Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  The doctor, alone, had grabbed a gun and easily burned down all six. Guards had come running, the doctor had been arrested, and the furious CO had been court-martialed along with her. It had, after all, happened on his watch. The directive came down from the top on Belle Riveau: No further contact to be initiated with natives of 539-Beta.

  On my screen, the seven bodies were placed on a cart by weeping fur-covered women and pulled away. The next day, I knew, the entire village had been abandoned. All the preliminary meetings with the natives, who had no idea they were human, all the first calm and fruitful contacts, all the first exchanges of information—all wasted. I turned off the screen and stared at the small brass sculpture on the wall shelf. A caduceus, rod and coiled serpents, exquisitely worked in diamond-fiber. It had cost my father six months’ pay. He'd given it to me a year before his death, on the day I graduated from medical school, when he'd practically levitated from pride. His Saul, an officer and a gentleman and a doctor. Of course, all that had occurred before the “regrettable incident” on the Midian.

  What would my father have said about what happened here on 539-Beta? Avner Rubin, pious as his son is not, would undoubtedly have thrown up his hands in horror and quoted Scripture. “And you shalt not oppress a stranger, or you yourself know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Or maybe—

  “Sir, I'm sorry to interrupt you,” my adjutant said on a corner of my screen, “but that native woman is back—with another one, who appears to be unconscious. What should I do with them now?”

  I stood abruptly, knocking over my glass of wine, a sleep aid that had failed.

  “Bring them to the infirmary,” I ordered him, and hurried over to greet them.

  Hutaral looked even worse than before: strained, wild-eyed, bedraggled. Her brown fur was matted and dirty. The girl, who looked about twelve, was tied tightly to a two-wheeled handcart, struggling and screaming wordlessly. Her jaw had been broken. Trying not to hurt her more than necessary, I examined the break. “Who hit her?”

  “I did,” Hutaral said.

  “You?” I said, surprised. “This is a bad fracture. I'm going to have to anesthetize her to set it.”

  Every weary muscle in Hutaral's body tensed, and I wondered what the translator had given her for “anesthetize.” But she said nothing. I slapped a patch on the girl and watched her stop thrashing, watched the horror in her eyes dim, watched her slide into unconsciousness.

  “Aaaahhhhh,” breathed Hutaral, and sat abruptly on the ground.

  I had no time for her, nor for much asepsis. I set and wired the jaw, all the time wondering if these people had penalties for child abuse. Originally I had thought Hutaral a caring, if primitive, mother. So much for first impressions. She'd done some serious damage to her daughter. As I was working, I heard a strange sound.

  On the ground, Hutaral had begun to weep.

  The Terrans can do nothing. All that this Dr. Rubin did was make Eyoli go into true sleep. Sleep is what brings the dreams! Our memories won't come by day until her blood flows begin—Dr. Rubin, a healer, must know that! Is he torturing my child, as his ancestors tortured my mother?

  What have I done in bringing Eyoli to this cursed place?

  “I don't understand,” the CO said. “What does she want?”

  “It's not completely clear as yet, sir,” I said carefully. Colonel Karenski had a reputation for being fair but hard. Did he know about me, about the Midian? Of course he did. I had tried, pathetically, to offset my service record with extreme military polish: shined boots, spotless uniform, salute so sharp it could have cut wood. Karenski slouched in his chair in fatigues, a glass of whiskey in his hand. He looked five times the soldier I would ever be, and he didn't look happy. All I had to impress him was my specialized knowledge.

  “Sir, as you undoubtedly know, initial reports on the natives’ genome revealed mutated genes on the X chromosome, including not only unique alleles but also long strings of unknown codons that—”

  “No jargon, Doctor,” Karenski snapped. “Save it for someone who understands it.” He stared coldly at me. “You're sure the native approached you, with no previous contact on your side?”

  “She sought me out, sir, and asked for my help with her daughter.”

  “So her daughter would ‘not awaken.’ And you have no idea what that means?”

