State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (17 page)

“Could they trust you?”

“Do you mean to ask if I was one of them?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

“I was. But not anymore.”

Hearing all of this is such a shock to me, I don’t know if I can trust her or not. “Well, what changed you?” I ask.

“You did,” she says.

“I did?”

“Yes.”

I’m suddenly aware of how cold the bench is. I stand and cross to the window and look out at the moon. It’s strange to think that it’s been up there circling the Earth all this time, shining down on everything since the beginning of humankind but concerned about none of it.

“Did Dad know?” I ask.

“Did he know what?”

“Any of this,” I reply. “How old you really are. Where you came from. That you’re not really dead.”

“Of course not,” she says, as if the very idea of it shocks her. “He didn’t know anything about that.”

“So you just let him think you were dead until he walked right into Eden to have his brain cut out?”

She stands to approach me, but I step away.

“You don’t understand,” she says.

I peel her glove off my hand, reach into my pocket and pull out my father’s pipe and hold it up.

“I don’t understand?” I ask. “I understand that he sat me down and gave me this pipe because he wanted to pass it down and because you always hated the smell of his tobacco. Look. Do you remember? I understand that he talked about you as if you were some kind of saint. He couldn’t wait to see you, Mom. Or maybe I should call you Chief? Or Miss Bradford?”

“Aubrey, please—”

“Please nothing. I tried to stop him. I tried to tell him the truth about what was going on. But he wouldn’t listen. You know why? He wouldn’t listen because he couldn’t wait to get inside Eden so he could see you. But you weren’t even there. And you weren’t there because Eden is a sham, and you knew it. You let him get slaughtered, Mom. I saw it. I saw his brain being lifted out of his head. I saw it put into that soup. And I risked my life to free him and to free you. Jimmy did too. And you stand here and tell me I don’t understand.”

She sits back down on the bench and sighs deeply. “You just don’t understand, Aubrey. You don’t.”

“Then you tell me!” I shout. “What don’t I understand?”

“He wasn’t your father.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t your father, Aubrey. He knew he wasn’t, too. He’d never tell you that, of course, but he knew. Sure, he had no idea who your real father was. But he knew I was already a month pregnant when I showed up there. He was a good man, Aubrey. A good, good man. But you have to understand, we were only together for eight months. Just long enough for me to have you, and then I was gone. I didn’t expect him to fall in love with me like he did. And I sure didn’t expect him to spend fifteen years making me out to be something I never could have been. He was a good man, and he was the right man to raise you, but he wasn’t your father.”

I look at the pipe in my hand, the yellow-stone bowl gray in the moonlight, worn smooth by my father’s hands.

“You’re lying,” I say, backing away. “You’re lying.”

When I run into the wall, I slide down it and sit on the cold stone floor, cradling the pipe in my shaking hands.

“I know you’re lying. He was my father. He was.”

“I’m not lying,” she whispers. “He wasn’t your father.”

I look up at her through tear-filled eyes. She’s sitting on the bench, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her hands, and her long, dark hair framing her face in the soft moonlight.

“Then who is my father?” I ask.

“Your father,” she says, “was Dr. Robert Radcliffe.”

I’m alone in the shelter when I wake.

Dreams must have had me thrashing in my sleep, because I’m tangled in the bedding and the motion sensor lights are on. As the nightmare fades, however, another one takes its place.

I remember learning the truth last night in that tower room. I remember running out and fleeing across the wall, desperate to get away. I remember falling, catching myself, my knees scraping stone. I remember pushing her away, screaming, “Don’t touch me! I hate you!” And I remember Jimmy’s strong hands helping me up, his shoulder supporting me, his gentle touch as he tucked me in. I remember sobbing myself to sleep and the sound of concerned voices beyond the curtain.

I get up out of bed and look around. The knees of my zipsuit are torn and blackened with dried blood. My coat and shirt are draped over a chair, my shoes parked on the ground. A pot of porridge steams on the stove. There’s an empty bowl and a clay carafe of cream nearby. After eating my fill, I wash my face in the basin, and use the latrine—which turns out to be a hole in the floor that drops away to who knows where and covered with a hinged wooden lid. Then I dress again in my shirt and coat. I’m still trying to force the shoes Seth gave me over the thick wool socks when the door opens and Jimmy and my mother walk in together, laughing.

