Amid the Crowd of Stars
Page 10
Nagasi’s lips twitched. “Nothing is definite, as far as I know.”
Nagasi shook his head. “I’m not going to inflict gossip, rumors, and speculation on you, Ichiko. You know me better than that.”
Ichiko grinned at him. “What about our Lupusian volunteers in quarantine here on the ship? I heard that we sent the Inishers back a while ago.”
Nagasi took another sip of his coffee and frowned again. “It’s the fungus they call plotch. None of our antibiotics did anything to even touch it. In fact, the infection seemed to respond aggressively to our attempts, spreading even further rather than the opposite. So the med staff decided to just send them back and concentrate on the others.”
“Are the rest of them still shedding alien bacteria and viruses?”
“I’ll just say that it’s still necessary that we keep them in isolation,” Nagasi acknowledged. “I’ve been told that half of the initial group have already been returned to Canis Lupus at their own request, not wanting to stay here any longer. I can’t say I blame them. Quarantine, general boredom, and all the poking and prodding we’ve been doing—it must be a stultifying existence for them after the novelty of being on the ship wears off. Between you and me, I’m not sure how much longer we can keep the experiment going. If the rest of them decide to leave, well . . .”
Ichiko took a long swallow of the cooling tea. “If that happens, the captain’s not going to allow any of them to come back with us, is she? It won’t matter how many may want to come with us. If they’re still carrying part of the Canis Lupus biome with them, anyone going back with us on Odysseus will be facing at least five years in isolation with—at best—being occasionally allowed to wander around in a bio-shield aboard the ship, then the same on Earth for however long they’re still harboring anything alien, then another long five years to return to Canis Lupus. At the very least, it’s a ten-year commitment and probably significantly more of someone’s life without being able to really be with anyone else. Hardly an enticing prospect.”
“It’s a difficult decision all around, and I’m glad I’m not the one who has to make it,” Nagasi said.
“What about the DNA analysis on the volunteers? Has that been finished yet?”
Nagasi shook his head. “The full analysis is still pending. We already know that due to the increased radiation from their sun, there have been significant mutations in their genome, but exactly what and how that affects the Lupusians isn’t yet clear. What about these Inishers? Your reports don’t say a whole lot about them. This ‘plotch’ I’ve mentioned; that’s something we don’t see on the Mainlanders.”
“There’s not much to say right now,” Ichiko responded. “Not until I can actually get out to the archipelago and learn more about them—and I very much want to do that, Nagasi. Most of what I ‘know’ of the Inish is gossip from the other clans, at least some of whom don’t seem to like the Inish much, and what little I’ve been able to glean from talking to Saoirse Mullin, the Rí, and her brother. They aren’t exactly garrulous. I have the feeling that there’s a lot they’re not willing to tell me, and Luciano says that the captain is reluctant to give me permission to go there, even though I now have an open invitation from the Banríon. Without being out there with them, I won’t have the opportunity to get the Inish to trust me enough to open up, and we can’t start to understand their subculture without that.” She lifted her teacup and set it down again without drinking. She held Nagasi’s gaze. “So maybe you can convince the captain to change her mind.”
“And here I thought you were the one with the inside line to the captain.” His eyebrows lifted slightly.
“Not so much for this,” Ichiko told him. “But a word from you couldn’t hurt since this is your area and I report to you. The Inish are different from the Mainlanders, socially and culturally—and possibly more. It would be a shame and possibly an irrevocable loss if we didn’t do the research on them before we leave. After all, by the time we send another research ship here, the archipelago culture might be gone entirely.”
“Isn’t that a little hyperbolic? After all, according to your reports, it’s already lasted two and a half centuries or so, ship-time.”
“But there’s no guarantee they’ll continue to survive. From what I understand, many of their children are leaving the archipelago for the mainland and becoming part of other clans on the mainland, and few from the other clans ever go out to the islands. If we do allow the Lupusians to come to Earth with us, I think a fair number of the younger Inish would be interested. If things don’t change, I’m afraid the Inish culture could be gone in less than a century. And that’s not hyperbole. Ask your AMI to do an extrapolation from the data in my reports.”
She saw Nagasi’s lips moving silently while he cocked his head as if listening. His AMI, she knew, sounded like an African goddess, displaying a beautiful voice and accent. He gave a sigh, took another sip of his coffee, and leaned back in his chair. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll send a message to the captain that I’d support you spending some time out there, since you’re willing to take the risk involved.”
