(eng) Paul J. McAuley - Stars 01 by Four Hundred Billion Stars

Author:Four Hundred Billion Stars [Stars, Four Hundred Billion]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3. THE KEEP

They took Dorthy straight back to the high camp overlooking the keep, and without even asking her about Kilczer or the twins (she was too dazed and exhausted to volunteer anything) dumped her in the tank of an autodoc. Any halfway competent medical technician could have told them that there was nothing seriously wrong with her—electrolytes out of kilter, histamine reaction, malnutrition, scurvy—but the only medical technician in the survey team had been Kilczer, who was dead.

The autodoc was a military model. It bypassed her sensorium so that she drifted without sight or touch or taste or hearing, unable to lift even an eyebrow, and cut off her consciousness with Russian sleep while it replaced her blood with artificial plasma, cut in a liver bypass and began to dialyze the toxins that slowly leaked from her cells, flensed away skin and subcutaneous tissue around her many inflammations and stimulated regrowth. A civilian machine would have fed her a diet of soothing induced dreams, of the beach at Serenity, perhaps, or of Tallman’s Scarp on Titan; but this model was efficient, no more. It sent her to sleep to stop her going insane from sensory deprivation while it worked, but it supplied no dreams; let her have her own.

Sometimes she was back with Kilczer on the other side of the hollow mountain, walking through pine forest with something shadowy behind them, something she couldn’t get him to see, or she was in her little singleship out where comets traced their long cold orbits, and Kilczer’s voice was crackling urgently from the receiver—but she couldn’t understand because he was speaking Russian. Or she was in the little clearing above the waterfall, seeing the herder rush through the tall grass and smash into Kilczer, or she was Kilczer, as the impact spun her out over the drop, or the herder. And sometimes she dreamed of hunting beneath a strange night sky, glowing with veils of frozen, luminous fog through which only a single, intensely bright star shone, the eye at the end of a long black rift. She was coming to understand that these latter visions might not be dreams at all, but something else, something trying to break through to her, when the machine decanted her.

All her senses rushed in on her at once. She was kneeling in a flood of blood-warm fluid, the same stuff stinging her nostrils as it ran out of them. Bright light rainbowed in the drops that clung to her lashes; beyond, someone reached out and gripped her arm at the elbow and helped her up. Cold tiles under her sticky feet. She coughed and coughed.

“Here, honey,” the tall woman, Angel Sutter, said, and guided her to a plastic mesh chair. “How you feeling?”

It was a small, brightly lit room, half of it taken up by the autodoc. A pump hummed somewhere, draining the amniotic fluid; the pallet that had tipped Dorthy out retracted into the machine’s hard white façade with a smug click. The wall opposite curved in as it rose; the wall of a bubbletent.

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