Meewee cleaned up and dressed and went to the galley for breakfast. Wee Hunk was waiting for him as a life-size man in an ocelot fur robe. “A hearty good morning to you, O man of the cloth,” the mentar said, offering his ID in Starkese without even being challenged. “I do hope your little scuffle yesterday with the vacuum cleaners hasn’t interfered with your appetite. The kulinmate down here is loaded with exceptional dishes. You should try the sourdough waffles.”
Meewee only grunted acknowledgment and sat at one of the long, cafeteria-style tables. When a waiterbeitor rolled over to take his order, he eyed it warily before asking for juice, toast, strawberry jam, and coffee.
“You’ll be pleased to know I’ve identified the security breach,” the mentar went on brightly. “Apparently, there was dust adhering to your skin and clothes that carried instructions for subverting our household mechs. You probably picked it up while still at Starke headquarters.”
“Cabinet?”
“Probably, but not necessarily,” the mentar said, and a diorama of the clinic cottage interior opened on the table next to Meewee. “Ready for your update?” Inside the diorama, the tiny figures of evangelines and Johns were rearranging furniture. Meewee’s eye went directly to the daybed where a resurrected Ellen Starke seemed to be lying, asleep. It was a jacket, he assumed.
“She still comatose?”
“Sadly, yes. Her condition has not improved, and her prognosis worsens by the hour. According to the continuity counters, Concierge has not attempted to edit or distort my observations. However, it did intercept the amnio syrup sample I tried to smuggle out and terminated the employment of my evangelinian smuggler.”
“We must get our own specialist in there.”
“I don’t disagree,” the robed caveman said, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that our best course of action is to remove Ellen from the clinic and treat her here, with a specialized autodoc if necessary.”
“Here? In the bunker?”
The waiterbeitor returned with Meewee’s breakfast. He spread jam on his toast and took a tentative bite.
“Yes, in the bunker. In the null suite, in fact. I’m assembling an impromptu revivification clinic in there even as we speak. I’ve purchased a hernandez tank, syrup, controller, and all the various pieces. And I’ve located a suitable autodoc.”
They watched the activity in the cottage as Meewee ate. When he was finished, Wee Hunk said, “The big problem is how to remove her from the clinic.”
“I thought you were her guardian,” Meewee said. “Can’t you just sign her out?”
“Yes, but doing so would force their hand. If some agency is indeed killing her gradually, in order to make it appear to be a result of the reentry crash, giving them any notice of our intent would only result in her immediate murder. If we are to remove her, we must do so in a lightning assault with no forewarning.”
Meewee wiped his mouth and refolded his napkin. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
THE NEWS FROM upshift was that a swing shift evangeline, and not Renata, had been fired for breech of clinic policy. Mary couldn’t be sure of the particulars because of the inferential nature of evangeline communication, but it appeared that Celia, whom Mary hadn’t met, had dipped a small vial into the tank and tried to smuggle a sample of the amnio concentrate syrup out of the clinic. It was further intimated that she had done this under the instructions of their client’s mentar, Wee Hunk. Her smuggling attempt was discovered, however, and she was summarily discharged. Nick rescheduled Renata to cover today’s evening shift and assigned Georgine to fill in this morning.
When shift overlap ended and Cyndee and Ronnie departed, Mary and Georgine cast about for something “stimulating” to do with their client.
“Let’s read to her,” Mary said and took the library from the shelf. But it wasn’t a library. It was heavy, and the pages were made of paper. It was a book. The evangelines sat next to the daybed and examined the dusty antique. The first two pages were blank. The book had been published in 2013, in Boston. That must have been the old Boston. There were no glyphs, icons, or illustrations of any kind. The text was threaded across 240 actual pages. When you touched a word, it did not pronounce or define itself or display its links. It just sat there on the paper like a stain.
On the daybed next to them, the Starke jacket was arranged on her back with her head on a pillow and her hands crossed over her chest. She looked as peaceful as a corpse. “We’re going to read from your book,” Mary told her and lifted the jacket’s hand to touch the pebbly surface of the book cover. But the book had not been mapped with a vurt analog, and so the jacket’s hand went through it. “Never mind that,” Mary said.
She opened the book and read: “The Apple Orchard, by Delany Kay. Chapter One, ‘Jae.’”
It was a day out of days when persons of flexible demeanor irradiated themselves with units of satisfaction or puzzlement or anxiety in accordance with their prescription. Through an act of carelessness, a bolus of nonspecific grief was released into the forward compartment. It floated unnoticed throughout the ship until Jae Taxamany, pulling herself through a bulkhead hatch, collided with it. Suddenly, for no good reason, Jae began to weep.
Mary was drawn immediately into the tale—it was plainly a love story—and took turns with Georgine reading it aloud for an hour, when they were interrupted by Medtech Coburn. He led his supply cart through the cottage door and mumbled something unfriendly as he passed the evangelines.
“That’s enough reading for now,” Mary said. “Georgine, allow me to introduce Matt.”
“Coburn,” Coburn said.
“Matt likes to be called Coburn,” Mary said.
“Dittoheads,” he muttered under his breath.
Mary was stung by the slur, and Georgine opened her mouth to make some retort, but changed her mind. Instead, Mary asked the medtech if there was anything they could do to help. Coburn assured her there wasn’t, except to leave him alone. Nevertheless, the evangelines stood in front of the tank to watch what he was doing, and after a while he dropped an empty nerve spool on Mary.
The evangelines took the hint and returned to the daybed. Georgine rolled up Mary’s sleeve to look for bruises. The spool hadn’t been heavy, and this wasn’t the real reason she rolled up Mary’s sleeve. She was actually hiding a yellow stain of amnio syrup the spool had left on Mary’s sleeve. If Wee Hunk wanted a sample of the syrup so badly, perhaps this one would do. “How’s that?” she asked Mary.
Mary honestly didn’t know. Would Concierge see through their ruse? Was this sample valuable enough to justify the risk? It was hours before she’d be leaving the clinic, so she didn’t have to decide just yet. She held out her other arm for Georgine to roll the other sleeve to match.
WHEN MARY TOOK her lunch break, she wandered the grounds, greeting strangers, and trying to appear approachable. At the tennis court, she watched a match. On the golf course, she had a slice of cheesecake and an iced coffee at the Nineteenth Hole. A steve waited on her. When she asked for the check, he said no one paid for such trifles at the clinic.
Passing the dining commons on her way back to the cottage, Mary ran into Hattie with several of her jenny colleagues. “Here she is,” Hattie said, presenting Mary to the others. “One of our newest health care providers.” The Jennys fussed over Mary and told her that their aff guests had been asking about them. Also, everyone was acutely curious about the Starke girl.
Hattie told her colleagues to go on ahead, and she walked a little way with Mary alone. “I want to give you a friendly piece of advice,” she said, “since you’re new at this game.”