Reunion: Chapter 18

  Kathryn was leaning against the medical chamber half asleep when Elim sheepishly walked in.  Not only was she exhausted, but as it did its work the chamber produced a gentle vibrating hum which she found oddly comforting.  Elim pulled up a chair and sat beside her with a stunned look on his face.   Kathryn roused enough to notice he was there and asked how Felix was doing.

  “Oh,” Elim said before standing up and coming around to the other side of the chamber to examine the display panel.  “Says he’s coming along nicely, still another ten hours to go but no complications.”

  “Good to hear, good to hear…  Were you worried about him too?” she asked.

  “No.  I mean yes, of course I’m worried about Felix.”

  Kathryn became aware that something was bothering her, quite profoundly from what she could tell by scrutinizing him more closely.  Downright haunted by something seemed more to be the case the closer she observed him.  “What is it, Elim?”

  “I…” she sighed, “I wasn’t sure I should tell you.  I… I didn’t know what to make of it when I found out.  I don’t know what to do.”

  Kathryn sat up straight, now fully alert with concern.  “When you found out what?”

  Elim picked up a chair and set it down in front of Kathryn, then heavily sat down facing her.  “The virus.”

  “The one that brought Earth down?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” She answered uncomfortably.

  “What about it.”

  “Well… I couldn’t sleep after Felix was attacked with how worried I was about him and all, so I went to the lab to look into it some more.”

  Kathryn nodded her understanding.  It was common for her as well to occupy her mind with work when she couldn’t sleep for whatever reason.

  “I wanted to do a more detailed analysis of the virus.  I wanted to piece together a clearer picture of whether it had been developed maliciously or accidentally or developed for testing and accidentally released… that sort of thing.  I figured if I took a closer look, I could answer some questions and get a better idea of exactly how it happened.”

  “And you did?”

  “Well, I’ve been using the Koboli equipment to do the research since it’s the most advanced, and…”  It was obvious that there was something the woman needed to say but was having trouble bringing herself to put the words together.

  “Out with it, Elim,” she ordered.  “What did you find?”

  “Using their equipment, it became clear that the virus had markers on it which could only be there if the Koboli had created the virus themselves.”

  Kathryn stared blankly at her.  She had trouble processing a meaning out of her words.  “I don’t understand.  What are you saying?  The virus struck Earth over six hundred years ago.”

  “Yes, but…” Elim sighed in exasperation as he stood up and began pacing the room in agitation.  “You have to understand that I’ve only been trying to piece this all together myself on the way here to talk to you.  The Koboli never had the same collapse of technological capacity which we had on Haven.   Their biomedical technology is continuous with original Earth tech before the fall, and they’ve only built on it since.  If they used original Earth tech to create the virus back then, and have only built on that technology now, that would explain the correlations that I’m seeing here now.”

  Kathryn was stunned.  Rage, confusion, and desperation might come later, but presently she was too stunned at the suggestion to feel anything at all.  “Do you realize what you’re saying?” she asked as she watched her pace back and forth.  “The scale of the accusation you’re making?”

  She stopped pacing and stood firm to look square at her.  “Yes.”

  “How could it have happened?” she asked both technically of her, and figuratively of herself.

  “They could have developed it en route and shot it back at Earth on their way to Kobol.   The timelines would match up.”

  Kathryn remained silent.  The darker, more distrustful military side knew instinctively that everything he was saying was true, but her human side, the side which had met and liked these people, was refusing to believe it.

  “It would explain a few things,” she suggested more gently.

  Kathryn looked at her in cold invitation to elaborate.  Elim sat down facing her in the chair again and counted on her fingers as she explained.

  “One.   They had no interest in coming to Earth, and we never really understood why.  This would be a damn good reason they wouldn’t be excited about anybody looking at this too closely.  They knew exactly what we’d find and why.  

  “Two.   How quickly and easily they were able to ‘develop’ a cure,” she said sarcastically with air quotes.  “They didn’t have to develop dick all.  They already had a cure or knew how to make one because they created the fucking disease.”  She could tell how agitated she was, a mixture of anger at her growing understanding and excitement at finally solving the next layer of the puzzle.

  “Three, they’ve been here before,” Kathryn added.  Elim looked up at her.  “We missed that,” she explained.  “They said they’d been here on the surface at least once, long enough to realize they had no interests here.  If that’s true then they would have encountered the virus as surely as we did, so they had to have known about it already.  They didn’t mention it when we launched this mission because they knew they could easily cure us when we caught it.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Elim exclaimed in disbelief.

  “We used to have a word for that,” a mechanically hollow voice slowly and coldly stated from a dark corner of the room.  “Genocide.”

  Kathryn had forgotten that Molly was still there propped up in the corner.  She’d remained silent until now as she listened to their conversation, but now spoke up.  “Everything I witnessed,” she said evenly, icily.  “Billions of dead.  Suffering upon suffering upon suffering.  Their doing,” she hissed.  Her eye burned with sapphire rage.  "They are lucky I no longer have arms to rip them apart with.”

