Darwin’s Paradox

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.”

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