Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1)

by Francis W. Porretto

  Alarmed for reasons he could never have expressed, he pushed the door open.

  Victoria straightened up abruptly. She'd been bent over the toilet. It appeared he'd caught her unawares. She flushed immediately, dabbed at her lips with a tissue, and donned a forced-looking smile.

  "Are you okay?" he murmured.

  The smile grew painfully wide. "Never better. What's got you up?"

  He shrugged. There was a faint yellow stain on the bosom of her silk nightgown. It looked fresh and moist. She saw his eyes move to it and immediately put a hand over it.

  "Vicki..."

  "I'm all right." The warning in her eyes and tone was unmistakable. His hands came up automatically in propitiation.

  "Okay. Are you heading back to bed, or would you like an early breakfast?"

  She shrugged and turned to the mirror over the vanity with an exaggerated display of indifference. He backed away and returned to their bedchamber.

  On the nightstand beside their bed sat the intercom box by which he or Victoria could summon an

  Inner Circle member at need, without needing to leave the suite. Its power LED glowed steadily in the darkness. He sat on the edge of the bed, laid a finger hesitantly upon the call button, and pressed. "Yes?" It was Dmitri Ianushkevich's voice, slurred by his ejection from what must have been a deep sleep.

  "Dmitri, could we have breakfast, please? I know it's a little early, but..."

  "Not at all, Ethan." The parapsychologist stirred audibly. His voice grew firmer and more precise. "Would you like anything in particular?"

  Ethan considered briefly. "Ham omelets and home fries would be fine." Not that I expect Vicki to care. "And, Dmitri...?"

  Ianushkevich seemed to sense Ethan's anxiety. "Yes, Ethan?" he said, almost too softly to hear.

  "Bring a pregnancy test."

  ***

  Charisse closed her ledger with a quick, angry snap, thrust herself back from the great desk, and rose to peer out at the farm through the north-facing window of what had been Alain Morelon's office.

  Vast and golden under the late summer sun, the Morelon cornfields stretched before her, perfect in their regularity, magnificent in their abundance. Irrigation towers jetted water and nutrient chemicals over the crops in even pulses. A swarm of Morelon cousins rode through them on the mighty machines that tilled, sowed, and reaped. They shouted, japed, and laughed as they worked, untroubled by any care or qualm. It was the living image of prosperity and serenity, the perfection of the great dream of Hope.

  The books are in order. The farm is in order. The family is in order. There's literally nothing to worry over. Except for the minor matter of a self-exiled true heir and the impending death of the world.

  Why hasn't he radioed?

  The thought that Armand would refuse contact with her for any reason was a spear through her gut. To entertain it for even an instant left her weak with anger and despair. To ponder whether he might be deliberately shunning her, out of fear that she might seduce him out of his redoubt among the Hopeless, came near to breaking her mind.

  I'd have thought Mom's condition would have been enough all by itself.

  Elyse Morelon had abdicated from life. Even before Charisse and Teodor Chistyakowski had set out for the Hopeless peninsula, Elyse had ceased to come out of her bedroom. Charisse had her meals brought to her, and spent as much time with her as the needs of the farm would allow. It didn't seem to help. Elyse was uninterested in conversation, in the affairs of the family, or in any news of the larger world. She would eat, or not, would listen indifferently to whatever Charisse had to say, and would nod in silent farewell when Charisse rose to return to her work. Her passivity was unbreachable.

  Charisse hadn't dared to mention that they'd found Armand. She couldn't imagine how her mother would react to the news of his whereabouts, no matter how glad she might be to learn that he still lived.

  She'd told no one of the two strangers who'd arrived after them, or of their message of doom.

  She became aware that her hands had curled into fists. She relaxed them with an effort.

  No use in that. My powers don't hold a candle to his.

  Sex-linked qualifications for saving the world. Tres etrange.

  Wait...

  An idea coalesced in the dim recesses of her mind.