  “No, sir, I don't. Yet.”

  “And then she approached you a second time, bringing a child with a broken jaw?”

  I didn't think “approached” was the right word for Hutaral's desperate intrusion into the base: ululating, muddy, shivering, weeping, pushing a homemade cart holding a maimed girl. But all I said was, “Yes, sir. I set the jaw. The child is sedated; the native is sitting with her; a guard has been posted. I sent a full report at 0400 hours.”

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked impatiently.

  I wasn't prepared for that question. I was here because I wanted him to tell me what to do, in everything except the scientific procedures. I didn't want to risk the same court-martial charges as my predecessor. My position in the Space Navy was already too precarious.

  “Well, sir, I was wondering—”

  “Don't wonder, Doctor! What do you propose to do?”

  I felt myself flush, the mottling of a schoolboy who doesn't know the right answer. Again I fell back on specialization. “First I'll sequence both subjects’ genomes and compare them with—”

  “Stop.” The colonel put down his whiskey. “Of course you'll do whatever medical scans and tests are required or useful or enlightening, if you can do so without objections from the native. I meant, are you going to try to figure out what she wants and give it to her?”

  I blurted, “Should I, sir?”

  “Yes, damn it! This is our first chance in twenty-five years to establish positive contact with a lost branch of humanity, and you're the one they've approached. Adding anybody else at this point is likely to scare them off. In fact, make sure that the guards keep all weapons out of sight. Keep surveillance unobtrusive and under no circumstances detain them if they wish to leave. Make damned sure you violate neither the letter nor the spirit of Headquarters’ directive. Send me reports every two hours unless circumstances make it expedient to delay. And Dr. Rubin?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Do not fuck up this situation. Dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir.” I heard clearly the unspoken word at the end of his sentence: Do not fuck up this situation, too. He knew about the Midian. “Thank you, sir.”

  Karenski only scowled.

  I ran all the way back to the infirmary. The child—Eyoli, her mother called her—would just be coming out of the anesthetic, and the AI had doubtless finished sequencing both their genomes. My next step was a brain scan. I only hoped that Hutaral had not changed her mind about permitting that.

  But she had. They were gone.

  Sleep. He made her sleep. I never imagined such cruelty. Eyoli's only hope was to stay awake without Awakening…and the Terran made her sleep.

  I pulled her by the hand and we stumbled outside. No one tried to stop us. I pushed Eyoli into the cart. Almost immediately her eyes closed again, but without dreams, thank the Goddess; she didn't thrash around or wake screaming. The stiff cloth around her jaw made her look like someone else, not my child. Of course, she was becoming someone else, many someone elses: my great-great-grandmother Anna, my great-grand-mother Utetha, my grandmother Ensara, my mother Abalu. I had been so proud on my Awakening Day, to become these women of my line, and prouder still when occasionally I glimpsed the memories of my great-great-great-grandmother, Elena. How many could do that?

  As I pushed the cart, heavier every kilometer with Eyoli's weight, it began to rain. I remembered my mother in the rain, younger than Eyoli was now. She had loved it. My grandmother was afraid of thunder. We hid in a cave just beyond that dell, cowering as the great peals crashed overhead and the lightning split the sky. The rain
came down harder. I made for the cave.

  It opened into solid rock, a shallow depression covered with moonthorn brush, but deep enough to shelter us from the storm. Both Eyoli and I were scratched and bleeding by the time I got her inside. I lit a candle from my pouch. In its wavering light I saw her eyes, the same dark gray as the raining skies, open and staring at me.

  “Mother mine,” she murmured through the stiff cloth, “make me die. Make me die!”

  “No!”

  “You don't know,” my daughter said, barely intelligible. “You don't know. You don't remember.”

  I would gladly have taken the burden of memory from Eyoli, but I could not. I, like all daughters, had inherited my mother's memories only up until the day of my birth. But Eyoli had the rest.

