by Ahern, Jerry
John Rourke closed his eyes, and sleep finally came.
Two
Annie Rourke Rubenstein sat with her hands bunched tight in her lap, staring out the window of Wolfgang Mann’s private J7-V. It had been flown all the way from New Germany (Argentina, Before The Night of the War) to Lydveldid Island, where she and Paul worked to help restore the Hekla community, picked them up and now was flying them all the way back, to what was once the United States.
She felt like she was coming home.
Sunshine washed over across the landscape, low with the dawn, reflections rising from rivers and streams and lakes, dancing like the sparkle of the diamonds in the little earrings Natalia had sometimes worn.
The Retreat was here, in Georgia, somewhere in the snowcapped mountains below them now. She could have found it from an aerial photograph, but the J7-Vs altitude was too great and its speed too fast for recognition by casual observation. And the home she’d been born in-well, she’d actually been born in a hospital-had been near here, too, but down in the piedmont, not up in the mountains.
The house had been burned the morning after The Night of The War, but even its skeletal remains were certainly turned to ashes when the ionization effect within the atmosphere rose to such a level that, one morning at dawn, fire swept the skies just behind the sunrise and almost everything on the surface was destroyed.
But this was home, in the physical sense, only partly now in the emotional sense. She was no longer a little girl, but a married woman, and far closer to thirty than twenty. Talk about a baby was
frequent with Paul, and they were planning to try to have one soon.
Yet, her father and her mother lived here, near Eden Base, although not in Eden Base proper.
And then there was her brother, Michael. Michael had been in New Germany since the war ended, there with Maria Leuden.
Maria was a nice girl, but not like a sister to her, as Michael’s late wife, Madison, had been.
“Whatchya thinking about?”
She looked at Paul and, as she did, his hand moved off the armrest between them, closed over both of hers in her lap. “Everything,” she smiled.
Paul laughed. “If I know you, you just realized that all the stuff you packed wasn’t enough and you left the one dress that you really needed at home.”
There it was again, that word, “home,” she thought.
She smiled, leaning her head against his shoulder “No. I brought enough.”
She was rooming a clothes horse, she realized. After all the years of living just with a brother, before The Awakening, then being in the field so much with the Family; she had never had the chance to just be a woman. Now she did and she enjoyed it, and she loved clothes.
“What were you thinking about?”
“Ohh, I really was thinking about everything, sort of. It’s only been weeks, really, but it seems like an eternity since we left here.”
“Well,” Paul told her, holding her hands still, “Akiro and Elaine’s wedding makes a good excuse, doesn’t it?” She laughed a little. “And,” he went on, “you get to be a bridesmaid.”
“I hope I don’t screw it up, being a bridesmaid, I mean.”
“All you have to do is just look pretty, right? You do that all the time, so no big deal.”
She punched his arm and looked out the window again, smoothing her skirt across her thighs, trying to see if she could just maybe locate The Retreat anyway …
The really special thing about any marriage was the fact that two people were pledging their lives and futures to one another, but she supposed there was something historic to the proceedings as well.
Akiro Kurinami and Elaine Halverson were the first two people from the Eden Project to return to the surface of the planet, after five centuries.
And now Akiro and Elaine were being married.
Sarah Rourke looked at herself in the mirror.
Her hair, longer than she had ever worn it before The Night of the War, was down, and she felt so fat that she couldn’t comfortably do anything else with it. And she tried telling herself she didn’t look like a blimp, that she was just pregnant, but that didn’t work.
The mirror didn’t accept excuses.
She couldn’t get into any of the clothes she’d worn while the war was still going on. Her feet were a little swollen and even her shoes felt tight. She couldn’t have bent over far enough to lace up combat boots if her life depended on it.
She’d felt like an idiot, but her toenails had needed cutting so badly she was putting holes in her socks. In the end, she’d asked John to cut them for her.
“Baby,” she said, not certain if she were talking about the child in her womb or herself…
John Rourke had started the pitosin I.V. at seven a.m.
It was ten and he was just through with his morning rounds when he heard his beeper kick in.
Martha Larrimore’s face was bathed in sweat, despite what appeared to be valiant efforts on the part of the German nurse. “Doctor Rourke! Thank God.”
“Relax. You’ll be fine,” John Rourke told her, looking at the continuous echo sound digital display on the monitor at the head of her bed, positioned just properly so she couldn’t see it.
The baby, perfectly formed, moved almost violently within her body. John Rourke placed his hand on her abdomen, feeling the baby with his fingertips as he watched it—clearly a boy-moving in the birth canal.
“How many centimeters?” Rourke asked the nurse, a blond haired woman somewhere in her fifties, her face perennially stern, her eyes equally warm.
“Nine and one-half, Herr Doctor. And she is better than ninety-five percent effaced.”
John Rourke nodded, telling Martha, “You hear that? You’ll be delivering in a very little while now. How’s your breathing?”
“I’m trying. I’m-” She screamed and grasped John Rourke’s hand. The American nurse, from Mid-Wake, who was acting as her labor coach, was panting in unison with her.
