Ethan of Athos (27 page)

“It's like the universe's biggest closet,” mused Teki. “Our own private storage locker. We really ought to clean house and destroy all the really old stuff that was thrown out there in Year One, but it's not like running out of room. Still, if I'm going to be an Assimilation Station head, I could organize something ... responsibility ... no more playing around...”

The ecotech's words became a buzzing drone in his ears as Ethan's attention was riveted on a collection of transparent plastic bags tethered a short way down the grid. Each bag seemed to contain a jumble of little white boxes of a familiar type. He had seen just such a little box readied for Quinn's donation at a Station biolab that morning. How many boxes? Hard to see, hard to count. More than twenty, surely. More than thirty. He could count the bags that contained them, though; there were nine.

“Thrown out,” he whispered. “Thrown -- out?”

The robot reached the end of a column and attached its burden thereto. Teki's attention was all on the working device; he moved off to monitor it as it cycled back through the airlock. Ethan reached back, grabbed Cee by the arm, bundled him forward, and pointed silently out the window.

Cee looked annoyed, then looked again. He stiffened, his lips parting. He stared as if his eyes might devour the distance, and the barrier. The telepath began to swear under his breath, so softly that Ethan could hardly make out the words; his hands clenched, unclenched, and splayed against the transparency.

Ethan gripped Cee's arm harder. “Is it them?” he whispered. “Could it be?”

“I can make out the Bharaputra House logo on the labels,” breathed Cee. “I saw them packed.”

“She must have put them out here herself,” muttered Ethan. “Left no record in the computer -- I bet a search would list that bin as empty. She threw them out. She really literally did throw them out. Out there.”

“Could they still be all right?” asked Cee.

“Stone frozen -- why not... ?”

They stared at each other, wild in surmise.

“We've got to tell Quinn,” Ethan began.

Cee's hands clamped down over Ethan's wrists. “No!” he hissed. “She has hers. Janine -- those are mine.”

“Or Athos's.”

“No.” Cee was trembling white, his eyes blazing like blue pinwheels. “Mine.”

“The two,” said Ethan carefully, “need not be mutually exclusive.”

In the loaded silence that followed, Cee's face flared in an exaltation of hope.

Home. Ethan's eye teased him as he stared eagerly through the shuttle window. Could he make out the patchwork farmlands, name cities, rivers, roads yet? Cumulus clouds were scattered over the bays and islands off the South Province coast, dappling the bright morning with shade, obscuring his certainty. But yes, there was an island the shape of a crescent moon, there the silver thread of a small river where the coastline looped.

“My father's fish farm is in that bay there,” he pointed out to Terrence Cee in the seat beside him. 'Just behind that crescent-shaped outer island.”

Cee's blond head craned. “Yes, I see.”

“Sevarin is north, and inland. The shuttleport where we'll be landing is at the capital, north one district from that. You can't see it yet.”

Cee settled back in his seat, looking reflective. The first whispers of the upper atmosphere carried a hum from the shuttle's engines. A hymn, to Ethan's ears.

“Will you be getting a hero's welcome?” Cee asked Ethan.

“Oh, I doubt it. My mission was secret, after all. Not strictly, in the military sense you're familiar with, but done quietly, on account of not wanting to start a public panic or cause a crisis of confidence in the Rep Centers. Although I imagine some of the Population Council will be there. I'd like you to meet Dr. Desroches. And some of my family -- I called my father from the space station, so I know he'll be waiting. I told him I was bringing a friend,” Ethan added, hoping to ease Cee's obvious nervousness. “He seemed quite pleased to hear it.”

He was nervous himself. How was he going to explain Cee to Janos? He had run through several hundred practice introductions in his mind, during the two-month leg of their journey from Kline Station, until he had wearied of worrying. If Janos was going to be jealous, or hard-nosed about it, let him get down to work and earn his designated alternate status. It might be just the stimulus needed to kick him into action at last; given Janos's own personal proclivities, he was unlikely to believe that Cee had shown every sign of being a prime candidate for one of the Chaste Brotherhoods. Ethan sighed.

