Darwin's Paradox (6 page)

Julie
walks SAM’s cool crystal matrix with a disquiet she is unaccustomed to feeling here. She can’t find SAM. Abruptly the glittering walkway swells into a fetid-smelling hollow and Julie knows she will see the dark figure again. Moving mechanically against her will, she rounds the corner and sees the dark figure. The smell of decay overpowers her. The figure beckons her. She recoils, resisting the force pushing her closer to the figure. Feet skidding, she slides forward.
Where’s SAM? What have you done with him?
she demands, trying to hide her rising panic.

[SAM is with us, a part of us now. Soon you will be. You must join us also...It is time to return...]

NO—

Julie jolted awake to the cacophony of chirping in her head, her danger sense flaring. She shook the sweaty hair out of her eyes and threw a searching glance around her in the pre-dawn glow. She saw nothing in her immediate vicinity, but
something
had woken her. A noise perhaps. She slid out of the sheet, hastily dressed and slipped the gun beneath her shirt in the small of her back then pulled on her hiking boots and threw things in her pack. As she slung the backpack over her shoulders, she flinched at the sound and knew one like it had initially roused her: a laser blast. To the northeast.

Heart slamming, she sprinted in a semi-crouch up a rise toward the east. When she crested the hill and peered over to the other side, she saw a shape, sprawled on the ground below, midway down a scree slope across from her—it was Aard! After a darting glance to ensure no obvious danger presented itself, she scrambled down the other side of the hill and up the scree slope to his side.

His shirt was soaked in blood that issued from a dark tear. She crouched close to his head. “Aard, who did this to you?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. She heard his breaths rattling in his throat. Someone had shot him in the chest. He blinked up at her and tried to point with the gun still clutched in his shaking hand. After a glance in the direction he was pointing and seeing nothing, she patted his shoulder and made to get up. “I’ll get help—”

“No!” He clutched her arm. “No time,” he choked out the words. “Victor Burke hired me to protect you. But things have changed in Icaria—Burke’s no longer mayor. He disappeared. I came to warn you—his replacement knows you’re out here.” He gasped in a breath. “So do those who want you dead.”

“Terrific,” she muttered. A dozen years ago it was the Dystopians who wanted her dead, not to mention Icaria’s entire Pol force once she’d been accused of murder and sedition. The Dystopians wanted to prevent her from getting her incriminating info-cube to the Head Pol. What they didn’t know was that her info-cube also held the key to Darwin’s creation and the possible answer to its cure in addition to Gaia’s pernicious conspiracy to reshape Icaria.

She knew Frank had delivered the cube to Burke. What had Burke done with it? Had the Circle removed Gaia? Given the present circumstances, it seemed unlikely and Julie was no doubt still considered a murderer.

“Something happened,” Aard continued in gasps. “Burke’s replacement ordered you hauled in, which made the others desperate to kill you. They kept sending more assassins. I took care of two of them.” So he had been shadowing her, after all. She’d guessed right; Aard had been picking them off her back. He’d saved her life several times already. Aard forced gurgling breaths in and out. “I got the one at the creek.” Julie felt her face warm briefly at the thought of Aard watching her bathing naked. He inhaled sharply then choked out, “...but his partner got me...”

“Oh, Aard,” she murmured sadly and gripped her lower lip with her teeth.

Aard clenched her arm and his eyes blazed like the sparks of a dying fire. “Julie, they want to kill you,” he forced the words out in halting breaths. “You’ve got to run. I can’t keep them away anymore.” The fire in his eyes was fading. “I failed.”

She swallowed and had to ask: “Aard, do they know about Angel? Who—
what
—she is?”

“We didn’t tell anyone,” he said, drawing in ragged breaths. “But they might know from their own spies. I’m sorry—” he strangled out the last words.

“Aard, no. Don’t be. I want you to know that—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish. The chirping in her head spiked and she swung around just in time to catch the glint and to jerk out of the line of fire. Missing her by millimeters, the silent burst of laser fire hit Aard in the chest. He gasped and shuddered violently, then lay still. Julie bolted to the cover of a nearby boulder, realizing that it must be a Secret Pol a Dystopian hunting her. Those had definitely been silent laser pistol shots, standard Secret Pol issue.

