Machine

by Elizabeth Bear

  * * *

  They might not have been the biggest tree in the galaxy. But then again, they might. They were a Vnetheshallan, from Shhele, and hospital rumor claimed they had come to the Core as a mere seedling. Their people, as a race, were mobile and vaguely humanoid in appearance in their younger instars. As they aged and became ready to reproduce, they returned to their homeworld, where they put down roots—literally—and generated seeds and offspring. And wrote a lot of poetry, created what their species considered great art, and so on.

  All except for this one, who had put down roots right here. Or put up roots, or put in roots perhaps, because if you considered the direction of growth, their roots went toward the center of Core Gen and their leaves reached out, filtering light from all these endless stars to feed their hungry cells.

  They had grown through and into the superstructure of the hospital. In a real sense, their body was Core Gen. Or at least a significant chunk of Core Gen, ox sector. (Carbon diox sector, from its point of view.)

  Job security, I supposed.

  I was apprehensive going in, to be perfectly honest. I’d never had an easy conversation with the being most of us jokingly referred to as the Administree. Their nervous system was not centralized into anything we mammals would recognize as a brain, and their thought processes were not linear in a sense most humans would recognize, but ran in multiple parallel tracks at once. Talking to them always made me feel like I was having an argument with a ball of coked-out snakes.

  I mean, in a good way. But still.

  “Hello, Administrator Starlight,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”

  The tree’s name was not pronounceable, but it translated as Grows-in-Starlight, which was pretty and accurate. I knew that their fox would translate for them as mine translated for me. When they replied, their “voice” came through the senso clearly.

  [Doctor/Coordinator Jens,] said Starlight. [Can you explain your professional choices to us?]

  “You believe I made the wrong choice in staying on Big Rock Candy Mountain when Tsosie wanted to fall back?”

  [Perhaps. Do you?]

  “I’ve reviewed the ayatanas, mine and Tsosie’s. I can’t be certain, quite honestly. I believe I made a choice that worked out as well as any choice could have, under the circumstances.”

  [You don’t think that contact with atavistic humans was an unnecessary risk?]

  My species’s premodern behavior has left us with something of a reputation, I’m afraid. “I was wearing some vintage ayatanas—”

  [And their information didn’t convince you to leave?]

  They weren’t unrightminded humans, and Starlight knew it. They were calling my bluff.

  Starlight didn’t have eyes, per se. So I wasn’t quite sure how it was that I felt them studying me. Perhaps vast branches bent subliminally toward me as they focused their attention. Perhaps I was merely self-conscious as all get-out.

  “That’s not what you want me to defend, is it?”

  [You are capable of self-criticism,] they said. [That is good.]

  Well, if the military taught us anything, it was how to accept discipline and how to accept praise. Often at the same time.

  It was a skill that I saw coming in handy right now. I nodded to accept the compliment, if it was a compliment. You could never be sure. Starlight’s senso would translate the gesture for them as a form of human communication. Whether they understood me any better than I understood them—well, who could tell?

  After a few moments, as if to see if I would fill the silence, Starlight said, [You brought a weapon into this hospital.]

  Helen? Were they talking about Helen? The machine?

  I would presume they were. If I had misunderstood, we could backtrack. I had come to understand that Starlight’s seeming aggression and rapid-fire sequences of contextless questions weren’t intended to give offense. It was just… how Starlight communicated.

  I said, “Helen? A person. A patient. I brought a patient into a hospital. That’s what hospitals are for.”

  Starlight seemed not to notice my indignation. It’s hard to tell, when dealing with really alien systers, what they do or do not comprehend about any communication, even if it’s translated for them. And the frustration, naturally, flows both ways. It’s hard to translate experiences outside of context.

  The Administree said, [It’s a threat.]

  I still wasn’t sure if they were talking about Helen, but they hadn’t contradicted me. “So are a lot of things we handle here. The machine is a person in need of healing. Should I have turned her away?”

  [You also brought crew members of an unknown vessel, and a vessel that had met with an unknown accident, back with you.]

  “We can help them, too. And you—well, the hospital, the Synarche, anyway—sent me to get them.” I paused and thought. “You could have refused us docking privileges.”

  [We considered it.]

  Ouch. “It was a weird trip,” I said.

  [Be that as it may. She wants you as a care liaison.]

  “She… what?”

  [Helen wants you to be her liaison. Apparently she trusts you.]

  I did not have time to be anybody’s care liaison. One of the physical symptoms of panic to certain members of my species is a coppery taste, if you were wondering. “Is she ready to be released on her own recognizance?”

  [Dr. Zhiruo offered her an uncorrupted, air-gapped space within the Core General architecture in which to rebuild and update her personality modules under Dr. Zhiruo’s supervision and with her help. Dr. Zhiruo says she’s already more integrated. She’s going to bring in the hospital archinformist as well, to work with integrating the machine once Helen is stable. Messages will be going out to the other archinformists serving on I Rise From Ancestral Night at the site of the generation ship. So, no, she’s not ready to be released. But it’s Dr. Zhiruo’s professional opinion that it is safe to let her observe the care of her crew, and start integrating her into society.]

