by Nancy Kress
Did all these people really need to be here? Maybe not, but everyone wanted to hear the first results of the team analyzing the awakened v-comas, and apparently Jenner had okayed this as an open meeting instead of a military briefing. So in addition to every scientist on the base and some of the techs, the room contained all three physicians, as much of the nursing staff as could be spared, Ka^graa—although no one to translate for him—more officers and, standing against a side wall, two privates who had recently awakened from comas. Zack, like everyone else, took furtive little peeks at the man and woman, whose faces showed no hint of whatever they were thinking.
The only significant people missing were the other three who’d awakened from comas. Caitlin was a child; Belok^ was a functional child; Toni had refused to leave her work on the gene drive. “His Highness can do without me.”
Major Denise Sullivan made the presentation. Her broad, kind face looked pinched with exhaustion, but she stood straight and spoke without either notes or polite preliminaries. Everyone here was well beyond preliminaries.
“Analysis of cerebral-spinal tissue from those who awakened from v-comas”—she nodded at the two privates—“hasn’t, so far, turned up much more than we knew from samples taken when they were asleep. There are proteins we haven’t seen before, as well as different and new folds in proteins commonly found in the brain. Proportions of various proteins are different. Specifically—”
She went into details. The presentation was pitched badly: too simple for Zack and the other scientists, who already knew all of this, too technical for the military. Without turning his head—he didn’t want to be rude—Zack watched the two soldiers standing against the side wall. They were the most interesting people in the room. What was going on in those altered brains? Their faces gave nothing away.
“So in summary,” Denise finished, “at the cellular level, we cannot yet explain much. What we do know is that only people with what we’re calling ‘the coma allele’ go comatose. In the coma, profound changes occur in the brain that may indicate both increased neural connections and altered neural connections, and that the result, according to IQ tests administered to all awakened subjects, seem to show a leap forward in intelligence.
“If the increased brain activity resulted only from increased density, length, or thickness of neurons, there would probably be a problem with overheating of brain tissue, since the brain would then use more energy and so generate more heat. Human cortical gray-matter neurons already had axons that were pretty close to the physical limits. Therefore, the most likely situation is that the greater proportion of the changes in brain functioning are due to revised connections and functioning among the neurons that were already there.”
Suddenly she threw her hands into the air and let them fall. “But we have no idea how. It may be that different receptors that affect how the brain works are being inhibited or activated, just as the dCA1 receptor is activated in memory formation. Or it may be that the v-coma patients are undergoing acquired savant syndrome. This all needs much more work, and that work requires, in part, equipment we don’t have.”
Major Duncan said sharply, “What is acquired savant syndrome?”
“Sometimes trauma to the left side of the brain—always the left side—results in people acquiring savantlike abilities they didn’t have before: to do mathematical calculations in their head, remember long strings of numbers, that sort of thing. The theory is that the ability was always there, latent, and the trauma destroys whatever mechanisms were inhibiting it. But savants often have trouble with social relations, too, and as far as we can tell, the v-coma subjects do not.”
Caitlin, cuddling in Zack’s arms, asking for a story, giving him a flurry of kisses. No, she had no trouble with social relations.
Duncan was not done with her questions. “Why did privates Ramstetter and Veatch, who fell into comas later than some other victims, revive earlier?”
“We don’t know.”
“Does that mean their brains underwent less rewiring than did others because they were comatose a shorter time?”
“We don’t know.” Denise hesitated; Zack knew what she was not saying. The gain in IQ was less for the two soldiers than for Caitlin, Belok^, and Toni. But IQ tests had always been suspect, and here the other three subjects were a child, a boy who had been mentally challenged before, and an already brilliant scientist. Not good data, and Zack saw the moment that Denise decided not to mention it.
Duncan asked another question, and now her hostility to the entire presentation became obvious. “And you—all of you scientists—are telling me that the human brain was remade by some tiny microbe? By a germ?”
