by Mel Keegan
A green glass bottle and several tiny cups stood by the censer; and behind them, a hypogun, several phials, a few items so unrecognizable, they could only be Resalq. Behind the table stood a little handling drone very similar to those in any Infirmary. It was active, waiting to be summoned, and as far as Travers could see, it had a single instrument which might have been a surgical probe, though Neil had seen nothing like it before.
On the back of the table was a delicate apparatus he did not recognize, though parts of it were familiar. The numerous gold filaments were very like the neural connectors Vidal had used in the transspace simulator, to link pilot and navigator so closely, they might have been sharing the same skin. These were coupled to a pair of large handies, and Mark was fiddling with the rig as he said,
“He’ll be here shortly. I’ve never known Michael to refuse a challenge, and this is something he needs … though the concept might scare the daylights out of him.” He frowned at Marin over the pair of synched handies. “Give us an hour, Curtis. Two, at the longest.”
“I’ll take care of our packing.” Marin gave Travers a speculative glance. “Is there anything you want, specifically?”
“Just the stuff we brought from the apartment in Sark … clothes, and the Chiyodas. I’ve gotten used to them.” Travers slid his hands into his pockets. “How long, Mark? Till we’re hunting a major storm?”
“Richard tells me we’re tracking several promising events even now,” Mark said quietly, with a gesture in the direction of Lai’a. “You saw for yourself, on the way in – we’re loading. Every scrap of data we’ve been able to glean is already invested in Lai’a. Dario and I spent hours comparing information from the Orpheus-Odyssey with any shred of original records we could find from our own past as well as the Aenestra expedition to Orion 359. As you know, the Orpheus-Odyssey is a hybrid … in fact, it’s a complete mongrel, but we know beyond doubt, those engines are the drive component from the Ebrezjim. We knew they had to be – there’s no other transspace engine technology in our history or yours. Dario stumbled over a set of archival records, little more than an account of service work performed on an unspecified ship; but these records reference fuels, fields, temperatures, radiation parameters – they’re describing a transspace drive, and as far as anyone is aware, only one was ever built. Better yet, the service report is specific about the engine configuration.”
“And it matches the salvaged drive Mick flew out of the graveyard.” Travers gave a low, soft whistle. “This tells us a few things.”
“It does.” Mark set down the handies. “We know, fact, the Ebrezjim fetched up in the freefall graveyard where Michael and Jo met Ernst. So, whatever befell the ship and crew at the hands of the Zunshu, at least some of them made it away. They almost made it home, in fact. Dario, Tor and I want to get aboard. Lai’a knows the region. It says there should be no difficulty in getting into the stable lagoon, and it’s more than worth the effort of trying to find the Ebrezjim. Dario has spent four decades taking to pieces the most ancient computer systems, relics, remnants, scattered across the frontier. If the AI core is viable, we might be able to reactivate it. Midani Kulich knows this technology at firsthand.”
“You want to run the logs,” Marin guessed.
Mark nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “The more we know about the Zunshu before we run headlong into their space, the better I’ll like it. Every extra scrap of information we possess increases our chances of coming back out of there.” One corner of his mouth quirked in something like wry humor. “You’ll forgive me if I find myself with a somewhat stronger reason to survive, lately.”
“Your people are heading out – again,” Travers said pragmatically. “A new Resalq world, a whole new virgin colony.”
“Yes.” Mark’s brows rose. “A Resalq world, Neil – not a Resalq enclave on a human world, or a Resalq community hidden in plain sight. Saraine and Riga are our homes, of course, and several more like them are scattered across the Deep Sky, but …” The gold eyes were luminous with inspiration. “A Resalq world. Now, there’s a fantasy for you.”
“A fantasy?” Marin echoed. “Not if Emil Kulich has anything to do with it! Speaking of whom – the Freyana?”
