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, cartwheelshaped 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 mainbrain. 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 semi-robotic tools were the culmination of Yellowstone’s surgical sciences. Even so, they would undoubtedly appear crude by Earth-side 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.’
