She was beautiful. When they put her in my arms, all my doubts vanished. My baby was as beautiful to me as any child has ever been to its mother. In those first few days I did not look for what was different. I saw only the wide, blue eyes which blinked at the light, the hand which grasped at a finger or a lock of hair and the mouth which searched for milk. I was too busy thinking about diapers and longing of sleep to concern myself with morphology and development. Let the other members of the team examine her cranial structure, her auditory responses, her joint function. Let them measure her weight to the gram and her height to the millimeter. I had only one thing on my mind. This was my baby. She needed me.
On day six, when they wanted to sedate her in order to perform an MRI I drew the line. "No one is giving my baby drugs!" I snarled. Clutching her to my breast, I searched for a rational excuse to justify a mother's irrational protectiveness. "We don't know how her body will react with medication. It could have a paradoxical effect. Or it could kill her."
That got their attention. It had taken ten years of hard work to come up with this living, breathing child. No one wanted to be responsible for bringing the experiment to a sudden, unanticipated halt. Yes, that was what my precious baby was to them, an experiment., the first successful neanderthal clone.Up until the time her embryo was implanted in my womb, she had been an experiment to me, too.
Motherhood had changed all that. I was glad now that fear of unwanted publicity or a potentially nasty custody battle had lead us not to seek a surrogate mother outside the team. I was glad she was my daughter. If I had not known how fierce the bond between mother and child is, I might have been like the others. Then who would have protected little Glory? Who would have made sure that she had a childhood and a family and all the things that are important to people, whether they are "modern" or "neanderthal"?
As she grew, I learned to accept that my colleagues were more interested in her origins than in the child she was. A human species thought extinct for over thirty thousand years walked--or rather crawled upon our earth again.
Cloning technology had been available for years, but it was purest luck that provided us with the necessary tissue. Ten year before Glory's birth, diggers building a tunnel in far north Finland had uncovered a frozen cave containing the perfectly preserved corpse of a neanderthal woman. We assumed she had died of asphyxiation after a cave in, since no other cause of death could be determined. It was possible she was a human sacrifice and that the cave was sealed deliberately, although there was no sign that she had struggled or tried to claw her way out.
Her clothing was simple--animal skins. The few tools she possessed were made of stone. There was no food of any kind in the cave except for baskets of seeds. Research revealed that the seeds were from the group Ipomoea , more commonly called morning glory.
Years before we successfully cloned Glory from tissue obtained from the female's corpse, I had planted a few of the seeds in my garden, just to see if they would grow. The results were astounding. In the course of a few months, the southern fence of my property was covered with green vines. Every morning, as the sun rose, the greenery was covered with brilliant blue flowers, the same shade of blue as my daughter's eyes. In the winter, the vines died back. Each spring they came to life again from the seeds of last season's flowers. The miracle of new life from old--just like my Glory.
For those who want to read about her gross motor skills and her manual dexterity, check out my colleagues reports. I am writing as her mother. When she took her first steps at ten months, I was so delighted that I called everyone I knew. When she began signing a few days later, I was like a proud parent whose child has just said her first word.
She was not all that different from a modern child. People who met her assumed that she was native American or Mexican. She had the sloped forehead, prominent nose and flat occiput that are commonly seen in Mayan statues. Her skin was a medium brown in contrast to her bright blue eyes. She was short for her age, though very stocky and extremely strong. She hated clothes, preferring to run around naked except on the coldest days of winter.
"Too hot," she would sign as she tugged at her sleeper. She sweated a lot, even as a child, though there was no unpleasant odor to her perspiration. Any blanket that I dared to place over her once she fell asleep invariably ended up on the floor.
She was terrified of water. Our first and last trip to the seashore was a disaster. She hid in the car and refused to get out again until we were safely home. By the age of two she was insisting upon showers instead of baths, and even these were rare.
She was also wary of strangers. As an infant, she did not respond to other children with giggles and smiles that way that babies usually do. Instead, she would seek out a woman--me, if I was there, some other woman if I was gone--and cling to her. When we were away from home, she liked to be in constant physical contact.
Though she accompanied me to the grocery store and occasionally to the movies or to the mall, it was clear that she preferred to stay home. The car seemed to worry her, in the same way that it worries cats. She would glue her nose to the window and watch the streets carefully.
"What are you looking for?" I asked once. She could understand speech without difficulty and could even talk, slowly, if she was careful to avoid words containing certain sounds such as "t" and "f" that were difficult for her lips and tongue to form.
Since I was driving and could not see her sign she replied aloud "I see how way home. We be loss, I show way home."
How much of this was Glory and how much of this was her race? There was no way to know. Eventually, if and when others of her kind were discovered and cloned, we would be able to compare them. For now, we had to assume that she was typical of her people.
"Perhaps they were all afraid of water," Hector, one of my colleagues in the project speculated. "And maybe they were afraid to meet new people or wander far from home. This might have prevented them from taking advantage of the seasonal migration of animal herds, putting them at a disadvantage compared to the moderns."
"We should try taking her someplace far from home and then see if she can find her way back," one of the graduate students suggested. "See if she has a homing instinct, like that of birds."
I was about to protest that no one was going to drop off my baby in some strange place when Hector said. "Don't be silly. If her people seldom traveled then they would never have evolved a homing instinct."
I did not point out to him that the hypothesis that neanderthal were afraid to travel was just that--a hypothesis. We were so hungry for knowledge of the past that we were all guilty of making broad assumptions based on observations of one small girl. Like trying to deduce a picture puzzle from a single piece.