“Shipped out of the Saraine system two weeks ago.” Mark stirred with an obvious effort. “The whole system is running cold and dark. The only people there now are the team of archeologists, perhaps twenty men and women fossicking through the ruins of the Eternal City, literally within sight of my house. A few power cells, a single transmitter, a small ship with engines shut down. From what we know, it’s not enough to alert a Zunshu scout.” He stopped, took a deep breath, exhaled it as a sigh. “I could say I just want to go home, and it wouldn’t be a lie.”
“It wouldn’t be the whole truth, either.” Marin set a hand on his arm. “I know you too well, Mark. You can’t stand a mystery! What became of the Ebrezjim? What the hell did those ancestors of yours do to rub the Zunshu so far the wrong way that a thousand years later they’re still destroying anything that moves out here?”
“And how,” Travers added bleakly, “can they be stopped?”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Mark laced his fingers at his own nape and leaned his head back into them as if he were weary, though he was wide awake. “We had comm from the Freyana just before the Wastrel arrived back. Emil Kulich is an arrogant bastard, but he’s exactly what those people need. According to Midani, he could pilot a ship the size and generation of the Raishenne, so the Freyana presents no challenge; and he has that damned arrogant way about him that seems to appeal to the elitists among the Resalq … the cultural purists who scorn the physical modifications the rest of us optioned, in the interests of survival.” He gave Marin a darkly amused look. “There’s a few more of them than you might have guessed.”
“Enough of a gene pool to breed a healthy generation of – well, of pure Resalq?” Marin wondered.
“Ancestrals?” Travers looked from Mark to Curtis and back. “They can do that – bring back the pure racial type?”
“Oh, yes. Thorough records were kept, and any engineering that was done to make us appear more human can be reversed, the same as we’re watching Tonio Teniko change, day by day, into something rather odd. He was never intended to be a Pakrani, and I don’t know how well the body morphology is going to suit him, but … could I, myself, be reengineered to resemble my forefathers? Of course.” He held up his hands. “I could even regrow the thumbs that were removed.”
“Damn,” Marin whispered. “I didn’t – that is, I never thought of this. You, uh, you’ll be doing this, Mark?” For an instant he seemed disturbed, and then swiftly masked the reaction.
One large hand palmed Curtis’s cheek and Mark said quietly, with surprising gentleness, “I’ve worn this body almost five times longer than you’ve been alive, and my children are even more humanlike even than I am. I’m almost reluctant to admit, the ancestrals seem alien, even to me, and I know it’s an appalling thing to say when they are the true Resalq, while we … what are we? What have we become?”
“You are Resalq.” Marin’s tone was emphatic. “There’s just two different kinds of Resalq, the old and the new. Among humans, it’s the same. We don’t think any less of Barb for being Pakrani, or of Bill Grant for being Lushi, but they’re as different from the old conventional Earther as you and Dario and Tor are different from Midani and Emil Kulich. Nobody’s asking any of us to be anything other than what we are.”
“Except Teniko,” Travers said acidly, “and I’m not even sure what dimension he’s living in most of the time.”
“Quite.” Mark was listening in the direction of the door and said to Marin, “If you want to get your packing done, here’s your chance.”
Curtis was already moving as Mick Vidal appeared. He was in a kimono of dark green silk which flowed about his thin frame, but he was moving better, Travers thought. There was a grace about him, a wiry strength returning one day at a time, and his face had just begun to
recover some of its curves. It might never return to the almost voluptuous youth Neil remembered, but Vidal had gained an angular, smoldering intensity which offset anything he had lost.
The blue eyes were more than a little skittish as he swept one glance around the paraphernalia of ritual and arcane technology. “Neil … thanks.”
“For being here?” Travers made dismissive gestures. “I don’t know how much I can do, but –”
“Moral support,” Marin said, and gave Travers his hand for a moment before he stepped out. “I’m just leaving, Mick.” He studied Travers with a deeply thoughtful look, and then met Vidal’s eyes frankly. “If I can help, Mick … call. I’m going back to the Wastrel. Later, Neil, Mark.”
