Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [9]
“You could turn the TV on,” Matthew said. “I’d like to catch the next news bulletin.”
“We don’t have broadcast TV,” the youth informed him. “The captain broadcasts occasionally, but we don’t need routine news bulletins. Everybody knows everybody. All we have to do is talk to one another.”
“What about the people on the ground?” Matthew asked.
“They make their reports, of course. They all have beltphones, just like on Earth. We’ve established a chain of comsats. But Base One doesn’t have broadcast TV either. There’s no need. We have VE-hoods for entertainment. I’m sorry—I hear that you used to be on TV a lot, on Earth.”
The youth said it as if he were trying to frame a compliment, but Matthew couldn’t hear it as one. He might have been slightly flattered to think that his reputation had preceded him, even at this distance from Earth and the twenty-first century, but his mind was elsewhere. To him, not having broadcast TV—not even having news—seemed a far more significant symptom of a breakdown in communication than the fact that the doctor was reluctant to talk to him and that a cabin boy had been sent to answer his immediate questions.
“Things have gone wrong, haven’t they,” he murmured. “Badly wrong.”
Frans Leitz blushed again, but the blush seemed as odd and unhealthy as its predecessor. “No,” he said. “Not really. Not yet. But they might, if the people on the surface can’t see sense. Everything depends on them—on their willingness to do what they came to do.”
“After seven hundred years of SusAn, they’re not sure whether they’re willing to do what they risked everything to do? Surely you mean their ability to do it?”
“Well, that’s what they say, of course,” the young crewman replied, ingenuously. “But it’s only a matter of determination. It is an Earth-clone world, even though it’s a little peculiar. Maybe you’ll be able to make them see that, Professor Fleury. We certainly have an urgent need for somebody who can.”
THREE
Matthew was enthusiastic to try out his legs, but Nita Brownell seemed to be in no hurry to complete the disconnection process and let him get out of bed. Frans Leitz helped her, with an easy alacrity. The fact that the young man had obviously been trained to operate as a medical orderly made Matthew feel slightly guilty about continuing to think of him as a “cabin boy” but it didn’t stop him doing it.
The moment he was released from the machines Matthew tried to spring into action, but immediately realized that his mental tiredness was a symptom of a general physical weakness. It was astonishingly difficult to sit up, let alone to step down to the floor.
When Matthew expressed surprise at his weakness, Nita Brownell—who was perfectly willing to be loquacious about purely medical matters—explained that the vitrifying agent that had protected his cells from damage while he was frozen down had only been able to preserve the basic structures. Many of the proteins involved in routine cell metabolism had suffered degradation, and had therefore required replacement. Unfortunately, the messenger-RNA system for transcribing exons from nuclear DNA and establishing templates in the cytoplasm had also been partly disabled, and was not yet fully restored.
“You must have been warned before going into SusAn that we couldn’t just defrost you,” she told him sternly, as if it were his fault that he had not remembered that particular item of information. “We had to give your cells time to get their internal acts together, and then restore function to your tissues. Even with IT support, it’s been a slow process. The machines kept you asleep as long as possible, but the final phases of the tune-up have to be completed while you’re alert and active. You’ll feel a lot better in a few hours, and you’ll probably be able to leave the room this time tomorrow. You’ll be shuttling down as soon as possible—within fifty hours, if all goes well.”
“Fifty hours!” Matthew exclaimed.