The Second Star, page 24
“But there were others—I know, I think I spoke to—”
“You thought there were. Because there were the others in the rest of the crew, and so you saw… what I saw… you saw multiples in Boz, too. But now that I think back over every interaction I had with him…”
“You wondered once if there was anything left of the original Boz inside of him,” Philip said. “I know you said that. And now you’re saying that it was all the original Boz, and that everything else was—what—an act?”
“Of desperation, perhaps,” Stella said. “Look, look at this—” She swiveled back to the computer and enlarged one of the several windows she had open on the screen. “I went back to the list of named personalities we had on Boz and I did a search on the names. And look—I can map them all. His ‘professorial’ persona, Leonid—Boz did his Masters degree under the dual supervision of a Dr. Lionel Winger, at Cornell, and a Dr. Leonid Adamov, from Bucharest. Hence Leonid. He just took the name. The thuglet with which he always faced Lily Mae’s Diana—Boris, a name of Russian origin that maps onto the personality of the bully, which works in the known cultural context. There was a well-known and very ambitious local regional politician in Boz’s time with the name of Imre—hence his Imre Imperator persona. He has what I call a ‘saint’ persona—”
“Konstantin. Yes, I think I actually spoke to that one.”
“You would have done. He created it for you,” Stella said.
Philip reared back. “He what?”
“You were a priest. He felt as though you might want to communicate with… someone you might relate to.”
“Where do you get that from?”
“Look it up. The first time Konstantin appeared as a named personality arrow in Boz’s quiver, it was when he first spoke directly to you. There was no mention of him before that.”
“I don’t… I don’t know what to say to that,” Philip said, looking dazed.
“You created a saint,” Stella said. “So to speak, anyway. That would be quite a feather in your cap to take back to your supervisors.”
“If what you say is true, I faked a saint, which is not the same thing,” Philip said. “You said they all had a warrior or protector persona—did he?”
“I believe so. Named Khan, and again, that fits, because that region remembers the Mongol invasions and they were their history’s bad guys, warriors, cold and ruthless, and I guess that he invoked one to ‘protect’ him, that would fit with making history pay its debts to him.”
“But what about—there was this pagan God persona—”
“Perun? I don’t know. Possibly he was running out of ideas by that stage. The others all had at least ten personalities and he was starting to show some which he could not fully substantiate. I ‘met’ someone—just once—who claimed to be a young gypsy boy. But the name was not Romany, and although the boy claimed to be able to play the violin, he also neatly precluded being put in a position to prove it by saying that he hadn’t been able to do so ever since a nebulous ‘they’ broke the fingers of his right hand. He…”
Philip sat up. “But wait. There is at least one other persona out there with a god-name.”
“What? Who?”
“Jerry. Loki.”
“Yes, but you see—that makes sense—Jerry had that personality all along, the trickster persona, the edge of selfishness, and Loki was a name that fit that persona. Whereas Boz then—ah, maybe he was even inspired by this!—plucked a name from a pantheon that he felt more culturally comfortable with, and then created a persona to match it. It’s exactly the opposite to what Jerry had done—a mirror image, almost.”
“I believe you, even though I don’t begin to understand what you are talking about,” Philip said helplessly. “And Jiminy, then—how was Jiminy different?”
“Jiminy was real,” Stella said. “That much I can bet on. Everything else Boz claimed to be was a fabrication.”
“The question then is, were the others fully aware of this? I mean, did they really know? And if they did know, why did they say nothing—and if they didn’t know, how come they couldn’t tell?”
“That might be something I can, carefully, talk to some of the others about. All kinds of questions arise. And they aren’t exactly saying nothing any more, are they?” Stella indicated the tell-tale drawing Philip still held with a toss of her head. “I can’t believe it took me this long to see…”
“We’ve been re-enacting the three wise monkeys story,” Philip said wryly. “If you weren’t seeing, I wasn’t hearing, and they certainly weren’t talking.”
“Well, we all are now,” Stella said. She swiveled back to the computer. “I checked the others, too. Look. Some of the personas aren’t given a name—Rob’s Poet, for instance, and Alaya’s Red Empress, and, well, Han’s evil twin just goes by Cap which would be short for Captain—but for those that are named, the names are random, Philip. They don’t map to anything that I can directly find in any of their backgrounds. Jerry has a den mother persona named Edwina, and unless he’s projecting the dimly remembered personality of some long-gone kindergarten teacher, I can find no Edwina in his personal record. Lily Mae has a bunch of named personalities—Billie, Mamie, Diana—and I can’t find anybody by any of those names in her past either. Rob’s named personas include Simon and Eddie—again, no matches. Han maps to Hal, to Raff, to Charlie—no matches. Alaya has a psychology guru by the name of Susan, who has nothing to do with her past. All of these new people, the named ones, they just… knew themselves and named themselves and the names fit. Not one of Boz’s ever did that.”
“Except Jiminy.”