All of Denise Sullivan’s apologetic uncertainty vanished. She stared steadily at Major Duncan. “Rabies, which destroys the human brain, is caused by a ‘germ.’ Toxoplasmosis, which causes humans to choose riskier behavior than they would otherwise, is caused by a single-celled parasite. Superhearing, a profound rewiring of the auditory areas, was caused by R. sporii. The ATCV-1 virus—”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Colonel Jenner said. “Is anyone else going to speak?”
Marissa Freirich rose hastily. She was one of the two schoolteachers in Enclave Dome, although lately no school had been held in the general disruption. At the Collapse, she’d been a twenty-one-year-old, brand-new fourth-grade teacher at the elementary school on Monterey Base. Now she worked with Caity and Belok^. It was clear that lecturing to this group of scientists and top brass intimidated her, but she plunged ahead.
“Before his coma, Belok^ spoke only a few basic phrases. Now his speech level is about that of a four-year-old, in both English and World, and he is learning to read. Caitlin McKay, who is four, could already read simple picture books. Yesterday she read aloud the first few paragraphs of Alice in Wonderland. In the original, which includes words like ‘conversations’ and ‘marmalade.’” Marissa bit her lip. “She doesn’t even know what marmalade is. Sounding out words isn’t the same as experience. But she has definitely gotten smarter. She—”
Colonel Jenner interrupted, but not with the sharpness that Major Duncan had shown. “Is it your sense that the intelligence of these children will just keep on growing? That they’ll get more and more intelligent over time?”
“I don’t … of course I’m not a scientist and it isn’t for me to say if … all I do is…”
“You work with those children,” Jenner said, relentless. “What do you think?”
Marissa said, “I think they had a big leap in intelligence and now they’re learning to use that. I don’t think that each day they’re getting smarter than they were the day before.”
Without twisting his body on his chair, Jenner turned his head to look at his two soldiers. All he did was blink once. The female private said, “Yes, sir. She’s correct.”
The male said, “Yes, sir. Agreed.”
Then Marissa, displaced schoolteacher, said outright what Dr. Denise Sullivan had only tiptoed around. Marissa said, “Either way, some of my students are getting a lot smarter and the rest are not.”
There. She had named it, the elephant in the room. Humanity bifurcating. If the changes in neural structure or efficiency were permanent and also inheritable, the human race was on its way to becoming two species.
Not an elephant in the room. A swamp’s worth of dinosaurs. Or—
An entire herd of zebras.
CHAPTER 20
Two weeks after the meeting with the scientists, neither Jason nor Elizabeth Duncan had been told anything about a new convoy heading north from Fort Hood. This was surprising: Why was Strople delaying the start of a second convoy? Jason’s best guess was some sort of internal upheaval at Fort Hood. Duncan had no opinion, or at least none that she offered aloud.
The two of them stood in the command post, watching the horizon. Beyond the stumpy woods charred in the destruction of New America’s siege, trees blazed red and gold and orange, bright spots among the more somber pines. Somewhere
farther north, on a flat field defended by nearly everything in Monterey Base’s arsenal, a crew of specialists and civilians repaired the hole in the Return.
They worked under an Army engineer and a sergeant who had, in his youth, been a welder. They used supplies of metal found on the huge ship, guessing at how to use those to seal and heat-proof and whatever else you had to do to the hull of a spaceship to let it rise higher than a thousand feet. Both men admitted they had no real idea what they were doing.
“Sir, if the bastards had hit any of that there alien machinery,” Sergeant Lewis Dunfrey had said during one of Jason’s visits to the site, “it woulda been all up with that flying boat. But the RPG didn’t hit nothing vital.” After a minute he’d added, “I hope.”
Duncan said, “If Major Farouk were awake…”
“Yes,” Jason said. More people had come out of v-comas, but not the physicist.
