Terran Tomorrow

CHAPTER 19

Zack watched Toni. It was unsettling to not know what he was seeing. He was unwilling to admit that he had become a little afraid of her.

He saw his old friend and colleague, looking physically unchanged. Toni wore the same tee and many-pocketed pants she had always favored, although now they hung on her; during the v-coma she had lost weight. Her gray-streaked brown hair was pinned back in its usual careless bun. She bent over the lab bench with the same round-shouldered stoop.

He saw her unchanged concern and love for Nicole, whom Toni visited three or four times a day, each time striding from the lab to the v-coma ward to stand wordlessly at the end of Nicole’s pallet. Toni never stayed more than a few minutes. Once, she whispered something in Nicole’s ear. The comatose body on the bed didn’t stir.

He saw Toni’s intense concentration as she worked, as she had always worked. The researchers in the next lab, Drs. Sullivan and Vargas, worked on the samples taken from Toni’s and Belok^’s bodies. Toni worked on the avian gene drive. To carry out her experiments, she’d commandeered as many lab techs as she could. The problem was that she couldn’t work with them. Zack saw her frustration that not even he could follow what she was doing.

Toni would bark out a sentence—sometimes just the fragment of a sentence—about her work. The problem, Zack eventually figured out, was that she was giving a report that left out several things: the intermediate steps to get to her process, the results of those steps, the scientific hypotheses that had led her to those processes in the first place. It was as if she expected Zack and the assistants to grasp those from what she’d said. And none of them could.

“Go back, Toni,” he said, so often that he grew even more impatient than he was afraid. “Start at the beginning of what you did, and why.” And she would look at him as if he were a not-very-bright fifth-grader instead of her department head. Explain? her look said. Why would I need to explain to you how to add sixteen and seventeen: add the six and seven to get thirteen, put down the three and carry the one…

Then she would try to explain, and that was even worse. She was apparently holding several different strands of thought at once—that’s what she called them, “strands”—as graphics in her mind, enormously complicated and detailed graphics. That let her see connections among them that she was pursuing both mathematically and experimentally, each step of which changed a graphic in ways that in turn changed all the others. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, draw it for him: “Too complicated.” And he could follow only a small part of it.

It made him humble.

It made him resentful.

Humbly and resentfully, he worked the intricate process of modifying DNA. The genes they modified would be injected into sparrows in the subterranean bird lab; the gene drive would incorporate itself into the sparrows’ reproductive machinery. The birds, artificially brought into mating readiness, would copulate and lay eggs. If Toni succeeded, embryos inside the eggs would carry a gene drive that would render all male offspring sterile.

If.

“Denatured random coil one sixty-four, with molecule fifteen,” Toni said, and Zack was supposed to know what she wanted him to do about the engineered folding of a protein he had never known existed.

Then all of it—proteins, genes, eggs—fled from his mind. An Army nurse entered the lab, protected by his scrubs from Toni’s scowl. “Dr. McKay,” he said, “your daughter is waking up.”

Caity had climbed off her bed and onto Susan’s, trailing her IV. When Zack dashed into the cubicle, she looked up at him fearfully. “Daddy! Mommy won’t wake up!”

He lifted Caity in his arms. “Yes, she will, honey. She needs to sleep now. Come on, let Mommy get her rest. Nurse, can this line come out of her arm? Can she… oh, Caity!”

The nurse detached Caity. Zack carried his daughter—where? There was no place to take her in this crowded makeshift coma ward, where now even the corridor held sleeping figures on gurneys. Zack clutched Caitlin as if she, not he, were a life raft. Her little body felt hot in his arms; she smelled of soap and a wet diaper, although she was far too old for diapers. He ducked with her into a supply closet, its shelves ominously bare.

The nurse followed, alarmed. “Dr. McKay, we need to… she must be examined! I’ve sent for Dr. Patel!”

“A minute… just give me a minute!”

“Daddy, I feel funny.”

