by mikel evins
“It was bad. Aches and fever at first. My joints hurt. My throat itched something awful. I had a hard time swallowing. It hurt. I started drooling like crazy. All day long drooling. I can’t remember much past that. Just nightmares.”
“What next?” I said.
He looked at me and shrugged.
“Nothing next. I woke up one day and Angel was like you see her now. Not as dark. The drives were still firing. They gave light that was like bright moonlight. And we weren’t weightless. But everything was dead. The air stank. There were zombies everywhere.”
“Zombies,” I said. “The robots with dead people strapped to them?”
“Yes,” he said.
“We call them zombies, too,” said Mai.
He nodded, not paying much attention.
Jaemon said, “Do you know what happened to the rest of the crew?”
Oleh stared at him for a long moment.
“She wants me to tell you what I know,” he said. “But it’ll punish her. Not me. I got away. It can’t reach me now. But it can still hurt her.”
Jaemon blinked a few times and glanced at me.
“Tell us about it,” he said. “Maybe we can help.”
“What will punish her?” I said.
He looked at me. His hands were clenched together, fingers wrapped around each other. His knuckles were white. White showed all the way around his eyes. His lips were pressed tight together. Then he opened his mouth and his lips quivered.
“It,” he said. “The Enemy. The demon in Angel of Cygnus.”
12.
We couldn’t get him to say anything else about his demon, or about Angel of Cygnus, or anything that had happened. We tried for about another hour, until we were starting to get impatient, and then I called a halt to it. He was getting more and more combative, and I judged that he needed time to rest. I went off to the infirmary and prepared a few palliatives and sedatives that I could give to him, just in case.
Mai volunteered to stay with him, but Jaemon ordered her and the rest of us to debrief with the Captain and get some rest. I promised to return and relieve Jaemon after we had talked to the Captain.
I was still in the Captain’s mess, talking with Captain Rayleigh, Doctor Yaug, and Chief Verge, when the alarm went off. We had spent almost three hours talking about what we had learned. Kestrel displayed red lights and sounded a klaxon.
She said, “Jaemon is in trouble in the quarantine bay.”
The Captain and I looked at each other. One second later the four of us rose from the table and floated out the hatch into the companionway.
The lift had never seemed so slow. The Captain drummed his fingers on the bulkhead next to it and barked at Kestrel.
“Let me see what’s happening in there,” he said.
Kestrel opened a display volume in front of us as the lift doors whisked open. We could see Jaemon floating in the quarantine bay with his legs wrapped around Oleh Itzal from behind. There was a nasty-looking contusion on Jaemon’s shoulder. He had an arm wrapped around Oleh’s neck and was trying to get it under his chin. Oleh was thrashing like crazy, pressing his chin down and gnashing his teeth. There were bits of foam at the corners of his mouth.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“What?” said the Captain.
“The foam on his lips. It’s a symptom of rabies.”
“Rabies?” said the Captain. “You think he was infected? Why didn’t it kill him before now?”
I shrugged.
“He was just recently infected? That wouldn’t make any sense with normal rabies. It takes time for the infection to manifest symptoms.”
“How much time?”
“Weeks. Months. Even years in some cases.”
“It would be a strange coincidence if he was infected months ago and it’s just affecting him now.”
“Probably not a coincidence. But remember, the viruses Kestrel found were engineered. She said they’ve been modified to work faster.”
The lift stopped and the doors slid back. We were in the companionway at once and gliding toward the cargo bay hatch.
“Why would anybody infect him, though?”
Yaug said, “Perhaps they didn’t want him being rescued.”
“Do you believe the same ship that seemed so attached to him would kill him?” said Chief Verge.
Yaug shook his head.
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“There’s another thing,” I said. “From the story he told us, I think he was infected before.”
The Captain glanced over at me.
“Shouldn’t he be dead, then?” he said.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Rabies is lethal, but techniques for treating it have existed for thousands of years. Not to mention, Oleh Itzal’s people had creche technology.”
“You think he’s been reconstructed?” said the Captain.
“Maybe,” I said. “I think it’s a fair bet they would have creches on a ship of this nature.”
“If he was reconstructed after an infection, shouldn’t he be immune?”
I shrugged.
“Depends on how different the strains of the virus are.”
We reached the cargo bay. The Captain banged on the bulkhead and said, “Open it up, Kestrel.”
The hatch slid back. We oozed our way in, acquiring membranes as we passed the boundary.
“I can’t enter,” said Yaug.
I glanced back at him.
“Do you have a membrane generator on?”
He shook his new head.
