The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [158]
Once underwater, Ranjit and Myra paused to inspect an elaborate doorway. Ranjit was giving his wife a mock-reproachful shake of the head as he traced a crack that defaced the lotus carvings, when the light above them suddenly dimmed.
Looking up through the brilliantly clear water, Ranjit saw an enormous shape passing just above them.
“It’s a whale shark!” he shouted through his aquaphone, so loudly that his voice was distorted into something resembling the old monk’s as reshaped by his throat mike. “Let’s go and make friends with it!”
Myra grinned and nodded. It was not the first time she and Ranjit had encountered these huge and entirely harmless plankton eaters in the waters around Trincomalee. As much as ten meters long, they were capital ships attended by a retinue of remoras, some attached to them by their suction pads, others swimming hopefully near the enormous mouths in the expectation of table scraps to feast on.
Ranjit started to inflate his buoyancy compensator, rising slowly up the shot line. He expected that Myra would follow at the same pace and was startled when he heard her voice, tightly controlled but clearly under a strain. “Something’s wrong with my inflator,” she gasped. “Be with you in a moment.” Then there was a violent hiss of air as her flotation bag suddenly filled. Ranjit was thrust aside as she was dragged violently upward.
It was in moments such as that when even the most experienced divers could panic. Myra made the fatal mistake of trying to hold her breath.
When Ranjit caught up with her on the raft, it was already too late. Blood was trickling from her mouth and he was not sure if he had caught her last whispered words.
He replayed them in his mind until he was standing on the pontoon of the air-medic helicopter that had arrived just in time to confirm what he already knew.
What she had said was, “See you in the next world.” He bent to kiss her chilled forehead.
Then to the helicopter pilot he said, “Let me use your phone. I need to talk to Dr. Ada Labrooy right away.”
48
THE SOUL IN THE MACHINE
If there was any patient for whom Dr. Ada Labrooy would pull out all the stops, it was certainly her beloved aunt Myra. It wasn’t entirely up to her, however. The alien machines that could do the job were fortunately nearby, getting ready to transform old Surash into the abstract of himself that would live on in the machines. But the parts had not yet been assembled together. Some were stacked in the hall outside Surash’s hospital room, some were on pallets in the yard, a couple were still on the trucks that had brought them from the Skyhook. It would take time to put them all together.
Time in which the remorseless agents of decay would be doing their best to make Myra’s body unusable.
They had to buy time. There was only one way to do it. When Ranjit bullied his way into the chamber where what was left of his wife was being worked on, he at last understood why they had tried so hard to keep him out. Myra wasn’t in a hospital bed. She was submerged in a tank of water with half-melted ice cubes floating on its surface. Rubber cuffs at her neck and groin gave work space to the preservation techs, each perfusing Myra’s body with some chill liquid while Myra’s actual scarlet blood ran into a—toilet? But yes, that was where it was going!
From behind him a voice said, “Ranjit.”
He turned, his expression still horrified. The tone of Dr. Ada Labrooy’s voice had been kind, but the look on her face was stern. “You shouldn’t be here. None of this is pretty.” She glanced at a dial and added, “I think we’re in time, but you should get out of here and let us work.”
He didn’t argue. He had seen all he could stand to