“So what do you think?” Kieran asked him. “Where did genetic codes come from?”
“Nobody knows. It’s what a lot of scientists out there are trying to figure out. . . . But I’d guess there has to be some kind of intelligence at work. You can’t get away from it.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a religious side, Leo,” June commented.
“Not really—not the way most people think of it, anyhow. But yeah, I think that the original religions—before they got corrupted and sold out to politics—encapsulated a lot of genuine ancient knowledge. The truth will turn out to be more exciting than anything people ever dreamed up.”
For a while, Sarda fell quiet. Kieran waited hopefully for some even deeper philosophical revelations and speculation.
“And even if she wanted to, how could she get back? She doesn’t have your real name, and you didn’t give her a number.”
“Love will find a way, Leo,” Kieran sighed.
* * *
Sarda called from his office the first thing next morning, while Kieran and June were finishing breakfast. “I got a message from Elaine!” he announced. “She called my administrative assistant at home—either she knew the name already, or she tracked it down since last night. She wants to know how to contact Mr. Troon.”
“Now do you believe in instinct and the arcane arts of divining human nature?” Kieran asked him.
“Okay, yeah, yeah. You were right; I was wrong . . . maybe. So what do I do?”
“Give your assistant my number and tell her to relay it back,” Kieran replied.
Elaine was through in less than fifteen minutes. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said, when Kieran answered. “I was confused and upset—but I think you knew that. I’ve been thinking about things, and I’d like to talk. It needs to be as soon as possible. Where can we meet?”
17
Elaine was noticeably red around the eyes and yawned intermittently—no doubt the result of a lot of thinking and not too much sleep. They met on a bench in a secluded corner of a leafy square on the administrative side of the Trapezium, facing a sculpture depicting a group of Lowell’s space-suited founders from the early days. Events, it turned out, had followed roughly the lines that June and Kieran had surmised.
“I met Leo casually not all that long ago. It was at one of those dinner parties where everyone tries to impress everyone else with how much they’re making. We were both bored and a bit repulsed by it all, and got to talking between ourselves about . . . well, the things Leo talks about. Interesting things, exciting things—things that have imagination and vision. I was captivated. We clicked, arranged to meet again . . . You know the kind of thing.”
Kieran nodded. “This was how long before the experiment?”
“A couple of months, maybe. As we got to know each other, he told me more about his research and its implications. I was blown away. He was right on the cutting edge of this speed-of-light travel anywhere in the Solar System that people have been hearing about for years—and outside it too, one day, I guess.” Elaine drew a long breath and exhaled. “He told me about the experiments they did with animals and things. Then, one day he told me he was scheduled to be the first human to try it. I started to get nervous, asking him how sure they could be that things mightn’t be happening in animals that it wasn’t easy to know about. . . . And eventually, I guess to try and be reassuring, he confided that it isn’t quite the way everyone thinks—you know, that you disappear from one place and reassemble in another. What it actually does is make a copy. Did you know that? And so for things not to get completely crazy, you’ve got to get rid of the original. Once the process is running commercially, it’ll be so fast that nobody will know the difference. But for the first experiment that Leo was going to be involved in, they kept the original in a suspended state—for a few days, until they could be sure. That was why he said I shouldn’t worry.”