“We understand each other,” he went on, “both of us being from the Plains and all.” She had known he would mention that sooner or later. “We got away, and I don’t think either one of us wants to go back.”
She did not speak, afraid to admit how much she sometimes longed for Lincoln now. But she could return to her own farm and the possibility of being her commune’s leader; Charles would be only another wandering man, while here he was a leader himself. He would not understand how Island life had palled for her. It had been different when a goal was in sight; now she was only going through motions and routines. Days passed with no seasons to mark the passage of years; even trips to other Islands offered only the sight of different faces among the same carefully tended environments.
I’m getting old, she thought. My life is slipping away from me. For a moment, she could almost sympathize with Eleanor, who probably wanted a change as much as anything else, even if that change jeopardized the Project.
Charles released her arm. “Give Chen my greetings,” he said. “Tell him that I hope things are going well for him, that they continue to go well.”
She watched him walk away along the right fork of the path, then frowned. He had always avoided mentioning her bondmate before, and she wondered why he had spoken of Chen now.
Chen said, “It’s a threat.”
He had been rubbing Iris’s temples while she told him of the meeting. She lifted her head from his lap and sat up on the bed, covering her chest with the sheet. “Sending you greetings is a threat?”
Chen shrugged his bare shoulders. “I have to work with some of those people on the Bat. A lot of things can happen if you get in trouble and others don’t help you fast enough. Charles just wants you to be persuasive.” He leaned back against the wall. “I’m not surprised at any of this.”
“You could have alerted me a little sooner.”
“I did. I heard talk on my last shift. You just weren’t listening. I guess you didn’t want to believe it.”
“Well, I do now.” She rested her head on her knees as she wrapped her arms around her legs. “Mother of God, why did they have to come to me? I didn’t ask for this.”
He stroked her back. “You have influence now. You earned it.”
“I don’t want it, and I don’t have that much.”
“The Linkers would listen to you. In the end, they care about the Project. They probably just haven’t decided what to do. It’s easy to let things drift.”
She sighed. “I’m getting old.”
“You look the same as you did when you were thirty.” He pinched the flesh on her hip. “A little fatter, maybe.”
She did not smile. “We still have a place to go,” she said. “If the Project’s going to come to this, I’d rather leave and go back to Lincoln. At least there —”
“In your house? With a bondmate? Do you really think you could live there again, forget what you’ve tried to do here? Do you really think they’d accept you?”
“My household —”
“I don’t care what they say in their messages. They may say they miss you, but they wouldn’t welcome you back.”
“My mother might need me later.”
“Your mother made her peace with you. Do you really want to live there?”
“It might be better than a life under the domes,” she replied. “The workers have some vague notion that they’d be freer there. They get tired enough of life on the Islands — what do they think it’s going to be like on Venus, without what we have here?”
“How can you ask that?” He grasped her shoulder. “Whatever it’s like, it’ll be ours, and our children’s.” He lowered his arm. “You forget our own child. Would you really drag that child back to Earth, give up her chance at something more?”
She plucked at the sheet. The child he spoke of did not yet exist, was no more than a promise and some frozen sperm and eggs stored by the embryologists, but the child-to-be often seemed as real to Chen as if Iris were already carrying her.
She glanced at her bondmate. Chen looked almost as young as he had when they met, and she had not aged physically; there were years left in which to become parents again. That had been one of her reasons for postponing the child’s gestation; waiting until actual settlements seemed more certain was another excuse. It was comforting to think of the stored genetic material, and she no longer had to feel guilty when sending messages to Angharad, for her mother would have a granddaughter.
Iris would have the child, and yet part of her still resisted the idea, was happier thinking of the potential child than dealing with the actuality of one. She had failed with one child, had never really known him; she might fail again. She should not have waited after promising Chen they would have another; the waiting had only fed her doubts.
“We’ve waited long enough,” Chen continued, anticipating her remarks even before she had spoken, as he often did. “We should have the child soon. You wouldn’t think of leaving the Islands then — you’d have a reason to stay.”
She touched his cheek. “I have a reason now. Whatever I say, I couldn’t return without you, without knowing we could still be together.” Chen, she understood deep down, would never be able to bear living in Lincoln, whether her household welcomed him or not; Eric’s memory would haunt him. “I’d always want you with me.” Admitting such feelings to him frequently would once have shamed her; now, she only regretted that she could not convey them more often, could still not easily admit to feelings that her household would have labeled a foolish weakness or worse. “Anyway, it seems foolish to think of having the child as things are now.”
“You’re right. You’ll have to speak to someone.”
“Charles’s idea is ridiculous. I can’t go to any Administrator with something like that. I’d be wasting their time.” Her neck was beginning to ache again. “I’ll have to go to Pavel Gvishiani, if only to convince him that he must do something.”
