Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [79]
“Who are you? Where am I?” His lips moved slowly, with careful deliberation, as if each syllable had to be constructed and approved by a separate portion of his brain before he attempted its actual verbalization.
“You’re in Golman Memorial Hospital, South Pacific Region. I am your duty nurse, Irene Tse.”
“I’d shake your hand, Irene, but you told me not to stress myself.” A different sort of smile this time, more calculating, reflective of looming uncertainties. “I don’t like taking orders, but you I think I’ll listen to. Not because I have to, but because it pleases me.” Defying her admonition, he raised his head again, holding it up longer this time. With each movement, each word, he seemed to grow stronger, not weaker. “You said ‘South Pacific Region.’ I’m on Earth?”
As she glanced over at his readouts in what she hoped was an inconspicuous manner, she did not comment on the obvious. He looked around, inspecting the room.
“How long have I been asleep?” His eyebrows tried to knot. “They must have knocked me out for the jump here.”
“No one knocked you out. You traveled to Earth and arrived here in a cataleptic state.” Reflexively, she put a hand on his lower arm. “As of this morning, you’ve been here in hospital thirty-four days.”
“Thirty-four…?” Leaning back against the pillow, he gazed pensively at the ceiling. “Not asleep. In coma.” She nodded gravely. “I didn’t wake up at all? I mean, if I did I don’t remember it, but it’s hard to think of being unconscious all that time. I don’t feel like I’ve been out for more than a day or two.”
“The mind plays wonderful tricks on the body.” She smiled reassuringly. “Sometimes the body plays back.”
She was acutely aware of the omnidirectional pickups that were judiciously placed around the room, of the fact that everything that was being said or done was being observed and recorded by a multitude of devices. It shamed her. Whatever he had gone through, this man deserved his privacy. It might never be given back to him, she knew. Issues of an order of magnitude greater than the personal desires of one man were at stake.
“Who found me?” Though he had asked a question, it seemed to her that his thoughts were concentrated elsewhere. He had posed it almost absently.
“I don’t know.” Before she could finish, her recorder vibrated gently against her. Removing it, she found information on the remotely activated page. “Some people called the Unop-Patha. A minor race about which not much is known except that they’re shy and inoffensive. They just happened to be in the right place to pick up the signal from your ship.” A line of questions appeared on the screen immediately after this information. Consenting only to the first, she firmly tucked the recorder back in its holder. “I understand that the vessel they found you in was of an old, discontinued type and wasn’t in very good condition.”
He laughed then, a good sign. It was followed by a spate of coughing that was not. Unable to raise his hand all the way to manage it, he let her slip the drinking tube between his lips. When she felt he’d had enough, she gently withdrew it from his mouth.
“That’s enough for now. You’ve been on osmotics for a long time, and you don’t want to shock your system with too much real drink and food too soon.”
“Yes I do,” he shot back. “I want to shock the hell out of it. I want tea, and coffee, and twenty-year-old bourbon. I want fish, and canned goods, and crispy vegetables, and cremated dead cow.”
Her mouth was firm. “How about some applesauce?”
“How about you—?” He broke off his rejoinder and inhaled deeply, slowly. “I can’t argue with you. I can’t argue with anybody right now. ‘Applesauce’!” Astonishingly, his expression grew mischievous. It was about the last thing she would have expected. “Will you feed it to me?”
Mindful of their significant unseen audience, she kept her response coolly professional. “That is part of my job.”
“Good! Then I will have some applesauce.”
When he said nothing more, she hazarded a cautious prompt. “Don’t you want to talk some more?”
Now he was grinning broadly.