Xenogenesis, page 8
“The shape of it…of us.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t speak. Her throat was constricted by an invisible hand that was squeezing hard.
Rex touched her, then. He brought his hand to her face and ran his thumb over her cheek, high up under her eye. It was a soft touch. Her trembling grew. Now the sweet-sour ache of need was added to it. Her breath evaporated.
“I can see everything from here,” he said, his voice low. “I saw it that day in the park. We fit together, you and I. You will cover yourself in glory and I will provide for us both. You know how to think, Belen. I can think, too, only differently. We will be together until we both die, because we’re so right for each other.”
“If that’s what you can see, then why haven’t you said anything?” she demanded. Her voice was strained.
“I thought you knew. I thought you were waiting, like I am.”
“Waiting for what?”
He kissed her then. His lips were hot and so incredibly soft, yet there was a firmness behind them, that in her incoherent state, Belen thought might be his indomitable will. Heated need stole any other thoughts and she clung to him, holding him there, holding his lips to hers.
When he finally let her go, Belen gave a shuddering exhalation.
Rex was watching her with a hot look in his eyes that matched her insides.
“I don’t want to wait any more,” Belen told him.
Rex didn’t wait for the end of the game. He didn’t wait for the end of the period. He got to his feet and picked up her hand and tugged her upright. He didn’t let go of her hand until they reached his little house in the Esquiline, where he finally made Belen his and she began to understand, just as he had known all along, how perfectly they fit together.
* * * * *
Belen’s life with Rex in it would have been perfect, except that Rex became obsessed with money.
His ability to see patterns and how systems worked had always been something he could use for fun. He could anticipate tankball plays and even predict which team would be the year’s winner.
Gradually, though, he started to apply the same systems analysis to what he called “success”. He had always gambled on tankball games, which he said wasn’t gambling at all, not for him. Belen watched him take a handful of credits and build them into enough money by the end of the tankball season that he could buy his own house. His first house.
By then, Tony was working in the administrative wing of the Bridge and living in a cramped apartment in the Esquiline, which he called paying his dues. When Rex bought a second house and rented it out, Tony was scathing in his criticism. “What next?” he asked Belen. “He quits his job and lives off the money people pay him?”
Belen had flinched, for that was exactly was Rex had been talking about lately. “By the time you emerge, Belen, I won’t need the salary anymore,” Rex had told her. “All the revenue streams will make up more than I earn. You’ll get to pick which house you want to live in…or we can buy whatever house you want.”
Belen couldn’t explain why such talk made her feel almost nauseous. She loved Rex. She had no doubts about that at all. Only, his single-minded focus upon the acquisition of money jarred her internal gyroscope about right and wrong.
She understood that Rex could see how money ebbed and flowed. He could see how to shift the pattern so it favored his ventures. No one else could do that. Only, it felt wrong to her.
Two years after she emerged, Tony and Rex had their final, fatal falling out. They had always been uneasy around each other, friends only because Belen insisted upon it. She had grown up with Tony and she admired his ambition as much as she appreciated Rex’s drive. Both men were aiming high and she had no doubt that both of them would achieve their goals. She only wished they could be real friends and not just tolerate each other because of her.
In the end, it was because of her they let go of even that superficial pretense.
Tony had never hidden how he felt about her. Even when Rex was completely a part of her life, he would often drop comments about his love and devotion for her, making them sound like jokes. Yet there was a look in Tony’s eyes that made Belen wary, even while he was joking.
Because they both worked in the Aventine, Belen often met Tony for lunch. She confided in him simply because Tony knew Rex better than anyone else besides herself. With Tony, she could vent all her frustration and uneasiness about Rex’s singular drive toward success, as he defined it.
Tony listened for a while, nodding in all the right places. Then he leaned closer. “Belen, why are you sticking with the joker? Can’t you see that he’s wrong for you?”
Cold touched her middle. “I love Rex. He loves me.”
Tony nodded again. “I can see it in his face every time he looks at you. He’d sell the ship itself if it would make you happy. Just because he loves you, though, that doesn’t mean you should stay with him.”
“I love him,” she repeated flatly. The cold was spreading now.
“You’re one of the most principled people I’ve ever known,” Tony said. “Rex…just isn’t. It’s chewing you up inside. How long do I have to sit by and watch him drain the life out of you?”
She stared at him. The cold had enveloped her completely. She felt as though she had turned into a block of ice. She couldn’t speak.
Tony reached over the table and picked up her hand. His trembled. Against her skin, his flesh was hot. “Most people are afraid to walk away from someone else because they don’t want to be alone. You, though…you wouldn’t have to be alone at all.”
She tried to speak. Her mouth wouldn’t cooperate.
Tony shook her hand, his dark eyes steady upon her face. “You don’t have to say anything. Only, I know this isn’t a shock to you. You’ve always known how I feel about you. I just didn’t say anything until now because, well, he does love you. He’s not good for you. The way he uses money….” His voice was rich with disgust.
