Core General was not what I had believed in. I was becoming increasingly convinced that there was something poisoned at its center, and the top administrators knew it, and they were physically prevented from telling. And that was why they were using me to reveal it. If I could collect the evidence, and figure out what was going on.
Losing my faith in Core felt like I was losing my family of origin all over again. Except worse, because I was closer to my crew than I had been to my family of origin. They’d died when I was too young to know them as people. I felt like I was losing my wife and daughter all over again.
It hurt.
And I realized that I was going to do it anyway.
People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be.
Usually the ones steeped in atavistic machismo.
I was afraid I’d done the same thing, except what I had picked up and latched onto was a hospital employment manual.
I wanted to jump up and run around waving my arms and shouting accusations. I wanted to yell at O’Mara, in particular, until my throat hurt. I wanted to finish my investigation, when I was so close to the answers that I could taste them.
And a pretty foul taste it was, too. But I’d pushed my poor body as far as it was willing to go, and it would fail me if I tried to push it any farther. I had to rest, as frustrating as rest was. I had to care for myself so I could solve the bigger problem confronting everyone.
Well, I told myself. I will deal with it in the morning.
Well, I told myself. The only way out is through.
I tuned myself to calm and doziness, and finally drifted to sleep while looking at memories of Rache in my senso. Some of them were my memories, recorded when she was very small. Some were hers, that she had saved and sent to me. I slept hard, for not nearly long enough, and woke when my timer nudged my biochemistry. That left me in a better state of mind than a loud noise or an explosion.
It was the little things.
Rilriltok was on duty when I made my way down to the secure ward Judiciary used to see to the medical needs of prisoners, which is what Specialist Calliope Jones had become. It was something of a surprise to find it here, because if this were its shift—which it was not—I would have expected it to be in Cryo. Since that was where it worked, being a cryonicist and all.
It buzzed over, excited and seemingly happy to see me, isinglass wings a blur. The cheerful blue light on its gravity control belt blinked, though the hab wasn’t producing much more than a third of a g. It was, I supposed, a sensible precaution, the way things had been going around here.
I reflexively put a hand on my own belt.
Friend Dr. Jens! The wind of its hovering stirred my hair. It tilted from side to side, like a bird cocking its head first one way, then the other, in order to examine me. I’m pleased to see you appearing more well!
“I’m pleased to be feeling better.” Self-restraint is not my most defining characteristic, but I managed to hold in the next thing that wanted to burst from my tongue, which was What are you doing here?
After a moment’s consideration, I went with a less potentially offensive construction. “What brings you to the prison ward?”
It zipped back and then forward on a horizontal plane, ending with its bulbous eyes and insectile mouthparts only centimeters from my nose. Long experience lent me the composure to stand still and not take it amiss: this was Rilriltok expressing nearly unbearable excitement. Nevertheless, my amygdala was momentarily convinced that I was about to be eaten by a giant bug. It responded by dumping a lot of adrenaline into my system.
Whatever. It seemed likely I might need the stuff soon, so uncomfortable as it was, I decided to hang on to it.
I’ve been doing brain scans! Brain scans, and going over some other things! Look!
Almost before I could accept the connection, it was downloading a giant bolus of information into my fox. Quarantine protocols lifted or no, this seemed like dubious practice under the current situation, but it was too late for me to complain about hygiene now.
And then I was too busy being interested in the data it was showing me to worry.
I had firewalls in place anyway. I was sure it would be fine.
“What’s that?”
I was experiencing Calliope Jones’s post-repair brain. I’d seen scans before, but the earlier ones had not been resolved to this level of detail. I wasn’t a neurologist or a cryonicist, but even a trauma doc like me could distinguish the pattern of remaining damage against healthy tissue. It was slowly being repaired, but the healthy tissue would take time to grow.
The injured portions of her brain looked like empty space, like a lightless nebula occluding the stars behind.
I wondered if the brain damage accounted for Calliope’s apparently questionable executive function. “I’m
