In Heaven and Earth

by Amy Rae Durreson

  “Compassion and the entirety of human history? Poor bastards.”

  “Yeah. There’s Jibrail on Sirius, and Zaphkiel on Deneb. Binah was last seen on Alpha Centauri station a century ago, and everyone knew Vairya was here, but no one knew exactly where.”

  Angels indeed, thought Reuben, who had spent a year in protective custody with nothing to do but read and seek absolution. Fascinated and disturbed, he walked over to the bed and looked down at his rescued cybernetic angel with unease.

  As a child, Reuben had been taught to see the melding of flesh and skin as anathema. It had taken long years to overcome that prejudice, but now it held a strange fascination for him. He had always wondered what it would feel like to touch a cyborg’s skin, whether he would feel the shiver of cold electricity where a warm pulse should be, but over the years the revolted fascination he had felt as a boy had become something else, something that still made him ashamed. A truly open-minded man would not eroticise it, either, but simply accept that all sentient beings were human, regardless of their origin.

  This particular sentient being was pale skinned and golden haired, so rare in the descendants of Earth’s last survivors. Reuben held his own hand out, marvelling at the contrast between his own brown skin and the weird variation of the cyborg, flushed where his blood ran close to the skin and milk pale in other places. Pretty, Reuben thought, but strange. Had he been sent off from Old Earth unfinished, without proper pigmentation? His skin did not cover him completely, but in places vanished to reveal articulated plates of metal or throbbing pistons. His chest was half made, certainly, the underplates showing there and at his sides. How much of that was cold damage?

  He had a human-enough cock, pink, and curled up primly against his belly. Did it function for more than just urine disposal, Reuben wondered. He’d never actually spoken to a full cyborg. Those who knew his name refused to speak to him.

  The polluted must be redeemed, Ahrima’s voice whispered in his memory, and he shuddered and stepped back.

  “Any ideas on that brain scan?” he asked Eskil.

  “Memory damage, possibly. I’ve got a search going, but I’m going to have to wait for results from Sirius. We don’t have anything in the onboard manuals.”

  The patient sighed softly, his eyelashes flickering.

  “He’s rousing,” Reuben said. “Let’s see if he’s any more coherent here.”

  “I’ve got you on camera,” Eskil said.

  Not hugely reassured, Reuben went to the bed, softening his voice to say, “Vairya, you are safe. Wake up slowly, now.”

  Vairya opened his eyes, blinking slowly. His eyes were blue, too bright a colour to be human, but the little sigh he gave was all misery.

  “Hey there,” Reuben said. “You’re okay. I’m Dr Cooper, this is the Medical Explorer Juniper, and you are safe. If you can talk, say yes. If you can’t, blink.”

  Vairya just stared at him, his eyes wide.

  Memory damage, Eskil had said. Very carefully, Reuben asked, “Do you know who you are?”

  Vairya wet his lips, but didn’t speak, still staring at Reuben. He looked frightened.

  “What do you remember, Vairya?”

  “Remember,” Vairya echoed, and Reuben swallowed back a gasp. Vairya’s voice was surprisingly deep and husky.

  Probably, Reuben reminded himself firmly, because he’d been standing in an airless city for God knew how long. “Do you need water?” He turned away a little to reach for a cup.

  Vairya sat up fast, whipping his hand out to seize Reuben’s wrist. “Remember!” he said, his breath catching.

  “What do you remember?” Reuben asked, feeling his pulse beat against the strength of Vairya’s grip.

  Vairya gasped, shuddering hard, before he choked out, “It could happen again!”

  Chapter Two

  “WHAT could?” Reuben said. “What happened to the city?”

  “Again. It could… again. Again… againagainagain. It could happen— happen again. Happen.” He blinked, all the panic fading from his face as it went completely blank. He sank back a little, his grip softening. Then, with a jerk, he sat up and repeated, “It could happen again! Again. It could… again. Again… againagainagain. It could happen— happen—”

  “Sssh,” Reuben said, his heart clenching as Vairya gasped his way through exactly the same loop again. “Sounds like your memory needs some work. Eskil? Any luck identifying that damage?”

  “Getting the file open now. Come on you slow hunk of silicon, talk to Daddy.”

  “…could… again. Again… againagainagain. It could…”

  “Quickly, or I’m just going to sedate him again. He can’t communicate like this, and there’s no point letting him stay scared.” Reuben glanced at the wall, where flickering numbers showed that Vairya’s pulse rate was rising rapidly.

  “Got it! Short term memory, but nothing here about how to fix it, except— uh oh.”

  “What?”

  Eskil’s voice sounded small and hopeless. “Knock him out, Coop. If he doesn’t heal on his own, there’s only one way to fix him.”

  “How?” Reuben demanded, pressing Vairya back against the bed firmly and pressing the sedation icon on the wall, holding his hand there so it could check his fingerprint for verification. The bed hummed a little, vibrating at just the right speed to lull Vairya. Reuben unpeeled Vairya’s hand from his wrist and pressed it softly against the bedframe to receive the rest of the sedative.

  “Again…” Vairya sighed, his voice reproachful. “It… could…”

  “I know,” Reuben murmured back to him, “but I need you to sleep until we work out how to get you talking properly. Gently does it, now. Sleep safe.” A gentle tone would ease Vairya under faster now the sedative was taking effect, so Reuben kept saying soft things.

  Vairya blinked at him twice, those blue eyes going hazy, but then he sighed and slept again. Reuben waited for a moment, watching to make sure he was properly under, before he stepped away from the bed. “Well?”

  “He was made with nanotech,” Eskil said, sounding frightened. “Without it, we can’t fix him.”

  Reuben glanced at his pharmacy with a shudder, imagining that tiny gleaming jar behind its layers of locked force fields. “Shit.”

  Eskil was still panicking four hours later when they all sat in the cramped mess, waiting for Chanthavy to finish her ansible call to Sirius.

  “They can’t ask us to,” he was saying, drumming his fingernails against the peeling surface of the table. His hair was stirring around him like smoke, thick purple cables lifting off his shoulders with agitation, the sensor tips at the end of each dread flashing as they caught the light. “Only ten operations a year satisfy the emergency criteria—”

  “You’ve been trained for it,” Meili snapped. She had been pacing up and down the mess, too jittery to sit, and now she swung on Eskil, turning perfectly on her heel. “We all have, and they’ve issued us with the bots. There’s no rational reason to prevent their use.”

  “Fuck rationality,” Eskil said, his drumming getting faster and faster. “I don’t want to be remade. I don’t want those things inside me.”

  Reuben poured them all another cup of tea, adding a liberal spoonful of sugar to Meili’s. He passed it to her and then put Eskil’s down in front of him, before leaning back against the counter with his own. The room felt cramped with all of them in here at once, especially when Eskil’s hair was spreading.

  “Way I see it,” he said, “none of you are still human anyway. What difference does it make?”

  “I’m human!” Eskil protested furiously, his hair suddenly standing out on end.

  Meili turned to face Reuben, sneering as she focussed on him, her metallic eyes gleaming. “Didn’t you know, Esk? Cooper thinks we’re all worth less than his shit.”

  “Didn’t say that,” Reuben pointed out, sipping his tea. “You all jump to add to your bodies, all your cyber implants, but you’re scared of a few little robots inside
you? I don’t see the difference.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Meili said flatly.

  “It’s different, Coop,” Eskil said earnestly, leaning forwardly. “These things, they’re just enhancements. We could survive without them, if we had to—”

  Reuben remembered a man in a green robe, eyeless and stumbling, pressing his hands to the wall to find his way.

  “—but nano, that changes who you are. It remakes you.”

  Reuben shrugged and poured another cup of tea at the sound of Chanthavy’s steps in the hall.

  She took it with a nod of thanks and sank into her usual chair with a sigh. She looked old, the lines around her eyes deeper than they had been that morning, and her whole face sagging with sorrow and exhaustion.

  “They’ve dispatched a Fleet investigatory team,” she said. “We are to remain here until they arrive. Our first priority is to repair Vairya’s memory and get an account of what happened, but they would also like us to start identifying the dead.”

