Tomorrow’s Heritage (18 page)

Old resentment flared within Todd. She’ll defend Pat, but Mari can call me names and slap me and it’s okay.

Mariette stood her ground. “You can’t order me around now, Mother, or tell me to clean up my language. I’m not a baby any more, and neither is Pat. Though he’s acting like one, like a baby scared of the dark.”

To Todd’s amazement, Pat turned his back on both women, going to Carissa. She had been sitting very still, saying nothing much at all, not seeming afraid, even while Pat and Jael were flirting with hysteria. Carissa reached out to Pat, offering him some unseen strength he badly wanted. The scene diverted Jael’s anger. She faltered, watching the pair as they shared and shut everyone else outside themselves. “I’m thinking of our baby, of all Earth’s children . . .” Pat said softly.

“But not of those who choose to go into space,” Mari retorted bitterly.

“If they desert us, they’ll have to take the consequences.”

“What consequences?” Todd asked. He was hoarse from shouting. At this rate, Dian would
have
to make the presentation to the Science Council. “You don’t even know what the consequences are going to be. They may be wonderful. What’s this family all about? Mother? Pat? Mari? What would Dad think of us right now? You know what he’d think. He never backed off from a new idea, no matter how risky. Never! And he wasn’t ashamed to shake a rival’s hand, either. We’ve got to try.
He
never stopped trying. He’d embrace this first contact—and you know it!”

They were a wall. Mariette, wrapping her Goddard loyalties about herself like a flag, sulking at the disappointment that the alien had put them in the shadow. Jael, empty-faced with terror, more frightened than Todd had ever seen her, unreachable in that fear. Pat, thinking hard along political lines, converting the discovery of the ages into a party campaign, organizing his paranoia into world-arousing oratory. Carissa was his comet’s tail, trusting in him to figure a way out of the confusion.

“Do you know what Dad’s lab motto was?” Todd rasped.

Jael was ahead of him. She recited mechanically: “ ‘We found a cure for cancer before we knew what was causing it.’ ” She wasn’t there. None of this had meant anything to her at all. His childhood faith had been built on sand instead of rock, and he had never fully understood that until this moment. Ward was gone. And now Jael wasn’t there for him, either. The pain sank deep, ripping out something important from his mind and heart. Incredibly, Jael sensed his loss. She begged forgiveness. “I’m sorry, Todd. It’s just too much. I can’t cope with this.”

“Mother, there wasn’t any way to break the news gradually. We weren’t sure ourselves until just a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying to decide how to tell you. I thought the family should know first.” Todd swallowed a surge of nausea. “This is . . . this is the most important thing that’s ever happened. Can’t you see that? It’s harnessing fire. It’s being Columbus and Neil Armstrong and Ward Saunder all in one.”

“Maybe we can hold it back, buy some time,” Pat muttered, talking to himself under the guise of discussing it privately with Carissa. She nodded, agreeing to anything he said.

“Oh, for—where have you been for the past hour?” Mari slapped her forehead in helpless disgust. “I can’t believe you’re Dad’s son, Pat. Don’t you ever think about anything but propaganda? That signal is tracking us as we orbit, all us little solar children—Earth, Moon, Goddard. There is no way you can suppress it. None. Not even if you get to be dictator of Earth and imprison or freeze every scientist who might detect that signal. Because you damned well won’t suppress Goddard! We’re going to be listening and talking to it on our own. Don’t worry, Todd. We’re not going to cross your circuits. We’ll pick up on your data and follow your patterns. But we’ll cteate our own signals.” She smiled thinly at Todd. “I don’t imagine Pat could suppress
you
, could he? And there are other telescopes, other listeners in orbit above us. As Todd says, not good ears, but good enough. In a few months, that signal will be bombing in, by his data. Face it, Pat! It’s coming, like it or not!”

Tears flowed again, and Mari broke off her tirade. Conflicting emotions battered her. She crawled out of her chair, clinging to the back, blindly beating with her fists and repeating a litany. “Dammit, dammit, they beat us, Kevin. They beat us. Dammit, dammit, dammit . . .”

“You shouldn’t have meddled, Todd,” Jael said distractedly. “None of us should have. Maybe we tried to go too far. We should have quit while we were ahead.”

“Mother, you can’t stay ahead if you stand still. We’ve got to keep trying, even if the possibilities are scary.” Todd laughed, and the sound was hollow in his ears.

