Machine

CHAPTER 16

CRYO DIDN’T HAVE A HUMAN doctor on staff. Rilriltok sensibly questioned the wisdom of exposing an unrightminded archaic human to giant predatory insects or tentacled hippopotami, so I was nominated to be the first to meet Master Chief Carlos.

I checked in with the nurses’ station when I got there. They told me that the patient was in a private room. He was eating, he’d been given an abbreviated briefing with a lot of stressful details redacted, and he was generally pretty polite to the (human) nursing staff who had been brought in from other units to buffer him.

Apparently, I got to be the one to tell him about space aliens.

He was sitting up in bed when I entered, and he looked absolutely normal. Normal for a guy who’d barely survived a bad cryo experience, anyway. I didn’t know why that should surprise me so much, but it did. I stopped in the doorway and blinked.

He had been sipping a nutritive broth through a straw. As I paused, he released the straw, looked at me, looked at the cup, and looked back at me.

“They claimed this was food,” he said mildly, my senso translating. “I know I’m in the future, but I’m not sure I believe them.”

“Don’t tell me hospital food was any good in your dia,” I said. “The goal is to make people want to leave, after all.”

“Get me a stick and I’ll hobble to the door. Are you a doctor?”

“Dr. Jens,” I said. “How could you tell?”

“Nothing gets past me. Also, you’re wearing scrubs and a lab coat.”

I touched my forehead to him. He grinned.

I was startled to discover that I liked him, right away. Despite his sunken cheeks and haggard features, he had charm. His tan complexion was tending greenish; his eyes had obviously been replaced with vatted clones; and there were traces of cryoburn and freshly regenerated flesh around his fingertips. The nails would take a while to grow back. And his hair, though his cheeks were stippled with beard shadow.

But he had that indefinable quality that makes you want to like someone. It might have been calculated, to set me at ease or to structure his own anxiety by allowing him to feel in control. Or it might have been how he interacted with everyone.

He wasn’t even slightly the atavistic toddler in a grown man’s body I realized I had expected—been braced for—when I walked in. At least, not on first meeting.

I took a breath and shook myself out, mentally speaking. Try not to be an asshole, Jens.

He pushed the tray away. “How are the rest of my crew?”

“Well.” This was what I was here for. It didn’t make it any easier. “May I sit?”

He nodded, so I crossed to the visitor’s chair and let myself down. I noticed him studying me and tried to move smoothly. I still caught my thumbnail picking at the edge of the exo and had to force myself to stop.

The worst part was watching his face change as I came closer, and he became less able to deny what he must, on some level, already know. In the normal course of events, Linden or another AI doc would have been monitoring his blood and brain chemistry, making sure that adrenaline and cortisol did not overwhelm his system.

But Dwayne Carlos had no fox. Even an AI would only have been able to work with intravenous drugs. Dr. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was somewhere on the water levels, regulating by relay, normalizing his chemistry as best she could with the crude measures available to us. But even if he’d had a modern fox and full access to senso, she couldn’t have taken his pain and grief away entirely. We still have to suffer through these things, experience them to move past them.

Living things have a dedicated sense of pain because you have to know you’re wounded to take the actions necessary to heal. The best we can do, medically speaking, is blunt the edge of it, because if you can’t feel, you can’t react.

“You’re the first to awaken,” I said. It would be cruel to draw things out longer than necessary. “We have retrieved only a few cryo units so far. We’re working on the others.”

“My ship isn’t here?”

“This is a hospital. Your ship is not fast enough to make it here, so we have been transferring your crewmates to faster-than-light ships.”

He blinked. “That’s impo— No, never mind. This is not the right time. Obviously it’s possible. Carry on.”

“We are ferrying crew from your ship as fast as possible.”

“But what about the people still running Big R? The skeleton crew… oh.”

“Oh?”

“They’re all dead?”

“They’re all in pods. Every single person, except the captain. I’m sorry, I have to inform you that the captain is dead.”

