Daniel watched the elder woman clasp her elegant hands together. “Seems we have one less member in the Circle,” she smiled sadly.
Julie mirrored her smile. “Yes.” Gaia was now in the Pol Station awaiting trial. Daniel figured she was going to be there a long time. Julie exchanged a glance with Daniel again. She looked as puzzled as he was. Aileen hadn’t answered her question.
“You’re familiar with the Circle?” Aileen went on. “What we do and who we are?”
“A little.” Julie tilted her head, thinking back. “Mostly from my database work with SAM. You’re a governing body of ecologists who oversee the individual Icarian governments, mostly from a holistic, total-Earth perspective.”
Aileen nodded. “Yes, our principal motive is in the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity and its varied ecosystems, Icarias included. We also recognize Icaria as an ecosystem worth preserving in its own right.” She’d raised an eyebrow pointedly and was now looking at Julie with an air of intense expectation. What did she expect, wondered Daniel. Judging from Julie’s expression, he didn’t think she knew either. When Julie failed to respond and just looked on with interest, Aileen continued, “You’ve faithfully embodied your father’s theories with a fierceness and thoughtfulness that is uncommon.” To this Julie visibly stiffened. Aileen went on, still wearing a sanguine expression, as if not noticing, “And although his work is commendable, there are several in the Circle who do not agree with many of his suggestions.”
Daniel saw Julie rally herself. This time she was ready to speak. He watched her jaw working as she prepared for an argument and drew in a breath to speak. He felt the edge of panic grip him. The Circle ran Icaria and Aileen effectively ran the Circle. Don’t blow it, Julie!
Before Julie had a chance to speak, though, Aileen continued, “I think we are now witnessing your father’s model for civilizations within stable chaos theory realizing itself before our eyes. If we choose to interpret creative destruction of a civilization beyond the literal, then perhaps we’re seeing an emerging paradigm for a civilization from an archaic form to one which is populated by veemelds, leading a Darwin-human race into a new era...perhaps a new species, capable of communication beyond our imagination.”
Daniel met Julie’s eyes with a dazed smile. Then he raised a brow and tapped his chin. Taking his hint and realizing that her mouth gaped open, Julie closed it.
“It would be, I think,” Aileen went on with cheerful pleasantness, “a good thing for the Circle to have a member who is not only a good ecologist but one who challenges the current thoughts and is willing to stand by her beliefs in the face of adversity, even ridicule.”
Julie’s mouth opened but no words came out. Julie’s eyes widened as Aileen ended with, “I was thinking of you.”
“Me?” Julie practically squeaked. She was flabbergasted.
“Think about it, Julie. I know it’s a big decision to make. You wouldn’t have to remain here in Icaria to fulfill your duties as a Circle member, either,” Aileen hastily added with a glance at Daniel. “In any case, I won’t keep you now. Think on it and let me know later. I’m sure Mr. Nakita is anxious to see you. We’ll speak again, soon. Good bye.” Aileen offered her hand to Julie, who remembered to close her mouth and took her hand absently. Then Aileen turned and glided out of the room with the elegance of a great flying bird, a subtle hint of jasmine remaining in the room as a reminder she was there.
Daniel and Julie locked stares. Her face had flushed with surging emotions. He could easily guess what they were. Only yesterday she was still outcast by all of Icaria as the seditious murderer who’d caused the plague; now for Icaria to embrace her as a member of its elite Circle was overwhelming. Possibly too much for her to bear all at once. He thought she was going to burst into tears, but instead she gave him a silly grin and shrugged, suggesting a coolness she was obviously far from feeling, then she turned to enter the room.
***
Zane was lying in a bed in a sterile room, empty except for the bed, a vee-com, a large holo and a bedside table well stocked with food and drink. He opened tired eyes and his face brightened with a smile when he saw her.
Still dizzy from Aileen’s incredible offer, Julie sat on the bed next to Zane and took his hand in both of hers. She gave him a broad smile of appreciation. “You were foolishly brave,” she said then added with a squeeze, “And I thank you for it.”
