In the Whole World: Chapter 12, "Magical Thinking, Part 1"
“Magical Thinking, Part 1”
Chapter 12/14
Word Count: ~3,000
On the morning of election day, Bill Adama wore non-military formal attire for the first time in two decades. It was also the first time in several weeks he had headed down to camp.
He was going to vote for his son.
The feel of the key in the front door lock was still strange to him-a pull of the door and a jiggle of silver metal that had not yet become familiar with frequent practice. He didn't dwell on the strangeness of it. He'd already done this just enough times to have remembered the other doors, in the lost civilization across the universe, those doors he'd used enough thousands of times to make this process of locking and unlocking entirely normal, those doors which, now irradiated or incinerated and in any case, closed forever, made the new doors, like everything new here, painful.
Walking down the hillside, he permitted himself one glance over his shoulder at the weather vane atop his house. What he saw made his heart skip a beat. The wind was blowing in from the south, up toward the giant mountain range overlooking the new settlement. But the weather vane, impervious to it, was pointing due west. Toward the camp itself.
Bill Adama was headed the same way, and after he voted for Lee Adama for president, he thought he'd pay a visit to Sarah Porter, see if he could figure out why Leoben Conoy wanted what he'd thought he'd stolen.
Bill Adama knew Conoy had failed. Because there in that weather vane on top of his house, beneath a layer of lacquer on an artificially lengthened shaft with a new striped fletching and a large faux copper tip, the real Arrow of Apollo remained above the old admiral's house, hidden in plain sight.
Today, he wasn't thinking about those old doors. He was thinking about the wind, which, blessedly, had no history.
Suddenly, though, it seemed to have a future.
"That's right, just sign in here. ID cards ready, please. One at a time."
Election day was, for Helo, mainly a new opportunity to covertly search for his wife. He was frustrated at the lack of options for searching for Sharon. A few days ago, an investigation into a set of thefts at the secondary school had allowed him to talk to two Eights-one a teacher, another a maintenance worker-but he hadn't gotten a flicker from either of them except a vague sense of pity.
It wouldn't do to be seen to be looking; he might attract still more impostors that way, a nightmare he didn't even want to contemplate. And while he had thought of a few tests, questions he could ask the Eights, so doing would only force the burden of proof onto Sharon herself. If he tried to test her, he would fail her test.
He could also, of course, ask Hera. Helo had realized that she knew exactly where her mother was, and that that was the major reason for her unconcern with Olivia, and the trial. But this, too, would be a hollow victory. At least, for Sharon, it would be-if she were really out there, if she were really testing him.
So he found himself, on the morning of the election, posted at the entrance table of the universal polling place, the commons building. He could assess all the Eights coming and going, look for a certain swagger, a certain warm, wary light in the eyes meeting his. And not that it mattered-they were too easy to fake-but he could see ID cards along the way.
If he didn't find her, would she ever come to him? To Hera? How long would she stay angry?
"ID cards, ready, please… ah, Chief. What can I help you with?"
Tyrol was clearly not in line to vote. He cocked his head, drawing Helo over to a nearby corner. "Try not to react. We don't want to create a panic. But Major Hoshi sent me to tell you that there's been a break-in at the arms locker…"
Gaius stepped out of the polling booth briskly, waited a moment for his heavily pregnant wife to emerge from the booth beside him.
"So who'd you vote for?" he asked dryly. Caprica raised expressive eyebrows.
"I'll never understand why the Twos are supporting this humanization absurdity," she murmured, her voice low because these days she was always cognizant that there were listeners all around. "They stand to lose as much as the rest of us."
He wrapped an arm around her waist. "If you win the district representative race-as I'm sure you will-then you'll have a chance at defeating it."
Actually, Gaius wasn't at all sure she would win. He especially hadn't been sure this morning when he'd woken up to a knife in his front door, pinning to it a note with a fairly plain message: "The next Cylon holocaust is coming here first."
He'd taken it down before she could see it, but it hadn't been the first, and he suspected she'd done the same on his behalf on more than one occasion.
There was a violence-an angry energy-that interim President Lee Adama's conscientious posture of inclusivity, politics of social reconstruction, and insistence on full Cylon pardon had contained, up until now. But come tomorrow morning, with the wind of a new administration's anti-Cylon, pro-godliness policies at their back…
His arm tightened around his wife as he saw the picketers who'd gathered at the entrance of the commons hall. Karl Agathon, a deeply grim expression on his usually affable face, was cuffing a man. The man in handcuffs, for his part, was screaming invectives at Lee Adama as the president entered to vote. The picketer's companion was holding a sign with the president's face on it. "'Apollo'," the sign read, the callsign in derisive quotation marks. Underneath it, in bright red letters, there was one word.
Heretic.
