Wouldn’t it be terrible to be always alone?
I’d always considered myself a loner. But in that moment, I honestly couldn’t remember why.
Once we’re in the equatorial stream, we ride the wind until we get into the right general area. Then we wipe off the appetite suppressant, and hunger sends us straight into the arms of the nearest electrical storm.
The urge to feed is a powerful motivator for most organisms. Mama chases all the algae she can find, and gobbles it double-time. For us on the inside, it’s like an old-style history doc. Everyone stays strapped in their hammocks and rides out the weather as we pitch around on the high seas.
I always enjoy the feeding frenzy; it gets the blood flowing.
I’d just settled to enjoy the wild ride when Ricci pinged me.
Two crews tried surgical interventions on the regenerated tissue. Let me know what you think, okay? Maybe now we can convince them to let you help.
The message was accompanied by bookmarks to live feeds from the supply ships. The first feed showed a whale wedging itself backward into a crevasse, its petals waving back and forth as it wiggled deeper into the canyon-like crack in the ice.
The other feed showed a whale scraping its main valve along a serrated ridge of ice. Its oval body stretched and flexed, its bladders bulged. Its petals curled inward, then snapped into rigid extension as the force of its body crashed down on the ice’s knife edge.
Inside both whales, tiny specks bounced through the sinuses. I could only imagine what the crew was doing—what I would do in that situation. If they wanted to live, they had to leave. Fast.
A chill slipped under my skin. My fault. If those whales died, if those crews died, I was to blame. Me alone. Not the two crews. They were obviously desperate enough to try anything. I should have contacted them myself, and offered whatever false apologies would get them to accept my help.
But chances are it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, except they would have had me to blame. Another entry in my list of crimes.
Frost spread across my flesh and raised goosebumps. I tugged on my hammock’s buckles to make sure they were secure against the constant pitching and heaving, dialed up the temperature, and snuggled deeper into my quilt. I fired up my simulation model and wandered through towering mountains of pseudoneural tissue, pondering the problem, delving deeper and deeper through chains of crystallized tissue until they danced behind my eyelids. Swirling, stacking, combining, and recombining …
I was nearly asleep when I heard Ricci’s voice.
“Hey, Doc, can we talk?”
I thought I was dreaming. But no, she was right outside my hammock, gripping the tethers and getting knocked off her feet with every jolt and flex. Her goggled and masked face was lit by a mad flurry of light from the bolts coruscating in every direction just beyond the skin.
“Are you nuts?” I yanked open the hammock seal. “Get in here.”
She plunged through the electrostatic barrier and rolled to the far side of my bed. When she came up, her hair stood on end with static electricity.
“Whoa.” She swiped off her goggles and breather, stuffed them in one of the hammock pouches, then flattened the dark nimbus of her hair with her palms and grinned. “It’s wild out there.”
I pulled my quilt up to my chin and scowled. “That was stupid.”
“Yeah, I know but you didn’t ping me back. This is an important situation, right? Life or death.”
I sighed. “If you want to rescue people, there are vocations for that.”
“Don’t we have a duty to help people when we can?”
“Some people don’t want to be helped. They just want to be left alone.”
“Like you?”
“Nothing you’re doing is helping me, Ricci.”
“Okay, okay. But if we can figure out a way to help, that’s good too. Better than good. Everyone wins.”
Lying there in my hammock, facing Ricci sprawled at the opposite end and taking up more than half of the space, I finally figured out what kind of person she was.
“You’re a meddler, Ricci. A busybody. You were wasted in the sciences. You should have studied social dynamics and targeted a career in one-on-one social work.”
She laughed.
“Listen.” I held out my hand, palm up. She took it right away, didn’t hesitate. Her hand was warm. Almost feverish. “If you want to stay in the crew, you have to relax. Okay? We can’t have emergencies every week. None of us are here for that.”
She squeezed my hand and nodded.
“A little excitement is fine, once in a while,” I continued. “Obviously this is an extraordinary situation. But if you keep looking for adventure, we’ll shunt you back to Jane without a second thought.”
She twisted the grip into a handshake and gave me two formal pumps. Then she reached for the hammock seal. She would have climbed out into the maelstrom if I hadn’t stopped her.
“You can’t do that,” I yelled. “No wandering around when we’re in a feeding frenzy. You’ll get killed. Kill us too, if you go through the wrong bladder wall.”
She smiled then, like she didn’t believe me, like it was just some excuse to keep her in my hammock. And when she settled back down, it wasn’t at the opposite end. She snuggled in right beside me, companionable as anything, or even more.
“Don’t you get lonely, Doc?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not much.”
Our hammocks are roomy, but Ricci didn’t give me much space, and though the tethers absorb movement, we were still jostling against each other.
“Because you don’t need anybody or anything.” Her voice in my ear, soft as a caress.
“Something like that.”
“Maybe, eventually, you’ll change your mind about that.”
What happened next wasn’t my idea. I was long out of practice, but Ricci had my full and enthusiastic cooperation.
Down belowground, I was a surgeon, and a good one. My specialty was splicing neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus. My skills were in high demand. So high, in fact, that I had