Tm going to wash up-it won’t take long at all-and then 111 be back and well help you to deliver your baby, okay?”
“Ohh-Hurry!”
John Rourke nodded, checked the echo sound digital display again. Despite being premature, the baby was well formed, large. And she was small. This would not be the easiest birth, and as he looked at the German nurse, he wrote on the pad at the top of Lt. Larrimore’s chart that she should be given a very mild sedative, nothing that would put her to sleep, but just enough to relax her so that she could aid in the delivery process, something to take the edge off her near-hysteria …
Jason Darkwood brushed an imaginary speck from the spit-shined brim of his hat, then looked below them at the ground. Here, there was nothing but radioactive desert, he knew, and should the German J7-V in which he, Maggie Barrow, Sam Aldridge and Sebastian now flew crashed, even if they survived the impact, they would never survive the exposure.
Parts of the earth, the scientists said, would be uninhabitable for generations.
That thought chilled him and he reached out and took Maggie’s hand.
“What’s the matter, Jase?” “Just thinking about something.” “What?”
Darkwood shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Well, with what’s happened, there’s already talk about our people returning to the land, at least in part; but, in a way, haven’t we been lucky living under the sea?”
Her pretty eyes looked back at him strangely. He felt the pressure of the engagement ring he’d placed on her finger weeks before beneath his hand. “I mean,” he told her, “the sea is clean and fresh and we could go anywhere except for worrying about the Russians, and
now we dont have to worry about them anymore. Every Island Classer and every missile in their inventory is under our control now. They couldn’t hurt us if they tried. But here, I don’t know, too many memories of what happened, what went before.” “Not looking forward to Hawaii?”
He laughed. “You’ve never had to deal with snow, Maggie. It looks
great in old videos and at first it’s a novelty. But when you have to work in it day after day, it loses its charm. The Oceano-graphic and Atmospheric specialists are saying that it snows at least once a day in the islands.”
“Maybe we can learn how to ski?”
Darkwood just shook his head, then held her hand more tightly. When he looked around the J-7 Vs cockpit, he could still see Sebastian, sitting in the co-pilofs seat, learning how to fly the aircraft.
Clearly, some of Mid-Wake’s citizens would adjust better to the new world than would others …
The head crowned, Rourke astonished really at just how well formed the child was.
The edge he’d had taken off Martha Larrimore with the mild sedative did the trick. She was holding her own with the breathing, controlling her pain so well that, if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought she were having a second or third child rather than a first.
“How-how-“
“He’s healthy looking, Martha,” Rourke answered her, easing the first shoulder out, then telling her, “I need another good push and well have him. Talk about shoulders! You’ll have to send this boy down to Mid-Wake so he can play football!”
She pushed, and suddenly the child filled John Rourke’s hands.
He raised the baby by its heels and it wasn’t even necessary to slap it on the behind to start it crying. The German nurse helped and John Rourke placed the little boy in his mother’s arms as he set about to cut the umbilical cord.
And the symbolism of what he did was not lost to him.
A cord had been cut for all the world, five centuries of war* suddenly ended in the total defeat of the enemy.
And now the task of rebuilding, die hardship of reclaiming the
land, the challenge of day-to-day life, lay before everyone who had survived.
When he cut the infant boy’s cord, the child cried.
Three
The headpieces-silly little round things like small crowns -worn by the bridesmaids incorporated a short veil which fell just below eye level. Gazing through the netting, all the world looked to have a pink cast to it.
Except the flowers.
And there were flowers by the score, flown in from Lydveldid Island, beautiful flowers, unlike anything Natalia had seen since before The Night of The War.
There was a wooden platform erected, with timbers from New Germany, labored over by the small contingent of Mid-Wake Marines that she understood were now permanently stationed on the New Germany base beyond the confines of Eden. It looked very much like the deck that had overlooked the yard of the small American suburban house she had occupied very briefly five centuries ago as part of the cover for a mission with Vladmir inside the United States.
The Mid-Wake equivalent of a boom box played the works of Chopin, a special recording made by German audio engineers to function in the American system, the pianist from Lydveldid Island, the speakers adapted to the unit with some minor difficulty, she understood, because they came from the Chinese Second City.
Chopin was a favorite of both Elaine and Akiro.
She watched Commander Dodd’s expression as the Revolutionary Etude began to play, wondering if his knowledge of Chopin were good enough to know the Etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12’s, more common title. That he had come at all was an anom
aly in itself, because the election that would name the first President of Eden was in progress, Dodd pitted against Akiro Kurinami and Dodd’s chances for electoral success dwindling by the moment.
She fluffed the skirt of the floor length pastel pink dress she wore. There were enough yards of cMffon in the skirt to make one of the hermetically sealed German field tents, she thought, smiling, picturing a group of German soldiers taking shelter inside a see-through tent that was colored pink. Annie never did things by half measure, of course, and Annie had made all three bridesmaid’s dresses, Annie’s yellow, Sarah’s blue.
The Presbyterian minister from Mid-Wake who would read the marriage vows that, in turn, Akiro Kurinami and Elaine Halversen would repeat after him, stood ready.
