“Dora, could I please ask you to tell me or J, or anyone else you feel comfortable with, if you’re going somewhere? It’s not at all that we don’t think you could do it, but… there are so many new and different things for you here that you’re not aware of yet. And also some dangers, like drowning.”
She lifted her arm as if about to touch my shoulder, then dropped it down again, remembering the IP space.
“Just for a little while longer until you get used to everything here, okay?” she continued.
“Yes, Tania. I am in agreement with you.”
“Stevanion is in the same condition as yesterday,” she said after a few moments.
I nodded. That was good. My Vision had shown Stevanion getting sick. Perhaps what it didn’t show me was Stevanion getting better again.
And if that was the case, that would mean that… that I wouldn’t need to take Stevanion back to Uni. I could stay here, on Earth, hidden from the Zlathars.
And stay where J is.
I would like that.
I would very much like that.
Tania and I walked in silence for several passes while I juggled my thoughts. I wanted to know more about J, but I was afraid to ask so bluntly. So I asked another question that I’d had on my mind ever since I met Old Earth Humans.
“Tania?”
“Yes?”
“I have an inquiry about a certain aspect of your previous lives.”
“Inquiry…?” She looked at me, her eyebrows raised. Something in her expression told me there might have been a better way to ask the question.
“I was wondering about cryo-preservation.”
“Yes?”
“Why did the people do it? Why did you do it?”
Her face saddened. “I guess it’s an obvious question to ask…Well, people had very different reasons to go into hibernation. Some of them were simply curious to see how the world would look in one hundred years. Some were hoping for a cure for an illness. Some tried to escape from a tragedy they experienced in their life.”
She smiled emptily with sad thoughts crossing her face. “I was one of those.”
After a few moments of silence, she continued, “My husband died.”
“Your husband? I thought Peter is your husband.”
“Yes, you’re right. Peter is my husband. Well, second husband. Before cryo, I was married to Harry. He was a scientist—a molecular biologist. He worked on… I’m not even sure, some kind of neural-computing… something like that. His lab was at the University of Neurotechnology and Innovation.”
Her gaze was absent, as if she was seeing something far away. “At any rate, there was an accident, an explosion in the laboratory, and… the whole team died.” She shook her head slowly, deep in her thoughts.
She was silent for a few passes. I let her take her time, avoiding her eyes, waiting until she was ready to continue again.
“His project,” she said at last, “was apparently cutting edge, new frontier and all that. No one else ever managed to reach the level they had.”
There was an instant blank veil around my mind, and I realized I was about to see a Vision in real time. Then, abruptly, it stopped.
Nothing else came.
Suddenly, I realized what I needed to ask. “Do you know the status of the project at the time of the accident?”
She was a bit surprised by my interrogating tone but answered nevertheless. “I’m not really sure… he wasn’t supposed to talk about it at all. It was top secret. He did say, though, that they managed to include parts of the neural chips in a real computer, but… officially I wasn’t supposed to know that either.”
All of a sudden, a dim light blurred my sight, like a fog blinding me from the images of reality, and the Vision scene appeared in front of me in full force.
A large room.
Eight matte-glass desks arranged in two rows.
Above each desk, shelves full of glass bottles, reagents, and kits.
Two walls with old-looking automation systems, blue light below the machines indicating they were operational.
The next moment, the explosion starts in slow motion.
Volatile fire bubbles, bursting in several places in the room at the same time, then expanding with enormous speed to the rest of the room, breaking windows, walls, floors, ceiling…
The Vision was gone. I was kneeling on the ground, my gaze empty.
Did I just see the past?
“Dora, are you all right?” Tania was now crouching next to me, touching my shoulder.
“Yes, Tania. I am all right. I am sorry, I was… sidetracked,” I said, looking at her, the powerful image of the exploding laboratory dominating all my thoughts.
The one where her husband had worked.
The one that had been empty at the time of the explosion.
I needed more information. This Vision raised too many questions to be left unanswered.
I stood up and moved one IP away from her.
“What happened after that?” I said, my classical Senthien tone back.
“You make me feel like I am at a trial.” She smiled, then stood up and continued walking.
“A trial of what?” I followed her.
“Never mind, Dora, I will explain it to you later,” she said. Then she paused for a moment to gather her thoughts.
“My children and I were devastated. None of us had a grip on reality anymore. That was probably my fault.” She looked away. “If I’d been stronger, my kids would have managed better.
“At any rate, we decided to cryo-preserve, hoping time would heal the wounds… Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.”
And again, she had that sad smile on her face.
“Being frozen for more than five thousand years turned out to be just a blink of an eye. When we de-froze, I was still suffering the same way as before the sleep.”
She took a few moments before she continued.
“I think, however, that the shock of finding out what had happened to us forced me to recover faster. There were so many other things to worry and think about, I finally managed to stand on my feet again.
