasn't there long enough. And you're not old enough. Then how?"
"I have no idea what you're even talking about. Are you all right, RJ?"
She took in a deep breath and let it out. She glared at him as if trying to pull the truth from his eyes. She picked up the medscan and looked at the data again. She looked
at him again, and then he realized what she was really doing. She was reading his emotions to see if he was lying to her, but he didn't even know what he was supposed to be lying about.
"There isn't enough of it to be maternally or paternally given. It seems to have come from Grant's DNA, to be a sliver of his genetic material, but how? How did it get there?" she mumbled.
"How did what get where?" Baldor asked in confusion.
"How did my DNA wind up in your body?" she demanded.
Baldor laughed. "Oh that, it's from the blood transfusion."
"What?" she asked.
"Remember when Dad was wounded and he thought he was going to die? He should have died, but you took a syringe of your blood and put it in him and it saved him. The doctor said it changed his chromosomes a little, so Sandra and I heal a little bit faster than other people, and we're hardly ever sick. It's not really that big a deal, is it?" he said.
RJ looked as if she had been kicked in the gut. "No, I suppose not. Get to feeling better." She left, Baldor fell back to sleep, and he all but forgot the incident at once.
Jessica practically ran back to her room, where she took Pete from the doctor and practically threw the medscan at him.
"Well?" he asked, and she damned his curiosity. She explained the incident as Baldor had told it to her.
"Yes, well that would explain it," he said, then added with arched eyebrows. "You forgot the incident?"
He would never know just how close he had come to getting his head snapped off his body in that minute. She turned on him and hissed, "You know how much information is in my brain? How many years of data are stored up there? Even with total recall, do you really expect me to be able to call up even the most obscure incident in mere moments?"
"I'm sorry, General." He bowed and quickly left her presence, so maybe he did know how close he'd come to death.
As the door closed Jessica held her son close to her. Pete fussed a little, no doubt upset because he could feel that she was.
"It's all right, Pete. It's all right. She's far away from us, and she hasn't reproduced. It was just a fluke." But for a minute, just one insane moment, she had been sure that RJ had given birth to her own child. That Stewart had given her yet another thing that he hadn't given Jessica, and all the old resentment for her sibling had felt new.
She looked at her son, Gerald's son. She wished Gerald could have known his son, and that Pete could have known his father. Had she been a normal woman it would have been possible. Of course, if she were a normal woman she would have most probably been dead before she had a chance to meet him.
Gerald would never know his son, but Pete would know his father because she would make sure that he did.
Chapter Eighteen
Most of the Abornie approached her with fear, lightly shielded animosity, and only when it was an absolute necessity. They were afraid of her, and they just flat and simple didn't like her. Which was probably just as well, because RJ had decided that she loathed them.
The Abornie loved Topaz and Levits, using any excuse to be near them, and avoided her—and therefore Poley—like the plague.
But then Topaz and Levits did nothing but praise and encourage them, while RJ gladly told them they were all worthless screw-ups, not worth the air they breathed.
RJ worked on her newest project and thought with a wry smile that it was rather like children with a strict parent and a lenient one.
The more lenient parent gives unconditional love and never demands anything from the child, praises the child on every small accomplishment, doctors their wounds without questioning how they got them, and rationalizes their shortcomings. The strict parent shows their love by trying to mold the child into a responsible and complete person, by setting necessary boundaries and demanding a certain amount of responsibility from the child for their own actions. The strict parent tells the child the unhappy truths the child doesn't want to hear, orders them to complete tasks they don't want to do, and punishes them when they screw up.
This was the role RJ had unwittingly taken on, the big difference being that she really didn't even care about the Abornie. Her only reason for getting involved with them at all was that she liked the planet, and didn't want them to screw it up again.
Although she had begun to believe that the planet's genetically engineered plant life wouldn't allow it to be destroyed. The plants were resilient, there was no doubt about that. You could cut a tree down, even pull it up, and within a week there would be a sapling in the spot. Give it six months and it was a full-sized tree again.
She had done extensive experiments, just tinkering around to see exactly how resilient the plant life was. She moved them into the ship into artificial light. At first they went through a little shock, and for about a week it looked like they weren't going to do as well as they did with real sunlight. Then they adapted, and you couldn't tell any difference between them and the plants growing outside.
On the planet's surface it rained an average of three times a week, so she tried removing them from water. After about a week they started to wilt. At the end of two they started to look really bad. But at the end of three weeks, the plants actually started to perk up again. What she found after running several years of experiments was that the plants could adapt to damn near anything and thrive.
They could resist temperatures as high as a hundred and fifty degrees, and as low as twelve degrees and still flourish. Above or below that range they went dormant, but the minute you lowered or raised the temperature they came right back again.
If forced, they could go as long as three months without water; after that they would again enter a dormant stage. But the minute water hit them they grew again. They would come back even after two years without water, but after that, some never recovered. They had an uncanny ability to adapt to almost anything you threw their way, so it would be hard, but not impossible, for the Abornie to trash out Frionia again.
RJ would let Topaz and Levits indulge the Abornie just so long, and then she would step in and do what was necessary to keep them from wiping themselves and the planet out, try to teach them some real values.
Of course since Topaz, and especially Levits, made it very clear that they just felt she was being over careful and mean, the Abornie mostly snuck around behind her back and did as they damn well pleased.
Just like a kid with a strict parent and a lenient one.
Over the years she had mostly given up. Maybe it showed a flaw in her personality that she couldn't even make herself care what happened to them. The one positive thing contact with the Abornie had done for RJ was to make her appreciate the human race a whole lot more.
The Abornie had a life expectancy of two hundred and fifty Earth years. For the first two hundred and twenty-five years they were usually completely ambulatory. They had all their health and all their senses, and it was only after two hundred and twenty-five years that their health started to fade at all.
Humans, even in the Reliance where medicine was highly advanced, only had an average life expectancy of a hundred years, and the last twenty of that was usually spent just trying to stay alive. Humans had short lives; they spent most of their short lives just trying to figure out what it was all about. About the time they finally figured it out it was way too late to enjoy it. If the Reliance had ever let you enjoy anything at all.
If humans had been given the life expectancy of an Abornie, there was no telling how they might have advanced and grown as a people. It is quite possible that the wisdom that humans would have gained from such long lives would have made it impossible for the Reliance or anything like it to have ever taken over.
But the Abornie wasted this gift. The only lesson they ever seemed to learn was that having more, and doing less to have more, was what it was all about. Even the equal sharing of chores she had noticed when she first observed them—that she had thought at the time showed how advanced they were—had turned out not to be an overriding air of fairness at all. Instead, it
was a direct result of their absolute childishness, and she didn't mean in the good sense. If one Abornie sat down for whatever reason, they all sat down, because why should one Abornie do anything if even one other Abornie is not doing anything? If they hadn't gotten over this, they no doubt would have starved out. The Abornie picked leaders based solely on popularity and argued about everything. Getting them to actually work together was like pulling teeth. The only thing any of them seemed to have the smallest bit of talent for was spending copious amounts of time trying to figure out the easiest way to do something. For this reason, anything they were doing always took five times as long as if they had just done it in the first place.
