Chains of Redemption (33 page)

"He's going to be fine, but . . ." He handed her the unit.

She shifted the baby so that she could take it. She read the information on the screen, then stared at the doctor. "This can't be."

"But it is," he said. "His cells are even regenerating faster than a normal Fourer's, faster than any hybrid on file. He's carrying your DNA. Genetically altered DNA."

Jessica handed her son to the doctor. "Watch Pete," she ordered. The doctor nodded and took the baby. RJ took the medscan unit and headed for the infirmary. When she demanded to know where Baldor was a nurse told her, and she marched to his room and burst through the door.

Baldor awoke from a drug-induced sleep to see RJ standing at the end of his bed.

"What the hell are you?" she demanded.

"Excuse me?" Baldor said. He was in quite a bit of pain, his brain was foggy from the painkiller they'd given him, and he half thought he was still asleep and dreaming. But as his thoughts cleared he realized she was really there.

"You heard me." She slung the unit at him. He picked it up off his belly and looked at it, it was some sort of chart, numbers and things that made no sense to him at all. He shrugged. He had no idea what she was talking about.

"I'm sorry, maybe it's the drugs, but this just looks like a bunch of gibberish to me."

"Are you going to lay there and tell me that you don't have any idea how you got her DNA? Because it sure as hell isn't mine. She was different from me. Did Stewart make her so she could have children? That's it, isn't it? You're her kid, aren't you? Hers and David's, and he knows I'm not her, and he's sent you here to spy on me, or . . ." She trailed off then. "Only you're a Fourer. Maybe she had an affair with a Fourer, but no, she wasn't there long enough. And you're not old enough. Then how?"

"I have no idea what you're even talking about. Are you all right, RJ?"

She took in a deep breath and let it out. She glared at him as if trying to pull the truth from his eyes. She picked up the medscan and looked at the data again. She looked at him again, and then he realized what she was really doing. She was reading his emotions to see if he was lying to her, but he didn't even know what he was supposed to be lying about.

"There isn't enough of it to be maternally or paternally given. It seems to have come from Grant's DNA, to be a sliver of his genetic material, but how? How did it get there?" she mumbled.

"How did what get where?" Baldor asked in confusion.

"How did my DNA wind up in your body?" she demanded.

Baldor laughed. "Oh that, it's from the blood transfusion."

"What?" she asked.

"Remember when Dad was wounded and he thought he was going to die? He should have died, but you took a syringe of your blood and put it in him and it saved him. The doctor said it changed his chromosomes a little, so Sandra and I heal a little bit faster than other people, and we're hardly ever sick. It's not really that big a deal, is it?" he said.

RJ looked as if she had been kicked in the gut. "No, I suppose not. Get to feeling better." She left, Baldor fell back to sleep, and he all but forgot the incident at once.

Jessica practically ran back to her room, where she took Pete from the doctor and practically threw the medscan at him.

"Well?" he asked, and she damned his curiosity. She explained the incident as Baldor had told it to her.

"Yes, well that would explain it," he said, then added with arched eyebrows. "You forgot the incident?"

He would never know just how close he had come to getting his head snapped off his body in that minute. She turned on him and hissed, "You know how much information is in my brain? How many years of data are stored up there? Even with total recall, do you really expect me to be able to call up even the most obscure incident in mere moments?"

"I'm sorry, General." He bowed and quickly left her presence, so maybe he did know how close he'd come to death.

As the door closed Jessica held her son close to her. Pete fussed a little, no doubt upset because he could feel that she was.

"It's all right, Pete. It's all right. She's far away from us, and she hasn't reproduced. It was just a fluke." But for a minute, just one insane moment, she had been sure that RJ had given birth to her own child. That Stewart had given her yet another thing that he hadn't given Jessica, and all the old resentment for her sibling had felt new.

She looked at her son, Gerald's son. She wished Gerald could have known his son, and that Pete could have known his father. Had she been a normal woman it would have been possible. Of course, if she were a normal woman she would have most probably been dead before she had a chance to meet him.

Gerald would never know his son, but Pete would know his father because she would make sure that he did.

Most of the Abornie approached her with fear, lightly shielded animosity, and only when it was an absolute necessity. They were afraid of her, and they just flat and simple didn't like her. Which was probably just as well, because RJ had decided that she loathed them.

The Abornie loved Topaz and Levits, using any excuse to be near them, and avoided her—and therefore Poley—like the plague.

But then Topaz and Levits did nothing but praise and encourage them, while RJ gladly told them they were all worthless screw-ups, not worth the air they breathed.

RJ worked on her newest project and thought with a wry smile that it was rather like children with a strict parent and a lenient one.

The more lenient parent gives unconditional love and never demands anything from the child, praises the child on every small accomplishment, doctors their wounds without questioning how they got them, and rationalizes their shortcomings. The strict parent shows their love by trying to mold the child into a responsible and complete person, by setting necessary boundaries and demanding a certain amount of responsibility from the child for their own actions. The strict parent tells the child the unhappy truths the child doesn't want to hear, orders them to complete tasks they don't want to do, and punishes them when they screw up.

This was the role RJ had unwittingly taken on, the big difference being that she really didn't even care about the Abornie. Her only reason for getting involved with them at all was that she liked the planet, and didn't want them to screw it up again.

Although she had begun to believe that the planet's genetically engineered plant life wouldn't allow it to be destroyed. The plants were resilient, there was no doubt about that. You could cut a tree down, even pull it up, and within a week there would be a sapling in the spot. Give it six months and it was a full-sized tree again.

