The Widow Page 5

  “What happened?” He asked.

  I sat up, trying to look as small and vulnerable as possible. Sebastian’s victory was going to be short lived.

  I told him everything, or at least a sanitized version of it. How I’d been mortified to have them all see me naked and how I’d closed the hatch and moved the bed over it so that I could have a bit of privacy. When spinning a story, it’s best to stay as close to the truth as possible. When I got to the end, I let a single, hot tear slide down my cheek and looked up at him with my eyes wide and glossy.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

  Julian looked positively apoplectic.

  He vanished down stairs and the screaming match that quickly ensued was deeply gratifying. The end result was that Sebastian spent the rest of the day reassembling my bed and reinstalling the hatch while I gloated from my perch on the bathroom ceiling, which I’d reached by standing on my newly returned chair.

  Julian came back in the evening, just as the light was fading, to make sure that everything was fixed and bring me my first real meal. The meat was dark and rich -rabbit he told me - which he explained was one of the few animals that thrived here, and the mixture of greens that accompanied it were bitter but fresh and crisp. We shared the small feast and when we were done, he pushed the bed over the hatch with a conspiratorial wink and produced a small, graceful bottle with a wax stopper.

  As the darkness descended, he poured a swallows worth into each of our mugs and held his up with a smile I could barely see in the gloom.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me softly. “I promise you’ll like this better than the last.”

  I sipped at it, then drained the rest in a quick, delicious swig, delighting in the burn as it raced down my throat.

  “Mead,” he told me, draining his own mug. “The bees always make more honey than we can use.”

  I looked at him skeptically, though I knew he probably couldn’t even see me.

  “Mead isn’t usually this strong.”

  “Well,” he admitted. “We fortify it a little with vodka from the extra potatoes.”

  An agricultural surplus sufficient for liquor meant these people weren’t just muddling along, they were actually doing quit well.

  “You like it?” He asked solicitously, misreading my silence.

  “It’s amazing,” I told him honestly, taking another long drink as soon as he’d refilled my mug.

  He scoffed.

  “I’m sure we must seem like complete primitives to you.”

  “Not at all,” I assured him. “You’ve done really, really well for yourselves.” I giggled, aware that the liquor must be even stronger than I’d first guessed and telling myself to slow down, even though I knew I probably wouldn’t listen. “I’m particularly awed by the poo burning stove you’ve invented,” I joked. “Pure genius.”

  “Really?” I could hear the smile in his voice. “Because you know, I came up with that myself.”

  I laughed. How long had it been since I’d laughed? I thought back. A year. At least a year. I leaned over and kissed him impulsively.

  His response was the complete opposite of what I’d expected. He stood up so abruptly he nearly knocked over the bottle of mead.

  “I…” He stammered. “I’m just… And you’re…”

  “Were you friends?” I asked helpfully, guessing at the reason for his distress.

  “Friends?”

  “With Duncan. My husband?”

  He exhaled a breath he seemed to have been holding forever.

  “Not friends really,” he said hesitantly. “I knew him of course, though and this seems, well…”

  “Disloyal?” I supplied.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Disloyal.”

  He pushed the bed away from the hatch and vanished without another word.

  I let out a sigh and poured myself another glass of the mead, squinting around at the pile of dirty crockery. Different worlds, different cultures, but if there was one universal truth I’d found, it was that a man would do almost anything to keep from having to take care of the dishes.

  In spite of his promise to come every day, he didn’t check in the next day or the one after. I tried not to sulk and congratulated myself on having at least added a half bottle of booze to my growing stash of contraband. I kept it on the roof of the bathroom, hidden from plain sight, but easily found if anyone cared to look. The screwdriver, my true prize, would be much, much harder to locate.

  I spent my time scanning the world outside, hoping to find some hint of whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to see. I watched the comings and goings from the manufacturing plant and tagged another large building as probably being the school, since children came and went from it regularly. I was nearly bored to tears when I finally found it, or perhaps I should say him.

  I dropped down from the ceiling, pushed aside the bed, threw open the hatch and raced down the ladder. Sebastian was there, laying in bed with an actual, paper book in his hands, reading. He held up a finger for me to wait, finished the page, then calmly set the book down and looked up at me.

  “Problem?” He asked.

  I took a deep breath, walked over to him, and slapped him across the face as hard as I could. At least that got his attention.

  “Big problem,” he guessed, rubbing his cheek.

  I reached back to swing again but this time he caught my wrist easily and held it in a vice like grip.

  “Don’t mistake my sympathy for your situation for anything more,” he told me darkly. “One free slap is your limit.”

  I yanked my hand away and turned my back on him, trying to collect myself. I took a deep breath and spun around.

  “He isn’t dead,” I snarled. “He’s gardening!”

  He looked genuinely puzzled.

  “Who?”

