by Nancy Kress
“How long?”
“I estimate ten to fourteen days, sir, but of course it depends on weather, on if New America attacks them, on the state of coastal highways.”
Those had not been maintained for ten years. Rock slides, forest encroachments, bridge collapses. The Strykers could pretty much go through or over anything, but not fast. And thanks to the climate shifts of global warming, which had been halted but not reversed, parts of the terrain between here and Texas were rainier and muddier this time of year than they had been in centuries.
“Did Li say anything else?”
“No, sir. The signal station will monitor the convoy’s progress via the Return. But there is something else.”
Of course there was. Hillson was not in this stiff, contained fury because the convoy had left Fort Hood. Jason waited.
“Six soldiers have deserted. Gone.” Hillson listed them, spitting out the names as if they were rotten fruit pits. “They took weapons, supplies, bivouac tents, and gear. Sometime in the night.”
Jason said nothing, a little surprised to learn that he was not surprised.
“Sir, I can organize a search party in half an hour. With quadcopters, or you can bring the spaceship down to—”
“No.”
Hillson blinked. “No?”
“No. Let them go. They can either be picked off by the enemy or found a settlement that—I assume all six are RSA survivors? They didn’t take any esuits?”
“All survivors. But, sir—they are deserters. In time of war.”
Jason understood what Hillson was not saying: Jason had executed Dolin but was taking no action against these six. Inconsistent, bad for discipline, bad for morale, Army regs …
“Hillson, let them go. In ten days I won’t want them here anyway.”
Hillson’s face crinkled into a fantastic terrain of bewilderment. Was there contempt there, as well? No, not yet. But Jason couldn’t tell, didn’t know, what Hillson would think about the much larger decision that Jason had to make soon. Hillson, loyal and tireless and meticulous, nonetheless lacked imagination.
In less than ten days.
But not yet.
“Yes, sir,” Hillson said unhappily.
The duty guard opened the door. “Sir? Dr. Patel is here.”
Christ, it was practically Grand Central Station in here. “Send her in. That’s all, Sergeant Hillson.”
“Yes, sir.”
Claire Patel walked in, her small upright figure stiff with determination. “Colonel Jenner, a word, please.”
“Certainly.”
“I’m concerned that the Awakened in the lab are working too hard. Doctors Steffens and Farouk, and the two lab techs who were in a coma before. Their bodies now require more energy and maybe more sleep—we don’t know why—but they’re hardly sleeping and they’re eating only when forced. All four of them are losing weight and starting to show signs of sleep-deprivation psychosis. The medical staff has tried reason, argument, and orders, and none of them will listen. As commander here, you could order them to preserve their own health.”
“How would I do that, Doctor? Except for Dr. Farouk, aren’t they all civilians?”
“We’re under martial law, aren’t we? Lock them in their rooms, or somewhere else, for six or seven hours and they’ll sleep. Put food in there. You could order that.”
“I could. I will not.” Didn’t she see the kind of resistance that imprisoning civilians—civilians!—“for their own good” would cause on a base already fragmented into military and scientists, those who welcomed the star-farers and those who resented them, those emerging as superintelligent and the rest of us poor slobs? She did not. All of them, Patel and Hillson and even Lindy, saw the situation here through their own lenses, and no other way.
“You won’t intervene to save their lives?”
“Are they in danger of imminent death?”
She hesitated. “No.”
Claire Patel was always honest; that was why he’d asked her that question. Jason said, “Is their work yielding any useful results?”
“Not yet.”
“Will it?”
“I don’t know.”
More honesty. Jason almost said, “Dismissed,” but not only should he not do that, it wasn’t necessary. Dr. Patel turned to go. But she had one more parting shot.
“Colonel Jenner, your grandmother has woken up. She’s not young. I hope she doesn’t overwork herself in the lab, as well.”
