The game was an obvious psychological metaphor for the freedom they all sought in an enclosed world, but it was ferociously difficult to play. “Bastard beats me every time,” Mike Wetherbee murmured.
“You’re very patient,” Grace said.
“Yeah, right,” Wetherbee said sourly. “When he’s in this phase he’s so depressive, so passive, he just sits there soaking in misery. He sucks the life out of you.”
Holle knew that Wetherbee was uncomfortable with the therapy program, although he had finally accepted the responsibility given how essential Zane was to the mission. That was why he had got others involved in the treatment: Holle who had referred Zane in the first place, Venus who had also suffered abuse at the hands of Harry Smith, a likely trigger for Zane’s condition, and Grace Gray, who had spoken to Zane on the ground after Harry’s murder. Grace was turning out to be one of the more competent of Wetherbee’s backup paramedics, having picked up a lot of field experience in her years with the okie city on the Great Plains. They made a good team, Holle thought, emotionally strong even if they had no experience with this kind of case.
But really, Wetherbee was just sharing the burden around. He had the mentality Holle had seen in a lot of medical students and doctors on the ground. Brisk, good-looking and competent, he didn’t have a steady partner, but he had had a string of relationships with women among the crew-a lot of people would want to tie the ship’s only doctor to them, and their children. But he’d never show a trace of survivor guilt, or any interest in the fate of his drowned homeland. And he maintained a kind of distance from his patients that sometimes made you wonder why he had ever gone into medicine in the first place.
Now Mike leaned forward and touched the screen to up the volume. “We’d been talking about the chess. Then suddenly he started talking about his father. Look, see the switch there?”
Holle saw how Zane sat up straight and looked around, almost as if he’d just arrived in the room. “Dr. Wetherbee?”
“Zane, I’m right here.”
“We’re in the surgery. We’re playing chess.” He glanced at the board. “I’m two moves away from getting you in check.” He smiled. Everything about Zane seemed brighter, Holle thought, as if he was another person.
“Two moves? I can’t see it, but that doesn’t surprise me.”
“I play chess with my father.”
“Note the present tense,” Wetherbee murmured to the women.
“I never beat my father. He’d hate that, if I ever did.”
“Did you, I mean do you let him win?”
“Oh, no. He’d hate to think of himself as weak. And he’d hate to see me being sentimental. The game is everything, winning…”
“You see the conflict,” Wetherbee commented. “I think he did let the father win, and then blocked it out. The old man kept setting up barriers the kid couldn’t break through. Listen to what he initiates now.”
“I tried to tell Dad about Harry Smith,” Zane said, on the screen.
“About what we talked about? The touching-all of that.”
“Yes. I tried more than once. The first time Dad just wouldn’t listen. The next time he hit me. He said I was lying about Harry Smith, who was a good man, a man he knew well. And he said I was dirty, soiled. He said I should shut up. He said if I told anybody these lies it would make trouble for no one but me, and get me thrown off the Ark, and then the eye-dees would rape me and kill me, and if they didn’t the flood would drown me.”
“But now that’s all over. You’re on the Ark. You’re safe.”
Zane smiled, looking quizzical. “Well, I’m still a Candidate, Dr. Wetherbee. That’s not the same thing at all.”
“Like he’s stuck in the past,” Venus said. “He doesn’t know he’s on the Ark.”
“Something like that, some of the time… Listen.”
On the screen, Wetherbee asked, “If you do make it onto the Ark, how do you think all this will affect you? The business with Harry Smith and your father.”
Zane frowned. “I don’t think much about that. Launch is years away.”
“You’ll have a duty,” Wetherbee said, pushing. “You won’t be there just as a person, but as a repository of genes. A contributor to genetic diversity.”
“I’m interested in the engines, the theory of the warp field-”
“Yes, but this is a key part of the mission, the human side of it. You will have to have children, on the Ark, or on Earth II. That’s the whole point. How do you feel about that?”
“Dirty.”
“That’s what your father said. But it isn’t necessarily true.”
“Dirty, dirty!” Zane swept his arm, scattering the pieces from the chessboard. Then he slumped.
Wetherbee paused the recording.
“You pushed him pretty hard,” Grace said.
“I know, I know.” Wetherbee sighed, and massaged a pale, stubbly face. “But when he gave me the opening about the father, I thought it was an opportunity I shouldn’t miss. I think the relationship to the father is the key to the whole mess.
“Look at the contradiction he’s trying to resolve. His father loaded onto him all the pain and the blame of the sexual abuse, and the father’s own drive and ambition, and maybe his own shame at what became of his son. So Zane’s dirty because of the Harry Smith thing, and isn’t fit to have kids. But on the other hand if he can’t contribute to the gene pool he shouldn’t be on the Ark. He should have been left back on Earth in the hands of the monsters his father depicted. But that’s a primal choice, of life and death. He could hardly be put under more pressure. Maybe deep inside he’s always just evaded the whole issue, buried the contradiction. It was showing up in the memory lapses, the self-harm. And then-”
“And then I triggered the crisis,” Holle said. “That day I suggested he and I could have a kid.”
Grace said, “That’s one of the kindest gestures you could ever have made to a man like Zane. You weren’t to know what was going on inside his head. He didn’t know himself.”
“Even I still don’t,” Wetherbee said, “after years of my ham-fisted therapy. But, look, I think he has some kind of dissociative disorder. He has splits in his identity, caused by the contradictions he can’t resolve, the pain he has to bury. That explains the memory lapses, the apparent shifts in identity-the way he seems to ‘wake up,’ uncertain of where he is, or even when.”
Venus said, “You’re saying our only warp engineer is Jekyll and Hyde?”
“So what do we do?” Holle asked.
He shrugged. “I have limited facilities for MRI scans. I tried that but can see nothing physically abnormal in his brain functions, whichever aspect of himself is apparent. I think the only answer is therapy-to understand him fully, and the damage that’s been done. And then to find some way to start the healing. Hypnosis is often used in these cases. I never hypnotized anybody in my life, but there are routines in the archive I might be able to adapt.” He grimaced. “This is going to take years more, if it works at all.”
“I guess we don’t have much choice,” Holle said. “Thanks, Mike. I know you didn’t sign up for this.”
“No, I didn’t.” Wetherbee looked resentful, then grinned. “But then, neither did Zane.” As they got up to leave, he cleared the screen and turned to a computer program.
It snagged Venus’s attention. “What’s this?”
“I’m trying to teach the ship’s AI to play infinite chess. With some prompting in my ear at least I might be able to put up a fight against Zane…”
In the small hours of the next morning, Holle was woken by two more calls. The first was from Wilson Argent in Halivah. They had found the little girl, Meg Robles.