The shots had come from the top of the scree slope behind a large boulder. She thought she made out a head poking out of the dark boulder silhouetted against the blood-red sky. Pols were typically dead shots, but she still had one advantage over him she knew this terrain far better than her pursuer did. Aard had also shown her a few tricks over the years.

Julie slipped off her backpack, then threw a last glance at Aard’s crumpled form before scrambling out from behind her rock shelter and pounding down the steep valley slope. The ground spit rocks around her from wide laser shots. The shots soon ceased as the man abandoned his vantage point to give chase.

Ditching silence for speed, Julie crashed through
Spirea
and willow shrubs and felt branches and leaves slap her bare arms and legs. With some satisfaction she heard the thuds and grunts of her predator’s awkward descent into the gully.
City boy
.

Julie led the assassin down the scree to a small winding ravine of a dried up creek. Once she heard him stumbling along the cobbles twenty meters behind her, she picked up several mid-sized water-worn rocks and ducked behind a thicket of
Spirea
and sweet-gale. Inhaling their pungent sweet aroma, she watched him pass her with awkward steps. She flanked him silently and smiled grimly. Then she pulled out her sling, tucked a rock in the pouch and, taking careful aim, sent the rock hurtling. It hit him on the back of the head with a sickening thud. He stumbled forward and fell but quickly scrambled up and spun around, weapon tracking toward her.

She inhaled sharply when she saw his face. It was the first time she got a good look at him. His shaven head and face were a monstrous tangle of scars and stubble. His crooked nose had obviously been broken at least once. One eye drooped as scar tissue pulled it down. Some new breed of killer, she wondered and reached for the small of her back.

He touched his head where the rock had struck him and brought his hand in front of him to see blood. He’d already spotted her standing in the bushes and now smiled with malice. “Thought a rock would do it, huh? Let’s see you do magic out here, veemeld, where you can’t use your A.I.-lover,” he spat out. “Die, bitch!”

Hand concealed in the bush, Julie pulled the trigger of Aard’s old gun a split second before the Pol did. The laser squealed and he jerked back. He stared at her in disbelief then toppled.

Shaking with fear and rage, Julie stepped out of the bush and stood over the dead man. She’d shot him in the heart. “No magic. Just a gun,” she said.

She forced herself to bend down and search him for identification then abandoned the grizzly task. He’d already identified himself as a veemeld-hater. Probably a Secret Pol. Had
nothing
changed in Icaria?

A swift glance confirmed that the man’s boot tread matched the prints she’d seen. Julie replaced Aard’s gun in her makeshift holster and grabbed the dead man’s weapon, a Secret Pol-issue silent laser pistol, and tucked it beneath her cinched-in belt. Then, grimacing with effort, Julie dragged the body to the bushes.

It was only as she regarded the crumpled form lying in an unnatural position in the bush, that she fully acknowledged what she’d just done: intentionally killed a man. She stared at the body and hugged her arms around her waist, feeling the air shiver through her lungs. It had started again. Would it ever end? That awful foreboding she’d felt lately of an imminent collision between past and future made her shake. How could she protect her cherished daughter and husband from this? Would she ever see them again?

Leaving the dead man behind, Julie sprinted up the dried creek bed back to the scree slope where she’d found Aard. Her assailant must have had a vehicle. She was going to find it, she thought as she scrambled up the steep ravine to retrieve her backpack. She was almost to Aard’s body when—

Mom?

Julie jerked to a stop. Her chirping sounds warbled as if tuning to the transmission. Angel?

I didn’t mean what I said.
Angel’s voice was edged with pain.
Please come back.

Julie dropped into a cross-legged sit on the talus.
Oh, honey. I didn’t leave because I was mad at you...

The chirping abruptly changed to a staccato grating like sheet metal ripping. Not the usual spike of danger. Just major interference. Julie couldn’t help grimacing with the effort of hearing her daughter through the fierce static that hurt her ears.

