Dirge

by Alan Dean Foster

  “I know; I know.” He made mollifying gestures. “You’ll be fully compensated for your sacrifice. And if the patient begins speaking rationally to others, you will be permitted to leave. On extended vacation, at hospital expense.”

  Her eyes widened. “‘Permitted’ to leave? What is this?” Looking past him, she focused on the man in the bed. The ordinary, now officially semicomatose man whose brief stirring had aroused an unexpected tidal wave of activity. “Who is this ‘Mr. Jones’ that you called Alwyn Mallory?”

  “You’re a good nurse, Tse. You don’t miss much.” Chimbu pushed his physician’s probe back from his forehead to the crest of his skull so that it pressed tightly against the receding hairline. “You know about Treetrunk?”

  She searched his face. He looked suddenly tired, weighed down by unexpected and unsought responsibility. “I’m not dead, so of course I know. What’s that to do with this Mallory person?”

  “If you’re going to attend him you have to know, so you might as well know now.” The hospital’s chief of staff was as serious as Tse had ever seen him. “He may be a survivor of the massacre.”

  Overwhelmed by the implication, for a long moment she had nothing to say. Finally she stammered, “There are no survivors of what happened on Treetrunk.”

  “You heard what the woman from the bureau said. He was found in a lifeboat on the planet’s inner moon, traumatized and speechless. He might be a refugee from a passing ship, or someone a disgruntled crew kicked out. Or…he might be a survivor of the catastrophe. The only survivor.” He peered deep into her startled eyes. “You understand now? Do you?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” As much as anyone could understand the impossible, she thought.

  “He wants you to stay. Or he might have meant something else when he whispered ‘Don’t’ to you. We don’t know yet. We don’t know anything. No one knows except him.” Turning, he gazed speculatively at the figure in the bed. “His reactiveness tonight might have been a one-time fluke. Or it might be the harbinger of future stirrings. We can’t take any chances with this man. He might be nothing important. Or he might be able to manage only another sentence or two. They might be sentences twenty billion humans are waiting to hear.” He took a step back from her.

  “Until we know what he meant when he said ‘Don’t’ to you, you are to stay with him. Continue with your usual duties. Bathe him, check his hydration and nutrients and medicine drip. Stay close.” His tone softened. “I know you’re not a statue, not a machine. You can use the room’s tridee. Whatever you want to make you as personally comfortable as possible will be sent in. The room monitors will remain on, recording twenty-four hours a day just as they have been for more than a month, so you don’t have to worry about missing something of significance. If one of his eyelids twitches, it will be noted and recorded.”

  “What—” She tried to gather herself, to make sense of everything that had happened in the past few frenetic minutes. “—what else should I do?”

  Reaching out to her, Chimbu gently squeezed her shoulder. “Be here. For him. If he wants to whisper, you listen. If he wants to converse, you talk.”

  She nodded. “Do you want me…Do you want me to ask him about Treetrunk?”

  The doctor considered. “No. The important thing right now is to encourage any progress in his condition. I’m still the Chief of Staff here, and I’ll shield you. From the government, from the military. So will my colleagues. If he speaks, let him talk about whatever he wants. If he improves enough, we’ll consider putting questions to him later. In the meantime his health is the most important thing. Don’t worry—if he lets something important or relevant slip, it will be recorded.” He released her shoulder.

  Around them, curative instrumentation and devices hummed and clicked softly. On the bed, a single figure lay unmoving. Tse and Chimbu contemplated it together.

  “Is there anything else, Doctor?”

  “Yes,” Chimbu murmured. “If the opportunity arises, be kind to him. He needs it.”

  12

  Having heard only one word in the course of one month, Tse did not expect tirades to spill from the mouth of the afflicted. But she was surprised when, upon awakening on the morning of the fourth day after being moved into the room, she sat up rubbing sleep from her eyes to find Alwyn Mallory staring at her.

  Nothing else had changed; nothing in the room had been disturbed, though she knew that down in Central doctors and other important people must by now be glued to viewscreens in response to the patient’s action. It must be demanding a tremendous effort on their part, she reflected as she turned and slid her legs off the inflatable bed, for them to stay out of the room.

