“Now,” said the Countess, “how fast can we pull this together? How soon can you be ready to travel?”
“Immediately,” said Bothari-Jesek.
“At your command, ma’am,” said Mark. “I do feel—it’s nothing psychic, you understand. It’s not even the general itch. It’s only logic. But I do think we could be running out of time.”
“How so?” asked Bothari-Jesek. “There’s nothing more static than cryo-stasis. We’re all going crazy from uncertainty, sure, but that’s our problem. Miles may have more time than we do.”
Mark shook his head. “If Miles had fallen frozen into friendly or even neutral hands, they ought to have responded to the rumors of reward by now. But if … someone … wanted to revive him, they’d have to do the prep first. We’re all very conscious right now of how long it takes to grow organs for transplant.”
The Countess nodded wryly.
“If—wherever Miles is—committed to the project soon after they got him, they could be nearly ready to attempt a revival by now.”
“They might botch it,” said the Countess. “They might not be careful enough.” Her fingers drummed on the pretty shell inlay.
“I don’t follow that,” objected Bothari-Jesek. “Why would an enemy bother to revive him? What fate could be worse than death?”
“I don’t know,” sighed Mark. But if there is one, I bet the Jacksoninans can arrange it.
Chapter Nineteen
With breath, came pain.
He was in a hospital bed. That much he knew even before opening his eyes, from the discomfort, the chill, and the smell. That seemed right. Vaguely, if unpleasantly, familiar. He blinked, to discover that his eyes were plastered with goo. Scented, translucent, medical goo. It was like trying to see through a pane of glass covered with grease. He blinked some more, and achieved a limited focus, then had to stop and catch his breath from the effort.
There was something terribly wrong with his breathing, labored panting that didn’t provide enough air at all. And it whistled. The whistling came from a plastic tube down his throat, he realized, trying to swallow. His lips were dry and cracked; the tube blocking his mouth prevented him from moistening them. He tried to move. His body sent back shooting aches and pains, burning through every bone. There were tubes going into, or perhaps out of, his arms. And his ears. And his nose.
There were too damn many tubes. That was bad, he realized dimly, though how he knew he could not have said. With a heroic effort, he tried to raise his head and see down his body. The tube in his throat shifted painfully.
Ridges of ribs. Belly gaunt and sunken. Red welts radiated all over his chest, like a long-legged spider crouched just beneath his skin, its body over his sternum. Surgical glue held together jagged incisions, multiple scarlet scars looking like a map of a major river drainage delta. He was pocked with monitor-pads. More tubes ran from places orifices ought not to be. He caught a glimpse of his genitalia, lying in a limp discolored lump; there was a tube from there, too. Pain from there would be subtly reassuring, but he couldn’t feel anything at all. He couldn’t feel his legs or feet, either, though he could see them. His whole body was covered thickly with the scented goo. His skin was peeling in nasty big pale flakes, stuck in the stuff. His head fell back on a pad, and black clouds boiled in his eyes. Too many damn tubes. Bad …
He was in a muzzy, half-awake state, floating between confusing dream-fragments and pain, when the woman came.
She leaned into his blurred vision. “We’re taking the pacer out, now.” Her voice was clear and low. The tubes had gone away from his ears, or maybe he’d dreamed them. “Your new heart will be beating and your lungs working all on their own.”
She bent over his aching chest. Pretty woman, of the elegantly intellectual type. He was sorry he was dressed only in goo, in front of her, though it seemed to him that he had carried on with even less to wear, once. He could not remember where or how. She did something to the spider-body lump; he saw his skin part in a thin red slit and then be sealed again. She seemed to be cutting out his heart, like an antique priestess making sacrifice, but that could not be, for his labored breathing continued. She’d definitely taken out something, for she placed it on a tray held by her male assistant.
“There.” She watched him closely.
He watched her in return, blinking away the distortions of the ointment. She had straight, silky black hair, bound in a knot—more of a wad, actually—on the back of her head. A few fine strands escaped to float around her face. Golden skin. Brown eyes with a hint of an epicanthic fold. Stubby, stubborn black lashes. The bridge of her nose was coolly arched. A pleasant, original face, not surgically altered to a mathematically perfect beauty, but enlivened by an alert tension. Not an empty face. Somebody interesting was in there. But not, alas, somebody familiar.
She was tall and slim, dressed in a pale green lab smock over other clothes. “Doctor,” he tried to guess, but it came out a formless gurgle around the plastic in his mouth.
“I’m going to take that tube out now,” she told him. She pulled something sticky from around his lips and cheeks—tape? More dead skin came with it. Gently, she drew out the throat-tube. He gagged. It was like un-swallowing a snake. The relief of being rid of it almost made him pass out again. There was still some sort of tube— oxygen?—blocking his nostrils.
He moved his jaw, and swallowed for the first time in … in … Anyway, his tongue felt thick and swollen. His chest hurt terribly. But saliva flowed; his dry mouth re-hydrated. One did not really appreciate saliva till one was forced to do without it. His heart beat fast and light, like bird wings fluttering. It did not feel right, but at least he felt something.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
The subliminal terror he had been studiously ignoring yawned black beneath him. His breath quickened in his panic. Despite the oxygen, he could not get enough air. And he could not answer her question. “Ah,” he whispered. “Ag …” He did not know who he was, nor how he had come by this huge burden of hurt. The not-knowing frightened him far more than the hurt.
The young man in the pale-blue medical jacket snorted, “I think I’m going to win my bet. That one’s coagulated behind the eyeballs. All short circuits back there.” He tapped his forehead.
The woman frowned in annoyance. “Patients don’t come popping up out of cryo-stasis like a meal out of a microwave. It takes just as much healing as if the original injury hadn’t killed them, and more. It will be a couple of days before I can even begin to evaluate his higher neural functions.”
Still, she pulled something sharp and shiny from the lapel of her jacket, and moved around him, touching him and watching a monitor readout on the wall above his head. When his right hand jerked back at a prick, she smiled. Yeah, and when my prick jerks up at a right hand, I’ll smile, he thought dizzily.
He wanted to speak. He wanted to tell that blue fellow to take a wormhole jump to hell, and take his bet with him. All that came out of his mouth was a hollow hiss. He shuddered with frustration. He had to function, or die. That, he was bone-sure of. Be the best or be destroyed.
He didn’t know where this certainty came from. Who was going to kill him? He didn’t know. Them, some faceless them. No time to rest. March or die.
The medical duo left. Driven by the obscure fear, he began to try to exercise, isometrics in his bed. All he could move was his right arm. Attracted by his thrashing as reported by his monitor pads, the youth came back and sedated him. When the darkness closed in again, he wanted to howl. He had very bad dreams, after that; any content would have been welcome to his bewildered brain, but all he could remember when he woke was the badness.