The Klaatu Terminus (33 page)

T
HE
K
LAATU’S WORDS STRUCK
T
UCKER’S EARS AND SKITTERED OFF
.
He stood there blinking stupidly. He knew something important had just happened, but he didn’t know what. Lia and Emelyn were staring at him. Kosh was gaping at the Klaatu. The air felt thick as it moved in and out of Tucker’s lungs, and the floor was very far away.

Had the Klaatu just said something about his mom?

He said, “What?” His heart was pounding in his ears and the walls seemed to be tilting. Lia grabbed his arm.

“I am sorry to tell you this way,” said the Klaatu. “I know it must be difficult.”

Tucker said, “Wait. What did you say?” He looked around frantically. His eyes landed on Emelyn. “What did she say?”

Emelyn said, “Tucker, your mother was very ill. Do you remember when she went away?”

“Of course I remember!” He jerked his arm free from Lia’s grasp. “That’s how all this got started.”

“Yes. Your father took your mother to a Medicant hospital.”

“I know! He told me she
died
! Why are you
telling
me this?”

“I did not die,” said the Klaatu. “I was transcended.”

This time, her words registered. Tucker stared at her, his mouth working silently. No words would come.

“By the time I was delivered to the Medicants there was little left of my mind. Irreparable fissures had opened in my brain. The Medicants could not help me, so I was given to a Boggsian, who made me into a Klaatu.”

“You’re my mom’s
ghost
?” Tucker said.

“I am not a ghost. I live, though not as a biological being. Once I was freed from my physical body, my thinking once again became clear. My memories, however, remained fragmented. It was my efforts to regain my memories and make myself whole that led me to create the diskos. I hoped to use them to observe historical events — specifically, my own lost past. I was successful, in a sense. I have watched you grow up. I have —” Her voice caught, and the image turned to face Kosh. “I have found echoes of longing, and regrets.”

Why is she looking at Kosh?
Tucker wondered.

“So, you’re like a ghost with memories and feelings,” Tucker said.

“No, I am your mother.” Iyl Rayn turned back to him. “Do you not recognize me?”

“You’re sort of blurry,” Tucker said.

The table emitted an electronic sound that may have been a sigh. “My body memory is fading,” she said. “As for feelings . . . I have feelings. For you I feel love, joy, and pride. But my feelings do not carry the power they once did. Transcendence saved me from who I was, but it also took away something elemental. This is why I cloned myself.”

Tucker looked at Emelyn and Emma with sudden understanding. Emma was gripping Kosh’s hand so hard her knuckles were white. Her face was even whiter. Kosh, gaping at the Klaatu, did not seem to know Emma was there.

Emelyn was looking intently at Tucker. “It is true,” she said. “We are clones of your mother.”

“There are five Emilys,” Iyl Rayn continued. “The original Emily was a Pure Girl of the Lah Sept, who as a young child was abducted from the temple and taken through a disko to Hopewell. She was adopted by Hamm and Greta Ryan.

“I commissioned the Boggsians to create three clones from a sample of my original DNA, which they obtained from the young Emily Ryan. The first clone, Emily One, was flawed — her DNA degraded during gestation. The clone did not physically resemble the original Emily, and was able to absorb only a few fragments of Emily’s already fragmented memory, including the numerophobia — a fear of numbers — impressed upon her as a child by the Lah Sept. That clone was augmented with new eyes and enhanced musculoskeletal features. She was also fitted with an experimental telomere regenerator to extend her useful lifespan. She became, in essence, a cybernetic organism, and was sent to the Terminus, where she lived a very long life as the custodian of the diskos. You knew her as Awn.

“The second clone, Emily Two, was physically identical to the original Emily, but the memory transfer was again unsuccessful. She was sent to replace the original Emily, Lah Emma, in Romelas. This cruelty was necessary to deceive the Gnomon, who might otherwise have removed the original Emily from Hopewell. Emily Two was raised as a Pure Girl until shortly before her blood moon, when she was taken by the priests to serve them in the temple. She became the woman you now know as Emma.

“The third clone, Emily Three, received a full set of my fragmented memories. She was further educated based on the observations I later made of my corporeal life by using the diskos. She is as close to the Emily Feye you grew up with as was possible. She is what I might have become, had I remained corporeal without becoming ill. In some ways, she is more the me I once was than I am. You know her now as Emelyn.”

“I share most of your mother’s memories, and all of her DNA,” Emelyn said.

“But you’re
not
her?” Tucker said, a part of him wanting her to disagree.

Emelyn smiled his mother’s smile. “Iyl Rayn is the continuation of your mother — the main trunk, you might say — while I, and Emma, and the woman you knew as Awn, are limbs.”

Tucker looked back at Iyl Rayn. “You said there were
five
Emilys.”

“I am the fifth Emily,” said Iyl Rayn. “I am your mother’s imago, her ultimate manifestation.”

“A Boggsian once told me that Klaatu are nothing but information.”

“As are you.”

“I’m not just information,” Tucker said.

“I once believed that of myself,” said Iyl Rayn. “Is there such a thing as a soul? I still do not know, though I have had millennia to think about it.”

“How old
are
you?”

“Today, according to the calendar system with which you are familiar, is the third day of June, in the year ninety-nine ninety-eight.”

Tucker thought for a moment. “You mean it’s my eight thousandth birthday?”

“There are many ways to compute that. Subjectively, you have lived five thousand nine hundred sixty-three days. That is, by your reckoning, precisely sixteen years, one hundred nineteen days. But yes, according to your ancient calendar, today is the anniversary of your birth.”

