Missed Connections (56 page)

"Any bastards hidden in the wings?" Cyril asked. "Any chance your murdering
byki
of a son is getting out of jail sometime in the next few decades? No? Then we're doing this my way."

"This is a great deal of trouble to go to for a warm body to fuck, my son."

Cyril smiled at his father, immune for once to his taunts. "It's a good thing I have the means then."

"I suppose it is. Spin it to be less sordid, though."

"You know there's nothing sordid about homosexual love in the year 2073 in all but the most backwards corners of the world, don't you?" Cyril asked. "But honestly I don't care anyway. I will spin this story like a top if it gets Scottie back safe."

Once they got over their collective heart attack at the thought of bringing someone back from what was supposed to be a one-way trip, the ISA began to see the light. Since Konstantin International would be footing most of the bill of outfitting the Sapling to transport a person and the design work had already been transmitted to the engineers in MB1, concerns turned to the medical issues.

"We've only done tests on animals as big as dogs, and even then only for thirty days in a state of cryosuspension," Doctor Nam, Scottie's partner in the tiny cryogenics department in MB1, repeated over and over. "I've barely got enough glycerol for a successful vitrification, and that's assuming that everything goes right the first time and we can get Andrews cold enough fast enough, which given the rudimentary nature of our facility—"

"Scottie already signed a release, if I recall," Cyril cut into the doctor's diatribe. "He's willing to be the first human trial."

"It isn't as simple as finding a willing subject! Idiots have been deliberately freezing themselves for over a hundred years, but none of them have ever been successfully woken up."

"But you've successfully woken up the animals you experimented on, with little to no side effects," Cyril pushed.

"There was some damage to peripheral nerves—"

"Doctor Nam, if you make this work, your name will be the most famous in recent medical history," Sophie interjected. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was considered Nobel work."

Doctor Nam seemed to wilt a little. "Do you really think so?"

"Absolutely," Sophie said encouragingly. "It's positively heroic."

It was, but not on Nam's part as far as Cyril was concerned. He had worried about broaching the idea to Scottie. There really was no guarantee he would survive the trip back to Earth, and he'd be alone for at least forty days. That was the absolute fastest Cyril could make the VASIMR engines work, outsized though they were for the little Sapling shuttle. ISA psychologists worried about the emotional atmosphere of MB1, staff doctors fretted about the possibility that Scottie could return a vegetable or worse, and engineers worried about computer controls for launch and reentry and a thousand other things that could go wrong. Cyril just worried about Scottie.

When the command staff told Scottie what they were thinking of trying, he didn't say anything at first. After an awkward silence that had everyone unconsciously holding their breath, Scottie said, "Better than drowning in my own lymph fluid, mates."

"Did Sophie do this?" he asked later when he and Cyril were marginally more alone. "Give you the idea, I mean?"

"We came up with it together," Cyril replied. "She has the will to get things moving on your side, and I have the money to make things happen over here. We're a match made in heaven."

"Careful, you keep talking her up and you're gonna want to bring her back instead of me," Scottie said, the last word coming out strangled as he began to cough. Cyril's hands folded so tight his nails cut into his palms as he waited the spasms out. "Sorry," Scottie gasped hoarsely at the end.

"Don't be sorry."

"I am, though. I've turned into an awful lot of fuss."

"You're worth it," Cyril assured him.

"Am I?"  Scottie stared straight at him, unblinking. "I want to live, Cy, that's why I'm giving this a shot, but… you don't know what's going to come out of cryosleep at the end of this trip, if I even wake up at all. I could be insane. I might not remember you, I might be paralyzed. This could seriously fuck with your life."

"You," Cyril said slowly, "have done nothing but fuck with my life from the first day I met you. You were so stupid back then, so cheerful. I really, really wanted to hate you."  He laughed weakly. "But I couldn't. You changed everything, Scottie. Everything about me today, I am because of you. Whatever happens, however you come back to me in the end, I just know I'm going to be so goddamn grateful you're with me, I won't… I can handle it, anything but your death."

