Archive for the 'The Story Arc' Category
Twelve
It was over twelve years since she’d had a warm bath, Julie thought as she slid into the steaming water and shuddered with the tingling rush of awoken sensation. Unfortunately that also included her many cuts and scrapes, which stung sharply. As if the little injuries awoke the large one, her arm began to throb angrily under the bandage and the slightest movement sent a jagged shaft of intense pain splintering through her. She supposed that in actuality it was simply the mitigin wearing off, then she saw that blood and fluid had seeped through the bandage and felt a pulse of alarm. Trying to keep the arm out of the water, Julie washed her hair and body with her other hand, soaping herself in slow caressing motions, then rinsed.
She lay back in a half-daze and let memories scud in ~ memories of when she and her father stood, marveling at a sunset, perhaps for the last time before the Pols took him away for a murder he didn’t commit. Her father’s eyes had creased when he smiled and lifted his face from its usual sadness. He had been a quiet man of few words, but with an intensity that often struck her with awe. Julie recognized nature’s role in her father’s demeanor. Under the sunset’s forgiving radiance, his bronze face had glowed like a warrior poet as he sucked on his pipe. She remembered savoring the sweet scent of burning pipe tobacco and watching the plume of blue smoke curl over his shoulder. It rose, then broke up into swirling tendrils as he lectured her.
“We have much to learn in stable chaos science, Angel. Ecosystems cycle over millennia in ways we may never discern. This heath, for instance, is a complex system, poised on the edge of chaos. It has the ability to balance order and chaos in ways we have yet to comprehend. Creation and destruction are parts of the same thing, Angel. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that everything degenerates toward entropy. Yet spontaneous order exists all around us in galaxies, cells, ecosystems and human beings. We’ve miraculously managed to assemble ourselves from a primordial, chaotic, soup of chemicals.”
“Mom says God made us.”
Her father smiled thoughtfully. “Perhaps it’s the same thing.”
She slipped her hand into his much larger one and rubbed against him like a cat, studying his great hand. It wasn’t the hand of an outdoorsman. Neither rough nor callused like her uncle’s, whose brown paws were seamed and cracked from the sun. Her father’s hands were pale and smooth like her mother’s, with slender fingers. They were the hands of a scientist who wrote intelligent words. Secure in his firm grip, she was convinced that her father and his words would protect her against anything . . .
More memories bubbled up in a febrile mixture of garish images . . . trying to keep up with her mother as she pulled her and her sister through a sea of people and droids, then feeling her mother’s hand slip away . . . striding the glittering malls festooned with cultured parks and fragrant gardens . . . pushing her way into the crowded tube-jet . . . sitting in her dark office and laughing at SAM’s crazy jokes . . . watching in frozen anguish as her friend, Nancy, was Shamed, then feeling the disgrace of her own Shaming . . . discovering that she was Prometheus and that her own father had given her away as a child to science without asking her and damned her to Darwin disease . . . discovering that her lost sister had died of it. . . stunned by her Uncle Bobby’s suicide in the Pol Station after he was arrested for peddling dystopian literature . . . quarrelling with Frank, then shooting him out of uncontrollable rage . . .
Out of those dark swirling visions, thoughts of Daniel floated to the surface . . . When they’d first snuck out of Icaria to walk the beach of Lake Ontario, already in love but too shy to admit it . . . the time she and Daniel bathed naked in a shallow lake the first day they’d left Icaria for good. She’d bashfully undressed in front of him then took his tenderly offered hand and followed him into the chilly water. They washed each other, then, still dripping wet, they made love in the shallows ~
A brusque knock at the door jolted her out of her reverie. She jerked up with a splash and snapped her eyes open.
“You ready, Ms. Crane?” Tyers called from the other side of the washroom door.
“Yes. Right there,” she responded and pulled herself unsteadily out of the water to dry and dress. When she saw the clothes Tyers had selected for her, she frowned. He’d left her a Com-Center uniform to wear. As she felt the soft crimson fabric and brought it to her nose, inhaling its freshly laundered scent, a whole new jangle of memories scudded in like missals that knocked her off balance. She leaned back against the wall to steady herself, feeling a sudden splintering pain rip through her arm, and saw spots in front of her eyes.
Once dressed, Julie opened the door with her left hand, her old clothes tucked under that arm. Tyers stood up from the same chair she’d sat in before and his mouth twitched as he appraised her, obviously enjoying the view. She was too annoyed to blush. “Why this?” she demanded, looking from the uniform to his face. “I don’t work in your Com-Center anymore.”
“It matches the fire in your eyes,” he teased, then added, “The colour red suits you,” and used the excuse to look her over more.
She held out her soiled clothes. “I’d like these cleaned and returned to me.”
“Why?” he asked, eyeing them with distaste. He added to her slight dismay, “You won’t be needing them again.”
She brought the clothes close to her face to take in the tantalizing scent of seasoned leather. “I just . . . want them. I don’t want to argue with you ~”
“Good, considering how you like to end your arguments,” he said with a smirk. He’d obviously alluded to her shooting Frank during their quarrel in the Den so long ago. Tyers swung his arm in an arc around the room. “You were asking about the Head Pol . . . This is his office and suite.”
Yes, it had been familiar. She’d never come in through the door, always by lift. Clutching her old clothes against her chest, Julie observed that the new Head Pol had thoroughly redecorated. Gone were Kraken’s antique wooden furniture and bookshelf, his classic sculptures and paintings. They’d been replaced with modern designs, sleek black leather furniture, abstract art and stark white walls. The new Head Pol had traded the romance of regal tradition with elegant but stark reality.
“Someone’s anxious to meet you.” The smirk became more pronounced. “An old friend.”
She did a quick rundown of who she might still know in Icaria. She had no friends left here. At least not live ones. The locked door to her left opened and Julie came face to face with a ghost.
