A promising ruddy sun peered over the horizon. “The birthrate doesn’t matter, Marian. Your DNA is now infected with the same flaw as ours is. Except that we produce Loving Helpers. Sometime in the next generation you’ll begin to produce nothing. Your DNA will not replicate anymore.”
A throaty sound of surprise. She got up and walked to the edge of the balcony, resting her elbows on the railing. The Potomac below was a dusky pink ribbon in the dawn.
He thought she would weep. It shocked him when she chuckled. “God help me. I’ve been a spook too long. If I were normal, I wouldn’t find this funny. But I’ve never been normal, have I?”
A flick of her adroit human fingers. The cigarette arced toward the lawn, a ruddy falling star.
“You outfoxed me. That sweet innocent little face. That pint-sized childlike honor. I thought humans were better at deception, Reen. We were so good at it, I felt sorry for you. Oh, Jesus.” She laughed. “You learned a lot from Jeff Womack. Political half-truths. You even hid things you shouldn’t have. I didn’t know you couldn’t sleep without others around. When you told me that, you scared me to death. I thought I could always protect you.”
“If you hadn’t put the Cousins in with the Helpers, you would have found out that we die if left alone.”
She turned to face him. Behind her, down the gentle bowl of the sky, the violet brightened to a rim of gold.
“Here,” she said, taking a plastic bag from the pocket of her jacket.
He took it. Small pink squares at the bottom, like confetti. “It’s an antidote. Enough for you and Oomal and the Cousins from Gerber. It works like adrenaline. Under stress, your body produces an endorphin that shuts down your system.”
Confetti. Like something from a child’s birthday party. And pink, the color of dawn.
Her voice was hurried. “When everything starts, put one in your mouth. It’s adhesive. There will be a burning sensation. Your pulse will race–”
“When what starts?”
“Stay in the White House. You’ll be safe here. The troops will guard you. Vilishnikov promised me that.”
“Marian!” he shouted, alarmed. “What’s going to happen?”
“Vilishnikov put all military troops on alert two days ago. At nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time they’ll attack the Cousin installations. Your defense can scramble electronics, but I know from what you’ve told me that you’re not prepared for a sudden overwhelming attack. I don’t want you to set foot outside the White House, Reen. I don’t want you to try to stop it.”
The plastic bag fell from his fingers.
“Pick it up!” Marian ordered angrily. “Damn you! Pick that up! Go in there and give it to the rest of those Cousins! At nine o’clock put one in your mouth. Make sure the others do, too.”
A quick triple pump from his heart. His head swam, and he sat down hard on a lounge chair. The delicate light of morning flooded the Mall and the leafless cherry trees.
He checked his watch. Six A.M. Oomal was wrapped in slumber in the room next door. At Andrews the Community was tucked into niches. In West Virginia the children were still riding their dreams.
“Will it work on the children?”
“What?”
“Will it work on Angela? Marian, did you ever once think about your daughter?”
He could see the answer in her face. “Get out,” he told her.
She hesitated. “Promise me you’ll use the antidote.”
“Damn you. Goddamn you.” Oomal’s words, but his own hushed voice. “A house in the country. Me all to yourself. Marian, must you always get everything you want?”
Turning his back on her, he watched morning fill the streets.
No cars moved on Constitution Avenue. The windows of the nearby buildings were dark. Saturday, he remembered.
It was Saturday, and the morning was so quiet, he could hear her every soft footstep as she left.
“GIVE ME your gun,” Reen said.
The Secret Serviceman in the colonnade looked up in dazed and sleepy alarm. Reen recognized him: the same agent he had encountered on the stairway after Jeff Womack’s assassination.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“I need a gun. Give me your gun.”