Alarm shot through him. “Funny how? Nurse! Come back!”

Caitlin vomited all over him.

Toni and Belok^ hadn’t done that when they woke—had they? “Nurse!”

Then Claire was there, taking Caitlin from him, laying her on a clean bed somewhere—how had they gotten to this cubicle? Zack, paralyzed with fear, didn’t remember. But Claire was saying, “It’s all right, Caitlin, your tummy just hurt for a minute…. Zack, there was almost nothing in her anyway, I’m not finding anything abnormal…”

Caitlin lay quiet on the bed, gazing solemnly at the three adults clustered around her, at the small crowd visible in the corridor beyond. This was an event: a third v-coma victim had revived, the first child to do so.

Claire said gently, “How do you feel now, Caitlin?”

“Good.”

That same unblinking gaze, Caity’s eyes traveling from Claire to Zack to the nurse, from the nurse to Zack to Claire. The stillness of her small body, as if everything in her was concentrated in her eyes, or what was going on behind her eyes. The adults all holding their breaths, waiting… for what?

The suspended moment spun itself out longer than Zack could stand. “Caity, sweetheart…”

“I’m good, Daddy,” she said in her high child’s voice. “I’m not sick.

“I’m just thinking.”

Jason had never had to do this before. Had never expected to do it. There was no protocol. There were only eight soldiers and a doctor on a charred stretch of land beside an alien dome, in a gray dawn.

The day before, after sex with Lindy, whatever drug she’d given him had let him sleep nine hours straight. He’d woken to a message from the signal station, addressed to, and delivered to him by, Major Duncan. The convoy, five days from Monterey Base, had been attacked by New America. There had been a firefight, and New America had won.

Duncan, her lips drawn in such a tight line that words barely fit through them, said, “General Strople says he will send another convoy, more heavily fortified, but he can’t do so until next month. He says to keep you and DeFord in stockade and to turn all available resources to the repair of the Return. He wants that ship, sir, and he wants it bad.”

“Yes.” Bad enough to cause the deaths of a convoy of his troops. New America did not take prisoners, not unless the prisoner was someone who, like Sugiyama, they thought could be of use to them. Had the convoy been underfortified? Or did New America have more scavenged weapons, more powerful weapons, that Jason didn’t know about? He knew for sure only one thing: the annihilation of the convoy had bought Jason more time. Time paid for by the deaths of yet more men and women, because of him.

And now he was going to cause another death.

They stood on the east side of Lab Dome, just beyond the armory airlock. Gray clouds seemed to hang directly overhead and a light drizzle fell on the burned-out woods. Jason was the only one in an esuit. If he had permitted himself, he would have felt at a disadvantage, a commander more vulnerable than his troops. He did not permit himself to feel that, or anything.

“Lieutenant, conduct the prisoner to the… the pole.”

Dolin staggered a little as he was walked to the shoulder-high stake driven firmly into the ground twenty feet away. The pole was the trunk of a dead sapling, dragged from beyond the woods and stripped of its branches and leaves. The exposed wood where branches had been torn away looked pale against the remaining bark.

Dolin lurched again, and his escort clasped him more firmly. Jason had instructed Holbrook to give Dolin some sort of drug to dull anxiety and pain. Maybe it was keeping Dolin quiet as well, although Jason had not asked for that.

He had the results of Hillson’s investigation. He had conducted a hearing as well—not a formal court-martial but more than Dolin was entitled to under the rules of war. He had Dolin’s confession, offered not only freely but sneeringly, with all the vitriol of a man who knew he had nothing more to lose: “I shot the fucker defending Kandiss, and I tried to shoot Kandiss too. Them cunts brought the sickness to the base and if you wasn’t an alien-loving traitor who don’t deserve to command a latrine, you’d of shot them all out of the sky before they even landed on Earth. Fucking lily-livered coward!”

The lieutenant tied a blindfold around Dolin’s eyes, then walked away.