He was gone then, and the door closed over behind him. The compartment was like a cocoon, dim, warm, fragrant with the charab, thrumming with the sub-etherics. Travers felt a weird thrill through the pit of his own belly and watched Vidal closely. He was shivering, though he was trying not to show it. Gooseflesh prickled along his arms and neck, and those arms were hugged about his chest.
“Michael, you don’t have to do this.” Mark’s voice was soft as crushed velvet.
But Vidal seemed to drag his shoulders back. “I do. I’m dreaming more – it’s not getting better with time. My subconscious mind must be a mess, and it’s getting worse. I close my eyes and it’s all right there, as if it was real.”
“I’m afraid it was real,” Mark said regretfully, “in parallel pasts or futures into which, thank gods, none of us must live. Which makes this no easier for you to bear.” He frowned over Vidal’s head at Travers. “Understand, Neil. These dreams are not the product of imagination.”
“I know.” Travers rubbed his palms together, trying to hold his thoughts in focus as the charab and sub-etherics began to affect him. “For godsakes, Mick, I know you well enough by now to know you’d be the last guy to get off on fantasies about … all that.” He gestured uncomfortably. “You’ve told me enough.”
“I haven’t told you a tenth of it,” Vidal muttered, “and that’s the whole point.” He drew a ragged breath. “I want it out, Mark. Out of my head. Gone.”
A sigh whispered over Mark’s lips. “I probably can’t expunge it completely, Michael. These memories go so deep, to tear them out by the roots I’d have to tear part of you away, too. You’d forget things you don’t want to forget. Things,” he added, “you need to remember. Say, your love for your father, the animosity you feel toward your mother – the first time you met Neil, your promotion to major and appointment to lead a Carrier Air Taskforce, your lifelong association with Robert Chandra Liang, your Daku beliefs. These memories are the building bricks from which you’re made, Michael. You can’t afford to jettison them.”
“I thought you could get the rest of it out,” Vidal rasped. “You did, for Curtis.”
“No.” Travers took a long breath of the charab. It was getting into his head and producing the oddest sensations. Chimera or gryphon made a man so high, he literally could not tell the phantasms of his imagination from reality. By contrast, the Resalq ‘spice’ relaxed every muscle in his body and at the same time seemed to sharpen his mind. Even his vision was in acute focus. He saw every detail down to the individual threads in the embroidered cushions – the very faint tarnish on the bronze of the incense burner, the slight patina on the table, which was hand-carved in the flowing lines of the Resalq tradition, and might have been a thousand years old. “Curtis remembers it all,” he said – as if each syllable was as long as a sentence, and imbued with as much nuance. “He can tell you everything that happened on the Argos, and in the hospital. Go back before that, and he remembers the night his best friend was murdered, and when he made his first Dendra Shemiji kill, for revenge.”
The charab was just starting to reach Vidal now. He relaxed visibly and his eyes darkened to rims of blue around vast pupils; his voice calmed as his mind drew back into focus. “Then, what’s the point, Mark, in all … this?”
“It’s the way you remember,” Mark told him. “Ask Curtis, and he’ll tell you it’s as if the rough edges have been sanded away. The memories slide by like quicksilver on glass, and seldom hurt. If you don’t dwell on them, if you avoid situations that forcibly remind you, you won’t even recall these nightmares from one year to the next. And if the memories do come back, don’t grasp at them – open your hands, let them go, they’ll slip through your fingers like warm oil, and you’ll just forget again.”
Vidal’s eyes closed. “Yes.” He mocked himself with a rueful grimace. “I’m being a pussy, Neil.”
“Most people would,” Travers guessed. “Uh, where do you want me, Mark? Curtis might have known what to do, but I didn’t want to ask too closely.”
“Very wise.” Mark gestured at the nearer of the two couches. “Michael, be comfortable.”
“You want me to lie down?” For a moment Vidal sounded skittish.
“Just sit. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Michael!” With a sound of sheer exasperation Mark took him in an embrace, held the shorn head against his shoulder. “If you don’t trust me –”
“I do trust you.” Vidal held him with obvious gratitude, and then pushed free and sat gingerly on the couch, peering at the apparatus. “This isn’t just some hypnotic ritual, then?”