Stella paused. “There was something about Jiminy… something different about the Children’s Collective.” Stella chewed on her lower lip. “Damn. If I had figured this out earlier maybe I could have pushed Boz out of the fugue state. He was still whole, Philip. He was himself. He could have helped us figure out the others. Maybe he could have been rehabilitated, released…”
“Maybe that is why it all fell out the way it did,” Philip said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” Philip said quietly. “And—again—it isn’t something you haven’t said before. There are…were… six of them, Stella. Only six of them. The rest of us are all strangers from a different century, a literally different world from the one that they left—remember the discussions you’ve had with them concerning all the stuff that happened while they weren’t here? Everything they knew is changed—everyone they personally knew, family, friends—it’s all been dust and ashes for a hundred years or more. All they have is one another—and then, when they came home, they got locked up in that habitat area with each other and forced to interact with that tight little group of people—that’s all they’ve got. You can’t just randomly pick and choose which of them you think might be ‘releasable’—it would break the only whole thing they have, the only thing they know—the cohesion of that little group. Themselves.” It looked like he was about to say something else but caught himself in time. He shook his head in a small frustrated gesture. He couldn’t talk about the alien presence and how that might have changed the game, not out loud, not here, and Stella heard the silence and understood.
“I have to talk to Martin,” Stella said. “This does change the prism I’m looking through.”
Philip gave her an urgent look and Stella nodded.
“I know. Go away, Philip. I have a report to write and it’s going to be a tough one. And before I take it to him, there are a few other things I need to check up on.”
“Eat first,” Philip said, smiling, but obediently getting up to obey the dismissal.
Stella grinned back at him. “Meet you for dinner later,” she said, and swatted at him. “We can talk more then. Now go. Let me work. Keep an eye on the crew for me.”
It took Stella another couple of hours to pull everything into an urgent report for Martin, even dutifully scanning in the drawings from the Collective although the report itself contained a thinly disguised rebuke for those drawings, which were clearly in Stella’s own remit and should have gone to her, instead of being hijacked by someone plainly under separate orders. Stella had to stop herself from starting that part of the report with ‘As you already know…’, but she was pretty certain that the drawings had been seen by Martin before they landed in the library, and there hadn’t even been a notification for Stella herself that they existed. It was only through Philip that she had learned of them at all.
When she finally copied the report onto her personal tablet and signed off the library computer, pushing her chair back and knuckling her blurry eyes, she remembered Philip’s admonition to eat something and became aware that she was in fact starving; her stomach rumbled in confirmation. She texted a note to Philip to ask if he felt like meeting her at the cafeteria imminently and while waiting for a response took a quick detour to the Parada quarters to check on Lily Mae.
She was not pleased to find that Lily Mae was asleep again, curled up on her side with her hands folded underneath her chin in a vulnerable and almost fetal position. Beside the bed were two water bottles, one empty on the floor and a quarter-full one on the bedside shelf; another half-full bottle teetered precariously on the bathroom sink, and the shrink-wrapped pack of twelve wedged into the bathroom, which Aisha the cleaner had brought the day before, only had three full bottles left in it. Stella looked around briefly for any detritus to account for the rest of the pack, but when she glanced at the door it was to see Rob Hillerman standing there, his hands folded primly in front of him. It was a feminine gesture but it didn’t look like he was Gem; Stella did the usual mental shuffle, looking for the personality that matched.
“Ruby,” Rob said, recognizing the blank look of non-recognition and supplying a name politely but with thinly disguised exasperation. “I’m Ruby.”
“Have we met?” Stella said carefully. “I’m sorry if I’m being rude.”
“Course we have. Leastways I think so. I had a few things to say every now and then.” Ruby sniffed, looking around Lily Mae’s cubicle with disdain. “I know she can hardly do anything with this one in here all the time, sleeping and lollygagging, but still. You’d think this Aisha woman would do a better job. Just look at that. She carted off a whole bunch of empties just this morning, and now there’s all this lying around. Wouldn’t happen if I was on the job.”
“What job’s that?” Stella asked, picking up the empty bottle on the floor which had been the object of Ruby’s scorn.
“I’ve been cleaning for twenty years,” Ruby said, sniffing, “and I can tell you I don’t leave no rubbish bobbing about in my wake.”
“I may have told this Aisha not to disturb Lily Mae if she’s asleep,” Stella said. “It may be my fault. I do wish Lily Mae would shake herself loose from this, though. I don’t like it.”
“Too many voices,” Ruby said, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorjamb.
“What was that?” Stella said, suddenly paying attention.
“It was clear… before. Now, there’s too many others. Too many voices. If they’re all talking at once, inside, it’s too hard to deal with the outside world at all. So she sleeps. At least nobody talks to her then or tries to get her to make sense of things. And it’s just getting worse.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“It’s trying to find a place,” Ruby said, and it sounded completely incongruous, but Stella felt the cold touch of something at the base of her mind, staring at Ruby’s earnest eyes. “Things were easier… before… it had settled, and it could have space…but now… too crowded. No room. No room for quiet and sense and sanity.” She sniffed. “I am a cleaner. I know what I see. There’s too much clutter. Something has to be cleared away in order to make room to breathe. Easier if you can just make the silence you need.”
