The Dark Reaches

by Kristin Landon

  Wherever here was.

  “I’m Hana,” the woman said.

  Linnea nodded. “I’m Linnea.”

  “Welcome, Linnea,” Hana said, and to Linnea’s startlement, kissed her firmly on the cheek. “Hold a moment.” Linnea floated obediently still while Hana deftly found and checked the pulses at her neck and wrists and ankles, shined a small light into her eyes, held a sensor against her chest while tilting her head with a listening expression. “Good enough,” she said. “Any more nausea?”

  “N-no,” Linnea said cautiously, and swallowed hard again. “What is this place?”

  Hana reached into a pocket of her coveralls, pulled out a small patch of cloth, and stuck it to the inside of Linnea’s elbow. “That will get you through the leftover queasiness,” she said, and as she said it Linnea realized that she already felt better. How could a drug in a skin patch work so fast? “As for questions,” Hana went on, “best save them for Pilang—she knows what you need to understand. But you can help me get the clinic set up—they’re lining up outside already.”

  Linnea only gripped the edge of the door more tightly. “Where is Pilang? When will she get here?”

  “She’d be here now,” Hana said, “if she was ever quite on time.” She reached out and touched the fabric bunched around Linnea’s hips. “Hm. That dress is silly.”

  “I agree,” Linnea said fervently, tugging at the floating fabric. “Have you got some proper clothes I can borrow?”

  “Two seconds.” Hana darted to one of the storage bags tied to the wall, tugged it open, and hauled out a maroon coverall like her own. She whipped it deftly out flat and looked from it to Linnea. “The belt can be pulled tight, and you can roll up the sleeves. You’re so tiny! Small as Pilang.”

  Linnea laughed. “I’ve never been called tiny before.”

  “That’s right, you grew up in a gravity well, didn’t you?” Hana’s eyes were wide. “No wonder you’re so short. Squashed down all the time! You must have good bones. And good lungs, breathing all that thick air. And dirt everywhere!” She jerked her head at the floating coverall. “Get changed, will you? There’s a water closet in back there. You know zero-gee fixtures, right? Good. Oh, and—” Hana whipped a black cloth from a pocket, covered Linnea’s hair with it, tied it at the back of her neck. “There. Can’t let hair float around, it gets loose, people breathe it in. Not nice at all.”

  “Thank you,” Linnea said diffidently, pulling at the knotted cloth to loosen it a bit.

  As soon as she had changed into the coveralls—leaving her feet bare and cold, but apparently that was the way here—Linnea tugged herself into the front room of the clinic.

  It, too, was disturbingly uneven, with lumpy bulkheads—walls, really, of a hard yellowish foam substance. Hana was clamping some lidded glass trays of tools onto a rack attached to one of the walls. The lights were brighter—still only chains of small yellow and orange bulbs here and there along the wall, but there were more of them. Linnea saw a standard examination lamp in among the jumble on the equipment wall. “Is this your regular clinic?”

  “This?” Hana snorted. “No, this place is a way station.

  “For travelers?”

  “Sort of,” Hana said. “When we find a small enough rock that’s not tumbling too fast, in a convenient orbit, we make one of these. Hollow out part of it, seal it up inside with sprayfoam.” She handed Linnea a crumpled list printed on plastic, and said, “Now, look through these trays, make sure every one has everything that’s on the list. There are extras of most of these things in that cubby under the pink lights. Anything else, ask.”

  Linnea started to work, peering at the unfamiliar labels on the packages. “Why do you have a clinic in a way station?”

  Hana was stuffing a stack of neatly folded linens into a cloth bag. “It takes a long time, hundreds and hundreds of days sometimes, to travel anywhere out here—unless you’re needed somewhere so much that you can catch rides on a jumpship. So there are way stations, places to stop over and wait for a slow ship going your way, a cargo carrier or a family vessel.” She grimaced. “We’re off our proper circuit, thanks to Esayeh, but Pilang doesn’t go to a place and not open the clinic—people count on it.”

  “Some people must live here a long time, waiting,” Linnea said.

  Hana nodded. “But that’s life. Stirred around, seeing new faces. ‘Here we are together, we may never meet again.’ ” The words sounded like a quotation.