“And then, a few months ago, we started getting Jumpers. Humans. From Uni,” she continued. “You would not believe what a blow it was to find out what had happened to the Earth. About the News, the Evacuation, and the solar storms.” She raised her eyebrows, shaking her head as she looked at the ground. “And—about Descendants. And what they did to humanity.”
“I am sorry for that, Tania,” I said and lowered my gaze.
“It seems to be in the fabric of our beings, doesn’t it? People have always found someone to abuse, someone to discriminate against. It was probably inevitable. The only question was who would get which end.”
The black hooded figure of the High Zlathar Priest appeared in my mind. It wasn’t a Vision. It was a very tangible fear of what he would do if he knew there were original Humans on Old Earth.
But the electromagnetic and radio silence of this world made it invisible to the universe.
After a few passes we reached the pool. She stopped a few IPs away from the water’s edge and handed me the towel. “I’ll stay here. Don’t do any diving like yesterday—nothing interesting to see down there.”
“Diving?” A new word needed explanation.
“Sightseeing under the water…?” Tania raised her eyebrows and smiled.
“No… I will omit it. This time,” I said.
She laughed sweetly. “Good, you are learning! There’s some Human in you after all.”
I was going back to my cottage, careful not to miss the turns I took on the way there.
On one bridge, a few people were walking my way. They moved to one side, still deep in their conversation. I squeezed my fists, clenched my jaws, and braced myself as several people brushed past my arm.
“You are the Senthien?” I heard a female voice right next to me. I opened my eyes and looked at the last woman in the group.
She was way to
o close. I stepped backward until I had one clear IP between us.
Then I started breathing again.
Now that I had some space, I could focus better on them. They were all Jumpers, and they looked familiar. And then I recognized the person who was talking to me: I had seen her at the Boolean Institute. She was the Human woman I’d seen in the corridor, the first one in line.
“I saw you a few days ago,” she said, obviously thinking the same.
“Yes.” I nodded. “I remember you. What were you doing there? Zamnan Second told me that they did not have any Humans in their institute.”
She smiled a thin smile. “I guess he lied.”
The rest of the group quietly laughed, and I realized that all of these women must have been at the Boolean Institute too, though I never clearly saw the others.
“Why are you here?” said a person to the left of the woman I talked to.
“I had been on my port to the Zlathar planet, and there was an error in the porting coordinates. I got ported here.”
“All porters that came here were Humans, Senthien,” said the person on the right. “You don’t belong here.”
“The Mind made an error in the porting procedure. I had not planned to come here,” I said in a very calm and neutral Senthien voice.
“Go back to where you belong!” said a woman in the back, and the others echoed their agreement. “This is our world.”
I looked at this group of women and for the first time understood how the malice the Descendants felt for Uni Humans had affected them. I wanted to respond, but I was distracted by footsteps approaching from behind.
I turned and saw J walking toward us. My heart skipped a beat, but my expression remained aloof. He stopped between me and the women, making sure he was one IP away.
“Is there a problem?” He raised his eyebrows.
“No, there is no problem, J,” said the woman in front. Then she looked at me and said, “We were just saying that Earth is for Humans.”
“And not Descendants!” called out the woman in the back.
“Well, Andrea, Julie”—he nodded toward them as he said their names—“the Old Earth Humans welcome everybody who ports to Earth and brings no harm. That includes Descendants. And the new Humans had better remember that.”
While still looking at the women, he said, “Dora, there is something I would like to discuss with you.” He then turned toward me. “Would you please walk with me?”
I nodded.
He walked past them, and I quickly followed. We crossed two bridges before he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes, J, I am fine. What would you like to discuss with me?”
He stopped for a moment to look at me and then grinned. “That was just an excuse to get you out.”
“Get me out?”
“From the ladies with the pitchforks.”
I frowned, not understanding at all what he was talking about.
“So, what’s this issue about, anyway?” he said.
“Humans are treated badly in Uni. This is simply their response to Descendants in general.”
He shook his head slightly. “That’s a very mature way to look at it. I think their attitude, although justified, would get me pissed.”
“Would get you what?”
“Pissed,” he said and continued walking.
“I do not understand.”
“Uh, the word? It means upset, angry. Aren’t you angry?”
“For what?”
“For how they talked to you.”
“It is they who should be angry. Zlathars pushed Humans down to the bottom of the hierarchy of the Uni society. I would react the same way if I were them.”
J stopped again, looking at me and narrowing his eyes. “I don’t get it.”
“Shall I explain it again?”
“No, I mean: if you have such a noble way of looking at it, how come Humans are put in such a bad position in the first place? Aren’t all the Descendants like you?”
I held my breath, staring at him for a few moments. Relax, Dora. It’s the most logical question. Answer in the most logical way. “No, there are several different species of Descendants.”
I moved on, hoping he wouldn’t press the subject.
“But,” he said, catching up with me, “they don’t all think like you, do they?”
