It made a noise that senso translated as a chuckle. Not that I need to be worried. But Dr. Jens here would probably prefer not to die of scarlet fever or something equally romantic and premillennial.
Surgeons are not notoriously great at bedside manner.
“That patient is Specialist Jones,” Helen said.
She’d told me about Jones on the way in. The historian. The one I wanted to introduce to our archinformists, if she lived. That level of confidence and backstory seemed to contradict Cheeirilaq’s theory that she’d been stuck in with the other corpsicles as a kind of frozen Trojan horse.
I nibbled my lip, trying to decide how to respond to Helen’s statement.
“I give permission,” Helen said suddenly.
“I beg your pardon?” I’d understood her perfectly. But I had expected her to say something quite different, based on available evidence and her behavior patterns so far.
“I give permission,” Helen said. “They are my crew. I am in authority over them, in the absence of a commanding officer. I give you permission to examine them, and to release such information as may be relevant to an ongoing investigation to Constable Cheeirilaq.”
I guessed all that extra storage and the personality reconstruction were having an effect already. Dr. Zhiruo was the best at what she did, and Helen must not have been as intractable a case as I’d feared.
Well, boomed Tralgar. That conveniently settles that. Now about the rewarming— It abruptly bent all three enormous legs at surprisingly sharp angles and dropped its posterior end to the deck, sitting down. It folded its tentacles and seemed to scrunch in on itself, widening and thickening throughout the muscular gumdrop of its body. This brought the conical head with its circle of bright violet eyes and walrus whiskers to my eye level, more or less.
This may be distressing information, it admitted, leaning toward Helen. She did not step back. Are you prepared to internalize bad news?
I’m here, Linden whispered in my senso.
“I am prepared,” Helen said.
Dr. Rilriltok? the Thunderby offered.
Rilriltok hovered gently over my shoulder. The breeze it generated was pleasant on my neck. It buzzed.
We can at best expect a thirty percent success rate based on the level of technology of the cryo units. Some of the patients who survive are likely to have severe deficits, possibly permanent ones. In those cases—survival, with brain injury—we can repair the organic damage, but in the absence of ayatanas—
“What are ayatanas?” Helen asked.
I realized I’d never heard her interrupt before.
“Machine-stored memories,” I said.
Helen nodded, an odd, crisp gesture that bobbed her head like the stride of a connecting rod.
In the absence of ayatanas, Tralgar continued, we cannot restore their memories or personalities. They will essentially be new people in the same bodies. The patient in the better capsule is much likelier to make a full recovery.
Helen collapsed in on herself. Literally, as her previous slight expansion vanished, and her body contracted to a smaller, denser-seeming version.
I asked, “Those odds don’t change if we wait? Past the point where the transplants and cultures are ready, I mean?”
They do not change, Rilriltok said, sympathetically.
I half expected Helen to straighten up, or shake herself, or make some other small human gesture of resignation and resolve. But what she did was stand perfectly still—eerily still, back in her statue mode. It was so very unsettling, being around an AI who was embodied in a humanoid but entirely unhuman shell.
“I should not be deciding this,” she said. “The captain should be deciding this.”
“Perhaps someone in the chain of command will be in the next shipload of rescues,” I suggested.
“The captain…” She was so still, so motionless, that it seemed as if her voice originated from all around us rather than being localized in the slight golden body of the peripheral. “The captain. The captain’s orders…”
There was a terrible sound like rending metal. Rilriltok darted back—a quick, perfectly horizontal zip of flight in reverse. Tralgar leaned its bulk slightly toward Helen and uncoiled its tentacles. Cheeirilaq froze, long thorax elevated so it towered over me, forelimbs cocked in a predatory position.
I swallowed my desire to run, tuned my racing heartbeat to a less painful level of acceleration, and trusted Linden to know what she was talking about when she said she had things under control.
“The captain,” Helen said, still utterly immobile except for the small motion of her small hands knotting themselves into fists, “gave the orders for the crew to be frozen. The captain wrote the program. The captain took Central apart. The captain made it happen. He died.”
Too late I remembered the body in the chair on the bridge.
Helen said, “It is not my fault. I followed orders. It is not my fault.”
I thought about that. About all the ways it could have happened. Epidemic illness among the crew. Mutiny and the need to stop mutiny.
Sophipathology and madness.
She didn’t seem to be done speaking, and none of us interrupted. In a standard second or two, with the air of someone gritting their teeth on a decision, she continued, “If we don’t try to help them, then they are all dead.”
As good as, Tralgar agreed.
“Do it,” Helen said. And collapsed in a puddle of gold, only vaguely formed to resemble a human being.
“Page Dr. Zhiruo!” I yelled, but the presence chime and lights were already announcing her arrival.