A God, the gods… it hardly mattered, as far as Baltar was concerned, whether this particular picketer thought that Lee's callsign amounted to taking the name of the god Apollo in vain, or whether he thought all the lords of Kobol were false idols standing in the way of the One True God that Gaius had come, despite himself, to see as a fact of the universe.
Lee's candidacy was doomed, as Gaius had tried to warn him, by his own apostasy. By the fact that he didn't seem to believe in any god whatsoever, only real life, fallible human beings. "Heretic" was just a shorthand for it.
"How many?" Saul was asking grimly. The Chief was standing next to the Tigh's dining room table, having declined a seat.
"Enough to arm a full militia of around eight hundred heads." The Chief's relationship with the military had never been an easy one-much less since arriving here on Earth-but his posture screamed his history, just now, perhaps more than it ever had when he'd actually been with the service. "It's worse than that, though. The Hitei Kan and the Greenleaf jumped back into orbit forty minutes ago."
Saul grunted. The two rogue ships that had fled when Lee had commandeered the fleet's tylium supply, months ago, had made two appearances since, jumping into range and then back out before they could be seized each time. The issue-that an eighth of the fleet's tylium supply had remained out of Lee's control, and that he'd ordered the unpopular seizure in the first place-had dogged his whole campaign.
"Any sign of expected attack?"
"They're not responding to wireless."
"What's the military command's probability analysis say?"
"I'm not sure they have one, sir. Helo's on election patrol, and Hoshi's… inexperienced." And not strategically minded, though the Chief didn't say it. "Sir." Chief heard himself deferring to the Colonel's old rank, and it felt right. "I think someone needs to make sure we're preparing for the possibility of civil war."
Saul nodded, briskly, and surged to his feet. Now their postures were identical. "I'm headed to the CIC. Find the admiral."
"Kara. I appreciate the thought. But I don't have time for a pleasure hike, just now. It's election day. There was a major weapons theft last night. There've already been six cases of voter fraud and forty arrests on disorderly behavior at the polls…"
"Hmm, and what will your presence here all afternoon change about any of that?"
"I'm actually the sitting president, as it turns out-"
"Who has a massive staff whose job it is to take care of incidental problems. But what could really happen before the polls close at 17 hundred hours? We won't even have results until two hours after that, minimum! C'mon." Blue and hazel gazes tangled in the air between them. "This is the time we have, Lee. This is it."
He hesitated. She saw it, gritted her teeth.
He didn't want to listen to her carefully prepared goodbye speech. He'd been avoiding conversation with her for days, because of it. Last night, she'd let herself be distracted by a hard, exhausting frak on their kitchen table, and this morning, he'd crawled out of bed before she was awake. Now… zero hour, it seemed. If he went with her, he would hear all the things his brain had been resolutely holding at bay.
He'd given over to what he knew was a brand of magical thinking: he half-believed that if he didn't go, didn't hear her goodbyes, then what she felt coming might not happen.
Magical thinking. He knew it was a coward's position, but part of him thought the easiest thing would be if she just, poof, disappeared, all at once. No goodbyes would mean no pain.
Frak. Just thinking it made him see the error. Why did they call it magical when they meant crazy?
"I'm having dinner in a little while with my father," he parried, hoping she could be waved off again. "He says he has some questions about Conoy and the Arrow…"
"It can wait, Lee." It's my last day on Earth, Lee. I can't wait, Lee.
He heard her, and though his whole chest compressed against it, the unspoken words slipped inside and took furious root. And so he just looked at her a long while, angry and afraid, like the moment before he'd left her apartment on the night they first met, like the day she finally told him she wouldn't leave Zak for him, like he'd looked at her across Zak's casket, like…
She shivered, and he relented.
"Fine. Let's go. But I don't want any touching goodbye scene."
"OK."
"And no final confessions, either. If you frakked someone else all over my desk last week, I don't wanna hear about it today."
"OK."
"And if even one godsdamned platitude about how you're 'already dead' or how, actually, my life will be easier once you're… if you go. If one of those even crosses your mind-"
"No trite bullshit. Got it."
"OK." He let out a breath. "Let me just tell my staff I'm running off with you." He paused a few steps away, turned back to her. "You didn't actually frak someone else last week-"
She laughed, but even now-especially now-that wounded her in her most-wounded place. Like he looked after I frakked Baltar. Like he looked when I came back from Caprica with the Arrow. Like he looked the morning I married Sam… "You know, I'm not s'posed to say, Apollo."
"Right." He heard her call him by his callsign, heard the cooling distance it implied, winced at what he'd accused her of and then realized that he still wasn't sure he hadn't been right to ask. "Great."
"Go, Lee."
He went. And against all odds, it would be the last time he left her voluntarily.
When Bill Adama finally came across Sarah Porter, an hour before the polls were to close, she was sitting by herself in the chapel on Colonial One. Her campaign had commandeered the ship as symbolic headquarters. In it, she was praying.