  “I’m not qualified to be a care liaison.”

  [Technically,] they said, with a pedantic tone that carried even across senso translation, [you’re extremely overqualified to be a care liaison. But the job should not be a problem for you. Which is good, because we are dealing with a dual first-contact situation. A form thereof, anyway. Helen’s encountered Terran humans before, but not the Synarche. And her crew, if any of them live, might as well be aliens.]

  “At least we can figure out how to speak their language.”

  [Your reports indicate that you already have studied their language and attempted speaking it to Helen when you met her. See?] Starlight rustled. [We are confident in your ability to do this job. We’re only formalizing a role you’ve already adopted.]

  “What is she going to do when Sally goes out again?”

  [Sally is under repair.]

  “That won’t last forever.” I felt like I was having the conversation I’d had with O’Mara all over again, and not in a good way. Going over their head was never going to work, anyway: hospital administration might disagree among themselves, but they knew how to present a unified front once a decision had been reached.

  Usually, I enjoyed the lack of politics. Usually, I enjoyed not reporting directly to the Administree, whose conversational style was, well, branching. Discursive. And I couldn’t always see how one topic hooked up with the previous one.

  Starlight rustled, [Right now, Dr. Jens, you are needed here.]

  I bit my lip and decided, for the time being, to save my ammunition. “I wanted to talk to you about this mission anyway. Something about this doesn’t add up.”

  [Elaborate?]

  “I’m worried about the coincidences,” I admitted. “I’m worried about the operations of three different shipminds, if we count up Sally and Helen and Afar, being affected, their memories—and in one case their consciousness—being damaged. I’m confused about the timeline, but it seems very strange that Sally’s memories would be sabotaged
before she encountered two other ships with damaged shipminds. While she was on her way to find them. Responding to their distress beacon, in fact.”

  [Yes,] the administrator agreed. [That is odd. I give you permission to enjoy exploring this question in your new role.]

  “You’re asking me to play detective?”

  [We understand that Master Chief O’Mara already has made such an investigative request of you. They believe you are suited to the task, and we trust their judgment.]

  They really were all conspiring against me. “I don’t want to lose my berth. I have no ambitions to be anything but what I am, Starlight.”

  [You’ll have your job. This is not a punishment, though you seem to think it is.]

  I sighed, and blew a straggling coil of hair out of my eyes. “It’s been a long dia.”

  [Get some rest,] Starlight said kindly.

  * * *

  And that was how, after a rest period that I was surprised to spend deeply asleep without any self-interventions (and without interruptions from other members of the hospital staff), I wound up playing secret agent/detective/tour guide to a sexy robot. If that sounds like the sort of punishment that would be handed out in a particularly surrealist purgatory, congratulations. You’re not wrong.

  And I wasn’t as familiar with a lot of the hospital as I should have been, because I hadn’t spent very long grounded since I first came to the hospital for training.

  Do they still say “grounded” when you’re on a spinning platform in space?

  I imagined that my grounding wouldn’t really sink in until the first time Sally, having completed repairs, left without me. Left with a different rescue specialist in place. Somebody, I knew, who might want to keep that berth when I was free to fly again.

  O’Mara had been very careful to withhold certain things from me. From what they’d said—and what they’d chosen not to say—it seemed likely Sally might be docked for longer than the dia or two it would take to get her back up to spec. But how much longer was the question.

  The hospital couldn’t afford to keep a resource as scarce as 50 percent of its ox-sector fast-rescue fleet locked away indefinitely when lives were at stake—unless the risk of sending her out outweighed any possible consequences. So O’Mara might stall for a little while, and keep Sally off the milk runs that a Judiciary ship or a more ordinary vessel could handle. But eventually lives would depend on speed, and Sally would go.

  And unless I had solved the crime and shepherded Helen through treatment, I would stay behind. Gnawing on my fingers behind closed doors and trying in public to compartmentalize and do my job.

  The Administree had said this duty wasn’t a punishment. They had told me I wasn’t being declawed and decommissioned. That suggested that they were telling the truth, and there was a return to my old job waiting at the end of this assignment.

  But it was hard to believe I wasn’t being punished when I knew very well that “my old job” was not even remotely the same as—or any guarantee of—my old berth. I enjoyed working with Sally and her crew. They were all good people and good at their jobs. I liked them. I trusted them. Even with Loese joining us so recently, we had become a team—a real machine. I didn’t even think I drove Tsosie to any more distraction than he drove me.

  And I dreaded going through the break-in and assimilation process with a new crew.

  When you live with people for months on end, the relationships come to mean a lot to you. Moving from one such berth to another is not dissimilar from getting a divorce from one family and moving immediately in with the next.

  One divorce was enough for this lifetime.

  And thinking about divorces wasn’t helping my emotional equilibrium any. I couldn’t dwell on the pain and confusion it caused me right now. So I needed to find something else to think about.

  And I couldn’t live in fear of a future that might not happen. Not during work hours, at least: I had to function. I had a job to do.

