Alternate Gerrolds (31 page)

“It’s all right, Mom—”

“No, it isn’t all right. There are things you need to talk about.”

I shrugged, embarrassed. “I’m okay now.”

“Mm.” She didn’t look convinced. “All right, let me give you the speech anyway. I know you already know this, but I have to say it anyway, because if I don’t say it, you’ll think that I don’t know it. Come here, sit down next to me.”

She put her arm around my shoulder, pulled me close, and lowered her voice almost conspiratorially. “Look, Hank is a real nice boy—” she began.

“He’s a
man
, Mom.”

“He’s a big boy on a big adventure,” she corrected. “He won’t be a man until he starts thinking like one. And you won’t be a woman until you stop thinking like a teenager.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“What it means is that sometimes, it isn’t about
now
. It isn’t always about what you want, what you think you need, what you think you have to have. Sometimes, it’s about who you’re going to be when it all works out, and your responsibility to that moment outweighs whatever you think you want now.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I could already see where she was headed.

“Sweetheart, here’s the question I want you to ask yourself. What kind of a person do you want to be? Whenever you have a big choice in front of you, that’s what you have to ask yourself. Is this the kind of thing that the person I want to be would do? What kind of memory will this be? A good one or an embarrassing one or a terrible regret?”

I stared at my knees. Whenever I sat, they looked bony. Knees were such ugly parts of the body. Knees and elbows. Why couldn’t somebody design joints that didn’t make you look like a chicken? Like the tripods. They had nice joints. They could swivel better than human joints—

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“What did I just say?”

“You said that I shouldn’t do things that I’ll regret.”

“What I said was that life is about building a collection of good memories. As you go through life, you need to choose what kinds of memories you want to collect. Because your memories determine who you are.”

“Oh.”

“All right,” she said, patting me on the shoulder in a gesture that was as much resignation as it was completion. “I can see that there are some mistakes you’re going to have to make for yourself. Maybe that’s the only way you’re ever really learn where anything is—by tripping over it in the dark.” She sighed. “Go ahead. Go get cleaned up for the party.”

There wasn’t much left to do. Most of the camp had already been packed up and loaded onto the trucks. So folks just stood around waiting, listening to the tent poles groaning in the wind. Overhead the lights swung back and forth on their wires. We waited in an uneven island of brightness. Only the generator, the mess tent, the hospitality tent and the shower tents were left. Almost everything else had disappeared, or was in the process of disappearing under a fresh layer of sand and dust.

Zakky was asleep in the hospitality tent. His diaper was clean, so I decided not to wake him; Marlena would handle it. She was on diaper-duty tonight. I headed back out to the party.

The mess team had prepared a grand smorgasbord; we had to finish the last of the perishables, so it looked like more food in one place than I’d ever seen in my entire life. The bar was open too. It seemed like an invitation to pig out and drink yourself silly. After all, you’d have twelve hours on the skywhale to sleep it off. But the disciplines of the past four months were too ingrained. The party was more subdued than usual. People were tired, and a lot of folks seemed depressed as well.

The band played everybody’s favorite songs, and all of the team leaders made speeches about how hard their folks had worked and how grateful they were and what a successful expedition this had been. And everybody made jokes about the thing and the tripods and offered bawdy speculations about where the thing might really fit and how the tripods made baby tripods, and so on. But it felt forced. I guessed the simmering resentments were still simmering.

I found Hank near the bar, chatting with the other offworlders and a couple of the interns. He saw me coming and excused himself. He took me by the hand and led me out of the tent, out of the island of light, out toward the soft red sand.

“There’s something—” I started.

“—I have to tell you,” he finished.

“You first.”

“No, you.”

We played a couple of rounds of that for a bit, laughing at our mutual silliness, until finally, I just blurted it out, “I really like you, Hank,” and he said, “I’m engaged to a girl back home” at the same time.