Stella found a giddy moment to wonder about what the watchers in the Surveillance Room would make of this gibberish—all of which was beginning to make perfect sense to her, now.
Illogon had jumped from the clear spaces of Boz’s sane, clear, singular mind… into the welter of personalities that now existed in all of the others. It was not, in the end, surprising that the entity might have started to lose its own marbles—and in a sense Stella was grateful that Lily Mae’s response had been to go semi-catatonic rather than into a screaming banshee mode. She remembered Jerry’s description of Lily Mae’s protector persona, Stiletto, and counted herself lucky that Stiletto hadn’t emerged to protect Lily Mae from perceived threats… which now pretty much might be anything, and everything.
“Has she… any part of her… talked to anybody here? Directly?” Stella asked, choosing her words carefully. “Do you know this, or are you assuming…?”
“It can make you feel… alone.” Ruby said. “And they would be…afraid. They wouldn’t understand.” Her eyes slid to Lily Mae where she lay curled on the bed, and then she added, very softly, “And she’s one of us. We will keep her safe as best we can. And all that she carries within her.”
Stella had to fight the urge to cast a desperate look at where she thought the nearest camera surveillance equipment was, like Loki did, and stick her tongue out at it. The sense of having someone constantly eavesdropping on every conversation she had with the Parada people violated every tenet of her training—and she felt increasingly hamstrung by not being able to ask real questions she needed real answers to just because doing so in the open might reveal more to those who sat watching over this place than Stella was ready to offer up to them. She closed her eyes for a moment, heaving a huge sigh, and then looked up at Ruby again.
“Is there a good time to come by when Lily Mae’s usually awake?” she asked. “I understand that she won’t be eager to. But if I could just get… some…” Aware that she was floundering, Stella closed her mouth with a snap. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be back later.”
Ruby plucked the empty water bottle from her hand. “Fine,” she said, her tone bland and completely conversational, as though she had said nothing unusual or untoward at all in this conversation and it had all been just about the presence of unsanctioned trash on the floor. “I’ll just get rid of this for you, then, shall I?”
There was a message from Philip on her tablet by the time Stella walked out of the habitat, and she made her way to the cafeteria to meet him. It was busy, with a number of tables occupied by various personnel—a shift-change in progress, with the day people going off and the night crew just coming on line. Philip’s table in fact already had another ensign sharing it, which meant that for at least a little while Philip and Stella had to content themselves with small talk and inanities, until such time as the inconvenient ensign finished her quick meal and excused herself. By that stage things were starting to thin out a little and nobody else approached their table, so Stella finally leaned in closer.
“Just been talking to Ruby,” she said.
“Who’s Ruby… all right, which one?” Philip said, resigned. “Every time I think I know them all someone else crawls out. Is there a limit to how many they can segment into?”
“I don’t know. There are way too many things here I don’t know. But I am getting an inkling that while that sedative might have started it all, it isn’t the medication that’s strictly speaking affecting Lily Mae adversely. Ruby, another of Rob’s, says that the whole thing is something along the lines of a self-defense mechanism. That there’s too much of a clamor inside Lily Mae’s head and… things… are loud and complicated. So much so that parts of her can’t hear the other parts of her think. So she chooses not to exacerbate things by communicating externally and adding more noise into the mix. That… makes sense, but I have no idea how to fix it.”
“Have you told any of this to Martin yet?”
“I was going to but I went by the habitat first and then I came here,” Stella said, tucking into a square of moussaka on her plate. “You were right about eating, at that. I feel better already. So no, not yet, I was planning on delivering the report in person but I might have to wait to do that tomorrow morning.”
“Just… be careful there.”
“Oh, I am,” Stella said, sounding faintly smug. “I took a moment this afternoon to comb through my own contracts, and the statements I signed. I can’t talk about any of this with anyone outside this place, anyone without a certain level of clearance, that is. But I am allowed to call on civilian authorities if I feel as though the military is overstepping on something. And those drawings… that was a deliberate attempt to cut me out of the loop, at least until such time as the military could inspect the things. If he tries to stonewall me on this, I might just call in the civilians, at that.”
“But he still has authority,” Philip said.
“Yes, and he threatened to pull me off if I overstepped the mark—as he saw it—again,” Stella said.
“That’s the worst thing that could happen…” Philip began, rousing.
“I am no use to them at all if I can’t do anything to help them,” Stella said. “I’m here for them. First, and only, them. Martin said he might have been instrumental in bringing me—or someone like me—on board in the first place, but that doesn’t mean that he gets to give me orders. That isn’t something I was paying nearly enough attention to, until now. I might need to… I don’t know… pull civilian rank.”
