Twelve days later, with Lortisse now ambulatory in a medical exoskeleton, cracking weak jokes with Rani and eating solids, Lante sent Baltiel a priority request to speak, all the urgent flags up, requires immediate Overall Command action. And that’s it, then. The thought of someone remaking him into a decisive commander was only slightly abhorrent, but it was still a gradient he had to overcome, a gravity well to escape, even momentarily. He was only surprised she hadn’t just acted, and asked forgiveness of the new man of purpose her altered prescription had created. Perhaps she, too, felt something of his lethargy.
The Lante that greeted him had no lethargy in her, though. Instead she looked terrified. That sight sent a shock through Baltiel, enough ersatz purpose to cast off the weight and spread his wings a little.
‘What is it?’ Even as he spoke he was accepting the secure files she passed to him, opening them up with rusty clearance codes and looking at the medical scan data revealed.
‘It’s Lortisse,’ Lante told him. ‘He’s not all right. He didn’t metabolize the fluid. It’s still there.’
Baltiel stared at the scans for as long as he felt he could, without quite understanding what he was looking at. ‘Does he know?’ was his eventual response, a proper Overall Command sort of thing to say, to cover for his frank bafflement.
‘Nothing, as yet,’ Lante confirmed. They were squirrelled away in what had been the isolation ward before Lortisse had recovered and isolation had been declared unnecessary. Lante was apparently recanting her position on that, stable door and horse notwithstanding. At the same time she was keen to keep it a private matter between herself and her superior, segmenting off-system space for them that Rani and Lortisse would not be able to access.
Baltiel rubbed at his eyelids. He wanted to retreat from this. He didn’t get it, and he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t get it, and staring at the walls of the inside of his mind had become a hard habit to break. For a moment he wavered, because what did it matter, now? But the call to arms got through to him and he shook himself, clawing for motivation.
‘Erma,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘I can’t deal with this as is. I need you to clear my head. Give me whatever’s necessary.’
She gave him the works, and thirty minutes for it to kick in, and when they reconvened he felt a new man, bright and crisp and fragile like ice. Beneath that ice the old abyss still yawned; he felt the hungry pull of it past the slightly manic flicker that frizzed at the edge of his vision. His brain was cut loose to dart and soar, though, and to admit he didn’t understand what he was looking at.
‘It went to his brain,’ Lante explained, guiding him through the scans. ‘It’s adopted some kind of encysted structure.’ Here, here, here, picked out on the images, the boundaries of a new and potentially hostile nation. ‘I don’t think it’s active. Certainly its structure has changed from its initial mobile form so it’s no longer triggering Lortisse’s immune system. If it were, he’d be dead of cerebral inflammation faster than I could do anything, or at least irreparably damaged. But look . . .’ She flagged up more areas, cross-referencing different scan angles. ‘It’s . . . past the blood-brain boundary. It’s between the hemispheres, in a kind of a clot.’
‘Explain “between the hemispheres”.’ Baltiel felt he knew, but at the same time the thought was appalling. ‘How can that be possible? I spoke with the man today.’
‘And that’s the thing. Through some miracle this hasn’t actually damaged the functioning of his brain.’
‘That’s a neat distinction,’ Baltiel pointed out. ‘So what has it damaged?’
‘I thought at first it had formed a ring around the corpus callosum that connects the left and right hemispheres, but there’s no corpus left. There’s just this, replacing it,’ Lante said helplessly.
‘Wasn’t this something people use to do once, as . . .’ Baltiel dredged his memory, failed, then picked the information from the ship’s library, laying it out for Lante. Epilepsy treatment: sever the hemispheres of the brain. Effective, but leading to unusual circumstances where the two sides fell out of step, reacted to different stimulus, couldn’t talk to each other. The files were tagged with recent access by Lante; he wasn’t bringing up anything she hadn’t already been over.
‘I’ve tested him,’ she said. ‘The old-fashioned stuff: different information in each eye, get each hand to select answers. He hasn’t got the symptoms of a severance patient. There’s still communication going on, somehow, even though the neural machinery is gone. Somehow that stuff is filling in for what it’s consumed.’ Lante looked pasty and unwell but, in his current state, Baltiel had no time for that.
‘Prognosis?’ he barked out.
‘How can I possibly say?’ she said. ‘This stuff could be active again tomorrow or next year or in a decade’s time, if this is just some part of its life cycle that’s interacting with human biology somehow. Which it can’t be. There’s nothing on this planet like a human, on so many levels. It can’t . . . parasitize us. Parasites are the most specialized of specialists!’
‘So, prognosis,’ Baltiel prompted.
She clenched her fists. ‘Most likely it’s just reacted to the hostile environment of Lortisse’s body. Perhaps in its regular host, or if it was without a host, this would persist until it encountered something more appealing, which in this case must mean never. And so Gav will be fine, he will be. But how can I know?’
She had modelled removal strategies, Baltiel saw. Most of them simulated at under twenty per cent chance of success. Above that, the probability of damaging Lortisse’s brain and irrevocably degrading who he was scaled in tandem with their ability to attack the infection. And that was assuming the stuff didn’t wake up and try to defend itself . . .
‘He needs to be told. We need to understand the situation, all four of us.’ Five, but Senkovi can catch up on the news when he’s done playing God to molluscs. And, at Lante’s trembling wince: ‘And like you say, most likely it’s just encysted there, harmless. We can hardly keep twenty-five per cent of our number in quarantine forever for something that’ll never happen, can we? But to be safe we should consider –’ And in their shared virtual space he flagged up her removal simulations.
Lante’s expression was saggingly grateful.
5.
We
Listen.
Information on either side of us. The crackling discharge of meaning. For generations
We
Listen, dying and renewing and feeding, careful not to upset the balance These-of-We have achieved. The world around us is quiescent now. We have made our peace with it.
And what have we found? We cannot know but we store and process, store and process, construct our theories and our models within the labyrinthine structures of our libraries. Each pattern of information that comes to us is examined and passed on, one side to the other and back.