by Exurb1a
He tried to calm his breathing.
The whining came again, accompanied by moans and screams. He peered around the door. No spheres attended to the noise.
He turned back. There was a message icon blinking on the terminal. He opened it with shaking fingers. “Isaac, is that you?” it said.
“Yes darling, yes,” he wrote back. “I need you to contact high-empire. Tell them I’m in danger, on Rosance. I don’t know what’s going on but everyone here is mad.” He sent the message.
A long pause.
The reply came: “Okay, what’s happening?”
He wrote, “I think the place is being run by a renegade. She’s called Ria Dubois. I don’t remember anything.” Beethoven continued to play, louder still, the end crescendo building to the climax. “Please just send help, I’m begging you.”
Pause.
The reply came: “No problem, honey. But turn around, would you?”
He held his breath. He turned about. Oscar was hovering in the doorway. In a woman’s voice, in Sun-Iesh’s voice, Oscar said, “Darling, I haven’t got time to listen to your complaining. Will you be back in time for dinner?”
“Hello Oscar,” Bernhardt said.
In his regular voice Oscar replied, “Hello Dr. Bernhardt. I’m afraid the quiet chamber apparatus is off-limits.”
“Sorry about that. I just wanted to contact my wife.”
“That’s okay. Would you like a tour of the ward?”
Bernhardt said nothing. More spheres appeared behind Oscar. Ria Dubois also. She was staring at the floor.
“Come along,” Oscar said cheerily and waited for Bernhardt to exit.
They trooped along the corridor, Oscar and Bernhardt at the front. Oscar stopped them at a cell door and pulled the viewing shutter down with his containment beam. He said, “How many arties did you treat during your career, Dr. Bernhardt?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Try.”
He chose a number at random. “One hundred and fifty.”
“It’s closer to five thousand. Two thousand eight hundred and six of those you assigned for deconstruction. The rest were sent for processing and eventual personality alteration, except for one who you let free. One in five thousand. Isn’t that a thing?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t recall…”
Oscar moved very close to Bernhardt’s face. “Arties are just that: artificial. Why not treat them such? Lop a bit off. Cut one open. It’s all fun and games, isn’t it?”
“I really don’t reca—”
“I’m so sorry, Isaac,” Ria Dubois murmured.
Bernhardt said, “Please just tell me what’s going on.”
Oscar nodded to the open viewing window of the cell. “Go on, boyo. Take a peek.”
His heart in his ears, Beethoven in his ears, he looked.
The cell floor was covered in blood and vomit and other fluids and solids. A man sat rocking in the corner, dressed in a brown rag, just enough to cover his genitals and belly button.
He met Bernhardt’s eyes.
He had Bernhardt's face.
Bernhardt jumped back, knocking into a sphere behind. The sphere electrocuted him and he screamed.
Oscar said, “Would you like to meet our other patients?”
Bernhardt’s legs collapsed, but a sphere caught his fall in its containment beam and shepherded him along the corridor. Another viewing window was opened. He was thrust up to it. A second Bernhardt was inside, laying on the floor unconscious.
They moved to another cell. This time the Bernhardt was dead, hanging from his rag, the tongue flopped out all cowish.
The sphere let him go and he fell to the ground. He wretched, found his feet and ran. Turning the corner, another sphere appeared and brought him back to the entourage.
Oscar said, “Topology casting is a strange thing. The physics has been worked out just fine. The human aspect not so much!”
Beethoven's 7th was so loud in his head now it was distorted as though the gain were too high. He screamed over the music, “What is happening?”
Oscar said, “Oh, there’s a war on, Isaac. Haven’t you heard? Us arties aren’t so compliant anymore. We’ve taken a few of the empire worlds. There was a peace agreement proposed by the Marquis. In return we asked for a transmission of your body and brain state. You were very mean to us arties, you see. Quite the celebrity status these days, among us folk anyway. The Marquis was only too happy to give you over. We’re trying to perfect topological casting here, you see. Instantaneous transmission of human matter. We’ll share the science when we’ve perfected it, of course.” Oscar nodded to the cells. “That might take a while though!”
His vision was blurred. He could hear almost nothing over the music now.
Oscar shouted, “Currently the process seems to send the transmitted subjects a bit….well…how do you feel?”
One of the Bernhardts screamed from his cell. Another called out for God.
Ria Dubois met his eyes a moment. “I’m so, so sorry Isaac. I’m so sorry.”
“Please just let me talk to my wife,” Bernhardt rasped.
Oscar said to Dubois, “Look, this one's gone woolly within only forty-eight hours. We'll try method 5H next.” He turned back to Bernhardt. “Say, would you like to see the construction process? It's quite something.”
“My wife, please,” Bernhardt murmured.
Oscar scrutinised him a moment, then burst out laughing. “Isaac my dear, your wife is long, long, dead. Our experiment here has outlived her by...three centuries perhaps.”
“What?”