Finally, she found her voice. “And you would be good for me?” Her voice was hoarse.
“I won’t make you feel the way he does. I won’t make you sit with a friend and cry the way you are right now.”
She wiped at her cheeks quickly and pulled her hand out of his.
Tony sat back. “Just think about it,” he said softly. “That’s all. Think about it and know you have someone to turn to, when he becomes too much for you to handle.”
When she arrived back at the tiny apartment they were living in, in the far opposite corner from the Bridge, Rex was sitting at the table with nothing in front of him, not even a screen.
“You’re waiting for me?” Belen asked.
“I saw you with Tony today,” Rex said. His voice was even.
“We met for lunch.”
Rex shook his head. “You were crying, Belen. He was holding your hand. It was more than lunch.”
She bit her lip. “You’re right. We were talking about you.”
Rex looked startled. It wasn’t an expression she saw on his face very often. He was that sure of himself. “Me?”
She drew in a breath, bracing herself, then sat at the table next to him. “You’re making me unhappy, Rex.”
He flinched. “How…?” he demanded, his voice hoarse. His eyes glittered in the low light.
“You really have to ask? You? You see everything.” The bitterness escaped with her words, despite trying to hold it back.
“I see you perfectly,” he said. “I see your beauty, your intelligence, your determination to help others. I love what I see.”
“Do you also see how much I hate this obsession you have over money?”
He blinked. “I’m not obsessed.”
“It’s all you think about!” she cried. “You don’t have any ambition at all, except to make more and more profits. It’s indecent!”
Rex’s hand curled into a fist. “I’m ambitious,” he said. “More than you know.”
“You’ve never spoken about a career, or a profession, or even serving the ship. You’ve never spoken of wanting anything from life that wasn’t something you could buy.”
“You, Belen. I wanted you.” His gaze was steady.
Her tears escaped. “Then why do you spend all your time trying to make more money? It’s all you talk about! You have me, Rex. I’m yours!”
Rex got to his feet and turned her chair out, away from the table, moving it as if she was not still sitting in it. Then he got to his knees in front of her and picked up her hand. “I do it for you,” he said, his voice low. “It’s what I can do, the only thing I can do well, while you’re brilliant and dedicated and every time I look at you, you make me even more determined to give you everything you could ever want. I love you, Belen. That’s why I do it. If you want me to stop, if you want me to…to…do something honorable and good and worthy, as you do, then I will. Just give me time to work it out. Please.”
She threw her arms around his neck and held him, sobbing hard. “All the time in the world,” she cried, “if you’ll only try.”
And he had. That had been the best year of her life, for she and Rex had spent nearly all their time talking about his future, for hers was already set. “You’ll be the head of the Medical Institute one day,” Rex told her. “While the only thing I know how to do well is make money. I suppose I could play tankball, except I should have started ten years ago.”
She kissed him. “Whatever it is you end up doing, I don’t care.”
“You don’t mind being poor?”
“Not in the slightest,” she said. “I always figured I would be poor because I always knew I was going to be a medic. If you’re with me, I really don’t care.”
It was just after the end of the year Tankball Association soiree when Tony stopped by the apartment. He had kept his distance since she and Rex had resolved their issues, not even meeting her for lunch. “Forget everything I said that day,” he told Belen gruffly. “It never happened.”
“Except it was because you said something that Rex and I worked things out and I will never forget that,” Belen told him.
Tony shook his head, his shaggy black hair falling over his eyes as he did it, shadowing them. “I’d rather forget. All of it.”
Belen let him keep his distance. She was too happy to care for right now, anyway. Besides, Tony was busy with the team campaign for the next elections. She suspected he was throwing himself into the work, although it was work he loved.
Now he was here on her doorstep. He looked haggard, as if he had not been sleeping lately. When she invited him in, he stood in the little open area in their cramped living room, his hands at his sides, looking ill and defeated.
“What has happened?” Belen breathed, gripping his arm. Even Rex looked concerned, as he parked himself on the edge of the table.
Tony tried to speak. He swallowed and tried again. “I…I’ve been offered a child.”
That explained the blank look in his eyes. He was stunned. Anyone would be, Belen thought, with a tiny touch of envy. She mentally shook herself for such a negative reaction. “That’s wonderful, Tony,” she said firmly. “It is an affirmation of everything you hold dear. Your values, your principals…it’s why they chose you, I just know it.”
He blinked and looked at her. “You don’t understand,” he said slowly.
Rex drew in a sharp, hard breath and lurched to his feet. “No!”
Tony shifted his gaze to Rex. “I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s a mistake,” Rex said, his voice hoarse. “It has to be.”
Belen’s heart squeezed as she began to understand. She just didn’t think she could encompass the whole, horrible truth.
“I spent the last hour going over it with them,” Tony said quietly. “Belen is the child’s mother.”
Chapter Eight
Long after she had wept the last tear she could squeeze from her aching eyes, Belen lay against Rex, listening to his heart. She was wide awake despite the lateness of the hour. It would be dawn soon.
