“That’s right.” Pirin looked at her, rather surprised.
“She does her homework,” Blackbear said proudly. Then he frowned, puzzled. “Something doesn’t make sense about this. How can we ‘see’ all these molecules, as if they just sit there? Don’t they vibrate constantly, in Brownian motion?”
“Of course, molecules are never stationary, just as their atoms are not red and blue balls. What you ‘see’ here is a time-averaged representation of their electron density.”
Everything was a “representation,” at this level; nothing was what it seemed. Blackbear stretched himself, feeling vaguely disoriented to be immersed so deep in the realm of the unseen and untouchable. He remembered the surgical ward of the clinic, where reality was as concrete as a swollen worm of an appendix for his fingers to find and remove.
Then he had an idea. “You know, now that I’m getting into this project, I’d like to research the heart syndromes some more.”
“I’ll give you some papers to read,” said Pirin.
“I’d like to interview patients, too.”
“We have every patient on file, from holo recording to molecular composition of all their bodily fluids.”
“Great; that will help when I interview them.”
Pirin looked at him oddly. “Excuse me?”
Blackbear hesitated. His command of Elysian was fairly good by now. “I mean, visit the patients—talk with them, examine them. That way I’ll get a real feel for the disease; I might find some lost connections.”
“Oh, I see.” Pirin shuddered. “I suppose you could. Perhaps the…Perhaps Tulle might arrange it. I’m not sure what good it would do. We’re working at the molecular level, after all. Excuse me, I have another experiment to attend to.”
Astonished, Blackbear watched the Elysian student depart, his talar hung precisely across his smooth unblemished back. At the Founders clinic, even the research specialists regularly toured their wards. But here, he had not seen a patient in months. For that matter, he had never seen a sick Elysian.
BY THE NEXT MORNING, EACH MUTANT EGG CELL HAD cleaved successfully into two identical cells. The twin speckled ovals hugged together, each with its nucleus like a crystalline marble floating inside. Blackbear watched, feeling a peculiar sense of beauty and shame, as if it might be a sacrilege to watch the work of the Goddess unfold under such a battery of instruments.
The next few cell divisions would each require most of a day to complete. They could not be “sped up,” as in the simulator, so there was nothing to do but wait for development to proceed over the next several months. By the third month, most serious defects would likely have appeared.
In three months Raincloud would be on Urulan—unless they called it off after this latest freighter attack. Blackbear shuddered. It did him no good to have so much time on his hands to think about things.
He needed to see patients. It had been such a relief to see the last of them, yet now he longed for someone to reassure with a kind word, or bring comfort with the right dosage. He needed to feel like a doctor again. He might not yet know enough to convince Pirin, but he could not escape the conviction that any approach from his lab had to connect somehow with actual patients.
From outside came Sunflower’s delighted peals of laughter. The toybox must have come up with something new to entertain him.
Something tugged at Blackbear’s trouser leg. Startled, he drew back from the egg in its nanoplastic womb and looked quickly down. He half expected Blueskywind, who loved to lie on her tummy and tug at anyone within reach. But of course the baby was off with Raincloud, helping negotiate with the Sharers.
It was Tulle’s capuchin trying to stick her nose beneath the hem of his trouser leg. The capuchin found his trousers a source of amusement; somehow she always seemed to think they must hide a treat somewhere, like one of Tulle’s pockets. Blackbear scooped the animal up and sat her on his hand, showing her the newly divided egg. “See there, little devil,” he told her. “What do you think? You once looked like that, too.”
The capuchin scampered down as Tulle entered the lab. “I hear all your eggs took,” said Tulle.
“So far,” Blackbear agreed. “We had to reinject the servos on one of them, but now they’ve all reached the two-cell stage.”
“Great start,” said Tulle. “If I were you, though, I’d try a couple of gene replacements, too. I know Pirin likes point mutations, but if the servos make one mistake, you waste months of development.”
“I see. Well, I’ll set one up then; I certainly need to learn that technique, too.”
“Pirin tells me you’d like to look at the disease in human patients.”
