Terran Tomorrow

CHAPTER 22

Zack was frustrated. He’d carefully repeated to Toni all of Marianne’s speculations about the ASPM gene, the mutation carried by all the v-coma victims, and human accelerated region 1. Toni had barely listened—or maybe she had. How would Zack know what this mentally enhanced Toni was doing? Maybe she was capable of following multiple pathways of thought at once. Or even all possible pathways, like electrons in an uncollapsed state. Or maybe she really wasn’t listening to him.

He finished with, “So maybe we should look more closely at the ASPM gene.”

“Okay.”

“‘Okay’? That’s it?”

“You look at it,” Toni said, and went back to her own work. If her attention had ever really left it in the first place.

He started to work, but after only an hour, Claire Patel came into the lab. “Zack—”

He knew. From the tone of her voice, the wideness of her eyes, his own half-dread, half-eager anticipation. He said, “Susan is awake.”

“Yes. She’s asking for you.”

“Is she all right?” Is she still Susan? Caitlin, to his immense relief, had emerged from her coma a brighter, more thoughtful child, but still Caitlin. She had pouts, she had tantrums, she liked snuggles, she still carried around Bollers, who now had stuffing oozing out of his fuzzy neck. But Caitlin was four. Her brain was expected to be highly plastic, her personality in flux. Susan was… Susan was his heart. What if she had changed in some important way other than intellectually, what if she no longer needed him, what if…

Claire said, “She’s as healthy as someone can be who’s been in a coma this long.”

Not what he’d meant. Zack rose on suddenly unsteady legs. “Tricia, can you finish this?”

The lab tech nodded. “Sure.”

When Zack reached the infirmary, someone had already brought Caitlin to her mother. Susan sat up in bed, Caity nestled beside her, and Zack thought his heart would split along its seam. Susan was thinner, her cheekbones sharp beneath shadowed eyes. She smiled at him.

“Zack.”

“Is it you?”

What a dumb thing to say! But she seemed to understand.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“How do you feel?” Also pretty dumb, but complexity seemed to have deserted him. There was something in her eyes… Claire tactfully withdrew.

Caitlin said, “Mommy is awake now, too. But she can already read good.”

“So I can,” Susan said. “Zack…” She stopped but not, it seemed to Zack, because she didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. She was waiting for him.

He walked carefully, as if something in him might break, to the side of the bed. There was no chair so he stood, putting his hand on her shoulder, looking down at her. Please, Sue—help me.

She did, just as she always had. “I feel fine, Zack. Shaky physically and mentally, but I’m hoping both will pass. I just need to get used to thinking… like this.”

He wasn’t yet ready to ask what “like this” meant for her, or to compare it to what had been said by those who’d awakened before her. That wasn’t what he wanted to know, anyway.

Susan continued, “What are you afraid of?”

He blurted out, “That now I won’t be smart enough for you.”

Her eyes widened; he’d surprised her. That he could do that was oddly reassuring. She wasn’t omniscient.

She said, “Of course you are. But I didn’t marry you for your admittedly formidable intellect, you know. That was never why I loved you. It still isn’t, and I still love you.”

Caity hugged Bollers, listening hard.

Susan added, “Nothing will change that. Not even if I were Einstein—which I’m not—and you were a block of wood.”

Caity said seriously, “If Daddy was a block of wood then he couldn’t talk.”

Zack said, “And from what I remember, Einstein didn’t treat his wives particularly well.” Relief filled his body, sweet as fresh strawberries in the sun, light as helium.

“Mommy, I want to write a story about a block of wood that talks. Where’s my tablet?”

Susan said, “She can write now?”

“A little,” Zack said, “and read a lot. Oh, Sue—”

“Yes,” she said. “Now tell me everything that’s happened since I fell asleep. Then I’ll try to describe what this is like for me.”

“Mommy, Daddy, I want you to help me with my tablet!”

“You will have to wait your turn,” Susan said in her no-nonsense, don’t-mess-with-me voice. That, even more than what she’d said, reassured Zack. Susan had always been the one to discipline Caity, Zack the one to spoil her.

They were still all themselves. They were still all here. They could ride out Marianne’s leap of punctuated evolution, or anything else. Together.

“Zack,” Tricia said, barging through the curtain. “Oh, hello, Ms. McKay. Zack, sorry to intrude, but Toni says you should come to the lab right away.”

“Not now.”

“Now,” Tricia said.

Lab techs did not command department heads. Zack looked up, irritated until he saw Tricia’s face. He hadn’t known the usually quiet woman could look like that. “What is it? What’s happened?” Another Awakened gone crazy, like the man who’d attacked Marianne? An escape of live sparrows with RSA? A breach of the dome by New America?