Except for shopping trips and monthly appointments at the lab, we seldom traveled. Fortunately, there was plenty to amuse her at home. I had several acres behind my house, with trees and a meadow. Occasionally, she would play with neighbor children as long as they were healthy. For obvious reasons, I could not send her to school--who knew what effect a simple case of chicken pox might have on her?-- but when she turned four, I started teaching her to read. Although she was slow to learn her alphabet, through simple repetition I was able to teach her words, and once she knew enough words she learned to read quickly. Math was more difficult, but this might have been because she was a girl and not because she was a neanderthal. I have never bee good at math myself.
At night, she preferred talking to television. She loved to hear stories, especially ones about "her people."
"Say sory," she would slur in her soft voice as she grasped the hem of my skirt. "Tell me the story about how I was born," she would sign when I glanced down.
I would put down my book or knitting, and she would crawl onto my lap "Once upon a time, there were people who lived in a far away land..."
She would nod her head at the familiar words. Her blue eyes went dreamy as if she was seeing that long lost world which I was describing.
"...We do not know what they called themselves. More than likely they called themselves 'people' the way that modern people call themselves 'people'. We do not know very much about them, except that they lived in Europe for over one hundred thousand years and then, almost overnight they vanished and were replaced by my people, the ones we call the moderns."
When she got a little older she began asking questions. "Where did your people come from?" she signed. "My people died. Your people came."
"We believe they came north from Africa."
"When did they come? Before or after my people died?"
I hesitated.
Her blue eyes narrowed, like those of a cat tracking a mouse. "Tell me," she insisted. "Tell me the whole story."
There was no keeping a secret from Glory. On those rare occasions when I tried to hide something from here, like an appointment at the lab for some painful tests, she always managed to guess the truth.
I sighed. "Around 35 to 40 thousand years ago, a group of people that we call 'moderns' arrived in Europe from Africa. Your people and my people lived close together for a few thousand years and then yours vanished."
When she frowned, her forehead rose rather than crinkling, giving her a surprised expression. "Your people killed my people?" She was only eight at the time, but she was watching me closely, as if to see if I would try to tell a lie.
I swallowed. "It is possible. There is no evidence of violence. The people inside the cave where we found your--" I searched for a word to describe her relationship to the girl from whom she was cloned.
"Sister?" Glory suggested in sign language. "Twin sister. The same as me but different."
My Glory was smart. It was not lack of intelligence that doomed her people. "Yes, that is a good way of looking at it. She seemed to have died peacefully. At first we thought that the cavern entrance collapsed, and she was sealed inside. However, the geologists say that the landslide occurred later. No one knows why she died in that cavern."
"Poison?" she suggested.
I did not like the implication of this. "Yes, I suppose the 'moderns' could have poisoned her food or water---"
Glory shook her head. "No, my sister took poison. So that she could die." She signed it so emphatically that she appeared to be stating a fact, rather than offering a suggestion.
"Where on earth did you hear something like that?" I demanded. Had she seen a story about suicide on television? I tried not to limit her viewing too much, since I wanted her to feel like a part of modern culture, but there are some things that children just should not see.
"No," she answered calmly. "I know it here." She touched her forehead between her eyes.
At times like that, I truly understood that my colleagues and I were blind travelers exploring a world of which we were woefully ignorant. Had we committed an act of folly, bringing a member of a dead race back to life? How on earth could we predict all of the possible complications and ramifications?
Glory loved to garden. She had an instinct for the weather. If an unseasonably late frost was coming, she would advise me to delay planting seeds. After days of drought, when the leaves hung limp, she would sign "Wait. It will rain this afternoon."
When asked how she knew, she looked puzzled "The wind tells me," she signed. "Does not the wind tell you?"
Such a wise child. So in tune to the ways of nature. Except for a slight difficulty with the mechanics of speech and a serious problem with numbers, she had all the physical and mental skills of moderns humans. What was it that had rendered her species obsolete in just a few thousand years? What fatal flaw did the neanderthal possess which gave the invaders from Africa an edge? Could it have been genocide? It was too dreadful to consider--and yet, modern man was physically no different than man thirty thousand years ago, and recent events had proved our species capable of the worst kinds of atrocities.
"There is no way to know if she is a typical neanderthal," Hector remarked one day during a conference. "There are so many differences between our world and the one in which she was raised. More sensory stimulation, exposure to advanced language and conceptual models, better nutrition, better prenatal care. "
In other words, like me, he could not imagine why a race of Glorys had vanished almost overnight--a few thousand years being little more than a blink of the eye in the four million year span of human history. It troubled all of us, even me. Especially me. The others were worried for their own sakes. Could what happened to the neanderthal happen to modern man? Could our species be wiped out in a couple of millennium? I shared their concern, but I was more worried about Glory. What if she had a fatal physical flaw? Would she turn fifteen or twenty and suddenly start to decline? Would some ordinary human cold virus kill her? The uncertainty was hard to bear. With a human baby, even a foundling, I would have had a fairly good idea of what the worst health risks might be. With Glory, anything was possible.
"Where my name?" Glory asked aloud one night. She was about eight or nine at the time.
"I named you after the morning glories in the back yard. Don't you remember? We found some seeds in the cave where your sister were buried. I planted some of the seeds in the garden. Your eyes were the same shade of blue as the flowers so I named you Glory."
