From the Personal Journal of Kai-Lee Symon
Five years. Has it really been that long since we escaped from the Janus?
At times, I still can’t believe we got away with it. Marisol’s last-minute, armed-and-dangerous appearance was the final ironic twist in a story knotted with them. She and I laugh about it now, but I remember all too clearly the numb despair we felt when we realized she had gotten the drop on us. I thought we were done for right up to the second she pulled her left hand out of her jacket pocket and extended it, palm up, revealing the metallic vial containing her DNA. Hefting the weapon with her other hand, she invited us to choose: “Either I’m going with you, or you’re not going,” she said.
It was the one and only time I’ve ever seen Rune Gaspar completely flummoxed. Of course, his stunned expression only lasted a second or two before he recovered his unflappable, focused demeanor and tersely ordered her to, “Sit down and strap in,” and wheeled to follow Gregor and Etsuo into the cockpit.
Once we got through takeoff—which was nowhere near as rough as I feared, but not nearly as smooth as I would have liked—and were free to move around the cabin, we converged on her en masse, demanding to know when and how she had changed her mind about the Colonial program and how she had discovered our plan. Unbeknownst to all of us, Marisol had come around to the truth even before Enid asked her to spy on Rune.
“I was a team player right up to the assembly,” she explained. “But when Garan asked Lawler to address Ke-Ling’s claim that we never had been and would never be the same as our Primes, she gave a non-answer, in my opinion. You can’t just blow a claim like that off with, ‘Oh, we’re confident there are no differences,’ and leave it at that. Your confidence means nothing to me, if you don’t have hard evidence to back it up. I figured if she had that kind of evidence, she would have trotted it out and laid the whole thing to rest. When she didn’t do that, I suspected there might be something to what Ke-Ling had said, after all. My attitude adjustment sort of took off from there.
“I decided to keep it to myself until I decided what to do about it. The undercover assignment of a lifetime,” she said, grinning wryly. “I’m pretty good at that kind of stuff, but I have to admit it was a relief when Huw asked me to watch the Chief. I figured she wouldn’t have asked unless she considered me above suspicion. That surveillance job was both my ace in the hole and my safety net; it gave me a legitimate reason to poke my nose into the inner circle and keep tabs on their doings. It would also provide the early warning and the brief window of opportunity I would need if it looked like someone was onto me.”
On the night of Garan’s disappearance, Marisol—who apparently conducts an extremely efficient search—had covered her assigned area much more quickly Rune anticipated. Once done, she started hunting down her boss to report in and get additional instructions. As fate would have it, she stepped out of the Deck Four-B lift and entered the corridor just in time to see Rune slip out the Gen-Lab and down the hallway toward the aft lift. Since his movements had more of cat burglary than search in them, she immediately wondered what he had been up to.
Stealing quickly and silently into the lab, she pulled up short when she spied the open vault. (Rune later admitted he decided on the spot not to reset the alarm or close the vault. “With a little luck, they wouldn’t discover the breach for hours. By then all their precious DNA would be so much useless submicroscopic goo,” he grinned wickedly. “Sure, I knew they would replace it with new deposits, but I wanted to make a statement.”) Entering the vault, Marisol went with her instincts and did a quick check for Gaspar’s DNA. It was gone. Since he had all but gift-wrapped the opportunity for her, she snatched the vial marked “Cruz” and hurried after him. Her boss obviously had a plan, and knowing him like she did, she was one hundred percent sure ending it all wasn’t on the agenda. When she mentally replayed everything that had happened so far that night—the abandon-ship drill, followed by Garan’s disappearance and Rune’s DNA theft—all the mental tumblers clicked into place. Abandoning her tail on Gaspar, she raced down to the flight deck and again went with her gut: Her chief would opt for the life craft with the cleanest line of egress.
To this day, Rune scowls when she smugly reminds him how she managed to get the jump on him simply by hiding in the passenger-cabin restroom. She had banked on the fact that he would be in too big a hurry to check it.
Once we were safely underway, Rune deprogrammed the biometric locks on the cabin portals, so we could move in. Eran and I picked quarters amidships—creamy beige bulkheads; Berber carpeting flecked in subdued greens, gold, and browns; a king-sized bed we could slide halfway into the bulkhead with one touch of an icon, transforming bed into sofa. Lu painted the portrait she had promised us; we hung it over our bed. As it turned out, the cabin originally assigned to Ke-Ling was two portals down from ours. A horse statue identical to the one we had seen in his quarters on the Janus seemed like his personal gift to us—Eran and I took it back to our place, setting it alone atop a high, rectangular glass-topped table framed in brass. We finished our home with four wide, square, gold-and-brown-striped floor cushions; a compact mahogany desk with slim, elegant lines and delicate brass inlays at the corners; and two fan-backed rattan chairs with seat cushions mottled in abstract whorls of brown and gold edged in burgundy.
At first, everyone felt guilty about taking other people’s things—everyone but Rune, of course. He didn’t have any qualms about availing himself of “the spoils of war,” as he called them. The rest of us got over the guilt, too, eventually. What else could we do? Life had to go on. Maybe the people we had left behind on the Janus would eventually go into my cabin and help themselves, too. I sure hoped so.
