Galactic North (28 page)

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 silver fish, 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 experince. 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, cartwheel-shaped 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 main-brain. 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.

I quickened my pace. Only my feet thudded in the silence. Yet my chaser was also running faster. I felt sick with fright. I summoned Katia, but after alerting her was unable to grasp a sentence, a command, anything. The faceless silhouette seemed to be gaining on me.

Faceless was right. It had no features, no detail. Eventually I reached an exit. The airlock sequence amputated the chamber from me. I did not stop running, even when I realised that the doors behind me were remaining closed. The shadow-man remained with the sleepers.

But I had seen enough. It was not human. Just a man-shaped hole, a spectre.

I found the quickest route back to the command deck of the
Wild Pallas.
Immediately I ordered Katia to begin a rigorous search for intruders, though I knew of course that no intruder could have escaped her attention thus far. My Katia was omniscient. She would have known the exact location of every rat, every fly, aboard the craft; except that aboard the ship there were no flies, no rats.

I knew that the shadow was not a revived sleeper. None of the reefers had been opened or vacated. A stowaway was out of the question—what was there to eat or drink, apart from the supplies dispensed by the computer?

My mind veered towards the illogical. Could someone have entered the ship during its flight—someone dressed as a chameleon? That imagined intruder would have somehow had to achieve invisibility from Katia’s eyes. Clearly impossible, even disregarding the unlikely manoeuvres required to match our velocity and position undetected.

I chewed on my lip, aware that each second of indecision counted against Janos. For my own defence, Katia would permit me access to a weapon, provided of course that the existence of the intruder was proven. Alternatively, I might best confront the situation by not confronting it. I could perform surgery on Janos without straying into those regions of the ship that the intruder had apparently claimed as its haunt. In a day or so, therefore, this ordeal might be over, and I could re-enter reefersleep. The most faceless, inhuman entities I would have to contend with upon my next revival would be Solpace Axis customs officials. Let them worry about the unseen extra passenger. Hadn’t the shadow permitted me safe slumber so far?

I chuckled, though to my ears it sounded more like a death-rattle. I was still frightened, but for once my hands had stopped playing arpeggios on the keys of an invisible piano.

I absorbed myself in technical eidetics outlining the medical systems Katia and I were about to employ. The gleaming semirobotic tools were the culmination of Yellowstone’s surgical sciences. Even so, they would undoubtedly appear crude by Earthside standards. This dichotomy galled me. Even if Janos would necessarily worsen by the time we arrived, how could we be certain that we were not reducing his chances with our outdated medical intervention? Perhaps Earth would have accelerated so far beyond our capabilities that the equation was no longer balanced in our favour.

Yet Katia would have weighed the issue minutely before selecting the appropriate course of action. Perhaps, then, it was best simply to silence one’s qualms and do whatever was required.

Drones assisted me in carrying the medical machinery into the crew reefer room, where my five colleagues lay in frozen sleep. I wore a facemask and a gloved jumpsuit, inwoven with a heating circuit. Katia would lower the room’s temperature before slightly increasing Janos’s own.

“Ready, Uri?” she asked. “Let’s start.”

So we commenced, my eyes constantly flicking to the open reefer I hoped soon to re-enter. The room rapidly chilled, lights burning frigid blue from the overheads.

Janos’s reefer cracked open with a gasp of release cold. I looked at Janos, still and white and somehow distant. Let that distance remain, I prayed. After all, we were about to open his head.

Katia, in fact, had already performed some preliminary surgery. The skull had been exposed, skin pulled back as if framing the white pistil of a flesh-leaved flower. Slender probes entered the scalp via drilled holes, trailing glowing coloured cables into a matrix of input points in the domed head of the reefer. The work was angstrom-precise, rendered with a robot’s deadening perfection. I had been briefed: those cables were substituting for the cybernetic implants within his brain that had fallen victim to the Melding Plague.

“When you have the top of the skull free you should feed it back along the cables,” Katia told me. “It’s crucial that we don’t lose cyber-interface with Janos.”

I prepped the mechanical bone-saw. “Why? What use is he to us?”

“There are good reasons. If you’re still interested we can discuss it after the operation.”

The saw hummed into life, the rotary tip glinting evilly. Katia vectored the blade down, smoothly gnawing into the pale bone. Little blood oozed free but the sound struck an unpleasant resonance with me. Katia made three expert circumferential passes, then retracted. I took a deep breath, then placed gloved fingers on the top of Janos’s head. The scalp felt loose, like half of a chocolate egg. I eased the section of skull free with a wet sucking slurp, exposing the damp pinkish mass of dura and gyrus, snuggling in the lower bowl of the skull. I took special care to maintain the integrity of the connections as I separated the bonework. For a while, humbled, I could only stand in awe of this fantastic organ, easily the most complex, alien thing my eyes had ever gazed on. And yet it managed to look so disappointingly vegetable.

“Husband, we must proceed,” warned Katia. “I have warmed Janos to a dangerously high body temperature, whilst not greatly increasing his metabolic rate. We don’t have time to waste.”

I felt sweat beading my forehead. I nodded. Inward, inward. Katia swung a new battery of blades and microlasers into play.

We operated to the music of Sibelius.

It was intriguing and repellent work.

I succeeded in detaching my mind to some extent, so that I was able to regard the parting brain tissue as dead but somehow sacred meat. The micro-implants came out one by one, too small for the naked eye to discern detail, barbed hunks of corroded metal. The corrosion, observable under a microscope, was the external evidence of the cybervirus. I studied it with rank feelings of abstract distaste. The virus behaved like its biological namesake, clamping onto the shell of the nanostructure and pulsing subversive instructions deep into its reproductive heart.

After three hours my back boiled with pain. I leaned away from the reefer, brushing a sleeve against my chilled forehead. I felt the room swimming, clotting with blobs of muggy darkness. For an instant I became disoriented, convinced that left was right and vice versa. I braced myself against the reefer as this dizziness washed over me.

“Not long now,” Katia said. “How do you feel?”

“I’m fine. And you?”