And was it just coincidence that the man would have been serving as janitor in Cam’s basement lab for weeks and, now, right after the events of last night, suddenly show up as an electrician changing light bulbs in Cam’s fifth-floor office? Was it coincidence that a light that never flickered had suddenly flickered, almost on command, so that “Juan” would have reason to stay and do his work?
And what about all that clumsiness: knocking the light cover free, falling off the ladder into the files, even the man’s chattiness? In retrospect it all began to seem staged, as if Juan had been trying to get his attention, especially there at the end, when he’ d set the folders on Cam’s desk. Why hadn’t he simply called Cam’s attention to them where they lay and let him take care of them? Especially after Cam had taken pains to explain Institute policy to him? Because he’ d wanted a glimpse at them?
Cam began to search his desk for the folders, and finally found them, buried under other work he’ d been trying to do since the man had left. Pushing the other papers aside, he pulled the stack of four folders toward him. The names on the tabs showed him immediately they were obsolete and probably needed shredding. If Juan had looked through them, he’d gained nothing of import, but if Juan was Rudy he’ d have known they were useless and never bothered with them in the first place. A quick flip-through of each file’s contents showed them pretty much in order, despite Juan’s claim of just shoving them together.
Cam laid all four down flat before him and opened the folder on top again. This time instead of going right to the header at the top of the first page, his eye caught on the blue sticky note affixed in the lower right quadrant. The handwriting on the note was not Cam’s. And the information it conveyed had nothing whatever to do with the rest of the file’s contents:
“Prelim DNA eval on lab coat blood anomalous.”
He stopped breathing, staring at the words that lurched across the two-by-two-inch square, understanding their meaning at once. A preliminary DNA evaluation on the blood in the lab coat he’ d bagged and tossed into the hazmat bin last night had already come back: anomalous. Meaning it wasn’t Lacey McHenry’s blood, at the least. Meaning there had indeed been an intruder, one they hadn’t yet identified.
He swallowed hard. Why not simply say
unidentified
, then? Why
anomalous
? Suddenly he jerked his hands off the folder as if it had burned him, the front flap falling back across that first page to cover the unnerving sticky note again.
Anomalous . . .
A roaring sounded in his ears as the room melted and oozed about him. Whereas a moment before he’ d stopped breathing, now he was breathing too fast, the edges of his vision flashing as he hyperventilated. Terror dropped upon him, hard and black. Narrow roughhewn rock walls closed in about him.
No! Not another one!
He clenched his eyes shut, willing the images away. They took him anyway.
Smoke filled his nose and burned his eyes and the ground shook as he raced after Rudy out of the narrow passageway and into a dark chamber, whose walls were barely visible at the end of their head lamp beams. The others of the team crowded around them, breathing hard, saying nothing, as from somewhere in the tomb complex a lion roared; only they all knew it was no lion.
“Which way?” Rudy asked in a low voice.
The pale green light of an electronic screen washed over Woofer’s chest and face. “It’s not coming up,” he said after a moment.
Cam ejected the empty magazine from his pistol and slammed a replacement into the chamber, noting he only had five clips left.
“It’s not coming up,” said Woofer again.
“They must be jamming it,” Rudy said. “We’ll just have to—”
He was cut off by another roar, much closer, and they all looked around. The beams from their head lamps speared the smoky darkness, congregating on one of the chamber walls. A deep boom echoed around them and shook the ground, and in the light of their combined beams a crack opened in the rock wall.
“Hit the ground!” Rudy bellowed, a second before the crack exploded in a gout of rocks and smoke as they all dove for cover.
Cam came out of it to find himself crouching under his desk. Beside him, his stacked folders had sprawled across the floor at his feet. He could hardly breathe for the dust and smoke that filled his airways and thought he might vomit at any moment. He was shaking so badly his legs beat a faint staccato against the desk’s wooden back, and of course his T-shirt was drenched with sweat.
“Dr. Reinhardt?” The voice of one of his lab techs sounded quietly from somewhere near the door, startling him so badly, he slammed his head into the underside of the desk. With a muttered oath, he tumbled out of his hiding place before the young man could grasp what was going on.
“I’m here, Pecos,” Cam said as he arose from behind the desk and settled again on the padded chair. “Just looking through some of my files.”
