“Already on it,” Weldon said. He smiled. “I put our Chinese spy to work with the shovel.”
“Excellent. When he’s done with the ladies’, he can dig new ones farther away, because this ain’t gonna be good for long.”
“You think we’re going to be here forever?” Weldon said.
Zack was about to tell him, I’m afraid so, but he collided instead with a tall young Hindu. “Sorry,” Zack said, suddenly feeling old and tired—especially when the young man glared and shook his head, and edged past with energy and attitude.
There was something about the young man that bothered Zack—not the rudeness, but a sense that he had seen him before. But where? Or was it just déjà vu triggered by extreme fatigue?
As they reached the leading edge of the gaggle of waiting women, Rachel approached Zack. “What happened with Pav?” she said.
“Who?”
“Pavak Radhakrishnan. You just slammed into him.”
Shit! No wonder the boy had looked familiar! He was the son of Taj Radhakrishnan, commander of the Brahma mission, Zack’s closest friend among the international astronaut community.
“I didn’t recognize him.”
“Do you ever recognize anybody?”
“Come on! Last time I saw him he was two years younger. And he had a different haircut and no piercings or tattoos.” He wanted to laugh, or shout with relief; this was the first normal father-daughter conversation he had had with Rachel in weeks. “But your point is taken.”
“Sorry.” She moved off.
“Tempers are frayed,” he said, as he and Weldon resumed their trek back to the Temple.
“It’s not going to get better, not until people have been fed and given some rest.”
“And we start all over the next day.”
“We need to get organized now,” Weldon said.
“Agreed. We need to elect a leader and the equivalent of a city council to assign tasks and referee arguments—”
Weldon smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “I nominate you.” They had caught up to another clutch of male urinators, including Harley Drake, Gabriel Jones, Vikram Nayar, and several men Zack didn’t know. You could tell they were engineers and astronauts, Zack realized; they didn’t just piss against the nearest wall, but rather waited patiently. Zack had not been present when his wheelchair-equipped friend performed whatever maneuvers were required to urinate. He could only imagine—
“Hey, Harls,” Weldon said. “I’ve just told Zack that he should be Supreme Leader.”
Gabriel Jones perked up. This was his area of expertise. “Sorry, Vikram,” he said to the Brahma mission director. “What Shane means is, he’s proposing Zack as a candidate for...mayor of our combined community. The job should also be open to someone from Bangalore, too. In fact,” Jones continued, with enthusiasm so genuine that Zack actually believed he was sincere, “you would be an excellent candidate yourself. Assuming that you agree that we need some kind of structure if we’re going to avoid slipping into chaos here.”
But Nayar threw up his hands. “I know nothing about this place. I have no more business leading these people than that baby. Make Stewart the mayor. He was Destiny commander. He has been here longer than any of us.”
Zack didn’t like where this political process was going. “Listen,” he said, “you guys have been through two days of hell, but I’ve been on the wire for the last ten. Right now, my judgment is seriously for shit.”
“All the more reason to ignore your protests,” Harley said.
Zack turned to Jones. “Gabe, this is right in your wheelhouse. You’ve got the experience and you even know some of the Bangalore folks.” Zack realized that he had never called the JSC director anything but “Dr. Jones.” And so our circumstances degrade courtesy.
But Gabriel Jones was just as reluctant. “I’m a bureaucrat, Zack. What we need here is more like an operational military leader. Some kind of...genius.”
“Fine, then.” Zack was growing tired of the debate. He was tired of everything. “Vote for Mr. Zhao. Look at what he’s managed to accomplish.”
“Well,” Harley said, “he’s our only known criminal. That certainly qualifies him for a political job.” Tired as they were, some of them laughed at this. “Okay, to be real, if Zack can’t or won’t do it, Shane’s already been acting mayor—”
Then Nayar spoke. “What do you think, Dale? You bridge these worlds.”
The beefy, red-faced man stepped forward. He looked and sounded American but was dressed in garb more suited to Bangalore, with a fat gold medallion hanging around his neck like an Olympic medal.
Dale Scott, the former astronaut who had been exiled first to Russia, then, when that nation licensed its spacecraft technology, to India.
“Maybe we ought to have an actual election,” Scott said. “Could just be a show of hands, or, hell, do a voice vote and pick whoever you want. But it will make people feel as though they had a say.”
He turned to Jones and Weldon, and you didn’t need to know the history to know how much he despised both men. “You guys ought to run. And I’ll run against you. We’ll all have a good time.”
“Before we get too pleased with ourselves,” Zack said, “we should remember that half of our population is women, none of whom are part of this discussion, and some of whom might be worthwhile candidates.”
“Listen to Mr. Politically Correct,” Scott said, directing his gaze at Zack. “Of course, that was always your style, wasn’t it?” Because, of all the people on Earth, there was one Dale Scott disliked more than Gabriel Jones and Shane Weldon, and that was Zack Stewart.
“Shut up, Dale,” Jones said. “He’s right. We can’t exclude the women from this.”