  Not only was he staring at her, he had raised his head slightly to get a better look. Now it fell back, the inches it had inclined forward proving too much for the man’s weakened muscles to sustain.

  “Don’t stress yourself,” she heard herself saying to him. “I’ll come over there.” Aware that monitors were everywhere, including the bathroom, she simply slipped out of the sleeping gauze and into her uniform.

  By the time she sat down in the chair that had been placed by the right side of the bed, he had ignored her advice to remain still and had turned his head to face her. Then he smiled. So brightly unexpected was it, so warm and full of thanks, of the simple joy of being alive, that this time it was her own eye she found herself daubing at.

  “Well, that’s better.” It was all she could think of to say.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” His lips moved slowly, with careful deliberation, as if each syllable had to be constructed and approved by a separate portion of his brain before he attempted its actual verbalization.

  “You’re in Golman Memorial Hospital, South Pacific Region. I am your duty nurse, Irene Tse.”

  “I’d shake your hand, Irene, but you told me not to stress myself.” A different sort of smile this time, more calculating, reflective of looming uncertainties. “I don’t like taking orders, but you I think I’ll listen to. Not because I have to, but because it pleases me.” Defying her admonition, he raised his head again, holding it up longer this time. With each movement, each word, he seemed to grow stronger, not weaker. “You said ‘South Pacific Region.’ I’m on Earth?”

  As she glanced over at his readouts in what she hoped was an inconspicuous manner, she did not comment on the obvious. He looked around, inspecting the room.

  “How long have I been asleep?” His eyebrows tried to knot. “They must have knocked me out for the jump here.”

  “No one knocked you out. You traveled to Earth and arrived here in a cataleptic state.” Reflexively, she put a hand on his lower arm. “As of this morning, you’ve been here in hospital thirty-four days.”

  “Thirty-four…?” Leaning back against the pillow, he gazed pensively at the ceiling. “Not asleep. In coma.” She nodded gravely. “I didn’t wake up at all? I mean, if I did I don’t remember it, but it’s hard to think of being unconscious all that time. I don’t feel like I’ve been out for more than a day or two.”

  “The mind plays wonderful tricks on the body.” She smiled reassuringly. “Sometimes the body plays back.”

  She was acutely aware of the omnidirectional pickups that were judiciously placed around the room, of the fact that everything that was being said or done was being observed and recorded by a multitude of devices. It shamed her. Whatever he had gone through, this man deserved his privacy. It might never be given back to him, she knew. Issues of an order of magnitude greater than the personal desires of one man were at stake.

  “Who found me?” Though he had asked a question, it seemed to her that his thoughts were concentrated elsewhere. He had posed it almost absently.

  “I don’t know.” Before she could finish, her recorder vibrated gently against her. Removing it, she found information on the remotely activated page. “Some people called the Unop-Patha. A minor race about which not much is known except that they’re shy and inoffensive. They just happe
ned to be in the right place to pick up the signal from your ship.” A line of questions appeared on the screen immediately after this information. Consenting only to the first, she firmly tucked the recorder back in its holder. “I understand that the vessel they found you in was of an old, discontinued type and wasn’t in very good condition.”

  He laughed then, a good sign. It was followed by a spate of coughing that was not. Unable to raise his hand all the way to manage it, he let her slip the drinking tube between his lips. When she felt he’d had enough, she gently withdrew it from his mouth.

  “That’s enough for now. You’ve been on osmotics for a long time, and you don’t want to shock your system with too much real drink and food too soon.”

  “Yes I do,” he shot back. “I want to shock the hell out of it. I want tea, and coffee, and twenty-year-old bourbon. I want fish, and canned goods, and crispy vegetables, and cremated dead cow.”

  Her mouth was firm. “How about some applesauce?”

  “How about you—?” He broke off his rejoinder and inhaled deeply, slowly. “I can’t argue with you. I can’t argue with anybody right now. ‘Applesauce’!” Astonishingly, his expression grew mischievous. It was about the last thing she would have expected. “Will you feed it to me?”