Please come home...

I can’t, darling. Not yet.
Julie glanced down at the gun she’d taken from the man she’d just killed. Her nose flared as she tried to keep her composure.
The Icarians are after me right now, sweet pea.
She swallowed convulsively and brought a hand to her mouth.
Look after Daddy for me, will you? Until I come back?
The static became overwhelming. She couldn’t be sure Angel had heard her.
I love you, Angel. Her throat closed and she felt her eyes heat with tears. Tell Dad that I love him...Angel?

There was no answer and soon the insect wail subsided to its normal trill. Julie dropped the gun, leaned her elbows on her knees and then cradled her head in her hands. Running her fingers into her matted hair, she let her tears flow. The chirping in her head spiked. She fisted away her tears then grabbed the dead man’s gun and leaped into a crouch, eyes roaming the slope. The sun was breaking over the horizon, firing the red sky with bold brilliance. There...on its highest point. Of course, her hunter had a friend. She caught a glint from a weapon and saw him, silhouetted against glittering sunlight.

She didn’t hesitate this time. Her shot missed and he returned fire.

Her right upper arm exploded in a blaze of pain. The next thing she knew she was sliding uncontrollably down the slope, smashing into jagged rocks on the way down. She heard the pistol that must have flown from her hand clatter far from her. Had she cried out? When she finally came to a stop on the dry creek bed, she pushed herself up with trembling hands and shook her head to clear it.

The nervous chirping spiked. She dropped on one knee and scanned for her assailant. He’d already moved off the slope top. Nauseous with the shooting pain in her arm, she looked at it and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her stomach twisted in alarm at the site of the large burn that had angrily carved through muscle. Shiny blisters and black flakes of burnt flesh boiled up and wept plasma and dirt. Fighting the urge to throw up, Julie scrambled unsteadily to her feet to bolt for cover.

“You’ve led us quite a chase,” said a calm voice close to her. “No need to run anymore, Ms. Crane.”

She spun toward the voice, squinting at the sun, and whipped out Aard’s weapon from her back holster. She didn’t get very far with it. Something hit the back of her head. The pain arced and shafts of brilliant light lanced the image of a man with tidy blue hair looking at her with an amused smile. The last thing she saw as the ground rushed toward her were several size-nine, freshly made boot prints. Then the darkness took her.

It
took her a while to realize that the thunder in her head came mostly from outside. Some motor was pulsing to the rhythm of the sharp pain that resonated through her head. Her whole body ached, she felt sick to her stomach and her arm smoldered with a brooding pain where the laser shot had burned her. She cautiously opened her eyes and when her vision cleared she saw that she was slumped in a curled position in a back passenger seat of a skyship. A pilot in front of her was doing diagnostics on the ship and the blue-haired man sat next to her, regarding her with a faint smile.

“Ah, welcome to the living again, Ms. Crane.”

She straightened up and winced from the painful jolt in her right arm. “Who are you?” She noticed that the wound in her arm had been bandaged.

“Inquisitive. Good. You must be feeling better. Don’t worry about the arm. Raymond treated it topically with
mitigin
and gave you some
ambrosia
to ease the pain.” That explained her nausea, she thought—Icaria’s drugs had always made her sick. “But we’ll soon get you to a Med-Center where they’ll treat it properly and clean you up. I’m Greg Tyers.”

The ship shuddered, beginning its ascent. Julie looked outside and caught a glimpse of Aard lying in a heap. She watched his dark corpse recede into the vast heath. Seen from this vantage point, the heath’s brilliant purple and green patchwork blazed with breathtaking beauty on either side of the widening river with its thousands of islands and the lake beyond. Then she could no longer make out Aard’s body from the heath’s multi-coloured quilt-work.

As the skyship skirted along the shore of Lake Ontario, Julie gazed to the north. Like pointillist paintings, the ancient remains of the old roads and buildings revealed themselves from the air in an abstract network of light green lines and shapes. The history of human habitation spoke in subtle whispers of shade and texture.

