The Second Star, page 39
“I don’t want to be any more of a bug under a microscope than I can help, right now,” she’d said, even faced with the prospect of a twelve-hour drive with an awake and aware human driver at the wheel of the car at all times.
“But we wouldn’t have to…” Philip objected, but Stella would have none of it.
“Old-school,” she said. “We do this old school.”
“Old school it is,” Philip said, resignedly. “It might take a little longer.”
“We have a little time,” Stella said. “You hopped us over on a stratoplane; Lily Mae is still somewhere in the middle of the ocean. You have a bit of wiggle room there.”
“I know somebody in Chicago,” Joe said unexpectedly. “Well, close enough to it, anyway. One of my best friends from medical school and his wife lived near here; he died a few years ago but I am still in touch with Amelia, his widow, and I am certain she could spare a couch for us for a couple of days. About the vehicle… might I be able to help?”
“You three can go to ground there for now,” Philip said. “I am staying in town, at the Bishop’s residence. I have to show my face, after having crossed the pond in such a manner. There are people I have to speak to, up there. Go to your friend, and give me the address. Joe, at this point, it is entirely possible that it would be either you or I who would be the only people with the credentials to obtain any kind of legal vehicle at all—and it might well be that you could find us a jalopy somewhere that matches Stella’s requirements—but let me try it first. I think the Church might prove an easier way to source something that might not be directly attributable to any one of us. If I get hold of a car, it might not be under my own name—and they might not know which vehicle taken by which agent and going in which direction might be the one they are looking for. It’s a layer of protection, perhaps. Leave it to me—I will come and find you when I’ve got something in hand.”
“The Bishop’s residence?” Stella asked, a little alarmed. “Are you sure you’re going to be safe…?”
“From what?” Philip asked, shrugging. “I have absolutely solid alibis for anything that anybody would want to accuse me of. And I came in that aircraft with fellow clergy, not any potential fugitives from any potential justice. So far as they know, Stella, you and Rob are still knocking about the Aegean somewhere trying to put together an exit. It hasn’t been that long, not nearly long enough for anybody to start widening the search area all the way over here.”
Joe’s contact, the widow, had initially been astonished to hear from him but had, as he had predicted, been happy to offer her house as a bolt-hole for a couple of days. It was an ordinary small home in a leafy suburban street, indistinguishable from its neighbors, a perfect place to lie low; Amelia welcomed them to it, apologizing that the quarters would be tight—there was a spare bedroom which was offered to Stella, Rob bedded down on a futon in the study, and Joe took up residence on the sleeper sofa in the living room.
Amelia took an interest in her visitors, without being prying; when Stella announced that she desperately needed some basic necessities—because previous luggage had been minimal, or mislaid along their travels—Joe gave her his own credit chit to put it on, and Amelia offered to take her shopping. It was pleasant—relaxing, even—to be doing something as prosaic as this, buying a change of clothes for herself and for Rob, tossing necessities like new toothbrushes and a shaving kit into a shopping cart just like normal people did every day in ordinary lives—even stopping for a cup of coffee and a break along the way. Amelia did not ask any nosy questions, but it was clear that Joe’s entourage interested her; it was, obscurely, that very reticence that made Stella trust her. She explained, in broad terms, what they were about, without really revealing the Parada angle, but it was impossible to even begin the story without implying that there was a cohesive group which was somehow deeply connected, that both Rob and Lily Mae were part of it, and that she, Stella, had held in some way a position in which she was in some way responsible for their wellbeing. If Amelia connected any of this with the fact—which she could not help knowing—that Joe White Elk had been part of the Juno crew, she did not fish for information. She did focus on the people involved.
“Your Rob,” she said. “He just has an air of… I don’t know… errantry.”
Stella laughed. “How do you mean?”
“He has the protective instinct,” Amelia said thoughtfully. “I’ve seen him watching you. You said that he was part of this group that you were concerned with helping—and that may have been true, then—but the dynamic must have changed since you both left that group. Because now I sense that somehow he is feeling responsible for you rather than the other way around. There’s a… tenderness.”
“That isn’t really…” Stella began, a little disconcerted, but then stopped. There was a certain amount of truth to it. If she wanted to pinpoint a moment where she was first aware of it, there was the time that he had offered her a shoulder as a pillow on a Turkish bus. But even before then—even when he was just one of the Parada six—it had been Rob—it had been him or one of his fragments—who had been the one to reach out to Stella. To trust her, first. To give her information. To commit to her. Perhaps it was in the hope that she would come through for the rest of them, for his family—but there was more to it than that. There was a warmth. Of all the Parada six, he had been a special case. There was… what was it Amelia had called it… a tenderness.
In a way Stella desperately wished that Amelia had not drawn her attention to this, because even though she tried hard not to let this new awareness color her relationship to Rob she could not help it now. There were times it was easy to just put it aside and focus on other things but they had established a camaraderie. She had napped on that shoulder more than once, she liked the sense of comfort and safety that she got from having his arm around her. But in the hours after she returned from her outing with Amelia, she was hyper-aware, wary, and she knew that he noticed it and didn’t know the reason why and would never ask.
