The Second Star, page 8
When the whispered colloquy came to an end, the four having reached some kind of conclusion, they all settled back into their seats, the Premier sitting straight-backed in hers like she was perched on a throne.
“We agree,” she said, and even though she meant the entire committee it almost came out sounding as regal as her position in her chair already seemed to indicate. “And it probably should—at this point—best come from you. You will provide a detailed overview of the topics you intend to cover in this interview, and provide it to us; we reserve the right to amend the agenda, but we will not do so unreasonably. When an approved agenda is returned to you, you may schedule your meeting. It will be recorded, and archived. It will also be the last time that you will have contact with the Juno crew, or have any further input on their circumstances, barring any specific actions we, as the responsible authorities, might require of you. You will make no further attempt to communicate with that crew, or influence any future events concerning them. From here on, your only duty will be to concentrate on the six from the Parada, and to provide us with a full report on what must, should, or even can be done in that situation. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Stella said faintly. And then, because her blood was still up and she could not let this go without at least an assurance, “And you’ll let them go?”
“We will consult on ways in which that can best be accomplished,” the Premier said. “They will have to make… certain promises. But yes, we will make every effort to release the crew of the Juno to the rewards that all of their accomplishments so richly entitle them. Lieutenant Colonel Martin Peck will supervise and liaise, as usual. We will await your interview proposal.”
Philip took Stella’s elbow as she pushed back her chair and shakily walked out of the conference room, with Ichiro, after giving the panel a formal bow, bringing up the rear. When the door closed behind the three of them, Stella collapsed against the wall.
“You won,” Philip said. “Hey, you won.”
“A battle,” Ichiro said. “Perhaps an important battle. But the war is still ahead and remains to be fought.”
“Let her have the moment, can’t you?” Philip said. He was smiling, but he was also very serious.
The door of the conference room opened again, and Martin Peck stepped out, all but running them down.
“I have to say,” he said, after taking a moment to give Stella a long and not easily interpreted look that was equal parts annoyance, astonishment, and respect, “that I never saw this coming from you when I first met you, Dr. Froud. I misjudged you.”
“She was strong right from the start,” Philip said. “In that first stop in the Surveillance Room. I remember. I was there.”
“Yes, but that was a quiet little roar,” Martin said. “I’m not sure I could have faced that lot down the way you did in there, though.”
Stella pushed herself off the wall, the hectic flush fading from her cheeks.
“Thanks,” she said, “I think. If you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do. You’ll have what they asked for, as quickly as I can put it together.”
Martin gave her a salute. “Ma’am,” he said, and it wasn’t a mockery, despite the smile that accompanied it. “I’ll be waiting.”
The demand to oversee Stella’s ‘agenda’ proved to be a gesture, largely a way to pass on the torch of responsibility. She received the approval note in less than forty eight hours, which startled her considerably. The text from Martin Peck came through on her official comm unit, which bleated at her while she was hard at work at her computer terminal in the library, trying to keep busy with something relevant while she waited for a response.
You’re a go, Martin’s message said. Amended doc attached. Make the arrangements. Let me know.
Stella had paused only long enough to retrieve the ‘doc attached’ and scan it for anything she absolutely couldn’t accept as being changed or deleted. All the important stuff was in there, however, and that was fine… except that there was also a message from the committee. A set of conditions for the Juno crew’s release, something that she was to ensure they were informed about; she was also to make it perfectly clear that a full acceptance of these conditions was a prerequisite for the lifting of their ‘quarantine’. This would be done—but it would be done under their rules, in their way. Stella had to catch her breath a couple of times as she read the carefully worded document, which never issued a direct threat but managed to make perfectly clear the prospect of looming consequences—ones that would be implemented without hesitation or regret if they were judged to be necessary. Ichiro had been right; she had won an important battle, but this document was not the endpoint. It was the next move in the war.
But all she could do at this point was speak the truth.
She swiped aside the document, opened a new contact, and sent a message to the officer in charge of the Juno group (copying Martin) to set up the necessary meeting as soon as that could be arranged.
They all waited for her behind the table in the interview room this time, Juno’s captain in the center and Tyrone and Joe flanking him. They all looked professionally calm. But the atmosphere in the room was charged, and Stella felt the weight of all three pairs of eyes as she crossed the room and sat down in her chair.
“When we last spoke, Joe,” she said, without preamble, “you asked me if the others were ‘all right’. The short answer to that is no, they are not. And the reason they are not is the reason you three are still here. They were already… affected… by the time you brought them back here, as best we can make out. You have been watched, day and night, for as long as you’ve been held here, waiting to see if you would start to react the same way. Hoping that you would not. That is partly why they brought me here in the first place. To make that diagnosis. As far as that goes, it was quarantine—but not for anything that you thought they were holding you for.”
