by MadMaxAU
He was surprised. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’m figuring on picking people I know can stand up to this.”
“I see. I considered first sheltering my friends; you think of pulling out those you can trust. That’s why you are suited to command, and I am not.”
Carl shrugged. He knew he was no real leader, not remotely like Captain Cruz; he just did what seemed obvious. Her other point was right, though. It was a lot less painful to watch comparative strangers sicken and die.
“I don’t like having to make these decisions on my own. I’m just an ordinary spacer, This is life and death, for chrissakes. “
“So it is.”
In a subtle way Lani withdrew from him, standing apart, face blank and eyes wary, waiting for his orders. She didn’t want the responsibility. Neither do I.
“Okay, I’ve got to tell the system which slots to start warming, or we can’t go any further.” He turned to the big console and began running his hands down the displayed list of crew skills. He pressed a finger at the dimple points next to two names.
“Jeffers and Sergeov,” he said grimly. Then he managed a dry, crusty chuckle. “Boy, are they going to be surprised.”
SAUL
Enough. Leave his poor body alone.
Saul rocked back from the treatment table and put down his implements.
“Cease code blue. Halt resuscitation procedures,” he said to the spidery med-mechs clustered around the pale, waxy figure that had been Nicholas Malenkov. “Maintain type-six tissue oxygenation, and begin precooling glycogen infusion for term storage.”
It was too late to “sick slot” the Russian. His dying had penetrated too deeply. Saul’s only recourse was to prepare the corpse as well as he could and actually freeze it against a hoped-for day when both thaw and cure might be available.
The master unit beeped twice. Saul, who had been looking sadly at his dead friend, glanced up.
“Yes? What’s the problem?”
“Clarification request, Doctor;” the med-mech announced. “Please select infusion and cooling profile. Also, term-slotting requires a death certification.”
He nodded. With clinical skills as rusty as his, it was a wonder he remembered the right general procedure at all.
“All right, then. Voice-ident:. Dr Saul Lintz citizen of the Diasporic Confederacy, seventh physician on Halley Expedition. Code number . . .” He pressed fingers at his temples. “I forget. Fill it in from the records.”
“Yes Doctor,” the machine assented quickly.
“I hereby certify Dr. Nicholas Malenkov, citizen of Greater Russia, expedition second physician, to be deceased beyond recall by available means. Cause: massive peripheral neural, damage brought on by undiagnosed, raging infection which crossed the blood-brain barrier three hours ago. Details and tissue analysis to follow in addendum.
“Patient term-slotted on this date . . . .”
Saul looked up at his reflection in the side of the gleaming mech…pale, yes, tired. More tired than he looked, apparently.
What is the date? Was it still November 2061? Or already December?
Have I missed Miriam’s birthday? Only ten years since she died at Gan Illana. And yet it seems like another century.
Sometimes it felt as if he was fighting on for one reason only—so that Virginia could get to see age twenty-nine. If they were still alive, in six months, to put another candle on her cake, then he would find a new priority. One thing at a time.
“Fill in the date. And select the most commonly used slotting procedure for neural-damage cases,” he told the mech.
“Yes Doctor.” The machine would consult the mission mainframe, aboard the Edmund Halley, and take care of the details.
There was little likelihood that medical science would have learned to reverse such massive trauma in eighty years—as well as how to thaw bodies frozen solid as ice. Still, he owed it to Nick to offer him that chance.
In any event, term-slotting did not call for human supervision. Let the mechs do it. If—when—we go home, it’d be best if the procedures used to cool and store the body were as standard as possible.
Saul turned to leave the treatment room, leaving behind him the whirr of automatic processing. As the door hissed shut he rested his shoulder against the fibercloth wall. His arms felt heavy, even in the thin gravity. His sinuses throbbed.
Well? he asked inwardly. What’re you planning to do? Develop into a real sickness and kill me? Or quit bugging me and go away!