Scottie smiled sadly. "I got my claws into you proper, didn't I?"

"You did."

"Do you regret it, luv?"

Cyril struggled for the right words. "I regret… not treasuring the perfect moments when we had them. I regret thinking I was invulnerable. I regret that my accident ever happened, and that I was taken away from you. But none of this means I regret anything to do with you. You make all those regrets worth bearing."

"Barmy, mate," Scottie said to him. "Completely crazy, that's you."

"Crazy in love."

"Oh my god, classic song quotes! Sing me some Beyoncé, darling, come on!" he cajoled. "You can't leave me craving R&B, I won't be able to sleep at all."

"I can't sing."

"Just try, darling. Try for me."

So Cyril did.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it. –Henry David Thoreau

Despite the potential unholy marriage of the law of diminishing returns and it's darker cousin Murphy, the Sapling shuttle successfully left MB1 four hundred and eighty seven days after it first arrived on the back of Evergreen, carrying with it three trays of botanical specimens, copious soil and rock samples, and one cryosuspended man. Barely anyone breathed as the rockets fired, lifting the little shuttle out of Mars's thin atmosphere and onto a brutally fast trajectory with Earth. Fortunately the two planets were still in close conjunction, and the trip came down to forty-five days, including a slowing down period for the shuttle as it approached Earth, so it wouldn't break apart upon reentry.

Mission Control monitored Sapling's progress twenty-four hours a day, everything from the stability of Scottie's pod and what vital statistics they could get from it to the fuel efficiency of the rockets. VASIMR ran on a nuclear base that fed an electrical system, and were as stable as could be asked for under the circumstances, but the ISA weren't taking any chances, and neither was Cyril. More often than not Mona had to force him to go to bed, and even then he barely slept, always drawn back to the stream of data that proved Scottie was still alive, the Sapling was still flying, and everything was still working.

The reaction of MB1's other inhabitants to Scottie's attempt at a return had been unequivocally positive. Cyril knew how charismatic the other man could be, and no one there wanted to see him die in agony. This assuaged the psych team and left Mission Control in a state of cautious optimism, and Cyril watched and didn't speak, because he wasn't sure what would come out of his mouth. Whether it was a desperate prayer or a filthy curse, either would be utterly embarrassing. For all the horrendous things that had gone wrong in his life, it seemed like this might be the karmic payback that might make a believer out of Cyril. As long as he didn't acknowledge the possibility of defeat, he would be fine.

Sophie wasn't so sanguine. She talked to him often, and usually with tears in her eyes. Every conversation was a variation on whether or not she'd done the right thing, her guilt at encouraging her brother to come with her, her guilt at staying behind, guilt at separating Scottie and Cyril in the first place… it was suffocating, the amount of guilt she carried, and Cyril finally broke his moratorium on the subject for her sake.

"You need to stop," he told her frankly five days out from Sapling's reentry. "You need to wipe your eyes and get yourself together and go and speak to your psychologist, because you need to understand that you've never
made
your brother do anything in his live. Literally, probably never. You might have influenced him because he loves you, but do you really think he would have put himself through the hell that was the military's training for this mission without being dedicated to it for his own sake, and not just yours? Sophie, come on."

She sniffed. "I think… I mean, I know that, it was just awful having him go from bad to worse here and thinking that, oh well, that was it, you know?"

"I can imagine."  He certainly could, in horrifically graphic detail.

"And I did make him do some things, when we were younger. I made him throw me out of a window once when we were kids."

"You
what
?"

"I'd built a parachute and I wanted to test it, but I couldn't quite persuade myself jump out of the third story window. So I made Scottie throw me instead."

Cyril gaped. "How did you not break your neck?"

"I had the forethought to stick a trampoline down there before I fell, obviously. I've never been an idiot, even if I do act like one sometimes." She smiled a little. "He's on a good trajectory, right? He's going to come in okay?"

"Everything looks good," Cyril assured her. "He should come down just a little ways off the Gulf. We've got ships standing by."

