“There was a virus—”
“We know,” I said. “You’ve been treated and I’m immunized.”
“My ship? My crew?”
“Your ship and the shipmind—the angel, sorry, we use a different word—have suffered significant damage. What we’ve been able to recover of the shipmind is here, with the first group of evacuees—fourteen of you. One other has been successfully awakened so far: Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. Do you know him?”
She shook her head. “Everything is very fuzzy. I know the—the shipmind. Central?”
“Helen,” I said. “And what’s left of Central, I think. If I understand the outcome correctly, they both suffered damage and integrated out of self-preservation. Helen’s become self-aware; I understand she wasn’t before.”
“Helen!” She gave a big sigh of relief. “Well, that’s something to make me feel a little more grounded, I guess. How’s our command structure?”
“Right now, you don’t have one.”
“Oh. Captain and first mate? Officers?”
“The captain, we believe, perished. No other officers have been retrieved. We’re ferrying your crewmates here in groups, but it’s going to take a while, and there were no commissioned officers in the first group.”
“I’ve just realized,” she said incredulously, “that I cannot remember anyone’s name.”
“Anyone?”
“Any of my crewmates. My family. I must have a family?”
I sighed. She certainly seemed as if she came from a millennian ago. “Our scans show you’ve suffered some intracranial scarring. It may be impairing your cognition—”
“Brain damage?”
“Repairable damage,” I said. “The memory loss is probably permanent, I’m afraid, but we’ve already infused stem cells and growth medium, and you should be finding your cognition clearing up over the next few diar.”
“You can… patch up brain damage.” She snapped her fingers and winced when it made the infusion needle jump in her vein. I could have reached out and put my hand on her arm, but for some reason the thought made me feel shy, so I didn’t.
“We have doctors that do nothing else,” I said. “Which, I am afraid, brings me to another part of your orientation that you might find unsettling. Not all—or even most—of the staff here are human. The doctor who’s been working on your neurological injury is an oxygen-breathing, water-dwelling vertebrate from a planet whose name I need mechanical assistance to pronounce. She gets around in a big tank on wheels.”
“My neurologist is a dolphin?” Jones broke into a delighted grin. “I think I might like the future!” Then she sobered. “How far in the future are we, anyway?”
“That’s a complicated question,” I said. “We don’t know exactly when you went into suspension, or exactly how much subjective time you had spent traveling before then. There are relativistic effects to consider. And—”
“Twenty-four forty-seven,” she said, with confidence. Then she froze. “No, I… I can’t say that with any confidence. The date popped into my head, but I can’t put a context to it. It could just be a date. So your people—are you descendants of the other ships?” She sat forward in the bed, animated despite the effort it obviously cost her. “Can you get me a timeline, oh, and—”
“Wait, wait,” I said, laughing. “You don’t want to talk to me about those things. You want to talk to Mercy. He’s the hospital archinformist. His specialty is medical history, but—”
“I’ll take it!” she enthused, beaming.
I got a voice link to Mercy and turned them loose on each other. Jones’s avocation shone through in her conversation: she wanted dates, names, places, and root causes of everything. Mercy rapidly retrieved a pile of pull numbers to get her started requesting histories. He only had to explain how to request data once. I excused myself: it seemed like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and I would only have been in the way.
Jones smiled and waved as I was leaving, but that was all. I felt a tiny pang. Her enthusiasm was utterly adorable.
Tralgar was waiting when I stepped outside. I checked the time and realized I’d been with Jones so long that Rilriltok had gone to dinner and its rest shift. I asked how Cirocco Oni was.
Tralgar’s tentacles contracted into coils. There’s damage. It might be reversible. And… something in the pod’s program seems to be trying to prevent the rewarming sequence from taking hold. Possibly it’s the remains of the program the ship’s captain released when he was evacuating his crew to the pods.
I thought about Helen’s desire to get everybody into pods for their safety. I thought about the machine.
I hadn’t told Carlos or Jones that they—and Oni, and the medic Call Reznik—were the only four of the fourteen crewmembers to survive rewarming to the point of needing the next medical interventions. Oni and Reznik were still touch-and-go.
I imagined the other graft clones had already been recycled. It took a significant amount of resources to keep them alive, blood pumping, lungs breathings, when they were intentionally grown with stunted brain structures.
It would have been in poor taste to congratulate Tralgar on the accuracy with which he and Rilriltok had estimated their chances of success in saving these patients. But right now, we were as close to that grim 30 percent mark as possible unless we started saving fractions of patients. Or unless Oni and Reznik died.
I had hoped they were being conservative. No matter how hard you try to stay uninvested and professional… people don’t go into medicine because their patients’ welfare is irrelevant to them.
“You’re going to want me to explain that to Helen, aren’t you?”
Maybe the tiredness in my voice and expression was strong enough to make it through the species and translation barrier. Maybe Tralgar had an appreciation for the exhausting nature of everything I had already done todia.
I will handle the communication. She will not wish to accept that Master Chief Carlos does not wish to speak with her.
“I know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll help that Jones is excited to. Pity Zhiruo isn’t able to run interference. Any word on Zhiruo yet? Or Linden?”
Starlight says Linden is communicating in outgoing packet bursts. They say she says the situation is difficult and unstable, requiring constant interventions. She has hopes that if she finds the right code sequences, she will be able to stabilize herself and commence repairs. Once that occurs, she should be able to resume normal functions. She says that will be soon. Whatever soon is.
I have heard no updates on Zhiruo, but I assume that once Linden has solved her virus she will be able to tackle its other instances. Unless Zhiruo manages to repair herself first, which is possible.
“Good,” I said. I rubbed my eyes. “I’m going to get some food while supplies still hold out. Do you want anything?”
I am well-nourished. Tralgar tapped its breathing slits with a meaty appendage-tip. Don’t forget to take that mask off before you try to put anything in your food hole.
By the time I got to the cafeteria I was ready to slide into a booth, drink a beer, and never talk to another living being. But when I checked the statuses I saw that Rhym and Hhayazh had claimed a table against the windows, and amended my mood to “never talk to another human being.”
I sent a request to join them, but perhaps they were too busy eating to notice the ping, because no reply came. So, when I arrived at the caf, I stood where they could see me and waved, and pointed to their table. They waved back and pointed to the table as well.