Miguel awoke to numbness, and the sensation of smothering. Something moved against his chest, moved against his face. Covering his mouth, covering and penetrating his nose, a thing, a solid, squirming thing!
“Don't try to move,” said a soft, androgynous voice Miguel did not recognize.
“Mmf!” he said, and tried to sit up.
“Don't try to move,” the voice repeated more firmly. “Your nerves have not finished reintegration. Please be patient.”
“Miguel,” said a more familiar voice. “The first aid kit can't help you if you don't sit still.”
He couldn't focus his eyes. Before him, twin images danced, blurry beyond recognition. It seemed very dark, as well, though something told him that was not his vision playing tricks. Not many lights on here. Here... in the lander? The floor beneath him hummed, and he could hear and feel warm air hissing from a ventilating unit somewhere not far from his left ear.
He forced his mouth open, spoke around the strange rubber thing that pressed against it. “Beth? Beth, what's happened? Why can't I move?”
“You've broken your back in four places. Now hush, the kit is almost finished.”
With effort, he worked his eye muscles until the twin blurs above him merged into a single, very fuzzy, image. A human form, long-haired and pleasantly curved, sat in a chair, at what might be one of the lander's makeshift science stations. And sitting atop Miguel's chest, a squat, white object with stubby protuberances (legs?) that made footprints of aching pressure against his flesh, pressure he had felt before but had not identified.
The object was white, and it had little black arms, little gray tentacles. And limbs that seemed stranger still, and more sinister. Knives and needles? Shiny things, certainly. Shiny things that moved and whirred and rotated in unsettling ways.
Beyond this strange machine, and beyond the vague form of Beth Lahler, he could see other sources of movement. Small lights seemed to crawl up and down the walls, and small shadows with them. Actually, now that he thought about it he could hear the clitter-clatter of tiny metal legs against the panels and bulkheads of the lander. As if an army of insects had arrived to cut it all apart and carry it away.
Of course, they must actually have the opposite intention. Like thing-Barta, Introspectia and its children could, on demand, split pieces of themselves off as separate machinelets, and then gobble them up again when they'd finished their tasks. A technologically sensible development, yeah, but creepy enough to keep surprising him, to keep him from ever quite getting used to it.
He thought of insects, with their exoskeletal bodies and their bulging, faceted eyes. Sensible, you had to admit, sometimes even elegant in their physical design. But no matter how fastidiously they cleaned themselves, how scrupulously harmless they kept their activities, even the prettiest of them was still a bug, a nasty, unclean thing you didn't want crawling around near you. Particularly not on your face.
He relaxed his eye muscles again, and let the view slip back to doubled blurs. He did not want to see the giant bug, no matter how wonderful and helpful, doing its work on top of his body.
“Peng took a bad blow to the head,” Beth said, her blur shifting slightly. “I can't figure out what he hit. I mean, his harness doesn't have much give to it, and there just aren't any sharp, solid corners within reach of his head. And nothing big came loose and flew around, either. Anyway, he's got some kind of concussion or something. The kit had to induce a deep coma to keep his blood pressure down.”
“Ungh,” Miguel replied.
The double smear of Beth leaned over toward him. “You may have noticed the gravity gradient's gone down a bit. I've got a couple of the thrusters working again, and we've sort of limped our way up out of the hole. I think the lander's had it, though. I can't fix it much better than I already have. Even in drydock, I bet they'd just part it out and build a new one.”
“Ungh.”
“You know, I think this is the longest I've ever had your attention. You always... I don't know, turn away when I try to speak to you. I wish I knew why you did that.”
He tried to sit up again, winced when the first aid kit trundled higher up his chest to force him down again.
“Don't move. Relax,” it said. “If you continue to move, I will administer a disabling current to your motor nerves.”
“Get this thing off me!”
“Just like that,” Beth said. “You always change the subject that exact same way. The first aid kit doesn't bother you, I do. Why is that?”
Miguel sighed. “Good lord. Listen, I like you just fine. I just...”
“Just what?”
He worked his face muscles, pushing aside the mask that the first aid kit was trying to hold over his mouth and nose. “Damn. Damn. Get this thing off me.”
“Don't try to move.”
Beth's blur moved again, took up a stiffer posture. “Just answer my question.”