“Hi, Julie,” Frank said. He was looking very much alive for someone who should have died from Darwin eleven years ago. He was dressed in a black Pol uniform and wasn’t wearing a helmet. She thought him thinner and lankier than she’d remembered him. Frank appraised her whole body, undressing her with his eyes, glanced briefly at the clothes she clutched, then rested his gaze on her face with a smirk. That recklessly handsome face had definitely aged since she’d last seen him. He’d let his dark hair grow long and had it pulled back in a ponytail. It gave his thin face a severe quality that brought out the coldness in his sea-blue eyes and a lingering bitterness in his sardonic mouth. She thought he resembled an undernourished timber wolf. “You look great,” he said, lips tugging into a leer.
“So do you . . .” she lied and felt her voice break up and drift away in pieces. The fire that smouldered in her arm flared up into her face as though she’d just walked into a wall of flames. Then she was falling and everything faded into blackness.
Eleven
The skyship shuddered briefly as it landed on top of one of Icaria’s high towers that rose out of the decrepit outer façade of the ancient city. Julie recognized it as the Pol Station. Of course. No surprise there. Then a realization slammed into her and her breaths seized in her chest ~ what if she’d misinterpreted their motives and this was just a simple mission on the part of the Pols to bring Julie Crane, the murderer, back to justice. Was she headed straight to a Pol Station dungeon to await execution with no chance to plead her or her family’s case? Was it possible that Burke was the only one who knew the truth about her and now he’d disappeared?
The pilot was the first to leave the ship. He opened the passenger door and waited for them, right hand resting lightly on his holstered gun.
Before disembarking, Tyers turned to her and spoke for the first time since they’d lapsed into silence at the beginning of the trip. His one question told her he knew everything. “So, did they all come back?”
She knew he meant the lower order A.I. machine voices in her head. And probably SAM, too. “Yes,” she replied, deciding that there was no reason to hide it.
Tyers simply nodded. “Shall we?” he motioned to the ship’s exit. She clamored out of her chair then felt her knees cave in under her. He was at her side instantly and steadied her. Giddy under a hot wave of nausea, she reluctantly took his arm as they stepped off the ship. Once on the platform, she slid from his grasp and walked stiffly on her own behind Raymond to the door leading from the roof. Raymond stopped at the door. Tyers held his card in front of the I.D. plate and stood aside as the door opened for Julie to step inside. As she did he tilted his head and asked, “You’ve demonstrated quite clearly that you’re the independent type, but what was it you were doing, splintering off from your family?”
Taken off guard, Julie stammered as she passed him through the doorway, avoiding his eyes, “I just needed some time to myself.”
“Ah,” he nodded, raising a brow, following her inside with Raymond behind them. “A domestic dispute.”
“You might say,” she said in a hollow voice and looked away. Let him think that. Perhaps he wasn’t so far off the mark, she considered, thinking of Daniel’s likely reaction to what she’d done.
“Yeah, I’d heard that about you, too,” Tyers said with a slick grin. “Bit of a loner, eh? Never even joined the veemeld association, your own kind.”
Hard when you’re one-of-a-kind, she bit out the thought. Even the other veemelds would have thought of her as a freak back then.
“At any rate,” he went on, leading her down the hall, “you made it easier for us to retrieve you.” That was the idea, she thought sardonically. “If your mate is anything like you,” he blithely continued, “we’d have needed reinforcements.”
No mention of Angel. That was good, she decided, and turned her attention to her surroundings. Upon entering the building, she’d instantly noticed the change in the air quality and recognized the stale smell of re-circulated, vented air. The building seemed alive with the droning of machines and technology. She didn’t remember the halls being so narrow and cramped. She was struck by their bright cleanliness and felt self-conscious walking through them in her dirty hiking shoes. She must look filthy and she knew she stank because she hadn’t bathed in days and had hiked hard in the heat of summer.
Tyers led her to a small room. There was nothing in it save a second door, a wall vee-com and a swivel chair. They stood in the room as though waiting for something or someone. Julie noticed Tyers tapping his foot nervously. Within moments the far door opened and a slim but muscular man with a dour face and stern mouth strode in as if he owned the place. His head was shaven and he wore a green Enviro-Center uniform like Tyers. He looked uncomfortably familiar.
Ignoring Tyers for the subordinate he was, the man fixed sharp eyes on Julie. He glared at her with such fierce hatred she almost recoiled and wondered what she’d done to warrant such malevolence. She didn’t know him. Or did she? The man nodded, looking her over like merchandise, as if confirming his loathing with what he saw.
“Well, well,” he said in a basso voice that carried a tone of contempt. “So this is the legendary Julie Crane.” Even though he was looking directly at her, he’d made it clear in every way that he was not addressing her, as though she was a dumb animal.
Julie glanced down at herself and felt her face smolder. Her leather shorts and faded blouse were stained and torn. She and her clothes stank from nervous sweat. Her nails were chipped and filthy, her legs and arms smeared with soil and blood, her boots scuffed and caked in dirt. Her hair, at the best of times a mess, was a shocking matt that hung like string over her eyes and stuck out in all directions. She knew she looked like a wild animal, with a dirty face browned from the sun. No, not too impressive, she supposed, especially for someone who was trying to gain concessions for her family. But there was more to his hatred . . .
“The notorious Julie Crane,” he repeated as if to himself and pushed out his lips in sober thoughts. “The woman who likes to shoot people.” He paused, raised his chin and sneered, “The woman who single handedly caused the worst epidemic humankind has known, assassinated the Head Pol and sent the whole Pol force running in circles like city-fools chasing a fox in a forest.”
The man then turned toward the door through which he’d entered, dismissing her from his attention as though she was no longer in the room. At least now she knew her status in Icaria and fiercely stomped down on the anxiety pulsing up her throat. So, they were pinning the whole Darwin plague on her too. Why not? She’d given them the means, revealing herself as Prometheus with that info-cube. Now she knew what Burke had done with it, but she was tired and hungry and out of patience. “Am I under arrest? Why have you brought me here?”
