The Starry Rift Part 23

Inductive heating, I thought: Baby's magnetic field was.h.i.+ng back and forth over the metal, cooking it.

I twisted my neck to glance back at the girl and saw her pain. She held her hands in front of her, like someone expecting a gift. Baby must have been warming her hands as well as the deck.

Baby couldn't help it.

Flat on the deck now, Zeal lowered his heel onto my chest. "Yes, the deck's getting hotter. I can just feel it through the sole of my shoe."

"Don't you touch her."

He increased the pressure on my chest, crus.h.i.+ng the wind from my lungs. "Or what, exactly?"

I didn't have the strength to answer. All I could do was push ineffectually against his boot, in the hope of s.n.a.t.c.hing a breath of air.

"I'll deal with you in a moment," Zeal said, preparing to move on.

But then he stopped.

Even from where I was lying, I saw something change on his face. The c.o.c.ky set of his jaw slipped a notch. His eyes looked up, as if he'd seen something on the ceiling.

He hadn't. He was looking at his goggle, pushed high onto his forehead.

Nothing about the goggle had changed, except for the thin wisp of smoke curling away from it where it contacted his skin.

It was beginning to burn its way into his forehead, pulled tight by the strap.

Zeal let out an almighty bellow of pain and fury: real this time. His hands jerked up reflexively, as if he meant to s.n.a.t.c.h the goggle away. But both hands were holding knives.

He screamed, as the hot thing seared into his forehead like a brand.

He lowered his hands, and tried to fumble one of the knives into his ap.r.o.n pocket. His movements were desperate, uncoordinated. The knife tore at the leather but couldn't find its way home. Finally, shrieking, he simply dropped the weapon.

It fell to the decking. I reached out and took it.

Zeal reached up with his bare hand and closed his fingers around the goggle. Instantly I heard the sizzle of burning skin. He tried to pull his hand away, but his fingers appeared to have stuck to the goggle. Thras.h.i.+ng now, he reached up with the other knife-still unwilling to relinquish it-and tried to use its edge to lever the offending ma.s.s of fused metal and skin from his forehead.

That was when I plunged the other knife into his s.h.i.+n, and twisted. Zeal teetered, fighting for balance. But with one hand stuck to his forehead and the other holding the knife, he had no means to secure himself.

I a.s.sisted him over the edge. Zeal screamed as he fell. Then there was a clatter and a sudden, savage stillness.

For what seemed like an age I lay on the catwalk, panting until the pain lost its focus.

"It won't be long before the rest of the crew comes after us," I told the girl.

She was still holding her metal hands before her: I could only imagine her pain.

"Need to make baby strong now," she said. "Feed it more." She moved to a console set into a recess in the railing itself. She touched her claws against the controls, and then gasped, unable to complete whatever action she'd had in mind.

I forced myself to stand, putting most of my weight on my good leg. My arm was in a bad way, but the fingers still worked. If I splinted it, I ought to be able to grip something.

I lurched and hobbled until I was next to her.

"Show me what to do."

"Give Baby more fuel," she said, indicating a set of controls. "Turn that. All the way."

I did what she said. The decking rumbled, as if the s.h.i.+p itself had shuddered. Overhead, I noticed a dimming in the glow of the pipe after the point where the smaller lines branched out of it.

"How long?" I said, pus.h.i.+ng my good hand against the slug wound to keep the blood at bay.

"Not long. s.h.i.+p get slower . . . but not enough for captain to notice. Baby drink. Then . . . bad thing"

"Everyone aboard will die?"

"Baby kill them. Fry them alive, same way as Zeal. Except you."

I thought of all that the Devilfish had done. If only half of those stories were true, it was still more than enough to justify what was about to happen.

"How long?" I repeated.

"Thirty . . . forty minutes."

"Then it's time enough," I said.

She looked at me wonderingly. "Time enough . . . for what?"

"To get you to the surgeon's room. To get you on the table and get those implants out of your head."

Something like hope crossed her face. It was there, fleetingly. Then it was gone, wiped away. How often had she dared to hope, before learning to crush the emotion before it caused any more pain? I didn't want to know . . . not yet.

"No," she said. "Not time."

"There is time," I said. If I could extract those implants in time, and remove those metal hands, she would weather Baby's magnetic storm when it ripped through the rest of the crew. There was nothing I could do for the other lobots, not in the time that was left. And maybe there was nothing anyone could do for them now.

But the girl was different. I knew there was something more in there . . . something that hadn't been completely erased. Maybe she didn't remember her name now, but with time . . . with patience . . . who knew what was possible?

But first we had to save the aliens. And we would, too. We'd have the Devilfish to ourselves. If we couldn't work out how to fly the aliens home, we could at least let them go. They were creatures of s.p.a.ce: all that they really craved was release.

