Nara

by M. L. Buchman

She squinted at the readout. She was an hour late for a meeting with Devra. She slid out from beneath the blanket and pulled the suit over her goose-bumped skin. Heat washed over her cheeks even thinking about facing Bryce, maybe she could sneak out without waking him. She finished sealing the front of the suit.

  “Now that’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen, you climbing out of my bed.”

  She spun about. He hadn’t moved. He’d been watching her the whole time without saying a word.

  “God, you’re gorgeous, Ri.”

  She pushed at her hair, knowing he was full of it. She wasn’t feminine, only minor curves had survived the combination of her genetic heritage, too many months of near starvation as a child, and her running. And she needed a shower badly.

  He rose slowly to his feet and came toward her. She couldn’t move even as he slowly pulled her against him. She lay her head against his shoulder. He wrapped his long arms around her and held her close with those big hands. She swayed back and forth with him as he slowly rocked side-to-side.

  This was what they needed to capture in the Icarus lab. Perfect harmony. Not a single word necessary.

  # # #

  Bryce woke from a falling dream when his head hit the floor. Hard. He opened his eyes to see Ri swimming before his smarting eyes. He reached a hand cautiously to check the back of his head as she stood at his feet covering her mouth while she laughed.

  “Are you okay?”

  He gave a tentative nod after finding no blood and only a small lump. “You might have woken me before you opened the door.”

  “I couldn’t resist. You looked so comfortable. What are you doing here in R1?”

  He smiled up at her as he lay across the middle of the threshold to her quarters. “Couldn’t wait for you to get all the way back out to R4.” He hoped she was of a similar frame of mind.

  In answer, she lay down atop him, her warm length causing a painful arousal that she rubbed shamelessly against. Their lips locked together and didn’t separate as they crawled into the room and he could hear the door shut beyond his feet. She ran kisses down his neck and he tilted his head back as she worked at the front of his shipsuit.

  His eyes focused on the wall behind him. It took a moment for the image to register. Earthrise.

  “Hey!”

  He’d catapulted Ri onto the floor without realizing. She squatted before him as he was stopped by the wall behind him.

  “Why did you d—? What’s wrong? You’re shaking.”

  He could hear the words, but they made no sense. There was nothing in him that could answer. The Earth rose blue and dangerous over her left shoulder. He was alive. It had all been a trick and the Old Bastard was back from the dead. More memories to dump into him. Strapped down. Unable to move as the Old Bastard’s genocidal attack against humanity’s weakness was poured into him blow by blow. Plans for Celia’s death. Plans for wiping out Bryce’s memories of himself separate from his parent.

  He clawed backward but there was nowhere to go. Ri looked into his eyes and then over her shoulder. She moved and blocked the image. It was as if she’d hauled a thousand kilos off his chest and he gasped out desperately for air.

  She placed a hand over his eyes and helped him to his feet. He squinted through her hand at the wall, but she’d doused the light. He banged his shoulder on the doorway and when the edge of the bed caught his shin, he collapsed into it.

  When he dared open his eyes again, the room was dimly lit by a bedside lamp. It was a plain bedroom with no decoration and no horrible image on the wall. A length of rusting steel with a vicious point was propped in the corner.

  “Was it real?” he asked weakly.

  “It’s just a picture.”

  “Why? Why do you have it?”

  She moved into the line of his vision and began to wipe his face with a cool cloth.

  “Why does it scare you so?”

  He pulled at her until she was kneeling on the bed at his side. An arm wrapped around her felt like safe harbor. Pulled her in until she was lying across his chest, now stroking his face with her delicate fingers.

  “Old memories. Bad ones. Besides, I asked first?”

  She ran a finger along the line of his chin. When it reached his lips, he raised up and clenched it between his teeth.

  “Why?” he mumbled around her finger as she tried to tickle his tongue.

  “It was a sign of hope. I would sit in my aerie on the long, clear winter nights of Nara. I had two views: the shining moon above, that man had once traveled to and populated, and the Zenbu taking the sacrificial on the streets below. I had to study the one to stay alive, but I yearned toward the other to preserve hope. During the day I had no such luxury. The horror of the streets was only too clear in broad daylight. So I kept that picture in my window.”

  Then her face twisted and the bright light of the woman within the body went out like a light switch. She struggled for the breath to continue.

  “I left the original page I tore out on the grave of Tancho Cadre.”

  Bryce pulled Ri down until her head was on his chest. He kissed the top of her head and rocked her. Her face, always so full of life, had gone dead as the memories swelled up in her. Her memories were perhaps as varied as his. Perhaps as bad, maybe even worse. She’d killed her mother unknowingly and her foster-mother with an awareness all too sharp.

  He didn’t know she was weeping until the tears began to soak through his shipsuit.

  # # #

  Ri glanced at the time and tried to ease out of the bed. His long arm snaked out and pulled her back beneath the covers. She felt herself melting into his embrace as he wrapped around her. The horrors of the nightmares seemed far away while deep in his arms.

  “I have to go.”

  “Uh-huh,” he agreed with her, but made no move to let go.

