"I don't want to see it," she said firmly. "Fuck Curtis and his psychological bullshit. I ain't going in there."
"She's your daughter," said Sandford wearily. "So it's your choice. If it were up to me, I wouldn't even have let you know. But Curtis..."
"Curtis can suck my dick," said Bess, suddenly filled with rage. "Fucking Curtis and the rest of the fucking Morlocks can just fucking run up the ramp and choke on their own goddamned vomit, for all I care."
"Fine," said Sandford, turning all the way around and moving back toward her. "I agree with you. There was no reason to bring you down here..."
"Goddammit," said Bess, shaking her head. "No."
"No?" asked the doctor.
"No," said Bess. "I need to see it...see her. See my daughter."
She stared down at the thing in the crib. She was expressionless as she watched the little red, wrinkled baby struggle to breathe the cloudy yellow billows of air surrounding her.
"It's a sixty-percent mix right now," Sandford tapped absent mindedly on the plastic enclosure and continued, "We keep tweaking it up and down, but she doesn't seem to be taking any combination of our air and theirs comfortably."
"You think?" Bess asked, her voice still and flat. She watched as the flaps on the baby's-her baby's-neck fluttering as they tried to suck in enough oxygen to keep her heart going. The baby's arms twitched, its pudgy little legs kicked weakly and futilely. It's eyes were sealed shut by a scabrous layer of tears mixed with the minerals that remained from the miasma of yellow tinged air. "I mean, you really think?"
"We're doing everything we can," said the doctor.
"Tell me something, doc," said Bess, spinning to face the man next to her, glaring at him with a gaze so intense that he flinched. "Are you happy with yourself?"
"Ms. Garvey," he started, but she took a step forward, invading the doctor's space, trying to ignore the wheezing, chunking noises from the ventilator at their waists.
"Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?" she said, her eyes stark and black. "Did you want to make monsters? Did you want to take human embryos and turn them into...into..."
"Bess," he said quietly, finally finding the strength to look directly at her. She was struck by his tiredness, by the lines on his face, the gray in his eyebrows, the complete dearth of energy in even his smallest motions. "If we keep producing humans, we're going to lose. You know that, don't you?"
She kept staring at him, waiting for him to break, to look away, but he maintained his position. Finally, she gave him a slight head shake, sighed and turned back to the incubator crib.
The girl in the box writhed, fighting her silent battle, she spared no energy on crying. Her small face was screwed up expressing her monumental effort at survival. The only sound in the room was the asthmatic whine of the incubator's atmosphere pump.
"When will she die?" asked Bess finally.
"A week, maybe," said the doctor. "She's the most successful of the new babies, and some of them have lasted five, six days. She might make it eight or nine."
Bess closed her eyes, listening to the thrum of the engine, and laid her palms flat on the glass incubator lid. It felt like a coffin.
"I want to hold her," she said finally. When there was no response from the doctor, she opened her eyes and looked at him. He was gazing down into the crib with those tired eyes, watching the baby struggle.
"If I open this lid," he said, and Bess cut him off.
"I know," she said.
Another couple of seconds passed, and he nodded. He reached to the side of the incubator, clicked a couple of switches, and the wheeze of the pump groaned to a halt. The room was silent.
Bess reached forward and unlatched the lid of the little crib. As she raised the lid, she noticed the bad air spilling over the sides in dirty yellow strands. She bent at her waist, reached down and picked up her baby.
The child's flesh was cool and rough. Bess shivered, babies were supposed to be warm, smooth and fuzzy. The infant weakly struggled in her arms and felt like some half-human, half-lizard., The wash of maternal love and fierce possessiveness she experienced was countered by an equally strong impulse to just drop the thing back into the crib and wash her hands...but she cradled her daughter to her chest, looking down as the flaps on the child's neck slowly fluttered to a stop, and the feeble twitching of her body grew weaker and weaker.
She raised one hand to her baby's face and gently scraped away the crusts from her eyes, wincing as a thin pink ooze of blood began to drip from the raw flesh she uncovered. The baby opened her eyes and Bess felt her heart contract, as though squeezed in a fist.
Jet black pupils set in yellow stared at her and Bess saw her face reflected in them for a second or two. The baby stopped struggling altogether, as though the touch of her mother's hands, the sight of her mother's face was the signal to just let go...the baby closed her eyes and it was over.
Bess kept her own eyes open, barely able to see through the haze of tears. She rocked her dead baby gently for the next half hour.
"Why?" asked Bess.
Curtis sighed and sat back in his chair. Behind him, on the stone wall, hung a landscape painting, Bess stared at it hungrily every time she was in the Chief's office. She drank in the deep blue ribbon of a river cutting through the almost obscene riot of the endless expanse of greens, and most of all the crystalline blue of the sky. She didn't really believe that the world had once looked like that-no natural thing could ever be that perfect, that beautiful-but she loved to imagine herself somewhere in that endless forest, fantasy world or no.
