494 ARTHUR C. ClARKE AND GENTRY LEE
A deep feeling of bitterness welled up inside her. She struggled to fight it. .
“I had a nice walk with Benjy yesterday,” she said, changing the subject.
“I’m sure he’ll tell me all about it this morning,” Ellie said. “He loves his Sunday walks with you. It’s all he has left, except for my occasional visits. . . . You know that I am very grateful.”
“Forget it. I like Benjy. I also need to feel needed, if you know what I mean. . . . Benjy actually has adjusted surprisingly well. He doesn’t complain as much as the forty-ones, and certainly not as much as the people assigned here to work at the gun factory.”
“He hides his pain,” Ellie replied. “Benjy’s much smarter than anyone thinks. He really dislikes the ward but knows that he can’t take care of himself. And he doesn’t want to be a burden to anybody—”
Tears suddenly formed in Ellie’s eyes and her body trembled slightly. Baby Nicole stopped nursing and stared at her mother. “Are you all right?” Eponine asked.
Ellie shook her head affirmatively and wiped her eyes with the small cotton cloth that she was holding next to her breasts to catch any leakage. Nicole resumed nursing. “Suffering is difficult enough to watch,” Ellie said. “Unnecessary suffering tears your heart out.”
The guard looked carefully at their identification papers and handed them to another uniformed man sitting behind him at a computer console. The second man made an entry into the computer and returned the documents to the guard.
“Why,” Ellie said, when they were out of earshot, ‘ ‘does that man stare at our photographs every single day? He must have passed us through this checkpoint personally a dozen times in the last month.”
They were walking along the lane that led from the module exit to Positano. “It’s his job,” Robert replied, “and he likes to feel important. If he doesn’t make a ceremony out of it each time, then we might forget the power he has over us.”
“The process was much smoother when die biots were handling the entrance.”
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“The ones that are still functioning are too critical to the war effort. Besides, Nakamura is afraid that the ghost of Richard Wakefield will appear and somehow confound the biots.”
They walked in silence for several seconds. “You don’t think my father is still alive, do you, darling?”
“No, dear,” Robert answered after a short hesitation. He was surprised by the directness of the question. “But even though I don’t think he’s alive, I still hope mat he is.”
Robert and Ellie finally reached the outskirts of Positano. A few new houses, European in style, lined the lane that sloped gently down into the heart of the village. “By the way, Ellie,” Robert said, “talking about your father reminded me of something I wanted to discuss with you. … Do you remember that project I was telling you about, the one that Ed Stafford is doing?”
Ellie shook her head.
“He’s trying to classify and categorize the entire colony in terms of general genetic groupings. He thinks that such classifications, even though they are completely arbitrary, may offer clues about which individuals are likely to have which diseases. I don’t completely agree with his approach—it seems too forced and numerical, rather than medical—but parallel studies have been done on Earth and they showed that people with similar genes do indeed have similar disease tendencies.”
Ellie stopped walking and looked at her husband quizzically. “Why did you want to discuss this with me?”
Robert laughed. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m coming to mat. . . . Anyway, Ed defined a difference metric—a numerical method of measuring how different any two individuals are, using the way in which the four basic amino acids are chained in the genome—and then, as a test, divided all the citizens of New Eden into groups. Now, the metric didn’t really mean anything—”
“Robert Turner,” Ellie interrupted. She was laughing. “Will you please get to the point? What are you trying to tell me?”
“Well, it’s weird,” he said. “We don’t quite know what to make of it. When Ed made his first classification structure, two of the people tested did not belong to any
496 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
group. By fiddling with the definitions of the categories, he was eventually able to define a quantitative spread that covered one of them. But the amino acid chaining structure of the final person was so different from every other person in New Eden that she couldn’t be placed into any of the groups. . . .”
Ellie was staring at Robert as if he had lost his mind.
“The two individuals were your brother Benjy and you,” Robert concluded awkwardly. “You were the,one outside all the groupings.”
“Should I be worried about this?” Ellie said after they had walked another thirty meters in silence.
“I don’t think so,” Robert said casually. “It’s probably just an artifice of the particular metric that Ed chose. Or perhaps a mistake was made. . . . But it would be fascinating if somehow cosmic radiation might have altered your genetic structure during your embryological development.’ *
By this time they had arrived at the main square of Positano. Ellie leaned over and kissed her husband. “That was very interesting, dear,” she said, teasing him a little, “but I must admit that I’m still not sure what it was all about.”
A large bicycle rack occupied most of the square. Two dozen rows and as many columns of parking positions were spread out over the area in front of what had been the train station. All the colonists, with the exception of the government leaders, who had electric cars, now used bicycles for transportation.
The train service in New Eden had been discontinued soon after the war began. The trains had originally been constructed by the extraterrestrials from very light and exceptionally strong materials that the human factories in the colony had never been able to duplicate. These alloys were extremely valuable in many different military functions. By the middle stages of the war, therefore, the defense agency had requisitioned all the cars in the train system.
Ellie and Robert rode their bicycles, side by side along the banks of Lake Shakespeare. Little Nicole had awakened and was quietly watching the landscape around her.
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They passed the park, where the Settlement Day picnic was always held, and turned toward the north.
“Robert,” Ellie said very seriously, “have you thought any more about our long discussion last night?”
“About Nakamura and politics?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I still think we should both oppose his edict suspending elections until after the war is over. . . . You have a lot of stature in the colony. Most of the health professionals will follow your lead. Nai even thinks that the factory workers in Avalon might strike.”
“I can’t do it,” Robert said after a long silence.
“Why not, darling?” Ellie asked.
“Because I don’t think it will work. In your idealistic view of the world, Ellie, people act out of commitment to principles or values. In reality, they don’t behave that way at all. If we were to oppose Nakamura, the most likely result is that we would both be imprisoned. What would happen then to our daughter? In addition, all the support for the RV-41 work would be withdrawn, leaving those poor people in even worse shape than they are. The hospital would be more shorthanded. . . . Many people would suffer because of our idealism. As a doctor, I find these possible consequences unacceptable.”
Ellie drove off the bicycle path into a small park about five hundred meters from the first buildings of Central City. “Why are we stopping here?” Robert asked. “They’re expecting us at the hospital.”
“I want to take five minutes to see the trees, smell the flowers, and hug Nicole.”
After Ellie dismounted, Robert helped her disengage the baby carrier from her back. Ellie men sat on the grass with Nicole in her lap. Neither of the adults said anything while they watched Nicole study the three blades of grass that she had grabbed with her chubby hands.
At length Ellie spread out a blanket and laid her daughter gently upon it. She approached her husband and put her arms around his neck. “I love you, Robert, very, very much,” she said. “But I must say that sometimes I do not agree with you at all.”
9
T:
•he light from the solitary window in the cell made a pattern on the dirt wall opposite Nicole’s bed. The bars on the window created a reflected square with a tic-tac-toe design, a near perfect three-by-three matrix. The light in her cell signaled to Nicole that it was time to rise. She crossed the room from the wooden bunk on which she had been sleeping and washed her face in the basin. She then took a deep breath and tried to summon her strength for another day.
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