“Exclude the women from what, exactly?” Sasha Blaine said. Zack hadn’t seen them, but Sasha, Rachel, and several other women had returned from the women’s lavatory event. Sasha cradled the sleeping baby. “Some important decision? I hope not. I hope this men-only discussion was about something really male, like growth on your nuts.”
All of them, Houston and Bangalore, assumed varying degrees of shame and sheepishness, even Dale Scott. Finally Zack said, “That’s exactly what we were talking about.”
Eventually the matter was settled: The Houston group under Jones would put forward one candidate, and the Bangalore group its own. The top vote-getter would become “mayor” and the runner-up would chair a council of seven. The council would be elected directly after that, three from whichever group won the mayoral job, four from the other. “That should give us some kind of balance,” Jones said. He was the one who had proposed the winning formula.
“In spite of the fact that there are more Bangalores than Houston folks,” Scott said.
Makali Pillay stood up. “We can’t re-create representative democracy here, and we don’t need to. I believe you have a saying at NASA. ‘Perfect is the enemy of good enough.’ This formula is good enough.”
Everyone would get one vote, including Rachel but minus Camilla and the baby. Zack searched out the girl, who had been his only companion for two days. She was sitting by herself...not truly apart from the Houston or Bangalore groups, but in her own world.
He could hear far-off barking. The dog...
Everyone broke to search for food. Zack assumed the “weather” would stay the way it was—a permanent hazy overcast, much like the famed California marine layer—meaning they would not have to scramble for shelter.
True, most or all could fit into the giant ground-floor chamber that had been the domain of the Architect, the outsized alien being Zack and Megan had followed into the Factory habitat, to their great regret. But it would be tight and nasty.
Just pondering that made him think of Megan, and Keanu’s brand of life, death, a sort of life again. He went searching for Rachel, just for the mere sight and touch of her.
ARRIVAL DAY: HARLEY
Not that it was the kind of activity Harley Drake sought, or even considered, but exh
austion, immobility, and hunger combined to make him an observer at the group meal near the wall of the Temple.
The impromptu foraging parties had produced a decent feast—food enough for everyone, it seemed. Not that Zack Stewart was much cheered by the accomplishment. “Two hundred people eat, what?” he said. “Two, two and a half kilograms of food a day?”
“Sounds about right,” Harley said. He had some memory of the figures, since they had been relevant to planning for long-term space missions. At the moment, however, he was too busy gnawing at one of the purple “vege-fruits,” to use Sasha’s handy term, to think about logistics.
“That’s half a metric ton of food every day. Throw in four liters of water...I mean, we’ve got some kind of big pond not far from here. Don’t know what feeds it, though—”
“You’re saying we need a lot of food and water every day.”
“I’m saying we managed to find enough nearby for one day. It was handy.”
“‘Low-hanging fruit’?”
“Literally. What about tomorrow?”
“Excellent question,” Harley said. He had been doing rough measurements of the habitat, which seemed to be about ten kilometers long, a third as many wide. Call it thirty square kilometers. Even if every square meter was used to grow food—and there was no way even half of the area would be suitable—how much could be produced? This was far outside Harley’s comfort zone; he had vague memories of the amount of acreage needed to support, say, an American farm family of the early twentieth century.... How did the conversion from acres to kilometers go again? What other factors affected things?
Zack was doing the same calculations, likely with more precision. He said, “The numbers aren’t promising.”
“Not for human technology or agriculture,” Harley said. “But look at the bright side: Your Architects must have designed this to support humans, and you’ve got to believe they wouldn’t scoop up two hundred if they didn’t want that many.”
“I really, really want to agree with that. But, look, I’m telling you this, but don’t repeat it: I’m not sure all the systems here are working right.”
“Oh, come on—”
Zack reminded him of how the Sentry seemed ill-suited to the environment or its mission, about the lack of night in a human habitat, about strange shifts in weather...about Megan. “What I’m saying is, this is an old, old vehicle...we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s got its share of malfunctions.”
Before Harley could press him further, Rachel arrived, redirecting Zack’s attention.
Harley was relieved. There were times when a man just needed to sit back, enjoy what was on the plate before him—or, in this case, in his messy hands.
Which was how he came to observe Rachel and the strange Brazilian girl, Camilla, in their different approaches to Keanu dining. Both were dealing with one of the purple vege-fruits, but whereas Camilla was happily chomping away, juice running down her chin as she chattered with a Russian woman, Rachel was struggling to peel each morsel, clearly forcing herself to eat. Camilla seemed to have found someone—likely the only person in the group—who spoke Portuguese. That would make anyone happier, especially a lonely nine-year-old girl. Her conversational companion was a middle-aged woman Harley had seen talking with Dale Scott not long before—a person she obviously knew.
He was curious about this girl. But Rachel’s voice was commanding his attention now. “Tell me we’re going to find something else to eat,” she was saying to Zack.
“We’ll get through this,” Zack said. “Whenever one door closes, another opens.”
“You sound like Mom.” Although Rachel’s tone was typically flip, Zack detected a quaver that could, with very little encouragement, lead to a meltdown. She turned to Harley. “Doesn’t he sound like my mom?”
This was dangerous conversational territory for a variety of reasons—Harley would no more get between a daughter and father than he would between wife and husband.