I am sure that I had told her this story before, but she acted as if she were hearing it for the first time. Her blues eyes sparkled with excitement. Though it was late at night, she insisted that we get out a flashlight and go look at the vines. There was little to see in the darkness, just green leaves, a few seed pods and tightly closed buds.
The next morning, she was not in her room. I found her out back, sitting in the grass, staring at the wide open blue flowers. She was naked, despite the early morning chill. I laid my hand on her head. Her hair was wet with dew. She must have been out here for hours.
"I watched them open," she signed. She smiled up at me. "They are like me. Alive after many years." Anything over one hundred was "many" to Glory. One thousand, one million--to her it was all the same.
She insisted upon picking a flower. I did not have the heart to tell her that the bloom would not last. Perhaps I should have. Later, I found her crying over the shrivelled blossom.
I tried to comfort her. "It would have closed and died anyway it you had left it on the vine."
She shook her head. Aloud she said "Is me." With her hands, she signed "It is alone, like me. Far from its brothers and sisters."
I put my arm around her shoulder. "You aren't alone, Glory."
"Not alone," she agreed reluctantly. "But far. Too far. Many years, too far."
Later, I was to discover that early that morning, while she was waiting for the blue flowers to open, she had picked up a few of the seeds and chewed on them. She did not consume enough to make herself sick or delirious, but enough to begin the slow process of change that would take my Glory from me.
One evening, six or seven months later, we were sitting beside the fire. Glory was reading a book about fairies while I knitted a sweater . "Glory, dear, would you hand me another ball of yarn?"
"There is only one ball of the white," she said "Tomorrow we will have to go to town and get some more.""
I glanced up from my knitting. "You've been practicing."
"Practicing?" she signed.
"Your t's. 'White'. 'Tomorrow.' 'Town'. You said them perfectly."
She flushed and lowered her eyes.
I set down my knitting. Leaning forward, I asked "What's wrong?"
"I did not say anything," she signed. "I was thinking tomorrow we would go to town. I did not say it."
"Nonsense. I heard you clear as day."
"As clear as this?" she asked.
I blinked.
"Like this? Did I sound like this?" she asked again. My eyes had not deceived me. Neither her lips nor her hands moved. She was speaking to me without speaking.
"How are you doing that?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know."The words seemed to appear out of nowhere. "I think of something I want to say and it is said."
I hesitated before asking my next question. "Can you read my thoughts?"
At that she smiled. "I have always been able to do that. Even when I was little. Not words, just pictures, feelings." Her expression changed to one of her surprised looking frowns. "But now I hear words when you think. And when I think words hard enough, you hear them. That is new."
Indeed it was. Next morning I was on the phone to my colleagues. They were skeptical, at first, until a battery of tests revealed that Glory was telling the truth.
"But we have run those tests before," Hector pointed out unnecessarily. I was well aware of all the results of the previous studies. "She tested as mildly perceptive of visual images and moderately perceptive of emotions. There was no evidence of verbal telepathic ability. And she certainly could not carry on a conversation without moving her lips the way that she does now."
"Incredible," was all Alicia, our physician had to say.
"So what does this have to do with why the neanderthals became extinct?" the graduate student asked.
"That is the million dollar question," Hector replied drily. "How on earth could telepathy make a species weak?"
"Maybe they discovered each other's secrets?" I suggested. "Maybe they could not stand being around each other?"
Alicia shook her head. "If that were the case, Glory's psychological profile would show stress. Based on her MMPI scores, she is completely well adjusted."
I always cringed a little inside when they reduced Glory to numbers. "I know she is happy," I snapped. "For now. She knows me. Nothing I could think would surprise her. What about when she grows up and goes out into the world? What if she runs into a serial killer on the bus? Will she know what he is thinking?"
We were all silent for a moment, considering what it would be like to ride a crowded bus or walk a city street in which every person's thoughts were a monologue. Even the ordinary sins of the ordinary person--the wife beater, the fetishist, the tax cheater--would be too much to bear if repeated over and over again.
"I suppose a society in which every one was telepathic might actually be more stable," Alicia said finally. "People would hesitate to think about anti-social activities, and if they could not imagine them first there would be less chance of them doing them."
"And there would be greater tolerance," Hector added. "Most people are the same under their skin. If thoughts were freely shared, there would be greater empathy. Less emphasis on the individual and more on the group."
"I still do not understand," the graduate student said again. "How did being telepathic doom the neanderthals to extinction?" He looked around the group as if hoping that one of us might have the answer, but despite our advanced degrees and academic awards and research grants, we were as clueless as him.
As Glory entered puberty, it was difficult to tell if she was becoming more withdrawn because of her telepathic ability or because of the hormone effects of adolescence. She had always been shy. Maybe the process of maturation was simply solidifying early personality tendencies into traits. Maybe--
Why can I never discuss Glory without using the words "maybe" or "what if"? So many questions. If I had known the answers to begin with would I have carried Glory in my womb? Yes. No. Maybe. The question is irrelevant. It happened. Her fate, my fate, the fate of all mankind was sealed thirty thousand years ago in a cave in northern Europe.
Shortly after her eleventh birthday, Glory surprised me once again. She was standing on the front porch, crying.
"What is the matter?" I asked, putting my arm around her.