  The outer door of the clinic, a proper metal hatch, opened with a screech, and Pilang floated in, dressed for work and wearing a loose backpack. She tugged the hatch shut, then turned over neatly in place to face the room. She spotted Linnea, and her face lit up. “Better, I see.”

  “She’s doing fine,” Hana said. “She has—”

  “A few questions,” Linnea said.

  “Not now.” Pilang sighed. “Patients are waiting, too many of them.” She rummaged in the backpack and pulled out two round brown rolls. “Breakfast. Eat it fast. I’ve had mine.”

  Linnea took hers, took a careful bite. The bread was chewy, filled with a sweet black bean paste. “That’s good,” she said. “Thank you. Pilang, I’m glad to help you here, but first—”

  “First rule,” Pilang said. “We don’t want gossip about you. It’s the only thing that travels faster than jumpships. So today you won’t talk. That accent—no one’s ever heard an accent like that. The less you say, the better.”

  “But I don’t know anything about medicine,” Linnea said. “How can I help?”

  “Everyone can always help,” Pilang said. “Records. The commscreen. You won’t have to talk, just get the information stored. You can use a commscreen?”

  Linnea considered. “Is it like the ones on Triton?”

  “Maybe a little better,” Pilang said. “But the interface is about the same.”

  The commscreen in their quarters on Triton had not been so very different from the ones Linnea had used every day for her work back home: a touch screen for input, another for display, data manipulation fairly intuitive. “Yes, I can probably use it.”

  Pilang flashed a smile. “Good. That will free Hana to help me with patients. Come here and let me show you what to do.”

  The morning passed quickly after that. The commscreen, a portable belonging to Pilang, had been clamped to a bulkhead; Pilang showed Linnea how to hook her feet through metal loops so she could use the screen without pushing herself off from the wall. Then, as patient after patient passed through the little clinic, Linnea processed them through. Each person carried, or wore on a chain, a small data crystal embedded in the end of a clear plastic rod the size of a finger. The first step was always to slide the rod into a slot on the side of the commscreen. Then a wealth of data appeared—the patient’s name, age in days, medical history, some coded information that Linnea guessed must be genetics or ancestry; behind them was a whole array of files marked personal or library, but these were only ghost images, translucent—not available to the screen she was using.

  Once she had loaded a patient’s information, Linnea made notes on the case as Pilang dictated them—symptoms, readings of vital signs, the treatment Pilang prescribed. The words were strange, but the commscreen corrected her spelling, she was relieved to find.

  Some of the treatment was surprisingly sophisticated for an outpost, more sophisticated than what Linnea had seen on Triton, certainly. Much of it was medicines in patches to be worn on the skin. And Pilang brought out a small device that seemed to ease the pain of fractures when she moved it over the area of the break. Perhaps it was true that the deepsiders were better at medicine.

  Though other cases puzzled her. One old woman showed Pilang a hard, two-centimeter lump, a tumor, along the edge of her lower jaw. Pilang studied it, sighed, then opened a decorated metal box. She searched out one tiny jar from the bright array inside, took a thin brush, and carefully painted the tumor with some vivid yellow pigment from the jar. When she was finished she b
lew on it until it was dry, then kissed the woman’s hand with obvious respect, and said, “There, oldmother, that should set you up in a tenday or two. Have it checked when the next doctor comes through.”

  “Thank you, daughter,” the woman said, her voice shaking with emotion, and kissed Pilang on the cheek as she left—and Hana, too, for good measure.

  Painting a tumor yellow? What use was that? Or was it some kind of superstition? Linnea looked curiously at Hana, who was smiling but blinking back tears as she tidied away the little jar and clamped shut the lid of the enameled metal box. What had just happened? Linnea felt a wave of disorientation, loneliness—of longing for Iain that made her chest ache. His calm voice, his eyes, his wry humor—his familiar warmth. . . .

  Only once did Linnea get a chance to look out into the passage outside, at the people lined up waiting. None of them looked at her—no doubt it was rude to stare. She studied them sidelong while Hana floated along the line collecting names and complaints.

