‘Where is this?’ he said. Might as well try the direct approach. He tried shifting his hands, but without success. Sma glanced somewhere over his head as he did so.
‘The GSV Congenital Optimist You’re all right… you’re going to be all right.’
‘If I’m all right, why can’t I move my hands or fee… shit.’
Suddenly he was tied to the wooden frame again; the girl was in front of him. He opened his eyes and saw her; Sma. A misty, uncertain light glowed all around. He wrenched at his bonds, but there was no sign of give, no hope… he felt the tug on his hair, then the thudding cut of the blade, and saw the girl in the red robe looking at him from somewhere over his be-bodied head.
Everything revolved. He closed his eyes.
The moment passed. He swallowed. He took a breath and opened his eyes again; at least these things seemed to be working. Sma looked down, relieved. ‘You just remembered?’
‘Yeah. I just remembered.’
‘You going to be okay?’ She sounded serious, but still reassuring.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he said. Then; ‘it’s just a scratch.’
She laughed, looked away for a bit, and when she looked to him again, she was biting her lip.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Narrow one, this time, huh?’ he smiled.
Sma nodded. ‘You could say that. Another few seconds and you’d have suffered brain damage; another few minutes and you’d have been dead. If only you’d had a homing implant; we could have picked you up days…’
‘Oh now, Sma,’ he said gently. ‘You know I can’t be bothered with all that stuff.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘Well, whatever; you’re going to have to stay like this for a while.’ Sma smoothed hair from his forehead. ‘It’ll take about two hundred days or so to grow a new body. They want me to ask you; do you want to sleep through the whole thing, or do you want to stay awake as normal… or anything in between? It’s up to you. Makes no difference to the process.’
‘Hmm.’ He thought about this. ‘I suppose I get to do lots of improving things, like listen to music and watch films or whatever, and read?’
‘If you want,’ Sma shrugged. ‘You can go the whole hog and spool fantasy head-tapes if you want.’
‘Drink?’
‘Drink?’
‘Yeah; can I get drunk?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sma said, looking above and to one side. A voice muttered something.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘Stod Perice.’ A young man nodded, coming into view, upside down. ‘Medic. Hello there, Mr Zakalwe. I’ll be looking after you, however you decide to spend the time.’
‘D’you dream when you’re under, if you do it that way?’ he asked the medic.
‘Depends how deep you want to go. We can send you so far down you think no more than a second’s passed during those two hundred days, or you can lucid dream every second of them. Whatever you want.’
‘What do most people do?’
‘Switch right off; wake up with a new body after no appreciable time.’
‘Thought so. Can I get drunk while I’m hooked up to whatever the hell it is I’m hooked up to?’
Stod Perice grinned. ‘I’m sure we could arrange it. If you want, we could give you drug-glands; ideal opportunity, just…’
‘No thanks.’ He closed his eyes briefly and tried to shake his head. ‘Occasional inebriety will be quite sufficient.’
Stod Perice nodded. ‘Well, I think we can rig you for that.’
‘Great. Sma?’ he looked at her. She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ll stay awake,’ he told her.
Sma smiled slowly. ‘I had a feeling you might.’
‘You sticking around?’
‘Could do,’ the woman said. ‘Would you like me to?’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
‘And I’d like to.’ She nodded thoughtfully. ‘Okay. I’ll watch you put on weight.’
‘Thanks. And thanks for not bringing that goddamn drone. I can imagine the jokes.’
‘… Yes,’ Sma said, hesitantly, so that he said:
‘Sma? What is it?’
‘Well…’ The woman looked uncomfortable.
‘Tell me.’
‘Skaffen-Amtiskaw,’ she said, awkwardly. ‘It sent you a present.’ She fished a small package from her pocket, flourished it, embarrassed. ‘I… I don’t know what it is, but…’
‘Well I can’t open it. Come on, Sma.’
Sma opened the package. She looked at the contents. Stod Perice leant over, and then turned quickly away, holding one hand at his mouth, coughing.
Sma pursed her lips. ‘I may ask for a new escort drone.’
He closed his eyes. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a hat.’
