‘Is it working?’
‘Yes. I think so. Perhaps between the two of us—’ Her jaws cracked together, teeth cutting her tongue. ‘Not going to be easy, but… losing more of me now. Language going. Don’t need now.’
‘Weather, don’t go.’
‘Can’t stay. Got to go. Only way. Inigo, make promise. Make promise fast.’
‘Say it. Whatever it is.’
‘When we get… when we—’ Her face was contorted with the strain of trying to make herself understood.
‘When we arrive,’ I said.
She nodded so hard I thought her neck was going to break. ‘Yes. Arrive. You get help. Find others.’
‘Other Conjoiners?’
‘Yes. Bring them. Bring them in ship. Tell them. Tell them and make them help.’
‘I will. I swear on it.’
‘Going now. Inigo. One last thing.’
‘Yes. Whatever it is.’
‘Hold hand.’
I reached out and took her hand, in my good one.
‘No,’ Weather said. ‘Other. Other hand.’
I let go, then took her hand in my metal one, closing my fingers as tightly as I dared without risking hers. Then I leaned down, bringing my face close to hers.
‘Weather, I think I love you. I’ll wait for you. I’ll find those Conjoiners. That’s a promise.’
‘Love a Spider?’ she asked.
‘Yes. If this is what it takes.’
‘Silly… human… boy.’
She pulled my hand, with more strength than I thought she had left in her. She tugged it down into the surface of the couch until it lapped around my wrist, warm as blood. I felt something happening to my hand, a crawling itch like pins and needles. I kissed Weather. Her lips were fever-warm. She nodded and then allowed me to withdraw my hand.
‘Go now,’ she said.
The red material of the couch flowed over Weather completely, covering her hands and face until all that remained was a vague, mummy-like form.
I knew then that I would not see her again for a very long time. For a moment I stood still, paralysed by what had happened. Even then I could feel my weight increasing. Whatever Weather and the boy were doing between them, it was having some effect on the engine output. My weight climbed smoothly, until I was certain we were exceeding half a gee and still accelerating.
Perhaps we were going to make it home after all.
Some of us.
I turned from Weather’s casket and looked for the way out. Held tight against my chest to stop it itching, my hand was lost under a glove of twinkling machinery. I wondered what gift I would find when the glove completed its work.
DILATION SLEEP
Spacers tell people that the worst aspect of starflight is revival. They speak the truth, I think. They give us dreams while the machines warm us up and map our bodies for cell damage. We feel no anxiety or fear, detached from our physical selves and adrift in generated fantasies.
In my dream I was joined by the cybernetic imago of Katia, my wife. We found ourselves within a computer-constructed sensorium. An insect, I felt my six thin legs propelling me into a wide and busy chamber. Four worker ants were there, crouched in stiff mechanical postures. With compound vision I studied these new companions, observing the nearest of them deposit a pearly egg from its abdomen. A novel visceral sense told me that I, too, contained a ready egg.
‘We’re gods amongst them,’ I told my wife’s imago.
‘We are Myrmecia gulosa,’ she whispered into my brain. ‘The bulldog ant. You see the queen, and her winged male?’
‘Yes.’
‘Those maggoty things in the corner of the cell are the queen’s larvae. Her worker is about to feed them.’
‘Feed them with what?’
‘His egg, my darling.’
I rotated my sleek, mandibled head. ‘And will I also?’
‘Naturally! A worker’s duty is always to serve his queen. Of course… you may exit this environ, if you choose. But you’ll have to remain in reefersleep for another three hours.’
‘Three hours… might as well be centuries,’ I said. ‘Then change it. Something a bit less alien.’
My imago dissolved the scenario, the universe. I floated in white limbo, awaiting fresh sensory stimulus. Soon I found myself brushing shimmering vermilion coral with eight suckered arms, an octopus.
Katia liked to play games.
Eventually the dreams ceased and I suddenly sensed my body, cold and stiff but definitely anchored to my mind.
I allowed myself a long primal scream, then opened my eyes. The eyes I opened were the eyes of Uri Andrei Sagdev, who was once a mainbrain technician at the Sylveste Institute but who now found himself in the odd role of Starship Heuristic Resource, a crewperson.
Under different circumstances, it is not a role I would otherwise have chosen. I was alone, the room cold and silent. My five companions remained in reefersleep around my own capsule; only I had been revived. I sensed, then, that something must be wrong. But I did not query Katia, preferring to remain in ignorance until she saw fit to enlighten me regarding our situation.
I hauled myself from the open reefer and took faltering steps out of the room.
It was several minutes before I felt confident to do anything more ambitious than that. I stumbled to the nearby health bay and exercised with galvanic activators, pushing my muscles beyond the false limits of apparent exhaustion. Then I showered and dressed, taking the expediency of wearing a thermal layer beneath my overalls. Breakfast consisted of fried ham and Edam slices, followed by garlic croissants, washed down with chilled passion fruit and lemon tea.
Why was I not concerned to discover our difficulty? Simply because the mere fact of revival told me that it could not be compellingly urgent. Any undesirable situation upon a light-skimming starship that does not instantly destroy it — probably in a flash of exotic bosons — will act on such an extended timescale that the mainbrain-crew overmind will have days or weeks to engineer a solution.
I knew we were not home, and that therefore something was wrong. But for a moment it was good simply to lie back in the kitchen and allow the music of Roedelius to envelop me, and to revel in this condition called life. To simply suck air into my old lungs.
I who had been dead, or near death, for so long.
‘Some more, Uri?’ asked my wife’s imago.
I was alone apart from a servitor. It was a dumb-bell shaped drone hovering on silently energised levitation fields above the metal floor. Extruding a manipulator from the matt-gold surface of its upper spheroid, it offered me the jug of pale juice.
With a well-practised subvocal command, I enabled my entoptic system. The implant supplied the visual and tactile stimuli necessary to fully realise the imago, the simulation of Katia, drawing it from the ship’s mainbrain. Bright grids and circles interrupted my ocular field, then meshed and thickened to form my wife, frozen and lifeless but apparently solid. Copyright symbols denoting the implant company flashed, then faded. I locked her entoptic ghost over the dull form of the servitor, its compact size easily concealed within her body-space. Her blunt silver hair fell around a narrow pale face, black lips pursed like a doll’s and eyes staring right through me. Her clasped hands emerged from a long hooded scarlet gown inlaid around the shoulder with the insignia of the Mixmaster geneticists, a pair of hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. My wife was a geneticist to the marow. On Yellowstone, where cybernetics was the primary creed, it made her a virtual pariah.