“I don't want to get in trouble, all right? As soon as we get back to Earth, I hit the bricks a free man. I don't want a bunch of fines and hearings and stuff slowing me down.”
His vision was definitely clearing, now. He could see her frown. “I don't think I follow you.”
“Fraternization,” he said. “Against policy, right? As I'm sure you're aware.”
Beth snorted, beginning to look angry. “You take a lot for granted, Mister. I was just talking about talking. I do know the regulations, and frankly I know when to keep my legs crossed. Lord, you've got some nerve!”
Miguel tried to raise his hands, remembered that he could not. But he did feel a tingling in them now. An unpleasant sensation, actually, like sharp objects jabbing him repeatedly, harder and harder.
“I can feel my hands again!” he said.
“Hmph,” Beth replied.
Oh, it had become one of those things, had it? Like a game of “wimp-out,” where the first to swerve from collision course must then admit defeat? It was his turn to snort. “You have me at a disadvantage, Tech Aid. If I've... misinterpreted your overtures, let me apologize.”
His tone indicated exactly what he thought of that possibility. And hearing that, Beth turned away slightly and did not reply. Had he overstepped himself? Lordy, it felt good to have this out in the open at last, but how much of it, really, existed only in his own head? In these days of long life, popular wisdom maintained that humanity had risen above the absurd tyranny of its hormones. As with the bit about prime numbers, Miguel had his doubts. He had scars enough, both physical and emotional, as evidence to the contrary.
“Maybe I should shut up,” he said, more quietly. “For whatever trifling value, Beth... Uh... Lord. If I did want to get in trouble, you would... I would...”
“Yes, you should shut up,” Beth said. She'd swiveled back toward him again, and now she rose from her chair, did a giddy dance for a moment as her personal gravity shifted. She stooped over, letting her hands and knees drop to the floor. Her face moved right over Miguel's, her breath warm against his skin. Her lips brushed his forehead, and then she pulled away again.
She looked down at him, and though her face was comically sideways, her expression held no trivial emotion. She brushed her hair back, tucked it behind an ear. “After the plasma wave hit, you and Peng both looked dead. My harness had jammed or something, and for a little while I couldn't get up out of my seat. I kept... screaming your name, waiting for you to wake up. But you didn't wake up. When the first aid kit pronounced you alive and recoverable, I... was very relieved. I didn't think about Peng until later.”
The jabbing sensation had spread to Miguel's lower body. He twitched. “Hey, I can feel my legs.”
Beth said nothing.
“Oh, I guess I changed the subject again, didn't I? Wait, I can feel my feet!”
“Stop moving,” said the first aid kit. Its neutral, androgynous tone had taken on a distinct ring of irritation. “This will stop you from moving.”
Miguel did not lose the tingling sensation in his limbs, but a sickly quivering suddenly slammed down on top of it and then vanished just as suddenly. He found, once more, that he could not move.
Fuck! Get it off me! he tried to say, but got no more than a gurgling sound.
“What happened?” Beth snapped, sounding frightened.
“Don't be alarmed,” said the monster on Miguel's chest, its calmness of voice now restored. “The patient faces greatest danger of self-injury during the final stages of the reintegration process. I have immobilized him as a precaution.”
“Fu...uuck,” Miguel managed to say.
“The patient will regain mobility in a few minutes, at which time he may resume limited physical activity. Thank you for your patience.”
“Get off me... you piece... of junk.”
“I have not finished administering treatment.” The first aid kit's voice had taken on a long-suffering quality that, despite its fleshless, genderless tone, sounded remarkably human. An appendage twitched, rotating a hypodermic needle back into its tool caddy and putting a glittering scalpel out in its place. Miguel felt a jolt of alarm for a moment, but the twitching and rotation continued, the scalpel vanishing and a gray, rounded instrument clicking into position instead. The arm moved, then, touching the rounded thing to Miguel's exposed chest.
Exposed? Oh, Lordy, was he wearing any clothing at all? He tried to look down at himself. Bare chest, yes. He couldn't see farther than that, though, with the damn first aid kit in the way. Plus, his eyes wouldn't bulge out far enough. Ow, even the attempt brought a biting pain behind his forehead.
“What troubles you?” Beth asked, seeing his exertions, his facial contortions. “Aside from the obvious, I mean.”
