3 October, 2115:
The recovery from the nanite reprogramming is slow, but Paul stubbornly talks his way out of the Crèche early by promising to continue resting in his quarters. As outsiders are not allowed inside the Crèche sections, it’s the only way Paul can meet with us face-to-face.
He has a small suite of rooms. The ETE skill at simulating sunlight hundreds of feet underground gives him a small garden alcove that looks very much like an urban apartment garden on Earth. The illusion goes a long way to forgetting that we’re buried so far in solid rock.
I’m also surprised by how “homey” his rooms are—most of what I’ve seen of life within the Stations is even more Spartan and sterile than the Melas Two bunkers (only much bigger and brighter). Paul even sleeps in what looks like a real bed with plush blankets and a frame that looks like hardwood. There are reproductions of famous masterworks on the walls, mostly impressionist landscapes. I consider that he must have been very young when his parents took him on the shuttle, but he’s still hanging onto his home world. I wonder if he’d ever consider visiting (no matter how he’d likely be received).
He sits at his executive-sized desk (which also looks like it’s made of wood) in a padded but utilitarian chair. The desktop is busy with graphics of Martian strata and composition analyses, but there are also photos of breathtaking landscapes, perhaps captures of places he’s seen in his adventures on the surface.
He asks us to join him, using one of his Rods to drag two other chairs in from his small tidy kitchen. The effort it takes him lets me know that he’s using the Rod because getting up to move the chairs himself might be asking too much of his still-stabilizing body. He looks pale, clammy, short of breath. I wonder if his recovery from the blast and the crash was as difficult.
“Thank you, Zauba’a,” he begins, his voice dry. “You did a fine job of scaring my brethren into useful action. We owe you a great deal.”
Zauba’a gives him a look of detached curiosity.
“You seemed to need the wake-up call,” I let him know I understand.
“Lives would have been lost needlessly,” he accepts, “if not by the Shinkyo taking ours, then by us going too far to keep them from doing so. Without you, we would have walked into disaster. We still may, but we will be slightly better prepared for it.”
He flexes his fingers. It looks like he’s fighting arthritis.
“But is this what you want?” I ask him.
He gives me a tired grin—it looks like even that effort hurts.
“I expect I feel somewhat like you,” he grates out. Then chuckles, though it’s more of a cough. “Sorry, Colonel—that didn’t come out right. Not mortal. Not older. But I expect there was a time in your life when you realized that you were no longer just a man, that you had in some way become a weapon. That’s what I’m feeling. And no, I’m not sure it’s what I want.”
“The difference between a tool and a weapon is what you do with them,” I try. He shakes his head.
“Guns make bad hammers,” he counters. “Design betrays intended function.”
Zauba’a gives a thoughtful nod.
“You have your doubts, Colonel,” Paul continues after a moment. “More than what you shared with my father.”
“I think I could say the same of you,” I give him back. He nods, his eyes going far away.
“You are right,” he tells me. “What we have done, what we will do… We walk a fine line. And anything we do may damn us further in the eyes of Earth.”
“Is it better to do nothing?” I challenge his doubts.
“Doing nothing is still making a choice.”
I nod to let him know I agree. Then I ask him more difficult questions.
“Will your Council interfere with the attempt to contact Earth?”
He smiles weakly, shakes his head. “This must come to pass. And my father does believe the best way is that you do it. He trusts you.”
“I wouldn’t trust me,” I warn him. He grins.
“You’re not the monster you think you are.”
“I’m just slowing down with age.”
“I think I know how that feels,” he jokes, then pulls up the sleeve of his simple blue tunic, looking at his bare left arm like he’s never seen it before. He flexes the hand again. I can see him shaking. “Care to humor me with a test?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’m not such a great fan of the theoretical when lives are at stake.” Then he looks at Zauba’a. “Do you have your Shinkyo sword?”
She rises after only a moment’s hesitation, and smoothly draws the two-foot-long blade out from under her cloak. He holds out his bare forearm in mid-air.
“I’ll regret this if I’m wrong,” he says, his face wincing in anticipation, “but I need to know before someone loses something more precious.”
Zauba’a looks to me for approval, and I reluctantly give her a nod. She takes a breath, and the cut is quick. I hear the blade thunk loudly. It stops as if stuck in Paul’s radius—it should have cleaved right through.
Paul’s mouth and eyes gape, but he doesn’t make a sound, not even to breathe. He looks at the blade stuck in him—there is very little blood—and then he grits his teeth as she pries the weapon out of the wound. He drops his arm down onto the desktop, and we all watch the wound close itself. It’s done in a handful of seconds. Then Paul cries out. Collapses half over his desk. Starts to giggle.
“Not sure what was worse…” he mutters shakily. “The cut or the shock of how hard you hit me… I think I felt that in my toes… That wasn’t pleasant… Not at all pleasant…” Tears leak out of his eyes.
“But you have your arm,” Zauba’a points out, wiping the blade on her cloak and putting it away. “And your answer.”
She did not hold back, did not “pull” her strike. She wanted him to be sure.
The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN Page 34
