After Earth

by Peter David

  “So what we were talking about was going against nature. That’s something we don’t do around here when we can help it. But the Ursa are taking a terrible toll, Jon. We have to try any approach that has a reasonable chance of success. And we thought if we took away your fear—”

  “I could be a Ghost.”

  “Yes. And if it worked in your case, it might work in others.”

  Jon thinks about that. “Did it work?”

  “What do you think?”

  He examines his mental state. “I don’t feel any fear. However, I don’t think there’s anything in this room I’d be scared of. Is there?”

  “Nothing,” the doctor agrees.

  “Then am I undetectable to the Ursa?”

  She shrugs. “There’s really only one way to find out. But first you’ve got to recuperate from your surgery.” She starts to leave—to go on to her next patient, Jon imagines.

  “Will you continue to visit?” he asks.

  Doctor Gold stops long enough to say, “As long as you need me.”

  Soon Jon receives a visit from another doctor: the one who performed his surgery. Doctor Nizamani is a small man with a big head and a dark beard flecked with gray. One small spot on the left side of his chin. Doctor Nizamani’s mouth, like Doctor Gold’s, pulls up at the corners. And like Doctor Gold, he asks Jon what he remembers. When Jon responds, Doctor Nizamani makes notes on a personal access tablet.

  “Are you experiencing headaches? Other discomfort?”

  “No,” Jon says.

  “Good.” Doctor Nizamani studies the computer data on the hologram beside Jon’s bed, calling up one screen after the other. Finally, he says, “I want you to walk up and down the hall, get some exercise. Your nurse, Marcus, will accompany you. How’s that sound?”

  “Sound?” Jon says. He’s not sure what the doctor is asking. “You mean …?”

  Doctor Nizamani pats Jon on the shoulder. “Never mind. Just walk.”

  Then the doctor leaves. The nurse with the dark hair approaches Jon.

  “Ready to take a walk?” he asks.

  Jon says he’s ready. With the nurse’s help, he gets out of bed. His legs are weak, and they shake a little.

  But he walks.

  Jon and Marcus negotiate the length of the hall four times. Then Marcus helps Jon back into his bed.

  “Nice job,” Marcus says, extending his hand.

  Jon looks at it, wondering what Marcus expects of him. After a while, Marcus takes his hand back. “That’s okay,” he says.

  Jon has no idea what Marcus is talking about.

  The next morning, Jon and Marcus walk again. Afterward, the nurse tells Jon he can take his meal in the cafeteria instead of in bed.

  The cafeteria contains eight rectangular metal tables. It’s empty except for a couple of other patients sitting at the table nearest the window.

  One of them is a tall fair-haired man who is missing an arm. The other is a woman with dark skin and a long black braid. The right side of her face, including one of her eyes, is covered with a bandage.

  They’re eating food from blue ceramic trays. Jon sees perhaps fifty such trays stacked by a wall alongside a buffet counter offering perhaps twenty choices of casserole, sandwich, salad, and soup.

  Marcus says he’ll be right back. “Enjoy yourself.”

  Jon considers the nurse’s choice of words. Enjoy? He scans the buffet. Nothing appeals to him. But he knows he has to eat.

  “Hey,” says the fair-haired man, his voice echoing a little as he addresses Jon across the room, “I felt the same way the first time. At least it’s hot.”

  Felt? “I don’t—”

  “It’s all right,” says the woman with the dark braid. “After you’re here a while, you get a little crazy. Grab some food and sit down.”

  She pats the bench beside her. Jon doesn’t know why.

  Following her instructions, he gets a tray and places some food on it, then goes to a table and sits down.

  But before he can lift a forkful of casserole to his mouth, the fair-haired man says, “If you want your privacy, we’re fine with that. But we’d prefer it if you’d join us.”

  “Come on,” the woman says. “We won’t bite.”

  Jon doesn’t understand the reason for the comment. He hadn’t expected her to bite.

