Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  Okay, then—how long did he have? He knew it took hours to shut down a nervous system, damp the lymphatic zones, leach the blood of residues. Hours. And the technicians would leave a lot of the job on automatic.

  He noticed a faint background sensation of chill. It seemed to spread as he paid attention to it, filling his body, bringing a pleasant, mild quiet … a drifting … a slow slide toward sleep …

  Deep within him, something said no.

  He willed himself to think in the blackness and the creeping cold. The technicians always left a pathway to the outside, so if something went wrong the patient could signal. It was a precaution to take care of situations like this.

  Eyebrows? He tried them, felt nothing.

  Mouth? The same.

  He made himself think of the steps necessary to form a word. Constrict the throat. Force air out at a faster rate. Move the tongue and lips.

  Nothing. No faint hum echoing in his sinus cavities to tell him that muscles worked, that breath strummed his vocal cords.

  The easiest slotting method was to simply shut down a whole section of the body. That must be what was happening. Right. His head was out, legs out. Feet gone, too. And genitals, he thought wryly, weren’t under conscious control even at the best of times.

  Arms, then. He tried the left. No answering shift of internal pressures. But how big would the effect be? He might be waving his hand straight up in the air, and never know it.

  Try the right. Again, no way to tell if …

  No; wait. A diffuse sense of something …”

  Try to remember which muscles to move. He had gone through life with instant feedback from every fiber, anchoring him in his body, every gesture suggesting the next. Now he had to analyze precisely.

  How did he make his arm rise? Muscles contracted to pull on one side of the arm and shoulder. Others relaxed to let the arm swing. He tried it.

  Was there an answering weight? Faint, too faint. Maybe his imagination.

  The right arm could be jutting up, and he wouldn’t know it. The attendants would see it, though, and patch into him, ask what was going on … unless they weren’t around. Unless they had gone off for coffee, leaving the sagging old body to stage down gradually into longterm stasis, with the medmon checking to be sure nothing failed in the ancient carcass …

  Suppose the arm worked. Even if somebody saw it, was that what he wanted? If they turned his head back on, what would he do? Demand his rights? Ted had undoubtedly disposed of that issue by now. The attendants were certainly under orders to slide him into a slot, no matter what he said. For his own good, y’know.

  Despairing, he stopped his concentration, willed the muscles to go suddenly slack.

  And was rewarded with an answering thump.

  It had hit the table. It bloody well worked.

  He waited. Nothing came to him in the blackness. No attendant came tapping in to correct the mistake.

  He was probably alone. Where?

  Not already in a slot, or else he wouldn’t be able to think clearly. On a medmon slab, then.

  He tried to remember the arrangement. The access terminals were on both sides, mirroring the body. So maybe, if it stretched, the right hand could reach half the input switchings.

  He concentrated and brought the arm up again. The hand probably worked; it would’ve been too much trouble to disconnect it while the arm stayed live. Remembering carefully, he lowered the arm, rotating it—

  A thump. Someone approaching? No, too close. The arm had fallen.

  Balance was going to be hard. He practiced rotating the arm without raising it. No way to know if he was successful, but some moves seemed correct, familiar, while others did not. He worked without feedback, trying to summon up the exact sensation of turning the arm. Dipping it to the side, over the edge. Working the fingers.

  He stopped. If he hit the wrong control he could turn off the arm. Without external nerves, there was no way to tell if he was doing the right thing.

  Pure gamble. If he had been able to, Nigel would have shrugged. What the hell.

  He stabbed with straightened fingers. Nothing.

  He fumbled and somehow knew through dull patterns that his fingers were striking the side of the slab. The knowledge came from below, some kind of holistic sensation from the thin nerve nets deep inside him. The body could not be wholly cut up into pieces; information spread, and the mute kidneys and liver and intestines knew in some dim way what went on outside.

  A wan answering pressure told him that his fingers had closed on something, were squeezing it. He made the fingers turn.

  Nothing happened. Not a knob, then. A button?

  He stabbed down. In his sinus cavities he felt slight jolts. He must be smacking the slab hard, to do that. With no feedback there was no way to judge force. He stabbed; a jolt. Again. Again—

  A cold tremor ran up his right calf. Pain flooded in. His leg was in spasm. It jerked on the slab, striking the medmon. The sudden rush of sensations startled him. In the heady surge he could hardly tell pain from pleasure.

  The leg banged on the slab like a crazed animal. His autonomic system was trying to maintain body temperature by muscle spasms, sucking the energy out of the sugar left in the tissues. A standard reaction; that was one reason why he was shut down.

  But he had activated a neural web, that was the point. He stabbed blindly with his fingers again.

  A welling coldness in his midsection. Again.

  More cold, now in the right foot. Again.

  A prickly sensation on his lips, on his cheeks. But not full senses; he could not feel his chest or arms. He started to press another button and then stopped, thinking.

  So far he had been lucky. He was opening the sensory nets. Most of his right side was transmitting external data. His leg was jerking less now as he brought it under control.

  But if he hit the shutdown button for his right arm next, he was finished. He would lie there helpless until the technicians came back.