“Oh.” He didn’t sound surprised.

“The ship’s… computer? Do you have a word for that?”

“The angel,” he said.

“The ship’s angel had been taking the ship apart to build cryo pods, under the captain’s orders. He took the library—Central?”

“Central.”

“He took it offline.”

“That would have limited the angel’s access to information and her decision-making resources.”

“It did,” I agreed. “She had mostly spun off into a peripheral when we found the ship. She had also filled the ship with instances of… a kind of large nanobot, capable of linking up and forming structures. And was using that, I think, as a kind of primitive computronium to support what faculties she had. She’s being reintegrated, and we’re building an architecture for her. She, in time, should be fine.”

Assuming we didn’t have to seal the entire hospital off forever to keep the toxic meme from spreading throughout the entire galaxy. But now was not the time to share that with a person who couldn’t do anything about it, and who had enough to worry about.

He said, “So about the pods.”

The corners of his mouth and eyes tightened. He was bracing himself. I offered my hand, against my better judgment. He took it and I winced in anticipation, but he didn’t squeeze.

Maybe he was considerate. Maybe he was still too weak for squeezing.

Whatever the reason, I was grateful.

Softly, he said, “The pods aren’t very good, are they?”

“No,” I agreed. “The pods aren’t very good.”

He might be from a culture spawned in the deep Before, but his agony was utterly human. His face fisted. He was so thin that I could see every individual fiber in his neck, deltoid, and the top of his pectoral muscle as his chin dipped and his body clenched.

His heart rate and blood pressure spiked; his cortisol and adrenaline levels ramped; he yanked his hand out of mine and locked it and its mate on the bed rails. Flesh whitened as blood squashed from the tender new flesh.

“Are you hurting?” I asked, jumping to my feet. “Where is the pain?” I was already reaching for the meds panel and cursing the fact that he didn’t have a fox. External pain management: Is there anything more barbaric?

Carlos sucked in air so hard it whistled. “Just… trying not to bawl like a brat.” The first word came out through clenched teeth, the rest on a rush of breath. He grabbed the next one as if he had to get it fast, before it got away.

Empathic grief clutched my chest. I laid a hand on his shoulder. He leaned away, so I removed it.

“Cry if you need to,” I said. “It’s a physiologically normal response.”

And I wasn’t sure how somebody who wasn’t wearing a fox thought he could avoid it, anyway.

Something about my words seemed to startle him. He got another breath, and this one stayed caught behind his teeth. He let it out in a controlled fashion, shaped around words. “Some big strong guy I’d look.” A barked laugh followed. “It’s okay. I think I’ve got it.”

When you work in a multispecies hospital the size of a small moon, you get used to feeling like you’re missing much of the cultural context in any given conversation. Even with other humans: it’s a big galaxy, and we don’t all think alike.

I didn’t understand what was going on inside Master Chief Carlos’s head, but I was prepared to roll with it.

“Obviously some of us survived.” He waved his own grafted hand, and winced when he noticed it. “More or less. You said I was the first awake.”

“Yes.”

“Am I the only?”

“So far,” I said, having checked that it was true. “Biologist Cirocco Oni is undergoing treatments for cryoburn before awakening, and Specialist First Rank Jones should be awake in the next dia or so.”

There was no flicker of recognition in his face when I said either name—but with over ten thousand crewmates, I would not expect anyone to know them all personally.

“There are thirteen more of your crewmates at the hospital already, and more on the way.”

“Will all of them live?”

“It is”—I searched for the right word—“unlikely.”

“How many more will make it?”

“I can’t be sure.”

He stared at me. “How many more are being retrieved now?”

“I also can’t be sure of that.”

“God damn it to hell, Doc, why the hell are you bothering to talk to me if you’re not going to tell me anything?”

There was the toddler. I flinched, but he didn’t come at me. Just as well. In his current state he wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, and I would have felt bad hitting him. And my whole body would have hurt even more afterward than it usually did.