The damn cold had been hanging on for eight weeks! In all of a life plagued by little, dripping bouts with one virus after another, he had never, ever suffered anything really serious. But now this lingering, dull ache was really getting to him.
He shook his head to clear it. Make up your damn minds! he told the bugs, at the moment not caring if they were cometary scourges or more banal imports from a warm and fecund Earth. Right now Saul didn’t see anything unscientific in personifying his parasites. He hated them.
Poor Nick Malenkov, survived by the man he nearly slotted. He tried to remember the big, brilliant bear of a Russian the way he had known him in life, but it was hopeless. All he could see was the pale slackness of cheeks unanimated by emotion . . . the emptiness of eyes unbacked by mind.
Oh, Lord, he prayed. Don’t let anything like this happen to Virginia.
She had used an override to get into his room, two days ago, and by some definitions committed a completely shameless act of rape. His weak protests had been smothered under her warm body, her blazing mouth—as she shred in a moment any microfauna he had, and thereby ended any further argument over protecting her from contagion.
A decisive woman. She had hardly left his side since, except for the fourteen-hour shifts, of course. And although he worried, Saul could not say he was anything but glad.
It’s her choice, he thought. And Carl Osborn will just have to learn to live with it.
For as long as the three of them lasted, at least.
Yesterday he had helped slot Jim Vidor, feverish and raving. At least that time they were able to get the poor fellow in in time. Lani Nguyen had watched raggedly. For lack of any real attention from Carl, she had taken up briefly with Jim. Now she was as alone as before.
His wrist beeper pulsed. The mechs in the recuperation chamber were signaling him.
Enough loafing, he thought. Somebody must have wakened, at last. One of the first six.
Put on a happy face, he reminded himself as he started stepping into isolation garments. While slipping on antiseptic booties he touched the bandage covering his left ankle.
The scar was almost healed now. He still wasn’t sure how he had been cut, during that frantic struggle with the purples in sleep slot 1. At first he had been certain it was a bite from one of the horrible native worms, but after what happened to Peltier, and Ustinov, and Conti, he figured it couldn’t have been. There had been a swelling and soreness, then it had gone away.
Just a scrape, I suppose. A man like me won’t die of a purple bite, anyway. And there’s too little gravity here to be hanged.
His nose itched.
I’ll probably die in a sneezing fit.
Saul finished dressing. He put on an isolation helmet and passed into the booth with a flashing green light over the entrance.
Someone had indeed awakened. It was Bethany Oakes, the first person decanted after Captain Cruz’s death. The assistant expedition leader had been a tough case. Her thawing had not been easy.
Hibernation wasn’t a natural human function. Inducing it involved complex, massive doses of drugs that dropped the body into a slumbering, near-death state—reducing metabolism an pH, cooling tissues down to a bare degree above freezing. The process was anything but routine, even after decades of use in space flight. To prove it for interstellar travel times had been one dream of Miguel Cruz-Mendoza. It was supposed to be another gift from the Halley Expedition to the people of Earth.
Working alone, with equipment that mig
ht or might not still be polluted with Halleyforms, Malenkov had chosen the slow-thaw method, allowing the patient to throw off sleep-center suppression naturally. The decision had been questionable. It might be safer, but it left the possibility that the decanted would awaken with no one left alive to greet them.
Bethany Oakes was still an ample woman. Three weeks’ hibernation under an IV drip wouldn’t change that much. But her eyelids were already dark with the blue heaviness of slot stupor. As Saul approached, they fluttered open. Her pupils contracted unevenly in the light.
He dimmed the wall panels and picked up a squeeze tube of electrolyte-balance fluid to wet her lips. Her tongue flicked out, drawing in the sweetness.
Good, he thought. The sipping reflex was a rule-of-thumb test Nicholas had taught him. A sign of good progress.
In the hazel eyes, an apparent struggle—a mind climbing laboriously out of the cold.