Then . . . once the Flux Swimmers were taken care of . . . we'd find a cryopod and save ourselves. So what if it took a while before anyone found us?

"No time," she said again.

"There is," I said. "And we're doing this. You're my patient, and I'm not giving up on you. I'm Peter Vandry, surgeon."

"Surgeon's mate," she corrected.

I looked down at Zeal's spread-eagled, motionless form and shook my head. "Surgeon, actually. Someone just got a promotion."

ALASTAIR REYNOLDS was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland, and-since 1991-the Netherlands, where he spent twelve years working as a scientist for the European s.p.a.ce Agency. He became a full-time writer in 2004, and recently married his longtime partner, Josette. Reynolds has been publis.h.i.+ng short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published seven novels: the Inhibitor trilogy (Revelation s.p.a.ce, Redemption s.p.a.ce, and Absolution Gap), British Science Fiction a.s.sociation Award winner Chasm City, Century Rain, Pus.h.i.+ng Ice, and The Prefect. His short fiction has been collected in Zima Blue and Other Stories and Galactic North. In his spare time he rides horses.

His Web site is members.tripod.com/~voxish/.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

I had the t.i.tle for "The Star Surgeon's Apprentice" a long time before I had the story itself, but that's often the way it goes. My hard drive is full of empty Word files with t.i.tles that I hope will-one day, somewhere down the line-become finished stories. It doesn't matter to me if it takes a year or ten years-just as long as someone else doesn't get there first! But "Star Surgeon" goes back even further than that, at least insofar as I've made several abortive stabs at a story concerning a young man who finds himself aboard a s.h.i.+p crewed by an a.s.sortment of less-than-pleasant cyborg grotesques. I think my first stab at it was about twenty years ago, before I'd sold a word. Now I've finished it, though, and I can move on to another of those empty Word files. So keep an eye out for "Monsters of Rock" somewhere around 2016. . . .

AN HONEST DAY'S WORK.

Margo Lanagan.

Jupi's talkie-walkie crackled beside his plate. Someone jabbered out of it, "You about, chief?"

All four of us stopped chewing. We'd been eating slowly, silently. We all knew that this was nearly the last of our peasepaste and drumbread.

Jupi raised his eyebrows and finished his mouthful. "Harrump." He brushed the flour from the drumbread off his fingers. He picked up the talkie and took it out into the courtyard. Jumi watched him go, eyes glittering, hands joined and pointing to her chin.

"Couldn't have come at a better time," said Dochi. "Eat something other than pease for a change." He rolled his eyes at me.

"Eh. Pease is better than nothing, like some people have," I said, but mildly. You don't pick a fight with the prince of the household.

"s.h.!.+" said Jumi, leaning toward the courtyard door.

"Why don't you go out?" Dochi pushed his face at her. "Listen right up close?" Dochi was sound in body, so could get away with rudeness. With my withered leg I had to be more careful.

"s.h.!.+" she said again, and we listened.

From the squeal of the voice and the way it worried on and on, it was Mavourn on the other end-and from Jupi's barking answers- "Yup . . . I'll be there . . . I'll fetch him on the way . . . Yup." Behind his voice, blue-daubs buzzed in the neighbor's bananas, tearing strings off the leaves for nesting. Farther away were the cries of sea-birds, and of that family down the lane that always fought, that no one spoke the names of.

Then Jupi was in the doorway, the talkie clapped closed in his hand, his arms spread as if to receive, as only his due, this gift from heaven.

Jumi smiled frightenedly. "Incoming?" she said.

Jupi tipped his head.

"A big one?"

"Mavourn says one leg and one arm, but sizable. Good big head, good s.e.x. Not junk, he says."

Jumi clapped her hands, sparkling. Then she went modest, pulled the cloth farther forward around her face, and ushered our emptied plates toward herself. The anxiety that had been tightening her like slow-wrung laundry these past weeks was gone.

And for us, too, all of a sudden the evening's heat and approaching darkness weren't oppressive anymore. We didn't need to flee from worried thoughts into sleep.

"So I can be useful too?" I said. "If it's sizable?"

Dochi snorted, but Jupi blessed me with a nod. "Amarlis can have work too, as I arranged with A. M. Agency Limited. Just as I arranged it, it comes to be, does it not?"

Jumi pushed the pease bowl and the bread platter toward him. "Eat," she said. "You will need your strength for working."

So we went to the office of A. M. Agency Limited and saw their hiring officer, and I was taken on as a team-onlooker, and put my mark on the dotted line.

"Well, there is no problem with the boy's hand, at least," said the hirer's a.s.sistant. He thought it was a kind of joke.

Jupi could have said, "Oh no, he makes a good mark." Or, "That's right, every other part of him is fine and sound." Or, "There are many activities for which two good legs are not needed." Instead he went icy quiet beside me.

