Knife Fight and Other Struggles

by Knife Fight

Neil patted her shoulder and blinked up Suki’s charts. The projection hung between them, reversed to Suki’s eyes so that the strings of numbers and charts were all but unreadable. But she could tell by the reassuring green of the status bars and the steady jags across the EKG window that there wasn’t anything serious to worry about. As if to reassure her even further, Neil called up quick views from the nanocameras in her aorta, at the base of her cerebellum, in the cilia of her lungs. All showed healthy tissue, every sign of business as usual for a by-the-books cryogenic revivification. Neil blinked, and the air between them was clear once more.

  “You’re doing great, Suki. Everything’s proceeding on schedule; we should have you up and around by tomorrow, Thursday at the latest.”

  Suki opened her mouth to try and speak. He shushed her with a finger on her lips.

  “No talk. We’ll have plenty of time for that later. Right now, I want you to collect your strength. We have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks.”

  Suki found that she could nod her head, ever so slightly, so she contented herself with that. Neil nodded back, leaned forward, and Suki lifted her chin, waiting for the life-giving warmth of his kiss.

  It didn’t come.

  “I have to go,” he whispered, his eyes strangely avoiding hers in their new proximity. “I can’t spend too much time here. I’ll—” Neil only pulled back a few inches, but it seemed to Suki like a gulf of a million miles had arisen between them “—I’ll talk to you about it later.”

  If Suki hadn’t known better, she would have thought that the temperature in the torus dropped by ten degrees then. Neil’s knees cracked as he stood up from the bedside.

  “Try and get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll be back to see how you’re doing in a few hours.”

  And then, with a thin smile that was a shadow of the smile that Suki knew, he was off. As Suki watched him climb the gentle slope of the torus floor, she felt her eyes brimming with slushy tears.

  What had just happened here? Where was the Neil Webley that Suki Shannahan had known and loved? Wasn’t love supposed to mean forever? Suki didn’t know how long forever was, but she had always assumed the word meant a time span longer than seventeen years!

  Suki felt a sob, the first sound she had uttered in those seventeen years, rise up in her throat. It came out as a horrible croak, the sound a frog might make—if that frog’s heart had just been sliced in two, on the cold steel dissection table of thwarted romance.

  By degree over the next six hours, the recovery rooms of Torus 3 filled up. From the manuals that Suki had committed to memory those seventeen years ago, she knew that these ghost-white forms who nested in complicated tangles of thick tubes and wires would count few if any colonists among their number. Phase One of the revivification would include only the crew, scientific teams and medical technicians absolutely essential to the task of preparing for the colonization drops. It would only be after the Gwendolyn was installed in orbit; the planet below thoroughly explored and charted; the livestock embryos grown and modified for survival in the new ecosystem; and the landers assembled, fuelled and tethered into their drop positions; only then that Phase Two, the truly monumental task of reviving more than three thousand colonists, would begin.

  In a way, Suki envied those colonists, sleeping in the long tunnel of freezers along the Gwendolyn’s core. They would wake up to a new world, made up like a brand new subdivision complete with high schools and strip malls and cineplexes, there waiting for them to begin their new lives. And in the meantime, they slept insulated from the hardships of construction, of exploration. From the simple heartbreak of waking. . . .

  “Well, well, well,” said a voice that was at once familiar and strangely unknowable. “Look who’s rejoined the living.”

  Suki looked up from the novel she’d been trying to start for the past hour, and almost instantly found she had to supress the urge to gloat.

  “Betty-Anne Tilley,” she said, as sweetly as she could manage. “Look at you.”

  After seventeen years, there was little left of the petite, strawberry blonde beauty that had taken Suki’s job away and thereby sentenced her to the freezers and the lowly status of a candy striper. Years in low gravity had lengthened Betty-Anne’s bones and drawn lines across her face that gave her a hard, spinsterish look. Although she was, like Suki, fully five years younger than Neil, this day standing beside Suki’s bed with her pharmaceutical pallet tucked under her arm, she seemed almost elderly. Betty-Anne smiled, and Suki was struck by how similar that smile was to the one Neil had given her before he had left her bedside—cool, professional, and more than a little heartless.

