Knife Fight and Other Struggles (23 page)

Betty-Anne laughed then, the way she always laughed after she made a joke, and in that instant the years fell away and Suki saw the girl that had been her best friend in the whole world, all through nursing academy. Suki felt a smile, a genuine smile this time, creep across her face.

“It’s good to see you,” said Betty-Anne as the years ebbed back into her face. “Really, it’s been too long. You’re going to have a lot to catch up on.” The corners of her mouth turned up again in that same cruel parody of a smile she’d shown a moment before. “Particularly, I think, with our mutual friend Doctor Webley.”

Mutual? What did she mean by that?

“We’ve already spoken,” said Suki coolly.

“Have you?” Betty-Anne regarded Suki speculatively. “Then you already know about the Arrangement? I must say, you’re taking it all rather well. You two had quite a thing going before we launched, didn’t you?”

Now Suki was angry. She sat up in bed, and as she did, long knitting needles of pain and jealousy pierced through her nerves. She was about to ask the obvious questions—
what Arrangement? With who?
and its chillingly obvious follow-up,
How could you steal the man I loved, Betty-Anne Tilley?
—but Suki wasn’t about to give Betty-Anne the satisfaction. She set her bare feet down on the warm, carpeted curve of the recovery room floor and teetered to her feet.

Betty-Anne reached out to take Suki’s arm. “Now, now, girl. Let’s crawl before we can walk.”

Suki pulled away.

“You crawl, I’ll walk,” she snapped, stalking off to the lockers where she knew she’d find a change of clothes. Before she stepped through the door, she turned back to see Betty-Anne standing in a shocked silence beside the empty bed.

“And one more thing,
Nurse Tilley!
” she shouted across the curving floor of the torus. “My name’s Suki Shannahan! Don’t call me girl!”

Arrangement? What in goodness’ name was this Arrangement that Neil had gotten himself involved in? Was he married? If so, then why didn’t Betty-Anne just call it that? Was he—Suki shuddered at the thought—living
common-law
? She supposed that living common-law was something of an Arrangement. But that didn’t seem right either, somehow. Everything was suddenly so confusing.

No one had tried to stop her as she came out of the locker room, velcroing closed the last few tabs on her red-and-white candy-striper jumpsuit. Strictly speaking, there was no reason to; her revivification had been routine, and there was no medical reason for her to stay in bed any longer than she felt she needed to.

Right now, the thing that Suki needed most was information.

Each of the six tori along the length of the
Gwendolyn
were connected to the core via three equidistantly spaced tubes, and Suki rode the climbing chain up the centre of the C-tube. Occasionally, she rode past a porthole, and caught a glimpse of the long, gleaming core of the
Gwendolyn
. From her slowly rotating perspective, it was as though it were nothing more than a gigantic barbecue spit, slow-cooking over the distant flames of their new sun. The starship wasn’t much different today than it was before she’d gone to sleep—if it weren’t for the red star’s peculiar light, they might have still been accelerating away from the Earth, barely past the beginning of their journey. At least, Suki reflected, the enormous wheels and gantries of the
Gwendolyn
remained a constant for her.

And hopefully, the operating system they’d installed on the
Gwendolyn
’s holographic-memory computer net had remained a constant, too.

Suki reached the top of the C-tube just as the hatch irised open and a pair of nurses she didn’t recognize guided a stretcher into a controlled descent on the tube’s opposite side. One of them, a balding Japanese man, nodded a greeting at her while his partner, a heavyset red-haired woman still wearing her surgical mask and HUD goggles bouncing in wide loops around her neck, hooked up the stretcher to a link in the down chain.

“Just woke up?” the balding nurse inquired politely.

“You could say that,” said Suki. Before he could say anything else, she pushed past him into the core of the starship. By the time the hatch irised shut, she had already strapped herself into the interface couch outside the cryosurgery theatre, and was tightening the headset.

You could say that again, in fact,
she said to herself as the bright, friendly colours of her personal interface came to life in front of her.

“I’m just waking up now.”

When she signed on with the company’s medical corps for deep-space work, Suki Shannahan had been offered a personalized interface as part of the package. And like many of her fellow volunteers, she had chosen an interface that would remind her of home: in her case, her family and their spacious estate home in the Richmond Hill Enclave. In those days, she had thought that such reminders would be a comfort in the coldness of space—now, she realized the decision was a mistake. The clean, white vestibule of the house on Fir-Spiralway, with the sounds of her brothers tussling upstairs and her mother on the phone in the kitchen and the TV in the living room replaying old CFL games as background noise were nearly perfect simulations, much more than reminders. But here and now, on board a strange starship orbiting a distant star, those memories were no comfort at all. Indeed, it was all she could do to hold back the tears and assign herself to the task at hand.

“Mom,” she said aloud, and waited dutifully while the simulacrum of her mother went through the standard exclamation into the telephone:

“Oh, look who’s come home for a visit! Sherry, I have to call you back—Suki’s here!”

