The Dark Reaches (17 page)

Pilang coasted into Esayeh’s sleeping space at the way station, caught a hand and foot in one of the tough fabric loops lining its padded walls, and swung to a swaying stop. Esayeh floated, his bare feet well wedged in work loops, hunched over his commscreen. The dim purple light he favored when he was working turned his short white hair an odd shade of lavender. “Hah,” Pilang said.

Esayeh looked up—pretending surliness, as always—and she gave him a smacking kiss on the forehead to forestall his inevitable criticism. “It worked,” she said. “None of your remarks.”

“She’s safely asleep? Because—”

“She’s settled in the back room at the clinic, sacked in tight. With what I gave her, she’ll sleep like a stone, and be right as sunshine in six or eight hours.”

Esayeh closed his commscreen and tugged himself nearer to Pilang, then turned to match her orientation.
Unusually polite, for him.
She suppressed a smile. After a moment, he returned her kiss—politely, on the mouth—then patted her shoulder. “Well done, friend. You brought me my Hidden Worlds pilot.”

“What can you do with her? Without her ship, she can’t reach—”

“Kimura Hiso has her ship,” Esayeh said. “But Hiso’s a fool. I know him of old, knew him when he was a boy—” Pilang rolled her eyes, and Esayeh broke off. “The point is,” he continued with dignity, “Hiso looks at that ship and sees the missile tubes. Weapons! Gah! Anyone can throw missiles at the Cold Minds, blow up one ship or two out of hundreds of thousands. A stupid game, and after a while they tire of it and hunt you down. But Hiso looks at that ship, and that’s all he sees: the chance to destroy something he’s angry at, like a child in a tantrum. So what
doesn’t
he see?”

Pilang sighed. “Just tell me.”

“He doesn’t see the essence of it,” Esayeh said. “The pilot. The human at the core, the one who wears and uses the ship.
He
can have the missiles.” Esayeh grinned at her. “
I
want the pilot’s mind. That gives me everything else.”

“Very pretty,” Pilang said, and sniffed. “And how will you win this woman pilot over to our cause? Your personal charm? Your eloquence? Your wealth?”

Esayeh turned rudely upside down. “
You
will win her over, old friend. Your people will. If this pilot heard me across thousands of light-years, and if she then had the courage to dare the journey here,
out of compassion
—then—” He let out a gusty sigh. “Then she is the key to our hopes.”

Pilang kept silent awhile, absorbing that. “Strange to think of all this—ending. Generations and generations and generations.”

Esayeh looked at her again, a gentle smile on his upside-down face. “Strange to think of having hope.”

Pilang felt the sting of tears in her eyes and blinked them fiercely back. “Don’t you do that. You know it’s too soon.”

“You’re right,” Esayeh said. “Too soon for me to speak to her, too soon to explain. First she must begin to understand why it matters. And you will teach her that.”

“What will I teach her?” Pilang asked stubbornly. “Medicine? Knitting? Vacuum cookery?”

“How we live,” he said. “Who we are. Our world.”

Our world.
She tried, she always tried to keep her heart hard, her mind clear, but she couldn’t help but treasure these slips of Esayeh’s—when he described himself as a deepsider. . . . “Huh,” she said, trying to sound disdainful, as she glanced at the chrono on Esayeh’s commscreen. “Very interesting. But I need my sleep now. I have patients to see. The clinic list was already half-full by the time we docked. Hana’s meeting me early to help set the place up, it’s always a mess with the amateurs using it between our visits.” She looked back at him. “You think this pilot will take such a risk? For us?”

“If she is the one we need, the one I called here,” he said, “she will.” He smiled, the luminous smile of a much younger man, and Pilang turned away quickly to hide the stupid tears in her eyes. Hope could be cruel, when it was wrong; and so far it had always been wrong.

This woman that Esayeh had saddled them with—she had better be worth it.

 

 

 

Linnea woke, dizzy and confused, in a dim space that made no sense to her sleep-blurred eyes. Zero gee—her body knew that much. She floated, still wearing yesterday’s stained and rumpled dress, in a sack made of blankets that was attached to a padded bulkhead. The shape of the space made no sense, uneven and roughly curved. The only light came from a string of tiny yellow bulbs curling along the opposite wall. Every surface she could see was festooned with cloth bags and lopsided boxes and arrays of cubbyholes crammed with wrapped packages, equipment of some kind. She smelled rubbing alcohol, dust, old, dried herbs.