Just as with humankind’s many artifacts, the heath would reclaim Aard into its fractal fabric of colour and filigree, while she hurtled toward the dark and sterile halls of Icaria. She couldn’t help feeling that her journey and her end lay in those dark halls, not in the heath below, where her sweet child was born and belonged.
Not me
, thought Julie. It seemed her own destiny lay along a path different from Angel’s or Daniel’s. A darker path. She’d cheated destiny, after all. She’d fled and raised a beautiful child in nature’s wilderness. Now the fate she’d forged for herself over twelve years ago when she’d discovered who and what she was had caught up to her at last and was drawing her back into the dark place.

Within minutes the ship was soaring southwest over the vast lake and Julie stole a glance at Tyers, seated beside her. In contrast to her tattered leather shorts, rumpled shirt and her sweaty body, dirty and rough with abrasions and cuts. Tyers looked groomed in his freshly-laundered Enviro-Center uniform and his creamy complexion that radiated with nuyu treatments. He sat upright, manicured hands folded over his lap, and gazed with detached interest at the lake below. He looked about her age, in his thirties, with a square, unexceptional face. A pleasant kind of face with unobtrusive features one never remembered—the kind that dangerously blended into a crowd.

Did Tyers work for Gaia or was he a hired assassin of some new government faction that had subverted her? Time had a way of changing players; yet somehow the game stayed remarkably the same. Pol renegades. Dystopians...Did these dissidents still exist or had others subverted them in turn? She supposed that hinged on what Burke had done with her info-cube and what Darwin was presently doing to Icaria. Julie thought of the irony of Gaia’s Secret Pols, her Gestapo that secretly reported to her while Mayor Burke and his Head Pol thought they were running the show. The chief of Secret Pols, in turn, kept his own agenda hidden from Gaia: the trickster tricked, subverted by her own rebel unit. Dykstra’s agenda ran counter to Gaia’s who wanted to empower veemelds under her influence; he just wanted to eradicate them. It was all such a tangled web.

When Julie first met Gaia at Kraken’s fateful birthday party, she was mesmerized and strangely drawn to the captivating woman, as if to a beautiful but deeply disturbing piece of art. Gaia had brought up the grizzly example of vampire bats’ mutual sharing of blood to illustrate the need for reciprocity in Icaria and to reprimand Julie for her reckless and uncooperative behavior. Julie had no idea until later of Gaia’s role in her own fate as Prometheus because she hadn’t yet discovered that she was Prometheus. Was Gaia behind this current abduction?

Julie looked Tyers directly in the eyes. “So, are you with the group who wants me alive or the one that wants me dead?” she demanded, realizing as she did how naïve she sounded. No matter, she didn’t have time to be delicate about the situation.

He smiled with what looked to her like sardonic amusement. “You don’t mince words, do you?” he said. “I’d heard that about you. Something about razzing the Shame Court judges...” No mistaking the sneer now.

He would bring up her awful Shame Court appearance for tripping a Pol twelve years ago, she thought with a glower. And what else had he heard? That she had a gifted daughter? “You didn’t answer my question.”

“You needn’t be concerned, Ms. Crane,” he said in an assuring tone that sounded condescending. “Our intention isn’t to harm you.”

“Could have fooled me,” she said with open sarcasm, glancing at her injured arm, and temper flaring. “Like your intention not to harm Aard?”

“Regrettably, we had to suppress you somehow,” he said, lips curling with a little more amusement than she cared for. “You didn’t give us much choice, attacking us like that.” He raised a hand and flicked it. “You should count yourself lucky that it was us or you’d be dead now. Raymond’s a crack shot. He only meant to slow you down. If he meant to kill you, believe me, you’d be dead now. As for your friend, we found him that way just before we caught up with you.”

He was lying, she thought. She could see it in his cloyingly sweet smile of reassurance and that overly earnest voice he’d adopted. “Sure,” she said not hiding her disgust and turned to stare pointedly out at the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Strange, for instance, how Tyers had come to haul her back to Icaria right on the heels of that assassin. Julie didn’t believe in coincidence.