  “Or,” said the man, “we can join you.”

  Jon doesn’t object. A moment later, the man and the woman bring their trays over and sit down.

  “Arvo,” the man says. “Arvo Lankinen. Good to meet you.”

  “Yada Srasati,” says the woman. She looks at Jon for a moment. “How do you feel?”

  “The cotton’s gone,” Jon replies.

  “The cotton?” Her skin bunches up over the bridge of her nose the same way Doctor Gold’s did.

  “You mean your head is clear?” Arvo asks.

  Jon turns to him. “Yes.” He sees his companions exchange glances and doesn’t know why.

  “It’s all right,” Yada says. “You’ve been through a lot. It’s going to take time before you’re back on your game.”

  “I suppose so,” Jon says.

  As they continue to converse, he learns that Arvo and Yada are Rangers. Their injuries are the result of Ursa encounters.

  “Listen,” Arvo says. “I want to tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing. You’re making a sacrifice, I know.”

  “But if it works,” Yada adds, “we may be able to get rid of the Ursa once and for all. And if that happens, there’ll be less misery in the world.” She touches her bandage in the vicinity of her eye. “A whole lot less.”

  Misery, Jon thinks. He doesn’t know what to say to that, either.

  Over the next couple of days, Doctor Nizamani is the only physician who comes to visit. Jon wonders where Doctor Gold is. One morning, after Doctor Nizamani checks Jon’s data screens, he says, “I’m clearing you for light exercise. You know where the gym is, right?”

  “Yes,” Jon says.

  “You can use any of the machines with the green signs. The yellows and the reds, you’ll work your way up to. Got it?”

  “Yes,” Jon says. “Can I go now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The gym is down the hall, on the right. Jon knows because he has passed it on his walks.

  When he enters the place, he sees Yada there. She’s running on a treadmill, her braid flopping up and down.

  Jon’s been eating with her and Arvo whenever he sees them in the cafeteria. To an outsider, it may look as if they were friends. To Jon, they were just three people sharing the same table until their meal had been consumed. Sometimes there are one or two other patients there as well.

  Sometimes there’s no one and Jon eats alone.

  There’s a female attendant who directs him to an apparatus with a green sign even before he asks, and so he gathers that she already has received instructions from Doctor Nizamani.

  When Yada realizes that Jon is in the room, she stops exercising, picks up a towel, and walks over to him. “Jon,” she says, dabbing at the exposed portion of her face, “I missed you this morning at breakfast. Arvo’s been discharged, you know.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” he says.

  “Don’t worry; he’ll be back to visit. I made him promise that.”

  Jon doesn’t understand why he would be inclined to worry, or why Yada would ask such a thing of Arvo, or why Arvo would agree to it. But then, he’s finding there are lots of things he doesn’t understand.

  As he and Yada speak, a couple of other patients enter the gym. One, a fellow with a shaven head and thickly muscled arms, is ensconced in a mag-lev chair. Another, who moves stiffly, is bandaged around his middle.

  They’re new to the medicenter, they say, but they know about Jon’s procedure. Like Yada, Arvo, and the other injured Rangers on the ward, they thank Jon for his sacrifice. They express the hope that his courage will help them wipe out the Ursa.

  “Bet you can�
�t wait to get out there,” the man in the mag-lev chair says.

  Jon doesn’t know why he would be unable to wait. Anyway, he has no choice in the matter. “My doctors won’t allow me to leave the medicenter until I’m ready.”

  The man in the mag-lev chair looks at him for a moment. Then his mouth turns up at the corners, and he says, “Damned doctors!”

  The others open their mouths and make a sound Jon doesn’t recognize. Or rather, he recognizes it but can’t put a name to it. It sounds like ha-ha-ha-ha.

  Yada seems to notice his lack of comprehension. She makes eye contact with the others. Soon they stop making the sound.

  “Jon’s probably got a routine he needs to start,” she says. “Let’s let him get to it.”

