Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [11]
“For what?” Solari prompted.
She took up the sentence readily enough, if a trifle guardedly. “For the sense of unease and disorientation that seems to have taken near-permanent hold of many of the surface-dwellers,” she said.
“Near-permanent?” Matthew queried.
“We believe that it will wear off eventually,” she insisted, before hurling herself back into her work with a concentration that excluded further inquiry. Matthew wondered whether she really counted herself part of that particular we.
Dr. Brownell had seemed relentless in her pursuit of possible gaps in their memories and possible failings of intellectual ability, but that had not been her primary field of expertise. Now that she was checking on the efficiency of their organs and metabolic pathways she had stepped up another gear. She had been bare-headed before but she was wearing a tiara now with side-lenses placed at the edges of her peripheral vision, and her eyes were constantly flicking back and forth as they read the data transmitted to the tiny screens. Some of it was reportage of tests carried out elsewhere, on samples extracted from the newly defrosted bodies, but most was the result of “live” transmission from the cleverer elements of their Internal Technology as they put the various parts of their bodies through a battery of tests.
“There’s a certain amount of peripheral cell-failure in most of your tissues,” she told them both, when they collapsed back on to their beds, their tiredness transformed to utter exhaustion, “but you’ve both been lucky. Because the vitrification and cooling processes proceeded unevenly, and there was a similar unevenness in their undoing, there’s always a slight problem at every tissue-boundary, especially where the cells are unalike, but neither of you has suffered unusually heavy losses anywhere. Vincent’s worst problems are in the dermal layers, while Matthew’s are the shrouds of the long bones, but both deficits should be fully remedied in a matter of days.
“Your alimentary canals and kidneys will take longer to make up the shortfall and flush out the debris, so you might both have some slight trouble with your digestive systems. I won’t program your IT to blot out the discomfort because I may need all the warning signs I can get. Don’t get paranoid about slight bellyaches, but if there’s any sign of allergic reactions of any kind let me know immediately. The tailors are already at work on your surface suits. We won’t be fitting them today but they’ll have to be well grown-in before you’re ready to shuttle down. This part of the ship is supposedly an ultrasafe environment, so we won’t be issuing you with specialized ship suits at all—but when I say supposedly I mean that we can’t be absolutely certain, so it might not be wise to go wandering around, and certainly not without a guide.”
“What’s wrong with the other parts of the ship?” Solari wanted to know.
Again, it was Leitz who answered what appeared to be a ticklish question. “We’ve suffered some systems failures,” he said. “Their effects are variable, but we’ve been forced to close some sections temporarily. Even the sections over which we have full control can be hazardous to non-crew members, though. The ship isn’t a homogenous environment, of course, even within the inner shell. When you came aboard it was probably no more than a glorified steel box, but once we’d hitched a ride in the comet core the hybrid began to evolve, and it’s been evolving ever since. Seven hundred years is a long time in the history of a world as small as this one, and we’ve been making progress all the while. It’s not just a matter of needing suits to go out into the ice—there are a dozen intermediary regions, and only a couple are exclusively AI territory. You’ll find the surface very strange, Inspector Solari, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that Hope is a little slice of home. In its own fashion, it’s a good deal stranger. If the people below understood that better, none of them would be laboring under