My eyes were glued to the floor patterns of the wooden bridge. “Descendant species were developed by targeted genetic manipulation and are, therefore, very different in their physical and mental states.”
He stopped in the middle of the bridge. I stopped as well and turned around to look at him.
“You are not answering my question,” he said, crossing his arms. “Okay, so which ones are the rulers?”
“There are no rulers. It is a homogenous society.”
J laughed out loud. “No. Not if Humans are treated the way they are, it’s not. So, who holds the strings?”
Strings?
“Who tells everyone else what to think?”
I understood now what he meant, and amazingly enough, he was more right then he could have imagined.
“Zlathars.”
“Zlathars. Okay. So, how come they didn’t tell you what to think?”
I took a deep breath. Time to leave.
“This discussion is not of interest to me,” I said with my best Senthien intonation. ”I would like to retreat to my living quarters.”
He opened his eyes wide, and for a few moments, he was just looking at me. Then his face changed into an expression I could not decipher.
He shrugged and said, “Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”
And he left in the direction we’d come from. The bridge shook from his heavy steps until he reached the other side.
He walked over several other bridges and then he was gone. I bowed my head low. I went back to my hut and sat on a wooden chair, my gaze empty on the floor.
Why did I say that?
I actually didn’t want to retreat to my living quarters. And I didn’t want him to leave, either. I wanted to be near him, I wanted to look at him, I wanted to talk to him. But instead—I pushed him away.
No. No, this can’t be. I’m doing things the wrong way. I need to go back. I need to find him.
Just as I was about to stand up, I heard footsteps over the wooden bridge leading to my hut.
“Dora!” It was Tania’s voice. “Dora,” she said again as she opened the leaf curtain. “It’s Stevanion. He’s not doing well. I think you should see him.”
Stevanion. Oh, no!
I got up swiftly and followed Tania until we reached the infirmary.
Tania moved the curtain away. I walked in, but then stopped. I stared at Stevanion in the bed. His face was white, unmoving, his eyes closed. Drops of sweat were shining on his forehead.
I have seen this.
The next moment, he coughed a heavy, throaty cough as his face grimaced in pain. I walked quickly to him, supporting his shoulders until his coughing frenzy ceased, and then helped him gently lay back on the bed. He resumed his corpselike posture, not moving, barely breathing.
“What is wrong with him?” I asked, though I knew the answer, but voicing it as a memory about to happen.
“I’m sorry, Dora. I don’t know. It seems he has a flu. Just a regular flu. It normally lasts for a few days only, but it’s as if his body doesn’t have the means to fight it.”
I closed my eyes with sorrow, defeat, and guilt.
Sorrow, because he was my only link to the world I had known all my life.
Defeat, because I had seen it. I knew what was going to happen.
Guilt, because he had accompanied me on my port in the first place. If he hadn’t, he would never have come to Earth. And he would still be healthy.
“Dora, how do you feel? Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“I mean… do you feel healthy?”
“Yes, my health is optimal, Tania. I thank you.” My eyes were still closed.
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“I am afraid for you, Dora. This is a classic Human disease, and it’s usually not life-threatening. But for him—and for you—it could be. Here, could you please drink this? It’s a specific herbal tea that might prevent you getting ill.”
I opened my eyes as she handed me a cup of warm green liquid.
“There is no need, Tania, I feel perfectly healthy.” My voice was strong, but inside I felt weak and uncertain.
She lowered the cup to her lap and looked at Stevanion.
“If he has any Human immunity left in him, he might survive.”
And if he doesn’t?
I looked back at Stevanion.
Then—then he will die.
I dropped my gaze to the floor.
What am I to feel for a dying person from a highly advanced world where disease doesn’t exist anymore?
“It’s difficult…” she said, as if she knew my thoughts.
“Yes.”
I stood up and walked slowly to the door. Then I turned back. “I need to… I have to… go. I need to think.”
“That’s all right, Dora. I understand. I’ll watch over him, you can go. But please, stay near the village, okay?”
“Near the village. Yes…” I said distractedly, and left.
Chapter 10
I walked across a few bridges, not really caring where I was going. I passed some people, but at this time of the day most were on the ground, working in the fields, so my time on the tree bridges was solitary. And that’s exactly what I needed. I spent more than a hundred passes walking around the village, thinking of the last few days.
What had happened? How did we port here? Was this really a mistake? Would the Mind really make a mistake? Or was it sabotage?
By who?
Certainly not by Uni Humans. I would have seen it. My Visions would have shown me something so drastic, I was sure of it.
My gaze was unfocused and empty on the bridge planks, but my thoughts were crowded.
The Mind.
Zlathars.
Visions.
Disease.
Death.
Death? Will Stevanion die?
I didn’t know how to deal with death. Not many in Uni did. We were not used to it.
The Senthien (Descendants of Earth Book 1) Page 10
