They cleaned him up as well as they could, helping him peel the second skin off his head and face, shoulders, chest and arms, legs. “We ought to leave it around your middle,” Sasha said, “until we get you some pants.”
Sanjay’s response was a spasm of laughter. Yes, his nudity was the concern. Not his condition, not the fact that he had been killed on Earth and reborn on Keanu. “What about Rachel?” he said, horrified at the way his throat felt and his voice sounded, like that of a man of a hundred. “Is she still on Earth? What happened? How did I get here?”
“Rachel is still good, as far as we know,” Sasha said. She nodded to the woman with her—Sanjay remembered her name now: Jordana, agro sector. “Do you have any memory of what happened?”
It didn’t take long to tell her—the approach, the missile, the crash. “That’s pretty much what we heard,” Sasha said. “And now here you are.”
“Having been killed.”
“Uh, apparently.”
“So I’m a fucking Revenant.”
“Well, yes.”
“Any idea how?” He looked up at the Beehive. “This hasn’t functioned for twenty years.” He thought of Jaidev and Zhao, who had devoted hours to the problem, with no success. “Did someone figure out how to turn it back on?”
“No,” Sasha said. “I’m kind of hoping you could tell us what happened.”
“I told you everything I know.” He croaked again. “So far.”
“Well, welcome back. Which sounds really stupid, like you’ve just been away on a trip.”
“Well, I have.”
Sasha turned to Jordana. “Let’s get him out of here. He needs water and God knows what else.”
Among the two gigantic mental adjustments Sanjay Bhat was making—realizing he had died, and that he had been reborn as a Revenant back on Keanu—there was a new one, perhaps more important:
No Revenant had lived more than a few days.
He emerged from the Beehive to a crowd larger than any he had seen in his life in the habitat. The HB population of Keanu had no celebrations or events that required such gatherings. “Is this all for me?”
“Everyone heard about the Beehive,” Sasha said.
Sanjay found that he could stand . . . that breathing was easier . . . that he seemed to be gaining strength. Aside from the emotional whiplash of going from dead to alive again—not inconsiderable—and the lingering discomfort of wearing strips of second skin and moving with muscles that seemed untested, he felt good. Even great.
He knew that he had been killed by a blow to his face and head. He carefully raised his hand and felt the same set of bones he had always known.
Allowing for the uncertainty of his new, second life span, Sanjay thought, Keanu brought me back good as new.
He spotted Jaidev and Harley Drake and Zhao and then, to his amazement, the legendary Dale Scott, looking as old and confused as Sanjay had felt fifteen minutes earlier.
Sanjay raised his hand. “Hi, everyone,” he said.
Then he heard a woman scream.
Oh my God, he thought, Maren.
Maren Houtman had been Sanjay’s lover for the past five years. And had the Adventure mission not intervened, likely for years to come, possibly for life. She had become that important to him in that time, though not, he realized with some embarrassment and worry, so important that she had a place in his thoughts until now.
He couldn’t possibly tell her that, either. Maren had many virtues, from intelligence and artistry (she had managed the trick of marrying pottery and sculpture to Substance K engineering) to classic Nordic beauty . . . but a sense of humor was not among them. Nor was she truly confident of Sanjay’s affections; when they argued, it always seemed to be about the likelihood that he would find someone he preferred to her—
It was probably in her nature. When scooped up by the object at Bangalore back in August 2019, Maren had been a clerical assistant with the European Space Agency supporting her boss during the Brahma mission. ESA had no representatives in the Brahma crew but was providing tracking and communication data.
She had endured the flight to Keanu and the years of adjustment, loss, and recovery without ever interacting with Sanjay Bhat in a significant way. Maren had just been a thin blond woman who spoke little and busied herself with food preparation and distribution . . . two things Sanjay Bhat avoided.
It was only when she began installing fascinating objects on various HB structures, from representational or abstract pieces to a misguided bust of Zack Stewart, that Sanjay began to notice her. (In fact, their first real conversation had been an argument over what Sanjay thought was the silliness of creating likenesses of deceased humans.)
Now Maren was on him, at him, kissing, holding. She was so distraught that she was hardly able to form words. But he did hear: “They just told me yesterday!”
“What?” he said, his voice sounding better, though still not great.
“That you were . . . were . . .” And then, unable to say were dead, she started sobbing.
“Look,” Sanjay said, “they were wrong!” He had to admit that he enjoyed the rush of emotion—he was blinking tears himself—as well as the comfort of Maren’s strong arms around him.
And her fragrance. Early in their relationship, he had realized that he loved the way Maren smelled.
Now she fastened herself to him with a ferocity he would have loved to reciprocate in a more private setting. She made it difficult for him to walk, not that the pressing crowd of HBs would have allowed much speed. “Let’s get you to the Temple,” Harley Drake was saying.
Harley’s command voice worked its magic. Maren’s death grip relaxed and the other HBs moved aside. Sasha and Jordana and Maren formed around him on three sides. All were taller, Sanjay realized, and the variety of coloring—ginger Sasha, blond Maren, and dark Jordana—sent a jolt of smug, unjustified pride through him. My three graces, he thought.
Sanjay had taken perhaps a dozen steps and was beginning to feel as good as he had ever felt when the vision in his left eye changed, not so much distorted as overlaid with another image.
What the hell—?
He felt a growing pressure at the back of his skull, and now his right eye was affected, too. The overlay resolved itself into the image of what looked like a giant egg. But that was swiftly replaced by . . . unknown faces, figures, landscapes.
Inside his head he registered . . . static, voices in languages he didn’t know, even music.
Then one word: Ring. It repeated, Ring, ring, ring.
He blinked but kept walking and smiling, telling himself, This is normal, this is temporary, this is not the beginning of my Revenant sell-by moment, right up to the moment where he fainted and fell on his face.
“Are you awake?” Maren’s voice in his ears, low, almost a whisper; her face in his field of view, brows furrowed.
They were in the Temple now, second floor, Sanjay’s work home for most of his adult life. Sanjay had been given a pair of trousers and a loose shirt. He was flat on his back on a couch; Maren was sitting on the floor next to him, his hand in hers.
He managed a quiet “Mmmm,” but squeezed her hand and pulled her even closer.
His vision cleared. The tableau was utterly familiar and at the same time totally disorienting. Physically and mentally, he had prepared for weeks to leave Keanu—possibly for good. He had had terrific, painful arguments with Maren. “Why do you have to go?”
“I know more about the vehicle than anyone.”