“It’s a mutation, I think. Carried in this one family.”
“Wha... ?” I furrowed my brow, trying to decode that. It made no sense. I asked about a little girl’s family life, and this biology Ph.D. candidate starts talking about mutations. For a moment I thought she might be mentally ill also, making random paranoid associations. “What are you talking about? What’s a mutation?”
“We all have people inside us. All of us in this family.” She stood, went to the window, and looked out at the silent, shaded street.
I finally understood. “You’re saying that... you too?”
She nodded, still looking out at the street. “It goes back many generations. We have several persons inside. Usually three, but not always. It must be some kind of beneficial mutation.”
“Beneficial?”
“We’re no crazier than other people.”
“But you...” I faltered. I told myself that I mustn’t get caught up in this absurd idea. The simplest explanation was that she was lying or delusional.
She turned away from the window. “Don’t you ever get... full? Not tired, just full. Like, you’re trying to learn something, and you’ve worked at it a while, and you just need a break? You might have all the time in the world. But you just can’t fit any more into your head.”
“Sure. I went to med school.” I could study maybe four hours a day, and then I was done. And after, the other things I loved—poetry, composing—proved impossible. They became almost painful, like noise.
“When that happens to me—to one of us—we just switch to a different self.”
I only nodded. If I were to grant her claim, I could see then how that might be useful.
“And all of humanity’s best accomplishments come from dialogue, right?” she continued. “From people interacting and challenging each other. Well, each of us can interact and challenge herself.”
“But—”
“You know,” she interrupted, “one of me studies cnidarians. What most people call jellyfish and corals.”
“Julie said fish.”
“No. You mean Juny said fish. Julie and Juliana wouldn’t confuse it.”
I tried not to show my surprise. She was right.
“I study cnidarians. And long ago I had a revelation. What is your blood?”
Her tone made it clear that her question was academic. So I shrugged. “Oxygen delivery system.”
“That’s what it does, but what is it? It’s the ocean inside. All progress in evolution is to take what’s useful that’s outside, and bring it inside and bring it under control. Bring the sea inside, control its contents and temperature, so you can bathe your cells even while you walk on land. That’s circulation. Bring the sights and smells of the world inside, where you can manipulate them and plan. That’s representation, imagination—the mind. Well, the greatest leap in human progress was to become social beings. And my family, we’re just bringing that inside us. You sit in society like a sponge in the sea. We carry a society within us, like blood.”
This had gone far enough. I put my hands together, as if pleading with her. “From where I’m sitting, this is not a very plausible explanation. I expected abuse. That’s still more likely than this... story.”
“I’ve told you the truth. Why can’t you even consider it possible?”
“Okay. Suppose what you say is true. We can prove it. Test the personalities the way we test synesthesia: exhaustive high-speed question and response. I could show that you can’t be faking it. Then I can let Julie go with certainty that her... behavior is not a kind of trauma.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. We’re too few. We don’t want people to... overwhelm us. Make us a freakshow. Maybe even accuse us of being the mutant threat.”
“You’d be a curiosity for a few weeks and then forgotten.”
“Maybe. But we shouldn’t have to beg for privacy. Should we?” She sighed. “Now you know our secret.”
“But, even if I believed this story, what you’ve told me doesn’t confirm that Julie will be safe.”
“We’ve raised generations of our kind here. Not one of us has been mentally ill. Not even a bit.”
I frowned. Suddenly I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped by the confusing complexity of this. Some part of me found her story weirdly plausible. The skeptic in me was resolved that I was being duped. I stood.
“I have to get back to the hospital. I have a long drive.” I went to the door.
“When will you... ?”
“Decide? It has to be soon.”
“I’ll come to your office tomorrow,” she said.
I nodded. “I have appointments till four. Can we meet at four-thirty?”
“Sure.”
She followed me to my car. I got inside and put the window down. “Suppose what you say is true,” I said. “Don’t you get... lost? Confused? By all those voices?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. No more than single people get lost or confused.” She looked at me hard and said softly—and, I realized in surprise, with genuine curiosity— “Now you tell me. Don’t you get lonely? All by yourself all the time?”
I frowned but didn’t answer. I started the engine. “See you tomorrow.”
I had to battle the next day with the county jail, which wanted to return the criminally insane schizophrenic to us. I learned that they’d already shipped him to another hospital in the city two weeks before—it was no doubt that hospital that had dropped the guy in our ER.
Nerves frayed and hands shaking from adrenaline after shouting into my phone, I went straight into the meeting with Kristine Louvrier at four-thirty. It was almost inevitable that we would end up in a fight, given my condition. When she threatened to sue and stormed out, I sat at my desk catching my breath, hoping to calm down. I wasn’t given the chance: big Thomas stuck his head in.
“Dr. Stevens has been looking for you. He’s mad that little girl is still in pediatrics. And he wonders where the hell you’ve been all yesterday.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“You look tired, Doc.”
“I am.”
Thomas knew better than to tell me to go get some rest. He gave me a sympathetically wistful smile and left.
