Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [81]
Without warning, he began to tremble, the covering sheet shivering above his torso like rapidly advancing bleached fog. The contrast between his strengthening voice and frail body could not have been more dramatic. When she started to rise, he lifted an arm to detain her.
“I’m all right,” he whispered shakily. “I’m all right.” His expression pleaded. “Would you—I swear I’m not trying anything here—would you just, hold me? For a moment. Just…hold me.”
Rising from her chair, she tentatively took a seat on the bed alongside him. Bending low, she put her arms around his shoulders. Immediately his head slid into the crook of her arm, like a bird finding its nest. Hesitant at first, she brought her legs up onto the bed and slid them carefully next to his. Then she lay down beside him.
More than an hour had passed when she awoke, quietly surprised to discover that she had fallen asleep next to him. Around her the machines ticked and whispered. The room was unchanged. No one had disturbed them.
Moving her head, she found that he was awake, staring at her, his eyes swallowing every inch of her as if she were a cool, invigorating potion, a silent libation for the soul. Uncertain and a little confused at what she was feeling, she sat up quickly on the side of the bed.
“Relax. Take it easy,” he told her. Then he smiled afresh. “Hey, did you hear what I just said? Me, telling you to relax and take it easy. Want me to check your vitals?”
She had to smile back. This man, who had obviously been through an experience too horrible to imagine, was irrepressible. She found herself liking him instead of pitying him. He sensed the shift in her attitude and was pleased.
“So you became a citizen of Treetrunk.” She rested a hand on his upper arm, not entirely for therapeutic purposes this time.
“Yes,” he told her. The smile faded away, and he began to shake again. In response to her look of alarm he willed his body to relax, forced the muscles to still. “It’s okay. I’m not going to scream again.”
She blinked. “You remember screaming?”
“I remember.” He nodded. “I just couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to stop it. It was so easy, to scream. It blotted everything out. A little.” He began to fidget beneath the sheet. “I’m sick of lying down. Help me sit up.”
Immediately she reached for the bed’s remote. “I can raise you to any angle you—”
“No, goddammit!” He was emphatic. “I want to sit up! Me, not the damn bed.”
She assisted him, wondering as she did so what Dr. Chimbu would have to say about stressing the patient. But no one interrupted them, either in person or via communicator, and with her aid in a couple of minutes he was sitting up straight, his back propped against the pillows.
“How do you feel?” Her concern was a mixture of professionalism and—something else. “Any nausea? That would be normal.”
“Not for me it wouldn’t. A little dizzy, maybe. That’s all.” Looking past her, his gaze focused for the first time on the view through the room’s large window. From his location in a top-floor corner of the hospital he could see palm trees and ships in the harbor and the blue, blue water of a tropical sea. A flock of flying foxes was flapping from east to west over the harbor, a dark motile cloud scattered among towering white cumulus.
Turning to her, he asked in a calm, quiet voice and without warning, “Would you like to know what happened to my adopted home? To Argus Five, also known as Treetrunk?”
Down in Central, and in linked monitoring stations all across the globe, instant pandemonium ensued.
13
It was a good life. Mallory was happy with his decision to resign his position on the Chagos in order to become one of the first settlers of the new world. That choice would not make him rich, but perhaps his progeny, if he ever had any, would one day find it useful to be able to boast that their great-grandfather,