Miguel's face burned. “How much clothing... have I got on?”
She grinned down at him. “Afraid I might sneak a peek at your equipment and lose control, Tech Chief?”
“Beth,” he pleaded. She seemed to enjoy his discomfort a little too well!
“You've got your trousers on, don't worry.”
“Ah. Good.” Relief washed over him like a cooling breeze. “The embarrassment of this situation... you have no idea. Remind me... not to break my back in the future.”
Her face grew serious at that remark, and she glanced over in the direction of First Mate Peng's seat, at the fore of the lander. “It could have been worse. Really, you should have seen yourself an hour ago.”
Miguel could think of nothing to say to that, and so they remained silent for a while. The tingling in his arms and legs intensified gradually, and then began to fade away again after a minute or so had gone by.
Experimentally, he wiggled his fingers. They wiggled, sure enough. He tried his toes, and then his ankles and knees and wrists, his hips and his elbows and shoulders. Everything responded. Small movements, yes, and a little weakly and sluggishly executed, but still a great improvement over his earlier paralysis.
“I can move,” he said, to Beth Lahler and the first aid kit both.
The kit trundled another few centimeters up his chest, stuck an instrument in front of his left eye and fired a blinding purple light into it.
“Ow!”
“Pupil dilation normal,” it said. “Neuro-electrical field status approaching normal. Reconstructive agents have begun self-disassembly. Do you feel an itching or burning sensation in your back and neck?”
“No.”
“Excellent. I will now permit you to resume limited physical activity. Please move cautiously for the next several hours.”
For his first trick, Miguel tried to knock the first aid kit off his chest with a lateral sweep of his arm. Unfortunately, his muscles proved somewhat difficult to control, and the kit, with its low center of gravity, proved difficult to tip. As if hurried by his motions, though, the kit tucked away several instrumented arms, and stepped quickly onto the floor.
“It has pleased me to serve you,” it said, with what sounded like a sincere tone. “Please call out if you experience any further discomfort.”
Miguel attempted an obscene gesture, failed.
With surprising speed, the kit scuttled across the floor and, turning on its side with a little hopping motion, slapped into a wall-niche obviously shaped and sized to accept it. It tucked its limbs in still further, and a panel door slid down over it and merged seamlessly with the gray bulkhead. In that brief, flickering moment, Miguel had gotten his only clear look at the machine that had saved his life. It did, vaguely, resemble a box with handles, like something he might actually recognize as a first aid kit from his own time and place. If such a box had mated with live crabs, the offspring might look like that: smooth, antiseptic-white carapace arching over an array of specialized limbs. It had had a bright red cross painted across its back.
Miguel tried to get up. His limbs didn't feel much like helping him, though, despite what felt like a quarter-gee or less in the gravity department.
“Here,” Beth said, offering him a hand. She pulled him into a sort of sitting position, and he curled his legs, crossing them slightly so he had something stable to balance on. His head pounded. The lander swam and shivered around him.
Sighing, he put a hand over his eyes. Buzzing, blackness at the edges of his vision. The taste of metal. As slowly as he had sat up, it was still too much for him in this weakened state. Slowly, his bearings returned.
“Okay?” Beth asked as he took the hand away from his face again.
“Yeah, I guess.” He put his hands flat on the floor, to steady himself. They felt stronger, more clearly under his control. “Where, uh... How far out of the hole have we got?”
“Not too,” she said, grimacing and shaking her head. “I can lift you into your chair if you want to see out the viewport.”
He thought about that, nodded. “Yeah, well, hold on to me, at least. I'm going to try and get myself up.”
Pushing with his hands, he levered himself up a bit and slid his legs underneath him until he knelt on the hard floor. Then, with greater effort, he straightened, bent a knee up and put one foot down flat against the floor. He swayed a bit, until Beth's steadying hands tightened on his shoulders. Oh, her touch tingled, it threatened to stun him more thoroughly than the first aid kit had.
He pushed up and got his other foot under him. Like a child attempting a first walk, he stood splay-legged, arms waving around for balance. His head swam as its local gravity dropped to zero, and even a little ways beyond. Swaying, he caught the edge of his seat, gripped it tightly. His strength picked that moment to fail.
“Falling,” he said, with as much calm and dignity as he could muster.
