Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

“I don’t… of course I’m not a scientist and it isn’t for me to say if… all I do is…”

“You work with those children,” Jenner said, relentless. “What do you think?”

Marissa said, “I think they had a big leap in intelligence and now they’re learning to use that. I don’t think that each day they’re getting smarter than they were the day before.”

Without twisting his body on his chair, Jenner turned his head to look at his two soldiers. All he did was blink once. The female private said, “Yes, sir. She’s correct.”

The male said, “Yes, sir. Agreed.”

Then Marissa, displaced schoolteacher, said outright what Dr. Denise Sullivan had only tiptoed around. Marissa said, “Either way, some of my students are getting a lot smarter and the rest are not.”

There. She had named it, the elephant in the room. Humanity bifurcating. If the changes in neural structure or efficiency were permanent and also inheritable, the human race was on its way to becoming two species.

Not an elephant in the room. A swamp’s worth of dinosaurs. Or—

An entire herd of zebras.

Two weeks after the meeting with the scientists, neither Jason nor Elizabeth Duncan had been told anything about a new convoy heading north from Fort Hood. This was surprising: Why was Strople delaying the start of a second convoy? Jason’s best guess was some sort of internal upheaval at Fort Hood. Duncan had no opinion, or at least none that she offered aloud.

The two of them stood in the command post, watching the horizon. Beyond the stumpy woods charred in the destruction of New America’s siege, trees blazed red and gold and orange, bright spots among the more somber pines. Somewhere farther north, on a flat field defended by nearly everything in Monterey Base’s arsenal, a crew of specialists and civilians repaired the hole in the Return .

They worked under an Army engineer and a sergeant who had, in his youth, been a welder. They used supplies of metal found on the huge ship, guessing at how to use those to seal and heat-proof and whatever else you had to do to the hull of a spaceship to let it rise higher than a thousand feet. Both men admitted they had no real idea what they were doing.

“Sir, if the bastards had hit any of that there alien machinery,” Sergeant Lewis Dunfrey had said during one of Jason’s visits to the site, “it woulda been all up with that flying boat. But the RPG didn’t hit nothing vital.” After a minute he’d added, “I hope.”

Duncan said, “If Major Farouk were awake…”

“Yes,” Jason said. More people had come out of v-comas, but not the physicist.

Jason had chosen not to be present at the repair site when Lieutenant Allen tried to lift the ship. If the entire vessel exploded, he would be needed to come up with a different strategy.

He half expected the Return to destruct. Not because he had the wispiest idea of the physics or engineering involved, but because the total destruction of the Return would somehow match the total destruction he had visited on Sierra Depot. Not that any of that made sense.

“Here she comes…” Duncan said. Jason felt her tense beside him.

A gleam on the horizon. Sunlight reflected so directly off the hull that Jason’s vision blurred. He looked away and when his gaze swung back, the Return was rising, rising, a streak in the blue sky like molten silver on the sea. Silent, swift, so beautiful his heart stopped. Then the ship was gone.

He barely dared to breathe. Long minutes later, she fell back out of the sky, slowed, hovered, and rose again. Whole, functional, returned from orbit.

Jason turned to his second in command. To his surprise, tears stood in her eyes—Elizabeth Duncan! He pretended not to notice, and the next moment the tears were gone.

“It worked,” she said in her usual dry voice.

“Yes.”

One thing gone right.

The duty guard knocked on the door. “Sir, a message from Lab Dome. Dr. Farouk has woken up. You said you wanted to know when it happened.”

Jason glanced at Duncan. She said, “Better late than never.”

“Like so much else,” he said.

Days later, Jason arrived at the command post early in the morning, after a night with Lindy. The night had not gone well.

It had been his fault. They hadn’t been together since the day before Jason had executed Dolin. She was kept so busy with the awakenings—eleven of them now—and he with running a base short of supplies, routine, and answers. But last night’s tension had not come from those inescapable cares. “You’re avoiding me,” she’d said to him yesterday. “Why?”

Sometimes he wished she were less direct. “I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. I waited for you to… never mind that. You’ve got something on your mind, Jason, something you’re not telling me. What is it?”

And less perceptive.

She repeated, “What is it?” but now her tone was softer, more concerned, Lindy at her most gentle. Damn her! Accusative Lindy he could have resisted; merely sexy Lindy he could have enjoyed. But this was Lindy evoking the kind of bond they had once had, in which they told each other their deepest desires and fears, as Jason had never told anyone else. This was the Lindy of long sweet conversations in bed after orgasm, wrapped in each other’s arms or propped up on pillows with glasses of wine or making the kind of silly jokes that grew from a long marriage. But he could not tell her that in the eyes of the United States Army, he was no longer in command of Monterey Base, was under arrest, was facing court-martial. That deception was known only to six other people, all bound to silence, and he could not be the one to break the secrecy that was eventually going to endanger so many. He had, after all, been its architect.

So he said, “It’s nothing,” and watched disappointment and then hurt darken Lindy’s eyes. And still she didn’t give up.

“All right. I don’t believe you, but I’m not going to press it.”

Lindy! When hadn’t she pressed, pried, burned through his reticence with a laser cutter? That was why he’d been able to be himself with her in the first place, why he had fallen in love with her. She had pushed him into love, and he had landed into more happiness than he’d thought possible. Until the war began.

He still loved her. He knew that now. Jane had been a momentary attraction; it was Lindy he wanted, needed. But it wasn’t fair to her to reconnect, not when chances were that Strople’s troops would execute him for treason. It would be too much like soldiers who quickly married before deployment, only to create widows and widowers. Jason had always considered that selfish behavior. Better to wait until you could offer, if not security, at least a living body. Until you were a little more in control of events.

Lindy said, “Spend tonight with me anyway, Jason. I just want to feel you next to me, inside me.” And she’d touched him, quickly and furtively, in that special caress only she knew that he responded to, and then tossed him a mischievous smile over her shoulder as she walked away.

Maybe his reasoning was wrong.

So he’d gone to her, and they’d tried to make love, and it had been a failure.

“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said, “it happens to all men occasionally. Look at the strain you’ve been under… it’s all right.”

“No.”

“Jason, love, you can’t control everything.”

The old accusation, and even though this time it hadn’t been an accusation, just a sweet reassurance, Jason had shut down. It was not all right with him. He’d said, “I think you should go now, Lindy.” His tone had been wrong and, stony-faced, he hadn’t corrected it. Lindy had left his quarters hurt and angry. He hadn’t gone after her.