New Earth

by Ben Bova

  “And the others that Adri spoke of.”

  Aditi smiled at him. “You have a fine sense of responsibility.”

  “Tell that to my little brother.”

  TRUST

  Jordan was awakened by a soft chiming musical tone. He struggled up to a sitting position. Aditi, curled beside him, opened her eyes.

  “Phone for you,” she said. “Dr. Thornberry.”

  “How do you—” Then Jordan remembered she had a communicator implanted in her brain. “Can we make it audio only?”

  She nodded, and Thornberry’s voice said out of nowhere, “Top o’ the morning to ya, Jordan. Do you want to have some breakfast before I march off to get me brain boosted?”

  “Certainly,” Jordan answered heartily. “We’ll see you in the dining hall in twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes. Right.”

  The bedroom fell silent.

  “Is he gone?” Jordan whispered.

  Aditi giggled. “Yes. All gone.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later Jordan entered the dining hall, wearing a fresh pair of light blue slacks and an open-collared white shirt. Aditi had sent him on alone; she would meet him after breakfast in Adri’s office. Thornberry was already there, sitting at a table with Elyse and Brandon.

  Breakfast was served buffet style, so Jordan picked what looked like an omelet and a cup of strong black coffee analog.

  Sitting opposite his brother, Jordan turned to Thornberry and said, “Ready for the experiment, Mitch?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” the roboticist answered, with an uneasy smile.

  Brandon looked up from his plate. “Jordy, about last night…”

  “I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes, Bran.”

  “Elyse told me I behaved like an ass.”

  “Not really.”

  “Really,” Elyse said.

  “Anyway, I apologize. That drink hit me pretty hard, I guess.”

  “No need for an apology,” Jordan said. “Brothers should be able to speak their minds to each other.” Yet he was thinking, In vino veritas.

  Thornberry’s head was swiveling back and forth like a spectator’s at a tennis match. But he kept his silence.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Brandon and Elyse started out for the observatory, while Jordan led Thornberry to Adri’s office, up on the top floor of the building.

  Aditi was there when they arrived.

  “Have you had breakfast?” Jordan asked her, by way of greeting.

  “I had some fruit here, with Adri,” she said.

  Adri said, “Aditi will run the stimulation; it is her area of expertise.”

  “Brain stimulation?” Thornberry asked, surprised.

  “Education,” said Aditi. “My field is education.”

  Jordan said, “And you educate people through direct brain stimulation.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Whenever possible.”

  Aditi led Jordan and Thornberry downstairs, leaving Adri in his office. They entered a small room that looked more like an office than a neurological laboratory. There was a desk in one corner, a pair of comfortable-looking upholstered chairs, and a padded couch along the far wall.

  “This is where the deed is done, is it?” Thornberry asked, looking around the room for equipment.

  Aditi nodded. “This is my office. And my schoolroom.”

  “Where’s the equipment?” Jordan asked.

  “In the walls, mostly,” she replied. “Behind the ceiling panels, too.”

  She seemed perfectly relaxed, at ease in her own surroundings. Thornberry looked a little edgy.

  “So what do I do?” he asked.

  Gesturing to the couch, Aditi said, “You lie down and relax while I set up the equipment.”

  As Jordan sat in one of the chairs, she went to her desk and pulled a lower drawer open. Thornberry stretched out on the couch, while Aditi took out what looked to Jordan like old-fashioned wireless earphones.

  “What’s that?” Thornberry asked.

  “The transceivers,” Aditi replied easily. Walking to the couch, she explained, “The first thing we must do is map your brain’s neural activity.”

  She handed the earphones to Thornberry, who fumbled with them, trying to slip them on.

  Aditi explained, “No, no, not in your ears. Press the pads against your temples.”

  Jordan saw the uneasy expression on Thornberry’s face. He felt a little nervous himself. But the headphones stuck to Thornberry’s temples with no trouble.

