Quicksilver(56)

“Do you think that all of us, the other squads wherever they might be, have been brought into the world in the same way, with as few blood connections as possible?”

“Yes. When I was twenty-one, I tried to find my birth mother and thank her for my life. The agency in Phoenix that handled the adoption was out of business, most of their records destroyed in a fire. The woman who had handled placements was willing to help. She turned up my mother’s name in what files remained—Heather Ing-wen Han. But I never could find anyone by that name or any record that such a person had ever been born in Arizona.”

Bridget had not been spared from the mood that had damped the spirits of the rest of us. “But why should we be denied the roots that give us a sense of belonging to a place, a time, a people?”

“Having asked the same question,” Panthea said, “I arrived at two answers, though I don’t know if either—or maybe each—is true. First, the work we’ve been chosen to perform will require us to have learned to be comfortable with being rootless, because we’ll be nomadic, going wherever we need to go to confront the Nihilim.”

I found it possible to come to terms with our extraordinary mission in part because the risks came with the reward not only of Bridget Rainking but also of her genuine affection. However, I was sobered, if not even discouraged, to consider that in order to serve humanity, we had to be to some extent separated from it. I like people, after all, and have always thought of myself as being as potentially noble as the best of them and certainly as foolish as all of them. I didn’t want to feel . . . apart, estranged.

This concern was exacerbated when Bridget asked for the second of Panthea’s reasons why our origins were such a mystery.

The seer said, “Could it be that Heather Ing-wen Han, Corrine Rainking, and the unknown young woman who left Quinn’s bassinet on that highway weren’t our mothers? Could it be that they were merely the vessels, surrogate mothers, by which we were brought into the world, and that we share no DNA with them? I suspect that we’re fatherless and motherless in a basic biological sense, that we were created—engineered—by some mysterious maker and that the sequences in our DNA that alarm authorities aren’t from an extraterrestrial race, but are from the Rishon of the first universe. If we have in us genetic material that provides us with a watered-down version of that race’s special gifts before they grew arrogant and destroyed their world, if we have no biological roots in this world, maybe we don’t exude the scent of prey, so to speak. We’re not recognized by the Nihilim as potential targets. Because they aren’t drawn to us either to kill us or make us suffer. They aren’t concerned with us at all—and so we may therefore stalk them.”

“That’s an unsettling notion,” said Sparky.

“I didn’t mean it to be so,” Panthea assured him. “I offer the thought only so that we might better understand ourselves.”

“The thing is, I want a mother,” Bridget said, not plaintively, but with a solemnity that left no doubt that this mattered to her. “Even if I never meet Corrine, even if I meet her and then don’t much like her, which seems quite possible, I nonetheless want to believe that she’ll return some day, that at least the chance exists I could touch her, hug her. Maybe ask her why she went away. Even though I suspect she might have no good reason why.”

Panthea sympathized. “I’ve been fortunate to have adoptive parents who loved me. It’s easier for me than for you to consider that we might be . . . outsiders in this fundamental way.”

Most of my life, I’d fantasized about my parents, not always in a sensible fashion. For instance, in my mind, my mother sometimes had been a former supermodel whose face was horribly scarred in an accident. Destitute and unable to show herself in public without causing pregnant women to miscarry and children to be so traumatized that they had to be institutionalized for the rest of their lives, she did the selfless thing—leaving me to be found on the highway and retreating from civilization to live in a convent with a sack over her head. Sometimes I imagined my father was a famous actor or a mob boss, or a millionaire with amnesia who would come looking for me when he remembered I existed, or he was that guy who invented the world’s best pillow and sold millions on cable TV commercials.

If what Panthea proposed was true, I would regret not being able to indulge in such fantasies anymore, but a second reason for dismay occurred to me. “Does this mean we’re not human?”

“No,” Panthea said. “Even if what I’ve seen as a seer is correct, we’re human, of course. The difference is that we were engineered maybe in a laboratory or else someplace beyond our easy comprehension, then brought into the world by surrogate mothers who perhaps didn’t have full knowledge of their role.”

“That doesn’t sound exactly human,” I said.

“Surrogate mothers have been around for decades,” Panthea said. “They have helped many couples when the wife was physically unable to carry her own fetus. Some of our DNA, our special abilities, may be from the Rishon of the first universe, but they, too, were human.”

“Until they degenerated into Nihilim,” Bridget said.

“Which does not mean you and Quinn and I will likewise become moral and then physical degenerates. Many Rishon of this second universe are well along that path. We have been seeded into this world to prevent their further slide into an apocalyptic disaster, at least as they are being encouraged and assisted by the Nihilim.”