Indecision. Then, “Sir, there are regulations. I can’t give you mine, but ...” The agent got up and walked with Reen to Landis’s office. A jingling of keys as he opened a steel gun safe. “This is a nine-millimeter federal issue. Ever handle a gun before? No? Okay, this is the slide. Pull it back to chamber the first bullet. After that, well, it’s an automatic, sir. It pretty much does the rest on its own. Here’s the safety. Leave that on until you have to shoot. The magazine’s loaded with Hydra-Shok hollowpoints. The gun’s light. Should be light enough for you to use. But it’s got plenty of stopping power.”
Reen took the automatic. Heavy, not at all light. It looked very much like Hopkins’s gun. His three-fingered hand and claw felt unwieldy on the grip.
The Secret Serviceman was young, earnest, and anxious. “About the assassination ... are you worried we can’t protect you? Or is there something going on the Service should know about? I admired President Womack very much, sir. And I know he was fond of you. Both President Womack and President Kennedy left very specific instructions as to your safety. An agent hasn’t been assigned to you, but that can be remedied. I can call–”
“Don’t bother. It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
Reen took the gun and left. On the landing of the staircase he remembered to pull the slide to chamber the bullet. Then, despite what the agent had said, he flicked off the safety.
He took an old gym bag out of the desk drawer in Jeff Womack’s study. Stuffing the gun into the tote, he walked into the bedroom and looked at the slumbering Cousins.
They seemed so peaceful, so innocent that some compassionate thing in Reen wanted to go away and leave them there.
“Oomal,” he called.
In the dim blue light, one of the cocoons stirred.
Louder: “Oomal!”
Radalt pulled the sheet down from his face. Next to Radalt, Oomal grunted and shrugged himself out of his bonds.
“Get up. All of you need to get up. Don’t bother bathing.”
“Are you okay, Cousin?” Zoor asked, crawling out from his sheet. “You sound–”
“In three hours the army will attack. We have to get the recombinants off Earth.”
Oomal’s fingers slowly unhinged, and his sheet fluttered to the floor. “Get the Gerber commuter,” he told his staff. “Fly up to one of the main ships to get more runners. There are twenty-one recombinant centers. I want them all cleared in two hours and those children up in space where they’ll be safe.”
Sakan made a graceless, overwrought gesture. “But what about the payroll? What are the workers going to do if we’re not there to sign the checks?”
“It’s all right,” Oomal said. “Everything will be all right. Go on.”
With troubled backward looks the Gerber execs left the room.
“She was here, wasn’t she? Marian was here,” Oomal said when they were alone.
“I want to go to West Virginia.”
“Yes, that’s fine, Reen. But I have a responsibility. The Community–”
“Oomal, think! Humans and Cousins are becoming extinct. If there is to be any future, we must save the children.”
The truth hit Oomal like a blow. He looked around the room, bewildered, then shook his head to clear it. “The Community ship’s over by the West Wing. We’ll take that.”
He hurried from the room, Reen after him. At their passage the maids looked up from their cleaning; the Secret Service agent in the colonnade glanced up from his daily report. The ship was parked on the lawn, Thural standing by it. His sleep must have been thin for him to awaken so early.
Thural’s
gaze flicked to Reen and then settled on Oomal.
“Get on the ship’s net. Alert the Community at Andrews. Tell them to send the word out,” Oomal called. “The humans are planning an attack.”
Thural tipped his head as though he thought Oomal was making a poor joke.
“Do it now, Thural,” Oomal said as he bounded onto the ramp, Reen at his heels. “And take us to West Virginia.”
Thural followed them. “But I am under rebuke, Cousin.”
“Just do it!”
“They will not believe me.”
Oomal turned, his face contorted. “Goddamn it to hell, just do it!”
Stunned, Thural walked down the short hall to the navigation room.
When the ship lifted, Reen said, “I want you to take the children to Mars station.”
Oomal stared out the window. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to keep them away from the rest of the Community. Promise me that.”
Reen saw the glimmering string of lights along the George Washington Parkway blink out. For a moment he feared that it had something to do with the coming attack, then realized that it was only the automatic timer kicking in.