“My pleasure,” Zane responded with his usual toothpaste ad smile. “Couldn’t let you take all the credit.”
“Well, that’s just the point. I wouldn’t have. I’d have been dead.”
“And that’s my point,” he returned, squeezing her hands back with his. “Without you Icaria would be dead.”
Julie snorted and snatched her hand away. “What kind of foolishness is this now?” she laughed uneasily.
“Well, first, you reinstated the A.I. core—”
“After I shut it down!” she scoffed.
“But that allowed you to establish the critical connection between human, virus, and A.I. through your veemeld trance and by joining with Proteus.”
He’d used the word allow but he’d have been more accurate to have used the word forced. What he hadn’t said was that the circumstance she’d put herself into had forced her into a kind of bravery she would never have plucked up on her own.
“‘Critical connection’?” she raised a brow.
“Critical to the next step in our evolution as a species and a planet, Julie.”
She was about to laugh at his remark but stopped herself as he seriously studied her face with ferocious intensity. “Don’t you understand?” Zane continued, his eyes flashing in challenge. “You’re the only person on this planet who can speak directly to Proteus, to us, and to the machine intelligence. You’re the vital link that will keep this world from coming apart and destroying itself.”
Julie sighed. Zane was always doing that to her: reminding her what was at stake. And usually it was the whole world. But he was wrong this time, she thought. There was another person who could do what she did: Angel. But Julie wasn’t about to divulge that information. Thinking of Carl’s cryptic words earlier, she shook her head at Zane and laughed sharply. “‘The vital link keeping this world from coming apart and destroying itself’ is a bit too much hyperbole, even for you, Zane,” she said, absently smoothing out his covers for him.
“Let me explain,” he said gravely, pulling himself up with a grunt of pain. Had he done that just for her benefit? It was just the sort of thing Zane would do to gain her sympathy. He was making her feel very uncomfortable. “Gaia had it more right than we’d care to admit. The science, that is. She was just misapplying it, for her own personal ends.”
Julie frowned at Zane. “What are you talking about?” Now she was really getting uncomfortable.
“Icaria is in big trouble, Julie. Has been for a while, and for the same reasons Gaia gave during her Circle speech twelve years ago. Our environmental conditions and our reliance on drugs and nano-foods have created a weakened gene pool. It’s ironic that Gaia’s warning about the potential destruction of Icaria is a reality, but it’s not because of the virus. In fact Proteus and SAM identified the severity of the problem soon after you left Icaria.”
“Infertility,” Julie said.
Zane looked stunned for a moment then recovered. “So, you know already?”
“I got hints from various people,” she said, thinking of what Frank had said during his initial failed seduction. “And Carl told us just moments ago.”
“How much of the rest do you know then?”
“Nothing. Carl had to leave to see a patient. We thought it was you, but I guess it wasn’t.”
Zane shrugged. “Dr. Olafsen and Dr. Cole at the DP have been keeping track of it for years. They can evaluate an individual’s tendency to be infertile by measuring his or her brain secretio
ns, particularly those from the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. Joshua found a decrease in potential fertility by over twenty percent in the last ten years. That’s a chaos of a lot. Proteus and SAM pointed Joshua’s people in the direction of the hypothalamus, which excretes gonadotropin-releasing hormones into the pituitary gland. You know the functions, of course.”
“Yes,” Julie replied. “GnRH promotes the development and maintenance of primary and secondary sexual characteristics and reproduction.”
“Good enough,” Zane said, waving a hand. “A number of orally consumed recreational drugs served as hormonal contraceptives.”
Julie raised her brows with sudden fascination. “The same ones that caused problems with Proteus? The ones that made me sick and promoted Darwin in others?”
