¿Que diablos?
“¿Que diablos?” exclaimed Juan Carlos as shock made him abruptly cry out in one of his two native languages instead of Standard. Grimacing, he held his aching skull in both hands, and then awkwardly fell back from the séance table. No one was holding hands anymore; the circle was broken; the trance was dispelled; the séance was over. “What the hell just happened?”
Next to Juan Carlos, Anna Ivlis was insanely clawing at the air and hysterically crying, “Papa! Papa! Go back to sleep, Papa! You mustn’t grieve alone in space, Papa!Go to sleep!”
Across the table from Anna, Mindy Obermeyer was rapidly working her digital pad. Suddenly, Anna stopped in mid-sentence and collapsed back into her chair, subdued by a deep and all-consuming slumber. Her breathing abruptly slowed to a muffled murmur, and the graphs of her vital signs suddenly stopped jiggling madly and then avalanched down a steep slope to a level plateau.
“Dr. Obermeyer…!” Juan Carlos struggled to say, as alarm clutched his throat. Daimler wasn’t capable of forging complex sentences yet. Being shocked out of trance was too disruptive. Only ragged fragments of ideas and feelings percolated from deep within his brain to his conscious mind, the way bubbles of steam percolate to the surface of a boiling teapot.
Mindy uplifted her palm to fend him off for a moment until she finished making adjustments on her digital pad. When she was done at last, she took a deep breath and leaned back relieved. Only then did she listen to Juan Carlos, who by then had regained his composure if not his dispassion. “Mindy,” he said in an incredulous gasp, “I saw those memories, but I didn’t perceive such… raw emotion… in the moment. The ghost of Anna’s younger self was so full of…guilt and self-recrimination! Why did you show that to present-day Anna? It was almost…cruel.”
Mindy listened intently to her assistant’s outrage, but cut him off at his last question. For the sake of them maintaining a productive and genuinely friendly relationship, it was important to Mindy that Juan Carlos trust her implicitly, and understand that despite his medical certifications, he was still only a student with much to learn.
All the same, Mindy knew Juan Carlos Daimler was a brilliant polymath with a major in archaeology, and minors over the past three years of his education at the Academy in history, sociology, space exploration, and his latest fascination, medicine. Juan Carlos was too smart to accept simply being told, “Trust me.” Mindy knew that to fully regain his trust and cooperation, she would have to tell him the whole story.
Mindy set her jaw, leaned forward, and said, “First of all, present-day Anna won’t have to ‘stand’ anything. This girl already came to me the victim of a trauma that many dedicated clinicians have gone to great lengths to make her forget. I wasn’t about to re-expose her to those horrors and risk opening old wounds without having a plan.” Mindy swiveled her head and scrutinized the girl sleeping peacefully next to her. “I’ve commanded her medi-pak to administer a powerful hypnagogic sedative. She’s sleeping like a baby. And as for her trauma, I’ve reapplied the memory mitigation therapy she received before I met her. She came to me an amnesiac wondering about her past, and for the most part, she’ll be that way again when she wakes up.”
Juan Carlos scoffed. “Then we’ve done nothing to help her. So what was the point of reviving her past?”
“The point was,” Mindy began, “to bring Anna to the climactic moment that threw her out of trance. I already know the Exploration Guild’s official report on the Ivlis expedition tragedy derived from their mission logs and journals. But what the official version didn’t tell me is how the tragedy ripped apart the surviving family members.” Mindy looked deep in thought. “I have to know how present-day Anna feels,” she said.
“Savannah was classified as ‘OPERATIONALLY SAFE’ by the Exploration Guild’s automated probes that discovered the moon, and remained so after years and years of periodic tests. The most recent tests were conducted by the Ivlis Expedition itself before it made landfall. It was known that the moon harbored harmless plant life, nontoxic filamentous bacteria, and a variety of simple worms, but the middle ground of the moon’s ecology was a mystery. Eventually, the Guild finally authorized a research expedition.”
Mindy said, “What no one who evaluated the habitability tests on Savannah realized, was that none of the tests had ever been conducted during the moon’s syzygy: Syzygy is the extremely rare time when Savannah, its sibling moons, its parent gas giant, and its sun are all aligned. That’s when those celestial bodies’ combined tidal forces caused a critical, extra fractional degree of warming on Savannah. Do you understand? No one had ever tested the moon during Syzygy Spring.”
On Earth, in the subarctic northern latitudes, during spring when the frigid tundra begins to thaw, the world practically explodes with dormant insect life hatching, mating, living, dying, and leaving offspring to hibernate until next spring. In the hot, arid deserts of Earth, the first few drops of spring rain cause even the rocks and sand to bloom with abundant, colorful blossoms; while insects and animals awaken, mate, live, die, and leave offspring to hide or hibernate until next spring. And once every 13 or so years, in their own kind of spring, cicadas come out of hiding in vast multitudes to carpet the earth.
Mindy said, “Lars and Inga Ivlis discovered only when it was almost too late, that what appeared to be organic granules ranging in size from a speck of silt to a grain of sand, and scattered throughout the topsoil of Savannah, were actually the stoney chrysalises of millions of species of trillions of dormant, noxious, vermiform creatures that only hatched during Syzygy Spring.”
Mindy stopped for a moment to give Juan Carlos a chance to comprehend that when Lars and Inga Ivlis discovered Savannah was a death trap, they must have been horrified that their daughter had gone storming unawares through a veldt that would soon be teeming with all manner of venomous, snakelike, creatures.
