The 14th Day by K.C. Frederick

all.” At last Fotor might pick up his glass and take a sip of his drink. After he put it down he’d shrug. “Come on,” he’d say reassuringly, “what difference does it make? You don’t owe me anything.” On that elemental island where the two of them were dust motes on a smooth expanse of glass, would Fotor continue to insist that underneath everything they weren’t all that different? “No,” Jory’s lips make a silent answer to his countryman’s assertion. As the tremor of the truck’s downshifting passes through his body, he’s returned to the present. He has things to do here; he has no time to think about Fotor’s island.
    In a few minutes this truck and another one are at the Life Sciences building, a newly-completed white cube perched atop a hill of bare red clay. There Jory and his fellow workers unload the greenery while some of them begin digging holes and others fill wheelbarrows with loam or carry bags of peat and fertilizer to the site. When the holes have been dug they carefully put the plants into the ground, first pulling away the burlap sacks, then cutting the twine that binds the shrubbery. They fill in the earth around the plants, add peat moss and pellets of fertilizer, then rake the area and water the bushes and small trees, placing a layer of cedar chips around some of them. Muscles strain, backs are wet, breath comes quickly, but in time a ring of dark green rises from the red clay, encircling the white cube.
    Jory pats the cool loam with his ungloved hand. So he’s a gardener now. The uncle for whom he was named would have found that amusing. The large, red-faced bachelor lawyer with the thick mustache lived in one of the densely settled suburbs of the capital, but he wore tweeds and affected a curved pipe and a walking stick like a country squire. Whenever Jory came to visit they’d have to go first to his uncle’s garden, where they’d walk solemnly among the growing things, stopping at certain points to admire. “There’s nothing like the fragrance of a tea rose,” the older man would exclaim, bending toward the plant, his eyes shut as if he were intending to bestow the softest of kisses on the damp petals. After the stroll among the flowers they’d repair to the dark-paneled study for serious talks about life. A bottle of whiskey would be set beside one of the decoys that was likely to be on the desk and the two of them would sit in silence while the older man sucked on his pipe, finally sending up a haze of blue smoke that veiled the hunting prints on the wall. “Now,” he’d declare enthusiastically, leaning forward with the anticipation of an archaeologist about to open a long-buried cask. “Now we’ll talk. Yes?”
    What they invariably talked about was the younger man’s future plans. As both of them knew, Jory’s father made no secret of his disappointment that his only child had chosen to work in a library. “It isn’t a profession,” his father told him more than once, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “it’s just a way of not having to make up your mind about something more definite.” Though Jory would never admit it openly, there was more than a little truth to this guess about his motives. But if he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, he was certain what he didn’t want to do: he had no intention of following his father’s path into government service. He wasn’t going to crawl up the same kind of bureaucratic ladder like a trained chimp, stopping for applause each time he reached another of the rungs labeled with a Roman numeral. Uncle Jory had no great love for library work either. He had his own, not very secret agenda for his nephew: that he would eventually go into the law. “There’s no better place to explore than in a library,” he’d insist, confident of how that exploration would