“How many have you had?” Emry asked.
“Ohh, I hardly remember anymore. Building a large population in an enclosed community like this, a lot of us have to be pregnant a lot of the time. I’ve probably carried more babies than most anyone else. Some of them have been surrogacies, though, not genetically mine, or no more than a bit.”
“You must really like morning sickness.”
“Well, one of my mods is being less prone to that. Still, all these pregnancies, they take their toll. But it’s worth it. I feel I should have a personal connection to the future I’m helping to design. I get so caught up in my work sometimes—I should never forget that these are people, not just genomes. That they’re our children, our responsibility.”
She sighed. “Still … it was different with your father. That was with Liam. That was love, pure and simple. Most of the rest … they’re the children of the community, and we all play a part in raising them. But Richard … he was my son. And the image of his father.…” She blinked away a tear.
“Ohh, Emry,” she went on. “I see so much of him when I look at you. Maybe not in the face, but behind the eyes. In your spirit, your strength and sensitivity. In the work you do, giving of yourself, using your gifts to protect others. He would’ve been so very proud of you, Emerald.”
Now Emry had to fight off tears. She put her fork down; she’d lost her appetite. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“He didn’t approve of fighting.”
“He chose not to fight. He never judged those who did. He hated killing, but you’re no killer, whatever they’re saying. He would have known that.”
“No. He wouldn’t.” The table was blurring before her eyes, getting all watery, so she stood and turned away from it.
A moment later she felt Grandma Rachel’s hands on her shoulders. “Emry, I don’t understand. You’ve done nothing that would give Richard any reason to be less than proud. Sure, you had a few wild years, but that was understandable, and you’ve more than made amends.”
“No. No, I haven’t come close. I never can.”
“I know your father wouldn’t have felt that way.”
“What do you know?!” Emry whirled on her. “You didn’t know him! You never talked to him my whole life! You didn’t know … what happened to him … what I did to him.…”
Rachel stepped back, taking a shuddering breath, but she stayed in control, looking levelly at Emry. “Then tell me.”
“I killed him!” she shrieked. It tore out of her, breaking free after years of suppression, and tears spilled forth from the gaping hole it left. Sobbing uncontrollably, she fell into a stunned Rachel’s arms. “It’s my fau—it’s my fault he died. I killed him.”
14
Origin Stories: Great Responsibility
December 2105
al-Khwarizmi Science Institute
Sol-Jupiter L3 point
Emry woke. Barely. Something was making her uncomfortable. She tried to drift back off to sleep, but the sensation wouldn’t go away. Something was pushing against her back. All of it at once.
A few moments later, she realized it was weight. That startled her fully awake. Yes—it felt like she was under about half a gee. Looking around, she realized she wasn’t on the Trident anymore, but in a hospital ward. It all came back to her. The expedition must have gotten back safely.
“Ahh, Emerald, at last!” That was the expedition doctor, Monica Railey, a handsome woman with warm chocolate skin. “Are you with us now? Do you know who you are?”
Emry laughed more than she had reason to; she was still rather punchy. “You kinda gave it away there, Monnie. I’m Emerald, uhh, Jones? Chang? McGillicuddy? Hold on, it’s on the tip of my tongue.…”
“Okay, she’s back,” Railey said with a sigh. “Sorry for the obvious question, but you didn’t seem quite sure who you were the last time you were awake.”
“I was awake before? I don’t remember.…”
“Most people don’t. Even just when coming out of surgery, let alone nearly a month of hibernation. You’re actually ahead of the curve there. Must be that Vanguardian physique.”
“I’m not a Vanguardian.”
Railey studied her for a moment, wearing a look Emry couldn’t decipher. “Well … you know what I mean.”
Emry just grunted in response. Railey helped her sit up, handed her a cup of apple juice, and advised her to sip it slowly. Once Emry demonstrated her mastery of that task, Railey decided she could be trusted to finish up on her own, and went to tend to another patient.
As she rehydrated herself, Emry contemplated Railey’s words. Not quite sure who I was.… She really wasn’t surprised. Emry hadn’t had a good answer to that question for over seven years now.
True, it had been nearly three years since she’d stopped changing the name on her forged IDs every few months, since she’d stopped being Kei or Jean or Barbara or Mary Jane or Kim or whoever and become Emerald Blair again full-time. But a name was not an identity, and she had spent most of those three years trying to figure out just who or what Emerald Blair was going to be. While still in rehab, she’d begun taking online classes again, catching up on her formal education. But with no career goals in mind, her approach had been dilettantish. Figuring she’d be more stimulated by direct experience, Emry had wandered Solsys and soaked in the rich diversity of cultures and beliefs, all the wild social experiments and evolutions that crop up on any frontier, in search of one that felt like home to her. Well, not all of them. She’d avoided Wellspring and Neogaia, already knowing all she felt she needed to know about them. She’d stayed away from habs where certain people might try to kill her if they recognized her. And she’d made no attempt to visit Vanguard or Earth proper, let alone go back to Greenwood; any place where there were Shannons was a place she had no wish to be.
