Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Mr. Stubbins said, “Say hello, Luke.”

“Hello,” Luke said. His voice was a little hard to understand.

“Hi,” Jason and Colin said.

“Hello,” Grandma said.

Luke didn’t answer or even look at anyone. Grandma said to Mr. Stubbins, “Traumatized, developmentally challenged, or Asperger’s?”

“All three. Be nice, Marianne.”

Colin said, “Grandma is always nice!”

“So she is,” Mr. Stubbins said. He talked different when he was around Grandma than he did to other people.

“A word, please,” Grandma said. “You, too, Allison.”

The three adults went into a corner and whispered hard at each other. Grandma waved her hands. Jason talked to Luke. “Do you live here?”

“Yes.” It seemed hard for him to say the word.

“It’s awesome, isn’t it? Where are your parents?” Jason said.

“Dead.”

“My mother is dead, too.”

Still Luke didn’t look at the boys. His face twisted like he had a pain. Jason said, “What’s wrong?”

“Too loud.”

Colin glanced out the window. All the machinery had stopped for lunch. “It’s quiet in here.”

Luke said, “The ground.”

Colin caught his breath. This was the kid that Ms. Blake said could hear the way Colin did! Right now Colin heard not only the ground but the plants outside and the electricity fence and some water deep under the building and a whole lot of other stuff. Could Luke hear it, too?

He said, “Do you hear plants? And storms coming?”

Then, for the first time, Luke did look at him. His eyes widened. “You can hear?”

“Yes! All those things! And not only that, I can show you how to block out the noise. You need to put it in rows….” Colin sat at the table and picked up the polished stones for Jason’s multiplication. He told Luke about putting the noises in rows in his mind, and that Luke should practice. Luke’s heavy face twisted with trying. Why was it so hard for him? And why hadn’t he thought of it himself? Colin had, before he could even remember. He went over it with Luke again, and then again. Grandma and Mr. Stubbins and Ms. Blake were still whispering shouts at each other. Jason got bored and went back to the math stuff on his worksheet.

Finally Luke’s eyes went round and he said, “Oh—”

“See? That’s better, right?”

Luke burst into tears and grabbed Colin’s hand. Colin was embarrassed but didn’t pull away. Luke wasn’t like Paul. He was going to be Colin’s friend, and Jason’s too, but Luke would be a friend who could hear the world, just like Colin did.

This really was the coolest place ever.

Sometimes it even made him forget what a bad person he was for crashing a tree branch onto Paul.

Judy and Marianne had become friends. In some mysterious way she reminded Marianne of Evan Blanford, although on the surface no two people could have been more different. Judy had given Marianne a complete tour of the Venture, but Marianne still understood very little about the ship being constructed on a reinforced-concrete launchpad. She was staggered by how close to completion the vessel was. A gleaming silvery cylinder with odd projections, it looked far too fragile to withstand liftoff through the atmosphere. Apparently some version of the Deneb energy shield activated during liftoff, protecting it. She was also surprised by the ship’s small size. Had Smith’s compatriots lived in such cramped quarters for the voyage to Earth? And could the Venture launch something as large and complex as the Embassy had been?

“No,” Judy said. “We haven’t found anything that would suggest that capability. What we have here is an abridged version of the alien tech. Either they didn’t want to share the full monte, or they adapted everything so we poor knuckle-draggers can actually build the thing. Prometheus handing down fire but not the Franklin stove.”

The more Marianne saw, the more questions she had. Three things, however, were completely clear.

First, the ship was the kind of massive, coordinated, expensive engineering effort that could only have been built by someone with complete control of the project, a fabulous fortune plus the ability to borrow even more money, and freedom from all committees, including Congress. If Stubbins was working with Washington, as Judy had said, it didn’t interfere with his ability to make, modify, reverse, or implement decisions as he alone saw fit.

Second, Stubbins’s staff were an eclectic lot. The only world-class physicist was David Chin, from Stanford, second in command. The rest of the physicists and astronomers, like Judy, were steady and unremarkable craftsmen who were probably not going to move humanity closer to understanding how World’s star drive worked. The engineers were drawn from various enterprises, as were the workmen and tech staff. “Stubbins looked for people who really want to go to the stars themselves,” Judy said. “Because of course we’re all hoping to be picked for ship’s crew, eventually. Also people who can be trusted completely. Stubbins wants no doubters, no betrayers, no leaks.”

And might not get any. Marianne had never seen such tight security, except on the Embassy . She spent a fair amount of time on the computers in the mess, even though she knew her every keystroke was monitored. She found no information whatsoever about Luke, whom Stubbins said was “found in an orphanage.” Luke, like Colin, was able to hear in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges. What did Stubbins want with him? What did Stubbins want with Colin?

She couldn’t ask him directly. Ever since her first morning here, when he’d come to the kids’ classroom (and why do that personally?), he’d been off-site. Judy didn’t know where.

“Washington, maybe,” she said. “David Chin keeps everything rolling along.”

They sat outside Marianne’s barracks on utilitarian metal folding chairs, there being nothing as frivolous as lawn chairs available, in a gorgeous November sunset. Both women huddled in heavy sweaters but the sunset was too good to miss. Gold, red, and an orange like ripe fruit faded slowly from the western horizon. The first stars pricked the dark blue above. A short distance off, Allison supervised the three boys, who climbed on a pallet of metal girders. The children became silhouettes against the sky, and a soft breeze brought, instead of the usual machine oil and dust, a fugitive scent of wild grapes. A hawk wheeled in the sky.

“I don’t see how World could be any lovelier than this,” Marianne said, before she knew she was going to say anything at all. The next moment she thought of what a small percentage of Earth this represented, while so much of the rest of it was struggling, starving, flooding, rioting, or all of the above. The Internet news just got worse and worse. She didn’t say any of this. Why spoil the moment?

Judy was hunched over an embroidery hoop, of all things; she said that embroidering flowers relaxed her. People were endlessly surprising in their hidden corners.

Marianne said, “How can you even see what you’re doing? The light’s mostly gone.”

“Yeah. I’ve pricked my finger twice.” She folded up her work and said abruptly, “Why do you think Stubbins is so hot to go to World?”

“I’ve wondered about that myself. I imagine he smells profit. He’s proven to have a good nose for it.”

“A lame pun. But profit of what kind? You know him better than I do, Marianne.”

“I don’t think anybody really knows him.”

“Yeah. ‘A grand, ungodly, godlike man,’” Judy said, making air quotes with both hands. Her embroidery slipped off her lap and fell onto the ground.

Marianne said, “I don’t recognize the quote.”