She pushed her hair impatiently out of her eyes and looked left and right. To the left, a dark cloth was stretched over a round opening, which had to be the door. No hatch. No floor, no sensible orientation at all, every surface crammed with loosely tethered junk. This place could not possibly ever be accelerated. So she must be in a habitat now, not a ship.

But where? If that had been a jumpship they’d taken her away in, then she could be anywhere in the Earth system. Anywhere at all.
Iain must be desperate.

She rubbed her eyes. No time now for guilt, or worry, or fear—for this moment, at least, no one was watching her. She reached up and gripped a couple of loops above her head, then started to pull herself out of the pocket where she’d been sleeping—but a ripple of nausea stopped her. She swallowed hard, willing it away. The nausea had to be left over from whatever drug Pilang had given her yesterday; it couldn’t be that
she
was spacesick, not after all these years. She clamped her lips tightly and slid free of the sleeping sack, ignoring the pulsing queasiness.

Her clothes were all wrong for zero gee. The thin silk skirt of the Triton dress kept floating up around her hips, tangling when she tried to move. And she was cold; the air was even thinner, even colder than the air in the city on Triton.

She realized that she could hear a woman’s voice outside the room, beyond the barrier: a light soprano voice, singing softly and wordlessly, as if the singer was concentrating on something else.

Linnea moved carefully to the cloth covering the door and felt around the edges for a way of pulling it aside. She found a loose edge, tugged—heard a ripping sound. She stopped, appalled.

Silence. Then the woman’s voice spoke from near the door. “It’s supposed to sound like that. Here.” A pair of pale, slender hands, one tattooed with a swirling chain of stars, slipped through the small opening Linnea had made. Then gripped the cloth and pulled. The cloth ripped loose, still anchored on one edge, and Linnea found herself floating almost nose to nose with a smiling young woman in maroon coveralls. Linnea vaguely remembered a rose-pale, fine-boned face looking down at her yesterday, wisps of white-blond hair escaping from a black cloth. This woman was the one who had helped Pilang carry her to the ship that had brought her . . . here.

Wherever
here
was.

“I’m Hana,” the woman said.

Linnea nodded. “I’m Linnea.”

“Welcome, Linnea,” Hana said, and to Linnea’s startlement, kissed her firmly on the cheek. “Hold a moment.” Linnea floated obediently still while Hana deftly found and checked the pulses at her neck and wrists and ankles, shined a small light into her eyes, held a sensor against her chest while tilting her head with a listening expression. “Good enough,” she said. “Any more nausea?”

“N-no,” Linnea said cautiously, and swallowed hard again. “What is this place?”

Hana reached into a pocket of her coveralls, pulled out a small patch of cloth, and stuck it to the inside of Linnea’s elbow. “That will get you through the leftover queasiness,” she said, and as she said it Linnea realized that she already felt better. How could a drug in a skin patch work so fast? “As for questions,” Hana went on, “best save them for Pilang—she knows what you need to understand. But you can help me get the clinic set up—they’re lining up outside already.”

Linnea only gripped the edge of the door more tightly. “Where is Pilang? When will she get here?”

“She’d be here now,” Hana said, “if she was ever quite on time.” She reached out and touched the fabric bunched around Linnea’s hips. “Hm. That dress is silly.”

“I agree,” Linnea said fervently, tugging at the floating fabric. “Have you got some proper clothes I can borrow?”

“Two seconds.” Hana darted to one of the storage bags tied to the wall, tugged it open, and hauled out a maroon coverall like her own. She whipped it deftly out flat and looked from it to Linnea. “The belt can be pulled tight, and you can roll up the sleeves. You’re so tiny! Small as Pilang.”

Linnea laughed. “I’ve never been called tiny before.”

“That’s right, you grew up in a gravity well, didn’t you?” Hana’s eyes were wide. “No wonder you’re so short. Squashed down all the time! You must have good bones. And good lungs, breathing all that thick air. And dirt everywhere!” She jerked her head at the floating coverall. “Get changed, will you? There’s a water closet in back there. You know zero-gee fixtures, right? Good. Oh, and—” Hana whipped a black cloth from a pocket, covered Linnea’s hair with it, tied it at the back of her neck. “There. Can’t let hair float around, it gets loose, people breathe it in. Not nice at all.”