  “Did they have any suggestions how we’re supposed to fix him?” Eskil asked.

  She looked at her tea, cupping her hands around the chipped ceramic, and said softly, “They’ve issued a Section Thirty-Nine exemption.”

  Eskil drew his breath in so sharply that the sound hissed across the room. Meili’s tea sloshed over her hands, making her swear.

  Chanthavy did not look up. “I am captain, and I will not ask it of any of you. I will inject the nanites—”

  They all shouted over her. Even Reuben snapped, “No!”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Eskil said. “We’ll draw lots.”

  “It’s my duty,” Chanthavy began.

  “We need you as captain,” Meili said. “One of us should—”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Reuben hadn’t intended to volunteer until the words burst out of him, but it felt right. He lifted his chin and met their horrified gazes. “Let me. He’s my patient.”

  “I’m the tech expert,” Eskil said, every word reluctant.

  “Then we’ll need you monitoring both of us. Chanthavy needs to be captain, and Meili’s expertise is contagious disease, not the mind. Vairya’s memory needs to be repaired and, last I checked, I’m the only brain surgeon on this ship. I’ll do it.”

  Meili was staring at him, her brow furrowed in confusion. “I thought your body was too pure for technology?”

  Reuben put his teacup down, irritated enough that the click of its base against the counter cut across the room like a gunshot. “I betrayed Ahrima. What makes you keep assuming I shared her prejudices?”

  “Enough,” Chanthavy said wearily. “Reuben, you are in no way obliged to do this. I have already said as much to the Protectorate advisors.”

  “They suggested me?” Reuben asked sharply. So much for gratitude.

  Chanthavy’s lips narrowed, but she just repeated, “You are not obliged.”

  “I’m volunteering,” Reuben said, and looked at them all. Chanthavy had a husband and two grown children on Sirius platform. Meili was the youngest of six siblings. Eskil had two elderly and doting fathers, who sent him long messages once a week, every one packed with photographs and sly jokes. At least nobody would miss Reuben if the nanojuice turned him to diamond.

  It might even get him a hero’s obituary. What an irony that would be.

  “Let’s do it,” he said, striding out of the mess. “No point in waiting, is there?”

  It took all four of them to open the safe where the nano treatment was kept. Reuben was the one to take it out, though, closing his hand around the cool bottle. Suddenly, for the first time in years, he felt certainty rush through him. Here was a necessary thing, and he was the one made to do it.

  As a boy on Rigel platform, he had been taught to believe in providence. He had rebelled against the idea even then, knowing, as only the young can know, that he had the intelligence and willpower to change the world for the better. As far as his faith had survived into adulthood, it had been in the belief that God had given him the ability to save lives for a reason, and so he would wage war on sickness and injury with all his strength.

  Even that faith had long since failed him, but standing here now, with the stuff that had almost destroyed humanity shimmering in a vial in his palm, he felt suddenly close to God again.

  “You still don’t have to,” Eskil whispered. “Not yet. We’ve got time to let you think it through.”

  “‘If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come— the readiness is all,’” Reuben quoted. Eskil looked blank, so Reuben smiled at him ruefully and asked, “What do you do in hyperspace when the rest of us are reading?”

  “Fly the damn ship,” Eskil snapped back with a ghost of a smile.

  “Play games and watch vids like a normal person,” Meili said, rolling her eyes.

  Chanthavy smiled at him, though. He wasn’t much older than Meili and Eskil, but her smile was that of an elder to an elder. “You’re hardly the Hamlet sort, Cooper.”

  “Even Hamlet took action in the end, for all the good it did him,” Reuben said.

  Chanthavy glanced at the uncomprehending faces of the rest of the crew and offered him a wry smile. “Another time, perhaps. Only you will be able to effect changes in our patient, but we will all be taking shifts to monitor your life signs. You have ten days before any nanites still in your system self-destruct. They will reproduce and change function at your direction. If the attempt proves fruitless, inform us, and we will revive you.”