  “My husband!” I snapped. “I saw him through the window.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “You can’t see that far from your window,” he told me. “How do you know what he looks like anyway? You never met him.”

  “The agency sent me pictures,” I countered. “And you are the worst lier ever. You aren’t even using the past tense.”

  “What?”

  “You said how do I know what he looks like, not looked. You use the past tense for dead people.”

  He shrugged. “I was never very good at grammar.”

  “Bullshit,” I spat. “What happened? Did he change his mind?”

  “Yeah,” Sebastian said. “He took one look at your perfect boobs and said to himself, ‘Hell, I can do better than that.’”

  “Nobody uses the word ‘boob’ anymore,” I told him.

  “I do. Now go away so I can finish my book.”

  “As soon as you tell me what’s going on,” I promised.

  He sighed. “What’s going on is you’re bored and you saw a guy from a mile away who might look a little like another guy you saw a picture of once. We’ve got a pretty small gene pool here, lady. I’d be more surprised if you couldn’t find someone who looked like him.”

  “You don’t look like him. Neither does Julian or Titus or…”

  The truth was, aside from age, Quince actually did.

  “Go back upstairs,” he told me, almost gently. “I’ll talk to them about getting you something to do so you don’t go crazy, okay?”

  I was far from satisfied, but there wasn’t a lot I could do, short of admitting I had ocular implants and had seen him as clear as day. Still, I was forced to concede that it didn’t matter much either way. I’d already known they were lying to me about something. At least now I had an inkling of what it was.

  Chapter Four

  Window Shopping

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p; Just to be sure, I watched him. I hadn’t just seen stills. I’d been given video of the man I was supposed to marry and the more I saw of this supposed doppelgänger, the more I was sure it was him. He worked in the greenhouse by day, stopping to go to another building around lunch and then returning, and at night he slept in a large, communal dormitory.

  His mannerisms, the way he parted his hair, even his dimples were an exact match. I tracked his life for three days and only became more and more certain.

  “They say you aren’t eating well,” Titus said.

  I looked down into my room and saw him standing there holding my lunch bowl, still full and long since cold, in his hands as proof. I’d stopped bothering to cover the hatch unless I was sleeping. It only meant I had to descend to let Quince up, and that was time I couldn’t spend watching.

  “I haven’t been hungry,” I admitted, turning my face back to the window.

  “His name isn’t even really Duncan,” Titus informed me. “And he doesn’t know that you’re here any more than the rest of the rabble. He didn’t send for you, I did.”

  I scooted to the edge and hopped down, since it seemed I was actually going to be provided with some answers for a change, I thought it would be rude not to pay attention.

  “Then what am I doing here?” I asked.

  “Besides wasting food?” He set the bowl on the floor by the hatch and pulled the chair over to the bed. Sitting down on it, he patted the bed across from him and waited until I’d taken a seat to go on.

  “He’s just a face I picked because it was young and handsome,” he explained. “I needed to get you here and I confess I had few scruples about how it was done. I’m afraid how to handle the situation once you arrived didn’t factor heavily into my plans.”

  “Why?” I asked, perplexed. “If you wanted me here, why didn’t he just send your own picture?”

  “Because if I’d sent my own picture, you would have arrived expecting to marry me, and much though it pains me,” he said, giving me a wolfish grin, “I’m the one man on this world that you can’t have.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “It would be political suicide for me to spurn the locals in favor of an import,” he explained.

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Because we need you,” he said simply. “We need fresh genes. We’re dying, but your children can save us. The people here who study such things told me that even one new, completely unrelated person would infuse us with enough clean DNA to keep us going another hundred years. So I got one. You.”

  I let that idea settle. Whether or not it was true depended a lot on how many of them there were and how careful they’d been about inbreeding. It was possible, but it had the ring of inauthenticity to me, perhaps only because I disliked the person saying it, but perhaps not.

  “So you plan on using me as a breeding machine?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Isn’t that why you came?” He asked incredulously. “We made sure it stated in your contract that you were willing and able to have at least four children. Is it suddenly distasteful to you because I’m allowing you to choose which man fathers them? Because I must say, that seems a little silly.”

  “Why the lies then?” I demanded.

  “Ask the Colony Board,” he shot back defensively. “They’re the ones who made it necessary. They declared us an illegal colony. Marrying someone in absentia and importing them was the only loophole we could find. Even that took a certain amount of creative bribing to pull off.”

  I chewed on his words, dissatisfied but unable to pinpoint why. I hadn’t enquired very closely into how the arrangement had been made. I’d assumed it was illegal but… Still, I knew the agency that handled the marriage had charged a ‘finders fee’ and that couldn’t have been cheap. The Colony Board might have been unable to legally stop them, but they certainly hadn’t picked up the tab.

  I heard a light clicking sound and realized Titus was tapping his foot expectantly. Clearly he wasn’t used to being kept waiting.