  How much of our genetic makeup do we have in common?

  The idea mushroomed to fill her thoughts. For a moment she stood blind, cloistered in a fantasy where the unreal might yet become real and disaster averted. When it released her to the world that was, she found that she was shaking. She stepped to her washroom, splashed cold water over her face, patted it dry and examined it in the mirror.

  Suppose it works. Is it justifiable -- on any grounds? Or have I renounced my morals out of the sheer selfish desire to live?

  It might not even be possible.

  Teodor will know.

  She ran for the radio.

  Chapter 39

  The gathering was immense. Armand could not believe there were as many people in Defiance as he saw before him. The throng filled the space between his hovel and those of his neighbors and spilled out along the paths beyond. Human bodies were packed so tightly together that most couldn't even raise their arms.

  Yet they'd left a space around him, an apron fifteen feet in radius about the hillock on which he stood. Teresza was there next to him, with Valerie in her arms. No one else dared approach.

  The silence was perfect.

  He groped for his voice. It came forth rough, tentative, and humming with doubt.

  "I, uh, need to be away for a while."

  The crowd instantly buzzed with apprehension. The faces of those nearest him had gone pale with sudden fear. He held up his hands, and the buzz subsided.

  "It's...nothing too serious. I expect I'll be back soon enough. There's just some...problems with my family...stuff you wouldn't want to hear about. I have to see to them. But..." He cast about for words that would carry just enough truth, phrases that would reassure them enough to let him leave, yet not cause them to infer that their monarch might be lost to them forever.

  He drew no comfort from any of the faces before him.

  We built this city. Terry and me. I gave them their water and fixed their machines. Terry taught them how to tend their crops and mediated their disputes. I taught them justice, and Terry taught them grace.

  They don't want justifications. They don't want reassurances. They want me to tell them I'm just kidding.

  The sea of eyes fixed on him was roiled by fear. He could not continue.

  "Allan -- Armand," called Lee Fitzhugh from the middle of the throng, "is it anything we could help with? There's a doctor in Thule we could fetch down here. He's pretty good, when he's sober."

  He shook his head. "I can't...no. Thanks, Lee, but it's, well --"

  "Or," Fitzhugh said, "if there's anyone in Victory or Resolve who's giving you trouble..."

  The crowd was immediately abuzz once again. This time it wasn't with fear. Armand held up his hands again and waited for calm to return.

  "It's not that. There are problems I can't deal with from...from this far north." He summoned his strength and channeled it into his words. "I have to...go back where I came from. I have to leave the peninsula."

  "Will Terry stay here, at least?" Alden Breunig asked.

  He shook his head. "I...she can't."

  Armand had sacrificed his home, his family, and his name. He'd renounced the world he loved, the refuge the blood and sweat of others had bought for him, and all the fruits sixty generations of his ancestors had wrung from the soil of Hope. He'd torn the woman he loved from all of that as well. From Teresza's face he'd learned the look of loss; from her voice he'd learned the sound of grief. He thought he knew them well.

  He'd been wrong.

  "I have every intention of coming back," he called out. "But even if I'm away for a long while, even if I never make it back, you'll be all right. You've got a
solid community, a sound base of technology, and reserves enough to weather anything but...well, anything I can think of. What have I done for you that you can't do for yourselves today?"

  No one spoke. Teresza pressed close to him. He wrapped an arm around her.

  "I know you all. You're good people. There's not one of you who's weak or shaky. You can trust yourselves. You can trust one another. You know how it's done now, this...this living business." His voice cracked and threatened to fail him, so he bore down, made it a thing of thunder and bronze, each word a cannon's report in the still, cold air that hung over the village of Defiance. "So just do it!"

  The silence stretched. He clamped his lips together, determined to wait them out, determined not to plead for his release.

  "Armand," quavered Leslie Ulrichs, "what if we can't?"

  The crowd murmured in assent.

