Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey trilogy (Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired) has been kicking up quite a storm, enough to put her on my radar even if she hadn't been the 2005 winner of the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Fortunately, due to a fortuitous meeting at Book Expo America, I was able to invite her into Fast Forward and experience her genius firsthand.
It's autoerotic asphyxiation, but nobody's admitting that.
The children get jump ropes or neckties or shoelaces, or they just do it to each other, thumbs under chins buried in baby fat. With childish honesty, they call it the pass-out game, the fainting game, the tingle game. The something-dreaming game, too.
When it's mentioned in the papers, journalists coyly obscure the truth. With Victorian prudishness, they report that the children strangle each other to get “high.” Because society thinks that children that young—nine, ten—aren't supposed to experience erotic sensation. The reality that kids don't always do what they're supposed to—am I the only one who remembers my own confused preadolescent sexuality?—gets disregarded with fantastic regularity.
But the truth is that they do it for the tingle through their veins, the arousal, the light-headedness, and the warmth that floods their immature bodies. Like everything else we do—as individuals, as a species—it's all about sex. And death. Yin and yang. Maybe if we admitted what was going on, we'd have a chance of stopping it before more die.
It's the things we don't talk about that become the monsters under the bed.
The game is autoerotic asphyxiation. You would hope the smart ones wouldn't do it alone, wouldn't do it at all.
But my Tara was as smart as they come.
Tara must have learned the game at the hospital, when she had her implant finalized. It was the cutting edge of therapy, a promising experimental treatment. An FDA trial; she was lucky to be selected.
The implant is a supercomputer the size of the last joint of my thumb, wired into my daughter's brain. Tara has RSD, reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, a disease resulting in intense, uncontrollable neuralgia. Which is to say, her nerves hurt. Transcendently. All the time.
The implant interrupts the electrical signals that cause the brain to register the sensations. The computing power is quantum, supplied by a Bose-Einstein condensate, and no, I don't know what that means or how it works, any more than I know how a silicon chip works, or a vacuum tube.
What matters is, it worked.
Two weeks after Tara returned to school, I got a phone call from Silkie Mendez's mother. I was still at work; Tara was in after-school enrichment, and her dad was supposed to pick her up. I'd get her after dinner.
It's the real mark of domesticity. You become somebody's mother, somebody's father. A parent, not a person at all.
But at work, I still answered my phone, “Doctor Sanderson.”
“Jillian. It's Valentina. We have to talk.”
You get to know the tone, so-carefully-not-panicking. A mother scared stiff, and fighting with every ounce of rationality to override the brain chemicals and deal with a threat to her child with smarts rather than claws and teeth. “What's wrong?”
Her breath hissed over the pickup on her phone. Cell phone, I thought, and there was noise in the background. Human bustle, an intercom, stark echoes off polished tile. I've been in private practice since my psychiatric residency, but you never forget what a hospital sounds like. “Val, is Silkie okay?”
“She will be,” Val said. The sob caught in her throat and she choked it back. “The doctor says she—Jillian, uh, she'll be fine—”
One thing I'm good at is getting people to talk to me. “Val, just say it. You don't have to soft-pedal, okay?”
I heard her gulp. She sniffled and took a breath, the phone crackling as she pressed it against her hair. “Silkie says Tara taught her how to hang herself.”
First, there's the pressure.
A special kind of pressure, high under Tara's chin, that makes her feel heavy and light all at once. She kneels by the chair and leans across the edge, because if she faints, the chair will roll away and she won't choke.
She's always careful.
After the pressure she gets dizzy, and her vision gets kind of…narrow, dark around the edges. It's hard to breathe, and it feels like there's something stuck in her throat. Prickles run up and down her back, down her arms where the pain used to be, and a warm fluid kind of feeling sloshes around inside her. She slides down, as things get dark, and then she starts to dream.
But not like nighttime dreams. These are special.
When Tara dreams the special way, she hears voices. Well, no, not voices. Not voices exactly. But things. Or sees things. Feels them. It's all jumbled together.
But there's a sky, and she walks out under it. It's not any kind of sky she's seen. It's big and pale, and seems…flat, and very high up. There aren't any clouds, and it looks dusty under the big red sun.
It might be a desert. She's read someplace that deserts have skies like that. And it's not just a picture. Tara can taste it, feel the pebbles under the soles of her shoes, the heat baking off the cracked tarmac. Except the tarmac isn't really tarmac: like it, but chocolate-brown, or maybe that's the dull red dust.
