Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  Buzz smiled slightly, shaking his head.

  ‘M&R,’ he said, LIA shorthand for Monitor and Record, a strictly hands-off observing operation.

  ‘And if we’re attacked?’ Mister knew better than to challenge a superior, but he was almost frantic.

  ‘If we are attacked,’ said Buzz, with a coldness which would have astonished those who only knew him as a cuddly grandfather-figure, ‘then we fight.’ He regarded the LIA agent with a dispassionate eye. ‘You did note that this is a warship, when you came aboard?’

  Mister flinched. Suddenly, he felt very small and quite stupid. He was so, so far out of his depth here… a mouse trying to survive in a whirlpool.

  ‘Sir,’ he said and was ashamed of his own cowardice.

  ‘Then brace up,’ said Buzz, deploying a term which had been used extensively in LIA training. When you found yourself weakening, perhaps having doubts about taking part in a hot interrogation, or even the justification of intruding into someone’s private life, you were to remind yourself of the duty you had to protect and serve the people of the League, doing whatever was necessary. And you were never, ever, to allow yourself to think that what you were doing was dirty. Brace up, be strong, stand tall as a valiant defender of the greater good.

  ‘Sir,’ said Mister and drew himself upright, taking a breath and feeling better. The voice was still there, muttering we are going to die out here, but he could tell it to shut up, now. He was an LIA operative, not a quivering wreck. Not a mouse drowning in a whirlpool. A wolf, circling in it, biding his time. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He couldn’t have claimed to have slept well, but getting up the next morning to find that they hadn’t been attacked by any kind of killer aliens made him feel that his fears of the night before had been rather foolish and he was able, at least, to eat some breakfast. There was even an alert look about him as he went around with Buzz – an improvement Alex didn’t fail to notice.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Alex said to Buzz, that night, after the exec had seen the LIA man back to his cabin. ‘I just have to ask – Buzz, what have you done to make him so cooperative?’

  Buzz looked at him with amused, warm brown eyes. He knew exactly how Alex would respond to being told that Buzz was lying through his teeth, deceiving the civilian and manipulating him with the skill of a puppet-master.

  ‘You are,’ he said, ‘too young to be told.’

  Alex stared at him for a moment and then cracked up laughing. There were some things, he recognised, that it was better to leave in Buzz’s hands.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Pleasure, dear boy,’ said Buzz and was already strolling to the door. ‘Try to get more sleep tonight, yes?’

  Alex did his best, but for once his Fleet training was letting him down. Usually, he could school himself into sleep whenever opportunity offered, but not right here. Mister would have been terrified to know that Alex was feeling pretty spooked at the moment, too. It was unnerving, knowing that Marfikian territory was surrounding and behind you, like creeping through a tunnel with sudden death on all sides and the only escape a narrow passage forward. And Alex, too, for all Simon’s assurances, was acutely aware of those nineteen frozen figures in sickbay and of the quiet, attentive figure of Shionolethe standing at her aunt’s bedside.

  Shion was there for three days, scarcely moving. She neither ate, nor drank, nor slept. Had it been anyone else, Simon would never even have allowed her to attempt it. Since he knew her physiology, he recognised that that, for her, was no more of a strain on her body than it would have been for a human to do the same for three hours. He had a mediband monitor on her too, of course. So he could see that her heartrate had slowed way down, even by her standards, and that she was in a state very much like deep meditation.

  Nobody disturbed her. Nobody called to ask if she was all right. Simon said she was and that was good enough. And Rangi said that she was not to be disturbed, that she was in what he called ‘reverie’ and should not be roused. He held his own meditations, chandra-circles, where he and like-minded members of the crew gave what spiritual support they could offer to Shion, Lady Ursele and her companions.

  And three days after they had picked her up, as the ship moved clear of Marfikian-enclosed space, Simon was able to start work on the patients.