  Nigel worked the arm back onto the slab. He made it shift awkwardly across his chest. His motor control must extend into his upper chest and shoulders to let him do this, but without any input from there he did not know how much he could make work.

  He willed the muscles to lurch to the left. A strange impression of tilting came into him. A tension somewhere. Muscles straining, locked, clenched and reaching, a stretching—More—

  A warm hardness on his cheek. His nose pressed against it but he had no sense of smell. The slab top. He had rolled himself partway over.

  He felt a gathering, diffuse weariness. The arm muscles were broadcasting to the surrounding body their agony, fed by the buildup of exhausted sugar-bearing molecules.

  No time to rest. The muscles would just have to keep working. He willed the arm to reach over the left side of the slab. He could feel nothing, but now he could make no fatal mistake.

  He punched down at random, searching. A spike of pain shot through his left side. Behind it came biting cold. Slabs of muscle began shaking violently, sending rippling pain through his left side.

  He stabbed down with fingers again. Light poured in on him. He had hit the optical nerve net. A gaudy, rich redness. He realized his eyes were still closed. He opened them. Yellow flooded in. He closed them against the glare and punched down again.

  The crisp, chill hospital smell. Another stab.

  Sound washed over him. A mechanical clanking, a distant buzz, the whir of air circulators. No voices.

  He squinted. He was lying on a white slab, staring up at fluorescent lights. Now that he could see, he got back the rest of his nets quickly.

  He reached up toward his neck—and his hand went the other way. He stopped it, moved the fingers tentatively. His arm was coming from above his head, reaching down … but that was impossible. He moved the other arm. It came into his vision the same way, from above.

  Something was wrong with him. He closed his eyes. What could make …?

  He rolled over pa
rtway and looked around the medmon bay. The sign on the door leaped out at him. It was upside down. He reached out, clutched the edge of the slab. It was upside down, too.

  That was it. When the eye took light and cast it on the retina, ordinary optics inverted the image. The retinal nerves filtered that signal and set it upright for the brain.

  So the med tech had screwed that up, too. The retinal nerves weren’t working right. That might be easy to fix, just move a fine-point fiber junction a fraction of a millimeter. But Nigel couldn’t, didn’t know how. He would have to manage.

  Nigel began to fumble with the thicket of leads that snaked over his body. It was easier if he didn’t look at what he was doing. He had to carefully disconnect the tap-ins at nerve nexus points. The big knot of them at the nape of his neck was hard to detach. It jerked free.

  He felt a hot, diffuse pain from the region, spreading up into his skull. The nerves were exposed, sending scattershot impressions through the area, provoking spasms in the muscles.

  He rolled over and studied the work table next to the slab. It was a jumble of connectors, microelectronics, and coils of nearly invisible wires. There was a patch that looked the right shape. He reached out for it and missed. His brain saw his arm moving up and corrected, always in the wrong direction.

  It took three tries before he could override his own coordination. He snagged the patch and nearly dropped it. Carefully he brought it to his head. The floppy oval of wires fitted over the gaping hole at the back of his neck. He fiddled with it until it slid—snick—into place. The pain tapered off.

  He sat up. Spasms shot through him. He gasped. Pain blossomed with every move. But he felt fully awake and deeply angry. He was in a deserted medical bay.

  He studied the liquid-optical readouts on his medical monitor. The program profile was mostly numbers. He couldn’t tilt his head far enough over to read the upside-down numbers. He worked on reading them directly. After a moment it wasn’t so hard. The winking digital program profile told him that his shutdown was scheduled to take another fifty-seven minutes.

  He got to his feet, shaky and light-headed. It was good to have his own chemistry back. He was tempted to rest for a moment and let the endless river of sensations wash over him. Even this sterile room of barren white light was lurid, packed with details, smells, sensations. He had never loved life so much.

  But he wasn’t safe. Coffee breaks didn’t last forever. He would have to find his clothes, get out—

  He started for a side door. The first few steps taught him to keep his head tilted down, toward his feet. He had to move his eyes the opposite way, though, to shift his vision. He bumped into the medmon and nearly fell over a desk. After a moment he could navigate around things. He went carefully, feeling each twinge of lancing pain as his left side protested. His right arm ached and trembled from spasm.

  He reached the door, opened it slightly, peered through. The equipment beyond was hard to recognize upside down. Clothes on pegs jutted straight up. Chairs clung to the ceiling. He fought down a sense of vertigo. His eyes were telling his brain that he was standing on the ceiling, and somewhere inside him alarm systems clamored to be heard.

  There were open drawers of surgical instruments, a wash up station, electronics gear. A prep room. He eased through.

  He found his clothes hanging in a locker, defying gravity. It was easier to put them on if he closed his eyes, going by feel alone. Too bad he couldn’t walk that way.