But not today. Today she was focused on Curtis, and the painting could have been another brown stretch of wall for all the attention she paid it.
"We're putting together an expedition," he said.
Her anger, while still present and almost overpowering, instantly receded, she put it away to give her complete attention to this new information. "An expedition?" she asked, curiosity and fear slipping in where the rage had been. "Outside?"
"The gill project simply isn't going to work," he said, fiddling with the quill on his desk. "The doctors tell me that if they had a hundred years and a much bigger population here in New America, they might be able to come up with some children who might survive outside, but they wouldn't bet their booze rations on it."
"Why did you tell me about my daughter?" she asked. "You don't drag other women down there, show them their babies dying..."
"You needed to see it for yourself," said Curtis. "You're leading the team outside, and you need to know that your mission is the only possible way to save the human race from extinction. You had to see the best our doctors could do before you accepted this other possibility..."
"I held my daughter in my arms while she died, Chief,"
"She was my daughter too," said Curtis, Bess sat back suddenly in her chair as though she were slapped. "Your egg, my seed."
"Jesus," said Bess, shaking her head.
"Was she...did she..." began Curtis, but then he stopped talking, blew a breath through pursed lips, and closed his mouth. Blinked. "Never mind."
"Did you see her?" asked Bess.
"I've been down there on all my downshifts," said Curtis. "I had hoped that there would be some new developments, some breakthrough-but there aren't any miracles gonna happen, Bess."
"No shit," said the Head of Security. "They're going to bury her tomorrow. I named her."
"What did you call her?" asked Curtis, looking mildly surprised.
"Spring," said Bess. "It's a pretty word."
"Spring," repeated Curtis, looking at her. " 'I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face'."
"What?" asked Bess.
"The words of a man long dead," said Curtis. "But I approve of the name. Shows a kind of optimism..."
"It's a pretty word," said Bess coldly. "Tell me about the expedition."
"We can't evolve in time to make any difference, even with all our gene-splicers and mad scientists," said the Chief, instantly dropping whatever vestiges of humanity he'd been exhibiting and shifting seamlessly into leader mode. "We can't get out of New America until we can breathe the atmosphere, and that isn't going to happen unless we do something to change the air up there."
"And we can't stay here," said Bess, remembering the Demon ripping Cameron to shreds.
"Not for much longer," said Curtis. "It's just the way it is-we simply can't block everything. Cracks develop in the earth, and one of these days there's going to be a vent we don't notice in one of the storerooms or down on Five, and that'll be it."
"So what's the objective?" asked Bess.
"Climate change," said Curtis, spinning his chair around to look at the painting. Bess could imagine him gazing at it, at those blue skies, and remembering his own childhood. "The science team thinks we can reverse the atmosphere devices the adversaries have laid in place. But it'll take an armed assault to test the theory."
"I'm good at armed assaults," said Bess, smiling for the first time since she'd laid her dead child back in its crib/coffin. "But you know guns don't work up there..."
"We've been dealing with that," said Curtis. "The techies have developed new weapons with oxygen-enclosed firing mechanisms, and you know we've got some people who can shoot arrows like Indians."
"How many people are going?" asked Bess. "And how far?"
"Your team will number twenty," said Curtis. "And I'm one of those twenty."
Bess remained silent for long enough to consider his participation. Curtis was old-maybe forty-five-but still fit. He still had all his teeth, which was rare in New America, and his muscle tone was that of a much younger man. Staring at the back of his head, Bess could see a spot on his scalp where the hair was starting to recede, but it looked good on him. Distinguished.
But, he hadn't been in a fight for, what, five years?
"You're too old," she said.
"Don't I fucking know it," he responded, swiveling back around to face her again. "But I've got to go. I know more about the adversaries than anyone else, and that knowledge may come in handy up there."
"You've taught us everything you know," she said.
"You can teach someone how to shoot a gun, right?" he asked. "Tell them everything about the gun, show them where to hold their fingers, how to breathe while they're pulling the trigger, tell them the right angles to hit to lock on the bullets, but when it comes down to crunch time, do you want a crowd of trainees who've never fired in the heat of battle on your side?"
"It's not the same thing," said Bess.
"It's exactly the same thing," said Curtis angrily. "Tom and I taught you everything we know about the goddamned aliens and their pets, we've described over and over again how the world has changed, but you're not going to believe it-believe it in your guts-until you're actually up there in the middle of it. Tom's dead now, so that leaves me. I'm not going to have the whole mission fail because you guys run across a highway and spend four hours debating whether you should cross it..."
"What's a highway?" asked Bess.
"Exactly!" said Curtis, dropping the quill onto the desk surface and standing up. "You're going to know or recognize approximately two percent of everything you see up there. It doesn't matter how many movies and old T.V. you've seen...you have no real experience with the world and your brain won't be able to process the information fast enough. And anyway, the point's not up for debate."
