<Correct> “Yes. A moment, sir, if you please.” The man finished tamping, slipped his foot into a waiting boot, then lit the pipe with the anachronistic lighter in his left hand. He puffed, drew in smoke, exhaled, put the lighter in his pocket, and settled back in the walnut embrace of his chair.
“I am Dr. Li,” he said. <Stand by> said the left hand, the old finger position for a now-obsolete palmtop computer, a finger position that had once meant pause, as <correct> had once meant enter, enter because it was correct. “Please remain in bed for a few more minutes while the nanos doublecheck their work. Redundancy is frustrating,” puffing smoke, “but good for peace of mind.”
“What happens if they find they’ve made a mistake?”
<Don’t be concerned.> “It can’t be a very large mistake,” said Li, “or we wouldn’t be communicating so rationally. At worst, you will sleep for a bit while things are corrected.”
“May I take my hands out from under the covers?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Davout did so. His hands, he observed, were brown and leathery, hands suitable for the hot, dry world of Sarpedon. They had not, then, changed his body for one more suited to Earth, but given him something familiar.
If, he realized, they were on Earth.
His right fingers made the mudra <thank you>.
<Don’t mention it> signed Li.
Davout passed a hand over his forehead, discovered that the forehead, hand, and the gesture itself were perfectly familiar.
Strange, but the gesture convinced him that he was, in a vital way, still himself. Still Davout.
Still alive, he thought. Alas.
“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Tell me why I’m here.”
Li signed <stand by>, made a visible effort to collect himself. “We believe,” he said, “that the Beagle was destroyed. If so, you are the only survivor.”
Davout found his shock curiously veiled. The loss of the other lives–friends, most of them–stood muted by the precedent of his own earlier, overriding grief. It was as if the two losses were weighed in a balance, and the Beagle found wanting.
Li, Davout observed, was waiting for Davout to absorb this information before continuing.
<Go on> Davout signed.
“The accident happened seven light-years out,” Li said. “Beagle began to yaw wildly, and both automatic systems and the crew failed to correct the maneuver. Beagle’s automatic systems concluded that the ship was unlikely to survive the increasing oscillations, and began to use its communications lasers to download personality data to collectors in Earth orbit. As the only crew member to elect disassembly during the return journey, you were first in the queue. The others, we presume, ran to nano disassembly stations, but communication was lost with the Beagle before we retrieved any of their data.”
“Did Katrin’s come through?”
Li stirred uneasily in his chair. <Regrettably> “I’m afraid not.”
Davout closed his eyes. He had lost her again. Over the bubble of hopelessness in his throat he asked, “How long has it been since my data arrived?”
“A little over eight days.”
They had waited eight days, then, for Beagle–for the Beagle of seven years ago–to correct its problem and reestablish communication. If Beagle had resumed contact, the mass of data that was Davout might have been erased as redundant.
“The government has announced the loss,” Li said. “Though there is a remote chance that the Beagle may come flying in or through the system in eleven years as scheduled, we have detected no more transmissions, and we’ve been unable to observe any blueshifted deceleration torch aimed at our system. The government decided that it would be unfair to keep sibs and survivors in the dark any longer.”
<Concur> Davout signed.
He envisioned the last moments of the Beagle, the crew being flung back and forth as the ship slammed through increasing pendulum swings, the desperate attempts, fighting wildly fluctuating gravity and inertia, to reach the emergency nanobeds . . . no panic, Davout thought, Captain Moshweshwe had trained his people too well for that. Just desperation, and determination, and, as the oscillations grew worse, an increasing sense of futility, and impending death.
No one expected to die anymore. It was always a shock when it happened near you. Or to you.
“The cause of the Beagle’s problem remains unknown,” Li said, the voice far away. “The Bureau is working with simulators to try to discover what happened.”
Davout leaned back against his pillow. Pain throbbed in his veins, pain and loss, knowledge that his past, his joy, was irrecoverable. “The whole voyage,” he said, “was a catastrophe.”
<I respectfully contradict> Li signed. “You terraformed and explored two worlds,” he said. “Downloads are already living on these worlds, hundreds of thousands now, millions later. There would have been a third world added to our commonwealth if your mission had not been cut short due to the, ah, first accident . . .”
<Concur> Davout signed, but only because his words would have come out with too much bitterness.
<Sorry>, a curt jerk of Li’s fingers. “There are messages from your sibs,” Li said, “and downloads from them also. The sibs and friends of Beagle’s crew will try to contact you, no doubt. You need not answer any of these messages until you’re ready.”
<Understood.>
Davout hesitated, but the words were insistent; he gave them tongue. “Have Katrin’s sibs sent messages?” he asked.
Li’s grave expression scarcely changed. “I believe so.” He tilted his head. “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything I can arrange?”
“Not now, no,” said Davout. <Thank you> he signed. “Can I move from the bed now?”
Li’s look turned abstract as he scanned indicators projected somewhere in his mind. <Yes> “You may,” he said. He rose from his chair, took the pipe from his mouth. “You are in a hospital, I should add,” he said, “but you do not have the formal status of patient, and may leave at any time. Likewise, you may stay here for the foreseeable future, as long as you feel it necessary.”
<Thank you> “Where is this hospital, by the way?”
“West Java. The city of Bandung.”
Earth, then. Which Davout had not seen in seventy-seven years. Memory’s gentle fingers touched his mind with the scent of durian, of ocean, of mace, cloves, and turmeric.
He knew he had never been in Java before, though, and wondered whence the memory came. From one of his sibs, perhaps?
<Thank you> Davout signed again, putting a touch of finality, a kind of dismissal, into the twist of his fingers.
Dr. Li left Davout alone, in his new/old body, in the room that whispered of memory and pain.
In a dark wood armoire, Davout found identification and clothing, and a record confirming that his account had received seventy-eight years’ back pay. His electronic inbox contained downloads from his sibs and more personal messages than he could cope with–he would have to construct an electronic personality to answer most of them.
He dressed and left the hospital. Whoever supervised his reassembly–Dr. Li perhaps–had thoughtfully included a complete Earth atlas in his internal ROM, and he accessed it as he walked, making random turnings but never getting lost. The furious sun burned down with tropical intensity, but his current body was constructed to bear heat, and a breeze off the mountains made pleasant even the blazing noontide.