And Tara doesn't think they have people like Albert in the kinds of deserts she'd get to on a plane.
As for Albert, he's a long, segmented being like a giant centipede, though he can't be a centipede because of the inverse square law. Which says that if you breathe through a spiracle, you can't breathe if you get that big. Of course…
…he isn't necessarily an Earth arthropod. And when she watches him, she sees all his segments swelling and relaxing, independent of each other. They each seem to have a top and bottom plate that slide rather than one hard shell like an arthropod would have. So it's more like armor than an exoskeleton. And Albert isn't his real name, of course, but Tara doesn't know his real name, because she can't talk to him.
He has a lot of legs, though, and lots of little fine claws and then two big bulky claws too, like a lobster instead of a crab. He chitters at her, which freaked her out the first few times, and grabs her hand with one knobby manipulator. It's all right. She's already reaching out, too.
I didn't call Tara's father, just arrived to pick her up at the usual time. I'd talk to Tara first, I decided, and then see what I was going to say to Jerry. He's a good guy, works hard, loves his kid.
He panics. You know. Some people do. Tara doesn't, not usually, and so I wanted to talk to her first.
She sat in the back, big enough to be out of a booster seat but not big enough to be safe with the airbags yet. She was hitting a growth spurt, though; it wouldn't be long.
RSD has all sorts of side effects. There are people who think it's psychosomatic, who dismiss it, more or less, as malingering. I got some resistance from my mom and my sister when we decided to go ahead with the surgery, of the she's-just-doing-it-for-attention and she'll-outgrow-it sort.
My Tara was a brave girl, very tough. She broke her arm on the playground a few days after her eighth birthday. I didn't figure out there were other issues until the cast was off and she was still complaining that it hurt. And then, complaining that it hurt more, and the hurt was spreading up her shoulder and down her side. And her right hand was curling into a claw while it took us nine months to get a diagnosis, and another ten months after that to get her into the trial, while she suffered through painkillers and physical therapy.
I watched in the mirror as she wriggled uncomfortably under her shoulder belt and slouched against the door, inspecting bitten fingernails. “How was school?”
“Fine,” she said, turning to look out the window at the night rushing past. It was raining slightly, and she had rolled her window down to catch the damp air, trailing her fingers over the edge of the crack.
“Hands in the car, please,” I said as we stopped under a streetlight. I couldn't see in the darkness if her eyes were bloodshot, or if those shadows under her chin were bruises.
Tara pulled her fingers back, sighing. “How was work, Mom?”
“Actually, I got a call from Mrs. Mendez today.”
Her eyes widened as I pulled away from the stop sign. I forced my attention back to the road. “Am I in trouble?”
“You know it's very dangerous, what you taught Silkie to do, don't you?”
“Mom?” A plaintive question, leading, to see how much I knew.
“The fainting game. It's not safe. People die doing that, even grown-ups.” Another stop sign, as she glared at her hands. “Silkie went to the emergency room.”
Tara closed her eyes. “Is she okay?”
“She will be.”
“I'm always careful, Mom—”
“Tara.” I shifted from second to third as we rolled up the dark street and around the corner to our own house, the porch light gleaming expectantly by the stairs, light dappled through the rain-heavy leaves of the maple in the front yard. “I need you to promise me you'll never do that again.”
Her chin set.
Wonderful. Her father's stubborn mouth, thin line of her lips. Her hair was still growing back, so short it curled in flapper ringlets around her ears and on her brow.
“Lots of kids do it. Nobody ever gets hurt.”
“Tara?”
“I can't promise.”
“Tara.” There are kids you can argue with. Tara wasn't one of them. But she could be reasoned with. “Why not?”
“You wouldn't believe me.” And she didn't say it with the petulant defiance you might expect, but simply, reasonably, as an accepted annoyance.
“Try me.”
“I can't promise,” she said, “because the aliens need me.”
Albert chitters again. It's hot. Really hot, and Tara wants water. But there never seems to be any water here. Albert tugs her hand. He wants her to follow. She goes with him and he takes her the same way he always does. Toward the big steel doors, and then down into cool darkness, the hum of big fans, and then he'll bring her underground and there will be a thing like a microphone, only at her height, not a grown-up one. And she'll talk and sing into it, because that seems to be what Albert wants her to do, while luminescent colors roll across his armor plates in thin, transparent bands.
She's never seen anything alive here. Except Albert.
