Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Nobody,” muttered Roic, “should die of old age at thirty-standard.” Certainly not such a blazing spirit as Taura’s had been.

  M’lord looked meditative. “If the Duronas’ or anybody else’s anti-aging research ever succeeds, I wonder if death at three hundred or five hundred will come to seem as outrageous?”

  “Or two thousand,” said Roic, trying to imagine it. Some few Betans and Cetagandans actually made it to almost two centuries, Roic had heard, but their healths had been genetically guaranteed before conception. For random folks alive and afoot already, not a help.

  “Not two thousand, probably,” said m’lord. “Some actuarially-minded wag once calculated that if all the medical causes of death were removed, the average person would still only make it to about eight hundred-standard before encountering some fatal accident. I suppose that means that some would slab themselves at eighteen and some at eighteen hundred, but it would still be the same game in the end. Just set to a new equilibrium.”

  “Makes you wonder about the Refusers.”

  “Indeed. If the God they posit waited billions of years for them to be born, a few hundred extra years till they die should hardly make a difference to Him.” M’lord stared off into some sort of twisty m’lord mind-space. “All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we’d never have been missed.”

  Since there didn’t seem an answer to this that didn’t make Roic’s head hurt trying to think about, he kept silent. They turned in past the sagging chain link gates of Madame Suze’s facility at last.

  It took many hours to bring Lisa Sato’s core temperature up from deep-cryonic to just below freezing. Miles sent Johannes back to the consulate, and, as the night wore on, took turn-about with Roic napping in a makeshift bunk in a room opposite Raven’s cobbled-together revival lab, set up on the third floor of the old patron intake building. Raven and Medtech Tanaka, too, took the night watch in shifts. Dawn of the new day brought the start of the critical procedures: the flushing of the old cryo-fluid, the swift replacement with what to Miles seemed vats of new synthetic blood. The skin of the supine figure on the procedure table went from clay gray to an encouraging warm ivory with the transfusion. The cryo-fluid gurgled away down the drain.

  If they’d had the time and equipment, not to mention a starter-sample from the patient, whole blood identical to the original’s could have been grown. The synthetic blood lacked the unique white cells the patient’s own body produced, so the revived person would have to be in isolation for an indeterminate time following, till her own marrow began to refill the immunity gaps. Miles had been kept asleep through that phase, Raven told him, but then, he’d had a lot more trauma, surgical and otherwise, to heal from. Ako had spent all last evening cleaning and readying the isolation booth.

  Raven was maddeningly vague about how soon his patient might be questioned, and made it clear that her children had priority as her first visitors. Miles didn’t argue with that; he couldn’t think of anything better to motivate the woman to fight her way to her full faculties.

  Miles was anxious to offer help, but as they approached the point of no return in the procedures, Raven sat him down at a distance on a stool with a face mask across his mouth. The memorystick around the edges molded to his skin in a flexible but efficient seal, and the electropores even filtered viruses. Still, Miles wasn’t entirely sure if it was only to block germs. So he bit his tongue rather than shrieking when Raven muttered, “Damn it… that’s not right.”

  “What’s not right?” Miles asked, as Raven and the medtech busied themselves about the table and didn’t answer.

  “There’s no electrical latency in the brain,” Raven said, just before Miles started to repeat his question, louder. “It should be coming up by now… Tanaka, let’s try a good old-fashioned shot of shock, here.”

  Lisa Sato’s head bore something resembling a swimming cap, studded with electronics and sensors, tight to the dark hair plastered flat with cryo-gel. Raven did something to his control screen, and the cap made a snapping noise that made Miles jump and almost topple off his stool. Raven scowled at his readouts. His gloved hand went out, almost unconsciously it seemed to Miles, to massage his patient’s limp hand.

  “Close that drain,” Raven said, abruptly and inexplicably, and the medtech hurried to comply. He stepped back a pace. “This isn’t working.”

