by John Barnes
“How could – what?”
He held up his hands. “Here’s the thought that occurred to me. The radio lag delay has shortened bringbacks from around three years to less than two. We’ve all been saying that if we knew how that was going to go, we’d have started out doing bringbacks on delays, even if people were in the same building. Because the delay doesn’t have to be radio lag; it was just that when we had to try to do Ms. Soon’s bringback on remote, we had to tolerate the delay, which otherwise we’d never have tried.
“But, here’s what intrigues me, Dr. Palemba, the delay could be artificial, we could just build it right there into the communication system, with the bringback and the coach right there in the same hospital. So we set you up with an interrupter; you talk as you, your prosnoetics switch out, your brain goes to its natural state, then your message is delivered. Your natural state brain replies, it comes back through a delay –”
“Do not,” I said, choking with more feeling than I had had in many years, “do not use the word ‘natural’ around me, all right?”
He did that little bow and forehead touch. “How thoughtless and rude of me. I am so sorry. But please think about it. It could enhance your life. Don’t let my rudeness and inconsideration cut you off from it.”
“Or cut us off from possibly being co-authors of the most brilliant research paper of the next decade?”
He grinned broadly; I didn’t know if I’d forgiven him but he thought I had. “Well, yeah. Well, hell yeah.”
“I’ll think about it. I don’t sleep much and I get ideas late at night. What’s the latest time I can call you?” I realized I probably had forgiven him, and right then, I knew I was going to do it.
WE PLUNGE IN, Layla and I, and the memory swarms back with all its feelings, all its details, how it felt to say what I said and hear what I heard. All those things that the prosecutors deduced from blood spatters and coagulation time, from fluid ballistics, from running approximating simulations, are now all mine in memory again.
I raged at my parents, cursed them, made sure they knew what this was about. I had planned the blows and cuts, knowing neither of them would have it in them to fight, so that they heard everything I had to say. Knowing how devoted Daddy was to Mama, when he came rushing in at her scream, I shattered him with a dozen planned blows, so that he was bleeding and helpless while I worked on her and explained that all that shit she called love was nothing of the sort, that I knew it was all for her, not for me, that she would not have made me a natch (the word they prohibited in the house) if she had loved me, that it was malice and not mistake. And I cut, and cut, till she died sobbing.
Daddy took longer, and I reminded him that what had happened to Mama was his fault, the whole time.
They knew the cuts and blows of it all from the crime scene analysis, but I never told anyone what I had said.
Or what I had felt: sheer, glowing hot joy.
I hadn’t sought a bringback of my own, though there were skilled practitioners who would gladly have done it, not because I didn’t want to interrupt my scientific work, as I’d told that slick mannequin Gbego, but because I’d feared that I might find remorse or sorrow or weeping over their bodies.
I don’t find a bit of that. The memory is pure white rage, and that delights me. Especially it makes me happy in this way: Daddy and Mama were so convinced that natural humans needed to be preserved. They talked about remembering the human heritage, and you could hear, inside that, that they wanted to live forever in the memories of natural humans.
Well, here they are. Fewer than a hundred natural humans left, and the memory of their destruction is a burning hot glowing pleasure that will warm me the rest of my days. A nubrid, now, a nubrid has such total plasticity, I might have worn the memory down into smooth forgiveness and acceptance. But a human? We’re not that plastic. We can hold a grudge forever.
All you ever wanted was for me to be human, Daddy, that’s what you said. I laugh and laugh. It’s no longer we, the bio Layla and the prosnoetic Layla are merged, I can feel it.
“Dr. Palemba?”
I sit up, startled. It’s Gbego. He looks worried – more than that, ill. I try to play casual, but I think even a nubrid with Gbego’s carefully honed people skills would not be able to be smooth or slick about this. I ask, “Is something the matter?”
“What we saw on the monitors...”
I shrug. “You saw me get those memories back.”
“We also saw...” His face works through those little squish-the-lips motions, over and over. Finally he says, “You enjoyed that.”
“I did.”
“In fact we’ve never seen such intense pleasure and focus in any brain. That woman who testified and shocked the world, seventy years ago... you’re still her. Or you’re her again.”
I ignore what he’s saying, because it’s simply irrelevant. I’ve got myself back; whatever I ever wanted from oh-so-beautiful and far-too-smooth Dr. Gbego no longer matters. So I just say, “You’d better do some prep, get recordings soon, and think about what lab tests you want to run. I think that you’re going to find you can declare me officially brought back. You’ll really want data from the next couple of days.”
He’s flailing around, still trying to absorb the meaning of what his instruments told him about my huge surges of pleasure and rage. Finally all he manages to squeak out is, “How will we ever publish this?”
THAT’S SUCH A stupid question. There are things he won’t say, things I won’t say, but plenty of things to publish. We’ll both advance our careers.
And of course there’s a real advance in knowledge all around. Dr. Gbego knows some technical things now that no one else had learned before, and me? I know what I really want to know.
