Chains of Redemption (38 page)

"I don't know, she used some pretty dirty tricks herself," Jessica said, not knowing whether to feel insulted or complimented.

"But she didn't know how Reliance hierarchy worked, not the way you did. Don't you see? It was fate. The closer I get to dying, the more I wonder whether I had any control over what I did at all. What put me . . . what puts any of us, in that one position we need to be in to change the universe? All any of us ever are is just a small part of everything else. If I hadn't picked the wrong man's pocket, if I had run further into town instead of down to the docks, I never would have met RJ at all, and I would have died at twenty. I wouldn't have been part of all this, and who's to say that if I had never been part of this that any of it would have happened?"

"It's too easy to say that we're like puppets on a string with little or no control over our own actions. It doesn't give you the credit you deserve for all you've done, nor does it hold me accountable for my crimes. I don't believe it for a second. I know what I did and why I did it. I committed great acts of terror against humankind. Me, my own self, I won't put it on fate, anyone, or anything else."

"At least cut yourself a little slack," Mickey said with a quiet smile.

"I have, or I couldn't have gone on."

"Just know that I don't bear you a grudge." His hand on hers tightened. "In my eyes you have more than earned redemption."

There was that word again. It meant a lot that he loved her even knowing who she was and what she had done. Jessica wished it were as easy as having him say all was forgiven. Talking, especially about all these deep things, was making him tired, so she changed the subject and did all the talking as he listened.

The same total recall that had made it obvious to him that she wasn't RJ now worked to tell stories in detail of happier times. Times they'd spent together with Diana and Gerald and a dozen other friends, most of whom were now dead. She told him stories about Dax when he was a child and about Pete. Times they shared together, only the happy ones, until Mickey had fallen asleep. His hand became limp in hers, but she could still feel his pulse pounding.

She disengaged her hand from his and walked out of the room. The nurse was standing outside the door attentively, and for a second she wondered if he had been listening, but if he had been, he would have been afraid now and he wasn't. So she told him to go back in and keep an eye on Mickey, and she went off in search of her son and Dax. She found Pete sitting alone in the mess hall staring silently at a wall, obviously in deep thought. He rose when he saw her, walked over to meet her in the middle of the room and embraced her; she held him tight for quite awhile.

"So, where's Dax?"

"He had to go. Something to do with some shipments being misdirected or some other presidential shit."

Jessica nodded with a smile. Raise a child with soldiers, and you couldn't expect him not to have a vocabulary like one.

"Come on." She took his hand and started leading him across the compound till they walked out the door and out onto the wall. It was night and the city lights shone on the shore.

"It's beautiful," Pete said.

"Yes."

"What's wrong, I mean besides Mickey? I can tell there's something else bothering you."

And of course he could, because he was an empath, just like her. He was her son in every way, shape and form. He felt the guilt and insecurity beyond her grief.

Jessica took a deep breath and let it out. "It's time I told you who you are."

"I know what I am, mother. I know that I'm a GSH, that I was created from yours and my father's DNA. I know exactly what I am." His voice was filled with panic, as if he feared she was about to tell him that everything he had ever known to be a truth was about to be undone with a stream of words he didn't want to hear.

"I didn't say
what
you are I said
who
, and you can't know who you are because I am your mother, and you don't know who I am."

If Pete had been bothered at all about her revelation it didn't show. In fact, the only strong emotion coming from him had been relief, no doubt because his image of himself and where he'd come from hadn't been altered. He didn't seem to understand at all why her confession was supposed to be such a big deal, and Jessica got a strange feeling that, like Mickey, he'd known all along. She half wished that either Mickey or Pete had started screaming about what a horrible bitch she was. It was as if they just didn't understand the true demon that she had been when she hadn't been RJ. But she'd now been RJ almost as long as she had been Jessica Kirk. So maybe Jessica was dead, and only RJ remained.

That was too easy. She knew what she'd done, and she knew why she'd done it, and they didn't. Maybe if they did they wouldn't be so quick to forgive and forget. She'd had no righteous reasons. She hadn't done it from a sense of duty to the Reliance. She had just wanted to beat her sister. It was simple sibling rivalry. The fact that hundreds, thousands of people had died in their little squabble hadn't really bothered either of them. But RJ had been on the right side. Jessica realized only now that it was this knowledge that had driven her completely mad. That when it was all done and said, not only had RJ beaten her at every turn, but she'd also been fighting the righteous battle, while Jessica had been working for the evil empire.

So on top of everything else, she'd been
wrong
, and that had been more than even her brain could bear.

Meltdown.

It all seemed so long ago now, and it was. Mickey's dying proved that. He had been a young man in his mid twenties when she'd first met him, and now he had died of old age.

They buried him on the island next to Diana. Many people spoke until their words were just garbled sound, meaning nothing. Jessica hadn't spoken, just stood there with Pete and Dax wondering why her tears were no longer flowing.

Mickey had hung on for two weeks after she returned home and then, feeling that even his mind was slipping, he had asked for a lethal injection, a quick death. For those two weeks there was not a single day that she hadn't cried so loudly that her body shook. But from yesterday morning when she had awakened to the news that he had chosen to die in the night, till now, no tears. She was sad, but she was no longer beside herself with grief.

