The Second Star, page 9
“That’s one of the early videos they recorded, straight after they were brought here,” Stella said. “They might have been. That might be the real people there. They didn’t know about all the personalities yet—then—so it’s hard to tell. With the Hillermans it’s always difficult, anyway. But from what I learned of some of the fragments Lily Mae does look a little like Mamie there. Mamie is one of her ‘people’. At least, that’s what she calls herself. She’s the one who keeps telling them things are going wrong, but is never believed until it’s too late—the twins insist on calling her Cassandra.”
“Is there any hope…?” Tyrone said, looking up, the expression on his face almost stricken.
“I don’t know,” Stella said carefully. “We have no means of knowing whether they’ve stopped fragmenting yet. I don’t know how far that can go, without a complete dissolution of personality. But I’ve seen case studies where patients carried hundreds of fragments, and we might only be seeing the beginning of this right now. My guess, and it is no more than a guess at this point, is that it won’t get that far. But any hope of them walking out of here as the same six people who first walked onto the Parada?” She shook her head slightly. “I think we’re past that. They may never each coalesce into a single entity again; if they do, they may not integrate the way they fit together before. When something like this changes, it leaves permanent traces.”
“Do what you must,” Hugh de Mornay said calmly, looking up and pushing the tablet back at her. “I will not betray them, or speak of this to people who cannot possibly be expected to understand. But I won’t promise to erase the Parada. She belongs in our legends. She and her crew. I will remember them. Alone, if I must.”
Communication with the outside world from within the bunker that housed the Parada secret may have been strictly monitored, but Stella, Philip and Ichiro were permitted to watch live when the Juno crew was permitted to step back out into the world. Stella felt something constrict her throat as the door of a large white building opened. Huge crowds waited in anticipation, and a thundering roar of human voices rose to greet the first man who stepped through—Captain Hugh de Mornay of the Juno, freshly barbered, wearing his dress uniform, his eyes squinting a little in the sunshine but forswearing sunglasses which would have hidden his face. The roar increased, if that was possible, when Tyrone Kidman and then Joe White Elk followed him outside. Stella saw Joe touch his chest, and knew why he did it—he had brought his talisman home, or permitted it to bring him home, and the power that resided there, so thin, so nearly worn out, was starting to recharge now that Joe stood with his own two feet on the soil of his home world. He closed his eyes, briefly, as though he was saying a prayer, before he opened them again and gazed out at the crowds, his features relaxed into an expression of calm serenity. Tyrone, the only one of the three who did choose to wear dark sunglasses, was also the only one of the three to look tense, his shoulders hunched a little as though he was folding his body protectively over something very precious.
The men waved to the crowd—Stella could see the first ranks, as the media camera drones panned and swooped around, and people were screaming, crying, laughing, hugging their neighbors at random, children carried on their fathers’ shoulders so they could have a better view, a forest of phones and tablets and cameras rising out of the throng to take any kind of photo that they could. There was an open walkway from the bottom of the steps where the men stood, cutting a swathe through the crowd, set apart from that space with barriers, like the channel that Moses supposedly once made in the sea; the crew of the Juno, the Captain a step ahead and the other two falling in abreast behind him, descended the steps and started down that path. Stella could barely make out anything coherent out of the roar and thunder of the crowd, but some things drifted through, when a drone camera swooped in closer and caught fragments of what was being shouted at the three who walked steadily down through the people.
Welcome home! Thank you! Wow! You’re back! You returned to us! Welcome home!
They were the world’s now, those three. They would always be. Their faces would be remembered and recognized from here on.
There was a press conference for a globe-spanning, dizzying array of media representatives, after. The questions—some serious, some deeply silly—came thick and fast, and the air was electric with flashes.
“Are you glad to be home?”
“Profoundly,” Hugh de Mornay said. “It is lonely out there. We dreamed of blue skies while we were so far from them.”
“What’s next for you?”
“Give us a moment,” Tyrone said. “I’d just like to get used to real gravity again.”
That was obviously a rehearsed remark done for effect—the man had been in ‘real gravity’ for some time—but if Stella knew it was fake nobody else did. That one was quotable, and would be quoted.
“Would you go back out there if they called you?”
“I would do whatever my world asks of me, if able,” Joe said. “Even go back into the dark. But going out again… you know what you can expect, this time. And that makes it both easier and that much harder to do.”
“What would you say was the greatest thing you accomplished out there?”
Stella held her breath for a moment, knowing that the true answer to that question was forbidden for them to offer, and wondering which of them would take on the burden of the big lie.
She saw Joe and Hugh exchange a long look, with Tyrone keeping his own gaze on the folded hands that lay on the table before them. Then Joe gave the faintest of nods, and it was the Captain who turned to face the news throng.