She had spoken with Pavel only briefly and infrequently. She had not forgotten that he was primarily responsible for bringing Guardians to the Islands, but she had managed to forgive him for that, as she hoped he had forgiven her for her past mistakes. She had even come to understand him a little. He shared her devotion to the Project; he had never lost the devotion to it that had dominated her own life, for he had nothing outside of his work. Without Pavel, she realized, the Project might not even have come this far.
Yet, in spite of her sympathy for the Linker, she feared him more than she had feared anyone. In his presence, she had often felt that if she displeased him, that if he suddenly saw her as an obstacle to his wishes, he would sweep her away as if she were no more than a fly.
“I’m afraid to go to Pavel,” she admitted.
“You think he doesn’t know that? That’s why he’ll listen. He’ll know you wouldn’t go directly to him unless it was urgent, and it is. Everyone knows that things can’t stay this way. I don’t like to think of what some of them might try to do.”
Iris pondered his words. Chen’s carvings were popular even among some of the Administrators, and because many preferred to sit for him instead of letting him use a screen image as a model, he sometimes heard useful bits of news. Carving had been an outlet and escape for Chen after Benzi’s defection; he had worked at it compulsively. His work had intrigued those bored with the Islands’ usual amusements, and some had come to enjoy the presence of the carver who would add a little beauty to their rooms. He could now pick and choose among the many who requested a little of his time; those who had once shunned him now offered him credit or favors. His success was as unsought for and as inadvertent as her own.
“You’ve never carved me,” she said, digging an elbow into his ribs, “even after all this time.” This gentle accusation was almost a ritual with them. She would look a little hurt; Chen would say there was no need to carve when he had the original with him, and the conversation would end with his hands roaming over her body as he showed her how he would shape the
clay and the wood. “I’m practically the only person in this corridor who has a holo of her face on the door instead of a carving.”
“I carved your face once,” he said, surprising her. “I carved you when you were at the Institute, but I didn’t really see what was inside you then. I couldn’t give that carving to you, and I couldn’t keep it, so I sold it. I never tried to carve you after that, and now — I can’t imprison your soul in a piece of wood.” He paused. “It would be good for you to see Mukhtar Pavel for another reason. Some are saying he’s grown weaker. Some think he’s no longer able to act.”
“I pray that they’re wrong,” Iris replied. Pavel might not be able to stop some of his own colleagues from moving against him if they sensed weakness, and the Project would suffer during their squabbles. “I had better request a meeting immediately.”
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Twenty-Eight
Iris could rarely go to the Administrators’ ziggurat without being reminded of her last meeting with Amir Azad. She had gone out of her way to avoid him ever since, and that had been difficult in the Island’s closed environment. He had come toward her almost every time she had glimpsed him; she had snubbed him when she could and muttered some excuse for not conversing with him when she could not. At first, she had kept away from him because her anger was still fresh and later, out of consideration for Chen, who knew that Amir was the only other man with whom she might have shared her life. She could think of Amir calmly now as she climbed the steps, could feel grateful that she had not tied her life to his and had kept her bond with Chen.
Three Guardians were standing by the entrance. She held out her wristband, thinking that they wanted to assert a little of their authority, but one of them waved her on into the hall with only a glance. She walked past closed doors, nodding whenever she passed a Linker. She tried to tell herself that Pavel Gvishiani would be sympathetic to the workers; his grandparents had been workers themselves. Pavel, however, would be unsympathetic to anyone who might threaten the Project.
She hesitated in front of Pavel’s door; it opened quickly after scanning her. Pavel Gvishiani was not alone; Amir Azad was sitting on a cushion near him. Amir had been restored to his place on the Administrative Committee a few years earlier, but she had not expected to find him here.
“Greetings,” she said as she stared past the men at the shelf above them, where a carving of Chen’s sat. The carving showed a broad face with hollow cheeks; Pavel’s mouth had been captured in a smile, but his heavy brows hung over watchful, observant eyes. Somehow, Chen had captured two of the Linker’s qualities — Pavel’s willingness to be charming when that served his purpose and his ability to be harsh when necessary.
Iris was suddenly afraid. She glanced back at Pavel, who had risen to his feet courteously instead of waiting for her to seat herself. “Greetings, Iris. Do sit down.” He gestured at another cushion.
She sat down and folded her legs. “Greetings,” Amir said. Iris did not reply. “When I heard that you would be meeting with Pavel,” he continued, “I asked if I might be present, and Pavel generously agreed.” Iris nodded coldly; she was in no position to demand that Amir leave.
Pavel arched his thick brows, which were as white as his hair. “When you requested this meeting, you said that you had something important to tell us. Our Links are closed. No one else will hear our conversation.”
“Several workers asked me to speak to someone in authority,” she said quickly. “Those who spoke to me spoke for many. I thought this was something that might require your attention. They feel that the Project is stalled, that Earth isn’t doing what’s necessary now. They feel that they’ve been given false hopes, and they’re no longer content with that.”
“The workers have a Committee of their own,” Pavel said. “They might have requested a meeting with one of us themselves.”