Jason said, “Raise weapons.”

He didn’t know any other way to do this. The United States Army was at war, by a valid vote of Congress even if Congress no longer existed. He was commander. He would not order a backroom lethal injection, or anything else that could give rise to rumors of torture. The five men with raised rifles were all volunteers, but all carefully vetted. None, as far as Hillson could tell, were likely to lie about what they were doing, or to turn and shoot the base commander. None of the five was Kandiss.

Dolin sagged slightly forward in his bonds, straightened, sagged again. Maybe he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Jason had not specified how high a dosage Holbrook should administer.

This man had willfully murdered a fellow soldier, while trying to murder another.

The United States was at war.

“Fire,” Jason said.

Five weapons laid down fire. If any of the guns were aimed to miss, Jason didn’t need to know about it. Dolin’s body jerked, jerked again, blossomed into red. The guns fell silent.

“Lower weapons,” Jason said.

Holbrook declared Dolin dead. The body was cut down. The burial detail moved into action, covered by the others.

Jason and Holbrook returned to the airlock. Just before he went inside, he heard a flock of sparrows somewhere begin their morning song.

Zack sat in the conference room of Lab Dome, beside Colonel Jenner—an unwelcome juxtaposition he had not planned. The room, as always, held more people than it should. Someone had moved out the table (putting it where?) and brought in more chairs. These were packed in so close that Zack could smell the mustiness in Jenner’s uniform. He tried to edge away, but it was impossible.

Did all these people really need to be here? Maybe not, but everyone wanted to hear the first results of the team analyzing the awakened v-comas, and apparently Jenner had okayed this as an open meeting instead of a military briefing. So in addition to every scientist on the base and some of the techs, the room contained all three physicians, as much of the nursing staff as could be spared, Ka^graa—although no one to translate for him—more officers and, standing against a side wall, two privates who had recently awakened from comas. Zack, like everyone else, took furtive little peeks at the man and woman, whose faces showed no hint of whatever they were thinking.

The only significant people missing were the other three who’d awakened from comas. Caitlin was a child; Belok^ was a functional child; Toni had refused to leave her work on the gene drive. “His Highness can do without me.”

Major Denise Sullivan made the presentation. Her broad, kind face looked pinched with exhaustion, but she stood straight and spoke without either notes or polite preliminaries. Everyone here was well beyond preliminaries.

“Analysis of cerebral-spinal tissue from those who awakened from v-comas”—she nodded at the two privates—“hasn’t, so far, turned up much more than we knew from samples taken when they were asleep. There are proteins we haven’t seen before, as well as different and new folds in proteins commonly found in the brain. Proportions of various proteins are different. Specifically—”

She went into details. The presentation was pitched badly: too simple for Zack and the other scientists, who already knew all of this, too technical for the military. Without turning his head—he didn’t want to be rude—Zack watched the two soldiers standing against the side wall. They were the most interesting people in the room. What was going on in those altered brains? Their faces gave nothing away.

“So in summary,” Denise finished, “at the cellular level, we cannot yet explain much. What we do know is that only people with what we’re calling ‘the coma allele’ go comatose. In the coma, profound changes occur in the brain that may indicate both increased neural connections and altered neural connections, and that the result, according to IQ tests administered to all awakened subjects, seem to show a leap forward in intelligence.

“If the increased brain activity resulted only from increased density, length, or thickness of neurons, there would probably be a problem with overheating of brain tissue, since the brain would then use more energy and so generate more heat. Human cortical gray-matter neurons already had axons that were pretty close to the physical limits. Therefore, the most likely situation is that the greater proportion of the changes in brain functioning are due to revised connections and functioning among the neurons that were already there.”

Suddenly she threw her hands into the air and let them fall. “But we have no idea how. It may be that different receptors that affect how the brain works are being inhibited or activated, just as the dCA1 receptor is activated in memory formation. Or it may be that the v-coma patients are undergoing acquired savant syndrome. This all needs much more work, and that work requires, in part, equipment we don’t have.”