At first Gbego will be bothered by the things he didn’t know he’d find out, the things he’d rather not have known. But soon he’ll see how to make this whole experience work for him. Perhaps later this week, at one of the unending parties where nubrids spend so much time, he will find his way to talking, or, really, bragging. People will find it so intriguing that he was working with that famous Dr. Layla Palemba that you saw in media. Layla, the natch who knows bringbacks better than anyone else, natch or nubrid, actually working her own bringback, isn’t that astonishing?
He will realize that the part of me that makes him sick and horrified need not intrude on what everyone wants to hear him say:
Yes, knowing Dr. Layla Palemba has been very inspiring.
Layla is a measure of the marvelous.
Yes, it’s been such an honor and a privilege to work with her. Not on her, oh, no, she’s tough and feisty and smart, I pity anyone so stupid he tries to work on her. With her, with her, with her.
What do I mean, a measure of the marvelous?
A measure of the marvel of plasticity that is the human brain, even the old natural human brain that, thank god, none of our parents would ever have stuck us with. A measure of the bigger marvel of neurology itself, that Ellauri and Jautta were able to understand the nubrid process a century ago. A measure of the even bigger marvel that in the last thirty years we’ve been able to do so much more to keep the surviving natches alive. A measure of the marvel of prosnoetics, to which she contributed, which saved them from being drooling, senseless lumps of flesh.
A measure of the biggest marvel of all, the continuing advance of science.
I imagine Gbego, my utterly smooth young-at-eighty nubrid neuro standing just a bit taller, shoulders stooped slightly, turning toward a perfectly beautiful young woman for her approval.
She beams at him, and then adds her little correction:
The science part is big, to be sure. But Dr. Layla Palemba is most of all a measure of the real biggest marvel of all: our modern global society that has so institutionalized generosity to the less fortunate and compassion for everyone that we are willing to spend so much expertise, time, research, and sheer treasure to rescue the very few surviving natches. She stands as a me
asure of the marvel that is us and our forgiveness and generosity.
Dr. Gbego will probably not even choke on a canapé when she says that. Probably he’ll take her aside and talk with her, tell her how deep her insights and compassion are. Perhaps they will have many meetings and deep conversations and some elegant sex in the days that follow.
And for the rest of the crowd, having satisfied themselves with the smooth little bit of interesting knowledge with which Dr. Gbego graced them, the rest of the evening will pass in a swirl of fine wine and perfect bodies in splendid clothing: smug smooth fake hateful nubrid bastards who have taken over the world, passing the time of which they have so much, letting time and life itself roll off them like neutrinos off matter, like bad memories off a plastic brain, like blood off a cleaver.
MOTA FELT IO’S arrival.
So did everyone else on the Segye-Agbaye; the networks picked her up and slotted her into their awareness like a new limb. She was reading in full dominant mode, a mental posture of command that brought everyone up short, but it resolved and her attention passed on to Mota and the other technicians quietly found something else to be interested in. Mota closed her eyes, and pulled herself away from the access panel she was working at.
[Apologies. I need you,] flashed into her communication line. Her mental sense of Io went tinged with regret, but not much of it. And it was overlaid with the quiet psych cue that got Mota by the scruff of her neck, made all her emotions cycle down, and made her limbs warm and heavy even in microgravity.
[Coming,] she signaled back. Not that it was necessary. Not that there was any question of whether or not she would.
She pushed off from the wall and headed down the corridor, the lights flowing over her skin as she passed. There was a familiar pattern to the output of each one; generations of modifications and repairs and replacements leaving each with its own strength and hue. And there was an atavistic comfort to moving through these halls, as though all the pieces of Mota’s being that troubled her on the colony below fit seamlessly into the ship.
Io’s presence was disruptive. When she wasn’t right there, Mota might be able to resent her for that.
Io was waiting at the shuttle bay, standing tall and expansive, her feet on the floor as though she needed them there. Mota caught herself on one of the room’s handholds and held herself there, her own body curled.
This close, the network bumped Io’s presence up in its priority for Mota; she could feel Io’s emotions like a second mental skin. Confidence and focus, curiosity and wariness directed at something off the ship, and that quiet, subtle tinge of chagrin. She could feel as well as Mota could that Mota would rather not be there.
She could also dismiss that out of hand. Work to be done.
“Apologies,” she said again, though her emotions conveyed just how much of a formality it was. “You’re needed. A foreign ship entered our system.”
Surprise shocked through Mota’s mind. [A ship?] she signaled back, letting her confusion flavor it. [Clarify?]
“Come with me,” Io said, and turned to the shuttle.
Mota followed. Shetried not to mind the tendril of annoyance wending from Io at getting a signal instead of a verbal reply.
THE SEGYE-AGBAYE HELD an orbit over the first point of landfall on Se, but after all this time the location was more symbolic than practical. Most of the major spaceports were on the other side of the planet, more closely hugging the equator, which meant that Io took their shuttle on a long angle down into the atmosphere toward a port with longer-range transports.
Se from above was nothing like the composite metal and regulated light of the Segye-Agbaye. It was a study in terraformed green and wispy white atmosphere, lit by a white sun, with the silvery lines of the colony spreading across its surface like a neural web. The quiet background murmur of the colony network became a warm ambient cloud, too many individuals to identify. Mota could swim in the sea of secondhand emotion, inclination, preoccupation until her own sense of self went fuzzy at the edges.