Dian suddenly spoke up. “I remember something about your dad, Todd. I read it in an article. I think it must have been true. It sounded like something he would have said. The critics were questioning him about one of his inventions, the viral inhibitor, I believe. They claimed he was messing with nature, that maybe it wouldn’t stop the plague but would wipe us all out, that he was going too fast. Ward Saunder said even the old Club of Rome used computers to plot out their doomsaying when they predicted Earth’s civilization would collapse in thirty or forty years. He thought that was ironic. An old-fashioned bunch of analysts, worrying about mankind on a non-stop slide through too much growth and progress, and they used the latest technology to make their points.”

“They were right in many respects,” Pat said emphatically. She had touched an area he knew well. “The famines, the plagues, the wars—they came true. We’re a long way from being out of that bunch of disasters even now.”

“And who knows when the next one will hit?” Pat hadn’t perceived that steel in Dian’s personality. He pulled up short, staring at her. “You want to talk disaster, Mr. Saunder? I cut my baby teeth on it. So, will it be a disaster? You tell me. Guarantee it. Bet your life on it. I’ve been there, and
I’m
not going to hide and scream and say the aliens are coming to eat us. Maybe that means that knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve seen all those disasters, and I say we’ve got to talk to that messenger. Maybe it’ll bring us a present, a solution, cures to our diseases, genuine immortality, the secrets of the universe. How do you know? You don’t! Neither do we. But if you can’t stop it, you’d better count on rolling with it, or finding a new friend.”

Todd jumped in to help her out. “The next disaster to hit us from within could be the worst yet, Pat. We just might need the help of intelligent aliens to get us out of it. Pat?”

“I want all your data, your decryption, as soon as your people get them.”

Dian dropped the holo-mode into its case. Nobody wanted to see the backup stats. They believed. That hadn’t been the problem. So much for secrecy, Todd thought. They might as well have put it on ComLink. At least that would have spread the panic around generally.

“Is that an order, Pat?” Todd asked softly.

“Of course it is!” Mari pulled herself together and marched toward the elevator. “Watch out for him. He’s so typical. When you turn this loose, the Earth Firsters will hit you with everything they’ve got, Todd.”

“Mariette, where are you going?” Jael demanded, starting to follow her.

Mariette sidestepped Jael’s grab at her arm. “I’m leaving. I’ll rent a flier from Orleans and have it come out and pick me up if you won’t let someone take me to the mainland. Then I’m grabbing the first transport heading out and up. It was a mistake to come here at all.”

Jael persisted, boring in, blocking Mari’s way. Surprisingly, she resorted to a caress, stroking Mariette’s face. “Don’t do this. You mustn’t. We can work it out. We’ve been separated from one another for so long—that’s why we quarrel.”

“I don’t quarrel with Todd like I do with you and Pat. He, at least, is willing to admit I might have some right on my side. But you and Pat won’t let me breathe. It’s got to be your way or not at all. You’re stagnating, smothering yourselves on this planet, and you’re trying to smother me, too.” Mari giggled, and Jael’s jaw dropped. “That’s amazing!” Mariette exclaimed. “Do you know where I heard that? Do you remember? No, I suppose you’ve conveniently wiped it out of your memory. Grandfather Hartman. I was about ten, and he dropped in, unannounced. Big, noisy argument! Him saying we were living like animals in that crater and how could you turn your back on all the fine, cultural things the Hartmans had labored for, throw away their money and name and dignity—all for a crazy inventor.”

Jael’s face froze, the earlier tenderness gone. Merciless, Mari struck her to the bone. “I remember your slicing him up, too. I burned it in my mind, because I never wanted to forget the way you were then. ‘Ward Saunder’s name will eclipse everything the Hartmans ever did or ever will do,’ you said with pride. ‘I won’t go back to that decadent stagnation. I was smothering there. Here, with Ward, I’m free.’ ”

Mari was eight centimeters taller than Jael, dark, thin, and long-boned, as Ward had been and as Jael was not. But they might have been identical twins confronting each other with awesome, feminine cold rage across the generations. Too different. And too much the same, because too much time had passed since Jael’s rebellion against her own parents. She couldn’t see the same thing happening between Mariette and herself.

Neither woman lowered her eyes, but Mari turned away. It wasn’t a defeat. She continued toward the elevator, cueing the servo, hurrying inside.

Carissa tried to break the shock with trite, consoling words. No one reacted, and she gave up. At last Pat straightened up and appealed to his brother. “You must give me everything you get, Todd, please.”

“This can’t be political. And I’m not going to feed your campaign with data you’ll twist into paranoia. Look, you’ll get all you need from the public sources. Even if you dropped this holo-mode in the sea, there are ten others just like it. And if you destroy those, in a few weeks, a month, two, the media are going to be flooded with alien messenger speculation. Project Search has the honor of being first, but it won’t be the last.”

