Or a fugue state, I thought. Like a programmed series of trigger responses, set off by a particular external stimulus.
Okay then. Hmm. “Calliope, would you consider stepping out of the walker?”
“I… can’t,” she said, with a kind of nauseated finality that made me disinclined to push the point. The craboid wavered.
“Okay, okay. If you don’t feel safe coming out, what if you suit up and let me come in? Is there room in there for two?”
I remembered the empty cargo space inside the walker. I bet that was where Calliope’s cryo chamber had been stored. Before it was placed among all the others on Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Then I wondered about the machine, and the rupture in the hull. I recognized that, as if with a magic trick, that rupture had forced our selection of which cryo pods to bring home in the first shipload.
Calliope said, “I didn’t say I don’t feel safe. Don’t twist my words.”
She had—though not in so many words. She had said with her allegations of nonconsensual experimentation that she didn’t feel safe. But it was pretty obvious that she was reacting rather than thinking, and much of what she was reacting to was inside her own skull.
“You don’t trust me, though?”
She laughed. “Of course I don’t trust you. You pretend to be nice, but I know what goes on here. They told me.”
“… They?”
I couldn’t see her, or feel her through the senso—but I still sensed the change in her and the moment when she snatched herself back like a coral retreating into its shell.
“They control your brain,” she said. “They tell you what to think, and you believe them because you don’t have a choice. They put a box in your head, and you don’t have a choice the same way I didn’t have a choice before I got that box taken out. They steal people and cut them up for parts. You steal people and cut them up for parts. I remember now. I didn’t before. I thought I was somebody else, but now I know.”
“What would I do with a lot of people parts?” I asked reasonably. I thought, but did not say, There are cheaper sources of protein.
“Rich people use them to live forever.”
“We can clone organs when we need them,” I reminded her. “And even that can’t keep people alive forever. Everything wears out, even brains.”
She snorted. “For a doctor, you’re really naive.”
I thought I was part of the murder cabal. I didn’t say that, either. She was obviously not thinking very clearly.
Hostage negotiation has never been my most natural skill set. I did study hard, but when I’m under pressure the sarcastic side of my mind still provides all the things I shouldn’t say. I’m sure that as long as I filter them out before they actually leave my mouth, it’s fine.
“Look,” I said. “I’m going to sit down. My legs are tired, and it seems like we might be here for a while.”
My legs were tired, but folding them up wouldn’t change that when the only thing holding me to the hull was mag boots. Making myself look small and relaxed might serve to de-escalate the situation, though, and sometimes you have to try every trick you can think of. Also, there were four alien surgeons in my head, and every single one of them used something different for an inner ear. Their disorientation was making me nauseated.
So I magnetized my rear end and stuck it to the hull. I had plenty of ox and plenty of battery, so now it was a matter of waiting for Calliope to have a change of ideation. Or at least a moment of lower paranoia. Or exhaustion.
It’s amazing how you can wear people down if you keep them talking. “Look. You said yourself that I saved your life. You saw the gunship. She was going to shoot you to keep you from destroying the hospital—”
“I wasn’t trying to destroy it. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
I didn’t point out that she’d been disassembling a hab wheel with I-didn’t-even-know-how-many people inside, and I get an extra cookie for that. I said, “Neither do I. And I want to keep you from being hurt. I kept the gunship from shooting you. Why would I protect you if I were one of the bad guys?”
A dry laugh. “Maybe you want me for parts.”
“It would have saved a lot of resources not to have woken you up, in that case.” I tapped my thigh armor with my fingertips, thinking. It echoed inside my hardsuit.
“You wanted to learn about the generation ship first.”
“Somebody sent you,” I said. “Somebody built that machine you’re in and put it in a ship full of casualties so we would be sure to bring it back here. Somebody moved Big Rock Candy Mountain and put you inside her and arranged things so that you would be one of the first we rescued. And somebody built a lot of triggers into your brain so that when certain things went wrong, you’d have no choice except to get on your horse and ride. So I have to wonder, Calliope—why this particular spot, to start prying apart the hospital? And what were you digging for?”
“Evidence,” she said.
“Evidence of what?”
“Evidence to broadcast.” The machine waved one appendage in an airy gesture. “Evidence of what goes on in here. Evidence to make people stop you.”
It was obviously sophipathology, but the conviction in her voice still gave me a chill.
“Well, you were digging in the wrong place,” I said. “These are environmental controls.”
She snorted, a harsh sound over the suit mike. “Is that what they told you?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Took a deep breath. Said, “This is a hospital.”
“Look, I’m going to try coming out,” she said. “I’ve done all I can from in here. Either people will investigate or they won’t. Let me suit
