CHAPTER 14
The search was, of course, fruitless, yet Uriah couldn’t say he didn’t get anything out of the experience between Sabrina’s sleeping and her waking. It gave him time to plan how to kill her. He didn’t relish the notion of her demise as much as he had with Livingston, but it had to be done. Her existence cut his food supply in half, and she could shoot him at the slightest wrong movement, paranoid as she was.
Uriah recognized fully his own paranoia about her paranoia. He wasn’t deluded. There was more to his decision, and thus was his thought process as he set out on a simultaneous wild goose chase:
Obviously, there was the matter of Sabrina’s being more willing to regard him as a potential molester than to acknowledge the simple truth that Livingston had conquered death. Incriminating as the video of his foray into Livingston’s basement had been, it was also corroboration of his story. Maybe she could have noticed this and dismissed it as a forgery designed to make the story more believable, but that view contradicted her distrust of him on the grounds that he’d caused the Housekeeping.
She couldn’t eat her cake and have it, too, and as Uriah crept closer to the hideout in nigh palpable darkness, he suspected she would realize this were she receptive to reason.
Indeed, she might even be a neurotic masochist. The signs of her confused lust for him were unmistakable. He wasn’t prepared to leave alive such a time-bomb of instability, who was likely trying to be violated – so baffling were her suspicions. God knew what other brainwashing Livingston could’ve performed on Sabrina, and she was currently in a room with highly concentrated alcohol. It was only a matter of time before these problems would surface.
So how to dispose of her? He didn’t know, nor did he need to. The same intuitive confidence that had welled up inside him dozens of minutes before, when he’d pierced the wall, now drew him through the hole. She was almost certainly asleep. Just grab a bottle, raise it high, and –
A sharp injection of pain surged through Uriah’s lower left leg, sending him crashing into the partially dismantled wall before he could seize the drink. In the faint light that escaped the basement proper, he could see with briefly distorted vision Sabrina, pointing her gun toward his neck. She was inexplicably wearing the quilt around her head, save her eyes and mouth.
“Pretend you’re a plant if you know what’s good for you,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’m gonna get something.”
By this point he’d been wishing he could photosynthesize anyway, hence he obeyed. After moments of equal parts terror and bewilderment, he saw Sabrina returned, gun still locked on him. He would have yelled next, but she’d already given him his own unorthodox headgear and pinned him to the ground.
Feeling the barrel directly over his heart, he continued his planty business as Sabrina joined him on the floor and moved close enough to be able to breathe her next words to him. “Keep calm, I’m not gonna shoot you. Talk as softly as I do, and let me explain.”
She did not displace the gun.
“I think I know what was wrong with you back there. It’s a mind-mod after all, not nanos.” There was a pregnant pause, after which she spoke more hastily. “Those are like weak radiation – they can only penetrate so thin a material. If we just keep our heads covered enough, our brains will be safe.”
Uriah jostled the area near the gun very slightly, eliciting Sabrina’s reply, “You’re not gonna hurt me? I’ll move it if you promise.”
“I promise.” He hardly felt it was necessary to say it, but guns have a way of altering people’s behavior.
“I almost started drinking it, y’know,” she whispered with a rustling of the quilted mass. “A drunk and a potential killer in the same room, now that would be just perfect.”
“Why exactly do we need to lie on the floor?” said Uriah.
“Gives us extra padding from the blankets.”
“None of this helps us out or feeds us.”
“No, but it keeps us from killing each other. Whoever we’re hiding from is one sick excuse for a human, if it is a human.”
There was nothing to add to this sentiment, unless he wanted Sabrina to know how much he hated himself for being such a helpless liability. They lay in stillness, positioned with the highest level of indignity either of them had experienced.
Yet Uriah noticed that the situation granted them a rare opportunity in recent days. “Y’know, Sabrina, in the time we’ve known each other, I haven’t learned a thing about who you actually are. Some say you can judge a person’s character best when they’re in the worst of circumstances, but after half a week without any sort of small talk, I can’t help but realize there’s something to be said for just … everyday gab.”
After another empty stomach’s protest, Sabrina replied, “I know exactly what you mean. Any specific questions you have, though?”
“What was your career up there? Low-gravity gymnastics?”
“Tee-hee,” she deadpanned. “I was an astronomer, thank you very much. Still am, at heart.”
“You mean, the first thing you thought when you got to the freakin’ moon was, ‘Okay, boring, I’ll look for another celestial body to live on’?”
If he had to guess what Sabrina would’ve done standing up, Uriah would suppose a playful punch in the arm. “Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking with my fickle twelve-year-old girl mind.”
“All right, just tell me the truth. But first, is this a really inconvenient way of communicating, or is it just me?”
She answered with a careful shifting of the positions of the quilts and her body, bringing both of them under a stifling yet secure tent of protection from Neurehab. She was smiling, of all things, when Uriah locked eyes with her, the most earnest and pitifully interested smile she had expressed.