I sighed and said, “Your ship is an extremely long way away. Lightspeed communication—pulsed lasers, for example—lags significantly behind simple ship travel. They’ll be back here centuries before any direct message they could have sent.”

Bit by bit, I watched Master Chief Carlos relax against the pillow. I was confident that he was forcing himself to. I was impressed that he had the ability.

“Awkward for RSVPing to parties,” he said. “You might as well drop by with regrets.”

“Or they can find out you’re not coming after you’re dead.”

I must have gotten the deadpan right, because he laughed.

“So you have faster-than-light travel.”

“Not me personally… but yes. Or sneakier-than-light, anyway.”

“Warp drive.”

“More or less. I can get you some books on it if you want? There are virtual classes.” And nothing is more boring than sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the outside world spin.

His mouth twitched, as if he was about to say something important. Then he settled back and folded his arms. “I’d be very grateful.”

“There’s another thing,” I said. “We’ve been limiting the staff treating you so far. But the cryonics docs—the real specialists—well, I should warn you that they’re not human.”

I saw his lips soften as his jaw slackened, though it didn’t quite fall open. “Aliens?”

“We call them systers. Some of them look… very different.”

“Do they farm humans for meat?”

“No,” I said, categorically. “Most of them couldn’t digest us. Amino acids all wrong, sugars backward. You know how it goes.”

He laughed. “So you’re not a cryonics specialist?”

“I’m a rescue specialist.” I smiled. “I got you here. And turned you over to Dr. Tralgar and Dr. Rilriltok.”

“Those are some names.”

I laughed. “Wait until you meet the beings that belong to them.”

His smile was more like a flinch, and quickly faded. “So you can’t promise me anyone else will live.”

“Not in any honesty,” I said, as gently as I could. Dammit, I went into rescue so that I wouldn’t have to give people bad news. Everybody I deal with is supposed to be in the middle of a crisis, not weathering a series of emotional blows. I hate this part of the job. “The cryonics specialists feel that we can expect about one in three of your crewmates to survive.”

He breathed out, slowly. “Wow.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shook his head. “We knew it was a crazy risk—oh God! The influenza virus, there was some kind of superbug wiping out the ship, you might be exposed—”

“We’re all inoculated,” I said. “And we engineered an antiviral to support your immune system and administered it before we woke you up.”

“You’ve cured the flu.”

“We’ve cured a lot of things.” I squeezed my hand closed, the familiar ache of joints reminding me that we hadn’t cured everything. “Part of your ship’s core is here. And she’s very eager to meet you.”

“You rescued Central?” he said hopefully. Then he must have remembered what I told him about Central, because his mouth contracted with dismay.

“Helen,” I answered.

“Oh. That thing.”

Perhaps it stung because his response was so similar to what mine had been. And because I was beginning to appreciate Helen as a person, rather than an ill-considered toy. I was struck silent for a moment.

Carlos tugged the sheets up. “I hope you’re not going to judge us all by that joke.”

“Since the moment we made contact with her, she’s been absolutely dedicated to your well-being,” I mentioned. “And that of the rest of her crew.”

“Some of the guys thought it was amusing,” he said. “I didn’t—my wife told me how dehumanized it made her feel, and I was never comfortable around it, after.” He frowned deeply. “My wife…?”

“I know she’s not among the patients we’re currently working on. Helen might be able to guide us to her cryo unit, though, and we’ll prioritize retrieving her.”

His mouth twisted again.

I said, “You do know your AI is self-aware and self-willed, right?”

“Helen?” He shook his head. “It’s a peripheral. Central has a personality module, but the Helen bot is just a bot. It can talk, and carry out assigned tasks, and keep you awake through a swing shift… but that’s all.”

“Well,” I said, settling back in my chair. “You’ll be surprised to discover that some things have changed….”

I had been wrong about Oni: there were complications treating her cryoburn, and her awakening was put off. So specialist Calliope Jones was the next to awaken, and I recalled that she was the historian. She was also the individual in the anomalous cryo pod, which made me hope she might be able to provide some answers about it.

