“You’re not supposed to beat up the natives, Mia,” Kenin said. “God, she’s not afraid of us at all. How can that be? You nearly gave her a concussion.”
Mia was as bewildered as Kenin, as all of them. She’d picked up the girl, who’d looked bewildered but not angry, and then Mia had backed off, expecting the girl to run. Instead she’d stood there rubbing her forehead and jabbering, and Mia had seen that her sarong was made of an uncut sheet of plastic, its colors faded to a mottled gray.
Kenin, Lolimel, and two guards had come running. And still the girl wasn’t afraid. She chattered at them, occasionally pausing as if expecting them to answer. When no one did, she eventually turned and moved leisurely off.
Mia said, “I’m going with her.”
Instantly a guard said, “It’s not safe, ma’am,” and Kenin said, “Mia, you can’t just —”
“You don’t need me here,” she said, too brusquely, suddenly there seemed nothing more important in the world than going with this girl. Where did that irrational impulse come from? “And I’ll be perfectly safe with a gun.”
This was such a stunningly stupid remark that no one answered her. But Kenin didn’t order her to stay. Mia accepted the guard’s tanglefoam and Kenin’s vidcam and followed the girl.
It was hard to keep up with her. “Wait!” Mia called, which produced no response. So she tried what the girl had said to her: “Ej-es!”
Immediately the girl stopped and turned to her with glowing eyes and a smile that could have melted glaciers, had Good Fortune had such a thing. Gentle planet, gentle person, who was almost certainly a descendant of the original dead settlers. Or was she? InterGalactic had no record of any other registered ship leaving for this star system, but that didn’t mean anything. InterGalactic didn’t know everything. Sometimes, given the time dilation of space travel, Mia thought they knew nothing.
“Ej-es,” the girl agreed, sprinted back to Mia, and took her hand. Slowing her youthful pace to match the older woman’s, she led Mia home.
The houses were scattered, as though they couldn’t make up their mind whether or not to be a village. A hundred yards away, another native walked toward a distant house. The two ignored each other.
Mia couldn’t stand the silence. She said, “I am Mia.”
The girl stopped outside her hut and looked at her.
Mia pointed to her chest. “Mia.”
“Es-ef-eb,” the girl said, pointing to herself and giving that glorious smile.
Not “ej-es,” which must mean something else. Mia pointed to the hut, a primitive affair of untrimmed logs, pieces of foamcast carried from the city, and sheets of faded plastic, all tacked crazily together.
“Ef-ef,” said Esefeb, which evidently meant “home.” This language was going to be a bitch: degraded and confusing.
Esefeb suddenly hopped to one side of the dirt path, laughed, and pointed at blank air. Then she took Mia’s hand and led her inside.
More confusion, more degradation. The single room had an open fire with the simple venting system of a hole in the roof. The bed was high on stilts (why?) with a set of rickety steps made of rotting, untrimmed logs. One corner held a collection of huge pots in which grew greenery; Mia saw three unfired clay pots, one of them sagging sideways so far the soil had spilled onto the packed-dirt floor. Also a beautiful titanium vase and a cracked hydroponic vat. On one plant, almost the size of a small tree, hung a second sheet of plastic sarong, this one an unfaded blue-green. Dishes and tools littered the floor, the same mix as the pots of scavenged items and crude homemade ones. The hut smelled of decaying food and unwashed bedding. There was no light source and no machinery.
Kenin’s voice sounded softly from her wrister. “Your vid is coming through fine. Even the most primitive human societies have some type of artwork.”
Mia didn’t reply. Her attention was riveted to Esefeb. The girl flung herself up the “stairs” and sat up in bed, facing the wall. What Mia had seen before could hardly be called a smile compared to the light, the sheer joy, that illuminated Esefeb’s face now. Esefeb shuddered in ecstasy, crooning to the empty wall.
“Ej-es. Ej-es. Aaahhhh, Ej-es!”
Mia turned away. She was a medician, but Esefeb’s emotion seemed too private to witness. It was the ecstasy of orgasm, or religious transfiguration, or madness.
“Mia,” her wrister said, “I need an image of that girl’s brain.”
