Beyond Regeneration

by Jenny Schwartz

  Undecided, Charley shuffled sideways and leaned against the wall of the building. It was warm from the sun, and for a moment she soaked in that simple, physical comfort. She wanted to talk with Alan about the QNA, but was now the time?

  Yes. The answer reverberated through her. Too often people’s fear of adding to a grieving person’s distress—their sense of inadequacy in the face of such pain—meant the mourner was left alone and feeling painfully isolated.

  Surely the distraction of questions about the QNA was better than that echoing loneliness and haunting sense that in living, you’d failed the dead?

  As for the personal cost to her, she’d survive. She’d offer sympathy and endure the scraping of her scars that was empathy. The QNA’s barrage of Alan’s memories hadn’t helped with that.

  “He can only ask me to leave. If he’s there.” And if he wasn’t there, where was he? She pushed the question away, and started along the gravel path that joined the Dos’ house to New Hope.

  The house was built to an unexciting rectangular plan, redeemed from utter sterility by a half-porch out front. Charley climbed the couple of steps feeling like an intruder. A mat by the door said “Welcome”, but it was dauntingly clean and not the place to wipe one’s feet. She was relieved that the path to the house wasn’t muddy. She pressed the buzzer and an electronic chime played a traditional ding-dong. It echoed twice before there came the sound of slow footsteps.

  Alan answered the door. With the hallway unlit behind him and wearing a black sweater, he appeared smothered in shadows.

  “Come in.” The words were automatic. He pushed the door wide, but that was the extent of his welcome. He turned and left Charley to follow him.

  Carefully, she latched the door behind them.

  The hallway and the lounge room, glimpsed in passing, suggested the house was like Lillian: striving hard to appear attractive, but missing the mark because it lacked a fundamental warmth. Throughout the walls were painted cream and the thick carpet was only a shade darker. The few pictures on the wall were uninspired Modernist reproductions and the sofas in the lounge room were eggplant purple and bare of scatter cushions. The television, shiny new, dominated the room. The air was cold.

  The light beige carpeting stopped abruptly at the kitchen, which had floorboards stained to match its dark wood cupboards. Granite countertops were clear of the clutter that accumulated in most homes. A single letterstand against the far wall held bills to pay. The room was depressing. Olive green vertical blinds shut out the spring sunshine that would have added life.

  “Coffee?”

  Charley declined and Alan slumped back in his chair. A mug half-full of coffee sat on the table in front of him and he wrapped his hands around it, seeking warmth.

  “Are you okay?” She winced at her own question.

  Alan ignored it, or maybe he answered it, obliquely. “I couldn’t go to work.” He gulped a mouthful of coffee. “I had to think.”

  “About Lillian?”

  A nod. “Why would someone kill her?”

  Charley blinked, and accepted for the moment his assumption of murder; accepted too his focus on Lillian. His need to talk, to try to understand his wife’s death, took precedence over the puzzle of the QNA.

  “Lillian walked on the beach at night, but she wouldn’t have gone on the rocks alone. She only took risks for a reason.” He looked at Charley. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d been crying. “She wasn’t having an affair.”

  Charley hadn’t even thought of the possibility.

  “Lillian had the opportunity. She was attractive and obviously fit. The men who come here, some of them need reassurance that they aren’t repulsive, that life continues for them. An affair with Lillian would have appealed to them. It wasn’t professionalism that stopped her, although she was a good nurse. Sex just wasn’t important to her. And Lillian had enough self-respect not to trade her body.” He studied his long thin fingers, unpeeling them from the coffee mug and flexing blood back into their tense whiteness. “I failed her.”

  “How?”

  His gaze roamed the kitchen; maybe for answers, maybe for understanding and acceptance. “We thought we were in love when we married, and we were, but not with each other. My parents were dead, my job—I’d just finished my training—consumed all my time and had done for years. I wanted to belong to someone. Lillian loved the idea of marrying a doctor. Her grandmother raised her, and they’d been poor. Lillian wanted money and status. She thought marriage to me would bring her both.”

