It was probably a gentle touch, but it didn't feel that way. It told Viktor right away his dream of pain had not been entirely a dream.
The woman's touch exploded through his head like a hammer blow, dizzying him. He jerked away from that probing finger—and found that the dream of flying was not altogether an illusion, either. He moved so easily, with so little force dragging at his body, that he knew that he couldn't be on Newmanhome. In fact, he couldn't be on any planet at all; he didn't weigh enough.
Viktor let himself fall gently back, hazily pondering the problem. The woman and the other person—a man's voice, not so much cooing as harshly gargling the sounds—were carrying on a conversation in the language that Viktor could not quite comprehend. If he wasn't on a planet, he thought, he was probably on a ship. What ship? Not Ark, certainly; there was nothing left of Ark but droplets of condensed metal, if any of Ark was left at all. Not old Mayflower, either, he was sure of that. There was nothing on Mayflower like this amber-walled room with its soft clouds of pastel light drifting across the ceiling. Some things looked somewhat familiar—the thing he was lying on, for instance. It was very much like the shallow pan that corpsicles were thawed in, and he caught a quick glimpse of several others like it in the room. They were occupied. There was a human body in each, and warming radiation flooding down on them: he was not the only person being brought back to life, he thought, pleased with his cleverness at observing that.
But where was all this happening?
And what was hurting him so much? As the explosion of pain in his skull dwindled again he became aware of two other hurting places—a mean, burning sensation in his right leg below the knee, and a sharper, smaller, but still very painful, hurt in his buttock. None of it made any sense to Viktor. Nothing else did, either. "Sense" was beyond him; he was dazed, confused, disoriented, and he was even having trouble remembering. On all the evidence, he was quite sure he had just been thawed out from a time in the freezer. But he remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had been frozen before. More than once, he thought, and which time was this? He reasoned that it couldn't have been the times when he was facing a long interstellar flight, because he had been a child then. He wasn't a child anymore, of course. Was he? And who was this woman, who was now coaxing him to lie down again?
The name "Reesa" crossed his foggy mind, but he didn't think this woman was she—whoever "Reesa" was.
He shook his head to try to dispel the confusion. That turned out to be a bad mistake; the pain burst through him again. But he felt the need to demonstrate his wakeful competence at once, like someone waked in the middle of the night by the telephone who instantly protests he wasn't asleep. He licked his lips, getting ready to speak.
"I don't feel very well," he said, forming the sentence with care.
Funnily, the words didn't come out right. It was more like an animal growl than a voice. He discovered that his throat, too, was extraordinarily sore.
The woman looked amused again and gestured to the man with her in the room. The man, Viktor saw, was quite normal-looking—neither as wraithfully thin nor as tall—but he wore what the woman wore, a sort of gossamer gown. He turned out to be quite strong. He pushed Viktor back down, holding him so that the woman could do something to him again.
The woman leaned close to Viktor. With her came a fragrance half like flowers, half like distant wood smoke.
Her nearness made Viktor suddenly aware that he was quite naked. The woman didn't seem to notice, or at least to care. She peered into his eyes. She touched the base of his throat with an instrument that glittered like metal but was soft and warm to the touch, while she studied a tiny, dancing firework display of color at the instrument's base.
Then she pulled down his lower lip. Instinctively he tried to twist his head away—again that explosion of pain!—but the man in the filmy gown gripped his head roughly, holding it immobile while the woman touched the damp, tender inside of Viktor's lip with some other kind of thing, and Viktor went quickly and helplessly to sleep.
When he woke up again he was alone in the room. Even the other resuscitation pans were empty.
His head still hurt, but the other pains were gone—well, not gone entirely, but now they were only little annoyances rather than agony. When he sat up he saw that his right calf, from knee to ankle, was encased in some sort of a pale pink sausagelike contrivance. He puzzled over that for a while, poking at it with a finger. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand much of anything at all; everything seemed so complicated. The way he felt, he thought, was almost like being drunk.
He tried to recollect how he had got here. There was a memory of being told he had to go back in the freezer …
Yes, that was true, he was pretty sure. It wasn't a comforting thought, though. He had a vague memory about freezing, something that someone had told him—was her name Wanda?—long before. It did not do to be frozen too many times. That he was sure of, though what it meant was very unclear.
He heard a man's voice growling something from the doorway, and when he looked around it was the fellow in the gown, looking at him. "You're awake," the man said—wonderfully, in words that Viktor understood. "Stay there. I'll see if Nrina wants to look at you."
Viktor made himself sit up. At least some questions were beginning to be clear. For some reason these people had decided to revive him from cryonic suspension. All right, he could understand that. He wondered how long he had been in the freezer this time. It couldn't be a matter of centuries again, of course. He simply would not accept that. But it had been long enough, at least, for the Reforms, or whoever's turn it was at the power plant detail this time, to get a little decent heat in the freezatorium. (But hadn't he just decided he wasn't in the freezatorium anymore? He wasn't sure.) And, if these people actually were Reforms, or if they were any other sect from frozen Newmanhome for that matter, they'd certainly changed their mode of dress. The man was taking off the filmy robe, and under it he wore nothing but a kind of kilt. Then, when the impossibly thin woman came back, Viktor observed that the gown she was wearing was the kind of clothing one wore for decoration or for modesty—well, no, not for modesty either, he thought; but certainly not for keeping out the cold. The thing was a long white smock, almost transparent, and he could clearly see that there was nothing much under it.
The woman looked different, though. She seemed to be more fretful and tired than when he had first seen her, as though she had been working hard, and the silky, gossamer gown was soiled with new spots of blood.
When he shifted position to look at her he thought to look down at himself, and was suddenly ashamed of his nakedness. Then, twisting for a better look, he saw that there was a wound on his right buttock. That was where one of the pains he had almost forgotten had come from. It wasn't an insect bite, but a sort of stab wound in the flesh. Someone had put some soft, rubbery film over it, transparent, almost invisible. The film peeled away easily when he poked at it, and under the dressing the wound was still oozing blood.
The skinny woman pushed his hand away, clucking reprovingly at him.
The man came over and firmly pressed the padding back in place. "Damn it! Leave it alone, can't you?" he said irritably. "Now sit still. Nrina's got to examine you to see if there's any more freezer burn, so you just let her do it, all right? I've got to check on the others."