1

For a long while the world was without form, but then grew less fuzzy and solidified, and finally Marta was returned to it…
She opened her eyes and found the greyness had reached everywhere… A junior nursemaid was watching over her, but she was sure the more important ones would be here soon…
Nurse Gee duly arrived and looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Marta expected (and feared) difficult questions, but when the nursemaid finally spoke she merely said,
“We have given you a sedative! Sleep now, we can talk tomorrow…”
And the world became fuzzy once more…
The following day was worse. The sedative appeared to have suppressed her dreams, and for that she was thankful…but now she remembered what she’d done, how she’d felt…that blissful feeling of release when she’d wielded the lancet…the happy oblivion she’d sunk into… Now everything was sharp and painful…the world felt raw, pitiless and unforgiving…
No children came to see her. Marta assumed they were being kept away. She was tended to by her nameless nursemaid. She assumed this one lacked the power of speech, as it said nothing during the whole time it attended her … Her arm ached, the tube down her nose hurt her throat…
No-one else came that day….
On day three Priya appeared… At first she just looked at her friend, then all at once she began to speak,
“Did you think I was just filling in time when I pulled you out of that pond…?”
Priya was angry, angrier than Marta had ever seen her…and she just had to lie there and take it,
“…slow day, nothing much else on, so I thought I’d save my best friend from drowning…”
She shrank under the lash of her friend’s withering invective,
“…and when I got you breathing again after the ‘plane went down that I was just at a loose end…”
“When are you going to wise up, Marta…? There are people here that care about you, depend on you… How could you be so selfish…? Why don’t you want to live…? If not for me, for the children…you’re their mother…! For Jorge, for Christ’s sake…! He loves you…and so do I…!”
Priya couldn’t contain her tears any longer…long painful-sounding sobs wracked her body,
“…but, we’re not real….” Marta ventured,
“Oh for God’s sake…! Is this not real…?” Priya had seized her friend’s hand in a painful grip,
“…who care’s if there’s some other Marta or Priya running around, we’re never going to meet them… We’re here…they’re there…we’re real…..! We’re the one’s that matter, not Marta ‘I’m a media star and a fashion icon’ back on Earth… She’ll never see what we have seen…do what we have done, what we’re going to do…! We’re the luckiest people in the history of the human race…you know that, don’t you…! To be here, with a whole world to explore…! So, stop feeling sorry for yourself, Marta! Get with the programme…it’s time to live…”
Marta felt that the numbness that had enveloped her since her return was finally receding,
“And in any case…” Priya was now holding her hand more gently, “…who would I have to bitch about the others with…? You’re my best friend, Marta, I can’t lose you…”
The tears that Marta had dammed up finally spilled over…her friend put her arms around her and let her cry…this was good, this was real…this meant she was alive…
Later, she asked her friend,
“How did you know…I mean, about what drove me to it…?”
“You talk in your sleep. Marta…and in any case, the Nurses were able to reconstruct what you had discovered, from your interface record… Nurse Gee briefed me…”
“Doesn’t it bother you at all…?”
“Actually, no…! So what if there’s someone back on Earth who shares my genetic make-up, I don’t feel any less real for it…and I’ll never meet that person, not properly…!”
Priya paused to smile at her friend,
“…and in any case, I don’t even like my Earthsister…she’s so stuck up and childish…!”
Marta couldn’t imagine that anyone who was an exact genetic match of her friend could be any of those things, but kept silent. After a pause she said,
“So, you were sitting with me while I was oút…!”
“For a while…the nursemaids said that we should give you some time to adjust when you woke up, before we all piled in…!”
“I’m sorry…” continued her friend, “…for being so rough on you…but I just felt I had to snap you out of it, show you what you’d be missing…”
Priya lowered her eyes,
“This is a beautiful world, Marta…your friends all love you…even the ones you wouldn’t think were really shocked and upset… And we are just at the start of something really, really amazing, and beautiful… Why would you want to miss that…?”
‘Why indeed…?’ she thought. The time when she craved release from her existence, now appeared curiously unreal…like a dream from which she had now awoken,
“The others are going to start coming to see you tomorrow…not all at once… But, Jorge will be first…! But now I think Nurse Gee would like to talk to you…”
Marta could see her nursemaid was now hovering in the background,
“I’ll leave you together, then…” finished Priya…