  She thought of the few clumsy and overeager men she’d slept with after being rescued by the Angel-lady. And the over-practiced skill of Jackson Turner. Bryce had been gentle and loving and…present. He always met her eyes. He just held her when that’s what she needed. And he even knew when that was. She snuggled back against him. She felt him reach around for a few moments and then wrestle something from his shipsuit before dropping it back to the floor.

  “Five creds for your thoughts.” He dangled the coin before her.

  “You seem to think I have pretty fancy thoughts.” She slid a hand between them and cupped him briefly. His sharp intake of breath was very satisfying.

  “Actually,” he gasped out. “It’s yours. Even the R2 Desert Pub doesn’t charge so much for a half-liter.”

  She reached out and touched the coin he held before her without taking it from his hands. He’d held onto it all this time. Twisting around, she faced him in the dim light of her bedroom. His beautiful, whiskey-dark eyes faced hers from only two noses away.

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Hey, I’m the one who’s paying for the thoughts here.” He waved his coin.

  She pulled it from his fingers and wrapped it in tight in her fist.

  “Here, I’ll show you.”

  # # #

  “I think we’ve found it.”

  Ri choked on her lemonade and managed to turn her head aside so that she spit it on the beach rather than herself and Kurt Bamker. He reached over and slapped her back a few times.

  The simulated sun sparkled on the drops as they soaked in. She wiped her hand on the beach blanket and propped the glass in the sand. Bamker had insisted that just the two of them meet in the Ocean biome. He’d been snoozing, stretched out in the afternoon heat when she’d finally left Bryce asleep.

  “It?” Ri managed to gasp out once she had mostly recovered her breath. A lump was still caught in her throat and she had to cough to clear it. “You mean the solution? Just like that, you found it?” />
  “Not just like that. You may not appreciate the factor that luck plays in such discoveries. We would still be floundering had you not uncovered the genome. The research they did. Utterly fantastic. Thousands of man-years of work were in that file. Tens of thousands.

  “The finest computers ever conceived worked for over two decades to crack the problem run by the finest minds. We now also have the advantage of far superior computing capabilities after forty more years of development. Do you realize that the most powerful computer ever built is this vessel? Donnie tapped into it with no one the wiser. That was a mighty tool in our search. But all that aside, I think we may have found it.” The big man smiled at her, his eyes hidden by sunglasses as he lay back on his beach blanket.

  “Feels nice to get out of the lab once in a while. I sometimes do my best thinking when I’m not crouched over a console. I was lying here watching the seagulls and a lone hawk squabbling over a dead fish just yesterday.” He pointed skyward.

  “I watched the whole flock of gulls come circling in from every end of the biome. They banded together and drove the hawk off. He finally had to drop his prize to gain height more quickly. Guess who got the fish.”

  Ri could only shake her head. What did this have to do with anything? But there was no way to hurry the man. She loosened the collar of her shipsuit to keep from roasting. Bamker was wearing swimming trunks, which was more than many wore on the beach. She was the most overdressed person in sight.

  “A lone blue heron had been following slowly behind. The fish hit in the shallow water and the heron scooped it up just as smooth as could be. The gulls all fell to squabbling as the heron flew off with no one the wiser. But that has nothing to do with my observation.”

  “Well, what the hell does?” She felt as if she were going to explode. Her voice was strident enough that a group playing beach volleyball a short distance off turned to look at her. Screw them.

  “The gulls. No one had to tell them to band together. They simply knew what each other needed. It looked like perfect telepathy, of which we still found no references in the data. I’m beginning to think they never analyzed a telepathic individual and therefore the data was never captured. Which makes one curious as to what other enhanceable capabilities exist in the yet hidden corners of the geno—”

  “Kurt,” Ri ground her teeth.

  “Where was I?” He had the decency to look a little chagrined. Even here it was unsafe to mention the genome. If anyone heard...

  “Fuckin’ seagulls.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, neither humanity nor the seagulls tested positive for telepathy according to any science in the databanks. So I asked myself what other response could cause them to act in such harmony when they feel threatened.”

  He left a pause that she was clearly supposed to fill in. She just shook her head.

  “Empathy response.”

  That didn’t help her at all.

  “They flew after that hawk like a single coordinated being, but their response was not intellectual. Nor instinctual. It was emotional. Feelings not thoughts were the key here. Think of humanity. The empathy response will send a father to die to protect the daughter. It will make the mother wake before the baby is even crying. It will make the lover gentle and considerate.”

  Ri hid her face with her hands at the thought of Bryce in the night. And again this morning.

  “I ran the alteration sequence I developed using Tenna and Veller’s data on Jenningson’s smart mice. Teamwork like you’ve never seen. They seem to be no smarter, but they were acting in unison by checking all of the maze’s paths at once. Five of them actually worked together to open the heavy door I rigged to hide the food.”

  “What good do smart mice do for us?” Ri tried to make sense of Bamker’s convoluted story, but felt stupid and little more.

  “There’s more. They each kept their own personalities. There was no detectable blurring with the pack. They aren’t five better mice or one better mouse with five bodies. They are five mice who can work together. Who appear to want to work together.”

  “Mice have personalities?”

