The FBI seemed eventually to settle on a hypothesis that she was an illegal clone of some kind. I was happy for them to lose themselves in that fantasy; I knew there was nothing else to find. Her legal status remained a puzzle. She certainly wasn’t Morag Poole, the person who had died so long ago, not in the eyes of the law. So she was assigned an open “Jane Doe” file — “like a faceless corpse fished out of the river,” as she said herself.
Morag wasn’t given her full freedom, not for now. She was released into my custody, but even that deal took some swinging, as the authorities had decided I was somewhat flaky myself. What saved the day was a surprise intervention from Aunt Rosa, who used the authority of the Church to back me up.
Anyhow after that week, we were all “released back into the wild,” as Shelley put it — all, to my astonishment, save John. He was sent to a more secure FBI facility down at Anchorage. There were “connections” the G-men wanted to investigate further. His legal status was dubious, but I wasn’t too concerned. If anybody could look after himself in a situation like that it was John. And anyhow, I had enough spite in me to be glad that the feds were giving him a hard time; I knew it was ignoble, but I felt he deserved it.
The rest of us were asked not to leave Alaska for the time being. We all went back to Prudhoe Bay.
What a strange crew we were.
Shelley and I threw ourselves back into the work. I was guiltily glad to have a distraction from the strangeness of Morag.
Tom and Sonia agreed to come back to the project, too. Tom said he didn’t want to see the bombers win, as he had seen for himself the damage the destabilization of the undersea hydrates could do. It pleased me deeply that we were going to continue working together, even though I knew the return of Morag was bound to put us under extraordinary, unprecedented strain.
The rebuilding of the Refrigerator itself had already begun, even before Shelley and I got back to the coast. Many of the techs working on that project were very young — just like the suicide bomber, a technician himself — and a good number of them had been killed. But the deaths seemed to have welded the survivors together; there was a determination about them that “the bad guys” would not win, that we who remained would see this thing through as a memorial to those we had lost. Maybe that was a predictable reaction: we had all grown up sharing a world with terrorists, with the dreary knowledge that with every step forward you took there was somebody waiting to drag you back. But it was moving even so.
The work proceeded quickly. The network of tunnels we had already built, burrowed through cubic kilometers of the seabed, was intact save for the area beneath the rig itself. Shelley needn’t have worried about our moles; most of them still functioned, just as I had hoped. Once the signals stopped coming they just sat patiently in their tunnels, waiting for we contrary humans to figure out what we wanted to do next.
The oil rig we had used as the base of the project was wrecked beyond usefulness, however. A whole new project to dismantle it safely was soon under way, an enormous undertaking in itself. A new nitrogen liquefaction plant would be set up on a platform not far from the site of the rig, anchored to the seabed. Once that was in place and attached to our network we would start her up again, and finish the analysis of our prototype system, work we had barely begun on the fatal day of the explosion.
And after that, with our proof of concept in place, we would go cap in hand to the authorities for backing for a wider rollout. The loss of Barnette had been a huge shock, but the whole incident had raised the profile of the project, and we had every reason to hope that in the end the bombing would do us more harm than good.
As we began to move forward again, the work was pleasing. We were all helping each other recover — and we were, maybe, saving the world in the process. It was deeply satisfying and thoroughly absorbing.
In the middle of all this, I found Morag a distraction. Can you believe that?
We ate together, walked, slept together.
It was a joy, of course, to hold her, to immerse myself in her scent, her warmth, the way her hair curled against my chest — sensations my mind had forgotten but my body remembered. It was as if I was suddenly made whole again.
We didn’t have sex, though. I wasn’t sure why. My body responded to her closeness, and I thought hers did, too. But somehow it didn’t feel right. Maybe it was something to do with the strangeness of her new body, a density I could feel when I touched her. But the truth may have been simpler. I was seventeen years older since the last time, though she hadn’t aged at all; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her.
Morag wasn’t freaked. “Give it time,” she said. “It’s not as if either of us is supposed to know how to handle this. I mean, how many support groups are there for husbands whose dead wives have come back to life? We’ll find our way through…”
Just as I’d said to Tom. But soon I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
When we talked we did fine, so long as we talked about the past, the years we had in common. She was interested in my work, because she was interested in me.
But if we talked about the wider world she quickly grew confused, and even, I feared, bored. She had been out of the loop for seventeen years, after all. She had no memories of 2033, for instance; she was like a coma victim who had slept through the whole thing, and the transformation of global society wrought by the Stewardship and the Happy Anniversary strike was something she was learning about, not something she had lived through, as I had.
I was ripped up by guilt to feel this way, as if I somehow wasn’t deserving of the strange miracle of her return. But being with Morag was — a dislocation. I really was relieved to get away from her, to get back to work, to normality.
She continued to be subjected to examinations by federal-agency scientists and doctors. I think they might have left her alone if not for that strange anomaly of her weight.
Rosa, too, or anyhow her VR presence, was a frequent companion for Morag, and so was Gea, manifested in the form of her little rolling robot. Charmingly, Morag remembered the toy that had gathered dust on uncle George’s shelf for decades. They would sit with her, hour after hour, the bent-over little old woman in black and the absurd robot, gently interrogating her. I was happy about this; I suspected they had a better chance of figuring out some aspect of the truth behind Morag’s reincarnation than any number of government doctors.
I was also keen for Tom to spend some time with his mother. He was very reluctant at first. He surely didn’t want to get hurt again. Or maybe some deeper instinct was operating, some aspect of Tom’s humanity blocking her out, because this couldn’t be her. But he accepted he had to deal with the situation. And so they spent time together, away from me, away from Sonia. I knew it wasn’t making him happy, though.
After a couple of weeks we got a call from John in Anchorage. He was to be released at last, and the FBI had reconstructed the story of the bombing. So Tom and I flew down to Anchorage to collect him, and to learn the truth.
Tom, John, and I sat in a small room in the Anchorage FBI field office.
John looked healthy enough. He was clean-shaven; he had even managed to get his hair cut. But you could tell he had been living in the same set of clothes for a couple of weeks, even though they had been laundered and repaired; there were faint traces of bloodstains on one jacket sleeve.
And there was a hunted look in his eyes, almost indefinable, but there. After all he had spent fifteen days in custody at the whim of a vast system, without charges, without information on the process he was being put through. “Did me good to see the other side of the bars for once,” he told me when we met up. But I could see that was just a front, that he was never going to sleep so easily again. My stab of unholy glee when I first heard he was going to be detained now made me ashamed.