Cee regarded his hands meditatively, and glanced up at Ethan. “And will they view you as a hero, or a traitor, in the end?”

Ethan surveyed the shuttle. His precious cargo, nine big white freezer cartons, was not consigned to the chances of the cargo hold, but strapped to the seats all around them. The only other passengers, the census statistician and his assistant and three members of the galactic census courier's crew heading for downside leave, hung together protectively at the far end, out of earshot.

“I wish I knew,” said Ethan. “I pray about it daily. I haven't prayed on my knees since I was a kid, but on this I do. Don't know if it helps.”

“You're not going to change your mind and switch back at the last minute? The last minute is coming up fast.”

As fast as the ground below. They were dropping through the cloud layer now, white fog beading on the window and flaring off in the wind of their passage. Ethan thought of the other cargo, secreted in his personal luggage, compressed and concealed: the 450 ovarian cultures he had purchased on Beta Colony for the sake of assuring any possible future Cetagandan follow-up of his activities -- and indeed, of assuring the Population Council itself -- that the original Bharaputran cultures had never been found. Cee had helped him make the switch, hours and hours spent in the census courier's cargo hold changing labels, doctoring records. Or maybe it had been Ethan helping Cee. They were both in it together now, anyway, to the neck and beyond.

Ethan shook his head. “It was a decision that somebody had to make. If not me, then the Population Council. There are only two choices in the long run that don't risk race war or genocide: all, or nothing. I am convinced you were right on that score. And the committee -- well -- I feared they would be constitutionally incapable of anything but a split decision. You're right in your perception -- as always -- I tremble at our future. But even in fear and trembling, I'm willing to reach for it. It ought to be -- interesting.”

If Ethan felt a spasm of guilt, it was for the 451st culture, EQ-1, whose container he held on his lap. If he were unable to complete his scheme, of all the sons born to Athos in the next generation, only his would not bear the hidden alleles, the recessive telepathy time-bomb. But his grandsons would get them, he assuaged his conscience. It would all average out in the long run. May he live to see it; may he live to nurture it.

“But you retained the chance to change your mind,” Cee noted. A jerk of his chin in the direction of the cargo bay and Ethan's luggage indicated the cause of his unease.

“I'm afraid I'm hopelessly economical,” Ethan apologized. “I should have been a housekeeper, I sometimes think. The Betan cultures were just too good to jettison into the vacuum. But if I get my old job back, or better still advance to head a Rep Center, there may be a chance -- I'd like to try my hand at gene splicing the telepathy complex into the genuine Betan cultures and slipping them back into Athos's gene pool, if I can do it in secrecy. As soon as I become adept at the operation, this one too.” He lifted EQ-1 from his lap, set it back carefully, his conscience quieted still further. “I did promise Commander Quinn a hundred sons. And as a Rep Center chief, I would have a seat on the Population Council. Maybe even a shot at the chairmanship, someday.”

There was a small crowd in the Athosian shuttleport docking bay in spite of the close secrecy surrounding Ethan's mission. Most of them turned out to be representatives from the nine District Reproduction Centers, eager to carry off their new cultures. Ethan was nearly trampled in the rush for the freezer boxes. But the Chairman of the Population Council was there, and Dr. Desroches, and best of all Ethan's father.

“Did you have any trouble?” the chairman asked Ethan.

“Oh...” Ethan clutched EQ-1, “nothing we couldn't handle...”

Desroches grinned. “Told you so,” he murmured to the chairman.

Ethan and his father embraced, not once but several times, as if to assure each other of their continued vitality. Ethan's father was a tall, tanned, wind-wrinkled man; Ethan could smell the salt sea lingering even in his best clothes, and inhaled pleasurable memories therefrom.

“You're so pale,” Ethan's father complained, holding him at arm's length and looking him up and down. “God the Father, boy, it's like getting you back from the dead in more ways than one.” His father embraced him again.

