Zenn Scarlett

by Christian Schoon

  Otha scowled.

  “Zenn, does that really make sense?”

  “Yes! If people thought the animals were dangerous and they wanted to make it look like we… I mean, what if Graad Dokes was doing it?”

  “Dokes?”

  “Or Ren Jakstra. He was just out here. And they both hate our animals and…”

  Otha put a hand up.

  “Zenn, stop. There’s no indication anyone’s sabotaging our animals. And accusing Graad and Ren…” He heaved an exasperated sigh. “Listen to me now. I know the pressure on a novice at end of term. And you’ve made some mistakes lately. But we all make mistakes. Sometimes it’s hard to own up and take responsibility. But inventing fantasies…”

  “These aren’t fantasies, Otha.” Zenn said, feeling she’d made a serious error thinking he’d understand.

  “As I was saying, inventing fantasies to excuse your mistakes is no way to be, girl.” The worry clouding his face was actually worse than if he’d been angry. “You hear what I’m telling you?”

  Once again, she’d opened her mouth too soon, with no evidence. She wasn’t going to convince him. All she could do was nod, avoid his gaze… and seethe inside.

  “Good. Enough said.” He seemed to relax a bit, sipped at his coffee. “I shouldn’t have to stress what a dangerous situation that was, Zenn. There’s no margin for error with creatures that size. When you said you were ready for the in-soma test, I had to take you at your word. But you can’t let your concentration falter. Do that, and you’ll end up thinking about yourself, about your fear.”

  He set his mug down and leaned on a chair back with both hands.

  “Whenever you’re treating a patient, it’s only about one thing: that patient,” he said. “It’s about what you need to do, at that moment, to help that animal. It’s about exercising simple, common sense while you do it. You keep yourself safe, you keep the animal safe, no exceptions.” He looked at her to make sure she was hearing him. She nodded again. “If your thinking isn’t one hundred percent on task…”

  Her stomach churned with self-reproach – at her impatience to prove herself, at her over-confidence, most of all at the tone in her uncle’s voice.

  “Will she be alright?” she asked.

  “The beast is fine. I dropped an antibiotic plug into the hole in her snoot. Mucous membranes are a little inflamed, but no permanent harm. And Ren will heal. Probably make more of a fuss than the sloo while he’s at it.” He regarded her for a moment. “How’s that arm?”

  “Fine. A little sore.”

  He nodded, went to the stove and refilled his chicory coffee from the pot before walking to the door. “So. Third test coming up. You’ll do better, won’t you.” He wasn’t asking.

  “I’ll do better.” She counterfeited a smile, and tried hard to believe that with this last statement, at least, she’d told him the truth. “Um…” she hesitated, then decided to risk the question: “Any chance of a hint about that?” She’d convincingly failed the first two tests. A perfect score on the final challenge was her only hope; a distant, unlikely, pathetic hope. But, at this point, she had nothing to lose.

  “You know that’s against the rules, Zenn.” The look he gave her before stepping through the doorway told her, yes, she’d made yet another mistake. She was beginning to get used to that look.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The sun was just dipping below the canyon wall when Zenn arrived at the maintenance garage where the in-soma pod was kept. The valley was deep in shadow, except where shafts of late afternoon sun cut through clefts in the cliff, producing dusty shafts of ruby light angling down to the valley floor.

  She was intent on going over the in-soma procedures one more time. She lay down in the pod, but got up again almost immediately. It was no use. She couldn’t concentrate. Yesterday’s dismal test kept playing over and over in her mind. Could Ren really have been responsible? Sure, he was a towner, he thought like a towner. He had it in for the cloister. But he’d been hurt, and the animal that did it was her patient. He could’ve been killed. What if it was her fault? All of it? This idea terrified her even more than the other possibilities. But the fact was, both Ren and Graad had potential motives. She refused to trust Otha on this, refused to accept his dismissal of her suspicions.

  Her failure with the sloo brought thoughts of her father to mind. She wouldn’t be sending a victorious shard to him on the next starship after all. And then there was Ren’s comment about Warra being “in over his head” on Enchara. What was that all about? She needed to try talking to her uncle again.

