The Second Star, page 23
“What were the drawings?”
“I don’t even know,” Philip said. “One of the orderlies took them. To be filed, he said. They must have been watching, and someone wanted to see what they had done—I don’t know on whose orders, because Martin was clearly out there with you, he must have left standing orders for this kind of situation, or someone else took it upon themselves to step in. They came almost immediately, I barely had time to take the briefest look at the pages from Rob—from Gem—before I heard the habitat doors opening and they came marching in demanding the papers…”
“I have to go up to the library and get a look at this stuff,” Stella said. “Damn it all. This is clearly in my bailiwick. I need to see, not some military brown-nose…”
Philip paused and looked at Stella with the beginnings of a slight sympathetic grin.
“What did Martin Peck do out there?” he asked.
“I have more questions than answers,” Stella retorted. “He’s just ‘following orders’ and that kind of attitude makes me itch to throw spitballs at it. Except that this time more is at stake than just me rebelling at a ‘thou shalt not’. He was… actually… being nice. He was. But I got the distinct feeling that there were things he couldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t tell me.”
“There are things I don’t tell people,” Philip said.
“You have the whole seal-of-the-confessional thing going for you,” Stella said. “That covers a lot of ground when you want it to, I suppose. Martin has his ‘orders’ and if he wants to tell me that things are sealed or classified and I don’t have the clearance, that’s as good. What’s my excuse, when I stay mum about things?”
“Doctor-patient privilege?” Philip suggested, after a beat.
“Hardly applies when practically all my interactions with my ‘patients’ are done under surveillance,” Stella snorted. “But we digress. The drawings?”
“I have no clue. Try the library first. But they didn’t get all of them.”
Stella sat up. “Where is it?”
Philip fished out a piece of paper which showed attempts of being neatly folded as small as it would go but which had clearly been crumpled into a ball before that had had happened.
“Sorry,” he said, handing it over, “I liberated that one before I handed the rest over, just balled it up and threw it under Lily Mae’s desk a moment before the orderly came in and took the remainder of the pile. It was on top of the handful that Gem gave me and it was clearly the one meant for ‘Doctor Stella’. I don’t suppose you can ever slip it back into the library record now.”
“What is it?” Stella asked, unfolding the paper, and then sat staring at a childish drawing of a creature which had a large head with a mane of what looked like wild hair spraying out in all directions from a hairline high on a domed skull, large inexpertly rendered black eyes, an elongated body with preternaturally long arms and legs, and an attempt at huge moth-like wings above and behind it all. The letters I L G were incorporated into the drawing—one above the creature’s head, one shaded into one side of what appeared to be a high collar of some sort around its neck, and one dangling from its left hand as though carried by its handle. Incongruously, it had a speech bubble above it and inside that was—in childish capitals—the word ‘Hello’. Stella raised haunted eyes to Philip. “You think this… might be…?” she asked haltingly.
“It might be,” Philip said, staring at the paper. “I mean… I have no idea if an adult with a greater amount of artistic talent might give us a clearer picture, here—remember, this was produced by someone whose mind claims to be only seven years old, no matter what the chronological age of the hand that held the pen. But from what I am seeing… and being what I am… I am asking myself why God sent those people one of His angels.”
On the morning after her return from her city excursion, Stella threw herself back into work. She checked on the crew, and discovered Lily Mae awake but not particularly communicative and the rest of them in a strange mood, almost expectant, looking up to find somebody’s eyes on her at any given moment, as if they were waiting for her to say or do something specific.
Uneasy and oddly apprehensive, still unhappy about Lily Mae’s status, she cut the visit short and made her way to the library to access Lily Mae’s medical charts, pulling up the detailed daily reports for the period since Boz’s death. Lily Mae had indeed been administered a light sedative in the immediate aftermath of that event, and Stella could not fault the medical response—the two were known to have been close, and Lily Mae had literally been holding Boz’s hand when he died. It was an obvious thing to do, to help someone who could have been potentially deeply affected by something like that. The doctor who had prescribed the sedative could not possibly have known about the thing that Lily Mae now carried, the presence that she had inherited from Boz, and could not have been expected to factor in any kind of effect that the sedative might have had on that. Stella could not see anything there that she would have done differently or that seemed to be deliberately done as means to nefarious ends—but something definitely seemed to have been affected, and she had not even been consulted on the matter, despite being a primary care physician on the record. She gave herself a moment to resent this.
Stella could find no repeat dose of the original sedative, or any further medications which might have affected the patient, and yet Lily Mae had barely stirred from her bed since they’d lost Boz. Stella herself could count on the fingers of one hand the hours she herself had been able to observe Lily Mae awake and moving. Something was wrong, but unless Lily Mae had been given medication which had not been noted on her chart for some nefarious reason which was being carefully concealed Stella could not put her finger on what was amiss. There was enough silence and secrecy already about the Parada crew that she could not bring herself to believe that there was yet another layer of conspiracy underneath all of that—and in any event she didn’t think that Martin Peck would have signed off on anything like this. He was nothing if not honorable in his own strict ways. Stella might not have official rank in his military universe but she was a civilian whom he himself had collaborated on putting in charge of the Parada people. She knew there were things he wasn’t telling her—but those would be strategy and planning issues, not basic medical ones. He’d told her in so many words that he had been instrumental in bringing Stella herself—or someone else with her skill set who could have taken her place—into the Parada crisis; he would not then actively work, or collude in, plans to hamstring the contribution that expert could bring.
