I altered the drone’s telemetry so that the neutron wind became invisible. Looking beyond, I saw no stars at all. Einsteinian distortion was squashing them up fore and aft, concealed by the flared ends of the ship. We were still accelerating towards light-speed.
‘Well?’ I asked, much later.
‘As you know, we’ve yet to reach midpoint. In fact, we will not reach home for another three years of shiptime.’
‘Is this a technical problem?’
‘Not strictly. I’m afraid it’s medical, which is why I was forced to bring you out of reefersleep between systems. Like the view, my darling?’
‘Are you joking? An empty universe with no stars? It’s the gloomiest thing I can remember.’
I was back in the coldroom where the six crew reefers were stored. Katia’s data ghost stood at my side, and Mozart warmed our spirits. Mozart’s joyous familiarity drowned out all the faint, distant sounds of the ship, and the frank necessity of this annoyed me greatly. I was not normally prone to nervousness.
‘Janos is sick,’ explained Katia. ‘He must have contracted the Melding Plague on Yellowstone. Unless we act now he won’t survive the rest of the journey. He needs emergency surgery.’
‘He’s sick?’ I shrugged. ‘Too bad. But SOP on this is clear, Katia. Freeze him down further, lock the condition in stasis.’ I leaned over the smooth side of Janos’s reefer, examining the bio-med display cartouche under its coffin-lid rim. The reefer resembled a giant chrome chrysalis or silverfish, anchored by its head to a coiled nexus of umbilicals. Within this hexagonal fluted box lay Janos. His inert form was dimly visible under the frosted clear lid.
‘Normally, that would be our wisest course of action,’ Katia said. ‘Earthside med skills will certainly outmode our own. But in this instance the rules must be contravened. Janos can’t survive, even at emergency levels of reefersleep. You know about the Melding Plague.’
I did. We all knew about it only too well, for it had crippled Yellowstone. The Melding Plague was a biocybernetic virus, something new to our experience. Yellowstone’s intensely cybernetic society had crumbled at the nanomolecular level, the level of our computers and implants. The Melding Plague had caused our nanomachinery to grow malign.
I permitted Katia to explain, walking to the kitchen and preparing salami rolls, stepping briskly through the dim corridors.
All crewpersons were fitted with such implants. Through these data windows we interfaced with the machinery of the reefers and the mainbrain of the ship as the ramliner cruised from star to star. Janos’s virus had attacked the structure of his own implants, ripping them apart and reorganizing them into analogues of itself. From one implant node, a network of webbed strands was spreading further into his brain, in an apparent attempt to knit together all the infected locales.
‘The experts on Yellowstone soon learned that cold does not retard the virus significantly — certainly not the kind of cold from which a human could ever be revived. We must therefore operate immediately, before the virus gains a stronghold. And I’m afraid that our routine surgical programs will fail. We can’t use nanomachinery against the virus; it will simply subsume whatever we throw against it.’
I gobbled my rolls. ‘I don’t know neurosurgery; that wasn’t on the skills eidetic.’ I brushed crumbs from my stubbled chin. ‘However, if Janos’s life is in danger—’
‘We must act. How are you feeling now?’
‘A little stiff. Nothing serious.’ I forced a very stiff grin. ‘I’ll admit, I was a little jumpy early on. I think those ants gave me the creeps.’
Katia was silent for a few seconds. ‘That’s normal,’ she eventually said. ‘Get plenty of rest. Then we’ll examine the surgical tools.’
I went jogging. I mapped a sinuous, winding path through the lifesystem, feeling the megaton mass of the ship wheel about my centre of mass. I was ruthless with myself, deliberately selecting a route that took me through every dark and shadowy region of the lifesystem I could think of. I silenced Mozart and forbade myself the company of Katia, disabling my imago inducer.
My thoughts turned back to the figure I imagined I had seen. What kind of rationale had flashed through my mind in the few seconds when I permitted the figure to exist outside of my imagination? Perhaps one of the sleepers might have thawed by accident and was wandering the ship in dismay. That hypothetical wanderer would have been equally surprised by my own presence. Ergo the person was now hiding.
Of course, the figure was undoubtedly a hallucination. One need not be drooling at the mouth to hallucinate — indeed, one could easily retain enough facilities to recognise the experience as being totally internalised. After the uneventful hours of wakefulness that had subsequently passed, I was anxious to dismiss the whole incident.
I jogged on, my shoes slapping the deck. I was approaching the nadir of my journey, the part of the ship that until now I had studiously avoided. Sensing my nearing footfalls, cartwheelshaped airlocks dilated open. I panted through an antechamber, into the vast room where nine hundred slept.
The chamber had the toroidal shape of a tokamak. Nine hundred deep-preservation reefers lined the inner and outer walls, crisscrossed by ladders and catwalks. I set about circumnavigating the chamber, to finally purge my mind of any stray ghosts. Hadn’t that always been my strategy as a child: confront my fears head on? I suspected that the boy in me would have been richly amused by my motives here. Nonetheless I insisted on this one ridiculous circuit, convinced it would leave me eased.
Most of these sleepers would stay aboard when we arrived in the Earth system. They were refugees from the Melding Plague, seeking sanctuary in the future. At the nearlight speeds this vessel attained between suns, large levels of time dilation would be experienced. Our clocks would grind to an imperceptible crawl. After thirty or forty years of shiptime, a mere six or seven hops between systems, more than a century would have elapsed on Yellowstone, enough time for eco-engineers to exorcise the biome of the Melding Plague. The sleepers we carried had elected not to risk spending the time in the planet’s community cryocrypts; in dilation sleep the effective time spent in reefers was less, and therefore their chances of completely safe revival were enormously increased.
I was jogging slowly enough to read the glowing name panels imprinted on each reefer. Men, women, children… the rich of my world, able to pay for this exorbitant journey into a brighter future. I thought of the less wealthy, those who could not even afford spaces in the cryocrypts. I thought of the long queues of people waiting to see surgeons, people like Katia, anxious to lose their implants before the disease reached them. They would pay with whatever they could: organs or prosthetics or memories. Or if they chose not to pay they might consider becoming crew. My people made good crew-fodder. It called for a certain degree of yearning desperation to accept direct interfacing with the mainbrain. The hard price of our bargain was the simple fact that our reduced state of reefersleep meant we would continue to age as we slept away the years.
That was not a bargain Katia had felt she could make. And I had known that I could not stand to lose my implants. Thus the Melding Plague touched us.
I felt bitterness, and this was welcome to me. I was happy to find familiar anxieties polluting my thoughts. I cast a dismissive glance over my shoulder, back along the curving ranks of sleepers I had already passed.
I was being followed.
The shadow was pounding along the walkway, halfway around the great curve of the chamber. I could barely see it, just a man-shaped black aperture in the distance.