  “You won’t have any tools in there except what you visualise,” Eskil said, his hair twisting into knots. “On the other hand, the bots will respond to your every whim. You’ll need to set up a mental protocol to control—”

  “I did the simulation training too,” Reuben said.

  “Really?”

  Reuben rolled his eyes as he walked over to sit on the second bed that Meili had set up. He stripped off and shrugged on a robe before he settled back against the crinkling pillow. “Yes, Eskil, I am just as qualified to be here as the rest of you.”

  “Bet it didn’t take you as many attempts to pass the sim as it did Eskil,” Meili said, adjusting the bed settings. “Or me, for that matter.”

  “Mei and I met in the resit class,” Eskil said. “Hey, Juniper, what did Cooper score in NTSIM01? Was he as crap as the rest of us?”

  “Ninety-seven percent, Dr Levin.” The ship’s computer had a prim voice, despite Eskil’s many attempts to reprogram it.

  They all turned to stare at Reuben, who glared back. “What? They docked marks when I swore at the examiner. When did you hack into my records, Eskil?”

  “It’s a sign of affection,” Eskil tried, but he was still staring. Suddenly, he smiled. “Okay, then, I’m a little less worried. Good luck, Coop.”

  “Ready?” Chanthavy said, holding out her hand.

  He passed her the vial. “As I’ll ever be.”

  Eskil and Meili left, and Reuben tried to find the most comfortable position on the bed. He spread his legs a little and winced as the bed’s extensions telescoped up and probed their way into place. He didn’t want to wake up swimming in his own waste, but knowing that didn’t make the damn things any less cold and uncomfortable.

  Across from him, Chanthavy was administering the first dose of nano treatment to Vairya. Now she returned to him. The nanites were in sync with each other, Reuben knew from his training, allowing a doctor with matching nanites in his bloodstream to direct them through a patient’s body with only willpower.

  “I’ll send the activation pulse in five minutes. You should be safely under by then.”

  “Thank you.”

  She looked down on him, her brow creased with concern. “Reuben…”

  “I volunteered. I’m trained. I’m capable.” He liked Chanthavy, but she worried through things so slowly it made him impatient. She was honest, conscientious, humourless, and had been one of the few captains willin
g to accept his application. He respected her, but he wanted to act now, not get caught in her second thoughts.

  Conscience does make cowards of us all, he thought and jammed his hand against the sedative pad. “Count me down, captain.”

  “Breathe slowly,” she said, her hand warm on his shoulder. “Ten… nine… eight…”

  He felt the pinch of an injection as he drifted away, but by then the sedative was drifting through him, wrapping him in clouds, and he couldn’t bring himself to care what else was now working in his blood.

  For a long time, he hung in that misty place between waking and dreaming, perfectly at ease. It was quiet here, with no one demanding his attention or judging him with every frown. Here, he could rest.

  Dreamily, he willed the clouds away and imagined stars instead, the light-strewn sky over Rigel. He had loved the stars once, before he set his heart on medicine, and he could still trace and name every beloved constellation. He had never really expected that he would end up so far from home, exiled to the wandering stars, but he had dreamed of flying through the stars then, as some heroic adventurer seeking out and saving long-lost outposts of humanity.

  Well, he was doing that now, in a way. He hadn’t known as a child that most of those colonies, cut off when Old Earth died, would need rescuing from their own bodies more than dangerous aliens. Too many of the early colonies had struggled to adapt to alien soils, or to live on space platforms made out of gutted colony ships or hollowed out asteroids, like Caelestia. The strongest— Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Caelestia, and Deneb— had recovered first and joined together into a loose federation. Others had vanished, died of radiation, malnourishment, civil wars like Rigel’s, or any of the countless dangers that awaited humans in space. Even the stronger cities had needed a century to recover before they started sending out medical teams to locate and help the lost colonies.

  Slowly, as he gazed at imaginary stars, he began to notice streaks of silver across the sky, sparkling like meteors.

  Each one left a trail of shimmering light that slowly covered the sky in gleaming cobwebs. Reuben watched it quietly until it began to cover the stars. Then he reached up and grasped a handful of threads, willing the scene around him to change.