Joe noticed, too. He had offered to take up a number of small chores in return for their board, and it was thus that he ended up wrestling Amelia’s excited Golden Retriever, Ash, at the end of a tangling leash on his way out to take the dog for a walk.
“Do you want to come with me for company?” he asked Stella, and it was just a perfectly ordinary question, but there was an undercurrent in it that made Stella hesitate just as she was about to demur. The same instinct obviously touched Rob, who said something about the collection of books in the study being fascinating and asking permission to hole up in there and catch up on his reading. Amelia said something about dinner. Stella abruptly nodded, and followed Joe and the dog out of the front door.
“I do not mean to pry,” Joe said, as they sauntered along the sidewalk underneath street-side trees already very nearly bare of leaves, “but… what is the end-game here? Did you come here with a plan?”
Stella gave him a somewhat bleak look. “I haven’t had time to plan anything for a little while,” she said. “Things just kept on running away with me. Right now, I have a plan to try and find Lily Mae before… before anyone else does so.”
“And then?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I suppose I don’t have much to offer in terms of protection or support,” she said. “But I have to find a way to help.”
“I said I could perhaps be of assistance in finding her,” Joe said. “If there is a way I can offer anything—after—you need to tell me. How certain are you that she is going to be in the place where you are seeking her, though?”
“Not very,” Stella said. “But it is the best extrapolation that I have. Home—the place she thinks of as home—is the only destination that I can imagine her consciously trying to get to. If she went anywhere else then it is truly random and I don’t have a prayer of ever seeing her again.” She managed a smile. “But don’t ask me what I am thinking of doing after. I don’t even know if there is going to be an ‘after’ to worry about, right now.”
“It is not just Lily Mae. There is Rob, also,” Joe said gravely. “I think he is a little bit lost—lost, and grieving.”
“I know,” Stella said. “I can feel it, and there isn’t much I can do except hold out a slim hope. If that doesn’t come true—or if things go really wrong—Joe, you have only the beginning of an understanding of what the Parada crew was, how much of a cohesive unit they were, never mind the extra bond between Rob and his brother. And yet he gave that up, to come out here with me, to help me find Lily Mae. You have only just met Rob; I may have spent more time with all of them, but even I don’t have all the answers, and I have a feeling that Rob is still holding onto things he hasn’t told me yet.”
“I think he trusts you, but he does not quite believe you,” Joe said. “He wants to. And a big part of him clings to that because if it does not prove to be true then he has lost more than he can bear to think about. It would mean that his own escape from that place was for no good reason, that he left his brother back there with no hope of a ‘rescue’ while he himself is ‘free’ out here. If this does not pan out… the guilt will come. And it will be ravenous.”
“I know. But there is something important here, about Lily Mae, important enough for him—for all the Parada people—to have accepted this disintegration of that tight unit that they returned to Earth as. When I find out what that is, then I’ll have a plan.” She shrugged her shoulders. “When I know,” she said, “I’ll tell you. I promise.”
It took Philip a couple of days to find a vehicle that matched his criteria, but in the end he managed to obtain an incongruously baby blue and somewhat aged minivan. It came with a GPS system, but one that could be turned off if desired, even though Philip roundly told Stella that he thought the action might be rather more palliative than actually efficacious.
He brought it round to Amelia’s house mid-morning of the third day that Stella, Rob, and Joe had found a perch there.
“You’re going cross country in that thing?” Amelia had asked, surveying the minivan with a raised eyebrow. “There has to be a better way…?”
Philip met Stella’s eyes, and gave a huge resigned shrug.
“Old school,” he said.
The four of them left Chicago towards the end of the day, looping out of the city with the sun setting at their backs, intending to use the hours of darkness for their journey—as they had left the sun setting when they departed, so the sun would greet them as they reached New York City at more or less the time that it would rise. They had no set plans about what would happen when they arrived there; Rob did raise the inadvisability of attempting to drive in the city itself, but given that human driver hands-on-controlled cars were illegal in most such places, Philip could quite sincerely reassure him that he had no intention of doing so. The idea was that they would leave their vehicle on the outskirts somewhere at a place where it was possible to pick up New York’s version of the CitiCar to reach the places they might need to be. But all that was still up in the air, seeing as it all depended on how, where, and even whether they could actually find Lily Mae in the city—and they couldn’t plan for that until they were close enough to find out if Rob, bolstered by Joe’s own potential affinity to the Parada crew, was able to use the Illogon link to pinpoint Lily Mae’s location with any degree of certainty.
Philip and Stella spelled one another at the wheel every few hours, spending their off hours grabbing a quick catnap on the folded-down rear seat of the minivan or helping Rob continue filling in Joe White Elk on the reasons behind their race to New York.
