John wasn’t meeting my eyes. Tom looked from one to the other of us, uncertain.
I said, “And that’s where you come in. Isn’t it, John?”
He waved his hand. Cushman disappeared, and new VR images coalesced. “They found traces of DNA on bits of the bomb-making gear left behind in Cushman’s room, up in Prudhoe.” We saw faces in the display on the tabletop, faces extrapolated from the DNA traces: an embryo, a baby, a young child, a boy, growing to adulthood.
I wondered if this technology was something else that would startle Morag after her seventeen-year absence. It was now possible to take a DNA sample and compute how that genome would have expressed itself as a fully grown adult — or indeed any age you cared to choose. Thus the criminologists had been given the ability to re-create the faces of the victims or perpetrators of crimes from the slightest human trace, a fleck of spittle, a flake of skin under a fingernail.
I recognized who it was long before the reconstruction was finished: those broad features, the deep, eager eyes, the prominent teeth.
“I know him,” Tom said. “I saw him at the launch event.”
So had I. The image was of Jack Joy.
“You were his first contact,” John said to me defensively. “After he met you on the plane. He looked you up, found out what you were doing, decided it was something his destructive little band might be interested in. It’s the way they work. Opportunistic, probing, looking for a way in.”
“I didn’t know he was in the Multipliers,” I said, “or anything like them. Obviously. He told me he was in the Lethe River Swimming Club.”
Tom asked, “So how did he get through to the project?”
John sighed. “He got in through me. I’m a Swimmer, too.”
Tom just gaped.
“Jack cross-checked the Swimmer membership with EI and the hydrate project, and out popped my name, as neat as you like. Couldn’t have been easier for him. Opportunism, you see. And that was the in he needed. He called me to introduce him to the project; he was talking about the Swimmers backing it financially. I couldn’t see any harm. It was only when he actually showed up, as a VR anyhow, that I started to feel uneasy.”
“I don’t get it,” Tom said. “If this guy wanted to destroy the project, why would he put money into it?”
“As a way in,” John said. “If you invest, you’re inside; the more you invest the closer to the center you get. And once he was inside it wasn’t hard for him to find Ben Cushman, who was already being groomed by the Multipliers.
“I couldn’t see the harm in the Swimmers,” John said miserably. “There is a whole spectrum of us, Michael. It helps you cope with a difficult world; you accept things, you find a way to make a living, you get on with your life, you try to enjoy the ride. There’s a lot of humor in there, you know — black, but it makes life a bit more bearable…”
I wondered if he knew about the Last Hunters, another group in his “spectrum,” and what he would think of their expression of black humor.
“And because of this stupid indulgence of yours,” I snapped at him, “a suicide bomber got through to the heart of my project. Because of you, we nearly all got killed.”
“The FBI cleared me,” John said, still defensive.
“But the moral guilt is all yours,” I said heavily.
He looked at me for a heartbeat, as if he were going to fight back. But then he hung his head, beaten.
Tom touched my arm. “For God’s sake, Dad. Take it easy on him.”
I didn’t really want Tom to see me in this black mood. “I’ve got a lot I have to forgive John for right now, Tom. I guess I’m not big enough to do it.”
Tom sat back. “You’re talking about Mom.”
And there it was, the issue that divided and united us, out in the open.
John raised his head, and I saw true misery in his eyes. “Michael, if you want to know, if it helps you at all, I’m ripped up inside, too. And at least I told you what happened between us before—”
“Before her ghost came back to life to tell me herself? Do you think that makes it OK, what you did?”
“You have to see, Michael, that we, Morag and I, had reached a kind of settlement between us. We had decided what to do. She would have the baby, we would see how we all felt after that, and then we’d talk to you. It was all going to be OK; we would fix everything.”
A settlement, I thought: a verbal contract, a lawyer’s way of rationalizing away pain.
“But she died,” John said. “Death came down on us like a blade. After that everything changed, all the threads of our life cut short.
“And in all the time since then, I’ve had to deal with this in my head. Michael, nobody knew the truth about that pregnancy, nobody but me, once Morag was dead. I knew how much you had been hurt — and how much more you would hurt if you knew what I had done — and I couldn’t tell you. And, with time, we settled down to a new way of being in each other’s lives, you and me. That was my way of coming to peace with myself.”
“Some peace,” I snapped. “You found Inge, you had two kids. And she left you, didn’t she? Maybe you were just as haunted by Morag as I was.”
His eyes blazed angrily. “I didn’t choose any of this, Michael. But I had to cope with it. But now Morag has returned, she hasn’t lived through any of this, she can’t understand it—”
Tom blurted, “I’ve spoken to her, too. Mom.” His voice was strained. He was sitting with his legs crossed at the knee, hands neatly folded on his lap.
I hated to see him like that, to think how John and I had put him in this position — how we’d failed to protect him.
He said, “With me it’s the kid, the damn kid. My little brother who killed my mom.”
I said, “I know—”
“I always felt second best to a fetus. To the ghost of a fetus. I grew up feeling that way. I always imagined she must have loved it more than me. Because she let it take her life, right?”
“And you talked about this to Morag?”
“She doesn’t listen. Or she can’t. To her it’s yesterday,” he said. “All that stuff when the baby was born. There’s something inside her that knows I grew up, I think, that knows all that time has passed, something deep down that recognizes me. But she doesn’t know how to talk to me. She remembers me as a happy kid of eight. She asks me about my life, about Sonia, like I was still a kid at grade school. She doesn’t know anything about how I spent seventeen years trying to cope with all this. I don’t want to hurt her. It isn’t her fault. And she’s my mom. But at the same time she isn’t.” He looked at John. “Do you know what I mean? My mom coming back hasn’t helped,” Tom said emphatically. “I’m sorry, Dad. That’s the way I feel.”
He was right, I thought. It was strange: a year ago, the fondest wish you could have granted me was to have Morag back in my life. And now she was back — and it was making nobody happy. It was as if Morag was a bomb that had been dropped into the middle of our tangled, multilayered relationships.
“Look at us, the three of us. What a mess.” I stood up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Now you’ve got your implants reprogrammed you can buy us both a beer, John.”
John stood, rapped on the door, and we were let out into the town.
Drifting through the mind of the Transcendence, Alia and Leropa explored the Redemption, and how it had touched Michael Poole’s life.
“This is the Third Level of the Redemption,” Leropa said. “It is called the Restoration. It is the beginning of a new age, in which the Transcendence will assume full responsibility for the past. If you have the power of a god, you have a responsibility to use it. Can you not see the magnificence?”
To touch the past was easy for the Transcendence, Alia could see now, for it had a mastery of the finitude of the universe. If you saw correctly the chains of causality wrapping around the curve of the universe, you only had to make the slightest adjustment, and your touch would cause ripples that would wash out to the furthest future, and then around the arc of time to the deepest past, and up through the long prehistory of humanity: ripples at last focusing on one woman and her unborn child. A flawed gene which might have expressed itself this way no longer did so — and a child was born safely, a mother survived to a healthy long life. That was all that was needed.