Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “My people sleep at night.”

  “I hope to have a cure very soon,” answered the doctor.

  “But you are doing nothing,” I said.

  “My machine is doing it for me,” he said, as if that made sense, but of course it didn't.

  Eyoli began whimpering in her sleep, and I tried to comfort her.

  The doctor watched us bleakly, as if he had bad memories of his own.

  Finally the answer came back. The problem was, I didn't know if it made things better or worse. I read it through twice, to make sure I fully understood it, and then decided that I was going to have to wake Karenski for the second time in one night.

  “Jesus!” said Karenski as his eyes fell on me. “You look worse than the kid.”

  “You've seen her?” I asked, surprised.

  “I'm in charge of this outpost. It's my job to see and know everything that goes on here. But I have a feeling I'm not going to like the next few minutes.”

  “Sir?”

  “You're afraid of me, Doctor. I don't like that in my officers. Just tell me what you found.”

  “I got the report back from 214-Alpha, sir.”

  “And?”

  “Remember I said that there is always a reason for mutation, that races don't just change for no reason at all?”

  “Get on with it,” said Karenski. “I'm not a schoolboy.”

  “It's pretty complex, sir,” I said. “The computer suggested environmental reasons for all the mutations—the down that covers them, the sixth finger on each hand, everything.”

  “And the one causing all this trouble? Is there a way to get rid of it?”

  “There's always a way to alter genetic makeup,” I said. “But it's not that simple. Millennia ago when Gregor Mendel started crossing peas and studying the results, he decided all traits were controlled by simple dominants or recessives. But—”

  “Get to the point,” said Karenski impatiently.

  “The point is that most genetics aren't that simple. There are partial dominants, incomplete dominants, linked recessives, more things than the layman can imagine.”

  “I assume what you're leading up to is that this racial memory or whatever we're calling it is linked to something else.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Does this mean you can't eliminate it?”

  “I can eliminate it, sir,” I said. “I can eliminate it from Eyoli and Hutaral in less than a day.”

  “But?”

  “I don't know why they developed the memory, sir,” I said. “Maybe there were poisonous fruits, maybe there were areas of great danger, I don't know—but Nature decided that, in this case, it was the best way to pass along vital survival information. They've been here so long that information is probably no longer vital, but until now it hasn't proven to be a detriment. The thing is, sir, it's sex-linked. Only females have it, and it only arrives with sexual maturity.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “According to the computer at the military hospital, the particular genes that are responsible for this are linked to the reproductive system. If I remove the memories, it will so alter the genes that they will run a better than fifty-fifty chance of producing deformed babies.”

  “How deformed?” asked Karenski.

  “I can't be sure, but my best estimate is no eyes. I don't mean blind; I mean no eyes at all. And totally deformed arms and legs. The hands and feet would grow right out of the trunks of the bodies.”

  I thought I saw Karenski shudder. He said, “So if you get rid of the memories, they'll have sightless deformed babies, and if not, this girl and—what?—maybe half a dozen more will go crazy or kill themselves?”

  “More than that, sir,” I said.

  “I thought I heard reference to ‘the Seven.’”

  “Yes, sir—but those seven are not the mothers. They're the grandmothers. This is a relatively primitive society, on a relatively uninhabited world. They've had no need to practice birth control; the more farmers and hunter-gatherers they have, the better. I haven't questioned Hutaral specifically, but let's say each of those six surviving females had six offspring. That's thirty-six in Hutaral's generation. Let's say half of them are females, and they each have six offspring. Do you see what I'm getting at, sir? A few have already killed themselves or gone mad, but there could be forty or fifty or more girls who are approaching sexual maturity in the next half-dozen years.”

  “So a generation goes crazy and probably kills itself, or everyone starts producing deformities.”

  “In essence, sir.”

  Karenski paused for a long moment. “Hobson had it easy,” he said at last.

  “Sir?”

  “Hobson's Choice.”

  “I'm not aware of the reference, sir,” I said.

  “You will be.”

  He comes back and lays a hand on my shoulder. Strangely, I do not find it distasteful or intimidating.

  “Can you help my Eyoli?” I ask.

  He seems troubled. “It depends,” he says.

  “On what?”

  “On many things. I have to think about it tonight. Maybe tomorrow I will know what to do.”

  “Why can you not cure her now?”

  “It is too complicated to explain,” he says, and although it sounds like a lie, somehow I know he is not lying.

  “I can't do it, sir,” I said.

  “Exactly what can't you do?” asked Karenski. He watched me closely.

  “I can't condemn them to an existence of nightmares, and I can't condemn them to a future of deformed babies—yet if I act I will condemn them to the one, and if I fail to act I'll condemn them to the other.” The words came out slowly, painful as vomiting hot lead. I hated being here in front of him again, but I couldn't think what else to do. Couldn't think, couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. I knew I looked a mess—no forced spit-and-polish this time—but it no longer mattered.