  “So any man I want?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Any but me. Pick one out and I’ll have him delivered. If you had your heart set on the one from the pictures, he’s as good as any other as far as I’m concerned. For that matter, pick five or six. I’m happy to set you up here with a nice little polygamous compound if that will make you happy.”

  “What about my quarantine?”

  He smiled slyly.

  “A necessary fiction. Lets say that for now, keeping your presence a secret is important to me and as your continued comfort is entirely dependent on my ability to provide it, it should be important to you as well.”

  “So how do I pick?” I asked.

  He shrugged again.

  “How should I know? Height? Breadth of shoulders? What criteria do you usually use? I can furnish you with IQ tests if you like.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I meant how do I pick if I’m not allowed to go outside and meet them.”

  “Ah. A much more reasonable question.” He tapped his finger against his upper lip, thinking it over. “It would of course be easier for me if you found you liked one of the ones who already know you’re here. Sebastian has a reputation for being, shall we say, feisty and Quince is a bit young, but as a doctor, Julian would be an excellent choice. His position gets him a number of perks not enjoyed by the general population.”

  I nodded. He was clearly insane, but I confess that the idea of having Sebastian as a sex slave had a certain appeal. I wondered if I’d be allowed to make him wear ass-less chaps to go and fetch my supper. I smiled at the idea and he took that for agreement.

  “Julian then? At least to start?”

  “Give me a few days to think about it?” I begged, back peddling. “This is all a lot to process.”

  “Certainly,” he said, clearly pleased. “I have to tell you I’m thrilled at how agreeable you’re being. I was afraid you’d make a fuss.”

  I wondered what he would have done if I had. Chain me to the bed and hold a lottery to see who got me on which night? I wouldn’t have put it past him. So I decided to play along for now, and see what transpired.

  Precious little as it turned out. I continued to watch through my window, ostensibly to shop for someone to procreate with, but really because there wasn’t anything else to do. Sebastian looked on with a scowl so fierce that I had to assume he knew exactly what was going on and heartily disapproved, and Quince toiled on in silence. He brought my food, took my sheets and changed them for fresh ones, refilled the soap in the bathroom, cleared the dirty dishes away, and tried very hard not to be noticed.

  That is, until a few days had passed. There was a wind storm howling outside, kicking up loose snow and tossing it about. It was both exciting, since it was at least a change of pace, and boring, since it meant few people ventured out where I could see them well and when they did they ran with their heads down and their hoods pulled tight.

  When Quince came up and knocked on the bathroom wall to get my attention, I had no idea what could be happening but he waved frantically for me to follow him, and that was novel, so I did.

  Once down the ladder, he hurried over to the far wall and pulled back a storm shutter that I hadn’t even noticed was there. With it gone, the room had a sweeping panoramic view up and down the coast and of the ocean with its waves whipped into a foaming frenzy by the wind. To the left, I got my first glimpse past the hollowed out promontory that contained the city.

  Fissures in the cliffs gushed lava in slow, regular beats, like the pulse of the planet itself, and where they hit the water huge billowing clouds of steam erupted, lit from within to every gaudy shade of orange and pink imaginable. That, I realized, was where they were getting their power. A geothermal hot spot certainly made a compelling reaso
n to relocate the colony back here from inland after the satellite went out.

  It was amazing to look at, but it wasn’t what Quince had brought me down to see. He tapped at the glass to get my attention again and pointed out to sea.

  Since my arrival, the sky had been gray. Sometimes leaden, sometimes steely, but always gray. The wind must have blown off the heavy clouds, because today I could see the real sky, not just the clouds that hung in it, and it took my breath away.

  Hanging there, enormous and beguiling, was the planet we were circling. It was indigo against the lighter sky and chased though with swirls of violet, and it stretched nearly the length of the horizon. Right in the center, perfectly bisecting my view, was a line of light so dazzling that I would easily have believed it was made of diamonds. I knew it for what it was, part of the gas giant’s ring system that the moon I now called home was embedded in, but that made it no less wondrous to behold.

  “Do you have a name for it?” I asked, then realized he couldn’t answer and kicked myself for my gaff. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him hurriedly. “It’s beautiful. Thank you for showing me.” I wanted to hug him, but remembering how well my last impulsive act of affection had gone over, I settled for standing beside him in companionable silence and watching the planet set into the ocean. It was magical, but never before had I felt so small and so very, very far from home.

  I returned to my little perch after the show was over. With no lights in our rooms, there was even less to do in the evenings than there was in the days, but the rest of the colony didn’t share our restrictions. The other buildings lit up like beacons, the light from their windows throwing boxes of illumination into the swirling snow still being blown about by the wind.

  If I focussed my implants in tightly enough, it was very much like watching a video, though the plot and dialog left a lot to be desired. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my ear implants to hear anything through the thickly insulated walls of my prison. I might have been able to eavesdrop on Sebastian and Quince, but with one of them being mute, that was a pretty useless skill.