It was easy—too easy, Lolimel said later, and he was right. Creatures, sentient or not, did not behave this way.
“We could haul all the neuro equipment out to the village,” Kenin said doubtfully, from base.
“It’s not a village, and I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mia said softly. The softness was unnecessary. Esefeb slept like stone in her high bunk, and the hut was so dark, illuminated only by faint starlight through the hole in the roof, that Mia could barely see her wrister to talk into it. “I think Esefeb might come voluntarily. I’ll try in the morning, when it’s light.”
Kenin, not old but old enough to feel stiff sleeping on the ground, said, “Will you be comfortable there until morning?”
“No, but I’ll manage. What does the computer say about the recs?”
Lolimel answered—evidently they were having a regular all-hands conference. “The language is badly degraded International, you probably guessed that. The translator’s preparing a lexicon and grammar. The artifacts, food supply, dwelling, everything visual, doesn’t add up. They shouldn’t have lost so much in two hundred fifty years, unless mental deficiency was a side effect of having survived the virus. But Kenin thinks —” He stopped abruptly.
“You may speak for me,” Kenin’s voice said, amused. “I think you’ll find that military protocol degrades, too, over time. At least, way out here.”
“Well, I … Kenin thinks it’s possible that what the girl has is a mutated version of the virus. Maybe infectious, maybe inheritable, maybe transmitted through fetal infection.”
His statement dropped into Mia’s darkness, as heavy as Esefeb’s sleep.
Mia said, “So the mutated virus could still be extant and active.”
“Yes,” Kenin said. “We need not only neuro-images but a sample of cerebrospinal fluid. Her behavior suggests —”
“I know what her behavior suggests,” Mia said curtly. That sheer joy, shuddering in ecstasy … It was seizures in the limbic system, the brain’s deep center for primitive emotion, which produced such transcendent, rapturous trances. Religious mystics, Saul on the road to Damascus, visions of Our Lady or of nirvana. And the virus might still be extant, and not a part of the vaccine they had all received. Although if transmission was fetal, the medicians were safe. If not …
Mia said, “The rest of Esefeb’s behavior doesn’t fit with limbic seizures. She seems to see things that aren’t there, even talk to her hallucinations, when she’s not having an actual seizure.”
“I don’t know,” Kenin said. “There might be multiple infection sites in the brain. I need her, Mia.”
“We’ll be there,” Mia said, and wondered if that were going to be true.
But it was, mostly. Mia, after a brief uncomfortable sleep wrapped in the sheet of blue-green plastic, sat waiting for Esefeb to descend her rickety stairs. The girl bounced down, chattering at something to Mia’s right. She smelled worse than yesterday. Mia breathed through her mouth and went firmly up to her.
“Esefeb!” Mia pointed dramatically, feeling like a fool. The girl pointed back.
“Mia.”
“Yes, good.” Now Mia made a sweep of the sorry hut. “Efef.”
“Efef,” Esefeb agreed, smiling radiantly.
“Esefeb efef.”
The girl agreed that this was her home.
Mia pointed theatrically toward the city. “Mia efef! Mia eb Esefeb etej Mia efef!” Mia and Esefeb come to Mia’s home. Mia had already raided the computer’s tentative lexicon of Good Fortunese.
Esefeb cocked her head
and looked quizzical. A worm crawled out of her hair.
Mia repeated, “Mia eb Esefeb etej Mia efef.”
Esefeb responded with a torrent of repetitious syllables, none of which meant anything to Mia except “Ej-es.” The girl spoke the word with such delight that it had to be a name. A lover? Maybe these people didn’t live as solitary as she’d assumed.
Mia took Esefeb’s hand and gently tugged her toward the door. Esefeb broke free and sat in the middle of the room, facing a blank wall of crumbling logs, and jabbered away to nothing at all, occasionally laughing and even reaching out to touch empty air. “Ej-es, Ej-es!” Mia watched, bemused, recording everything, making medical assessments. Esefeb wasn’t malnourished, for which the natural abundance of the planet was undoubtedly responsible. But she was crawling with parasites, filthy (with water easily available), and isolated. Maybe isolated.
“Lolimel,” Mia said softly into the wrister, “what’s the best dictionary guess for ‘alone’?”
