CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Waking was agony.

It began as only a low murmur of voices, speaking a familiar language but with pitch and intonation so changed that they were barely comprehensible. It was like the voice of a machine. He strained to understand. “… little more asfanol… even a few more minutes… until we know what to do with athers (others?)… heart beat sturdy (steady?) now…”

Then a clearer statement, in an angry and petulant lower voice. “Damned nuisance. Can’t do a thing until we have a policy statement. Why that fool had to do what he did… it will take us a month…”

He was breathing. The air came hot into his lungs, searing the delicate alveoli with every slow breath. He felt it burn across the air-blood barrier, then fiery rivers of oxygen were surging along arteries and capillaries out to every extremity of his body. It was a relentless pain. There was an agony of awaking tissue and returning circulation, accompanied by muscle spasms he could not control.

Peron moved his tongue. As it touched his teeth it felt dry and swollen, too big for his mouth. But when he licked his lips there was a sense of slick, glycerine texture and a taste that puckered the inside of his mouth. He grunted in disgust, but no sound would come from his throat.

“He’s awake,” said another voice. “Get ready. Peron Turca. Can you open your eyes?”

Peron tried to do it. The lashes felt gummed shut, but by a steady effort he could free them, little by little. He peered upward through slitted eyes and found that he was looking at a pale gray ceiling, curving without seam to meet walls of the same color. Somewhere off to his right there was a steady swishing and pulsing sound.

He turned his head to that side. The neck muscles reluctantly creaked, stretched, and obeyed his mental command. He was lying next to a great mass of medical equipment, monitors, pumps, IVs, and telemetering units. Numerous tubes and wires ran across to his bared right arm. Others extended to run up his nostrils and down to his lower body. He was naked.

He lifted his head. There was something subtly wrong in making the movement, but it did not feel like an internal problem. It felt rather as though the laws of mechanics had been changed, so that although he was clearly not in freefall, neither was he moving under any normal form of gravity.

And something was wrong with his eyes. Badly wrong. He could see, but everything was blurred and indistinct, with edges poorly defined and with all colors muted to pastel shades.

Peron turned his head to the left. Next to the table on which he was lying sat a woman. She was middle-aged, frowning, and looking at him with obvious disapproval. Her face had a smooth, babyish skin, and she wore a blue cowl that was closely fitted to her skull.

“All right,” she said. She did not seem to be speaking to Peron. “Motor control seems to be there. Command: Let’s have three c.c.’s of historex in the thigh.” It was the voice that he had first heard, and again it sounded hoarse and oddly mechanical. He saw and heard nothing happen, but after a few seconds there was a brief new ache in his thigh. Then the pain in all his muscles began to decrease. The woman gazed at his expression, and nodded.

“Excellent. Command: Check the monitors, and if they’re satisfactory remove catheters. Gently.”

Peron stared down at the catheters that ran into his lower body, and made sure that he kept his gaze on them. Again he saw and felt nothing, but after a moment they had vanished. Another second, and the tube into his nostrils was gone. He drew in a long, shuddering breath. The fire in the lungs was still there. The woman still looked annoyed. “You feel strange and uncomfortable. I know. S-space has that effect on everybody at first. It doesn’t last. Just be thankful that you’re alive when you ought to be dead.”

Alive! Alive. Peron had a sudden flood of memory, carrying him back to the last despairing minutes on Whirlygig. He had been dying there, resigned to the inevitable, quite sure of his own death — and here he was alive! All the pain washed away in a moment, overwhelmed by knowledge of life. He wanted to speak, to give a great shout of joy at the fact of simple existence; but again no words would come out.

“Don’t try it,” said the woman. “Not yet. You’ll have to learn how to speak, and it takes a little while. And don’t rub your eyes. They’re working normally but things look different here. Now, there are things to be done before you’re ready to talk. That fool Wilmer certainly gave us all a problem, but I guess we’re stuck with it. We can’t kill you now. Command: Bring him a drink. Water will do, but check the ion balances and the blood sugar, and if he needs anything make the necessary additions.”

She held out her hand, and suddenly it was holding a flask of straw-yellow liquid.

“I want you to try to take this from me. Can you do that? Then drink all of it and try to talk to me.”

Peron lifted his arm, and again there was the feeling that the laws of physics had been changed. It took deliberate control to make his hand move in the direction that he wanted. He carefully took the container, brought it back to his mouth, and drank. It was like balm, soothing his throat and making him realize for the first time that he was desperately thirsty. He drank it all. “Good. Command: Take it away.” The flask was gone. The woman looked a little less irritated. “Can you speak? Try a word.”

Peron swallowed, worked his vocal chords, and was rewarded with a grunt and a grating cough. He tried again.

“Yaahh. Y-Yaasss.” His voice sounded alien in his ears.

“Excellent. Give it time. And listen to me. You have to know just a few things, and there’s nothing to be gained by waiting to tell you them. Do you know who the Immortals are?”

“They vissi — vizzit — Pen’coss. Don’ know if ‘uman — or not. Lave — live — f’rever.” “Wish that were true.” The woman gave Peron a sour smile. “I’m an Immortal. And now, so are you. But we won’t live forever. We’ll live about seventeen hundred years, according to our best current estimates — if we don’t get killed somehow along the way. That’s one thing you have to learn. You can be killed just as easily now as you could before. Living in S-space won’t protect you. Understand?”

“Unn-derstand.” The skin on Peron’s face felt as though it had been stretched tight, and it could not show the emotion he was feeling. If he was an Immortal, what had happened to the others? Would he outlive Elissa by sixteen hundred years? No good news could make that thought palatable. He lifted his head — again, that strange feeling — and looked at the woman directly. “What happ’n to others on Whir’gig?”

“I’m not in a position to tell you that. I told you, what Wilmer did for you has made more trouble than he dreamed. Before we are permitted to tell you more, we have to get approval from Sector Headquarters, and that means a long trip. We’ve been on the way for about five hours already, and it will be nearly two days before we get there. Until we do, you’ll have to be patient.

“My patient, as it happens.” She gave him her first real smile. “You can start by resting some. In a few minutes you’ll get a reaction from the historex, and I’m going to give you another sedative and painkiller now. Command: Give this man five c.c.’s of asfanol.”

Nothing visible, but again a surprise ache of something in his thigh. Peron wasn’t at all ready to go to sleep — there were a hundred questions to be answered, and he wasn’t sure where to start.

“Are we going back to The Ship?”

The woman looked startled, then amused. “No. I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you that. We’re on a longer trip — Sector Headquarters is outside the Cass system — nearly a light-year away from Cassay and Pentecost.”

“And we’ll be there in two days. So you do travel faster than light!” Now she was looking very uncomfortable. “I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m a doctor, not a damned administrator.” There was an irritation at somebody or something in her tone, and Peron filed it away for future reference. “But we don’t travel faster than light. In S-space, light travels almost two thousand light-years of normal distance in one of our years. We’re travelling at only a fraction of light-speed.”