In Heaven and Earth (3 page)

“
Again…” Vairya
sighed, his voice reproachful. “It… could…”

“
I know,”
Reuben murmured back to him, “but I need you to sleep until we work
out how to get you talking properly. Gently does it, now. Sleep
safe.” A gentle tone would ease Vairya under faster now the
sedative was taking effect, so Reuben kept saying soft
things.

Vairya blinked at him
twice, those blue eyes going hazy, but then he sighed and slept
again. Reuben waited for a moment, watching to make sure he was
properly under, before he stepped away from the bed.
“Well?”

“
He was made
with nanotech,” Eskil said, sounding frightened. “Without it, we
can’t fix him.”

Reuben glanced at his
pharmacy with a shudder, imagining that tiny gleaming jar behind
its layers of locked force fields. “Shit.”

Eskil was still panicking
four hours later when they all sat in the cramped mess, waiting for
Chanthavy to finish her ansible call to Sirius.

“
They can’t ask
us to,” he was saying, drumming his fingernails against the peeling
surface of the table. His hair was stirring around him like smoke,
thick purple cables lifting off his shoulders with agitation, the
sensor tips at the end of each dread flashing as they caught the
light. “Only ten operations a year satisfy the emergency
criteria—”

“
You’ve been
trained for it,” Meili snapped. She had been pacing up and down the
mess, too jittery to sit, and now she swung on Eskil, turning
perfectly on her heel. “We all have, and they’ve issued us with the
bots. There’s no rational reason to prevent their use.”

“
Fuck
rationality,” Eskil said, his drumming getting faster and faster.
“I don’t want to be remade. I don’t want those things inside
me.”

Reuben poured them all
another cup of tea, adding a liberal spoonful of sugar to Meili’s.
He passed it to her and then put Eskil’s down in front of him,
before leaning back against the counter with his own. The room felt
cramped with all of them in here at once, especially when Eskil’s
hair was spreading.

“
Way I see it,”
he said, “none of you are still human anyway. What difference does
it make?”

“
I’m human!”
Eskil protested furiously, his hair suddenly standing out on
end.

Meili turned to face
Reuben, sneering as she focussed on him, her metallic eyes
gleaming. “Didn’t you know, Esk? Cooper thinks we’re all worth less
than his shit.”

“
Didn’t say
that,” Reuben pointed out, sipping his tea. “You all jump to add to
your bodies, all your cyber implants, but you’re scared of a few
little robots inside you? I don’t see the difference.”

“
You wouldn’t,”
Meili said flatly.

“
It’s
different
, Coop,” Eskil
said earnestly, leaning forwardly. “These things, they’re just
enhancements. We could survive without them, if we had
to—”

Reuben remembered a man
in a green robe, eyeless and stumbling, pressing his hands to the
wall to find his way.

“—
but nano,
that changes who you are. It remakes you.”

Reuben shrugged and
poured another cup of tea at the sound of Chanthavy’s steps in the
hall.

She took it with a nod of
thanks and sank into her usual chair with a sigh. She looked old,
the lines around her eyes deeper than they had been that morning,
and her whole face sagging with sorrow and exhaustion.

“
They’ve
dispatched a Fleet investigatory team,” she said. “We are to remain
here until they arrive. Our first priority is to repair Vairya’s
memory and get an account of what happened, but they would also
like us to start identifying the dead.”

“
Did they have
any suggestions
how
we’re supposed to fix him?” Eskil asked.

She looked at her tea,
cupping her hands around the chipped ceramic, and said softly,
“They’ve issued a Section Thirty-Nine exemption.”

Eskil drew his breath in
so sharply that the sound hissed across the room. Meili’s tea
sloshed over her hands, making her swear.

Chanthavy did not look
up. “I am captain, and I will not ask it of any of you. I will
inject the nanites—”

They all shouted over
her. Even Reuben snapped, “No!”

“
It’s too
dangerous,” Eskil said. “We’ll draw lots.”

“
It’s my duty,”
Chanthavy began.

“
We need you as
captain,” Meili said. “One of us should—”

“
I’ll do
it.”

Reuben hadn’t intended to
volunteer until the words burst out of him, but it felt right. He
lifted his chin and met their horrified gazes. “Let me. He’s my
patient.”

“
I’m the tech
expert,” Eskil said, every word reluctant.

“
Then we’ll
need you monitoring both of us. Chanthavy needs to be captain, and
Meili’s expertise is contagious disease, not the mind. Vairya’s
memory needs to be repaired and, last I checked, I’m the only brain
surgeon on this ship. I’ll do it.”

Meili was staring at him,
her brow furrowed in confusion. “I thought your body was too pure
for technology?”

Reuben put his
teacup down, irritated enough that the click of its base against
the counter cut across the room like a gunshot. “I
betrayed
Ahrima. What
makes you keep assuming I shared her prejudices?”

“
Enough,”
Chanthavy said wearily. “Reuben, you are in no way obliged to do
this. I have already said as much to the Protectorate
advisors.”

“
They suggested
me?” Reuben asked sharply. So much for gratitude.

Chanthavy’s lips
narrowed, but she just repeated, “You are not obliged.”

“
I’m
volunteering,” Reuben said, and looked at them all. Chanthavy had a
husband and two grown children on Sirius platform. Meili was the
youngest of six siblings. Eskil had two elderly and doting fathers,
who sent him long messages once a week, every one packed with
photographs and sly jokes. At least nobody would miss Reuben if the
nanojuice turned him to diamond.

It might even get him a
hero’s obituary. What an irony that would be.

“
Let’s do it,”
he said, striding out of the mess. “No point in waiting, is
there?”