* * *
Marianne was not in the lab. She sat with Colin in the conference room. A group of Settlers had been in there with him, discussing plantings for the garden that had to be created all over again outside the dome since, while Marianne had been comatose, there had apparently been a terrible battle. Colin asked the Settlers to leave the room and they had, trailing children and bits of environmental conversation. Colin sat in a powerchair, his injured leg in some sort of cast, regarding his grandmother with intense curiosity.
“No,” she said, “you first. Tell me everything that happened while I was comatose. How were you hurt?”
He did. Part of her mind listened intently, although it was an effort to slow comprehension to the speed of his words. The rest of her mind kept evolving the thoughts that had seized her since she’d woken up four hours ago.
Night in the dome—dim lights, soft breathing beyond closed curtains, solitary footfalls in the corridor. She lay in the v-coma ward, yes. A narrow bed, a green Army blanket that was too warm. She didn’t move it yet. She lay absolutely still, mental fingers that were still Marianne tentatively touching her new mind, as if it were a lab specimen.
It was not. It was her. She was not fragmented, not fundamentally different. But her thoughts ran on parallel lines simultaneously, and the tracks crossed and recrossed, making connections she could not have made before. The image came to her of a yarn sculpture she had seen once, long ago, so intricately and fantastically knotted that each strand seemed to connect to every other in ways that her linear mind could not conceptualize.
Linear no longer.
She lay there for three hours, making neither movement nor sound, knotting strands. Her old watch, still on her wrist after journeying to the stars and back again, glowed with the time. Eventually, a nurse moved silently through the curtains.
“I’m awake,” Marianne said.
The nurse brought Lindy Ross. Marianne submitted to Lindy’s examination but said little. Lindy finished by saying, with unnecessary force, “Marianne, you must eat. Your brain is now using more glucose, and you are already in ketosis. I’m going to send food in here now.”
“All right,” Marianne said, and for the first time, Lindy smiled.
She ate. She walked up and down with an orderly, until he was satisfied that she would not fall. She dressed in her own clothes, which she found in a plastic bag under the bed. She wanted to talk to someone, but not Lindy, who had seemed agitated and distracted. Someone who might understand the thoughts in her head. Zack McKay was, Lindy said, asleep—“Finally!”—and shouldn’t be disturbed. Jane was still comatose, Ka^graa too hard to talk to without Jane’s translations. Claire, the nurse said, had gone to Enclave Dome. Dr. Steffens was here, but apparently she would not leave her lab work to talk to anyone, even Jason. Jason himself was out of the question. He would listen, but he would not care about the topics knotting themselves fantastically through her brain.
Ryan? No. Marianne loved her son, but he was now more frail than she had ever been.
She slipped out of the ward and asked a startled soldier on his way to the mess, “Where can I find Colin Jenner?”
“Ma’am?”
“Colin Jenner,” she said patiently. “Please find him and then take me to him.”
He hesitated, evidently weighing his choices. She was, after all, the CO’s grandmother. He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and delayed his breakfast long enough to hunt up Colin in his Settler meeting and take Marianne to him.
When Colin h
ad finished his recitation of attacks and counterattacks; of his and Lindy’s supremely stupid, brave attempt to get a message to the signal station; of ship repairs and comas and awakenings, he said, “Grandma, tell me how it feels.”
That was Colin—feeling before all. She said, “It doesn’t ‘feel’ like anything. I just think differently. Faster, more deeply. Colin, do you remember when you were small and were fascinated with elephants?”
“Of course. I drew them all the time.”
“You did more than draw them. You made up stories about them, you talked to pretend elephants, you dreamed about rescuing an elephant in a basement, like in your favorite picture book.”
He smiled. “I remember.”
“I want to tell you about genetic evolution. After all, that’s what I am, an evolutionary geneticist, the only one here at the base. Evolution is a process, but not an evenly paced one.”
“I know that much,” Colin said.
“I’m rehearsing here, Colin—trying to find the one strand to explain it simply.” And each idea—almost each word—led to other strands, other ideas. Her task now was to separate out the ones that would make sense to nonscientists. This was urgent.