Along the way, she’d dabbled in various religions, visiting their houses of worship, opening herself to their teachings, hoping to find the peace and enlightenment that her mother had found in her Dianic beliefs. But all of it rang false to her. There was certainly beauty and imagination in it, but she sensed nothing beneath the symbols and myths, no truth tying them together—nothing but a self-deluding desire to believe the universe gave a leak about its occupants. Lyra Blair’s Goddess hadn’t protected her, hadn’t spared her daughter from misery and loss, any more than her husband had. If there was one thing Emry had learned, it was that people had to rely on themselves.
So Emry had turned away from higher callings and tried to find a career that satisfied her. During her travels, she’d made a living at various jobs, from laborer to stripper to pilot to model to bouncer, but nothing that seemed like a life’s calling. She’d dabbled in acting, but couldn’t lose herself in a part; she’d tried sports, but wasn’t much for following rules. She’d gone so far as to enroll in the FEEL academy on Vestalia, but had soon found that sex as a profession required a selflessness she couldn’t muster, a commitment to placing the clients’ desires above her own. Like so many things in life, it was less fun as a job than as a hobby.
Back in August, wondering if science was her thing, she’d signed on as a pilot and general assistant for the Trident expedition: a two-month survey of Neptune’s moons, plus a month’s travel either way with the crew in hibernation. She’d hoped some distance and quiet time would help her figure things out. True, there was some publicity involved in such a trip, but they were routine enough by now that she wouldn’t draw too much attention.
But she’d found the survey rather tedious, relieved only by her dalliances with various researchers. Unfortunately, in the close quarters of the expedition, her bunk-hopping had created some tensions. She’d caused a couple of fights and started a few more. It had been a relief for everyone when the time to go back into hibernation had come. Now Emry hoped the debriefing would go quickly so she could finally end her association with the project.
But she had no idea where she’d go next
.
Dr. Railey had been watching her, she realized. Once Railey saw she had Emry’s attention, she came forward, oddly hesitant. “Emerald … you, uh, have a visitor. She’s been waiting, and … well, normally I wouldn’t, but this is rather urgent. Are you up to seeing her?”
Uh-oh. Had someone filed a complaint about her behavior on the expedition? Was this the mission director come to chew her out? Or had Dr. Bonham’s wife somehow found out about the free-fall bondage lessons she’d given him? Either way, might as well get it over with. “Sure, Mon. Bring her on in.”
It never occurred to her that it would be Bimala Sarkar. She rarely gave any thought to the private investigator’s visit to her in rehab nearly three years ago, and until now the woman had obliged her demand to stay out of her life. But Emry recognized her instantly, and tensed as she approached. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The elegant Indian woman remained silent until she stood by Emry’s bed. “Emerald,” she said in a quiet, controlled voice. “Your father—”
“Don’t call him that!”
Sarkar’s dark eyes hardened, and her voice with them. “Richard Shannon is dead.”
It took some time for the words to sink in. “He’s—what?” Her sense of disorientation was returning. Was this still a hibernation dream?
“Richard Shannon. Your father. He died, Emerald. Eighteen days ago. He was fighting a fire. He went into the burning building, searching for people trapped inside. He found them, got them out. But he was slow coming behind them, and the ceiling collapsed.…” Her voice faltered. She took a deep breath. “He died as he lived, Emerald. Helping people.”
Emry hardly heard it. She was … she … she didn’t know what she was.…
She threw up the apple juice all over her bedsheets. Dr. Railey came rushing over to check on her. Emry was too dazed to understand what she said.
She couldn’t understand any of it, really. She couldn’t understand how he—how her father could be dead. She couldn’t understand where all this grief was coming from. All this loss, when he’d been lost to her for seven years. All this love.
“Did he … did he say … anything.…”
“About you?” Sarkar asked, her voice cold. “No, no famous last words. It was too quick. But there’s a message for you in his will. And he left you his home, all the things in it … if you want them. He didn’t expect you would, but he wanted you to have them anyway.”
“Oh, Goddess.” The sobs came now, erupting from deep inside. The room spun around her. Distantly, she felt Monica’s hand on her shoulder.
Once the sobs ran dry, leaving a torn, burning throat behind them, Sarkar asked the doctor to leave her alone with Emry. “So I guess he was your father after all,” the tall woman said once Railey had gone. “I thought you hated him, Emerald.”
“I never … wanted him dead.”
“Well, you got it anyway.”
Emry stared at her. “What are you saying?”
“You never knew Richard Shannon, Emerald. Never knew what he became after you left him. He was such a sensitive soul. Losing your mother was devastating enough. But for his only daughter, the other love of his life, to turn on him, abandon him … That destroyed him. He was never the same after that.
“Yes, they gave him medicines for his depression, and that helped him function. He was able to go on with his life. But there was never any joy in it again.”
She smiled wistfully. “He kept on doing good for other people. Nothing could change that about him. But it became something he did to distract himself from his own loneliness. From the empty rooms in the empty house he went home to. From not knowing where his little girl was or whether she was safe—and from knowing all too well that she despised him, blamed him for Lyra’s death.
