Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 (20 page)

Dr. Mwaru used a genetic test to confirm that the recovered girl was Emmy. Tissue tests were supposed to determine her biological age, but the results were mixed.

Wilderness survival ages a body both rapidly and unevenly, not to mention the unknown side effects of passing through a time portal twice. No one had ever done it before. Dr. Tran's work had been purely theoretical until today.

"It worked," said Dr. Tran.

"Then why is she eighteen and not eight?" asked Akhtar.

"Experimental error," said Cail. Obviously, he wanted to say, but didn't. Taxonomists like Akhtar sometimes forget that science is more than just making observations. Science
occasionally
involves experiments, he wanted to say, and those experiments
occasionally
go awry.

"There is no way to get her back then," said Cail. "Our Emmy, eight years old, is gone forever."

Dr. Tran paused. It was as if he sensed he should apologize somehow, but he wasn't sure what for. And Cail felt something parallel. As if he should be thanking Dr. Tran for all this, though he couldn't find anything to be grateful for.

They should have waited until the science was more developed. It might have taken a hundred years or more, but they had nothing if not time. If they had waited, they could have had her back, intact.

Now they had this Emmy. Unkempt, unhappy, feral looking. Wearing a feathered pelt that looked like it came from a dinosaur. Asleep, because only sedation would stop her from screaming.

This Emmy had completely lost her ability to speak. Cail and Akhtar wanted to fit her with a translator chip, but there were sanity, age, and consent guidelines, and it was not likely that this Emmy would meet any of them. It wasn't even clear that a chip would work in her case. She seemed to speak in patterns, but those patterns might be gibberish. If she was using language, it must have been one she made up herself.

I was I again. I understood this place. I used to live here.

Mama.

Papa.

They looked the same.

I understood them.

They did not understand me.

I was out of practice with words. In the other place, we were all so similar, we barely needed language at all. And when we did, we clicked our tongues, tapped our fingers, rolled our eyes back, popped our wrists. Everything quiet, or almost. We always managed to get our point across. Not here.

Here we had no voice. Ears and no voice. It's enough to make you scream.

It's enough to make you stab somebody.

SpB Baikal was a small, research oriented base. There weren't any extra personnel on hand to give speech therapy or administer mental health care. They put in a request for extra staff, but in the meantime, Cail and Akhtar had to care for Emmy mostly by themselves.

Emmy's modes of screaming contained many variations. The unifying theme was anger.

"It's almost as if she didn't want to be rescued," said Cail.

"Children prefer the familiar, even if it is worse," said Akhtar. "She just needs time to adjust."

How much time?, he wanted to ask. And what if she never adjusts? But there was no point in asking. Akhtar didn't know the answers to the questions any more than he did.

"Something happened to her, on the other side of the portal," said Akhtar. "Something changed her."

"It could have been Dr. Tran's botched vacuum job that damaged her."

Akhtar didn't want Dr. Tran to be the villain in all of this. Because if he was, then so was she. He had proposed a plan, she had insisted they follow through, and now that it had gone wrong, Cail felt like his skepticism somehow made him heroic.

For Akhtar, the villain was the portal. Passing through, living on the other side or passing back. One of those three things, possibly all of them, had permanently altered Emmy.

The legal issues of consent and guardianship still needed to be worked out. Once they were, they could fly out and have Emmy treated by specialists. Brain surgery of some kind seemed in order. Until then, they searched for ways to calm her without sedating her completely.

She liked to look out the windows, into the blackness of space. That could keep her quiet for as long as twenty minutes. In the Simulacrum Hall, the forest tableau could engage her for up to an hour.

After five days, she stopped screaming completely. She was compliant, cooperative, yet still stubbornly silent.

Cail was relieved. Akhtar was unnerved. She could see the way Emmy's eyes darted around. Taking everything in. Emmy was plotting her escape. It was clear to Akhtar, but there was no point in warning Cail. He would just dismiss her.

How could a mentally impaired cavewoman escape from a space base?, he would want to know.

I don't think she's human anymore, Akhtar would reply.

And Cail would dismiss that notion, too, if she ever were to raise it. There was no intelligence in the Universe that was not human, at least none that was able and willing to make contact. Only the million-year-old ruins of the Ancients hinted at an alternative sentience, and with the ways they learned to manipulate time, it was possible that the Ancients were neither alien nor ancient. They could have been humans, too, from far in the future.

Maybe Emmy was one of them now, thought Akhtar.

Don't be ridiculous, Cail would say. He said that a lot.

On the third day of quiet Emmy, they decided to take dinner in the mess hall.

"How do we know that OaIII was uninhabited five thousand years ago? Maybe Emmy found a civilization to live with. Maybe she wants to go back to them," said Akhtar. Emmy was sitting quietly, food untouched as her eyes moved around the room rapidly.

"Unlikely," said Cail. Unlikely was the word Cail used when he really wanted to say ridiculous.