The man halted at the door. “Get her cleaned up,” he said, not bothering to look back. “She looks and stinks like an animal.” He flicked a hand. “Use Suite One.”
Julie noticed the surprise in Tyer’s face. She drew what comfort she could from the man’s order. For whatever else it meant, at least she knew she wasn’t going straight to a dungeon and execution. Whatever they had in mind for her entailed some level of presentation.
“Then take her to the Pielou Med-Center for processing,” the man added and disappeared through the door that had just irised open.
That sounded less promising, Julie thought. The door hissed shut and she felt Tyers relax. The man obviously intimidated Tyers also. She bridled in her despair with a question. “Who was that?”
Tyers turned to her with an even look. “Brian Dykstra.”
She swallowed. “A relative of the previous Chief of Secret Pols?” Julie had been instrumental in John Dykstra’s arrest and incarceration twelve years ago. Not only had her model identified him as a Dystopian, but her research had also uncovered his involvement in criminal activities for Gaia.
“The son,” Tyers responded.
Julie held back a grimace. John Dykstra had hated veemelds with a passion, especially her. So, apparently, did his son. He had good reason, she acknowledged ~ she’d put his father in jail. “Your boss?” she asked, projecting a false calm in her voice.
Tyers scowled. “Yes.”
“And he answers to the Head Pol, I guess.”
“All in good time,” he said with a sneer. She was fishing but he didn’t take the bait. He turned to the door and she followed him out. Who’d replaced the dead Kraken? Who was the Head Pol now? She didn’t like the sound of Dykstra’s command to “process” her. What did he mean by that? Was Gaia still running everything, including the Circle and Icaria-5’s mayor? Twelve years ago Julie’s sleuthing had uncovered Gaia’s blackmailing of virtually every member of that planetary governing body, but it seemed as though that information, like other parts of her info-cube, had never made it out of Burke’s office. Julie shuddered as she thought of the DP, the place Gaia had had in mind for her once she’d discovered Julie’s lack of cooperation. No one ever left the DP, at least not in one piece.
There was one sure way to find out the truth, she thought, as Tyers led her out of the room back into the hallway where Raymond waited, but she stifled the urge to communicate with SAM again. SAM wasn’t SAM anymore. She wasn’t sure what her A.I. friend had become, now that he’d joined with Darwin’s virus, Proteus, and she wasn’t in a hurry to find out. Her strange, recurring nightmare flickered back and she felt her stomach twist. A disturbing idea that had been simmering in her mind surfaced briefly: that Proteus was behind the dream. That Proteus was sentient and messing with her psyche. The thought was too terrifying and she shoved it to the back of her mind again.
Tyers stopped at another door. When he opened it and motioned for her to enter past him, Julie saw that it was a large, fully furnished suite. Suite One. It looked oddly familiar. A swift appraisal revealed a set of glass doors leading to a patio, bathed in evening sunshine, two other closed doors and a set of doors for a lift. The room was elegantly furnished with comfortable chairs, a sofa and table, vee-com-equipped desk and artwork.
Tyers followed her into the room with a smirk. “Don’t bother with either that door or the lift,” he said. “They’re locked. There’s a bathtub in the washroom, there.” He pointed to the third door. “I suggest you clean up and change. I’ll have some clothes sent up via the washroom chute.” He moved back to the hall door. “I’ll be back in an hour to take you to the Med-Center to heal that arm and your other injuries.” He closed the door and she heard the click of the lock.
Left alone for the first time since she’d been apprehended, Julie gave in to emotional exhaustion and dropped into a plush chair. She closed her eyes and exhaled, long and slow. How was she going to convince these people to leave her and her family alone? Was she being held? And by whom? The success of her “mission” depended on the answers to these questions and she was now having her first major misgivings. In good time, Tyers had said. Yes, all in good time . . .
Swallowing down her rising confusion and despair, she refused to admit to having regrets. A part of her had felt inexplicable longing to return here and now that she was back, it felt all wrong. The city felt nothing like she’d expected. Instead of evoking warm familiar feelings, it felt like a foreign and eerie place from a discarded dimension of her existence. She remembered how she used to find the constant thrumming of the environmental system soothing. Now it only added to the discomfort she was feeling.
Even the machine voices in her mind annoyed her. They chattered in her head like a room full of strangers telling secrets she couldn’t understand and she kept shaking her head as if that would make them go away. Of course it didn’t. Then there was SAM, the one thing she’d openly looked forward to. Once her best friend, SAM was now a stranger to her. She felt betrayed somehow; and very lonely. She missed Daniel and Angel.
Blinking back tears, she pushed herself from the comfortable seat and wandered to the patio doors. They were locked, of course. She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked out onto the stark patio, unable to see beyond its walls to the heath. Her gaze rested on the evening sky, now inflamed with the blushing shades of red and ochre, and she imagined the heady fragrance of sweet bog and pepper and the rowdy clamoring of birds that rose at this time of the day.
After confirming that the other door and lift were indeed secured, she shuffled to the door Tyers had suggested. It opened into a spacious bathroom, complete with large bathtub, toilet and separate shower. Three of the walls were alive with the sights, smells and sounds of lush jungle vegetation ~ the latest in holo-art, she supposed. There was a second door but it wouldn’t budge. It probably led to the mystery room behind the locked door in the living room.
She started the water then gingerly undressed, wincing as pain shot through her arm. She dropped her filthy bloodstained clothes on the floor and stood watching the tub fill with churning water through a haze of thoughts.
As the laminar flow spilled into riotous tendrils only to find a uniform pattern of turbulence, she was once again reminded of her father and chaos theory. Stable chaos, he’d insisted, permeated everything and everyone. Like fractals of a larger interconnected universe, each person had his or her own cycle of creative destruction to experience before merging into a greater community of consciousness. Where was she in that cycle? Would she be as serene when it was her time like her father was the day the Pols took him?