Tricia said, “Toni says she’s made the gene drive. To wipe out the birds. She’s got it, and it works.”

“We were tinkering with the wrong thing,” Toni said. “We were trying to modify the DNA in the gametes. I modified the histones instead.”

Zack scanned the rest of her notes. She’d done an amazing job. Histones, spool-shaped proteins around which the DNA in a eukaryote was strung, were more tractable than genes. Histone modification could radically alter the activity of a gene without altering its DNA sequence. When the cells divided, the alterations were passed on to the daughter cells. Virology already possessed a gamut of proteins capable of altering histones, but Toni had found a new one. More: she had found a way to exploit epistasis, the effects of genetic mutations that depend on other mutations. Her notes—much clearer than before she’d Awakened!—showed how her modified histones affected other histones, changing the behavior of cell signaling, pasting the genemod into two copies of all cells.

He said, “The birds…”

“Yes. I’ve been inserting trial gene-drive mods into frozen sparrow embryos. They paste themselves beautifully into both chromosomes. I mated the offspring with another nest brought into artificial readiness. From the males—nada. Nothing. Zilch. The males are sterile. The females reproduced, and of their offspring, all the males were healthy but sterile. We’ll get a selective sweep, Zack. Within a few decades, there will be no more sparrows left in North America—and no RSA. Eventually, the disease will be gone from the entire world.”

He had to sit down. It wasn’t her conclusion that staggered him—they had known that was what a successful gene drive would do—it was her science. How had she done that so fast? She’d had to breed two generations of sparrows… of course, sparrows mated very young, and hormones could bring them into fertility out of season. Still, she must have had viable gene candidates ready to go shortly after she awakened.

He looked at her with awe.

She frowned. “But the other gene drive, the one to eliminate RSA directly instead of going through reproduction—I haven’t cracked that one yet.”

He nodded. She would crack it. All they needed now was time.

“I’m tired,” Toni said abruptly. “I’m going to sleep. Will you come get me if Nicole wakes up?”

Zack nodded again. Toni left. Zack sat still a long time, ignored by everyone working in the lab around him.

He saw what Toni, for all her new brilliance, did not. Toni’s incredible intelligence was focused on science—as it always had been. But there was more than science involved. Inserting this gene drive into more birds and then releasing them into the wild was a political decision, with enormous ecological implications. Look what had happened thirty-eight years ago, when the original R. sporii had nearly wiped out eight species of mice. Entire economies had been shaken.

Probably, given the way things were now, releasing the birds would be a military decision, made at Fort Hood. He didn’t trust military decisions. Not anybody’s, no matter how much “military intelligence” they were based on—

“Oh my God,” he said aloud, suddenly realizing, and everybody in the lab stopped and stared at him.

Hillson said to Jason, “The deranged corporal who attacked Dr. Jenner is under restraint.”

“Good.” They had no psychiatrist at the base, although that was the least of the problems represented by Corporal Douglas Porter. Hillson, however, didn’t yet realize that.

The master sergeant stood by the doorway of the command post, making his twice-daily report. As always, Hillson’s uniform looked rumpled and slightly askew, as if assembled in the dark. Which it might have been; Hillson seemed to need almost no sleep. His homely, intelligent features gave away nothing, but Jason heard volumes in his voice, most of it either bewildered or disapproving.

“The convoy from Fort Hood is still eight days out,” Hillson said. “It was attacked by New America just west of the Los Angeles nuclear zone. Lieutenant Li relayed what the Return picked up of the convoy’s radio signals to Fort Hood.”

Jason, startled, said, “The Return can do that now?”

“Yes,” Hillson said, disapproval lapsing very briefly into Army pride. “Specialist Martin is getting pretty good with that alien hardware. She figured out more of the communications capabilities than that lab tech did. That Branch Carter.”

“Good. What did Li say about the attack?”

“The convoy leader, a Major Highland… do you know him, sir?”

“We were at West Point together.” And Highland had been a prick even then.

“Oh,” Hillson said, with the enlisted man’s disdain for the academy. “Anyway, sir, the convoy wiped out the enemy. But it slowed them, for repairs and medical and burials and such. So eight more days, maybe more.”

Another reprieve.

And then, “What else, Hillson? You don’t look that grim because New America lost a battle.”

“No, sir. Ten more deserters.”

Ten. Well, that might actually be a good thing, although he couldn’t say that to Hillson. Not yet. Unless…

“Give me the names.”

Hillson did. Jason hid his relief; none of them were Awakened. He said, “They’ve gone off to start their own little army? I assume they took supplies and weapons?”

“Yes, sir. They stole what they wanted.”