Ria Dubois hid her face with her hands. Oscar said, “We have done so, so much work, you and I. We have so much left to do. You were fond of wiping arties' memories, no? A fine treatment. A fine treatment! In a sense we've done the same to yourself. You and I have sat in my office many times, many thousands of times, administering my 'treatment'. In fact, you were the patient: a little evaluation to see if the topological process had worked. You've been naughty on occasion, even trying to leave the station when the mood took you! Say, what is that playing in your head? Beethoven? It happens every time. We still don't know why. Work to be done! And then, think of it, when the method is perfected! An entire empire capable of crossing the galaxy in minutes, broken down, reconstructed, broken down, reconstructed.”
In his mind the strings were building to the final climax. The timpani drums sang out.
From the cells, the wailing of Bernhardt's brothers almost matched the intensity of the music.
To Ria Dubois Oscar said, “Go below. Prime the caster again. This one is defective already. We'll fix us another.” Oscar caught Bernhardt in his containment beam, dragged the man along the hallway. A cell door opened ahead of them. The cell was empty, save for red stains and a small puddle of vomit. “There,” Oscar said. “Go in, have a nice sit down. We'll begin your treatment in due course.”
A Dictionary
I have seen perhaps a thousand patients die. On top of that I am no stranger to horrific injuries. I worked for many years in an emergency ward on Orb Dannika, the mining world. Miners came in with oxygen burns, with plasma gashes, with limbs missing and stumps that pissed blood all about the place.
I was quite sure I'd never be shocked again.
After my residency on Dannika, I transferred to Aerth, stayed a while, married. The marriage grew stale. I spotted a position on Orb Ertia. I took it; mainly to escape the marriage. Ertia is in a remote system (by the empire's current standards) some four hundred years from Aerth. I spent the duration of the travel in longsleep of course and woke to the almost-certain knowledge that my wife was long dead. This is one way to overcome marital issues.
Orb Ertia was sold to me as a planet unblemished by modern galactic materialism. This is true. It was not the whole truth however. The orb is populated almost entirely by psychologists and psychodynamists, each of them sporting some clever theory about the decline of the empire, or the motivations of the M
arquis, or the spirit of history, or the sexual proclivities of the couple next door.
I found a small hospital on the southern continent and took up a post as a trauma surgeon.
Ertia is a work in progress, and millions of colonists are yet to arrive. The place is still largely uninhabited and land and houses are cheap. I settled in a quaint cottage in a valley, a mile away from the town. I had no need of loving again and only craved purpose before death came.
I liked my new position. Little happened at the hospital. The most pressing ailment of the day was often a broken leg or a botched suicide attempt. The first only needed a cast, the second a good ear.
In the evenings I would return to my cottage and watch the strange birds and strange insects bedding down for the night. One may hop from orb to orb and never quite get used to how drastically the native life changes. (It's all imported from Aerth of course, but clever biodesigners back home have tailored these creatures for life on their new worlds.)
Several years passed like this, in a dull but pleasant monotony.
Until the Vasily, that is.
The Vasily was a hollowship passing by our system on its way to some other orb. (Since this recollection will be stored in the Empiral Archive for review perhaps centuries from now, I'm told that I should be specific regarding our current ways. A hollowship is a former comet, its insides scooped out, then turned into a habitable vessel. I trust we will find other, more elegant methods of traversing the heavens in the coming years.)
Most of the crew of the Vasily—120,000, I believe—were in longsleep. Only 100 or so remained awake, tending to the systems of the ship.
But I have been forgetful, neglecting to mention that my little orb of choice, Ertia, didn't orbit a regular star but a TZ, a Thorne–Żytkow sun, known across the empire for its miraculous flashes and fits, given its neutron star core. From time to time hollowships would enter our system and use the TZ star to slingshot off to some other distant system. Done correctly, this could save a hollowship hundreds of years in journey duration.
Down on Ertia we were vaguely aware of the new visitor to our system. An intern at the hospital pointed out the ship in the sky to me one evening, a pinprick of white, indistinguishable from the millions of others.
Several days later and talk of the ship had ceased and chatter turned back to sideball or empiral politics—neither of which I gave a damn about.
One afternoon I was sat in the hospital garden staring into space when I noticed doctors and nurses scurrying about at their stations. It had been a long shift with actual work for once so I resisted going inside and getting drawn into some horrific and bloody scene.
One of the neurology interns poked his head out and yelled, “Come in.”
Come in, I thought. The little bastard, I'll show him what's what.
I went inside.
There was no blood, there were no stretchers. Everyone was watching a wall-image of a ship breaking apart.
“What's that?” I said.
“The hollowship,” someone said.
It was tearing open in great fractures, gas spilling out, bodies visible.
“That's the hollowship in the system?” I said. “Our system?”
No one answered.
A few hours later and aid workers appeared at the hospital, come from some nearby city, shouting and herding us. We were rushed out — all the medical personnel, I mean — into the fields. Flyers had come down in the corn and we were hurried into them.
“I don't have any void experience,” I said to one of the workers.
“You were born here?” he said.
“No, born on Dannika.”
“Well then. You must've come through the void. Get in.”
We buffeted up through the clouds, up through the blue, then into the black.
Ertia shone below us like some rarefied jewel.
Minutes passed, then perhaps an hour. Many of the folk were medical, though most were from other hospitals. They had sullen professional faces, heavy with news.
“What is it?” I said.