A sharp pang of sympathy for Anna’s younger self lodged in Juan Carlos’ chest as a sad realization overwhelmed him. “She blamed herself for the tragedy on Savannah,” he muttered half aloud. “She thought nothing bad would have happened if only she hadn’t argued with her mother. But Mindy, she’s wrong. She didn’t want the tragedy to happen. And no one had any idea Savannah was dangerous until her parents, themselves, discovered it.”
Mindy said as sagely as an old owl, “Children often overestimate the importance of their actions on the lives of their parents. What happened on Savannah was a tragic accident, but without someone to guide her, such as a parent, young Anna felt responsible. She blamed herself, and that guilt debilitates her to this day. It takes time for a child to mature and gain perspective. My hope was that the last two years have given Anna that perspective.”
An old maxim that Juan Carlos had heard veteran space explorers say, but he had never fully appreciated until now, tumbled impromptu from his lips: “Space is a dangerous place.”
When Mindy sensed Juan Carlos was ready, she resumed apprising him of the fate of the Ivlis expedition. “With Savannah becoming more toxic and life-threatening by the second, Lars Ivlis was desperate to get his family back to Harbard’s Ferry and escape. Once onboard his starship, he used its suspended animation sarcophagi to put Anna in hibernation, and preserve Inga’s body in glaciation. Then he launched his starship towards Earth, and took his family home.
“Lars should have hibernated most of the way home, but since he was piloting alone he had to periodically awaken to monitor the status of his ship. But once awake, he couldn’t make himself go back to sleep right away. He tried, and failed, to reconcile whatever responsibility his daughter deserved for his loss, and himself for not preventing it. In the end, he found himself crushed by grief and the thought of being alone, not only in the vastness of space, but in the eternity to come without his mate. So instead of sleeping as he should, he slumped on the deck beside his wife’s sarcophagus and grieved for far too many days and nights in the dark.
“Is it any surprise then,” Mindy asked, “that Lars Ivlis slowly went…a little mad? That’s how the Exploration Guild described him when their rescue ship intercepted Harbard’s Ferry near Earth.”
Mindy yawned, stretched her arms, and groaned when her joints protested. “Anna and her father have both received extensive psychiatric treatment since they returned home, but neither is anything like healed. Their current relationship is ice-cold and distant. They speak to each other with stiff politeness, but they can’t forgive or comfort the other. They’re both still too caught up in their own hurt, guilt, and feeling of abandonment when the other could not be there for them when they needed the other most.”
Mindy looked straight in Juan Carlos’ eyes and said, “I knew all the relevant facts about the Ivlis expedition tragedy from the official investigation report, but nothing in the report could tell me what I needed to know. I needed the séance so that I could take present-day Anna Ivlis to that climatic moment when the ghost of her father was grieving beside her mother’s sarcophagus, so I could observe how she would react.
“The Anna from two years ago didn’t have the maturity to put aside her own hurt and empathize with her father; to see him as a person, not a parent. But this Anna, the older Anna, felt compassion for her father; her heart went out to him,” Mindy explained. “Despite their current relationship, the present-day Anna still found some compassion for her father; perhaps even some forgiveness. And if she could find some forgiveness for him, then perhaps she can find some compassion, and even some forgiveness, for herself.”
Having come to the end of her tale, Mindy leaned back in her chair with a Cheshire cat smile on her face. “Forgiveness? I can work with that.”
Juan Carlos stared down, past the carpet, the floor, the Academy’s lower fuselage, and perhaps the Pacific Ocean itself, while he weighed what Mindy had told him. At length, his serious, professional expression gave way to his usual, mischievous smile, which in its own way complemented his colleague’s own. Then he asked Mindy, “What next?”
Mindy stretched again, but this time, not so much because of nervous tension. She said, “It’s late. We’re both tired. We should all go home. But first, I need to wake Anna from her soporific and check her state of mind.”
“Wake her?” Juan Carlos said dubiously, drawing back a little. “When you put her under, she was an emotional mess.”
Not answering her consultant directly, Mindy pored over her digital pad for a while, then tapped an icon that caused Anna’s medi-pak to dispense a suite of drugs. Then she reached across the séance table and took Juan Carlos’ hand with her right, and Anna’s limp hand with her left. “I’ve reinstituted Anna’s memory mitigation treatment and erased most of the events she just experienced.”
“You planned to erase her memories all along,” said Juan Carlos, finally realizing his colleague’s strategy. “That’s why you weren’t worried about re-traumatizing her.”
“I admit, I took a gamble,” Mindy confessed, shrugging her shoulders, “which is something I normally would never do. But in this case it was necessary. If I couldn’t find some embryonic behavior or emotion in Anna that I could work with, some shred of hope to form the foundation of a therapy, then the Academy would have no choice but to expel Anna. Which means she would be cut off from the guidance and protection of other Working Class Telepaths, and would in all likelihood decompensate into mental illness or worse. I had no intention of letting that happen to a child who had already suffered so much, without putting up a fight.
“However, my dear Mr. Daimler, if it’s any comfort to you, I didn’t erase all her memories.” Mindy consulted her digital pad via its synthetic telepathy output to confirm that the molecules comprising Anna’s short term memory were being dismantled atom by atom by a holy alliance of pharmaceutical drugs and nanobots. “I left a smattering of memories that Anna recalls most fondly. I want her to feel that the séance was beneficial, and that perhaps further therapy could reveal more cherished memories.”
Mindy checked her digital pad one last time, then said, “Enough chitchat, let’s get down to business. As Anna awakens, she’ll think she’s simply coming out of our shared trance. Let’s not disabuse her of that misconception for the time being. Ready?”
Juan Carlos nodded, then closed his eyes.