AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That was the real oddity about Hali Ekel. She said she had never been groundside. Life was not rendered down to raw survival here the way it was groundside. There was time here for softer things, more sophisticated dalliances. Ship’s records at your fingertips. But Hali Ekel had groundside eyes.
Waela stopped drinking, her hunger satisfied. She turned and stared directly at Hali.
Could I tell her about Kerro’s voice in my head?
“You scattered the graphs there,” Hali said. “What were you thinking?”
Waela felt a warm flush spread up her neck.
“You were thinking about Kerro,” Hali said.
Waela nodded. She still felt a tightening of her throat when she tried to talk about him.
“Why do you say hylighters took him?” Hali asked. “Groundside says he’s dead.”
“The hylighters rescued us,” Waela said. “Why should they turn around and kill him?”
Waela closed her eyes as Hali remained silent and watchful. You see, Hali, I hear Kerro’s voice in my head. No, Hali, I’m not insane. I really hear him.
“What does it mean to run the P?” Hali asked.
Waela’s eyes snapped open. “What?”
“Records says you once lost a lover because he ran the P. His name was Jim. What does it mean to run the P?”
Slowly at first, then in bursts, Waela described The Game, then, seeing the reason for Hali’s question, added: “That has nothing to do with why I believe Kerro’s alive.”
“Why would the hylighters take him away?”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“I want him to be alive, too, Waela, but . . .” Hali shook her head and Waela thought she detected tears in the med-tech’s eyes.
“You were fond of him, too, Hali?”
“We had our moments.” She glanced at Waela’s swelling abdomen. “Not those moments, but good just the same.”
With a quick shake of her head, Hali turned her attention to the pribox, keyed another scan, converted it to code, stored it.
“Why are you storing that record?”
She’s watching me carefully, Hali thought. Do I dare lie to her?
Something had to be done, though, to allay the obvious fears aroused by this examination and the questions which could not be answered.
“I’ll show you,” Hali said. She called back the record and shunted it to the study screen beyond the holofocus. With an internal pointer, she indicated a red line oscillating across a green matrix.
“Your heart. Note the long, low rhythm.”
Hali keyed another sequence. A yellow line wove its way through the red, pulsing faster and with lower intensity.
“The baby’s heart.”
Again, Hali’s fingers moved over the keys. “Here’s what happened when you thought about Kerro.”
The two lines formed identical undulations. They merged and pulsed as one for a dozen beats, then separated.
“What does that mean?” Waela asked.
Hali removed the node from Waela’s hand, began restoring the pribox to its case at her hip.
“It’s called synchronous biology and we don’t know exactly what it means. Ship’s records associate it with certain psychic phenomena—faith healing, for example.”
“Faith healing?”
“Without the intervention of accepted scientific medicine.”
“But I’ve never . . .”
“Kerro showed me the records once. The healer achieves a steady physiological state, sometimes in a trance. Kerro called it ‘a symphony of the mind.’”
“I don’t see how that . . .”
“The patient’s body assumes an identical state, in complete harmony with the healer’s. When it ends, the patient is healed.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s in the records.”
“Are you trying to tell me my baby is healing me?”
“Given the unknowns about this rapid gestation,” Hali said, “I would expect greater upset from you. But you don’t seem capable of maintaining long periods of physiological imbalance.”
“Whatever else she may be, she’s still an unformed infant,” Waela said. “She could not do that.”
“She?”
Waela felt pressure against one of her lower ribs, the baby shifting.
“I’ve known all along that it’s female.”
“That’s what the chromosome scan says,” Hali agreed. “But the odds were even that you could guess right. Your guess doesn’t impress me.”
“No more than your faith healing.”
Waela stood up slowly and felt the baby adjust to this new position.
“Unborn infants have been known to compensate for deficiencies in the mother,” Hali said, “but I’m not selling faith healing.”
“But you said . . .”
“I say a lot of things.” She patted her pribox case. “We’ve set up a special exercise cubby down in P-T. You have to keep up your body tone even if . . .”
“If you’re right, this baby will be born in a matter of diurns. What can I do to . . .”
“Just get down to P-T, Waela.”
Hali slipped back out through the hatch before Waela could raise more objections. That was an alert and intelligent woman in there. Waela knew how to search records, and her curiosity would not be dampened by inadequate answers. Now, what do we do?
Hali turned at the crèche hatch and saw one of the children staring out at her from the open bubble of the play area. Hali knew the child, Raul Andrit, age five. She had treated him for nightmares. She bent toward him. “Hi. Remember me?”
Raul turned his face up to her, wan and listless. Before he could answer, he fell out of the bubble into the passage.
Setting her alarm signal on call, Hali turned the child onto his back and attached the pribox. The emergency readout buzzed and, for the first time, Hali doubted a computer diagnosis. In the snarl of facts blurring past her eyes she read: fatigue . . . exhaustion . . . 10.2 . . .
“Yes?” The voice of a responding medic w
as thin in her pribox speaker. She briefed him and set the boy up for a glucose and vitamin series from her emergency packet.
“I’ll send a cart.” The speaker blipped as the medic broke the connection.
Hali put a question to her computer: “Raul Andrit: age?”
The screen flashed 5.5.
“What is the age of the subject just tested?”
10.2.
Her fingers scurried across the keys: “The last subject tested was Raul Andrit. How could he be 5.5 and 10.2?”
He has lived 5.5 standard annos. His body exhibits the characteristic intracellular structures of one who is 10.2. For medical purposes, cellular age is the more important.
Hali sat back on her heels and stared down at the unconscious child—dark circles under his eyes, pale skin. His chest appeared too thin and it heaved convulsively when he breathed. What the computer had just told her was that this little boy had doubled his age in a matter of diurns. She heard the cart pull up, a young attendant with it.
“Get this child to sickbay. Notify his Natali sponsor and continue treatment for fatigue,” she said. “I’ll be along shortly.”
She hurried toward Physical Therapy and, at the passage turn, bumped into a breathless medic rushing out. “Ekel! I was just coming for you. You signaled with a child who fainted? There’s another one in the Secondary play area. This way.”
She followed on his heels, listening to the description. “He’s a seven-anno in Polly Side’s section. Kid can barely stay awake. Eating too much lately and, what with food monitoring, that’s a problem—but he was weighed today and found to be down two kilos from last week.”
She did not have to be told that this was a significant drop for a child of that age.
The boy was lying on a stretch of thick green lawn in the free-play area, a shutter-shielded dome overhead. As she crouched beside him to set up her case, she smelled the fresh-clipped grass and thought how incongruous that was—the enticing green odor and this boy ill.
The pribox readout did not surprise her after Raul Andrit. Fatigue . . . exhaustion . . . signs of aging . . .
“Should we move him?”
That was a new voice. She turned and looked up at a thin-faced man in groundside blue standing beside the medic.