  En route to find Otha, she encountered Hamish on the south side of the calefactory hall. He was pulling a hay wagon piled high with a loose mountain of bedding straw.

  “Novice Zenn, good evening,” he said, dropping the wagon tongue and pausing, claw-digit raised in greeting.

  “Hamish, have you seen Otha?”

  “The director-abbot is at work in the infirmary surgical room. I assisted him in bringing the long-neck leaf-chewer life form to be cured of its ailment. I did not wish to see the medical cutting involved. I elected to bring this sleeping straw to the slaughter-creature Rasputin instead. The director-abbot has entrusted me with the lock-combination to open the caging door. I have never done this, but he tells me it is not difficult.” Hamish brandished a slip of yellow paper in one claw. He didn’t sound especially thrilled. But apparently tending to Rasputin was better than watching Otha operate. Maybe Hamish, like most humans she knew, had an aversion to the sight of blood.

  “Would you like some company?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very much,” he answered quickly. “Your companionship is welcome.”

  She’d be going in that direction to reach the infirmary anyway. And she had other reasons for wanting to walk with the sexton.

  “So, Hamish,” she said as he lifted the wagon tongue and leaned ahead, tugging the wagon into motion. “Did you happen to notice Ren Jakstra anywhere around the cloister yesterday, in the morning, maybe? Down by the treatment pools?”

  “The constable person? No, novice Zenn. I did not.”

  “You didn’t… smell him?”

  “I detected no novel odors.”

  A possible defect in her latest theory.

  “What about Graad Dokes?”

  “No. I did not sniff up his smell or hear sounds of him within the cloister.”

  “But you might’ve missed the signs, right? I mean, you could’ve been out of range, or not paying attention.”

  “There is an amount of truth to this. The wind velocity yesterday was greater than average. This may have made it difficult for me to detect an unusual presence.”

  Zenn considered this new information. The fact Hamish hadn’t noticed anything unusual wasn’t helpful, but it didn’t rule anyone out.

  Hamish turned his head toward her as they walked. “You are thinking over your concept of who is interfering with the cloister animals, are you not?”

  “Yes, and I’m not really getting anywhere. At least as far as turning up any evidence.”

  “What if this lack of evidence indicates lack of the thing that would leave evidence?”

  “Oh?” She stopped, and he brought the wagon to a halt. “So, you think I’m just inventing fantasies, too? That all this is just a wild goose chase?”

  “Are there untamed water fowl loose in the grounds?”

  “No, no, that’s just a saying. It means you think I’m imagining things. Which is pretty much what Otha thinks.”

  “So, you have spoken of your theory to the director-abbot? And he remains skeptical in the matter?”

  “Yes, very skeptical. And he’ll stay that way until I come up with something to convince him.”

  Zenn started out, and the coleopt again forced the wagon into motion. “Hamish,” she said after they turned onto the path leading to the infirmary. “I want you to do me a favor. When you’re on patrol in the cloister grounds, like at night, if you do sense something strange, so
meone in the compound who shouldn’t be here, I want you to come and tell me. Not Otha or Hild.”

  “I should not alert the director-abbot? Should he not be informed of such an event?”

  “You know how Otha is when you wake him up for no reason,” she said, feeling a momentary tug of conscience as she formulated her argument.

  “He dislikes this. His voice becomes loud and insistent that this must not occur.”

  “Yes. But if you come to me, I can decide whether to tell Otha or not. So you won’t have to worry about making him mad. Alright?”

  Hamish’s antennae did a brief dance above his head as he reflected.

  “Yes… if you wish this. I will come to you first with news of strangeness in the grounds.” Even via the Transvox, Zenn could sense his unease at the arrangement. She forced herself to overlook his discomfort. She needed information if she was to have any hope of unraveling what was happening. And she needed the raw data, unfiltered by Otha or Hild.

  “So,” Zenn said brightly, steering the talk to something else. “How about this? At Rasputin’s cage, I’ll handle the gate combination. You get up on the hay-rack and fork the straw down to me, and I’ll fork it into his cage.”

  Hamish agreed that this sounded like a highly satisfactory plan.

  Half an hour later, Zenn found Otha in the infirmary’s main operating theater, up to his elbows in the abdomen of an anesthetized Gliesian mountain raff.