Or maybe the Goodlaw was right, and she was a Freeport pirate hiding from justice amidst ten thousand identical corpsicle coffins.

It had to be kidding, right?

How do you tell if a mantoid the size of a Terran pony is kidding?

I checked in with Mercy to make sure he was still okay and open to receiving visitors. He was, as long as they were willing to come to him for a nice, in-person, air-gapped audio conversation. All of the remaining AIs had compartmentalized themselves, which meant that consulting them required intercom communication, or moving one’s self to the physical location of their storage media. As if visiting an oracle in a temple.

At the same time, I realized that Rilriltok and Tralgar had assumed that I would be available to midwife the rebirth of every single member of Helen’s crew. That… was not going to work out long-term. Whatever I was doing for Helen, I wasn’t the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans.

And—I made a solemn promise to myself—I was not going to allow myself to be bullied into becoming the care liaison for ten-thousand-odd archaic humans. Or even three-thousand-odd, if we managed to save thirty percent.

Still a lot of humans.

“Sally,” I said, while I was masking up to go in and visit Jones. We have transparent polymer filter masks for situations like this. Very effective, and they help the patients’ psychology enormously. Rilriltok thinks it’s very funny that humans find other humans with their breathing and eating holes covered ominous, but then its face has an immobile exoskeleton and it breathes through spiracles, so I’m not sure its opinion is broadly medically applicable.

I hear you, Sally answered, muffled by protocols.

“Do you have time to send a message to Starlight that Core General needs to hire a lot of stable, sensible, Terran-style volunteers to manage introduction to modern society for the Big Rock Candy Mountain survivors? Once we’re not under quarantine, that is.”

That’s an excellent point, Sally said. The next load of survivors can’t dock until the quarantine is lifted, anyway. In the meantime, I can send you Loese. She’s cluttering up the place without enough to do. She’s getting on my circuits.

I laughed. Loese, grounded, sounded like a shipmind’s worst nightmare. And from what I’d seen, she wasn’t taking the enforced downtime or the vague sense of personal responsibility well. “Send her to Tralgar.”

I will. How are you doing?

“Overworked,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about it. “And none of it is actually my job.”

I still had barely begun the assignment O’Mara and Starlight wanted me to work on. It was amazing how much stuff everybody had for me to do.

I opened the door and stepped into the isolation chamber. A woman with black hair and a medium complexion rendered grayish and chalky by cryoburn and fatigue looked up, blinking as if her eyes weren’t focusing exactly as she expected. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Dr. Jens.”

“Calliope Jones,” she answered. “I’m alive? I’m in a hospital?”

“The biggest hospital in the galaxy,” I agreed. “And you’re definitely alive, unless dead folks have skills I’m not aware of. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

She laughed, then flinched when her dry lips cracked.

“Here.” I poured a cup of water and stuck a straw in. “This might help with that dehydration.”

She sipped. Her lip left blood on the straw. She seemed to surprise herself with her own thirst, and finished the water.

“What do you remember?” I asked when she’d put the cup aside.

“Um,” she said. “A… drill? Flashing lights. An alert. People scrambling for… for escape pods? No, that can’t be right. We don’t have escape pods. There’s nowhere to escape to.” She looked around. “Except apparently there is. I was in a cryonics freezer, wasn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said.

Ouch, I thought. What a way to live. Like being stuck on a single planet with no failsafes and no way off in case of catastrophe.

Except the generation ship was far more precarious and fragile even than a planet.

“There was a virus—”

“We know,” I said. “You’ve been treated and I’m immunized.”

“My ship? My crew?”

“Your ship and the shipmind—the angel, sorry, we use a different word—have suffered significant damage. What we’ve been able to recover of the shipmind is here, with the first group of evacuees—fourteen of you. One other has been successfully awakened so far: Master Chief Dwayne Carlos. Do you know him?”