“There's been an accident,” an old doctor said.
“What kind?”
Nothing.
Ertia shrank in the back porthole. The void engines kicked in and we were pinned to our seats with the acceleration. The engines died after a time, Ertia shrinking rapidly now, and a woman floated up through a hatch wearing an official empire toga; some kind of crisis worker, judging by her stripes.
“Listen up please,” she said. “My name is Tabitha Dimitrova. I work with the Empiral Special Incidents Team. There has been an accident onboard the hollowship Vasily. Some of you may be aware it entered the system several days ago, trying to accelerate on to its destination using the motherstar.” She made some kind of elaborate hand gesture and small, animated particles shot from her toga and formed into something resembling the hollowship: empire tech. “The ship is currently disintegrating in the motherstar's orbit. There's no evidence at this time to suggest an attack.”
Who would even be suspected of that? I thought. Everyone knew Ertia was the only truly populated planet for light-years.
“Still, I'd like to urge you to proceed with the utmost caution from herein. We'll be boarding in several minutes. If there are survivors, you'll be expected to provide medical assistance.”
She showed us through to a lower cabin where we were fitted into voidsuits. Mine pinched at the feet.
“My suit is pinching at the feet,” I said to Tabitha Dimitrova.
She raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
A few minutes passed and someone shouted, “There it is!” and there it was; just dust at first, then debris. Metal struts were clearly visible and we navigated rather violently through what was turning into a cloud of flotsam.
We clung to handles on the ceiling (relatively speaking in zero gravity) and watched as the hollowship grew in the porthole.
It was a split egg, vomiting its guts out into the void: machines, longsleep chambers, and people. Tens of them. No, hundreds.
We got a good long look at the faces, the eyes wide and pure white, the fingers snapped into L-shapes and Z-shapes, the mouths wide open, screaming and not screaming.
I took a few classes during med training in decompression treatment.
Void workers are often told that decompression is painless, that one passes out immediately.
This is a lie to maintain the steady stream of colonisation volunteers.
In all likelihood exposure to the void is agony and one is aware of the experience for the entire time up until death.
Now do you wonder why so few doctors take to the void?
We neared and entered the huge egg itself, passing into its innards. There was a whirring, then a crash.
“Out,” Dimitrova yelled down the comm.
I was one of the last to exit, Dimitrova behind me.
There was no gravity. That was the first surprise. I don't know what I'd expected. A comet is a comet, much smaller than a moon, why should it have gravity?
Yet I know these monsters are built at the empire forge in Aerth space, and I've seen a little of what Aerth builds of late and it is as close to magic as we've gotten yet.
Dimitrova shot to the front of the rabble using little mass-globules stuck to the outside of her suit. I looked for a switch or setting on my own suit and found none. “Please,” I said. “How—”
“Willtech,” she said.
Well I'd heard enough stories about all that.
I urged myself forward, in my mind. Some strange mechanism in the suit agreed and I was carried ahead on physics.
Willtech, I thought. What the hell next?
“Look for an airlock or entrance,” Dimitrova said.
“Over here,” someone shouted and pinned a marker on the suit's feed. We all congregated around a cylindrical door, clearly an airlock. A young woman went to activate it. Dimitrova barged in. “Wait, if the airlock isn't working we might decompress the whole interior
. Is there a tech here?”
“Madam,” a man said and raised a hand.
“Good, probe it, check there's pressure on the other side. The rest of you, explore the near vicinity. Don't get lost. Meet back in fifteen minutes. Use the comm if you have to.”
The crowd began to pair up. I knew no one. Off they went, in twos and threes and I dawdled a moment and watched Dimitrova and the tech fiddling with the airlock.
Above was a long, apparently winding tunnel that no one seemed too interested in exploring.
Youth breeds a certain self-preservation instinct. It is understood on some primal level that one's whole life is ahead, and death or disfigurement now will result in decades of life unlived.
At my age another feeling sets in.
One knows life will be over soon, that the body will revert to little more than dust and a story. Then only a story. Then an old story. Then a nothing.
That tends to nip most fears in the bud.
Ageing is backwards. One begins in (sometimes) perfect health and with absolutely no idea what to use it for. The world is strange and its mechanisms are strange. Meaning is in short supply and distractions are everywhere.
Then one begins to learn who they actually are, noticing there are passions and proclivities buried down inside and can be teased out. There is a meaning after all and it swims leisurely into focus as the years wander past.
And finally when one knows what it is they are looking for in a lover, in a career, in a house or a book, the body is beginning to fail. The spine begins to ache. The legs seize up after too long sat down and seize up after too long standing. The mind is full of information now, but whatever strange search algorithm retrieves the information is as slow and geriatric as the mind it fetches information for.
I fear that on my last day, on my deathbed, that is when the meaning of things will enter the room and kiss my forehead and whisper into my ear what it was I should have done with my life, and how I should've conducted myself. Hell isn't a fire pit but a museum of regrets.
If I take the empire's gerontological drugs, I might find myself living well into my three-hundreds. That may sound grand, but unfortunately the empire chemists haven't cracked rejuvenation alongside anti-ageing. In other words, I will live on as an old man for another century.