  She spoke now as if tranced, in despairing quiet, her round child's face twisted in adult horror. “The knives…I wasn't dead when the Terran began using the knives. My dead child, your brother…he lies there on the table and she raises the knife over him and I can still see.” Trance vanished, and Eyoli screamed.

  I wrapped my arms around her as tightly as I could. If I had to, I could tie her again…but I could not tie her forever. Evvico's daughter, another granddaughter of the Seven, had hung herself from a shipberry tree three days after her Awakening. Both of Amabila's daughters had drowned themselves. Urdu's daughter's mind had snapped and she had set fire to three huts, killing four men, trying to burn out the memories of her grandmother.

  Memory, always in need of taming even when sweet, can only bear so much.

  I held my daughter as she experienced her grandmother's death—her own death, to the ignorant young—for the tenth time, the twentieth time, forever…

  They were easy enough to follow with the infrared tracker, even through the storm. All the while I raced along, rain lashing me, I kept hearing the colonel's voice in my head: “Don't fuck up this situation.” But he had also said to not lose this chance. What if—

  I saw the sad little handcart overturned in the rain. Hutaral crouched in a shallow depression in the rock, holding Eyoli to her as if all the forces of Nature had conspired to pull them apart.

  “What is the matter?” I asked. “Why did you take her away?”

  Hutaral stared at me and said nothing.

  At first I thought my translating mechanism wasn't working. I tapped it a couple of times. The tiny light still glowed. “Hutaral, if I have offended you…”

  “You made her remember,” she said at last.

  “Remember what?” I asked, confused.

  “What happened so long ago.”

  I knew what she was referring to, but it made no sense. “But that was long before Eyoli was born.”

  She stared at me again without answering.

  “Are you saying that she can remember things that happened before she was born?”

  Now it was Hutaral's turn to look puzzled, peering at me through her rain-soaked fur. “Cannot the females of your race do so?”

  “No, they cannot. Are you telling me you can all do this, not just Eyoli?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she is remembering what happened to—”

  “To my mother,” said Hutaral. “She is more than remembering it. She is”—the translator paused for an instant, trying to come up with an equivalent word—“experiencing it.” Experiencing it. She meant that Eyoli was living that horror over and over, each time as if it were the first. Lying half dead on that table, watching a Terran knife descend into the flesh of your infant who, you believed, was also still alive. Over and over. Dear God, what we had done to these people? I said to Hutaral, a sodden blur in the rain, “I will fix this. I promise you, Hutaral. Now that I understand it, I promise you that I will fix this!” She only stared at me.

  He seemed sincere, and if his race were like all males and really could not remember What Has Gone Before, then he could be forgiven for making my Eyoli sleep. I did not know if he could help, but I knew that none of the Ones could.

  “Will you trust me?” he asked. “I need to use a few more machines on Eyoli—nothing that will hurt her. I know what to look for now. Please, Hutaral. Just a few more machines.”

  Did I have a choice? I looked at Eyoli and knew that I did not.

  “I will trust you,” I said.

  It didn't take long: brain scan, skin scrapings, blood test, half a dozen other things for the computer to analyze.

  Except that my lab computer couldn't analyze it. Oh, it could do white cell and red cell counts, and it could study the encephelogram and conclude that Eyoli was sane, and it instantly pronounced her to be in perfect health but under great tension. But all it could tell me was that she was different from any person of human stock it had ever analyzed, and that was the whole of it.

  Hutaral let me draw blood and take some scrapings from her, and the computer came up with the same conclusion: human stock, healthy, like us in most ways, and it was simply not programmed to understand and analyze the differences. I needed an AI.

  That meant I was going to have to awaken Karenski. I didn't dare delay even until morning; I didn't know how long Hutaral would allow Eyoli to stay on the post.

  Karenski met me in his office at Headquarters. I'd wanted a screen conference, but apparently the CO did not meet with his officers this way, not even with one like me. “I just put in an eighteen-hour day,” he said angrily, rubbing his eyes and running his hand through his unkempt hair. “This had better be good.”