She shook her head. “Everything is very fuzzy. I know the—the shipmind. Central?”

“Helen,” I said. “And what’s left of Central, I think. If I understand the outcome correctly, they both suffered damage and integrated out of self-preservation. Helen’s become self-aware; I understand she wasn’t before.”

“Helen!” She gave a big sigh of relief. “Well, that’s something to make me feel a little more grounded, I guess. How’s our command structure?”

“Right now, you don’t have one.”

“Oh. Captain and first mate? Officers?”

“The captain, we believe, perished. No other officers have been retrieved. We’re ferrying your crewmates here in groups, but it’s going to take a while, and there were no commissioned officers in the first group.”

“I’ve just realized,” she said incredulously, “that I cannot remember anyone’s name.”

“Anyone?”

“Any of my crewmates. My family. I must have a family?”

I sighed. She certainly seemed as if she came from a millennian ago. “Our scans show you’ve suffered some intracranial scarring. It may be impairing your cognition—”

“Brain damage?”

“Repairable damage,” I said. “The memory loss is probably permanent, I’m afraid, but we’ve already infused stem cells and growth medium, and you should be finding your cognition clearing up over the next few diar.”

“You can… patch up brain damage.” She snapped her fingers and winced when it made the infusion needle jump in her vein. I could have reached out and put my hand on her arm, but for some reason the thought made me feel shy, so I didn’t.

“We have doctors that do nothing else,” I said. “Which, I am afraid, brings me to another part of your orientation that you might find unsettling. Not all—or even most—of the staff here are human. The doctor who’s been working on your neurological injury is an oxygen-breathing, water-dwelling vertebrate from a planet whose name I need mechanical assistance to pronounce. She gets around in a big tank on wheels.”

“My neurologist is a dolphin?” Jones broke into a delighted grin. “I think I might like the future!” Then she sobered. “How far in the future are we, anyway?”

“That’s a complicated question,” I said. “We don’t know exactly when you went into suspension, or exactly how much subjective time you had spent traveling before then. There are relativistic effects to consider. And—”

“Twenty-four forty-seven,” she said, with confidence. Then she froze. “No, I… I can’t say that with any confidence. The date popped into my head, but I can’t put a context to it. It could just be a date. So your people—are you descendants of the other ships?” She sat forward in the bed, animated despite the effort it obviously cost her. “Can you get me a timeline, oh, and—”

“Wait, wait,” I said, laughing. “You don’t want to talk to me about those things. You want to talk to Mercy. He’s the hospital archinformist. His specialty is medical history, but—”

“I’ll take it!” she enthused, beaming.

I got a voice link to Mercy and turned them loose on each other. Jones’s avocation shone through in her conversation: she wanted dates, names, places, and root causes of everything. Mercy rapidly retrieved a pile of pull numbers to get her started requesting histories. He only had to explain how to request data once. I excused myself: it seemed like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and I would only have been in the way.

Jones smiled and waved as I was leaving, but that was all. I felt a tiny pang. Her enthusiasm was utterly adorable.

Tralgar was waiting when I stepped outside. I checked the time and realized I’d been with Jones so long that Rilriltok had gone to dinner and its rest shift. I asked how Cirocco Oni was.

Tralgar’s tentacles contracted into coils. There’s damage. It might be reversible. And… something in the pod’s program seems to be trying to prevent the rewarming sequence from taking hold. Possibly it’s the remains of the program the ship’s captain released when he was evacuating his crew to the pods.

I thought about Helen’s desire to get everybody into pods for their safety. I thought about the machine.

I hadn’t told Carlos or Jones that they—and Oni, and the medic Call Reznik—were the only four of the fourteen crewmembers to survive rewarming to the point of needing the next medical interventions. Oni and Reznik were still touch-and-go.

I imagined the other graft clones had already been recycled. It took a significant amount of resources to keep them alive, blood pumping, lungs breathings, when they were intentionally grown with stunted brain structures.