Jason had chosen not to be present at the repair site when Lieutenant Allen tried to lift the ship. If the entire vessel exploded, he would be needed to come up with a different strategy.
He half expected the Return to destruct. Not because he had the wispiest idea of the physics or engineering involved, but because the total destruction of the Return would somehow match the total destruction he had visited on Sierra Depot. Not that any of that made sense.
“Here she comes…” Duncan said. Jason felt her tense beside him.
A gleam on the horizon. Sunlight reflected so directly off the hull that Jason’s vision blurred. He looked away and when his gaze swung back, the Return was rising, rising, a streak in the blue sky like molten silver on the sea. Silent, swift, so beautiful his heart stopped. Then the ship was gone.
He barely dared to breathe. Long minutes later, she fell back out of the sky, slowed, hovered, and rose again. Whole, functional, returned from orbit.
Jason turned to his second in command. To his surprise, tears stood in her eyes—Elizabeth Duncan! He pretended not to notice, and the next moment the tears were gone.
“It worked,” she said in her usual dry voice.
“Yes.”
One thing gone right.
The duty guard knocked on the door. “Sir, a message from Lab Dome. Dr. Farouk has woken up. You said you wanted to know when it happened.”
Jason glanced at Duncan. She said, “Better late than never.”
“Like so much else,” he said.
* * *
Days later, Jason arrived at the command post early in the morning, after a night with Lindy. The night had not gone well.
It had been his fault. They hadn’t been together since the day before Jason had executed Dolin. She was kept so busy with the awakenings—eleven of them now—and he with running a base short of supplies, routine, and answers. But last night’s tension had not come from those inescapable cares. “You’re avoiding me,” she’d said to him yesterday. “Why?”
Sometimes he wished she were less direct. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I waited for you to … never mind that. You’ve got something on your mind, Jason, something you’re not telling me. What is it?”
And less perceptive.
She repeated, “What is it?” but now her tone was softer, more concerned, Lindy at her most gentle. Damn her! Accusative Lindy he could have resisted; merely sexy Lindy he could have enjoyed. But this was Lindy evoking the kind of bond they had once had, in which they told each other their deepest desires and fears, as Jason had never told anyone else. This was the Lindy of long sweet conversations in bed after orgasm, wrapped in each other’s arms or propped up on pillows with glasses of wine or making the kind of silly jokes that grew from a long marriage. But he could not tell her that in the eyes of the United States Army, he was no longer in command of Monterey Base, was under arrest, was facing court-martial. That deception was known only to six other people, all bound to silence, and he could not be the one to break the secrecy that was eventually going to endanger so many. He had, after all, been its architect.
So he said, “It’s nothing,” and watched disappointment and then hurt darken Lindy’s eyes. And still she didn’t give up.
“All right. I don’t believe you, but I’m not going to press it.”
Lindy! When hadn’t she pressed, pried, burned through his reticence with a laser cutter? That was why he’d been able to be himself with her in the first place, why he had fallen in love with her. She had pushed him into love, and he had landed into more happiness than he’d thought possible. Until the war began.
He still loved her. He knew that now. Jane had been a momentary attraction; it was Lindy he wanted, needed. But it wasn’t fair to her to reconnect, not when chances were that Strople’s troops would execute him for treason. It would be too much like soldiers who quickly married before deployment, only to create widows and widowers. Jason had always considered that selfish behavior. Better to wait until you could offer, if not security, at least a living body. Until you were a little more in control of events.
Lindy said, “Spend tonight with me anyway, Jason. I just want to feel you next to me, inside me.” And she’d touched him, quickly and furtively, in that special caress only she knew that he responded to, and then tossed him a mischievous smile over her shoulder as she walked away.
Maybe his reasoning was wrong.
So he’d gone to her, and they’d tried to make love, and it had been a failure.
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said, “it happens to all men occasionally. Look at the strain you’ve been under … it’s all right.”
“No.”
“Jason, love, you can’t control everything.”
