Terran Tomorrow

by Nancy Kress

  I have violated my oath as an officer in the United States Army. Except—he did not believe that. Now his duty to his country lay in preserving the scientists at Monterey Base and the diplomatic mission from World, so that together they could find a solution to what had destroyed the old Army along with everything else.

  The penalty for treason in wartime was death.

  But maybe there wouldn’t be any court-martial. Maybe the order would come later today to summarily execute Jason and DeFord. If so, nobody but the seven of them would hear it.

  “Jim,” Jason said to Goldman, “we’re returning now to base.”

  * * *

  Belok^ sat up on a pallet, in a row of pallets divided by inadequate curtains. La^vor crouched beside him, holding his huge hand. The boy blinked his large dark eyes, looking dazed. Zack hung back as Claire knelt on the floor beside the rumpled blankets.

  “Belok^? Kar^ judil¡?”

  La^vor spoke rapidly in World; Zack couldn’t tell if Claire understood her. Claire listened to Belok^’s chest, shone a small light into his eyes, tested his reflexes. Belok^ said nothing, but the skin between his eyes wrinkled slightly.

  La^vor stroked her brother’s hand. It seemed to Zack that Belok^ was gathering himself, trying to pit his challenged, mostly wordless mind against circumstances. He looked slowly around the cubicle, then directly at Claire, at La^vor, at Zack. Some emotion moved in the depths of his eyes.

  Zack felt the hairs on his arms prickle.

  La^vor went on murmuring to her brother.

  Belok^ stood up. He staggered, stiff with not moving for so long, and Zack saw how thin his arms had become in his coma. La^vor jumped up and let him lean on her. From his great height he looked down at her upturned face. “La^vor,” he said slowly.

  She answered in World, something reassuring. Zack braced himself. Now Belok^ would say the name of his dead brother, Glamet^vor¡, and she would have to tell him that the only other pillar holding up Belok^’s universe was dead.

  Belok^ looked all around once again. Then, haltingly, he said something in World: something of several words, something that might have been an entire sentence, something he had never been able to say before. Then a second entire sentence.

  And none of the other three, frozen by surprise, managed to say anything at all, until Zack said in a voice that didn’t even sound like his own: “Caitlin.”

  * * *

  Caitlin had not woken, nor Susan, nor any of the other v-comas. When Zack had finished checking, he returned to Belok^’s cubicle. The boy was sitting up, broad back against the wall, while a clutch of medical personnel peered at him from the corridor. Claire said, “La^vor, kar^ … I mean, hee^kan … no … we need Jane for this!”

  Zack said, “I’ll go get Ka^graa. He can’t translate like Jane, but he’s the best we’ve got. Besides, he’s the head of the World expedition.”

  “No, he’s not,” Claire said crossly. “But go get him anyway.”

  Zack didn’t want to leave. In the corridor, a young Army nurse, Josie Somebody, hovered at the edge of the silent crowd. He said, “Please go find Dr. Ka^graa and bring him here. Right away.”

  An expression of distaste flitted across the girl’s face. But she said, “Okay,” and walked off. A soldier rounded a corner of the corridor and said something to her, but she shook her head and moved on. Zack returned to Belok^.

  He was still speaking, fluently and without hesitation.

  Claire, who’d rocked back on her heels, looked as if she’d been hit with a two-by-four. La^vor was weeping. Zack got out, “What is he saying?”

  Claire said, “He’s hungry.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I can only get a few words, but mostly, yes, it seems to be that he’s hungry. Also that he wants to see Glamet^vor¡. She hasn’t told him yet. But, Zack, it’s not what he’s saying … it’s that he’s talking so much and so easily.”

  “I know.” And then, “Colin Jenner and the others…”

  Claire nodded, understanding without Zack’s finishing his sentence. Colin Jenner and the other superhearers had had their auditory centers rewired in utero by the original R. sporii. The infants, hypersensitive to sound, had cried nonstop until drugs were developed to tamp down their ability. Some had stayed on the drugs for life. Some, like Jenner, had been bright enough to learn to compensate, as bright children learned to compensate for dyslexia. They had learned selective attention, still hearing the incessant background noise but paying attention only to those they chose at a given moment.