“Oh, good,” she says. “We were hoping you’d be up.”

“Look what I shot,” Jimmy says.

The creature he holds up looks like some half-aborted monster in the making, and I can only imagine by the thin flaps for arms and the bumpy pink skin that it must be a bird he’s plucked of its feathers. Then I notice the bow and arrows slung over his shoulder. He must be right at home here.

“I need to talk to you,” I say, addressing my mother.

“Okay, sure,” she replies. “You look like you could use a little cleaning up. Here, carry these.” She hands me two towels. “Jimmy, would you mind putting things away by yourself while Aubrey and I go out for a bit?”

“I’ll be fine,” Jimmy says, over his shoulder. “Dun’ hurry back. I might need to rest some anyhow.”

There’s only a slight wind outside, and the sun hangs in perfect blue china skies, reflecting brightly off the stone and the drifts of snow. Despite the ache it causes my lungs, the winter air is invigorating. She leads me down a mountain path, away from the hut and the wall. I want to talk with her, but the path is only wide enough to accommodate us single file, so I follow along behind, carrying the towels, cautious of my steps, and look out over the wild world folding away beneath us.

The path hugs the slope and eventually turns a bend and switchbacks down toward a mountain cove, a hollow cupped between surrounding peaks. In the center of this hollow, an oasis of trees and plants, some still green, stand out brightly against the surrounding gray. A gentle steam rises up. Birds chirp and flit between the spindly and leafless maples.

I see as we approach that the steam comes from a set of pools—springs heated by some geothermal workings deep in the mountains. My mother peels off her coat and her shirt and lays them out on a flat rock beside the pool. Then she steps out of her pants and wades into the water in her underclothes, lifting her thick hair and tying it up on her head.

“Aren’t you coming in?” she asks, smiling at me.

I don’t know whether I’m more uneasy about seeing my mother half naked or having my mother see me. But the water looks relaxing, and after our hike across the Yucatan and the long flight here, I sure could use a bath. I set the towels down and undress as quickly as possible. When I step down into the pool, the water is silky against my skin, and the heat soothes away pains I didn’t even know I had.

My mother leans her head back and sighs. She says, “This is one thing I sure would miss about this place.”

I spin slow circles in the pool, enjoying the view of the trees set against the gray cliffs rising sharply behind them.

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

“Oh, about nine or ten months now.”

“That’s all?”

She nods. “You were supposed to come here with me.”

I stop my spinning and look at her. “I was?”

“Yes, you were. At least that was my plan.” Then she looks at my bare chest and asks, “How did you get that scar?”

I lower in the water until only my head and neck are exposed. “I think maybe I should be asking the questions.”

“Fair enough,” she says. “I didn’t get to finish telling you everything last night. If it’s alright with you, I’d like to now.”

“Go ahead then,” I say.

“I know this is hard, Aubrey. But you need to understand why things happened the way that they did.”

“I’m listening.”

“Okay, then. I told you last night how I had arrived at the Foundation. Now let me tell you about how you arrived. When Robert—that’s Dr. Radcliffe—and his wife had Hannah with their surrogate, he was disappointed that she wasn’t a boy. He had funny ideas about the differences between women and men. Anyway, they had made several attempts, and it was Katherine’s last egg, so he immediately began looking at the fifteens below to see if anyone might be a suitable mate for her. If he couldn’t have a son, maybe he could at least have a grandson. I see how you’re looking at me, and I know how it sounds. It’s crazy. But you have to understand that to him it wasn’t. And when you’re around someone like that all the time, it begins to stop sounding crazy to you anymore too.”

“So how do I come in? I mean, if he is my father.”

“I think he had just assumed that I was no longer fertile. None of the others had been when they had reached my age on the serum. But then, most of them had taken it when they were already quite old, and I had only been twenty. Anyway, he was cataloging our manufacturing database for sintering machines when he discovered—let’s see, how do I say this to a boy?—well, he discovered an applicator system that I had designed for the tampons I was having sent up from Holocene II. I made it for me, but I also thought it might help the girls down below. Anyway, Robert cornered me about it, and once he realized that I truly was fertile, his relentless pursuit began.”