“Nope.” Beth had shifted her grasp to his armpits, and she lifted with them, simultaneously raising him to his feet and pulling his body tight against hers. Her curves pressed against him, warm and soft and immediate. Something stirred and stiffened inside his trousers.
“We're going to turn,” Beth warned. Her tone held no trace of embarrassment, nor of passion. Only a sort of brusque cheerfulness, the voice of one stranger to another on a crowded skytrain.
“Okay,” he said. Together, they swiveled until he felt the chair against the backs of his legs. “Does that... can I sit?”
“Wait a second.” She did something with her foot. Behind him, the chair shifted slightly. “Okay.”
Gently, she began to lower him into the seat.
The floor, no, the entire lander jerked upward and to one side. The lights went out. Miguel fell into the padding, and Beth tumbled in on top of him. Both cried out, and instinctively he wrapped his arms around her.
“What happened?” He shouted. “What happened?”
Beth struggled against him. “We've had a deuterium leak since the plasma wave hit. Damn, I didn't think it would run out so fast. Let me get to the panel.”
Miguel's grip remained tight. “We've run out of fuel? We've stranded ourselves?”
“Miguel, let me go. Let me get to the panel.”
“Why? What can you do?”
“Let me go!”
Her breasts felt hot against his bare chest. Her hair had tumbled across his face. White light spilled in through the viewport, casting shadows across her. She had never looked so beautiful.
Regretfully, Miguel unlaced his fingers and loosened his grip on her. She flopped against him for a thrilling moment, then rose a bit. But rather than rising fully, she paused, and then settled back down into his lap again.
“The panel lights have gone blank,” she said, with an oh-yes-of-course sort of tone. “The batteries shorted, and the generators have no fuel. Right. We are stranded, Miguel. We can't do anything. We can't even call for help.”
He should answer her intelligently. He should let her up, and get up himself, and they should find a way to fix the lander and get out of here. But Lordy, he just couldn't help himself.
He kissed her. She had no reaction to that, so he kissed her again, and again, and then his hands were roaming across those beautiful curves he'd admired for so long.
“Miguel!” She cried out, struggling in his arms.
His heart sank. Hormones had betrayed him after all, seizing him in this moment of weakness. What troubled realms had they just cast him into?
“Miguel,” Beth said, turning her face toward his, brushing long hair out from between them. “The first aid kit said 'limited physical activity.' Let me do it.”
Suddenly, her mouth moved against his skin, and her hands roamed across his curves, quickly finding the bulge in his pants, and the means to free it from bondage. Her breath shuddered, her voice moaned with unfettered desire.
Astonished, Miguel could not think what to do. Could not think... Did not need to. His muscles still felt weak, but his blood burned, it boiled inside him. And Beth's muscles were doing just fine. He sat back into the chair's thick padding and let his hormones take over.
~~~
“Doctor Manaka?”
A hand shook Yezu, firmly. He opened his eyes. Techman Chase stood beside his bunk. Or hovered, actually, in this planetoid's abominably weak gravity.
“Yes? What?”
“Doctor, your spectral analyses are complete. You asked me to wake you when the data was ready.”
“Oh.” He rolled away, covering his eyes against the light. “I've changed my mind. No, wait. I haven't.”
“You sure?”
Rising, Yezu gave a weary nod. “Yes, thank you. I'm afraid my stronger guilt defeats my strong intent. I've monopolized your computer long enough.”
Chase snorted. “You certainly have. If there were any gravity around here, Captain would be pacing holes in the floor. As it is, he's bouncing around, making everybody crazy. He loves to keep a few trajectories in his pocket, just in case we need to move in a hurry, but this time we just haven't had the chance to compute any.”
“Go any direction,” Yezu said, tiredly swinging his feet out, then grabbing the edge of the bunk to steady himself when, nearly weightless, they continued to swing past the “down” position. “I bet you a pound of centrokrist you'll never come to grief.”
Chase shook his head. “Bet me all you like. Captain won't believe it unless it comes out of the computer.”
“Ech. I find that odd, considering the quality of your computers.”
“Now, now,” Chase said. “Be nice. We've been very accommodating to your needs, I think.”
“Of course. Of course you have.”