  Karenski still studied me with that unnerving intensity. “You're a doctor, but you're also an officer. I expect my officers to use their initiative.”

  “How does initiative enter into it?” I asked. “I'm facing two unacceptable alternatives.”

  “Well, it's your problem,” said Karenski. “But if it were mine, I'd find a third alternative.”

  I stared at him uncomprehendingly. “A third alternative?”

  “Didn't Sherlock Holmes once say that when you eliminated the impossible, whatever was left had to be the truth? Well, when you eliminate the unacceptable, whatever's left must be a viable course of action.”

  “I have no idea what you're getting at, sir,” I said. “If you would just tell me—”

  “Then you'd be using my initiative, wouldn't you?” he said, scowling. He raised his hand slightly and flipped it sideways, a gesture of both dismissal and disdain. The gesture was what snapped me. I snarled, “It wasn't Hobson, sir. Your history is faulty.”

  “What?”

  “Thomas Hobson, early seventeenth-century Englishman. You said I'd be facing Hobson's Choice, but that term refers to having just one course of action, and it came from a stupid story about taking the horse nearest the livery stable door or no horse at all. But I have two choices, both bad. A better reference for you to use would have been King Solomon with the baby he ordered cut in half. Also a reference suited to my background, isn't it? Sir?”

  He leaned forward, “Are you accusing me of anti-Semitism, Dr. Rubin?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I certainly hope not. There is no such thing in the Space Navy—in which, incidentally, you don't seem very happy.”

  “Irrelevant, sir.”

  “Maybe not.” All at once both his anger and his intensity seemed to vanish. He leaned back in his chair and regarded me from under half-closed eyelids. “The subject is closed, Doctor. I'm going to be off reporting to Sector Headquarters for three days. I expect you to have your problem solved long before I get back.”

  “I'll try my best, sir,” I sai
d stiffly. What had just happened here?

  “Good. And once it's solved, Dr. Rubin, I don't expect to be bothered by you in this office ever again. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I genuinely hope so.”

  He saluted, and I had no choice but to salute back and then leave. I had the confused impression that Karenski, despite his dislike, had been trying to tell me something he couldn't say outright. What? Why? And what was I supposed to do now? Karenski didn't want me in his command, but he did want me to solve the problem of Hutaral and Eyoli. Then, halfway across the base to medical quarters, I saw it. And stopped dead in my tracks, flooded with hope and fear. My fingers shook as once more, this time without authorization, I keyed in the security codes to access the AI on 214-Alpha.

  “How much do you love Eyoli?” he asked me.

  “She is flesh of my flesh,” I answered. “I would die for her.

  “Would you live for her?”

  “I do not understand, Dr. Rubin,” I said.

  “It is difficult to explain,” he said. “I cannot cure her here. But I can cure her, and all the other young girls who descend from the Seven, elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere?” I repeated. “Do you mean the mountains, or the flat plains a day's march to the north?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean another world.”

  At first I thought he was jesting, but then I saw from his face that he wasn't.

  “Another world?” I said. “Why?”

  He ran his hand through his head fur, making it all stand up. His strange Terran eyes were red and bright.

  “It is very complicated, but if I cure the young women here, they will produce…very strange babies, many of which will die at birth.”

  “And that will not happen on another world?”

  “My computer—that is the machine I speak to—tells me that there are two worlds where that will not happen.”

  I cried, “I do not understand why two worlds will be good for us and all the others will be bad.”

  “It is not necessary that you understand now,” he said. “What I must know is if the descendants of the Seven would be willing to travel to another world, if that meant that the young women would no longer suffer with their memories.”

  Another world. No longer home. And against that, Eyoli's life. Slowly I said, “If we go, you will make the bad memories vanish?”

  “No,” he said. “All their memories will vanish, and will never return.”

  I could hardly look at him. No memories. My mother laughing bare-headed in the wind, my grandmother's loving arms around my mother, my great-grandmother waking at dawn just to see the Three Moons rise together. No memories.

  “Hutaral, there are no easy answers here,” said Dr. Rubin. “If you would rather stay, I will not force you to leave.”

  “I must confer with all the Ones. How could I alone say? It may be many days before we can reach an agreement.”

  He shook his head. “I am sorry, Hutaral, but I must have an answer within two days, or it will be too late.”

  “Are you saying that Eyoli will die in three days?” Terror filled me once again.

  “No,” he replied. “I am saying that you will not be able to leave after two days.”

  “But—why?”

  The answer was simple enough. If I didn't steal a cargo ship in two days’ time, Karenski would be back—and if I hadn't stolen it by then, he'd be sure I was never going to.

  I spent the rest of the night studying the star charts, mapping the wormholes, having the computer plot a course to Henderson's World that would keep us light-years from any system where our military was stationed.

  That had been my final question to the computer. Even if I took Eyoli and the others away, even if I gave them the drugs that would eradicate their racial memories, there was no way to alter the changes to their genes. They would still be programmed to produce defective babies—and by the same token, there was no sense taking a cross section of males with us, since they were guaranteed to produce such babies.

