Black Hull (27 page)

“Sorry,” FOD said.

Do not mention the true nature of the
Utopias. I know it tempts you, but you’ll ruin her only hope. Nothing else
exists for a sexbot in the universe.

I’m done. Get out of my head.

If you do, I will prevent your trip
home. That should be good enough a threat, yes?

Fuck you.

“Well?” Axa asked, perplexed.

“Yes, well?” XJ repeated after her. “I’d
like to know when we rendezvous with Sera.”

“XJ—how many times—I’ve been trying to
tell him, over and over, but he just doesn’t seem to understand that she’s—”
Mick cut GR off:

“Soon. You’ll see her soon, okay?”

“Thanks Mick. Will we have enough time
to play our game of chess? I’m afraid that—spacequake—destroyed our setup.”

“Of course,” Mick smiled. XJ released a
familiar curl of smoke from his neck. He turned to FOD, as did everyone else,
looking for an explanation of what had happened, and where they were now.

“I’ll give you the bad news first. We’ve
got a taint.”

“Who?” Axa asked.

“You…” FOD said, his deep eyes drilling
into her. “And I’d prefer you were dead and ejected than on my ship. But he
won’t go for that.”

Axa looked at Mick.

“That’s impossible, I only did the
usual—”

“They activated your taint when they
kidnapped you so they could collect an additional bounty, after they raped
you.”

Where’s your filter god damn it?

I am the only unfiltered truth left to
mankind.

“Where’s Sera?”

“She’s dead—they killed her,” GR blurted.

“GR!” XJ squealed. “How dare you!”

“She
is
dead. He’ll forget again
though. They’ve had too long a relationship—his AM is too bad—he can’t retain
that she’s gone.”

“But Mick, you just said—” XJ said.

“I wasn’t lying either, was I FOD?” Mick
turned to FOD.

“No, he’s not lying. You’ll see her
soon.”

“You’re a liar, GR. I’ll say, your AM
gets worse and worse all the time. And you talk about mine. No wonder you never
play chess with me.”

FOD said to Axa, “We boarded their ship,
the bounty hunters. I was taking care of everything. She didn’t listen, came
aboard, got herself killed.”

“She did it to save you,” Mick said.

“She should have listened. She’d be
alive,” FOD returned coldly.

“Who are they talking about now?” XJ
asked GR.

“Don’t know, ” he replied.

They’re both deteriorating fast. Does
the .HUM erode?

No, the .HUM’s in their memory. The
alzeimagnetism affects their electromagnetic neural pathways. Their original
consciousness, as it was when the .HUM was taken, is intact in there somewhere.

“She was tainted, and by then, so were
you. We had a tail before we laid you down in the infirmary. A UCA battalion
tail.”

Axa moaned, grabbing at her stomach.

“You okay?” Mick asked.

“Fine.”

“You’re lucky. This ship has one hell of
an infirmary station. Top of the line. The UCA spared no expense,” FOD said.

“Did you leave her behind?”

“No. We dropped her body off. I was paid
to protect her. My last ties to human formality nearly got us killed,” FOD
said. “I thought of killing you. But I’m responsible for you now, and so you’re
still alive.”

“What do you mean, responsible for
her?
”
Mick said. Puzzled, he looked to Axa. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

“I think so.”

“I’m the reason she’s out here,” FOD
said.

“How’s that?” Mick asked.

XJ and GR walked off, distracted by some
plan XJ cooked up whereby they would repair
The Great Auk’s
engine.

“You know I sent a body, from one of the
organ worlds. Untraceable, after I circmodded him. He took
her
with
him.”

“Why?”

“I have a permit, I got him off world,
past security checks at the system edge,” Axa said.

“This ship,
The Great Auk,
has
been the primary investment of the UCA military for the past six years. There
was an entire moon dedicated to its creation and testing. I stole the ship,
obliterated every record and person who worked on it. That’s why we’re alive
now.”

“I don’t understand,” Axa replied.

“They bombed us. It was their only way
to destroy me. A Q-bomb—a force you can’t imagine. The only contingencies this
ship has for such an attack are untested—or,
were
untested: entangled
particle .HUM transfer, or, what we successfully used to escape: wormhole
generation.”

“Wormhole generation? I’ve never heard
of that,” Axa said.

“Welcome,” Mick said.

“We escaped. They killed themselves for
no reason. But there’s no reason to cheer.”

“We’re alive and going to Utopia, right?
That’s reason enough for me,” she said.

Mick looked around, out the black
portholes, to the blanket of stars surrounding them:
What are you getting
at?

FOD looked at him:
I didn’t have time
to input coordinates for the wormhole’s destination.

“Fuck,” Mick said. He slammed the table.
“For what?” he screamed at the ceiling.

You turn to god? That is man’s oldest
lie—sorry— lie is a misnomer: evolutionary stepping-stone. The mythemes served
their purpose for a time. The better for humanity to spread, consume, in tight,
rationalized conformity.

“What is it?” asked Axa.

“He understands that we didn’t land
where we should have. In fact, there are a million preferable places we could
have arrived. We landed in the precise worst-case scenario. Still, I’m pretty
determined. We’ll make a fine last run.”

Where? Where’d we end up? Where are we?

“We are in the Block.”

“Block?” Mick replied.