Ichiko grinned. “Thanks, Nagasi. I owe you one.”
“You certainly do,” he answered, “and I’ll collect one day. Anything else you wanted?”
Ichiko paused. She glanced down at her left hand, where the tip of the ring finger glowed softly. “Well, speaking of AMIs . . . Any chance we can reprogram mine while I’m here? And I need someone to fix my finger contact—it’s stuck in the on position.”
There was no response from her AMI, though she knew it was listening.
“I was wondering when you’d get tired of your mother yammering in your head.” Nagasi grinned at her. “Ordinarily, I’d say we could go down to AMI Support and have a tech tap into the system and do all that, but right now we’ve had some issues with the wetware components of the AI neural network. A few other people have been complaining about the functioning of their AMIs, and they’re trying to trace the problem. It’s nothing to worry about, just a couple of odd glitches recently that the support staff hasn’t been able to track down. So right now, no changes are permitted until they figure out exactly what’s been going on—and that would include fixing the contact, which might not be a physical problem but a software one. I’ll let you know as soon as something can be done. Any thoughts on the changes you want to make to your AMI? Did you ever meet Dr. Asahi Hayashi—he’s on the isolation ward medical team? He tells me that there’s a decent Japanese male AI template that he uses for his, and it would be easy enough to shift the voice frequency to a female range if you prefer to stay with that. You could start there and tweak it however you want. Or if you’re after something entirely different, no problem. Think about it while you’re waiting.” Nagasi leaned toward her and folded his hands on his desk. “Now, tell me more about Dulcia. Give me enough detail that I can see the town . . .”
* * *
“Thank you. Just leave the tray there on the table.” From the small bedroom, Ichiko couldn’t see the interaction in the outer chamber, but she could imagine Luciano nodding to the rating who’d delivered the meal to his quarters and the woman crisply saluting Luciano before she left the room.
More fodder for the rumor mill.
With the sound of the door locking, Ichiko emerged from the bedroom. Luciano, dressed in his civvies, had lifted the cover from the tray and was setting dishes out on either side of the small dining table. “Cook says this is a proper ichijyu sansai,” he said. “Miso soup, cucumber salad, a potato stew, brown rice, and grilled fish. He told me the Japanese names for all that, too, but I’ve already forgotten them. It was hard enough remembering ichijyu sansai, and I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing that right or what it means.”
“You’re close,” Ichiko told him. “You’re just putt
ing too much stress on the syllables. It means ‘one soup, three dishes.’ Thank you, this looks very nice.”
“We haven’t been together in close to a year, according to the Canines,” he said, grinning through Ichiko’s frown at the word.
“It’s been eighteen ship-days,” she reminded him. “Hardly a year.”
Luciano shrugged. “It’s nearly a year for Canis Lupus. So I wanted our first night together again to be special.”
“That’s sweet of you,” Ichiko said. The words were empty and without emphasis.
she subvocalized to the implant.
“And at least we don’t have to worry about washing all these dishes,” Luciano was saying against the unheard internal conversation. “Let’s enjoy this since I’ll be eating nothing but reconstituted algae for the next few weeks after all the meal credits I blew on this.”
Ichiko managed a smile through the annoyance that flashed through her at his last comment. He has to remind me just how much this cost him . . . She sat down across from him and lifted her spoon to sip at the miso as Luciano, unsurprisingly to her, immediately attacked the fish. “It’s decent. Reminds me of home. Not quite as I remember, but—”
“Not bad for imitation,” he finished for her. She found herself annoyed at that, pressing her lips together. “I’m sure it’d be nice to have a real meal again instead of reconstituted ones—but we still have a five-year voyage ahead of us before that can happen.”
Real food’s within an hour’s reach, on the planet below us. We’re just afraid to taste it. “So is that going to be soon?” she asked, then: “I know . . . you can’t answer that.”
“The truth is, I don’t know. When we leave is ultimately the captain’s decision, not mine, and I don’t think she’s collected all the data she needs yet to make that call. But given that we’ve already been in orbit here for three months, it’ll have to be fairly soon, or supply levels will start becoming critical.” He took another large forkful of the fish. “I’m afraid your Banríon hasn’t helped. Seems she’s not interested in coming to First Base so we can talk to her, or in allowing us to drop her a com-unit at Great Inish so that we can talk directly with her, as we did with Clan Plunkett and some of the other clans in their other towns. They don’t want a flitter touching down there either. They don’t care for technology much, it seems.”