“What happened?” Hugh said, calmly enough. “I assume, since you are here and you are telling us this now, that someone higher up finally decided that we had a right to know?”
“I said I was going to tell you the truth,” Stella said, “I can tell you what happened, to the best of my knowledge, but not why it happened. Although I am certain enough, from what I have learned about them and about you, that you three aren’t likely to have caught this by any kind of direct ‘contagion’, if you like—the reason they were afraid is that you two crews did share a similar experience and they simply can’t trust that you won’t go the same way. I think you won’t. They told you I was a doctor, and I am, but not just a physician. I am a Psychometric Counselor.”
“They went crazy?” Tyrone said. “The Parada crew?”
“That is not a word I use lightly,” Stella said. “Have you ever heard of Dissociative Personality Disorder?”
“Like, multiple personalities?”
“Multiple souls,” Joe said quietly. “Or maybe a single soul, broken into pieces.”
“There are different theories,” Stella said. “Both of those things. Maybe even some combination of them. Perhaps when a single mind, or soul if you like, shatters … each piece grows a whole new self, as it were, while regenerating. And sometimes those pieces don’t regenerate into blind copies of the original, but create versions of themselves which… address certain needs.”
“Starfish,” Joe said, with a slight nod. “Like starfish. Regenerating from a single ripped limb. If you ripped all the limbs off you might get that number of new starfish—but they’d be new starfish, different starfish, not identical to the one that had been ripped apart to create them.”
“A soul is like a starfish?” Hugh asked, sounding a little perplexed. “So—the Parada people—they—”
“Something shredded those people,” Stella said. “Could you tell anything was amiss when you first crossed paths with them out there? Because the people working with them think that it must have started back then, back in the ship. They became… different people. Collections of different people. Some of them more than seven or eight different people. Some of them more than that. It is stable, on the one hand, in that the personalities they now carry are fixed and they can be interacted with directly while the personality in question responds in predictable ways and can directly remember specific things. It is also very much not stable at all, because the personalities can get triggered by unexpected things and manifest without any kind of control by the… by… the original starfish, if you like.” She grimaced. “Let me give it to you in more clinical terms,” she said. “The six crew members of the Parada returned to Earth… in pieces. Or in multiples. Each of them carries a number of strongly defined individual personalities, some of which it may be possible to trace back to issues or events in a particular person’s life or past, some of which appear to be without any known root—and both kinds are equally strong and present. Individual sub personalities respond as fully human people, consistently, and in a chronologically accurate manner. So far, so known, about the syndrome—but there are aspects to this that are unprecedented. The fact that all six individuals were affected at the same time and presumably through a common trigger, but as full adults, and not, as usual in such cases, rooted in some trauma from their childhoods. The fact that all the shared personalities appear to be fully aware of one another. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be any ‘lost time’, which is something that has often been a big, not to say defining, factor in such cases.” She shook her head helplessly. “There is just so much I don’t know yet. The personalities that have manifested have been at least partially mapped and documented, but their origins—the exact moment of their manifestation—the reason they exist at all—we don’t have answers to any of those questions. There is something out there—something that affected all six people in some significant and reproducible way because every single crew member is affected in the same manner. The personalities we have met so far range from entities chronologically equivalent to their own physical self’s age, to those older than they currently chronologically are, to those younger than they are.”
She paused, and looked straight at Joe. “Every single one of them appears to have a personality who claims to be between five and eight years old. And more often than not when one of those manifests it somehow triggers all the others. It’s as though it is necessary for all of them to be out, present, and communicating at the same time. The splinters—personalities—fragments—sub-identities—appear to have means of internal communication inside each given physical host, if you like. They’re aware of one another. When they switch, they… retain a certain amount of memory, or they are able to access another personality’s memory if they need to. I’m not sure yet how this works. In cases I’ve seen up until now, a personality which is in control of the body is in charge of that body while it’s ‘out’ and other personalities can ‘lose time’ over it—they are blacked out, unaware, not conscious, a personality can wake up in a strange place and have no idea how they got there because that personality wasn’t in charge when the body arrived there. But that doesn’t happen with this crew. It’s like they’re reinventing the syndrome from within. Not only that, they also have established pathways of interacting with individual chosen personalities in other hosts. There is a complex social organization there which we have only begun to unravel.”
“That sounds intense.” Hugh said. “The ones who are in charge of this whole circus… they thought this crew would… splinter… too?”
“Some of them are still not entirely convinced that you won’t,” Stella said carefully. “Having observed the Parada crew… they are understandably uneasy about what would happen if you succumbed to this… out there… after they let you go back into the world. Where they couldn’t control it.”
“But you…? You don’t think…?”
