Chains of Redemption (37 page)

Suddenly she knew the exact moment when the little piece of her spirit that had remained had departed. It was the damned Ocupod incident.

When that happened, I knew. And once I knew there was no going back. I was no different in the minds of any of them that day than the Ocupods. We had all been created, and therefore our feelings didn't matter. It would have been so easy for Levits to just let me kill the bastard to make a point. But no, he chose the Abornie over me. He chose to make me look like a moron rather than let the Ocupods have the killer. Because he never understood that the Ocupods had as much right to thrive as the Abornie did. I knew then that I was still just a freak in the eyes of the masses, and that was when I reached the shit saturation point. I just couldn't take the crap anymore. Everyone seemed more interested in everyone else's needs, in their feelings than mine. Because I'm bulletproof they treat me like I can't be hurt, and the only one who ever really understood that I could be was Whitey.

I just shut down. I didn't even know I'd done it, but I just shut myself off from everyone else. I was tired of being used when I was handy and forgotten when I was no longer necessary or entertaining. Tired of playing second fiddle, as Topaz would say. I was sick to death of everyone else's needs being more important than mine. So I just moved myself to a place where they couldn't hurt me, and now . . . I'm barely even alive. That's why Topaz decided to stay. Why Poley's found a new friend, because I wasn't really there for them anymore.

She started to blame herself for the way she felt, but it wasn't all her fault. How much could one person, even her, be expected to put up with, before something inside them said
enough
?

Still she hated the way she felt, or rather the way she didn't feel.

She started to get up several times and found that she simply didn't have the will to do it. At one point Poley walked up to her. "RJ, are you having a malfunction?" he asked, standing at her feet and looking down at her.

"Yes," she hissed.

"Do you need medical attention?"

"No!" she snapped.

"Would you like me to help you up?"

"No . . . I just want to lie here. Why don't you go play with your new friend and leave me be?"

"Are you mad at me because of Alan?"

"I'm not capable of working up mad. In fact, I can't even seem to work up an 'I don't give a shit'."

"You are depressed," Poley said, nodding his understanding, "because of Levits and Topaz."

"And about a billion other things," she said.

"I could give you a shot . . ."

"To make me believe that I'm happy? No thanks."

"Alan is making dinner, would you like to eat?" Poley asked. No doubt this was why he'd come looking for her in the first place.

"No, I'll just lay here staring at Father, wondering why he ever bothered to make me."

"He made you because he needed you."

"What do you mean?"

"You and your siblings were his key to eternal life."

"Freaking beautiful."

"RJ, staring at father will not help your depression," Poley said matter-of-factly.

"Well what would . . . short of drugging me up?" RJ asked flippantly.

"Perhaps if you went to work with your plants," Poley suggested.

He was trying to be helpful, so maybe he hadn't totally replaced her in his personality chips. Problem was she didn't want to be helped. "I don't want to work with my plants."

"What's wrong exactly?" Poley asked.

"Everything, Poley. Think about it. I'm ancient, so I should have it all figured out by now and I don't. I'm not even close. I don't know how to feel anymore. I've forgotten what it's like to be truly alive. You're just learning, and I'm forgetting." She rolled over and lay her face on the cool steel floor. "Sometimes it's not that life is bad, it's just that it isn't good. Do you know what I mean?"

"Not really."

"It's like nothing's really wrong but it isn't right either."

"That doesn't make any sense RJ . . . Perhaps you should go into the cryogenic chamber. I could wake you up when we reach our space."

"And I can be in this same great mood, five years older and covered in goo, no thanks," RJ said to the floor. "I've got to figure out what's missing and how to get it back before we get home, or what's the point of going home at all?"

"I've promised Alan that he can see Marge."

RJ banged her head on the floor.

"That won't help, either," Poley said.

"Maybe not, but it feels so good when I quit."

The campaign wasn't finished, yet Jessica found herself leaving the battle with a minimal crew and heading back to Earth.

"He'll be all right, Mom," Pete said, as he sat down beside her on the bed in Jessica's quarters.

Jessica shook her head. "No . . . no Pete, he won't be. He's an old man and he's sick. He's going to die. I just . . . I need to see him one more time." She cried, and he put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her. Pete had grown up in battle, he knew all about death. She saw no reason to whitewash it for him now. Besides, she couldn't be strong for him, she needed him to be strong for her. "I just need to see him. To talk to him before he dies."

Pete nodded silently, and she realized he was crying, too. Mickey had ordered him made, but all that mattered to Pete right now was that Mickey had always been in his life, and now he wasn't going to be. At twelve there were a lot of things about himself that Pete didn't know. Jessica knew the time to tell him was rapidly approaching, but she'd put it off this long, so she could put it off a little while longer.

Dax met their boat at the docks, where they embraced and had a good cry. Finally Jessica pulled away from him and dried her eyes.

"Can I see him now? Is he lucid?"

"Yes and yes. He's actually asking to see you every time he wakes up," Dax answered. "His brain's as sharp as it ever was, it's his body . . . It's just giving out on him."

She and Pete followed Dax to Mickey's room, but at the door Jessica stopped.

"I . . . I'd like to see him alone."

Dax nodded. "Come on, Pete, we'll go get something to eat."

Pete looked reluctantly at his mother, and she forced a smile. "You must be upset, someone has said 'food,' and you aren't gone already." She put her hand against his cheek and then bent down and kissed his forehead. "Go on."

