When Viktor began to explore outside the immediate confines of Nrina’s laboratory he encountered still more strangers. He even tried speaking to some of them now and again, for language practice, but he was wary. When he looked at them, he did not fail to see that they were looking at him as well, and with just as much speculative interest. He thought that the branding on the forehead was probably a useful precaution. Some of the glances from females were frankly sexual, and Viktor appreciated that very much . . . the memory of Reesa slowly fading from his mind.
Some of the sexually charged looks, however, were from people who were definitely male, and about that Viktor was far less pleased.
By the time Viktor could make himself understood to people like Nrina his life had fallen into a routine. He ate when food was offered. He slept when he was tired. He made his required four donations of sperm each day—a little surprised at himself, and not unpleased: after all, he was pretty nearly a middle-aged man now! And between times, all the time, he tried to learn this world he was in.
Of course, Viktor was not the only newcomer in the habitat. Jeren, Mescro, and Korelto were as innocent as himself, and two of them, at least, were curious. (Jeren wasn’t. Jeren took what came without complaint or question. His main interest was in following Viktor around.) But those three had an advantage Viktor didn’t share. All the things they wanted to know Manett, the veteran of more than eight months ahead of them out of the freezer, already knew—and told them. But it seemed that Manett just didn’t like talking to Viktor.
For some reason, Viktor could not guess why, Manett had taken a dislike to him. More than a dislike. Viktor pondered, without resolving, the curious idea he had formed that sometimes, when he caught Manett’s eyes on him, the expression in them looked almost like fear.
Then Nrina called him in for another examination.
When Viktor greeted her, careful with his pronunciation, the woman looked pleased, but she just waved him to a table. There she did all the things she had already done to Viktor—touched his head with various instruments, studied the polychrome readings, and felt the part just above his temple that had hurt so badly, looking satisfied when he said it hurt no more.
“Your leg, then,” she said, speaking slowly so that he could understand. He raised it obediently to the table, and she touched a buzzing rod to the dressing.
The pink sausage fell neatly open. Viktor looked, and smelled, and squinted his eyes shut, trying not to be sick. A big piece of his calf was gone. What was left stank of dead meat and decay.
Nrina didn’t seem to mind. She bent close to study it, by eye and with more of the instruments that flashed rainbow colors for her. Then, satisfied, she sprayed it with something that felt like nothing at all, but quickly dissipated the terrible odor and left the exposed raw meat covered with a film of metallic gold. She pressed the two halves of the wrapping back together and sat down facing Viktor, her knees hugged to her breast, regarding him.
When she spoke to Viktor it was slowly, a word at a time. “You have . . . suffered . . . damage . . . from improper freezing. For . . . a long time. Do you understand?” He nodded. “So . . . there are two things. Your leg. It will . . . I think . . . be all right . . . in a season. It will . . . heal completely.”
“That is good,” Viktor said.
She nodded seriously. “The brain . . . I do not know.”
Viktor blinked at her. “What?”
“I have . . . inserted . . . additional material . . . in your brain . . . to replace . . . what was lost. It may take. I think it has . . . partly.”
“Partly?”
“Perhaps more. We must wait.”
“I have been waiting,” he said bitterly.
She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then, smiling, she said, “You will . . . wait some more. Now go. You will help Manett. You must learn . . . to do his work.”
Manett was waiting for Viktor outside the examination room, and his expression was even more dour than usual. When Viktor asked him what Nrina had meant, Manett flared up. “It means she’s going to give you my job, damn your hide!” he rasped. “Come on. I’ll show you what to do—but just don’t talk to me!” And he led the way to the outermost shell of the habitat, where the wraithlike but oddly muscled man who had tattooed Viktor in the first place was waiting impatiently for them.
The man wasn’t wearing a filmy robe now; he was dressed in shiny, copper-colored things like overalls, which covered everything from neck to feet, and he had a hood of the same material in his hand. “This is Dekkaduk,” Manett said, short and surly. “Get dressed.”
Dekkaduk looked at him inquiringly, but didn’t say anything either. He waited while Viktor struggled into the same sort of garment. It was light and flexible, but it felt metallic. Still, it was elastic, too, because it slid over the sausage around Viktor’s lower leg easily enough.
“Now,” Dekkaduk said, “we go inside.” He was speaking the language of the habitat people. Because Viktor was concentrating on what he was doing it took a moment for him to understand. Manett helped him along with a shove.
“Dekkaduk said move,” he snapped. “Get your damn hood on!”
Then Viktor found out what his job was. All three of them donned their hoods, then crowded all together into a tiny cubicle; Manett pulled the outer door closed—it was thick but light—and opened a door on the other side.
Immediately the transparent front of Viktor’s hood clouded over and he felt a stinging cold. A moment later he could feel Manett roughly poking at his back, doing something that resulted first in a faint click, then a hiss. The icy cold of the suit warmed; warm air began to flow through the hood. Gradually the frosted inside of the faceplate began to clear.
Viktor could see Manett’s face bending toward his, and through the two visors he could see the man’s look of sour satisfaction. When Manett spoke Viktor could see his lips move, but the voice came from inside the hood, right next to his ear. “You’re all hooked up,” Manett announced. “Now let’s shift some stiffs.”
And so they did. For an hour or more. Warm inside their heated suits, with their warmed air supply from the cables that connected them to sockets in the wall; and the stiffs they moved were corpsicles from the cryonics chambers on Newmanhome.
What Manett and Viktor did was the hard work—pulling out the old capsules, opening them to show the frozen bodies inside. The air in the freezer must have been searingly dry, for no frost had collected on either capsules or bodies. Some were facedown, and they were the easiest; all Viktor or Manett had to do was to pull or cut away the hard-frozen fabric over the hip and then stand aside while Dekkaduk thrust a triangle-bladed instrument into each patch of rock-hard flesh to gouge out a tiny sample. The ones who had been frozen faceup were more difficult. They had to be lifted out, or at least turned to one side, so that Dekkaduk could get at them; and then Viktor could see the frozen faces. Some were almost as though only asleep. Some were contorted. Some seemed to be silently screaming.
Then they slid the capsules back—each marked with its star or cross or crescent. Viktor was glad when it was over, because it was frightening to look on the corpsicles and know that not long before he had been just like them—and not very far in the future, maybe, might well be back there again.
Back in his own study room, as he leaned over the teaching desk, he blew on his fingers. They weren’t really cold. It was his soul that was cold. He thought it would never be warm again.
But as he talked to his unreal mentor in the desk he began to forget the freezer. “What shall we study today, Viktor?” the simulacrum greeted him. “It is up to you to choose.”
“Thank you,” Viktor said, aware that he was thanking no one real. “Can you show me some more pictures, please?”
“Of course. Incidentally, your accent is getting much better. But what pictures would you like to see?”
“Well,” Viktor said, “I used to be interested in astronomy. Can you show me what the skies look like now? I mean, not just Nergal, but everything?”