“Well,” he said guardedly, “I thought it might be useful.”
“It’s a very good idea,” she said. “We need to broaden our approach. The machines don’t know everything. I’ll make us an appointment at the Palace of Health.”
THE PALACE OF HEALTH WAS NOT IN HELICON. IT WAS located inside a large disk-shaped satellite that orbited the planet. The satellite’s rotation generated near-normal g-force at its outer rim. As Blackbear entered from the shuttlecraft, with Tulle and Pirin and the children, the first thing they did, of course, was to meditate at the butterfly garden. Blackbear left the children off at the garden with Doggie, with a holocube in Hawktalon’s hand and strict instructions to keep in contact with Dad.
Finding the entrance within the upcurving tunnel of the ring’s outer rim was a bit of a puzzle. Even Tulle seemed to have trouble locating a door with her groping hand. Pirin, who took his role as senior student very seriously, had dutifully come along but he hung back now, as if hoping Tulle might not find the door.
“May we enter please?” Tulle spoke at last, giving up.
The palest outline of a doorway appeared, just a glimmer of light tracing its arch. Above the portal a faint inscription appeared, in fancy Elysian letters similar to the inscription above Science Park. With some difficulty Blackbear made it out; not “Hope Abandons,” as he first thought, but “Hope Follows All Who Enter Here.”
From the top of the arch a furrow deepened and extended down to the threshold, as if the double doors were about to open. Then a servo voice spoke. “You are expected, Citizens, but one of you has no psychiatric exam on file.”
“He’s a foreigner,” said Tulle with a touch of irritation. “Foreigners don’t require the exam. They’re used to morbidity.”
A moment passed. “You are correct. Please report my defect to…”
The doors parted, folds of nanoplast wrinkling along their inner edge. An attendant came to meet them, a blank-faced servo built somewhat like a waiter, wearing white instead of black. “This way, please,” the attendant spoke in the soothing tones of a shuttlecraft. “The first patient on your list inhabits a chamber with oxygen-enriched atmosphere. You will remain outside; however, if physical examination is required, I can assist.”
The patient’s chamber was located at an “upper” level, an inner ring of the satellite where the artificial g-force was so low that the visitors had to use handholds to steady themselves. They found themselves looking down at a sizable chamber of glass, within which a woman sat upon a floating cushion. From her shoulders a train of swallowtails drifted around her in a haphazard spiral. Arlen Papilishon was the name Blackbear had memorized from her file. The lowered g-force in her chamber was intended to reduce the strain on her heart, which had atrophied despite repeated transplants.
“Good morning, doctors.” From a speaker somewhere, Arlen’s firm voice replaced that of the hospital. “I hear the highest reports of you,” she added, for Pirin had dutifully called up the generen of each patient; few of them seemed to have mates. She rose from her seat and floated slowly upward toward them. Her eyes blinked rapidly, as if a sudden light irritated them. She was very thin, but appeared otherwise healthy and alert, her skin as smooth as Blueskywind’s.
The hospital told her, “You will be asked to undress for examination.”
/> “Undress? Now there’s something I haven’t been asked in a long time,” said Arlen ironically, “not by a human, at any rate.”
“I’d like to ask a few questions first,” said Blackbear. He could already see the obvious: the distended neck veins, the shortness of breath, and other symptoms typical of cardiomyopathy. “I’m Doctor Windclan; my mate will hear the highest reports. We’re researchers, you know, trying to cure and prevent your type of heart disorder.”
“Oh, you’re Doctor Windclan. I’ve already heard all about you, from Kal Anaeashon. He visits me every week.”
At that, all his questions flew out of his head. Flustered, he turned over a page in his notes, trying to avoid the eyes of his colleagues. “Uh, could you tell me, first off, how’s your digestion?” He asked what she thought of her diet, whether she slept well, whether she had chest pains. Beside her a beverage cup and a holocube gradually descended. As the patient answered his questions, a jumble of figures from her file passed through his head: her pulse rate was high, her heart chambers were atrophied and misshapen, her blood contained abnormal cardiac enzymes, and several of the thirty-six different classes of white cells were low. Blackbear relaxed and felt quite the physician again, while Tulle and Pirin stood by listening.