She talks into the microphone, though, sings it silly songs and talks about things. Her mother and father, and the divorce. The time in the hospital, and the friends she made there. Insects and arthropods, bicycles and card games. Her friends and teachers, and how happy she is to be back in a real school.
Colors rippling across his carapace impatiently, Albert waits. They've done this before.
I blamed the implant. Nobody likes to think her kid is experiencing symptoms of undifferentiated schizophrenia, after all. I rescheduled for the next day and took the morning off and we made an emergency appointment with Dr. al-Mansoor.
Tara waited outside while I went in to talk to the doctor. She looked bleary-eyed under the scarf tucked over her hair, the flesh slack over her cheekbones and shadowed around the eyes. I like Dr. al-Mansoor. And it was pretty obvious she hadn't planned on being in the clinic at 7 AM to see us, but she'd managed to get there.
I put a cup of coffee on her desk before I sat down. She took it gratefully, cupping lean fingers around the warm paper, her wedding ring flashing as she lowered her head over the steam. “You have a concern, Jill?” she asked.
Her given name is Hadiyah, but I always have to remind myself to use it, even though we'd gotten to be good friends over the last four months or so. I think she respected the questions I asked. None of the other parents were in the medical profession.
I looked down at my own coffee cup and cleared my throat. Best to just say it. “I think there's a problem with Tara's implant.”
They'll catch her if she tries it here. So Tara sits and folds her hands and tries not to rock impatiently, first in the waiting room and then in the office while Mom and Dr. al-Mansoor talk, mostly over her head. There's a dollhouse on the ledge, though, along with some other toys that Tara is mostly too old for, and Tara busies herself with the dolls and the furniture until she gets bored, and starts running the red fire truck back and forth along the ledge. She stages a four-alarm fire and a rescue, complete with hook-and-ladder work on the dollhouse, though the sizes are off and the dolls have to make a death-defying leap from the second floor to be caught at the top of the ladder by a half-scale fireman.
She's totally lost track of the grown-up conversation, and they're not talking about her now anyway but about some other girl in the trial, though Dr. al-Mansoor is very careful not to say her name. “She hasn't had any similar ideations, though….”
The conversation stops, and Tara looks up to find Mom and Dr. al-Mansoor staring at her. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Tara,” Dr. al-Monsoor says, smoothing her scarf over her hair, “where did you learn to play the fainting game?”
Tara bites her lip. Her hair falls across her eyes and she pushes it back. She never promised not to tell. “At the hospital,” she says, dragging it out. She turns back to the dollhouse and saves another Ken doll from the flames.
“Who taught you?”
This Ken doll didn't jump hard enough. He falls short of the ladder, and the miniature fireman lunges frantically to catch him. He gets one of Ken's outreached hands, and clutches it. Firemen have gloves, big rubber ones, so it must be the gloves that are slipping in the sweat, not Ken's hand. Ken sways perilously as the fireman hooks his feet in the rungs of the ladder and hauls on his hand, Tara mimicking both Ken's cries for help and the fireman's reassurances.
The grown-ups are silent, watching. Until Tara's mother clears her throat and says, carefully, “Tara? Did you hear the question?”
“One of the other girls,” Tara says, letting Ken rock back and forth a little, hands slipping. She watches him carefully. Maybe if the fireman slides a little higher, ladder rungs gouging his tummy, he can keep his grip. Oh, no, gasps Ken. Don't worry, I've got you! cries the fireman.
“Which girl?”
Tara shrugs. She won't remember. That's not a lie, and they can't make her remember, either. The fireman hauls Ken up once his predicament stops being interesting.
Tara prefers a happy ending.
“Tara,” Mom says, quietly, “she could be in a lot of danger. You have to tell us.”
It takes a long time. But eventually, she does.
I barely knew Jodi Carter. She was older than Tara, twelve or thirteen, and they hadn't been roommates. But they'd spent time together, in the common room or the girls’ bathroom.
I wondered how many other girls Jodi had taught the fainting game. At least, from what Dr. al-Mansoor said, it didn't seem like she was having the hallucinations. I was guiltily glad it wasn't my job to answer either of those questions.
Dr. al-Mansoor and I had a hasty conference while Tara banged around a little more with Barbie dolls and fire trucks. My worry that Tara was the only child to report some sort of hallucination after receiving the implant was enough to make my hands cold.
We got Tara checked in—back in her old room, in fact—and Dr. al-Mansoor put her under observation. No restraints, but she'd be under fifteen-minute checks, though the room had a one-way window so she'd at least have the illusion of privacy.