Ten
Angel was pulling his arm. “Dad, they took Mom!”
“What?” He turned to his distressed daughter from his workbench. Lately, she looked more like a scamp than a young girl, taken to wandering off to explore while he worked silently on projects with little meaning.
“I couldn’t talk to her,” she continued, her words rushing out like a turbulent brook, “because the insects played interference.”
“The insects what?” She wasn’t making any sense, he thought, realizing he was annoyed that she’d brought up her mother. He was trying his hardest, without much success, to forget her. Since Julie left them over a week ago, he’d sadly accepted that he’d probably never see her again and the loss opened up a huge, pulsing wound. The wound was healing, at least going numb, and here was Angel opening it up again.
“Got in the way,” she explained. “They got in the way.”
Daniel frowned, confused as well as annoyed. “But I thought the insect noises carried your voices, let you talk to one another.”
“Except they got too loud. As if they didn’t want me to hear Mom.”
“That’s—” ridiculous, he silently added to himself. She was implying that the virus had a mind of its own. He dismissed the thought as absurd, just a child’s impression, and exhaled with impatience. “Who, Angel? Who took her?”
“I don’t know. But they’re taking her back to Icaria,” she continued, dancing from one foot to the other in nervous agitation.
Icaria, he thought, looking off into infinity. Icaria ~ the last place he ever wanted to be, but the place Julie had never stopped longing for. Although they’d never discussed it, he knew of her strange yearning to return. There were a lot of things she never discussed with him, he thought. A lot that she kept secluded, close to her heart. Her family, for instance, and her father particularly. Daniel had met Bobby, her eccentric uncle, her only living relative at the time. After the cypols took her and tagged her a veemeld, useful to the outer-city, she’d lived with Bobby for a while until the DIC offered her a high-end job with high-end pay.
Bobby was a crusty old hermit and didn’t like attachments, but he had a tender spot for Julie and they’d become very close. When her ex-boyfriend arrested Bobby and her uncle died while in custody at the Pol Station, it hurt her deeply. Daniel supposed maybe that was exactly what that Pol had in mind when he’d arrested Bobby: to hurt Julie. Revenge for leaving him ~ and loving another. Only days earlier Langor had spotted her with Daniel and had hurled an insult, one that had convinced her to reveal her identity to Daniel. The Pol had done his work: Daniel left her in disgust. It was, ironically Langor’s further action ~ Bobby’s arrest and incarceration in the Pol Station ~ that brought Daniel and Julie together again.
Of her mother, Daniel knew only a little from the hushed arguments between Julie and her little sister when they techno-slummed with him in the inner city. Despite Julie’s defensive remonstrations, her sister had insisted that their mother was a drunk and had deliberately let go of them in the crowd that day that they’d lost her. For years Julie continued to look for their mother. They never found her and had to resort to living in the streets.
Then her sister was snatched by a cypol and Julie left Daniel to look for her. Julie had finally tracked her down: she’d died in a foster home, but Julie had refused to discuss the details with him. Of Julie’s father, Daniel knew nothing, except that he’d been arrested for a double murder and had left Julie, her sister and mother destitute. Julie had adopted the nickname he’d given her when she was a child: Angel.
Julie so fiercely locked away that part of herself, but he knew it was there. He’d caught glimpses of it from time to time during their twelve years together. Usually it boiled to the surface during arguments, the kind they used to have during their early years outside.
It often began with some innocent remark on his part, followed by a surprisingly biting response from her then a bark of rebuke from him to which she would take great exception and throw him a monosyllabic word like “fine.” He’d learned to dread such a response for what it was: a smoldering rage building inside her. Eventually he recognized ~ always too late ~ that he’d unwittingly touched upon a close-guarded fear or pain that erupted in a stunning explosion of emotion that she just as quickly subdued and tucked away, leaving him dazed, as though he’d just slammed head-first into a tree.
He never understood Julie’s obsession with Icaria. It should have been the last place she wanted to be. They’d barely gotten away with their lives. Memories of that last day in Icaria still strobed through him like a fibrillating heart. He’d already left her by then, because she’d deceived him by concealing who and what she was, but then she got in that row with Langor for arresting her uncle and she accidentally killed Langor’s partner. Someone then tampered with the vids, cleverly skewing her actions into those of an assassin and suddenly the whole Pol force was chasing her and only Daniel could help her.
He found her huddled and shivering in a grimy lower-level hall, sobbing uncontrollably, overcome with despair and completely undone. He’d never seen her that way before ~ she’d always been the quiet and stalwart inspiration of their techno-slummer group ~ and that momentary breakdown alone had shocked him into feeling immense compassion for her. He took charge, for once, and led Julie to the inner city ~ straight into an ambush by Pols, lead by a Secret Pol who wanted her info-cube, and wanted her dead. She and Daniel only slipped away because a techno-slummer she’d mothered recognized Julie and the gathering mob did the rest.
Daniel had never intended to join her: he’d promised himself that he would help her escape outside, where she could eke out a living on her own . . . but as they said their good-byes, both miserable and lonely, something snapped inside of him and he knew he couldn’t live without her. He had never regretted coming out here with her, but he sometimes wondered whether he really knew his wife . . . and whether she had ever really been happy.
Angel’s glum voice filtered through his miserable thoughts: “ . . . and it’s because of me that she left.”
Startled, Daniel studied his daughter for several heartbeats and finally realized that she blamed herself for her mother’s departure. He berated himself for not noticing before. Angel had probably been beating herself up this whole time, but he’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself to notice just how much his own grieving daughter was hurting from misplaced guilt. He’d spent many hours picturing Julie back in Icaria, striding with confidence in that blazing tunic that looked so good on her and brought out her forest-green eyes. He saw her lured back into the technological paradise to which she was so accustomed and possessed such prowess. He saw her laughing with her A.I.-friend, SAM. And he felt hopeless ~ so hopeless he hadn’t recognized the quiet agony his daughter was suffering.