  Microbes in the fetal brain had done that. Microbes, that for two billion years had been the dominant form of life on Earth. That had evolved complex and sophisticated signaling techniques, gene-swapping techniques, interdependencies, antibiotics to kill each other. Microbes that, through the union of two prokaryotes, had begun the long evolutionary march toward the multicelled organisms that eventually became humans. Microbes, that still made up one-third of the cells in the human body, outnumbered humans on Earth by a factor of 1022, and could produce a new generation every twenty minutes and so had adapted to—and modified—every available ecological niche on Earth, clear through the stratosphere, solely to aid their own survival.

  What had microbes created for themselves in Belok^’s brain?

  “Zebras,” he said aloud, and Claire looked at him as if he were crazy.

  CHAPTER 18

  By the time Jason reached base, Elizabeth Duncan had her orders from Strople, brought in from the perimeter by Private Laura DeSoto and delivered as if both of them didn’t already know the orders would not be obeyed.

  Jason jumped out of the FiVee in the armory airlock, went through decon, and left Lab Dome for Enclave. Between the domes, soldiers grunted and swore as they cleared away wreckage from New America’s attack. Jason didn’t ask what they did with the enemy bodies; he could see the mass grave at an edge of the charred forest. Carry-bots trundled body bags and sacks of lime. Amid the devastation, the twin energy domes shone almost obscenely bright in the afternoon sun.

  At the command post, Elizabeth Duncan said, “You look like shit, sir.”

  Jason blinked; she had never spoken to him with anything approaching such informality. He said, “You don’t look great yourself, Major.”

  “Do you think Strople will promote me, now that you’re in stockade?”

  “Probably.”

  But neither of them could sustain the banter. He had been up for thirty-six hours and sagged with fatigue, and banter was foreign to Elizabeth Duncan’s nature—had she rehearsed it to try to reassure him of her loyalty without any embarrassing sentiment? Unwritten rules forbid them to name what they had actually done: falsified information and retained control of a United States Army base after being relieved of command. To name things was to give them greater power—although it was difficult to see how this situation could have more power over either of them than they had already committed to. But they had made their decision, they’d made it together, and for good and sufficient reasons.

  Still, Jason had been unwilling for as good a soldier as Duncan to go down with him. If it came to that, he and Specialist DeFord would go alone to court-martial, and Strople would never know that Major Duncan plus four others had collaborated with Jason. But it was not going to come to that.

  She said, “Sir, General Strople has ordered me to bring him the Return. I told him the ship is too damaged to fly that far.”

  Which might, for all they knew, be true. “Did he believe you?”

  “I don’t know. But he pretended to. He’s sending a unit here for the court-martial and to take control of the base.”

  “Sending? How?” If they had somehow acquired more planes or functional choppers and the fuel to fly either …

  “FiVees. A convoy of eleven vehicles.”

  Jason blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I calculate about ten days.”

  Over the broken roads, through the desert and up the shat
tered coast … no way to refuel except with what they carried with them, the possibility—no, the certainty—of attack by New America.…

  “They want the Return that bad,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Yes. Or they don’t believe that I wasn’t complicit in your decision.”

  “Fuck,” he said, knowing that she had never before seen him lose control, “fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We can’t catch a break.”

  “You took out Sierra Depot.”

  Her voice held uncharacteristic admiration, in which there was nothing personal. In another world, Jason thought, she could have commanded the entire US Army; she had the necessary toughness, control, and intelligence. If the Collapse hadn’t happened when it did, she’d have risen through the ranks faster than he did. Instead she stood a chance of going down with him.

  He said, “Elizabeth, when the convoy arrives, I’ll be in the stockade along with DeFord and you will disavow any knowledge of—”

  A scuffle outside the closed door. “No!” said the soldier on duty, and Duncan’s hand moved to her sidearm. But when the door was flung open, Claire Patel stood there.