And then I choked on my tongue and said, “What?” and he started to repeat it, and I cut him off. “I heard you the first time.” And meanwhile,
my heart was in free fall, while my brain was saying, “Thank Ghu, you didn’t give say anything stupid—” and my fingers wanted to reach into his chest and shred his heart for not telling me this before.

He held me by the shoulders and made what he must have thought were compassionate noises: “—I just wanted to tell you that you’re really sweet, and I’m sure you’re going to find the right guy, and I hope you’ll have a happy life because you deserve it—oh, look, here comes the skywhale!”

I turned to look, not because I didn’t want to see it, but because I didn’t want Hank to see the tears running down my cheeks. The big ship came majestically over the ridge, all her lights blazing, a vast platform in the sky. She floated toward us, passing directly over the camp, while everyone came pouring out of the mess tent, cheering and waving. The skywhale dropped anchor half a klick past the camp and began pulling herself down, like a grand gleaming dream come to rest.

The camp speakers came alive with fanfare and trumpets and everyone shouted themselves silly, hugging and kissing each other in celebration. It looked like the party was finally starting; but actually it was ending. This was just the final beat. We had ninety minutes to load and be away, if we wanted to beat the heat of the morning. There wasn’t a lot of slippage on that; most of the tents and air-cooling gear had already been collapsed and packed. If we didn’t get out on time, we could be in serious trouble.

I threaded my way around the edges of the crowd, looking for Mom. I wanted to tell her that I was going to grab Zakky and his diaper bag, my duffel too, and just go on aboard and curl up in a bunk somewhere. And not have to talk to anybody. There wasn’t anything I wanted down here anymore. But Hank came following behind me and grabbed my arm. “Hey, Swee’pea, are you all right?”

“I’m fine, thank you! And I’m not your Swee’pea. You already have a Swee’pea.” I pulled free and stormed away, not really caring which direction I headed, so I ended up smack in the middle of the party, and that meant that I had to hug everyone goodbye, even though I’d be seeing most of them on the skywhale, and back home too.

—Until I bumped into Marlena Rigby. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, bewildered.

“Who’s taking care of Zakky?”

“You’re supposed to—he’s your brother.”

“We traded shifts, remember?”

“No, we didn’t—I told you I wasn’t going to miss the party.”

“Oh, good grief. You are such a stupid airhead! We made this deal a week ago. Oh, never mind—” I headed off to the hospitality tent.

Zakky was gone.

Okay, Mom had come and gotten him.

Except the diaper bag was still there.

Mom wouldn’t have collected the baby without gathering his things. I unclipped my phone from my belt. “Mom?”

I waited while it rang on the other end. After a moment, “Yes, sweetheart?” Her voice founded funny—like she’d been interrupted in the middle of a mouthful.

“Where are you?”

“I’m with Daddy, down by the dig. We’re … um, saying goodbye. What do you need?”

“Is Zakky with you?”

“Isn’t he with you?”

“He’s not in the crib.”

“When did you see him last—”

“I checked on him thirty minutes ago. I thought Marlena was watching him. We had a deal. But she went to the party anyway.” I was already outside, circling the hospitality tent. “He couldn’t have gone far—”

She made an exasperated noise. The sound was muffled for a moment, while she explained the situation to Daddy. Then she came back. “We’re on our way. You start looking.”

Everybody I passed, I grabbed them, “Have you seen Zakky? He’s missing—” Nobody had seen him. And nobody had time to help me search either. They were all hurrying to gather their things and board the dirigible. In frustration, I just stopped where I was and started screaming. “My little brother is missing! He’s somewhere out there!! Doesn’t anybody care?!”

The problem was, the skywhale had to leave whether everybody was aboard or not. She wasn’t rigged to withstand the heat of the day. And most of the camp had been dismantled and was already on its way south on the trucks, so there weren’t the resources on the ground to support more than a few people anyway.

Thirty seconds of screaming was more than enough. It wasn’t going to produce any useful result, and Daddy always said, “Save your upset for afterward. Do what’s in front of you, first.”