It would have been in poor taste to congratulate Tralgar on the accuracy with which he and Rilriltok had estimated their chances of success in saving these patients. But right now, we were as close to that grim 30 percent mark as possible unless we started saving fractions of patients. Or unless Oni and Reznik died.

I had hoped they were being conservative. No matter how hard you try to stay uninvested and professional… people don’t go into medicine because their patients’ welfare is irrelevant to them.

“You’re going to want me to explain that to Helen, aren’t you?”

Maybe the tiredness in my voice and expression was strong enough to make it through the species and translation barrier. Maybe Tralgar had an appreciation for the exhausting nature of everything I had already done todia.

I will handle the communication. She will not wish to accept that Master Chief Carlos does not wish to speak with her.

“I know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll help that Jones is excited to. Pity Zhiruo isn’t able to run interference. Any word on Zhiruo yet? Or Linden?”

Starlight says Linden is communicating in outgoing packet bursts. They say she says the situation is difficult and unstable, requiring constant interventions. She has hopes that if she finds the right code sequences, she will be able to stabilize herself and commence repairs. Once that occurs, she should be able to resume normal functions. She says that will be soon. Whatever soon is.

I have heard no updates on Zhiruo, but I assume that once Linden has solved her virus she will be able to tackle its other instances. Unless Zhiruo manages to repair herself first, which is possible.

“Good,” I said. I rubbed my eyes. “I’m going to get some food while supplies still hold out. Do you want anything?”

I am well-nourished. Tralgar tapped its breathing slits with a meaty appendage-tip. Don’t forget to take that mask off before you try to put anything in your food hole.

By the time I got to the cafeteria I was ready to slide into a booth, drink a beer, and never talk to another living being. But when I checked the statuses I saw that Rhym and Hhayazh had claimed a table against the windows, and amended my mood to “never talk to another human being.”

I sent a request to join them, but perhaps they were too busy eating to notice the ping, because no reply came. So, when I arrived at the caf, I stood where they could see me and waved, and pointed to their table. They waved back and pointed to the table as well.

We’d worked together long enough that I didn’t worry about a miscommunication. I just went and got my food.

Running into my colleagues in the cafeteria so often seemed a little odd, given prior experience and the size of the hospital, but with the lifts down until Linden came back online, nobody was moving around the bubble much. And, I reminded myself, even if the lifts had been running, people at Core General tended to stick to the areas closest to where they worked and lived—as with neighborhoods in a big city.

I wasn’t used to spending so much time grounded, so I’d never really had occasion to notice, before.

Sally’s slip, when she wasn’t unloading at the Emergency Department, was near the oxygen casualty section. Her crew all had our quarters nearby. The Ox Cryo unit was a few dozen meters along the same ring. The cafeteria was a few levels hubward.

When I came back, I was carrying a tray of salad, cloned steak tips, and butterscotch pudding. I also had a dark beer, a mug of tea, and a powerful fixation on the coffee I wasn’t going to be drinking any time in the near future, unless I climbed into a softsuit and made a trek around the outside of the hospital to get to the one humans-only caf that served java. To make matters worse, I’d been informed when I requested the alcohol ration that there wasn’t going to be much more available unless and until we got a supply run.

Maybe I could start a batch of hooch with some medical yeast and lactated ringers. I was sure it would be fine.

Rhym had long since demolished their dinner in the single-minded manner of their kind, so they must be here to keep Hhayazh company. Or possibly to soak in the ambiance: Who could tell? Hhayazh had some greenish slime with lumps in it that I identified from the smell as fermented legumes. Or, if not true legumes, whatever its planet used for lentils.

I raised the snifter of beer to my colleagues as I sat, and said, “Here’s to the inevitable beer riots.”

Hhayazh pointed its bristles at me and buzzed, Does your species immediately resort to social upheaval when threatened with a lack of intoxicants? I would think you would have rightminded that tendency out by now.

“It usually takes at least a couple of hours,” I admitted. The salad had little green flat crunchy seeds in it: an unexpected treat. And probably full of useful fatty acids.