“We survived,” Hugh said, and that answer wasn’t gung ho or grand, it was a piece of simple truth, served up without embellishment. He waited for it to sink in, and gather just a little bit of silence as a reaction. And then, drawing a deep breath, he went on. “We learned that it was possible to survive the uncanny, the unexpected, the unspeakable. You have to understand that there is a price for that lesson, and that the price may not, indeed, cannot, be the same for any two people. Some of us pay more than others. But what we pay… is not something that is easily shared. Someday, maybe. Not today. There is a promise between us and the stars, and we may not break it.”
He had skated as close as he could to implying that there was more, of which he could not speak, but even the harshest reading that could be put on those words by some General or a watching politician could not possibly be misinterpreted into his having broken the compact, or his conditioning. Hugh de Mornay had told the truth as best as he could without actually lying. Stella could see, from an almost imperceptible change in his stance, a slight relaxation of a stiffness he had carried in his shoulders, that he had chosen his words carefully, had said what he could say, and was now free of that. He could talk circles around this subject in the years to come—but with these words, in answer to the first direct question that addressed the thing of which he could not speak, he had actually defied every command of prohibition that had been laid upon him without ever having directly breached the conditions of his freedom. He was an honorable man, and his honor cut both ways. Obeying the orders of higher authorities and his own personal principles he had buried a seed of that unspoken truth into the ground of the rest of the narrative. The rest would take care of itself.
There was more, of course—so much more. The world celebrated for days. There were actual fireworks. The Juno crew seemed to have no respite at all from the full glare of public attention. Stella kept an eye on it all, particularly in the evenings, when she retired to her quarters and reviewed the day’s unadulterated adoration of the ‘star-men’, as they quickly became known.
“There’s a part of me that wishes I was out there,” she said to Philip over breakfast on the fourth day after the Juno crew left the compound. “You know, sharing the party.”
“You started the party,” Philip said. “A good part of the reason that they are out there at the party is because you unlocked the doors. And remember, it wasn’t a free ride. They had to pay quite a price for it.”
“So did I,” Stella said quietly. “And I don’t think any of us are done paying it yet.”
3.
Stella didn’t really believe in coincidences. There were times, of course, when everything in the world seemed to conspire to make something turn out a certain way—but if she was honest with herself few of those occasions occurred in a manner where she couldn’t trace at least a faint line of causality, even if she had to do so after events had played out. It was the way she saw the world, the way she saw a human mind function, the way she saw the human mind take the lazy way of explaining things it didn’t want to dwell on too much.
Perhaps it was coincidence that she happened to be in the Surveillance Room when something odd happened on the screens, something that caught her eye and her immediate attention. It was the day after the Juno crew was released into the world’s adoring gaze, but the Parada crew had not been supplied with any kind of real-time link to the outside world—it had been decided that they needed a more gradual introduction to a world two centuries older than the one they had left behind and the only one they remembered—and they would have had no way of knowing of the events concerning the other crew or that those three men were no longer on the same premises as themselves. And yet something drew Stella’s eye—a reaction—both intriguing by itself and something that forcibly reminded Stella of Joe White Elk’s words: I heard children.
As Stella watched from the Surveillance Room the Parada six were gathered together into a tight little knot in the middle of the common area. They sat on the floor, in a circle, their heads bowed so that they were close together, and they held hands—not in a way an adult would hold hands with another adult, but in the almost awkward way a small child would do so. In fact their entire body language had changed completely, and even the six-foot-nine frame of Hanford Millgar had somehow managed to fold itself up into the space that might have been occupied by a child.
A six-year-old child.
She snatched up her tablet and called up the Parada profiles which listed the known personalities which had been observed in each crew member. She found the captain, and scrolled down his list with a finger until she halted abruptly when she found what she sought.
Glory, presenting as a six-year-old girl self-describing as red-haired.
They all had them, the child personality. Every single one of them.
Half-watching the screen, waiting for the group to do something she could observe more closely, Stella looked up the other crewmembers.
Alaya: Momo, presenting as seven years old, gender indeterminate.
Bogdan (or, as even she had already started to think of him, Boz): Jiminy, presenting as an eight-year-old self-described blond little boy.
Lily Mae: Coco, presenting as a seven-year-old girl.
Jerry: Gadfly, presenting as a seven-year-old boy.
Rob: Gem, presenting as a wheaten-haired seven-year-old girl.
The children. All the children. All of them out, all of them together. What did Joe call them? ‘The Children’s Collective’.
“Well,” Stella murmured to herself, tucking her tablet into the side pocket of her tunic and straightening, “Children. It had to be children.”
Stella had always been a little ill at ease around children, particularly very young ones, although she had always been able to conceal that fairly well from anyone who wasn’t really paying close attention—to the point that she had a reputation, in her practice, of being ‘good’ with children. But being ‘good’ with them merely meant that she had evolved a strategy to interact with them so that she could help a young patient through a difficult time. It did not mean that she liked them, or even wholly trusted them. Children were… difficult. It was just the crowning glory of this entire tough, unique, unprecedented Parada situation that it involved personalities that were this young.
She turned sharply before she could talk herself into changing her mind and marched out of the Surveillance Room, heading straight to the holding area where the six crewmembers were held.
