Space Eater (11 page)

Wui was lifting his plastic fork with what looked like a lump of volcanic slag on the end of it. He put the lump down again. “Oh, Birch had a brainstorm about that one. It is just so typically Birch ... He thought about it this way and that, he thought about how signals of vast classification level would come through should you find out anything really interesting—and he decided he didn’t really trust anyone in Tunnel to know more than him about anything such. So he’ll be taking the shot himself—when you’re safely through the gate and with the what d’you call it, the antidote ready all day and all night in case heavy pains should come through...”

“Cutoff dope, we call it,” Rossa said. “The official term is something along the lines of ‘gamma-coded RNA phage.’”

“Could be fun,” I said. “We can maybe stick the odd pin into Birch when the outward trip’s over—keep him on his toes. I can stand it if you can stand it, Rossa...”

“You don’t
have
some of the places where I’d like to punch old man Birch,” Wui said to her darkly.

“This caper means he’s fixed himself a billet as the only Corvus information line if Tunnel closes ... God, nearly 1300 already. I’ll have to start the check sequence if Cathy hasn’t done it all three times, and I expect she has. Report to Medical in half an hour, then, folks. Wear your best pajamas, uphold the pride of the Force in distant lands.” He smiled, all nerves and no humor at all: “Didn’t they say ‘join the Force and see the world’? Yes. Well, remember what I said.” He went out of the room almost at a run, as if he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as us anymore.

“He looks so dreadfully guilty,” Rossa said.

“My guess is there’s some other little thing they haven’t told us. Maybe the second-class transit doesn’t work as well as they’d like. Maybe there’s a big chance we end up as a couple of hundred kilos of frozen mince going around Mars or Pluto.” I could see I was talking like Wui to stop myself thinking too hard about where in a bit under two hours the pathway of my own life was coming to a narrow exit, which was perfectly round and 1.9 centimeters in diameter. “Maybe it’s all a big hoax, and every month when the Tunnel food runs low they draft another couple of suckers to be sliced apart—really the MT rig is a gadget for converting people to soya granules, and ... oh, never mind that.” I didn’t have to look at her. “You’re biting your lip again, and hard.”

“Once I suffered terribly from mouth ulcers, you know; we had the synthesizer turn out a vitamin cocktail and that seemed to help. I used to start the ulcers when I nibbled at my lip for ... one reason and another.

But it doesn’t make much difference now, does it? I hardly have time to get a good ulcer going, even if I have two hours longer than you. Sorry. I’m rambling. Doesn’t that clock go slowly?”

I looked at it. 1304. “Suppose we could start walking very slowly to Medical; or maybe we could have some more water.”

“Medical, yes. Ken, have you noticed that we don’t have escorts anymore?”

“We know our way around now. This dump isn’t too big.”

“I never heard of Security loosening their nasty grip on someone just because they knew their way around. I think ... I think it is that feeling they have in the cells before an execution. I knew a prison guard once: he told me they truly hated the last night before a firing squad, with the corridors stinking of death, and the worst job of all was taking out the condemned person to the yard. They avoided that job if they possibly could.”

I said: “Sure. We’re the condemned ones. I got that all right. Now how about discussing something else, anything else at all?”

By now the others had gone from the little mess room, all of them, and left us there. Behind the serving hatch, the chef hauled at a steel blind that came rumbling down like a guillotine. Maybe guillotines don’t rumble, but if they did, they’d sound like that, if there were still any guillotines anywhere. The digits on the big square clock shifted quietly: 1306. A feeling like cold fog. I looked around and around: all the colors I could see were Force drab except one bloody splash of ketchup substitute on the next tabletop. Rossa looked gray herself, and I guessed I did too.

“Ken. There is nothing else I could conceivably talk about this afternoon. I want to know ... I think I know all I need about pain, but they are so careful in CommAux. Once or twice in the bad times I’ve seen—I think I’ve seen—death out on the edges of the pain, like a fuzzy blue mountain at the horizon; but I’ve never come close to the foothills. This will be something new. What’s it like, Ken, when you ...

terminate?
You
must know.”

