I’d talked with Diana about the emotional, or existential, discomfort I’d gone through last time, and she said that as far as she knew, there was no medical solution for it. How could there be, when you’re metabolizing slower than a sequoia? Just try to think comfortable thoughts before you go under.
It sort of worked. Most of us could see the overhead viewscreen, and I’d set up a program for it to show a sequence of soothing pictures while we waited to cool down. Expressionist paintings, quiet nature photographs. I wondered whether Earth had any nature left. Neither Man nor Tauran was sentimental about such things; they found beauty in abstractions.
Well, we didn’t have such a great track record, either. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
So I spent the dreaming five months, which sometimes felt like five minutes, in a series of quiet pastoral environments, most of which were extrapolations of places I’d only read about or seen in pictures; even the commune where I grew up was in a suburb. I had played in neatly manicured parks and dreamed they were jungles. I came back to those dreams now.
It was curious. My dreams didn’t take me back to Middle Finger, where Mother Nature and I had always been on intimate, battling terms. No rest in that, I guess.
Coming out of SA was more difficult, and uncomfortable, than when I’d had Diana to help. I was confused and numb. My fingers didn’t want to work, and they couldn’t tell clockwise from counterclockwise, unscrewing the bypass orthotics. When I lifted myself out I was streaked with blood from the abdomen down, though there was no injury.
I went to help Marygay, and she was only one step behind me, trying to sort out and loosen straps. She had managed not to splash blood all over herself. We both got dressed, and she went back to check on Sara, while I looked at the others.
Then I checked on Rii Highcloud, who was our volunteer medico. She was actually a librarian, way back in real life, but Diana had given her an intense week of training in how to use the standard medical kit aboard the ship.
Antres 906 was alert, and nodded at me when I peered over the edge of the box. Good thing. If something went wrong, the creature would have been at the mercy of a first-aid manual that had an appendix about Taurans.
Jacob Pierson was frozen solid, with no life signs. He had probably been dead for five months. It made me feel vaguely guilty that I didn’t like him and hadn’t looked forward to working with him.
Everyone else was at least moving. We wouldn’t know if they were well until they were up and talking. Unwellness could take odd forms, too; Charlie had come out of SA on Middle Finger unable to smell flowers, though he could smell other things. (Marygay and I used it as an excuse, a private joke, for not remembering names or numbers: “Must’ve lost it in SA.”)
She said that Sara was coming along fine; she’d needed some mopping up, but didn’t want her mother to help, of all people.
We got the screen working, and Earth looked all right, or at least as we expected. About a third of what we could see, between clouds, seemed to be city, a featureless grey, all over northern Africa and southern Europe.
I drank some water and it stayed down, though I could imagine it floating, a cold spherical lump, in my stomach. I was concentrating on that when I realized Marygay was crying, silently, blotting floating tears with her knuckles and forearm.
I thought it was about Pierson and started to say something comforting.
“The same,” she said tightly. “Nothing. Just like Middle Finger.”
“Maybe they’re…” I couldn’t think of anything. They were dead or gone. All ten billion.
Antres 906 had climbed out of the box and was floating behind me. “This is not unexpected,” it said, “since there was no sign of Centrus having been visited by them.” It made a strange sound, like a hoarse dove. “I must go to the Whole Tree.”