Ark

69

Holle put off going to see Wilson about Venus’s issues. She felt she needed time to think it through.

Instead, back in Seba, she went down to Deck Ten where she was due to meet Doc Wetherbee and Grace Gray for an update on the progress of Zane Glemp’s therapy. Wetherbee said Zane was participating in a dream circle there today, and Wetherbee wanted to observe.

Coming out of the airlock from the cupola Holle met Grace, and they crossed the deck heading for the downward stair. In the open area at the center of the deck Grace had to pull Holle back, to avoid the hard body of a kid who went plummeting down the length of the fireman’s pole.

“Whee!”

“Jeez,” Holle said, breathing hard. “Nearly got me that time.”

“Yes. They get faster every day. They dare each other to see how far they can fall without grabbing the pole.” They reached the ladders, and began their descent. “I persuaded Wilson to put a net across the hole in Deck Fourteen, to keep them from smashing into the hydroponics at least.”

“Little bastards go crazy.”

Grace, climbing down below Holle, grinned. “It’s hard to control them twenty-four seven, Holle. I mean, my Helen’s seven years old now.”

“I listen to them speak sometimes. Even their language is different from ours. They play complicated games of tag, and they must have fifty words for ‘gotcha.’”

“Yes. But no word for ‘sky’ or ‘sea’…”

They reached Deck Ten. More than a year after the fire the deck was still pretty much a ruin, with blackened walls and burned-out instrument racks. Even the flooring was a lash-up to replace the melted mesh panels. The whole of this hull had never really recovered, and had an air of shabbiness and age.

The dream circle was just getting started, and a toll collector was having the dreamers press their thumbs to a handheld pad to collect their payments. Wilson had installed a new currency of credits, collected electronically and stored in the ship’s memory; you were paid for your work, and in turn you had to pay for everything save for air and water. You even had to pay for sharing your own dreams on a burned-out deck. And a slice of every payment went straight to the common treasury, which Wilson controlled.

Among the dreamers was Zane, who looked shy, subdued. Holle wondered which alter was dominant today.

Grace was still talking about the children. “Kids just adapt to the place they’re brought up in, I guess. On Ark Three we used to deal with raft communities. Trading, you know. We encountered kids older than Helen who had spent their whole lives on the sea, who never saw dry land at all… They were happy, or could be. Wherever you’re born, you think is normal-all the world, all you ever need.”

“But they’re so different from us.”

“As we were different from our parents’ generation. They were bound to be. And I guess the next children, the colonists on Earth II, will be different again.”

“If we ever get there.”

“Sorry?”

“Oh, nothing. Hey, here’s Mike.”

Mike Wetherbee came clambering down from the upper decks. He looked harassed, as he always did; his hair graying, he looked to be aging quickly. He carried an emergency medical pack at his waist, and a small camera. He was here to film Zane’s participation in the dream circle. You never saw a camera nowadays save for such specific purposes.

As Wetherbee took his place beside Holle and Grace, the dreamers began to listen to Theo Morell, who spoke first. “I was trapped in this tunnel. Like being stuck behind an equipment rack, you know? I was all alone, everybody else was dead-no, they never existed in the first place. It was just me, I was shut in but I couldn’t breathe. Then somebody started banging on the outside of the hull, and I started shouting and I screamed, but my voice just echoed. Then I wriggled forward and I saw a kind of light…”

The rest listened, spellbound. The dozen dreamers were a mix of the Ark’s various factions, Candidates and gatecrashers and illegals. Holle noticed that one girl was making notes on a handheld, a record of what was said. Zane just rocked back and forth, and he jabbed at his bare arm with a plastic toy, a kid’s screwdriver. Holle thought it was ironic that Theo Morell should be the one to start the sharing. He remained king of HeadSpace, but since Wilson had restricted access to the booths by the simple means of imposing a hefty charge on their use, the cheaper dream circles were flourishing.

Mike Wetherbee murmured, “Classic Ark dream. Confinement, claustrophobia, a fear of what’s outside, but a longing for release.”

Grace whispered, “Sounded to me like a memory of his birth. Like he was struggling to pass through a giant vagina.”

Wetherbee grinned. “Oh, yeah, that too. The dreams are always about sex.”