  He laughed. He couldn't help it. They could never have restrained him by force. They wouldn't have dared. Nor could they have kept him with justice. He owed nothing to any of them. Would they try to hold him with need?

  "If you can't," he said, "then I will most certainly come back. Count on it. But you won't like it. Because I'll kick your asses from here to the polar ice. Each and every one of you. I'll box your ears for your stupidity. I'll make you wish you'd seen the last of me. So don't even think about failing and falling apart when I'm gone. You owe me!"

  There was no reply. He nodded and shepherded his wife and daughter back to their hovel. They would begin their preparations for the journey in the morning.

  ***

  "Can you do it?" Charisse said.

  Teodor stared at the pair of genetic sequences spread out side by side on his light table.

  The commonalities were tremendous. Apart from the lack of a Y chromosome, the weak G allele on the twenty-first chromosome, and four variant alleles on the seventeenth, Charisse's gene map was Armand's. The editing required to reproduce his pattern from hers would be minimal, and all but guaranteed against error. Indeed, a genesmith of far lesser skill could do that part without a qualm. He would not need access to the source material that had yielded Armand the First to produce an identical zygote for Armand the Second.

  As for egging the product into accelerated mitosis...

  That was a card I swore never to show.

  But whom did I swear to?

  He searched in vain for a reason he'd be unable to do it. He strained even harder for a reason to refuse to do it...a reason that would take precedence over the lives of a hundred million people.

  "I can," he said slowly, "assemble a zygote with your brother's gene map from yours. I think I can prod it into developing at an accelerated rate." He looked back over his shoulder at Charisse, who stood with her arms crossed over her breasts. "If the zygote is viable, I can incubate it here, through its first couple of months, at least. But I can't imagine how it would do any good, even if it were to live to term."

  Her face clouded. "Well, if Vicki were to hold on for long enough..."

  "Yes. If. But if those two Cabal people were right, the odds are better that the whole planet will explode a week from Tuckerday at half past noon."

  Charisse winced. Teodor turned and leaned back against the light table. The tools of his trade, the genetic manipulators, editors, and incubators with which he'd earned his reputation as the best genesmith on Alta, stood all around them, mocking him for his impotence.

  "Charisse," he said softly, "what makes you think this hasn't been thought of already? How can we be sure the powers Armand possesses aren't equally the result of something in his upbringing? Maybe the sort of diet he ate as a boy, or the sorts of books he loved, or something else I can't reproduce?"

  Charisse lowered her head and drew a deep breath.

  "That could well be, Teodor. I don't claim to know that much about it. Even if it's all in the genes and we get every conceivable lucky break in the baby's development, we'd still be racing a very unfriendly clock. But I want to live -- I want my world to live, so I'm groping." She looked him full in the eyes. "Can you do this?"

  Teodor had known Charisse Morelon from before the cradle. For her first sixteen years she'd been a living song of joy, a creature of pure innocence who took delight in every passing instant and everything around her. The new Charisse, who combined Elyse's beauty with Alain's penetration and Armand's cliff-like immovability, was a different, much less pleasant experience.

  "You realize," he said, "that we're talking about a genetically engineered slave. A child to be brought into a world to serve the purposes of others, with no rights of his own. Doesn't that trouble you in the slightest?"

  She nodded. "Yes, Teodor, it does. Just not quite as much as your death, and mine, and my mother's, and the deaths of all my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. Not quite as much as the death of a hundred million people from starvation. Not quite as much as the possible extinction of the human race. Perhaps a little more than those things trouble my brother, damn him."

  Teodor reeled before the anger in her words.

  "The costs will be considerable."

  She inclined her head. "I'll see to them."

  "Not just the original engineering --"

  "Worry about that part and leave the rest to me. Can you do it?"

  "Yes, I told you so!"

  "Will you do it?" Her eyes were obsidian spears in the gloom.

  The moral onus on me will be no less than hers.

  "I will."