“They weren’t sure you’d listen to their Committee. They thought —”
“— that I’d be more likely to listen to you,” Pavel said. “Or, that if I didn’t, at least their Committee wouldn’t be blamed for your failure. I suppose that at least one of its members came to you with this request. How transparent they are, and what an odd choice they’ve made for a spokeswoman in this case.”
“Is it so odd?” she asked. “I’ve come to you before.”
“Yes, but in this case — I haven’t forgotten that it was your son and his friends whose actions brought these problems upon us.”
Pavel had never alluded to that incident before. Iris lowered her eyes. “I want to do what I can to repair the damage, to keep matters from getting worse. The workers are getting impatient and desperate — they may do something foolish that could set the Project even further back, and Earth could be quite severe with all of us then.”
Pavel nodded. “We’re well aware of how impatient the workers are growing.”
“But you haven’t done anything about it.”
“Because I’m apparently too feeble to act.”
She forced herself to gaze directly at him. “There are some who say so, Administrator Pavel.”
“And what did these people tell you?”
She bit her lip. “They told me that they want to be stored cryonically or put in hibernation until the domes are ready. I told them how foolish an idea that was, and then they said that if Earth won’t give us what we need, they’re prepared to ask the Habs to do so. That’s how far things have gone. You know how they feel about Habbers, and yet they’re willing to do that.”
“Some of them work in communications,” Amir murmured. “I suppose that if they were desperate enough, they’d get a message through to the Habs and not worry about the consequences. And if the Habbers were then willing to return, and we refused to accept them, we’d have a great many angry workers to deal with and no way to do so. The Guardians we have here could hardly control them all.”
Iris glanced at the bearded man, and realized that he and Pavel must have known what she would tell them as soon as she had asked for this meeting. The Island cyberminds to which they were Linked must already have predicted the possibility of this problem and could probably even determine which workers were likely to be most discontent.
“In the end,” Pavel said, “all of us want the same thing, do we not? All of us — Earth, Linkers, the workers, everyone.” He paused. “I want to ask you a few questions, Iris, and you must be honest with me. There are complexities in human behavior that sometimes adversely affect the projections of cyberminds. You live among the workers. Tell me this. If I appealed to Earth, perhaps even to the Mukhtars themselves, and asked them to allow the Habbers to help us again, would the workers be satisfied, even if it took years to get Earth to agree?”
Iris folded her hands. “But if you asked the Mukhtars, wouldn’t they see that they couldn’t wait?”
“They’ll think of their positions. Even making such a request would provoke a struggle among the Mukhtars, and until that’s resolved, and one faction wins out, no decision would be made. You haven’t answered my question. Would the workers wait?”
She shook her head. “I think it’s gone too far for that. They’re tired of waiting and seeing nothing done to make it possible for them to be settlers. Some believe that Earth might even find a reason to abandon the Project.”
Pavel leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Tell me something else. Why should I believe your assessment? Your son was plotting with his friends, most likely for months, while you, his own mother, suspected nothing. Don’t tell me that you weren’t close to him, either. You saw him on occasion and you faced a dangerous situation with him — people often reveal much about themselves when they are dealing with danger. Why should I believe that you understand the feelings of other Islanders and can predict what they might do when you failed to see your own son’s intentions?”
Somehow, Iris kept her face still. Pavel had given her an opening; she could admit that she might be wrong, leave this room, an
d wash her hands of the matter. She could tell Chen that Pavel had not listened to her; she and her bondmate could return to Earth and admit that their dream was finally dead. But something in her would die as well; once, she would not have given up so easily.
She took a breath, then spoke carefully, trying to keep her voice steady. “I knew. I knew about my son. I don’t mean that I knew consciously what he was planning to do, but all the signs were there. He sought the company of Habbers, he didn’t care about the Project as I did. When he was gone, I understood at last that I should have seen it coming. He’d given me all the clues. But I was distracted by my own ambitions at the time, and I simply refused to see. What I’m saying is that, even though I’ve convinced others of my innocence by now, I was, in fact, guilty.”
Pavel was silent.
“I made up my mind,” Iris continued, “that the only way I could atone for my negligence was to stay here and do as much as I could for the Project. I told myself that I would never avoid seeing the truth again. I have no ambitions to distract me now, and do not willingly turn away from whatever I sense because it might be unpleasant. I’ve heard the workers — more important, I’ve sensed their mood in our residence, and one close to me has convinced me that I can no longer let this pass. The workers want something done now. Some of them are so tired of waiting that they’ll risk anything to bring an end to it, even their own punishment. And if you do punish them, you’ll only provoke others and convince them that they have no more to lose. Please believe me. You must act soon.”
“I believe you,” Pavel said softly. “I am also moved by your willingness to admit your lapses and faults.” His words carried a sardonic tone. “Here is another question for you, Iris Angharads. What do you think I should do?”
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