He said, “You’re trying to find the words to explain it to Jason, when he’s being Colonel Jenner.”
Even as a child, Colin had been quick to perceive the cues in human relations. Marianne took his hand where it rested on his knee, above the cast on his shattered leg. Her deeply veined hand squeezed his muscular fingers, on which his Settlement sunburn had mostly faded. She unknotted strands of thought in her mind, knotted them again, pruned and simplified.
“There are three parts to what I want to tell you. First, that punctuated evolution led to long periods where nothing much seemed to change in human beings, followed by rapid change. Five or six million years ago, proto-humans diverged from apes. Two hundred thousand years ago, by some estimates, toolmaking began. A hundred thousand years ago, modern humans emerged in Africa. Seventy thousand years ago, the first cloud of R. sporii hit Terra, wiping out most of humanity except those with natural immunity—which is why Worlders aren’t immune. They’d already been taken from Terra to World by the so-called super-aliens. About forty thousand years ago, the Great Leap happened—Colin, are you following this?”
“Every word. I already knew it, you know. And so does Jason.”
“Just bear with me. Humans had had a long period of cultural stagnation. Really long. Then, during the Great Leap Forward, modern humans started burying their dead with funeral rituals, making clothing with bone needles, carving buttons and fishhooks, creating jewelry and art. By thirty-six thousand years ago, they had fertility figurines and cave paintings and musical pipes.
“Some equivalent of the Great Leap must have occurred on World, too, or humans there would have stayed at an earlier stagnant level. I’ll come back to that.”
Colin nodded. He turned his head slightly—hearing something that she could not? Marianne didn’t interrupt herself to find out. She wouldn’t lose her line of thought, but he might.
“That’s the history, or a brief version of it. Second comes the genetic part. This is all known science. Our divergence from apes correlates with multiple mutations in a region of the genome called HAR1—human accelerated region one. The human brain developed a much wrinklier cortex, to mention just one change. Other mutations in other genes correlate with other advances. One of them—this is important—is a gene called ASPM, on chromosome one, which has mutated fifteen times in the last six million years, and the mutations seem to correlate with milestones in human evolution. The last mutation occurred along with the development of agriculture and sophisticated writing. Of course, mutations can be destructive, as well—an ASPM allele causes microcephaly in fetuses, who are born with small brains—in fact, brains exactly the size of Australopithecus africanus a few million years ago. And changes in one gene can affect others. ASPM is seminal. It affects the division of cells in developing brains. It affects other cells. It affects coding in IQ domains of the human genome.”
Colin’s face crinkled in concentration. “So you think that everybody who went into a v-coma had this mutation? In that one gene?”
“Yes, yes. Or maybe in two copies of the gene. I can talk to Zack McKay about that.”
“But what does this have to do with—”
She said, “I think the virophage tweaked the ASPM gene. The v-comas are the next stage in human evolution.”
Colin opened his mouth, then closed it again. When he spoke, the sentiment was pure Colin, the democratic populist. “But not for everybody? That’s not fair.”
“No, dear heart. Evolution never is. This may or may not be evolution, depending on whether it gets into the germ line and can be passed on to the next generation. But there’s one more thing.”
He said unhappily, “Go ahead.”
“Microbes.”
“R. sporii?”
“No, its virophage. The fact that some humans, those with—maybe—a given mutated allele—fall into a coma and others don’t—that means something important. It means we’ve encountered this virophage before, or we wouldn’t have the genes to react to it. And since some of those in comas are Worlders, humanity encountered the virophage before a hundred and forty thousand years ago.”
Colin frowned. “Are you saying that the virophage caused humans to … oh, I don’t know … diverge from apes? Millions of years ago?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure we can know. But that’s the wrong question.”
“Grandma, you look tired. Maybe you should—”
“No, let me finish! We’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question for decades now—ever since Worlders first landed in New York Harbor. We’ve been asking ‘What do we want?’ How can we develop a vaccine against the spore cloud, counteract the virophage, eliminate RSA—they’re all the wrong questions.”
