I’m not talking about a part-time admin or social facilitator. Anyone can have those. I had an entire cadre of people fully dedicated to making sure that if I spent most of my time working and sleeping, what little time remained would be optimized to support physical, emotional, and intellectual health. All my needs were plotted and graphed. People had meetings to argue, for example, over what type of sex best maintained my healthiest emotional state, and once that was decided, they’d argue over the best way to offer that opportunity to me.
That’s just an example. I’m only guessing. They kept the administrative muddle under veil. Day-to-day, I only had contact with a few of my staff, and usually I was too busy with my own work to think about theirs. But for a lot of people, I was a billable-hours bonanza.
But despite all their hard work, despite the hedonics modeling, best-practice scenarios, and time-tested decision trees, I burned out.
It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I was, and remain, only human.
I could have just reduced my surgery time. I could have switched to teaching or coaching other surgeons. But no. Some people approach life like it’s an all-or-nothing game. That’s me. I couldn’t be all, so I decided to become nothing.
Until Ricci came along, that is.
When the storm ended, the two of us had to face a gauntlet of salacious grins and saucy comments. I didn’t blush, or at least not much. Ricci had put the spark of life in a part of me that had been dark for far too long. I was proud to have her in my crew, in my hammock, in my life.
The whole hab gave us a hard time. The joke that gave them the biggest fits, and made even Vula cling helplessly to the rumpus room netting as she convulsed with laughter, involved the two of us calling for evac and setting up a crèche in the most socially conservative hab down belowground. Something about imagining us in swathed in religious habits and swarming with crechies tweaked everyone’s funny bones.
Ricci weathered the ridicule better than me. I left to fill the water kegs, and by the time I returned, the hilarity had worn itself out.
The eight of us lounged in the rumpus room, the netting gently swaying to and fro as we drifted in the bright directional light of the aquapause. Water spilled off the skin and threw dappled shadows across the room. Vula had launched the media drones and we’d all settled down to watch the feeds.
More than once I caught myself brainlessly staring at Ricci, but I kept my goggles on so nobody noticed. I hope.
Two hundred kilometers to the northwest and far below us, the seventeen remaining whales congregated in the swirling winds above a dome-shaped mesa that calved monstrous sheets of ice down its massive flanks. A dark electrical storm massed on the horizon, with all its promise of rich concentrations of algae, but the whales didn’t move toward it, just kept circulating and converging, plucking at each other’s skin.
Three hundred kilometers west lay the abandoned corpses of two whales, their deflated bladders draped over warped sinus skeletons half-buried in slush.
Our media drones got there too late to trap the whales’ death throes, and I was glad. But Vula and Bouche trapped great visuals of the rescue, showing the valiant supply ship crews swooping in to pluck brightly colored body bags out of the air. Maybe the crews put a little more of a spin on their maneuvering than they needed to, but who could blame them? They rarely got a job worth bragging about.
One of Bouche’s media broker friends put the rescue feeds out to market. They started getting good play right away. Bouche fired the media licensing statement into the middle of the room. The numbers glowed green and flickered as they climbed.
“Look at these fees,” she said. “This will underwrite our power consumption for a couple years.”
“That’s great, Bouchie,” I murmured, and flicked the statement out of my visual field.
Night was coming, and it presented a hard deadline. If the whales didn’t move before dark, they’d all die.
Ricci moved closer to me in the netting and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I turned my head and touched my lips to her temple, just for a moment. I was deep in my brain simulation, working on the problem. But I kept an eye on the feeds. When the whales collided, I held my breath. As the bladders stretched and budged, I cringed, certain they’d reach their elastic limit and we would see a whale pop, its massive sinuses rupture, its skin tear away and its body plunge to splatter on the icy surface below. But they didn’t. They bounced off each other in slow motion and resumed their aimless circulation.
Hours passed. Eddy got up, extruded a meal, and passed the containers around the netting. Chara and Treasure slipped out of the room. Vula was only half-present—she was working in her studio, sculpting maquettes of popped bladders and painfully twisted corpses.
Eddy yawned. “How long can these whales live without feeding?”
I forced a stream of breath through my lips, fluttering the fringe of my bangs. “I don’t know. Indefinitely, maybe, if the crews can figure out a way to provide nutrition internally.”
“If they keep their whales fed, maybe they’ll just keep stumbling around, crashing into each other.” Vula’s voice was slurred, her eyes unfocused as she juggled multiple streams.
“I’m more worried about nightfall, actually,” I said.
Ever since we’d dragged ourselves out of my hammock, Ricci had been trying to pry information from emergency response up the beanstalk, from the supply ship crews who were circling the site, and from the whale crews. They were getting increasingly frantic as time clicked by, and keeping us informed wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
I rested my palm on the inside of Ricci’s knee. “Are the other crews talking to you yet?”
She sat up straight and gave me