Glory wiped the tears from her eyes. "A dog is dead on the road," she signed. Though speaking telepathically was easier for her than signing, we had agreed that she needed to keep up her sign language and speech therapy. Also, I did not like the way that visual images, sounds, smells, emotions were beginning to bleed through when she tried to send me a telepathic message. It made me feel disoriented, as if I had stepped outside my own skin and into hers.
I glanced over her shoulder. "There is nothing in the road, dear. No dog."
"There is a dead dog in the road. I saw it." This time she spoke telepathically. There was something about the word "is" that confused me. Was she saying "is" or "will be" or "was"? And "saw" could just as easily have been "see" or "will see" Tense often became blurred when Glory spoke with her mind.
The visual image that accompanied the message was crystal clear. In my mind's eye, I saw a black and white long haired medium sized dog lying motionless in the middle of the road. One of its legs had a bloody wound through which broken bone could be seen. Blood leaked from its nose. Its eyes did not blink as flies buzzed around his face, drinking the moisture of its tears.
"It is not real," I assured her. "You imagined it."
"It is real," she insisted with her hands. "It exists. You have not seen it yet with your own eyes, but it is there."
She has been reading too many ghost stories and fairy tales, I thought. In the last two years she had begun to take an interest in anything that had to do with physical anthropology---this, for obvious reasons--and magic, particularly the folk magic of Europe and pre-colombian America. The supernatural tales had filled her head with strange ideas, I decided. She had imagined seeing a dead dog in the road and that made her think that it was going to happen.
Foolish me. She did not merely 'think" that it was going to happen. She knew it. The next morning I found her standing in the same spot on the porch. She was not crying today. Why should she? She had already expressed her grief for the dead animal the day before. But tears sprang to my eyes as I looked over her head. In the street in front of our house lay the dead black and white dog. It looked just as she shown it to me it, down to the buzzing flies.
That was how I discovered that Glory had begun to read the future the same way that she could read minds.
"This is way beyond our expertise," Hector said. Or was it Alicia? We had all said something along these lines after we discussed Glory's new psychic skill. "But if we bring in another person, we risk blowing our cover."
"Our cover" was a web of lies which we had spun years before Glory's birth. Very few people knew what we were doing. Our grant came from a branch of the government which had its own reasons for preferring secrecy. Over the years, members of our team had published only in scientific journals, and we had been careful to conceal Glory's whereabouts, giving the impression that she was a "he" who was being reared in an institution somewhere in Asia. Since royalties from my books had left me financially independent, I never published any more, so no one associated me with the project, and no one except a handful of scientists knew why my "daughter" was a little odd looking.
"Imagine the headlines." This was Alicia. "'Prophet for the new millennium. Neanderthal returns from the dead to reveal our future.' I say we keep this to ourselves as much as possible. I know someone who can analyze the data for us, but we should collect it ourselves."
Would things have turned out differently if we had called in an expert? Expert at what? Psychic phenomenon. No one had ever documented the kind of skill Glory showed. This was no best guess or premonition. Have someone drop a deck of cards on the table tomorrow in a room one hundred miles away and Glory could tell, just by touching that person's hand today, which cards would fall face up. She could also tell strangers what they had for breakfast on Sunday a week ago just by looking them in the eyes.
Even the member of our team were beginning to get spooked. Increasingly, they relied upon me to gather the data. It did not take psychic power for me to know what was going on inside their heads. They were scared of Glory.
Even I had become just a little bit afraid of her. When she said "Let's not go to the store today. Let's go tomorrow," I wondered if she had seen a traffic accident in our future. When she looked at me and frowned, I felt a shiver of fear. Was she picturing my death? Part of me wanted to ask, but another part of me knew that this was not something that I was meant to know.
Glory must have known what we were thinking, but she said nothing. She spent her days in the garden, staring at flowers or rocks or just out into space. At night, I would find her lying awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Whenever I tiptoed into her room she would say my name and hold out her hand, but I sensed that she was far away.
One night, I got up the courage to ask "Where do you go when you are quiet like this?"
Rather than speaking, she opened her mind to me. I was standing on a hill covered in pale green, knee high grass. The sky was blue but the air still had a hint of winter chill. Though I usually hate the cold, through Glory's mind I experienced this cool breeze as something pleasurable.
Her eyesight was better than mine. In the distance I saw snow covered mountains. I recognized the peak, though the ski lifts were missing. There were no roads, no houses, just miles of ancient forest. The air smelled so clean. And still. That faint electric hum that follows us everywhere on modern day earth was gone, and without its constant buzz I could hear/feel a deeper, slower, more subtle rhythm that something--Glory's mind--told me was the earth itself. I had never felt so much a part of my world. This was home.
She released my hand. The image of the pre-historic world vanished. I felt its loss like the withdrawal of a powerful drug. My first instinct was to grab her hand and say "Take me back."
Then, something worse than loss hit me. Glory did not merely have brief visions of this paradise. She was living it everyday in her imagination, for hour at a time. Soon it would overwhelm her. Soon her mind would leave this world forever.
Though it was dark in her bedroom, I felt her smile. It was bittersweet. "You are my mother," she said silently. "You are my home." She sat up in bed and leaned forward. I put my arms around her. She pressed her ear to my chest. "Your heart feeds me." Behind those simple words I got a glimpse of what it was like to be an embryo, sightless, floating in a sea which soothed, nourished, loved--an existence every bit as beautiful as that of those who lived on that long forgotten earth. And I saw myself through the eyes of an infant, my face radiant and so loved that nothing could tear the baby's eyes away. I had never seen myself like before. I almost did not recognize myself, because it was not really myself I was seeing. It was Glory's love for me. "I never leave you," she mumbled aloud. There was a hint of sadness in the words, but I pretended not to notice it.
