Darkship Renegades (9 page)

UNDERWORLD

Kit looked grey again.

Doc’s living space and his treatment facility were one and the same, and going to him for help was much like going into the home of a gnome in a medieval story.

It started at the low door, which was set into what looked like a hill side, and was in fact a very small hill taking up most of the plot he owned. It was covered in low-growing herbs, clover among other things. And the door was almost perfectly round, inset in the side of the hill, made of oak or a good facsimile. A huge iron ring knocker was the only way to call those inside. Not needed this time, as the door opened ahead of us, presumably reacting to some signal from the doctor. Then we were inside, and going past the doctor’s long living room, with the walls covered in bookcases, and past the fireplace with large chairs one on each side of it.

And then past the kitchen which despite its modern cooker looked like an ancient kitchen, from the water pump—which poured warm or cold water at a signal—to the cooker which was hidden behind a holo of a cooking fire with a tripod pot over it.

After that opened an area that looked like—and probably was—a private relaxing area. A sofa had a book on top of one of the arms, as though the doctor had been interrupted by our call while reading, though that wasn’t possible because he’d never have got to the complex in time. And there was a low table, with a dirty cup on it.

They set Kit on the sofa, looking even paler amid the garish floral pattern of the upholstery. He’d been treated on that sofa before and bled all over it, and I was sure so had other people, but it didn’t show. I suspected the sofa, like most other things in this place was an impostor, a biological construct that drank up the blood spilled and remained sterile. The idea of that made me shudder.

But that was just a way to avoid thinking of how ill Kit looked, lying there, pale, and drawn and still.

Kit?
I said, mentally, but there was no answer. And it was like everyone else had forgotten I even existed, not that it mattered. I
wanted
them to give Kit all their attention. Bruno had come in the door supporting me and dropped me in one of the chairs next to the fireplace in the living room. Not that I’d stayed there. Now my legs were steady under me, and I could walk.

So I’d come into the back room and leaned against the wall, as close to Kit as I could get, because I couldn’t get close enough. Jean and Doc mostly were working on him. Or Doc was, and giving short orders to Jean to clamp this, and use that. I guessed that either Jean had some training, or he was really good at following half-barked orders. Or both. And the doctor’s house might look like a cozy cottage, but it was obviously a sophisticated medical intervention center, as well equipped as any Earth hospital.

Bruno and Zen stood a little farther away, handing things to the main combatants. And I—a stranger so new to Eden that I didn’t even know the limits of their biotechnology—could do nothing but hamper those who were trying to save Kit’s life. I stayed at the periphery, looking on, feeling superfluous and useless, and trying not to think.

Trying not to think I’d gone crawling off, with my burner, looking for trouble, instead of staying and trying to cover Kit, trying to protect him. Trying not to think that he’d been the main target; he’d always been the main target. Trying not to think of where Zen had gone, when she had disappeared all that time.

But most of all, I was trying not to think of why Kit wasn’t answering my mental touch. He should be able to. I should be able to
feel
him even if he were in a coma. I’d done so before.

The doctor took measurements and readings, swore softly, did something to the side of Kit’s head that involved two tiny needles attached to what looked like a crystal egg, and started putting stickers on Kit’s chest. I knew that type of sticker—it was a sensing device that sent info to a computer. Then Doc put something like a transparent helmet connected to other machines on Kit’s head and swore some more, then looked up and saw my expression.

“He’s not going to die,” he told me, gruffly. “I know how awful it looks, but despite the blood loss, it’s not nearly as bad as it seems. It’s more…” He shrugged. “The brain damage is no more than he would have suffered if he’d had a small stroke. People survive those every day. Their brain reroutes and they go on. Some people don’t even notice them. Their speech slurs a little, for a short time, and that’s that.

“I’m going to guess it was not the shot your attackers wanted to make. He was probably moving too fast for them. Possibly he was trying to reach you. But the wound is enough to damage his coordination and his capacity to pilot…and judging from where it is, possibly his speech. Not life threatening, mind.” Doc bit his lower lip, as though in worry. “He’ll slur his words a bit, and his movements might not be as precise as they should be. But for a Cat…”

For a Cat, whose ability to pilot was all-important and built-in, whose speed and coordination were biological gifts he had had since birth, losing those would be like dying. I felt my legs go weak again. “You mean, Kit will never be able to pilot again?”

Doctor Bartolomeu looked at me for a moment as though he’d forgotten who I was, or perhaps as though he didn’t understand a word I’d said. “No, no. Of course that’s not what I mean. There are ways of recovering, including some very specialized neurosurgery combined with intensive therapy. Our problem is time. None of those methods will allow him to leave with us tomorrow and I can’t take everything required for that level of surgery aboard the
Hopper
.”