And the whole idea of Megan, and Harley’s role in her death...well, no, do not go there. “Harley wants to stay out of our argument,” Zack told Rachel.
Then he glanced at Harley, as if to say, I’m going in...save yourself. He told Rachel, “Look, you always said not to B.S. you.”
“Since when did you start listening to what I wanted?”
“I always listened, kiddo.” He smiled. “Sometimes I just didn’t do what you asked.”
“Sometimes?”
Zack elected to change the subject by using a physical prop. “Here, try this instead.” He offered Rachel a different vege-fruit, this one more barklike. “I’ve been gnawing on this for a whole day and it hasn’t killed me yet.”
“Ha-ha.”
But she tried it. “It’s like...what is that, herky jerky?”
“Beef jerky. But herky jerky might be a good name for it. You like it?”
“Better than that purple crap.”
“Hunger does wonders for the appetite.”
“Now you sound like Grandma.” And so the latest emotional crisis passed. Rachel brought Harley back into the discussion. “Both of you keep watching her,” Rachel said. “Camilla.”
“Because they brought her back, right?” Harley said. He hesitated only a moment. This was too important a matter to be put aside just to spare feelings.
“Exactly,” Zack said. He lowered his voice. “And because they brought her back, and she’s the only one that’s still alive. Megan and the others...didn’t last more than a couple of days.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Rachel said, too loudly.
“The Architects,” Zack said. “That seems to be the name for the aliens that run the place, or rather, ran it. We only met one, and he’s dead.”
Harley watched Rachel as she took in this information. To any child born in the last fifty years, this was just some familiar sci-fi story.
But it was also real. And involved her parents. Harley could only liken it to the way in which real combat—something he had played at as a kid, and studied for years—suddenly became real.
It had not been pleasant for him. This could not be pleasant for Rachel.
“How do you know there aren’t others still here?” she said slowly, as if trying to dip a conceptual toe into this strange water.
“I don’t,” Zack said. “Though Megan seemed to be saying—channeling this thing—that he was the only one.”
“Of his kind,” Harley said.
Zack looked at him, blinking, as if suddenly struck by a notion. “Yes, of his kind.”
“Wait,” Rachel was saying. “This Architect spoke to Mom?”
“Through her, yes.”
“Oh, shit—” Now she seemed truly upset.
Zack slid his arms around her. “It...didn’t hurt her, honey. She said it was just like...being on stage with an earbud, getting a prompt—”
“It’s not that. It’s just that...I barely had a chance to talk to her for more than a minute, but some big dumb alien had her for hours!”
Zack looked at Harley. Rachel’s point was inarguable. “I know,” he said gently. “It was unfair. Nothing about this whole business has been fair.”
Now it was Harley’s turn to change the subject. “You said Camilla’s ‘the only one still alive.’ I know they brought back Megan and Pogo, but...”
“There was at least one more,” Zack said. “A man from Natalia’s life, one of her athletic trainers. Konstantin was his name.”
“How did he die?”
Zack’s pained expression gave Harley most of the answer. Killed, was what it said. “He had an accident.”
“So, there were four Revenants,” Harley said. “Megan, Pogo, Camilla, this Konstantin. Three died in accidents. Why are you so curious about Camilla’s survival?”
“Because Megan said—channeling the Architect—that there was a...limit.”
Rachel rejoined the discussion. “What?”
“They were only brought back for a couple of days. Their job was t
o communicate with us.” Zack looked at Harley: Save me, his expression said. “That’s why the Revenants were all people we had known in our lives...so that we could communicate with them. Camilla for Lucas, Konstantin for Natalia.” He paused. “Megan for me.”
“Pogo Downey doesn’t fit,” Harley said. He was going to get this information even if the extraction and circumstances were painful for Zack. They all needed to know this.
“Well, he died here. He was brought back after Konstantin was killed. Maybe he was...I don’t know, an easier retrieval? Some kind of automatic response?”
“So, if we die here, we might come back?”
“Maybe. For a few days, at least.”
“Hardly seems worth it,” Harley said. “I’m not entirely convinced we’ve got this worked out.”
Now it was Rachel’s turn to stare at Camilla, who was up and around. She and the Russian woman seemed to be getting ready to go somewhere. “So if the Revenants only come back for a couple of days, why is she still here?” she almost hissed.
Zack looked tired. “Honey, I just don’t know.”
And then, whether newly energized by food, or just out of teen restlessness, Rachel suddenly arose. “I’ll be back in a few.”
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk.”
“I don’t think so—”
“Daddy! Come on, I’m not going far. It’s not dark yet.” Now she was directly challenging him. “There isn’t anything dangerous here...that’s what you told us.”
Zack looked at his daughter. Then he smiled the tightest smile Harley had ever seen. “Yes. That’s what I told you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m the one who’s always screaming at people in horror movies not to split up, right?”
“Right. Do I need to tell you not to get out of sight and hearing?”
“Probably not.” She smiled. “Daddy?”
“What?”
“Now you sound like yourself.” Victorious for now, Rachel smiled at Harley and walked away. A few moments later, Camilla and the Russian woman headed off the in same direction.
Heaven's War Page 9
