Not that she was herself a doctor, no. That was too much even for a dream. Sue-ling Quong was the surgeon, not Moon; Moon was not even the official nurse, because Daisy Fay McQueen was the one who had the familiarity with the ship's small (but adequate) resources—as well as limbs enough to handle anesthesia and half a dozen other chores at once. But Moon was right there to assist them both, scrubbed up, masked and gloved, custodian of the scalpels and other instruments.
There wasn't much blood when Sue-ling deftly lifted a flap of Sork's shaved skin from above his temple, not even when she began cutting through the skull itself, though the harsh stink of burning bone was unpleasant. Moon took note of it, then put it out of her mind. It was a real human life that was at risk here, and her feelings had to be forgotten. She could see that Sork Quintero was in bad shape, breathing strangely, his eyes half open but unseeing. Without immediate surgical intervention he might easily die, Sue-ling had said, before she scrubbed and inserted her memo disk.
That had been the strangest sight of all for Moon Bunderan. She had never seen anyone under the disk before. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at the masked face of the surgeon wonderingly. Was it really her friend Sue-ling Quong who was standing so tall there, cutting and drilling the skull of her lover—maybe of her former lover?; Moon was beginning to wonder just what the relations were becoming— anyway, carving into Sork Quintero's helpless flesh and bone with her memmie-precise skill? It didn't look like her, behind the cap and surgeon's mask. When she spoke, the voice didn't really sound like hers, either. "Suction," snapped Sue-ling, in a flat and commanding tone that Moon had never heard from her before, and instandy Daisy Fay, anchoring herself firmly with a couple of her tentacles, was using another to direct the gurgling little tube into the incision in Sork's skull, to pump away the oozing blood that was obscuring Sue-ling's view. "Careful!" warned Sue-ling. "Don't touch the brain!"
Daisy Fay was certainly careful. For that matter, Moon was careful, too, as she handed over a scalpel or a sponge. As carefiil as she had ever been in her life . . . and beginning to dream again, too. This was not so different from operating on a calf or a ram! It was not impossible. . . .
It was not impossible, at least, if she were willing to do what Sue-ling Quong had done, and allow her own skull to be opened, as Sue-ling had opened Sork's with her buzzing litde drill, for a memmie implant.
Moon shuddered involuntarily, and got a warning look from Sue-ling.
How long the surgery took Moon could not guess— hours, probably. She was too keyed up to keep track of time . . . but then it was over. "We'll leave the skull open," the surgeon decided. "We may have to go in again; but we'll suture the scalp now."
And then, when gauze had hidden the top of Sork's head and Daisy Fay was left to, very gently, fit a kind of helmet atop it to guard it from accidental bruises while Moon put the instruments in the sterilizer, the surgeon stood back. "He's stable. I think he'll be all right for now," she declared, "but that clot was in a tricky place and if another one should form he could be in bad trouble. We'll have to watch him for a while."
And then the surgeon lifted her hand to her memmie socket. As she slipped the disk out she blinked and seemed to reel dazedly for a moment before she caught herself.
Then Sue-ling Quong looked wonderingly at her friends. "Wow," she said, rubbing her suddenly aching head. "Is the operation over? Is Sork all right? How did I do?"
They left Kiri standing guard over the unconscious Sork, warned to call Sue-ling if there was the slightest change in his condition. Sue-ling herself went off to catch as much rest as she could, the large problems of The Golden Hind out of her mind as she concentrated on her patient. Those weren't Moon Bunderan's immediate concerns, either. Wearily she washed herself up after the operation, wondering how it could be that there had seemed so little blood in the operation itself, and yet so much on her hands and gown? And all the time, she was keeping an eye on Thrayl, stretched doglike on the floor behind her. When she turned to look at him, he did not meet her eyes. "Thrayl?" she ventured. "Are you feeling any better?"
Even then he didn't look up. When he answered his voice was low and wretched. "The smallsongs are not happy here, Moon. They hurt," he said.
"How do they hurt, Thrayl?" But, however she pressed him, he would not explain. When she lost patience and went back to the control room, he got up and followed her, still sunk in apathy.
There Daisy Fay came to greet her. "There's news, Moon," the machine-woman said, the face on her belly plate smiling. It was no more than a tentative smile, hopeful rather than reassuring. But it was still a smile, when Moon Bunderan had begun to forget that there were things to smile about. "It isn't as bad as we thought in this place! There are stars here, we just couldn't see them!"
Litlun moved his arms reprovingly. "We do not know that these are stars," he croaked, correcting her. "They are objects, yes."
"They're damned big objects," Krake said, his tone more baffled than hostile. It wasn't hard for Moon to deduce that she was coming in on a continuing argument—but what else had this whole trip been but arguments? "Show her, Marco."
"Right, Francis!" Marco Ramos said, and began tapping on the keyboard. "We made a systematic search, Moon," he told her. "There's nothing that we can detect in the optical frequencies, but when we switch down in the infrared—look."
As soon as Marco made the frequency shift, the screens were speckled with tiny dots of light. To Moon it looked like a sky, all right, though an impoverished one—not like the dense shoals and reefs of stars in their own universe, not even like the bright nighttime skies over her own ranch, almost as poor as a night sky in town, when the bright lights drowned out the heavens.
"We can see more of them with magnification," Marco pointed out, "but they're pretty faint. All they radiate is low-level heat—but they're there, all right."
"They have to be stars," Krake said flady. "Maybe this is an old universe and the stars are almost dead."
"Or they could be brown dwarfs," Marco offered, "though I don't see how brown dwarfs could exist unless there were some really big, bright ones, too? And I can't find any useful data about brown dwarfs on the lecture chips."
Krake ordered. "Turn up the magnification. Give us some close-ups."
The images on the screen swelled and shrank again as, obediently, Marco moved the magnification area across that vast, dark sky. It looked, Moon thought, almost like some nearsighted reader sweeping a magnifying glass across a printed page. But Marco's best efforts showed very little. At utmost magnification, the objects were still simply points of warmth in the frigid cold of this universe's space.
"That's all there is. Just heat," said Marco, working at the board. "I'm not getting anything else, Captain. No optical frequencies, no ultraviolet, no radio—nothing but low-grade heat, and not much of that."
"Puzzling," crowed the Turtle, Litlun, uneasily. "One has never encountered such objects before, except—"
"Except what?" demanded Krake.
Chief Thunderbird cut in. "The Facilitator means only that there are stories of such things," he squawked harshly. "From very old times. Not well documented. Of no help to us now, certainly."
Krake gave him a hard look. "If there is something, I want to know it," he said. Lidun muttered in the larger Turtle's ear, but Chief Thunderbird only waved him away.
"It is not relevant. As a matter of more importance," the big Turde squawked, "what has the Taur to tell us of this?"
Diverted, Krake turned to Moon Bunderan. "Good question. What about it, Moon?"