  She tapped on the observation window. Otha looked up and nodded for her to enter. After hastily scrubbing, she gloved, gowned and masked-up before stepping into the brightly lit room, her thoughts about everything she wanted to discuss with her uncle jostling for position within her.

  Too heavy for the largest op gurney, but too gangly and delicate to suspend from the overhead track-and-pulley system, the raff’s boney form was laid on a succession of foam pads, strung out in a row to accommodate the animal. Coupled with its long, sinewy neck, the raff’s body configuration gave it the incongruous look of an Earther camelid of some sort but outfitted with the immense hind legs and tiny forearms of a tyrannosaurus rex. But besides being clearly mammalian, the triangular head displayed the blunt teeth and heavy jaw structure of a herbivore. Surgical drapes covered its midsection, with a square opening in the draping where the incision had been cut and the chest flesh peeled back. The metal tines of a Garrigson rib-spreader protruded from the glistening, red cavity. In the background, the rhythmic sound of the ventilator compressor puffed quietly as it forced air in and out of the raff’s four lungs.

  “Good timing,” Otha said, his words muffled by his surgical mask. “Hand me that synlast-graft. The number twelve.” He nodded his head toward the stainless steel instrument tray next to him.

  She peeled the wrapping from the foot-square patch of synthetic grafting tissue and passed it to him. Leaning into the body cavity, he wrapped the graft around the garden-hose-sized artery connecting two of the three hearts that raffs needed to pump blood all the way up their lengthy necks to their brain.

  “There,” Otha grunted, leaning away from the animal and admiring his handiwork. “That should do it. He’ll be cropping the high branches again in no time. Want to close?”

  Zenn’s stomach flipped. “Yes! Thanks.”

  She picked up the protein-stitchgun from the metal tray and checked that it was fully loaded. Standing on her tip-toes to look down into the operative field, she drew together the two edges of the delicate visceral pericardium membrane and placed her first sutures.

  “Good,” Otha said, looking over her shoulder. “Keep your spacing even… nice work.”

  “Otha,” Zenn said, not looking up. “What Ren was saying before, about Dad. What did he mean about politics?”

  Otha stood for moment, watching Zenn methodically stitch together the thin veil of tissue surrounding the raff’s hearts.

  “It’s about your mother,” he said finally. Zenn turned to look at him. “No.” He motioned at the raff. “Keep at it. Get him closed up.” She turned back to the opening. “Your father has this theory about… what happened to Mai.”

  “A theory?” Zenn looked at Otha again. “What kind of theory?”

  “There was an investigation after Mai… after it happened. There were irregularities, with the in-soma operation. Facts that didn’t quite seem to add up. At least not to Warra.”

  “What facts?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear all this? Now?”

  “Otha…” Zenn stopped her work, but didn’t look up. She waited.

  “I don’t know if you remember this. But there were several kinds of equipment that malfunctioned during Mai’s in-soma run on the Indra that day – monitors, navigation system, the autopilot.”

  “Yes. The radiation knocked them out.”

  “That’s one of the issues. For Warra,” Otha said, going to the instrument tray. He picked up a las-scalpel and began to clean off its cutting tip. “When the pod’s problems began, the Dahlberg radiation levels the Indra was producing weren’t dangerously high. And Mai’s in-soma unit had all the appropriate shielding and D-rad repulsers. Warra thinks it’s just too much of a coincidence that all these things went wrong at once.”

  “Was it? Coincidence?”

  “Not necessarily. You know as well as I do how in-soma insertions can go bad.” He gave her a look, but didn’t say anything about the sloo. He didn’t have to. “They’re always risky, one way or another.”

  “What does Dad think happened?” She was suddenly finding it hard to keep her sutures lined up.

  “He thinks somehow, someone meddled with the pod systems. He thinks somebody wanted that in-soma unit to go off course, into the Indra’s skull.”

  “On purpose?” Zenn stopped her work and faced Otha. “Who would do that?”

  “Well, that’s the question I’ve put to Warra. And despite the final report, despite what we know… Zenn, your father thinks Mai’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Zenn felt as if the floor had dropped away, as if she was falling into empty space. She stood staring at the pattern of stitches she’d placed, unable to think.

