- Chapter 18 - How Do You Spell Finesse? -
Luci wished the ground would swallow her up and end her agony of embarrassment. Ford had challenged her, and she'd drug him tooth and nail off the old alien equipment, but in the process she'd managed to coat herself thoroughly in the greasy black stuff Ford had called hydrocarbon. She had to look terrible, and they were headed out to meet the Kryptonian. Luci actually groaned when they stepped outside into the moonlight, not because she was facing the beautiful boy from Onlea's story with grease on her nose but because of the stars. They stretched out above them forever. The sickening feeling of vertigo set in, and Lucy was certain she would fall right off the world into the sea of stars. It was wide open, not like home where everything was close and safe, and there was always a ceiling to hold you in.
Luci dropped to the ground, clutching the grass and squeezed her eyes shut. She could barely hear someone screaming past the rushing in her ears.
The Eradicator had been carefully composing herself for the introduction of her Kryptonian to the other members of the breeding project, when Luci apparently lost her mind and started screaming. She dropped to the ground, clutching at the Earth and ripping at the grass. "What's wrong with her?" the Eradicator barked. "Reo? Help her."
"Get her back in the barn," Reo replied. She'd seen this form of madness before. It was a terror born of life in space only living in cramped space stations or in the core of mining colonies like Luci and Ford. "It's the outside. She's agoraphobic."
While the Eradicator and Reo bundled his sister away, Ford stared up at the stars without terror or even wonder. He was still floating along on the detached river his life had become. The humans and the Kryptonian were standing across the yard, watching his sister lose it. Why did they look so concerned over his sister? She wasn't anything to them. It had to be fake concern, put on for their benefit. Ford headed across the yard, feeling slightly sluggish in the gravity of Earth, and met them before they could get to his sister. Planting his feet firmly in front of the Kryptonian, Ford tugged at the man's arm. "So you're the Kryptonian," he said. "Hey. I'm talking to you. Are you listening?"
Clark tore his eyes away from the drama between the three women to look at the little boy addressing him so matter-of-factly. "Is she okay?" Clark asked. "Do they need our help?"
Ford looked over his shoulder at the barn where apparently the Eradicator and Reo had retreated with his sister. "I think they've got it. I need to talk to you, if you're the Kryptonian."
What kind of kid was this? Clark wondered. "My name is Clark, and I'm a Kryptonian. I think we should probably go check on your friend."
"She's my sister, and it's okay. She just got scared," Ford said. He looked up at the sky and shrugged. "It's really big out here."
Martha and Jonathan exchanged worried looks. It was one thing to play host to a couple of alien refugees, and a completely different thing when the aliens were hysterical children. They had decided as a family that placating the Eradicator when she was acting benign and politic was much easier than dealing with her when she was angry, and as long as her requests were reasonable they were going to grit their teeth and politely help. Neither of them had banked on any of the refugees being children, young children at that. Jonathan was reminded of Clark when he looked at the red-haired boy. Another lost alien was on their doorstep. "You say it's big out here?" Jonathan asked. "What do you mean? You come from up there." He pointed at the sky. "And it's really big up there."
"I mean it's big out here, wide and open. We come from a little place out there, closed in tight," Ford said. He wanted to tell them Luci was agoraphobic but he didn't know the English word. "Can we talk, really talk?" Ford slipped into galactic standard, feeling fairly certain that the humans wouldn't understand him. Then maybe they'd take a hint and let him talk with the Kryptonian. His manifesto tucked safely under his arm, he stared up at Clark, a picture of stern seriousness.
"How old are you?" Clark asked. The kid looked about ten but he acted thirty. He claimed the girl who lost her cool was his sister but he didn't seem overly concerned about her. Dropping down to the kid's level, Clark offered him a hand. "Why don't you introduce yourself, and we can talk...in whichever language you'd like." Clark recognized that speaking in Galactic standard excluded his parents, but if the kid wanted a relatively private conversation it was the way to go.
"My name is Ford, and my sister back there is Luci. We need somewhere safe to stay, a new home. Earth seems nice enough, but it isn't really safe. I'll need your help to make it really really safe." Ford took out his manifesto and started to flip it open, but the Eradicator wrapped her arms around him from behind in some fake semblance of an affectionate hug, temporarily ending his attempt to talk with Clark.
"That got out of hand on me there," the Eradicator said. "Not to worry, the girl grew up inside a mining planet. That was her first glimpse of a sky and she lost her head a bit. Ford here isn't scared of the sky though, are you?"
It was all Martha could do not to try to snatch the strange red headed boy away from the Eradicator. Just watching the machine cuddle a child as though she felt some emotion for him, had her hackles erect and her maternal instincts buzzing.
Apparently she wasn't the only one disturbed by the Eradicator's hug. Jonathan came around her and disentangled Ford from the machine's grasp. "Why don't I take Ford and go check on his sister at the barn? Are you worried about your sister, buddy?"