  EIGHT

  Crisp, cycled air cut in his throat. Down the bright claustrocorridors he went, brushing by the few who passed in this narrow side passage, their faces flashing before him. He reached an obscure storage vault and slipped inside, feeling strangely exhilarated. He tapped his fingernail and tweaked a nodule by his ear. Ship-comm:

  suggest that in light of the news Earthside I go through these minor items of collective business quickly

  His thumbnail, knowing he had come on line late, flashed an outline of the shipwide congress Ted had called. A flashing red dot showed they were still among the first Items of Business.

  matter of Nigel Walmsley the facts of which are given in your update. He has shown an attitude in the past which I can only characterize as noncommunal. He weasled by several regs during his ground duty at Isis. He has been nonconstructive in the analysis net. All these are disagreeable features of a man I know many of us revere for his early role in the discovery of the Marginis wreck. However it has come to my attention—the facts are laid out and witnessed in your summaries—that he has been systematically deceiving the medical teams about his declining health. He did this from a misguided sense

  Nigel studied the summary, including a detailed analysis of his reaction to the analysis net, to Carlos, to suggestions that he give up his jobs. Quite factual. He returned to the corridor and began to walk, listening, watching the faces that passed.

  steady buildup of sociopathic responses, well documented by the therapists

  Men and women slid by. They were selected for their compatability, their ease with each other, for who else could endure the long compression between the stars? No sun hung here behind a veiled sky, no sudden rains or dark storms stirred the spirit. Only the slow steady strum of canned breezes, ripples of pressure, a programmed replication of distant Earth. They shared these mild rhythms, smooth faces free of madmen and Mozart, no leaping soaring flying dying. They turned away from the silent steady abyss outside, the long pressing silence that enclosed them, the emptiness that defined their place.

  in the midst of studying this constellation of acommunal responses, many of them no doubt the product of his physical deterioration, the therapists also detected the medical deception

  So Ted had conned him into the therapy, knowing it would help build a file on him, suspecting it would turn up a glitch in the medical profile. Quite clever.

  and as many of you know he has held on in hopes of proving his personal and rather eccentric model of the situation humanity faces

  Nigel walked as quickly as he could toward the big bowl auditorium where the bulk of Lancer’s crew would be assembled. He would confront Ted there, have it out.

  but that hope has vanished and it would be a kindness for him to not let him wither out here, getting mean and withdrawing even more from the fellowship of his

  Quite shrewd of Ted to slip it in before a big discussion of Earthside news, when everyone was champing at the bit to hear.

  so though the medical situation is not really bad I still recommend

  He hurried. Ahead two ship’s officers leaned against a bulkhead. Nigel slowed. They might not know anything, but then again—He veered down a roundabout route. And hurried.

  he be put into the Sleepslots until we make Earthside. I’m sure it would be more poetic if he died out here but simple humanity

  He was getting close. There would be discussion and that would give him time.

  so I throw it open to discussion before we take up the Earthside

  He was within sight of the auditorium doors when three women from the senior crew saw him.

  his absence from this gathering of his fellows speaks volumes about his attitudes and, yes, I think his own shame at his childish deception he has

  The women started toward him. He backed away and walked rapidly toward a drop tube.

  well it appears no one wishes to counter my recommendation and therefore

  Nikka! Why hadn’t she said anything argued—

  pass on to the fresh news of a Swarmer offensive against all mainlands and indications of their concerted biological campaign

  Whatever she thought of him, surely the thing with Carlos could not have made her go along with this. Nigel refused to think otherwise. He fell three decks at maximum speed in the drop tube. He came out next to a work gang carrying a thruster housing and fell in behind them unnoticed. When the women came out of the tube he was bent over, pretending to adjust the magnetic sled’s balance. He ducked into a prep-up room and waited. Th
en he doubled back on his trail. The women were gone.

  as well as, we are told, continuing provocative allegations about cooperation—yes, I know this is hard to believe—between the Chinese and some elements of the Swarmers

  He sent a query to their flat, but it answered that no one was home. He kept moving. If she was not at the meeting, then—Of course.

  and since the newest information on this biological transformation of the enemy may tie into or provide a clue about their planetary origins, I think we should move immediately to review this data in the light of

  He approached the medical complex quietly, carefully. He found Nikka arguing with an administrator. He waited until she looked around in exasperation, caught her eye, and signaled for silence. She said nothing until they were out of sight of the big med center archway.

  “I came to get you! What took you so long? Ted has called a—”

  “I know.” He explained in rapid, clipped sentences, feeling a sure anger come welling up. “And there’s no point in barging in there now. That lot won’t give me a hearing.”

  “You’ve got to.”

  “Ted hasn’t the power of a captain, but the consensus is clearly with him. And consensus, luv, is everything.”

  “In a free discussion—”

  “Right you are. But getting it free, there’s the rub. Ol’ Ted’s been quite pissed at me for some time, I gather. He’s a very smart man.”

  “He is unprincipled, short—”

  “Has it occurred to you that all I’m resisting is a soft ride home?”

  “It’s more than that. This is, well, your life.”

  “Was.”

  “It still can be.”

  “Hard to see how to beat him.” He took her head in his hands and kissed her on the forehead with a wan, distant affection. He felt strange energies building in him, a resolve he had thought lost.

  “We can go home, refuse to let them in. Request time on the group net to discuss your case.”

  “There’s plenty of evidence for Ted’s position.”

  “Empty facts.”