“Thank you,” Linnea said diffidently, pulling at the knotted cloth to loosen it a bit.

As soon as she had changed into the coveralls—leaving her feet bare and cold, but apparently that was the way here—Linnea tugged herself into the front room of the clinic.

It, too, was disturbingly uneven, with lumpy bulkheads—walls, really, of a hard yellowish foam substance. Hana was clamping some lidded glass trays of tools onto a rack attached to one of the walls. The lights were brighter—still only chains of small yellow and orange bulbs here and there along the wall, but there were more of them. Linnea saw a standard examination lamp in among the jumble on the equipment wall. “Is this your regular clinic?”

“This?” Hana snorted. “No, this place is a way station.

“For travelers?”

“Sort of,” Hana said. “When we find a small enough rock that’s not tumbling too fast, in a convenient orbit, we make one of these. Hollow out part of it, seal it up inside with sprayfoam.” She handed Linnea a crumpled list printed on plastic, and said, “Now, look through these trays, make sure every one has everything that’s on the list. There are extras of most of these things in that cubby under the pink lights. Anything else, ask.”

Linnea started to work, peering at the unfamiliar labels on the packages. “Why do you have a clinic in a way station?”

Hana was stuffing a stack of neatly folded linens into a cloth bag. “It takes a long time, hundreds and hundreds of days sometimes, to travel anywhere out here—unless you’re needed somewhere so much that you can catch rides on a jumpship. So there are way stations, places to stop over and wait for a slow ship going your way, a cargo carrier or a family vessel.” She grimaced. “We’re off our proper circuit, thanks to Esayeh, but Pilang doesn’t go to a place and not open the clinic—people count on it.”

“Some people must live here a long time, waiting,” Linnea said.

Hana nodded. “But that’s life. Stirred around, seeing new faces. ‘Here we are together, we may never meet again.’ ” The words sounded like a quotation.

The outer door of the clinic, a proper metal hatch, opened with a screech, and Pilang floated in, dressed for work and wearing a loose backpack. She tugged the hatch shut, then turned over neatly in place to face the room. She spotted Linnea, and her face lit up. “Better, I see.”

“She’s doing fine,” Hana said. “She has—”

“A few questions,” Linnea said.

“Not now.” Pilang sighed. “Patients are waiting, too many of them.” She rummaged in the backpack and pulled out two round brown rolls. “Breakfast. Eat it fast. I’ve had mine.”

Linnea took hers, took a careful bite. The bread was chewy, filled with a sweet black bean paste. “That’s good,” she said. “Thank you. Pilang, I’m glad to help you here, but first—”

“First rule,” Pilang said. “We don’t want gossip about you. It’s the only thing that travels faster than jumpships. So today you won’t talk. That accent—no one’s ever heard an accent like that. The less you say, the better.”

“But I don’t know anything about medicine,” Linnea said. “How can I help?”

“Everyone can always help,” Pilang said. “Records. The commscreen. You won’t have to talk, just get the information stored. You
can
use a commscreen?”

Linnea considered. “Is it like the ones on Triton?”

“Maybe a little better,” Pilang said. “But the interface is about the same.”

The commscreen in their quarters on Triton had not been so very different from the ones Linnea had used every day for her work back home: a touch screen for input, another for display, data manipulation fairly intuitive. “Yes, I can probably use it.”

Pilang flashed a smile. “Good. That will free Hana to help me with patients. Come here and let me show you what to do.”

The morning passed quickly after that. The commscreen, a portable belonging to Pilang, had been clamped to a bulkhead; Pilang showed Linnea how to hook her feet through metal loops so she could use the screen without pushing herself off from the wall. Then, as patient after patient passed through the little clinic, Linnea processed them through. Each person carried, or wore on a chain, a small data crystal embedded in the end of a clear plastic rod the size of a finger. The first step was always to slide the rod into a slot on the side of the commscreen. Then a wealth of data appeared—the patient’s name, age in days, medical history, some coded information that Linnea guessed must be genetics or ancestry; behind them was a whole array of files marked
personal
or
library
, but these were only ghost images, translucent—not available to the screen she was using.