Daniel leaned close to Angel and took her hand. “Sweetheart, it’s not because of you . . . well . . .” he trailed. That wasn’t strictly true either.
“I was so mean to her. She got mad at me and I shouted at her and didn’t listen. We’ve been arguing so much. I can’t do anything right ~”
“Now hold on there, Angel.” He squeezed her hand for emphasis. How mother and daughter resembled one another in temper, he thought. “Your mother loves you more than anything. She left because of you but not because of anything you did. She left to protect you.”
“Well, we have to go after her! Now!” Angel shook out of his grasp, agitated.
Daniel stiffened at the thought. Then he rested his hands on her shoulders to calm her. “Listen, Angel, that would undermine what your mother just did. She left to lure them away from us ~ from you. She made it clear from the way she left that she didn’t want us to follow her. If we did, we’d make her sacrifice meaningless.”
“I don’t care!” she said hotly.
“Icaria’s 500 kilometers away. It’s at least three weeks, more like two months, just to get there. By then she could be ~” he cut himself off but finished the thought in his head: she could be dead . . . or worse.
“All the more reason to go NOW!”
He slumped in his chair, meeting the blazing eyes of his fierce little daughter. He’d just started getting used to the idea of losing Julie again ~ maybe forever this time. Well, no, he’d never get used to it; there would always be a gnawing empty ache inside him where she belonged. But he’d visualized a life without her. Now Angel wanted him to go on some rescue mission to save Julie who likely didn’t want ~ or need ~ to be saved, in a place where he no longer belonged.
“They hurt her, Dad,” Angel finally said in a low voice. “I felt her pain. I heard her mind scream.”
Swallowing hard, he put an arm around Angel and squeezed her tight to him. He felt her anguish ooze into him like blood from one cut to another. He understood Julie’s compulsion to save others. Her history of abuse and abandonment had taught her to be fiercely self-reliant but also to care for others less fortunate than her. He’d let self-centered and selfish anger rule his adolescence. While he lay passed out in self-pity in a dark alley, covered in his own vomit from drinking tub-jet fuel, Julie had swept in like a warm ocean tide, raised his techno-slummer group out of the gutter of despair, fed them with love and hope and set them on the shores of self-sufficiency. She was his valiant hero and he loved her. Then she deserted him to go save her sister, who’d been taken by a cypol. But instead of finding Diana, Julie was taken to the outer-city for her useful abilities as a veemeld. Only years later she found her sister: she’d died of Darwin Disease in a foster home.
Now Julie had left him again ~ but this time to save her daughter, and maybe make peace with a place that no longer cared for her. Was that what drew her there? Was it her perception of unfinished business? She’d inadvertently started the Darwin plague. He recalled the time he found her in the lower levels when he’d gone looking to rescue her, and she’d refused to go with him. She still intended to deliver into trustworthy hands the info-cube that held the answers to Darwin. It was only when Pols caught up to them and opened fire, that she relented. She’d finally left the cube with Frank, the only Pol she could trust because he wasn’t a Secret Pol. Daniel had never asked Aard about the state of Darwin in Icaria, and he knew Julie hadn’t either. Was she afraid of what the place might have become? Was she still blaming herself?
Now his beloved wife was hurt and needed him again . . .
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Angel patted his hand with an optimistic smile. “We’ll find her and bring her back.”
Nine
It took her a while to realize that the thunder in her head came mostly from outside. Some motor was pulsing to the rhythm of the sharp pain that resonated through her head. Her whole body ached, she felt sick to her stomach and her arm smoldered with a brooding pain where the laser shot had burned her. She cautiously opened her eyes and when her vision cleared she saw that she was slumped in a curled position in a back passenger seat of a skyship. A pilot in front of her was doing diagnostics on the ship and the blue-haired man sat next to her, regarding her with a faint smile.
“Ah, welcome to the living again, Ms. Crane.”
She straightened up and winced from the painful jolt in her right arm. “Who are you?” She noticed that the wound in her arm had been bandaged.
“Inquisitive. Good. You must be feeling better. Don’t worry about the arm. Raymond treated it topically with mitigin and gave you some ambrosia to ease the pain.” That explained her nausea, she thought ~ Icaria’s drugs had always made her sick. “But we’ll soon get you to a Med-Center where they’ll treat it properly and clean you up. I’m Greg Tyers.”
The ship shuddered, beginning its ascent. Julie looked outside and caught a glimpse of Aard lying in a heap. She watched his dark corpse recede into the vast heath. Seen from this vantage point, the heath’s brilliant purple and green patchwork blazed with breathtaking beauty on either side of the widening river with its thousands of islands and the lake beyond. Then she could no longer make out Aard’s body from the heath’s multi-coloured quilt-work.
As the skyship skirted along the shore of Lake Ontario, Julie gazed to the north. Like pointillist paintings, the ancient remains of the old roads and buildings revealed themselves from the air in an abstract network of light green lines and shapes. The history of human habitation spoke in subtle whispers of shade and texture.
Just as with humankind’s many artifacts, the heath would reclaim Aard into its fractal fabric of colour and filigree, while she hurtled toward the dark and sterile halls of Icaria. She couldn’t help feeling that her journey ~ and her end ~ lay in those dark halls, not in the heath below, where her sweet child was born and belonged. Not me, thought Julie. It seemed her own destiny lay along a path different from Angel’s or Daniel’s. A darker path. She’d cheated destiny, after all. She’d fled and raised a beautiful child in nature’s wilderness. Now the fate she’d forged for herself over twelve years ago when she’d discovered who and what she was had caught up to her at last and was drawing her back into the dark place.