Time had come for the Cousins. Past time. In his mind he saw lights going out all over the universe.
“When you’re safe,” Reen said, “I’ll go back to help the Community.”
After a silence Oomal asked, “What do you have in that bag?”
“A gun.”
“For Christ’s sake. A gun?” Oomal’s voice wavered between amusement and grief.
Reen looked out the window at the gold dawn streaking the sky. “Oomal, I shouldn’t have trusted Marian.”
Oomal hooked the side of Reen’s tunic and drew him near. “Listen to me.” His Brother was so close that Reen could smell the spice of sleep on him. “I loved my human employees. And in a few hours the whole truth will be out. They’ll be wondering why I lied to them. They’ll wonder how I could have eaten dinner in their homes and gone to Little League baseball games, all the while doing my best to make their race extinct. You don’t have a corner on the guilt market.”
They stood like that, perilously close, closer than Communal Law allowed, and together they watched the ship leave the lights of Fairfax County behind.
Reen put his finger to the emblem on his Brother’s chest, thrilling at the contact of childhood Mind.
Oomal didn’t move but looked at Reen in query.
“Intelligence,” Reen whispered.
“Yes?”
“Both of us. We should have been more intelligent than to love the thing we were destroying.”
It had snowed in the West Virginia mountains, and the trees were thick with white.
“You know?” Oomal said wistfully. “In Michigan we used to go sledding with the human kids. I’ll miss the snow.”
The snow. The trees. Oomal’s humor. Angela’s beautiful hands.
Reen and Oomal made their way from the ship. At the door they met Thural.
“Did you call ahead to warn them?” Oomal asked.
“I warned them, but I do not know if they believed me.” Oomal nodded. “You’ve done all you can. Go round up the West Virginia Cousins and get them on the main transport.”
The children’s’ house smelled of blueberry muffins. In the dining room the recombinants were having breakfast. As Reen and Oomal entered, Angela jumped up from the table and ran over to hug Reen’s waist. His hand dropped to cradle the warm bulge of her cranium, the wisps of blond hair.
Quen came around the table, his expression furious. “You bring him here?”
“Get the children together, Quen,” Oomal said. “Get them on board the transport. We’re going to Mars station.”
“Mars station is deserted!”
“Now, Quen.” Oomal’s face was strangely impassive. Shock? Reen wondered. Or an effort not to alarm the children?
Mrs. Gonzales emerged from the kitchen, a spatula in her hand.
“The army plans to attack the Cousins,” Reen told her. “Stay here if you like. It will be safe enough for a while. We must take the children.”
After a long, steady look at Reen, the caregiver bent down to Angela. “Come on, sweetie, let’s get your clothes. We’re all going for a ride together.”
She ushered the children from the table and into the dormitories.
Quickly, without looking back, Reen hurried outside. Thural was still standing by the commuter, pretending not to have noticed Reen’s exit. Behind him the West Virginia Cousins were packing the transport to leave.
Stepping off the porch onto the snow, Reen went around to the side of the house, Jeff’s gym bag bouncing at his side.
Tali had spies, Reen knew. Hopkins had been a teacher of deception, Tali a good student. The spy from West Virginia would have been told to keep an eye on Reen. Whoever the spy was, he would follow.
He heard the door of the house open. Heard footsteps crunch in the snow. He paused and looked over his shoulder. Quen was walking behind him, and Thural was a few paces back.
Seeing him stop, they stopped, too, and peered at the snowbound trees in a parody of innocence.
“Go back to the ship,” Reen said.
Neither Cousin moved. Thural was engrossed in a tiny black-green pine, Quen in the eaves of the roof.
“Go back,” Reen said. “Please.” Please, not Thural.
Thural finally turned and made his way slowly to the other ship, his boots leaving blue-pooled indentations in the white.
