Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [75]
That the patient was someone special was evident not only from the parade of specialists who visited his room but from the presence of the two plainclothes guards who were always present outside his door. These men and women were polite but uninformative, insisting to inquisitive staff that they had no more idea who the man in room fifty-four’s bed was than they did. They had been assigned to watch and protect. There was no need for them to know anything more, and frankly, they preferred it that way.
So the equatorial days slid into equatorial nights, with the tropical sun dropping systematically behind the distant high island of New Hanover, without more than a few people at the very top level of hospital administration knowing that the silent, unimpressive figure who lay motionless in corner room fifty-four was the most important patient on the entire planet.
Certainly Irene Tse was unaware of his prominence. Unlike some of her colleagues, she worked the graveyard shift because it allowed her to spend many of her daylight hours diving. Wearing their compact rebreathers, she and her friends would spend endless hours in the waters framing the dozens of small islands that speckled the ocean surrounding New Ireland and New Hanover, observing what was still the world’s most diverse and impressive aggregation of underwater life. Widowed at twenty-three when her husband had been crushed in a stampede of panicked three hundred kilo bluefin tuna, at thirty she had yet to remarry. A lively and spirited personality, she had been attracted to a number of men and several women, but attraction was not love, affection not passion.
As far as the motionless man in fifty-four was concerned, identified on his charts as a Mr. Jones, to her he was just another patient who needed to be cared for, an insensible lump of humanity who might or might not one day emerge to a greater or lesser degree from his present state of catalepsy. At two o’clock in the morning she greeted the guards, both of whom were engrossed in watching a live windsand race from central Asia. Even though they all knew each other by sight now, she was required to produce her ident as well as being physically recognized by both retinal and heartwave scanners.
Once passed into the room, she began by checking the monitors. It was not necessary for her to record their readings, as these were transmitted directly to the hospital’s central monitoring facility. Activating the levitator, she changed the bed and sponge-bathed the patient while he hung suspended in the field, the atoms of his body temporarily magnetized. When she shut down the field he was lowered gently in fresh hospital gown onto the newly changed bed.
She was preparing to move the osmotic fluid injector to a new area of his torso when she felt something touch her arm.
She might have stopped breathing for a second or two. She wasn’t sure. What she was certain of was that fingers had moved against her skin. Looking down, she saw that the patient’s left hand had brushed her wrist. Fallen against it, no doubt. As she was preparing to make a note of the phenomenon, two of the fingers, the middle and the index, rose. Trembling, they lightly grazed her for a second time before falling back, as if exhausted by their own nominal weight.
Looking up, she saw that the two fingers were not all that had moved. The patient’s head