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?”
“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.
CHAPTER 20
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.