2

Nurse Gee regarded her with her cool green eyes,
“Once again Miss Fernandes, I take my hat off to you…”
Marta found the choice of idiom amusing…she couldn’t imagine the nursemaid in a hat…
Nurse Gee continued,
“…your resourcefulness and your imagination…and your sheer bloody-minded persistence, are a lesson to us all…”
“Don’t give me too much credit…” the girl responded, “…the answer was obvious, really…it shouldn’t have taken me so long to work it out…”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit…! To think outside the box, outside the paradigm under which you live, is the hardest skill of all…and none of your friends had the remotest suspicion…”
“Priya didn’t seem all that surprised…”
“Priya is very practical…she lives in the now…. The what might have been, the what will never be, do not interest her… She is most level-headed of all of you, as important in its way as your more imaginative approach…”
Nurse Gee paused,
“…I think I must clear up one or two misconceptions…before we proceed further… You and your friends are unique, there are no other Martas or Priyas in existence, apart from your models that is… No other Domes on this world, or any other, for that matter… As I told you before, if you remember, this course of action was forced on us…forced on the Mission by the failure of the original genetic material to be viable… We sometimes wonder…”
Here, Gee gave the robotic equivalent of a sigh,
“We sometimes wonder what the original children would have been like…but that has been wiped off the slate of probability… This is the world we inhabit…this is what we must work with…”
Nurse Gee fixed her with her eyes,
“Now we must turn to the matters at the heart of this discussion… I am sorry to press you but you have undergone unique experiences, you are in the possession of special insights and specific knowledge… These are of considerable value to all of us here present…and to the Mission as a whole… We have been able to reconstruct something of what you experienced from your interface record…but whole sections of this are not recorded, and even where a record exists, much of what you experienced is subjective, it is within your head, Marta…and it is about this that I must question you…!”
The girl found she was holding her breath…
Nurse Gee continued remorselessly,
“First of all, can you describe your recollection of your encounter with the pseudo-crustacean subject you call ‘Oswald’, leaving nothing out this time…!”
And so Marta told her, about the touch of the creature, the images she saw in her mind, and how the creature had led her to a specific point at the edge of the pod grove and encouraged her to go inside,
“Was it your opinion that the creature was directing you towards an encounter with the guiding intelligence at the heart of the grove…?”
“Definitely…! To use a cliche of science fiction films of the last century, it was clearly a case of me saying ‘take me to your leader’…and the creature obliging!”
“What happened once you were in the grove…?”
“For a while I just wandered aimlessly…but then it occurred to me that Rai had been able to find the heart of the grove and link with the pod because he had ingested the sap… So, I did too…!”
“What did you experience then…?”
She found that she was relaxing into the role of observer, documenting and reporting back on phenomena objectively,
“I found that my whole perception shifted… It was dark but I could see without the aid of my torch, which I discarded…the surrounding pseudo plants appeared to pulse with light… I could ‘hear’, although I don’t think this was a physical sensation, more like I was plugged in, somehow, to the thoughts of the grove…”
The girl paused lost for a second in the memory,
“I knew instantly which way to go, and what I must do when I got there…”
“Which was…?”
“I knew I must lie down and allow the pod to link with me…”
“What do remember after you did this…?”
“Well nothing…!”
Gee looked quizzically at her,
“Nothing after that is a memory, as such, until I woke up in the infirmary… It’s a series of dreams, really vivid dreams which I’ve had many times…”
“How do you regard these dreams…?”
“Well, now I’ve had time to think about it, I regard them as the means by which the pod intelligence communicated with me…using symbols and images…”
“What makes you think this…?”
“I think the intelligence was able to use things that it found in my mind to bridge the gap between our kind of intelligence and its own brand…and put across complex ideas successfully…”
“A truly formidable achievement…”
“I think so…!” said Marta,
‘Now will you stop regarding them as a source of food…’ she said to herself,
“What do you think they were trying to communicate to you through these ‘dreams’…?”
“This is where we leave the realm of facts and dive head first into philosophy….” said the girl,
“…I think they were trying to tell me something about how they experience time, about its true nature, in fact…”
“Why…?”
“Who knows…they obviously think it’s important for us to know…but, I think what they told me is more important than why…! I’m pretty sure that they regard time as essentially circular…and that they can experience….no, perceive time, at any point along its path…”
“This, of course, goes against all our recent scientific knowledge and theories…”
“…but not against some of our older beliefs…”
Marta was pensive for a while, but then continued,
“Of course, they told me indirectly about my true relationship with Marta da Guia…although how they would have known, I can’t explain…!”
“Perhaps they took this knowledge from your own mind, from things that you already knew, subconsciously…”
“Perhaps, but I can’t help feeling they actually knew…! That they know things that from an Einsteinian perspective, they can’t possibly know…”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that…!”
“Neither am I, really…! It’s more of a feeling than anything else…”
And that was it…! Nurse Gee asked her a few more routine questions about events since her return from the grove, about how she’d done the research that had uncovered the truth about the Earth siblings, stuff Gee already knew from the interface record, essentially…and the interview was ended…