“We can’t leave him behind,” I said, louder than I intended, as I stared at the still-unconscious Kit and felt my throat closing in panic. “I think they were after him all along.”

“Yes. That much is obvious,” the doctor said. “No. We can’t.” Doc looked completely lost and, for a moment, like a little boy on the verge of tears, which was quite a feat when one considered that at the same time he looked hundreds of years old. And was. “Perhaps that’s what they wanted. To have us leave without Christopher, which would leave him at their mercy, and would mean we didn’t have with us the person they think can interpret Jarl’s writings.” He frowned. “But even if we just delay we’ll be giving them an opportunity to make good on the attempt to kill him. Any time we remain on Eden gives them another chance to kill Christopher or sabotage the ship. We can’t do that. It’s obvious Castaneda wants him out of the way, though I can’t even start to imagine why…unless…” He shook his head as he looked at Kit. “No.”

Suddenly, his face seemed to crumple further, his wrinkles multiplying. It was horrifying, like something out of a scary legend, like watching a hundred years fall on a man in minutes. “Oh, damn it, Christopher,” he said, under his breath. “Of all the things I didn’t want to have to do.”

“What?” I asked, because this sounded bad. It sounded very bad.

He paused, looking like he was trying to talk himself into something. “Yes. I’m very much afraid we will have to take drastic measures. And I don’t like to do it.” He looked up at me, his eyes bleak amid their nest of wrinkles.

THE MAGIC POTION

“Normally I wouldn’t use this,” Doc Bartolomeu said. Now I was the one closest to him. Jean had stayed in the other room, monitoring the machines hooked up to Kit. Bruno and Zen were probably there still. I hadn’t paid attention. I’d followed the doctor back to his kitchen area, which I knew from before also served as a laboratory.

He had opened a cabinet that looked impossibly deep, and from within it pulled a few vials, muttering to himself as he shook them. After a while, he lifted one of them, frowned at the contents, read the label on it, which was covered in strange symbols that weren’t even letters as far as I could tell.

“Is it a poison or something?” I knew that sometimes, for therapeutic reasons, people administered things to patients that would kill them under other circumstances. That was close to the full extent of my medical knowledge.

The doctor turned, still holding the vial in between his fingers, his expression for a moment completely blank, then focusing on me, as though he’d just noticed me. He shrugged. “No. Poisons are part and parcel of any doctor’s job…this.” He shrugged and suddenly smiled, a genuine smile. “I am old-fashioned, I think. Very old-fashioned, as this technology has existed since before we left Earth. This vial contains nanocytes of a specialized sort. They’re repair nanocytes for brain damage.” He reached under the counter for one of the bulbous round containers used for administering medicine. He fitted it with an inhaler tip, moving with all the care normally reserved for high explosives.

“What is that?” I asked. “I mean, why…why are you…”

“They’re not inherently dangerous.” He took a deep breath.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Doc, holding the inhaler in one hand, looked up at me. Up, though I was a small woman, because he had shrunk with age. Not that he’d ever been very tall, but I’d seen holos. He’d probably been around five foot six or five foot seven. Now his body had collapsed in on itself, unable to bear gravity for the three hundred or so years he’d been alive, even if some parts of him were younger. Growing cloned parts was normal in Eden, but the structure itself knew its age, and showed it.

His eyes showed it too, just now, shadowed with worry and looking very much like he’d rather do anything than tell me the truth. “You know nanocytes are old technology…”

I nodded.

“Well, these…these are just more specialized. Nanoscale assemblers. They go in and repair brain damage, and restore connections that are supposed to be there. They provide two key functions, leading to neural rehabilitation. First, they provide trophic and metabolic support, to promote stem cell proliferation and replacement of damaged neurons, glia and micro vascular components. But new cells aren’t enough, they don’t have the proper connections. So the second function is to rebuild those connections by inserting synapsin and receptor proteins to restore neural connection. Does that help?”

“No,” I said. “Considering how little of your science I know, and how little I can understand, they’re just a sophisticated way of not answering my question.”

He blinked at me, and something like a flash of amusement tinged his eyes. I suspected if he weren’t so worried about Kit and about what he was doing to Kit, he would have laughed. “You forgot to add
you old fraud,
” he said amiably, and the amusement in his eyes deepened, probably at my blushing. “Kit or Kath would have added it. Child, one of the few advantages of having practiced the medical profession since well before your great-grandmother was alive—”

“I didn’t have a great-grandmother.”