Doesn’t sound as bad as he’s making it
out to be.

It’s worse.

“That can’t be real—the galaxy? The
Block galaxy—is real?”

“And we’re near its core, honey,” FOD
said.

This place has reached even her
sex-ridden waystation in M82. All know it—fear it.  

Tell me you fuck.

“My, Axa. You are beautiful. If I were
to—one last time,” FOD said. He looked at her, her gentle, warm body. Her dark
eyes watched him in horror, pondering not the absurdity of his advance, but
what her imagination had conjured at the mention of the Block.

The kitchen was
cleared, dishes away, the sink dripping. Mick walked over to it, turned the
faucet all the way off. He dimmed the kitchen light, preparing to return to
couch, where Karen and the kids had already snuggled up, a movie paused. It was
another one of the superhero ones that Christopher loved and Mick couldn’t
stand. Karen didn’t seem to mind either way, so long as they were all
surrounding her. Selby wagged his tail, stood from the rug in the living room,
then went out to see what was taking Mick so long.

“Popcorn’s out here, dad,” Christopher
called.

“Yea Dad, popcorn’s out here,” James
echoed his brother.

Selby looked up at Mick, wagging his
tail. He watched his companion, stilled, reading a card.

“What’s this?” Mick said, half out loud.

“Come on, it’s going to be too late to
start it,” Karen called back. She wanted to feel him, to remember how real he
was. He had only gotten home a week ago, and she knew she would have to tell
him. She just couldn’t do it yet. Things would never be the same once she did,
and it was a time to be selfish, to pretend, to go back in time, and to have
her family, all of it, intact and happy, for just a short while longer.

“What the hell is—Karen?” Mick said
louder, anger entering into his voice.

He’d told her upon coming home what he
had decided on the trip—he would give it all up. The time away was too much. It
was those words that had hurt her the most.
How was I supposed to know? I
could only go by the facts—the fact that I was going to be living alone for the
rest of my life, and see my husband once every three years, three months at a
time.
She’d convinced herself:
The times have changed, but I’m a
Nantucket whaler’s wife. There’s no real difference.
She’d told herself:
There
is a difference—they had wooden knobs, you have Eric.
But again Mick’s
proclamation had been the hope her heart had long ago repressed—he’d opened up
about his anger issues, expressed an interest to work on them. He’d said he
didn’t want to miss out on his kids’ lives anymore.
How was I to know?

She stood up from the couch, pushing
James aside, leaving the cushion of their soft arms and legs. In the dim
kitchen glow she saw a sight to paralyze her: Mick held in his hand a piece of
plastic. Before he could say a word, she knew his onslaught would prevent her
from formulating a lie—it came too quick, too powerfully.

“Eric Reynolds? What the hell is Eric’s
plastic doing here?” Mick said, his volume elevating, his tone deteriorating.

She tried hard to sound normal,
“Paperwork. He had paperwork for me to sign.” The children already cowered in
fright next to Selby, who had retreated. Though their father had been away for
several years, they hadn’t forgotten his rage, or the sudden rise of it.

“Paperwork?” he said.

“Yea, from the night at Fedeli’s,” she
said
.

“Yea?” he said, testing her bait.

“I told him to come do it here, I
couldn’t leave the kids. He left that—I’ve been meaning to call him, I just
haven’t remembered.”

“Christopher,” Mick said, staring out to
his son from across the dark room.

Scared, the boy didn’t respond
immediately. The direction of Mick’s increasing anger transferred to his child:

“Christopher, you answer when I talk to
you—do you understand?” Mick shouted.

“Yes dad.”

“Was Eric Reynolds at the house?”

Mick watched Karen’s reaction; she
turned immediately to her son.

“Don’t fucking lie to me Christopher.
Turn around Karen, what’s the matter?” he went on, stepping forward.

“I don’t remember,” Christopher sobbed.
His mother had given him enough of a look to let him know in an instant:
lie
for me
. He had interpreted it as
lie, or else Dad will hurt us, maybe
kill us.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he said,
an urge rising in him to take his son and lift him up by the neck. He
refrained—he wouldn’t start his home stretch off that way. He’d never
really
hit his kids—nothing he couldn’t justify.

“Was he here or not?” Mick said, softer,
lowering his tone. Karen knew the edge in it though—it was as dangerous, if not
more, than his roar.

“I don’t think so,” Christopher said.
“He might have been.”

“Go to your room, get to your god damn
room. Both of you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” cried James. He
moved his small body away from the dog.

“You’re going to cry now?” Mick charged.

“Mommy!” screamed James.

“I’ll give you something to cry about,”
Mick said. Karen stopped him by the shoulder.

“Are you lying to me?” he said, pausing,
looking into her soul.

“No, no, no,” she moaned. “You’re
imagining it.”

“I’m not imagining this,” he said,
throwing the card to the floor.

The kids raced up the stairs, the joy of
their movie, their family time, forgotten. The wholeness, the security, the
resumed strength of the Comptons as a solitary unit shattered in as much time
as it took for their father to discover the evidence of their mother’s
infidelity. Darkness filled their minds, hopelessness. The end of all things
had come into their home, and it was eating their father alive. They couldn’t
explain why, but they could understand the fear—the fear lit their muscles and
brains. Atop the stairs they listened: