She looks at him for a moment. “Was the sound anything like this?” She recreates 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. “Your name is Polk. 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.
“I seem to,” he agrees.
“And your father’s chin.” She points to it. “You see the cleft?”
“Yes.” My parents. He looks to the doctor. “Is it possible for me to see them?”
As on other occasions, her eyebrows, which are very fair, come together in a bunch of skin. He knows now that this is an expression of consternation.
“I’m afraid it’s not, Jon. They’re dead. They were killed in an Ursa attack six months ago.”
He turns back to the data tablet. “Dead,” he echoes.
“Yes. In fact, it was their deaths that spurred you to volunteer for the surgery. You said it was the only way you could make their deaths count for something.”
Jon continues to study the image on the tablet. He doesn’t feel any anger now. But something—curiosity, perhaps—draws him to the people in the picture.
“I’m sorry,” Doctor Gold says.
Jon recognizes the expression as one of sympathy. “Your condolences are acknowledged,” he tells her.
Days pass, an alternation of light and shadow punctuated by visits from Doctor Nizamani, Doctor Gold, and occasionally other doctors as well.
Yada leaves, as she said she would. The damaged Rangers in the medicenter smile when they see him but seldom speak to him. He can hear them whisper things: “It’s Blackburn.” “Better cut out the jokes.” “Don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
In the gym, Jon’s promoted to the red machines. He finds them a challenge, just as he found the green machines and the yellow machines a challenge at first. But he’s getting stronger. He can see that. He believes his doctors see it, too.
Pretty soon he’ll be fit for duty.
Jon has another dream.
He’s standing in the desert, watching Explorer I lift off from an airfield outside Nova City, its destination a world in another star system. Jon is eight, nine, perhaps ten years old. His father’s hand rests on his shoulder.
“I wish my grandfather was alive to see this,” says Gregory Blackburn. “If not for him, none of this would have happened.”
Explorer I glints in the light of the first sun as it rises into the flawless blue of the sky. Higher and higher it climbs. Then it’s gone.
Jon’s father’s parents, Grandpa Masters and Grandma Sheila, are making whooping noises. Jon’s parents are embracing.
They are smiling, all of them. He knows now what that means. They’re happy.
When Jon wakes up, he finds himself looking at the ceiling of his room in the medicenter instead of the sky. The airfield, his parents, his grandparents … they’re gone.
But it wasn’t just a dream, he realizes. It really happened. He had forgotten, but now he remembers.
It happened.
He wonders about his father’s grandfather. Did I ever meet him? Did I know anything about him before my procedure?
He gets dressed and goes to the medicenter’s library, where he sits at a workstation near the transparent wall along the corridor and looks up his family’s genealogy.
Jon finds that his paternal great-grandfather, Elliot Blackburn, was born in 883 AE. As an adult, he became the spokesman for a group of engineers that made presentations to the Tripartite Council advocating the official exploration of neighboring star systems. After all, they said, the Ursa had been the cause of misery for hundreds of years. It made sense to settle a planet that would provide an alternative for those sick of the bloodshed.
Elliot Blackburn died without making much headway on behalf of his cause. However, his oldest son, Masters, picked up where his father left off. When Savant Ella Dorsey broached the idea of a space colonization program in 951, it was at the urging of Masters Blackburn.
Dorsey’s idea was opposed by both the Primus on religious grounds and the Prime Commander for reasons never publicly stated. However, Jon’s grandfather continued to speak in support of colonization to professional organizations and civic groups.
Finally, in 960, Brom Raige—who had become Prime Commander only a year earlier—tilted the Tripartite Council in favor of a space program.
Tähtiin Industries, which had been working privately with the Savant, possessed plans for an interstellar vessel. With the Council’s support, Tähtiin began developing what it called Explorer I.
Jon’s father, Gregory, had Explorer I in mind when he entered the terraforming program at Nova City University’s Thermopoulos School of Engineering. His dream, he said in his valedictory address, was to prepare a home for humankind free of the fear that had plagued Nova Prime for hundreds of years.
Jon’s mother shared this dream, though she took a different route to it. Inspired by her mother, a Ranger flier in the Varuna Squadron, Adabelle Bonnaire became one of the youngest pilots in the history of the Corps. Her goal, according to her Ranger file, was to helm an interstellar vessel to the first new human colony in almost a thousand years.
Jon’s parents met at a conference sponsored by Tähtiin Industries in 968. Gregory Blackburn was twenty-five at the time, a year older than his wife to be. They married a year later.
They didn’t realize their dreams, Jon notes. His mother didn’t helm Explorer I. His father’s terraforming program wasn’t needed. Yet on that airfield, they were happy that humankind was following the course in which they believed.
Jon has never aimed for the stars. His goal as a Ranger has been to destroy the threat represented by the Ursa on Nova Prime.
However, he has something in common with his forebears: He began by wanting humankind to be safe from fear.
Later that morning, Jon sees Doctor Gold. She smiles at him and asks, “How are you feeling?”
He isn’t sure how to answer that. He reminds her of his deficit in the area of emotion.
The doctor reddens. “Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s all right,” he says, having learned that a blush represents embarrassment. “This is a new experience for you as much as it is for me.”
She smiles again. “Thanks for understanding. And allow me to rephrase the question: Have you noticed any changes in your mental state?”
He assesses himself along those lines. “I’ve been thinking a lot, more than I ever did before. About my family, for instance.” He tells her about his dream of the airfield and what he did afterward. “I wonder if I’m trying to replace feeling with thinking.”
“That’s interesting,” she says.
He looks at her. “Is it?”
“Well, yes, of course it is.” Then she adds: “Everything about you is interesting.” And she turns away from him to check the data on his holographic screen.
Something changes in her expression, but Jon can’t decipher the change. His tutorial covers only so much.
“Is something wrong?” he asks, venturing a guess.
Doctor Gold shakes her head—a negative response, he’s learned—and says, “Everything’s fine.” But she continues to study the data.
Then she runs out of screens. But instead of turning back to Jon, she turns away from him.
This behavior, too, was covered in the tutorial. “You’re uncomfortable,” he observes.
“No,” Doctor Gold says. “Just tired. I haven’t slept a lot lately.”
He’s seen his records. He had difficulty sleeping, too, after his parents were killed. “An inability to fall asleep may be the result of unresolved emotional issues.”
She looks up at him. “Where did you hear that?”
“It’s noted in my file.”
Doctor Gold laughs softly. “Right. You’re a smart guy, Jon.”
His records support her observation. He placed first in his cadet class in all measures of intelligence.
“Very smart,” Doctor Gold says. She places her hand on his and leaves it there.
In the tutorial, such behavior is described as an indication
of emotional involvement. Jon asks Doctor Gold if he is reading her gesture correctly.
She takes her hand away. “You’re getting better at interpreting behavior, Jon, but in this instance you’re reading into it a little too much.”
“Then you’re not emotionally involved?”
“I’m part of the medical team assigned to your case,” she says. “Let’s leave it at that.”
He agrees to do so. After all, she’s his doctor.
As Jon was taught, he doesn’t look away from Doctor Gold. He intends to wait until she does it first.
But she doesn’t look away for a long time.
Jon is sitting at his usual workstation in the medicenter library, looking up more information on his family, when he feels a hand on his shoulder.
Looking back, he sees a tall, broad-shouldered man looming behind him. “Mind if I interrupt?” he asks.
“No, sir,” Jon says, rising from his chair.
His visitor is Prime Commander Raige. He and Jon met more than once before Jon’s procedure. That, too, is noted in Jon’s file.
Raige says, “Good to see you again, Ranger.” He salutes.
Jon knows why.
“Let’s sit down,” Raige says. “No need to stand on ceremony.” He pulls a chair over from the next workstation, then points to Jon’s chair.
“It’s a courageous thing you’re doing for us, Blackburn. Extremely courageous. We wouldn’t have selected you if we thought you were going into this precipitously. But you heard all the risks, and you volunteered anyway.
“As you know, I am one of this procedure’s biggest supporters. It’s not just a matter of getting one more Ghost out there in the field, as valuable as that will be. If this works, there will be a lot more like you. An army of Ghosts. These Ursa are tougher than any we’ve faced before. Deadlier. We have to try anything and everything to keep more people from dying.”
Just then, Jon catches a glimpse over Raige’s shoulder of someone out in the hallway, on the other side of the transparent wall. It’s Doctor Gold, he realizes. And she’s crying.
Jon is familiar with the behavior. After all, it’s the first one he studied. But why is Doctor Gold engaging in it? Most of the time crying reflects sadness. Is Doctor Gold sad? For what reason?
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