Jerry.”
“I finished the day’s duties before coming here. The warp bubble is functioning within all nominal parameters, incidentally. Driving us onwards to Earth III. I thought I should stay out to, umm, pilot Zane 3 here, so to speak. He knows what you’re intending today, it’s been on his mind. He’s nervous about it, I have to tell you. He fears he will lose something of himself in the process of integration. He’s aware he’s popular with the crew, the younger ones. That gives him a certain validation.” He eyed Holle. “Which is one reason you’re pressing ahead with the process, isn’t it? I know there are reservations about the influence Zane has on the youngsters.”
There was no point lying about that. “Wilson has expressed some concerns.”
Zane snorted. “Wilson has his own ‘concerns’ with the youngsters, as we all know.”
“But that’s not why we’ve decided to try to begin the process, Jerry. If we didn’t think you were ready we wouldn’t attempt it. You’re very important to us, obviously. Your needs are paramount.”
“All right. The question is, are you ready? It’s only been seven years since you took over from Mike!”
“Give us a break,” Holle said. “I had to learn psychiatry from scratch. It’s not easy, Jerry. In fact, I don’t think we’d have been able to get this far at all without you.” That was true. The alter called Jerry had been like a study partner, as Holle and Theo and Grace had gone through the psychiatry journals, books and expert systems stored in the ship’s archive, and Mike Wetherbee’s incomplete notes on the case. “And you’re happy about undergoing the process yourself?”
“Even a partial integration will strengthen us, all of us, I’m sure of that. And besides, I am under no threat today; I don’t expect to feel any change.”
In the program they had drawn up, a sequence of steps without a fixed timescale, Jerry would be the last of the alters to be integrated.
Theo leaned forward. “Jerry, you know there’s another reason we decided to start the process today. Because, if all’s gone to schedule, Seba should have arrived back at Earth about now. And if they did it’s entirely to your credit. You programmed the warp bubble.” Theo mimed throwing a basketball. “You picked them up and threw them home.”
Zane grinned. “Well, of course I’m aware of that. If it all worked it’s a significant triumph- if. But we’ll never know, will we?”
Holle touched Theo’s arm. “I think that’s enough. It’s been good to talk to you, Jerry.”
“Always a pleasure, Holle.”
“Is Zane 3 there? Maybe you could let him come forward.”
“Momentarily.” Zane closed his eyes and lay back on the couch. For a moment it seemed as if he had fallen asleep. Then he stirred, restless.
His face softened, his lips pushed forward into a kind of pout. He opened his eyes and looked around the surgery. “Oh, crap, I’m still here.”
“Hi. Am I speaking to Zane?”
“You know who I am.”
“And you know why you’re here today.”
“You’re going to try this ridiculous reintegration procedure, so-called.”
“Are you happy about that?”
He laughed, a dull, bitter sound. “What difference does it make if I’m happy or not?”
Theo said, “Seba should be arriving at Earth about now. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?”
“They went outside the hull,” Zane said. “Kelly and those others. They’re either dead, or in a cage somewhere. We’ll never see them again.” He stared directly at Theo, until Theo looked away.
Holle said to Zane, “Shall I take it you consent to the procedure?” “Yes, yes. Just get it over.” He lay back, his eyes screwed shut.
Holle began the patient process of hypnosis. “Just relax. You can feel the tension, the energy, pouring out of your fingers and your toes, like a liquid. You’re sinking deeper into yourself…” The trigger words Wetherbee had used to put Zane into a hypnotic trance always worked quickly.
Holle, as she had for seven years, felt the strain of just being in the same room as Zane 3. His passiveness, his depression, his all-consuming self-pity were crushing. It was a small consolation to her that Mike Wetherbee, according to the marginalia of his notes, had often felt the same way.
After the Split and Mike Wetherbee’s kidnapping, Wilson had had to find volunteers to take over various aspects of Wetherbee’s medical role. Grace Gray, grave, apprehensive but responsible, had taken the lead, and was self-educating into the role of ship’s doctor as best she could. And Holle had stepped up to take over Zane’s complex case. She had already shadowed some of Wetherbee’s sessions, knew roughly what the work involved, and she saw that it needed pursuing if Zane was to be salvaged.
And it had been Wilson who had suggested that Theo support her. Wilson, shuffling what was left of his crew after what he called Kelly’s mutiny, thought Theo needed another focus, another key duty aside from his gatekeeping of the HeadSpace booths. Theo had done well, after initial reluctance. He had thrown himself into the studying. His experience with virtual systems was a help, in a way-for it was as if Zane was living in some faulty virtual reality of his own.
As she’d got to know him better, Holle started to see how poor Theo’s education had been; rightly or wrongly his father, who he always called “the general,” had identified a military career as Theo’s only option in a drowning world, and had restricted his wider development. In different times, given the opportunity, his personality and talents might have expressed themselves in quite different ways.
But that was probably true of her too. None of them was ever going to know.
Being with Zane 3 made her realize how tired she was herself. As seven years had worn away since the Split the burden of keeping the hull going weighed ever more heavily. She had very few spares, very little in the way of redundancy or backup, and any fault required ingenuity to fix, even the manufacture of replacement parts in the machine shop that were never as good as the original. The thought that the journey might last another twenty-two years was crushing. She was tired, all the time.
But she had to park that feeling outside the door of the surgery, and focus on Zane. Maybe it did her good to have two burdens to distract her, rather than just one.
When Zane was safely under they checked the recording equipment was working, and Holle made a diary note of date and time. “All right, Zane. We’re going to try to help you welcome the alter we call Zane 1.”
Theo glanced at the notes on his handheld. “He’s seventeen years old. He carries the shame you felt when Harry Smith abused you in the Academy. That was his purpose, that was why he was created. To help you cope with that.”
Zane sneered. “So you say.”
“Are you in your safe place?”
“I’m in the museum. In my room.”
“What can you see?”
“The door is open.”
Holle said, “What can you see through the door?”
“A boy. He’s frightened.”
“I know. Well, you can help him, Zane. Can you go get him, and bring him into the room with you?”
“I don’t know.” Zane twitched on the couch.
“You can send him out again any time you want.”
Zane lay silently for a minute, then stirred.
“Is he there?”
“He’s standing beside me. He’s smaller than me. Skinny. He’s sort of shivering.”
“Can I speak to him?”
Zane shuddered, and when he spoke again, his voice had a subtly higher pitch. “I can’t see. It’s dark.”
It had always been dark when Harry Smith had come for Zane. “Do you know who I am?”
“Doctor Wetherbee?”
They went through this every time. “No. I’m Holle. Dr. Wetherbee asked me to help. Do you remember we discussed that?”