But the screaming did make people aware there was a problem. By the time I finished circling the camp, calling for Zakky everywhere, Dr. Blom was already organizing a real search. She came barreling through like a tank, snapping out orders and mobilizing her dig team like a general at war.

She had a phone in each hand, one for incoming, one for outgoing. “No, you’re not getting on the whale,” she barked at one of them. “We’re not going home until we find that child. We’ll ride back in the trucks if we have to.” I was beginning to understand why Daddy had invited her along. She was good at organization. And no one argued with Dr. Blom. Except Daddy, of course.

She marched into the mess tent and started drawing on one of the plastic table cloths, quickly dividing the camp and its environs into sectors, assigning teams of three to each sector. “Take flashlights, water, blankets, a first-aid kit, and at least one phone for each person. With a working GPS, dammit!” To the other phone: “Well, unpack the flying remotes then! I don’t care. We’ve still got twenty hours before infra-red is useless.”

Dr. Blom didn’t stop talking until Mom and Dad came rushing into the mess tent. She looked up only long enough to say, “I need another thirty people to cover the south and west. Pull as many members of your team off the dirigible as you can.”

Daddy opened his mouth to say something, then realized how absolutely stupid it was to object. He unclipped his phone and started talking into it. Mom did the same. In less than a minute, the skywhale started disgorging people, running for the mess tent. Other people began pulling crates off the trucks, cracking them and pulling out equipment. I’d never seen so many people move so fast. It was all I could do to keep out of the way. I felt useless and stupid. But it wasn’t my fault, was it? I mean, stupid Marlena was the one who screwed up, not me—

Daddy came striding over; his face was red with fury. “Go get your stuff and get aboard the whale. Now.” I’d never seen him so angry.

“But I have to stay and help with the search.”

“No, you will not. You’ve done enough already.”

“Daddy—”

“We’ll talk about this later. If there is a later. Right now, the only thing I want you to do is get onboard and keep out of the way—”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I sobbed and ran. All the way to the gangplank and up into the whale, where I threw myself into the first
empty seat I could find; half of them were filled with duffels and backpacks. Everything was all screwed up. I wanted to die. And I was so angry, I wanted to scream. If only—

Except there wasn’t any “if only.” There was only me. Stupidly chasing Hank. Stupidly not checking Zakky. Stupidly acting like a stupid little spoiled brat.

Suddenly, I stopped and sat up. Wait a minute. I bounced out of my seat and went looking for Hank. He was on the upper deck, already sacked out in a bunk. I shook him awake, hard. “Come on, I need your help.”

“Huh, what—?” He rubbed his eyes. “Look, if you’re going to yell at me some more, can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“Zakky’s missing. You can track him.”

“Huh? What?”

“Would you two take that somewhere else? People are trying to sleep here.”

I said something very unpolite. But I pulled Hank out of his bunk. I grabbed his clipboard and dragged him out. “The tripod you gave me for Zakky. You can track it!”

“Well, yeah,” He said, still rubbing his eyes. “Only all the equipment is packed up.”

“Well, unpack it then!”

“The truck has already left,” he said. “We sent it off an hour ago.”

“Can we call it back?”

“No, wait—” He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. He looked like he had gone back to sleep. “Yeah, that’ll work.” We headed down to the communications room of the whale. It was his turn to drag me. The communications officer looked annoyed at the interruption. I knew her from back home. The kids called her Ironballs, but her real name was Lila Brock. She was a wiry little woman with a hard expression and her hair tied back in a bun.

I didn’t understand half of what Hank said to her; most of it was in another language, techno-babble; but even before he finished, she was already turning to her displays and typing in codes. The screens started to fill with overlaid patterns and colors. She frowned. “Wait a minute, let me see what I can read from the satellites.” More typing. More colors, more patterns. “Okay, I’ve got probables.” She tapped the big display. “Here, here, and here—”

Hank copied the feed to his clipboard and overlaid it on a map of the
camp. “Okay, that first one is the truck,” said Hank, eliminating the one that was moving too fast. “And this one is the lounge of the whale—”