  Fourteen

  Lady Ursele knew before she opened her eyes. The alien machinery was everywhere inside her. She could feel the cold hard brittleness of it inside her liver, the wires which looped inside her torso and the one which ran up through the back of her neck to the high pitched whine of the thing she could feel under her skull. There were hard, cruel things in her throat and her sinuses, making her want to gag. And there was something in her stomach, something which filled her with nausea and the bitter stench of bile.

  A shudder ran through her and she lay very still, fighting against the panic which made her want to scream and tear at her own flesh.

  ‘Remove it.’ Her voice was so faint, it was barely audible, the agony and anguish making it hard for her to breathe. ‘I choose death.’

  ‘In a week.’ It was her niece’s voice. It was Ariel, speaking to her very gently, with infinite compassion. ‘In a week, my grace, my most beloved grace. You must bear it till then.’

  It was what she had been told, what she had agreed, that the shock of the artificial immune system was immense and that she must endure that for a week before they would agree to take it out. But she had not known. Even her worst imaginings had not conjured this horror. It was unbearable. Death would be a mercy.

  ‘Ariel…’

  ‘I am here, my grace.’ A hand slipped softly under hers. ‘And you are attended.’

  A quiet murmuring of familiar voices… some of them were crying, she could hear that. But they were there.

  ‘They are well. All are well. Rest, my grace.’

  Lady Ursele allowed consciousness to slide away from her.

  It was four days before she was able to take any interest in her surroundings. In her brief periods of consciousness she was aware of her physical needs being attended to and aware, too, that Ariel was always with her, quietly at her side. But the revulsion of feeling her body so violated by that terrible machinery was so great she could not bear to open her eyes. Not until the fourth day, when she woke and found that she could breathe a little easier. Had they removed…? Ah, no. It was all still there. But not as painful, not as horribly immobilising.

  Lady Ursele opened her eyes.

  Ariel was there, sitting on the floor beside her bed, as she had when she was a girl. She looked very different with her geometric haircut and the strange clothing worn by the Fourth, but she was still Ariel. She looked weary, Lady Ursele saw. And her eyes were heavy with held-back tears.

  ‘Ariel…’ she murmured and Shion looked up, found her aunt looking at her and moved around at once to kneel, taking her hand.

  ‘It is a little more bearable, my grace?’

  ‘A little…’ Lady Ursele saw that her attendants were around her and looked at them. She saw the grief and anxiety with which they had been watching over her and she rallied herself, for their sake. ‘I will be well,’ she said and closed her eyes again.

  It might have been just minutes or hours later that she became aware that Ariel was crying – trying not to let her hear, but with the little catch in her breath Lady Ursele remembered from those times when little Ariel had come to unburden her childhood griefs.

  And, just as she had then, she reached out her hand, groping a little, found Shion’s hand and pulled, very gently.

  Shion slid up onto the bed beside her and snuggled close, burying her head against Lady Ursele’s shoulder and just staying there, like a child.

  By the following day, Lady Ursele was able to take stock of her surroundings. She was in the quarters Shion had prepared for her. They were tiny by her standards, but not altogether unpleasing. She had been prepared for worse, for the micro-space Shion had told
them she lived in as an officer. And she could see the care that had gone into this, every effort to make her comfortable.

  The attendants, too, were adapting to the quarters which had been provided for them, though rather alarmed by the technology. But they learned fast and they were all so focussed on Lady Ursele that they could, Shion thought, have been housed in a garbage tank and fed on scraps and they just would not have cared.

  On the sixth day after her awakening, Lady Ursele was able to sit up and the following day, got to her feet – unsteadily, dizzy with nausea and with support on all sides, but standing and taking some tottering steps. When it became too much, Shion picked her up easily and carried her through to the bathroom.

  Being bathed, her skin anointed, her hair dressed, the seventeen pieces of fabric of a chamlorn’s robe draped around her, all of that made her feel better, more normal. On the seventh day, she took some sips of sterile water. And on the eighth day, she ate. It was no more than a nibble of the blandest protein, but she managed to chew and to swallow and to keep the food down as she felt the machine in her stomach pumping anti-pathogens into digestive juices.

