Mother Death

5

“What’s your name, brother?”

“Keep still. For a few moments, please.”

But Avram couldn’t just lie there. He tried to sit up with a half-formed body, and with blue eyes staring, asked, “What is this place?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

The newborn face turned left, then right. Then, with a sigh, he faced forward again. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“No reason to be,” Ord replied. “I just hoped you knew more than me.” In better days, the penthouse would have been fitted to make visiting Chamberlains comfortable. But instead of luxurious furniture or elaborate energy fields, Ord had created a starless night sky beneath which stood a string of beds—wooden frames covered with dense alien symbols and filled with a meter of soft gray dust. Inside each bed was a human skeleton, archaic in form, the elegant bones vanishing behind an assortment of bright young organs and new flesh, the toothy white skulls transformed into familiar, wide-eyed faces.

“This talent doesn’t come equipped with a history,” Ord confessed. “I can work it, but I don’t know why things look the way they do.”

The brothers had identical faces, sharp and pale and gently handsome, their strawberry hair unkempt and their sky-blue eyes projecting the same sense of wary amazement.

“You saved my life,” said Avram.

“You’re welcome.”

A deep, grateful breath. “Are you the Baby?”

“Ord.”

Avram closed his eyes. “The Baby.”

Bodies began moving inside each of the adjacent beds. Hands and bare feet flinched, then everyone tried to sit up, lungs blowing the healing dust high into the dry, dark air.

To each of his patients, Ord said, “Relax. Please.”

“This is one of Alice’s talents,” said Avram. “Am I right?”

He gave a little nod.

“It must be awful… being transformed before your time…

Nearly two dozen people were being reborn. There was a Papago and a Lee and two Ussens, and so on. Each belonged to a disbanded Family. Each asked the same questions, then listened to Ord’s gentle voice while watching his face float above them.

“I know about that Papago,” said Avram, pointing to his neighbor. “Someone like her vanished while awaiting trail.”

“Buteo wouldn’t have gotten a fair hearing,” Ord explained. “What else could I do?”

“My jailers were terrified of you. They seemed convinced that you were coming for me next, which was why they hurried to convict.”

“Your trial smelled, too.”

“You were watching over me?”

“When I could.”

Avram took a breath, for courage. “But if judge and jury had been fair…

Silence.

Avram laughed, bitterness bleeding into resignation. “Is this how you live now? Charging around the Milky Way, righting wrongs against the Families… ?”

“I’ve also put an end to a dozen major wars,” said Ord. “Plus hundreds of little fights. And I’ve reterraformed mutilated worlds. And I’ve rescued overloaded starships. And when I can, I’ve tried to convince people to support the Great Peace—”

“Well,” said his brother, “it’s good to keep busy.”

Without warning, Ord was the Baby again.

“It’s a big galaxy,” his older brother warned. “How many places can you be at once?”

Silence.

“Even with Alice’s talents… what? Two or four. Maybe ten. But not everywhere.” Avram threw his naked legs out of the bed, then added, “Alice was spectacular, but finite. The same as you, I’m guessing.”

Ord didn’t reply.

“Is that why she gave you these gifts? So you can run from system to system, putting out proverbial fires—?”

“I don’t know,” Ord conceded. “I’m never been sure what she intends for me.”

Avram blinked, unable to contain his surprise. Then, after a long pause, he made himself ask, “What do you intend for me?”

“If you’re willing, I’d like your help.”

“Of course.” Avram looked between his feet, judging the distance to the dusty ground. “How long has it been since you saved me?”

Ord told him.

And his brother winced, his face tightening as it lifted. A fire shone in the dark of his eyes. “Where are we? Exactly.”

“Earth.”

There was no reaction.

“Inside our old house, as it happens.”

For a very long while, Avram sat motionless. Then his face softened, and with the beginnings of a smile, he said, “So you’ve come home to rescue Alice.”

Ord said, “No.”

His brother stubbornly ignored the answer. “What you were doing before… saving each of us like you did… you were practicing for today, weren’t you…?”

“No,” Ord told him again.

Then he added, “Saving you was easy. Much too easy to make it any kind of practice, I’m afraid.”

Once Ord had stripped the mansion of its traps and lesser terrors, he invited his reborn companions to wander at will, and if possible, grow used to their circumstances. In their own way, each was grateful, but they were obviously worried about the future. Buteo, a tiny walnut-colored woman, reported activity in the nearby forest. “There’s a hundred fancy uniforms with people set inside them,” she said. “And either they’re extraordinarily stupid, or those uniforms want me to see them watching the house.”

Ord saw quite a lot more: The local districts had been evacuated. Elite military units were rushing from the ends of the solar system. The Earth’s artificial moon was being brought close to the Earth. But most alarming were the sophisticated energy barriers—invisible curtains shrouding the estate, designed to withstand nuclear detonations, tetrawatt discharges, and any sudden retreats by the criminals trapped inside.

