Part 38 (1/2)

'What would prompt anyone to embrace such a thing?' asked Vera.

'That's what we asked ourselves. Had Yammie started to identify subconsciously with her specimen? Did something trigger a personality reaction? Identification, sublimation, conversion. We went through all the possibilities. But Yammie was always so even. And never happier than now. Pregnant, fulfilled, loved.' Mary Kay tucked the blanket around Yamamoto's neck, brushed the hair back from her forehead. A long bruise was surfacing above her eyes. In her frenzy, the woman must have flung herself against the machines and walls.

'Then the seizures returned. We hooked her up to an EEG. You've never seen anything like it. A neurological storm, more like a tempest. We induced a coma.'

'Good,' said Vera.

'Except it didn't work. We keep getting activity. Something seems to be eating its way through the brain, short-circuiting tissue as it goes. It's like watching a lightning bolt in slow motion. The big difference here is that the electrical activity isn't general. You'd think an electrical overload would be brain-wide. But this is all being generated from the hippocampus, almost selectively.'

'The hippocampus, what is that, please?' Rau asked.

'The memory center,' Mary Kay answered.

'Memory,' Rau repeated softly. 'And had this hippocampus been dissected by your machine yet?'

They all looked at Rau. 'No,' said Mary Kay. 'In fact, the blade was just approaching it. Why?'

'Just a question.' Rau peered around the room. 'Also, were you keeping laboratory animals in this room?'

'Absolutely not.'

'I thought not.'

'What do animals have to do with it?' Parsifal said.

But Rau had more questions. 'In clinical terms, Dr Koenig, at its most basic, what is memory?'

'Memory?' said Mary Kay. 'In a nutsh.e.l.l, memory is electric charges exciting biochemicals along synaptic networks.'

'Electric wires,' Rau summarized. 'That's what our past reduces to?'

'It's much more complicated than that.'

'But essentially true?'

'Yes.'

'Thank you,' Rau said. They waited for his conclusion, but after a few moments it became clear he was deep in contemplation.

'What's strange,' said Mary Kay, 'is that Yammie's brain scans are showing nearly two hundred percent of the normal electrical stimulus in a human brain.'

'No wonder she's short-circuiting,' Vera said.

'There's something else,' said Mary Kay. 'At first it looked like a big jumble of brain activity. But we're starting to sort it all out. And it looks like we're tracking two distinct cognitive patterns.'

'What?' said Vera. 'That's impossible.'

'I don't follow you,' said Parsifal.

Mary Kay's voice grew small. 'Yammie's not alone in there,' she said.

'One more time, please,' Parsifal demanded.

'You have to understand,' Mary Kay said, 'none of this is for public disclosure.'

'You have our word,' said Thomas.

She stroked Yamamoto's arm. 'We couldn't make sense out of the two cognitive patterns. But then, a few hours ago, something happened. The seizures stopped. Completely. And Yammie began to speak. She was unconscious, but she started talking.'

'Excellent,' said Parsifal.

'It wasn't in English, though. It wasn't anything we'd ever heard.'

'What?'

'We happened to have an intern in the room. He'd served as a Navy medic in sub-Mexico. Apparently the military plants microphones in remote recesses. He'd heard some of the recordings and thought he recognized the sound.'

'Not hadal,' said Parsifal. Confusion aggravated him.

'Yes.'

'Rubbish.' Parsifal's face was turning red.

'We obtained a tape of hadal voices from the DoD's library, top secret. Then we compared it with Yammie's speech. It wasn't identical, but it was close enough. Apparently, human vocal cords need practice to handle the consonants and trills and clicks. But Yammie was speaking their language.'

'Where could she have learned to speak it?'

'That's exactly the point,' said Mary Kay. 'As far as humans go, there aren't more than a handful of recaptures that speak it in the world. But Yammie was. It's all on tape.'

'She must have heard some recaptures then,' Parsifal said.

'It's more than simple mimicry, though. See that wall over there?'

'Is that mud?' asked Vera.

'Feces. Her own. Yammie used it to fingerpaint those symbols.'

They all recognized the symbols as hadal.

'We can't figure out what they represent,' said Mary Kay. 'I'm told that someone on a science expedition below the Pacific was starting to crack the code. An archaeologist. Van Scott or something. The expedition's supposed to be a big secret. But one of the mining colonies leaked bits of the story. Only now the expedition's disappeared.'

'Van Scott. It wouldn't be a woman, would it?' Vera asked. 'Von Schade? Ali?'

'That's it. Then you know of her work?'

'Not nearly enough,' said Vera.

'She's a friend,' Thomas explained. 'We're deeply concerned.'

'I still don't understand,' Parsifal said. 'How could this young lady be mimicking an alphabet that humans have only just discovered exists? And aping a language that humans don't speak?'