The Widow Read online

“Would you like to choose or shall I?” I asked him, keeping my voice neutral.

  He looked at the wand, obviously pleased at the idea, and I showed him how to pull up lists and sort them and make it play text or voice. He pointed to the little musical note icon on the screen and looked a question at me. I pressed it and a list of songs scrolled up. He jabbed at it, seeing a name he recognized and I grinned and pressed it.

  The breathtaking complexity of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto boomed out, filling the room. We listened to the entire thing and when I tried to press the screen to show him something else his eyes went wide and he spread his hands to cover the screen.

  “Okay,” I told him. I expected him to switch it off when one of the organ pieces started, but he didn’t. When Sebastian arrived with my dinner I stayed and ate with them, then curled up on one of the spare beds. It occurred to me that he had no way of knowing that I hadn’t been sleeping with Julian and had no intention of now taking up with him and I wasn’t looking forward to explaining the fact. I knew he wouldn’t press matters with Quince in the room, and while I couldn’t stay with the boy indefinitely, even a single nights grace seemed welcome.

  They were awake and playing with the wand when I got up.

  “Pick that one,” Sebastian was saying, pointing at the screen. “No, the one above it.”

  I watched, bemused, as they listened with rapt attention to something from the early days of rock that I didn’t even recognize.

  “Good morning,” I said when the song was over.

  They both looked up at me, startled and guilty.

  “You better go get breakfast,” Sebastian told Quince under his breath. “I won’t play anything until you get back.”

  Quince took off like he’d been shot out of a cannon.

  “I’m guessing you don’t have a wide variety of music here,” I said with a grin.

  “Try any,” he told me. “Music and movies were all in the central computer and it crashed when the power satellite went down. They moved it over here eventually, but never managed to get it back online.”

  “You don’t have any?” I asked amazed.

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing but books, and precious few of those. As soon as they knew what was happening, they got the bright idea of printing everything out, but they started with medical and technical guides. It wasn’t until they realized they only had a few reams of paper left that someone decided to do some literature and history, so we wouldn’t devolve into complete barbarians.”

  Whether or not they had succeeded was in some doubt, in my opinion, but I kept that to myself.

  The door opened, but it was much to fast for Quince to have returned. I thought perhaps Titus had decided to check up on us, but it was Julian who walked in somewhat reluctantly.

  “Morning,” he said with forced brightness. “I’m sorry to intrude, but Titus wanted me to check you over and well… I should have come yesterday but…”

  “It’s fine,” I told him, forestalling the harsh words Sebastian was clearly getting ready to spew. How ridiculously hypocritical was it for him to be angry with Julian for something he had actually done himself.

  I climbed up the ladder and waited until Julian was through the hatch, then closed it carefully.

  “I’m very sorry for what happened,” I told him honestly enough, remembering that he had, after all, been the only person to come forward and try to help me.

  “Do you think anythings broken?” He asked hesitantly. “I mean, I’ll check your arms and ribs but I’d rather not have to…” He looked at my waist pointedly.

  “Oh no,” I assured him vehemently. “Just a little sore. Nothing some time wont cure.” The last thing I wanted after last night was to be splayed out for a gynecological exam. I wondered if the women ever visited the spiders. Sebastian had told me that the pollies could change arms, did the spiders do so as well? If they had one for sucking, was probing also in their repertoire? I suppressed the image that brought to mind with a shudder.

  “I went outside for an hour yesterday and just sat in the snow,” he admitted with a wry grin.

  He got down to business, checking my wrists and having me pull my onesie down to the waist so that he could make sure all my ribs were sound. He managed it with a clinical detachment that I found both vexing and comforting.

  He seemed eager to be gone when he finished, but I held him up just a moment more.

  “You didn’t get into any trouble, did you?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “A bit of a tongue lashing, but nothing worse. Titus can be very tolerant when he needs you. I don’t think Sebastian would enjoy the same leniency, but then Sebastian would never need it.”

  Ha! If he only knew.

  “You made a good choice, by the way,” he said, surprising me. “He argued against us bringing you here, but now that he views you as being his responsibility, he’ll do everything he can to protect you.”

  So, their not knowing I was coming until the last minute had been just another lie. They were piling up so fast I wasn’t even keeping track of them anymore.

  “But be careful,” he finished warningly. “Titus wants you here, but he doesn’t need you. He won’t show you any mercy if you defy him, and Sebastian is as powerless against him as the rest of us.”

  I took my meals downstairs the rest of the day, listening as Sebastian and Quince sifted through centuries of music. After dinner I decided I’d had enough and showed them the movie selection.

  They were mystified, since the closest they had ever come to a film were the Shakespeare productions that they put on to amuse themselves in the dead of winter.

