stool, taking her empty glass as well as his. He passed her, standing at the nearer counter, untwisting the cap on the bottle. “What do you think? You want some more 500-year-old whiskey?”
“Talk about aging! Am I gonna need some more whiskey?” / “Might not be a bad idea.”
“All right.” She paused. “I’ll have some more whiskey. You want a lot of strawberries?”
“Yeah.”
He poured the second glass, closed the bottle and turned to watch her as she fixed the strawberry shortcake, ladling freshly cut strawberries which they had grown themselves onto the chunks of cornbread. She was dressed as she usually dressed. Rarely did she wear pants, although she was so talented that she could easily have made more than the few pairs she had fabricated. His father—their father—had provided before the Night of The War bolts of material and thread and a sewing machine and all the necessary accessories. Annie had taken Aft to using the machine like a pianist would take to a concert-tuned piano. He had read about concerts, pianists and the like, watched the videotape of a concert several times. And he listened to music incessantly, as did Annie. But she wore one of her typical in idea If-length full skirts, navy blue in color. And a blouse which seemed to hold up on her shoulders by friction—he had read a novel where such a garment had been described as a “peasant blouse.” This was her usual attire. He watched her as she carried the dessert back to the main counter.
He followed her, crossing to the far side of the counter and straddling the stool. He scratched his bare left thigh where it itched beneath the ragged edge of the cut-off Levi’s. There were still more pairs of these in the storeroom than he could wear through in a lifetime, but these old ones were comfortable for sitting around the Retreat at night.
“So—what do you think he has planned for us?”
“Salud,” he murmured, raising his glass. He had studied Spanish from books and audio tapes and—again his father had provided—watched the one Spanish language movie in the tape library innumerable times.
“Salud, already.” And Annie clinked glasses with him. “So, what do you think?” He wished that he smoked, so he could have lit a cigar or cigarette and delayed saying what he felt. “All right.”
But he didn’t smoke. “He always talked about the six of us being vital for survival.”
“AH right—so?”
“So—you’ve probably seen me—I’ve seen you do it—“ “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” “I’m talking about being human.”
“Michael!”
“I think he planned this all along, from the first time that he learned what was going to happen to end the world. That’s why he awakened us, spent only five years with us and then slept1. He planned it.”
“What do you—“
“When you look at Paul Rubenstein, in his chamber—what do you think of?”
“That he’s—“ I
“That’s he’s a man? The only man who isn’t your blood relative?” Michael Rourke watched his sister. She looked down at her dessert, playing with it with her spoon, not eating it. “I think about that,” she whispered. And she looked up then. “And what about Natalia?”
“I think that she’s a woman,” he answered, his voice almost a whisper. Michael Rourke looked behind him, at the four cryogenic chambers which dominated the great room—the two others had been put away into the storage area. He looked at the face of the woman Natalia—he remembered something suddenly. Her blue eyes.
Michael turned away—Annie continued to stare at the cryogenic chambers. And he knew what she stared at. “Did he—did he—“ Michael Rourke didn’t answer her, his sister.
Chapter Eight
It lasted only a minuscule amount of time, but as soon as it began, Michael Rourke hit the buttons for play and record—the radio made sound. Words.
As he listened, he tried to understand them—the words—but the language was alien to him.
He checked the Rolex Submariner his father had given him before taking the sleep. The transmis-sion lasted approximately two and one-half minutes. Annie was already in bed.
The radio had yielded words only twice in all the time he had monitored it. Once nearly five years earlier. Once now.
He had put the words off as an errant transmis-sion bounced back from some object in space. The transmission had been vastly weaker five years ago. It was strong this night.
‘ ‘The Eden Project?” he asked himself. Had they come back, entered Earth’s orbit? Was it a message? Was it that he could not understand the language? Or that the transmission was so garbled as to be unintelligible, the fault of atmospheric disturbance, or the fault of his equipment? He had stripped the radio with Annie’s help several times, searching—in vain—for some fault in the receiver itself.
There had been none that he could discern.
It was impulse, but he had learned to obey that sometimes. He snatched up the Predator as he ran across the great room, toward the storage area. His father’s Bushnell eight-by-thirtys—he passed them by. The forty power zoom lens spotting scope he used as a telescope. He grabbed this, stuffing it box and all inside his shirt. Pulling aside what blocked the emergency exit hatch, he worked the combination, opening it, and started up through the tunnel along the rungs his father had put in place five centuries earlier. He kept moving, through the next hatch, not bothering to put the bar in place, merely closing the hermetically sealed door. He kept moving, upward, the exertion making him sweat, the flashlight in his left hand bouncing its beam across the natural rock chimney in the darkness, a white light. The upper door—he wrenched the bar free, swinging the door open, the cold wash of night air chilling him as he crawled out onto the top of the mountain. He let the hatch swing closed behind him.
I Stars—millions, the night cold and crystal clear ¦ and the moon little more than a crescent of light. I The box for the spotting scope—he opened it, f not bothering with the supporting bipod.
The forty power scope—he zoomed the lens to half of full magnification, searching the horizon.
A streak of light.
Holding his position, he increased the magnifi-cation—the streak of light gained definition, clarity, color. Orange, tinged with yellow and red. It zigzagged. A meteor, he told himself, would not do that. It vanished toward Earth and in his mind he marked the approximate position. North-west, beyond the mountains, past which he had never ventured, long past these. Michael Rourke’s hands trembled—had they ceased to be alone? He watched the night sky, shivering with the cold. There was no more light, no further clue.
His voice unsteady—he told himself because of the cold, thin night air—Michael Rourke whis-pered, “I’ll find you.”
Chapter Nine
“If it was the Eden Project, it was a crash maybe. And if it wasn’t the Eden Project, then it almost had to be some other type of aircraft. That means people—that other people are alive.” »
Annie licked her lips—she felt strange hearing Michael’s words. She was used to them being alone except for the four sleeping figures in the blue gas swirling cryogenic chambers. She stood up, slipping off the counter stool, stuffing her bare feet into her slippers, her robe and the nightgown beneath it falling past her ankles, the hems brushing the gap of flesh above the banded tops of the slippers. “What do you want to do about it, Michael?” she asked, her voice low, turning to the stove to pour the boiling hot water into the teapot. She grew her own herbs in the garden and made from them an herbal tea which she had become quite fond of. She could smell it as the water penetrated the holes in the small metal tea strainer, and she placed the lid of the china pot in position, twisting it slightly to lock. She would let the tea steep.
“That’s ^yhat I wanted to talk to you about,” she heard Michbel saying. She turned around to face him, holding the teapot with a potholder, setting it on the counter beside their waiting cups— Michael tolerated the tea because coffee was a scarce commodity.
Annie gathered her robe around her and eased back onto the stool. “You want to go and see, don’t you?”
“Yes—I have to.” He reminded her of the memories she had of her father—he looked
virtually identical to John Rourke and he sounded identical to him. Her father
had made instruc-
AfL
tional videotapes for them regarding minor sur-gical procedures, gunsmithing techniques, etc. She played them often so she could remember him. She had no specific memory of her mother, though looking at her in the