I argued for the right to sleep in the waiting room. Dr. al-Mansoor countered with an offer of her office couch. Tara and I went home to fetch her pajamas and get her some lunch while Dr. al-Mansoor and Mrs. Carter had a long talk with Jodi, who was already checked in for observation of her apparent hallucinations.
Afterwards, Dr. al-Mansoor and I sat and drank more coffee—worse coffee, this, from the staff room pot, lightened with artificial creamer and too sweet because that was the only way it was drinkable—out of chipped mugs, and waited while one of the clinic staff got Tara settled in. She was furious that I'd told her she had to stay, and after she had exhausted herself on a temper tantrum and two sulks, I decided it was just as well if I gave her a little time alone to get the leftover wrath out of her system. At least Tara wasn't a kid who held grudges.
“I didn't know about this fainting game thing,” Dr. al-Mansoor said, blowing over her coffee.
“It's not new.” Pediatric psychiatry isn't my specialty, but you hear things, pick up around the edges in the journals. “Like inhalant abuse. Every generation figures it out, or anyway some of them do. The question is—”
She nodded. “And then there's the whole issue of whether the implant is causing hallucinations.”
“Only when she's on the verge of unconsciousness.”
“And a hypnagogic state doesn't do it. Sleep's no good. It's got to be hypoxia.”
My turn to stare into my coffee. “Apparently. What do you think of the character of the hallucinations?”
“Some alien entity trying to communicate with her? It's a common marker for schizophrenia.”
“But that's the only symptom she's got. No mood swings, she's obviously rational—”
Dr. al-Mansoor smiled. “Odd, isn't it?” And then she cocked her head to one side as if she were listening, and held up one finger to silence me. “Oh,” she said. “You know, I may have something here.”
The plastic chair creaked under me when I resettled my weight. It wasn't late, just after lunch, but it felt like six or seven o'clock at night. I was a little shocked every time I glanced at my watch. Busy day. “Well, don't keep me in suspense.”
“The implants use a quantum computer chip.”
“Tell me something I didn't know.”
“Well, the chips were all manufactured at the same time, right? And the same place. Probably all from one condensate. So what if there's quantum interference? I mean”—she waved her long, elegant hand beside her face, her diamond flashing—”what if the chips can transmit electrical patterns back and forth between the girls? Feebly. And when their synapses are already misfiring from the hypoxia, those patterns get overlaid, and Tara's subconscious mind translates those signals into symbols, as they would in a dream—”
“The symbol being some kind of alien trying to communicate. Is that possible? The transferal, I mean.” What I knew about quantum mechanics could be written on an index card, but it sounded…
Hell, it sounded like an excuse not to pull the chip that was Tara's promise of a normal life out of her head. It might be a straw, but it wasn't a bad-looking straw.
She made a face, pulling her jaw back and flattening her lower lip, and then wrinkled her nose. “I guess so?”
“Why is it only Tara?”
“There's something wrong with her chip? Or something right with it. If that is what's going on, it's functional telepathy.”
“That would mean there wasn't any problem, really.”
“Other than half the clinic strangling themselves for the fun of it, you mean.”
“Right.” I thumped back in my chair. I'd lurched forward at some point, without realizing it. “That. Tara won't promise. She thinks her alien friend needs help.”
“If she promises, can you trust her?”
“Tara? Yes. What about Jodi?”
“I'll ask Mrs. Carter what she thinks. We'll have to address it with all the kids. One of the staff is making calls. Tara seems a special case, though. For her, we could edge the voltage down a little and maybe get rid of the hallucinations, if my guess is right. Which it probably isn't. But that might affect pain management.”
“Right,” I said. I put my half-empty cup down on the edge of Dr. al-Mansoor's desk. “I'll go talk to her. If asking nicely doesn't work, there's always extortion.”
Mom comes back before dinner, and takes Tara down to the cafeteria to eat. Tara likes the cafeteria. There's always something she doesn't get at home very often. Today it's meatloaf and apple pie, with brown gravy. The meatloaf, not the pie.
Mom's watching her worriedly, and pushing kidney beans and cottage cheese—and other stuff Tara can't figure out why anybody would eat—around on her salad bar plate. “Dr. al-Mansoor thinks the things you're seeing are feedback from the implant,” she says, when Tara is halfway done with her meatloaf.
