Lost Past by Teresa McCullough, Zachary McCullough Page A

were their biological children.  There was no evolutionary advantage to be intelligent.
                  “Did we have children?”
                  “No, I didn’t want to raise them alone. But we can have them now.”
                  On Earth, that would be a sexual advance. Here, it meant applying to the Plict .
                  “You want children?” he asked.
                  “Oh yes. Next year, I’ll be too old. I wanted you to come back and help me. We could marry again.”
                  Again, there was a flicker of something she was concealing. “ Katrine , what aren’t you telling me?”
                  “Nothing.” She flinched away from him.
                  He wanted to grab her and shake it out of her, but he pushed his anger aside and used his best clinical manner. He modulated his voice to soothe her and spoke in a hypnotic tone, “Just relax. You are tense, but that will go away. Let me massage your shoulders.” He went behind her chair and worked on her shoulders and neck, saying soothing things while he did so. His motions seemed familiar, as if he had done this before. He felt her muscles relax, and after several minutes, he got her into a state where her barriers were down.
                  She finally started talking. “I wanted to prove to you that you didn’t care. You thought you did. You really didn’t. You couldn’t. I called you and you came. You came for me, which proved you cared. We were to meet near the school because you had to drive past it. The bomb went off and you weren’t supposed to stop. It would prove you didn’t care. They were animals. But you stopped. You must be crazy. No one risks themselves for animals.”
                  “But I did stop.” His hands stopped working during this speech. He had a fleeting urge to hurt her, but he clenched his fists and kept silent.
                  “You didn’t care enough about me. You wanted me to wait. If you loved me, you would have come to me,” Katrine said, believing the absurdity.
                  He tried to understand how she could believe he wouldn’t stop to save lives. Did she know him so little, or did he assume too much about himself? He was unsure of what kind of person he was before his amnesia, but his stopping to help proved something he approved of.
                  “Did you set the bomb?”
                  “I couldn’t set a bomb,” s he giggled . “Hernandez set it. We planned it together. He likes me. He told me that if you died in the school, he would marry me. But I knew you wouldn’t go in the school.”
                  “But I did.”
                  “To save the animals.”
                  “Are they really animals? Are we a different species?”
                  “No, we can still interbreed. But there are so many differences. We don’t get so many Earth diseases.“
                  “Which ones?”
                  “I don’t know what they are called,” she said irritably. She stood up and walked over to a computer and mouthed some words. Fascinated, John realized why he couldn’t visualize Vigintees with a keyboard. The vocal cords didn’t need to be used, but the remaining act of speaking was enough. The list on the screen started with allergies, Alzheimer's, arthritis, cancer, and diabetes. The remainder of the list included Tay –Sachs, Huntington's chorea, sickle cell anemia, and other hereditary diseases.
                  “We don’t even have words for most of them,” she said with pride. “We never get contagious diseases. Our immune systems are much more advanced.“
                  AIDS and other contagious diseases weren’t on the list, but John saw no reason to comment on that