“My fault,” he said.
Oleh Itzal’s face was deep red. He was making a strangled growling noise. His jaws were clenched tight, his jaw muscles bulging. Veins stood out in his neck. Jaemon was hanging onto him for dear life, still trying to set a choke hold.
I flew across the room and caught myself on Jaemon’s leg. I fished out one of the sedatives I’d prepared and squashed it against Oleh’s upper arm. The ampule pushed the drug out through a temporary port in my membrane. Oleh didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were rolled back in his head. I waited thirty seconds.
Jaemon grunted, “No dice, Lev,” and panted with the effort.
I crushed a second ampule against Oleh’s arm. It didn’t seem to have any effect. I rolled a third one between thumb and forefinger, unsure how much I could risk giving him.
Then he relaxed. His growl turned into a hiss and then a sigh. He went limp, and Jaemon fumbled for a second before peeling himself loose and shaking his hands.
“Wow,” he said, breathing heavily. “You wouldn’t think that little guy could be so strong.”
“It’s not normal,” I said.
“No kidding,” said Jaemon, still shaking his hand in the air.
“No, I mean it’s probably convulsive. He couldn’t keep it up without damaging himself.”
“‘Convulsive.’ You think this was one of Kestrel’s viruses?”
I nodded. I checked his pulse, then peeled open one eyelid and shined a spot into his eye. I checked the other one.
Then I pushed away from him and took hold of Jaemon’s arm.
“What’s this?” I said. I gently touched the half-circular discoloration on his shoulder.
“Oleh bit me.”
“Bit you?” I said. “Did he break the membrane?”
“I don’t know. Did he?”
“Kestrel?” I said.
“Jaemon’s membrane is unbreached,” she said.
“Wow,” said Jaemon. “What are the odds?”
“I suspect this was deliberate,” I said. “If we were still on the Guard’s Military Police, I’d recommend you treat it as attempted murder.”
“I don’t know, Lev,” said Jaemon. “He might have wanted to kill me, but I don’t think he was in his right mind.”
“I don’t mean you,” I said. “I think someone tried to kill Oleh Itzal.”
“The virus, you mean?”
I nodded.
Jaemon looked at Oleh, still f
loating limp in front of us. His color was slowly returning to normal.
“Attempted murder, huh?” said Jaemon. “Who’s the perp?”
I said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
13.
In the creche, Oleh was transformed. Jaemon and I had stripped the filthy rags off him and wrapped him in a shower envelope in his bathroom. After a thorough scrubbing, he looked entirely different. The cleaning made him stir a few times, but the sedatives won out in the end.
We toweled him off and floated him out of the bathroom and across the living room. I snapped a generator around his waist and inflated the membrane, and we slid him through the hatch into the companionway. Captain Rayleigh was waiting there and he played traffic cop, chasing curious crewmen out of the way as we shifted Oleh up the lift to the infirmary.
We shoved him into a creche, sealed it, filled it, and triggered the membrane generator to disengage. The gel settled against his body and started to feed us readings. The creche spat out the membrane generator. In a few minutes Oleh was in the early stages of cold sleep and the creche was running its first full scan.
“So I guess we’ll have to get the rest of his story from his sleep persona,” said Jaemon.
“Sort of,” I said.
“What do you mean ‘sort of?’” Jaemon said.
“Oleh Itzal doesn’t technically have a sleep persona,” I said.
“What?” said the Captain.
“Sleep personae are artifacts of the Fabric,” I said.
“Oh,” said the Captain. “I get it.”
“Wait,” said Jaemon, “I don’t.”
I said, “The Fabric constructs your sleep persona when you go to sleep.”
“Okay,” said Jaemon.
“But Oleh doesn’t have the Fabric.”
Jaemon looked at the creche, then back at me. He blinked at me.
“Wow,” he said. “I guess I didn’t put that together. He really doesn’t have any connection to the Fabric at all, does he?”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t yet exist in his time.”
“I guess I didn’t really think that through,” Jaemon said. “How did they do…well…anything?”
“In other ways,” said the Captain.
“My brother the historian,” said Jaemon. “So, wait. If he doesn’t have a sleep persona, how will we be able to talk to him in the creche? Do we have to wake him up?”
I shook my head.
“We can’t. If we wake him up, the virus that’s already in his body will have the chance to spread further. Besides, if we woke him up now, all we’d get out of him is a lot more fighting and growling.”
“Yeah,” said Jaemon. He rubbed the bruise on his shoulder. “I’ll pass. But, so, how do you talk to him, then?”