They had not really talked of the Illogon before, especially not at Amelia’s place where they could have been overheard, and it was only now that Joe learned some of the details of Lily Mae’s escape. Joe didn’t say much, listening and absorbing—he was so silent, in fact, that Stella interrupted the account at one point to ask if he had any questions and he lifted a hand to stop her.
“When I have put them into the proper words, I will ask them,” he said. “But so far I have gained several answers to questions I already had.”
It took just over twelve hours to reach the outskirts of New York City, and then another half a day to find a place to stay, and a manner in which they could find their way to the Bronx address where Lily Mae had lived before she left Earth for the stars. It was the apartment she had grown up in as a girl, which she had inherited on her parents’ death and which she had always considered her home base.
“She’s going home,” Stella said, “and if she’s going home she’ll be looking for this place. It’s the childhood home we all want to return to in this kind of crisis. And if I’m right and it’s all tied up with the Illogon’s desires, then that’s going to be the place she instinctively seeks out—the place of origin. The first home. The beginning. She’ll be here.”
But although she exhorted both Rob and Joe to listen, to reach out, to keep looking for any sense of Lily Mae anywhere near, they seemed to have struck out completely. Days passed without so much as a sign, and the days lengthened into a week, and then longer.
“She couldn’t be here yet,” Stella said. “She might still be on her way.”
“How long do you intend to give her?” Philip asked quietly.
“She’ll be here,” Stella said, stubbornly, absolutely certain of that fact for no reason that she could actually articulate. She annoyed even herself because as a scientist she should have been working with some kind of empirical evidence that she could have offered up as proof of her hypothesis—but she had nothing, nothing except that burning certainty, a knowledge, the provenance of which she had absolutely no idea of. All she knew was that she was willing to lay down her life in defense of that idea.
It began to seem hopeless, though, even for her, until the morning Rob rose abruptly from a chair, his shoulders stiff, his head turning, as though he was a hunting dog with a scent of quarry at last. Stella began to ask him if he was all right, but then read her answer from the too-bright glint in his eyes, from the expression on his face that was a mixture of disbelief, astonishment, and the dawning of a fragile joy too tenuous to be completely trusted but nonetheless desperately clutched at.
“I think…” he said, choosing his words very carefully, “I think… she is here.”
Stella took control of the situation, and they all deferred to her—it was as though she was the searchlight, the guiding light, the seeker. It was Rob and Joe who were the only guides who could hope to take them directly to Lily Mae, but it was Stella who had been the compass pointing to the place where they were to look. All Rob could tell her at that moment—and Joe could only quietly add a word of agreement, that he too could sense something coming closer—was that the presence they had come here to seek was close. But it was Stella who chose, of all the possible places, the one spot where they would go to wait for Lily Mae to come.
Her old street. The street that she had lived on in the happiest days of her life. The place where a child would come, when it wanted to ‘come home’.
The rise in sea levels had wreaked havoc with the shorelines of New York, and there were many places that had been abandoned, left to rot, too close to lapping waters that had never been there before, overrun by the wharf-side vermin seeking higher, safer ground. Lily Mae’s old neighborhood was split between streets that looked as they had always had, as though nothing at all had changed, and streets which were empty, houses with broken windows staring empty-eyed into lots where other buildings had been permitted to disintegrate into collapsed piles. The building that housed Lily Mae’s old apartment was only partially inhabited, and several more or less completely empty buildings marched further on down towards the old shoreline. Where those buildings ended, a number of more or less ruined ones covered the rest of the way, their foundations inundated by the water which lapped at the edges of some of the ruins.
What people there were on the streets above the waterline tried to ignore the four people who were obviously not part of the neighborhood; Stella, having led them here, took a step back and allowed Rob to take point. His eyes were darting around, from ruin to shadow to any scurrying human who might be the one he was seeking, but none of them were, not one of them was Lily Mae. He stumbled forward, one foot in front of the other, his eyes unfocused, almost blind, with Philip occasionally guiding him around obstacles in his path which he quite literally didn’t even seem to know were there.
After almost an hour of this, with no success, Rob looked exhausted, defeated, lost. By this stage it was Joe who was beside him, one hand on his elbow to ostensibly guide him but sometimes literally supporting him. Stella was almost ready to call a halt, to say that they could try again later, when Rob suddenly stopped. His head went up. He shook Joe’s hand off and turned unerringly, staring past a crumbling house a little way down the street. Everyone turned with him, four pairs of eyes scouring the area, which, for once, seemed empty of people.
It was Philip who reacted first.
“There,” he said, pointing.
Sitting on the edge of a semi-ruined wall, with its gray-coated back to them and a hood of sorts drawn up over its head in a way that had disguised its silhouette, a hunched-over human figure resolved itself from the background. It appeared to be holding something in its right hand—a tire iron, a length of iron rebar, something long and metal and absolutely filthy—and it was hitting the wall upon which it sat with the length of the thing, in a gesture which spoke at once of a banked anger and a sense of bitter defeat. Stella peered at the figure, still far enough away not to have noticed them or responded to their presence, through narrowed eyes, frowning.