  “It’s been longer for me than it has for you,” said Betty-Anne, as though she were reading Suki’s mind. “You haven’t changed a bit—I guess the freezers really are the ultimate beauty sleep.”

  Betty-Anne laughed then, the way she always laughed after she made a joke, and in that instant the years fell away and Suki saw the girl that had been her best friend in the whole world, all through nursing academy. Suki felt a smile, a genuine smile this time, creep across her face.

  “It’s good to see you,” said Betty-Anne as the years ebbed back into her face. “Really, it’s been too long. You’re going to have a lot to catch up on.” The corners of her mouth turned up again in that same cruel parody of a smile she’d shown a moment before. “Particularly, I think, with our mutual friend Doctor Webley.”

  Mutual? What did she mean by that?

  “We’ve already spoken,” said Suki coolly.

  “Have you?” Betty-Anne regarded Suki speculatively. “Then you already know about the Arrangement? I must say, you’re taking it all rather well. You two had quite a thing going before we launched, didn’t you?”

  Now Suki was angry. She sat up in bed, and as she did, long knitting needles of pain and jealousy pierced through her nerves. She was about to ask the obvious questions—what Arrangement? With who? and its chillingly obvious follow-up, How could you steal the man I loved, Betty-Anne Tilley?—but Suki wasn’t about to give Betty-Anne the satisfaction. She set her bare feet down on the warm, carpeted curve of the recovery room floor and teetered to her feet.

  Betty-Anne reached out to take Suki’s arm. “Now, now, girl. Let’s crawl before we can walk.”

  Suki pulled away.

  “You crawl, I’ll walk,” she snapped, stalking off to the lockers where she knew she’d find a change of clothes. Before she stepped through the door, she turned back to see Betty-Anne standing in a shocked silence beside the empty bed.

  “And one more thing, Nurse Tilley!” she shouted across the curving floor of the torus. “My name’s Suki Shannahan! Don’t call me girl!”

  Arrangement? What in goodness’ name was this Arrangement that Neil had gotten himself involved in? Was he married? If so, then why didn’t Betty-Anne just call it that? Was he—Suki shuddered at the thought—living common-law? She supposed that living common-law was something of an Arrangement. But that didn’t seem right either, somehow. Everything was suddenly so confusing.

  No one had tried to stop her as she came out of the locker room, velcroing closed the last few tabs on her red-and-white candy-striper jumpsuit. Strictly speaking, there was no reason to; her revivification had been routine, and there was no medical reason for her to stay in bed any longer than she felt she needed to.

  Right now, the thing that Suki needed most was information.

  Each of the six tori along the length of the Gwendolyn were connected to the core via three equidistantly spaced tubes, and Suki rode the climbing chain up the centre of the C-tube. Occasionally, she rode past a porthole, and caught a glimpse of the long, gleaming core of the Gwendolyn. From her slowly rotating perspective, it was as though it were nothing more than a gigantic barbecue spit, slow-cooking over the distant flames of their new sun. The starship wasn’t much different today than it was before she’d gone to sleep—if it
weren’t for the red star’s peculiar light, they might have still been accelerating away from the Earth, barely past the beginning of their journey. At least, Suki reflected, the enormous wheels and gantries of the Gwendolyn remained a constant for her.

  And hopefully, the operating system they’d installed on the Gwendolyn’s holographic-memory computer net had remained a constant, too.

  Suki reached the top of the C-tube just as the hatch irised open and a pair of nurses she didn’t recognize guided a stretcher into a controlled descent on the tube’s opposite side. One of them, a balding Japanese man, nodded a greeting at her while his partner, a heavyset red-haired woman still wearing her surgical mask and HUD goggles bouncing in wide loops around her neck, hooked up the stretcher to a link in the down chain.