"Good." She sighed. "I guess that'll be the tricky part."

It definitely would. The Sapling's living capsule was the only thing designed to survive the furor of reentry, and Scottie's revivification would depend directly on how quickly they could reach him before he started to thaw. Unhappy scenarios flowed through Cyril's brain like a river of fear, and he had to grit his teeth and actively shut it down to keep from being sidetracked. "We'll manage it."

"I know you will."

Miracle of miracles, they did. Cyril monitored Sapling's reentry from Mission Control, and it was a perfect descent, not too fast, not too hectic. The capsule drifted complacently down into the Gulf of Mexico, and a half an hour later it was picked up by one of their prepared search and rescue boats.

"We've got him!" came in over the radio. "His pod is secured, no exterior damage or loss of power. Captain Andrews is alive."

The control room erupted into cheers, and Cyril leaned back against the wall and thought,
I can never, ever gamble after this, because I've used up all my luck for the rest of my life.

re
·
vive :

1) To restore to consciousness or life

2) To restore from a depressed, inactive, or unused state: to bring back

3) To renew in the mind or memory

Bringing Scottie back to life was a delicate operation. His cryosuspension had been successful, in that he didn't appear to be coming out of it any worse than he'd already gone in, but there was a lot left to do to make it possible for him to wake up. The surgeon in charge of the operations decided to place the freshly grown grafts for his throat and trachea at the same time as the revival, as well as a partial lung transplant. "We have complete confidence we'll be able to wake him up," the medical team said again and again, and Cyril had no choice but to believe them. It seemed rather all or nothing to him, but that was the status quo for everything they'd attempted so far with Scottie.

At the two weeks of waiting mark, Cyril rethought his stance on his lover's potential for sainthood. Being on the outside was terribly hard work. The past two weeks had been agonizing for Cyril, standing by with bated breath during the operations themselves, watching them restart Scottie's heart, watching brain activity register on scans, watching things
work
. If they worked so well, so why wasn't Scottie awake yet?

"You have to be patient," Sabine counseled him. "Captain Andrews has been through an ordeal, it's not surprising that his mind might want to take a little extra time to process it all. Not to mention, even with the accelerated healing agents they're pumping into him, he's practically got a whole new respiratory system. That would set anyone back."

"I don't mind waiting when I can see the goal," Cyril said, standing and watching Scottie through the glass as the nurse inside checked his vitals and carefully washed his face around the ventilator. "Getting him here I had a timer to go off of, a clock to base my actions on. Now I don't. Now it's just a matter of sitting there trying not to freak out every time a machine makes a new noise."

"You could go back to work," Sabine suggested. "This might be the perfect time to start a new project, clear out your head."

"I don't want to leave him."

"You aren't leaving him if you're not paying complete attention to him one hundred percent of the time," she pointed out. "You've got the latest and greatest tab systems, I'm sure you can interface your setup to run right here."

Cyril considered it, then shook his head. "No. I'd never be able to concentrate."

"Read a book, then. Read it out loud. It's got to be better than just sitting there staring at him for sixteen hours a day, Cyril. I think even Scottie would find that a little creepy."

Cyril stared at her. "You only use his first name when you're trying to play me."

"Do I?"  She smiled implacably.

"Fine. I'll read a book. Or play a movie, he might like that better."

"Whatever you want, as long as it's not moping."

Playing the movies helped. It gave Cyril a place to stare that wasn't Scottie's face, and the soundtracks gave him a rhythm to move to that wasn't the slow, steady beep of the heart monitor. He still glanced over every few minutes, but that frequency seemed to be more acceptable to the people waiting along with him than before, so Cyril kept it up.

Scottie slept for another week, not enough to alarm anyone except for Cyril. At the end of that third week, just as Cyril was getting up to go back to his quarters and sleep, Scottie woke up. Just—down one moment, all systems normal, and then wide awake the next. There was nothing subtle about the man. Cyril would have laughed if he hadn't suddenly felt like he'd been plunged into a tub of ice water.