She had done extensive experiments, just tinkering around to see exactly how resilient the plant life was. She moved them into the ship into artificial light. At first they went through a little shock, and for about a week it looked like they weren't going to do as well as they did with real sunlight. Then they adapted, and you couldn't tell any difference between them and the plants growing outside.

On the planet's surface it rained an average of three times a week, so she tried removing them from water. After about a week they started to wilt. At the end of two they started to look really bad. But at the end of three weeks, the plants actually started to perk up again. What she found after running several years of experiments was that the plants could adapt to damn near anything and thrive.

They could resist temperatures as high as a hundred and fifty degrees, and as low as twelve degrees and still flourish. Above or below that range they went dormant, but the minute you lowered or raised the temperature they came right back again.

If forced, they could go as long as three months without water; after that they would again enter a dormant stage. But the minute water hit them they grew again. They would come back even after two years without water, but after that, some never recovered. They had an uncanny ability to adapt to almost anything you threw their way, so it would be hard, but not impossible, for the Abornie to trash out Frionia again.

RJ would let Topaz and Levits indulge the Abornie just so long, and then she would step in and do what was necessary to keep them from wiping themselves and the planet out, try to teach them some real values.

Of course since Topaz, and especially Levits, made it very clear that they just felt she was being over careful and mean, the Abornie mostly snuck around behind her back and did as they damn well pleased.

Just like a kid with a strict parent and a lenient one.

Over the years she had mostly given up. Maybe it showed a flaw in her personality that she couldn't even make herself care what happened to them. The one positive thing contact with the Abornie had done for RJ was to make her appreciate the human race a whole lot more.

The Abornie had a life expectancy of two hundred and fifty Earth years. For the first two hundred and twenty-five years they were usually completely ambulatory. They had all their health and all their senses, and it was only after two hundred and twenty-five years that their health started to fade at all.

Humans, even in the Reliance where medicine was highly advanced, only had an average life expectancy of a hundred years, and the last twenty of that was usually spent just trying to stay alive. Humans had short lives; they spent most of their short lives just trying to figure out what it was all about. About the time they finally figured it out it was way too late to enjoy it. If the Reliance had ever let you enjoy anything at all.

If humans had been given the life expectancy of an Abornie, there was no telling how they might have advanced and grown as a people. It is quite possible that the wisdom that humans would have gained from such long lives would have made it impossible for the Reliance or anything like it to have ever taken over.

But the Abornie wasted this gift. The only lesson they ever seemed to learn was that having more, and doing less to have more, was what it was all about. Even the equal sharing of chores she had noticed when she first observed them—that she had thought at the time showed how advanced they were—had turned out not to be an overriding air of fairness at all. Instead, it was a direct result of their absolute childishness, and she didn't mean in the good sense. If one Abornie sat down for whatever reason, they all sat down, because why should one Abornie do anything if even one other Abornie is not doing anything? If they hadn't gotten over this, they no doubt would have starved out. The Abornie picked leaders based solely on popularity and argued about everything. Getting them to actually work together was like pulling teeth. The only thing any of them seemed to have the smallest bit of talent for was spending copious amounts of time trying to figure out the easiest way to do something. For this reason, anything they were doing always took five times as long as if they had just done it in the first place.

They were the proof that breeding would tell, that environment could only effectively combat breeding if you changed someone's environment completely. Their ancestors had been a bunch of egg-headed scientists who had probably never shed a drop of sweat in their lives. To add insult to injury, these were people so selfish that they valued their own lives above that of their fellow beings.

To find out exactly what caliber of people had gone into the bunkers you only had to ask yourself a few simple questions. Would you want to live on a dead world? Do you think you deserve to live more than your family, your friends, your neighbors, or even the guy who runs the corner market? Could you really stand being alive knowing that by taking a place in the bunker you had ensured someone else's demise? How vain do you have to be to think you deserve to be the future of a race's gene pool?

RJ had read everything she could find on the planet to read in the years she had been here, and the utter and complete selfishness of the Abornie's ancestors was abhorrent. It seemed that there had actually been room for hundreds of thousands more people in the bunkers, and enough supplies to sustain them. But the scientists, doctors and politicians had decided that they had no idea how long the "winter" would last, and that they were better off keeping their numbers to a bare minimum to ensure their own personal survival. Some of the occupants of the bunkers had actually decided to go to the bunkers while leaving their entire family on the surface to die. They had written what she was sure they thought were heart-rending accounts of how they'd been forced to go below and leave their loved ones to die. How hard the decision had been for them. RJ wasn't buying any of it. Their family, friends, homes, pets, everything would be destroyed, they knew it, and they chose to save their own asses.

The Abornie were the descendants of people who thought it showed great courage that they were willing to go below and leave everyone else to die to save their race. They'd had ice water for blood.

Even their on-going feud with the Ocupods had been their own damn fault. They had realized early on—because though they were selfish and self-centered, they were also incredibly intelligent—that the Ocupods attacked them only when they tried to use any kind of machinery, electricity, or basically any form of technology. But they just kept trying anyway, until the Ocupods eventually ran them out of the ruins where they had been living and into the jungles. Even then they kept trying, even though it had caused the death of many of their people, because they just wanted to have it all. They knew that technology existed, and they were willing to sacrifice lives—as long as it wasn't theirs, and no one ever thinks it's going to be them—just to have simpler lives.