  ‘It is bearable, my grace?’ Shion’s eyes were anxious. It had been a week. If Lady Ursele still could not stand the implants, then they would have to accede to her wishes and remove them. How long she could survive in quarantine and survival suit… how long she would want to survive like that… was not something Shion wanted to think about. But she knew that her aunt would not choose to live like a laboratory specimen.

  ‘It is bearable.’ Lady Ursele said and though she could not smile yet, her eyes were warm. ‘I will be well.’

  It was another week before Shion reported that her aunt was moving comfortably about her quarters and resuming at least some of her daily routine. Bathing, dressing and preparing her for the day took between two and three hours, anyway, with an equally lengthy procedure late at night to get her ready for bed. It seemed hardly worth it, since in normal circumstances she would only be in bed for an hour before getting up to start the whole cycle all over again. Meals were taken mid-morning and mid evening, both of them at least two hours from start to finish, however little she was eating. In between times, to start with, she was resting, but it wasn’t long before she had Shion and her attendants giving her reports as she lay on the bed. And by the end of the week, she had got to the encounter room.

  She was not having visitors yet – wouldn’t be ready for that for some time – but she was taking an increasingly alert interest in her environment and situation. She had questions, both for Shion and for her attendants and none of them, as Shion reported, were about tech.

  ‘I’ve told you, her grace isn’t the slightest bit interested in technology,’ she said, when Eldovan asked if Lady Ursele had asked about the star-pool, yet. ‘There is no ‘yet’,’ Shion said, with a grin at the incomprehension in the faces around the briefing. ‘She isn’t going to ask, doesn’t want to know, could figure it out for herself if she wanted to but honestly, hard as it is for you to get your heads around, it is so completely unimportant to her that she wouldn’t see the point.’

  It was hard for them to get their heads around, so tech-oriented as they were themselves. Shion had told them that her people lived at a very simple level of technology, with nothing more sophisticated than the kind of hydrogen motors that League kids played with as toys. But this was not, as she had also tried to explain, because they were unable to develop any more advanced tech than that. On the contrary, they could have had more powerful tech than the League’s, easily, long before the League was even founded. The level of technology in their society was a choice, a deliberate choice to halt any further development on the basis that the technology they had provided all that was needed for a safe, clean, comfortable life.

  ‘The Solarans,’ Shion pointed out, ‘told us about your technology, anyway, long ago, when they started to visit. And her Serenity’s response, when told about starships and atomic power, was, ‘how awful’. You would get the same response from just about anyone on Pirrell. I was the only one interested in your tech and that made me so weird I had to leave. So don’t, please, don’t expect her grace to develop any kind of interest in how the star-pool or any other kind of tech works. The only thing that interests her, the only thing that ever has or ever will interest her, is the welfare of the people. Which, to start with, was making sure that her attendants were safe, comfortable and fulfilled. And now that she is assured of that she’s starting to learn about life for people on this ship – and that will always be, for her, in terms of how safe is it, how comfortable is it, how fulfilled are people here.’

  She had told them that before, explaining that the role of the chamlorn, beyond the ceremonial, was to ensure the safety, comfort and fulfilment of the people, by the decisions that they made on what was permitted. But it all sounded vague, to people accustomed to thinking of ‘government’ in terms of people who debated and decided at a far more active level. The chamlorn would not be asked to rule on everyday, practical decisions. These, the ayalee, the short-lived genome, made for themselves. The chamlorn’s was a guiding, moral voice, along the lines of, ‘it is needful to provide for the injured’ rather than ‘build a hospital here.’