I walked dejectedly down to pediatrics.
Julie sat propped up in her bed. The television flickered silently in the corner. A checkerboard sat on the bed beside her, the pieces arrayed in the middle of a game. She drew on a pad of paper on her lap.
“Hi,” I said. I checked her chart but nothing had changed. I’d given her a battery of cog tests in the morning, and then a social worker had talked to her using a therapy doll. She showed no cognitive deficits and had reported no inappropriate touching. I leaned against the end of the bed now and looked at her drawing: a cat with huge eyes. It appeared clever, rather professional to my eye, kind of like one of those Japanese cartoons. Or one of the figurines in her room.
“Who’s winning?” I asked, pointing at the checkers game. I assumed she was playing the nurse, who inevitably had been called away to rounds.
She shrugged. “I’m not playin’.” She switched pencils, and started darkening one iris of the cat’s eyes.
“Who is?” I asked.
“Juliana and Julie.”
“Ah. And you’re Juny.”
“Course.”
I noticed then that she was drawing with her left hand, with quick facility. I frowned. During our session in the morning, she had struggled to fill out some written tests, trying to grip the pencil around the cast that covered her right wrist and palm.
“You’re left-handed?” I asked.
She only nodded.
“But you write with your right hand?”
“Naw,” she said, focusing on her quick strokes. “Julie and Juliana do. I don’t.”
She looked up at me then and set the pencil down. She spoke faster, with sharper intonation, as she asked, “Can I go home tomorrow, Dr. Doug?”
I hesitated. The
change in tone was eerie, and the muscles around her eyes had switched from a slack ease to attentive concentration.
“Juliana?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I sighed. “Perhaps. We’ll figure it out tomorrow, anyway.”
“I miss school,” she said. “Julie misses school.”
“And Juny?”
“Juny never pays attention in school. Except in music class.”
“Oh.” I straightened. “Well, don’t stay up too late. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“Okay.”
As I was opening the door, I heard the clack of a checkers piece. I looked back. She was reaching across herself and awkwardly using her right hand to arrange a black piece. There was a pause, and then with the right hand she moved a red piece. She sat back, sighed, and then her expression took on a relaxed, even vacant expression, almost transforming into a different face. She picked up the pencil with her left hand and continued to draw.
I went out into the hall. The head doctor stood there, looking at Julie through the window on her door.
He nodded a minimal greeting. “Strange case. Fascinating. I understand why you’ve been stalling. There’s a paper in it, for sure. But, you know, I think she can be treated with standard pharmaceuticals. Thorazine will kill those other voices. Get her out of here first thing in the morning.”
After my miserable commute home, I found my wife watching television in the kitchen. She’d ordered pizza out, and about a third of it remained, sitting in its soggy cardboard box on the counter.
We exchanged salutations and I went to the cupboard. I, at least, was going to eat from a plate.
“I had a bad day at work,” I said.
She nodded. “I’m sorry, hon. That’s getting regular for you lately.” But she looked right back at the television.
“We don’t talk much anymore, do we?”
She frowned. “We talk.”
“No we don’t. You watch TV during dinner every night. We always eat take-out.”
“You expect me to cook?” She frowned, suspecting these were the opening moves of me picking a fight.
“No. No. But, I mean, we’ve got time then.”
“Time?”
“We didn’t cook. So we’ve got some time. To talk.”
She turned off the TV. “Okay. Talk.”
We finished the pizza in silence.
The next morning, as I came in, Kristine Louvrier had already staked out the waiting room. She paced before a seated heavy man in a suit who clutched a briefcase. When she saw me, she made a straight line to intersect my path.
“I’ve brought my lawyer. You better get yours.”
“No need,” I said.
They followed me to my office. “I would like to speak to Ms. Louvrier alone a moment,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” the lawyer drawled. He put a hand on his vast stomach—as large as my own, I noted with a wince—and shook his head angrily.
I looked at Kristine Louvrier. Her eyes moved quickly around the room while she thought. Finally her steel eyes met my gaze.
“One minute,” she said.
“I advise against it,” her lawyer protested.
“One minute.”
The lawyer sighed and went into the hall. She closed the door, turned, and glared. “So?”
I sat. “I want you to give me your word, your word, that if anything starts to go badly for Julie, you’ll call me.”
She frowned. Slowly, she sat down too. “What changed your mind?”
Lying awake in bed the night before, Stevens’s words, “Thorazine will kill those other voices,” had echoed in my mind, horrifying me. It sounded so much like he spoke of killing two... persons. I realized then that I already believed.
But I would be ashamed to repeat what our head doctor had said. So I just shrugged. “Do you promise?”
“Why do you want me to?”
“Because nothing is nature is so simple. Mutations that are purely beneficial are rare. Your petty fear of a week of notoriety cannot be allowed to endanger a girl’s welfare.”
After a long pause she nodded. “I promise.”
“That’s not good enough,” I told her.
She scowled angrily. “What do you... ?” And then, after a moment of reflection, she smiled. “We promise,” she said. “All three of us.”