He fixed me with an unwavering look. “Athena Hera Sinistra, one of the advantages of having practiced the medical profession since well before the birth of the great-grandmother you should have had is that I can avoid answering questions without lying.”

I stepped in front of him, on the path he would have taken to the room where Kit lay. “Kit is my husband and I have a right to know if anything you’re about to do to him is dangerous.” I was on shaky ground. Marriage in Eden is a private contract between two or more consenting adults, nothing else and nothing more. It didn’t necessarily give you the right to medical decisions. We’d signed a standard contract, Kit had said, with the modification that it was for life, but I couldn’t remember—suddenly—if it included right of mutual medical decisions or not.

Doc Bartolomeu snorted. “Living is dangerous. We’ve all been served a death warrant the minute we drew our first breath.”

I didn’t answer, just crossed my arms on my chest to let him know
that
was not even a sophisticated way to avoid answering.

His gaze wavered and he sighed. He whispered something that sounded like “I’m too old for this.”

“You have some reason to mistrust this treatment,” I said. “Even though, as you say, it is old news.”

He shrugged. “A friend of mine trusted on a nanoscale assembler prophylactic…And it didn’t work at all or at least…” He frowned. “And Christopher…” He frowned. “Well. It’s probably safe, but…”

“But…”

Doc swallowed hard. “But,” he said, speaking very fast, suddenly, “Jarl Ingemar died of a neural degenerative disease known as Hampson’s disease. The NSE/NSA is useless against it and…”

“Jarl died of suicide,” I protested.

“Yes, but long after it had become obvious that his Hampson’s was irreversible and that the nanocytes could do nothing. It is a…No standard human on Earth would even have known about it, since it hits only at what is, for homo sapiens, an impossibly old age. But Jarl…”

But Jarl had been impossibly old in standard human terms, over three hundred years old. “What does the disease do?” I asked. “And what can it possibly have to do with Kit who is still very young?”

“Well…I said that nanocytes could not fix the damage, but…”

“But?”

“But in injecting these nanocytes into Christopher…”

“Yes?”

“Even though they’re of a very different kind from the ones we used on Jarl…”

“Yes?”

“They still need to know what the healthy configuration of connections for the neurons, the pattern of the healthy brain is. And I’ve never taken a pattern of Christopher’s. He’s young and, that I know, not prone to strokes, and besides…”

“Besides?” I asked. I was trying not to think that there was this monster-disease in Kit’s genetics that would eventually hit him if we lived that long. In three hundred years, the chances of my darling still putting up with me were close to none. And besides…besides…Besides there were three hundred years, give or take, before we needed to think of this, and in three hundred years lots of things could happen.

“And besides, I don’t like nanocytes. They feel too much like magic. So, I didn’t take a pattern of his brain while it was healthy. What the nanocytes do is—in communication with each other—spread out and recreate the pattern of the healthy brain.”

“And the brain you imprinted was Jarl’s,” I said. I can read the writing on the wall when the print is ten feet tall and written in fire.

It seemed like my words relieved Doc immensely. His body sagged with relief. Had he been so afraid of having to say it? “Yes. Yes. But…”

“But?”

“Even though the imprint was taken in the early stages of Hampson’s disease, I want to point out that none of this is relevant. Not really. Look…We’re not remaking all of Christopher’s brain in the model of Jarl’s.” His throat worked as he swallowed. “I wouldn’t. It would replace Christopher with Jarl. It wouldn’t be different at all from what your…what Alexander Sinistra wanted to do with you.”

I supposed. Changing the recipient’s brain to resemble yours was probably less messy than a transplant, but the result was the same. The original brain would stop existing.

“It’s a small, localized dosage, carefully programmed, and too limited to effect any serious change in Christopher’s brain.”

“But you’re afraid.”

“Only because Jarl was in the early stages of Hampson’s disease when the impression was taken,” he said. “I’m afraid it will trigger it in Christopher, and I want to say that it’s a superstitious fear, not at all real. But I…”

“Is there some way we can avoid doing this at all?” I asked. Yeah, I’m not superstitious. But I would not willingly drop cold iron in the middle of a Gaian priestess’s dance. I would not loudly declare that a computer on which I depended had no personality. And I would not bet my husband’s life on a risky treatment, if I could help it.

“Oh, sure. He’ll survive on his own. And in six months, with therapy with some micro-targeted surgery, he will be back to normal. But…”

He didn’t say
But we don’t have six months.
He didn’t need to say it. Oh, Kit had six months on the purely biological level. The program the doctor had outlined was safe, secure and…deadly.