They remained silent for the remainder of the journey. Tyers settled back in his seat and donned his vee set while Julie kept her eyes riveted on the glittering lake and the rough heath scudding past her. She saw her past and future flowing on a collision course and it seemed that the greater distance they put between them and her former home, the more keenly she felt those contented years in the heath dissolve before her. But it was tempered by a mixture of relief for the family she’d left behind. If they knew about Angel, they certainly weren’t pursuing her...yet. She and Daniel were safe for now. If they could stay that way for a little while longer until she succeeded in securing them permanent safety...

Suddenly Julie thought to try reaching her daughter with her mind.
Angel? It’s Mom. I’m okay...
The chittering grew animated with a grainy sound.
Can you hear me, sweetheart?
She shook her head to try to clear the static.
Go away. Let me hear my daughter!
As if in response, the virus twitters only increased. Julie slumped in her chair. It was as though the virus refused to carry her message...

An hour later she could make out the glimmering towers of Icaria-5 to the northwest and ran her teeth absently over her lower lip. It was a beautiful sight, she conceded with growing excitement. The enclosed city had sprung up literally from beneath the ancient surface city. Icaria had evolved from Toronto’s extensive underground malls, connected to its transportation system, then burst like a phoenix out of the abandoned outer city, glass towers reaching for Heaven. She’d had a lot of time to think of what her return here meant to both her and to the family she’d left behind. Hopefully, she could fulfill both her needs getting concessions for her family and Icaria’s need whatever that was then return home to the heath. There lay the quandary. Depending on what Icaria wanted with her, it was also possible that those needs were mutually exclusive; in which case, she was ready to abort her mission and flee, knowing that she’d once again be condemning herself to a fugitive’s existence, this time never to see her family again.

Over a decade ago, the Pols of Icaria had chased her out of Icaria for a murder she hadn’t committed. Now she was returning there.

She wondered if Darwin had removed more than half of the population, as predicted. Funny how she’d never asked Aard, who used to travel to Icaria at least twice a year. Perhaps she didn’t really want to know. And what about the veemeld community? Had they finally consolidated and become a power to contend with? Or had they remained the same disparate and disorganized group of individuals they were when she left? She remembered how Zane, obviously desperate for members, had tried to lure her into joining their organization. And the A.I. community? What about SAM? Just before her departure from Icaria, SAM had talked about his ambitions for an “A.I.-community”. Did he have friends now? She wanted desperately to ask Tyers. She was certain that he had all the answers, but she refused to speak to him and instead let her curiosity rage inside.

As they approached the high towers, Julie felt her breathing escalate. This was where Icaria’s machine voices had faded away when she’d left. Would they...?

Abruptly the machine voices of Icaria-5 washed in her mind as if on an incoming tidal surge and she inhaled sharply. She’d initially thought that they would burst in, but, perhaps because she’d anticipated them, it felt more like walking from an empty hallway into a crowded room.

She caught Tyers watching her carefully and wondered if he knew about her strange abilities. Of course he did. It was obvious that she was being brought back because of those very abilities, though for what exact purpose she could only guess. Ignoring him, she felt her heart slamming as she prepared to veemeld. She knew she was within SAM’s range if the machines of Icaria were already talking to her. Would she remember how? Was SAM even there? Or had they dismantled him? Or had Zane, who’d inherited SAM as his new veemeld partner, irreparably changed SAM’s personality? Only one way to find out. She plunged in:
Hey, SAM...It’s me...Julie...your...well, hi...

[Hey, Julie. Welcome home...]

SAM sounded strange. Different. His gentle voice resonated like a cool rippling wave. Julie didn’t care. She felt a smile blossoming on her face.
SAM! You’re there!

[Yes, we are. We’ve been expecting you.]

We?
She killed the smile and felt her stomach twist with a dark dread.

[We are joined. Proteus and SAM.]

Julie realized that she was staring wide-eyed at Tyers who was looking directly at her with intense interest.