"What's the mission?" asked Bess.
"There's an air processing plant thirty miles away, down the river," he said. "we're going to try and switch gears on the adversaries."
"Switch gears?" asked Bess.
"Gene Tichborn has come up with a machine that'll reverse the poison machines the aliens have installed," said Curtis. "If it works, we'll build more. Eventually..."
"We have to get the machine there, install it, and then get home?" asked Bess, shivering a bit at the prospect. She'd had a rough day.
"Yep," said Curtis.
"Thirty miles," she said.
"It can be done," said the chief. "We've been working on the prospect for some time, now. We've got oxygen tanks that are easily portable, we've got weapons that will fire out there, we've got the device loaded into a cart and we've got enough bad-asses to make it happen. I've just been waiting to see if it would be necessary."
"And your daughter dying made it necessary?" asked Bess.
Curtis looked at her, and she was struck by the fire in his eyes. He was old, yes-he'd come to New America with the first wave, his parents were important people in the old American government, and he'd been here ever since. He dedicated himself to the struggle of making their subterranean community viable, to keep it alive, to ensure that the human race wouldn't disappear from the earth like so many other species had. Still, he was old and tired, and vital, fiery eyes didn't mean that he could survive the rigors of the upper world.
"Our daughter," he said, face blank, "was the last, best hope of the doctors. From now on, I'm not going to waste any more precious embryos on that kind of research. We were meant to breathe the air of Earth, and not the yellow filth that the adversaries have foisted upon us..."
"You're not making a re-election speech, Curtis," said Bess. "I held our daughter in my arms while she tried to breathe, you know?"
"Then I don't need to convince you," said Curtis. "Go take a shower, get some rest. We're not going to waste any time on this, so we'll be assembling at first bell tomorrow in the chow chamber."
"Do you feel anything about your child dying?" asked Bess, getting to her feet. "Don't get me wrong-I'll be ready for this mission and we'll get the job done. But I want to know if you have any human feelings about your own flesh and blood."
"Whether I have human feelings or not is irrelevant, Bess," said the chief, his face a mask of stone. "What matters is whether we can attain our objective."
"Right," said Bess, turning to go, flexing her fingers. They still had blood on them from Cameron's death and the crushing of the Demon pieces, but she ignored that remembering how Spring had felt in her arms, the cold flesh snuggling and wiggling beneath her hands...
"Bess," said Curtis softly.
"Yeah," she said, half-turning as she reached for the door.
"She was beautiful," said the commander of the world's surviving humans. "She had your face, and she was beautiful."
Bess looked at him for a long moment, gave him a tight nod, and turned away.
"Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with a lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Real shadows of the indignant desert birds."
-W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming They were gathered in the slop hall, the twenty soldiers, and a cohort of scientists. Early mess had been postponed, and a guard at the cavern's main entrance turned away grumbling workers, directing them to the secondary mess on Three. Many of those turned away tried to sneak a peek over the guard's shoulder to see into the hall, but couldn't see through the curtains Curtis had ordered hung.
Bess was cautiously optimistic about her team. Half of them were her best security people, the other half were specialists of one kind or another who looked physically fit and able to make a thirty-mile trek through enemy territory and not collapse halfway there.
"In the old days," Curtis said, "any one of us could have walked thirty miles easily and had enough energy afterwards to stay up all night drinking..."
There was laughter from the crowd, but Bess didn't join in. She was too busy assessing her team, cataloguing their strengths and weaknesses, trying to figure out who would be best suited to do what, wondering who would buckle at the first challenge. Her interest was drawn when Curtis got to the important parts.
"....but it's the new days-and this is going to be the hardest thing any human has ever done. Man crossed the oceans on sailing ships of fragile wood, man leveled mountains to make railroads, and man landed on the moon-but this might be more difficult than any of those feats.
"There is no breathable air in the world, other than here, in the Warren," he continued. "The atmosphere up there will kill you in less than five minutes if it's all you have to breathe-and that's a generous estimate, because two or three of those minutes will be you holding your breath. And you're not likely to have that luxury; if your suits are ruptured, your masks removed, you're going to be so surprised that you won't have time to take a deep breath, and your death will come a lot quicker."
Silence from the crowd, but Bess was heartened to see that no one looked scared or discouraged. They all watched Curtis, standing on his cafeteria table, with professional interest.
"I am probably the last human to walk up there, and it's been thirty years," he continued. "One or two of you were alive back then, but you were babies. I was a teenager, and I remember how bad things had gotten-the trees were mostly dead or mutated, the animals were all gone, the sky had turned yellow from the poison in the air and the rivers and streams were gone. It's been thirty years since we shut the doors of the Warren, of New America, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse..."
"Will there be aliens?" asked one of the security people, a big kid named Zack. Bess could see others nodding, as though they'd thought of the same question and were simply waiting for a chance to ask it. "Other than the Demons and the Diggers, that is? Intelligent aliens?"