People who would ambush us, coming out of the
Hopper
; people who would shoot an unarmed man in cold blood, would not shrink at trying other methods of getting rid of him.

The longer we stayed in Eden, the longer they’d have to try to kill Kit. I couldn’t understand why they’d want to kill Kit, or why technologically sophisticated people with knowledge of biological science, would think that Kit had a special gift for understanding Jarl’s notes, but they clearly did. And they clearly wanted Kit dead so that they could control energy production and energy access in Eden. And through it, all of Eden, which couldn’t
function
without energy.

And in six months…They’d only have to be lucky once, while we, playing defense, had to be lucky every time. And they had all the power in the world, while Doc and I had only the sort of undertow, marginal power that obtains through family and friendship connections, through whispers in the dark, through messages passed in secret.

So far we’d been able to outwit Castaneda and the board, but only because there had been very little time, and they hadn’t counted on us even attempting to defend ourselves. We’d had surprise and speed on our side. Not weapons you could deploy twice.

I closed my eyes, feeling as though cold were radiating from somewhere near my stomach and spreading throughout my body. I would not tremble.

Physical courage is easy, and yet each time, before I attack, each time before I jump in the face of great odds, I’m perfectly conscious of a micro-hesitation before I move, a hesitation that tells me that I know the danger, and I don’t like it more than anyone else would.

It’s just that when faced with physical threats, as much as I hate the danger of attacking, I know there is also a danger in doing nothing. Adrenalin pumps through my veins and jumping to the attack is easier than sitting still.

When the danger wasn’t physical, though, and when it threatened Kit rather than myself, courage was more difficult. Could I live without Kit? Sure I could. I’d lived most of my life without even knowing he existed. I could even live without love. For years, since my surrogate mother had disappeared in the night when I was six, I’d lived without love, my fists clenched against a world that didn’t even like me.

Understand. I was my putative father’s clone, in almost every way possible except gender. Stuff had been tampered with, of course. I was female, and there were a lot of genes affected by that, all-important change. But that change was not enough to make my basic personality different from Daddy Dearest’s.

The gifts I had—of speed, of reasoning, my sense of direction, my effortless and unthinking affinity for mechanics, even the very odd telepathy I shared with Kit—were Mule enhancements. And I’d seen enough of my own basic nature which was often cold, grasping, selfish, and paranoid, to know I wasn’t all that different from the late, unlamented Good Man Milton Alexander Sinistra who had been designed, long ago, by humans who should know better, to be a sort of super assassin: a human weapon that could be deployed with complete precision and utter ruthlessness.

Without Kit, would I become like him? Who knew? I didn’t.

But to keep this treatment from Kit meant to risk losing him, anyway, and maybe Eden as well and everything I held dear.

What poet was it who had said something about, next to his lady love, considering the world well lost? Life never gives you the same kind of options that poetry gives you.

Give me half a chance to trade this world—both worlds, Eden and Earth, with the Thules thrown in to make up the weight—for Kit’s life and happiness and I would do it without hesitation and without blinking.

But no one was giving me that choice. I could risk Kit’s mind and life this way. Or I could risk it in a way that would be more dangerous and that might take the world with it.

I felt my fists clenching and opened my eyes, realizing my inner turmoil hadn’t taken more than a few seconds. “Do it,” I said, stepping aside. “Give him the nanocytes.”

Even as I said it, I knew that the doctor didn’t need my legal permission. I was Kit’s ward not the other way around, and though we were married, because of my lack of legal status, I probably couldn’t make decisions for him during his incapacitation. If anyone were legally responsible for Kit, it must be Jean and perhaps Tania.

But the doctor hadn’t asked Jean. Or Tania. Or at least not in my hearing. He’d asked me. That was because what he needed wasn’t legal permission but something far more complex. He needed moral authority, to salve his own all-too-human conscience, in case it all went wrong.

And while Jean and Tania loved the child they’d adopted while he was still in the biowomb as much as they loved their genetic daughters—if not more, as I’d sometimes suspected—their…
being
wasn’t intertwined with Kit’s, while mine was.

They’d survive his death, if it came to that. Parents do survive the loss of their children, though it’s always a sad and terrible thing that by rights should violate some law of nature. I’d probably survive too, physically, at least. But some part of me was intertwined with what Kit
was
and that part would die forever with him.

No, I’m not speaking of souls or spirits. Or perhaps I am. Yes, I know that Nikola Tesla, about whom Kit had made me read, claimed to weigh souls as they left the body. I’m also aware that no one else has been able to prove the existence of such a thing.