Black Man / Thirteen

PROLOGUE: HOMEWARD BOUND

Gleaming steel, gleaming steel…

Larsen blinks and shifts slightly on the automated gurney as it tracks under a linear succession of lighting panels and lateral roof struts. Recognition smears in with vision, blurry and slow; she’s in the dorsal corridor. Overhead, light angles off each metal beam, sliding from glint to full-blown burst and back as she passes below. She supposes it’s the repeated glare that’s woken her. That, or her knee, which is aching ferociously, even through the accustomed groggy swim of the decanting drugs. One hand rests on her chest, pressing into the thin fabric of the cryocap leotard. Cool air on her skin tells her she’s otherwise naked. An eerie sense of déjà vu steals over her with the knowledge. She coughs a little, tiny remnants of tank gel in the bottom of her pumped-out lungs. She shifts again, mumbles something to herself.

…not again…?

“Again, yes. The cormorant’s legacy, yes, again.”

That’s odd. She didn’t expect another voice, least of all one talking in riddles. Decanting’s usually a wholly mechanized process, the datahead’s programmed to wake them before arrival, and unless something’s gone wrong…

So you’re the big expert on cryocapping now, are you?

She isn’t—her entire previous experience comes down to three test decantings and the one real deal at journey’s end on the voyage out, whence, she supposes, the déjà vu. But still…

…more than three…

…it is not more, it is not…

The vehemence in the retort has a ragged edge on it that she doesn’t like. If she’d heard it in another person’s voice, a test subject’s voice, say, she’d be thinking sedatives, maybe even a call to security. In her own thoughts, it’s suddenly, intimately chilling, like the realization that there’s someone in the house with you, someone you didn’t invite in. Like the thought out of nowhere that you might not be wholly sane.

This is the drugs, Ellie. Let go, ride it out.

Gleaming stee—

The autogurney bumps slightly as it takes a right turn. For some reason, it sets off a violent jolt in her pulse, a reaction that, drugged, she labels almost idly as panic. A tremor of impending doom trickles through her like cold water. They’re going to crash, they’re going to hit something, or something’s going to hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end-over-end through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn’t safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn’t—

Let go, Ellie. It’s the drugs.

Then she realizes where she is. The autosurgeon’s folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of her vision as the gurney slots into position on the examination rack. A qualified relief seeps into her. Something’s wrong, but she’s in the right place. Horkan’s Pride is equipped with the finest automated medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she’s read it in a Colony News digest, the whole shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And look, there’s a limit to what can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl, and so does anything hostile that you might be carrying.

But the panic, the sense of inescapable nemesis, won’t let her go. She feels it dull and insistent, like a dog worrying at an anesthetized limb.

She rolls her head sideways on the gurney, and sees him.

More familiarity, sharper now, jolting through her like current.

Once, on a trip to Europe, she went to the Museo della Sindone in Turin and saw the tortured image printed on cloth that they keep there. She stood in dimness on the other side of the bulletproof glass, surrounded by the reverent murmurs of the faithful. Never a believer of any sort herself, Larsen was still oddly moved by the harsh and hollow lines of the face staring back at her out of the sealed vacuum chamber. It seemed a testament to human suffering that completely short-circuited its divine pretensions, that rendered the devotions paid it beside the point. You looked at that face and you were struck by the sheer stubborn survivability of organic life, the heritage of built-in, bitten-down defiance that the long march of evolution had gifted you with.

It could be the same man. Here, now.

He’s propped against a tall corner cabinet, staring at her, rope-sinewed arms folded across a cage-gaunt chest whose ribs she can see even through the T-shirt he wears, long straight hair hanging either side of narrow features drawn even thinner with pain and want. His mouth is a clamped line, etched in between the sharp chin and blade-boned nose. Hollows cling under the bones in his cheeks.

Her heart surges sluggishly in her chest as she meets his eyes.

“Is it—” With the words, an awful understanding is welling up inside her now, a monstrous recognition that her conscious mind is still sprinting hard ahead to evade. “Is it my knee? My leg?”

Out of somewhere, abruptly, she finds strength, she props herself up on her elbows, she forces herself to look.

Sight collides with recollection.

The scream shrills up out of her, rips momentarily through the cobwebby drapery of the drugs in her system. She can’t know how weak it sounds in the cold dimensions of the surgery, inside her it seems to splinter in her ears, and the knowledge that comes with it is a blackening of vision that threatens to suck her away. She is not, she knows, screaming at what she can see;

Not at the neatly bandaged stump where her right thigh ends twenty centimeters below her hip; not that.

Not at the stabbed-home comprehension that the ache in her knee is a phantom pain in a limb she no longer owns; not that.

She’s screaming at memory.

The memory of the gurney ride along the quiet corridor, the soft bump and turn into the surgery, and then, veiled in the drug haze, the rising whine of the saw blade, the grating slip in tone as it bites, and the small, suckling sizzle of the cauterizing laser that comes after. The memory of the last time, and the sickening, down-plunging understanding that it’s all about to happen again.

“No,” she husks. “Please.”

A long-fingered hand presses warmly down on her forehead. The Turin shroud countenance looms above her.

“Shshshsh…the cormorant knows why…”

Past the face, she sees movement. Knows it from memory for what it is. The stealthy, unflexing spider-leg motions of the autosurgeon as it wakes.

Gleaming steel…