  ‘So her questions,’ Shion said, ‘are focussed on first, how we keep people safe here when clearly just about everything in this environment is extremely dangerous. That’s why she’s asking about training, the rank system, the qualifications and responsibilities shown in insignia. Comfort, she wants to know that people are well housed, with pleasant food and proper hygiene. And fulfilment, she wants to know that people here have all the opportunities they should have for a happy, fulfilled life. And her concern in that, as I told you it would be before her grace even arrived, is the bar on intimate relationships.’

  That caused a ruffle at the table, though it was well mannered, the little protest was quite evident.

  ‘It is important,’ Shion insisted, against the almost silent but strongly defensive reaction. ‘To deny people love, the most natural and important aspect of a fulfilled life, that is as appalling to her as if we were keeping people chained up in isolation cells. Nobody denies love on Pirrell. When love happens it is embraced, celebrated. To reject love for yourself because you give your work or anything else a higher priority is so transgressive with us that we tell stories about it – the Man who said No is one of our core value stories. And the idea of trying to prevent two other people from celebrating their love is just so terrible that it’s the stuff of horror stories. Seriously, you know all those traditional tales you tell kids about kings who won’t let their princess daughters marry the scruffy stranger, who then turns out to be a prince in disguise? Pirrellothians would never, ever, let their kids hear anything so terrible. Even adults would be in tears. The cruelty, the tyranny, the monstrous horror of a parent trying to deny their child love… wow, that’s right up there with graphic cannibalism in terms of ‘disturbing content’.’ She grinned at Alex. ‘So you, doing that to your crew… that is really really hard for her grace to understand and to square with the assertion that you care for them as a parent.’

  Alex nodded, with a wry look. ‘Not an easy thing,’ he conceded, ‘even for us.’

  The discussion had unexpected repercussions. Later in the day, when Shion was leaving the quarantine zone while her aunt had her mid-evening meal, Ali Jezno came hurrying up. He had rather obviously been laying in wait for her, asking straight-off if he might have a word.

  ‘Thing is,’ he said, barely waiting for Shion’s assent, ‘I’ve heard there’s a story – the Man who said No.’ He looked at her hopefully. ‘If it is allowed,’ he asked, ‘may I have it?’

  Shion looked startled. ‘But I already…’ then she realised. ‘Sorry, Ali,’ she said. ‘We had that conversation before…’

  Ali grinned. He had long ago got past the frustration and awkwardness of running up against this, people who remembered shared experiences with hi
m which he did not. He had lost a lot of his memories in the injuries which had come so close to killing him that Rangi Tekawa had been ready to sign the death certificate. Simon’s radical surgery had saved his life. And the engramisation therapy he and Rangi had devised had given him some recall, too, as recordings of his life aboard ship had been played to him over and over and over again as his new, cloned brain cells were forming their neural network. He had filled in a lot of the gaps since, with professional re-training and just talking to people, but there were still a lot of times when people talked about things that he didn’t remember.

  ‘Reboot?’ He asked and he didn’t need to ask that hopefully, or as a favour. It was something he was entitled to as part of his long term rehabilitation. Shion nodded and smiled back.

  ‘Have to go to dinner, now,’ she observed. ‘Meet you at Donuts, after?’

  ‘Donuts it is,’ Ali said and as they parted, ‘Thanks, Elcom.’

  This was the usual shipboard address used by crew for Lt Commanders and it was evident that Ali thought nothing of it – Shion was an Elcom, just like any other officer of her rank.

  It was, Shion thought, very comforting, that. Just as it was to go into the wardroom for the familiar ritual of dinner. Here, as on all Fleet ships, the skipper would take the watch for this half hour and senior petty officers take over all the watchkeeping posts so that all of the officers could come together in the wardroom. It was the one time in the day when they met socially and that was a tradition even the radical Fourth had not overturned.

  Dinner in the wardroom was always either a semi or full formal occasion. Even if it wasn’t the full formality of a dress dinner, which they had at least once a week, you were not expected to sit down to it in the casual overalls of shipboard rig. So Shion called in to her cabin, showered and changed into the smarter groundside rig, with its mid-grey jacket and darker grey pants.