“I think it's from the implant,” Tara agrees. She'd picked out a mockneck shirt to hide the bruise across her throat. Mom frowns at it. “But maybe not feedback. I've been thinking about Albert.”
“Albert?”
“The alien.” Tara slashes her fork sideways. “I don't think it's just him. I think it's a whole species.”
Mom leans forward, arms folded behind her fussed-at plate. “He told you his name?”
“No.” Tara drops her fork and jerks her hands back and forth beside her head. “He talks in colors or something. He's Albert because of Albert Einstein.” She drinks some milk and picks up the fork again. “But he keeps wanting me to talk in a microphone into a computer. I think he's trying to learn how I talk. Anyway, I think he's in trouble. He needs help.”
“What kind of help?” Mom starts chasing the kidney beans around her plate again, pretending like she's only being polite.
“I don't know,” Tara says. She stops herself abruptly, chews and swallows the mouthful of mashed potatoes before mom can yell at her. She reaches out and picks a hard, round red grape off her mother's plate, waiting for the nod of permission. It crunches sweetly between her teeth. She takes another one. “I just…it seems really important.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
Mom picks up one solitary kidney bean on the end of her fork and stares at it. She slips it into her mouth and chews slowly. “Tara,” she says. “It's more important that you don't risk your life playing the fainting game anymore. If Albert's real, and he's a grown-up scientist, even if he's an alien, he'd agree with me. Don't you think?”
“I'm always careful. That's the problem. I think if I had just a little more time with him, we could talk.”
“It doesn't matter how careful you are. It's dangerous.”
“Mom—”
“Tara.” Mom puts her fork down, and uses that voice. “Promise me.”
Tara finishes her meal in silence, while Mom stares at her and doesn't eat another thing. They're going to make her sleep in the hospital bed tonight, with the lights that don't go off and the shadows behind the one-way mirror all the time.
It's okay. She can sleep anywhere. And she has a plan.
I was supposed to sleep on the couch. Predictably, I spent the entire night in the observation room. Tara seemed to be sleeping, under the pale blue light, her hair fanned out on the pillow and her knees drawn up against her chest as always. I sat and watched her with the observation room lights off, so every time Dr. al-Mansoor or the staffer came in for the check, a wedge of light fell across the floor and dazzled me for a minute.
Each time, they paused in the doorway, glanced through the window for a moment, smiled at me, and withdrew. I think Dr. al-Mansoor was hoping I'd fall asleep on the bench. Not quite.
At two in the morning, Tara began to thrash.
She kicked the covers off and rolled out of bed, rolled under the bed in the space of time it took me to hit the call button and dive for the connecting door, shouting her name. I crawled after her, scrabbling on hands and knees. The metal railing caught my shoulders, knocking me off my knees and onto my belly, and I squirmed after her. She jammed herself into the space by the head of the bed and curled on her side, knees drawn up, hands pressing me back, pressing me away. Battling, until her arms went soft and her feet kicked, or I should say shivered.
I couldn't hear her breathing.
I got my hand around the slender flexible bones of her ankle and pulled. She went limp as I dragged her out, and first I thought she was making herself dead weight, but when I got her into the light I saw how limp she was. I thought it was the light turning her blue, but then the door thumped open and the light came on and I could see it was her skin, as well.
You're supposed to check the airway. Her mouth fell open, slack, and I ran my fingers into it. Her tongue hadn't fallen back, but I thought my fingers brushed something smooth and resilient, hard, at the back of her throat.
“Jillian,” Dr. al-Mansoor said, her hand on my shoulder.
“She's choking,” I said, and let her pull me out of the way. “I think she palmed a grape at dinner. I didn't think—” Stupid. Stupid. No, I didn't think at all.
Dr. al-Mansoor yanked off her rings. They rattled on the floor, disregarded, gold and diamonds knocked aside as she straddled my daughter's hips, straightened her neck. She placed the heel of her interlocked hands under Tara's breastbone, and I loved her with all my heart.
I remembered Tara crowding away from me under the bed, her eyes wide and wild, her desperation. Tara was the smartest kid I've ever known. She'd had swimming courses, first aid courses. She was ten. Not a baby, just ask her. She knows more about entomology and dinosaurs and stellar astronomy than I ever will.
She'd known I'd come after her. She'd known I could save her. She'd jumped out of the bed so I would see that she was in distress. And she'd crawled away from me, buying time.
