Sometimes, in his desire to learn more, he even eavesdropped. He did it by lying on a couch in the comer and staring at a lectern, doodling or pretending to read. Quite often people elsewhere in the room didn’t realize he was listening, and sometimes they would even talk about the children of Zygote — mostly when he was actually skulking out in the hall.
“Have you noticed most of them are left-handed?”
“Hiroko tweaked their genes, I swear.”
“She says not.”
“They’re already almost as tall as I am.”
“That’s just the gravity. I mean look at Peter and the rest of the nisei. They’re natural-born, and they’re mostly tall. But the left-handedness, that’s got to be genetic.”
“Once she told me there was a simple transgenic insertion that would increase the size of the corpus callosum. Maybe she fooled with that and got the left-handedness as a side effect.”
“I thought left-handedness was caused by brain damage.”
“No one knows. I think even Hiroko is mystified by it.”
“I can’t believe she would mess with the chromosomes for brain development.”
“Ectogenes, remember — better access.”
“Their bone density is poor, I hear.”
“That’s right. They’d be in trouble on Earth. They’re on supplements to help.”
“That’s the g again. It’s trouble for all of us, really.”
“Tell me about it. I broke my forearm swinging a tennis racket.”
“Left-handed giant bird-people, that’s what we’re growing down here. It’s bizarre, if you ask me. You see them running across the dunes and expect them to just take off and fly.”
That night Nirgal had the usual trouble sleeping. Ectogenes, transgenic… it made him feel odd. White and green in their double helix… For hours he tossed, wondering what the uneasiness twisting through him meant, wondering what he should feel.
Finally, exhausted, he fell asleep. And in his sleep he had a dream. All his dreams before that night had been about Zygote, but now he dreamed that he flew in the air, over the surface of Mars. Vast red canyons cut the land, and volcanoes reared nearly to his unimaginable height. But something was after him, something much bigger and faster than him, with wings that flapped loudly as the creature dropped out of the sun, with huge talons that extended toward him. He pointed at this flying creature and bolts of lightning shot out of his fingertips, causing it to bank away. It was soaring up for another attack when he struggled awake, his fingers pulsing and his heart thumping like the wave machine, ka-thunk, ka-thunfe, ka-thunfe.
The very next afternoon the wave machine was waving too well, as Jackie put it. They were playing on the beach, and thought they had the big breakers gauged, but then a really big one surged over the ice filigree and knocked Nirgal to his knees, and pulled him back down the strand with an irresistible sucking. He struggled, gasping for air as he tumbled in the shockingly icy water, but he couldn’t escape and was pulled under, then rolled hard in the rush of the next incoming wave.
Jackie grabbed him by the arm and hair, pulled him back up the strand with her. Dao helped them to their feet, crying “Are you okay are you okay?” If they got wet the rule was to run for the village as fast as they could, so Nirgal and Jackie struggled to their feet and raced over the dunes and up the village path, the rest of the children trailing far behind. The wind cut to the bone. They ran straight to the bathhouse and burst through the doors and stripped off their stiff garments with shaking hands, helped by Nadia and Sax and Michel and Rya, who had been in there bathing.
As they were being hustled into the shallows of the big communal bath, Nirgal remembered his dream. He said, “Wait, wait.”
The others stopped, confused. He closed his eyes, held his breath. He clutched Jackie’s cold upper arm. He saw himself back into the dream, felt himself swimming through the sky. Heat from the fingertips. The white world in the green.
He searched for the spot in his middle that was always warm, even now when he was so cold. As long as he was alive it would be there. He found it, and with every breath he pushed it outward through his flesh. It was hard but he could feel it working, the warmth traveling out into his ribs like a fire, down his arms, down his legs, into his hands and feet. It was his left hand holding on to Jackie, and he glanced at her bare body with its white goose-pimpled skin, and concentrated on sending the heat into her. He was shivering slightly now, but not from the cold.
“You’re warm,” Jackie exclaimed.
“Feel it,” he said to her, and for a few moments she leaned into his grip. Then with an alarmed look she pulled free, and stepped down into the bath. Nirgal stood on the edge until his shivering stopped.
“Wow,” Nadia said. “That’s some kind of metabolic burn. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”
“Do you know how you do it?” Sax asked him. He and Nadia and Michel and Rya were staring at Nirgal with a curious expression, which he did not want to meet.
Nirgal shook his head. He sat down on the concrete coping of the bath, suddenly exhausted. He stuck his feet in the water, which felt like liquid flame. Fish in water, sloshing free, out in the air, the fire within, white in the green, alchemy, soaring with eagles… thunderbolts from his fingertips!
People looked at him. Even the Zygotes gave him sidelong looks, when he laughed or said something unusual, when they thought he wouldn’t see. It was easiest just to pretend he didn’t notice. But that was hard with the occasional visitors, who were more direct. “Oh, you’re Nirgal,” one short red-haired woman said. “I’ve heard you’re bright.” Nirgal, who was constantly crashing against the limits of his understanding, blushed and shook his head while the woman calmly surveyed him. She made her judgment and smiled and shook his hand. “I’m glad to meet you.”
One day when they were five Jackie brought an old lectern to school with her, on a day when Maya was teaching. Ignoring Maya’s glare, she showed it to the others. “This is my grandfather’s AI. It has a lot of what he said in it. Kasei gave it to me.” Kasei was leaving Zygote to move to one of the other sanctuaries. But not the one where Esther lived.
Jackie turned the lectern on. “Pauline, play back something my grandfather said.”
“Well, here we are,” said a man’s voice.
“No, something different. Play back something he said about the hidden colony.”
The man’s voice said, “The hidden colony must still have contacts with surface settlements. There’s too many things they can’t manufacture while hiding. Nuclear fuel rods for one, I should think. Those are controlled pretty well, and it could be that records would show where they’ve been disappearing.”
The voice stopped. Maya told Jackie to put the lectern away, and she started another history lesson, the nineteenth century told in’ Russian sentences so short and harsh that her voice shook. And then more algebra. Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.” And she would glare at them and demand the next answer.
Nirgal stared at her, remembering when she had been their Bad Witch. It would be strange to be her, so fierce sometimes and so cheerful others. With most of the people in Zygote, he could look at them and feel what it would be like to be them. He could see it in their faces, just as he could see the second color inside the first; it was that kind of gift, something like his hyperacute sense of temperature. But he didn’t understand Maya.
In the winter they made forays onto the surface, to the nearby crater where Nadia was building a shelter, and the dark ice-spangled dunes beyond. But when the fog hood lifted they had to stay under the dome, or at most go out to the window gallery. They weren’t to be seen from above. No one was sure if the police were still watching from space or not, but it was best to be safe. Or so the issei said. Peter was often away, and his travels had led him to believe that the hunt for hidden colonies must be over. And that the hunt was hopeless in any case. “There are resistance settlements that aren’t hiding at all. And there’s so much noise now thermally and visually, and even over the radio,” he said. “They could never check all the signals they’re getting.”