TWENTY-THREE
They laid out Jim Chisholm on the floor of Crusader as it returned to Crabtree. He was still alive, still breathing regularly, but there was nothing they could do for him until he was out of the suit.
“We could try cutting it open,” Nadis said quietly, as if wary of letting Chisholm hear her. “If we did it slowly… it’s not as if we have to worry about pressure loss.”
“Last resort only,” Axford said. “If he arrests, then we cut. Until then I’m the only person going anywhere near him with a knife. He’s stable for now, and I could probably get an airline into him if I have to.” He had been monitoring Chisholm’s carotid pulse.
“I agree with Ryan,” Parry said. “There has to be an easier way to get him out of that thing — we don’t want to damage the suit if we can help it.”
He knelt by the comatose man and ran a hand across the flattened bulge of the suit’s chestpack. There were no display windows, input sockets or keypads, but there was a kind of mosaic of shaped panels set into the slope of the top surface, where it blended with the upper chest. The panels might have been nothing more than some form of baroque ornamentation, but why there and nowhere else on the suit? The top of the chestpack was the logical place to put controls: smack in the middle of the golden triangle where a suited figure could reach things easily. He brushed his hand against the leftmost panel, which was shaped like an equilateral triangle.
“Careful,” Svetlana whispered. “One of those things might be a self-destruct.”
Parry looked up at his wife. “And that information is going to help me how, exactly?” He turned back to the suit and pressed his thumb against the triangular panel. The helmet said something: a few quiet phrases in a language he didn’t recognise. It was a woman’s voice, calmly authoritative.
“Anyone get that?” Parry asked.
“Nuh huh,” Nadis said, but she held the helmet over her head, so that her ears were closer to the source of the sound.
“Try it again,” Svetlana said.
He pressed the panel. The helmet spoke again: what sounded like the same voice saying the same phrase, but in a more strident tone. Parry waited a moment, then pressed again. The voice sounded even more firm, as if this was absolutely the last time it wanted to have to say whatever it was saying.
“Wrong thing to press,” Parry said. “That’s what she’s telling us. The tone of her voice, it was like, I’ve told you three times now …”
“Why put a command button there if you’re not meant to press it?” Svetlana asked.
“I’m thinking…” Nadis said, her purple fingernails clicking against the grey globe of the helmet. “Maybe it only makes sense to press that thing when the helmet’s locked down.”
“She could be right,” Parry said.
Svetlana knelt down next to him. “Let me see that thing. You were pressing the triangle, right?”
“Yep. Could mean anything.”
“Or something very specific and obvious.” She looked around at the little party. “Triangles, people. Three sides.”
“Nope,” Parry said. “Still not getting it.”
“Three gases: O2, CO2, N2. Sure as hell wouldn’t make much sense to adjust the trimix without putting on the helmet. Maybe that’s what she’s saying: Put the helmet on, dummy, then I can actually do something for you.”
Parry laughed. “Maybe you’re right.”
“What’s the next symbol along?”
“Three horizontal bars, on top of each other.”
“Press it.”
The voice came out of the helmet again: calmer this time, and with what sounded like a different set of phrases.
“Anyone recognise any of that?” Svetlana asked.
“Not me,” Parry said, “except that it almost sounded like…well, Japanese, or something. But not Japanese.”
“Maybe Chinese,” Nadis said. “Perhaps we should get Wang to listen in —”
Svetlana shook her head. “I don’t think it was Chinese, but we’re in the right ballpark. It’s something Oriental or Asian, a language we’ve all heard, stuff that’s seeped into our brains on vacation, at a subliminal level. We recognise the music, the structure, but not the content.”
“Why did you say vacation?” Parry asked.
“Because I keep thinking about a diving trip I was on years ago, about the way one of the dive instructors spoke to her boyfriend. I was just a kid — no certification, nothing. Cattle-boat stuff, off… fuck, where was it? Phuket, maybe.”