"And what makes that unlikely? Did you go over the geographic reports yourself?" asked Akhtar.

Cail didn't respond. He hadn't. In retrospect, he should have. But how to say this without sounding like an idiot?

Dr. Mwaru walked by, tray in hand. His greeting was cheerful, he was oblivious to aany marital tension. Emmy stood up as Dr. Mwaru passed, not to greet him, but to stab him in the eye with her chopstick.

I had to make them understand.

I was I.

They were they.

We were not we.

I had to make them cast me out.

"Portal," I said to Mama after the stabbing. It's the only word of mine that she can understand.

Emmy would need to be confined in the jail for the rest of her time at SpB Baikal. She would be leaving soon. Captain Alastair had assigned a robotic transport. Cail was in charge of verifying her flight plan and conducting the pre-flight inspection.

The mourning process began again for Cail and Akhtar. The place she was going, it wasn't quite a prison, but it wasn't your standard rehabilitative and reparative center. It was a little of both, halfway between each. It would be far away, they would see her only once a season or less. Akhtar tried to convince herself this was the right thing, but she couldn't.

Emmy didn't belong to this world any more. She never would.

Akhtar had one last choice to make for her daughter. She wanted that choice to be an act of love.

She stole a few minutes of port time, just enough to get them down to the surface of OaIII, down next to the inactive volcano, into the cave, quiet, dark, and dry. Back to the portal. Back through the portal.

Back to the wild. Back fending for herself, thousands of years out of their reach. She might die of starvation or a toothache. Back to the cruelty of nature.

Akhtar was going to have a hard time explaining this to her husband.

"It was an act of love," she said to herself. She was practicing. She spoke directly to the portal's surface, which was still like a deep lake. It beckoned her.

Akhtar stuck her hand and just her hand through the portal. She wanted to touch Emmy one last time. She wanted to feel the world Emmy was now a part of.

The portal felt cold and gelatinous. Worse than that, it felt alive. It buzzed, it spoke to her in its own language, and Akhtar somehow understood.

Back away.

The surface of the portal began to ripple in time with Akhtar's heart. She felt a stiffness in her body, an absence of control. Her body took two steps back for her. She wasn't sure who was in charge anymore. The experience taught her something valuable. The portals, dozens of them scattered across planetary surface and floating through space unmoored, were always thought to be devices crafted by a long absent intelligence. Akhtar now knew the truth. The portals were intelligence. They were not devices, they served no one, they were beings in and of themselves. Their civilization continued. Emmy was a part of it, and now so was Akhtar.

It was an act of love.

After I passed through Portal, but before I re-entered the we, I turned around to say my prayers.

And Portal listened.

And spat out a new I.

I pulled this new Emmy close.

I taught her how to pray. That's when the hand emerged.

The portal flashed colors and young Emmy walked back through. She looked just like Akhtar's Emmy. Eight years old, same braid, same overalls.

"Emmy? Is that you?"

"Mama?"

The little girl looked confused. She seemed the same. And for right now, that was enough. They would sort it out later, back at the base.

It was an act of love.

This jungle is going to eat us. It will bury us. It will erase all trace of us.

The ants will devour our bones, the algae will cover our unburied corpses. There will be nothing left of us and no I will ever know we were here.

It is all part of Portal's plan.

It will take an eternity of prayer to make peace with this fact.

The only thing that keeps us alive are our numbers. That we can work together. That we can pass down knowledge. That we can know the poison from the fruit. That we can know which types of ants will keep you full the longest.

There will never be a last of us. Only longer and longer gaps. The end of we. The beginning of I. An I will not live very long here, not without us. We will end. I will go on.

It is a difficult and endless act of generosity, almost too much for us to understand.

Portal gives and will keep on giving.

Portal never takes, but with that one exception. And even then, what was taken was returned. Moments after the return, a hand emerged.

It was a vision, a hand to take, a hand to turn Portal purple, we knew we had to respond with an act of love. A sacrifice to show Portal our devotion, our faith in Her plan. We gave her the most precious thing among us.

We gave her a new one of us. And that is how Portal will know we love Her so.

We love Her.

Because it is through Portal that we know life, all of us. It is through Portal that I became we. And through Portal that we will become I.

Mike Resnick and Ken Liu

What a time traveler needs most
when going back to childhood:
a solid plan that can be forgot,
an adventurous spirit that can be curbed,
lust for the road that can turn off to rest,
desire for the next hill that can stop for a drink.
And for the lost times, the loose times, the left times,
the botherations, hesitations, frustrations, privations,
and all the other aberrations
that lead to growing up again:
one good, old-fashioned compass rose.

After a hard day in endless night,
it's good to get out on the course,
though you're sure to spend your whole time
fighting hazards. There's no hope of
escaping the sand, and though you
would think the ball-thief pixies
that lurk under the trees back home
would have no place up here, sadly
they hide just fine behind rocks,
despite the lack of oxygen.