“S-Saul . . . ?” Her voice was barely audible.
“Yes, Bethany. It’s me, Saul Lintz.” He bent forward.
“Are we . ..” She swallowed, and smiled thinly. “Are we at aphelion yet?”
Saul blinked. Of course, the expedition’s second-in-command hadn’t been scheduled to be unslotted for thirty-three years, when the comet would have nearly reached its farthest point from the sun, when the colony would be briefly busy again preparing for the rocket maneuver that would send them hurtling past Jupiter toward rendezvous with the waiting harvesters, nearly four more decades beyond that.
How could he tell her that it had been more like thirty-three days!
He shook his head, wishing he had better news, and wondering how to tell it.
Saul smiled in his best bedside manner. “No, Betty, not quite . . .
PART 3
WHEN SPRING LAST
CAME TO GEHENNA
January 2062
Nobody ever did anything very foolish
except from come strong principle
-Melbourne
VIRGINIA
What a difference a mere three weeks made!
Virginia wondered as she glide walked past hurried, bustling workers. Had it been only that long? Only twenty five days since the remnants of the First Watch had gathered, weary and haggard, to note the passing of the year 2061?
An ebullient New Year’s Eve it had not been. Even with the wall holos set to their cheeriest summer scenes, it still felt like the winter of Ragnarok. They had huddled near the farthest end of the mammoth Central Complex Lounge—four poor survivors—and toasted from Carl’s carefully hoarded supply of Lacy Traces liqueur.
The bottle had gone quickly. There seemed little point in saving anything.
All attempts at conversation had lapsed. The vids from Earth were too depressing to watch—snappy scenes of commercial consumption or, even worse, an awful melodrama about the Scott expedition to the South Pole . . . no doubt somebody’s stupid idea of a gesture in their honor.
At her suggestion, Saul and Carl had tried to play their first game of chess since the death of Captain Cruz—or since Saul and Virginia had taken up shared residence together. But it wasn’t like before. The two men had hardly exchanged a word or a glance, and the play was savage. When Saul’s wrist comp called him away to tend the thawing sleepers again, Lani and Virginia had shared a look of relief.
She would never forget that gloomy evening for as long as she lived.
That had been less than a month ago. Now . . . well, things were different. At least superficially, they were much better. One at least heard voices in the cool hallways again, and people were trying to find solutions.
Virginia was also getting better at moving about in Halley’s soft gravity. She skim glided quickly, grabbing the fiber floor with velcroed slippers and pulling along a wall cable on her way toward Control Central.
It was still a new experience, coming this way without a mind fogged from lack of rest, or a body nearly limp from fatigue. A full seven hours’ sleep was like a sinful luxury.
Yesterday, her shift had coincided with Saul’s. They’d had a chance to make love for the first time in a week, and slept side by side, linked through her electronic familiar, touching in the dim glow of JonVon’s status lamps. Saul had to leave early to get ready for today’s test of his new invention, but Virginia had awakened feeling his warmth still on the webbing beside her, his musty, now-familiar scent on her arm.
Someday, when I have some free time again, I’ll have to find out what JonVon’s making of our dreams. Saul and I are getting closer all the time, our shared, enhanced senses more and more vivid. I wonder—is it possible that I might have been right, after all? Is it possible to simulate human mental processes so well that you can achieve “telepathy” of a sort?
If so, can we give Earth at least one present, before we all die?
This morning she had stopped just before leaving her cubicle, hesitating by the slide door, and turned back to pick up a stylus. On the face of a memory pad she had scribbled quickly . . . not a poem—not yet—but a sketch for one.
Hoku welo welo,
Oh, unforgiving Comet—
Ua luhi au,
I am very tired—
The mixed verse had reminded her of her homesickness. She missed Kewani Langsthan, the only other Hawaiian on the first shift, who had lost an arm to an explosion on A Level, on Christmas Eve, and had to be slotted immediately when the stump went infected.