“Phuket,” Nadis said. “As in Phuket, Thailand?”
Parry stroked the barred symbol again, making the helmet utter the same sequence of phrases. Nothing strident or chiding about the tone now. “It’s Thai,” he said. “The spacesuit is speaking Thai.”
“Why, in God’s name…” Svetlana said, and then trailed off. “That symbol you keep pressing — I’m guessing here, but maybe those bars are meant to represent radiator grilles, or… something.”
“You’ve lost me, babe.”
“If the first one’s trimix control, maybe the second one’s thermal regulation. Would make a kind of sense, right? If you’re going to put controls on a suit, those would be near the top of the list.”
“The third symbol is a kind of… sunburst motif.”
“Coms, maybe? Okay, big guess, I admit. So sue me. Next?”
“Something similar… kind of like an eight-pointed star, or a compass.”
“Directional control, maybe? We know the suit has built-in thrust, enough for hovering under Janus gravity.”
“No,” Parry said. “Too complex. This is just a single symbol. You can’t input enough information into a single control button to specify direction.”
“It doesn’t have to work like that. We’ve no idea what happens when the helmet’s locked down. Maybe those symbols just call up HUD menus, or open voice-command channels, or maybe even thought control.”
“Okay, maybe.” Parry’s finger dithered over the chestpack. “There’s one last symbol: just a square. You want me to go ahead and press it?”
Nadis looked nervously at the helmet. “Go ahead.”
Parry pressed it. The helmet said something — a shorter sequence of phrases this time — but nothing obvious happened. He pressed it again; got the same verbal message.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Svetlana said. “Why Thai? As far as I know, Jim didn’t speak Thai any more than we do. They can’t have dug the language out of his head.”
“I agree it’s weird,” Parry said, “but then so is the fact that he strolled out of that ship in the first place. We’re in weird territory here. This suit is just part of it.”
“The suit bothers me,” Svetlana said.
“Bothers me, too. It’s not like any of our suits — certainly not like the one Craig was wearing, which was the only suit of ours the aliens got a look at.” Parry stroked the square symbol again, just in case something might have changed. He heard the same message in Thai. “It’s beyond anything we’ve got; beyond anything the Chinese had, or that Wang is capable of making for us. But it isn’t like anything we saw on that ship, either. It’s modern-looking — but not so modern that I’m terrified just being in the same room as it.”
“So maybe it isn’t alien,” Nadis said. “Maybe this is just… a suit. Made by people. Maybe even made by Thai people. But not from our time. From after we left.”
“A suit from the future, you mean?” Parry asked.
“Sorry to break it to you,” Nadis said, still holding the helmet close to her head, “but we’re in the damned future. Two hundred and sixty years into it, to be precise. Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised if we run into pieces of it now and then. We might kid ourselves that it’s still only 2070, but we all know that’s just a big white lie to keep us all from doing the same thing Bob Ungless did.”
“Please confirm that English is your preferred language option,” the helmet said in its usual voice.
Nad
is almost let go of it. “Whoah,” she said, grinning in delight and surprise.
“Please confirm that English is your preferred language option,” the suit said again, more firmly this time.
“Maybe you should answer the thing,” Svetlana said.
“Yes,” Nadis said, speaking into the open circle at the base of the helmet. “English is my… preferred option. Holy shit.”
“Switching language preference from Thai to English. To switch back, or select another language, please access menu modes or provide statistical speech baseline.”
“It was listening,” Parry said, “waiting for us to say something in Thai. When we didn’t, it figured out what we wanted to hear from Denise’s speech.”
“Why’d it take so long?” Nadis said, still looking at the helmet with a silly grin on her face.
“Must have needed a big chunk of language to get to work on. That’s probably what it meant by ‘statistical sample’.”
“So it knows English,” Axford said. “That I can handle. But Thai? Why would anyone programme Thai into a spacesuit?”
“Wait,” Svetlana said, with a wicked look. “Pass me the helmet.”
