“Ah, Ms. Alizond. If you would be so good as to help tighten this strap?” Dennett barely looked up as I approached the thrashing ghoul. He had somehow—presumably in conjunction with Gould’s little helpers—managed to trap Lady Cybelle in a space suit with its glove rings locked together, forming a field-expedient straitjacket. She was placid for the time being, suckling on a bottle of Fragile blood, but he was clearly intent on taking no chances and was busily lashing her to the commander’s reentry couch within the capsule with a fearsome array of fetters. “Once she’s in place, I can plug her back in and restart the nutrient flow. It’s strictly a temporary measure—we can release her when her mind returns—but for the time being she needs close supervision and restraint. If you would be so good as to grab this strap and brace yourself, then afterward, if you could fetch Cook—”
“There’s a stowaway!” I couldn’t contain myself. “She attacked me, but I’ve glued her inside my room! You didn’t issue me a telephone, so I couldn’t report—”
“Most of the shipboard communicators are in use inside the skeletons,” Dennett interrupted me. “How do you think Gould operates them?”
“But there’s an intruder!”
“One problem at a time.” He sighed. “Where did you meet this person, and what induced you to glue her inside your room?”
“I was on my way to the kitchen; I ran into her in one of the companionways. She asked who I was, then threw a knife at me—a ducted-fan blade. I got a door between us, then ran. I don’t know who she is but she looks . . . just like me . . .” I slowed.
“So you’ve discovered your evil twin?” Dennett asked, not unkindly. “Have a seat.” He gestured at the copilot’s couch beside the madwoman. “It would be best if we don’t have to worry about which one of you is the real Ms. Alizond, don’t you think?” I froze, then glanced over my shoulder at the open hatch. A grinning skull stared back at me. “Further confusion would be undesirable.”
“But I—”
“Grmm. Brnz,” Her Grace mumbled around a mouthful of raw meat.
“What was that?” Dennett leaned over her, losing interest in me all of a sudden. I glanced at the hatch again. “Oh I say.” He turned back to me. “Listen. I think you should stay here. I’ve sent for more supplies; just keep her well fed, and nothing will go wrong, do you understand?”
“Wait, what—”
A distant thud, more felt than heard, rippled through the capsule. “I have a mission to run,” said the deacon, straightening up (insofar as it was possible for him to do so in the cramped confines of the sarcophagus). He turned toward the hatch. “And it’s probably best if we keep both you and your twin in known locations for the time being. So if you will excuse me . . .”
He scrambled out: Skeletal arms reached in to replace him with a bright blue mesh basket of feedstock canisters and a talking box, then the sarcophagus hatch slammed shut overhead. “Glrmmmm!” moaned the thing on the couch. It subsided into a routine of sucking and munching. I shuddered and looked at the recently resurrected zombie. Were those cheeks slightly less hollow, those eyes an iota less mad?
“Maintenance operator,” blatted the talking box, “secondary nutrient spigot one requires refilling urgently. Remove the expended A4921K cartridge and replace with a fresh A4921K cartridge!”
Another thudding bang rippled through the floor of the capsule. I bent over the bag of stores and rummaged desperately for a fresh A4921K—a cylindrical green assembly with a valve at one end and a spindle protruding from the other—then swore at the talking box until it explained, in monosyllables, how to install it. There were more distant bangs. The Soyuz was very close to soundproof; whatever was going on outside must be extremely loud to carry through its hull. The small porthole in the wall of the sarcophagus was positioned inconveniently, pointing at one wall of the crypt. I will confess to stealing a glance through it from time to time, but most of my attention was directed at Lady Cybelle, who, for the most part, lay slobbering and quiescent upon her couch (although from time to time curious spasms rippled through her, as though she was testing the breaking strength of the restraining straps).
After a while, I began to feel dizzy. Not ill, merely disoriented—as if the chapel was undergoing some sort of very slow maneuvering. I lay down on the second couch and just in time, for moments later the stack of supplies toppled sideways. There was another deep thud from beneath. Cybelle moaned quietly. “Where? Whaaaare?”
“Hush,” I replied, preoccupied by what a deep sense of foreboding informed me must be the onset of a slow-motion space battle.
“Need . . . control.” I turned sideways to look at her. She stared back, sidelong, with the beginnings of lucidity visible in her unnaturally smooth and immobile face. Her expression was disturbing, as inexpressive as a corpse whose collective anima had died but whose mechanocytes had not yet voted to liquidate the collective: However, compared to the mindless ghoul that had ravened her way through the crypt before Gould’s skeletal remotes subdued her, she was a paragon of lucidity. “Who. Am. I?”
I told her, but the news clearly upset her bitterly, and I was compelled to silence her with another bolus of blood-liver pâté while I took stock of my thoughts. Meanwhile, the banging from outside continued: At one point a shudder rippled through the floor and set the muted clappers high above to thudding against their muffled bells. The supplies drifted up toward the top of the sarcophagus, and I nearly followed them: I was forced to net them together and drag them down to the floor (and a good thing I did so, for seconds later the gravity resumed—about a hundredth of a gee, offset at a thirty-five-degree angle if I am any judge of such things).
Finally, everything straightened up again, and the clamor stopped.
“Who. Am. I?” asked Cybelle.
I stared at her. I had, it’s true, been feeding her more or less continuously for an hour. And the Soyuz had become uncomfortably warm during that time, and I’d lost track of the gurgling and bubbling noises coming from within her space suit, but the heat exchanger it was plumbed into was definitely hot to the glance: and for the first time there was something not unlike sentience in her expression. “You’re the priestess, Cybelle, aren’t you?” I was suddenly acutely aware of my own lack of paramedical training: “Are you hungry?” I asked.
She shook her head weakly. “Not now.” She swallowed. Yes, definite signs of lucidity. Color was returning to her skin, which was slowly flushing toward a healthy blue. “Hot’n’cold. It’s a, a fever.” Her eyes rolled for a moment, then I realized she was scanning her surroundings. “This suit. Heat exchanger. I’m too hot.”
Hot. That was what Dennett had been talking about—heating her up, cranking her metabolism up into overdrive and force-feeding her newly integrating organs. “How do I turn the temperature down?” I asked her, pointing at the control panel.
“Let me—” She tried to sit up, then to raise her arms. For the first time, she saw that her sleeves were locked into one another at the wrist rings. “Was I violent?”
“You tried to eat the deacon.”
“I’m sure the traitorous little shit deserved it . . .”
I made a snap decision. “Let’s see if we can get you out of that thing.”
It was, I discovered, not difficult to unfasten space-suit glove rings from the outside. As soon as I had unlocked them, Cybelle pulled her hands apart. Then she began to fumble ineffectually with the seat webbing. “Something’s wrong.”