‘Nothing of the sort, darling. Is the music fine?’
‘Music’s fine,’ I answered, leaving the kitchen.
I entered a curving hexagonal corridor, bathed in dull ochre light. A node of Roedelius chased me, humming from piezoacoustic panels in the walls. The gravity that held me to the floor arose from our one-gee thrust, and not from the centrifugal spin of the lifesystem, otherwise the vertical and horizontal axes would have been interchanged. This fact told me that we were not at home; not approaching the cluster of carousels and asteroids called Shiphaven, in the Trojan point that trailed Jupiter. We were still on stardrive, still climbing up or down from the slowtime of light-speed.
We might be anywhere between Epsilon Eridani and Solspace.
My stroll carried me away from the core of the vesel to her skin, where the hot neutron sleet wafted past us. The parts of the vessel through which I travelled grew darker and more machinelike, colder and less familiar. Irrationally, I began to imagine that I was being pursued and observed.
I have never enjoyed either solitude or the dark. I was a fool, then, to address this fear by turning around. Yet the hairs on my neck were bristling and my sweat had become chilled.
Most of the radial corridor was dark, apart from the miserly locus of light that had followed me like a halo. Nonetheless, it was still possible to make out a darker thing looming in the distance, almost lost in the convergence of the walls.
I was not alone.
It was a figure, a silhouette, regarding me. Not Katia’s imago, for sure.
I felt a brief terror. ‘Katia,’ I croaked. ‘Full lights, please.’
I jammed my eyes shut as the bright actinics snaped on. Red retinal ghosts slowly fading, I reopened them, not much more than a second later. But my watcher had gone.
I slowly emptied my lungs. I was wise enough not to leap to conclusions. This was not necessarily what it appeared. After all, I had only just emerged from reefersleep, after several years of being frozen. I was bound to be a little jittery, a little open to subconscious suggestion.
It seemed I was utterly alone. I vowed, shakily, to put the experience immediately out of mind.
Ten minutes later I had reached the outer hull, and was in naked space — or rather, seeing through the proxy eyes of a drone clamped on the outside with spidery grappling feet. The machine’s camera head was peering through a porthole, into the room where I sat. I looked pale and strained, but I did not have company.
I looked away from the porthole, towards the bow of the ship. The vessel, the Wild Pallas, was a ramliner — a nearlight human-rated starship. Most of what I saw, therefore, was very dense neutron shielding. The vessel required protons for its bosonic drive process. Ahead, a graser beam swept space and stripped deuterium nuclei into protons and neutrons. Our gauss scoop sifted free the protons and focused them into the heart of the ship. The neutral baryons were channelled around the hull in a lethal radiative rain, diverted clear of the lifesystem and its fragile payload of sleepers. The drone sensed the flux and passed the data to me in terms of a swirling roseate aura, as if we were diving down the gullet of the universe.
To the rear, things were eclipsed by the glow of the exhaust. Gamma shields burned Cherenkov-blue. Within the ship, the proton harvest was extremely short-lived. Fields targeted the protons into a beam, lancing through a swarming cloud of heavy monopoles. The relativistic protons were decelerated and steered into the magnetic nodes. Inside each monopole was a shell of bosons which coaxed the protons to disintegrate. This was the power source of a ramliner.
I had studied all the tech before signing up for the overmind partnership, the human-cybernetic steering committee that commanded this vessel. When I say studied, I mean that I had downloaded certain eidetic documents furnished by the Macro that owned the ship. These eidetics entered my memory at an almost intuitive level, programmed of course to fade once my contract expired. They told me everything I needed to know and little else. We carried nine hundred reefersleep passengers and we crew comprised six humans, each of whom was an expert in one or more areas of starflight theory. My own specialties were scoop subsystems — gauss collimators and particle-ablation shields — and shipboard/in-flight medicare. The computer that wore the masque of Katia was also equipped for these zones of expertise, but it was deficient — so the cybertechs said — in human heuristic thought modes. Crewpersons were therefore its Heuristic Resources — peripherals orbiting the hard glittering core of its machine consciousness.
Crewpersons thus rode at a more reduced level of reefersleep than our passengers: a little warmer, a little closer to the avalanche of cell death that is life. The computer could interrogate us without the bother of complete revival. Our dreams, therefore, would be dreams where matter and number flowed in technological tsunami.
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