“Yaug and I have an idea,” I said. “We can run his personality on Kestrel’s systems. That’s sort of how a sleep persona works, anyway. The Fabric runs your consciousness on its processors, outside your body.”
Jaemon and the Captain looked at each other.
“I did not know that,” said the Captain.
“Running Oleh on Kestrel’s systems won’t be exactly the same, but fairly similar. We’ll still passively read his memories and model his sense perceptions. But instead of feeding the contents of the conversations straight back into his brain as the sleep persona would, we’ll store them for later integration, after we take care of his virus problem and get him safely integrated with the Fabric.”
“Okay, sure,” said Jaemon. “Sounds good.”
He turned to his brother.
“You understood everything he said, right?”
“Of course,” said the Captain.
“Okay. Me too,” said Jaemon.
“We know anything new about what caused his little blow-up?” said the Captain.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Kestrel? What have we got so far from the creche?”
“I found one of the engineered viruses in his central nervous system,” she said.
“One of the rabies derivatives?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s also one of the ones with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis inclusions.”
“Mind-control virus,” the Captain said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, now we know what it does,” said the Captain.
“We know one thing that one of them does,” I said. “Remember, there are about a hundred different ones.”
“Collect the whole set,” said Jaemon.
We looked at him.
“What?” he said innocently.
14.
I sat in a comfortable chair looking at Oleh Itzal. He was on a sofa that faced a big window, looking out at the park-like grounds outside. He looked young, even younger than he had looked after Jaemon and I got him cleaned up. His face was hairless. The hair on his head was cropped short on the back and sides and brushed back on top. It was honey colored. The light from the window gave it a nice shine. He wore a light blue tunic with short sleeves, and light, loose off-white slacks. One leg was crossed over the other and he rested easily in his chair. His hands and feet were bare.
I waited. He watched small people, possibly children, playing on the grass outside. I glanced out the window and saw one of them with long hair and a skirt ride a bicycle down a paved path and ditch it in the grass to run over to two others in shorts, with shorter hair. E pushed one of them from behind playfully, and e chased em around the grass, screaming and giggling.
I looked back at Oleh Itzal and he was looking at me.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re Lev.”
I nodded.
“That’s right,” I said.
He looked out the window again.
“Where am I?” he said. “I can’t be here. This place doesn’t exist anymore.”
“You’re in a dream,” I said.
He nodded slowly.
“A dream. That figures.”
“It’s a lucid dream, artificially induced.”
He looked at me again.
“Artificial? Did you cause it? Are you controlling it?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not controlling you. We’re using the dream to talk with you while you’re unconscious.”
He stared for a moment.
“Why?” he said.
“Do you remember being in the quarantine apartment?”
He frowned.
“Yes, I think so. You and some others found me aboard Angel.”
He looked out the window again, still frowning.
“You brought me out and took me to your ship.”
He lifted his hands and looked at them. He rubbed them together slowly. He laid them on the arms of the chair and uncrossed his legs, setting both feet flat on the light blue-gray carpet. He stared out the window.
“What next?” I prompted.
He frowned again.
“I think I went to sleep. I had a nightmare.”
“What happened in the nightmare?”
He shook his head slowly, still looking out the window.
“I’m not sure. I remember faces staring at me. I remember being terribly afraid. I was fighting for my life.”
He sat looking out the window, frowning deeply.
“Is that all?” I said.
He shook his head slowly.
“There’s more but I don’t know how to describe it. There were sounds that frightened me. I felt like I was floating outside my body. I was fighting, but it wasn’t me. It was just my body fighting. I was somewhere else, watching.”
He opened his mouth again, but nothing more came. He just sat. After a moment, he closed his mouth again.
I waited for a few minutes. He just sat and looked out the window.
After a little while I said, “We’ve found engineered viruses in your environment, and in your body. I’m pretty sure one of them caused the nightmare.”
He looked at me again, frowning.
“Engineered viruses?” h
e said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree.”
“Could they be from your ship?” he said.
I shook my head.
He looked out the window.
After a moment, he said, “It seems like all of this should be more upsetting to me.”
I said, “You’re not really you. We’re running a model of your cognitive processes on an external processor.”
He blinked at me.
“A what?”
“A simulation. We’re running your personality outside your body. I have your emotions damped, so that we can more easily have a productive discussion.”
He frowned again.
“How—no, forget it. Why would you do something like that?”
“The virus that has infected you is extremely dangerous. It has proliferated in your nervous system, and caused severe symptoms. I think your nightmares are your memory of the seizures and violent behavior that you exhibited as the virus began to affect your central nervous system.”