Nadis pushed it across the room in a slow, shallow arc. Svetlana caught it easily and started speaking into the base of the helmet. Something guttural and Eastern European, hesitantly at first, but then with increasing fluency.
Nadis looked at Parry. “What the hell language is that?”
“Armenian,” Parry said. “At least, I think that’s what it is.”
The helmet started speaking to Svetlana. She looked up, wide-eyed. “It’s answering. It sounds weird, like some dialect I’ve never heard before, but it still makes sense. It’s better at it than me.” She shook her head in amazement. “The damned thing speaks Armenian. How many languages does this thing hold?”
“I don’t know,” Parry said. “Why don’t you ask it?”
They forced it to switch back to English. Svetlana stood with the helmet under her chin, like a soup bowl. “Er… can I ask you something? You’re a spacesuit, right?”
“I am a general-purpose spacesuit, yes.”
Svetlana’s questions tumbled out in a rush. “Who made you? Where were you made? When were you put together?”
The helmet answered her after only the briefest of pauses. “I am a general-purpose spacesuit of the Chakri five series. I was quickened in the Kanchanaburi Corporation manufacturing complex, New Far Bangkok, Triton. Quickening commenced at 15:12:34 GMT, July 27, 2134. Quickening finished at 04:22:11 GMT, August 9, 2134.”
“You mean 2134 as in… the year 2134?” Svetlana said.
The suit did not answer.
Svetlana sounded less sure of herself. “What happened after you were quickened? Who owned you? How did you get here?”
“After two months of adaptive training with human subjects, I was certified spaceworthy. I became the corporate property of Surin Industries on October 15, 2134. On February 3, 2135, I was delivered to Surin Industries space vehicle Spirit House as part of a batch of thirty suits of the Chakri five series. I remain the property of Surin Industries, but since I contain no user-serviceable parts, I must be returned to the Kanchanaburi complex for repair and upgrade.” The suit paused momentarily. “Since I cannot establish my present location, either by navgrid reference beacon, inertial vector trace-back or event memory stack, I cannot say how I got here. Wherever here might be.”
“So you’re lost,” Svetlana said.
“Please assist me to update my location file. I do not require high precision at this point. Kindly specify coordinates in any of the following recognised positioning formats —”
“That can wait,” Svetlana said. “We need you to do something for us now — are you still understanding me?”
“Yes,” the suit said, with the merest hint of irritation.
“Then you need to open up so that we can get at the man wearing you.”
“Are you asking me to release you?”
Svetlana glanced at the others. Parry nodded. The helmet appeared to have no sense that the person talking to it was not the person inside the suit’s lower section.
“Yes,” Svetlana said. “Go ahead and release me.”
“My sensors indicate that the helmet has been disengaged and that the ambient environment is safe. However, there is a small but finite chance that these observations are in error. You may suffer injury or death when I release you. Are you prepared to accept this risk?”
“Yes. Open. Let me out.”
“Would you like me to ask you that question again should similar circumstances arise?”
“Just open.”
“Please wait a moment. In the event that you wish to abort the opening procedure, any sudden vocal utterance will be interpreted as a command to reverse the process. If you do not wish to reverse the procedure, please refrain from making any sharp vocal utterances for the next ten seconds. I am now opening.”
Parry stepped back from the suit. It opened in an odd way — not at all how he had been expecting. A crack appeared in the front of the neck ring, widening and elongating until it reached the top of the chestpack. The crack then veered sideways to run down the left side of the chestpack, under it, and then down to the suit’s crotch. The two upper halves of the suit sagged aside easily, with the right side retaining the asymmetric extension of the chestpack. Chisholm was naked under the suit — there was no inner layer, no biomonitor patches. Parry and Nadis worked his arms free of the sleeves and then hauled him from the lower part of the suit. His legs slipped free easily despite the apparent tightness of the suit design. His body was pale and completely hairless, even in the genital area, with none of the scars or blemishes that inevitably came with a career in space. All lean tissue, with so little fat that his ribs were painfully obvious. Jim Chisholm had been fifty-two when he died, but this could have been the body of a man in his twenties.
