Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [80]
Afterward he slept, ignorant of the frenzy of activity his awakening had galvanized within government and military circles. Indifferent to a flood of entreaties, she refused to wake him early or otherwise intrude on the peacefulness that seemed to have come over the rechristened Alwyn Mallory. True to his word, Dr. Chimbu and the rest of the medical team supervising the precious patient’s care backed her decision.
Two more days passed in recovery for Mallory. Two days during which the inner workings of government lurched forward in a state of semiparalysis. Two days in which extraordinary efforts somehow succeeded in keeping an always ravenous media ignorant of the lone man in room fifty-four of the Golman Memorial Hospital on the island of New Ireland. The intentional isolation helped. Even in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century, New Ireland was not an easy place to visit.
In those forty-eight hours Mallory went from barely being able to raise his head to being able to feed himself, from hesitating in the clouded search for words to talking voluminously. His apparent progress was underlain by the very real medical fear that he could lapse back into coma at any moment. Chimbu and others put their careers on the line by supporting nurse Tse’s determination not to pressure the man in their care for details or ask if he knew anything about what had happened on Treetrunk.
Following lunch on the third day, her forbearance and the medical staff’s conviction were rewarded.
“A couple of days ago, when I mentioned the kind of ship you’d been found in, you laughed at me.” She came toward the bed, having just dumped his lunch dishes and utensils in the room’s recycler.
This time he only chuckled. “I remember. You said that it was old and not in very good condition. That’s hardly surprising.” When he was alert, like now, she found that his eyes had a wonderful twinkle. “It was an old lifeboat, freighter class. I got it cheap, since the masters of the cargo ship that left it behind on Treetrunk knew it would cost too much to renovate it to the point where it could pass a safety-board inspection again. Fixing it up, puttering around with its innards, was my hobby. Kept me busy whenever I started to think too much. I never expected it to actually fly anywhere again, much less offworld.” His gaze met hers. “Did you know that I was a member of the original survey team of the Chagos?”
The name meant nothing to her, and she told him so. Down in Central, where hospital communications had been linked in half a dozen ways with centers of power all across the planet, technicians scrambled while several of their superiors digested the patient’s disclosure in stunned silence.
To Mallory, however, the innocently ignorant Tse clearly required elaboration. “The Chagos was the starship that discovered and carried out the first surveys of Treetrunk. Since there was no reason for the people who brought me from there to here to presume that kind of personal connection, I guess no one made it. Also, I used to space under the name Alwyn Lleywynth.” He grinned. “Finally got tired of people not being able to spell or say it, and had it changed officially when I settled on Treetrunk.”
“That’s interesting,” she told him, nodding. “I have a feeling that you’re right and that no one made the connection.” They would be making it now, she knew without a glance at any of the pickups. Making connections and trying to draw conclusions.
“I was good at what I did. I’m also an accomplished bitcher, which didn’t endear me to many of my colleagues, I’m afraid. But in spite of my customary complaining, I liked Treetrunk. Liked it a lot. Enough to ask for my release and stay behind when the Chagos finally left. I helped build the place, worked on some of the first infrastructure for Weald and a lot of smaller towns. Always kept to myself as much as I could, though. I didn’t much care to be around people. It was one of the reasons I originally went into deep space. It was one of the reasons I chose a new world to be my home and final