Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

The conference room was empty, although copious crumbs and three dirty cups of what passed for coffee littered the table. Scientists. If it had been soldiers, their squad leader would have roasted them. The stuff was undrinkable, anyway.

Jason waited, studying formulae and diagrams scrawled on the whiteboard. None of them was intelligible to him, but he could tell that none looked biological. Jason needed to find time to interview Major Farouk, the physicist, about his theories on the Return . Not that Jason had understood Farouk’s specialty even before the physicist had gone into v-coma.

A lab tech ambled in, spotted Jason, and retreated hastily.

Eventually Tarrant and Kandiss arrived with McNally, who carried a canvas weapon sling. Tarrant gave Jason a faint nod: All okay, sir . McNally laid the sling on the table, unzipped it, and stood back. Kandiss removed an A15 with odd mountings on the underside of the barrel.

McNally gave the impression of hunting carefully for the right words—or maybe it was for words simple enough. “I modified it so it can be fired remotely, sir. If a soldier falls and drops the rifle, this device here, it automatically orients the weapon in the direction of the last shots. Then the controller—this doohickey here—can keep the weapon laying down fire in bursts, if you want to. The rounds probably might not hit nothing, but if the down soldier isn’t visible, maybe it’ll convince the enemy that the position is still being held.”

Kandiss stared at the A15 beside the coffee mugs as if it were a snake. Lena Tarrant said, “Sir, we tested the weapon. It performs as described.”

Jason said to McNally, “Private, have you had ordnance training?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you an engineer of any type before the Collapse?”

“No, sir. Didn’t finish high school.”

“Have you ever studied mechanical engineering or weapons manufacture, or received any kind of advanced training in those areas?”

“I been reading on the computer in the enlisted library, sir. Since I waked up.”

“And that reading taught you to invent this?”

“No, sir. This isn’t in any reading.”

“How did you invent it?”

For the first time, an emotion flitted across the private’s face, gone in a nanosecond: disgust. He said, “I looked at the A15, sir. And I thought about it. And I experimented.”

“Did you have permission for these experiments?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you have permission to be in the armory, removing weapons?”

“I belonged there, sir. I was on armory guard.”

“Which did not include any form of removing, and certainly not of modifying, an A15 without an OPORD to do so.”

Now McNally looked Jason straight in the eyes. “No, sir. But I thought you might find it pretty useful, sir. That’s how come I brought it to you.”

The unsaid words were: And risked disciplinary action to do so.

Beside Jason, Tarrant shifted uneasily. Kandiss stiffened. Jason knew without looking at them, what each was thinking. Tarrant was impressed with the weapon. Kandiss, the spit-and-polish ex-Ranger, was focused on the breach of regulations. But McNally had brought this to Jason voluntarily, at personal risk, because he thought it would be valuable to the Army.

Jason made his decision. “Private, you are reprimanded for taking unauthorized action. However, this could be a useful modification if a hunting party is surprised by an enemy patrol and takes casualties. In the future, you are to bring any ideas for weapons modification to me or Major Duncan before you implement them. Failure to do so will result in disciplinary action. Am I making myself clear on this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will take the A-15 outside, along with Sergeants Kandiss and Tarrant, and demonstrate it more fully than you were able to do in the armory. If they find it satisfactory, you may be asked to modify more A-15s.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Jason didn’t go to the mess, after all. He was no longer hungry. Walking around Lab Dome had been a good, if uncomfortable, idea. There were more Awakened here, and every one of them could, like McNally, outthink Jason, even in areas in which they were not trained. This was, as his father used to say when Jason was a child, a whole new ball game. Could Jason put it to advantage? He should interview more of the Awakened. He should find out what they were thinking—if he could follow it—before the convoy arrived from Fort Hood and everything changed.

The Settler children, oblivious of rank, knocked into him as they chased their ball along the corridor. “Sorry, man!”

Jason turned his path toward the infirmary. While he was doing this observational walk-around, he should discover who else had awakened from v-coma.

Jane had.

She woke, lapsed back into sleep, woke again with a start, slept fitfully. There were dreams, and when she woke completely she was not sure what had been dreams and what had happened during the brief period of wakefulness. There had been monstrous trees overgrowing World, there had been Glamet^vor¡ pursuing her with a knife, there had been a leelee she’d had as a childhood pet and her lahk Mother and Colin…

Colin sat by her pallet in a chair with wheels, his leg wrapped with some contraption of cloth and plastic.

“Jane?”

“Ne¡… jinn grat^…” And then, clearer in her head, “I am here.”

He smiled. “Where were you before?”

She stared at him dumbly. His smile disappeared. “Are you all right?”

“I am… not me.”

His warm brown eyes took on that look of understanding, the look that always reminded her of home, where there was so much less struggle to understand. “Yes, you are you. But while you were in the coma, the virophage did things to your brain. You’re… well, if you’re like the others who have woken up, you’re smarter.”

Smarter? Jane didn’t feel she knew more than before. But…

She said slowly, “Things look more clear.”

Colin leaned forward in his chair. “You mean your vision was affected? Your eyes?”

“No.” What did she mean? Her mind was racing and yet standing still, like a skaleth¡ quiet in its pasture, patient wisdom in its dreaming eyes. “I see… you more clear.”

He laughed, stopping abruptly. “That sounds alarming. See me clearer how?”

“I don’t have words. You are a shape, a color… no, a feeling made of shapes and colors. The feeling of you.” She felt the inadequacy of the sentences, and then their sexual connotations. Warmth mounted from her neck to hairline. “I didn’t mean…” Oh, words were so inadequate!

But Colin had always been good at knowing what she meant. “Your increased smartness is… psychological? You have a sort of intuitive grasp of what people—or at least me—are like?”

“No. Yes. It’s… hard to explain.”

It was impossible to explain, and not only because she didn’t know the World translation of some of the words he had used. Her thoughts had always been tinged with color, but now ideas, sights, had deeper and complex shadings and more profound shapes, and—this was, she realized, completely new—the shapes were connected to each other in ways they had not been before.

She said, “Tell me of the others who are awake.”

Colin pointed a finger at her. “See, right there—you are the only one of the Awakened who has asked what the other Awakened are like now. This might be half-baked because I just thought of it this minute, but maybe what happens in the comas is that you guys are smarter mostly about whatever you spent a lot of time thinking about before? Like paths through the woods—the brain paths used the most get the most changes in the coma.”