“What’s up?” Cam asked when Pecos seemed unable to find his tongue.
The young man shifted uncomfortably. “The unity meeting has begun, sir. Dr. Viascola sent me to get you.”
“Ah.” Cam glanced at the time on his computer screen and saw that it was indeed 5:10. . . .
How long was I out?
“Guess I got a little distracted,” he said, with a sheepishness not altogether feigned.
As he set his computer to hibernation mode, he noted the lab outside his office was deserted and wondered if it was too much to hope no one had seen his little “episode.” Then he recalled the lab’s video surveillance cameras, and knew with dismay that it wouldn’t matter. If Swain wanted everyone to know, they would.
It was as he came around the desk toward the office door that he saw the sprig of now curled-up cottonwood leaves, lying on the desk alongside the place where “Juan” had placed the folders he’d found.
Aware of Pecos’s eyes on him, he looked away and continued walking, but as he followed the young man out of his office, he recalled how the sprig had been tucked into the end of the fluorescent tube box. That, too, had been no accident. Because every evening after dinner, Cam strolled down to the lake overlooked by the resort’s restaurant at the other side of the campus. It offered solitude, tranquility, release, and a pleasant view of the setting sun across the water . . . and cottonwood trees. It was a habit with which Rudy was obviously familiar. The sprig testified to that, even as it served as a wordless request for a face-to-face meeting where they wouldn’t be watched or overheard.
A request Cam wished heartily he could ignore, even knowing he would not be allowed to do so.
New Eden
After Andros’s reproof in the Justorium’s dreaded Cube, everyone went to lunch in the main cafeteria just off the mall in the Enclave’s central commons. Like almost every other chamber in the Enclave, the cafeteria was a low-ceilinged, dimly lit space. Long folding aluminum tables with attached benches stood so close together there was hardly room to walk between them. They were serving sweet potato pie again today, with lentil soup and sliced cucumbers in a goat’s-yogurt sauce.
Andros’s trial and punishment was naturally the primary topic of conversation. With Terra already reassigned to crèche work and sitting at a different table with her charges, Zowan had to rely on his lifelong friends and sleepcell mates, Parthos and Erebos, for moral support. They sat to either side of him at Table 9—Parthos, tall, handsome, and dark-skinned; Erebos, shorter by a head with coarse black hair that stood up in an unruly brush from his head. Last night Andros had sat across from them.
Not in the mood to talk, they sat in silence, listening to the others prattle on about their shock and horror—not that Andros had been punished so severely, but that he’ d needed it at all.
Gaias, who had taken a seat at the table not far from Zowan, commented loudly, “It just goes to show how you never know what might be going on in someone’s head. Right, Zowan?” He looked at Zowan as he said this, and by that drew everyone ’s attention to him, as well. Before Zowan could answer, Gaias asked what he knew of the affair. “Surely you would have reported it if Andros had spoken such blasphemies before.”
Since Zowan and Gaias had already had this conversation, Zowan said nothing. But his brother would not be put off. “You’re not answering me, Zowan.”
“What difference does it make?” Zowan asked testily. “He’s been punished, hasn’t he?”
“It makes a difference because, in point of fact, you did not report his earlier blasphemies but dismissed them as foolish talk.” The conversation at Table 9 all but ceased as nearby diners listened in.
“Is that why you didn’t pull your lever today?” Gaias’s words were met with the sudden combined hiss of indrawn breaths around them.
At Zowan’s side, Parthos turned to look at him in alarm, the whites of his eyes a stark contrast to his dark skin.
“Because your own failure led to his discipline?” Gaias let the question hang, eyes boring into Zowan. The cafeteria’s soft lights reflected off his hairless skull, casting odd shadows beneath the lidded, quivering oculus, and obscuring his natural eyes in shadow. A smile twitched his lips. “Or was it your reluctance to punish someone whose blasphemies you agree with?”
Zowan glared at him. “Whatever I did, it is a private matter. It is our right to pull the lever as we deem just, and you are remiss for even bringing it up.”
Gaias’s hairless brows lifted. “How can there be any justice in the toleration of blasphemy?”
“How is not saying the Affirmation blasphemy?” Zowan demanded. “Don’t you actually have to say something in order to blaspheme? And what meaning can any affirmation have if a person must be forced to say it?”