“Well, practically, observing the stars from a rock without an atmosphere is much easier than what Hubble had to do down here. Plus you don’t have to worry about natural disasters on the moon.” Nor about Unnaturals screwing her over, it occurred to him. Not with the scandal that would cause. “But most people have some sort of romantic reason for doing what they do for a living, and I’m hardly the exception. It’s so cruel, come to think of it. I got so bored of what I did up there, but now that my life sucks even worse, I finally miss what I used to have.”
“What was it about the moon that drew you to it? Something from your childhood?”
“It always is, isn’t it? Sure, the actual astronomy part was something I grew into around my high school years, but I fell in love with the moon about twenty years ago. My mom was at work late on a Saturday, and my dad walked into the living room that day while I was sitting in front of the TV. I remember seeing him look at the screen, then back at me, and he just turned it off out of nowhere. He took me out back, onto the deck, and told me to look through his telescope.”
By now her pupils were dilated with nostalgic immersion. “It’s hard to describe what it was about the image of the moon I saw then that, well, captivated me. Maybe it was the sight of all the lit-up buildings mixed with natural scenery below it, or maybe it wasn’t so much the picture as what Dad added to it with his words. He told me about how the moon provides brightness at night without actually emitting it directly like the sun does.”
Her eyes drifted in the direction of the only light source in the basement before she added, with a slow nod, “Yeah, that’s it! Something about the reality of a body that gives so much comforting light without all the destructiveness of the sun, all the flares, blinding effects, UV radiation – that struck me as beautiful. Forever.”
Uriah delayed his response before grinning as if preparing to burst out laughing. He thought better of that, naturally. “I’m sorry, it’s just so saccharine. Nice touch with the TV bit.”
She scowled. “You think I made it up?”
“No, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you did. Come on, no one goes through that. In real life, your dad would’ve
been dragging you kicking and screaming away from the tube.”
“Not if my parents raised me right, which they did. Excuse me for having a dad who just happened to have a fondness for positive cliches. I can have a passion for my job.”
“Passion is fine,” he said with a coolness unperturbed by Sabrina’s offense, “so long as it’s real.”
She sighed. “It’s not like intellect had nothing to do with it, if that’s what you’re implying. If anything, knowing the actual science of moons and astrophysics only made the love deeper, or ‘real,’ if you insist. What’s your passion, if you think mine’s so fake?” she said, propping herself up on one elbow.
“Mental pathology. I never did become an actual doctor, I mean, like I said, I was poor. But I think that, even though the number of people who would need me keeps dropping, I’d find it more fulfilling than anything else to preserve the lives of folks like you and me. Folks with bodies trying to kill us from the inside.”
“Would you have given up your body? If you got rich enough, I mean.”
“Stupid question, ‘cause I wouldn’t’ve gotten money from that stuff. Robots do the majority of it, all the fun parts that people will pay for. I never said my passion was my career.”
Sabrina simply shook her head. He added, not wanting to really answer her original question, “Probably for the best I didn’t make a job of it. It’s parasitic, if you think about it. We’re opposites in that sense, Sabrina. Your calling is pure science, something that doesn’t have to feed off people’s suffering to earn you money.” Uriah turned his head skyward, suddenly rather mesmerized by the quilt’s minimalist patterns of pure color. “Not mine, though. If I weren’t jobless I’d be selling life.”
“That’s just what humans do, isn’t it? We try to get whatever goodness out of the bad that we can, and besides that we look for the truth. Expand our minds. If we get lucky, the second goal helps the first.”
“Sure, but it’s still very cynical, this idea that we have to get money or some other incentive just to help people. Even if it’s necessary.” He gave a stilted laugh. “This is gonna sound all kinds of wrong given the situation, but y’know, as much as Unnaturals piss me off, I’ve never been against robotics. If we’d only kept the nanos under control, humanity could’ve gotten out of this business of selling altruism.”
“Nanos were a problem before now?”
“Well, what I meant by that was that nanos caused these deaths.”
Sabrina didn’t look too surprised, as if she suspected this herself but had her doubts. “How does an electromagnetic pulse to that machine I saw in the video set off billions of nanobots?”
“Trillions, unless just one can kill a person. But I never pretended I knew the details. Who knows what can not only nuke someone instantaneously, but also keep them from decaying after a few days?” Looking back at her, Uriah could only see tiredness. “If you want me to get back in my own quilt, I could let you get that sleep I owe ya.”
“That’s all right, you can stay here if you want.” She yawned and closed her eyes. “I’m comfortable around you.”
Cheap words coming from a girl with a gun, but I’ll take it. “Thanks. I’ll think of a plan.”
That empty promise would surely get him in trouble, as would his not hatred of, but decided indifference to, Sabrina. Still, things could be worse. He could be nearly suffocating and, after escaping the quilted coffin, slithering toward a tempting bottle of Nicky D’s rum.