  Aditi seemed perfectly at home. She went back to her desk chair and played her fingers across the empty desktop. Jordan saw it was a digital display screen, showing an image of a keyboard.

  The wall above the desk began to glow and the image of a human brain took form, false-colored pale pink, deep lavender, and pearl gray against the screen’s bright blue background. Jordan could see sparkles of light flickering across the brain. Nerve impulses, he thought.

  “Is that me?” Thornberry asked.

  “That’s your brain,” Aditi said, without taking her eyes off the screen. “Impressive,” she murmured.

  “What happens now?”

  “Once the mapping is finished, you go to sleep,” Aditi said, still with her back to Thornberry.

  “Um … I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  Jordan stifled a laugh.

  Aditi said, “I’m sorry. I should have thought of that.” She tapped at her desktop and the wall screen went dark.

  Once Thornberry pulled off the headphones and hurried out of the office, Jordan said to Aditi, “I had no idea you were so … competent.”

  “I told you I was a teacher,” she said.

  “Yes, but you didn’t tell me how you teach.”

  “Once Dr. Thornberry returns, I’ll sedate him neurally and the downloading can begin. He’ll be asleep and there won’t be anything for you to do. You could leave and return in three hours.”

  Jordan thought it over for all of a second. “I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind. I ought to witness the entire procedure, boring though it may be.”

  She arched a brow at him. “You want to make certain I don’t do anything terrible to him.”

  Jordan shook his head slightly. “My dear, I’m sure you could do whatever you want to him while I’m watching you do it and I wouldn’t know that anything nefarious was going on.”

  Her expression grew serious. “I’m not going to hurt him, Jordan.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I should stay through the whole procedure.” Then he smiled and added, “Besides, it’ll give me the chance to stay with you.”

  She blushed slightly, but before she could reply Thornberry reentered the room. “Well, that’s a load off me mind,” he said. “So to speak.”

  They all laughed.

  * * *

  Aditi was wrong. It was anything but boring.

  Mapping Thornberry’s brain took less than half an hour. Once she was satisfied with it, Aditi said to Thornberry, “You’re going to go to sleep now.”

  “Wish me pleasant dreams, why don’t you?”

  “Pleasant dreams, Dr. Thornberry,” Aditi said. Turning back to her keyboard, she murmured, “Now we deactivate the parietal cortex.”

  She tapped a key on the desktop and Thornberry’s eyes fluttered and closed. In a moment he seemed deeply asleep, his chest rising regularly, his arms relaxed at his side.

  Watching the brain image on the wall screen intently, Aditi touched another key. Jordan turned his attention from her toward Thornberry. He could see the man’s eyeballs moving rapidly behind their closed lids. REM sleep, Jordan realized.

  Deeply asleep, Thornberry stirred slightly, clenched his fists and then opened them again. He muttered something incomprehensible.

  “Is this normal?” Jordan whispered.

  Aditi nodded, her eyes focused on the image of Thornberry’s brain. It was flickering madly now, nerve impulses racing back and forth. Thor
nberry groaned softly and his arms tensed, his legs shifted, as if he were straining to get up.

  Aditi touched another key and Thornberry relaxed, his arms and legs going limp, his breathing deep and slow and regular.

  For a while nothing seemed to happen. But Jordan could see that three small sections of Thornberry’s brain seemed to be glowing with activity. He wished he knew enough about brain physiology to tell what those sections were, what their functions might be. He thought a bright pink region near the base of Thornberry’s brain might be the thalamus, but he wasn’t sure. He recognized the frontal cortex, which seemed ablaze with neural activity.

  When he looked back at Thornberry, Jordan saw that the man’s beefy face was swathed with perspiration. His body was arched with tension and his eyes were still moving back and forth behind their closed lids.

  Jordan whispered again to Aditi, “Should I wipe his brow?”

  “Don’t touch him!” she hissed, without taking her eyes off the wall screen. “This is the most critical period of the download.”