  So I set the AI on 214-Alpha to a truly monumental final task. There were offshoots of humanity on thousands of worlds. Most hadn't changed at all—but some had mutated even more than Hutaral's people had mutated. Was there any human offshoot anywhere in the galaxy with a genome that could negate the harm I would do to Eyoli's and the others’ ability to produce normal children?

  The AI had to tie into a batch of even more powerful computers—though in this case I think better-informed computers would be more accurate—before it could come up with my answer: the altered grandchildren of the Seven, when mated to the males on Henderson's World or 702-Delta, would produce normal children. The gene for the memories would not recur.

  But 702-Delta possessed a military base, and I couldn't land a stolen military cargo ship there. Not even one that Karenski had wanted me to steal, which was what I believed. He wanted to help the natives; he wanted me out of his command; he wanted to avoid any further political incidents with natives. But he wouldn't want to identify a stolen ship as his own, or his already-suspect staff officer as its thief. So 702-Delta was out of the question.

  Henderson's World, however, had started out as a farming colony. For all anyone knew, that's what it still was. With one exception it had had no contact with the rest of humanity for fourteen hundred years—but that one exception was a female sailor who had stowed away on a small ship that had put down to make repairs just over a century ago, and before she was returned to her planet she'd been thoroughly examined, and the findings were logged, coded, and forgotten. Those findings included the entire genome in the semen found in her from what had apparently been a very exciting shore leave.

  Many more human traits are carried on the X-chromosome than on the Y-chromosome. But not on Henderson's World.

  Logging off the terminal, I tried to still the tremor in my fingers. Three days ago I'd been looking forward to publishing a series of papers, possibly winning the Assein Prize, certainly bolstering the career my father had so badly wanted for me. Now my fondest hope was that I had talked a primitive alien female into letting me become an outlaw with a reward on my head.

  “We will trust you,” I said to Dr. Rubin.

  “I hope you will not regret it.”

  “If you can save our children, we will not regret it.”

  “Your husbands…your partners…will be cared for, as will the young males,” he said. “I have left instructions.”

  That I did not understand. “Why would the other Terrans obey someone who steals from them? What if they will not care for the males here?”

  “It is me they will be mad at, not the Ones,” he replied. “I know one of us did a terrible thing once, but most Terrans are very decent people who will help others whenever they can.”

  I did not believe it, so I made no answer. Then I thought further and realized that Dr. Rubin was sacrificing whatever he valued to help us. Maybe Terrans were not what we remembered.

  I hope so, or my arguments, which I voiced so passionately, will have condemned sixty-three of the Ones to a terrible existence on another world.

  We loaded the ship and took off without incident. That must have been more of Karenski's doing. Had anyone else tried to steal a cargo vessel from the outpost, they'd have been shot down before they hit the stratosphere. Hell, they'd have been stopped and taken into custody before they reached the ship.

  According to the navigational computer, it would take four days, traveling at light speeds and traversing seven carefully selected wormholes, to reach Henderson's World. I decided not to contact them until we were within their star system; I didn't want anyone else tracing my signal.

  I began treatment on Eyoli and the other girls while we were in transit. The drugs were painless, although most of the girls cried when I pierced their skins with a needle. I had to have Hutaral explain to the others that I was not a direct emotional descendant of the doctor whose actions had precipitated this, an
d that I was trying to cure the girls, not hurt them.

  And after what seemed an eternity, in which I was sure we would be shot out of the ether, we braked to sublight speeds. I could see Henderson's World, green and pastoral, flanked by a pair of moons, on the main viewscreen.

  “Is that it?” asked Hutaral, pointing to the image. “The place where our daughters and their daughters will live without the memories and the nightmares?”

  “That's it,” I said. “Henderson's World, where we will all spend the rest of our lives.”

  I gazed down at the planet, pristine and lush. If the deebees were right, it would indeed be a promised land, overflowing with milk and honey. Where we would all, every one of us, be strangers.

  My father would have understood.

  Hutaral said, “You have given everything up to help us.”

  “Nobody forced me to,” I got out over the tightening in my throat. “It was my own decision.”

  “But you are no longer a doctor,” she persisted.

  “No,” I agreed. “Once the supplies in my bag run out, I am no longer a doctor.”

  “What shall we call you then, if we cannot call you Doctor?”

  I looked again at the pastoral world below, not sure if I wanted to laugh, or cry, or tremble. Here I am, Lord.

  She repeated, “What should we call you?”

  “Moses,” I said.

  In a review of Ian McDonald's monumental novel River of Gods, the Washington Post called him “a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time.” Certainly, he has tapped into the Zeitgeist with his recent work, which charts the move from Western-centric science fiction to tales of emerging superpowers. The world of River of Gods has proven fodder for several subsequent stories, including the Hugo-nominated novella “The Little Goddess.” In the story that follows, McDonald takes us once again into his fascinating and utterly convincing world of mid-twenty-first-century India.