I can make her happy in this world, I thought. I can.
Shortly after her twelfth birthday, Glory's psychic powers reached a plateau. Then there began a rapid decline. To my surprise, my colleagues were not relieved. Far from it. "This is not right," Alicia said. "No species experiences a loss of neural function during puberty. I think we may have found our 'why'. Neurologic degeneration."
She initiated a new round of tests, including scans, blood work, even a lumbar puncture. I drew the line when Alicia suggested a brain biopsy.
"What on earth will that tell you?" I demanded.
"It will show us if she is suffering from a viral infection, an autoimmune disease or a lipid storage problem. Some conditions can be treated."
"She is doing fine," I protested. "So what if she can no longer predict tomorrow's stock market ? She talks, she walks, she makes decisions like any other twelve year old."
Hector picked up a folder. "Her MMPI shows that she is suffering from severe depression."
I jumped to my feet. "Because you keep picking on her!"
Hector and Alicia two stared up at me. Simultaneously, they shook their heads. "She is grieving," Alicia said quietly. "She is mourning the loss of her psychic abilities. If we can determine what the problem is and fix it, then her depression may resolve."
She was right. I had lied to myself that Glory's moodiness was adolescence. It was the weather. It was "just a phase." But her tearfulness, her extreme quiet, her sleepless nights, her poor appetite--these were classic signs of depression which I had missed because I did not want to see them.
That afternoon, I sat down with Glory on the porch swing behind our house. She could still sense my emotions, but she had trouble with the actual thoughts so I spoke aloud. "Glory, Dr. Alicia thinks that you may be sick. She thinks that you can not see the past and future because there is something wrong with you. She wants to do another test. It is a dangerous test. But it might help us to find out what is wrong with you so that we can cure you."
She peered up at me. Her eyebrows rose. "Cure me?" she signed "You want to make me forget my visions?"
"No, dear." I shook my head. "I want to help you regain your visions. That is why you are so sad, isn't it? Because you have lost them."
Her eyebrows rose higher. Anyone else looking at her would have said that she was startled, but I knew that this was a frown of intense concentration. She was considering something. It took her almost a full minute to make up her mind what she would say next. "I have not lost them," she signed. "I put them away."
"Put what away?"
"My visions."
"You put them away? Where?"
She pointed towards the field behind my house.
"You buried them?"
"No. They are there. In the flowers you planted. The morning glories." Then she told me the secret she had kept from me for years, how she had begun to chew a few seeds everyday. "I do not know why I ate the seeds at first. It made me feel right. I started hearing better and seeing better. Things made more sense. I could understand you better. I was not so afraid, because I knew when scary things were going to happen. And at first, you seemed so excited. But later, you became afraid. You thought that I was going to leave you for that other place. So I made myself stop."
"Stop having visions. You can turn them on and off?"
She signed "No. I stopped chewing the seeds. It is the seeds which tell me things. The seeds open all the doors." Tears trickled down her cheeks. Her hand movements became clumsy, but she still managed to sign the words "I thought I would close the door and go back to before. But before is lost. Now it is.." She searched for a word. "...hot in here. There is no air. Like being locked inside a car. I do not like it here." She clutched me. There was terror in her eyes. "But I do not want to leave you, Mommy."
If hearts truly break , mine shattered at that moment. I knew then that I had lost her. If she kept her resolve not to use the morning glory seeds anymore, her depression would worsen until she killed herself from despair. If she started chewing them again, her visions would take her further and further away from reality--this reality, which included me. Either way, I would lose her. So I did what all mother's do, I chose the path that would make her happy.
"I think your sister had those seeds in the cave with her for a reason," I told my daughter. "I think you are supposed to use them. Without them, you can not be healthy." Holding out my hand, I added " Come on, let's go gather some." I forced myself to smile for her sake, and I think that for once my fake smile fooled her.
Should I have kept the power of the seeds a secret? Yes, my conscience says in retrospect. But then I remember. The decision was not mine to make. It was made by people who died thirty thousand years ago.
Glory was all but forgotten as my colleagues plunged into a new research project. The seeds were analyzed. They were a previously unknown variant of the subspecies commonly referred to as "heavenly blue." Like their modern cousin, the paleolithic seeds induced mild changes in perception that consisted primarily of an increased sensitivity to sensory stimuli. These changes lasted for a few hours only and did not recur if the seeds were used daily in small doses. After a few weeks of continued use, the senses seemed to become more acute. IQ in the test subjects slowly rose. They developed better problem solving abilities.
The psychic skills which Alicia and Hector hoped to uncover never materialized, but what they found was even better in their eyes. People feared anything that smacked of magic. A new compound that enhanced telepathy or precognition might be banned as a "drug". But a plant that made people smarter--no one could object to that.
It was next to impossible to keep something like this a secret within the academic community. Our graduate student, who, after all these years still had not completed his PhD thesis, found a quick way to make money. He stole some on the seeds, planted them and began selling them to friends and colleagues who in turn planted them and began selling them and so on. At this point, the newly discovered species of Impomoea which had been popularly dubbed "heavenly glory", began to spread like wild fire across the college campuses and technical communities of the world.