  “Sorry, sir … she insisted and I didn’t want to…”

  “It’s all right, Private. Dismissed.”

  “Colonel Jenner—I’m sorry to burst in like this but you have to be told now … Belok^ is awake.”

  For a disoriented second, Jason couldn’t remember who Belok^ was. Then he got it. “Out of his coma?”

  “Yes!”

  “The others?”

  “No, but they’re all being closely watched. There’s more. I examined him, and he’s changed. He can talk now.”

  “The coma made him able to talk?”

  “It did something inside his brain. No, don’t ask for details because we don’t know. But he’s different now.”

  The other v-coma victims had already been able to talk. Jason’s exhausted mind fumbled at Claire’s unspoken ideas. She moved forward a step. “We don’t know what it means, no. But Zack McKay’s spinal-fluid analyses seem to indicate massive alteration of brain chemistry. The kind of chemicals that usually indicate more formation of synapses, more pruning of synapses, the sort of profound changes that are usually seen only in small children and adolescents.”

  “Doctor,” Duncan said, “do you mean that the v-coma victims will wake up with increased verbal fluency?”

  “We don’t know, Major. That’s the whole point.”

  Jason said, “Monitor the situation and keep me informed. Dismissed.”

  Claire grimaced; too late, he recalled how much the civilian doctors and scientists disliked it when he addressed them as if they were soldiers. Well, tough. He had more important things on his mind than civilian touchiness.

  But then Claire’s face softened. “Colonel,” she said, gently and yet with the note of defiance that said she knew she was overstepping boundaries, “I’m sorry to say this, but you should get some sleep. You look like shit.”

  * * *

  Zack thought that the next v-coma to wake up would be Caitlin, since she had gone comatose at the same time as Belok^. But it wasn’t Caitlin. At evening, the little girl still lay comatose in the same cubicle as her mother, and the nurse said there had been no change in either of them. Zack gazed down at his wife and daughter, reached out, touched Susan’s hand. It felt so warm, so alive …

  “Dr. McKay,” said the same nurse he’d sent to find Ka^graa. Only now she looked oddly defiant. “There’s another v-coma awake.”

  “Where?”

  “Bed on the end.” The nurse turned away … sneering? Why?

  The bed on the end held Toni Steffens.

  Head Nurse Amy Parker bent over Toni, who batted her away. “I’m fine. Nicole?”

  “Still comatose,” Amy said. “Dr. McKay, Major Holbrook will be here in a minute.”

  “Zack,” Toni said, wonderingly. And then, “I have the motherfucker of all headaches.”

  Well, whatever had been going on in Toni’s brain had not changed her personality. But her broad, intelligent face looked puzzled. Holbrook strode in.

  “Dr. Steffens? How do you feel?”

  “Headache.”

  “I’m going to examine you. Everybody out, please.”

  Zack waited, fidgeting from one foot to the other, just outside the curtain, until Holbrook emerged. “Vitals are all fine,” he said. “I don’t think it’s wise to give her anything for the headache until we—”

  “I can hear you, you know,” Toni said. “No, I don’t want anything for the headache. And no, I’m not a superhearer now, you’re just loud. Be quiet and let me think.”

  Think? Zack pushed his way into the cubicle. Toni struggled to sit up, her nutrient IV bobbing, her puzzled expression replaced by such intense concentration that she seemed frozen all over again. Holbrook said, “It would be good for you to walk now, Dr. Steffens.”

  Toni didn’t answer. Eventually she said to Zack, “Tell me what’s happened while I was comatose.”

  Where to begin? “New America attacked the base with fighter jets and—”

  “Not that.” Toni raised her newly thin arm and waved it, brushing aside New America, the base, and the fighter jets. “What happened in the lab. Not with the v-coma analysis—with the avian gene drive.”

  “Nothing. Toni, you know that.” Had her memory been affected? “All work on the gene drive was dropped to investigate the v-coma and try to—”

  “Shut up now.”

  Zack held on to his temper. He and Holbrook glanced at each other, neither knowing just what they were dealing with, uncertain how to proceed. A minute passed, two. Then five very long minutes.

