Tales From Across Space

TALES FROM ACROSS SPACE

KATE MACLEOD

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CONTENTS

Required to Assist

Sword and Tattoo

Being Neighborly

Tumbling Up

Death Spiral

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About the Author

Also by Kate MacLeod

REQUIRED TO ASSIST

Shifting from a lack of awareness of anything to a vague feeling of warmth and comfort is not really waking up. And I guess I was half-sensing someone calling my name, but that warmth was so, well, comforting, I just wanted to sink back down in it.

And then my sinuses filled with the assault of ammonia and I was up, not just awake but sitting up, pushing the offending source away from my face as I struggled to scramble back from it. That was harder to do than it ought to be, my muscles still lax from the long hibernation, my joints not as young as they used to be. So I just flailed.

Miss Lorna, please be calm.

The voice had an odd tone to it, a deep yet vaguely female voice, but too deliberately soothing. I had opened my eyes when the ammonia fumes had hit me, but it was still too bright to see, and I was blinking madly, trying to decide between the pain of eyes open and the confusing lack of information of eyes closed.

I was still flailing. Someone was near me, someone was assaulting me with horrible smells, and yet I didn't know where they were.

Please be calm, Miss Lorna, the voice said with more urgency. I do apologize for startling you. Often if I remain motionless for too long humans forget that I am there. I have startled many people, I am sorry.

Get rid of the smell! I all but shrieked.

It is already gone. Just take a few deep breaths, Miss Lorna.

Don't call me that, I said, but I stopped flailing. I threw my legs over the side of the metal table I was sitting on – not cold, there must be a heater beneath it keeping it at just the right soothing temperature – and let my head fall forward then slowly opened my eyes. No longer staring straight into the lights, they finally had a chance to adjust. A field of white came into focus, then I saw the speckles of shiny gray embedded in the white and realized I was looking at the usual flooring of a medical bay.

Would you prefer Miss Wincott?

Lorna is fine, I said. Just Lorna. No miss. I raised my head to see narrow feet in shiny white boots. My gaze traveled up past the knees where the boots didn't end, then past the hips that still seemed to be covered in shiny white pleather. At that point I stopped trying to make sense of it, some androgynous form covered in pleather, but when I reached the shiny, white head, the features merely suggested by indentations in the planes of the face – no mouth or to eyes or ears or nostrils to speak of, just bumps and indentations to suggest where such things might be – my brain finally settled on android.

How are you feeling, Lorna? the android asked me, leaving just the slightest gap before my name so I could still feel the miss there.

I'm all right, I said, running my hands over my face then through my inch-long hair. They had cut it short just before they had put me in hibernation. That felt like minutes ago. Why am I awake?

There has been an incident which triggered the protocol to rouse you, the android said.

Protocol, I repeated. I wish it would find smaller words. I didn't know how many decades I had been asleep, but the brain fog was lingering something fierce.

Are you having memory difficulties? Do you recall the agreement you signed with Generations Corp?

I recall, I said with a sigh. The only way I could afford a ticket on this ride to a new world: I had volunteered to be the emergency responder for the flight. If a problem arose that the ship's computer systems could not resolve, it was programmed to wake a human. In this case: me.

The training had been… interesting. It spanned a week, but somewhere in the second day, my trainer looked up from his materials to say to me, you realize of course that everything I'm telling you the computer already knows how to resolve? Anything you'd be roused to deal with is frankly beyond our ability to predict.

At the time I had taken that as meaning there was little likelihood I'd be awakened at all, and he had agreed it was a remote possibility.

And yet here I was.

Would you like to see the data we've collected for you, Lorna? Again with that little pause. Data. That sounded like a good place to start. I had compiled data to earn my paychecks back on Earth. Not terribly exciting work, but it had paid the bills.

Yes, the data, I said, but then, You know what? In a bit. First I need tea. A proper cup of tea.

I shall fetch one for you, the android said.

No, I said, finally raising my head to look right at its expressionless face. No, just point me in the direction. I'll make my own.

Are you ready to walk?

I pushed off the table, my stocking feet hitting the floor. I was a bit wobbly at first, but a few steps in I had it.

The android had a smooth, gliding gait like a debutante from another age who had practiced for years walking with a book on her head. It was also fast, slipping past me to take the lead which was just as well since I didn't know where I was going. I kept a few fingertips brushing against the wall in case my balance abandoned me, but I found myself getting stronger the more I moved. The effects of some of the stimulants I had been given during the rousing procedure, I remembered that much from my training.

I had been put under while still on Earth, the sleep coffin with my body in it being launched up into space and slotted into its spot on the generation ship while I was already sleeping the sleep of the next-to-dead. I had seen brochures but hadn't paid much attention to them. I had been the last passenger to sign on, the ship unable to leave for its colonial destination without a person willing to be woken in case of emergency and possibly not put under again. People with families didn't want to reach their new home with Mom or Dad suddenly a century older or even dead.

I didn't have a family. I just wanted to get off the Earth, to leave that whole world behind. The details of the ship, even of the world we were heading to hadn't mattered as much as just leaving.

I found the reality of the ship much larger than I had imagined from the pictures I had glanced at. Everything was shiny and white, not just the android, and would be impossible to keep clean if all the humans in its holds were awake and moving around, touching things with their oily hands and filling the air with their dander. Now that my eyes were adjusting the light felt less harsh, more a soft glow that didn't have to work too hard to fill such gleaming spaces. I heard a whirr behind me and glanced back to see a cleaning robot polishing the floor. The sound its motor made was like it was humming to itself while it worked, never quite finding a tune but merrily in search of one.

We have a variety of foodstuff available for your use, Lorna, the