Major Duncan said sharply, “What is acquired savant syndrome?”

“Sometimes trauma to the left side of the brain—always the left side—results in people acquiring savantlike abilities they didn’t have before: to do mathematical calculations in their head, remember long strings of numbers, that sort of thing. The theory is that the ability was always there, latent, and the trauma destroys whatever mechanisms were inhibiting it. But savants often have trouble with social relations, too, and as far as we can tell, the v-coma subjects do not.”

Caitlin, cuddling in Zack’s arms, asking for a story, giving him a flurry of kisses. No, she had no trouble with social relations.

Duncan was not done with her questions. “Why did privates Ramstetter and Veatch, who fell into comas later than some other victims, revive earlier?”

“We don’t know.”

“Does that mean their brains underwent less rewiring than did others because they were comatose a shorter time?”

“We don’t know.” Denise hesitated; Zack knew what she was not saying. The gain in IQ was less for the two soldiers than for Caitlin, Belok^, and Toni. But IQ tests had always been suspect, and here the other three subjects were a child, a boy who had been mentally challenged before, and an already brilliant scientist. Not good data, and Zack saw the moment that Denise decided not to mention it.

Duncan asked another question, and now her hostility to the entire presentation became obvious. “And you—all of you scientists—are telling me that the human brain was remade by some tiny microbe? By a germ?”

All of Denise Sullivan’s apologetic uncertainty vanished. She stared steadily at Major Duncan. “Rabies, which destroys the human brain, is caused by a ‘germ.’ Toxoplasmosis, which causes humans to choose riskier behavior than they would otherwise, is caused by a single-celled parasite. Superhearing, a profound rewiring of the auditory areas, was caused by R. sporii. The ATCV-1 virus—”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Colonel Jenner said. “Is anyone else going to speak?”

Marissa Freirich rose hastily. She was one of the two schoolteachers in Enclave Dome, although lately no school had been held in the general disruption. At the Collapse, she’d been a twenty-one-year-old, brand-new fourth-grade teacher at the elementary school on Monterey Base. Now she worked with Caity and Belok^. It was clear that lecturing to this group of scientists and top brass intimidated her, but she plunged ahead.

“Before his coma, Belok^ spoke only a few basic phrases. Now his speech level is about that of a four-year-old, in both English and World, and he is learning to read. Caitlin McKay, who is four, could already read simple picture books. Yesterday she read aloud the first few paragraphs of Alice in Wonderland. In the original, which includes words like ‘conversations’ and ‘marmalade.’” Marissa bit her lip. “She doesn’t even know what marmalade is. Sounding out words isn’t the same as experience. But she has definitely gotten smarter. She—”

Colonel Jenner interrupted, but not with the sharpness that Major Duncan had shown. “Is it your sense that the intelligence of these children will just keep on growing? That they’ll get more and more intelligent over time?”

“I don’t… of course I’m not a scientist and it isn’t for me to say if… all I do is…”

“You work with those children,” Jenner said, relentless. “What do you think?”

Marissa said, “I think they had a big leap in intelligence and now they’re learning to use that. I don’t think that each day they’re getting smarter than they were the day before.”

Without twisting his body on his chair, Jenner turned his head to look at his two soldiers. All he did was blink once. The female private said, “Yes, sir. She’s correct.”

The male said, “Yes, sir. Agreed.”

Then Marissa, displaced schoolteacher, said outright what Dr. Denise Sullivan had only tiptoed around. Marissa said, “Either way, some of my students are getting a lot smarter and the rest are not.”

There. She had named it, the elephant in the room. Humanity bifurcating. If the changes in neural structure or efficiency were permanent and also inheritable, the human race was on its way to becoming two species.

Not an elephant in the room. A swamp’s worth of dinosaurs. Or—

An entire herd of zebras.