The tray engages, and we slide out of the hollow EMR machine together, into the plain gray of the dive-room. It's painted gray all over for just this moment, to not provide any confusing stimulus to a disoriented brain.
"Strong work, Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.
It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.
I roll away from Mei-An and look up at Carrolla. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know.
"Fine work, really excellent," he's saying, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"
I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray and sit up with my back to the girl. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.
"Not bad," I say. My tongue feels thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me hold it up while I take a sip. Better. "Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"
He frowns. "You gave up the juice? Dammit, Rit, that didn't come cheap. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of drinking that?"
I shrug. "It came to mind."
He laughs. "Well shit. But, I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the skulk-end, some new seed-blend. Sound good? Yes sir. Let's get you to recovery."
"I'm fine."
"Of course, I'm fine also, now move it."
Carrolla is always effervescent, even when he's blackout drunk. Most people want to punch him after a few minutes, but I like it. Either punch him or sleep with him, actually, he gets his share of both.
Together we hoist my body up off the bench, and I can mostly walk on my own, so he mostly lets me, assisting only when I sway. We hobble together out of the gray dive-bay, and he's saying something about the girl, Mei-An, and Don Zachary. A warning maybe. I barely listen. Down the polished steel-floored corridor we go, to the end of the smithy building and the glass-walled outlook space. Here there's a massage chair with a Cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray Arctic waves off the edge of our floating barge, skulk 47.
I let him settle me down in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. Beyond the glass the Arctic spreads north into endless nothingness, into spaces where there used to be ice. There's nothing there now, not since we blew it all up in our hunt for hydrate resources deep underwater, in the Arctic skirmishes. This is the world we've made for ourselves.
"Switch on your favorite music," Carrolla says, as he guides my head into the sonic bath-well in the chair's head. He makes a good nurse, better than he'd ever have been as a marine. That's a small mercy. "Settle in and you'll be up in time to party, unless Don Zachary comes for you first."
"Arcloberry," I mumble, in place of what I meant to say which was perhaps some kind of joke.
He nods and repeats the word but I don't hear it, and the world fades away as the sonic bath takes hold with a medley of music I've reacted well to in the past. Underneath the beat it attempts to mimic the sound of the mother's pulse, automatically reverting the body back to the same womb-like state of recovery and growth I put Mei-An into.
It's a poor imitation for most, and works even less for me, since I never had a mother, and the pulse I grew up to was the seven-tone chime of an external machine womb, but still, I like the music. In a few hours I'll wake up feeling better, and so will Mei-An. We'll probably have sex, part of the contract for those who need a little extra context to frame the mental re-structuring a graysmith provides, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. She was pretty, and real.
I drift off thinking of her and the blunt-nosed face of Don Zachary's son I saw in her mind, completely unaware of how goddamn awful he's going to make my life, any moment now.
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Copyright © 2014 by Michael John Grist
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Bells of Subsidence previously published in Clarkesworld #66, 2012
Cullsman #9 previously published in Andromeda Spaceways #55, 2012
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ISBN: 1496117115
ISBN-13: 978-1496117113
Cullsman #9 Page 12