   

  In his suite, Jaren was delighted when he received a summons from Kathryn to join her in the medical bay.  He’d been concerned that she’d felt a little distant the last couple of days.  He’d been trying to brush it off as them having work to do and there simply not being much time lately for their stolen moments of affection, but he missed her all the same.  When he entered the medical bay, she stood up to greet him and he rushed over to hug her, but her hand against his chest held him back from her.   There was something in her eyes, a seething anger he’d never seen before.  Whatever it was it, it scared him.

  “Elim was just here,” she stated so coldly.  “And she shared with me a discovery that he’s made.”

  “Oh?” he asked with interest.

  “Yes, in studying the virus.”

  “Oh.”   His tone shifted from interest to understanding.

  “Yeah,” she nodded, her anger growing ever less constrained.  “It was you, the fucking Mormons.  You did it.”

  “Well,” Jaren began to harden.  “Not me persona-”

  “Stop.  Don’t.  You lied to me about it.  Your people lied to all the rest of us about it, but you, lied to me about it.  All those hours we spent together, the times we spent in bed together, the mornings we woke up together.  Not once, could you ever find an appropriate moment to tell me that your people had committed genocide?”

  “When is an appropriate time to confess to genocide, Kathryn?”  His voice was icy, nowhere near as conciliatory and pathetic as she’d hoped he’d be.  She hated to have to admit to herself that he had any point.  “My people have many faults, and have done much wrong, but what we did to Earth is… it’s our original sin, that for which we can never atone.  It is this guilt which urged us to establish contact with and help Roma and Haven.  You both keep wanting to know what our angle is, what we want to get back from you for our help, well there it is.  We wish to atone, to someday, maybe… be forgiven.

  “Yes,” he continued, “the people who launched on the mission to Kobol were fanatics, and the most fanatical among them hatched a conspiracy once they were underway, one which was later condemned by the rest of us.  They engineered in secret a virus and delivery rocket to return it to Earth.  They launched it before anyone else onboard knew.  They were eventually found out, but by then it was too late.  We were never able to confirm what happened to Earth until we developed rift technology and could come back and see for ourselves.   But when we did, our worst fears were confirmed.  We never came back because the shame was… well, overwhelming.  It was too painful a reminder to be here.  My people have had to live with that shame every day for the last six hundred years.”

  “You lied to me!” Kathryn exclaimed, her hurt and anger finally erupting, “to me!” 

  “Yes, I did!” he snapped back with a snarl.  “I was under orders Kathryn.  Remember orders, Captain?  Remember how much you liked about me that the work came first just like you?  My government was working on how to reveal this to you in the least disruptive way now that we’re all in mutual contact, we were working on some way to formally apologize and atone, it was not my place to step out ahead of my government, you have to be able to understand Kathryn that I… I wanted to tell you a thousand times.”   For the first time his body took on an apologetic tone.

  “Get out.” she said, turning her back on him and putting her hand on the Felix’s medical chamber.

  “Kat…”

  “Get. out.”

  She could see his expression in a control panel’s reflection, and at first, he looked as though he was going to cry, but then seemed to stiffen his expression and hold back.  He sharply nodded his understanding and without another word turned and left through the sliding medical bay doors.

  “Well, there you go,” Molly’s head said from the shadows.

  Kathryn’s body remained stiff and rigid, kept so by proxy of her keeping her emotions clamped down.   Feeling vacant and numb, she made her way over to Molly’s head, allowing herself to fall against the wall and slump down to the ground.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” the head offered.

  “His people killed billions.”

  “Yes,” Molly acknowledged.

  “And yet… all I can think about is the hurt that he lied to me about it.  How can that feel anywhere near as important?” she asked.

  “Because you love him,” Molly’s head softly explained, “and because you’re a human being.  It’s your nature.  You understand big, but you feel small.  So it goes…”

  “I do love him…” Kathryn admitted.  “And I fucking hate him.”

  “Such is love.  I hate him too,” she smiled, “but it’s easier for me.  I hate him by association, for being part of the group that perpetrated so much evil to me and mine, that brought down the civilization I loved so much, for leading to the death of my love.  But in the end, he didn’t do any of these things himself.   His only sin was keeping the secret for others.  It makes it easier for me to forgive him personally, but for you… for you with the trust and love you’ve already put in him, the lying is a far greater sin than any guilt he might have by association for a genocide which took place generations ago.”

  “I had a fiancée you know Molly, back on Haven?  We split just before I left on my mission to Kobol, before anything happened with Jaren.”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought I loved him, but he never could have hurt me like this.  I think I knew that.  There was security in that.  It was safe.   I loved him, but I had no idea how pale my feelings were until I got swept up with Jaren, until he hurt me like this.  This is what real love feels like isn’t it?  To hurt like this…”

  “Not all the time child, but yes.  It is true that the deeper the love, the more it can hurt.  That’s just how it works; that’s the bargain.  Can I tell you a secret thought?”