No Hawaiian was among the replacements. She didn’t know whether to regret it or to be glad that her countrymen were being spared this terrible time.
Anyway, the news from the island republic was not good. The last time she had had time to listen to the Earthcasts, tensions had been rising. Nations of the Arc of the Living Sun had accused Governor Ikeda’s government of “unecological projects.”
Ever since that evening months ago, when she had briefly shared Saul’s memories of his lost homeland, she had suffered from a deep, lingering fear for her own people’s precarious renaissance.
Haalulu kuu lima
My hand shakes—
E awiwi . . . Ka la
Be quick, oh Sun—
The sketch had disappeared into JonVon’s stochastic well of memory. Perhaps she would call it up again to work on it, if she had time, or remembered. Meanwhile, her pet machine would echo with her musings. Unlike the prim processors of Earth—or the stolid mission mainframe the techs had begun crating to move down from the Edmund to Central—JonVon did not simply file things away. He…it…was programmed to “remember” from time to time, untriggered and unpredictably, and to “ponder” new correlations.
She herself had no time to devote to the protect with which she had planned to while away the years. But JonVon would always have at least a small corner of memory devoted to it, gathering and organizing data for when, at last, she could turn her attention back to the question of intelligence itself.
I must remember to ask him what he has learned, now and then.
And here we are, she thought on coming to a double hatch with a burning amber light overhead. The entrance to Central Control . . . command post for the invading hordes from Earth.
Before entering, she had to submit to another damned cleaning. A bulky mech towered beside the hatchway.
“Please present all surfaces for ultrasonic exposure,” it directed, holding forth a flat, humming plate and a vacuum hose.
She sighed and stepped forward, turning before the double-tubed, jury-rigged machine. Harmonics from high frequency sound waves stroked her skin in multiple octaves, all the way down to a low, grumbling growl that made her teeth grate.
She knew all the override codes, of course. But it would be better to submit to these measures, as half ass and useless as they had to be. Somebody was bound to find out if she got into the habit of bypassing regs for her own convenience.
The low tingling told of bits of debris being shaken loose from her clothing and skin, to be sucked away into the vacuum inlet. Of course, this wouldn�
�t really stop people from tracking around cometary germs. Saul had said that the only long term effect of the procedure would be to destroy all their clothes and eventually wreck everybody’s hearing.
The tingling stopped and the vacuum hose shut off. Virginia imagined a puff of air, cotton fibers, and skin cells all sighing out into space far above, where the stars shone unblinking on a stark icescape.
“Prepare eye protection, please.”
She grimaced and drew the goggles from her waistband.
“Lay on, MacDuff,” she muttered, and scrunched her eyes shut as the hallway seemed to fill with actinic brilliance.
This was sheer idiocy, she knew. The UV lamps were their best weapon against the Halleyforms, but there were only about two dozen left, and they were burning out at a rate of one or more a day! There were already numerous cases of sunburn and skin rash.
The uncomfortable glare cut off and she breathed in relief.
“You may pass,” the mech pronounced
“Thanks,” she answered sarcastically s the softly hissing door opened, letting her into a bustle of activity.
Voices tinged with anxiety…human torsos that disappeared into hooded data-speech shells . . . hands working switches or mech waldo controls. Yes, there’s quite a difference that three weeks can make.
But the undercurrent of dark fear was still with them. If anything, it had grown.
Over in a far corner, a half dozen forms clustered in low G crouches around a holo map. Virginia recognized Dr. Oakes and her chief aides. Another damn strategy meeting.
Olakou na alii . . . They are the chiefs, heaven help us.
I wish Saul didn’t have to go down to the inner chambers to test his new machine today. I miss him so, already.
Virginia stepped up behind Walter Schultz, the man now operating mech control 1. She was still early, but the fellow clearly needed to be relieved. His shoulders were hunched under the isolation hood, and his hands clenched whitely on the waldo-teleoperator controls.