  Mindful of their significant unseen audience, she kept her response coolly professional. “That is part of my job.”

  “Good! Then I will have some applesauce.”

  When he said nothing more, she hazarded a cautious prompt. “Don’t you want to talk some more?”

  Now he was grinning broadly. “Applesauce. Your idea.”

  Afterward he slept, ignorant of the frenzy of activity his awakening had galvanized within government and military circles. Indifferent to a flood of entreaties, she refused to wake him early or otherwise intrude on the peacefulness that seemed to have come over the rechristened Alwyn Mallory. True to his word, Dr. Chimbu and the rest of the medical team supervising the precious patient’s care backed her decision.

  Two more days passed in recovery for Mallory. Two days during which the inner workings of government lurched forward in a state of semiparalysis. Two days in which extraordinary efforts somehow succeeded in keeping an always ravenous media ignorant of the lone man in room fifty-four of the Golman Memorial Hospital on the island of New Ireland. The intentional isolation helped. Even in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century, New Ireland was not an easy place to visit.

  In those forty-eight hours Mallory went from barely being able to raise his head to being able to feed himself, from hesitating in the clouded search for words to talking voluminously. His apparent progress was underlain by the very real medical fear that he could lapse back into coma at any moment. Chimbu and others put their careers on the line by supporting nurse Tse’s determination not to pressure the man in their care for details or ask if he knew anything about what had happened on Treetrunk.

  Following lunch on the third day, her forbearance and the medical staff’s conviction were rewarded.

  “A couple of days ago, when I mentioned the kind of ship you’d been found in, you laughed at me.” She came toward the bed, having just dumped his lunch dishes and utensils in the room’s recycler.

  This time he only chuckled. “I remember. You said that it was old and not in very good condition. That’s hardly surprising.” When he was alert, like now, she found that his eyes had a wonderful twinkle. “It was an old lifeboat, freighter class. I got it cheap, since the masters of the cargo ship that left it behind on Treetrunk knew it would cost too much to renovate it to the point where it could pass a safety-board inspection again. Fixing it up, puttering around with its innards, was my hobby. Kept me busy whenever I started to think too much. I never expected it to actually fly anywhere again, much less offworld.” His gaze met hers. “Did you know that I was a member of the original survey team of the Chagos?”

  The name meant nothing to her, and she told him so. Down in Central, where hospital communications had been linked in half a dozen ways with centers of power all across the planet, technicians scrambled while several of their superiors digested the patient’s disclosure in stunned silence.

  To Mallory, however, the innocently ignorant Tse clearly required elaboration. “The Chagos was the starship that discovered and carried out the first surveys of Treetrunk. Since there was no reason for the people who brought me from there to here to presume that kind of personal connection, I guess no one made it. Also, I used to space under the name Alwyn Lleywynth.” He grinned. “Finally got tired of people not being able to spell or say it, and had it changed officially when I settled on Treetrunk.”

  “That’s interesting,” she told him, nodding. “I have a feeling that you’re right and that no one made the connection.” They would be making it now, she knew without a glance at any of the pickups. Making connections and trying to draw conclusions.

  “I was good at what I did. I’m also an accomplished bitcher, which didn’t endear me to many of my colleagues, I’m afraid. But in spite of my customary complaining, I liked Treetrunk. Liked it a lot. Enough to ask for my release and stay behind when the Chagos finally left. I helped build the place, worked on some of the first infrastructure for Weald and a lot of smaller towns. Always kept to myself as much as I could, though. I didn’t much care to be around people. It was one of the reasons I originally went into deep space. It was one of the reasons I chose a new world to be my home and final resting place.” His voice fell slightly. “That’s all changed now. When I get out of here I think I might like to settle down in New York, or Lala, or Joburg. I want people around me now. Lots of people. Swarms of ’em.”

  Without warning, he began to tremble, the covering sheet shivering above his torso like rapidly advancing bleached fog. The contrast between his strengthening voice and frail body could not have been more dramatic. When she started to rise, he lifted an arm to detain her.