My banter with Hhayazh aside, I was worried about food. Ox sector, at least, grew a lot of its produce on-site, supporting the ox/carbon dioxide biosphere and providing restorative environments for recreation, exercise, and hanging around with plants that didn’t want to argue about politics or sports teams.

It occurred to me that Ceeharens were the most common sentient vegetable on Core General, and that I didn’t know if they even had a preferred sport as a species.

A brief consult with senso informed me that they had several, each a little more incomprehensible than the last. Well, it was my own fault for wondering.

I brought my attention back to the table, where Rhym was fiddling a drinking straw with their tendrils and saying, Something weird is happening.

I swallowed salad. “What weird isn’t happening? We’ve got people from the deep past, a sexy robot with damaged memory cores, a ship full of Darboof with compromised foxes and brain damage, and a toxic meme infecting our AI staff like the technological equivalent of caterpillar fungus. None of this is normal.”

Caterpillar…? Rhym asked, in the tone of somebody who had tried to look it up but didn’t have the right search terms.

So I told them about the fungal parasites on Terra that hijacked the brains of insects and made them perform all sorts of self-destructive behaviors in order to spread the fungal spores.

They were incredulous and horrified. There’s something professionally gratifying about being able to gross out a tentacular tree stump who also happens to be one of the galaxy’s most experienced trauma surgeons.

Hhayazh won the digression—and horrified us both further—by telling us about a similar fungus on Rashaq that infected several species, including Rashaqin nymphs. Not the adults, at least, but the mental image of Rilriltok with a giant sporing body bursting from its back was bad enough that I resorted to tuning to erase it. I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy my pudding otherwise, and if we were facing food shortages, I certainly wasn’t going to waste it.

“But you were going to tell me something else,” I prompted. “Before I distracted you with mind-controlling fungus.”

Rhym leaned back, tendrils twitching. Their eyes narrowed. They had lens-type eyes with lids like humans, operating on very similar principles. Their lids closed from side to side, though, and they were lucky enough to have a nictitating membrane. I’d contemplated more than once getting one added, but I didn’t want to be out of work for the surgery and long enough for the eye to heal. Twice: once for each eye, because they didn’t do them both at the same time.

They said, Sally, will you establish a direct senso link, and handle the translation?

I’m here, Sally said, a little less fuzzily than was lately usual. She wasn’t reaching us through the hospital infrastructure then, but by direct transmission. You’re all encrypted.

Hhayazh leaned in to the table, clacking excitedly. Do you remember that private ambulance that cut us off when we were bringing Helen and her crew in?

“Sure.” My beer was finished. I switched to the tea.

It left.

“But we’re under quarantine.” I expected Hhayazh or Rhym to tell me that the ambulance had left before the quarantine started. I was already mentally preparing myself to ask something like, So what’s so weird about that?

But Rhym said, We know. And there’s something even weirder.

I waited. I sipped my tea. I looked from one colleague to the other.

Rhym writhed excitedly. About twelve standard hours later, another one showed up. Docked in the same berth. And Tsosie saw them bringing in a cryo unit.

Just like the other one, Hhayazh said.

“Weelll.” My tea was somehow empty. I swallowed the last drop and set down the cup. “It is a hospital. People do show up in cryo tanks and tubes, in ambulances.”

When we’re under interdict? Hhayazh said. And then leave again?

“We don’t usually spend this long in dock. Maybe it’s normal activity and we miss it most of the time.” I licked butterscotch pudding off my spoon. Maybe I’d overdone it on the antianxiety tuning. I should probably feel a little more worried by the information my colleagues were giving me than I did. I should let more emotion get through, but…

But I didn’t really want to feel any more anxious. I was tired of feeling anxious.

Maybe, Sally agreed inside my head. But then why can’t I find any record of the patients the private ships brought in? Or even any record of their flight plan or other cargo?

“Oh,” I said.

Oh, Rhym agreed.