  Bamker raised his bushy eyebrows above the rim of his sunglasses. “All living things do.”

  She wasn’t about to argue the point, that there was a level below which personalities didn’t seem to exist. Though she could still recall this one particular clown fish where the Angel-lady had taken her spear-fishing off Cat Island. She’d had to surface because the fish’s antics in protection of its anemone home made her laugh so hard she’d kept spitting out her regulator.

  He sat up and looked toward her, brushing sand from his elbows. “I have a dose ready for testing. I’m fairly sure it is the proper mix though I certainly wouldn’t try a human subject until I know much more.”

  “We don’t have much time for hesitation.”

  He pulled off his glasses and all humor left his expression.

  “Young lady, there are some risks you do not take. If it takes a month to do the testing, I will take a month. By your curves we will only lose another few hundred in that time. Regrettable, but better than wiping out the whole race at one blow.”

  “We,” Ri took a deep breath before continuing. “We appear to have jumped two months along the curve courtesy of Ag-boss Merkar. A hundred and fifty dead in minutes. Two more ag-bays lost. The unrest has increased drastically and the curve has steepened. Rather than more peace as an aftermath to the riot, we’ve lost twenty then thirty in the last two days. The pressure. Good, rational people are coming apart. The Nara Effect, based on those few data points, is just five months away.” She grabbed his wrist hard.

  “Now talk straight man. Can we actually do it?”

  Bamker set his sunglasses aside.

  “I had no idea. Perhaps I can compress the testing cycle.” He began to speak very quickly. “What we have is a virus that will induce three pairs of gene alterations that should increase the human empathic response. It heightens sensitivity in the non-dominant hemisphere of the cerebral cortex to the patterns of brainwaves, specifically brainwaves from outside the brain’s own patterns.

  “In other words, it should amplify others’ feelings, without drowning the person in their own feelings. Being more sensitive to others’ emotions will make us less likely to misunderstand one another, or know that there isn’t malice behind a misunderstanding.”

  “And you know how to get it into the cells all at once? You said that was hard.” Ri knew her grip was digging into Kurt’s wrist, but she couldn’t release it.

  “I’m rather pleased with that bit of work. We borrowed the transmission mechanism from a common cold rhinovirus. Once we tuned it up a bit, it hits every cell in an impressively brief period of time, gamete and grown cell alike. Then we hijacked a retrovirus that caused a lot of trouble at the turn of the last century, an nasty little bug called HIV, and used the mechanism to upregulate the RNA production for those particular genes.”

  Ri looked from Bamker’s self-satisfied expression out toward the ocean’s waves. She didn’t understand half of what he was saying, but he sounded confident. The heartbeat of Stellar One was still strong, but they had to hurry. There were barely ninety-five hundred of them left.

  # # #

  The old, familiar sweat made his shipsuit cling to his back. For two hours Jaron had cleared trail. Finally able, for the first time since Samnal’s death, to swing a machete. He’d opened up trails that even Robbie had missed. The biome felt cleaner and healthier now that he could tend to it properly. He couldn’t imagine why he’d not seen to it sooner.

  With a final slash, he broke into the central clearing. He was the first to arrive. He plunged his machete into the soil and stood, his legs rooted to the spot. The connection ran down his legs, through the soles of his boots and down into four meters of soil. He tried not to think of the difference from the true jungle. Along the Orin
oco he’d been able to imagine all the layers of dirt, rock, and finally magma that rested beneath his feet. He’d felt strong and supported by his connection to the Earth.

  Here on Stellar One it was four meters to the water pickups, six to the service tunnels and ten to deep space. A rustling branch announced the second arrival.

  # # #

  Robbie stopped at the edge of the clearing and stared at Jaron. He looked powerful. His shipsuit stripped down to his waist. The sheen of sweat made his skin glisten in the sun. And though he was not a heavily-built man, his muscles were nicely defined on his lean body.

  When he noticed her, she stepped forward. He welcomed her with open arms and a kiss that curled her toes. He stroked her cheek so gently when they separated that she had to turn away so that he wouldn’t see her tears.

  She spotted his machete planted in the soil and stabbed hers alongside it. Both planted firmly in the soil. Others started arriving in the clearing. Each member of the jungle team threw their machetes to quiver point first in the soil. Yet more kept coming. He’d clearly called in more than just the usual crew. Rajesh Menala, the command crew pilot came in through the trees as if he’d been chased. After surveying the clearing, he moved to the back edge.

  Robbie whispered from her position, “Are you sure about him?”

  “What animal is ever sure until the time of testing comes? He will stand as suits his breeding and upbringing. Besides, having one from the command crew may be worth the risk.” His statement was so final she didn’t dare question it.

  She wanted again to ask what he was planning, but didn’t want to risk having her request turned aside by her lover. Their trust was just beginning, though they’d worked together in the jungle for over half a year and several summers before. Robbie would offer him the faith he asked for. She would curb her impatience for him.

  His head jerked to the left as someone called his name. He strode into the bushes and she followed close behind, not recognizing the voice. Jaron was confronting the blond woman who ran the Ocean biome.

  “No, Yerke.” His tone had a harshness and strength Robbie had not known he possessed.