Elaine wore a classically flowing white wedding dress, puff sleeved and high necked with tiers of lace in its skirt; the dress made for her in New Germany. The tiara which supported her veil was the same one worn by the mother of Mid-Wake’s Marine Captain, Sam Aldridge, for her wedding to Sam’s father, the veil itself of lace, crafted in Lydveldid Island. The silk shoes she wore originated in the Chinese Second City.
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, Annie Rourke Rubenstein beside her, stepped up behind Sarah Rourke as Sarah, Elaine’s matron of honor, started down the aisle, a pretty little child from New Germany with ringlets of strawberry blond hair carrying Elaine’s train as carefully as if it were made of crystal.
Natalia’s mind was on everything but doing a good job as a bridesmaid, and there wasn’t really that much to do anyway, just stand there and look pretty and decorative. She had left behind seven classes of eager, scruffy, wonderful children from the Wild Tribes of Europe, crdldren to whom she taught eveiything from basic hygiene to basic math, children who had taught her that her natural woman’s instinct toward motherhood was alive and well and yearning. But the women from New Germany who aided her at the school would see to the welfare of her precious charges for a while, she told herself.
There was the permanent school which was being built, Soviet prisoners of war doing the labor, problems with design changes and the like. She would be happy when the school was finished,
but even happier when the last prisoner was repatriated. That
would be several months yet.
And she was very tired, putting in eighteen hard hours before boarding the aircraft to Eden, sleeping only fitfully on the aircraft. But the time spent was necessary, so much to do to make certain that everything ran fluidly in her absence.
It was the thought of seeing John again whieh drove her, bom as an added inducement for traveling here, back to Georgia, and immersing herself in her work even more so than usual.
Because he was never out of her mind.
And, as she looked up, John stepped forward, taking Elaine’s arm; and John looked toward her and their eyes met and she looked down at her dress just to control her breathing.
In a moment, John would give the bride away, then sit down again.
Natalia would be standing less than six feet from him.
As Natalia looked at the little bouquet clutched in her hands, the petals of the flowers there trembled …
John looked-Natalia had no words to form the thought.
There was a little weariness in his eyes, but he looked happy, and the uniform of a brigadier general of Mid-Wake’s Marines (all the men of the wedding party wore military dress uniforms) became him, although she knew he was uncomfortable wearing it.
Sam Aldridge, a very good looking man, wore the same uniform, more ribbons, less rank, but somehow it didn’t look the same on Sam.
Dress blue.
He looked-She smiled, looking away. “Natalia.”
She turned, faced him.
John’s hands touched gently at her upper arms and his face bent over hers and she raised her chin, his mouth touching at her lips, then gone. He held her close for the briefest instant. “You look exquisite,” he told her.
“So do you,” she laughed, looking down at her hands. They trembled, and her breathing was short, shallow, and her face felt warm and flushed.
“Would you walk with me?”
“Yes.”
He placed her right hand into the crook of his left elbow and they started across the floor, toward the doorway which would lead into the nearly completed corridor. The room-the wedding and now the reception filled it-would someday be the seat of Eden’s new government, the only portion of the structure fully completed, me complex begun by Dodd but never finished.
They passed Jason Darkwood, Jason coming to attention, bowing slightly to her. Paul and Annie were huddled in a corner with Elaine and Akiro and Colonel Mann
and Sarah (thank God John had told her about it and through John she had come to believe in, that Sarah didn’t look).
At the doorway, John leaned forward, opening a door for her which she passed through, gathering her dress around her, John behind her. The door closed, and she felt his hands on her arms, turning her around. She was powerless to say or do anything.
“You look well, Natalia.”
His brown eyes were so deep, so clear.
“You look just tired and happy enough to be enjoying your new hospital.”
He smiled. “I am.” She shivered, half from the feelings just having him look at her gave her, half from the colder air here.
Almost instantly, John began unbuttoning his uniform jacket, slipped out of it, folded it around her shoulders, enormous on her, the warmth of his body still in the fabric. She saw the butt of the little Smith & Wesson revolver on its Barami HipGrip just to the left of the center of his body. Some things never changed. She drew the coat tightly around her. She wanted him to say that he missed her, that he loved her, knew that perhaps he had said it when he told her she looked well. And she cursed herself for loving him, but wouldn’t have wanted not to love him, because loving him, was that around which, her entire existence pivoted, had ever since she had opened her eyes in the desert after he and Paul found her; perhaps ever since she had seen him that very first time in Latin America when they were agents on opposing sides for countries locked in conflict.
Natalia could not look at him anymore without dying inside, but if she turned around he might touch her and she would fall apart and cry. “I will be leaving sometime tomorrow. They tell
me, Colonel Mann’s personal plane is dropping off Paul and Annie and then flying on to Europe with me.”
“If you want to teach, soon there’ll be children enough here. I just delivered one this morning, a boy.”
“The first of the Eden children? Premature?”
“Yes, but healthy, both mother and son. I avoided a C-Section, for the obvious reasons. She was a little afraid, but that’s per-fectiy natural.”