Lolimel said, “The closest we’ve got is ‘one.’ There doesn’t seem to be a concept for ‘unaccompanied,’ or at least we haven’t found it yet. The word for ‘one’ is ‘eket.’”
When Esefeb finally sprang up happily, Mia said, “Esefeb eket?”
The girl look startled. “Ek, ek,” she said: no, no. Esefeb ek eket! Esefeb eb Ej-es!”
Esefeb and Ej-es. She was not alone. She had the hallucinatory Ej-es.
Again Mia took Esefeb’s hand and pulled her toward the door. This time Esefeb went with her. As they set off toward the city, the girl’s legs wobbled. Some parasite that had become active overnight in the leg muscles? Whatever the trouble was, Esefeb blithely ignored it as they traveled, much more slowly than yesterday, to Kenin’s makeshift lab in the ruined city. Along the way, Esefeb stopped to watch, laugh at, or talk to three different things that weren’t there.
“She’s beautiful, under all that neglect,” Lolimel said, staring down at the anesthetized girl on Kenin’s neuroimaging slab.
Kenin said mildly, “If the mutated virus is transmitted to a fetus, it could also be transmitted sexually.”
The young man said hotly, “I wasn’t implying —”
Mia said, “Oh, calm down, Lolimel. We’ve all done it, on numerous worlds.”
“Regs say —”
“Regs don’t always matter three hundred light-years from anywhere else,” Kenin said, exchanging an amused glance with Mia. “Mia, let’s start.”
The girl’s limp body slid into the neuro-imager. Esefeb hadn’t objected to meeting the other medicians, to a minimal washing, to the sedative patch Mia had put on her arm. Thirty seconds later she slumped to the floor. By the time she came to, an incision ten cells thick would have been made into her brain and a sample removed. She would have been harvested, imaged, electroscanned, and mapped. She would never know it; there wouldn’t even be a headache.
Three hours later Esefeb sat on the ground with two of the guards, eating soysynth as if it were ambrosia. Mia, Kenin, Lolimel, and the three other medicians sat in a circle twenty yards away, staring at handhelds and analyzing results. It was late afternoon. Long shadows slanted across the gold-green grass, and a small breeze brought the sweet, heavy scent of some native flower. Paradise, Mia thought. And then: Bonnet Syndrome.
She said it aloud, “Charles Bonnet Syndrome,” and five people raised their heads to stare at her, returned to their handhelds, and called up medical deebees.
“I think you’re right,” Kenin said slowly. “I never even heard of it before. Or if I did, I don’t remember.”
“That’s because nobody gets it anymore,” Mia said. “It was usually old people whose eye problems weren’t corrected. Now we routinely correct eye problems.”
Kenin frowned. “But that’s not all that’s going on with Esefeb.”
No, but it was one thing, and why couldn’t Kenin give her credit for thinking of it? The next moment she was ashamed of her petty pique. It was just fatigue, sleeping on that hard cold floor in Esefeb’s home. Esefeb efef. Mia concentrated on Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
Patients with the syndrome, which was discovered in the eighteenth century, had damage somewhere in their optic pathway or brain. It could be lesions, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or even cataracts. Partially blind, people saw and sometimes heard instead things that weren’t there, often with startling clarity and realism. Feedback pathways in the brain were two-way information avenues. Visual data, memory, and imagination constantly flowed to and from each other, interacting so vividly that, for example, even a small child could visualize a cat in the absence of any actual cats. But in Bonnet Syndrome, there was interruption of the baseline visual data about what was and was not real. So all imaginings and hallucinations were just as real as the ground beneath one’s feet.
“Look at the amygdala,” medician Berutha said. “Oh, merciful gods!”
Both of Esefeb’s amygdalae were enlarged and deformed. The amygdalae, two almond-shaped structures behind the ears, specialized in recognizing the emotional significance of events in the external world. They weren’t involved in Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Clearly, they were here.
Kenin said, “I think what’s happening here is a strengthening or alteration of some neural pathways at the extreme expense of others. Esefeb ‘sees’ her hallucinations, and she experiences them as just as ‘real’—maybe more real—than anything else in her world. And the pathways go down to the limbic, where seizures give some of them an intense emotional significance. Like … like orgasm, maybe.”