“Exactly! Combined with other nano-products, these drugs have formed a disastrous hormonal soup, spawning a bouillabaisse of endocrine disrupters and neurological disorders. Kids aren’t developing into fully functional reproductive adults and adults are losing their ability to conceive for a host of reasons but mainly from low estradiol in women and low sperm counts in men. The average male is reaching the critical count of less than forty million sperm per milliliter!”
Julie leaned forward, her brow creasing with concern. “What does that have to do with me?”
“I was getting to that,” he waved her down with an impatient look. “Thanks to Gaia, Carl and I have been doing experiments with the offspring of adults who contracted Darwin, and sharing our results with Kristin’s group. Veemeld kids who got Darwin passed onto them from their Darwin mothers who were either veemelds or married to veemelds—it doesn’t matter which parent was the veemeld—showed a strong tendency against infertility. In fact, they showed a tendency toward enhanced fertility. Darwin kids who weren’t veemelds were hit and miss but statistically a little better than non-Darwin controls, both veemeld and non-veemeld. Carl’s lab found that a kid’s tendency for enhanced fertility is directly related to their unique communication with Proteus. But it’s all intuitive, like for you when you were a child, through inarticulate communication.”
He pushed himself forward, forgetting to grunt with pain this time, and gave her a pointed stare. “Over fifty percent of our adult population now have Darwin and could potentially communicate with the virus. But they don’t. Not because they can’t, we think, but because they haven’t trained their minds to do so.” His eyes flashed with that same intensity she’d seen in him at the lab when he’d discovered her ability to build new neurons through continuous REM. “If somehow we can teach them to communicate with Darwin by first teaching the kids to consciously do what they now subconsciously do, then we may save our population and Icaria.”
They stared at each other in silence for several moments as Julie digested the implications of what he’d said. She matched his intense look. “You want me to stay in Icaria and teach them to do what I do.” She suddenly wondered if Aileen knew he was going to spring this on her.
He gave her a manic grin. “We think it’s the only way, Julie; and you’re the only one to do it. You’re the only one who can save Humanity.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. Leave it to Zane to remind her of the scope of her actions, and always with little or no regard for her personal feelings. He was such a scientist. She’d only gotten her family safe and together and Icaria wanted her to stay behind. She’d already calculated all the options and knew Daniel would refuse to stay in Icaria. “Who’s we?” she asked wearily.
“Why, everyone!” Zane exclaimed. “Except for the mayor who’s been out of the picture for a while. I mean the CDC, the DP and The Circle. Carl and Aileen are meeting with the mayor to give him the arguments, then he’s supposed to speak with you.” He glanced at the open doorway, where Carl had just entered and was talking quietly with Daniel. He and Daniel looked briefly at Julie and Zane then walked out of her range of vision. She got the distinct impression they were having a similar discussion to the one she was having with Zane. What was Daniel going to think about leaving her behind? And for how long? He wasn’t going to like it. She didn’t like it. He’d have a stroke over it.
She was only dimly aware that Zane was still talking to her and returned her attention to him. “.…tart with the kids. They’re already advanced. Only they don’t have the discipline.”
“How many are there? Kids who hear Darwin, I mean?”
“Carl estimates about a hundred veemeld kids who have Darwin. He assumes they all hear Proteus. It’s Proteus, by the way, not Darwin they hear,” he corrected Julie. “As Darwin, or Pro-1, Proteus is inarticulate. To my knowledge, no Darwin victim ever heard Proteus; but their offspring, who got a different form of Proteus—Pro-2—from their mom’s egg, could hear the insect noises.”
“What about Darwin—I mean Proteus kids who aren’t veemelds?” Julie insisted. “Surely you should be aiming your efforts their way, seeing that they make up a much larger part of the population than veemelds do.”
“Like I said before, it’s hit and miss. Carl found with those he tested that only twenty percent of non-veemeld Darwin kids could hear Proteus.”
“Does that mean that the other eighty percent are incapable of communicating with Proteus or that they just haven’t figured out how?”
Zane shrugged. “That’s the question, isn’t it? We can’t tell. That’s something we hope to find out, with your help. My feeling is it’s the latter.”