  “Sure,” says the man in the mag-lev chair. “Can’t hunt Ursa till you’re back in shape, right?”

  Jon assumes that the man is right.

  Jon’s starting to doze off on his bed, fatigued from his workout in the gym, when Doctor Gold enters his room.

  “Hey there,” she says.

  Jon sits up. “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

  “You can’t get rid of me that easily.” She checks the data on the hologram beside his bed. “Did you see Doctor Nizamani today?”

  “This morning. He cleared me to work out.”

  “Excellent.” She continues to check his data. “That means you’re making progress.”

  “I have a question.”

  Doctor Gold turns to him. “What’s that, Jon?”

  He tells her about Yada’s request for information the other day in the cafeteria: “How do you feel?”

  “I didn’t know how to answer her,” he says. “I still don’t. Then, just a little while ago, in the gym, someone said something and everyone made a sound. I didn’t know what to make of that, either.”

  Doctor Gold tilts her head to the side. “What was it that person said?”

  Jon did his best to replicate the remark: “Damn doctors!”

  She looks at him for a moment. “Was the sound anything like this?” She re-creates it almost perfectly.

  “Yes.”

  Her mouth pulls up at the corners. “It’s laughter, Jon. The people in the gym were laughing.”

  “Laughing.” He points to her mouth. “And what’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “What you’re doing with your mouth.” He uses his thumb and forefinger to push her mouth up at the corners. “This. I see it all the time.”

  Doctor Gold’s brows come together over her nose. She puts her hand over his and removes his fingers from her face. Slowly.

  “I was afraid this might happen,” she says. “We took every precaution, ran as many tests as we could on primates as well as on people. But in the final analysis, we’ve never done this kind of surgery on a human being.”

  “You thought what might happen?” Jon asks.

  “It’s not just fear that originates in the amygdalae, Jon. Other emotions are connected to those parts of the brain as well.”

  He tries to follow her logic. “Are you saying I’m no longer in touch with my emotions?”

  “I’m saying it’s possible. And even if you have lost touch, it may only be a temporary situation. Despite the way it looks to Doctor Nizamani, your brain may not have healed completely.”

  “What if it has?”

  Doctor Gold doesn’t answer right away. “Then—and I know this sounds disappointing—the situation may be permanent.”

  Jon considers the possibility. He doesn’t feel disappointment.

  He doesn’t feel anything at all.

  That evening, Doctor Nizamani, too, makes the observation that Jon has been distanced from his emotions.

  “This is a challenge,” he says, “not only because you’re incapable of feeling but because you’re incapable of perceiving emotions in others. If you’re going to work with other Rangers, you’ll have to have some idea of what they’re feeling.”

  “How can I do that?” Jon asks.

  “Emotions are most often conveyed through facial expressions. I’ll arrange for an automated tutorial on the subject. It’ll be part of your daily regimen.”

  Jon agrees to participate in the tutorial. He wonders what he will learn.

  It’s an unusually warm morning in the desert. Jon has been given permission by Doctor Nizamani to sit outside in the medicenter’s courtyard, a place with ocher-colored ceramic pots full of colorful desert flowers. He’s watching the second sun top the horizon when he receives a visitor.

  It’s neither one of his doctors nor one of his nurses nor even one of the injured Rangers on his ward. This visitor has a round face and curly red hair. She wears a dark blue robe clasped at the throat. She asks: “Do you know who I am, Jon?”

  “Yes,” he says. “You’re the Primus.” He has seen her many times before on his computer screen but never in person. “Your breath smells like cinnamon,” he observes.

  “How … kind of you to say so,” says the Primus. “Would you mind if I spoke with you for a little while?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind.”

  Her mouth turns up at the corners, but he knows what that means now. The Primus is smiling.

  In the brief time Jon has spent with Doctor Nizamani’s tutorial, he has learned to recognize a half dozen facial expressions. The smile is one of them.

