Space, Inc

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Julian drops in to my link, synching in Stephe from Sharman to take over. Guiltily, I wonder if Nuria wasn’t right to get me to pass this off to Julian: He’s the better manager. Doubt lasts all of three seconds, then I boot up the software which will aid me in coupling expertise in the form of the telesurgeons within lag limit to need in the form of the cases pending, reserving myself for those cases that need my experience. The urgent request gets passed to the duty surgeon on IMS-2, and I get a chance to think I shouldn’t have had that cup of coffee, before Y’ pages me.

  Y’s patient on Desert Rose is unstable with a thoracic cavity full of blood, Y’s going to have to open the chest, and he’s having technical problems. His visuals are degrading, his imaging input is losing resolution, and even worse, beginning to stutter. Since he’s going to be working on breathing lungs and a beating heart, he needs the system to track the motion, stabilizing the images and synchronizing his instruments with the natural movement. I route his synch through my station temporarily and call on genie for a diagnostic. It turns out that Y’s OR suite contact-priorities haven’t been set high enough, and with the current state of emergency other links are poaching some of his bandwidth. Since only sysadmin, the genie-minders, get to meddle with those settings, I call them with a “fix, please, stat.”

  I’ve no sooner reclaimed my bandwidth when Stephe pages me, wanting help with the bypass setup in her patient with the badly damaged lungs; with a nervous glance at the waiting casualty list—three of whom could get into trouble very quickly—I synch with her to assist as she establishes the jugular lines and watch until the woman’s oxygen saturation and her blood pressure finally begin to come up. Then the genie pages me over to the other EMS, aboard a material research platform, where the duty-doc and paramedic are running a code on a patient who has just arrested with an arterial blood embolism. There is nothing else I can do for them: they know what they’re doing, they have the expert system support, they’ve given the recommended drugs, and they have the hyperbaric chamber ready.

  I freeze all links, giving myself a chance to breathe. When I pull my hands out of the gloves, sweat glitters in the creases of my palms. I check the other departments: The shuttle capsule has been retrieved and towed to Semmelweis, its original destination. Luther has issued another set of recommendations, this time for prophylactic treatments to begin immediately for all staff in all platforms with known penetration. That means turning over three of our bioreactors to the synthesis of his recommended mycostatins, and he has recommended that they be given by intramuscular bead implants, as well as aerosolized through the ventilation system; he’s going to be a popular man.

  His prediction is that prophylaxis should be ninety percent effective in preventing infection; and immediate identification and aggressive treatment of the actual diseases should produce around an eighty-five percent cure rate, even for the bad actors. He adds, comfortingly, that additional information from Earthside suggests a better-than-even probability that the abbreviated sterilization will have been effective even on the radiation-resistants, in the presently incalculable event that one of the impact fragments was carrying infectious material. I don’t bother asking genie to try the arithmetic to tell me the probability that one of us will die of fungal sepsis within the month.

  I review the operations in progress, the patients waiting, and unhook myself from the surgical station for a quick visit to the head. It’s a small triumph over circumstances that I actually make it there and back before Y’ pages me. His link’s stable, but the damage to his patient’s pulmonary veins is more extensive than the diagnostic imaging suggested; now he’s in there moving things around. I confer quickly with Julian, who accepts coordination of the surgical roster from me without even a literary quip, and drop into synch with Y’ and Desert Rose. Y’ has the Rose’s second paramedic suited and scrubbed to do fluid control and monitor the sterility of the field, while the duty anesthetist from ISM-2 is working anesthesia and life support, and an on-site technician is managing the mounting of transfusions and drags onto the operating assembly. It’s a brute of an operation. IMS-1’s communications system manager overloads and crashes, and the backup system comes up with the old settings, so Y’s bandwidth steal recurs and I have to take over clipping and gluing oozing vessels while he gets that corrected. Then Desert Rose starts having power problems, and while the engineers there are rejigging circuits to keep power going to the OR suite, we run out of SynthaHeme-M and have to go to an alternative blood substitute, and the patient’s blood pressure promptly bottoms out with an adverse reaction. But Y’ and I work as though our thoughts have synched as well, the anesthetist is sharp and solid, the patient is young, fit, and tough, and God, or whoever decides these things, toys with us all and then decides he doesn’t need another angel right now.

  One for our side.

  I check our status: Three ORs still going, two at quarantined platforms, one something that has nothing to do with the emergency—an incarcerated hernia. Julian looks like he has been squeezed through a fist-sized hole in the outer wall, very slowly. He gives me a precis: Final casualties, seven dead, including the patient with the arterial gas embolism, twelve injured, mostly decompression. The IBDD confirms the original estimates of radiation-resistance, so Luther’s numbers stand. Further analysis of the shuttle’s disintegration suggest that it really was a malfunction, enough by the sound of things to lead to heads rolling but not, we trust, to wars starting. The same analysis gives us some hope that the trajectory of the cargo carried it away from the platforms, toward Earth atmosphere—although there’s an understandable reluctance to disclose that reassuring tidbit Earthside, even though reentry would have charred it.

