The Descent Part 38

'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?'

'But she's not mimicking or aping them.'

'Are we to suppose the creatures of h.e.l.l are channeling through this poor woman?'

'Of course not, Mr Parsifal.'

'What then?'

'This is going to sound awfully half-baked.'

'After the nonsense we just witnessed out front?' said Parsifal. 'Possession. Exorcism. I'm feeling pretty warmed up.'

'In fact,' Mary Kay said, 'Yammie seems to have become her subject. More precisely, the hadal has become her.'

Parsifal gaped, then started to growl.

'Listen.' Vera stopped him. 'Just listen for a minute.'

'Bud's right,' Thomas protested. 'We came all this way to hear such nonsense?'

'We're just trying to go where the evidence points us,' Mary Kay pleaded.

'Let me get this straight. The soul from that thing,' said Parsifal, pointing at the decaying cranium, 'jumped inside of this young woman?'

'Believe me,' Mary Kay said, 'none of us want to believe it, either. But something catastrophic happened to her. The charts spiked right before Yammie fell unconscious. We've gone over the video a thousand times. You see Yammie holding the EEG leads, and then she falls down. Maybe she conducted an electric current through her hands. Or the head conducted one into her. I know it sounds fantastic.'

'Fantastic? Try lunatic,' Parsifal said. 'I've had enough of this.' On his way out, he stopped by the sectioned skull. 'You should clean your necropolis,' he declared to the roomful of people. 'It's no wonder you're hatching such medieval rubbish.' He opened a magazine and dropped it over the hadal head, then stalked out. From the tent of glossy pages, the hadal eyes seemed to peer out at them.

Mary Kay was trembling, shaken by Parsifal's vehemence.

'Forgive us,' Thomas said to her. 'We're used to one another's pa.s.sions and dramas. We sometimes forget ourselves in public.'

'I think we should have some coffee,' Vera declared. 'Is there a place we can collect our thoughts?'

Mary Kay led them to a small conference room with a coffee machine. A monitor on the wall overlooked the laboratory. The smell of coffee was a welcome relief from the chemical and decay stench. Thomas got them all seated and insisted on serving them. He made sure Mary Kay got the first cup. 'I know it sounds crazy,' she said.

'Actually,' Rau said quietly after Parsifal was gone, 'we shouldn't be so surprised.'

'And why not?' Thomas said.

'We're talking about old-fas.h.i.+oned reincarnation. If you go back in time, you find versions of the theory are almost universal. For twenty thousand years the Australian aborigines have tracked an unbroken chain of ancestors in their infants. You find it everywhere, in many peoples, from Indonesians to Bantus to Druids. You get thinkers like Plato and Empedocles and Pythagoras and Plotinus trying to describe it. The Orphic mysteries and the Jewish Cabala took a crack at it. Even modern science has investigated the activity. It's quite accepted where I come from, a perfectly natural phenomenon.'

'But I just can't accept that, in a laboratory setting, this hadal's soul pa.s.sed into another person?'

'Soul?' said Rau. 'In Buddhism there's no such thing as soul. They talk about an undifferentiated stream of being that pa.s.ses from one existence to another. Samsara, they call it.'

In part goaded by Thomas's skepticism, Vera challenged the idea, too. 'Since when does rebirth involve epileptic seizures, homicide, and cannibalism? You call this perfectly natural?'

'All I can say is that birth doesn't always happen without problems,' Rau said. 'Why should rebirth? As for the devastation' - and he gestured at the TV view of destruction - 'that may have to do with man's limited capacity for memory. Perhaps, as Dr. Koenig described, memory is a matter of electrical wiring. But memory is also a maze. An abyss. Who knows where it goes?'

'What was your question about lab animals, Rau?'

'I was just trying to eliminate other possibilities,' he answered. 'Cla.s.sically, the transfer occurs between a dying adult and an infant or animal. But in this case the hadal had only this young woman at hand. And it found an occupied house, so to speak. Now it's disabling Dr. Yamamoto's memory in order to make room for itself.'

'But why now?' asked Mary Kay. 'Why all of a sudden, like this?'

'I can only guess,' Rau said. 'You told me your mechanical blade was about to dissect the hippocampus. Maybe this was the hadal memory's way of defending itself. By invading new territory.'

'It invaded her? That's an odd way of putting it.'

'You westerners,' said Rau, 'you mistake reincarnation with a sociable act, like a handshake or a kiss. But rebirth is a matter of dominion. Of occupation. Of colonization, if you will. It's like one country seizing land from another, and interposing its own people and language and government. Before long, Aztecs are speaking Spanish, or Mohawks are speaking English. And they start to forget who they once were.'

'You're subst.i.tuting metaphors for common sense,' said Thomas. 'It doesn't get us any closer to our goal, I'm afraid.'

'But think about it,' said Rau. He was getting excited. 'A pa.s.sage of continuous memory. An unbroken strand of consciousness, eons long. It could help explain his longevity. From man's narrow historical perspective, it could make him seem eternal.'

'Who's this you're talking about?' Mary Kay asked.

'Someone we're looking for,' Thomas said. 'No one.'

'I didn't mean to pry.' After all she'd shared with them, her hurt was evident.

'It's a game we play,' Vera rushed to explain, 'nothing more.'

The video monitor on the wall behind them had no sound, or else they might have noticed the initial flurry of action in the laboratory. Mary Kay's pager beeped and she looked down at it, then suddenly whirled in her chair to see the screen. 'Yammie,' she groaned.

People were rus.h.i.+ng through the laboratory. Someone shouted at the monitor, a soundless cry. 'What?' said Vera.

'Code Blue.' And Mary Kay flew out the door. A half-minute later, she reappeared on the monitor.

'What's happening?' asked Rau.

Vera turned her wheelchair to face the monitor. 'They're losing the poor girl. She's in cardiac arrest. Look, here comes the crash wagon.'

Thomas was on his feet, watching the screen intently. Rau joined him. 'Now what?' he said.

'Those are the shock paddles,' Vera said. 'To jump-start her heart again.'

'You mean she's dead?'

'There's a difference between biological and clinical death. It may not be too late.'

Under Mary Kay's direction, several people were shoving aside tables and wrecked machinery, making room for the heavy crash wagon. Mary Kay reached for the paddles and held them upright. To the rear, a woman was waving the electric plug in one hand, frantically casting around for an outlet.

'But they mustn't do that!' Rau cried.

'They have to try,' said Vera.