127: HERITAGE

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Map] ………. Next> ………. Last>>

Xanthe’s issue turns out to be some kind of hormone regulation thing. “A synnerve,” the Friend explains, “has grown into the amygdala and, while it’s inactive, has interrupted Xanthe’s adrenalin regulation.”

“Is it dangerous?” Captain Klees asks.

“It’s… difficult to say. It puts a lot of extra stress on the body and, if untreated, is likely to exacerbate the chances of post-chronostasis organ failure, as well as just regular organ failure later in life. They haven’t shown any sign of post-chronostasis organ failure, fortunately. It’s also having a major effect on their mood, ability to sleep, and of course, their judgement and risk awareness. We’re currently treating with regular sedatives, but there’s a line to walk, here. There’s a chance – and we don’t know how high a chance – that the body will recalibrate and fix this on its own, but only if the effects are felt. We’re using sedatives to take the edge off, but trying not to over-sedate.”

“And if they don’t recover on their own?”

“Then they’ll be on consistent medication and close heart monitoring until we have access to a brain surgeon with a properly outfitted surgery. Or.”

“Or?”

“Well, the synnerve in question is inactive, of course; the issue, whatever’s going in in there, must be structural. But the conductivity of the inactive nerve might be part of it. There is a chance – again, we don’t know how great a chance – that killing the synnerve properly would solve the problem.”

“You want to turn the electrostatic shielding back on and drop Xanthe through it.”

The Friend shrugs. “This Friend doesn’t want to do anything. It is merely suggesting a potential treatment.”

“Have you raised this with Xanthe?”

“Of course. They said no, for now. They want to see if it’ll heal without doing that. But we thought you should be aware, especially since they may change their mind if it doesn’t.”

Captain Klees nods. “Thanks for telling me. How’s Captain Kae Jin?”

“Heart and brain are intact, and lungs aren’t getting any worse. We have some concerns over her liver and kidneys, and suspect damage to her digestive system. Running tests puts on more strain, so we try not to run them on things we don’t need to know or can’t do anything about. Also, there’s her legs.”

“What about her legs?”

“They don’t work. Nerve damage in the spine, we think. She has some limited use of a few leg muscles, can lift them up and soforth, more in her right than her left. But many of her muscles don’t work at all, and she has very limited sensation in them, too; no temperature sensation, limited pressure and pain. We’ve got her on muscle maintaining drugs; the same kind they use in the chronostasis pods, so we have plenty. But we’re – ”

“Not surgeons, I know. Will she recover without surgery?”

The Friend shrugs. “Nerves can do strange and surprising things. But it’s not likely. Denish is modifying a wheelchair to can carry her oxygen tank and drug IVs; it’s not a major concern compared to the organ failure. She wants to address Hylara tomorrow.”

“Is she strong enough?”

“We think so. She can say multiple sentences without losing her breath now, so long as oxygen is on hand. She should be fine for a short address.”

And so, the next day, we prepare to address Hylara again.

We all crowd into the medbay to do it. We usually like to do this kind of thing from Engine Ring 1, where all the equipment is, but there’s no need to make Captain Kae Jin go all the way to the front of the ship when there’s a perfectly good terminal in the medbay itself. With Earl’s assistance, she wheels up to the microphone, pulls off her oxygen mask, and speaks.

“Javelin Courageous to Hylaran colony. This is Captain Sienna Kae Jin. As per protocol, I am co-captaining the Courageous with Captain Adin Klees, my crew are revived, and we are preparing to orbit your planet in just over one month. We require information on the condition and location of your colony so that we can properly plan supply drops down to you. Please respond. Courageous out.”

“Message recorded and sending,” Tal says, as the captain accepts the oxygen mask from Earl and straps it back on.

“Was that alright?” she asks. “I didn’t sound out of breath, did I?”

“You sounded very commanding, Captain,” Xanthe assures her.