Stella abandoned that line of investigation, contenting herself with putting a warning note on Lily Mae’s record that any further medications to be administered to the patient were to be run by Stella herself, in order to cross check potential damaging interactions with existing treatments that may have already been in place and that the patient’s excessive lethargy and sleep patterns should be monitored closely. Then she turned her attention to other things.
She found the original Children’s Collective drawings, the physical papers, in a folder in the back shelves of the library, and laid them out side by side on a work table. Without the one Philip had sequestered and brought to her, there were seven others, all of them executed with the kind of childish hand that was to be expected from the young minds that comprised the Children’s Collective—and Stella had to consciously remind herself that this was a truncated Collective, at that, seeing as Boz’s Jiminy was gone and Lily Mae’s Coco had not participated in this particular conclave. None of the pictures were signed so there was no way of really knowing which one of them had produced which drawing; nor was there anything in these sketches to indicate why the Children’s Collective suddenly assembled—apparently spontaneously—to produce them. And, indeed, at least five of the seven seemed… arbitrary. Stella discarded the one infested with butterflies—there may have been psychological interpretations of butterflies in this context, but Stella was inclined to believe that this particular one was just something done by Momo or Glory, two of the four little girls in the Collective. There was a complicated set of two drawings done by what appeared to be the same hand and seemed to be something of a storyboard, telling a kind of story that could be inferred from the inexpertly rendered images, something that involved flying masked superheroes ranged against serried ranks of almost comical bug-eyed monsters, which, seeing as neither side was rendered in anything much more complex than barely fleshed out stick figures, it was hard to take all that seriously. Stella suspected Jerry Hillerman’s Gadfly as the author of those. There was an empty landscape consisting of hills covered with large daisy-like flowers (possibly Momo or Glory again). There was one which appeared to be no more than a graphically-rendered comic book ‘BLAM’, just nested stars that looked like an explosion from the center point of the paper; they’d had had no colored crayons, just pens, but Stella could vividly see this particular image as being passionately colored in in oranges and reds. But the last two drawings Stella pulled out of the pile and studied more closely.
They may or may not have been done by the same hand—and she suspected Rob’s, or at least his Collective persona, Gem. At least one of them was definitely done by the same person who had drawn the one Philip had brought to Stella as a personal message. The first one was reasonably innocuous—just a child-imagined spaceship, with rocket flames coming out of the base below what looked to be spindly-looking landing gear but with the ship itself apparently suspended by itself in the middle of the page and surrounded by artlessly drawn stars. The spaceship had a window, and an attempt to portray a stick-figure-type person who was looking out of that window into the stars. Stella’s own imagination improved the image as she stared at it, because there was something terribly huge and sad and lonely about the whole thing, and if it had been possible to see the face of the figure behind the window inside that spaceship, had the young artist been capable of rendering such a thing at all, Stella could imagine an expression with the downturned mouth of sadness, an endless sorrow in the eyes.
The second drawing, though, was the one which she stared at the longest, reading in it a message that she could not quite pin down but which seemed to gel perfectly with something she had thought about before… if only she could remember what precisely that was. It showed five human figures—again, little more than barely stick-men—ranged in a semi-circle at the top of the page. Behind each of those figures, like an echo or a repeat, many smaller similar figures receded away towards the edges of the paper. Below and in the middle of the page stood a sixth figure, which appeared to be holding hands with a child-sized smaller figure. These two were encircled in an irregular kind of balloon shape, lightly cross-hatched, as though they were in their own separate little bubble.
It wasn’t a huge leap to assign the six figures in the drawing to the six individuals from the Parada crew. It wasn’t even difficult to give them identities. One of the top five figures was shown as having longer hair, and it was clearly supposed to be Alaya. Two of them were a little removed from the others, towards the left of the page, and they seemed to have been rendered so that the position of their limbs was an almost exact mirror image of one another’s—Rob and Jerry, the twins. Of the remaining two, one was depicted as a shade bigger than anyone else on the page, which indicated authority, and thus Han; the other, positioned slightly further from the rest at the far right hand side of the page, had pointillist hair, and that pointed to Lily Mae’s own close-cropped tight-curled hair.
Which left the isolated one at the bottom as Boz, the engineer. The one who died.
Was that the point of the bubble? A childish rendition of death?
The ones on the top all had repeats of themselves, shadows of shadows of shadows, attached to the primary figures and disappearing into the distance—the fractured personas? Was it supposed to be a depiction of what had happened to them all—the multiple people who now inhabited each individual body?
If so, why was Boz depicted so differently? Simply because he was gone?
Who was the child figure?
Stella stared at the drawing, feeling the itch of something… something… something others had said to her. Something she herself had said to other people.