How much of what followed was a result of the seed and how much was just coincidence? We will never know. The next few years were a time of great change in the world. Almost simultaneously, two research teams perfected working cold fusion reactors. A research team in France discovered the on/off gene switch for the regenerative process that leads to cancer. Within months of its isolation, doctors all over the world began to report quick, simple cancer cures which targeted this gene. A housewife in the Yucatan deciphered a previously indecipherable pre-Mayan written language which turned out to belong to the mysterious Olmecs. These texts revealed their origins. By examining geological maps, a teenager in Lebanon deduced where bronze age peoples of the middle east obtained tin, radically altering notions of bronze age trade routes. Child musical prodigies were a dime a dozen. An Irish scholar deconstructed the Irish language and from this information was able to pinpoint the exact ethnic origin and time of arrival of the various legendary tribes. Mathematical delliminas that had vexed modern minds for years were suddenly solved. And a professor at an obscure little midwestern university discovered the secret of faster than light travel.
Pharmaceutical companies vied for the "rights" to heavenly glory, but how can you patent something that grows on road sides? Some legislators considered banning it, but with all the great thinkers allied against them, they did not get very far. Instead, there were calls for a parity program to make sure that those who lived in colder and urban areas had equal access to the seeds. As the years passed, the augmented intelligence which they provided was considered the "norm". People chewed their seeds each day the way that they might take a vitamin. Parents were taken to court for refusing to provide for their children's well being--i.e. refusing to give them the seeds...
But I am getting ahead of myself. It must be Glory's influence. She was the one who taught me that a story does not contain merely its own present reality. It also contains the past upon which it is based and the future which it creates. The events which were to come are part of Glory's story, too, but in order to understand them you must understand Glory. And to understand Glory you must understand her People.
In the early days of heavenly glory mania, I can not say that I cared much about what was happening in the world. My main concern was Glory. She had resumed her daily use of the seeds. Though her depression lifted, she became more withdrawn, spending up to twelve hours each day lost in her visions. Sometimes, she took me with her. Hand in hand I would step through the doors which she had opened and glimpse the past, sometimes as discreet moments, more often as a stream of time, one event leading to another. Occasionally, she would forget that I was with her and she would see history as she had begun to picture it, not as a progression of events but as a...words fail me here. It was like seeing all the things that have ever happened in one spot at the same time, image piled upon image, each image crystal clear.
I began to use the seeds, too. My memory improved. I could balance my checkbook without a calculator. Soon, I no longer needed a checkbook to keep track of my bank account. My high school french returned to me. I began reading Balzac in his native tongue.
One day, as I was drying off after a shower, I noticed a tiny mole. Under ordinary circumstance it never would have caught my eye, but my improved memory told me that it had not been there a month ago.
I had the mole removed. It turned out to be a melanoma. Unfortunately, despite its small size, it had already spread, meaning that I would need additional treatment.
My heart sank at the news, until the doctor added "Fortunately, thanks to recent progress, disseminated melanoma had now joined the list of treatable disease." I took three injections and nine pills. My hair did not fall out, I did not vomit. Within two months, I was declared cancer free.
"A miracle." The oncology nurse beamed at me. "I did not want to say anything before, but if you had come in a year ago with that kind of advanced cancer, you would have been dead by now."
Did Glory know what kind of fate she had saved me from? I was afraid to ask.
The heavenly glory seeds were responsible for problems as well as miracles. For every new cure there was a new weapon. Almost every country was at war with its neighbors or itself. New technologies meant that some previously valuable natural resources became worthless, plunging some countries into poverty. Meanwhile, there was an increased demand for other resources, making some previously quiet countries targets for invasions. The world map had to be redrawn almost weekly. Many people more became worried at the increase in armed conflict. People began to sign up for the space colonization expeditions which the new technology had made feasible. Like rat's leaving a sinking ship, I thought.
"Did you know this was going to happen when you told me about the seeds?" I asked Glory one day.
She ducked her head. "Not when I told you. I could not see then." She had a special way of thinking the word "see" to indicate that she was talking about her visions and not plain old eyesight. "Without the seeds I was blind."
"What do you see now? When you look into the future of our race, what do you see?"
She gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. "It is going to be alright," she thought. A wave of positive feeling washed over me. That was one of the benefits of telepathy. Emotions could be conveyed so much more easily through thoughts than through words. "The seeds will do their work as they did the last time, and then they will stop working."
"The last time? Glory, do you know something you are not telling me?"
She gazed up at me. Her bright blue eyes were wide. "I am telling you now," she signed so that there would be no confusion. "Give me your hand, and I will show."
This is what she showed me. I wish that I had the power to share it with you as it was shared with me. Words are all I have to work with, so I will have to make the best use of them that I can.
"We are the People. But we are also the Big Noses, the first name the Restless Ones gave us when they arrived our in land. They came from the south, the land of Fire, which is their Father. Once upon a time, their Father grew angry and their world was consumed by fire and drought. They sought refuge in the ocean. In the sea, there is no sleep. In the sea there is no dream. There is only the Here and the Now. Those who take to the waves must keep one eye open if they are to stay afloat and avoid the sharp fangs of the Monsters of the Deep.
"When they won over the guardian of the west with their devotion to water, he sent the rains back to Africa. The Restless Ones returned to the land, but they took with them the Here and the Now that they had learned from the sea. They also carried within them the changeability of water, its restlessness. Water must flow or it stagnates. The Restless Ones must move, or they go mad and begin to feed upon their own. They are creatures of the sea and moon, waxing and waning, ebbing and flowing, never still. Once a month, their women bleed in honor of their celestial Mother.
