Inheritance

Dr. Brand had promised there would be guards at the ferry dock, and as they approached Reese saw hired security in black jumpsuits with guns at their hips. The protesters were still there, blockaded behind a metal barricade, and Reese eyed their signs as she and David hurried through the turnstile to the empty ferry. UNITE AGAINST THE NEW WORLD ORDER, one sign declared. Another had an alien head on it—gray skin and giant black eyes—with a circle and a diagonal slash across it.

At Angel Island, a light-skinned Imrian man with black hair met them at the dock. He introduced himself as Nura Halba and said he would be their primary liaison going forward. He looked partially Asian, and Reese wondered whether the Imria had chosen their race as well as their gender in order to be intelligible to humans. She didn’t know what to think of that possibility, and she surreptitiously studied the Imrian as he drove the SUV away from the dock toward the ship. He caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror and asked, “Is anything wrong?”

“No.” She looked out the window. Asking Amber about Eres Tilhar’s gender was one thing—at least Reese knew Amber well enough to ask that sort of question—but she couldn’t ask Nura Halba whether he had picked his race as if selecting from a menu of choices.

When they arrived at the ship, Halba escorted them down the corridors to the triangular room where they had first met Eres Tilhar. Today, two of the walls were like giant windows. Straight ahead was the beach at the edge of the field, and beyond that, sailboats bobbed on the water. Halba took David’s father to meet with Dr. Brand—she was going to share her research materials with him—and left David and Reese alone with the teacher.

“Please sit,” Eres said, and David and Reese sat down in the two empty chairs. “Learning susum’urda is a very intimate experience, and first I want to assure you that you can trust me. I won’t share anything I learn about you during our lessons with anyone else without your permission. I want you to feel free to explore your new abilities. I am only here to teach you; I am not here to judge.” Eres sounded friendly, but Reese felt a little nervous. How much would Eres be able to know by touching them?

“Today we’ll begin with some very basic skills,” Eres continued. “The adaptation that you’ve been given is an ability that we Imria are born with. Susum’urda allows us to share consciousness with one another—to experience directly how others experience the world. We begin to teach our children how to manage this ability from a very early age, and the first thing we teach them is how to identify their core selves; how to situate those selves in their surroundings and to maintain that sense at all times. If you don’t maintain that sense, you are in danger of losing track of who you are when you share consciousness with another. At best, that is disorienting; at worst, it can lead to serious psychological complications.”

Disorienting, Reese thought, remembering the night in the shed with David. That was one way to describe it; another would be all-consuming.

Eres looked at Reese. “Have you experienced anything of that sort?”

“Uh… well, David and I don’t really know how to do susum’urda, so it’s definitely been disorienting.”

Eres nodded slowly, but Reese could not read the expression on the ummi’s face. “We Imria train from childhood how to properly manage susum’urda. By the time we’re your age we are well-equipped to handle it. I admit I’ve never trained anyone of your age before.”

“Are we too old to do this?” David asked.

“I don’t know. I think there is some risk involved, but of course, risk is part of everyone’s life.”

Reese didn’t find that comforting. “What’s risky about it?”

“You are both… involved romantically, is that correct?” Eres asked.

Reese blushed. “Um… yeah?”

“What does that have to do with it?” David asked.

Eres sat back, hands folded. “You both should refrain from being physically intimate before you’ve learned how to manage susum’urda.”

Eres spoke with the clinical detachment of a doctor, but Reese’s face still burned.

“Okay,” David said doubtfully. “Why?”

Eres glanced from Reese to David. “Because the connection of susum’urda is very powerful. You must first learn how to be centered in your own self—your own consciousness—before you engage in physical intimacy. Otherwise you risk losing yourself in the other; you risk erasing parts of your own identity.”

“Can’t you shut it off?” Reese asked, remembering what Amber had done. “You don’t always have to be doing this susum’urda when you touch someone, do you?”

“That’s true, but neither of you are trained to do that. Neither of you can control that yet. So I must ask that you both exercise some restraint. Any questions?”

“No,” Reese and David said at the same moment. She glanced at him, and he looked about as embarrassed as she was.

“Excellent. Today we’ll begin by spending some time with our selves. Every individual goes through life always already situated on a map created by his or her mind. Please close your eyes and I will show you.”

Reese reluctantly closed her eyes as Eres’s soft, clear voice continued. She felt a little ridiculous. The lesson so far seemed like some kind of catechism class: a lesson in abstinence followed by prayer. This was not what she had been expecting.

“Now, look within yourself,” Eres said. “Do you see that you have a sense of the interior of your body? The first thing you will sense are the basic needs of your physical self. Whether you are hungry. Whether you are warm or cold. Whether you are in pain.”

Reese found it difficult to focus on the sensations that Eres was talking about. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to keep them closed, and her muscles twitched as she tried to relax into the chair. It was made of a hard, slippery material like lacquered wood, and she was distracted by wondering what kind of tree the wood came from—or whether it was wood at all.

“Notice that you always know where your hands are. Whether your fingers are curled or straight. Notice how your body is situated in relation to the chair beneath it. You know where you are in this room. Your brain has mapped out all these details, and you are always interacting with the world. As you breathe in, you are interacting. As you sit up or lean back, you are interacting. All these signals are sent to your brain through your body. Your self—your mind—can never be separated from your physical body.”

Reese breathed in and out, feeling her lungs rising and falling. She remembered when her mom had gone through her most virulent anti-Catholic phase and brought her to a parent-child meditation retreat in Marin. Reese had squirmed on the cushion she had been told to sit on, her eyes blinking open and closed as the meditation instructor asked her to focus on her breath. This felt sort of like that: an exercise that was beyond her powers of concentration.

“Notice the details that arise in your mind. Details about where you were this morning before you came here; knowledge of where you will go when you leave. You are always situated in space, within the map of your world, but you are also always situated within the timeline of your life. On our world, we remember the first time we experience susum’urda with another being, usually one of our parents, who hold us in their arms and love us. For you, in your world, you may remember your first close friendship. You may remember an experience that filled you with joy. This is who you are. Only you have these experiences in this particular order.”

Unlike Eres’s instructions to focus on her body, which felt like a slick rope Reese couldn’t quite grasp, these instructions resonated with her. She had never thought of herself as a timeline of experiences, but it made sense to her. She saw her mother’s face from above as she flew into the air on the swing set in Dolores Park, her short legs pumping into the blue sky. She remembered her father waving at her in the Seattle airport the first time she had flown to see him after the divorce, her stomach knotted with trepidation because she was angry with him, but she still missed him. One summer night when she was twelve years old, she and Julian had snuck out of the vacation house in Guerneville and climbed down the steep steps leading to the river, where the water lapped softly at the floating dock. They swam in the dark, the full moon shining over them, while their parents’ voices called from the deck of the house above.

“This is the path you will take when you share your consciousness with another person,” Eres said. “First, you will sense their physical body, their interior experience. Then, as your own experience with