Empathic grief clutched my chest. I laid a hand on his shoulder. He leaned away, so I removed it.
“Cry if you need to,” I said. “It’s a physiologically normal response.”
And I wasn’t sure how somebody who wasn’t wearing a fox thought he could avoid it, anyway.
Something about my words seemed to startle him. He got another breath, and this one stayed caught behind his teeth. He let it out in a controlled fashion, shaped around words. “Some big strong guy I’d look.” A barked laugh followed. “It’s okay. I think I’ve got it.”
When you work in a multispecies hospital the size of a small moon, you get used to feeling like you’re missing much of the cultural context in any given conversation. Even with other humans: it’s a big galaxy, and we don’t all think alike.
I didn’t understand what was going on inside Master Chief Carlos’s head, but I was prepared to roll with it.
“Obviously some of us survived.” He waved his own grafted hand, and winced when he noticed it. “More or less. You said I was the first awake.”
“Yes.”
“Am I the only?”
“So far,” I said, having checked that it was true. “Biologist Cirocco Oni is undergoing treatments for cryoburn before awakening, and Specialist First Rank Jones should be awake in the next dia or so.”
There was no flicker of recognition in his face when I said either name—but with over ten thousand crewmates, I would not expect anyone to know them all personally.
“There are thirteen more of your crewmates at the hospital already, and more on the way.”
“Will all of them live?”
“It is”—I searched for the right word—“unlikely.”
“How many more will make it?”
“I can’t be sure.”
He stared at me. “How many more are being retrieved now?”
“I also can’t be sure of that.”
“God damn it to hell, Doc, why the hell are you bothering to talk to me if you’re not going to tell me anything?”
There was the toddler. I flinched, but he didn’t come at me. Just as well. In his current state he wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, and I would have felt bad hitting him. And my whole body would have hurt even more afterward than it usually did.
I sighed and said, “Your ship is an extremely long way away. Lightspeed communication—pulsed lasers, for example—lags significantly behind simple ship travel. They’ll be back here centuries before any direct message they could have sent.”
Bit by bit, I watched Master Chief Carlos relax against the pillow. I was confident that he was forcing himself to. I was impressed that he had the ability.
“Awkward for RSVPing to parties,” he said. “You might as well drop by with regrets.”
“Or they can find out you’re not coming after you’re dead.”
I must have gotten the deadpan right, because he laughed.
“So you have faster-than-light travel.”
“Not me personally… but yes. Or sneakier-than-light, anyway.”
“Warp drive.”
“More or less. I can get you some books on it if you want? There are virtual classes.” And nothing is more boring than sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the outside world spin.
His mouth twitched, as if he was about to say something important. Then he settled back and folded his arms. “I’d be very grateful.”
“There’s another thing,” I said. “We’ve been limiting the staff treating you so far. But the cryonics docs—the real specialists—well, I should warn you that they’re not human.”
I saw his lips soften as his jaw slackened, though it didn’t quite fall open. “Aliens?”
“We call them systers. Some of them look… very different.”
“Do they farm humans for meat?”
“No,” I said, categorically. “Most of them couldn’t digest us. Amino acids all wrong, sugars backward. You know how it goes.”
He laughed. “So you’re not a cryonics specialist?”
“I’m a rescue specialist.” I smiled. “I got you here. And turned you over to Dr. Tralgar and Dr. Rilriltok.”
“Those are some names.”
I laughed. “Wait until you meet the beings that belong to them.”
His smile was more like a flinch, and quickly faded. “So you can’t promise me anyone else will live.”
“Not in any honesty,” I said, as gently as I could. Dammit, I went into rescue so that I wouldn’t have to give people bad news. Everybody I deal with is supposed to be in the middle of a crisis, not weathering a series of emotional blows. I hate this part of the job. “The cryonics specialists feel that we can expect about one in three of your crewmates to survive.”
He breathed out, slowly. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He shook his head. “We knew it was a crazy risk—oh God! The influenza virus, there was some kind of superbug wiping out the ship, you might be exposed—”
“We’re all inoculated,” I said. “And we engineered an antiviral to support your immune system and administered it before we woke you up.”
“You’ve cured the flu.”
“We’ve cured a lot of things.” I squeezed my hand closed, the familiar ache of joints reminding me that we hadn’t cured everything. “Part of your ship’s core is here. And she’s very eager to meet you.”
“You rescued Central?” he said hopefully. Then he must have remembered what I told him about Central, because his mouth contracted with dismay.
“Helen,” I answered.
“Oh. That thing.”
Perhaps it stung because his response was so similar to what mine had been. And because I was beginning to appreciate Helen as a person, rather than an ill-considered toy. I was struck silent for a moment.
Carlos tugged the sheets up. “I hope you’re not going to judge us all by that joke.”
“Since the moment we made contact with her, she’s been absolutely dedicated to your well-being,” I mentioned. “And that of the rest of her crew.”