Boz. Boz had always been different. She had seen it herself. She had commented on it.
The personalities of the others had always felt organic. Parts of the original whole, peeled away from the core, acquiring their own individuality along the way, becoming as real and alive as the original, as any other persona in the shared body. Boz… what was it she had called him? Artificial? As though he had created his own fragments to order, perhaps first picking names for them and then crafting the personas to fit…?
But what was the child figure…?
It called us out first.
That thing, in the secret drawing, the one only Stella had, not part of the collection. Illogon. The alien entity. The thing that called out the children. The Children’s Collective. The thing that had potentially caused this entire situation, the thing that had taken six human minds and shattered them.
Six minds. What if it had always been only five? What if Boz had never been truly afflicted?
There had been a loneliness about him. An isolation. The others had always protected him, had always been close, had never left him alone. As though they knew—as though they felt that he was different, that he needed the support of the Many, which all of them had, to strengthen him while he carried the heaviest weight of all, the One, the alien mind itself.
What had been different? Was Boz just the most stubbornly sane of them all? The most completely focused, to the point that there was no room in his brain to spare for creating entire personalities to carry aspects of his self? Had he been the key to it all… and now he was gone…?
Stella pushed aside the drawings and turned to the computer screen, calling up Boz’s file and all the personalities they had had on record for him, staring at each of the names and trying to remember exactly what it was that had distinguished that particular personality from the rest. And then, squaring her shoulders, she began to type in search queries for every single name on Boz’s list, cross checking with Boz’s own biographical data.
This was going to take a while. But the picture was coalescing in her mind. And it was no longer the same picture she had constructed from the pieces that she had been given when she had arrived here, no longer the picture which she had believed so unquestionably to be true.
Philip found Stella in the library, hours later, still at the computer, concentrating so hard that she didn’t even realize that he had come in until he touched her shoulder gently and she jumped, swiveling her head around and staring at him for a long blank moment before the recognition came.
“Do you plan on eating anything today?” Philip queried. “Also, did your mother ever tell you that if you don’t stop staring at a computer screen for at least a little while every day your eyes are going to turn square and stay that way?”
“I have something,” Stella said, ignoring his attempts at levity. “I’ve been taking way too much for granted, or at face value. It seems like I just wasn’t seeing what was right in front of me. For whatever reason, the Children’s Collective has decided to give me a nudge. Here, if you didn’t have a chance to look at those drawings when you got them handed to you, take a good look now. That one. The one with the semi-circle of those figures on the top. Do you see? Do you see?” She hooked her finger over the page and tapped on the solitary figure at the bottom of the page. “That. You know who that is?”
“Is this meant to be them? The six of them? And if they are—then is that one… Boz?”
“I should have done this as soon as I started getting a sense that he was different from the rest. I told you that, remember? That I thought he—that his people—were more, I don’t know, artificial than the other five’s fragment collections? That it felt more like he picked out a name, and then whittled out a puppet character to inhabit it? Well, how about, characters to pretend to inhabit it? Philip, what if he was the only one who was not fragmented at all?”
Philip lifted his eyes from the drawing, and they were haunted. “But why?”
“Because of…” Stella glanced around, wary. Of all places, the library might have been wired, and she didn’t want to blurt out things she didn’t want known. “Well, I haven’t figured it all out yet,” she said, instead of what she had intended to say. But she smiled at Philip, and he understood the unspoken perfectly well. The Parada’s alien guest was very much present for both of them. And Philip was the one who voiced the irony of it.
“Protection,” he said.
Stella nodded, her expression intense. “They are extremely bonded,” she said. “And when… whatever happened… happened up there… oh, it must have been appalling, for Boz. He was the only one who didn’t…”
“I take it you think all these other figures are the other fragments? The other souls?”
“Well, but souls are your department,” Stella said. “The other personalities, yes.”
“But if the numbers are accurate, there are more than we know…?”
“Don’t take it too literally,” Stella said, “I don’t think the seven-year-olds who drew that were concerned with accuracy. What was intended was the idea be conveyed, not the details.”
Philip tapped the smaller figure beside the Boz-character. “But then what’s this?”
“There was one,” Stella said. “One true one. One true fragment. Jiminy. I heard it said—I heard it, and I skated right over it—they were the first to come out. The children. The Children’s Collective. All the children, from every one of them out there. Whatever caused their sense of wonder to snap loose and break apart from them and assume its own—if you like—soul… that’s what the children were, Philip. That wonder. The awe. The endless astonishment of it all. The empty cups waiting to be filled. They’re real, all of them—yes, even Jiminy. But Jiminy was the oldest of the children—even that. Jiminy was the wariness within the wonder. Jiminy was the most adult of the Children’s Collective. And when the rest of them kept going, peeling persona after persona off and giving each one life and existence, Boz and his mini-me, the Jiminy soul, they… they couldn’t follow. They stood back, and they watched, and oh God, Philip, I don’t know yet, I can’t tell you exactly, I don’t know whose idea it was in the end—but he just made it up—to be like the rest of them…each of them contained multitudes, in the end, but Boz, Boz was always alone…”