3

The following day she waited,
‘They don’t want to see me…’ she thought some time during the dead hours…
Eventually, in mid-afternoon, Jorge came. He hung back as if uncertain,
“Please don’t make this harder than it already is…” she said in a small voice…….
Reluctantly, he came forward…..he reached the end of her bed,
“How are you……?”
“In my right mind again, again…I think…”
She looked at him with an expression, almost of pleading, in her eyes,
“Please hold me…”
Awkwardly he came forward and gave her a hug,
“Please forgive me…I didn’t know what I was doing…”
It sounded fake, even to her…she’d known what she was doing, it was just a different her, who had been doing the thinking…but she knew that that her had wanted to die, at that moment,
“…if lost you, Marta, I don’t know if I’d want to carry on living… There are so few of us, we can’t afford to lose anyone….and having finally got you back after all those years alone…”
Jorge seemed overcome by emotion at that moment and couldn’t carry on…
She squeezed his hand…reassuringly, he squeezed back,
“I heard…what you found out… I don’t think any of us were really surprised, I think we all knew really, in our hearts…but didn’t want to believe…”
“Priya…didn’t really seem that bothered…”
“She’s just putting a brave face on it…!”
The boy looked seriously at her,
“What you’ve found out is very important…”
She smiled, for the first time in…who knows how long,
“I think that might just be the understatement of the century…”
“Give it time, the century is still young…I might come up with a better one…”
She laughed at that, they both did,
“Hey…humour has returned to our lives…” he said,
“…turning to more serious matters…” she said, “…they reached out to me, they understood our way of thinking…they crossed the bridge… I don’t know if it’s possible to overstate this, an intelligence that’s the equal of, no…superior to us, but utterly different, on the first planet we visit… If didn’t know better, I’d say this was no coincidence…that we’re being guided in some way…”
Jorge looked shocked,
“…and this from someone who doesn’t believe in a higher plane…”
“Moving swiftly on…” she said, “…this changes everything, you know…! Forget exploiting the pod groves for sap, this is the first contact we’ve dreamed about…all those scientists, all those hack science fiction writers…for the last two centuries…”
“Maybe we should ask them…”
Marta looked momentarily confused, so he pressed on,
“They already share the sap…” when she looked none the wiser, he added,
“Look, they’ve developed a symbiotic relationship…with the pseudo-crustaceans, that is! Maybe they’d be prepared to do the same for us…if we asked them nicely…!”
It was like the sun suddenly coming out on a cloudy day, the transformation in her face was marvellous to behold,
“Jorge…! You’re a genius… That’s it, it’s brilliant…! Have you told anyone else…?”
“…you’re the first…”
“Never mind, we’ll tell them together…”
Jorge had wanted to ask her about some of the other things she learned, about the pod view of the nature of time…about its implications for the structure of the universe… But that was it, she was off! Talking nineteen to the dozen about plans for the future, how they could develop a new society…no, a new kind of society based on ethical, ecological principles, in concert with this new intelligence…and he was so glad, he’d got her back…
Just after six they were joined by Nurse Amber, who came in holding the twins in each arm,
“Look…! who’s that…?”
“Mama…!” cried the twins in unison,
“Mama was ill…but now she’s better…” she said this to the infants but looked all the while at Marta,
“You are better now, aren’t you, Marta…?”
The girl quailed at the condemnation in the nursemaid’s eye,
“Yes, I’m better now…” she said quietly,
“Would you like to hold them…?”
“Yes, very much…”
The nursemaid seemed satisfied and passed over both children to her… She hugged them almost desperately, so hard, in fact, that they shrieked and giggled in glee,
‘…I think I got off lightly…!’ she told herself, ‘My conscience is a machine, who’d have thought it…!’

Coda

“I thought I’d find you here…” Marta looked at her friend sceptically,
“Well, a certain mathematician said you’d probably be here, anyway…”
Marta had found a quiet corner in the Garden where she could she work remotely via her ’face. Since her release from the infirmary, she’d thrown herself with renewed vigour into her scientific work, but concentrating on exobiology rather than climatology. She was supposed to be working with Priya on this, but had tended to sideline her friend in recent weeks… Some of her irritation at being disturbed must have shown in her expression…
Priya looked slightly abashed,
“…I’m sorry to disturb you… But, I have something I’ve just got to tell you… Promise you won’t tell anyone else…”
“Scout’s honour…!”
“Well me and Sal…we’ve decided to have a ceremony, to celebrate our commitment to each other…”
“Oh really, where did all this come from…?”
“Well, I was talking to Jorja…about stuff….!” Priya could see her friend’s lips compressed slightly at this point,
“…and we just thought, people back on Earth, when they love each other they have a ceremony…they have a marriage ceremony…! And I know we’re too young to get married, plus there isn’t really anyone here to marry us, anyway…! But, I know Jorja wants to…she’s just got to persuade Rai, and I thought, maybe you and Jorge…”
Marta found her friend’s enthusiasm touching,
“Hold on a minute…give me chance to catch up…!”
“Sorry, I’ve sort of got carried away by the idea… Han and Su-ying, they want to do it as well…! Please Marta, it would be so great if we all did it together…”
“OK, OK…! Look, I’ll talk to ‘a certain mathematician’ about it, I promise…! Where is the dashing groom, anyway…?”
“Oh, he’s out with Raj, in aircraft two…”
Priya seemed satisfied and they talked about other things, work mainly… Marta was conscious that she’d been sidelining her friend and now made a real effort to bring her up to speed on her recent thoughts,
“…I said, my recent results indicate that pseudo-crustaceans have a role in relaying communications between groves…” she was aware that her friend was no longer listening, “… are you OK…?”
Priya looked up at her with real concern in her eyes,
“That was Mission AI…we’re all wanted in the briefing room, now…they’ve lost contact with Sal and Raj’s ‘plane…”

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Chapter 22 O’ Brave New World >>