Malhelan computing revolved around the quaint and practically useless notions of central processing and random-access digital memory. One had to feed the computers endless streams of didactic, excruciatingly explicit instructions to get them to do anything at all, and even then the slightest error sufficed to bring them, messily, to a halt. The systems employed a number of elaborate schemes for trapping and correcting errors, but these didn't help much. Dressing up a stone axe, as he sometimes said to Chase and the others, did not make it steel.
“There's still some food in the galley, if you'd like to eat while you work.”
Yezu waved his hand dismissively. “Not hungry, thank you.”
Chase nodded, more from impatience, Yezu thought, than out of any real sense of politeness. He turned and, bracing a foot against one of the bunks, shot through the hatch and away down the length of Rockhammer's central corridor.
Yezu slid from his bunk, drifted for a moment before finding stability in the near weightlessness. His stomach churned. He wondered when he would get out of this rotten place, when circumstances would again let him find his work and his comfort in the same vicinity. Not soon, he supposed.
Minutes later, he found himself at the computing station he thought of as “his,” the one with the window and the telkom and the almost-sensible layout of controls and displays. In point of fact, the crew shared this little niche in the same way that they shared the galley and the showers and the gruesome “sanito” facilities. But Yezu hogged the station whenever he could, and complained when he could not, and for the most part, the crew humored him in this. His projects had frequently kept the computer at a deathly crawl anyway, so they'd found little need for the workstation.
“Queen to king's knight four,” Yezu said into the telkom plate, holding down the RECORD/TRANSMIT button. “Good morning, Tomus, or have you had your morning already? Good evening, then, or maybe I should just say 'good.' Unfortunately, I have precious little 'good' to speak of myself. The living conditions have really begun to wear me down. Oh!”
He took his finger off the button. What in heaven's name... Outside “his” window, he could see a peculiar smudge of white, about the size and shape of his thumb, with a much brighter speck at its center. He depressed the button again.
“Well, one of our friends has come back for a visit. From the look of things, I'd say his course is on a line with Rockhammer's current position. Moving which way? I cannot tell. Hold on while I inform the bridge.”
He pressed some other buttons. The “INTERKOM” light came on. No picture appeared on the screen before him, though, no doubt because he hadn't tripped the right controls. Well, to blazes with it.
“Bridge. First Officer speaking.”
“Navel of the world. Manaka speaking,” Yezu said, following the informal protocol of Rockhammerian humor. Had he been farther forward, he'd have said “nipple” or “cake-hole.” Farther aft, he'd have named a less pleasant anatomical feature.
“Go ahead.”
“Have you spotted the, uh, bogey outside my station?”
The First Officer cleared his throat as if preparing to deliver a criticism. “Repeat and confirm, Manaka. Bogey at two-seventy by ought? Range presently indeterminate?”
“Yes,” he sighed. He tired of the Malhelans' professional banter, their steadfast refusal to speak normally when discussing matters pertaining to Rockhammer's maintenance and operation. Still, refusing to go along with the joke would get him nowhere. “Bogey at two-seventy by zero zero. Range indeterminate. I confirm.”
“Acknowledged. Bogey is on our scopes. Radar soundings indeterminate at this time.”
Yes, of course. The ellipsoids did not reflect radio waves in the same way they did visible light, so that Rockhammer's old-style radar equipment gave decidedly questionable readings at times. This left them with little means, other than patience and sharp eyes, to determine the objects' ranges and velocities.
“If it helps,” Yezu said, “the ellipsoid has brightened and shifted colors. It appears distinctly bluish in hue.”
“Acknowledged. We confirm your observation.”
He sighed. So early in the day, conversations like this one did not amuse him.
“Manaka out.” He switched communication modes, went back to his Centromo transmission. “Tomus, these Malhelans can wear me farther down in an hour than convention lectures could in a four-day weekend. Really, Wedge has a completely different personality. Count yourself luckier than I. Now, where were we? Have I moved yet? Yes, I have.”
The computing station had grown brighter, and bluer. He looked up, into a dazzling blaze of sapphire light outside his window. It filled the entire view, swelling and brightening rapidly.
“My God,” he said, “Talina. Be happy, my love, wherever you are. Tomus, I believe that thing is going to hit us.”
He stared silently for a few moments. Such a pretty shade of blue, such a pretty—
His universe ended.