Within minutes the ship was soaring southwest over the vast lake and Julie stole a glance at Tyers, seated beside her. In contrast to her tattered leather shorts, rumpled shirt and her sweaty body, dirty and rough with abrasions and cuts. Tyers looked groomed in his freshly-laundered Enviro-Center uniform and his creamy complexion that radiated with nuyu treatments. He sat upright, manicured hands folded over his lap, and gazed with detached interest at the lake below. He looked about her age, in his thirties, with a square, unexceptional face. A pleasant kind of face with unobtrusive features one never remembered ~ the kind that dangerously blended into a crowd.
Did Tyers work for Gaia or was he a hired assassin of some new government faction that had subverted her? Time had a way of changing players; yet somehow the game stayed remarkably the same. Pol renegades. Dystopians . . . Did these dissidents still exist or had others subverted them in turn? She supposed that hinged on what Burke had done with her info-cube and what Darwin was presently doing to Icaria. Julie thought of the irony of Gaia’s Secret Pols, her Gestapo that secretly reported to her while Mayor Burke and his Head Pol thought they were running the show. The chief of Secret Pols, in turn, kept his own agenda hidden from Gaia: the trickster tricked, subverted by her own rebel unit. Dykstra’s agenda ran counter to Gaia’s who wanted to empower veemelds under her influence; he just wanted to eradicate them. It was all such a tangled web.
When Julie first met Gaia at Kraken’s fateful birthday party, she was mesmerized and strangely drawn to the captivating woman, as if to a beautiful but deeply disturbing piece of art. Gaia had brought up the grizzly example of vampire bats’ mutual sharing of blood to illustrate the need for reciprocity in Icaria and to reprimand Julie for her reckless and uncooperative behavior. Julie had no idea until later of Gaia’s role in her own fate as Prometheus because she hadn’t yet discovered that she was Prometheus. Was Gaia behind this current abduction?
Julie looked Tyers directly in the eyes. “So, are you with the group who wants me alive or the one that wants me dead?” she demanded, realizing as she did how naïve she sounded. No matter, she didn’t have time to be delicate about the situation.
He smiled with what looked to her like sardonic amusement. “You don’t mince words, do you?” he said. “I’d heard that about you. Something about razzing the Shame Court judges . . .” No mistaking the sneer now.
He would bring up her awful Shame Court appearance for tripping a Pol twelve years ago, she thought with a glower. And what else had he heard? That she had a gifted daughter? “You didn’t answer my question.”
“You needn’t be concerned, Ms. Crane,” he said in an assuring tone that sounded condescending. “Our intention isn’t to harm you.”
“Could have fooled me,” she said with open sarcasm, glancing at her injured arm, and temper flaring. “Like your intention not to harm Aard?”
“Regrettably, we had to suppress you somehow,” he said, lips curling with a little more amusement than she cared for. “You didn’t give us much choice, attacking us like that.” He raised a hand and flicked it. “You should count yourself lucky that it was us or you’d be dead now. Raymond’s a crack shot. He only meant to slow you down. If he meant to kill you, believe me, you’d be dead now. As for your friend, we found him that way just before we caught up with you.”
He was lying, she thought. She could see it in his cloyingly sweet smile of reassurance and that overly earnest voice he’d adopted. “Sure,” she said not hiding her disgust and turned to stare pointedly out at the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Strange, for instance, how Tyers had come to haul her back to Icaria right on the heels of that assassin. Julie didn’t believe in coincidence.
They remained silent for the remainder of the journey. Tyers settled back in his seat and donned his vee set while Julie kept her eyes riveted on the glittering lake and the rough heath scudding past her. She saw her past and future flowing on a collision course and it seemed that the greater distance they put between them and her former home, the more keenly she felt those contented years in the heath dissolve before her. But it was tempered by a mixture of relief for the family she’d left behind. If they knew about Angel, they certainly weren’t pursuing her . . . yet. She and Daniel were safe for now. If they could stay that way for a little while longer until she succeeded in securing them permanent safety . . .
Suddenly Julie thought to try reaching her daughter with her mind. Angel? It’s Mom. I’m okay . . . The chittering grew animated with a grainy sound. Can you hear me, sweetheart? She shook her head to try to clear the static. Go away. Let me hear my daughter! As if in response, the virus twitters only increased. Julie slumped in her chair. It was as though the virus refused to carry her message . . .
An hour later she could make out the glimmering towers of Icaria-5 to the northwest and ran her teeth absently over her lower lip. It was a beautiful sight, she conceded with growing excitement. The enclosed city had sprung up literally from beneath the ancient surface city. Icaria had evolved from Toronto’s extensive underground malls, connected to its transportation system, then burst like a phoenix out of the abandoned outer city, glass towers reaching for Heaven. She’d had a lot of time to think of what her return here meant to both her and to the family she’d left behind. Hopefully, she could fulfill both her needs ~ getting concessions for her family ~ and Icaria’s need ~ whatever that was ~ then return home to the heath. There lay the quandary. Depending on what Icaria wanted with her, it was also possible that those needs were mutually exclusive; in which case, she was ready to abort her mission and flee, knowing that she’d once again be condemning herself to a fugitive’s existence, this time never to see her family again.
Over a decade ago, the Pols of Icaria had chased her out of Icaria for a murder she hadn’t committed. Now she was returning there.
She wondered if Darwin had removed more than half of the population, as predicted. Funny how she’d never asked Aard, who used to travel to Icaria at least twice a year. Perhaps she didn’t really want to know. And what about the veemeld community? Had they finally consolidated and become a power to contend with? Or had they remained the same disparate and disorganized group of individuals they were when she left? She remembered how Zane, obviously desperate for members, had tried to lure her into joining their organization. And the A.I. community? What about SAM? Just before her departure from Icaria, SAM had talked about his ambitions for an “A.I.-community”. Did he have friends now? She wanted desperately to ask Tyers. She was certain that he had all the answers, but she refused to speak to him and instead let her curiosity rage inside.
As they approached the high towers, Julie felt her breathing escalate. This was where Icaria’s machine voices had faded away when she’d left. Would they . . .?