  “Just woke up?” the balding nurse inquired politely.

  “You could say that,” said Suki. Before he could say anything else, she pushed past him into the core of the starship. By the time the hatch irised shut, she had already strapped herself into the interface couch outside the cryosurgery theatre, and was tightening the headset.

  You could say that again, in fact, she said to herself as the bright, friendly colours of her personal interface came to life in front of her.

  “I’m just waking up now.”

  When she signed on with the company’s medical corps for deep-space work, Suki Shannahan had been offered a personalized interface as part of the package. And like many of her fellow volunteers, she had chosen an interface that would remind her of home: in her case, her family and their spacious estate home in the Richmond Hill Enclave. In those days, she had thought that such reminders would be a comfort in the coldness of space—now, she realized the decision was a mistake. The clean, white vestibule of the house on Fir-Spiralway, with the sounds of her brothers tussling upstairs and her mother on the phone in the kitchen and the TV in the living room replaying old CFL games as background noise were nearly perfect simulations, much more than reminders. But here and now, on board a strange starship orbiting a distant star, those memories were no comfort at all. Indeed, it was all she could do to hold back the tears and assign herself to the task at hand.

  “Mom,” she said aloud, and waited dutifully while the simulacrum of her mother went through the standard exclamation into the telephone:

  “Oh, look who’s come home for a visit! Sherry, I have to call you back—Suki’s here!”

  And from the living room, her father hit the mute button on the CFL commentary, and called over his shoulder, “How’s Daddy’s little girl!?” and, before she could even consider the question, flicked the volume back up to twice again as loud and turned back to the television.

  It really was just like home.

  “Tell me about the Arrangement, Mom,” said Suki.

  Her mother appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Sunlight streamed in behind her through the French door to their minuscule back yard, throwing her into silhouette.

  “The Arrangement,” said Suki’s mother. Her index finger went to her chin, as though she were contemplating how to explain something far too grown-up for her little Suki to understand. “Well, dear. The Arrangement was a plan that the medical crew of the Gwendolyn implemented amongst themselves on Day 689 following a 214-day review of crew family counselling records. The Arrangement has remained in force until this day.”

  “More,” said Suki. “Text.”

  “Well, dear. Come into the living room. I’ll have to show you the rest on television.”

  Suki followed her mother into the living room and sat down on the couch. Her father lifted the remote and switched the channel from the CFL to a screen that was filled, according to Suki’s request, with nothing more than text. At the top was the heading,

  HORMONAL SUPPRESSION THERAPY AND

  THE NORMALIZATION OF SEXUAL/AGGRESSION

  RESPONSES IN HIGHER PRIMATES

  and underneath that,

  HELEN ROCKHOLME,

  BSc MA

  and below that, more than thirty-three screens of densely packed dissertation and equations, appended with charts, tables, and a hypertext index that Suki didn’t even need.

  After cramming all those cryogenics manuals back on Luna, Nursing Chief Rockholme’s slim research paper was an absolute piece of cake. When she was finished, she took the remote from her father and used it to check on a few other things in the system, accessing the nano-surgery databank, before she switched the CFL game back on.

  “Would you like something to eat?” asked Suki’s mother.

  “No, thanks, Mom,” said Suki, giving her mother a perfunctory hug.

  “We always love you, dear,” said her mother.

  “Exit,” said Suki. Her voice was trembling, but it was clear enough for the interface—her mother and everything she came with vanished in a flash of phosphor.

  “Love me,” said Suki as she took the headset off and rolled off the interface couch. “I’m glad somebody still does.”

  She found Neil in his apartments in the residential torus. The ship’s engineers had done all they could to make the torus seem like an Earthly garden, but aside from planting shrubs and trees and vegetable plots every few metres, there was only so much they could do. It was still nice, Suki had to admit it—nicer than the recovery rooms, nicer than the core shafts, nicer than the cryosurgery theatres.