Powered by indignation, the words bubbled out of the deep doubts he’d long wrestled with, though he could hardly believe he was speaking them here in front of everyone. The other young men stared at him blank-faced. Except for his friends—who looked horrified.
Gaias glowed with triumph. “So you do sympathize with him!”
Zowan shot to his feet. “Andros is not a rebel. He did not deserve to be punished so severely simply because he had a few doubts.”
His words were seized and swallowed by utter silence, as even the kitchen staff paused in their chores to listen.
“Father is wise and powerful,” said Gaias sternly. “He knows things other men do not. Has he not saved us all? Does he not now keep us alive? If we lost him, where would we be? Why would anyone not want to affirm all that he is to us with humble gratitude? We owe everything to Father.”
Around him others nodded and murmured agreement.
“The Affirmation is true and is a right thing to do,” Gaias went on. “If a stubborn child, out of the promptings of his foolish heart, refuses to say it, we have every right to force him to do it. For his good and ours.”
“Andros is not a child.”
“But he was foolish.”
Zowan refused to give in. “If we must be forced to say the Affirmation, we have no freedom to truly love Father at all. So what is the point?”
Gaias snorted. “We have life, Zowan, and for that we owe him love. Freedom to deny it will not change our debt of gratitude.”
Zowan glanced down the long closely packed tables, the many faces turned toward him full of puzzlement. Did none here understand what he had said? No. There was Terra: he saw it in her soft brown eyes. He suspected Parthos did, too, from the way his clenched fist pressed against the edge of the table at Zowan’s side.
Zowan returned his gaze to Gaias. “If we have no freedom,” he said, “we can have no real love. And no life.”
With that he turned and pressed his way between the opposing walls of diners’ backs to the end of the tables, then strode out the cafeteria’s main doors. A rumble of excited conversation spilled after him. He crossed the spacious central square with its four-faced statue of Father standing by the Sanctuary entrance ramp on one side, the mall with its long island of waterfall, running stream, and plantings of fan palms extending away on the other. Taking the corridor to the upper levels, he passed the library and the administrative and security offices, then followed the long zigzagging corridor that traversed the Hydroponics sector, with its low chambers of lighted growing tanks. Finally he reached the shaft that accessed the animal and agriculture sectors and started up the long metal ladder inside it.
With Zowan’s staff of youngsters all off at their afternoon lessons, the goat barn was deserted except for the goats in their paddocks. On the message board, beneath the chore rotation charts, a small computer screen informed him of the projection for when he might take the goats out for their biweekly dose of sunlight.
Having learned early on that the goats especially required sunlight to thrive, the Edenites had set up a protected area in a narrow ravine on the Earth’s ruined surface. An invisible energy field helped shield them from the poisonous fumes’ deadly rays. Even then, surface walking was dangerous, for the radiation and toxin numbers varied throughout the day. All trips were timed in accordance with projected and actual readings of the sensors both in and outside of the ravine. Right now the real-time readings were still too high, the safety window predicted to come in midafternoon.
While he waited, he busied himself with cleaning out the paddocks, hauling the collected droppings to the composters, and dousing the empty paddock with enzyme neutralizer. Then he transferred the goats that would go outside today into the holding chute before the passageway leading up to the surface.
By the time he finished, the external toxin and radiation readings had indeed diminished into the safe range, so he went to the change room and struggled into the stiff, bulky, brown-mottled protective suit. After securing its hook-and-loop fasteners, he pulled on one of the gloves, tucked the other into his belt beside the brown-lens goggles, and hooked the respirator around his neck. Then he went out to his charges, who waited along the holding chute fence calling for him.
As he slipped into the pen, they wheeled and trotted toward the enclosure’s far side. When he opened the outer gate, they poured into the narrow, cement-walled corridor beyond, their hoofbeats and eager bleats echoing in the long, dark space. The corridor, barely high enough for Zowan to walk upright, led steadily upward, then leveled off in a series of U-turns before angling slightly downward. The air became noticeably drier and easier to breathe. Shortly after that, the cement-coated walls and floor gave way to damp, raw-faced rock and a muddy track pocked with old, water-filled hoofprints. The goats picked up speed, the kids jumping playfully as they hurried toward freedom, while Zowan labored after them, the mud sucking at his heavy boots.