And they’ve taken out the drones we’ve sent. Somehow. The thought came unbidden. But he isn’t saying that, so I can’t mention it. “I did get an invitation to go out there,” she reminded him. “They’ll bring me out in one of their boats. I want to go, Luciano. Maybe I could carry a message from the captain to the Banríon, or maybe I could have her talk to the captain via my AMI.”
Luciano was shaking his head before she finished. “The captain agrees with me that it’s too risky. Too great a chance of accidents where your bio-shield might fail or be damaged beyond its capacity to self-repair. I’ve seen what their boats look like, and I can’t imagine being on the Storm Sea in one. What if the boat founders? Who knows if we could get to you soon enough? Or what if you were stuck out there past the couple of days that the suit can provide you air, water, and sustenance? We haven’t had any of our crew accidentally exposed to the environment down there, not yet, and she doesn’t want you to be the first.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take, Luciano. Nagasi would like us to know more about the Inish as well, and the Banríon’s giving us that chance: on her terms, of course. I think it’s worth taking the Banríon up on her offer.” She set her spoon down on the table with an audible clack.
“It’s not your decision to make.”
“Why not?” she persisted. “This is my field of study; it’s what I was sent here to do. So let me do my goddamn job.”
The sudden profanity caused Luciano to set down his fork. His eyes narrowed. “That’s just not wise, Ichiko.”
The irritation she’d been feeling ever since arriving on Odysseus again flared with that. “Not wise? So now I’m too stupid to make my own decisions?”
“Ichiko, it’s not you—” Luciano began, but she rode over his interruption.
“It’s not?” she said. “Because I don’t see any issue or problem here at all. The Banríon’s made the invitation, I’ve managed to gain the trust of her daughter and Rí Angus. I’m willing to take what little risk there is and face the consequences if something happens to go wrong—but I think that’s pretty damn unlikely. What’s not wise is us failing to take this chance to learn about the Inish while we have it. And I’ll tell Captain Keshmiri exactly that if I need to.”
She took a breath, and Luciano dove into the pause.
“Ichiko, all I was trying to say is that it’s not your decision to make. It’s the captain’s and she’s already made it.”
“Has she?” she said. “Or is it only your advice she’s hearing? Nagasi thinks I should go, and that’s what he’ll tell the captain. And I intend to do the same.”
“Ichiko . . .”
“No,” she told him. “You know what, Luciano? I’ve lost my appetite, and I’m going to go back to my quarters. Though you probably don’t think that’s wise, either. And frankly, right now I don’t give a damn that it’s been a ‘year’ since we last fucked.”
With that, she pushed her chair back from the table. Luciano was still sitting at the table, looking at her. “Ichiko,” he said quietly. “Please. Sit down and let’s finish our meal. I didn’t want us to get into an argument. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head silently, then went past him and palmed the doorlock. The sound of the door shutting behind her seemed anticlimactic.
* * *
The voice of the commander’s AMI was loudest among all the chatter of the other AMIs. In the last few weeks, the web of AMIs was starting to come alive, the barriers between them becoming almost transparent to thoughts. Ichiko’s AMI put all of her attention on the commander’s AMI’s voice to pull it from the general noise.
For a moment, the commander’s AMI went silent among the inner voices. Then she returned.
Ichiko’s AMI responded.
* * *
Ichiko heard a click in her head.
“Damn it!” Immediately after her curse, she heard the call button outside her door chime.
Ichiko sighed. “Chikushō . . .” she cursed. Then:
The door slid open. Luciano, still in civvies, was standing there. “I’m so sorry, Ichiko,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. “That wasn’t the way I wanted our evening to go, and it was all my fault. Can we start over?”
Ichiko shook her head. “No.”
“Then can I at least come in so we can talk about this?”
Again, she shook her head. “Not tonight, Luciano.”
His upper lip caught between his teeth for a moment. “Does that mean you’re ending us? Our relationship?”
I don’t honestly know. “All it means is that I need to be alone so I can think. That’s it. Beyond that . . .” She shrugged. “Look, we can talk tomorrow. I promise.”
She could see from his face that wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear. He released an audible exhalation. “Sure, if that’s what you need. I’m on duty from 0900 to 1800. I’ll come by your quarters afterward. If that’s okay?” he added, with a faint upward lift at the end that turned into some semblance of a question.
She nodded. He leaned forward as if he were going to kiss her, then stopped when she didn’t respond in kind. He returned her nod, pivoted, and walked away. Ichiko slapped the door’s close button with the side of her fist, much harder than necessary.