I handed her the release paperwork, already filled out. And then I handed her one of my business cards. “Please. Call me, if I can ever help.”
She nodded, then rose and opened the door.
I stood in the waiting room and watched them leave. Juliana—I think it was Juliana—waved to me as she stepped through the automatic doors. Then I did my morning rounds, but at eleven I went back to my office and called my wife.
“What is it?” she asked, still wary after the evening before.
“Hon,” I whispered. “Can you sneak out of work for an hour and come have lunch with me?”
Her voice softened. “Is everything okay? Work okay? Is it that girl?”
“I guess so.”
“Is she okay?”
“I think she will be,” I said. “I think she’ll be as well as any girl can be who just lost her parents.”
“Good.”
“But she made me think, hon. I just feel... I feel lonely. I need to hear your voice now. Sometimes I can’t think without having you hear me and talk back to me. And sometimes I...” My voice almost broke. I felt the pressure of tears, but I resisted them. I took a deep breath and started again. “Sometimes I... I don’t like myself much. When I’m alone. But I like myself more when I’m with you.” There was a long silence. Then she said, softly, “I’ll be right there.”
Copyright © 2010 Craig DeLancey
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SHORT STORIES
Astronomic Distance, Geologic Time
Bud Sparhawk
Just to put things in perspective...
Gerald Homer Cahille giggled. It was the happy laugh of a two-year-old enjoying his first warm, wet experience of a puppy’s tongue.
If his father hadn’t been delayed at the bus stop he never would have seen the romping puppy in the window and decided, there on the spot, that it would be the ideal companion for his son.
“It’ll be good companionship for the boy while I’m gone,” he told his wife mere weeks later as he embraced her, lifted his bag to his uniformed shoulder, and headed off to war.
“Yes,” she replied with a smile, knowing exactly who would be cleaning up the messes, doling out the nightly food ration, and trying to manage two unruly creatures that had no concept of civilized behavior and therefore would bring so much trouble into her life while he was away.
Still, after seeing the joyful smile on her son’s face and knowing the companionship the dog would provide—hardly a substitute for a father—she accepted the inevitable.
For the next few years Gerald and Rex, the dog, were inseparable, happily destroying his mother’s carefully tended victory garden, inflicting visible damage on his family’s shoes, and managing to transport enough dirt and grime indoors, although not all at once, to build a second yard. Only his entry into school eventually separated them, making each afternoon a delightful, romping reunion when the bus deposited Gerald at the curb.
During the first half of his life Rex chased seventy-five squirrels; chased twenty cars and trucks; pissed on nearly three thousand trees, bushes, and poles; humped three bitches and uncounted legs; ate nine hundred pounds of dog food, occasional table scraps, and a quarter of the turkey and associated dressing his mother had prepared for Thanksgiving shortly after the war, when such luxuries became once again available.
Rex also utterly destroyed every toy he was given except for a prized, saliva-soaked, grimy tennis ball that he lovingly dropped on the laps of unsuspecting guests.
The age of technology had long passed, as had the age of arts and, inevitably, th
e age of knowledge. The race knew that there was little left for them, for even immortality can exhaust its attractiveness.
Their last great project began when a few retrograde individuals decided to create something that would answer the question of why they, of all the creatures who must occupy the Universe, were so lucky as to be at the precise center. The answer was to send something to the distant “edge” of the Universe, ten billion light-years away. The likelihood of their descendants hearing the answer after that much time was negligible. Even if they never learned the answer, the question would finally be settled, which was sufficient reason to regain the long-forgotten skills and knowledge so necessary to conceive and build something that would endure the trip.
It took over four thousand cycles for them to devise the plans, another two thousand to muster the resources, and five more for the actual construction. Perfection is not something easily achieved, even for these incredibly advanced beings that used everything they’d learned from millennia of unbroken, continual advances in every imaginable field.
The six tiny ships, each no larger than the seed of thistledown, were wonders—part mechanism, part dream, and entirely an exercise in aesthetic perfection. Once released, the ships would sip on photons for sustenance and use dark energy for fuel.
Despite their beauty, they were nevertheless rugged enough to outlast the worst disaster imaginable and intelligent enough to deal with any obstacles encountered, such as black holes, maelstrom nebulae, and deep time pools. Since they would be moving at near light-speed they would avoid close encounters where their immense relativistic mass might perturb the balance of entire systems.
With great fanfare the six craft, Emanni, Kilasta, Majat, Remmin, Boinit, and Istophel, were launched in the six cardinal directions. During the course of their journey each ship would pass through the nearest galaxies and, eventually, through those that had not yet begun to form from the aggregation of star stuff, gases, and other random parts of the Universe.
Initially slow moving, they rapidly gathered speed so that, in the first infinitesimally tiny fraction of the planned voyages, they’d achieved nearly three-quarters of the speed of light. After that they followed what would become a zigzag course of looping curves around black holes and dense stars to boost their speed by fractions of a percent. Since they started in a dense volume of their galaxy, it only took fifty thousand years to reach 90 percent of light-speed.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11 Page 14