“You don’t know what it was like for me, having to report to him when I was tracking you. How he longed to hear any scrap of news about you, but how much it hurt him when he did. I—I tried to quit sometimes. It wasn’t good to be so personally attached to one of my clients. But I couldn’t help it.”
Emry studied her. “You … were attached?”
“I loved him. I did all I could to console him, bring him joy. But he couldn’t let go … not so long as you were still out there, alive but lost to him. We had some good times together, but a part of him was always elsewhere. I could never reach it.”
Sarkar’s brow furrowed, wrinkling her bindi. “Then came the news that you’d joined this expedition. He was so proud of you—and then he heard them describe you as an orphan. You told them you had no parents. You denied he even existed!
“It got bad after that. He was inconsolable. He just … went through the motions of life. Of his work. He got careless. I don’t … I don’t think his own safety mattered much to him anymore.”
Emry’s dizziness was returning. “Goddess … what are you saying?”
Sarkar straightened, looming over her. “Exactly what you think. That I blame you. If you hadn’t been such a self-absorbed little brat—if you’d given the tiniest consideration to his pain instead of wallowing in your own—if you’d only talked to your own father even once—he wouldn’t have died in agony. Or at least the last seven years of his life wouldn’t have been so miserable.
“Either way, Emerald Blair … you destroyed your father’s life.”
January 2106
Emry waited several minutes after the crate stopped bouncing around before she took a chance on cracking it open. The smart-matter foam that concealed her chemical and heat signatures and gave false readings to terahertz and x-ray scans also impeded her own ability to pick up sounds from outside, so she waited until the storeroom was (hopefully) empty again before she risked cracking the seal. As she lay waiting, keeping her respiration slow to conserve her limited air supply, she hoped no one in the facility had an immediate, urgent need for replacement bioprinter cartridges.
When she figured enough time had passed, she cracked open the lid and slowly stuck out the hand in which she grasped the highly illegal scene-painter grenade she’d paid a fair percentage of her inheritance to obtain. Pressing the trigger with her thumb, she lofted it into the air, yanking her hand back in and letting the lid fall shut just before she heard a muffled pop and splat from outside. She waited a few more seconds for the thin film now plastered over every surface in the grenade’s line of sight—hopefully including any image receptors—to flow together and harden and for its nanoparticles to “lock in” the light currently passing through them. From now until the film decayed in an hour, each nanoparticle would continue shining that same wavelength and intensity of light toward the surface it adhered to, so that any camera would continue to see the same image it saw now, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Emry was thus able to climb out of the crate without being spotted.
Still, depending on how good the motion sensors were in here, the painter grenade might have set them off already. It was possible the security personnel would chalk it up to a false alarm when they saw nothing on the monitors, but Emry doubted they would be that careless. After all, this organization was even better at making enemies than the Freakshow had been. So she’d have to move quickly before someone came to investigate.
Again, she quailed at the thought of what she was trying to do. How could she ever get away with this, when so many assassins and terrorists before her had failed? She reminded herself that, at this point, she had nothing left to lose.
The storeroom door was locked from the outside—oh, they were being very careful—but the lock itself was only moderately challenging for Emry, and only because of the time limit. It opened itself to her within twenty seconds, and she gingerly cracked the door open. She tossed out her second painter grenade, waited a few seconds after the pop-splat, and darted out the door and down the hall, scooping up the remains of the grenade core as she’d done with the first. A handy ladies’ room presented itself, and she ducked inside just before a pair of armed guards rounded the corner, heading for t
he storeroom. With luck, it would take them several minutes to detect the nanoparticle films.
Either way, the security guards ironically helped her, for as they went past, she slid her badge through the crack of the bathroom door. After a few moments, it vibrated briefly against her fingers, and she pulled it back to confirm that it had indeed imaged and copied the guards’ badge design, with her own face and a fake name in the relevant spots. A second vibration told her that it had successfully copied their RFID codes. She should now have access to anywhere in the complex.
She paused to check herself in the mirror and make herself look neater than someone who’d just smuggled herself in a crate, combing her unruly hair and tying it back into a frumpy, non-attention-grabbing bun. Her tinted interface visor and loose jacket helped make her further nondescript. Nodding in approval, she headed for the door … and then hurried back to use the facilities. She’d been in that crate a long time.
This was the lowest level of the complex, and her target was higher. She could override the lock on the elevator doors, but didn’t want to risk drawing attention or being cornered by going up in the elevator itself. And she wanted to avoid being spotted on a stairwell camera. So once she forced the elevator doors open, pleased to see that the car was way at the top, she stepped back, got a running start and jumped up as hard as she could. She kicked off the back wall and over to the spinward side, which she ran up as fast as she could to maximize Cori traction.
Suddenly the elevator car lurched into downward motion, startling Emry. She slipped, twisted, and caught herself on the lip of the door frame of her target floor. Desperately, she pulled herself up and wedged her fingers into the crack, hoping this door wouldn’t have an alarm. The car was looming closer and looking heavier by the second. She finally managed to wrench the doors open and pull herself through … only to see, as she darted her gaze back, that the car had come to a stop one floor above. Whew. And so my life of crime continues.
Only Superhuman Page 23