"To which god, Sarah?" Bill asked softly, sliding onto a pew across from where she knelt.
She smiled gracefully. "To Apollo, to ask him for a successful contest, today. Ironic, I suppose." She watched him carefully, but spoke as if simply making conversation. "Do you know the Taurons associate him with the moon? Odd, given that most of us think of the sun-"
"Why the alliance with Conoy, Sarah? He doesn't believe in anything you do, you must know that."
"I wondered when you would finally come and ask me. You, or your son." Her smile was gentle, now. "It's simple, Bill. The end of the Scrolls of Pythia. 'And in the days after the miracle, the children of the gods shall reunite with their own lost children, and together the people of the gods shall rule again.' I knew I needed to make a lasting alliance with the followers of the Cylon's one God-blasphemous, of course, but nearer to us than…" Realizing who she was talking to, she looked away uncomfortably.
"Then us skeptics." Bill was frowning, not only because he thought her interpretation of that verse was a bit self-congratulatory-that was to be expected-but because his dim memories of hearing the scrolls read, many years ago at services with his mother, pricked at him. "There's another part, after that, though. The scrolls end… strangely."
"Strangely, yes. Also beautifully. 'And the whole world shall dissolve with the cry of the horn. So launch, children of the gods, the impossible return, before the angels blaze to their lasting heaven. That which you have abandoned, carry with you. Those who are undiscovered, enfold them in your arms and bring them home. Step, at last, through the doorway of the years, and find there the slow, partial peace of those whose hearts are fire and who have sacrificed that fire for the cause of life.' " She cleared her throat. "It moves you every time, doesn't it? Since we got to Earth, I feel as if I'm hearing it for the first time."
"I know what you mean." He let the words marinate in his brain, because he did know what she meant. The old claptrap seemed, suddenly, as if it might mean something.
But he'd come here with another purpose. Deliberately, almost gently, Bill drew a sidearm from where it had been tucked beneath his suit coat at his side and pointed it at her levelly.
"I'm afraid I can't let you leave here, Sarah, until the Hitei Kan and the Greenleaf are back under colonial control, and the weapons stolen last night have been recovered by the military. Or until I can trust your orders won't lead to mass bloodshed."
Her throat seemed to close over, if her hard swallowing was any judge. "Under whose authority? You're not the fleet commander anymore, Bill."
"I'm afraid you're mistaken. I was reinstated an hour ago. Just after Major Hoshi determined the colony is at threat level alpha for civil war."
"My staff… They're waiting for me…"
"If you were able to go outside, you'd find that the control room says this room is dark, and that they believe you've gone to hold services at the temple."
"Bill, this is madness. You must know it is."
"I think," the commander said reflectively, "that I'd prefer it if you called me Admiral Adama. For the time being."
There were hours, days, maybe years, in which Samuel Anders worked contentedly on the projects to which he'd been assigned: maintain all systems, diagnose viruses, repair, start up, shut down, repeat. His life as a hybrid passed like a dream he was having as if from the point of view of another organism, one who saw in different colors, colors which streamed across his vision more mesmerizingly than the galaxy out of Galactica's observation deck. An organism with new capacities for seeing patterns, forknowing….
But whatever Sam had known, lying in his hybrid bath for months, receded swiftly the second that he woke up.
"…a war, and I'm afraid we're going to need your aid. Ah, there, you are." Gaius Baltar briskly rubbed a cotton ball dipped in iodine over the place where he'd just injected Sam with his last available milliliters of his unborn son's blood, and plastered a bandage on top.
"What the… where the hell am I?" Sam demanded. Was he in some kind of tomb? A temple? Was he on the surface of a planet? In a hybrid bath? He'd become a hybrid?
His head was suddenly aching, felt like it had been in a pressurized vise for hours. A wave of blackness hit his vision, and nausea followed hard in its wake.
Baltar was peering back over his own shoulder worriedly, and whatever he saw there, through the pillars, put a light of fear in his eyes when he turned back to Anders.
"Listen carefully. There's no time to explain. But Leoben Conoy is coming this way, and if you have any sense of self-preservation, I suggest you play hybrid. Now."
Though Sam knew better than to trust Gaius Baltar's word, he trusted fear a great deal, and it was almost oozing from the man's pores. And he trusted Leoben Conoy less than about anything.
Conoy. The dream he'd just been having was receding too fast to catch more than the tiniest final tendrils of it, but there was something there…
Oh, gods. His eyes bulged, and the nausea grew worse. But he laid back in the bath, rested his aching head, and attempted a hybrid imitation, coding all the panic that was rushing to his aching brain.
"Set… set anterior timer. Prepare mobile care units. Prepare mobile deflection units."
He could hear the sound of stone scraping against stone, edging closer.
"End of line."
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