"Yes, go check on the children, Jonathan. I'd like to speak with Martha," the Eradicator said.
Clark didn't much care for the single-minded stare the Eradicator was leveling his mother with. He was uncomfortably reminded of her penchant for threatening murder at the drop of a hat, and humans were exquisitely delicate creatures. Before Jonathan could drop Ford and get in the middle of things, Clark shook his head at his father and pointed to his eyes. He could watch the Eradicator even if they stepped inside, and he would stop her if the machine got out of hand. There was no reason to abandon the placate-the-Eradicator plan yet. "Weren't you going to take Ford to see his sister, Dad?"
The Eradicator looked at Clark and Jonathan and grinned in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. "I just want to talk with her."
Sitting on a prickly flake of dried grasses, Reo watched Luci resting in a mound of those same grasses tossed together into a crude bed. Sleeping, the child looked even younger than twelve, too young to be orphaned and alone, too young to protect a baby brother and cater to her mysterious benefactress, Onlea, an insane Eradicator. With a frown plastered on her face, Reo tried to retain the objectivity she'd worked so hard to maintain during their journey. If she remained aloof and was careful, she wouldn't get trapped by the children, trapped into a mother-role she had avoided her whole life. Having children was like deciding to add parasites to your life. They were fundamentally useless creatures that you had to feed, clothe, educate, and endure for the majority of your life.
Calling her an impractical parasite, didn't make Luci seem any less innocent or perfect or pitiful to Reo today.
Luci, opened her eyes and immediately started to breathe rapidly again.
"Hey." Reo snapped her fingers in front of Luci's face and pointed at the ceiling. "We're inside again. You don't need to panic."
It took Luci a second to process that she really was inside, and everything seemed to settle into a more mentally manageable place. "Did I faint? I scared myself a little out there."
"You panicked. It's a physiologic response to noxious stimuli. I wouldn't be ashamed. It's normal when you're raised in a hole to have a hard time dealing with something as big as outside. I've lived most of my life in space stations, so I've seen people raised like you who have problems facing that." Reo pointed to the sealed barn doors and the wide open space stretching out the other side of it.
"Thanks," Luci muttered. Why was Reo playing sentinel, sitting beside her? It wasn't like she liked Luci or her brother? She didn't talk to them while they were stuck on a ship together for months. They had been cargo to her, annoying cargo that needing feeding. For once, the old woman seemed to be willing to treat her like a person, and she wasn't putting on her normal cool airs. Luci wasn't ready to buy the turnaround but at least she hadn't woken up alone. "Is Ford okay? Did he faint too?"
"Ford is fine. That child is fearless," Reo said. "He is still outside."
Luci didn't agree about Ford being fine or fearless. That fearless kid was a fake mask. Her little brother was not fearless. He was a baby, scared of the dark and the miners in their home, everything. Her brother wasn't the cool robot who wasn't afraid and didn't cry. Luci first thought that it was a phase or a game or something, but it wasn't passing. "He's not supposed to be fearless. He didn't used to be."
Reo didn't argue with Luci about Ford. She wasn't a psychologist, but she knew ten year-olds weren't supposed to act the way Ford did. It was probably some trauma induced syndrome caused by all the upheaval or his parents' deaths. Every alien species had its own psychological response to grief and shock. Reo wasn't even sure what the kids were genetically, much less how to psychologically profile them. "I'm sure he'll go back to acting more normal when things calm down."
"Do you think things are going to calm down here?" Luci asked.
Reo looked around, contemplating the pseudo-developed culture that produced the livestock container they inhabited, and she didn't know. Societies on the lower side of development could be scary in their own crude way, and they had high-tech terror along for the ride in the form of their own Eradicator. "Maybe."
Martha stared across her kitchen table at the Eradicator, unable to fathom what the creature could want from her. She could trace virtually every bit of pain and trauma her family had suffered for more than a year back to this one machine. As ineffectual and infantile as it would be, Martha wished she had her shotgun back so that she could pepper the machine's perfect façade with buckshot. It wasn't likely to cause any real damage, but maybe she could tear away some of the lie, the fake face and flesh that let this machine pretend to be alive. "What do you want?"
"Unfortunately, I seem to need you. First, I tried to be you for the children. I used you as my template. There was the mother-smile and the mother-voice and the mother-clothes." The Eradicator demonstrated each accessory as she listed it. "I don't seem to have managed it very well though. There's an intangible aspect that I can't seem to quantify or replicate, and the children aren't comforted by me."
"You tried to be a mother to those children out there? Did you orphan them first?" Martha asked. "Why would you take on a pair of children?"