“Did you love him?”

“Love him? Of course not.”

“So you just slept with him, then?”

“Lord, no, boy,” she says. “Wherever do you get your crazy ideas? I didn’t sleep with him.”

“You didn’t?”

“No way. He didn’t have anything going on anymore that way anyway. But he did have sperm left in the freezer. And he wanted to be a father more than he wanted anything. He made a convincing case about it too. He said I was a perfect genetic match. It was quite flattering in a way. He told me I could help save the planet with my egg. And I’m ashamed to admit that I was swept up in it. You have to understand, Aubrey, he had shown me videos of the destruction. Of what humankind did to one another before, during, and after the war.”

“I know. He showed some of the same images to me.”

“It’s still no excuse,” she says, “but I went along with it. And then as soon as I was pregnant, he sprung this whole thing on me about having to go down to Holocene II to have the baby. I couldn’t believe it.”

“But why?” I ask. “Why not have me at the Foundation?”

“Because of his wife, Katherine.”

“You mean she didn’t know?”

“She had no idea. And I think he was scared to death to tell her. You see, Hannah was around fifteen by then and just coming into being a sexually mature young woman herself. But he immediately placed her on hormone blockers and whatever other cocktail he and his buddies cooked up to keep her young. His plan was to wait until you turned fifteen, and then he’d call you up and have her perfect mate. That way he gets his son and his grandson, and his wife and daughter never know.”

“Hannah doesn’t know?”

“I don’t think he ever told her.”

I suddenly have a sour taste in my mouth and I turn to spit on the edge of the pool. “Ugh.”

“Did you swallow a bug?”

“No,” I say. “But I kissed Hannah and she’s my sister.”

“Half-sister,” she corrects.

“Yeah, but still. And what was Radcliffe thinking? I mean, I don’t know much about it, but aren’t we given genetic tests down in Holocene II, just to make sure we’re not too closely related to someone we intend to take as a mate?”

“Yes. And I said the same thing to Robert. But you have to understand what an egoist he was. He thought the risk of defective grandchildren was far outweighed by the chance that they’d be of—let me remember exactly what he called it—oh, yes, ‘superior intelligence’ he had said.” She pauses to stare off into empty space, as if seeing Radcliffe’s image there above the pool. Then she says, “You know, for someone who claimed to hate humankind, he sure did love himself.”

“So how do we get to where we are now?”

She leans her head back and sighs, then continues:

“Everything changed when I had you. Actually, before I had you. As soon as I was down in Holocene II and away from Robert, I began to question all the things he had taught me. It really was a brainwashing. Then, as you began to grow inside me, it became impossible to maintain the belief that human beings are some kind of virus that needs to be stamped out. I just couldn’t accept that you, this perfect person who wasn’t even born yet, that you were evil.”

“You loved me?”

She smiles. “I love you still.”

“So what did you do then?”

“That’s when I began recruiting.”

“Recruiting?”

“Yes, the others that you’ve already met—Roger and Bill and Beth and Jillian. You met Seth too, but not his wife, Nicole. They were students of mine. And they were all smart in their own ways. Seth and Nicole were older. They were up from Level 5 temporarily, learning how to teach so they themselves could educate tunnelrats. It began with them. Then I included the others. I’d keep them after for special classes, preparing for a plan that was taking shape already in my mind. You see, I knew then that I had very little time. That the minute I had you, I would be heading back up to the Foundation. And I knew that Radcliffe would call you up in fifteen years. I knew he’d brainwash you and make you into a monster just like him. And I couldn’t allow it. I wouldn’t.”

“So what did you do?”

“After I went back up, I secretly stayed in touch with the others down below. Beth and Bill stayed on your level, so they gave me frequent reports on how you were doing. I watched you grow up through them. I also befriended a few tunnelrats with Seth and Nicole’s help. Then we began to have them bore farther south and closer to the surface, hoping to one day be able to break out. But fifteen years passes fast, and before I knew it you were all grown up, and we weren’t ready yet to make an opening. That’s when we cooked up the last minute plan to break you out of the train. The tunnelrats helped me get explosives and showed me how to use them. I found a spot I could land in a glade not too far from the trestle where the train comes out of the mountain.”