“I’ll leave you to your colleagues then,” Concierge said from the porch. “Don’t hesitate to call with questions or concerns. I’m always available.”
When they were alone, the new arrivals and the night shift introduced themselves to each other. Mary noticed that her sisters were not burdened with funny hats. One of them, Cyndee, said, “Well, come on and meet Myr Starke.”
Situated in the raised portion of the room was a tall columnar tank of clear glassine. It was filled with a thick amber liquid that was shot through with thousands of tiny bubbles. A chrome bar was suspended in the liquid, and from the bar hung a human skull.
“Careful of the step,” Cyndee said as she led the others to the tank. A metal band, like a halo, held the skull in a rigid grip with long screws sunk in bone. The skull had no skin, eyelids, or lips. Its bulging eyes lay lifeless in their sockets. Three of its—her—front teeth were missing, and tubes ran through the gaps they left. Many more tubes and wires entered the woman’s skull through natural foramina and machine-drilled holes.
Mary and Renata stood in front of the skull while Cyndee introduced them. “Myr Starke, these are Mary Skarland and Renata Carter. They’ll be relieving Ronnie and me in about an hour.”
Cyndee looked expectantly at Mary who said, “Good morning, Myr Starke.” She paused for a response, but the skull only stared straight ahead. She glanced at Cyndee and added, “Renata and I are here to keep you company when Cyndee and Ronnie have to leave.”
None of the evangelines seemed to know what else to say, so they pulled two more chairs next to the tank and sat down.
“Did you get a tour?” Renata asked.
“There was no time,” Ronnie replied. “We were rushed here in the middle of the night.” Which was probably why they had no hats yet.
“It’s a beautiful facility. So many jennys,” Renata said.
Ah, thought Mary, and so it begins, the talking between the lines. Of course there were a lot of jennys here. This was a medical facility. But it was also a place where bored affs had idle time on their hands. If there was ever a place where companions were needed, this was it.
Mary said, “Just wait till we get Myr Starke up and around in a lifechair.”
The others nodded in agreement. All it would take were two or three prominent clients here to get the ball rolling. And who could be more prominent than a Starke? But Myr Starke was a long way from riding in a lifechair. Nevertheless, it was frightfully clear to all of them that this assignment was an opportunity of tremendous importance, not only for them, but for their whole neglected sisterhood.
“Concierge loaned Cyndee and me a course in revivification science,” Ronnie said. “You want, I’ll copy you guys.” Mary and Renata raised their open palms for it.
Cyndee said, “It’s informative, but it would help to have some alphines.” This meant that they’d already looked at the material, and that it was way over their heads. But Mary resolved to give it a try, or to find other, simpler lessons on the WAD.
Mary said, “We’ll pass it along to our replacements on the swing shift,” which meant that if they were going to be successful in raising the evangeline profile at the clinic, they needed to establish some channel of communication with the others. The four new colleagues looked at one another and smiled. If they dug in and played smart, they might make a solid beachhead on the shores of the Fagan Health Group for hundreds, if not thousands, of their sisters.
Just then, a jenny in a nurse’s uniform bustled into the cottage, looked at the four of them, and said, “What’s this, a convention?”
The evangelines rose at once. “No, Myr Jenny,” Cyndee said. “Our shifts are supposed to overlap.”
The nurse watched them a moment and said, “Sit, sit. No one rises for jennys around here.” She went to the hernandez tank and rapped its side with her knuckles. “Hello in there. We’ve got a big day ahead of us, Myr Starke. My name is Hattie Beckeridge. I’m your head nurse.” She moved her hand left and right in front of the skull, but the eyes didn’t follow. “Head nurse, get it?”
Hattie went to the control unit at the side of the tank and paged through a blur of medical frames. As she did so, she said to the evangelines, “I don’t see the point in hiring companions at this stage of our guest’s recovery, especially so many of you. Be that as it may, since you’re here, you might as well be doing something useful. As you can see, our guest hasn’t awakened yet. That’s not surprising, considering the trauma she’s been through. Still, we’ve got her stabilized and she’s in fair shape, all things considered. We’ve got about a billion little buggies inside her skull doing DXR. She should begin to stir by the end of the day. Now come over here and take a look at this.”
When the evangelines joined her at the control unit she opened a larger-than-life model of the Starke woman’s brain. Sheets of blue light rippled slowly over different parts of the brain’s convoluted surface.
“This is a simple EEG reading of cortical activity,” Hattie said. “Notice how slow it is, about two hertz. That’s a typical delta wave frequency. Most people’s brains slow down this much during normal sleep. But in a healthy brain, the wave passes smoothly over the entire surface, not patchy like this. This ‘island’ effect is caused by uneven tissue thawing which causes a cryogenically frozen brain to awaken in a piecemeal fashion. In other words, some parts of the brain are working while others aren’t yet. That can be terrifying to a patient. Myr Starke may be having bizarre thoughts and memories in the form of a continuous nightmare that she can’t seem to awaken from.
“It won’t last long, Myr Starke,” Hattie added to the skull. “You’re thawing just fine.
“Anyway,” she continued, “we suppress the side effects as much as possible, and we’re quick to reestablish sensory pathways. That’s where you can help.”
“Tell us what to do,” Cyndee said.
“We shall begin by always assuming that our guest here can see, hear, and smell everything in this room. So, talk to her, show her things, sing to her, do whatever you can think of to engage her interest. I don’t think I need to tell evangelines how to be fascinating,” she added with a grin.
“Well, I must go now,” Hattie continued. “I’ll leave the EEG display up for you. There’ll be a medtech in soon to work on her. Good-bye for now, Myr Starke. I’m leaving you in the hands of your ’leen companions.”
THE QUARTER HOURS of pine sap, cranberry, popcorn, and ripe banana passed quickly, and the evangelines took turns standing directly in front of Starke’s tank and telling her in detail who they were and where they were from, whether they were espoused and to whom, what their apartments looked like, and anything else that came to mind. By the time Cyndee and Ronnie went off shift, the four women felt they had always known each other. Ronnie and Renata, in fact, said they remembered each other from way back in evangeline school.
Then Mary and Renata were alone with their client. They struggled to come up with new conversational topics. Renata wasn’t from Chicago, so Mary told her and the skull about last night’s canopy ceremony, the slaughter of slugs, the crazy man in the Skytel, and especially the fireworks. As a rule, evangelines didn’t sing, so they didn’t try that, but Mary taught Renata and the skull how to shimmy. Fortunately, before they ran completely out of ideas, a medtech came in, pushing a supply cart.