But being with Io changed that. She brought them down into one of the bays and stepped out and the colony parted for her; the port technicians quietly delegated someone to see to her, and the ambient noise quieted just as Mota herself had.
They boarded a fast, mid-range shuttle: nothing that would carry them outside of the dense inner system, but one that would convey them quickly. “Omo,” Io said. One of the farther-flung unmanned stations, then.
Io linked into the ship’s transmitters; she wanted Mota to do the same, so Mota did the same. It was easier, sometimes, to lean back and let her body connect with the network on an unconscious level; let herself be moved like a limb for the dominant force in the room.
The transmission kicked in, and brought with it another’s telepresence. Yan. Pilot. Working with the survey teams and contingency fleets.
There was a warmth to Io’s transmission out. [I’m bringing Mota. She’s the expert on ancient Earth.]
Which had always been a useless, hobbyist’s expertise. Mota sat up.
The cradle of humanity was far enough away to be irrelevant. Any knowledge about it was historical or speculative: even the evidence of its planets, writ into the wobble of its star, was information that had been issued in light long before anyone on Se was born.
[You found a ship?] she signaled, and the transmission went out to Yan.
“The ship entered the outer system and gave off a signal,” Io said, and the response from Yan came back.
[It is from Earth,] Yan sent. His words were tinged with certainty and wonder. [Will you be able to operate it?]
Mota sent a request back to the databanks on Se. Better to queue up any resources she might need now, while the transmission delay was still small.
[I want to see it,] Mota sent back. Then, [Maybe. I’ll do my best.]
Yan sent as much as he could back over the transmitters as they approached; Mota drank it in, moving through his recordings and the archived information the first colonists had brought with them. Earth must have had its own evolution after the Segye-Agbaye left; Mota could look back down an unbroken chain of history and see the Earth they had left behind, but the Earth of all those intervening years was shadowed to her. This ship, then, was a glimmer of light.
They docked on Omo and Io took the lead, guiding them through to the bay where Yan worked. Mota followed.
The room Yan occupied was large enough for one person to move comfortably in; not three. It was dominated by a central column, with a curved screen, which Yan was studying. He looked up and smiled to them as they entered.
Mota signaled greeting, and felt a flicker of concern pass through Yan. “She always prefers signal to vocal,” Io said.
Not always, Mota thought, and she could feel Yan catch that thought, and respond with a gentle amusement. Io seemed to notice that, and the focus of her attention fell on Mota. Then it passed back to Yan.
Mota was silent for a moment, watching the interplay of their emotions. The landscape between them changed like the clouds playing across Se’s atmosphere.
Then Yan turned to Mota. “There’s text. It displayed as soon as I opened the hatch.”
He waved his hand toward the screen, and Mota squeezed past him to look at it. She touched the screen – a brush at the corner, away from any of the symbols – and it changed. She touched it again; it changed again.
[Translation corpus?] Mota signaled. The interface was strange – tactile. [An old Earth tradition. A critical number of words in their natural contexts. If it’s a corpus, they didn’t expect whoever found this ship to speak their language.]
“A contact ship, then,” Io said. “Specifically.”
Mota hesitated, and felt Io sigh.
“Please,” Io said, with a gesture to the corpus, and Mota felt like she was waking up. Like the faculties of her mind which had gone quiescent at Io’s presence were, given her permission, rearing up again.
The network data on Earth sprang up in her
mind, almost tangible under her fingers. Not that language – not that one. Closer. The Segye-Agbaye had left Earth early into its projected interstellar phase; this ship was different in design from the Segye-Agbaye, and its language didn’t match exactly to any of the ones on record. How many generations separated them from their common ancestry? How long did it take for a language to evolve like this?
One of the programs flagged a pattern: some 68% similarity in the ship’s language to another language, with the differences seeming to follow common linguistic rules. Mota selected the match, ran the program, and the corpus sprang into semi-legibility.
“I have it,” she said, and part of her was surprised at that. Comfortable enough to be vocal, then. But now she could see the patterns of the foreign ship’s operation, and she could make the ship respond. She highlighted the updated translation program on the network for Yan and Io.
A linguist could refine it, but the screen was at least interpretable now: Mota could look at a word and the network would take it from her visual cortex, and it would interpret it and deliver that information to the language centers of her brain.
“This column is a container,” Mota said. She moved through the prompts, and the screen went transparent – enough to see a woman’s face, her mouth and nose covered by some apparatus, her eyes closed.
Io moved forward, and Yan melted back to give her room. “A person?”
“Stasis,” Mota said, and her hands fluttered. [Generation ships like the Segye-Agbaye were considered to be a second-best solution,] she signaled. [Governments wanted to preserve individuals from Earth who would sleep through the interstellar voyage and wake up at their destination. So the astronauts who left Earth would also be the ones who arrived at the new colony.] “If the ship is from Earth, then she is from Earth.”
She felt their surprise. Awe from Yan, and a kind of hunger from Io. The hunger made her want to stand aside, become small and unnoticed again.