Reen turned and kept walking, hearing the squeak of his own steps, of Quen’s. Around a corner, in the center of a winte-blasted garden, he stopped and looked back. Quen was standing against the wall, beyond a row of spindly fig-tree corpses and the stick grave markers of withered tomato plants.
Reen unzipped the bag, took out the gun. “Quen,” he said.
The Cousin didn’t look up.
It took both hands to lift the automatic. Reen sighted to the center of Quen’s chest, just to the left of the lightning bolt.
“Quen,” he said in low apology and pulled the trigger.
A sky-splitting crack. Reen’s arms were jerked up over his head. Quen was flung backward. Blood sprayed the white wall, the snow.
On the ground Quen made a little sound, like someone surprised by bad news. He put his hand to his chest and then stared idiotically at the brown covering his palm.
Reen approached, and Quen finally looked up, looked right at him despite Communal law. His eyes were terrified.
It would take only a few minutes; Cousins never took long to die. But Reen couldn’t walk away and leave him. He lifted the gun again. Quen raised his hand as though to ward off the bullet.
The explosion made Reen’s ears ring. Quen’s hand dropped. Without a single tremor, without another breath, he lay still.
Reen slipped the gun back into the bag. When he walked around to the front of the house, he saw Oomal and Thural by the door of the transport. The children were boarding.
There was horror in Oomal’s face. “Reen? My God. I thought I heard–”
“No one will report back to Tali now. You’re safe enough. I’ll go to Anacostia and try to warn the Cousins.”
Angela stood in the line of children at the ship, making a snowball. When she saw Reen, she stopped her play and ran over, flailing in the ankle-deep snow. He sank to one knee and gathered his daughter to him.
Too bad, oh, too bad. If only he had broad shoulders and a wide strong back, he wouldn’t have failed her. He could have kept the world at bay.
“Go for a ride, Daddy,” she said.
“Yes,” he whispered into her hair.
The human need for embraces, it must have something to do with never wanting to let go. Angela against him, stomach to stoma
ch, chest to chest, furnished him with a sort of magic. A daughter-shaped impression that, if his mind ever failed to remember, his body would never forget.
“Reen. It’s getting late.” Oomal took Angela by the shoulders and gently pulled her from her father.
Reen couldn’t get up. The cold snow had soaked his uniform so that he couldn’t feel his legs. Angela, standing next to Oomal, was looking at him as gravely as any Cousin. Her thumb was in her mouth. Then Oomal turned her around and walked her inside. Kneeling there, Reen watched his whole world rise, round and silver, into the robin’s-egg-blue day.
THE HOUSE was empty, but not in the way Langley had been. It was as if the house had simply taken a breath and in a moment the children would return, carried on the warm, muffin-scented wind, to pick up the doll left on the chair, the mittens forgotten on the floor.
Reen slid his finger down one side of the long breakfast-strewn table and thought he could feel in the wood the vibration of high piping voices, of laughter, of small running feet.
The house remembered. It would remember for a long, long time.
Finally, hefting the tote, he walked out to the small runner they had left him. A glance at his watch. He was surprised to see it was only twenty minutes to eight, time enough to finish his duty.
All duties finished sometime, he thought as he lifted the ship into the clear morning air. All projects, all lives had an end. If he could, he would go to Mars when he was done. There he would spin out the remainder of his days, watching his daughter grow up and his own race die.
In a few centuries the Cousins would fade in the new race’s memory like photographs in a family album. But the children wouldn’t completely forget.
Here’s my grandfather. He had a farm in Ohio.
Reen remembered looking at the family album Jeff had once placed in his lap.
And my grandfather on my father’s side. Here. Here’s a picture of him in Poland.
Perhaps Angela’s children would inherit from the humans that specific love of family rather than the Cousins’ generic love of race. If they did, Reen would grow old and sweet and distant, as Jeff’s round-faced grandfather in Poland or the laughing Ohio farmer with his arm around his pudgy wife.
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