I didn't mind what the man said. I was too happy to mind. I had a contract and I was going to do a useful job like any man-why would I care what anyone said? It was a nuisance, only, because Jupi minded so much that I had to mind on his behalf, and because, when we had finished our business, I had to swing along so fast and chatter so hard to make Jupi give up his minding with a laugh and hurry after me, and answer my questions.

Next morning before dawn, we took my job-ticket to the Comm-store, and in the middle of the wonderful bustle there I was issued my onlooker's whistle and megaphone. Jumi had plaited me a neck-cord for the megaphone, which would hold it close on my back while I walked so I could manage the crutches, and loose at my hip when I stood at my work and might need to reach for it fast.

Then we went down to number 17 plan to await the incoming.

The boss-men and the gangers grouped themselves, tense and sober, around my Jupi and his crackling talkie. My brother, Dochi, and his friends formed another group, as they did outside the Lips Club most nights, only without the showy bursts of laughter. They were tired; they were missing their sleep-in.

I was in the main crowd of workers. As soon as the general shape and proportions of the incoming were clear, we'd be teamed up. There was not much talk, just watching the bay and s.h.i.+vering in the breeze. Many of us wore the new Commstore s.h.i.+rts, bought on credit when the news came yesterday. The dull pink and mauve stripes were invisible in the dusky light, but the hot green-blue stripes glowed, slas.h.i.+ng down a man's left chest, maybe, with another spot on his right collar. To my eyes, as I read the plan over and over, trying to make it real, trying to believe my luck, the crowd was sticks and spots floating in darkness, with a movement to it like long gra.s.s in a slow wind.

Every now and then another team-onlooker would come clearer against the others, his whistle a gleam, his megaphone swinging in his hand. These men I examined keenly; I was one of them now. I thought they all looked very professional. Their heads must be full of all manner of lore and experience, I was sure, and my own memory seemed very empty by comparison. Home life at my Jumi's side was all I knew; I felt as if I ought to be ashamed of it, even as a pang of missing-Jumi made me move uncomfortably on the plan's damp concrete.

Won't this house be quiet without my little monkey! she had said this morning.

Which had made me feel peculiar-guilty because I'd not even thought about how Jumi might feel, that I was going to work; fl.u.s.tered and a little angry, it must be confessed, because it seemed that I could do no right. I could be a sort of stay-at-home, embarra.s.sing half-person by her side, or I could be a cruel son leaving her lonely.

While I was feeling all this, Dochi gave one of his awful laughs. Yes, he's such a screecher of a monkey, he said. So loud as he swings from tree to tree!

Jumi gave him her mildest reproving look. She broke the soft-boiled egg and laid it on top of my soup in the bowl and pushed it toward me, under Dochi's laughing at his own joke, which she was not stopping.

Thank you, Jumi, I said.

The joke was that I was so quiet and so little trouble, anyone could ignore me if they chose. The joke was that, after some years of trying, of las.h.i.+ng out at Dochi with my crutches and being beaten for it, I would rather sit as I did now at my food, wearing a blank look, and let the laughter pa.s.s by.

The incoming appeared on the horizon like a small, weak sunrise. The workers stirred and gestured, and another layer bobbed above the s.h.i.+rt-stripes, of smiling teeth, of wide, bright eyes. My Jupi barked into the talkie, and the two tugboats crawled out from the headland's shadow. They sent back on the breeze a whiff of diesel, and many noses drew it in with delight-a breakyard is supposed to be all smells and activity. How long had it been since Portellian smelled right and busy? Long enough for all our savings to be spent. Long enough for us to be half a sack of pease, a quarter of a sack of drumflour away from starting starving.

At first, all we could see was the backlit bulk of the thing, with a few bright rags of aura streaming in the wind, thinning as it came closer. The light from the sun, which as yet was below the horizon, made the thick shroud glow, and the body shape was a dark blur within it. I thought I could see a head against a bigger torso. But you can't be sure with these things; they're never the same twice in their build and features, in their arrangement of limbs.

What kind of people could afford to send craft up into the ether to find and kill such beasts? They must be so rich! A boy born bung-legged to those people would be no shame or disadvantage, I was sure-they would get him a new leg and sew that on. Or they would get him a little car to drive himself around on their smooth roads. There would be so many jobs for him, his leg wouldn't matter; he might do finecrafts with his hands or grow a famous brain or work with computers. n.o.body would be anxious for him or disappointed; he wouldn't have to forever apologize for himself and make up to his family for having come out wrong.

"It's a long-hair, I think," said someone near me. "I think I can see hair around that head-if it is the head."

"Hair? That's good."

"Oh, every part of it is good."

"It's low in the water," said another. "Good and fresh. Quality cuttings. Everything cheaper to process. Bosses will be happy."

"Everyone will be happy!"