“But you have the decoders,” Pat said, looking searchingly at Dian.

“That’s right,” she agreed. “I’m a scientist, Mr. Saunder. What I puzzle out won’t be classified. But I’m not going to let it go public piecemeal. It’s going to come in batches, and I don’t hand it just to you or even just to Todd. It’s knowledge. It belongs to the whole world, and to Goddard.”

“Yes, but . . .” Pat was combing his hair with his fingers. He wasn’t showing off for the cameras, for once. The gesture was completely unconscious.

Todd saved Dian further trouble. “We go to the Science Council conference directly from here. After that, the facts are available to the world. You’ll have to get in line along with everybody else.”

“You don’t have an exclusive.” Pat looked mean and dangerous. “Earth First has pull, and some military contacts. There are other decoders . . .”

“And you’re the one who worries about wasting money and resources!” Todd laughed weakly. “Sure. Go ahead. Duplicate our efforts. I happen to think I’ve got the best team in the world. Dian and Beth and Wu Mim and Anatole have been on top of this for months. If you want to make it a race, be my guest.”

“You can be hurt,” Pat warned. “You’ve got stock in SE Consolidated and SE Trans Co, not to mention all your ground-based ComLink installations.”

“Are you going to shoot up my satellites and people with missiles, too?”

Pat recoiled in shock. “I didn’t mean that . . .”

“Didn’t you? Mari wasn’t exaggerating. I was almost killed by someone who has a grudge against a Saunder supported project—the Colony. Now you threaten Project Search—and me. Just what am I supposed to think you meant? What is Mari supposed to think?”

“It was a financial threat. I didn’t say anything about missiles. I don’t have any goddamned missiles!” Pat shouted.

Dian offered the holo-mode case to Todd, who said, “You’re getting good at undercutting your siblings financially. But you’d better check and see if you can carry through before you threaten me. I’m diversified. A lot. I won’t say you can’t make a dent. But you can’t cut off my lifeline like Earth First is cutting off Goddard’s funds in the Protectors of Earth committees. Unlike Goddard, I won’t talk secession. I’ll fight you, Pat. If you want a Saunder civil war, you’ll get it.”

Visibly shaken, Pat backpedaled. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . don’t, kid! Not us. Not you and me. We’ve got so much between us.”

“Not as much as we used to. And what about Mari? There’s plenty of love there, too. If I didn’t get through to you on anything else, Pat, hang onto this—Kevin McKelvey and that Colony will fight if you push them too hard. And they’ll fight damned mean.

“The alien messenger is going to look at us as humans. That’s it. It’s not going to distinguish between Earth First and Goddard or cities or seabed installations or primitive farms. We’re all the same species, and we ought to act like it. You keep up your present course, and there may not be any Saunder name for that baby to inherit. We just may kill ourselves off before the messenger ever gets close enough to shake our hand or deliver a warning to us, if it turns out to be hostile. Think about that. Think
hard
.”

He and Dian started for the elevator. Jael stopped them. She waited. Obediently, hurting inside, Todd gave her a good-night kiss. He peered into those eyes which were so like his own. What he saw was discouraging. “I wanted this to be happy news, Mother. It would have made Dad happy, you know.”

Reluctantly, JaeI nodded. “Yes, it would have. You’re very much like him. It’s just that . . . that the rest of us don’t have your courage.” Todd didn’t trust himself to speak. Jael whispered, “Mari . . . where did I . . . why did it go wrong? Please . . .”

“I’ll talk to her, or try to,” Todd promised. The weariness returned to him full force, a burden he didn’t think he could take. He kept promising. He couldn’t turn her down. Todd attempted a smile, but couldn’t manage it. We Spacers are supposed to speak the same language . . .”

“The language of the alien messenger,” Pat said. His voice was ice. He was staring at the now-empty holomode projector, thinking. The wrong thoughts. There would be no soothing, persuasive speeches from Pat Saunder, no famous voice to guide humanity toward the coming event, to help it accept the alien contact. The future seethed with panic and fear—all the wrong things.

It seemed like ten kilometers to the elevator and hours before the doors opened. The holo-mode case weighted Todd’s hand and arm. The wonderful discovery. Mankind’s future. The news—
we are not alone.

Neither was he, but it felt that way. Dian offered the solace of her presence, comforting for the beloved people he was losing. He barely sensed her hand on his arm or heard the elevator doors slide shut. It seemed an appropriate ending to a disastrous evening when the cage began to sink back toward the private suites two levels below. They weren’t going all the way down, but they had taken one hell of an emotional knockdown.

“It’ll work,” Dian said gently. “You’ll see.”

“It’s got to. For all of us.”