Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [69]
"We came to see Tanaka-san," Jin explained. "It's important."
"She's busy right now"-Tenbury jerked a thumb at the room beyond-"but they should be done soon."
Raven craned his neck to peer through a narrow glass window in the door. "Ah, cryoprep in progress? I'd like to see that."
"Raven-sensei's a doctor. From Escobar," Jin began. Tenbury looked perturbed, and began to speak. Miles cut the debate short by simply knocking.
The knock was answered by a frowning woman, brown skin like old leather, spare of build and with straight white hair where Suze was stout and frizzy, but of a like age, Miles judged, and without the alcohol fumes. Her face lightened when she saw Jin.
"Ah, you're found, Jin! And who have your creatures savaged now, and can it wait?"
"No one, Tanaka-san. But it's kind of urgent. Suze-san sent us over."
Miles let Jin run through his introductions, at which the boy was becoming nicely practiced. He picked up: "We've made arrangements with Madame Suze to use your facilities for a private cryorevival, if they meet Dr. Durona's needs. May we come in?"
"Huh!" she said, and gave way, staring at Raven. Miles wondered if he'd rumpled Raven's clothes, mussed his neat hair, and doused him with gin if he would have seemed less out of place, here, less alarming to these people. Too late.
On a table standing out from the far wall lay the naked body of a frail old man, detained, Miles thought, at the border crossing between life and death. A sheet draped across his middle lent him a scrap of dignity, as much as one could have when given over to plastic tubes and the will or whim of others. A cold-blanket wrapped around his skull sped the chilling of his brain. A tube from a tank above, divided partway down, ran a clear liquid into both carotid arteries. A wider tube, from a vein in his thigh, ran a dark pink color to a knee-height tub with a drain, with a trickle of water from a spout above to keep things flowing. Judging from the paleness of the skin and nails, and the color of the murky exit fluid, the old body was almost wholly perfused with cryo-solution.
Ako hovered, closely supervising the process; she'd evidently overheard something through the doorway, because she looked up and said excitedly, "A doctor? We're getting a real doctor?"
Miles waved down this hope, before it could grow big and bite. "Just visiting. We'll explain it all when you're finished, here."
Jin was staring; Miles wondered how disturbing this process was to the boy, or if he'd seen it before. It was disturbing to Miles, and he'd done it before, or had it done to him. Maybe the more unsettling for that? For the first time, he wondered how much the news of his own encounter with the needle-grenade had felt like history repeats to his father, if it had triggered unwelcome old memories of the Princess-and-Countess Olivia's messy death. I must apologize to him for that, when next we meet.
"It almost seems too simple," Miles murmured to Raven.
Raven said, "The complexity lies in the cryo-preservation fluid, which has a whole pharmaceutical facility behind it. Or so one trusts. Where are you getting your cryo-fluid, Madame Tanaka?"
The medtech's old mouth set in a flat smile. "The concentrate falls off the back of a few loading docks of hospitals here in town. They discard their outdated supplies a couple of times a year. We distill our own water to reconstitute it."
Miles's brows rose. "Is that, um . . . all right? Medically?"
Raven shrugged. "If the use-by dating is fairly conservative, yes."
It was not, Miles supposed, a choice between discarded fluid and fresh, but between discarded and none. He was reminded again that this place was a parasite operation, clinging to the underbelly of a more functional economy, without which it could not continue to exist. Granted, if its host economy functioned rather better, it wouldn't need to exist.
Medical sensors blinked timing lights. Ako withdrew the tubes and sealed the entry and exit incisions with plastic bandage,