And from the living room, her father hit the mute button on the CFL commentary, and called over his shoulder, “How’s Daddy’s little girl!?” and, before she could even consider the question, flicked the volume back up to twice again as loud and turned back to the television.

It really was just like home.

“Tell me about the Arrangement, Mom,” said Suki.

Her mother appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Sunlight streamed in behind her through the French door to their minuscule back yard, throwing her into silhouette.

“The Arrangement,” said Suki’s mother. Her index finger went to her chin, as though she were contemplating how to explain something far too grown-up for her little Suki to understand. “Well, dear. The Arrangement was a plan that the medical crew of the
Gwendolyn
implemented amongst themselves on Day 689 following a 214-day review of crew family counselling records. The Arrangement has remained in force until this day.”

“More,” said Suki. “Text.”

“Well, dear. Come into the living room. I’ll have to show you the rest on television.”

Suki followed her mother into the living room and sat down on the couch. Her father lifted the remote and switched the channel from the CFL to a screen that was filled, according to Suki’s request, with nothing more than text. At the top was the heading,

HORMONAL SUPPRESSION THERAPY AND

THE NORMALIZATION OF SEXUAL/AGGRESSION

RESPONSES IN HIGHER PRIMATES

and underneath that,

HELEN ROCKHOLME,

BSc MA

and below that, more than thirty-three screens of densely packed dissertation and equations, appended with charts, tables, and a hypertext index that Suki didn’t even need.

After cramming all those cryogenics manuals back on Luna, Nursing Chief Rockholme’s slim research paper was an absolute piece of cake. When she was finished, she took the remote from her father and used it to check on a few other things in the system, accessing the nano-surgery databank, before she switched the CFL game back on.

“Would you like something to eat?” asked Suki’s mother.

“No, thanks, Mom,” said Suki, giving her mother a perfunctory hug.

“We always love you, dear,” said her mother.

“Exit,” said Suki. Her voice was trembling, but it was clear enough for the interface—her mother and everything she came with vanished in a flash of phosphor.

“Love me,” said Suki as she took the headset off and rolled off the interface couch. “I’m glad somebody still does.”

She found Neil in his apartments in the residential torus. The ship’s engineers had done all they could to make the torus seem like an Earthly garden, but aside from planting shrubs and trees and vegetable plots every few metres, there was only so much they could do. It was still nice, Suki had to admit it—nicer than the recovery rooms, nicer than the core shafts, nicer than the cryosurgery theatres.

But without someone to share it with, let’s face it,
Suki thought.
A shrub’s just something else in the path. Something else to trip over.

Neil answered his door on the second chime. To Suki’s surprise, he didn’t seem particularly surprised to see her.

“Come inside,” he said, ushering her into the narrow space that made up a second-class cryosurgeon’s living room. “You’re looking well.” He said it without looking at her, Suki noted bitterly.

“Why did you do it?” she asked him.

Neil just looked at her. Seeing him this third time caused her to revise her assessment of the effects of his aging once more. It wasn’t as though the years had made him stronger, or more assured, or better looking. They had only emptied him, she realized, made him simple and streamlined.

“What are you talking about?” he finally said.

“You know,” said Suki. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Neil sat down on the sofa, shrugged his confusion. He really didn’t get it, Suki saw. He really had no idea!

“The Arrangement!” Suki was shouting, and she didn’t want to be shouting, but she couldn’t control herself. “I know about the Arrangement!”

“Ah.”

Neil folded his hands on his lap, and sat staring at them. Suki folded her arms across her chest, glaring across the tiny room at the man she had thought she had loved more than anything in the world. Finally, Neil looked up. His perfect blue eyes were rimmed with red, although his face otherwise betrayed no emotion.

“Would you have rather that I’d married?” It came out as nearly a whisper.

“That was the only other choice?”

Neil tried to smile, but perhaps seeing Suki’s reaction, he abandoned the attempt.

“That was the only other choice?” she said again. “Let Nurse Rockholme inject you with her nano-machines that you knew would shut you down for good, or go off and get married . . . to some . . . to some. . . .” Suki was so angry she could barely speak.

“Some bimbo?” Neil finished it for her.

“Your word,” said Suki. “But yes. That’s the general idea.”

“Oh, Suki.” Neil stood up and stepped over to her. “You went to sleep so early. You have no idea how bad things got.”

“I read the reports,” said Suki, stepping away from him. “I know what happened.”

“You did.” Neil stepped back too, crossed his own arms. “Well, you know what happened. But you still don’t know how bad things got. Seventeen years—that’s how long we all had ahead of us. We’d all signed on to spend the prime of our lives in the dark, between the stars. Nothing to do but monitor the life signs of all those colonists. And when we had to, intervene. And I don’t have to tell you, Suki—when a body’s down to six degrees Celsius, there are precious few medical emergencies that can’t wait a day or a week or a month.”