  The bottom fell out of Miles’s stomach in a sickening lurch. “Raven, you can’t stop.” My God, we can’t afford to botch this one. Those poor kids are waiting for us to deliver their mother back to them. I promised…

  “Miles, I’ve done over seven thousand revivals. I don’t need to spend the next half hour jumping on this poor woman’s corpse to know she’s gone. Her brain is slush, on a micro-level.” Raven sighed and turned away from the table, peeling down his mask and drawing off his gloves. “I know a bad prep when I see one, and that was a bad prep. This wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could ever have done.” Raven was far too controlled a man to throw his gloves across the room and swear, but he hardly needed to; Miles could read his emotions in his set face, the more fierce for the sharp contrast with his usual easy-going cheer.

  “Murdered… do you think?”

  “Things can go wrong without someone intending them, you know. In fact, that’s the statistical norm. Though not around you, I suppose.”

  “But not, I think, in this case.”

  Raven’s lips flattened. “Yeah. I can do an autopsy, in a bit, here.” When he had recovered his tone of mind, presumably. “Find out exactly what kind of bad prep this was. There are a number of choices. I thought there was something odd about the viscosity of that return fluid…” He paused. “Let me rephrase that. I bloody insist on the autopsy. I want to know exactly how I was set up for this failure. Because I don’t like being set up like this.”

  “Amen,” growled Miles. He slipped off his chair, jerked down his mask, and approached the table with its mute burden. The blood pump was still keeping the skin hopefully flushed, deceptive promise. Absently, Raven reached out and switched it off. The silence hurt.

  How was he going to explain this to Jin and Mina? Because Miles knew that would have to be his next task. In his rush and his arrogance, he had taken away their hope… no, he’d only taken away their false hope. This ending was apparently inevitable, however and whenever it was arrived at, now or later, by his hand or another’s. The reflection didn’t console him much.

  I will get you justice… no. He wasn’t in a position to make any such pledges to them. And I will try sounded too weak, mere preamble to another adult put-off. But guilt fueled his rage against his—their—unknown enemy as nothing else could. How odd, how suspect. How futile.

  A sharp rap fell on the operating room door. Roic, awake again? He wasn’t going to greet the news of their fool’s errand with any joy, either. Miles stretched his back, grabbed his cane, walked to the door, and glanced through the narrow glass. And was immediately glad he hadn’t just yelled, Come in, Roic! Because standing outside was Consul Vorlynkin, looking harried, with Jin and Mina in tow, one tugging on each arm.

  Miles slipped through the door and stood with his back pressed to it. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to wait at the consulate till I called.” As if he couldn’t tell, by the way Vorlynkin was being pulled about. He supposed it was a good thing the children seemed to have lost all fear of the man, but it would be better if he hadn’t turned to putty in their hands. Yeah, like I should talk.

  “They insisted,” Vorlynkin explained, unnecessarily. “I told them she wouldn’t be awake till tomorrow—you told them how unappetizing you looked when you came out of cryo—but they still insisted. Even if they could only see her through the glass. I don’t think they slept all night. Woke me up thr
ee times… I thought maybe if they could just see, they’d settle down. Take naps later, something.” Vorlynkin’s voice slowed as he took in Miles’s grim stance. So he only mouthed, and did not voice, the words What’s wrong?

  Miles wasn’t ready for this now. Hell, he wasn’t ready for this ever. He’d had the unenviable task before of informing next-of-kin or the friends who stood in that place, but they’d always been adults. Never children, never so wide open and unarmored.

  Mina and Jin’s excitement was quelled, as they looked at him. Because if things had gone well, wouldn’t he be puffing it off already, taking the credit? There was no way to make this better, and only one way to make it over. He wanted to kneel, to grovel, but it seemed only right to look Jin in the eye. He took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Something went wrong with the cryorevi—no, with the cryoprep. There was nothing Raven-sensei could do. We tried… we think your mother died during her cryoprep eighteen months ago, or sometime soon after.”

  Jin and Mina stood still in shock. But not crying, not yet. They just stared at Miles. Stared and stared.

  “But we wanted to see her,” said Mina, in a thin little voice. “You said we would see her.”