Coin shifted his weight in his powerchair. “What’s the right question?”
Marianne leaned forward, swayed, caught herself. “The right question is ‘What do the microbes want?’”
“Microbes don’t ‘want’ anything! They’re not sentient!”
“No. But natural selection leads to the proliferation of traits that aid their survival. So why select for a strategy that essentially results in rewiring their human hosts’ brains? What does the virophage gain when it does that? There are a lot of potential answers.
“Maybe they need some protein found in neurons or synapses or brain-chemical cascades, and the rewiring causes more of that protein to be made.
“Maybe they’ve evolved to hijack our cellular machinery to aid their reproductive success, as a lot of viruses and parasites have evolved to do with all kinds of animals.
“Maybe they use us to carry them elsewhere so their territory is increased and so their numbers grow. Like cherries, who use mammals to eat their fruit and excrete the seeds in new places, or burdocks that cling to fur to get seeds somewhere else. That’s how both smallpox and measles pathogens got to the United States—humans brought them.”
Colin said, “So which is it? What does the virophage ‘want’?”
Marianne shrugged. “I don’t know. But I always thought that we humans would someday transform ourselves with genetic engineering. What if the opposite is true—if microbes are the dominant force? If genetic engineering, at which microbes are expert, transforms us? It always has created new life-forms, from the moment the first fermenting bacterium merged with a swimming bacterium. But—there’s still a strand missing!”
“A strand of what?”
“Something I haven’t figured out. Damn it, I don’t have the math!”
“Math? What has math got to do with it?”
All at once Marianne’s vision blurred and she sagged in her chair. “I am tired. I think I better rest now.”
Colin powered his chair to the door, opened it, and shouted down the corridor. “Hey! Anybody! Will somebody help my grandmo
ther back to her room?”
A civilian on janitorial duty stuck her head from a doorway, a plump older woman with hair like electrified wire and a cheerful smile. “Just a sec!”
“Thank you,” Marianne said.
“Grandma, just one quick question. Why are you telling all this to me, instead of to the brain-change scientists? Especially the ones with enhanced intelligence?”
“I will tell them. But they all want to know how the virophage changed the v-coma victims’ brains. I want to know why.”
Now Colin looked totally bewildered. “Is there a why? Doesn’t evolution just happen?”
“Yes. But there’s a missing piece, and I don’t have the math—Jason!”
“Are you all right?” Her other grandson, tall and stern in his uniform, the cheerful janitor hovering behind him. He scowled at Marianne and Colin. “I was coming to see you—what are you doing out of bed?”
“Take me back, please,” she managed to get out. Again her vision had blurred; exhaustion felt like a physical weight on her shoulders, her chest, her brain. But she heard Colin repeat his question, and even as Jason lifted her in strong arms and half carried her from the room, she smiled at Colin.
“Grandma, why me?”
She said over Jason’s shoulder, “Because scientists think in performable and replicable experiments, and you drew elephants.”
CHAPTER 21
“Sir? Permission to have a word with you?”
Private McNally, one of the awakened, saluted. Jason was on his way to the mess in Lab Dome. He had resolved to have a larger presence at the other dome. Although he would never have Hillson’s intel network—and didn’t need to, as long as he had Hillson—he could at least walk around and see more for himself. And be seen. Also, perhaps the scientists would be less formal with him, less guarded, if he went to them instead of either summoning them to the command post or staging formal presentations.
And maybe he would happen to run into Lindy.
McNally stopped him in a crowded corridor. Beyond lay an open area, or what passed for an open area in the crowded dome, where three shouting Settler children played a game with a ball. The ball bounced off crates, most empty, off chairs where two Settlers sat talking, off a nurse hurrying to the infirmary. McNally’s salute had been a halfhearted swipe at his forehead. Or maybe not halfhearted as much as preoccupied.