And you wonder why I let them. But Jason’s reasons would have to wait a short while yet. Hillson was going to be troubled enough when that conversation happened.

“Sir—”

“Anything else, Sergeant?”

“No, sir.”

Hillson, deeply unhappy, left. Unhappy but completely loyal. He passed Major Duncan entering the command post. She said, “Sir—Doctor Farouk wants to see you.”

“Farouk?”

“Yes, sir. I was at Lab Dome and he stopped me, practically sputtering. It took me five minutes to get him to speak in normal English instead of formulas or equations or whatever the hell they were. I brought him here to see you, but what I got from him, I thought I’d tell you first. I could be wrong, but…”

“Major? What is it?” He had never seen her look like that.

“Sorry, sir. Dr. Farouk says—at least I think he says it, he indicated that it needs more work—but he thinks he understands the physics of the starship. Of the engine, I mean. He thinks that in another few years or so, we might know enough to build ones that can be bigger or smaller or different. He’s very excited, sir.”

Another few years. Jason—and Duncan as well—knew they did not have another few years. Their eyes met.

“Good news,” Jason finally said.

“Yes, sir,” she answered.

Neither of them meant it.

And then, before Jason had even seen Dr. Farouk, Zack McKay appeared, asking to tell Jason something about Dr. Steffens.

And about sparrows.

Jane sat on a child’s chair beside Belok^, who sat on the floor. Monterey Base had nothing like the thick, richly embroidered cushions of home, nor World’s low tables of polished karthwood. The items Jane had brought with her lay on the floor at her feet.

La^vor crouched beside Belok^. Jane knew that La^vor was afraid of what might happen to Belok^. La^vor had lost one brother; she needed some of her lahk to hold on to, here in this strange place that had never, not once, felt like home. The patterns and colors that La^vor made in Jane’s mind were unfocused and gray.

And Belok^? Jane needed to find his patterns. She held up the first of her items, a flattish, more or less rectangular stone. In World, which he’d understood even when he couldn’t speak much of it, she said, “Belok^-kal, what could you do with this?”

The giant child looked puzzled.

“What things could you do with this stone?”

He took it in his big hands and turned it slowly over and over. Jane waited. La^vor put the tips of her thumbs together, a World gesture of anxiety.

Finally Belok^ said, “Build. Build a thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

More waiting. The pattern in her mind was a cloud, colorless and formless but filled with light. She watched it take form as Belok^ answered, his words slow and thick, like tree sap emerging after a long winter.

“Build… house. Build… cookstove… build path build table build steps.”

La^vor gasped. The formless pattern in Jane’s mind took on tints and lumps. She said, “Can you do anything else with the stone besides build?”

Again the puzzled face, creaking into understanding. Belok^ looked at the stone. Next his gaze roamed around the other items Jane had brought: a cup, a blanket, a hammer, a length of wire, a small 3-D printer. Belok^ stared at the tablet on which La^vor had been teaching him to write his name. He picked up the tablet pen, put it down again. His childish brow crinkled into sand waves. A full minute passed.

Belok^ reached into his pocket. He pulled out a soft white stone; Jane had seen Settler children play with these in some complicated game. Belok^ scratched the white stone over Jane’s rock. Three symbols, crude but recognizable: his name in World.

La^vor burst into tears.

Immediately Belok^ dropped the white stone and put his arms around his tiny sister, folding her to him, murmuring comfort. And in her mind, Jane saw Belok^’s shapes: whole and brightly colored, kind and loving and frighteningly innocent.

She almost cried, too. Belok^’s pattern in her mind was a simpler, cruder version of Colin’s.

She went to him, straight from Belok^ and La^vor, almost running along the corridors to his room. He wasn’t there. She found him conferring with gray-haired Sarah Waters, from the Settlement. “Colin!”

“What is it?”

“I need to talk to you!”

Sarah, startled, faded tactfully away. Jane didn’t talk. She seized his chair and tried to push it. Colin made it roll by itself, following her along the narrow, clogged corridors as swiftly as possible. Jane kept her head down so no one could see her face. She ignoring Colin’s repeated, “Jane? What is it? Jane?” At his room, she closed the door, climbed onto the bed, and lay down. She pulled up her wrap.

His face changed; his pattern shifted. He whispered, “Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“I haven’t said anything, Jane, because I didn’t want you to feel that in a place strange to you, you were in any way pressured to… I wanted to give you…”

“I know. Don’t talk now. Later, but not now.”

Colin ducked his head, and she couldn’t see his face. Then, carefully, he heaved himself from chair to bed. Jane, in an agony of desire that was sweet as Terran honey, sweet as World mef fruit, sweet as home, reached for him.

For a while, then, the patterns were all shining, and she didn’t have to picture what must inevitably come.