There was no worse place for war than the overcrowded Earth.

Some believed that Ord needed to be reminded of the obvious. “You should just go get Alice now,” said one of the Ussens. “Or better, why didn’t you slip in and out of her cell when you first got here?”

“Because I wasn’t strong enough,” he explained. “And I’m still too weak, frankly. Most of my talents—”

“Alice’s talents.”

“Are elsewhere. Waiting.” Ord gestured in a random direction. “If I’d brought everything, I would have lost any chance of surprise.”

“Surprise,” the Ussen echoed, choking out a laugh.

“Besides,” said the Baby, “being small has blessings. I still look harmless. I’m not forcing anyone to panic quite yet.”

Avram asked the obvious. “But what if they keep you separated from your other talents?”

“They won’t,” Ord promised, showing them nothing but confidence.

The Ussens grumbled, but said nothing.

Buteo showed a half-grin.

“Fine,” said Avram. “We’re here with you. We owe you a debt, and you need our help, you say. So what are we suppose to accomplish?”

“I can modify you.” Ord gave them a wide smile. “I’ll make it so you can study my surveillance feeds. I want your impressions about what’s happening. Your best hunches, and your worst.”

“Wouldn’t you do the better job?” asked Buteo.

Ord shook his head.

“I’m just the Baby. Remember?” Then he gave them a soft, self-deprecating laugh, wondering if they could see just how lonely he was…

When Ord was still a child—when the authorities had moved to arrest Alice—she wasn’t found in the spacious penthouse. She was waiting for her captors inside a tiny, nearly anonymous bedroom deep in the mansion’s bones. It was the same room where she had lived as the Chamber-lain baby, and wrapped up in thick nostalgia, she had bided her time by watching scenes from those ancient days.

The room’s furnishings were exactly as Alice had left them, complete to the small, old-style universal window. The only structural change was the transparent wall set between the room and the adjacent hallway. This was where the daily tours ended. Guests would pause and stare, and their Nuyen guides would finally, mercifully grow quiet, allowing each person the freedom to consider the red-haired monster who had taken refuge here, and how very much she meant to their lives.

Ord passed gently through the wall, influencing nothing.

The window showed the present: Alice alone inside her prison cell, dressed in a plain white prison smock, nothing substantial changed for millennia. Ord watched as she paced from toilet to door, every step made slowly and carefully, three steps required to cross her universe… and she turned with a dancer’s unconscious grace, retracing her steps so precisely that Ord could see where the hyperrock floor had slumped in four places, worn down by the naked balls of her feet.

The cell and this old bedroom were the same size.

Ord wasn’t the first guest to note the irony.

With a corporeal hand, he touched the warm electric image of the face. Did she sense that he was here? Did Alice retain those kinds of powers? It would be lovely if she could simply come up and visit him for a moment, like she had done once before. Things would come easily and quickly. But if it were possible, the prisoner never gave him a sign.

With every other hand, Ord searched the room. This was where Alice would leave him instructions. It would be like her. A motile scrap of flesh; a whisper of refined dark matter. Either could have slinked about for thousands of years, evading detection, waiting for his touch to unfold itself, then explaining exactly why she had selected him, or damned him, into becoming her successor.

But there were no keys, or clues. Or anything else worthwhile.

The one possible exception was set on one of the crystal shelves above the narrow bed. Like any Chamberlain, Alice had been a rabid collector; odd gems and favorite holos were mixed together with fossils of every age and origin. One fossil showed a human handprint set in yellow mudstone. In a glance, Ord knew its age and its curious origin: It was a female Chamberlain’s hand, and the stone beneath was ten million years old. Alice had created it. On some alien world—a single taste gave Ord twenty candidates—his newly grown sister had pressed her right hand into a streambed. Then she had buried her mark, and several million years later, she had dug it up again. Cooked to stone, and in a rugged fashion, lovely.

Ord reached for the handprint, almost by reflex.

Then, he hesitated.

The trap was almost perfectly disguised, its elegant trigger married to the young rock, waiting patiently for his hand. A camouflaged relay connected it to a single globule of molten, magnetized antiiron set deep underground. The weapon was far too small to hurt Ord, even at close range, and he wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been searching for it. The globule was inside a null-chamber set beneath that very bored woman, and it had probably always been there, her pacing back and forth above it, oblivious to any danger.

Ord’s first analysis taught him about the trigger and the relay.

And the next ten analyses showed him nothing new.

There was a temptation to put his hand in hers. For a slippery, seductive moment, Ord wondered if that was why he had come here. Not to ask advice, but to instead do one more good thing for a needy Chamberlain.

He slowly, slowly withdrew his corporeal hand.

Then he pulled it through his hair, his scalp more than a little damp, the perspiration tasting of oceans and fear.