“Is there anything at all that bothers you,” Blackbear asked the woman, “aside from your heart? Any aches, joint stiffness, anything?”
“I ache to get out of here.” Her eyes blinked rapidly again.
A rush of recollection came over him, for how many patients on the chronic ward at Founders would have said the same. He regarded her with warm sympathy. “What about your eyes?” he asked. “Any vision problems?”
“No, but I will have if they keep the light this bright forever. I don’t know why the light’s so bright in here.”
The hospital told Blackbear, “The patient exhibits certain delusions; see her file.”
“Well you could still check her eyes out,” Blackbear replied.
“It will be done, Doctor.”
“A pleasure meeting you, Doctor Windclan,” Arlen called out to him. “Do stop by again, one of these decades. Or send your great-grandson, someday.” For generations she could float there in that near-weightless balloon.
When the exam was completed, the attendant led them away toward the next patient, catching the handholds one by one. For a minute or so, the three researchers were silent. Blackbear recalled Kal’s offer, to take him to visit the “defective” Elysians.
“That Kal,” said Pirin scornfully. “How like him, to prefer the dead to the living.”
“But that patient’s not dead,” Blackbear exclaimed. “With all your transplantation technology, why can’t she be cured?”
Pirin looked offended. “Nothing’s perfect.”
“You saw her file,” Tulle reminded him. “She’s had half a dozen transplants. They all go bad. Some regulator response is messed up, something outside the heart that acts upon it. That’s just what you’re trying to work out.”
“Where do all these transplanted organs come from?” he wondered. “You don’t seem to have all the transit crashes that we do back home.”
At that, Pirin gave him a very odd look indeed. “The organs come from simbrid embryos, of course.”
He froze in his tracks. So Elysians grew up those near-human fetuses for more than medical research. Human enough to transplant, but not enough to be born as infants.
Tulle paused, looking back to him.
“I was just wondering,” Blackbear said, as he walked on more slowly, “whatever would happen if one of those simbrids happened to be ‘born.’”
“That couldn’t happen,” said Pirin. “Anyway, it would only produce an indecent sort of animal.”
“It might be intelligent.”
Pirin laughed. “Intelligence isn’t everything. Servos are intelligent.”
Tulle considered this. Beyond her, the blank-faced attendant was about to introduce the next patient. “Society needs limits,” she said quietly. “We make sure the simbrids aren’t born, for the same reason we cleanse our servos.”
Chapter 10
THE LOSS OF THE SECOND VALAN SHIP FILLED THE NEWS for over a week. Since no actual footage was available from this latest event, the news replayed old recordings of Imperial nuclear attacks on their provinces, in case anyone needed a reminder of Urulite savagery.
In a surprise appearance, Lord Zheron broadcast a speech across the Fold. Now elevated to the post of Imperial Grand Vizier, Zheron gave a remarkably frank account of the incident. “The Imperator had not the slightest intent to harm a single Valan barbarian on their stinking spy ship. Our regional commander of the Imperial Fleet was under orders only to follow the ship until it passed well beyond Imperial space territory. Unfortunately, a rogue ship of an enemy of the Imperium destroyed the Valan spy ship, intending to discredit His August Majesty the Imperator. The inhuman perpetrators of this treasonous deed will be eliminated! That is, brought to trial.”
Inside Verid’s office, the statement with its translation floated in bright letters above the table. Raincloud was pointing out the nuances. “An ‘enemy of the Imperium’ generally means a personal enemy of the Imperator,” she noted.
Lem nodded. “Not surprising, given all the claimants Rhaghlan had to eliminate. They must have hundreds of supporters still at large.”
The three of them reflected silently on the implications for stability of the new regime.
“Was it really a spy ship?” Lem asked.
Verid shrugged. “Any Valan ship passing so close to Urulite space probably carries a spy or two.”