  Nearest to the clinic’s hatch, a gray-haired woman in bright blue-green floated holding a toddler in her thin arms. The child was bundled tight in a yellow-flowered blanket, its face covered with a soft mask that held in its frequent sneezes. It wore a harness attached to the woman carrying it, which she had also clipped to one of the ubiquitous handholds. She was singing to it softly—a tune that sounded old, almost familiar, not quite.

  Next to them was a girl who was obviously in the last stage of pregnancy—a girl who could not be past her middle teens—curled against the wall, chatting cheerfully with an old man whose hand was wrapped in a stained bandage. On down the line Linnea saw people of all ages—some with no obvious illness or injury, and others with a wrist or ankle in a foam brace, or a dressing covering what might be a burn, or wearing the same kind of mask as the child.

  Linnea ducked back inside. Pilang was finishing with two patients at once, children in for a check, brought by an old man with a cheerful, wrinkled face and a bald pink scalp ringed by a tattooed-on crown of leaves. “Yes, yes,” he was saying to Pilang. “The supplements right before they go to sleep. I remember.”

  “Every twenty-four hours,” Pilang said. “Use the timer we gave you, or you’ll lose track.”

  “These aren’t my first children,” the old man said with dignity. Then he smiled at Pilang. “But thank you. I’ll use it.”

  When the pregnant girl’s turn arrived, Pilang and Hana both greeted her with embraces and kisses, though Linnea felt almost sure they’d never seen her before. The girl seemed to warm under their welcome, and watched attentively, smiling, as Pilang measured her belly, listened carefully to the baby’s heart, took a sample of her blood. “Everything’s going very well,” Pilang announced. “But no more travel for you until this big boy gets born, all right?”

  The girl dimpled. “No, no travel.”

  “Won’t be the first baby born in a way station. Clair’s a good one for that, we’ve a very good midwife living here, the baker’s husband.”

  “He’s given me his caller already,” the girl said.

  “Just so. Now, good fortune to you. Next time through, I’ll hope to see you and your son both fat and healthy.”

  “Or on our way home, finally,” the girl said, her eyes lit with shy happiness.

  Before the next patient entered, Linnea said, “That one’s very young, isn’t she? To be having a baby all alone?”

  “That’s when we usually have them,” Pilang said. “Before we go out to work in space, in all the rads, or start doing the really dangerous work on the farms. You try this boy, and that boy—oho, it’s fun, I won’t tell you it’s not. And then if you’re lucky, there’s a child.” She smiled. “I had one, a boy. Maybe you’ll be as lucky.”

  “They told me on Triton that your numbers are decreasing,” Linnea said.

  Pilang gave her an odd look. “Did they, then? Well. I’d like to know who counted us, we move around so much, it’s like counting a swarm of bees.”

  Linnea only shook her head. “Where is your son now?”

  Pilang’s eyes looked absent. “Grown, gone. . . . It’s been a long time since I looked in the traffic files to see where he was last time he linked in. He’s a fine person, but I don’t know him very well.” She looked at Linnea. “I was learning medicine, traveling with my teacher. But his oldmother and oldfather, they brought up two of my friends’ babies, too, and they did a good job with him. I still hear from them with news sometimes.”

  Linnea smoothed the linens she was spreading over the examination surface. “So you never settle in one place? With one person?”

  “Most do, in time,” Pilang said. “Later in life, when we’re safe inside—off the farms, out of the mines, not moving around anymore. Too late then for babies, most everyone’s had all the rads they can handle. But people are sensible by then. It’s a good time to marry.” She washed her hands with a clear gel, then rubbed them briskly dry as she turned to Hana. “Call in the next one, please.”

  They saw many people with injuries, some old and only partly healed. Deepsiders appeared to lead dangerous lives, sheltering in fragile habitats surrounded by vacuum, surviving mostly by hard work mining metal from asteroids, or tending the sealed farms in the larger habitats. Farming seemed especially hazardous—many ways to get hurt, using powerful equipment, working under hot, bright light sources, handling the chemicals in which the plants grew.

  In another moment between patients, as Linnea and Hana were bundling up some soiled linens for washing, Linnea asked Hana, “Do you have any children?”