The gold filaments were fine as threads, bleeding through Mark’s hands as he lifted them, set a hank of them carefully on Vidal’s shoulders, on the dark green silk of the robe. “Not just. How much do you know about the creation of memories, and their physical storage?”
“Not much,” Vidal admitted. “It’s something to do with synapses … not that I know what a synapse is, come to think of it.”
“Synapses are the connections between nerves in your brain,” Mark said thoughtfully. “The average human brain has a couple of trillion of these connections – a Resalq brain, about twice as many because our brains are structured a little differently and also tend to be somewhat larger, if only because we tend to be generally larger than humans. The synapses pass information between nerves; this is where the physical process of thought takes place. These nerves and synapses are not thoughts – though for around a century, early in the history of human research into consciousness and brain function, scientists convinced themselves that mind and brain were one and the same, and that electrochemical processes were thoughts! It sounds bizarre now; the truth is so much more complex. However, modification in the shape or form of the synapses is what enables information to be retained and retrieved … memory. And here’s where it gets interesting.
“The synapses have a malleable quality. This synaptic plasticity means the neural connections change over time – they can be strengthened … they also weaken, almost like muscles which atrophy if they’re neglected. And it’s this plasticity that gives us the little elbow room we need for memory suppression.
“What I’m going to do, Michael, is simply to find the exact location of the memories you want to be dulled, blurred, half-forgotten. When I’ve located them using a network of sensors which are right out of a Resalq lab, I’ll apply a tiny counter-charge to the synapse cluster ... not enough to destroy it, by any means, but enough to use its own plasticity to slightly morph it – blur it. Afterwards, the memories will be soft-edged –”
“As if you’re remembering something you saw in a movie ten years ago,” Travers added. “This is how Curtis describes it. He recalls everything that happened to him, but if he doesn’t concentrate on the memories, they’re no more painful than something he was told or read about, a long time ago.”
Vidal had taken every syllable up osmotically. He licked dry lips to moisten them and rubbed his arms, an unconscious display of stress. “All right. What, uh, do I do?”
“Try to relax,” Mark was busy with the equipment. “I’m going to induce a mildly hypnotic state, similar to a trance. You won’t be unconscious, and you won’t lose any fraction of your will. If you cared to, you could get up and walk away at any
moment. The tranced state will be induced with a small shot of a drug called 34-Triphenac-A. You might have heard of it.”
If Vidal had not, Travers had. “They used to call it Babble-on. In heavy doses, it’s a truth serum. Also toxic as all hell.”
“Quite true.” Mark was checking the hypogun. “Lethal levels are reached long before the drug forces a stubborn subject into compliance, so an interrogation is always a tricky business involving enormous doses of the drug interspersed with shots of the blocker, which itself is toxic. The usual result is hepatic and renal failure within a few hours; obstinate subjects frequently die unless they get medical nano and cloned organs.”
“And you’re going to shoot me with this shit?” Vidal demanded, though he did not get to his feet.
“With a minute amount of it, as a psychotropic,” Mark corrected, “and remembering to take into account your current weight, as well as your doubtful health. And yes, I conferred with Doctor Grant before I prepared this shot, and yes, he calculated the safe dosage.” He gestured with the gun. “Check it, if you want to.”
“I wouldn’t know what I was looking at,” Vidal admitted, and settled again. Relaxation was profound as the charab and sub-etherics worked their way into him. The Triphenac would be only the last rime of hoarfrost on his thoughts, little more than a gossamer web which would divorce him from reality. He leaned back into the cushions, eyes closed. “Do it.”
The gun thudded softly against his shoulder, not enough to inspire a grunt of discomfort. Travers watched closely as he subsided a little further; breathing becoming as deep and regular as that of a sleeper. Mark waited a few moments before he sorted the gold filaments and said quietly,
“Watch the handies, will you, Neil? You’ll see a pulse as I connect each of these.”