  “Now,” the Primus continues, “you’re probably thinking I’ve come to talk to you about your decision to undergo brain surgery. Heaven knows I made my position on that subject known to the Prime Commander when it was first contemplated. In fact, I spoke to him about it every day—both him and the Savant.”

  Jon doesn’t know what to say to that.

  “As you can imagine,” says the Primus, her expression hardening, “I was against it.”

  Jon doesn’t imagine anything these days. He only observes and reacts.

  “But what’s done is done,” the Primus says. “The only thing we have to talk about now is what effect the surgery has had on you.”

  “I have discussed the effects with my doctors,” Jon says.

  “I have no doubt of it. But their concern, and the Prime Commander’s, is how useful you can be as a weapon. My concern is your humanity.”

  “I’m still human,” he says. “It’s just that I’ve been altered.”

  “You have been altered; on that we may agree. But …” She shakes her head. “You see, Jon, we’re all born with souls—you, me, and everyone else. But your surgery, for which you volunteered, seems to have cut you off from the part of you that feels.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “It was exactly what I feared.” She leans forward. “Feeling is what makes us who we are, Jon. Do you believe that?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Well, it’s true. Without compassion, without love, we’re no different from the animals. Or, for that matter, from the machines with which we surround ourselves.”

  Jon isn’t an animal or a machine. He wonders why the Primus would imply otherwise.

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve ventured into new territory, child. Technology constantly conspires to strip us of the qualities that make us human beings. This challenge is only the latest in a long history of such challenges.”

  “But I am a human being,” Jon insists.

  “Not in the way that matters most,” the Primus says. “So why am I here? What’s the point if you’re no longer one of God’s chosen creatures? The point, Jon, is that you can still be redeemed. You can still pray to heaven—and I mean pray—to be remade in the image God intended for you. And if you want to do that, I can help.”

  Jon isn’t inclined to be remade in such an image, not even enough to inquire about the effort involved. “That won’t be necessary.”

  The Primus sits back in her chair. A tear grows gradually in the inside corner of her left eye and tumbles down her cheek.

  “Very well,” she says, her
voice trembling slightly, “you may say that now. But there may come a time when you understand what you’ve done, a time when you fear for your soul. And when—”

  “I’m beyond fear,” Jon says.

  The Primus looks at him for what seems like a long time, her eyes wet and shiny. Then, without another word, she gets up and leaves him sitting there.

  As alone as he was when she appeared.

  Jon graduates to the machines with the yellow signs in the gym. Yada says she’s proud of him. She also says she’ll be leaving the hospital soon.

  “I can’t go out in the field anymore,” she tells him, “but I can still make a contribution. I’ll be working with the Prime Commander’s office to educate the public about Ursa attacks.”

  She smiles with the half of her face he can see. “I expect to hear good things about you.”

  Jon looks at her until she looks away. To do otherwise, he has been told, is rude. Then he begins exercising on the yellow machines.

  They turn out to be more demanding than the machines he’s been using. When he finishes, he’s more fatigued. However, he knows exercise is necessary if he’s to get out of the medicenter and do what’s expected of him.

  That night, Jon has a dream.

  There are two people in it. They look familiar, but try as he might, he can’t seem to identify them.

  When he wakes, he can still see them. One is a male, perhaps fifty years old, with a long face, dark eyebrows, and a thick shock of silver-gray hair. The other is a female. She, too, is about fifty years old, but her hair is light brown with only a few streaks of gray.

  When Doctor Gold comes to see him, he describes the dream to her. She doesn’t comment right away. She instead brings up a picture on her data tablet and asks, “Are these the people?”

  They are. “Who are they?”

  “They’re your parents, Jon. Adabelle and Gregory Blackburn.”

  He looks more closely. He has seen himself in a mirror. He looks for evidence of heredity in the picture—and finds it.

  “You have your mother’s eyes,” says Doctor Gold as if she can read his mind.