One's Aspect to the Sun (40 page)

The conclusions I came to were these: she was tired of running. And I was finally tired of chasing.

So one day I sat down and loaded the chip marked
PC35411
into my datapad. I added up the numbers for my parents' birthdays and the year she left us on Nellera, punched it in as the password, and it opened up the message like a charm. But I didn't send it, not that message. That decision was my mother's to make, unless and until she wasn't able to make it herself and I had proof of that. Instead I took the address it was to be sent to, and wrote my own message.

STATIC ELECTRONIC MESSAGE: 25.7

Encryption: securetext/novis/noaud

Receipt notification: disabled

From: “Captain Luta Paixon”

To: “Anonymous”

Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2284 11:16:55 -0500

To whom it may concern: Please forward this and the attached message along the route established. There is no danger to you or recipient.

Many thanks,

Luta Paixon,

Captain, Tane Ikai

Encoded inside that message was the one I wanted Mother to read. I used the same password she'd placed on the
L/L
chip; she'd figure it out.

Mother,

You said: No one should have sole control of human aging. Think about it?

Come home,

Luta

Four days later I was lying on my bunk, trying to get some rest. That goal was being thwarted by my brain insisting on trying to figure out how I was going to pay for a new main drive, when Baden commed me. We'd made the skip through to Beta Comae Berenices the day before, with the
Winchester
hovering behind us like an anxious mother, and tomorrow we should make the wormhole to MI 2 Eridani. One more skip from there would take us to Beta Hydri and the proceedings on Vele.

“Captain, message for you.”

I sat up and touched my implant. “From Lanar?”

“No.” Baden's voice sounded strange. “It purports to be—from you.”

“On my datapad,” I said, bounding for the desk to snatch it up. It wasn't vid, only a text message, and it was brief.

Received: from [205152.59.68] Eri Main Datastation

STATIC ELECTRONIC MESSAGE: 25.7

Encryption: securetext/novis/noaud

Receipt notification: enabled

From: “Captain L. Paixon”

To: “Luta Paixon”

Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2284 6:25:22 -0500

Dear Luta,

You may be right. I'll see you on Vele.

M.

I thumbed my implant comm. “Baden, where did this message come from?”

“Through the comm relay from MI 2 Eridani,” he said.

It did have the relay stamp from the Eri datastation at the top, but that didn't mean it had originated there. It could have bounced around Nearspace for a while before it got to me.

It seemed like, at least when this message had been sent, she'd been safe. And somehow, she knew about what was happening on Vele. I wondered if Lanar had found a way to get a message to her, too, or if her network of contacts was just that good.

Either way, it seemed like everything was going to come together on Vele. I rolled over, closed my eyes, and this time my brain let me sleep.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Vele was a smallish planet, about the size of Mars, circling its star at a distance similar to Earth's from Sol. It was Earthlike and yet somehow alien; it had little axial tilt and so seemed to have one long temperate season that rarely varied, and something in their biochemical makeup made a lot of the plants look
wrong.
It was a nice enough planet, though, and I would have liked it more had it not been the place where Hirin originally took sick.

Mother was as good as her word. We said goodbye to the
Winchester
and set down on Vele late one mild, starry night, and the next morning I was barely dressed when I got a message ping. It was voice-only, but it was Mother. “Are you accepting visitors?” she asked.

“Dock One-Eleven,” I said. “I'll be at the bridge deck airlock.”

“Wait inside. I'll knock,” she said.

I supposed it was to avoid drawing attention; me standing alone outside the door, obviously waiting for someone. She was the expert at all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, so I did as she asked.

When the knock came, I opened the airlock immediately and there she was, standing at the top of the metal staircase. Her hair was a rich, dark brown with pale highlights now, and she wore the midnight blue uniform of a dockworker. She carried a canvas carryall slung over her shoulder and vidshades hid her eyes, but it was her. She was smiling.

I waited until we were inside before I said anything. “So, you're here to see if PrimeCorp can wiggle out of this one?”

She pulled me into a quick hug. “Actually,” she said, “I'm mostly here for you.”

“For me?”

She slid the vidshades off and tucked them into her carryall. “Do you have any caff?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, not being much of a hostess, am I? Let's go to the galley.”

Strangely, it was deserted. I pulled us both steaming mugs from the machine, and we sat down at the long table. “That was some message you sent me,” she said, looking around the room. “Nice ship you have here.”

“Thanks,” I said. “There wasn't much to it. The message, I mean.”

“No, but you certainly got straight to the point, and it made me think.” She blew across the top of her caff, making the liquid ripple and steam writhe in the air. “I hadn't really stopped to think about things for quite a while. I was on automatic pilot, you might say. It was . . . a wake-up call. Anyway,” she went on, pulling a datapad from her carryall and setting it on the table between us, “I've sent this data to Lanar. Dates, names, and details on the research data PrimeCorp appropriated and sabotaged, what companies were involved—everything.”

I looked up from the pad, meeting her eyes. “You sent the message.”

She nodded. “I sent the message.”

“And your people? Are they out of PrimeCorp's reach?”

“No-one on that end realizes what's happened yet. By the time PrimeCorp gets notice of this, they'll be well away.”

“PrimeCorp's going to have a lot of things to worry about, all of a sudden.”

