Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield Page A

survey of Earth’s northern hemisphere. At the time no one in the south expected to find humans alive beyond the equator. What they feared and what they sought were the teratomas, genetically modified and monstrous forms created in the Belt and seeded on Earth by Belt ships during the final days of the Great War. Whatever they found, the survey craft were to destroy.
    They had found and killed teratomas by the thousands. They had also found, and rescued, a fair number of people. The adults were left with their memories intact. Small children found alone were treated as soon as they were picked up, to obliterate their earlier memories.
    It was done as an act of kindness. The months before rescue were of terror and of deadly raids from the sky. That was followed by the agonizing death of parents and siblings from drinking poisoned water, or by near-starvation and sometimes by cannibalism. Before their memories were wiped, the woman on the aircraft had asked Jan and Sebastian their names. She wrote them on tags and placed them around their wrists; then she touched the Lethe spray to their temples.
    That was all they had, all they kept from the past. They were logged in upon arrival at the displaced persons’ camp in Husvik as Janeed Jannex and Sebastian Birch. It took a month to learn to respond to them.
    * * *
    “After that we spent just about every day together.” Jan felt cold and clammy as she recalled the time of rescue and rebirth. It was a relief to move on to the normal days of schooling and training and planning a future. She had always taken the lead in that. Sebastian seemed happy to sit and dream. If he went along with her plans, it was only because she coaxed and persuaded him.
    “No long periods of separation?” Christa Matloff had listened in sympathetic silence. “What you’ve described was more than thirty years ago. You had no individual training since then, or different schools? I’m thinking of art courses, say, that he took and you didn’t.”
    “None.” That last comment sounded as though Sebastian’s cloud drawings must be involved. Jan glanced at the clock. She had talked for close to a quarter of an hour, and there was still no sign of him. “If you think that he might have picked up a disease, I’m sure I would have been exposed to it, too.”
    She was really asking a question, and the other woman was smart enough to see it that way.
    “It’s not a disease. In fact, I’ll be honest with you, and admit we don’t know quite what it is. I don’t want you to feel we’re making a big mystery out of nothing. Come on, and I’ll show you.”
    She led Jan back the way they had come, through another door and into a room filled with CAT and PET scanners and SQUID sensors, flanked by rows of monitors. Jan, to her great relief, saw Sebastian sitting down at the far end. He was fully dressed and—typical Sebastian—quite relaxed. He caught sight of Jan and gave her a nonchalant wave.
    “You’re feeling all right?” she called.
    He frowned. “All right? Yeah. Getting hungry, is all. We about done?”
    He addressed his question to a blue-uniformed man who was fine-tuning an image on a monitor.
    “Done as we’re likely to get.” The man turned to Christa Matloff. “We’ve scanned, analyzed, recorded, and tagged. What now?”
    “Did you perform the search?”
    “Long ago. I can show you the structures, and I can assure you that there’s nothing like it in the data banks.”
    “Did you search the full Seine?”
    “No. We’d have to get special authorization, and I didn’t think I needed to.” The man turned to Sebastian. “You said you’ve never been off-Earth before?”
    “Nah.”
    “So it’s down on Earth, if it’s anywhere. And it’s definitely not in the Earth data banks. Do you want me to set up a full Seine search?” “I don’t think so, not at the moment.” Christa Matloff stepped toward the monitor. “Let’s have another look at it.”
    It! They kept saying