“Some of the guys thought it was amusing,” he said. “I didn’t—my wife told me how dehumanized it made her feel, and I was never comfortable around it, after.” He frowned deeply. “My wife…?”
“I know she’s not among the patients we’re currently working on. Helen might be able to guide us to her cryo unit, though, and we’ll prioritize retrieving her.”
His mouth twisted again.
I said, “You do know your AI is self-aware and self-willed, right?”
“Helen?” He shook his head. “It’s a peripheral. Central has a personality module, but the Helen bot is just a bot. It can talk, and carry out assigned tasks, and keep you awake through a swing shift… but that’s all.”
“Well,” I said, settling back in my chair. “You’ll be surprised to discover that some things have changed.…”
* * *
I had been wrong about Oni: there were complications treating her cryoburn, and her awakening was put off. So specialist Calliope Jones was the next to awaken, and I recalled that she was the historian. She was also the individual in the anomalous cryo pod, which made me hope she might be able to provide some answers about it.
Or maybe the Goodlaw was right, and she was a Freeport pirate hiding from justice amidst ten thousand identical corpsicle coffins.
It had to be kidding, right?
How do you tell if a mantoid the size of a Terran pony is kidding?
I checked in with Mercy to make sure he was still okay and open to receiving visitors. He was, as long as they were willing to come to him for a nice, in-person, air-gapped audio conversation. All of the remaining AIs had compartmentalized themselves, which meant that consulting them required intercom communication, or moving one’s self to the physical location of their storage media. As if visiting an oracle in a temple.
At the same time, I realized that Rilriltok and Tralgar had assumed that I would be available to mi
dwife the rebirth of every single member of Helen’s crew. That… was not going to work out long-term. Whatever I was doing for Helen, I wasn’t the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans.
And—I made a solemn promise to myself—I was not going to allow myself to be bullied into becoming the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans. Or even three-thousand-odd, if we managed to save thirty percent.
Still a lot of humans.
“Sally,” I said, while I was masking up to go in and visit Jones. We have transparent polymer filter masks for situations like this. Very effective, and they help the patients’ psychology enormously. Rilriltok thinks it’s very funny that humans find other humans with their breathing and eating holes covered ominous, but then its face has an immobile exoskeleton and it breathes through spiracles, so I’m not sure its opinion is broadly medically applicable.
I hear you, Sally answered, muffled by protocols.
“Do you have time to send a message to Starlight that Core General needs to hire a lot of stable, sensible, Terran-style volunteers to manage introduction to modern society for the Big Rock Candy Mountain survivors? Once we’re not under quarantine, that is.”
That’s an excellent point, Sally said. The next load of survivors can’t dock until the quarantine is lifted, anyway. In the meantime, I can send you Loese. She’s cluttering up the place without enough to do. She’s getting on my circuits.
I laughed. Loese, grounded, sounded like a shipmind’s worst nightmare. And from what I’d seen, she wasn’t taking the enforced downtime or the vague sense of personal responsibility well. “Send her to Tralgar.”
I will. How are you doing?
“Overworked,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about it. “And none of it is actually my job.”
I still had barely begun the assignment O’Mara and Starlight wanted me to work on. It was amazing how much stuff everybody had for me to do.
I opened the door and stepped into the isolation chamber. A woman with black hair and a medium complexion rendered grayish and chalky by cryoburn and fatigue looked up, blinking as if her eyes weren’t focusing exactly as she expected. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Dr. Jens.”
“Calliope Jones,” she answered. “I’m alive? I’m in a hospital?”
“The biggest hospital in the galaxy,” I agreed. “And you’re definitely alive, unless dead folks have skills I’m not aware of. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
She laughed, then flinched when her dry lips cracked.
“Here.” I poured a cup of water and stuck a straw in. “This might help with that dehydration.”
She sipped. Her lip left blood on the straw. She seemed to surprise herself with her own thirst, and finished the water.
“What do you remember?” I asked when she’d put the cup aside.
“Um,” she said. “A… drill? Flashing lights. An alert. People scrambling for… for escape pods? No, that can’t be right. We don’t have escape pods. There’s nowhere to escape to.” She looked around. “Except apparently there is. I was in a cryonics freezer, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
Ouch, I thought. What a way to live. Like being stuck on a single planet with no failsafes and no way off in case of catastrophe.
Except the generation ship was far more precarious and fragile even than a planet.
“There was a virus—”
“We know,” I said. “You’ve been treated and I’m immunized.”
“My ship? My crew?”
“Your ship and the shipmind—the angel, sorry, we use a different word—have suffered significant damage. What we’ve been able to recover of the shipmind is here, with the first group of evacuees—fourteen of you. One other has been successfully awakened so far: Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. Do you know him?”
She shook her head. “Everything is very fuzzy. I know the—the shipmind. Central?”
“Helen,” I said. “And what’s left of Central, I think. If I understand the outcome correctly, they both suffered damage and integrated out of self-preservation. Helen’s become self-aware; I understand she wasn’t before.”