  She regarded him a moment longer, then donned her wrap and headed for the door.

  "Where are you off to?"

  She didn't look back. "Gallatin."

  The door closed silently behind her.

  ***

  As Victoria slid back under their covers, Ethan slid out from under them.

  "Ethan?"

  "Gotta pee." He snatched up his robe, scampered through the darkness for their bathroom, swung the door closed, and dropped to a squat before the toilet.

  For six straight nights he'd hurried for the bathroom on the instant Victoria returned from it. She had yet to leave enough urine to trigger a reading from the pregnancy test strip Ianushkevich had brought him.

  He peered closely at the seat, but found nothing. He wedged his fingers under the seat, raised it as quietly as he could, and looked down at the porcelain bowl.

  He spotted a thin yellow dribble running down the wall toward the pool at the bottom. He swiped at it frantically, whacking his elbow against the bowl in the process, pulled the strip close to his eyes and counted off the seconds.

  It took only forty-three seconds for the telltale blue cross, vivid and definite, to appear.

  He fell back onto his rump on the polished stone floor.

  She opened my valve. She probed my body psionically, found my valve, and opened it.

  He tottered on a fine wire between incredulity and despair.

  I sacrificed everything for her. I gave her my future, my career, and my dream of a family. I watched her murder her mother, and kept silent about it. She abused me repeatedly, and I never said a word in protest. I even agreed to wear an explosive collar so I could be with her again.

  It wasn't enough for her.

  He allowed no mitigating thought to disturb the funnel of rage building in him.

  She raped me.

  A measureless time later, the bathroom door creaked open. Victoria found him there, still sitting on the floor, and frowned.

  "Ethan?" She looked swiftly around him. "Are you okay?"

  The words tinkled meaninglessly in his ear. He pondered them as if trying to translate them from some ancient Earth tongue.

  "I...don't know."

  Her gaze moved to the strip of stained fabric he clutched. "What's that?"

  He stared stupidly at the pregnancy test, forgotten in his hand.

  "Ethan?"

  "This?" He held it up before him. "It's a pregnancy test strip. Dmitri brought it down for me. If your urine makes it show a blue cross, i
t means you're pregnant. There's the blue cross right smack in the middle. See?" He climbed to his feet and thrust it at her, and she recoiled.

  "But Vicki," he said, "I couldn't possibly be pregnant. That doesn't happen to men, does it? So it has to be you. But before I moved in here with you, I had a contraceptive valve implanted in me. Dmitri insisted." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "So how do you suppose this happened?"

  She looked at him with the bland puzzlement of one who doesn't understand why she'd been spoken to. Her expression held no more emotion than the gaze of a sheep.

  Until she smiled.

  It was a subtle thing, a delicate, slightly crooked curve of the lips that barely touched her eyes. There was no warmth in it, only a trace of embarrassment at having been caught. She added a microscopic shrug, turned, and let the door fall closed between them.

  Chapter 40

  The central office of Gallatin University's Social Sciences department was a small room with no windows on the third floor of the Genet Center. It sported only a secretary's workstation, some file cabinets, and two molded plastic chairs for waiting guests. There were no doors to adjoining offices. The secretary was a gray-haired woman of about sixty. She possessed a grandmotherly face, kindly blue eyes, a warm smile, a low, sweet voice, and an absolute immovability before every argument, inducement, or blandishment Charisse could lay before her.

  "I really am sorry, Miss," she said. "

  But Dr. Ianushkevich no longer deals with the public for any reason. He can't possibly be your brother's advisor. He doesn't meet with students. He's just an adjunct scholar here. For the last several decades his researches have been independent of other department initiatives, so the university has honored his request for privacy." Her smile turned gently sad. "I wish I could be more help, but I'm afraid it's just impossible." Charisse retained only the barest grip upon her composure. Charm hadn't worked. Status hadn't worked. Money hadn't worked. She closed her eyes briefly and racked her brain for a fresh approach.