  “Well, you didn’t fail her there.” Charley sounded like an over-bright personal coach to her own ears, but Alan’s gloom was so deep that she felt driven to counter it. Alan and Lillian’s relationship was like a twisted, bleak shadow of her and Eric’s love. “Lillian had money and she was important at New Hope.”

  “But New Hope is Jack’s, not mine. When we moved here, it was Jack Lillian wanted, but he never saw her. Lillian wanted the prestige that he never notices.”

  Alan rubbed his hands together as if washing them. “I failed Lillian because I didn’t share myself with her, and so she never grew beyond wanting the outside things. That’s all there was to her, the outside things of money and power. I knew what was missing in our marriage, the caring, but I didn’t try to provide it. I just fell in with Lillian’s demands for the outside things.”

  The dissection of a marriage was heartbreaking.

  Alan grabbed a box of tissues, blew his nose, then stared at the blinds covering the window. “The night of the break-in, I saw someone at the office window. I often take a late night walk. I…I like the dark.”

  Charley remembered the QNA’s shared image of the cave, the symbol of Alan’s safe retreat. It was more than him liking the dark: he felt safe in it. She wondered what had happened in his life to make night-time preferable. The Vietnam War had scarred a lot of people, combatants and civilians; some had been only children.

  “I shouted at the person at the window. I couldn’t see who it was. They ran. It decided me. Lillian and I had to confess to Jack. The stakes were too high for secrets and double dealing.” He stared at his hands. “I slept in the spare bedroom that night, and I think Lillian crept out and used the attempted break-in to hide…” He cleared his throat. “To hide some things.” He focused suddenly on Charley. “When your husband died, what did you regret?”

  “Our future. Children. Time.” She paused, then repeated slowly. “Time. We were young, idealistic. We knew we loved each other, but we were always busy. I wish I’d wrung more out of our time together.”

  She stared at the scrupulously clean table top. It was ironic. Her grief for Eric had included anger at life not lived and loved to the full, but what had she done for two years? You couldn’t call what she’d been doing, living.

  “About the QNA,” she said, abruptly. That was her concern. The scrupulous confession Alan intended to make to Jack was none of her business. “Alan, do the QNA communicate with you?”

  He froze, before slowly nodding.

  “In memories?” she prompted.

  “So far.” Apparently, her pinpoint understanding of his experience unlocked his tongue. “The QNA’s communication is growing stronger, clearer. I couldn’t tell Jack. No one else senses them or, at least, I haven’t noticed that they do.”

  “I do. What I want to know, among other things, is how?”

  Alan wet his lips. His hands traced vague shapes in the air. “The human body gives off electrical energy, a very small amount. I think the QNA must have a similar field, one that can mesh with humans’. It’s weak, which is why I have to be in immediate proximity to them to receive and send a communication.”

  “Electrical impulses. Auras. Kirlian photography.”

  “No. I mightn’t be clear on the science of it, but my, our, experience with the QNA is not pseudo-science. With the QNA we’re communicating without language, at a cellular level. By increasing or decreasing energy transfer, the QNA stimulate particular cell
s in us. If you stimulate certain glands, people feel specific emotions.”

  “And emotions are energetic,” Charley said, following his argument.

  Emotions. Bristling with anger. Crackling with excitement. Communication with the QNA was about emotion.

  Perhaps all initial communication, even among early humans, was about emotion?

  “So the QNA must sense and recognize us by energy pulses, like images from heat sensitive photography?”

  He straightened in his chair. “It’s fascinating. To communicate with us, to be conscious of itself as an intelligence, the QNA must be able to perceive and remember energetically and, possibly, chemically. At some point of critical mass, the swarm developed an intelligence, and then, the intelligence developed sentience. The question is how? What were the triggers for intelligence to take the giant step into self-awareness? The QNA are still learning, still growing into what their intelligence can be.”