He laughed at that. Sma did too, eventually (though she threw things at the drone, later). Stod Perice accepted the hat as an onward-gift.
It was only later, in the dim red of the hospital section light, while Sma danced slowly with some new conquest, and Stod Perice was dining out with friends and telling them the story of the hat, and life went on throughout the rest of the great ship, that he remembered how, a few years earlier, and very far away, Shias Engin had traced the wounds on his body (cool slim fingers on the puckered new-looking flesh, the smell of her skin and the tingling sweep of her hair).
And in two hundred days he would have a new body. And (And this?… I’m sorry. Still fresh, that one?)… the wound over his heart would be gone forever, and the heart beneath his chest would not be the same one.
And he realised he had lost her.
Not Shias Engin, whom he’d loved, or thought he had, and certainly lost… but her; the other one, the real one, the one who’d lived within him through a century of icy sleep.
He had thought he would not lose her until the day he died.
Now he knew differently, and felt broken by the knowledge and the loss.
He whispered her name to the quiet red night.
Overhead, the ever-watchful medical monitoring unit saw some fluid seep from the bodiless human’s tear ducts, and wondered dumbly at it.
‘How old is old Tsoldrin, now?’
‘Eighty, relative,’ the drone said.
‘You think he’ll want to come out of retirement? Just because I ask him to?’ He looked sceptical.
‘You’re all we could think of,’ Sma told him.
‘Can’t you just let the old guy grow old in peace?’
‘There’s a little more at stake than the happy retirement of one ageing politico, Zakalwe.’
‘What? The universe? Life as we know it?’
‘Yes; tens, maybe hundreds of millions of times over.’
‘Very philosophical.’
‘And you didn’t let the Ethnarch Kerian grow old in peace, did you?’
‘Damn right,’ he said, and wandered a little further into the armoury. ‘That old pisshead deserved to die a million times.’
The converted minibay engineering space housed a dazzling array of Culture and other weaponry. Zakalwe, Sma thought, was like a kid in a toy store. He was selecting gear and loading it onto a pallet which Skaffen-Amtiskaw was guiding after the man, down the aisles of racks and drawers and shelves all stuffed and packed with projectile weapons, line guns, laser rifles, plasma projectors, multitudinous grenades, effectors, plane charges, passive and reactive armour, sensory and guard devices, full combat suits, missile packs, and at least a dozen other distinctly different types of device Sma didn’t recognize.
‘You’ll never be able to carry this lot, Zakalwe. ‘This is just the shortlist,’ he told her. He took a stocky, boxy-looking gun with no appreciable barrel from a shelf. He held it out to the drone, ‘What’s this?’
‘CREWS; assault rifle,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. ‘Seven fourteen tonne batteries; seven-element single shot to forty-four point eight kilorounds a second (minimum firing time eight point seven five seconds), maximum single burst; seven times two-fifty kilogrammes; frequency from mid-visible to high X-ray.’
He hefted it. ‘Not very well balanced.’
‘That’s its stowed configuration. Slide the whole top back.’
‘Hmm.’ He pretended to aim the readied gun. ‘Now, what’s to stop you putting your supporting hand over here, where the beams are going?’
‘Common sense?’ suggested the drone.
‘Uh-huh. I’ll stick with my obsolete plasma rifle.’ He put the gun back. ‘Anyway, Sma; you should be pleased old men do want to come out of retirement for you. Dammit, I should be devoting myself to gardening or something, not storming off to the galactic backwoods doing your dirty work.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Sma said. ‘And a big struggle I had too, convincing you to quit your “gardening” and come back to us. Shit, Zakalwe; your bags were packed.’
‘I must have telepathically already have realized the urgency of the situation.’ He heaved a massive black gun from a rack, swung it with both hands, grunting with the effort. ‘Holy shit. Do you fire this mother or just use it as a battering ram?’
‘Idiran hand cannon,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed. ‘Don’t wave it around like that; it’s very old and quite rare.’
‘No fucking wonder.’ He struggled to lift the gun back into its rack, then continued down the aisle. ‘Come to think of it, Sma, I’m so old my whole life ought to be on triple time or something; I’m probably grossly undercharging you for this whole sorry escapade.’