  Jin’s voice was throaty, husky, entirely unlike himself. “You promised…”

  The trio had fallen apart from each other at the blow of this news. Quite spontaneously and uncharacteristically, Jin’s hand found Mina’s. Mina’s other hand wavered and gripped Vorlynkin’s again; he looked down at her in dismay. “Now?” he said. “Are you sure… ?” His hard gaze rose as if to nail Miles to the wall.

  “They have a right,” said Miles in reluctance. “Though I don’t know if an ugly memory is better than no memory. I just… don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” admitted Vorlynkin.

  Mina’s chin jutted out. “I want to see. I want to see her.”

  Jin gulped and nodded.

  “Wait a moment, then…” Miles slipped—fled—back through the door and said, “Raven, we have visitors. Next of kin. Can we, ah, tidy her up a bit?”

  Raven the supposed Jacksonian hard-ass looked deeply shaken at this news. “Oh gods, it’s not those poor kids? What are they doing here? Must they come in?”

  “They’ve a right,” Miles repeated, wondering why those words seemed to resonate in his mind. He ought to know, but these days he couldn’t blame every memory lapse on his own ten-year-old cryorevival.

  Raven, Tanaka and Miles hurried to get the silent figure decently draped, to remove the useless tangle of technology from about her, tubes and electrodes and the strange cap. Miles smoothed the short black hair back over the ears. Its slickness rendered the middle-aged female face sophisticated yet skull-like, and Miles wondered how the children’s mother had worn her hair. Weird little things like that could matter all out of proportion. A swift and useless tidying-up, this.

  Over, let it be over. Miles went to the door and held it wide.

  Jin and Mina and Vorlynkin filed through. The look Vorlynkin flicked at Miles in passing had very little love in it. Jin took the consul’s free hand as they came up to the tableside. Because who else was there left to hang onto, in this spinning hour?

  The children stared some more. Mina’s lips parted in bewilderment; Jin raised his eyes to Miles with a half-voiced Huh?

  Drawing back in something between outrage and scorn, Mina said, “But that’s not our mommy!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Miles just barely kept himself from blurting, idiotically, Are you sure? Neither set young face held the least doubt. “Then who,” he choked, wheeling to stare at Raven, at the draped figure on the table, “was it that we just…” Murdered was unfair, as well as inaccurate. And, he suspected, would also be deeply offensive to the upset cryorevival specialist. “That we just…” Fortunately, no one here seemed to expect him to fill in the blank.

  “Her numbers were right,” said Raven. “…Or anyway, her numbers were the ones you gave me.”

  So either Miles had grabbed the wrong drawer code from the cryo-storage data, which he knew very well he had not, or the numbers had been fudged somewhere upstream. By somebody. For some reason. Concealment? To protect Lisa Sato’s cryo-corpse from kidnapping by her supporters, or someone like the N.H.L.L.? Or by Miles—no, Miles didn’t think anyone on Kibou-daini could have imagined a nosy Barrayaran Imperial Auditor taking this interest. Or might it have been a genuine error? In which case—Miles pictured the millions of cryo-drawers in, under, or around Northbridge alone, and his heart sank. The thought that nobody might actually know where Lisa Sato had been stashed was too horrible to contemplate for more than an instant.

  Or—and the notion was so arresting, Miles caught his breath—someone else had been ahead of him, with the exact same idea. In which case… No. Before his inner visions could proliferate madly, he’d better fasten them down with at least a few facts. Physical ones, not all these trailing tenuous tentacled inductions.

  Miles took a deep breath, to slow his hammering heart. “All right. All right. We’ll start with what we can know. First is to ID that poor, um, patron. Make that a priority for your autopsy, Raven. I’ll go back to the consulate tight-room and—” Miles broke off as Vorlynkin cleared his throat, ominously.

  Vorlynkin nodded to Jin and Mina, clinging together in white-faced silence. Miles wasn’t sure whether to read their postures as fear, or anger, though at least they weren’t weeping. In either case, Vorlynkin was probably right—it wouldn’t do to discuss the gruesome details of an autopsy in front of them just now, even if the subject wasn’t their mother after all. Children, as Miles had reason to know, ranged naturally from deeply sensitive to remarkably bloody-minded; sometimes, confusingly, the same child at different times. Was dealing with women practice for dealing with children? It was likely just as well he didn’t have time to follow up that thought. With a sweep of his arms, Miles shepherded Vorlynkin and his charges back out into the corridor.

