While Earth was plotting her world’s death, it was also building this extravagant, useless ship. Making itself a new toy.
Oblivious to her wrath, Mansfield struggles to his feet and holds out one hand toward the image of the grand, golden ship. “Welcome to the Osiris.”
Gillian murmurs, “Where we will be reborn.”
By definition, a spacecraft can’t be a final destination. “Where is this thing taking us?”
“Someplace almost no one else has ever been,” Mansfield says.
Noemi wonders how sinful it would be to slap an old man if he was very, very evil and also incredibly irritating. “Thanks for that helpful answer. How’s Abel supposed to find you somewhere nobody’s ever gone?”
Her taunt hits its mark. Mansfield pales as he sits back down on the low couch. The thought of missing his chance at immortality obviously shakes him. It’s Gillian who answers, and she’s talking to her father, not to Noemi. “Abel’s going to come to the ship. It won’t be long, you’ll see. He won’t let us leave without him. Even without the girl, Directive One will bring him to us in the end.”
Mansfield’s eyes meet Noemi’s. They’re blue like Abel’s, cold like Abel’s could never be. “You’d better hope so, anyway. Because your fate is my fate, Miss Vidal.”
“Then I hope I die,” Noemi says.
“That can be arranged,” Gillian says. She touches Noemi for the first time, laying a hand on her arm. Her flesh is cool, and she grips the sore, tight spot where the ampule lies beneath the skin, waiting to kill Noemi on command.
10
ABEL’S NEXT MOVE MUST BE HIS MOST DANGEROUS one yet: returning home.
His DNA mirrors Mansfield’s in many regards. This means he’s able to get through the security fence via a simple scan. No mechs or human sentries are in sight. As the ornate metal gate swings open to admit him, Abel looks up the hill toward the house silhouetted by the periwinkle of early dawn, its shape comforting and familiar. Each panel of the geodesic dome seems to glitter from the city lights all around.
The house is currently uninhabited. He can tell that from the lack of energy use within, the lack of light, the lack of guard mechs rushing out to seize him. Abel had calculated that Mansfield’s instructions were genuine; his words were too peculiar, too rushed, for him to have been laying a trap. Mansfield’s traps would be more careful. Still, Abel’s relieved to have his calculations verified.
As he walks closer, he sees signs of disrepair. Mansfield’s garden has become a brown, withered shadow of its former self, even though mechs had been taking care of it until recently. Enough time has passed for vines to begin reclaiming the carefully shaped hedges. Dust dulls the sheen of the lower panels. Weeds poke up between pathway stones; even on this dying planet, life fights for every inch.
Mansfield left within the past few hours, in the physical sense. The disrepair tells Abel that Mansfield stopped thinking of this house as home some weeks back. Why?
A few twigs have been blown onto the steps that lead down to Mansfield’s basement laboratory. Abel had planned to enter through this door, but he halts a meter short of it, unable to go farther. He keeps replaying the last time he was on those steps, running up and out and away, escaping with his life. The memory shakes him, and so he walks toward the front instead.
Anyway, why shouldn’t he enter through the front door? He has the right.
Mansfield always wanted me to call him Father, Abel thinks. If he were truly my father, I’d inherit a share of his estate. I hereby declare this house my share.
But walking through the front door is even worse, because the wreckage is almost complete.
All those books are gone. The holographic fire has gone out, and nothing remains but an eerily blank wall. Even the grandfather clock has been whisked away, leaving a bright square on the carpet where the light never had a chance to fade the colors. Swiftly he checks Mansfield’s bedroom; this, too, is empty. Patterns of dust suggest the home’s contents were emptied out within the previous day or two, possibly within the past few hours. Nobody is present, either human or mech, and the silence is total. The house has been hollowed out, as if all the days Abel spent here were nothing but an illusion. He feels as if he cannot trust his own memory banks.
Why bring me here for instructions and then hide the instructions? Abel thinks with what he’s learned to recognize as the human emotion of irritation. He welcomes the feeling; it’s an effective distraction from his fear for Noemi’s life.
He frowns as he walks back into the living room and sees something left behind, a relatively small, brightly colored oil painting by Frida Kahlo, Tree of Hope, Keep Firm. Mansfield had acquired it when he bought the entire collection of a closing museum, and he displayed it prominently as a masterwork by the greatest surrealist of the twentieth century. However, Mansfield had little personal feeling for the painting. If anything, he disapproved of it: Some people throw everything they think and feel up on the wall for everyone to see, my boy. They don’t understand subtlety.
But Abel doesn’t understand subtlety either. The direct emotions of the Kahlo appeal to him. In this picture, Kahlo had painted two self-portraits stranded on a parched and barren landscape, one self in day and one in night. One lies on a hospital gurney, face hidden, bandages askew to reveal the still-bleeding cuts in her side; the other sits upright, brilliant in a red dress with flowers in her hair, holding the brace Kahlo was forced to wear after her spinal injury. This one stares at the viewers, challenging them to understand.
What’s most interesting about