“Wait a second,” Kosh interrupted. “June third is your birthday?”

“Yeah,” Tucker said, startled by the fierce expression on Kosh’s face.

Kosh wheeled on Iyl Rayn. “You were
pregnant
? And you
knew
it?”

“That is true.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would never have left!”

“You were not ready to be a father, Kosh.”

“I could’ve been! If you had told me. I
loved
you!”

“As I loved you. But you were only seventeen.”

“And you were only nineteen!”

“I had no choice for myself. But I could make the right choice for you.”

Kosh glared at her. “It was not yours to make.”

Emma, who had been standing by with a bewildered and stricken expression, suddenly turned and ran out of the barn.

“Perhaps not,” said Iyl Rayn, “but it is done, and now you have choices of your own to make. You have a woman who may love you as I once did. And you have a son.”

Kosh clenched and unclenched his fists, then closed his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. When he opened his eyes, he was looking at Tucker Feye.

T
UCKER DIDN’T THINK THAT ANYTHING COULD SHOCK
him more than finding out his mother was a Klaatu, but he was wrong. Kosh was his
father
?

Neither of them knew what to do. All Tucker could think was,
My mother is a ghost. My uncle is my father.

Still, looking at Kosh’s bright blue eyes, at his long, stubbly chin, Tucker realized that deep inside he had sensed for a long time that Kosh was more like him than his father — than the man he had
thought
was his father.

Kosh, looking as stupefied as Tucker felt, slowly reached out and placed his hand on Tucker’s cheek, as if to make sure he was real.

“Kosh . . .” Emelyn touched Kosh’s sleeve, then inclined her head toward the barn door. “What about Emma?”

“Where did she go?” Kosh asked, looking around confusedly. He hadn’t noticed her leave.

“I think you should find out,” Emelyn said.

Kosh looked from Emelyn to Tucker, then at the image of Iyl Rayn, then back at Tucker. “I still can’t believe you blew up my barn.”

“That was long ago,” said Iyl Rayn. “Emma is here now.”

Kosh stared at her, drew a shuddering breath, then ran out after Emma.

“Kosh is not very smart sometimes,” Lia said.

“Yes he is,” Tucker said, leaping to Kosh’s defense.

“That’s not the kind of smart I meant,” Lia said.

“Kosh is more tender and thoughtful than you know,” said Iyl Rayn. “He will make Emma happy.”

“Yes, but first he will make her cry,” Lia said.

Emelyn laughed.

“Kosh and Emma will have to make an important decision soon,” said Iyl Rayn. “As will you all. We are at the Terminus, as you know — the forward edge of the existence of the diskos. I have made a pact with the Gnomon. The diskos are being dismantled even as we speak. Soon, the disko you see before you will be the only remaining portal to the past. One day it, too, will be gone.”

“Why do the Gnomon want to destroy the diskos?” Lia asked.

“The Gnomon fear being caught in a loop,” said Iyl Rayn. “They were unduly disturbed by your cat-with-no-beginning-or-end, and by the time stub in which Tom Krause found himself.”

“Tom?” Tucker heard himself say.

“What is a time stub?” Lia asked.

“Tom Krause returned to a Hopewell in which neither of you ever existed. In fact, his continued existence in that time stub is uncertain.”

Tucker recalled his visit to Hopewell when Red Grauber and Henry Hall had claimed to have never heard of the Krauses. Had that been a time stub too?

“How is that possible?” he asked.

“This is precisely what concerns the Gnomon. They fear that which they do not understand. It may be that we live many lives, that we each contain within us multitudes. And if each tic and quaver of the timestream creates a new reality, what of it? Consider the lepidopteran as it moves through the stages of its short life: ovum, larva, pupa, imago. Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. Ovum, larva, pupa, imago . . . over and over again, for millennia upon millennia. Is each turn of the wheel unique and special? To the butterfly, perhaps. The universe remains indifferent.

“The Boggsians, for example, are content to relive their lives again and again. They have retreated into the past. They work their farms, raise their children, and live their lives as they always have. They have created their own time stub. That choice is available to you as well. So long as this disko remains functional, the past remains open to you.”

“I can think of places I would prefer not to revisit,” Lia said.

“Me too,” Tucker said. He thought for a moment, then asked, “What happened to Dad? I mean —”

“You mean the man who loved you and raised you as his son,” Iyl Rayn said.

Tucker swallowed, surprised to feel his eyes well with tears.

“He did love you,” said Iyl Rayn, “He lost his way; but never doubt that he loved you.”

“He tried to kill me.”

“Had it come to that, he could not have brought himself to do so. Master Gheen would have wielded the blade, as he did with your friend Tom.”

“But what happened to him?”

“Adrian was visited by a Timesweep in his prison cell in Hopewell. He was transported to Romelas, at the time of the Yar Rebellion, where he ended his days preaching the word of Christ, as he set out to do as a young man.”

“It’s true,” Lia said. “I saw him there, in a church. A Christian church. He recognized me.”

“But Romelas is gone,” Tucker said. “Are there any Christians left at all?”

“The world is large — I am sure there are some, possibly the descendants of those whom Adrian reached with his message. What about you?”

“I don’t know what I am anymore,” Tucker said.

“You have time to think about it.” Iyl Rayn’s indistinct features swam, then coalesced into a smile, and for the first time, Tucker saw in her his mother’s face.