It took all four of them
to open the safe where the nano treatment was kept. Reuben was the
one to take it out, though, closing his hand around the cool
bottle. Suddenly, for the first time in years, he felt certainty
rush through him. Here was a necessary thing, and he was the one
made to do it.

As a boy on Rigel
platform, he had been taught to believe in providence. He had
rebelled against the idea even then, knowing, as only the young can
know, that he had the intelligence and willpower to change the
world for the better. As far as his faith had survived into
adulthood, it had been in the belief that God had given him the
ability to save lives for a reason, and so he would wage war on
sickness and injury with all his strength.

Even that faith had long
since failed him, but standing here now, with the stuff that had
almost destroyed humanity shimmering in a vial in his palm, he felt
suddenly close to God again.

“
You still
don’t have to,” Eskil whispered. “Not yet. We’ve got time to let
you think it through.”

“‘
If it be now,
’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be
not now, yet it will come— the readiness is all,’” Reuben quoted.
Eskil looked blank, so Reuben smiled at him ruefully and asked,
“What do you do in hyperspace when the rest of us are
reading?”

“
Fly the damn
ship,” Eskil snapped back with a ghost of a smile.

“
Play games and
watch vids like a normal person,” Meili said, rolling her
eyes.

Chanthavy smiled at him,
though. He wasn’t much older than Meili and Eskil, but her smile
was that of an elder to an elder. “You’re hardly the Hamlet sort,
Cooper.”

“
Even Hamlet
took action in the end, for all the good it did him,” Reuben
said.

Chanthavy glanced at the
uncomprehending faces of the rest of the crew and offered him a wry
smile. “Another time, perhaps. Only you will be able to effect
changes in our patient, but we will all be taking shifts to monitor
your life signs. You have ten days before any nanites still in your
system self-destruct. They will reproduce and change function at
your direction. If the attempt proves fruitless, inform us, and we
will revive you.”

“
You won’t have
any tools in there except what you visualise,” Eskil said, his hair
twisting into knots. “On the other hand, the bots will respond to
your every whim. You’ll need to set up a mental protocol to
control—”

“
I did the
simulation training too,” Reuben said.

“
Really?”

Reuben rolled his eyes as
he walked over to sit on the second bed that Meili had set up. He
stripped off and shrugged on a robe before he settled back against
the crinkling pillow. “Yes, Eskil, I am just as qualified to be
here as the rest of you.”

“
Bet it didn’t
take you as many attempts to pass the sim as it did Eskil,” Meili
said, adjusting the bed settings. “Or me, for that
matter.”

“
Mei and I met
in the resit class,” Eskil said. “Hey,
Juniper
, what did Cooper score in
NTSIM01? Was he as crap as the rest of us?”

“
Ninety-seven
percent, Dr Levin.” The ship’s computer had a prim voice, despite
Eskil’s many attempts to reprogram it.

They all turned to stare
at Reuben, who glared back. “What? They docked marks when I swore
at the examiner. When did you hack into my records,
Eskil?”

“
It’s a sign of
affection,” Eskil tried, but he was still staring. Suddenly, he
smiled. “Okay, then, I’m a little less worried. Good luck,
Coop.”

“
Ready?”
Chanthavy said, holding out her hand.

He passed her the vial.
“As I’ll ever be.”

Eskil and Meili left, and
Reuben tried to find the most comfortable position on the bed. He
spread his legs a little and winced as the bed’s extensions
telescoped up and probed their way into place. He didn’t want to
wake up swimming in his own waste, but knowing that didn’t make the
damn things any less cold and uncomfortable.

Across from him,
Chanthavy was administering the first dose of nano treatment to
Vairya. Now she returned to him. The nanites were in sync with each
other, Reuben knew from his training, allowing a doctor with
matching nanites in his bloodstream to direct them through a
patient’s body with only willpower.

“
I’ll send the
activation pulse in five minutes. You should be safely under by
then.”

“
Thank
you.”

She looked down on him,
her brow creased with concern. “Reuben…”

“
I volunteered.
I’m trained. I’m capable.” He liked Chanthavy, but she worried
through things so slowly it made him impatient. She was honest,
conscientious, humourless, and had been one of the few captains
willing to accept his application. He respected her, but he wanted
to act now, not get caught in her second thoughts.

Conscience
does make cowards of us all
, he thought and
jammed his hand against the sedative pad. “Count me down,
captain.”

“
Breathe
slowly,” she said, her hand warm on his shoulder. “Ten… nine…
eight…”

He felt the pinch of an
injection as he drifted away, but by then the sedative was drifting
through him, wrapping him in clouds, and he couldn’t bring himself
to care what else was now working in his blood.

For a long time, he hung
in that misty place between waking and dreaming, perfectly at ease.
It was quiet here, with no one demanding his attention or judging
him with every frown. Here, he could rest.

Dreamily, he willed the
clouds away and imagined stars instead, the light-strewn sky over
Rigel. He had loved the stars once, before he set his heart on
medicine, and he could still trace and name every beloved
constellation. He had never really expected that he would end up so
far from home, exiled to the wandering stars, but he had dreamed of
flying through the stars then, as some heroic adventurer seeking
out and saving long-lost outposts of humanity.

Well, he was doing that
now, in a way. He hadn’t known as a child that most of those
colonies, cut off when Old Earth died, would need rescuing from
their own bodies more than dangerous aliens. Too many of the early
colonies had struggled to adapt to alien soils, or to live on space
platforms made out of gutted colony ships or hollowed out
asteroids, like Caelestia. The strongest— Alpha Centauri, Sirius,
Caelestia, and Deneb— had recovered first and joined together into
a loose federation. Others had vanished, died of radiation,
malnourishment, civil wars like Rigel’s, or any of the countless
dangers that awaited humans in space. Even the stronger cities had
needed a century to recover before they started sending out medical
teams to locate and help the lost colonies.