The old accusation, and even though this time it hadn’t been an accusation, just a sweet reassurance, Jason had shut down. It was not all right with him. He’d said, “I think you should go now, Lindy.” His tone had been wrong and, stony-faced, he hadn’t corrected it. Lindy had left his quarters hurt and angry. He hadn’t gone after her.
Not fair to her, none of it. The rest of the night had been sleepless.
Dawn broke, pink and gold and angelic, over the burned forest. Then a knock on the door—Christ, this early? Hillson must never sleep. But it wasn’t Hillson.
“Sir,” said the guard, “Major Sullivan to see you.”
The scientists almost never requested to see Jason, especially at the command post. The daily reports to Jason from Lab Dome all said the same thing: no more information about brain changes. More v-comas were awakening, and all showed the same increased intelligence as the first ones. Dr. Steffens was working day and night on the gene drive for birds, with no results. No vaccine, no boosted human immunity. Nothing changed. And yet, here was the head of the vaccine team. Hope surged in Jason.
“Show her up.”
Major Denise Sullivan appeared at the command post with a sheaf of printouts and a puzzled face. “Sir? Something major to report on the virophage.”
“Proceed, Major. Do you have—”
“The vaccine? No. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have started like that, it’s not the vaccine, it just has to do with virophage transmission, but I thought you should know…”
It wasn’t like her to be this flustered. Jason waited.
“We’ve been looking at how the virus affects those who don’t fall into comas. The controls, you know. The epidemiological graphs, which I’ve printed out for you in incremental time units, plotting blood samples versus—”
“Major,” Jason said, summoning patience, “cut to the chase. I don’t need the graphs. Just tell me what the graphs say about transmission.”
“Yes, sir.” She tilted her head slightly, obviously thinking how to phrase this simply enough for Jason, and he thought that she looked in that moment like a large bird.
She said, “Everybody is infected with virophage. Everyone here. But if you don’t have the allele, the virophage seems to leave your body after a period of time ranging from two days to seven. Your immune system fights it off. Like a rhinovirus.�
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“A…”
“A cold. But if you are, or were, a v-coma, the virophage stays in you. And then you can go on infecting other people.”
“For how long?”
“Unknown. But from the contact diagrams we constructed, the transmission goes on after you come out of the coma. That seems to be how subjects twenty-nine and thirty-one contracted it. If you look at graph sixteen-A—”
“I will. But let me see if I understand this. I had the virophage, but it’s gone from my body now, and I can’t infect anyone else. Dr. Steffens, who was in a coma and is now out of it, can go on infecting people and if they have the right genes, they go into a v-coma and come out smarter.”
“Well, there are nuances that you haven’t … but yes, sir. Basically, yes. Metabolic cascades…”
“Major, I don’t want this discussed with anyone who doesn’t already know about it.”
“But, sir—”
“That’s an order, Major.”
Jason was thinking about Dolin, Winfield, Kandiss. If this intel entered the base’s rumor factory in some twisted form, it wouldn’t change who could or could not fall into v-coma, but it might fuel the anti-star-farer sentiment out there. Without the Return, after all, there would not be any virophage on Earth, nor any division among those who could spread it further and those who could not.
Jason said, “Leave those graphs with me. I want to study them. Anything else?”
“No, sir.” She left. But before Jason had time to study the virus-transmission graphs, Hillson appeared. The master sergeant’s entire body was so rigid it looked as if he were encased in invisible cement. This was Hillson in his most extreme rage.
“Sir,” Hillson said.
Jason said, “The second convoy has started from Fort Hood. Finally.”
“Yes, sir. I just received the encrypted call from Lieutenant Li.”
So whatever turmoil had been going on at Fort Hood, delaying a second convoy, had been solved, or subdued, or killed, and Strople was still in command. Or again in command. Either way, he was confident enough of his troops to now send a detachment rumbling north to claim the Return.