  “You told me to keep you informed, sir,” I noted, shifting my weight uneasily.

  “I didn't tell you to wake me out of a sound sleep.”

  “It can't wait, sir.”

  Suddenly he was alert. “All right, let's have it.”

  “I know what the child's problem is, sir,” I said, “and if I don't cure it quickly she will either kill herself or go mad.”

  “Well, then, cure it. You don't need my permission.”

  “It's not that simple, sir.”

  “Somehow it never is,” said Karenski. “Suppose you lay it out for me and stop giving me sentence fragments, Dr. Rubin.”

  “All right,” I said. “It seems that the females of this human offshoot have a…well, a racial memory is an inadequate term. Once they reach childbearing age, which is to say, once they begin menstruating, they can remember every incident of their progenitors’ lives. Not everything of their mothers'—the mother's memories and experiences are cut off at the moment of birth, which argues a biological encoding of the inherited memory. But each female experiences the memories of her maternal grandmother, maternal great-grandmother, and so on.”

  “Let me guess,” interrupted Karenski, who wasn't stupid. “This kid's grandmother is either the one our half-baked doctor chopped up on the assumption it was already dead, or she's one of the half dozen who got to watch it at close range.”

  “And now she can't differentiate the memory from the reality. Right now it only seems to appear to her when she sleeps, or at least it's at its most potent then, but Hutaral—that's the mother—assures me that soon it will be with her every second, awake or asleep.”

  “Poor kid,” said Karenski, surprising me. “How do you cure it?”

  “I don't know yet,” I said. “First I have to find out what caused it.”

  “I thought you just told me: when she hits a certain age or level of physical maturity.”

  “I'm not making myself clear,” I said. “It's a mutation. No other human stock possesses it. Most mutations serve a purpose. I have to find out what purpose this serves before I decide if it's even a good idea to change it—and then I have to find out how to change it.”

  “And that's your report?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir,” I said. “I need access to a much more powerful medical computer than the one we have on 539-Beta. My computer recognizes that there are inconsistencies between Eyoli and what we would call normal human women, but it's not complex enough to tell me anything more than that. I'
d like to tie into the main computer at the military hospital on 214-Alpha, but I don't have the authority to do so.”

  “And this should solve the problem?”

  “If it doesn't, then it's probably insoluble.”

  “All right, Dr. Rubin. Give me ten minutes, and then unless you hear otherwise from me, you can access the 214-Alpha computer.”

  “Thank you for your generosity, sir.”

  “It's not generosity, damn it! That's not how the military works. But then, you've always had trouble with that, haven't you?”

  We stared at each other. Karenski might be a fair man, but he was also a Space Navy commander and it was clear he didn't like having me on his watch. What I had done on the Midian would not be forgivable to him, not even if a dozen courts-martial had acquitted me, instead of merely one. Striking a superior officer who was maiming an enlisted man and then briefly disappearing afterward—that should have gotten me a dishonorable discharge, if not the brig. That it didn't, because the superior officer was cruel and oppressive, would never sit well with someone like Karenski. He was too Navy, too establishment, too much a man who, in my father's terms, had never ever been “a stranger in the land of Egypt.”

  “Dismissed,” he said, and I went back to medical quarters. Hutaral had her arms wrapped around Eyoli, who slept uneasily. Hutaral's eyes followed me as I walked past her and sat down at my desk, staring at my timepiece to avoid staring at my father's caduceus. When ten minutes had passed I activated my computer, accessed the computer at the military hospital, and had my computer feed it all the data I'd accumulated. I figured the data would be ten minutes each way in transit, and the hospital computer itself might take a full minute to analyze it and come to some conclusions. That gave me perhaps twenty minutes.

  I heated up some coffee. I was aware that Hutaral was watching me. I didn't want to wake Eyoli, so I gestured that she could have some coffee, but she made a face and shook her head.