“Helen!” She gave a big sigh of relief. “Well, that’s something to make me feel a little more grounded, I guess. How’s our command structure?”
“Right now, you don’t have one.”
“Oh. Captain and first mate? Officers?”
“The captain, we believe, perished. No other officers have been retrieved. We’re ferrying your crewmates here in groups, but it’s going to take a while, and there were no commissioned officers in the first group.”
“I’ve just realized,” she said incredulously, “that I cannot remember anyone’s name.”
“Anyone?”
“Any of my crewmates. My family. I must have a family?”
I sighed. She certainly seemed as if she came from a millennian ago. “Our scans show you’ve suffered some intracranial scarring. It may be impairing your cognition—”
“Brain damage?”
“Repairable damage,” I said. “The memory loss is probably permanent, I’m afraid, but we’ve already infused stem cells and growth medium, and you should be finding your cognition clearing up over the next few diar.”
“You can… patch up brain damage.” She snapped her fingers and winced when it made the infusion needle jump in her vein. I could have reached out and put my hand on her arm, but for some reason the thought made me feel shy, so I didn’t.
“We have doctors that do nothing else,” I said. “Which, I am afraid, brings me to another part of your orientation that you might find unsettling. Not all—or even most—of the staff here are human. The doctor who’s been working on your neurological injury is an oxygen-breathing, water-dwelling vertebrate from a planet whose name I need mechanical assistance to pronounce. She gets around in a big tank on wheels.”
“My neurologist is a dolphin?” Jones broke into a delighted grin. “I think I might like the future!” Then she sobered. “How far in the future are we, anyway?”
“That’s a complicated question,” I said. “We don’t know exactly when you went into suspension, or exactly how much subjective time you had spent traveling before then. There are relativistic effects to consider. And—”
“Twenty-four forty-seven,” she said, with confidence. Then she froze. “No, I… I can’t say that with any confidence. The date popped into my head, but I can’t put a context to it. It could just be a date. So your people—are you descendants of the other ships?” She sat forward in the bed, animated despite the effort it obviously cost her. “Can you get me a timeline, oh, and—”
“Wait, wait,” I said, laughing. “You don’t want to talk to me about those things. You want to talk to Mercy. He’s the hospital archinformist. His specialty is medical history, but—”
“I’ll take it!” she enthused, beaming.
I got a voice link to Mercy and turned them loose on each other. Jones’s avocation shone through in her conversation: she wanted dates, names, places, and root causes of everything. Mercy rapidly retrieved a pile of pull numbers to get her started requesting histories. He only had to explain how to request data once. I excused myself: it seemed like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and I would only have been in the way.
Jones smiled and waved as I was leaving, but that was all. I felt a tiny pang. Her enthusiasm was utterly adorable.
* * *
Tralgar was waiting when I stepped outside. I checked the time and realized I’d been with Jones so long that Rilriltok had gone to dinner and its rest shift. I asked how Cirocco Oni was.
Tralgar’s tentacles contracted into coils. There’s damage. It might be reversible. And… something in the pod’s program seems to be trying to prevent the rewarming sequence from taking hold. Possibly it’s the remains of the program the ship’s captain released when he was evacuating his crew to the pods.
I thought about Helen’s desire to get everybody into pods for their safety. I thought
about the machine.
I hadn’t told Carlos or Jones that they—and Oni, and the medic Call Reznik—were the only four of the fourteen crewmembers to survive rewarming to the point of needing the next medical interventions. Oni and Reznik were still touch-and-go.
I imagined the other graft clones had already been recycled. It took a significant amount of resources to keep them alive, blood pumping, lungs breathings, when they were intentionally grown with stunted brain structures.
It would have been in poor taste to congratulate Tralgar on the accuracy with which he and Rilriltok had estimated their chances of success in saving these patients. But right now, we were as close to that grim 30 percent mark as possible unless we started saving fractions of patients. Or unless Oni and Reznik died.
I had hoped they were being conservative. No matter how hard you try to stay uninvested and professional… people don’t go into medicine because their patients’ welfare is irrelevant to them.
“You’re going to want me to explain that to Helen, aren’t you?”
Maybe the tiredness in my voice and expression was strong enough to make it through the species and translation barrier. Maybe Tralgar had an appreciation for the exhausting nature of everything I had already done todia.
I will handle the communication. She will not wish to accept that Master Chief Carlos does not wish to speak with her.
“I know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll help that Jones is excited to. Pity Zhiruo isn’t able to run interference. Any word on Zhiruo yet? Or Linden?”
Starlight says Linden is communicating in outgoing packet bursts. They say she says the situation is difficult and unstable, requiring constant interventions. She has hopes that if she finds the right code sequences, she will be able to stabilize herself and commence repairs. Once that occurs, she should be able to resume normal functions. She says that will be soon. Whatever soon is.
I have heard no updates on Zhiruo, but I assume that once Linden has solved her virus she will be able to tackle its other instances. Unless Zhiruo manages to repair herself first, which is possible.
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