  “We have to tell Jack,” she said.

  Alan collapsed like a punctured balloon.

  “Come on, Alan. We can’t keep this from Jack. It’s his lab. And I’d like to know why he can’t sense the QNA.”

  Alan hunched his shoulders. “There’s something else I have to tell Jack first. A confession.” He shot a hunted look at her. “About Michael Janz.”

  She’d dismissed Alan’s need for confession as minor, but the look in his eyes, the guilt, this wasn’t minor. “What did you do?”

  “I planted a sensory bio-enhancement in Michael.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Michael offered Lillian money,” Alan said. “Looking back, it wasn’t much to sell our integrity for. He worked on Lillian, played on her envy of rich people’s lives, and Lillian worked on me. I knew she was dissatisfied with our life, and I felt guilty. In the end, I agreed to plant a bat’s hearing in one of Michael’s ears. I reshaped his ear, the shell of it, a little bit, too.” Momentarily, professional pride stirred, and subsided. “Lillian falsified the QNA records so that we could keep Michael supplied with the QNA needed for the bio-enhancement to take and grow.

  “It was unprofessional. Michael said he was willing to take the risk, but I should never have let him trial the new technology, especially when he intended to adapt to it without significantly changing his lifestyle. At least the three kids at Jabberwocky have had time and space to adjust to the physical changes of sensory bio-enhancement. The psychological implications if it had gone wrong…”

  If it had gone wrong, if the untested sensory bio-enhancement had driven Michael mad, the responsibility would have lain with Alan. But Alan had borne a double burden of potential guilt. If it had gone wrong, publicity of it would have destroyed Jack’s work and reputation.

  “Did it go wrong?” Charley asked. Michael looked healthy, sane. She shuddered. Looks weren’t everything. If Michael was insane…it would be a disaster. He had the money and power to command all sorts of nightmares.

  This was the flipside of bio-enhancement’s superhumans—the possibility of creating subhuman freaks.

  “No. Maybe.” Alan stood restlessly and grasped the back of a kitchen chair, rocking it on its back legs. “The hearing adaptation took physically—his body didn’t reject it—but Michael didn’t perceive a significant improvement in his hearing.”

  Her breath escaped in a whoosh of relief and appreciation of the irony involved. The operation, its dangers, the betrayal, all were for nothing. All that was left was the nasty aftermath. “Does Michael know that you intend to tell Jack?”

  Alan pushed the chair into the table and shoved his hands into his pockets. His movements were jerky with unaccustomed defiance. “Michael never asked for our secrecy. It was simply understood. Jack would never have accepted Michael as a trial subject for sensory bio-enhancement, so the operation had to be done on the quiet. Lillian and I took a week’s holiday and some of the QNA from the lab and met Michael at a private hospital. I doubt there was any record of what we did. Michael’s efficient about that sort of thing.” The derisory line to Alan’s mouth straightened into determination. “I have to tell Jack. Now.”

  Charley nodded, although he was beyond noticing her response. It was just as well. If he’d asked for reassurance, she’d have come up blank. A betrayal like this shattered professional and friendship ties. Jack would be hurt. She acknowledged the pain that thought caused her. Jack would be hurt, but there was no way of softening the news.

  She and Alan walked out of the house, leaving his coffee mug on the table in the empty kitchen. Neither held the front door, and it slammed behind them. Alan didn’t lock it. He hunched his shoulders and plodded forward. For him, the sunshine and fresh wind off the ocean didn’t exist.

  Halfway along the path to New Hope, Charley turned aside. She had no part in the coming scene. It was something to be grateful for in this day of battering surprises.

  He walked on, unheeding.

  She headed for the beach with its freedom of the open horizon, and once on the white sand, she turned in the opposite direction to the rocks.

  The beach was empty, and in the absence of people, she felt it possible to breathe naturally again. The runaway pace she’d set slowed to an amble, and finally, stilled. The warmth of the sun with its suggestion of summer lured her to the soft sand that formed the slope of the dunes. She lay full length on the white sand and let the heat of it soak into her with the same effect of relaxation as a warm bath.