  But without someone to share it with, let’s face it, Suki thought. A shrub’s just something else in the path. Something else to trip over.

  Neil answered his door on the second chime. To Suki’s surprise, he didn’t seem particularly surprised to see her.

  “Come inside,” he said, ushering her into the narrow space that made up a second-class cryosurgeon’s living room. “You’re looking well.” He said it without looking at her, Suki noted bitterly.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked him.

  Neil just looked at her. Seeing him this third time caused her to revise her assessment of the effects of his aging once more. It wasn’t as though the years had made him stronger, or more assured, or better looking. They had only emptied him, she realized, made him simple and streamlined.

  “What are you talking about?” he finally said.

  “You know,” said Suki. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Neil sat down on the sofa, shrugged his confusion. He really didn’t get it, Suki saw. He really had no idea!

  “The Arrangement!” Suki was shouting, and she didn’t want to be shouting, but she couldn’t control herself. “I know about the Arrangement!”

  “Ah.”

  Neil folded his hands on his lap, and sat staring at them. Suki folded her arms across her chest, glaring across the tiny room at the man she had thought she had loved more than anything in the world. Finally, Neil looked up. His perfect blue eyes were rimmed with red, although his face otherwise betrayed no emotion.

  “Would you have rather that I’d married?” It came out as nearly a whisper.

  “That was the only other choice?”

  Neil tried to smile, but perhaps seeing Suki’s reaction, he abandoned the attempt.

  “That was the only other choice?” she said again. “Let Nurse Rockholme inject you with her nano-machines that you knew would shut you down for good, or go off and get married . . . to some . . . to some. . . .” Suki was so angry she could barely speak.

  “Some bimbo?” Neil finished it for her.

  “Your word,” said Suki. “But yes. That’s the general idea.”

  “Oh, Suki.” Neil stood up and stepped over to her. “You went to sleep so early. You have no idea how bad things got.”

  “I read the reports,” said Suki, stepping away from him. “I know what happened.”

  “You did.” Neil stepped back too, crossed his own arms. “Well, you know what happened. But you still don’t know how bad things got. Seventeen years—that’s how lo
ng we all had ahead of us. We’d all signed on to spend the prime of our lives in the dark, between the stars. Nothing to do but monitor the life signs of all those colonists. And when we had to, intervene. And I don’t have to tell you, Suki—when a body’s down to six degrees Celsius, there are precious few medical emergencies that can’t wait a day or a week or a month.”

  “So you got bored.”

  “More than bored,” said Neil. “Do you remember what I told you about space, back on the shuttle? About love?”

  “Like yesterday,” she answered wryly.

  “Well, I was wrong,” he said. “Love didn’t keep us together. Not when it went sour. It divided us, started feuds. Simon LeFauvre nearly died—”

  “The knife fight. I read about it.”

  “It was scalpels—not knives. And it would have gotten a lot worse—someone would have died—if we hadn’t nipped it all in the bud.”

  “With the help of Helen Rockholme’s research project.” Suki felt fingernails digging into her elbows. They were, she realized belatedly, her own. “What about us?” she demanded. “Didn’t you ever think about us? As something other than some kind of . . . of sickness?”

  His shoulders slumped, and Neil turned away at that.

  “It made us crazy,” he repeated. “You don’t know. You weren’t there.”

  Suki felt something in herself soften at that. What if she had been there, she wondered? Would she have fallen into the same morass of promiscuity and licentiousness that overtook the medical crew of the Gwendolyn over the first two years of its voyage? Would her love for Neil have grown pale, the way so many of the others had for one another, and finally transformed into something darker, something like hate? Would she have volunteered, like the rest of the crew, to take Nurse Rockholme’s little machines into her bloodstream, and shed that part of her forever?

  Suki’s love had been preserved, after all, a perfect flower pressed between the frozen pages of her hibernation. It had never thus far faced a true test.

  Until now, that is.