  Actually, I had two jobs to do. Maybe three. All of them full-time, and all of them conflicting with one another. What I could do that would help me with at least two of the tasks in front of me was download an ayatana from one of Core General’s engineers so I at least knew my way around as well as anybody, and do the busywork assigned to me. That might also help me get a pattern on the sabotage attempts: nothing like a bat’s-eye view for getting the lay of the land.

  Oh, for the love of little space fishes, another Void-spawned ayatana.

  At least I found one that belonged to a syster with a biology and taste buds that were pretty close to human, although the physiology was a miss.

  Back to thinking really hard about peeing.

  * * *

  I walked out of the Memory Department feeling like half my legs were missing and I was likely to tip over at any moment. I somewhat alleviated the sensation by trailing my fingertips along one wall and letting my exo handle holding me up, but every time I blinked I could feel the hospital spinning. To add insult to injury, I had been issued my new gravity belt, per O’Mara’s orders, and I couldn’t even risk using it because of my acquired dyspraxia.

  There was a lot of Core General to cover in the orientation tour I’d been asked to conduct. Since I had to narrow it down somehow, I collected Helen from her room and started her toward the cafeteria. Helen didn’t eat. But she might enjoy the social hub. And frankly I liked my groceries as much as any sentient I’ve ever known, and the hospital has better food on offer than the ambulance ship’s limited galley.

  Fortunately, the engineer in my head was an expansive, good-natured person with a possibly unhealthy fascination for strain tolerances, and I was perhaps a little tipsily ebullient as I brought my charge down to the third-tier ox caf a little before first-shift main meal. I decided to be kind and get on the intranet before we arrived so we could still have a good chance of getting a table in a corner, before the real flood began. I would have gone to get actual coffee, but the cafe that served it was most of the hospital away, the decontamination process on the way out took twenty minutes, and anyway the ayatana I was wearing made me feel vaguely nauseated when I even thought about it.

  Sigh.

  My gamble worked, and I reserved a four-top by a viewport, with the bustling space of the Core on one side and the bustling cafeteria on the other. We arrived, I left Helen to hold it down, and I went through the line.

  I scanned the metabolic codes and consulted the food preferences of my inner engineer. It’s a terrible idea to nauseate a simulated passenger who is using your body for its physical responses. Which is how I wound up with spaghetti and fruit salad with a healthy sprinkle of freeze-dried crickets.

  Simulated crickets, obviously. We’re not barbarians.

  We returned to Helen. I was a little surprised that she had cheerfully plunked herself down with her back to the room. I realized I had expected her to be stereotypically paranoid, like a character in a spy story. She seemed contented, though, and I started scarfing up my lunch as fast as I could ply my chopsticks.

  Helen picked up a pair of chopsticks as well, and began experimenting. It was interesting watching her practice with them. She was a fast learner, and got measurably better at it over the course of one meal, even when she was lifting squish-ripe mango, slippery as a liver, before putting it back in the bowl so I could eat it.

  Helen did not consume organics, obviously.

  “Any questions so far?” I asked, around a mouthful of spaghetti. My mother and my old CO would both be horrified by my table manners.

  Luckily they weren’t here.

  Helen turned her unsettling suggestion of a face to me. “Can I see my crew?”

  I swallowed quickly. “I should have made arrangements to take you there first. I’m sorry. Give me a moment.” I tapped into senso and filed a request to visit.

  * * *

  It was while my attention was turned inward that my old friend Dr. Rilriltok fluttered up, with the kind of timing that makes less sav
vy species accuse male Rashaqins of being telepathic.

  The cafeteria was in an inner portion of the wheel, so the force of its simulated gravity barely affected Rilriltok, and it could even fly on its dazzling, crystalline wings—without using the gravity belt to compensate. It did mean that those of us who were eating had to be gentle when we gestured with our utensils, lest we send a dollop of mashed potato or globroot floating into an unsuspecting colleague’s airspace. But there was enough spin to keep your orange juice in the glass. After twenty ans in and out of space, that was almost a luxury.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” I said to Helen as Rilriltok approached. “A giant bug is about to land on the table.”

  A moment later a giant bug landed on the table, wings buzzing to a gentle halt while their breeze stirred my hair. I balanced a cube of cricket-sprinkled melon between my chopsticks, shielding it from the wind with my other hand. Nobody wants surprise cricket in their air intakes.

  Helen was staring unabashedly. Can you stare without eyes? Anyway, her focus was locked on Rilriltok.

  She asked, “Is there any news of my crew?”

  Greetings, friend Jens, said Dr. Rilriltok. Greetings, Helen. One moment and I will acquaint you with the status of your crew. There has been no immediate change and there is no immediate danger I see that Dr. Jens has filed a visit request for you; may I assist you in preparing psychologically?

  “Do I require psychological preparation?” She was looking at me.

  “Hospital visits can be stressful,” I said, with as little irony as I could manage.

  Rilriltok set a tray in front of where it perched. As its head dipped forward, its large raptorial forearms craned up and out of the way. The blades were delicate-looking and translucent as fine porcelain, and as glitteringly sharp as a ceramic knife blade.

  The smaller manipulator arms began selecting pieces of what looked like raw sliced lobster, shell and all. I’d been known to eat the cooked version—they were synthetic land prawns—but I still averted my eyes as the crunching and squishing started.