  Toni pushed back her blankets and tugged at her IV. “Get me out of this thing. Out of here.”

  “Be careful,” Holbrook said, “your muscles will have partially atrophied and—”

  “Get me out and to the lab. Zack, I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  Toni looked at him. Her puzzlement was gone. She gazed at him with what looked like … was it pity?

  Toni said, “I’ll try to explain in terms you can understand. Stop me if I go too fast.”

  * * *

  Jane stirred on her pallet, caught in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness, where the real and the imagined cannot be told apart because all things have become possible. She was with her lahk sisters in their house of curving karthwood; she was on Terra under a dome; she floated free in a dark space of cold, glowing stars. Creatures scampered through the walls, through her blankets, through her brain. Voices rose and fell, or were they waves on the beach at Kle^chov^ol¡? No, they were the stars themselves, rumbling before they exploded in novae of gas and speeding particles and the end of everything.…

  “They’re killing us,” a star said.

  “And he’s letting them.”

  “Nah, Josie, the old man’s all right. He stopped the attack by the Newsies and pulled off that raid on Sierra that—”

  “And he let in them fucking aliens that’re killing us!”

  “Nobody dead yet—”

  “Might as well be—”

  “For two cents, I’d—”

  “Watch your mouth, Carl.”

  “Quiet, you guys, my head nurse is coming…”

  But no one was coming, Jane was alone except for the things scudding through her brain: leelees … no, Terran “mice” … no, something else …

  Then nothing, and again she slept.

  * * *

  Another morning, after another long and mostly sleepless night. It might, Jason thought blearily, be an interesting experiment to see how long he could go sleepless without losing the rest of his mind. Parts of it seemed gone already. His thoughts moved slowly, through tarry mud, and in circles.

  Eight days until the convoy arrived.

  Court-martial.

  Running out of supplies.

  Toni Steffens.
Belok^.

  Eight days …

  “Sir?” said the private on duty outside the command post. Jason hadn’t even heard the door open. “Dr. Ross asks to see you.”

  “Dr. Ross?”

  “Yes, sir.” The private peered at him; did Jason look that bad? Probably.

  “Let her enter.”

  “I’m already in,” Lindy said, pushing past the guard.

  Jason said, “Dismissed.”

  Lindy closed the door. There were still bruises on her face, but unless she wore some sort of brace or bandages under her clothes, she didn’t seem to be suffering from her reinflated lung. She wore her determined look. Jason straightened for the blow. “What is it? Have v-comas died?”

  “No. And nobody else has revived, either.”

  “Dr. Steffens?”

  “I haven’t been to the lab—Claire Patel is there, examining her yet again. Or trying to, since Toni won’t stop working long enough for much examination. She’s got everybody over there doing things and she’s barking orders like General Patton.”

  “Working on what?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not a virologist. I’m also not there, I’m here.”

  Jason snapped, “Why are you here? I didn’t send for you.” The snappiness, he dimly realized, was cover for a barrage of emotions fired by just seeing her.

  “No. I’m here to examine you. Jason—Colonel, sorry—you’re showing disturbing signs of sleep deprivation. Two different people have told me so. And—”

  “Who? Who told you that?”

  “—as your physician—”

  “You’re not. Major Holbrook is. Where—”

  “With the v-comas. They’re not waking but they’re stirring. I’m it, Colonel, and I’m going to examine you. Now.” She pulled out a portalab and moved toward him.

  Jason submitted. She could give him drugs to keep him going, maybe something that would last until the court-martial was over. Even at West Point, where designer pharmaceuticals had been ubiquitous to ward off sleep, to keep the body going through the physical punishment of training and the mental fog of studying while exhausted, Jason had avoided drugs. He hadn’t wanted to surrender control of his faculties, not even to something that was supposed to enhance them. He’d kept to the same puritanical policy while in combat in Congo. But this was not West Point and the combat here couldn’t be worked out in physical activity, and Jason could see the end of his strength rolling toward him as inexorable as the convoy coming up from Fort Hood.