  Biting his lip in apprehension, Jordan stared at Thornberry’s struggling figure. He looks like he’s fighting demons, Jordan thought. Like a soul being exorcised.

  And then Thornberry relaxed again, totally, as limp as a flag on an utterly still day. His eye movements slowed, although they did not cease altogether. A crooked smile spread across his sweat-soaked face.

  Aditi turned in her desk chair toward Jordan. “It will be easier from here on. Everything’s fine now.”

  “What happened?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

  She drew in a breath, then explained, “It’s quite natural for us to resist new ideas, especially if they conflict with what we already believe. Dr. Thornberry’s brain was suddenly invaded by a massive dose of new concepts, and he instinctively resisted. Perfectly natural.”

  “And you overcame his resistance? You forced him to accept—”

  “No, not at all,” Aditi said. “The program merely repeated the new information until it became recognizable to his brain. It’s the same process as ordinary classroom learning: it takes time to adapt to new knowledge and to accept it.”

  Jordan marveled, “But you can do it in minutes, instead of a whole semester.”

  With a glance at her wristwatch, Aditi said, “It took more than an hour, Jordan.”

  He looked at his watch and saw that she was right.

  “Still…” he said.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Aditi. “In another ninety minutes, two hours at most, he’ll have absorbed everything the program has to tell him.”

  Jordan couldn’t help wondering what else Thornberry’s brain was being forced to absorb.

  LEARNING

  As Thornberry slept on peacefully, Jordan gave voice to his nagging doubts.

  “Aditi, dear, I’ve got to ask you—”

  “If the physics program is all that I’m downloading into Dr. Thornberry’s brain?”

  “Yes,” Jordan admitted, feeling awful about it.

  She turned her desk chair to face him. “That’s all. It’s quite enough. I had to map his brain first to see if he could accept such a massive amount of information.”

  “I want to believe you, I really do.”

  “I know you do, Jordan. And I know how difficult all this must be for you.”

  “It’s all so new. It takes time to adapt to new information.”

  Her smile turned impish. “What did I tell you? You’re going through the same process of adaptation that Dr. Thornberry’s experiencing.”

  “Except that he’s doing it in a few hours, while I’m taking much longer.”

  Wheeling her chair closer to him, Aditi said, “You’re not suggesting that I use brain stimulation to indoctrinate you, are you?”

  “No! Not at all.”

  “That would be an ethical violation,” Aditi said. “We use brain stimulation to educate people, not to manipulate them.”

  “Even if I asked you to? Even if I volunteered?”

  “It’s not allowed,” she replied. “We have our code of behavior. We’re not monsters, no matter what Dr. Meek thinks.”

  Jordan gazed at her utterly earnest face. “Your ethical standards are somewhat higher than ours. On Earth, the temptation to use direct brain stimulation to control people would be unbearable—for some.”

  “But not for you.”

  “Nor for you.”

  Her stern expression eased. “You trust us, Jordan. That’s wonderful.”

  “I trust you, Aditi.”

  “That’s even more wonderful.”

  “I love you.”

  She broke into a sunny smile. “That’s the most wonderful thing of all.”

  But suddenly Jordan felt uneasy. “My brother suggested that when the rest of us leave for home, I should stay here.”

  Aditi’s eyes widened. “Stay? Would you? Would you stay here with me? That would be fantastic!”

  “I want to,” he said. Then he heard himself add, “But…”

  “But,” she said.

  “All that Adri’s told me. All that the Predecessor told me. The human race is in danger. Other races, on other worlds.”

  “It’s a great responsibility for you,” she said softly.

  “I can’t turn my back on it. On them.”

  “I know.”

  “You could come with me,” he blurted.

  “To Earth?”

  “Yes.” Jordan’s mind raced. “In fact, it would be an enormous help. You could be an ambassador, a representative of your people. One look at you and they’d see that we have nothing to fear from you.”

  Aditi gave him a skeptical look. “Just as Dr. Meek sees he has nothing to fear?”