Abruptly the machine voices of Icaria-5 washed in her mind as if on an incoming tidal surge and she inhaled sharply. She’d initially thought that they would burst in, but, perhaps because she’d anticipated them, it felt more like walking from an empty hallway into a crowded room.
She caught Tyers watching her carefully and wondered if he knew about her strange abilities. Of course he did. It was obvious that she was being brought back because of those very abilities, though for what exact purpose she could only guess. Ignoring him, she felt her heart slamming as she prepared to veemeld. She knew she was within SAM’s range if the machines of Icaria were already talking to her. Would she remember how? Was SAM even there? Or had they dismantled him? Or had Zane, who’d inherited SAM as his new veemeld partner, irreparably changed SAM’s personality? Only one way to find out. She plunged in: Hey, SAM . . . It’s me . . . Julie . . . your . . . well, hi . . .
[Hey, Julie. Welcome home . . .]
SAM sounded strange. Different. His gentle voice resonated like a cool rippling wave. Julie didn’t care. She felt a smile blossoming on her face. SAM! You’re there!
[Yes, we are. We’ve been expecting you.]
We? She killed the smile and felt her stomach twist with a dark dread.
[We are joined. Proteus and SAM.]
Julie realized that she was staring wide-eyed at Tyers who was looking directly at her with intense interest.
Eight
Julie walks SAM’s cool crystal matrix with a disquiet she is unaccustomed to feeling here. She can’t find SAM. Abruptly the glittering walkway swells into a fetid-smelling hollow and Julie knows she will see the dark figure again. Moving mechanically against her will, she rounds the corner and sees the dark figure. The smell of decay overpowers her. The figure beckons her. She recoils, resisting the force pushing her closer to the figure. Feet skidding, she slides forward. Where’s SAM? What have you done with him? she demands, trying to hide her rising panic.
[SAM is with us, a part of us now. Soon you will be. You must join us also . . . It is time to return . . .]
NO ~
Julie jolted awake to the cacophony of chirping in her head, her danger sense flaring. She shook the sweaty hair out of her eyes and threw a searching glance around her in the pre-dawn glow. She saw nothing in her immediate vicinity, but something had woken her. A noise perhaps. She slid out of the sheet, hastily dressed and slipped the gun beneath her shirt in the small of her back then pulled on her hiking boots and threw things in her pack. As she slung the backpack over her shoulders, she flinched at the sound and knew one like it had initially roused her: a laser blast. To the northeast.
Heart slamming, she sprinted in a semi-crouch up a rise toward the east. When she crested the hill and peered over to the other side, she saw a shape, sprawled on the ground below, midway down a scree slope across from her ~ it was Aard! After a darting glance to ensure no obvious danger presented itself, she scrambled down the other side of the hill and up the scree slope to his side.
His shirt was soaked in blood that issued from a dark tear. She crouched close to his head. “Aard, who did this to you?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. She heard his breaths rattling in his throat. Someone had shot him in the chest. He blinked up at her and tried to point with the gun still clutched in his shaking hand. After a glance in the direction he was pointing and seeing nothing, she patted his shoulder and made to get up. “I’ll get help ~”
“No!” He clutched her arm. “No time,” he choked out the words. “Victor Burke hired me to protect you. But things have changed in Icaria ~ Burke’s no longer mayor. He disappeared. I came to warn you ~ his replacement knows you’re out here.” He gasped in a breath. “So do those who want you dead.”
“Terrific,” she muttered. A dozen years ago it was the Dystopians who wanted her dead, not to mention Icaria’s entire Pol force once she’d been accused of murder and sedition. The Dystopians wanted to prevent her from getting her incriminating info-cube to the Head Pol. What they didn’t know was that her info-cube also held the key to Darwin’s creation and the possible answer to its cure in addition to Gaia’s pernicious conspiracy to reshape Icaria.
She knew Frank had delivered the cube to Burke. What had Burke done with it? Had the Circle removed Gaia? Given the present circumstances, it seemed unlikely and Julie was no doubt still considered a murderer.
“Something happened,” Aard continued in gasps. “Burke’s replacement ordered you hauled in, which made the others desperate to kill you. They kept sending more assassins. I took care of two of them.” So he had been shadowing her, after all. She’d guessed right; Aard had been picking them off her back. He’d saved her life several times already. Aard forced gurgling breaths in and out. “I got the one at the creek.” Julie felt her face warm briefly at the thought of Aard watching her bathing naked. He inhaled sharply then choked out, “. . . but his partner got me . . .”
“Oh, Aard,” she murmured sadly and gripped her lower lip with her teeth.
Aard clenched her arm and his eyes blazed like the sparks of a dying fire. “Julie, they want to kill you,” he forced the words out in halting breaths. “You’ve got to run. I can’t keep them away anymore.” The fire in his eyes was fading. “I failed.”
She swallowed and had to ask: “Aard, do they know about Angel? Who ~ what ~ she is?”
“We didn’t tell anyone,” he said, drawing in ragged breaths. “But they might know from their own spies. I’m sorry ~” he strangled out the last words.
“Aard, no. Don’t be. I want you to know that ~”
She didn’t get a chance to finish. The chirping in her head spiked and she swung around just in time to catch the glint and to jerk out of the line of fire. Missing her by millimeters, the silent burst of laser fire hit Aard in the chest. He gasped and shuddered violently, then lay still. Julie bolted to the cover of a nearby boulder, realizing that it must be a Secret Pol ~ a Dystopian ~ hunting her. Those had definitely been silent laser pistol shots, standard Secret Pol issue.
The shots had come from the top of the scree slope behind a large boulder. She thought she made out a head poking out of the dark boulder silhouetted against the blood-red sky. Pols were typically dead shots, but she still had one advantage over him ~ she knew this terrain far better than her pursuer did. Aard had also shown her a few tricks over the years.
Julie slipped off her backpack, then threw a last glance at Aard’s crumpled form before scrambling out from behind her rock shelter and pounding down the steep valley slope. The ground spit rocks around her from wide laser shots. The shots soon ceased as the man abandoned his vantage point to give chase.
Ditching silence for speed, Julie crashed through Spirea and willow shrubs and felt branches and leaves slap her bare arms and legs. With some satisfaction she heard the thuds and grunts of her predator’s awkward descent into the gully. City boy.
Julie led the assassin down the scree to a small winding ravine of a dried up creek. Once she heard him stumbling along the cobbles twenty meters behind her, she picked up several mid-sized water-worn rocks and ducked behind a thicket of Spirea and sweet-gale. Inhaling their pungent sweet aroma, she watched him pass her with awkward steps. She flanked him silently and smiled grimly. Then she pulled out her sling, tucked a rock in the pouch and, taking careful aim, sent the rock hurtling. It hit him on the back of the head with a sickening thud. He stumbled forward and fell but quickly scrambled up and spun around, weapon tracking toward her.
She inhaled sharply when she saw his face. It was the first time she got a good look at him. His shaven head and face were a monstrous tangle of scars and stubble. His crooked nose had obviously been broken at least once. One eye drooped as scar tissue pulled it down. Some new breed of killer, she wondered and reached for the small of her back.
He touched his head where the rock had struck him and brought his hand in front of him to see blood. He’d already spotted her standing in the bushes and now smiled with malice. “Thought a rock would do it, huh? Let’s see you do magic out here, veemeld, where you can’t use your A.I.-lover,” he spat out. “Die, bitch!”
Hand concealed in the bush, Julie pulled the trigger of Aard’s old gun a split second before the Pol did. The laser squealed and he jerked back. He stared at her in disbelief then toppled.
Shaking with fear and rage, Julie stepped out of the bush and stood over the dead man. She’d shot him in the heart. “No magic. Just a gun,” she said.
She forced herself to bend down and search him for identification then abandoned the grizzly task. He’d already identified himself as a veemeld-hater. Probably a Secret Pol. Had nothing changed in Icaria?
A swift glance confirmed that the man’s boot tread matched the prints she’d seen. Julie replaced Aard’s gun in her makeshift holster and grabbed the dead man’s weapon, a Secret Pol-issue silent laser pistol, and tucked it beneath her cinched-in belt. Then, grimacing with effort, Julie dragged the body to the bushes.
It was only as she regarded the crumpled form lying in an unnatural position in the bush, that she fully acknowledged what she’d just done ~ intentionally killed a man. She stared at the body and hugged her arms around her waist, feeling the air shiver through her lungs. It had started again. Would it ever end? That awful foreboding she’d felt lately of an imminent collision between past and future made her shake. How could she protect her cherished daughter and husband from this? Would she ever see them again?
Leaving the dead man behind, Julie sprinted up the dried creek bed back to the scree slope where she’d found Aard. Her assailant must have had a vehicle. She was going to find it, she thought as she scrambled up the steep ravine to retrieve her backpack. She was almost to Aard’s body when ~
Mom?
Julie jerked to a stop. Her chirping sounds warbled as if tuning to the transmission. Angel?
I didn’t mean what I said. Angel’s voice was edged with pain. Please come back.
Julie dropped into a cross-legged sit on the talus. Oh, honey. I didn’t leave because I was mad at you . . . I . . .
The chirping abruptly changed to a staccato grating like sheet metal ripping. Not the usual spike of danger. Just major interference. Julie couldn’t help grimacing with the effort of hearing her daughter through the fierce static that hurt her ears.
Please come home . . .
I can’t, darling. Not yet. Julie glanced down at the gun she’d taken from the man she’d just killed. Her nose flared as she tried to keep her composure. The Icarians are after me right now, sweet pea. She swallowed convulsively and brought a hand to her mouth. Look after Daddy for me, will you? Until I come back? The static became overwhelming. She couldn’t be sure Angel had heard her. I love you, Angel. Her throat closed and she felt her eyes heat with tears. Tell Dad that I love him . . . Angel?
There was no answer and soon the insect wail subsided to its normal trill. Julie dropped the gun, leaned her elbows on her knees and then cradled her head in her hands. Running her fingers into her matted hair, she let her tears flow. The chirping in her head spiked. She fisted away her tears then grabbed the dead man’s gun and leaped into a crouch, eyes roaming the slope. The sun was breaking over the horizon, firing the red sky with bold brilliance. There . . . on its highest point. Of course, her hunter had a friend. She caught a glint from a weapon and saw him, silhouetted against glittering sunlight.
She didn’t hesitate this time. Her shot missed and he returned fire.
Her right upper arm exploded in a blaze of pain. The next thing she knew she was sliding uncontrollably down the slope, smashing into jagged rocks on the way down. She heard the pistol that must have flown from her hand clatter far from her. Had she cried out? When she finally came to a stop on the dry creek bed, she pushed herself up with trembling hands and shook her head to clear it.
The nervous chirping spiked. She dropped on one knee and scanned for her assailant. He’d already moved off the slope top. Nauseous with the shooting pain in her arm, she looked at it and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her stomach twisted in alarm at the site of the large burn that had angrily carved through muscle. Shiny blisters and black flakes of burnt flesh boiled up and wept plasma and dirt. Fighting the urge to throw up, Julie scrambled unsteadily to her feet to bolt for cover.
“You’ve led us quite a chase,” said a calm voice close to her. “No need to run anymore, Ms. Crane.”
She spun toward the voice, squinting at the sun, and whipped out Aard’s weapon from her back holster. She didn’t get very far with it. Something hit the back of her head. The pain arced and shafts of brilliant light lanced the image of a man with tidy blue hair looking at her with an amused smile. The last thing she saw as the ground rushed toward her were several size-nine, freshly made boot prints. Then the darkness took her.