The surveillance operator must have overheard her, drawn the right conclusions, and alerted the proper authorities—because Martin Peck met her in the corridor just outside the crew quarters.
“What are you doing?” he asked, standing firmly in her path.
“I have to meet them sometime,” Stella said.
“Now?” Martin still questioned, not moving.
“You have a better time?” Stella riposted. “Look. I need to speak to these people. I freely admit that doing that freaks me out on some level because it… it doesn’t feel real to be talking to people who should realistically have been dead long before I was born. I have come to terms with that, to the point that ‘I need to speak to these people’ has become something I need to do… soon. And right now, in there, I have an opportunity I may not get again soon, or be around to see it if it does happen. I don’t relish this, or even particularly look forward to it, but something is happening in there that I do need to investigate. That’s the Children’s Collective in there.”
“The what?”
Stella sighed. “I will come straight to you, and explain,” she said. “After. Joe White Elk spoke of this in the interview I had with him—I’m sure you have that on the record somewhere, you can go find that particular section. But he only gave me hints, and here I have a chance to observe the real thing in real time. Please let me through. Before I lose this.” Her grip on her temper slipped just a little—she didn’t have all the answers and perhaps she never would but she was trying to learn, and having to beat her forehead against a brick wall or having to keep vigil outside a locked gate until the paperwork came through wasn’t the way she would accomplish that. “Don’t you understand? This may be the best way in I have got. And over and above that, I have reason to believe that these child personas might have been the first to fracture off. There is a lot I could be learning in there, right now—even if I could just stand around and eavesdrop! Would you please just start trusting…”
“You should make a plan,” Martin said, stubborn and digging in just a little against the perceived attitude he was getting. “A schedule.”
“This won’t work according to a schedule,” Stella said, still patiently enough, but biting the words off nonetheless. “Those people in there don’t subscribe to your schedules. You’re trying to impose order on a kind of chaos that I don’t even know the fullest extent of. But this might be a beginning.” She softened her tone. “Please, Martin. Now. Let me go.”
He hesitated, but then she saw his jaw clench as his teeth clicked together. “I am responsible,” he said. “For… for safety.”
“Whose?”
“Everyone’s. Yours.”
“There are no actual guarantees,” Stella said. “But if I am to make a connection this is a place to start, an opportunity that might not come my way again.”
Martin’s right hand balled into a fist, and then relaxed, in a gesture of resignation. He stepped to one side. “I’ll be watching,” he said. “From Surveillance.”
“You do that,” Stella said, slipping past him and on to the door into the crew quarters.
There was a permanent guard on duty outside those doors. The one standing there now stared at Stella as she defiantly flashed her ID at him.
“I have access,” she said, irritated. She saw his eyes flick over to Martin, glanced over just in time to see him give a small sharp nod and resented both him and the guard for disregarding her rights here and colluding over her head on whether or not she was allowed entrance. The guard nodded and stepped away from the door—and Stella wasted no further thought or energy on him. She simply ignored him, reached past him, and slipped into the room which she had watched so often since she had been brought here but inside of which she had never been… and into the presence of six people she was fascinated by, frightened by, bewildered by, six people whose physical presence in this room with her she could barely believe in even when she was less than six feet away from them. She caught herself holding her breath.
The black woman lifted her head out of the circle to look up at her. Instinct—and all professional experience—would have had Stella address her by her real name, the name borne by the physical body she still inhabited. But this was not Lily Mae Washington. The eyes that met Stella’s were wary, wide, and very young.
“Coco?” Stella asked softly.
The child simply gazed back at her solemnly.
“My name is Stella. Will you introduce me to your friends?”
“Okay,” Coco said. She started by nodding her chin to her right, where she held hands with the hunched-over nearly seven-foot figure of the captain and said, “This is Glory. She’s only six. She’s the youngest of us. And that’s Momo, and Gem, and Gadfly, we’re all the same age. And that’s Jiminy. He’s the oldest. He’s nearly eight. And he’s always last. Always late.”
Stella wasn’t quite sure what that meant—late to what? To this gathering?—but she let that go, filing it away for further consideration later, and concentrated on what was happening in the moment. The bodies of the adult crew members sat cross-legged in a circle on the floor of the common room, holding hands. The eyes that rose to meet Stella’s at every introduction were the physical eyes that graced the adult bodies. But in every single pair of them Stella could read only the children who had been introduced to her by these names. There was nothing else there, no trace of an adult mind at all, the only expression in those eyes an innocence, a childlike wonder, a wary but not frightened serenity, and a kind of wisdom and knowledge that had always been beyond an adult mind which made Stella’s hair stand on end.
“Hello,” Stella said. “It’s nice to meet you. What are you all doing?”
“They’re gone, aren’t they?” Jiminy said, and Stella’s heart did a backflip.
“Who’s gone?”
“The others. Those others. Who were out there when we were there. Who helped bring us back here. They’re gone.”