“So what are the Valans going to do about it?”
“They’ve already demanded a session of the Fold Council to authorize a space blockade. This can be done by generating white holes at those jump stations essential for Urulite vessels to cross the Fold.”
Raincloud blinked. “But if Urulan is closed off, how will we be able to—”
Both Verid and Lem stared at her, hands raised. No one was to mention the Urulan trip, even in the security of Verid’s office.
“Of course it would make no practical difference,” Verid said loudly, “since no one in the Fold visits Urulan. Nonetheless, given our Elysian emphasis on the long-term view, we would prefer a more judicious response.” She waved a hand above the table, and the floating letters disappeared. “I think I’ll handle the Valan demands. A few minor Valan indiscretions might come to light; we save them for just such occasions. Now, about our friends at Kshiri-el. Any progress?”
With difficulty Raincloud shifted gears in her head. She had spent her last couple of days at Kshiri-el “negotiating” with Yshri, while studying Urulite documents all night; it was enough to make her head spin. “Mostly all Yshri wants to talk about is how people could lifeshape themselves for a new planet,” she summarized. “Then Ooruwen comes in and tells us it’s hopeless, and nothing but total abandonment of the project will do.” Ooruwen was just as capable of colorful language as Zheron. “I get the feeling there are as many opinions on this as there are Sharers.”
Verid grinned, and her shoulders shook as she chuckled. “I think you know our good sisters well. Still, it’s a shame that Leresha won’t come back to talk. She would have woven something together.”
Considering Leresha’s views, Raincloud thought that whatever she wove together would be unlikely to please the Elysians.
THE FOLD COUNCIL DECLINED TO BLOCK URULAN’S JUMP stations, but they called for monetary compensation. The figure demanded was high, and the vote passed by a large margin; only Elysium abstained, to the withering scorn of Valedon and other Fold members.
From Urulan, the demand met silence. Well deserved though it was, Raincloud suspected even a tenth that amount might be hard for the impoverished Imperium to come up with.
Over the next two months, Raincloud spent more and more of her Visiting Days inside the high-force satellite, training with Lem and Iras. With regular medic
al treatment, her muscles swelled to an alarming extent; her sleeves no longer fit, and she felt afraid to hug the children, lest she squeeze too hard.
“Enough of this,” she told Iras one day as they swung their arms before practice. “I know those Urulites grow biceps to rival Black Elbow, but any more will just block my movements.”
“I’ve noticed that.” Iras had grown her flesh a bit, too, although not so much as Lem, who had allowed his thighs and upper arms to expand until he looked almost gross. Raincloud suspected he still hoped to impress her sexually; if so, the result was just the opposite, for she liked men slim and modest. Despite his experience in martial arts, Lem seemed to have less of an inner understanding of rei-gi than Iras did.
“Let’s work on multiple attacks today,” said Raincloud. Even with her added muscle mass, an Urulite fighter could well outweigh her twice over, so the best she could do to simulate was to take on two at once. “We’ll start with an easy one. You both grab my arms from the front, aiming to pin me. I’ll respond with a hip pull, and you’ll both end up on your backs on the floor.”
Iras thought it over. “I see, a double ‘Falling Leaves.’”
Lem still looked skeptical, but the two of them stepped into position. Raincloud bent at the knees to lower her center of gravity and let her shoulders relax. This would take concentration; thank Goddess the two of them were good enough by now so that she no longer had to worry how they fell.
They sprang at her at once, each catching one of her forearms, which she had carefully turned down. She bent low, her hips moving back, while her arms swung theirs into alignment together. Then her torso thrust swiftly forward beneath the four arms; a pivot to the right propelled the arms back, still along their original path of momentum. The attackers’ bodies naturally followed their arms, rotating to fall on their backs on the mat. A resounding thud echoed through the practice room. Raincloud finished the move by twisting both their arms to the mat, taking care to keep them intertwined. The “leaves” had “fallen,” all right. For a moment there was silence, filled only by her heart pounding heavily inside.
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