  Julian and I review the rota. Y’ has already worked nearly two full shifts; I have worked one, and none of the people who would ordinarily cover have overdosed on sleep. So we decide I’ll continue through this next shift, Y’ will pick up the two after that, and then we’ll be righted; I’ll just owe Y’. We’d switch, only Y’ has a partner among the environmental engineers; their shifts are coordinated.

  Julian orders me to find something to eat. I order him to do likewise. Besides, we’ve both been notified we’re due our first dose of antifungal prophylaxis. We make an appointment for the doctor’s lounge in ten.

  I’m almost out of the chair before the page comes in, so I throw it up on the flat-screen. Stephe, hair unraveling in long plaits, like a handsome Polynesian medusa. No preamble: “The World Court just announced their decision. The freehabbers get to keep their kids.”

  This is surely the last outcome I could have predicted, given the recent demonstration of the extraordinary dangers of our suspended lives.

  Stephe is saying, “There’s a strong recommendation that the kids be taken down on the normal three-month rotation, and they’re requiring medical monitoring—but the research that we’re doing on bone and muscle protection and the development of rotating platforms decided the judges. And we knew that three of them were pro-space, but it was a five-four decision.”

  “Some of that bone-protection research doesn’t stand up to critical review.” That’s not what I would have said; it is only the most accessible objection.

  “But there are quality trials in there as well, two random controlled trials in the last year. We’re finally getting the numbers to up here to get grade 1 evidence. We’ve been accepting being tied to Earth all those years, with that three-month down rotation, and families staying downside—” She blinks at me, eyes suddenly a lighter green, and starry. “Wow!” she says. “That’s going to change things.”

  “Stephe,” I say slowly, “your partner’s a physician. Did he pass the genotype tests?”

  “Yeah,” she breathes. “We knew that before we married. But we decided that one of us should stay down with the kids. The kids should pass, too. I wonder if the freehabs need a couple of doctors. I expect it’ll be a while before the commercial stations come to terms with kids in space.”
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br />   “You need sleep,” I tell her, quellingly.

  She laughs, hair flying. “I need to call Hikaru, before somebody wants me. Don’t say anything about this to anyone, will you?”

  “Cross my heart,” I say, more than a little bemused. And she leaves me to think of the twelve hours we have just lived through, the hours we are going to live through, waiting for any contamination to declare itself.

  If there’s news coming in, there must be bandwidth to spare. I settle back into the chair, fit the virtual array over my head again and request a channel to Earth.

  It’s the middle of the night, but Luis is not asleep. Nor is he alone: I can hear movement around him, in the common area of the clinic’s living caravan.

  Luis looks good, and that’s not only because I’ve been celibate too long. He has one of those faces that time only improves, since age reveals character. Though he was almost as light-skinned as Stephe when we met, Africa has darkened him, set squint-lines around his eyes, made him thoughtful in motion, careful of his energies. Like many of us, he’s a mongrel, born in a country that no longer exists, but unlike many of us, he has found his heart’s home. He was always the one I was closest to, my friend, my preferred lover; our intimacy at times made the others jealous. I’m not surprised at his greeting, “Helen, thank God. I’ve been trying to get through from this end. We heard the news—what’s been getting through the UA government filters. Are you all right?”

  Terence, unseen behind him, says, “Ask her if it was sabotage, like the EEN said.”

  A woman—Charmaine, probably—shushes him. Luis looks pained. This is certainly being monitored from my end, and probably from his, and Luis has always been cautious. Terence, on the other hand, thinks his radical credentials are imperiled if he’s not on some official shit list—and if the African governments are filtering the news, then quoting the Earth Ekumenical Network is a fine way to get there.

  “How should I know what anyone on Earth is saying?” I parry. “I’ve had my head in the hood for the past nine hours. I’m all right, Luis. We weren’t one of the platforms with decompression emergencies. Needless to say, I’ve been busy assisting the ones that did.” That I judge safe to say. I will leave off mention of the contamination, lest that is not to be public knowledge where they are. “How is it with you?”

  “We wanted to thank you for that last cash transfer.”

  I flutter my hands. They look puffy and dry, with red pressure marks from hours in the gloves. His will be long, thin, weathered—I corral my vagrant thoughts. “You know I believe in the work, Luis, and it’s no hardship for me.”

  After the pan-American War, support to the African restoration was cut, including support to our mobile clinic. With the cynicism of young, bruised idealists, we decided that those of us who could would find the highest salaried jobs until we had banked enough for five years’ self-sufficiency. I was the only one who qualified for space.

  For my first three-month downtime, I joined Luis and Charmaine on the edge of the Sahara. After nine months in the confined, regulated, precarious environment of the space habs, I was utterly disoriented, starting at any shift of light, any change in the wind. I fainted when I stood up; I developed sunstroke; I had constant diarrhea, infectious and nonfectious. Luis was alarmed; Charmaine, contemptuous.

  By the end of my third year, the others had reunited in the field, working in the Ganges delta. I was better at managing my readaptation, but Terence and I argued constantly. I saw how to expand our practice beyond the mobile clinic, using one or more telesurgery stations, but that would have required negotiation with local and regional governments, obtaining access to bandwidth and infrastructure—trusting and buying in; to Terrence, a deal with the devil.