Ej-es.
“Phantoms in the brain,” Berutha said.
“A viral god,” Lolimel said, surprising Mia. His tone, almost reverential, suddenly irritated her.
“A god responsible for this people’s degradation, Lolimel. They’re so absorbed in their ‘phantoms’ that they don’t concentrate on the most basic care of themselves. Nor on building, farming, art, innovation … nothing. They’re prisoners of their pretty fantasies.”
Lolimel nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I see that.”
Berutha said to Kenin, “We need to find the secondary virus. Because if it is infectious through any other vector besides fetal or sexual …” He didn’t finish the thought.
“I know,” Kenin said, “but it isn’t going to be easy. We don’t have cadavers for the secondary. The analyzer is still working on the cerebral-spinal fluid. Meanwhile —” She began organizing assignments, efficient and clear. Mia stopped listening.
Esefeb had finished her meal and walked up to the circle of scientists. She tugged at Mia’s tunic. “Mia … Esefeb etej efef.” Esefeb come home.
“Mia eb Esefeb etej Esefeb efef,” Mia said, and the girl gave her joyous smile.
“Mia —” Kenin said.
“I’m going with her, Kenin. We need more behavioral data. And maybe I can persuade another native or two to submit to examination,” Mia argued, feebly. She knew that scientific information was not really her motive. She wasn’t sure, however, what was. She just wanted to go with Esefeb.
“Why did you first enter the Corps?” Lolimel’s question stuck in Mia’s mind, a rhetorical fishbone in the throat, over the next few days. Mia had brought her medkit, and she administered broad-spectrum microbials to Esefeb, hoping something would hit. The parasites were trickier, needing life-cycle analysis or at least some structural knowledge, but she made a start on that, too. I entered the Corps to relieve suffering, Lolimel. Odd how naive the truest statements could sound. But that didn’t make them any less true.
Esefeb went along with all Mia’s pokings, patches, and procedures. She also carried out minimal food-gathering activities, with a haphazard disregard for safety or sanitation that appalled Mia. Mia had carried her own food from the ship. Esefeb ate it just as happily as her own.
But mostly Esefeb talked to Ej-es.
It made Mia feel like a voyeur. Esefeb was so unselfconscious—did she even know she had a “self” apart from Ej-es? Sh
e spoke to, laughed at (with?), played beside, and slept with her phantom in the brain, and around her the hut disintegrated even more. Esefeb got diarrhea from something in her water and then the place smelled even more foul. Grimly, Mia cleaned it up. Esefeb didn’t seem to notice. Mia was eket. Alone in her futile endeavors at sanitation, at health, at civilization.
“Esefeb eb Mia etej efef —” How did you say “neighbors?” Mia consulted the computer’s lexicon, steadily growing as the translator program deciphered words from context. It had discovered no word for “neighbor.” Nor for “friend” nor “mate” nor any kinship relationships at all except “baby.”
Mia was reduced to pointing at the nearest hut. “Esefeb eb Mia etej efef” over there.
The neighboring hut had a baby. Both hut and child, a toddler who lay listlessly in one corner, were just as filthy and diseased as Esefeb’s house. At first the older woman didn’t seem to recognize Esefeb, but when Esefeb said her name, the two women spoke animatedly. The neighbor smiled at Mia. Mia reached for the child, was not prevented from picking him up, and settled the baby on her lap. Discreetly, she examined him.
Sudden rage boiled through her, as unexpected as it was frightening. This child was dying. Of parasites, of infection, of something. A preventable something? Maybe yes, maybe no. The child didn’t look neglected, but neither did the mother look concerned.
All at once, the child in her arms stiffened, shuddered, and began to babble. His listlessness vanished. His little dirty face lit up like sunrise and he laughed and reached out his arms toward something not there. His mother and Esefeb turned to watch, also smiling, as the toddler had an unknowable limbic seizure in his dying, ecstatic brain.
Mia set him down on the floor. She called up the dictionary, but before she could say anything, the mother, too, had a seizure and sat on the dirt floor, shuddering with joy. Esefeb watched her a moment before chattering to something Mia couldn’t see.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 25