What’s it like? What’s it like, the moment when you go to sleep? “Nobody ever asked me that before,”

I said slowly. “Usually it hurts before, and it’s pretty calm and nice in the tank after. I don’t know too much about between. The ways I’ve gone ... sometimes there’s a slow pain burning and you sink through that until it goes out. Sometimes there’s a hell of a big pain, sudden, like a flashbulb going off and straight into the dark. That’s the best way.”

“Then the dark is all there is to fear? There’s nothing of consciousness between the end and the new beginning? I can surely stand oblivion ... if that’s
all
there is between.”

“It’s all you ever remember, don’t worry. Sometimes I’ve had a feeling, as if a dream had sort of whizzed by when I wasn’t there to notice. Only ever remember the feeling, though, not any dreams.”

One of her eyebrows slid up a millimeter or so. “That would please Hamlet, wouldn’t it? It was dreams that worried him. Aye, there’s the rub.”

“What? Oh, the play thing. Suppose he found out in the end?”

The eyebrow went down again and left her face its usual stony mask. “_That_ Hamlet had the good luck to be fictional. It’s real people who have to worry about finding out. And you know that, sometimes, when a person finds out, her body comes fresh and new out of that tank while her mind stays behind...”

“Yes, but—“ I remembered Raggett telling me, a long time ago in another world, about a 72 percent dropout rate for the new batch of first-timers. “Yes, but you’ve been specially picked. That’s because of all you went through in CommAux, I guess: you can stand any amount of shock after that.”

“Perhaps. Ken, very recently you spoke your mind about Central and their unspeakable master plan. It was wooly, you said, it was fuzzy and full of holes. I don’t want to find myself slipping through one of those holes and becoming a hulk that has to be force-fed and cleaned up like a baby. Slipping through a hole, that should really be a joke, shouldn’t it?”

Another memory surfaced like a foul gas bubble bursting through mud in the swamp training ground: one of the things you got to hear after a while was that dropouts didn’t get quite that kind of treatment. A vegetable, sure, but not a vegetable for life. Whatever happened to them was over inside a week, and the rumor that was never said too loud was that parts of those hulks went into making a thick yellowish stuff I’d floated in many a time. A story like that, you either believe it or not. I opened my mouth and was just smart enough to shut it again before anything came out.

“About time we got to Medical,” I said instead; and we went without either of us saying anything much else.

Ngabe wasn’t there; maybe he too didn’t want to start socializing with the condemned folk this late in the day. Especially as he was something like number-one gun on the firing squad. (Another stray thought: the blank round in just one of the squad’s guns, that was supposed to let everyone go away thinking
they
hadn’t helped finish someone who wouldn’t get the tank—though I reckoned you must be able to tell from the recoil. For us, all the rounds were live ammo ...) The stupid-looking medic/6 issued us with hospital gowns and things like plastic socks. Without ever looking me in the eye, he asked if I’d taken anything besides water today. No, I said. Did I want to visit the lavatory? No, I said, and then realized I did.

“Cubicles over there. Alcohol rub, all over please, then put on the sterile gowns and footwear,” he said in a tired voice, and pointed to doors off the surgery. We did what he told us. I damn near froze to death with evaporating spirit all over me, and the fumes didn’t help either. The stink first reminded me of how I’d had a throbbing headache and then reminded me extra hard by kicking the headache into gear again.

I pulled the gown around me, shivering, and remembered another thing about the morning: lying in bed not quite awake, not wanting to wake because somehow you know you’ll feel bad ... there was something of that feeling in the time between and the dreams that might be prowling there. The thin plastic of the gown wasn’t much help; the stupid socks had elastic to hold them on, but were loose enough that when I walked I rustled like someone moving through dry leaves.

“I suppose I must look as silly as you,” Rossa said out in the surgery. “What do we do now?”

“Wait till you’re called,” said our friendly host, who was sitting in the only chair. I hitched my rear up onto the couch (which made him give me a dirty look, but he didn’t say anything); Rossa got up there too and we sat about half a meter apart. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say while the life and soul of the party was over there not looking at me. We sat there.

After a while there was a twitch ... that was the word to put to it, anyway. Everything inside me twitched, the room twitched, the light in the air twitched on its way to my eyes. It was like—it wasn’t like anything I’d felt before, but the feeling was that the room and everything in it had been like a film projection—and someone had slapped the screen hard from behind, sending a quick ripple through the fabric. The clock said 1400. When I turned to Rossa she was looking at the clock face too.

