Emergency controls, yes. He knew them from the briefing.
He searched the polished steel surface and found the panel on the side. Ipan stared woozily at the meaningless lettering and Leon himself had trouble reading. The letters jumped and fused together.
He found several buttons and servo controls. Ipan’s hands were stubby, wrong. It took three tries to get the reviving program activated. Lights cycled from green to amber.
Ipan abruptly sat down on the cool floor. The blue-white flies were buzzing all around his head now and they wanted to bite him. He sucked in the cool dry air but there was no substance in it, no help … .
Then, without any transition, he was looking at the ceiling. On his back. The lamps up there were getting dark, fading. Then they went out.
Leon’s eyes snapped open.
The recovery program was still sending electrostims through his muscles. He let them jump and tingle and ache while he thought. He felt fine. Not even hungry, as he usually did after an immersion. How long had he been in the wilderness? At least five days.
He sat up. There was no one in the vessel room. Evidently Ruben had gotten some silent alarm, but had not alerted anyone else. That pointed, again, to a tight little conspiracy.
He got out shakily. To get free he had to detach some feeders and probes but they seemed simple enough.
Leon. The big body filled the walkway. He knelt and felt for a pulse. Rickety.
But first, Kelly. Her vessel was next to his and he started the revival. She looked well.
Ruben must have put some transmission block on the system, so that none of the staff could tell by looking at the panel that anything was wrong. A simple cover story, a couple who wanted a really long immersion. Ruben had warned them, but no, they wanted it so … . A perfectly plausible story.
Kelly’s eyes fluttered. He kissed her. She gasped.
He made a chimp sign, quiet, and went back to Ipan.
Blood came steadily. Leon was surprised to find that he could not pick up the rich, pungent elements in the blood from smell alone. A human missed so much!
He took off his shirt and made a crude tourniquet. At least Ipan’s breathing was regular. Kelly was ready to get out by then and he helped her disconnect.
“I was hiding in a tree and then—poof!” she said. “What a relief. How did you—”
“Let’s get moving,” he said.
As they left the room she said, “Who can we trust? Whoever did this—” She stopped when she saw Ruben. “Oh.”
Somehow her expression made him laugh. She was very rarely surprised.
“You did this?”
“Ipan.”
“I never would have believed a chimp could, could …”
“I doubt anyone’s been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It all just, well, it came out.”
He picked up Ruben’s weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol, silenced. Ruben had not wanted to awaken the rest of the Station. That was promising. There should be people here who would spring to their aid. He started toward the building where the Station personnel lived.
“Wait, what about Ruben?”
“I’m going to wake up a doctor.”
They did—but Leon took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some patchwork and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only then did he show the man Ruben’s body.
The doctor got angry about that, but Leon had a gun. All he had to do was point it. He didn’t say anything, just gestured with the gun. He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you couldn’t talk you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.
And in any case, Ruben had been dead for some time.
Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.
Kelly looked at him oddly throughout the whole time. He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought about helping Ruben first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he could not explain.
But he understood immediately when Kelly wanted to go to the Station wall and call to Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the wild darkness.
A year later, when the industrial conspiracy had been uncovered and dozens brought to trail, they returned to the Excursion Station.
Leon longed to lounge in the sun, after a year of facing news cameras and attorneys. Kelly was equally exhausted with the rub of events.
But they both immediately booked time in the immersion chambers
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TOR ANTHOLOGIES EDITED BY DAVID G. HARTWELL AND KATHRYN CRAMER
The Ascent of Wonder
Spirits of Christmas
TOR BOOKS BY DAVID G. HARTWELL
NONFICTION
Age of Wonder
EDITOR
Bodies of the Dead
Centaurus
Christmas Forever
The Dark Descent
Foundation of Fears
Northern Stars (with Glenn Grant)
Northern Suns (with Glenn Grant)
The Science Fiction Century
The Screaming Skull
Visions of Wonder (with Milton T. Wolf)
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE HARD SF RENAISSANCE
Copyright © 2002 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
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Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
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The Hard SF Renaissance Page 173