“Well, I've been indoors for a year,” Ethan smiled. “Kline Station didn't have a sun to speak of, I was only on Escobar for a week, and Beta Colony had too much sun -- nobody goes aboveground there unless they want to be fried. I'm healthier than I look, I assure you. In fact, I feel great. Uh --” he looked around surreptitiously one more time, “where's Janos?” Sudden fear shot through him at his father's grave look.

Ethan's father took a deep breath. “I'm sorry to have to tell you this, son -- but we all agreed it would be better to tell you first thing....”

God the Father, thought Ethan, Janos has gone and lolled himself in my lightflyer...

“Janos isn't here.”

“I can see that.” Ethan's heart seemed to rise and choke his words.

“He got kind of wild, after you left -- nobody to be a restraining influence on him, Spiri says, though I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself, and Janos was old enough to start playing a man's part -- Spiri and I had a bit of an argument about it, in fact, though it's all settled now --”

The docking bay seemed to spin around Ethan's center of gravity, just below his stomach. “What happened?”

“Well -- Janos ran off to the Outlands with his friend Nick about two months after you left. He says he's not coming back -- no rules or restrictions out there, he says, nobody keeping score on you.” Ethan's father snorted. “No future, either, but he doesn't seem to care about that. Though give him ten years, and he may find he's had a bellyful of freedom. Others have. I calculate it'll take him at least that long, though. He always was the thickest of you boys.”

“Oh,” said Ethan in a very small voice. He tried to look properly grieved. He tried very hard, twitching the corners of his mouth back down by main force. “Well --” he cleared his throat, “perhaps it's for the best. Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.”

He turned to Terrence Cee, his grin escaping control at last. “Here, Dad, I want you to meet someone -- I brought us an immigrant. Only one, but altogether a remarkable person. He's endured much, to make it to refuge here. He's been a good travelling companion for the last eight months, and a good friend.”

Ethan introduced Cee; they shook hands, the slight galactic, the tall waterman. “Welcome, Terrence,” said Ethan's father. “A good friend of my son's is a son to me. Welcome to Athos.”

Emotion broke through Cee's habitual closed coolness; wonder, and something like awe. “You really mean that... Thank you. Thank you, sir.”

Two of the three moons rose together that night over Athos's Eastern Sea. The little breakers murmured beyond the dunes. The second floor verandah of Ethan's father's house gave a fine view over the moon-spangled waters of the bay. The breeze cooled Ethan's blush, as the darkness concealed its color.

“You see, Terrence,” Ethan explained shyly to Cee, “the fastest way to gain your paternal rights, and Janine's sons, is to devote all your time to public works until you gain enough social duty credits for designated alternate status. There's plenty to do -- everything from road repair to parks maintenance to work for the government -- maybe sharing some of your galactic expertise -- to all kinds of charity work. Old men's homes, orphanages for the bereft and repossessed, animal care, disaster relief services -- although the army handles most of that -- the choices are endless.”

“But how shall I support myself meanwhile?” objected Cee. “Or is support included?”

“No, you must support yourself. To gain designated alternate points the work must be over and above the regular economy -- it's really a kind of labor tax, if you want to think of it that way. But I thought -- if you will allow me -- I can support you. I make plenty for two as a Rep Center department head -- and Desroches and the Chairman have hinted that I may get the Chief of Staff post at the new Rep Center for the Red Mountain district, when it goes into place year after next. By then, with diligence, you'll have your D. A. status. And then it can go really fast, because,” Ethan took a breath, “as a designated alternate parent, you can become a Primary Nurturer to my sons. And being a Primary Nurturer is, bar none, the fastest way to accumulate social duty credits toward paternity.” Ethan faltered. “I admit, it's not a very adventurous life, compared to the one you've led. Sitting in a garden, rocking a cradle -- someone else's cradle, at that. Though it would be good practice for your own, and of course I would be happy to stand as designated alternate parent to your sons.”