“It was perfectly clear,” Earl agrees, “and should get the message across. If their silence was suspicion or snobbery directed towards the replacement crew, then this should resolve the problem. And presumably, they do want to be able to receive our supplies.”

“Transmission time?” Captain Kae Jin asks.

“Slightly over forty minutes, each way,” Sam reports. “So we should get a reply in… probably an hour and a half, or a bit less.”

We do not get a reply in an hour and a half, or a bit less.

We do not get a reply in three hours.

We do not get a reply in a full day.

“Hmm,” Tinera frowns, checking the console in Habitation Ring 1 for the hundredth time and verifying that no, there have been no radio messages received. “I guess they just don’t want to talk to us.”

Asteria and I are looking over her shoulders. (I check the atmospheric analyser taped to the wall. Atmosphere is within normal paramaters.) “Tal and Denish are combing through all received data,” Asteria says. “It’s possible that something’s wrong with the code, and it’s misinterpreting their transmissions as random space noise.”

“It picked up their first one.”

“They copied your format on the first one, right? The person who answered clearly had no idea what they were doing or what the protocol was. They might have a different method that our system is missing, for some reason.”

“If they did,” I point out, “they’d have switched back as soon as it became clear we weren’t getting their messages, surely.”

“Maybe. I suppose it depends what their bureaucracy is like.”

“They’re practical enough to have survived this long without the expected resupply from the Courageous. I’m sure having to use an unexpected radio format won’t stop them.”

“The problem may in fact be the opposite,” Earl notes, coming up behind us. “Do we know what this Hive Cattail was doing when they received your transmission?”

I shrug. “They claimed to be a materials port supervisor. I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s clear from their message that they weren’t expecting to hear from the ship,” Earl notes. “They thought we were all dead. And we also know that Hylara isn’t using long-distance radio communication, which makes sense since there’s nobody to talk to outside their settlement. Materials port supervisor sounds like they might be responsible for moving goods in and out of the settlement itself; controlling movement through the airlocks, perhaps, if there are contamination dangers.”

“Maybe,” Tinera says. “Is it important, what Supervisor Cattail does?”

“It’s important whether their radio transmissions are recorded. If we were picked up by, say, some radiation or weather monitoring system that only exists to find immediate problems, there might be no record of our transmission. The system might only be used occasionally; being picked up at all might be a complete chance of timing.”

“After they got the message, they’d surely make sure someone was always monit – ”

“And if some random gate guard ran in out of the radioactive wasteland yelling at you that they’d just been contacted by a semi-famous book author from a starship that went missing in their grandfather’s time, would you believe them?”

Huh. I hadn’t considered that.

“They’d have to be monitoring, though,” I say. “Just in case.”

“Earl is inclined to agree that they probably would. Probably. But do they have the spare resources or manpower? Are the hazards of the planet known to cause hallucinations or faulty reasoning, or even vivid dreams? How often does this happen? It’s possible that somebody claims to have heard from the legendary ship that was supposed to save their struggling colony every few years. It’s possible that they have no reason to believe that this port supervisor is actually correct.”

“What do we do if that’s the case?” I ask. “If they aren’t watching or listening for us…”

“We pull out the planetary analysis equipment when we hit orbit,” Asteria says, “and we stay there until we find signs of the settlement. Then we dump something nearby that they can’t miss. That should get them listening. I hope we don’t have to do that, because finding a tiny settlement on a planet could take years, but it’s a give-and-take with habitability – if there’s not many habitable areas, they’ll be easy to find. If there’s a lot of habitable areas, they’ll be harder to find, but at least it means we get a really habitable planet.”

“I’m sure our descendants in three centuries after trial and error has found the most fatal dangers will appreciate that.”

“Worst case, we can just ignore the colony and set up our own. Technically, they own the planet, but I don’t think those laws are going to mean anything out here. We can settle on opposite sides and have no chance of reaching, or probably hearing from, each other for lifetimes. I’d rather not though; they must be in desperate need of resources, and setting up will be so much easier from an existing base.”