Lonely, she guessed that was what she felt most. Her friend was dead, she was never going to see him again, and she guessed it mostly made her feel lonely. He had been in bad health, and she knew he didn't want to live like that. He'd been able to get around with little or no help right up till the last few weeks of his life, and she understood and guessed she was a little relieved that he had chosen to die before he went through any more pain, or lost anymore of himself. It seemed a proper death for such a noble leader.

She'd miss him.

She walked down to the dock and just stood staring out over the surface of the ocean. She remembered the day she'd jumped in and tried to swim herself to death, and Gerald had come after her. He'd saved her. At the time she'd wondered why, and when he'd died she'd actually hated him for it. Now, well, she hated to think of all she would have left undone, and what she would have missed. She never would have had Pete. Wouldn't have lived to watch Dax grow into the confident leader he had become. To see the Reliance fall.

She was sorry her friend was dead, but she was glad that she was here, alive and fully functional.

It was good to be alive. She took in a deep breath, and felt weird when she realized she actually felt happy.

Who knows, if I live long enough I just might yet deserve Mickey's forgiveness
.

She sat down and dangled her feet over the side of the dock. The breeze in her face was brisk but felt good, and the air off the ocean smelled clean.

Pete walked up beside her and sat down. He put his arm around her, and she put her arm around him.

"You're feeling better," he announced.

"Yes," she said simply.

"Me, too. It's not normal, is it?"

"What?"

"To get over a death so soon?" Pete asked, sounding suddenly uncomfortable with the subject he'd chosen to talk about.

Jessica shrugged. "Who's to say what's normal? We loved Mickey; we'll always remember him. But he was an old man in a lot of pain. He lived a good life, a full life, and he died the way he wanted to. He loved many people, and he was loved by everyone that knew him. I don't think anyone truly disliked him. He's left a son and two grandchildren. He lives on through them. He lives on through us."

Pete nodded. "And we'll always have each other, so we'll never be alone."

"Right son, we'll never be alone."

RJ hummed tunelessly as she worked with her plants. The plants seemed to be adapting even to the ship's artificial gravity. At first it had been pretty touch and go, and she had been afraid that she had at last found something her beloved plants couldn't adapt to, but then they had come back like champs.

Not that it really mattered.

The plants were once again beginning to thrive. The longer they were in space the fewer problems the plants would have, till eventually they would be fully adapted even to this most completely foreign environment.

They were truly amazing.

"This one doesn't look so good," Alan said from where he was helping her with the plants. RJ walked across the bunk hall she had converted to a green house to check on the plant. He was right, it didn't look very healthy. Fortunately it was a species she had brought many of.

"Cut it off and we'll eat it tonight," RJ said. Alan cut the plant off at ground level; the plant's roots would stay in the ground dormant for a while as if sulking, and then it would spring up again.

They did this every day, checked the greenhouse and cut off the sickly plants, thus making room for healthier ones. She kept her tree starts in a refrigerator to keep them dormant till she could plant them. They just grew too fast to be contained on the ship.

They had constructed and installed "grow lights" on the ceiling and under the top bunks. They had removed the mattresses from the bunk beds that lined the long, narrow room, made the bunks into planters and filled them with soil and nutrients from the surface of the planet. They covered the surface of the dirt with a fibered mesh made of basically the same fabric the Abornie's clothes were made from and secured the edges. Then they cut small holes in the fabric and planted the plants. The holes would tear larger as the plants grew, but the fabric would still ensure that dirt wouldn't be slopped all over the room and plants disturbed if there was in-flight turbulence or on takeoff.

When the plants had all been small they had watered the beds manually. Now the beds were hooked up to the water recycling mechanism of the ship, and they found that running water through the plants in the middle of the recycling process not only made the plants grow better but also helped to recycle the water faster.

RJ had spent most of the first three months they'd been in space moving from one spot to another in the ship, lying on the floor and concentrating on the picture—whoever it might be—above her, meditating at length on the meaning of life, in particular her own life. On the last day of the third month she had suddenly realized that she was no closer to finding answers than she had been when she had first started her quest, and then enlightenment had flooded into her brain like a cascading waterfall of ice, complete with the chunks.

Nothing mattered.

There actually were no answers.

She couldn't figure any of it out because it wasn't supposed to make any sense. It just was.

The answer was that there was no answer. It was so incredibly simple.

You had to work hard at not trying to figure it out, to just exist, and try to enjoy at least part of the existing. You couldn't actually expect to enjoy much more than a small piece of existing, because mostly being a living, breathing, existing being meant that shit rained on your head more often than not, and you had to take the good when you could and try to whitewash the bad parts so that they didn't seem so bad.

Because you couldn't stop bad things from happening.

Which was why nothing really mattered.

If you actually thought that it did, it was just an illusion, an illusion that kept you going so that you could live out the next totally meaningless day, off into oblivion.

So, being enlightened with the knowledge of the absolute lack of meaning to any of it, she had then risen from the floor. She'd gone directly to her quarters, removed Kirk's eye in its cube from her pocket and the chain from her body and stuck them in a drawer. Then she had gone to take care of her plants. It was none too soon, either, because although Poley and Alan had tried, they really neither one had the talent with plant life that she did. They hadn't known what to do when the plants started to go through shock, and though still alive they had looked sad indeed.