“They did a pretty good job,” Axford said appreciatively as the others lifted Chisholm onto one of the lander’s passenger couches.
“Is he going to be okay?” Svetlana asked.
“He was dead, Svieta,” Axford said patiently. “Anything else has to count as an improvement.”
“But he was with us and… now he’s gone again.”
“We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that he comes back,” Axford said.
“Fingers crossed — that’s the best you can offer?”
“I’ll do everything I can, but if you want miracles, you’ve come to the wrong doctor.”
* * *
Three times a day, at the end of every eight-hour monitoring shift, Svetlana received an e-mail summary on her flexy either from Axford himself or one of the duty nurses. Axford’s preliminary assessment had been that Chisholm was in a deep coma, but there were no indications of grave damage to his central nervous system. Axford had placed him on a nutrient drip, but more aggressive intervention seemed unwise. The fever was abating, although his temperature was still a cause for concern. Scans were inconclusive: there was no sign of the glioblastoma, but his brain was awash with chemical and electrical activity, all of which clouded Axford’s view of the real damage.
So they watched, and waited, and hoped.
Days passed, then a week. The fever vanished. Axford ran more scans and found the fog clearing: familiar brain structures began to emerge from the chaos. The blastoma was gone. It was as if it had never been there: perfect symmetry had been restored across the commissure. Axford compared the new scans with the old printouts in his medical records. The new scans looked like images of a younger brain, before the disease had taken hold. No surgeon would ever have been able to guess at the distortion Chisholm’s brain had suffered in the final months before he had become a Frost Angel.
Axford refrained from hypothesizing, refusing to speculate about how the aliens had repaired the damage: for all he knew, they’d simply filled in the missing brain tissue, like builders bricking up a gap in a wall
; or perhaps they had re-grown Chisholm’s entire body using the template provided by the frozen corpse Svetlana had carried into the ship.
Whatever the aliens had done, Svetlana was sure of one thing: they had returned Jim Chisholm to them. But the face she had looked into across the table had been more like that of the younger brother of the man she had known, not the man himself. And she did not know that younger brother at all.
TWENTY-FOUR
Jim Chisholm came out of the coma on the ninth day. He opened his eyes and asked the duty nurse — Judy Sugimoto that shift — if he might have a glass of water.
Sugimoto roused Axford. Axford was still rubbing sleep out of his, eyes when Svetlana arrived, with Parry in tow.
“How do you feel, Jim?” Axford asked, while Sugimoto helped him sit up in bed and swabbed his lips.
“I feel fine. Much better than before.” He looked around at the wary faces of the welcoming party. Nine days on, Axford’s nutrient line had filled out some of the contours around Chisholm’s face and skull. His scalp was shadowed with re-growing stubble, although Axford had taken care to shave his beard, the way Chisholm had always done. Chisholm smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry if I alarmed anyone.”
“We weren’t alarmed, just concerned,” Svetlana said. “Do you remember much of what happened in Underhole?”
He blew out. “Oh, yes. As if it happened yesterday. Which it didn’t, of course. How long ago was that, exactly?”
“About nine days,” Svetlana said.
“It doesn’t feel like it. I remember falling from the sky, sitting at the table, mistaking you for Bella —” He pursed his lips and shook abashed. “I’m sorry about that. It’s just that you all look a little older than I remember. And you always did look a little like Bella, Svetlana.”
“It’s okay, Jim,” Svetlana said, smiling to let him know that she had taken no offence. It was so strange to be talking to him — so strange that, even as it was happening, she could not honestly say that it was pleasurable. This was uncharted emotional territory, and the further she went into it the more adrift she felt. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. Hoping it sounded sincere, she said, “It’s just good to have you back with us.”