He nodded and followed Dax. Jessica took a deep breath and entered the room. She walked right up to Mickey's bedside and dismissed the nurse in attendance with a nod of her head. Jessica sat down in the chair that had been placed there for visitors and took Mickey's hand. To say he didn't look like himself would have been a horrible understatement. He was almost skeletal, and his color was all but non-existent.

"You're here. Thank God, I don't think I could have held on much longer," he said, his voice showing just how weak he was.

"So, just what's wrong with you?" she asked bluntly, but with obvious concern.

He smiled, and he suddenly looked like Mickey again. "It would be easier for me to explain what isn't wrong with me."

Jessica laughed, the tears falling from her eyes and splashing on their joined hands. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you."

"You'll do fine," he said.

"I'll miss you . . . There's something I have to tell you." Her sobbing made her almost incoherent, so she took a deep breath and tried to get herself under control. "Something I should have told you a long time ago . . ."

"I know already," he interrupted.

"No, you couldn't, I'm . . ."

"Jessica Kirk. Yes, I know," Mickey said with a smile.

"But . . . how?"

"Right from the beginning I had my doubts. Remember one of the first things you ever told me was that 'people see what they want to see'? Well, I wanted to see RJ, and right away I started to ask myself what the chances were that RJ could have actually survived the attack that killed even Poley and Topaz, then escaped from the Reliance to return here. It seemed too good to be true. Then there were the little things." He coughed a little, and then continued. "RJ couldn't forget things, yet there were obvious gaps in your memory. Mostly they were small things, so I rationalized them away, told myself you'd had some sort of breakdown. I mean, you were obviously crazy. Sorry, no offense."

"None taken."

"Somewhere deep down, I think I knew all along that you weren't RJ, but I was never a hundred percent sure until Diana died and you started looking for Topaz's formula. You see, Topaz used the serum he'd created, but he was never actually able to duplicate it . . ."

"Something happened. Something outside the bounds of his experiment," Jessica said with a sigh. "That's why the formula wasn't on file anywhere, because he didn't know how he had made it. After he'd lived a few hundred years and learned being eternal wasn't all it was cracked up to be, he just deleted everything he'd ever had on it to make sure no one else could even try."

"Probably. The point is that I hadn't forgotten that fact, and if I hadn't what were the odds that RJ had? It's not the sort of thing RJ, or anyone for that matter, would have forgotten. Unless you just didn't know in the first place. When you spent months and tore the place apart looking for the formula I knew then, for a fact, that you weren't RJ."

"But . . . I could have been one of the others from the batch. Stewart made twelve of us. My chip was dysfunctional, so some of the other's locating chips might have malfunctioned as well. After all, I have both eyes." Jessica felt more than a little cheated, she had wanted to confess, and she wasn't at all sure that she liked the idea that a mere mortal had figured out her clever act.

"The eye was the other thing. See RJ had your eye put into a resin cube, and she carried it in her pocket. If she had lost it she would have been highly pissed off, but you never once mentioned it. And no, I knew you couldn't have been one of the others. Ever since I've known you, you've sat and stared at Alsterase with the same haunted look in your eyes that she had. That's how I knew who you were, and that you'd never hurt either us or the New Alliance again. You had obviously come here looking for some sort of deliverance. Now why would you need to do that unless you were Kirk?" He smiled, a smile that went all the way to his eyes. "Besides, the eyes aren't exactly the same color, are they?"

"They're damn close," Jessica said smiling back.

"Close—as Topaz would say—only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."

"Why didn't you tell everyone, Mickey? Why didn't you order me away?"

"Like I said, at first I just willed myself to believe that you were RJ. I needed to believe that I hadn't lost her, too. By the time I knew for sure . . . You were already my friend, a friend, in many ways more important to me than she was. She left me here to go off on an adventure, and I don't think she ever planned to actually return. But you . . . You always came back. Look where you are right now. You should be across the galaxy fighting one of the final battles in this long campaign, but instead you're here. For no other reason than you knew that I needed you here. You have put my needs, our friendship, above the needs of even the New Alliance."

"But I destroyed Alsterase, I had your friends killed . . ."

"You were a puppet of the state. Like RJ, you broke away. You and she aren't so different. Who knows what horrors RJ committed when she was a Reliance goon? You couldn't have done it at all if it hadn't been for David, and he was supposed to be on our side. If I could forgive him, and I did before anyone else, why couldn't I forgive you?"

"I can't forgive myself."

"I know. Maybe you shouldn't, maybe it's only remembering our sins that keeps us from committing them over and over again."

Jessica nodded; she had begun to believe this herself. "You know . . . She, RJ, she may not actually be dead." Jessica told him what she thought had happened to the ship.

"If anyone could make it back, it would be her. You'd better be ready."

Jessica nodded silently. "I'm sorry, Mickey. Sorry for all the lies. Sorry for all the pain my actions caused you and everyone else."

"I let it go a long time ago. Let me tell you something I probably shouldn't. I think you did what RJ couldn't have done. She would have continued to pound the Reliance, and we would have fought many successful campaigns, but I don't think we ever would have won. You see, RJ was all about the fight, all about battle strategy, but she didn't have your training in government. You implemented political answers to problems that never would have occurred to her, or any of the rest of us for that matter.

"The talents that allowed you to successfully attack and destroy Alsterase were the same talents you used to take the Reliance down. Sort of a kick in the Reliance's pants when you think about it. They taught you how to play dirty politics, and you wound up turning their own tactics on them. RJ never would have done that, because she didn't have the training for it."