Kamikaze, Part 1
by Jayel
I've always hated the name Valentine. It's a shame I'll have to use it for my first-born.
We had been crossing the grasslands for two days more than a week, making it exactly ten days since we had left Devon Adair behind, sealed in a cold-sleep capsule on a death-ship from another time. We were all still bothering to remark on at least an hourly basis that as soon as we knew what was wrong, as soon as Alonzo heard something from the Terrians or Yale had some sort of breakthrough in his analysis of his cybernetic connection to EVE, we would be going back for her. We said these things as much for ourselves as for Ulysses, her son, who still seemed to believe us. In fact, the confidence Uly showed in all of us, the trust he bestowed so unreservedly on every adult left in the Eden Project that we would find a way, was heartbreaking, especially for me. I was his doctor; I knew him inside and out, and it had been my job, my duty, my destiny to save his mother. And I hadn't.
But perhaps I take too much on myself again when I say I felt worse about losing Devon than anyone else did. Medically speaking, John Danziger was as sturdy as ever; indeed, the man's capacity to bounce back from every kind of physical trauma never ceased to astound me. But speaking as his friend and yes, I suppose as a woman, I had to admit that emotionally he was a wreck. Alonzo and I had often speculated on how John's relationship with Devon had evolved and what it might eventually become, but even we were surprised to see the change in him. The ironic humor I had been so quick to call sarcasm and the raw courage we had all labelled good old-fashioned foolhardiness were gone now, replaced by an almost fanatical sense of purpose. The Eden Project was going to make it to New Pacifica if John had to drag us behind the transrover like so much unwilling cattle. And his devotion to True and Uly, always remarkable, had become fanatical as well. As Magus expressed it, he "watched over those kids like a hen with two eggs." Alonzo and I agreed that Devon must have gotten a sworn promise out of him to take care of all of us and make sure we made it. I just worried that soon we'd need someone to take care of him.
Morgan, Wolman and I were in the rail, scouting ahead of the main caravan for a place to camp for the night. Our water supply was getting low, and we had detected the possibility of a freshwater lake in the area. We were all on gear--that was one of the more amusing aspects of the new Danziger regime; no one left the main group without being and staying on gear. So we all began receiving the signal at the same time.
"Are you guys hearing this?" Morgan said, his eyes so wide that if I hadn't seen him panic a thousand times already I might have been afraid they'd fall out. "Music . . . old jazz . . . "
"Speakeasy," Wolman interrupted with a cautious grin. "Don't you see it?"
I flipped the second eye-piece of my gear into place and saw immediately what he meant. The rail morphed into what looked to my untutored eye like a very early model Rolls Royce parked under a rain-obscured streetlight. The music Morgan was talking about was wafting through the open basement windows of a disreputable-looking building across the street along with a smoky yellow light. As we watched in stunned amazement, a couple dressed to the nines of 1920s evening fashion came laughing around the corner and were admitted through a dimlylit door a few greasy concrete steps down from street level. "Who's projecting this?" I asked, knowing I should remove my gear for a closer look but loathe to lose the image. "Do you think it's EVE?"
"I think that's a definite possibility," Morgan said. I looked over at him and almost laughed, he looked so perfectly at home in a pin-striped, double-breasted gangster suit. "I think we should get out--" Then he disappeared, zipped out. Obviously he had taken off his gear.
"If it is EVE, she's already found us," Wolman pointed out as he climbed from behind the wheel. "We may as well have a look around."
Prudence dictated that I agree with Morgan, but neither prudence nor Morgan could have been called one of my favorite concepts. "I agree," I answered, stepping out onto the rainy sidewalk. "And by the way, nice suit."
Wolman looked down at himself, then grinned. "Why thank you, Doc," he replied. "And I may I say you're looking rather spiffy yourself."