“No kids today,” Holle murmured. Generally a few children took part in sessions like this. The transcripts showed how the kids recounted the visions that bubbled up inside their heads of Earth, fantasies of the planet for which they were evolved but which they could never see. Holle found them fascinating, but terrifically sad.

“No,” Wetherbee said, “but the kids like Zane. You’d think they’d fear him. They think he’s funny, or something, the different people that speak out of his mouth. He’s a novelty, in an environment that lacks novelties.”

Grace murmured, “What are his dreams like?”

“Depends which alter is speaking.” Wetherbee pointed. “I think that’s Zane 1, the youngest. See he’s playing at self-harm with that plastic screwdriver? I gave him that to deflect him from doing it for real. At least he can’t break the flesh. Zane I has anxiety dreams, very sexual. Zane 3’s are the most disturbing, elaborate fantasies about rivers and serpents and hunters, in which nothing is real but just melts away when you look at it.”

Grace shook her head. “Do you think you have all the alters mapped out now?”

Wetherbee looked pained. “After three years I hope so. I continue to believe he has dissociative identity disorder-more than one personality inside the one head. These alters are spun off at times of extreme stress or pain.

“ This one, Zane 1, was created when Zane was about seventeen, and was subject to sexual abuse by Harry Smith. Zane couldn’t stand the distress this caused him, the shame, the lying, the bullying response from his father. So he spun off Zane 1, who serves as a receptacle for all the pain. It’s a coping mechanism, you see.

“The next big crisis for Zane came when he was around twenty-four, as we prepared to go to warp at Jupiter. That crisis caused two splits, I believe. He was already guilty at being on the Ark because he was too ‘dirty’ to be able to contribute his genes to the pool. Zane 2 was a receptacle for all that shame and remorse. And now he felt he wasn’t coping with his duties at that key time-which, if you think about it, was the crux of his whole life. So he created another entity, called Jerry-an older man, calmer, away from all the adolescent crises. Jerry comes out, often at night when Zane sleeps, to handle Zane’s work assignments. Zane just sort of wakes up to find everything done and sorted out, and he has no memory of doing it, no physical trace of the events save maybe lost sleep. Jerry is the sanest of the alters, if you can use that word. Pain in the ass to deal with, actually. There may have been other splits, other alters created at earlier points of crisis-the launch from Earth, for instance. I’m not sure.

“All these alters took away an awful lot of Zane’s functioning. The alter that’s left is the one I call Zane 3. He’s an empty shell. He has no real memory of his life before Jupiter. It’s as if he just woke up after we went to warp, fully formed. And he doesn’t have any knowledge of the work he does aboard the ship; that’s all Jerry, you see. In some ways Zane 3 is the craziest. I think he genuinely doesn’t believe he’s on a ship at all.”

Grace asked, “So in all this, where is Zane?”

Wetherbee shrugged. “They’re all parts of him. I think Zane 3 serves as a kind of central point, but he’s not the leader.”

“It sounds fantastic.”

“I know. A lot of commentators believed DID was always iatrogenic-that is, a product of the diagnosis itself, a kind of fantasy concocted between doctor and patient, maybe unconsciously. I knew doctors who would have loved to have a DID case on their hands. You could write a book about it.”

“But not you,” Holle said.

“Hell, no. I’m not smart enough to have cooked this up, believe me.”

Grace asked, “So what’s the prognosis? What can you do about it?”

“There are ways to reintegrate the various personalities into a whole. But we’re talking more years of therapy. I think I’m going to hold off until after ’51, when we’re due to reach Earth II. That will be the last time we will need Zane the warp engineer. He is in fact functioning, in his strange, broken way. I don’t think I can risk endangering that. When I get my clinic up and running on Earth II-then maybe I’ll have time to fix Zane.”

Holle asked, “Of his alters, which one do you like the least?”

“Good question. That one,” Wetherbee said, pointing to Zane. “The alters are stuck at the age they were created. Zane 1 will be seventeen years old, forever. And he relives the abuse, the pain he absorbed, over and over. That’s his function, to take those memories away from Zane. But it means he’s trapped in an eternal present, like a recording stuck on replay. Zane 1 is in hell.”

They fell silent, and watched Zane sitting with the dreamers as he jabbed the toy screwdriver into his arm over and over. These were the crew who would have to face the dramatic, unexpected challenges of Earth II, Holle thought. How could they possibly cope?