“I bet they finally get back to us and we set up down there and then it turns out that their people and our people absolutely hate each other.”

Asteria shrugs. “Irrelevant. We’re building a human society in total isolation with no second chances. Whether we like it is a side issue.”

Earl clears Earl’s throat. “Cory, can you find – ah.”

“Earl forgot Cory’s dead, huh?” Asteria asks.

“… Perhaps.”

There’s no ‘Cory’ on the crew manifest. “Who’s Cory, if I might ask?”

“It’s what we used to call the AI,” Asteria explains. “Short for ‘Courageous’.”

“Oh, man!” Tinera scowls. “That’s way better than our name. We should’ve called it Cory.”

“What did you call kem?” Earl asks.

“Amy,” Asteria says.

“Why Amy?”

Asteria shrugs. “It’s some pre-Neocambrian reference. What’d Earl want from Cory?”

“Data on the predicted planetary conditions, but Earl will look it up later.”

Tinera steps back. “Earl can have this terminal right now, I’m done.”

“Thank you.”

Two days later, Xanthe is released with a shot of some kind of slow-release gel in their arm, and Note with a firm instruction to eat what they can stomach once they’re off the post-chronostasis broth and pull their weight back up to a safe level. While Xanthe immediately claims a bedroom, Note comes with me to Storage Ring 2 searches among the crate of personal effects until they come up with a small wooden box of jewellery. Thirteen rings are looped through their ears, not the fine jewellery I’m used to seeing on academics and businesspeople but the gather-rings of the Khemin, lumpy and home-made. Rings of wire with tiny aluminium charms cut and folded out of old cans, rings of steel cut from the machinery of old wrecks, rings of pewter and a surprising number of rings of gold. It’s normal for a Khemin to have one or two gold earrings, hand-cast by the wearer themselves (usually when they’re children), but Note Waveskimmer has a full eight of them, the most I’ve ever seen in Khemin ears. Furthermore, while a few of them look to be the inexpert casting of a child, several look even and practiced, probably earned when they were an adult. They dig around in the crate a while longer, and pull out something utterly ingenious.

It looks like a bunch of long strips of black rags with random objects tied into them, but as Note starts to put it on, I see what it is – a headscarf, where the very long ends have been cut into strips. Gather-rings and gather-charms are knotted and threaded into this fringe, much like most Khemin would thread them into their hair. Note expertly wraps the headscarf and pushes the cloth ‘braids’ behind their shoulders, where they end just under Note’s shoulder blades. (It’s probably not that ingenious an invention; come to think of it, Khemin presumably go bald sometimes as they age, and they presumably do something like this when they do. It doesn’t take being an astronaut to go bald. But it’s the first time I’ve seen it.)

“Ah,” they say. “That’s better.” They catch me staring, and grin. “You are thinking that I finally look normal, cousin.”

I shrug. “Something had to be normal on this ship eventually. Statistically.”

Note laughs. “We must bring our normal to our new planet, it is our responsibility to do so. If we don’t, who will?” They pat my arm. “Do not let them make you a Texan, Aspen of Greave roots.”

“I – what? They haven’t.”

“Not fully. Not yet.” Note pats my arm again, and digs in the crate once more. “Ah! Here we go.” They pull out a wooden Khemin flute, which they hang around their neck using the attached thread, and with more care, an unstrung mandolin. Then they pause, staring at a small hand drum. They caress it carefully.

“Your drummer is with the waters?” I ask.

“Richard,” they say quietly. Their fingertips brush something else I don’t recognise, some small wooden instrument with metal keys on it. “And Lex.” They pull back, and stand up quickly. “Well. Xanthe will be wanting the mandolin.” They brush past me and toward the airlock, ignoring the rule about not being outside the living rings alone and leaving me with the personal effects crate. I could look through it. I could probably take as much time as I want without anyone noticing.

I don’t.

I head for the more populated rings to be with my crew. We spend far too much time dwelling on ghosts already.

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Map] ………. Next> ………. Last>>