  I took matters in hand and began at the beginning, with a silent film by Buster Keaton. We had to pause it so I could explain things a dozen times and I was regretting my choice until near the end, when I looked over and saw Sebastian in the dim illumination cast off by the screen, grinning from ear to ear.

  I started another one as soon as it was over and waited until they were caught up in it before climbing up to go to sleep. Sebastian followed me, catching me off guard.

  “Don’t you want to see the rest of the movie?” I asked.

  “I can watch it any time,” he said, closing the hatch and taking a seat in one of the chairs as if he planned on staying a while.

  Here we go, I thought, letting the silence stretch.

  “We have a problem,” he finally told me.

  “We do?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

  He nodded slowly.

  “And it is?” I demanded, not liking his mood at all. He hadn’t been at all hesitant about telling me my husband was dead. How much worse could this be?

  “I can’t have sex with you.”

  I let his words hang there for a moment, absorbing them. They were good news, really, but for goodness sakes. It was bad enough when Julian had gone to such lengths to avoid my bed. Two in a row represented an alarming trend. I suddenly wanted to race into the bathroom and check to make sure nothing had begun to sag while I wasn’t looking.

  I also wanted to ask why the hell not, but was too mortified by the possibly answers.

  “That isn’t really a problem.” I told him instead. “At least not an immediate one. Julian said temporary infertility was common in women after a long time in space. He’s probably already passed that on to Titus, so we won’t be suspected for a while, at least.”

  “And if he asks me about it?”

  “Lie,” I said simply. “You people seem to have a knack for it, anyway.”

  The light was completely gone and I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t think it was worth risking it to turn on my implant. He wouldn’t see me do it, but it would be easy for me to slip up and do something I shouldn’t be able to in the
dark.

  There was a long pause.

  “If Julian told him details, and he asks me…”

  “What? Like birthmarks or something?” I scoffed. “I haven’t got any. Besides, you saw me naked the first day we got here, along with Titus and Julian. Use you’re imagination.”

  He sighed, and it came to me that this conversation was harder for him than it was for me.

  “Just tell me what it is you think you’ll need to know, and I’ll fill you in,” I said, trying to be helpful.

  “Everything,” he snapped, “I’d never even seen a woman before you. I wouldn’t know where to begin. The library was purged of anything salacious ages ago and my imagination just isn’t that good.”

  I doubted that, but the first part of the statement was too alarming for me to focus on the second bit.

  “You’d never seen a naked woman?”

  “Not a naked woman,” he corrected me icily. “Any woman.”

  Chapter Eight

  Gray Period

  I laughed.

  “You’ve never seen any women up close?” I clarified, sure he must be exaggerating.

  “Not up close, not from a distance, not at all,” he growled.

  “That’s impossible,” I told him simply. “No society is that segregated.”

  “We aren’t segregated,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve never seen one because there aren’t any. You’re the only woman here.”

  “Here in the city? What, are they still back in the dome inland?”

  “Here on this world.”

  And still everyone was doing their best to avoid my bed. Now that was unflattering, and like every revelation I’d been able to winkle out since I’d been here, it raised more questions than answers. It certainly explained why Titus would spend so much money to send for me, but if the last woman had died, did they really believe that I could do anything? Even if I had a dozen children and they were all girls and they all lived long enough to have children with the boys I’d seen playing outside…

  “When?” I asked suddenly.

  “When what?”

  “When did the last woman die?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. Sebastian was in his mid to late thirties. The youngest child I’d seen was around five. The math made no sense.

  “Yesterday? Last week? Five years ago? When?”

  “Not long after the satellite went down,” he told me.

  So over two hundred years ago. I tried to fathom how that was possible. “I don’t understand,” I finally admitted, at a loss. “Its true I haven’t seen any women since I got here, but I thought they were being kept downstairs where it was safer. If they’ve really all been dead for hundreds of years, where did the children come from? Or you for that matter.”

  Human cloning? That had been proven impossible. Could they have perfected an artificial womb and be using frozen eggs? Given their technology level the idea was laughable and even if they had, why not crank out several dozen women? Could all the men posses a mutation that kept them from fathering female children? If so, bringing me here fixed nothing. And then it hit me.

  Julian said Quince was going downstairs to visit his mother.

  “That isn’t possible!” I blurted.

  “You can’t really have thought we’d be going down to them if there were any women here…” Sebastian said, as if that was an answer.

  “But it isn’t possible,” I insisted. “We can’t even live off the flesh of Nelfs and you’re suggesting… No. You’d have better luck breeding with one of the rabbits. At least its a mammal.”

  “You can say it’s impossible as much as you want,” he told me simply, ”but that isn’t going to make it any less true. You don’t have to like it, but you need to believe it.”

  “So what happened to the women?” I demanded, shelving the larger problem until I could wrap my mind around it. “Did they kill them all?”