  Jordan’s heart sank. “Yes. You’re right. There would be people on Earth who’d be frightened of you, no matter what.”

  For a few heartbeats neither of them spoke. Thornberry snored softly on the couch, completely relaxed.

  Then Aditi said, “I’d go to Earth with you, Jordan.”

  He shook his head. “There’d be danger there for you. Fanatics, madmen. What they fear they try to destroy.”

  “You’d protect me.”

  “No. It’d be too dangerous for you. You’d be much better off staying here.”

  “While you went back to Earth?”

  “I’d return for you.” Then, realizing it took eighty years, he added uncertainly, “Someday.”

  Aditi reached out and took both Jordan’s hands in hers. “No. I’ll go to Earth with you.”

  “But—”

  “I love you, Jordan. I’m not going to be parted from you. Not for anything.”

  He leaned toward her and kissed her.

  “A fine thing,” Thornberry called from the couch.

  Jordan flinched reflexively away from Aditi. She looked surprised, scooted her chair back toward her desk, and peered at the image of Thornberry’s brain on the wall screen.

  “You two smooching away while I’m tryin’ to sleep.” Thornberry was half sitting up, grinning at them, the headphones dangling lopsidedly.

  “Don’t remove the transceivers just yet, please,” Aditi called to Thornberry. While he pushed the headphones back into place, she tapped on her desktop keyboard, then spun her chair around to face Thornberry. “Very good. The program is finished. You can get up now.”

  Thornberry yanked the headphones off and swung his legs off the edge of the couch. “Well now, do I look any smarter to you?”

  Jordan thought he looked totally normal, except that his wrinkled shirt was stained with perspiration.

  “You look fine, Mitch,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  Thornberry hesitated a moment. “Pretty normal. Me shirt’s a bit sticky, though.” Then his beefy face broke into a broad smile. “B’god, I see! I see it all! By all the saints in heaven, I understand how it works!”

  Aditi asked, “What can you tell me about the energy screen generators?”

  “Why, they t
ap the multidimensional branes that envelop space-time and focus them to produce a warping field that absorbs incoming energy.”

  Jordan felt impressed. Aditi pulled a digital notepad and stylus from her desk drawer and handed them to Thornberry.

  “The basic equations, please,” she said.

  Grinning, Thornberry scribbled away on the notepad’s screen, his tongue peeking out from between his teeth.

  “There,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Aditi said, “I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. But your equations have been sent to the chief of our physics department…”

  “And?” Jordan prompted.

  Aditi’s smile told him everything. “He confirms that your equations are correct. The downloading worked fine.”

  “I’m a bloody physicist!” Thornberry crowed. “And I can build a field generator from scratch, b’god.”

  “It worked,” Jordan breathed.

  Aditi nodded happily. “It certainly did.”

  Thornberry got to his feet and pranced across the room. “I want to call Hazzard. I want to impress him with me new knowledge. We can build an energy shield for the ship, b’god.”

  “Well, I’m certainly impressed,” said Jordan.

  VERIFY

  Hazzard was impressed, too. On the wall screen above Aditi’s desk, his dark face was split by a bright grin as Thornberry spouted enthusiasm about building an energy shield to protect the ship from harmful levels of radiation.

  Glancing at his wristwatch again, Jordan said to Aditi, “I should get over to the observatory and see how Dr. Rudaki is doing with your astronomers.”

  She nodded. “I understand. I’ll stay here with Dr. Thornberry.”

  Jordan looked at Thornberry, chattering happily with Hazzard. The astronaut seemed halfway between delighted and bewildered at the roboticist’s fervor.

  “He won’t miss you,” Aditi said.

  Jordan agreed with a nod. He kissed Aditi lightly on the lips and headed for the door.

  “Dinner tonight?” he asked her.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Jordan whistled happily as he strode briskly through the city’s bustling streets toward the observatory. It works, he thought. The brain stimulation works and there aren’t any bad side effects. None that I could see, at least. Mitch seems as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning.