Someone had deliberately committed a murder. This was not a fight, not a horrified and angry somebody who didn’t mean to do it, “I swear I didn’t….” No. This somebody meant to do it. They had decided and planned and executed.
Now he had to tell Philip and Angela, and he had to tell Helen. He had to tell the whole world, all the worlds, that Venera was spinning out of control, that the arrival of aliens had made the place crazy, but not in any of the ways people had feared since the possibility had been raised all those hundreds of years ago. There were no riots, no religious revivals, no barbaric, tribal displays of aggression.
No. Just murder. This really had nothing to do with the aliens themselves. This had to do with petty, frightened humanity.
Michael stopped and rubbed his eyes. This was also nuts. Nuts. He had his work to do. He looked up, got his bearings, and headed for the staircase, the administrative level, and his desk.
It was midnight before he walked back through his own door. The light was still on. Jolynn sat on the sofa in front of the living room view screen, going over her endless series of teacher reports.
When she heard the door, she looked up and smiled, tired but beautiful.
“How twentieth is this?” she said as she swung her legs down so he could sit beside her. “The dutiful wife waiting for her husband to come home?”
Michael didn’t answer. He took her in his arms and held her close. She returned the embrace, not speaking, just enveloping him with her warmth, her fragrance of soap and lilacs, and the strength of her presence.
“How bad is it?” she asked when he finally released her.
“Beyond bad.” He pulled his cap off and tossed it on the end table. He told her about Derek and Kevin, dead in the infirmary, how the sanitary checks in the galley had turned up nothing, how he’d had to seal their room, quiz the people on guard, write it all up, decide whom to assign to the investigation, work out the announcement for general release into the base stream, and then go tell Helen.
“What did she say?” Jolynn asked.
Michael felt his jaw begin to shake. “That’s the worst part. I’m not sure she heard me all that well. She was so…preoccupied with the C.A.C. report.” He ran both hands through his hair, pulling strands of it free from the ponytail and not caring. “She basically told me to handle it, and I’m not sure I can.”
Jolynn said nothing.
“It’s not that they’re dead,” he told her. “It’s that they were murdered by one of us. A Veneran, maybe even a v-baby. We’ve never had anything worse than a bad bar fight, and that was ten years ago. People come here to be safe. People come back here to be safe, and now…” His throat closed around the sentence. “Now, when the greatest thing that has ever happened to humanity is happening to us, we’re killing each other. How the hell did that happen, Jolynn?”
She took his hand in hers. “Because we’re being human, and some of us aren’t very good at that.” She stroked the back of his hand with her palm, a gentle rhythm, distracting him from the swirl of his own thoughts with the touch of her warm skin. “If we give into the belief that we are somehow better than the general run of people, it’s going to chew us up and spit us out. That belief kills something vital, because as soon as you start believing you’re better, you have to start proving everybody else is inferior. It makes you crazy.”
“How would you know?” he joked tiredly.
“When I was on Earth, I went to the Baghdad ruins. Did you?”
Michael shook his head. “But you told me about them.” Through her memories he saw the rubble, the dust, the rats, and the starving dogs nosing around the dust-gray skulls. He smelled the empty smell of desert encroachment and heard her whisper, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
“So I came back, to the world with the edges and the boundaries and its own history and Grandma Helen to make sure we never went crazy like human beings are wont to do from time to time.” She shook her head. “Wrong again.”
Michael let his head fall back until he was staring at the ceiling. “What do I do, Jolynn?”
“Your very best, my love,” she said, enfolding him again in her arms. “Your very best.”
Chapter Fourteen
CA’AED FIRST BECAME AWARE of the wrongness as an itch. A small nerve bundle at the base of one of its lower northwest sails (half-furled now to keep the course smooth and steady) itched, not painfully but persistently. Ca’aed concentrated on the patch. The air around it tasted fine. A silent command sent a runner to the spot to ingest a few cells and compare them with the healthy patterns it held inside. Normally, Ca’aed would have just had the itch soothed by a caretaker, but times were dangerous now and caution was indicated.