  Otha took the stitchgun from her. Wordless, Zenn went to the bench by the far wall and sat while Otha unclamped the raff’s aorta, removed the rib-spreader and placed the final sutures to close up the creature’s chest.

  “That’s why Warra took the job on Enchara, after it happened,” Otha said, turning away from the raff and pulling off his mask. At the wall, he pressed the switch that shut down the machinery that had been re-circulating the animal’s blood, and simultaneously sent a small electrical charge to start its hearts beating again. “Warra thinks Mai’s death is connected somehow to the Indra disappearances. And Enchara is the last system before the Outer Reaches, where most of the ships have been lost.”

  Zenn took her own mask off, stared at her uncle – she was getting too much input, too quickly.

  “He thinks someone reprogrammed the in-soma pod’s autopilot, sent it into the animal’s skull.” Otha came to stand close to her. “And he thinks Mai’s lab assistant might have had something to do with it.”

  “Vremya?” Her mother’s long-time assistant came from the Russo-Asiatic sector on Earth. Beyond that, all Zenn had really known about her was that she had specifically requested to be her mother’s lab tech, and that she’d had to get special clearances of some kind to leave Earth and come to Mars. Eventually, she’d become Mai Scarlett’s right-hand women, almost a partner in her Indra research. “But she was killed too,” Zenn said. “When the radiation spiked.”

  “Yes. But, Vremya was also with your mother earlier, during the contamination scare in Mai’s lab. Warra thinks that fact is… significant.”

  Zenn had heard all about this incident. It was a year or so before Zenn was born. Her mother was trying to grow a culture of Indra brain tissue. Vremya was assisting, and had her respirator on; Zenn’s mother was just putting her breather on. The culturing flask
of Indra neural cells ruptured somehow, and tissue particles became airborne. Everyone was terrified her mother had breathed in some of the brain tissue. No one knew what effect that might have had on her.

  “But you ran tests, afterwards,” Zenn said. “No traces of Indra tissue were found in Mom, right? She was clean.”

  “Yes. Exactly. Warra, however, is still convinced there’s a link between that event, the missing Indra ships and the in-soma pod malfunctioning.”

  “But the missing Indra ships have disappeared with all their passengers and crews. Mom’s accident was completely different.”

  “That’s what we’ve tried to tell Warra. Your father is a stubborn man.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Zenn said. “Mom was trying to cure that Indra. Why would anyone want to stop her from doing that?”

  “Well, there are people who would like to see the entire Indra fleet out of commission. Permanently.”

  “The Authority on Earth?” Zenn said. “I thought they were ready to start up contact with other planets again, end the Rift.”

  “Warra doesn’t think it’s them. He thinks it’s the New Law, behind the scenes.”

  Zenn thought for a second. “The New Law? You always said they’re just a noisy little bunch of Earther fanatics.”

  “Hateful, anti-alien fanatics. Yes. I still say that. Warra thinks they’ve got more influence than we know.”

  “But without the Indra ships, the whole Accord would just… fall apart. There’d be no interstellar travel, no communication between star systems. Every planet would be totally isolated. It would be chaos, the Dark Ages all over again – forever. Even the New Law types aren’t that crazy. Are they?”

  “I don’t know, Zenn. The main point here is that there’s no evidence Mai’s death was anything but an accident. Or that it’s related to the Indra problem.” Otha picked up his episcope from the counter, inserted the ear-buds and went to stand near the raff’s upper thorax to listen to the animal’s breathing. “Warra’s ideas about this may just be his way of dealing with the pain. In his mind, a random accident makes Mai’s death senseless. But if he could find a reason for what happened… Well, maybe that’s what’s kept him going lately.” Satisfied the raff’s lungs had taken over respiration, Otha turned off the ventilator, and the rhythmic pulsing of the compressor died away. “What he’s doing now, trying to reopen the investigation, that’s put him on the wrong side of some influential folks on Earth. The negotiations to end the Rift are at a delicate stage. There are people who don’t want anybody rocking the boat right now. That’s what Ren was talking about.” At the raff’s head, Otha now removed the ventilator tube from its throat, then stood a moment, stroking the sleeping animal’s muzzle. “Your father may just need more time to sort things out, to learn to live with the past and move on.”