  “I’m so sorry about all this,” Miles repeated inanely. “I promise you”—damn, he really needed to cull that phrase from his vocabulary—“I’m still going to look for your mommy. The problem has just suddenly become a lot more interesting. Er, difficult. It’s just become a bit more difficult. I need more data, d—” Need more data, dammit, was an old mantra of his, almost comforting in its familiarity. Some setbacks were simply setbacks. Others were opportunities breaking down the door in disguise. He was reasoning ahead of his data—remember, data?—to imagine this was the second sort. Well, that was what experience could grant one—a high degree of certainty while making one’s mistakes…

  Mina said, “But what’s going to happen to us, now?”

  Jin added anxiously, “You’re not going to make us go back to Aunt Lorna and Uncle Hikaru, are you?”

  “No. Or at least, not yet. Consul Vorlynkin will take you back to the consulate for the moment, until we get somewhere with all this, or…”

  “Or?” Vorlynkin repeated, as Miles trailed off.

  “We’ll get somewhere.” I just don’t know where. “I’ll stay here for the clean-up, then join you all there later. When you get back, Vorlynkin, put Lieutenant Johannes on a preliminary data sweep-search for me. I want to try to find that Dr. Leiber, the one who was associated with Lisa Sato’s group here in Northbridge eighteen months ago.” Not much of a clue, but he had to go with what little was in hand. Miles wondered just how common that surname was on Kibou. Well, he’d find out shortly.

  Vorlynkin nodded, and herded the kids off. Jin looked around as if regretting his lost refuge. Mina reached up and took the consul’s hand, which made him twitch a little, possibly with guilt, but he manfully endured. This was clearly distressing for the children. Hell, it’s distressing for me.

  Roic, sleep-rumpled, stuck his head out the door of the improvised bunk room and squinted as the trio vanished around the corner. “I heard voices. What’s going on?”

  Miles brought him up to date
. His expression, when he learned that they’d just deftly snatched the wrong body, was all that Miles had pictured. Of, course, you had to have been around Roic for a while to read all the nuances of bland his face and posture could convey. Was there some sort of secret school for armsmen to learn this, or was it all apprenticeship? Armsman-commander Pym was a master, but Roic was catching up.

  “Y’know,” said Roic, as Pym would not have, because Pym would have had an exact bland to cover it, “if you’d quit while you were winning, right after Wing, we’d be on our way home right now.”

  “Well, I can’t quit now,” said Miles tartly.

  “I can see that, m’lord.” With a sigh, Roic followed him back into the lab.

  Raven had tidied up and was getting ready for his next task. Medtech Tanaka was laying out an array of rather disturbing instruments on a tray next to the cryorevival table. She looked up at their entry and asked, “Will we still get our free cryorevivals, then?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Miles automatically. “Rent, after all.” He was surprised she still trusted them for the task, but was vaguely heartened that she evidently agreed with Raven’s analysis. He did not add, And we might be back; he was growing more cautious. Belatedly.

  Raven tapped his fingers on the table and looked over the instruments. “Do you want me to send any samples out to a commercial lab for analysis, or try to set up something here?”

  “Which is faster, and which is better?”

  “If I wanted to do a good job here in-house, I’d need to bring some of my team from Escobar. This would likely take more time than sending samples out. Either risks drawing attention. Results ought to be the same.”

  “Hm. My instinct is to keep this close till we know what we’re dealing with. I’d say, go as far as you can on your own, and then we’ll take stock. My working hypothesis is that this was a deliberate substitution, sometime in the past eighteen months. If we knew who this woman was, where she came from, it might tell us something about who could have put her in Lisa Sato’s place.” Or not. “Makes a difference if she was just swapped out, or if she was actually frozen in place of Sato from the get-go, in which case…”