“Yes.”
“And do you remember what we said we’d do today?”
“You said you’d try to make me go into Zane 3.”
“How do you feel about doing that?”
“I don’t know what it means.” He rubbed his arms, which were pitted with the small scars of the self-harm he still managed to achieve, periodically. “I’m dirty. I should wash first. Zane won’t want me.”
“No. You’re clean. Clean inside. Zane knows that, Zane 3. He wants to welcome you, because that way he can help you, he can take away how you’re hurting, and you can help him, because he needs to remember what you remember. So it’s all a good thing, isn’t it?”
“I’ll be gone, if I go into him.”
“No. You’ll still be there, everything that makes you unique. It’s just that you’ll be inside Zane 3, not outside. I won’t forget you.”
Zane suddenly opened his eyes and stared straight at Holle, his face twisted. “Promise me that.”
Holle had never helped Zane, or Venus or Matt, while the abuse was actually going on, though all the Candidates had suspected what Harry Smith was up to. For years she’d turned her back, afraid for her own position. Now, hearing this plea for help as if from the boy Zane had been back then, but expressed in the gruff voice of a thirty-nine-year-old, her heart broke. “I promise. Maybe you could step back and let me talk to Zane 3 again.”
After another pause the alter Zane 3 emerged, visibly. “So what now? How do we actually do this? How do I get him inside me?”
Holle glanced at Theo. The texts and case studies were vague on the precise mechanics of this crucial moment.
Theo leaned forward. “Can you see him? What’s he doing now?” “He’s crying.” Zane sounded faintly disgusted.
“Then just hold him,” Theo said. “Put your arms around him. See if you can stop him crying.”
“OK.” Zane sounded reluctant, but his upper arms twitched, a vestige of movement. “I’m holding him. He’s making my shirt wet. He’s stopping crying. I… Come on. It’s OK.”
Holle asked, “What’s happening?”
“It’s like a shadow falling across me, I-oh, I can see him, but he’s inside my head now. Inside my eyelids!”
“Don’t be afraid,” Holle said, soothing. “It’s going well. Everything’s fine. Can you hear his voice? Can you hear what he’s thinking?”
“I can hear, I can see, oh God. I can see his memories. It’s like HeadSpace porn. Did this happen to me? I remember now, I remember the first time, Harry was comforting me about the antimatter accident, he put his big heavy arm around me-oh, shit.”
“It’s OK, Zane, you’re doing well.”
“And this poor kid has been carrying this garbage around for all these years?”
“He did it for you, Zane. I’ll count down from five, and then you’ll wake up, you’ll be here with me and Theo in the surgery. OK? Five. Four…”
On waking, Zane was subtly different. More anguished. Angrier.
Holle asked, “Are you OK? Do you want anything, some water?”
“No water. I’m fine.” He sounded anything but fine. He looked dazzled; he shaded his eyes. “Everything’s bright. Ow, and loud. ” But the only noise in the room was the unending hum of the ECLSS pumps and fans. “I hear my heartbeat.”
Holle spoke softly. “What do you remember?”
“That I didn’t remember before? Years of systematic abuse by that prick Smith. And, in retrospect, years of grooming even before that.” His eyes snapped open. Suddenly he was mocking, angry. “Or maybe you put this shit in my head. Nothing else about this experience is real. Why should these memories be any more valid?”
Holle felt beaten. “Zane, we’re just-”
“Are we done? Can I go?”
76
Five days after Seba arrived in Earth orbit, Masayo called Kelly to the shuttle flight deck.
She swam through the lock from Seba. Mike Wetherbee and Masayo were waiting for her, loosely strapped into the twin pilots’ couches at the nose of the shuttle. Kelly briskly kissed Masayo, and she drifted behind the two men, looking over their shoulders. For long minutes they looked out of the flight deck’s big windows in silence.
There, looming over them beyond the windows, was the Earth itself. Even after five days it was hard to believe that they were here, that after a seven-year flight from Earth II they had actually made it home again. Yet here was the blunt reality.
The world was a shield of lumpy cloud, so close that its curvature was barely visible. Looking ahead to the horizon Kelly could see the cloud banks in their three-dimensional glory, continent-sized storms crowned by towering thunderheads. Seba was approaching the terminator, the diffuse boundary between night and day, and the sun, somewhere behind the hull, cast shadows from those tremendous thunderheads onto the banks of clouds beneath. Meanwhile on console screens data and imagery about the Earth chattered and flashed, information on climate and oceanography and atmospheric content and the rest compiled by instruments intended to inspect a new world, and whose electronic eyes were now turned on the old.
Masayo asked, “So how’s Eddie?”
“Fine. Going crazy. You know how he gets before he crashes for his nap.” Eddie, Kelly’s second child and fathered by Masayo Saito, four years old now, conceived and born in microgravity, was a spindly explosion of energy. Eddie was one of just four children born during the voyage from Earth II, which had brought the crew roster up to twenty-three. In a hull designed for a nominal crew of forty or more, there was plenty of room for the kids to play. “Jack Shaughnessy’s with him. Says he’ll put him to bed when he calms down.”
“Good.” Masayo smiled, his broad face bathed in the light of Earth.
Kelly felt a stab of affection for him. Now forty-one, Masayo had lost his boyish good looks to thinning hair and a fattening neck, and like all of the crew after eighteen years in the Ark he was sallow, too pale, with a darkness about the folds of his eyes. But his enduring good nature showed in his face, and the easy command that had once won him the loyalty of the Shaughnessys and his other ragtag illegals now inspired love from his son with Kelly.
Did Kelly love Masayo? Did he love her? Those questions weren’t answerable, she had long ago decided. They would never have come together, never stayed together, if not for the unique situation of the mission. But that was the frame in which they lived, and within which any relationship had to flourish. For sure, she believed he was good for her.
But Mike Wetherbee was watching Kelly in that clinical, mildly judgmental way of his. “Jack’s pretty reliable,” he said, his tone needling. “You can trust him. I guess.”
Mike seemed on the surface to have got over his hijacking from Halivah, seven years earlier, drugged and bound. But whenever he got the chance he put pressure on Kelly, especially over her children, digging into that dull ache, that awful memory of having given up a child. Mike hadn’t trained as a psychiatrist; whatever skills he had he’d picked up on treating patients since the launch, notably Zane. He seemed to have learned well, if his slow, subtle torture of Kelly was any sign.
But today Kelly’s focus was on the present, not the past, and she ignored him. “So what have we learned?”
Masayo grunted. “Nothing good. If we’d hoped Earth had somehow healed-well, we’re disappointed.” He paged through images and data summaries on a screen before him. “There’s no exposed land, none at all. But according to the radar the flood’s not as deep as we might have expected. It’s around fifteen kilometers above the