  The shocks of the day replayed through her mind, one by one, raising questions that she couldn’t answer.

  Michael had a sensory bio-enhancement. Did the trio at Jabberwocky know of it? Had Michael experienced, and not mentioned to Alan, similar extra-sensory phenomena to that of the trio? But if his bio-enhancement hadn’t worked, Michael wouldn’t have experienced those phenomena, would he? Did he know about them anyway from eavesdropping on the trio’s conversations? Nicola said that Jabberwocky was bugged.

  Perhaps the biggest question was Michael’s motivation for risking his own health. Sensory bio-enhancement was very new and virtually untried. What had been worth the risk to Michael of his own mental balance?

  Charley stretched, then wriggled her shoulder blades deeper into the sand. Maybe she was judging Michael from the wrong standards. Just because she was a coward who could imagine nothing worse than exploring new worlds didn’t mean that other people looked at new technology the same way. Maybe Michael, like the trio, saw opportunity where she saw risk.

  She flung her arm up to shade her eyes.

  Alan saw the risks involved. Was it too fanciful to say that the risks haunted him?

  How would Jack react to Alan’s confession? The emotional cost of his breakthrough technology was coming high. How would Alan cope if he ended up minus job and friend, as well as wife? She thought it unlikely that he and Jack could continue to work together. The trust between them would be missing.

  As for the QNA, would they miss Alan? How crucial had he been in their evolution to sentience? Would they have ever communicated with her if they hadn’t first made contact with him?

  Did she wish, honestly and truly, that communication with the QNA hadn’t happened?

  “Would I have been happier to stay uninvolved?”

  But then, she hadn’t been happy before arriving at New Hope.

  Prosaically, her tummy rumbled. In the day’s information overload, she’d forgotten to eat lunch. She gave her stomach an apologetic rub before scrambling up and brushing off the clinging sand. Eating was at least something concrete she could do while her brain whirled with information and speculation.

  It was the tail end of the lunch hour. Charley accepted a bowl of Caesar salad from New Hope’s kitchen staff and sat at a table in the empty dining room to eat it. The salty taste of anchovies in place of bacon seemed appropriate so close to the sea, and she discarded only a few.

  For the moment, the difficulties presented by the weirdness introduced by the QNA and three trial subjects to the happenings of
New Hope couldn’t be solved, but she’d been a reporter long enough to learn her way around a criminal case and its likely unravelling. So, if she couldn’t solve the bigger puzzle, she could concentrate on the question of who Alan had seen trying to break into New Hope.

  Michael would have had no need. Solomon? Charley chomped a piece of lettuce to smother her grin. The idea of Solomon, eminent physician, breaking into New Hope was funny. She ate another lettuce leaf quickly since people who ate alone had to be careful about smiling at solitary jokes. The QNA gave her enough reason to think herself crazy, there was no gain in confirming that impression for the general public. As punishment, she ate an extra anchovy.

  “Hi, Charley.” Keanu, New Hope’s psychologist, grabbed a glass of orange juice and joined her at the table. He took in her grimace and guessed its meaning instantly. “Here, have my juice. Those lil fish are killers.” He got himself a second glass and came back to the table. “I really need a bourbon. To quote Staci, Jack’s in a rampaging mood.”

  Anchovy and orange juice mixed churningly in her stomach. So, Alan had made his confession.

  “Jack’s rifling through the filing cabinets like a one man cyclone, and anyone who interrupts him gets their head bitten off.”

  “As you did?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” Keanu admitted with a rueful grin, aware of his own ruffled feathers. “Usually Jack’s so controlled no one suspects he has a temper. All I did was mention the sympathy card people are signing for Alan.”

  Charley ate more lettuce, effectively reducing her ability to respond.

  Keanu sighed. “So, just a warning. If you’re thinking of interviewing anyone, don’t choose Jack.”