  Kathryn chuckled at the head despite herself.  “Sure…”

  “It’s always worth it.  As much as the hurt is magnified, so is the joy and in retrospect the joy always outweighs the hurt.  It’s what you remember when the hurt fades, and it always does with time.  Never completely, but the more time goes by the more you remember the good and forget the bad.  As much as I loved the world before the fall, it was nevertheless so terribly grey.  It was full of grey people who didn’t know how to love with all their heart, who’d forgotten why they should strive with every bit they had to give.  You might think that they were lucky.  They never suffered disappointment or heartbreak that ruined them, but you know what?  They never really lived either.  It always made me sad to see people like that all around me.  Some did though, like the people who left on the mission that founded your colony.  They knew how badly the odds were against them, but they went anyway.  They did it because it was something worth living for, worth devoting oneself to.  They did it because they were in love with the possibilities of it created, and the part they might play in all this.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive him,” Kathryn offered distantly as she stared into space in the dimly lit room.

  “Well, that’s the great part,” the head laughed through the scroll jutting out of its backpack.  “You don’t have to…  With time you may find you can, may even find you want to.  But if you can’t, that’s okay to.  Either way you’ll have learned a lot from the experience.  You’ll have grown as a person and take with you to your next love what you’ve learned from this one.”

  The two sat in dim silence for some time as Kathryn thought beyond words.

  “So what do I do now?” she finally asked in a soft voice.

  “I think first you need to decide what you’re going to do about the virus.  I imagine your instinct is to tell everyone.”

  “Of course.”   After a moment she repeated herself.   “I mean of course, what else could I do, keep the secret for them?  Why would I do that?”

  Molly hesitated.

  “What is it?” Kathryn asked.

  “You told me that the Mormons waited to contact you long enough for you to make your own way back to this ship, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your people appreciated that didn’t you?”

  “Yes…”

  “Maybe you should extend the same courtesy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Jaren said that his government was working right now on how to reveal what they did and come up with some sort of reconciliation offer.  Maybe the best thing you could do would be to have Jaren signal his government that they’ve been found out but keep it to yourself for a short while to allow them to admit it their own way.  Yes, they’ve lied about it all along, but try to keep in mind that they are a dozen generations removed from those who actually did it, and that according to Jaren it was only a small faction of them, who were in turn condemned by the rest of them.”

  When Kathryn didn’t say anything, Molly continued.  “You have to consider what outcome you really want here.  Do you want to punish them?  Shame them?  I know how satisfying that would be, believe me.  But that would mean tension between your people, a possible loss of the peace if your whole planet felt betrayed the way you did.  If that’s what you want in your heart, then do what you need to.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “If you want to keep the peace, if you want to nurture good relations between your people, you extend the same courtesy to them as they did your people.  Let them step out on their best foot, not in the interest of their people at the expense of yours, but for your own people’s sake, for preserving their relationship with an otherwise very valuable ally.”

  “That would probably be best, but then I’d be complicit in the lying.  It would mean lying to people I care about.”

  “And that’s the rub sweetheart.  Perhaps now you better understand the position Jaren found himself in.”

  “Damn you.” Kathryn said, lowering her head between her knees in despaired understanding.

  The head only chuckled.  The young can be so blind.

   

  The door slid open to Jaren’s suite and Kathryn stood motionless in the doorway.   Jaren got up to greet her, but he kept his distance after Kathryn held her hand up to him.  She entered the door and let it close behind her.

  “I hate that you lied to me,” she finally said.

  “Kat-” he tried to protest but she stopped him by putting her hand up again.

  “Just listen.   Please.”

  He nodded and humbly sat down on his bed to listen.

  “I hate that you lied to me.  I don’t think I can ever look at you quite the same way again.  I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for keeping something so big and important from me regardless of why you did it.”

  Jaren was obviously frustrated and itching to respond but remained silent.

  “That being said, I… I can…”  She sighed.   The words were hard to force out of her mouth.  “I can understand the position you were in.  I understand that I made it clear that professional responsibilities had to come first for us.  Hell, this is why us getting involved while we worked together was a bad idea in the first place.  I need time to figure out what this means for us.  If I can get past it.  I just don’t know right now.  The hurt is too fresh.

  “That being said Jaren, if what you say is true, that your government is working on how to announce this and try to make amends, I don’t feel justified taking that away from them.  I keep thinking about how your people waited to allow us to reach this ship on our own despite your yearning for the archive.  This feels the same.  A formal confession would be better for all of the colonies collectively than the ugliness a sudden revelation of the cover-up would.  For everyone’s sake I… will implicate myself.  I will share in your lie, and I’ll order Elim to as well.   But you must tell your government that they must make their move soon, that my silence is conditional and very temporary.  Do you understand?”

  Jaren nodded.

  “Will you relay this your people this?”

  “Right away,” he softly answered.

  “Will they move quickly?” she asked.

  “Under threat?   Yes, I believe they will.”  He sounded so cold.  He must not have appreciated being told to be quiet and listen like that.  Either that or the shame was creeping back in.

  “Good.”   Kathryn said before turning back to the door.  As it opened Jaren called her name and she stopped in the open doorway. 

  “Time and space, Jaren,” she said without looking back before continuing through the door.  “Time and space,” she repeated as the door closed behind her.