I looked down and couldn't help but laugh. I had heard enough about flappers to recognize one, but I had certainly never expected to *be* one, even in VR. After so many months in sensible hiking gear, a beaded dress and pearls was rather exhilarating, and I found myself wondering how Alonzo would look in one of these old-fashioned three-piece suits.
"You guys are insane," Morgan snapped, zipping in again under the streetlight. "There's a hollow with a lot of dark, scary-looking trees right there where that so-called 'speakeasy' should be. We have no idea what's in there, and I for one don't want to be one of the first ones to find out."
Wolman raised his rifle, now transformed into a tommy gun. "I figure this still works," he said. "If you don't want to come inside, stay here in the car and listen to the radio." He turned and started toward the steps.
"Really, Morgan, I'm sure it's all right," I lied. "Why don't you wait here? We'll be back in five minutes, I promise."
By the time I caught up with Wolman, he had already knocked on the door. A slit-shaped panel slid back, and a pair of beady eyes right out of a *film noir* regarded us with patent suspicion for a long moment before ushering us inside.
The room was packed with happy, drunken people, all celebrating madly in a cavernous room that fairly glowed with opulence in spite of the seedy-looking exterior and a cloud of tobacco smoke that would have choked us if it had been real. A fair-sized orchestra was pouring a slow rendition of "Honeysuckle Rose" across the dance floor like bourbon-flavored syrup.
"Look there," Wolman said, pointing to the center of the dancers. "He looks pretty real, doesn't he?"
One of the couples did look a little more substantial than the rest, a little more "there." He was very tall, almost as tall as Danziger, and powerfully built, but he seemed as light on his feet as an Astaire, twirling his partner through the dancers. "They both look . . ," I began, taking a step toward the stairs that led down to the dance floor.
"No way that's a real woman," Wolman disagreed. "Look at those eyes."
The woman in question had looked up in our direction, and indeed, she did have extraordinarily lovely eyes, so blue they seemed violet. These widened perceptibly when she saw us, and she seemed to shake her partner out of his reverie. "Son of a bitch, Val," she said with a laugh, reaching for the glittering band she wore around her hair. "They're here."
Suddenly the club melted from around all of us, leaving me, Wolman, and these two strangers standing in a cool grove of trees next to the lake we'd set out to find. In the real world, the man was dressed . . . well, like Alonzo, actually, in what I had always mentally called "fly-boy clothes," and the woman was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of ordinary work pants cut off well above the knee--so well above, in fact, that I considered offering Wolman a snout full of oxygen. Behind them was a log shelter that had been there long enough to weather gray and to my right was some sort of transport unlike anything I had ever seen, resembling nothing so much as a child's toy rocket.
"You walk away from that perimeter surveillance monitor for five minutes and look what happens," the man, Val, said in a drawl as thick as Texas chili. He took a couple of steps toward us, and Wolman raised his rifle. "Hey, man, don't shoot me," he protested, raising his hands. "We're just here to help. You're from the Eden Project, right?"
"What do you know about the Eden Project?" I asked, putting a hand on Wolman's arm.
"Not much," Val admitted amiably. "Just that you supposedly blew up on take-off, except we knew my old friend, Alonzo Solace, had already taken something real big and bulky out about eight hours before this phantom explosion supposedly took place."
"I'm Tara Donohoe, and this is my husband, Valentine, Val," the woman explained, flashing Wolman a dazzling smile that went a long way toward lowering the barrel of his rifle. "He's right; we're friends of Alonzo's, sleep jumpers. I happened to be ferrying a big freighter out of that dock when you guys left. You went out the hole they had opened up for me, actually. I knew Alonzo was on the wheel of that ship, so I called in to find out what was going on. Control told me I had been bumped back a slot, so I didn't really think anything about it."
"Until the next morning when the news came on that you guys took off on schedule and ended up toast," Val finished. "Then we knew something was up, something big. The Council doesn't bother to fake news unless they think it's absolutely necessary. Too many things can go wrong; too many people have access to the feeds."
