Resolution (92 page)

‘No.’ Kian twisted at the last moment, faced his attacker. ‘There
is
no anger.’

A lean-faced, unshaven man stopped, confused, his knife half-raised, blade pointing down. Then he twitched forward.

And a square fist looped out of the crowd and dropped the attacker. His blade clattered on the tiles.

‘Bastard.’ The big woman who had thrown the punch stood ready for more.

Then the two bodyguards leaped onto the prone man and wrenched his arms back.

‘We’ve got him, thank you, ma’am.’

‘You’re welcome.’ She ran a hand through her short greying hair. ‘A conference in freezin’ fuckin’ Montreal. I thought this weekend was going to be
boring.’

‘It’s not that cold yet,’ said Kian. ‘And thank you very much.’

‘You’re welcome, pal. My name’s Kat.’

She held out her hand, unperturbed by the ruined claw Kian offered in return.

‘I’m Kian.’

‘Mmm. Interesting eyes you’ve got.’

They married the following spring.

She was Katerina Hinton, Dr Kat to her large and boisterous clan of Iowa wrestlers and cow farmers. When Kian stayed with one of the cousins or aunts or uncles, they made no allowance for his privileged status or physical condition; he did chores with the rest of them. No-one cared about the age difference between him and Kat; and they took it for granted that Kat would teach him to milk cows.

During the long walks around the fields, she would also show him the beetles that rolled away the dung - ‘Or we’d be buried in cow-flap. Not just here, I mean the entire state’ - and other glimpses of ecology’s complexities, such as mites that saved human houses from being inundated with shed skin cells.

‘Deirdre can write the coupling equations,’ Kian said once. ‘But you bring it to life, dear.’

‘Yeah? I’ll show you coupling.’

In bed, they laughed a lot.

At social events, they were K’n’K, or Two K. And they had a social life (not just with Kat’s faculty colleagues at Iowa State) as Kian dropped his mu-space missions back to the minimum. UNSA, careful to show how they looked after this generation of Pilots as they matured, were more helpful than expected.

‘Probably knew they’d have to answer to me,’ said Kat.

For reasons they never discussed with anyone else, Kian and Kat bore no biological children of their own. But they adopted a Eurasian girl called Maria, and furnished her with all the love they were capable of, which was a great deal.

One night, when Maria was fifteen, she came home from college very late, scratched and bruised. She was shaking, but neither too embarrassed nor too angry to explain how the boys she was with had drunk too much (she was not entirely innocent in that) and tried to go way too far.

Kian went to visit them in hospital.

He never repeated what he had told them, but they and their families became very quiet in the community during the final months before they packed their belongings and moved out of state.

When Maria was twenty-five, she consulted with UNSA as part of a team designing terraformer bacteria. The first full-scale trials were scheduled for a new world, nameless as yet, where the surface was uninhabitable but the geology encouraged the use of nanobores to drill out subterranean homes for the first batch of colonists.

With an eye to the future, the colonial team included half a dozen memetic engineers. The ship’s cargo manifest, on the same mission that carried the first test samples from Maria’s project, included a hardcopy of
Sequencing the Memome.
Deirdre, when Maria told her, was both pleased and mad. ‘Pissed off and proud,’ she said. ‘The first time I’ve understood quantum superposition in my gut. Those
bastards.’

By the time Maria was thirty-two, she was Dean of Iowa State. Despite her administrative duties, she used her authority to bully her way back into eco-research - ‘Because politics bores the
piss
out of me’ - while acting as assistant wrestling coach.

During the final semester that year, she organized Kat’s retirement party.

One cool evening at the end of May 2207, Kat told Kian she was dying.

They were sitting on the deck behind their cottage, looking out across the body of water that Kian called a lake and Kat referred to as The Pond. Tiny flies danced upon the surface. Kat put down her glass of iced tea, then pointed at a flat stone stained with pale grey-green patches.

‘What do you see, Kian?’

‘Life, of course, my love.’

She had taught him how to look. How to see the miracle of life where others would notice only discoloration.

‘Anything more complex than a bacterium,’ Kat said, ‘eventually breaks down.’

After a long moment Kian took her hand.

‘It’s the bacterium’s loss. Never knowing love.’

Kat smiled. She kept hold of his hand as they watched the sun go down.

Six weeks later she was dead.

After the burial, family and friends accompanied Kian back to the cottage. From a rear window he looked out at The Pond, and silently sipped a white wine that Kat had bought when they were in Paris the year before.

‘I love you, Dad,’ said Maria.

‘You’re the best daughter we could have had. And Kat...’

‘Was the best Mom in all possible worlds.’

Behind them, Paula and Deirdre looked at each other and blinked.

‘She showed me how wonderful this world is.’

‘I know.’

‘But she didn’t realize ...
She
was the best part of it. The magic that was everywhere.’

Deirdre shivered. Paula bit her lip.

They had known Kian long enough to sense when his words held multiple layers of meaning.

Surrounded by forest, some twenty miles from Portland, Oregon, stood an UNSA flight base with an enviable reputation within the organization. Although engineering protocols and training programmes were standardized across the globe, it was inevitable that local variations would creep in, and that some facilities would become better than others.

Enclosed in Hangar 7, in the middle of the base, a bronze, purple-banded ship, fresh from its latest service, waited.

There were armed guards at the perimeter and drones hovering overhead, scanning visible and infra-red wavelengths. That remained standard procedure at UNSA bases, though anti-xeno protest was a thing of the past.

On the fourth of July, two nights after the pallbearers lowered Kat McNamara (nee Hinton) into the ground, celebratory fireworks exploded in the sky over Portland, joined by the more modest efforts of outlying communities.

And on the morning of the fifth, an engineer called Eddie Eisberg was the first person to enter Hangar 7, despite the hangover which thickened his head. It took him a full two minutes to work out the situation and press the big red alarm button.

The sound echoed through the empty hangar.