She shrugged and turned the datapad around with a finger. “Let's hope so. At any rate, I've decided that I have to let it go,” she said simply. “I'm going to go and talk with Schulyer, release my research data publicly, and let PrimeCorp take me to court if they want. They'll stop bothering you, at any rate.” She put a hand on one of mine. “It was probably the hardest thing I've ever done to leave you on Kiando. Leave you
again
. Seeing you, and Hirin, and Maja—it sort of cracked something inside me.”

“I would have helped you, you know.” I couldn't stop myself from saying it. “You didn't have to disappear.”

She sighed. “I know. You know what happened?”

“Yuskeya told me, what she knew, anyway.”

Mother sat back in the chair, cupping her mug in both hands and staring into its depths. “I just did what I've been doing for so many years. Put the plan into action. Keep moving. I had a dummy ticket booked on that starliner that was orbiting Kiando—that's standard practice for me. So I took a shuttle up to the starliner under one of my other identities, changed my appearance in a stateroom, caught a shuttle back down to the planet, and hopped on a short trader to Cengare. From there I shipped out for MI 2 Eridani. And the whole time, I was thinking what a fool I was, and how I should have just gone with you.”

I smiled wryly. “Turns out, that would have been a bad idea. PrimeCorp caught up with me almost right away and ended up nearly destroying my ship.”

She met my eyes then. “But I still would have
been
there. I would have been part of your life for once, instead of just watching from the outside.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally I said, “I watched the videos. Showed them to Lanar, too.”

“So you know the best and the worst of it.”

“You didn't do anything I wouldn't have done.”

She smiled at that.

I sipped from my own mug. “You know what I got out of it all? That at some point, people should start benefiting from your research. Isn't that what all your work has been about?”

She didn't answer, so I went on.

“I know it's a worry—what will happen. But you can't take all the responsibility on yourself. We've been hunting immortality, wishing for it, working towards it, for centuries. You're only the locus that all that work has led to. You're the last function in the equation. Most people will probably embrace the technology, but some won't. Society will change, of course, evolve just as it always has when conditions change. You can't take it on yourself to be responsible for what immortality will mean to humanity. You have to give people the chance, and the choice. What happens then—well, it can't be your worry.”

“Your message made me come to a similar conclusion,” she said. “But the letting go—I want to. It won't be easy.”

“You don't have to stop your own research,” I said. “It's what you love doing. You just have to focus on the people you'll be helping. Take Hirin, for example. I gave Hirin a blood transfusion a few weeks ago, and the changes in him have been—well, unbelievable.”

Mother stared at me. “What?”

I realized that Mother didn't know about Hirin's virus, and told the story as succinctly as I could. “He had a bad reaction when we went through the Split. The virus surged, and it affected his heart. We decided to gamble that a transfusion from me might help.”

“Transferable bioscavs? I wouldn't have thought—especially that generation, and after so long . . .” She stared into the distance, likely envisioning complex formulae and nanostructures I couldn't even begin to imagine. “They didn't have any adverse effects?”

I chuckled. “Well, they seemed about to kill him for a few days, but then he got better. Since then they—the bioscavengers, I guess—have been reversing a lot of the damage age has done to him. It's noticeable already.”

She still seemed stunned. “After so long in your system . . . I wouldn't have thought—” her voice caught and tears sprang to her eyes.

“What is it?”

“If I'd realized sooner . . . but it never worked in tests—”

My heart lurched. Perhaps the transfusion had been an even bigger gamble than I'd thought. I caught her hand briefly and squeezed. “It's okay. I know you would have told us if you'd known. Maybe it had something to do with the particular virus Hirin had.”

“Is Hirin here? I'd like to run some tests, if he'd let me.”

I smiled. Whatever else I might convince my mother to do, she'd never stop being a scientist. “I'm sure he will.” I touched my implant and messaged Hirin, asking him to meet us in the galley. “What about the new generation of bioscavs—the ones you mentioned in the video? Will they work for Hirin?”

“Ye-es,” she said hesitantly. “They'd be more limited. I wouldn't say they could prolong his life indefinitely. But they'd extend it for a good many years yet.”

Hirin came into the galley, stopped dead and did a double-take. “
Hola
, that is weird. Even with the different hair colour, you two look amazingly alike. You're going to have to wear name tags if you're both going to be on this ship. I don't want to start making passes at my mother-in-law by mistake.”

I took a swipe at him as he passed me, which he ducked with newly-reacquired speed. “If a man can't tell his wife from her mother—” I started, but he cut me off.

“Hey, I get to plead extremely unusual circumstances,” he protested as he filled a mug with chai for himself.

“Mother wants to take a look at your virus, and your bioscavs,” I said. “Do you mind?”

He shook his head and held out his arm, implant facing Mother. “But will there be anything of the virus left to find?”

“Oh, I think so,” Mother said. She placed her datapad gently over Hirin's implant, waiting for the connection. “The bioscavengers would deal with the virus in one of several ways—by neutralizing parts of it or by altering the body's reaction to it—but they wouldn't necessarily erase it. And I want to see how they've adapted themselves to your body, too.”

“I still have all the data Dr. Ndasa collected,” Hirin volunteered. “He gave me a copy to keep for my own records.”

The datapad chittered and Mother removed it, pressing her fingers swiftly over the screen. “I'd love to see it, Hirin. The comparison would be valuable. This will just take a few minutes to analyze.”