They talk about possession. After a crisis, you hear people say they have no idea what they were doing.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I reached down and grabbed Dr. al-Mansoor's wrists and held on tight. “Jillian, let go,” she said. “It's just the Heimlich maneuver.”
Her face was inches from mine, her eyes red with sleeplessness rather than asphyxiation. Her scarf had fallen back, and her hair was all tangled over her shoulders. It didn't matter. We were all women here.
“Thirty seconds,” I said.
She stared at me. She leaned against my hands, but I held on to her wrists. Tight.
“Brain damage,” she said.
Dreams can happen fast. The length of the REM cycle affects it, of course, but sometimes even when they seem to take hours, days, they're over in seconds. Just the forebrain trying to make symbolic sense of electrical noise kicked up by the random signals firing up the brainstem. “Hadiyah. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Let her talk to Albert.”
She licked her lips. And then she jerked her chin sharply, and I saw her mouth move, counting. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen—
Albert is waiting. He's in a hurry, too. This time, he grabs Tara's hand in his manipulator without preamble and almost drags her into the tunnel, his many legs rippling indigo-azure-gold as they race underground. But this time it's different, dream-different, the microphone gone and a kind of control panel in its place, not made for Tara's hands. She stops, confused, just inside the arched doorway and waits for Albert to show her what to do. And isn't it funny, now that she thinks about it, that the doorway is tall enough for her, when Albert's only two feet high?
He takes the controls in his manipulators. They move over the keypad with arachnid grace. “Tara,” the air says.
“Albert?” At her voice, colors ripple across the panels before him. He turns, regarding them with every evidence of thought in the tilt of his expressionless face on the ball-jointed neck. She shouldn't try to guess what he feels. She knows that.
She does it anyway. “You figured out how to talk to me.”
“I did,” he says. “Come here. Put your hands on the plate. We don't have much time.”
“Before my mother stops us?”
He chitters at her, his antennae bristling. “Before the program ends. This is a simulation. I am the last remaining, and we used the last of the power to reach you. We looked and looked, and you were the first we found.”
“You're dying?”
“Our sun is dying,” he says, and her face crumples painfully. She sniffs back stinging. “Soon, the computers will fail. We've lived in them for a very long time. The rest have gone ahead, to conserve power. I chose to stay and search.”
“But you can't—I just got to talk to you—”
“Will you let me give you our history?”
“Of course,” she says, reaching out. He stops her, though, as sharply as he urged before, his manipulator indenting the flesh of her hand.
“Wait,” he says. “I will put it in your brain. You have to give permission. It could change you.”
She stops. His manipulator is cool and hard, the surface sandpapery. “Change?”
“Make you more like us.”
She looks at him. His antennae feather down, lying against his dorsal surface like the ears of an anxious dog. He's still. Maybe waiting, she doesn't know. “And if I don't you die.”
“We die,” he says. “Either way.”
She stares at him. The stinging in her eyes grows worse, a pressure in her sinuses and through her skull. She pulls her hand from his manipulator, reaches out resolutely, and places both palms on warm yellow metal as the first tear burns her cheek.
“Don't mourn.” The voice is uninflected, but his palp reaches out softly and strokes her leg. “You will remember us.”
We made it to nine. I yanked my hands back, Hadiyah pressed hers down. The first push didn't do it. She realigned, lips moving on what must have been a prayer now, and thrust forward sharply, the weight of her shoulders behind it.
Something glistening shot from Tara's lips and sailed over Hadiyah's shoulder, and Tara took a deep harsh breath and started to cough, her eyes squinched shut, tears running down her cheeks.
“He's gone,” she said, when she got her breath.
She rolled over and grabbed my hands, and wailed against my shoulder like a much younger child, and would not be consoled.
There's enough room in Tara's implant for three or four Libraries of Congress. And it seems to be full. It also seems like she's the only one who can make sense of the information, and not all of it, and not all the time.
She's different now. Quieter. Not withdrawn, but…sad. And she looks at me sometimes with these calm, strange eyes, and I almost feel as if she's the mother.
I should have stopped her sooner. I didn't think.
At least she hasn't tried to strangle herself again.
Hadiyah suggested we not tell anybody what had happened just yet, and I agreed. I won't let my daughter wind up in some government facility, being pumped for clues to alien technology and science.
I won't.
She's ten years old. She's got school to get through. We'll figure the rest of it out in our own time. And maybe she'll be more like herself again as time goes by.
But the first thing she did when she recovered was paint a watercolor. She said it was a poem.
She said it was her name.