“Why?”
“Just a hunch.”
“I hope for the sake of Icaria that you’re right, Zane.”
“I do, too.”
Julie nodded and her eye caught Daniel leaving the outer office. “I’ll think about it,” she said hastily. “Right now I have a very important question to ask someone else,” she said. She gave Zane a brief hug, to which he squeaked in pain, then turned and pelted out of the room after Daniel.
She heard Zane calling after her, “You’ll do it, won’t you, Julie? For Icaria?”
When she caught up to Daniel, Julie tilted her head and gazed at him rather coyly. “Did you really mean what you said to me when I was in the trance?”
He looked mildly affronted that she even needed to ask the question. “Of course I did,” he said. He didn’t seem otherwise irritated with her or agitated. Perhaps he and Carl hadn’t been discussing her remaining behind, after all. Daniel hitched up an eyebrow and smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “So, will you?”
She grinned, showing all her teeth. “Yes, I will.” She recalled the words that had pulled her out of her dark coma: “You’re everything to me, Julie, my love. Marry me again.”
48
Angel didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, fidget or stay still. Her nervous joy had spilled out of her in beads of sweat and nervous giggling prior to the ceremony’s start, until Manfred teased her, “It’s just your parents. I’d hate to think what you’ll do when it’s your turn up there.” She’d blushed fiercely and had to turn away from his smirking face.
Now, sitting here next to Manfred, watching her parents legally affirm their vows, was taking her breath away. She sensed her mother’s joy surging through her like electricity and lighting her face with a beautiful, ethereal glow. Her father looked so proud and handsome.
Earlier, Daniel had managed to wink and give Angel a nervous smile as he waited for Julie to appear at the back of the room. When she did, arm hooked through Victor’s, his gaze drifted from Angel and glued to his spouse and he seemed to drift into a reverent dream. Angel turned and stared at her mother. She looked so beautiful! The cream-coloured gown she wore emphasized her athletically slim but shapely figure, firmly framed in a tight bodice that was tastefully revealing but not too low-cut, with scalloped short sleeves and a skirt that flowed out to the floor like diaphanous petals of a flower.
Her mother glowed with a happiness that Angel couldn’t remember seeing in he
r before, Julie’s open-mouthed smile beaming with enough wattage to light up all of Icaria as she met Daniel’s eyes with her own sparkling emeralds. She seemed to glide down the aisle using an energy source created all on her own.
Victor, on the other hand, Angel noted, shuffled nervously beside her mother, his face taut with serious concentration and intent not to make a wrong move. Angel was sure she detected a look of swelling pride in his tight face though.
As she passed Angel, Julie turned her head and gave her daughter a crooked smile. Angel swallowed with pride and joy and almost burst into tears. Too nervous to look anywhere else, Victor looked straight ahead. With a visible sigh, he relinquished Julie to Daniel at the altar and found a seat next to Angel and Manfred and Carl. Angel patted his shaking hand and gave him a big smile when he glanced down at her. His deed done, Victor could now relax and a great smile finally surfaced on his lined face. Angel liked him—he reminded her of Aard: tough on the outside and tender on the inside.
The Justice of the Peace, an older man with light blue hair slicked back and a long pointy hawk-nose but warm, kind eyes, had reached the vows: “Do you, Julie Crane, accept this man as your lawful husband?”
Eyes locked unblinking on Daniel’s, Julie said, “I do.”
“And do you, Daniel Woods, accept this woman as your lawful wife?”
“I do.”
“You may exchange rings,” the J.P. instructed them.
Angel saw her father’s hand shake as he tried to put the ring on her mother’s finger. Julie had to help him and she stifled a nervous giggle. They looked so sweet together, as if they were getting married for the first time, Angel thought. “With this ring I promise to love you, cherish you and support you throughout my life,” Daniel said in a serious voice.
Julie repeated his words in a soft voice, which barely veiled her swelling emotions, as she slipped the other ring on Daniel’s finger.
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