The soldier turned. Through the faceplate of her helmet, the woman looked middle-aged, which still felt so strange to Jane. On World, she would be a Mother. The soldier nodded.
“Stay here, please,” Jane said to the others, and slid past her protectors. At the far end of the armory another line of armed soldiers stood in front of the huddle around Jason. Ryan was among them, and Colin’s powerchair. Jane caught a glimpse of Colin’s face and knew, from the Colin-patterns in her mind, that Jason was not dead.
Colin looked up at her. “I saw the military guarding you… but Jason…”
“How bad is it?” Jane knelt by his chair, felt his outrage in her mind and bones and heart.
“He’ll live. The fucker hit his chest but Holbrook said he missed everything vital. Oh, Jane—”
She knelt by his chair. “Do you need to stay with him? Or with your father?”
Colin glanced at the huddle. The press of bodies had shifted, and now Jane could see Lindy bending over Jason. She, not Holbrook, was injecting something into the colonel. A nurse came through the airlock wheeling a gurney. Jason’s eyes were open; he said something to Lindy that Jane couldn’t hear. Blood stained the entire front of his uniform.
Colin said, “I can go. But the soldiers—”
He hadn’t even finished his sentence when the middle-aged female soldier appeared beside them and said, “This way, ma’am.” The other guard was leading Ka^graa, Belok^, and La^vor.
Jane said, “Colin, too.”
“All right.”
She took them out of the armory and to the secure quarters where all the Awakened slept. Jane crowded into Colin’s room beside his chair and closed the door. He said, “Did you know?”
“About the birds? No.”
“I don’t know what Jason tells you.”
“Jason and I don’t talk,” Jane said. She felt grief pressing in on him, jagged pieces, sharp as scalpels, and knew that not all the grief was for the ecology.
She said, “We have two days.”
His eyes filled with tears. Like the men on World, Colin was not afraid to cry. He said, “You know, then.”
“That you must stay here? Yes. And I must go.”
“I want to be with you. But Earth is going to need people who are not New America. Who are not military, not killers, not destructive, not…”
She took his hand. “Colin, I want to say something. I have been thinking about this. It is possible to want a thing too much. Even a good thing. Wanting it too much makes you rush after it, chase it hard. And then, like anything being chased, it runs away.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
Jane struggled to find words. The pattern, so clear in her mind, was wordless, and this was not her language. But nothing had ever been so important to communicate.
“You want Mother Terra, as we have Mother World. But let Her come to you. And if She comes with some technology necessary to keep you alive, let Her. You don’t have to grab technology, like Monterey Base does, but you don’t have to push it away, either. Just receive it, as a gift.”
“I want to live without tech, free with nature.”
Jane said slowly, “Nature is not free. Or pure.”
“Jane—”
“Don’t be disappointed in me, Colin. Just listen. I have been practicing reading English. In the library. Do you know what ‘kintsugi’ is?”
“No.” His face wore a stubborn look, and Jane saw the resemblance to his brother, and to his grandmother.
She said, “It is from an art in a place called ‘Japan.’ They made earthenware pots, like ours on World. Sometimes the pots break in the firing of them. Then kintsugi comes. It means to stick the fragments of broken pots together with a golden lacquer, to make something even more beautiful because it was broken and mended.”
There was a long silence. Then Colin said, “I love you.”
“I know,” Jane said, and felt that knowledge, too, as patterns in her mind, full of sorrow and joy and the weight of two planets.
She crawled onto his lap, careful of his injured leg, and held him.
Marianne and Ryan walked beside Jason’s gurney, with Lindy on the other side. Orderlies wheeled it from the armory to the OR. Soldiers, and no one else, filled the corridors along the way. Dr. Holbrook had gone ahead to scrub. The bullet was still in Jason and had to come out.
Just before Jason disappeared into the OR, Lindy stooped and kissed his lips. Jason’s eyes were closed, but Marianne watched his mouth form a brief curve.
She had always thought of Colin as the fragile one. Colin was the one who’d had a ruptured spleen from a schoolyard bully. Who had had to learn to compensate for the superhearing that for the first three years of his little life had tormented him and made him cry constantly. Who had sobbed over the deaths of countless pet gerbils. Who’d carefully watered every plant that he heard “clicking” from dryness. Who had tried to found a quixotic, impossible way of living in harmony with nature.
But Jason turned out to be the one who was most vulnerable.
She said, “How badly is he hurt? I want the truth, Lindy.”
“Not very. Of course, surgery is always a risk, but he should be okay. He should have been wearing body armor, but he probably thought it would send the wrong message—Marianne, they shot him! One of his own men! Don’t they know how hard he’s struggled to hold this base together, to do the right thing, even now that… Did you know about this? The birds and the forced exodus?”
Exodus. Biblical. No, not biblical—older than that. What Jason was forcing on Earth was Promethean science, an ambitious experimental enterprise to counteract a major threat, a science which pits potential pay-offs against huge risks. Marianne, who had herself engaged in Promethean science on World, understood.
She said truthfully, “If I had thought about it, I would have known what Jason would do. But I’ve been thinking about something else. Thomas Farouk and I… Lindy, I need to talk to Jason. Can I do that before he goes under anesthesia?”
“No, of course not. What is it? Tell me.”
“I can’t. On second thought, it will wait. It’s already waited a hundred and forty thousand years.”
Lindy stared at her. “Are you okay?”
Was she? Were any of them? “Yes. Just get Jason well. We only have two days.”
Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Marianne turned to the sergeant who seemed to always accompany Jason, an older man with bristly gray hair above a face that gave nothing away. Except right now.
“Dr. Jenner, ma’am, I’m Master Sergeant Hillson, Colonel Jenner’s aide. Will he be all right?”
“I’m told that he will be.”
Hillson nodded. “Good. I need to talk to you, ma’am. About the Awakened.”
“What about them?”
“They’re all leaving on the Return,” he said, with no uncertainty. “All of them, no exceptions. Colonel Jenner was going to talk to them to make sure they understand that. He can’t, now. So you have to.”
She considered him. Hillson was going to carry out Jason’s orders even if he, she, and everybody else died doing it. Marianne had barely had time to consider those orders, including what it would mean to return to the alien planet she had left, in her personal time stream, less than three months ago. Three months and twenty-eight years.
“Ma’am?” He was immovable as mountains.
“All right,” she said. “Get all the Awakened together in the conference room.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. It was fortunate that he didn’t salute; she might have tried to slug him. From nerves, from fear, from frustration. When was the last time her life had been under her own control?
Maybe it never had. She no longer knew, not since she and Farouk had worked out their theory.