Everything that could be said had been spoken already, at least once. The horrible facts had been gone over until they were bruised and bloody.
“You have always wanted a child,” Rex had pointed out, more than once.
“If I refuse this one, we might still be offered one of our own.”
“No one refuses a child,” Rex said. “It’s unheard of.”
“So is owning more than one house,” she shot back. “No one knew what ‘rent’ meant until you dug it up from the archives.”
Rex crossed his arms. “You would let another woman mother the child that should be yours? Raise them to their standards? If they even have any?”
She had begun crying then, because Rex had known exactly where to strike, to open up her defenses and blast them out of existence. He knew her. Too well.
Now, her tears were gone.
Rex shifted against her, pulling her closer. In the dark, she could only see the profile of his cheek and a hint of the widow’s peak, the blond hair showing pale in the dark. The expression in his eyes was hidden from her.
“You should take the child,” he said, his voice very low.
“I can’t leave you,” she whispered.
“You should. I’m useless, Belen. Good for nothing. Tony will be Captain one day and you will be good for him. And his career.”
“You don’t want me….”
“If a man can be said to not want the oxygen he breathes, then yes, I don’t want you. That’s why you have to go. That’s why you have to take the baby. This is what you were meant to do and I would hate myself if I stopped you from it. I would hate you for letting me do that to you.”
He was giving her a way out. Even though she had thought she had no more capacity for tears, she felt them gathering. They tore at her vision and her heart. “Don’t say it. Please.”
“I have to.” He kissed her temple. “I can only go on loving you if you do this. If you…leave. And I would much rather love you than hate you.”
* * * * *
Belen moved out of the little apartment the next day and into Tony’s house in the Esquiline two days after that, along with the baby girl they named Jessica. She didn’t see Rex for another five years.
Jessica was two years old when Tony finally coaxed Belen into his bed. When she cried, afterward, he even seemed to understand her tears, which made her cry harder.
Three years later, when she came face to face with Rex in public for the first time, Tony had been there to prop her up—physically, as well as mentally, for his arm stayed around her waist the whole time. Afterward, he got her drunk and nursed her hangover the next morning with more tenderness than the most dedicated medic had ever shown.
Rex, though, seemed to thrive after she left. As far as she could tell, he had returned immediately to his old ways. He was intent on the making of money, for the sole purpose of acquiring more and more of it, with no honorable role or profession as the foundation for his success.
Now that she was not with him, people talked about Rex freely in front of her. No one understood him. They couldn’t grasp how someone could thrive without a job or profession. Rex didn’t appear to work at all. He instead seemed to spend his days talking to people.
Jessica was only six months old when Rex stunned the ship by putting a new tankball player under contract. Nerida Giles had not yet been offered a place on one of the professional teams, although her agility and skill as a topman in the amateur leagues had assured her a place. The day after Nerida’s emergence, when she was legally able to enter contracts under her volition, she signed a deal that meant Rex would manage her career for her. All she had to do was play as well as she could and work at getting better at it.
The entire ship scratched their heads over the deal. “What does he get out of it?” they asked. “It’s not as though she’s making any money as a player.”
Belen suspected Rex had seen some sort of pattern that no one else could. Four months later, the Zealots offered Nerida more money than any other player in the history of the game, along with perks and side benefits unheard of until then.
As everyone debated the details, more facts emerged. Rex had spent the intervening months haggling with five teams, negotiating terms, with each team trying to outbid the other, while the price rose higher and higher.
Within a year, Rex had signed on four other players, three of them already established as professionals and looking to move up. There was little fuss over these contracts because the ship was already immersed in Rex’s latest scandalous scheme; selling car journeys.
He wasn’t selling the private cars themselves, which most people could understand. There were not enough private cars on the ship to go around and the Bridge strictly limited their manufacture. People who owned cars tended to take care of them. They could sell them to others if they needed money. Rex, though, acquired a dozen cars and was offering to drive people from one location to another, for a small fee.
“But the train is free,” one of Belen’s fellow medics had pointed out.
“What if the train isn’t running right then?” another said.
“Besides, he’ll pick you up right where you are and drop you right where you want to go. No walking needed.”
The scheme was simple enough and became a viable form of transport on the ship, especially when someone needed to get somewhere quickly. The scandalous part of the business was that Rex was not personally involved in it at all. He hired drivers to operate the cars and took part of their earnings for himself, to help pay for the cost of operating the vehicles and for his own spreadsheet.
Belen suspected people might have settled for considering him an enterprising man, only they could not figure out why he was doing it.
“It’s not as if he has a special interest in cars,” one of Belen’s friends had said, echoing what Belen had heard from others. “He has all those tankball players on contract, too. They have nothing to do with cars. So what is his profession? Is it tankball, or something else?”
Belen could have told them, although when it came to Rex and his gossip-generating businesses, she stayed absolutely silent. She knew, as no one else seemed to grasp, that everything Rex did, he did to acquire more money. That truth would have shocked and dismayed the ship.