She said, “1400 was the time Wui mentioned, wasn’t it?”

“At it in the lab again,” the medic/6 grunted, as if that explained everything. Down there a machine was trying to—what had Ellan said? -- to change the gravitic potential of all space. Up at ground level the special landlines from the nuclear installation at Sizewell would be throbbing as most of its output got diverted to Tunnel.

“They’ve opened the door,” I said. “Hey, Corvus is just down that corridor now.”

“If it’s working as it should,” Rossa said as if from 162 light-years away.

“If it’s not working we bloody well won’t have to take the trip...”

The room went quiet again, except that the medic started scratching himself on the side of the leg: it seemed to make more noise than was reasonable. Then there came a second twitch, not exactly like the first. Maybe someone had taken a poke at the imaginary projection screen from the front this time instead of the back. The clock read 1402, but that changed to 1403 as I looked. A three-minute peep through the gate. Everything going according to plan. Another memory from one of the briefing sessions: ”

...compromise between necessary tissue deformation and maintenance of cerebral integrity ...”

(Imagine a sausage.) Both of us were shivering still, but it might have been the leftover chill of our sterilizing alcohol rubs. Maybe.

Time went by. I could have used a visit to the lavatory but didn’t want to have to ask permission like some goddamn trainee. The medic showed how he had resources to cope with boring waits: he stopped scratching one leg and started on the other.

1425. A knock on the door. It was another of the pinheads from Security, who said: “Message from Dr.

Ngabe—all on schedule, scrub up at 1430.”

“It’s
Mr
. Ngabe,” I told him as the medic/6 scuttled off with a bag. He didn’t say anything; he went to the now-empty chair but decided he should just stand to attention by the side of it.

“When do we get a look in?” I asked him.

“Orders are to escort you down for 1450,” he said, and his mouth shut up as firm as the vault door down the corridor. Real VIP treatment we were getting here, smiles and courtesy all the way. I looked at Rossa, at the guard, at the clock, at nothing in particular. Just like the wait before you go into action, I said to myself loud and clear inside my head. Except it wasn’t excitement, it wasn’t even fear; just a sort of sick empty feeling that couldn’t be 100 percent due to the day’s tasty no-calorie diet. 1435.

Daydreams of how if I jumped for the shelves to the left I could put a good heavy reagent bottle through Security’s teeth before his hand got halfway to that sidearm ... I wasn’t thinking that way so much now, already. Reflexes sagging, battle instinct flabby with too much of the dreaded drug H20, and I still needed a piss. 1440. I shifted my weight because of a cramp, and wondered how Rossa could keep as still and quiet as she did. Security shifted his weight too. Ten to one he was daydreaming about how he’d plug me very neatly through the temple if I made a dive. Hell, wouldn’t bugger up the project one bit, would it?

Just scrape the brains off the wall and take them down to the lab with the rest of good old Jacklin for Ngabe to work on. Could be that was Security’s job anyway, delivering us as handily dead meat ... well, he’d said “escort” and not “deliver,” that was something. Ngabe would make it quick and easy, I reckoned, some kind of painless pill, doctors always a damn sight more squeamish than their patients.

1445...

“Time,” the guard said, getting up and motioning us through the door. They’d really planned it all, accidentally I hoped, to be as intimidating as possible, down to that last walk to the wall where the firing squad would be waiting. Security walked behind us. You could feel every particle of loose grit on the cold concrete when you moved over it in those hospital socks. This time the walk wasn’t into dank silence: a whirring hum drifted up the passage, and I could feel a current of warmer air. In the lab the electrics would be hot and fans would be cooling them. Over the sill of the first door, where a Security woman was standing in front of the fusegear to guard it from enemy action. She and ours swapped some obscure information without words—just a couple of dumb animals, wonderful how they understand, you’d almost think they could talk. Ahead, white light showed through the inner circle of the big vault door. It was warmer still and the whirring louder. My guts couldn’t shrink any more than they had, but I could feel them trying. The male guard knocked on the pitted metal wall of the last partition; the thick steel soaked up the blow with a dead
clunk
. He tried again, slapping his whole hand against the wall, three times. If they never answered the knock we’d never get off the ground.