“We have no idea, as I said, just how and why and how long ago the point of fracture was for any the others, or how long it might take to manifest,” Stella said. “So far as I can tell, you three aren’t showing any signs of such fragmentation. I can’t tell you that you never will. But to the best of my knowledge and experience, I don’t think that it’s something that just randomly happens, say, in a starship, and that anyone who sets foot anywhere near a star drive is going to end up being fifteen different versions of themselves. That is certainly one possibility that might be put forward to explain what happened to the Parada crew. Another is something they found out there before you found them—something that might have affected their drive to, as best as I understand it, malfunction in the first place or made it cut out which you say it had done by the time you arrived on the scene. They’re checking that out with the hardware—I daresay every inch of that ship is going to get a thorough examination—but there are a lot of things we can’t answer right now. Some of those answers might take years to figure out. If we ever do. I told them that it is ethically indefensible to keep you imprisoned here any longer. And they agree with me, up to a point. They are ready to let you go. But there are conditions.”
“I think I know them,” Hugh de Mornay said. “But go on.”
“Silence,” she said. “The price is silence. If you step out of this place, you forget that you ever saw the Parada. And they mean forget. There is a way to block the memory, if necessary. They might actually prefer that. But one way or another… if you go out there and you are asked anything about your mission—where you went, why you returned, what happened while you were out there—you may not speak one word about the most important thing of all. Where you are involved, the name of the Parada doesn’t exist outside these halls, and that ship’s crew must remain dead as far as the world is concerned. You can never say anything about your part in bringing the Parada home.”
“They want to take part of my mind,” Tyrone said, barely getting the words past clenched teeth.
“Not take it. Not erase it. There are ways… but tampering with memories in that kind of permanent way is always potentially messy. I would not condone that, or perform that on you.”
“They would probably be able to find someone who would,” Tyrone said.
“Probably,” Stella said steadily. “But it won’t be me. There is another way. Not…take a part of your mind. Just put it behind a wall—keep it more yours, if anything. I can sequester it. I can do a hypnotic block. You are simply not going to be able to communicate anything about the blocked subject—not directly—not verbally, or in writing, or in any other form. The most heroic thing you have ever done, you can never tell anyone about.”
She wove her fingers together, where her hands rested on the table before her, and stared down at them for a long moment before looking up again and meeting each pair of eyes in turn.
“They record these sessions, as you have to be aware that they do, and what I say now I say knowing that I am on the record,” she said. “I will not do harm. I can put a block in place. I will do no more than that.”
“I can give you my sworn word that I will not speak of it,” Hugh de Mornay said. “But that isn’t going to be enough, is it? Not for the people holding the keys.”
“I would accept that, from you,” Stella said. “I know I can take that from Joe, because I have a feeling that he already keeps his secrets close and this would not be a hardship. But you, Tyrone…” She turned to look at the engineer, flushed under his shock of red hair, and there was sympathy in that look, even pity. “I don’t doubt that you would give your word. But you are too full of this thing. You’re brimming with this memory. You might swear that you will never utter a word about it—but you could never have a conversation about this subject with anyone else, ever. Maybe you could cling to the silence in a formal situation like a media interview—but the moment you let that guard down, it would probably come spilling out in some form. It isn’t that I don’t trust you. It’s just that… it would be more than you could hold on to.”
Tyrone’s eyes were actually full of tears. “But I don’t have to forget it? If… if you…”
“I would never take that away from you.” She hesitated. “Father Philip Carter—you met him, I know he came to speak with you all—I don’t know if he told you this. He should have done, but you may have had other things to talk about. But he’s also been reading up on the Parada people, and there are interviews on file with all of them—and Tyrone—Bogdan Dimitrov asked after you. Repeatedly. In several interviews. Not just him, the man who used to be fully and completely him, but at least two of his splinter personas, too. They all remember you. They all know what you did. It isn’t going to disappear.”
“I would still like to have been able to speak with him,” Tyrone said. “Shake the man’s hand and have a drink with him and talk about things…”
“Things that nobody else but you and him would even understand,” Joe said. “I would like to do the same. But even in the silence, out there—we keep the memory, no? We may not speak of it, but we can carry it and hold it close and let its presence in our own spirit shape the course of our lives from here on?”
“Can we… at least see them?” Hugh de Mornay asked. “Before we have to bury them behind walls?”
Stella tapped her tablet screen, and pushed it across the table. “I have this.”
The three men bowed their heads over the tablet and watched the fragment of a video that Stella had transferred there from copious quantities of material stored in the Parada data banks. It was very short, maybe a minute and a half, and it showed the six crew members of the Parada sitting around a table sharing a meal. Bogdan, the engineer, seemed strangely solitary, concentrating on his food, paying close attention to his plate—but Han Millgar was actually laughing at something with Alaya McGinty, who sat next to him, and across the table from them Lily Mae was fielding what looked like a double-pronged conversation with the Hillerman twins who flanked her on either side.
“Are they all… themselves… here?”