  “I’m all right,” he whispered shakily. “I’m all right.” His expression pleaded. “Would you—I swear I’m not trying anything here—would you just, hold me? For a moment. Just…hold me.”

  Rising from her chair, she tentatively took a seat on the bed alongside him. Bending low, she put her arms around his shoulders. Immediately his head slid into the crook of her arm, like a bird finding its nest. Hesitant at first, she brought her legs up onto the bed and slid them carefully next to his. Then she lay down beside him.

  More than an hour had passed when she awoke, quietly surprised to discover that she had fallen asleep next to him. Around her the machines ticked and whispered. The room was unchanged. No one had disturbed them.

  Moving her head, she found that he was awake, staring at her, his eyes swallowing every inch of her as if she were a cool, invigorating potion, a silent libation for the soul. Uncertain and a little confused at what she was feeling, she sat up quickly on the side of the bed.

  “Relax. Take it easy,” he told her. Then he smiled afresh. “Hey, did you hear what I just said? Me, telling you to relax and take it easy. Want me to check your vitals?”

  She had to smile back. This man, who had obviously been through an experience too horrible to imagine, was irrepressible. She found herself liking him instead of pitying him. He sensed the shift in her attitude and was pleased.

  “So you became a citizen of Treetrunk.” She rested a hand on his upper arm, not entirely for therapeutic purposes this time.

  “Yes,” he told her. The smile faded away, and he began to shake again. In response to her look of alarm he willed his body to relax, forced the muscles to still. “It’s okay. I’m not going to scream again.”

  She blinked. “You remember screaming?”

  “I remember.” He nodded. “I just couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to stop it. It was so easy, to scream. It blotted everything out. A little.” He began to fidget beneath the sheet. “I’m sick of lying down. Help me sit up.”

  Immediately she reached for the bed’s remote. “I can raise you t
o any angle you—”

  “No, goddammit!” He was emphatic. “I want to sit up! Me, not the damn bed.”

  She assisted him, wondering as she did so what Dr. Chimbu would have to say about stressing the patient. But no one interrupted them, either in person or via communicator, and with her aid in a couple of minutes he was sitting up straight, his back propped against the pillows.

  “How do you feel?” Her concern was a mixture of professionalism and—something else. “Any nausea? That would be normal.”

  “Not for me it wouldn’t. A little dizzy, maybe. That’s all.” Looking past her, his gaze focused for the first time on the view through the room’s large window. From his location in a top-floor corner of the hospital he could see palm trees and ships in the harbor and the blue, blue water of a tropical sea. A flock of flying foxes was flapping from east to west over the harbor, a dark motile cloud scattered among towering white cumulus.

  Turning to her, he asked in a calm, quiet voice and without warning, “Would you like to know what happened to my adopted home? To Argus Five, also known as Treetrunk?”

  Down in Central, and in linked monitoring stations all across the globe, instant pandemonium ensued.

  13

  It was a good life. Mallory was happy with his decision to resign his position on the Chagos in order to become one of the first settlers of the new world. That choice would not make him rich, but perhaps his progeny, if he ever had any, would one day find it useful to be able to boast that their great-grandfather, or whatever, had been among the original surveyors and colonizers of Argus V.

  Despite his irascible, often contentious personality, he had no difficulty finding work. As a jack-of-all-trades on KK-drive craft like the Chagos and a retired ship’s engineer—and at a precocious age, at that—he was a master of many skills that were highly valued in the new colony. Disdaining seductive offers from the rapidly burgeoning municipality of Weald and the innumerable companies and concerns that specialized in abetting the development of new colonies, he set himself up as an independent consultant. Wealth did not flow in his direction, but he made a more than adequate living. In his ample free time he visited many of the beautiful and as yet unexplored regions of the temperate equatorial belt or enjoyed the home and shop whose construction he had supervised. Its isolation on an uninhabited mountainside deep within a choice patch of virgin alien woods gave him the freedom to tinker with the surplus freighter-class lifeboat he had purchased on a whim for an astonishingly modest sum.