  Hana laughed. “No. I’ve been to too many births. Catch me messing with that! And anyway, I don’t like boys.”

  “So you don’t mind this, traveling around all the time.”

  Hana grinned. “It’s the best life. We see everything, everywhere. Doctors have to keep moving. I’ll be a doctor myself someday, when Pilang says I’m ready.”

  Pilang looked up from the commscreen, where she was elaborating on some of the notes Linnea had taken, and said, “Traveling’s the main work we do in our guild. We have to be with our patients, get our hands on them.”

  “So you can diagnose them better?”

  Pilang laughed. “No—so they know they’ll be all right.”

  Linnea smiled at her. It was true: Crying babies, querulous old people, people in pain, all seemed to calm under Pilang’s deft touch, listening to her warm voice.

  “Next, please, Hana,” Pilang said briskly.

  It took nine hours to see everyone in the line, which never seemed to diminish; more people arrived over the course of the day. By the end, Linnea’s belly was so empty it ached, but Pilang and Hana only set to work putting everything away. Linnea helped as much as she could, wondering when dinner would be.

  As they were finishing, someone banged at the hatch. It swung open immediately after, and a child, boy or girl Linnea could not tell, popped through. “Eh, Pilang!” Linnea decided it must be a girl, maybe nine or ten. “What you have for me?” Her brown face was grubby, but her hands were clean. She wore no headcloth; her hair was shorn to black stubble, and an elaborate tattooed filigree of black leaves encircled her neck.

  “Eh, Mick. The usual. Here.” Pilang tugged the knotted bundle of dirty linens loose from the wall, pushed it toward Mick, who snagged it. “Come by my sleeper in an hour, I’ll have some food for you. And wash your face first.”

  “Got it. Want to talk to you anyway.” Mick looked at Linnea with lively curiosity, glanced away when she caught Linnea’s eye—then shoved off expertly with her bare feet and shot through the center of the hatchway, tugging her bundle behind her.

  “Now for dinner,” Pilang said decisively. “Hana, go see Elga, get us some of her lemon noodles and greens, with maybe some of that salty bean curd. For four, Mick looked hungry. We’ll eat in here—it’s better if Lin keeps out of public space.”

  Hana nodded, then stopped before opening the hatch. “I forget. Elga owes us?”

&
nbsp; Pilang frowned and tallied on her fingers. “No—no, with four dinners, we’ll owe her. Ask her to come by tomorrow morning before we go—we’ll work it out. I’ve got some odds and ends of chips in this station I can pass to her.”

  Hana nodded and vanished. As the hatch closed behind her, Linnea turned and faced Pilang. She said nothing, but she knew Pilang could read her expression: It’s time.

  Pilang settled against the wall facing her. “All right.” She met Linnea’s eyes. “Ask.”

  Again Linnea wished for Iain’s calm, steady presence at her side. But here I am. “First—why did you kidnap me?”

  “To get you away from Triton,” Pilang said. “To get you out of Perrin Tereu’s hands, and Kimura Hiso’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they are not your friends,” Pilang said quietly.

  Linnea felt a jolt of anger. “And you, who made me so sick and dragged me off against my will, you’re my friend?”

  “Yes,” Pilang said, “I am. And so is Pilot Esayeh.”

  Linnea studied her, considering. A pilot. “A deepsider pilot? Was he the one I saw?”

  “A Tritoner, once,” Pilang said. “He still thinks of himself as one of them, you know, not one of us. But he’s been out here with us for five thousand, six thousand days. He’s a deepsider now, admit it or not. But he knows both peoples. He knows where you need to be: here with us.”

  “Without my ship? What use am I? What is it he wants from me?”

  “He’s deep,” Pilang said. Her expression was somber, controlled. “His mind, it isn’t always easy to understand. He spends so much time in otherspace—he doesn’t just make in-system jumps, he goes out on long circuits, gone for days.” She pursed her lips. “Look, Lin. I’m no pilot. I’m no Tritoner. I never know what he’s thinking, I’m just his friend. He asked me this favor, and I did it. Beyond that is his to talk about, not mine.” She sighed. “There. We’re square.”