"We ignored these new arrivals at first, hoping that their restlessness would lead them to travel on to the north, where the jeweled caverns would quench their thirst for riches and the earth would teach them stillness. But they liked our stories. Like children, they gathered around our fires and eagerly demanded tales of the past, tales of the future, tales of birth and tales of death. They wanted stories of those things which the Here and Now could not show them.
"Though we would have given our stories freely, they insisted upon offering us something in return. We told them that we desired nothing. They shook their heads and said slyly 'Only because you do not know what we have to offer.'
"This was not true. We knew what they had brought with them from their southern home. We knew why their God of Fire had turned his back upon them. The guardian of the east, the Lord of Knowledge whom they called serpent or rabbit or sometimes thief had tried to win them with a bribe. He had given them a handful of seeds and told them 'Plant them. When the flowers bloom and fall, they will produce more seeds. Eat a few and plant the rest. The seeds will make you as wise as the guardians, and then you will know the secrets of earth, fire, water and air.' The Restless Ones did as he instructed, and they became even wiser in the Here and Now.
"At first, the People rejected the gift of the Restless Ones. Did not want to know the secrets of the four guardians. We did not need their knowledge, because we already knew the secrets of the String of Stories which connects yesterday with tomorrow. When Past and Future are linked, there is no air, no fire, no water, no earth. There is only is. Not the 'is' of Here and Now. I speak of the 'is' of 'was' and 'is' and 'will be'.
"The Restless ones would not hear us. They loved to listen, but they seldom heard anything more than their own desires. Because our land was green and fertile, they chose to settle down nearby--if one can call what they did 'settling.' They gouged holes in the earth and with the dirt and stones constructed hills in which to dwell. They carved other holes in earth and used them to create streams with which to feed the seeds which they planted according to their rules and not natures. They enslaved animals. They found new uses for fire.
"The only element they could not master was the air. The Guardian of the East was jealous of his knowledge. He had made certain that the seeds which he gave them did not contain any of his power.
"For many years the two tribes lived side by side. The Restless One's seeds took root in the earth. The spread until ever east facing hill greeted the dawn with a flush of blue as bright as the summer sky. Their color was the same as the blue of our eyes. The Restless Ones whispered 'There are no coincidences. Your eyes, the flowers--the same blue. You must be the chosen ones. Taste the seeds and you will master the air, and together we will rule the earth.'
"We did not want to master the air or rule the earth. We wanted only to weave our stories. Clever Restless Ones. They knew how to ensnare us. 'There are no coincidences.' Indeed, in stories nothing happens by chance. Everything has its purpose. We looked at the flowers. We stared into each others eyes. For many years we debated, until finally even our doubts became just another part of the tale. And then we ate.
"For many years, we noticed nothing except that the stories had become more beautiful, the colors richer, the patterns more complex, the whole more satisfying. Like living things, they grew, spinning more stories. Story lead to story. Many more years passed, and all we wanted was the Story.
"The Restless Ones were enchanted by the tales we spun. They gave us a new name. We were the Past and Future Folk. To them, our stories were prophecy, because the seeds had made it possible for us to see the future and the past as clearly as the hand before our eyes.
"And so it was for many years. We lost interest in hunting. The Restless Ones fed us. We lost interest in shelter. The Restless Ones kept us warm. We chewed our seeds and told our tales, and they listened and acted upon our words. Their man made hills became mountains. Their man made stream became rivers. They took earth, fire and water into their hands and forged new elements. They had mastery of all things--except for air. We alone knew how to control the element of the east. Our spirit selves rode on the backs of clouds. With each exhalation, we imparted secrets. We learned to speak to Those Who Live in the Past and She Who Will Come in the Future. We learned to speak to each other without moving hand or lip. Our tongues grew weak from lack of use. Ordinary speech became difficult. No problem. We could now tell the Restless Ones our stories with our Mindspeech.
"How they revered us. They called us 'the Old Ones' and the 'fairies'. They offered us gifts. They mated with our women and valued our mixed breed offspring with their big noses and clever, Restless minds because these children possessed a tiny spark of our magic which gave them fleeting glimpses of the Story, which was forever denied to the People of the Here and Now.
"How they feared us. We learned that no matter how hard they begged, they did not really want to hear the story of their end. To do this was to invite our own end. We tailored the stories to suit their needs, offering words of hope and advise.
"Later, as we sank deeper into the Story, we no longer cared whether our end came now or later so we began to tell only the truth. That was when they made us oracles and witches. They locked us away and approached us on their knees or carrying chains and torches, depending upon their whim. They looked upon our faces which did not fear death, and they shivered.
"Our numbers dwindled. We lost interest in sex. Soon, the only children being born to our women were those planted in our wombs by the Restless Ones. Those of mixed race joined their fathers' people and became shamans and healers and storytellers They spread to the four corners of the world, and even in this Here and Now they walk both earth and sky.
"Meanwhile, the Past and Future Folk began to disappear. The oracles died. The witches were murdered. A few of our kind went to live in caves or in the forests, taking with us only the precious seeds and our intense desire to merge with the Story.
"Then came the killing summers. The fire God had followed his errant children north. He scorched the earth. He dried up the water. The only element he could not touch was the air. But he could kill the fruit of the air. For many years, the blue flowering vines withered each spring and produced no seed. When the killing summers ended, the vine which re-emerged had changed. Now, when the Restless Ones chewed the seeds, they saw only pretty colors.