  One more year, I told us all. One more year, to give us more of a cash reserve, and then we’ll work it all out. Three months into that year there was an opening for a surgeon on IMS-1; I was invited to apply. And we all confronted how much I wanted that post, how much more satisfying I found the mastery of skills and technology required of this work, than the enervating struggle with Earth’s chronic afflictions.

  Charmaine demanded a divorce; Terence called me a traitor; Michel withdrew. Luis alone gave me his blessing, and for him, alone, I would have stayed.

  Luis is saying, “We were able to license some recombinants producing the proprietary antiparasitics, the ones effective against the super Plasmodium. Maybe now things have settled down politically, the WHO will get permission to release their new mosquito sterilization vector.”

  I smile, despite myself. I’m sitting in a space platform under IBDD quarantine, after a decomissioning shuttle disintegrated in orbit. Half the world’s media is yelling screwup and the other half conspiracy; the IBDD has canceled all its inspections until further notice and three countries have issued statements declaring they’ve decided to review IBDD participation in their own decommissioning operations. But things are quiet in Africa.

  After that long, slow moment of lag—well beyond operating distance—he returns my smile. “Any chance I could talk you into coming out into the field again, next time you’re down? We should still be here; we’ve got some excellent colleagues, including some I’m sure you’ll have heard about, in telesurgery.”

  “Luis … let me think. That’s not an evasion, I do need to think.”

  He nods. “You should go. I don’t want you spending all your salary on expensive calls—”

  “When you’ve expensive drugs to spend it on. I’ll send you a vmail. Look after yourselves. All of you. Stay safe.”

  His smile is sweetly ironic, and fades just as one hand be gins to reach out to me, as I, deceived by the virtual image of him, reach out in turn, into the unseen space beyond the virtual image. The surgery interface re-forms around me, a series of windows on the two ORs still running, the biosensor outputs from recovering patients, a reminder from Julian about our appointment in the doctor’s lounge, from Luther about the need to start antifungal prophylaxis, from the research coordinator about the necessity of registering our optouts if we object to the medical information gained from our exposure (putative exposure) and prophylaxis being distributed to the scientific community…

  Five facets of the icosahedral doctor’s lounge look up, or down, if you will, on Earth. It’s dark now, though if we turned off all our lighting, we could see the civilizations of Earth sprinkled across the landmasses. Only the seas of Earth are dark. And the space above.

  Y’ slouches beneath the window, rumpled and squinting. Even without the contrast, Nuria would look graceful, even in the knees-up astronaut tuck. Julian hangs beside her, tethered by one arm to a strut, sucking on a coffee-sac. The dayshift duty-docs orbit them gently, as though they are convalescents and their recovery, precarious.

  Julian lifts an eyebrow to me. “And how was your night?”

  * * *

  Alison Sinclair is the author of Legacies, Blueheart, Cavalcade (nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award) and Throne Price (with Lynda Jane Williams). She has lived in Colchester (England), Edinburgh, Victoria (BC), Hamilton, Boston, Leeds (England), Calgary, and Ottawa. She has done basic and medical research. In 1999 she graduated from the University of Calgary with an MD and now works in Victoria as a medical writer. When not working or writing she sings, swims, dabbles in computers, and fantasizes about being perfectly organized. Her Web site is at http://www.sff.net/people/asinclair/.

  I KNEW A GUY ONCE

  by Tanya Huff

  WANTED: SERVERS, CLEANUP CREWS

  Temporary and permanent staffers needed for station recreation facilities. Apply in person to the Quartermaster’s Office. On-the-job training provided. Minimum wage. Shift negotiable, but failure to appear for scheduled work will result in immediate dismissal.

  Applicants must show proof of station residence or have a valid employee number.

  ALTHOUGH there were only two people in the passenger compartment of the supply shuttle, the cramped quarters had the
m practically in each other’s laps. The company had no intention of wasting shipping space on privacy; nearly every square millimeter of the four-by-eight-meter compartment they weren’t actually occupying had been filled with labeled containers.

  As the shuttle left Io, they were a study in contrasts.

  The young man, his environmental suit still so new it crinkled softly when he moved, gripped his helmet tightly in both gloved hands. He wore his dark hair at the Company’s regulation length, but it looked to have been styled rather than cut. His face was tanned with high spots of color on both cheeks, and he was trying too hard to appear unafraid.

  The older woman’s short gray hair seemed to have been hacked off during a power shortage, when lights, as unessential, were the first thing to be shut down. Her skin had the almost translucent paleness of someone who’d spent her entire life protecting it from high UV, and her environmental suit was so old it had digital readouts in the cuff. As soon as the main engines cut off, she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

  Tried to go to sleep.

  “They say that this last bit from Io to the station isn’t as dangerous as it used to be.”

  She opened her eyes and turned her head enough to see him smiling at her, his teeth very white, his lips pulled back just a little too far. “They’re right,” she said at last.