“Do I require psychological preparation?” She was looking at me.
“Hospital visits can be stressful,” I said, with as little irony as I could manage.
Rilriltok set a tray in front of where it perched. As its head dipped forward, its large raptorial forearms craned up and out of the way. The blades were delicate-looking and translucent as fine porcelain, and as glitteringly sharp as a ceramic knife blade.
The smaller manipulator arms began selecting pieces of what looked like raw sliced lobster, shell and all. I’d been known to eat the cooked version—they were synthetic land prawns—but I still averted my eyes as the crunching and squishing started.
Rashaqin do not use their mouths to speak; they communicate through a combination of stridulation and controlled breathing through the spiracles on their abdomens. So they have no taboo about talking with their mouths full.
Rilriltok flipped its wing coverts and buzzed, Helen, I am pleased to tell you that we have completed the DNA sequencing of your crew members without compromising the integrity of their compartments.
Helen looked from Rilriltok to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I do not have the vocabulary for what it just said. Can you help me?”
She seemed… calm. Maybe Zhiruo’s therapy was helping. I suppose nothing is likely to make you more anxious than feeling like you can’t handle the cognitive load that’s expected of you. That you’re used to handling.
I found her a dictionary easily enough. It didn’t take long to translate for Helen, who was still apparently compiling and integrating the code and assimilating the uplink that would give her access to real-time translation through a link to Linden’s functions.
Most of us ran translation through our foxes, under most circumstances, but the sheer volume of species and languages at Core made that impractical. The hospital probably played host to enough human languages alone to overload my fox’s storage capacity.
Zhiruo had provided the tools for Helen, and had assured me that the kit she’d issued was firewalled to Well and gone. Air-gapped, even. I told myself that if the Core General wheelmind and the head of AI Medicine thought it was safe, it was probably safe. And she was rebuilding her entire mind from a kit, so it wasn’t reasonable to expect her to have finished integrating.
Rilriltok picked up another slice of synthetic land prawn. I went back to my spaghetti. Friend Jens, why have you been avoiding me?
I choked on that spaghetti, which was very upsetting to the engineer ayatana, who was much more sensibly designed with regard to airways and food passages.
At least it didn’t come out of my nose. It’s a bad dia at work when that happens. Especially in front of an alien doctor who’s going to wind up asking a lot of interested and helpful questions about sinuses and be very confused why humans evolved so stupidly as to let our respiration and food nutrition use the same set of tubes.
It’s a bad design. I admit it. Nobody asked me for my input until it was far too late!
By the time I got myself under control enough to glare at Rilriltok, there was no sign of any mischief in its posture. There was no point trying to make eye contact—which eyes would I choose? All I would see in any of them was my reflection. Rashaqin do not have muscles in their faces to give them expression. The chitin is pretty, and excellent armor, and makes performing surgery on a Rashaqin an incredible pain in the ass involving a skill saw to open and epoxy to close. But it does not move.
It did scintillate with faint ripples of red and silver that might be laughter, and might just be enjoyment of the food.
It reached out a fine manipulator, and snagged a strand of my spaghetti. I broke the strand with my knife before it could weave my entire plateful into a braid and slurp it up.
After so many ans, I was wise to Rilriltok. For an obligate insectivore it certainly had a taste for Terran carbohydrates. It claimed that this was because synthetic land prawn didn’t have stomach contents, depriving it of important nutrients. I had told it repeatedly that it could order its own salad.
The gesture of food-stealing had special meaning when performed by a male Rashaqin (male being something of a misnomer, as even Terran species don’t limit themselves to two tidy sexes that always behave in the same predictable ways, but Rilriltok’s species has two sexes and its is not the one that lays eggs). It meant that Rilriltok saw me as a colleague and a competitor—an equal—and not a threat, or an inferior. It was a compliment and a display of affection.
I should have swiped its land prawn in response, but I wasn’t in the mood for sushi.
“I haven’t been avoiding you!” I protested. It had only been—well, less than two diar, right? I had possibly lost track of my actual assigned rest periods. “I’ve just been… very busy. And so has Helen, here.”
I looked at her to see if she needed that translated, but apparently she’d gotten the common vocabulary all right.
I had been very busy. Exhausted, and sleeping like the dead on the one chance I had gotten. Wedging research into a few spare hours. Running from meeting to meeting…
I don’t just mean since this last emergency call, Rilriltok said.
…And trying not to spend too much face-to-face time with my friends when I wasn’t on duty. Rilriltok was right. I had been hiding, and not just since this last mission. Hiding from my friends, because I was afraid that they would notice that my pain management was not what it should be. And then they’d want to do something about it, being doctors.
The way O’Mara had.
Doctors never want to hear that you’re sick and tired of being poked; that you want to be left alone; that you’ve had enough experimental cures and management strategies for one lifetime. Doctors always want to try this one last thing.
Doctors are an enormous pain in the ass. Trust me. I know. I am one.
Time to change the subject, in other words.
“What do you know about the safety issues since I’ve been gone?” I asked in what I hoped was a light, gossipy manner.
Male Rashaqins did not, historically, survive without a very well-honed sense of other people’s goals, motivations, and appetites. Part of why they made excellent doctors—and champion players of strategy games—was that they were fantastic at thinking outside the ordinary and at noticing patterns too subtle for most beings to detect.
I think they are concerning, Rilriltok said, after a moment of meditation. They are, I think, meant to look as if they are intended to look accidental. But they are not intended to look accidental.
I had to parse that one a couple of times before I was really sure what I thought it meant. “You think whoever is doing it is… acting out? Wants to get noticed?”
I think someone or someones are doing it. And it’s dangerous and constitutes an enormous risk, so either they’re severely damaged, or they have what seems to them an exceedingly good reason. It patted the antigravity belt strapped around its thorax with one feathery foot-tip. You could talk to the Goodlaw.
I hadn’t met Core General’s new lead law enforcement officer. I also knew that the sexes of Rilriltok’s species went out of their way to avoid interacting with one another. “But isn’t it a female Rashaqin?”
That consideration should give you context for how seriously I take this. Rilriltok picked up its beverage. It put a straw operated with a sort of squeeze bulb between its mandibles, not having the ability to suck, and seemed entirely focused on imbibing its drink. This was a mechanically fascinating process, involving manipulating the squeeze bulb until a honey-colored bubble, held together by surface tension, appeared at the top of the straw. Rilriltok then nibbled at it with the small wiggly mouthparts that were barely noticeable at the bottom of its wedge-shaped head.