But Dwayne Carlos had no fox. Even an AI would only have been able to work with intravenous drugs. Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was somewhere on the water levels, regulating by relay, normalizing his chemistry as best she could with the crude measures available to us. But even if he’d had a modern fox and full access to senso, she couldn’t have taken his pain and grief away entirely. We still have to suffer through these things, experience them to move past them.
Living things have a dedicated sense of pain because you have to know you’re wounded to take the actions necessary to heal. The best we can do, medically speaking, is blunt the edge of it, because if you can’t feel, you can’t react.
“You’re the first to awaken,” I said. It would be cruel to draw things out longer than necessary. “We have retrieved only a few cryo units so far. We’re working on the others.”
“My ship isn’t here?”
“This is a hospital. Your ship is not fast enough to make it here, so we have been transferring your crewmates to faster-than-light ships.”
He blinked. “That’s impo— No, never mind. This is not the right time. Obviously it’s possible. Carry on.”
“We are ferrying crew from your ship as fast as possible.”
“But what about the people still running Big R? The skeleton crew… oh.”
“Oh?”
“They’re all dead?”
“They’re all in pods. Every single person, except the captain. I’m sorry, I have to inform you that the captain is dead.”
“Oh.” He didn’t sound surprised.
“The ship’s… computer? Do you have a word for that?”
“The angel,” he said.
“The ship’s angel had been taking the ship apart to build cryo pods, under the captain’s orders. He took the library—Central?”
“Central.”
“He took it offline.”
“That would have limited the angel’s access to information and her decision-making resources.”
“It did,” I agreed. “She had mostly spun off into a peripheral when we found the ship. She had also filled the ship with instances of… a kind of large nanobot, capable of linking up and forming structures. And was using that, I think, as a kind of primitive computronium to support what faculties she had. She’s being reintegrated, and we’re building an architecture for her. She, in time, should be fine.”
Assuming we didn’t have to seal the entire hospital off forever to keep the toxic meme from spreading throughout the entire galaxy. But now was not the time to share that with a person who couldn’t do anything about it, and who had enough to worry about.
He said, “So about the pods.”
The corners of his mouth and eyes tightened. He was bracing himself. I offered my hand, against my better judgment. He took it and I winced in anticipation, but he didn’t squeeze.
Maybe he was considerate. Maybe he was still too weak for squeezing.
Whatever the reason, I was grateful.
Softly, he said, “The pods aren’t very good, are they?”
“No,” I agreed. “The pods aren’t very good.”
He might be from a culture spawned in the deep Before, but his agony was utterly human. His face fisted. He was so thin that I could see every individual fiber in his neck, deltoid, and the top of his pectoral muscle as his chin dipped and his body clenched.
His heart rate and blood pressure spiked; his cortisol and adrenaline levels ramped; he yanked his hand out of mine and locked it and its mate on the bed rails. Flesh whitened as blood squashed from the tender new flesh.
“Are you hurting?” I asked, jumping to my feet. “Where is the pain?” I was already reaching for the meds panel and cursing the fact that he didn’t have a fox. External pain management: Is there anything more barbaric?
Carlos sucked in air so hard it whistled. “Just… trying not to bawl like a brat.” The first word came out through clenched teeth, the rest on a rush of breath. He grabbed the next one as if he had to get it fast, before it got away.
Empathic grief clutched my chest. I laid a hand on his shoulder. He leaned away, so I removed it.
“Cry if you need to,” I said. “It’s a physiologically normal response.”
And I wasn’t sure how somebody who wasn’t wearing a fox thought he could avoid it, anyway.
Something about my words seemed to startle him. He got another breath, and this one stayed caught behind his teeth. He let it out in a controlled fashion, shaped around words. “Some big strong guy I’d look.” A barked laugh followed. “It’s okay. I think I’ve got it.”
When you work in a multispecies hospital the size of a small moon, you get used to feeling like you’re missing much of the cultural context in any given conversation. Even with other humans: it’s a big galaxy, and we don’t all think alike.
I didn’t understand what was going on inside Master Chief Carlos’s head, but I was prepared to roll with it.
“Obviously some of us survived.” He waved his own grafted hand, and winced when he noticed it. “More or less. You said I was the first awake.”
“Yes.”
“Am I the only?”
“So far,” I said, having checked that it was true. “Biologist Cirocco Oni is undergoing treatments for cryoburn before awakening, and Specialist First Rank Jones should be awake in the next dia or so.”
There was no flicker of recognition in his face when I said either name—but with over ten thousand crewmates, I would not expect anyone to know them all personally.
“There are thirteen more of your crewmates at the hospital already, and more on the way.”
“Will all of them live?”
“It is”—I searched for the right word—“unlikely.”
“How many more will make it?”
“I can’t be sure.”
He stared at me. “How many more are being retrieved now?”
“I also can’t be sure of that.”
“God damn it to hell, Doc, why the hell are you bothering to talk to me if you’re not going to tell me anything?”
There was the toddler. I flinched, but he didn’t come at me. Just as well. In his current state he wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, and I would have felt bad hitting him. And my whole body would have hurt even more afterward than it usually did.
I sighed and said, “Your ship is an extremely long way away. Lightspeed communication—pulsed lasers, for example—lags significantly behind simple ship travel. They’ll be back here centuries before any direct message they could have sent.”
Bit by bit, I watched Master Chief Carlos relax against the pillow. I was confident that he was forcing himself to. I was impressed that he had the ability.
“Awkward for RSVPing to parties,” he said. “You might as well drop by with regrets.”
“Or they can find out you’re not coming after you’re dead.”
I must have gotten the deadpan right, because he laughed.
“So you have faster-than-light travel.”
“Not me personally… but yes. Or sneakier-than-light, anyway.”
“Warp drive.”
“More or less. I can get you some books on it if you want? There are virtual classes.” And nothing is more boring than sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the outside world spin.
His mouth twitched, as if he was about to say something important. Then he settled back and folded his arms. “I’d be very grateful.”
“There’s another thing,” I said. “We’ve been limiting the staff treating you so far. But the cryonics docs—the real specialists—well, I should warn you that they’re not human.”
I saw his lips soften as his jaw slackened, though it didn’t quite fall open. “Aliens?”