"Yeah, great, but how did you get here?" Morgan demanded, scrambling down the hill to plant himself stalwartly to the rear of me and Wolman.
"Look, we're perfectly willing to explain all about us," Tara said impatiently. "Just tell us this--is Alonzo okay? You do know him, right? You are Eden Project, not convicts?"
"Yes, we are," I said, going past Wolman to meet them. "And Alonzo is fine. But you have to understand, we've been through a great deal, and it's made us rather suspicious of strangers."
"No kidding," Val muttered, shaking his head.
"We've seen some pretty weird stuff, too," Tara said, shooting him a look that fell somewhere between a warning and a caress. "You asked how we got here . . . we came in that." She pointed to the transport. "Actually, we probably arrived about four years before you did."
"That's impossible," Wolman scoffed.
"Impossible for you, oh my aggressive *compadre*," Val interjected with an exaggerated bow that looked to me like the first harbinger of a major temper. "But nothing is impossible for Renaldi's rocket."
"Hey, look," Tara interrupted, pointing behind us. "Looks like the cavalry is here."
Standing at the top of the ridge were Danziger, Alonzo, Baines and Magus, and we could hear at least one other vehicle behind them. "What's going on down there?" Danziger called. "You guys okay?"
"We're fine," I called back. "Hey, Solace, I think we found some friends of yours."
Alonzo raised his binoculars and waved to me. Then he suddenly just dropped them, and his rifle, and everything else he was carrying and came running down the hill, past all of us, and scooped Tara up in his arms. "I'm dreaming," he said, swinging her around and around. "I have to be dreaming . . . "
"You don't dream, remember?" Val teased, clapping him on the back. "I'll thank you to unhand my wife, sir."
I couldn't have said it better myself. If anyone had asked me before we landed on this planet if I would ever feel jealousy, I would have told them that wasn't possible. And even the day before I would have considered it highly unlikely- -my feelings for Alonzo were not possessive, or so I thought. But watching him hold this other woman, this pretty other woman, so tight and be so happy to do so was almost more than I could bear in silence. "So you all do know each other," I ventured."
Alonzo turned back to me with such a genuinely happy grin that I couldn't do anything but smile back at him. "Forever," he said, taking my hand and drawing me into the group.
"Come on, not quite as long as all that," Tara protested, winking at me. "I thought she looked like your type."
Alonzo blushed, but his hand squeezed mine. "This is Dr. Julia Heller," he informed them. "And yes, she is my type, actually."
"Unbelievable," Val groaned playfully. "A woman in every port, even the ones that aren't supposed to be inhabited."
"A good pilot always brings along all necessary supplies," Tara said, giving him an affectionate poke. "Why don't you guys take us up there to meet your friends? Something tells me we've got a lot of catching up to do."
Story Notes:
A NOTE FROM THE WRITER: When the television series Earth 2 ended so abruptly, I felt cheated--how could they hook me so completely into these people's lives, work their way so deeply into a fascinating narrative, and then just leave it unfinished, with no explanations and no resolutions? Then when a friend put me on-line, I discovered that I was far from alone in my feelings--you guys were pissed off, too, and doing a bang-up job of creating your own resolutions while demanding an explanation from the network, the production company, and anybody else you could find. So when all of the details that kept rolling around in my head as I watched and re-watched my videotapes of the original episodes started to come together into a possible way of going on from where they left us, I wanted to share it with you and see what you thought. Thanks to everyone who e-mailed their comments--I hope I answered everybody. And I hope no one who liked "Kamikaze" up to a point is disappointed in the way it came out. If you are, tell me; I can take it. (Naturally, any positive comments are more than welcome as well.)
Anyway, thanks (especially to Frank!). I hope my stuff helped you guys through the drought as well as everyone else's stuff has helped me.
Jayel
Anyway, thanks (especially to Frank!). I hope my stuff helped you guys through the drought as well as everyone else's stuff has helped me.
Jayel