"I didn't orphan them personally, but they are orphans. It would be a personal favor to me, if you would care for these two children, Luci and Ford. You have a talent for motherhood. Clark turned out well considering the environment and the society, and you were even able to reclaim your son after the damage to his memory." The Eradicator felt she was perhaps going overboard, heaping on the sincere-sounding compliments, but she wasn't sure how much finesse Martha was going to require. "Will you take on the children?"
"When I take in those children, it will be for their sakes not as a favor to you," Martha growled. "We may not know why you took in refugees, or where you're headed with this, but I'm sure we're going to find out eventually. For your information, being a mother isn't in your voice or your face or your clothes." Martha pushed her chair back, feeling righteous and angry and vindictive all at once. "It's in your soul, something you don't have, and you can't replicate."
The Eradicator smiled and shrugged, apparently not taken aback by Martha's vehemence. "But you'll take on the children?"
Black coffee, thick and cold sat in the bottom of Gabe Sullivan's cup. There was more to be had in the pot, but he was going to have a hard time sleeping as it was. His mornings started at five AM, and he usually turned in by ten in the evening, which meant he was twenty minutes past his bedtime and counting. Chloe hadn't made it home, and she hadn't called. Most likely she was working on a story, trying to get a last minute article into the Torch, but he wished she would answer her cell phone, or call him. To be honest, he was used to his daughter's independent streak, and nine times out of ten she phoned, but that meant ten percent of the time he ended up over-caffeinated and terribly worried.
Gabe knew he should punish her, or at least have a serious talk with his daughter about her vanishing acts, but it was hard for him being a single parent to exert authority a lot of the time. Resolving to put his foot down, Gabe carried his coffee cup to the sink and tossed the last of his beverage.
He heard the click of the front door opening and closing. Gabe started composing a thorough chastisement.
"Dad, you're up. I should have called, and I'm sorry. Things were crazy, and my phone's battery died," Chloe said. "Can you forgive me?"
His resolve to be stern didn't survive Chloe's quick apology and explanation of her failure to call. "So, was it a big story?" Gabe asked. "Can your old dad have a scoop on the craziness that kept you out tonight?"
Taking a seat at the kitchen table, Chloe shrugged. "It was a story," Chloe said. "We were investigating Mrs. Flutey, one of the school's teachers, but we got a little sidetracked." I kissed Clark, and he started a fire.
"Did you say Mrs. Flutey?" Gabe frowned and joined Chloe at the table. "Honey, I'm not sure what you were investigating, but I think Mrs. Flutey was on the news tonight. She's dead."
"Dead?" Chloe whispered. Her mind kicked into high gear, running through the possibilities Mrs. Flutey's death could imply. Had Lex been involved in her death? She and Clark sent Lex to investigate. Surely, he wouldn't have killed the woman. "Are you sure?"
"Suicide by all reports," Gabe replied. "What were you kids investigating?"
"Suicide?" Chloe remembered the denial and the horror, the confusion that Mrs. Flutey had feigned. What if it had all been real? Was it possible for her to not know she was a mutant? Had their investigation opened her eyes and caused her to kill herself? The recurring theme of her short life flashed through Chloe's mind, truth was a powerful thing. She had never really thought of it as destructive before, but it could be. The truth could kill. "I have to call Clark."
Almost everyone was in the barn, Martha, Jonathan, Luci, Ford, and Reo. They were working out the details of their newly populous household. It would be interesting to see where they put everyone. Clark assumed he'd be sharing his bedroom with the little boy. He should probably be in there, helping make the decisions and greet the refugees, but he had responsibilities, one very pretty yet unstable responsibility. "Eradicator, I agreed to host your refugees, but I can't play host to you personally. You're not simpatico with my parents' universe, and I won't let them be hurt."
"You're right. They don't like me much," the Eradicator said. "I can't leave just yet, though. There are details that need ironing." I need your cooperation. What brand of finesse would it take to get Clark to help her? Reo signed up for a little cash and extortion. The children had been satisfied with a fairy tale. Clark was the centerpiece, the Kryptonian. Maybe it was time for the finesse of logic. If she could explain her mission properly, so that he could understand the simple perfection of her quest, how could he not help?
"Details? Tiny details like why you've been collecting people?" Clark stared at the Eradicator, completely unable to read her smooth passive face. "What's really going on?"
"I can give you the truth, but I would like you to keep it to yourself for a few days while you think about what I have to say," the Eradicator said. "I have a mission, a very human mission when you think about it. If a human notices a species in danger of vanishing, they do everything in their power to preserve that genetic path. It's a logical choice, a conservationist's vision." The Eradicator smiled warmly, the words coming easily now. "Clark, you are an endangered species. Those people I'm collecting are the closest thing to you left in the galaxy. I want to preserve Krypton, her last son. I learned the hard way that preserving an individual to eternity doesn't really work, but through life, the crazy virus that is genetic potential, Krypton can survive."
The Eradicator sighed and caressed Clark's cheek. "You just have to have hundreds and hundreds of children."
