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.”
The possibility shimmered and shifted in her mind.
Colin plunged on, “So Toni Steffens is spending all her time in the lab since she woke up, and the kids are learning to read faster, and my grandmother is spinning theories about evolutionary biology. And you’re being Jane, focused on people.”
He was alight with clear, bright colors, entranced with his idea, and in love with her. Jane saw him, all the way through. She felt dizzy, even though she was lying on a pallet with tubes stuck in her. And then, behind Colin, standing in the doorway, she saw his brother.
“Jane,” he said, coming into the curtained cubicle. “Colin. How are you feeling, Jane? Did you just wake up?”
“Yes,” Jane said. She saw Jason Jenner, too. Every line of him, every shape he made in her mind, was tense and jagged. His face looked older than Colin’s by at least a decade, even though she knew they were only a Terran year apart in age. This was a man carrying huge burdens—in her mind they were gray harsh shapes of enormous density—and buckling under them. No, not buckling—not yet. But add a little more, and he might. Or not. In Jane he called forth pity, along with a desire to not add to his cares.
“I feel fine,” she lied.
“Good. Has a doctor checked you over?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll send one.” He vanished. A few minutes later Claire appeared. In those few minutes, Jane looked again at Colin, and the shapes/colors of the brothers shifted and shimmered in her mind, along with what Colin had said about those who woke up becoming more intelligent pursuers of whatever had preoccupied them before. Her thoughts widened out to include everything she knew about the base, about Jason Jenner, about the terrible Terran war, about Colin’s destroyed Settlement and the displaced Settlers she had talked to, about World.
“Jane—what is it?” Claire said. “Am I hurting you? What are those tears about?”
But Jane could not tell her. Sorrow swamped her, but she couldn’t give it words. Jane might be wrong. Other shapes were possible, other colors from other people.
But she didn’t think so. One pattern was so much clearer than all the rest—a pattern based on what Jason Jenner was, what Colin Jenner was, what she herself had become, and the others like her. People acted from what they were, and from how their essential natures shifted and colored the situations around them. Also, the pattern in her mind was not only the clearest and most likely, it was the best.
If that pattern did indeed come to pass, she would never see Colin Jenner again.
Marianne left the infirmary, with Dr. Holbrook’s reluctant permission. She had wanted to leave yesterday but he had forbidden it. “You aren’t a young woman anymore,” said this Army doctor who was older than she was. What did he see when he looked at her, knowing and yet not knowing what changes had come to her neural structures?
So people had come to her: Ryan, her grandsons, Ka^graa. Zack McKay, whom she’d sent for. Zack and she had talked for a long time, Marianne slowing her thoughts and words so this very intelligent man could follow them. Zack had left looking dazed.