"Fortunately for us, we had predicted this, as we predict all things. Many years before, we had set aside a store of the original seed. We guarded the secret of its location. When one of our People died in the cavern, we left her there in the freezing cold because we knew that she was the sister of She Who Will Come in the Future. When the avalanche which we had foreseen sealed the cave, we knew that our work was done and we laid down in the earth and gave up our lives so that our spirits could join the Story.
"For many years, the Restless Ones searched for the legendary cavern with its cup of knowledge, but they never found it. Not that they needed it. Their clever minds and the meager gifts of the mixed-breed offspring which we had given them were tools enough to help them achieve the power they desired.
"They missed our stories, however. From time to time, one of the Restless Ones would separate from the rest and come looking for us. To this day, they seek us in those rare hidden places which the earth still contains. But they will not find us. There is now only one, She Who Will Come in the Future, the one who tells this story, the one you call Glory."
Hector and Alicia had their own slant on the story which Glory told. "Fascinating hypothesis," Alicia said. "Two groups of homo sapiens so closely related that they could communicate and interbreed, but with a difference in their neurobiochemistry that lead them to respond in dramatically different ways to a common hallucinogen."
"We will have to warn the producers to make sure that the source plants are not allowed to cross pollinate with the wild strain, otherwise the hybrids may lose their potency," Hector added.
"Mmm." Alicia jotted down a few notes. "Perhaps we can do a clinical trial and see if a hybrid Ipomoea neanderthalis and modern Ipomoea loses its intellect enhancing properties. That would confirm Glory's story..."
They continued tossing ideas back and forth at each other, in the brisk, almost manic manner that was common among those who used the heavenly glory seeds on a daily basis.
I interrupted their scientific discussion. "That damned graduate student has sold the story of Glory's birth and childhood to a tabloid. It is just a matter of time before the public finds out about her relationship to heavenly glory."
I must admit that the seeds have their use. I did not have to spell out my fears for my colleagues. Alicia straightened up. Her eyes were wide with alarm. "Oh my! This is going to mean trouble. There is a sizable lunatic fringe that is trying to declare the seeds illegal. They think so much progress is unhealthy."
Hector took over her train of thought as smoothly as if they were two mouths sharing the same brain. "They will see Glory as a villain. A neanderthal 'pusher' if you were, come to seek revenge for the extinction of her own kind."
"Or a savoir," Alicia added. "Which will be almost as bad for the girl. We have to find a safe place for her."
"Perhaps our sponsor..."
I left them to their dialogue. Once they got started they could go on like this for hours. And the scary thing was that in the last twelve weeks, they had managed to produce more sound data and come up with more useful applications from our research than they had in the last twelve years.
As I drove home, I was thinking about Glory. I did not trust our government sponsor. Neither did Alicia and Hector. For all their scientific talk, my colleagues were almost as protective of Glory as I was. After a discussion, we had agreed to conceal the real nature of Glory's psychic powers. But our ex- graduate student knew our secret. If military intelligence discovered her gifts for telepathy and precognition, they might try to seize her, make her their own oracle. Clone her.
I could not risk letting that happen. The best thing for us to do would be to disappear. I could assume a fake identity. I would place my money in an island bank. Glory looked enough like a modern to pass. We would have to sever all ties with Alicia and Hector and our few friends, but that would be no problem. We were used to a quiet life---
Do I have a bit of neanderthal blood flowing in my veins? Is that what made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as I eased my car onto the gravel driveway in front of my house. I had a terrible premonition. Hurriedly, I switched off the ignition and sprinted into the house. It was empty. I ran through the kitchen, out the back door and into the garden. Shading my eyes from the sun, I searched for her while calling her name.
"Glory. GLORY! Where are you?"
I found her body beside the heavenly glory vines. Her blue eyes were closed, like those of the flowers. She wore a half smile on her lips. She looked very peaceful. I touched her brow. Cold. I checked her wrist. No pulse. I pried open one eye. Her pupil did not respond to the light.
"Oh, Glory!" I moaned. I knelt beside her and laid my cheek against hers, sobbing. "Why did you do it, Glory? Why did you leave me?"
The wind touched the back of my neck. It seemed to whisper something in my
ear which
sounded like "Hush."
"...we all must go back to the Story sooner or later. Don't cry, Mommy. I love you. We love you. That was why we did it. You are the Mother, She who Nurtures She Who Will Come in the Future. And She Who Will Come in the Future is us, and therefore you are Our Mother. We did it for you. We left the corpse of our sister in the cavern, so that one day you could give life to She Who Will Come in the Future and become Our Mother. We love you, Mommy. We placed the seeds beside our sister's body because we knew that you, who nurtured and protected us, would need the knowledge they contained in order to heal yourself of your tumor. Now you are healed. Now you will live for many years and we can tell our stories to you, and you will tell them to the others. Listen to the wind, Mommy, and you will hear us."
"I want my Glory black. I want to hold her, see her."
"Then close you eyes."
I closed my eyes.
She appeared in my mind's eye. "I am here." She held out her arms. Her skin was warm. Her scent was hers. "I will always be here, Mommy. Now listen. I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time..."
Copyright © 1999 by McCamy TaylorBio:McCamy writes speculative fiction with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her long fiction can be read on her web site at http://www.nationwide.net/~taylorjh.
E-mail: taylorjh@nationwide.net
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