Speaking of people and things left behind, we did our best to make sure our DNA wasn’t among them. Eran and Rune scheduled the abandon-ship drill on cleaning day, meaning our quarters had been newly vacuumed and dusted by the android cleaning crews. Not quite as effective as the decontamination Ke-Ling had done, but trying to pull the same stunt would have set off alarms from Deck One-B to Six-A. Once our quarters were shipshape, we sprayed everything—clothes, furniture, carpeting, personal care items, you name it—with a solution Alis gave us, then cranked up the heat in our quarters when we left. The good doctor promised us the combination of heat and chemicals would effectively destroy any genetic material left behind.
Five years later, life is still unfolding and still full of surprises—although these days, most of the surprises are pleasant ones. A year or so after we left the Janus, I realized the Alpha memories implanted in me shortly after birth seemed to be fading. Or maybe not so much fading, as popping up less and less often. I asked Alis about it one night as I was making dinner in the galley. (We take turns cooking, something even Lu has learned to enjoy doing.)
Our doctor was leaning against the table, watching me cut up vegetables for soup. Her eyes narrowed as she thought about my question. “I hadn’t noticed, but you’re right, now that I think about it.”
“So what’s going on?”
Looking pensive, she nibbled her lower lip. “I’m not an expert,” she finally began, “but I would guess our neurochemistry has changed dramatically. Since the chips were set to respond to prescribed chemical processes in our brains ….”
“… and since our brains no longer operate according prescribed guidelines,” I added.
She nodded. “It’s possible the ICEs aren’t being triggered as often.” Neither of us knew for sure if she was right, but the possibility alone made everyone’s day.
As for other surprises ….
Monogamy has broken out big-time on The Awakening. (That’s what we named our ship, by the way.) Lexi and Jordi are still together, of course. Marisol and Isidor became an item a few months after our escape, Na’weh and Rune—two people I would have chosen Most Likely to Be Loners—a few months after that. Lu fell head over heels for Gregor—an interesting couple, to say the least! He’s logical, cautious, and concise, and she … isn’t. Alis and Ziv turned out to be the real deal after all, with no matchmaking help from me. But I would have to say Liriene and Etsuo win the award for cutest and most unlikely couple. You should see them together. I swear, one flutter of those thick, black lashes, one tiny Gallic moue, and that taciturn man melts into a fawning love-struck puddle. Of course, the feeling is mutual; Liriene pampers him shamelessly.
If I had to choose the biggest surprise to date, it would have to be the fact that Eran and I are expecting a child—about two months from now, according to Alis. When he and I first talked about it, we reckoned we should wait to start a family until we got to the planet, which we call New Hope. (Now that we can see our new world from a better angle, we’re sure it’s habitable.) Anyway, Eran and I thought we should wait, until Rune pointedly reminded us we’ll be another fifty years or so getting home. Eighty-five isn’t old, but still. Besides, like Rune says, we don’t know if we’ll find a civilization or have to build one, and adult children will be a big help, if it comes to the latter. So we’re starting our families now. Since we got pregnant first, Eran and I are a kind of test case.
Honesty compels me to admit I almost wimped out before we even got started, and all because Alis refused to deactivate my contraceptive implant until she was sure Eran and I understood what having babies “the old fashioned” way involved. She made us watch this video—I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t pretty. Who knew having a baby was such a sweaty, gritty, gory, painful proposition? Even Alis looked slightly green around the gills.
Eran recovered first. It couldn’t be as bad as it looked, he said, because back in the day, most women had more than one child. Furthermore, medicine had come a long way since that video was made. I had to admit those were two perfectly logical arguments, but as far as I was concerned the deciding factor wasn’t logic but the mysterious maternal urge that seemed to spring up out of nowhere. Now, when I feel our child move inside me, when I think about how little bits of Eran combined with little bits of me to make someone brand new … I’m one hundred percent sure we made the right decision. Whenever Alis does an obstetrical scan and gives us a peek at our daughter, life seems nothing short of miraculous, which only goes to prove Ke-Ling was right when he said life was an ineffable mystery that should be held in reverence and awe. The sheer, unadulterated, beautiful wonder of life hits me hardest when I lay my hand on my unbelievably big belly and recall the journey that brought us to this point.
We still talk about that journey, still ask ourselves questions like, “How did this happen?” and, “Why us?” and, “Can all the amazing, serendipitous turns our lives have taken be written off as random chance?” Is there something or someone … greater … out there? A higher intelligence? A cosmological force? Was Eran right on the money when he described our awakening as a “call to join in again?” Late at night, when our defenses our down, most of us confess we feel that way—although we tend to append a lot of long, drawn-out, appropriately sophisticated disclaimers to the admission. Still, it’s an intriguing idea.
Will we find our answers out here? Or down there on our new world? I have a feeling we’ll we find at least some of them in our children’s eyes. All I know is, we’ll be looking. But if you ask me, life isn’t about having all the answers. I think life is about the questions—admitting they’re there and will always be there, facing them and carrying on, even when you’re not likely to get answers any time soon.
Life is a journey of discovery, a quest to learn about ourselves, the people we meet, and the cosmos around us. Like I told Eran, we’ll make mistakes along the way; no one gets it right all the time. But my guess is, getting it right isn’t what matters most. What matters most is living our unique moments of history the best we can, doing our part to move civilization forward on humanity’s clumsy, risky, and occasionally glorious search for meaning and truth. What matters most is that we all keep searching, no matter what.
Otherwise, why live?
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© 2010, Kathy DiSanto, all rights reserved
