Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [80]
‘S’ all right,’ he called over his shoulder to Tekton. ‘They’re just taking you to the medi-lab. I’ll be seein’ you soon.’
Tekton concealed his fear at being separated from Hob and let free-mind immerse itself in the exotic and original design touches of the central reception area; the free-floating mezzanine and retractable walkway, the pond water sculptures that periodically turned to ice statues, and most importantly, the staggered skylights that flooded artificial light into the atrium in intricate, specially conceived patterns.
My skylights, thought Tekton with pride. Mine. His chest swelled as he watched the delicate dappling effect that moved across the floor. Imagine how it would look under true solar rays.
Tekton was possessed by a sudden mad compulsion. Ampere or Murex, or whatever it should now be called, must see sunlight again. It must.
The balols, however, were not mindful of Tekton’s private ecstasy and hurried him across the atrium to the escalators. They descended several floors and walked another distance into an area where the lights were not as bright, and the decor less impressive.
They pushed him through a set of sliding doors into a grey room fitted with the standard range of medi-equipment. One wall of the room was lined with retractable bed-cubes.
A humanesque attendant approached him, eyeing the wounds weeping through onto his dishevelled and tattered robe. ‘You’d better get yourself over on a bed while we take a look at those legs,’ said the attendant in clear Gal.
Tekton nodded with relief. Now that he was here, in something resembling proper care, he suddenly noticed how much the cuts throbbed and how nauseous he felt.
No need to suppress the pain now, logic-mind informed him in a cool tone.
He tottered over towards the bed-cubes but his eyes began to play tricks. The wall wavered, beds slipped in and out of their slots and grey patches appeared and disappeared before his eyes, heightening his sick feeling.
In desperation he fell upon the closest bed, unaware that it was already occupied.
The attendant shouted for him to stop, but he’d already lifted a knee onto the mattress and was falling forward. The momentum seemed to tip his nausea past the non-returnable point and he vomited the residue of his last meal onto the feet and legs of the occupant.
His eyes cleared after that, the grey patches abating.
An angry, surprised and horrified face confronted him. A face, surprisingly, that he knew.
‘Thales Berniere,’ said Tekton, spitting little bits of vomit from his mouth. ‘Heavens to Crux. What are you doing here?’
JO-JO RASTEROVICH
Diving into the clamour without a particular tone or voice to focus upon was like being drowned in noise; so loud and so blurred that it caught the sides of his throat and sucked them together. Only Jo-Jo couldn’t feel the sides of his throat, didn’t even know if he still had one. Was the sensation imaginary? He did have a vague sense of breath - but that could well have been hindbrain memories.
As he grappled with the auditory explosion, part of his mind ventured further with that notion. He hadn’t wanted to think about it properly before, but Rast’s fear had sparked a deep survival instinct. He had to face all the possibilities.
His knowledge of the Extras’ transformation procedures - like the rest of Orion’s - was sketchy. He thought he’d heard that their trans-processes varied, dependent on what form of Post-Species sentience they wished to attain. There were the typical Extras that used a Host body, and then there were these guys; the bodiless kind.
The very first Post-Species experiments had been on humanesques, but aliens joined them quickly enough. Where their practices had taken them since then Jo-Jo could only guess. Were there second-, third-, fourth-generation Extras? Or did their population - if you could