Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

Dolin sagged slightly forward in his bonds, straightened, sagged again. Maybe he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Jason had not specified how high a dosage Holbrook should administer.

This man had willfully murdered a fellow soldier, while trying to murder another.

The United States was at war.

“Fire,” Jason said.

Five weapons laid down fire. If any of the guns were aimed to miss, Jason didn’t need to know about it. Dolin’s body jerked, jerked again, blossomed into red. The guns fell silent.

“Lower weapons,” Jason said.

Holbrook declared Dolin dead. The body was cut down. The burial detail moved into action, covered by the others.

Jason and Holbrook returned to the airlock. Just before he went inside, he heard a flock of sparrows somewhere begin their morning song.

Zack sat in the conference room of Lab Dome, beside Colonel Jenner—an unwelcome juxtaposition he had not planned. The room, as always, held more people than it should. Someone had moved out the table (putting it where?) and brought in more chairs. These were packed in so close that Zack could smell the mustiness in Jenner’s uniform. He tried to edge away, but it was impossible.

Did all these people really need to be here? Maybe not, but everyone wanted to hear the first results of the team analyzing the awakened v-comas, and apparently Jenner had okayed this as an open meeting instead of a military briefing. So in addition to every scientist on the base and some of the techs, the room contained all three physicians, as much of the nursing staff as could be spared, Ka^graa—although no one to translate for him—more officers and, standing against a side wall, two privates who had recently awakened from comas. Zack, like everyone else, took furtive little peeks at the man and woman, whose faces showed no hint of whatever they were thinking.

The only significant people missing were the other three who’d awakened from comas. Caitlin was a child; Belok^ was a functional child; Toni had refused to leave her work on the gene drive. “His Highness can do without me.”

Major Denise Sullivan made the presentation. Her broad, kind face looked pinched with exhaustion, but she stood straight and spoke without either notes or polite preliminaries. Everyone here was well beyond preliminaries.

“Analysis of cerebral-spinal tissue from those who awakened from v-comas”—she nodded at the two privates—“hasn’t, so far, turned up much more than we knew from samples taken when they were asleep. There are proteins we haven’t seen before, as well as different and new folds in proteins commonly found in the brain. Proportions of various proteins are different. Specifically—”

She went into details. The presentation was pitched badly: too simple for Zack and the other scientists, who already knew all of this, too technical for the military. Without turning his head—he didn’t want to be rude—Zack watched the two soldiers standing against the side wall. They were the most interesting people in the room. What was going on in those altered brains? Their faces gave nothing away.

“So in summary,” Denise finished, “at the cellular level, we cannot yet explain much. What we do know is that only people with what we’re calling ‘the coma allele’ go comatose. In the coma, profound changes occur in the brain that may indicate both increased neural connections and altered neural connections, and that the result, according to IQ tests administered to all awakened subjects, seem to show a leap forward in intelligence.

“If the increased brain activity resulted only from increased density, length, or thickness of neurons, there would probably be a problem with overheating of brain tissue, since the brain would then use more energy and so generate more heat. Human cortical gray-matter neurons already had axons that were pretty close to the physical limits. Therefore, the most likely situation is that the greater proportion of the changes in brain functioning are due to revised connections and functioning among the neurons that were already there.”

Suddenly she threw her hands into the air and let them fall. “But we have no idea how. It may be that different receptors that affect how the brain works are being inhibited or activated, just as the dCA1 receptor is activated in memory formation. Or it may be that the v-coma patients are undergoing acquired savant syndrome. This all needs much more work, and that work requires, in part, equipment we don’t have.”

Major Duncan said sharply, “What is acquired savant syndrome?”

“Sometimes trauma to the left side of the brain—always the left side—results in people acquiring savantlike abilities they didn’t have before: to do mathematical calculations in their head, remember long strings of numbers, that sort of thing. The theory is that the ability was always there, latent, and the trauma destroys whatever mechanisms were inhibiting it. But savants often have trouble with social relations, too, and as far as we can tell, the v-coma subjects do not.”

Caitlin, cuddling in Zack’s arms, asking for a story, giving him a flurry of kisses. No, she had no trouble with social relations.

Duncan was not done with her questions. “Why did privates Ramstetter and Veatch, who fell into comas later than some other victims, revive earlier?”

“We don’t know.”

“Does that mean their brains underwent less rewiring than did others because they were comatose a shorter time?”

“We don’t know.” Denise hesitated; Zack knew what she was not saying. The gain in IQ was less for the two soldiers than for Caitlin, Belok^, and Toni. But IQ tests had always been suspect, and here the other three subjects were a child, a boy who had been mentally challenged before, and an already brilliant scientist. Not good data, and Zack saw the moment that Denise decided not to mention it.

Duncan asked another question, and now her hostility to the entire presentation became obvious. “And you—all of you scientists—are telling me that the human brain was remade by some tiny microbe? By a germ ?”

All of Denise Sullivan’s apologetic uncertainty vanished. She stared steadily at Major Duncan. “Rabies, which destroys the human brain, is caused by a ‘germ.’ Toxoplasmosis, which causes humans to choose riskier behavior than they would otherwise, is caused by a single-celled parasite. Superhearing, a profound rewiring of the auditory areas, was caused by R. sporii . The ATCV-1 virus—”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Colonel Jenner said. “Is anyone else going to speak?”

Marissa Freirich rose hastily. She was one of the two schoolteachers in Enclave Dome, although lately no school had been held in the general disruption. At the Collapse, she’d been a twenty-one-year-old, brand-new fourth-grade teacher at the elementary school on Monterey Base. Now she worked with Caity and Belok^. It was clear that lecturing to this group of scientists and top brass intimidated her, but she plunged ahead.

“Before his coma, Belok^ spoke only a few basic phrases. Now his speech level is about that of a four-year-old, in both English and World, and he is learning to read. Caitlin McKay, who is four, could already read simple picture books. Yesterday she read aloud the first few paragraphs of Alice in Wonderland . In the original, which includes words like ‘conversations’ and ‘marmalade.’” Marissa bit her lip. “She doesn’t even know what marmalade is. Sounding out words isn’t the same as experience. But she has definitely gotten smarter. She—”

Colonel Jenner interrupted, but not with the sharpness that Major Duncan had shown. “Is it your sense that the intelligence of these children will just keep on growing? That they’ll get more and more intelligent over time?”