  I reached behind my ear and quickly turned on my heat vision, cursing myself for not having done so sooner.

  “After the satellite went down, they couldn’t keep the inland domes habitable so they moved back here. The population had grown though, and there wasn’t enough room for everyone, so they started digging the tunnels. Most of the colonists believed that they were exposed to something during the excavation.”

  “Yeah,” I quipped. “I saw what they were ‘exposed’ to.”

  “Not them,” he said patiently. “A toxin of some kind. They never isolated it. It made everyone sick. Half of the men and all of the women died in less than three months.”

  I ran through the list of possibilities in my mind. A gas or poison was possible, but it should have worked more quickly and indiscriminately. An alien parasite seemed likely. It wouldn’t be able to live off a human host, but that might not stop it from trying. If there was something in a woman’s chemistry that it found more hospitable, that could explain the disproportionate death rate.

  “What were the symptoms?” I asked, wishing I had my wand so I could do some research, but unwilling to disturb Quince to get it.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said haltingly, “and I’m not a doctor. They called it the red eye, because the last thing that happened before you died was the whites of your eyes turned red.”

  “Big Red,” I told him. “That’s what they called it on Earth, for the way it effected the eyes and because scientists thought it started with a group of research monkeys on Mars.”

  “You think that’s what we had?”

  I shrugged. “The time frame is right, and most of the colonies that were receiving any imports from the Sol system were struck with it. It must have only been a coincidence that it hit you when you started on the tunnels. But Big Red was hardly ever fatal,” I told him. “And it didn’t have any more or less effect on women that I ever heard of. There must have been something in your diet or habits that made you more susceptible.”

  “One of the theories at the time was that Earth had shut off the power satellite and sent the plague because we didn’t comply with their order,” he told me, his color going a little brighter.

  “No,” I told him with perfect certainty. While that might have seemed logical to the colonists, I knew it simply couldn’t be true.

  Earth had acquired the technology for large scale out of system colonization about three hundred years ago and immediately gone forward with reckless abandon. Settlers were sent to any planet that was even marginally habitable and the strain of supporting them all crippled Earth almost immediately.

  The Colonial Board was founded to determine which worlds were capable of eventual self sufficiency and the rest were ordered to zero out their populations. The existing colonies couldn’t be evacuated, but they didn’t have to be. If they simply stopped having children, the problem would take care of itself in a generation. Over half of them had refused to comply and been cut off. Of those, none but this and two others had survived.

  “Sending a sickness that could wipe out the entire human race if it got off the planet would have been idiotic and expensive. Why bother? The whole reason you were selected for the cut was because you couldn’t survive without help. All they had to do was nothing.”

  “But we did survive,” he pointed out.

  “If that’s what you call this,” I agreed with a sigh. Solving an old medical mystery with nothing but a single symptom was certainly impressive, but I was still worlds away from an explanation I was willing to accept.

  “So the plague and the power satellite going out within a year of the order was a coincidence?”

  “If they never happened, we wouldn’t have a word for them,” I told him, “but that doesn’t mean they aren’t related. If either had happened a few years earlier you would have gotten a repair crew or medical assistance. Eart
h didn’t cause them, but the schism certainly contributed to them being catastrophic.”

  “You still can’t know that they didn’t do either, or both,” he protested.

  “Actually, I can,” I assured him. “Earth and the Colonial Board have been at war for fifty years. If there were even a shred of evidence that Earth was responsible for something like that, it would have been headline news.”

  “A war?” He asked, amazed.

  “A cold war,” I clarified, “but still a war. Because of it’s proximity, Earth exacts a monumental level of control over the inner colonies, the ones in the Sol system, and the Colonial Board, which technically has jurisdiction over them, is constantly pitching a fit.”

  “Either way,” he said with a shrug, having no way of checking my information. “Who’s responsible doesn’t change the facts.”

  “And those are?” I asked pointedly. “I don’t see how you could have gone from ‘all the women are dead’ to ‘lets have babies with the giant spiders in the cellar’. Its hardly a natural progression, even if its were possible, which I still say it isn’t.”

  “I don’t know,” he said simply.

  I checked his face but there was no sign of deception or anger, only a cool, sad violet and the obvious pain and resignation in his voice.

  “The only records from the time are journals and they mostly talk about how angry everyone was at Earth for abandoning us and how we had to survive at any cost, to prove them wrong.”

  I rubbed my temples. I finally had some answers and they were only making the storm in my head worse.

  “And I was brought here to…”

  “To see if the plague is gone,” he told me.

  I wished I hadn’t asked. Now, on top of everything else, I had to worry about getting sick.

  A thought suddenly occurred to me.

  “So what’s in it for the spiders?” I asked.