THREE

Matthew was enthusiastic to try out his legs, but Nita Brownell seemed to be in no hurry to complete the disconnection process and let him get out of bed. Frans Leitz helped her, with an easy alacrity. The fact that the young man had obviously been trained to operate as a medical orderly made Matthew feel slightly guilty about continuing to think of him as a “cabin boy” but it didn’t stop him doing it.

The moment he was released from the machines Matthew tried to spring into action, but immediately realized that his mental tiredness was a symptom of a general physical weakness. It was astonishingly difficult to sit up, let alone to step down to the floor.

When Matthew expressed surprise at his weakness, Nita Brownell—who was perfectly willing to be loquacious about purely medical matters—explained that the vitrifying agent that had protected his cells from damage while he was frozen down had only been able to preserve the basic structures. Many of the proteins involved in routine cell metabolism had suffered degradation, and had therefore required replacement. Unfortunately, the messenger-RNA system for transcribing exons from nuclear DNA and establishing templates in the cytoplasm had also been partly disabled, and was not yet fully restored.

“You must have been warned before going into SusAn that we couldn’t just defrost you,” she told him sternly, as if it were his fault that he had not remembered that particular item of information. “We had to give your cells time to get their internal acts together, and then restore function to your tissues. Even with IT support, it’s been a slow process. The machines kept you asleep as long as possible, but the final phases of the tune-up have to be completed while you’re alert and active. You’ll feel a lot better in a few hours, and you’ll probably be able to leave the room this time tomorrow. You’ll be shuttling down as soon as possible—within fifty hours, if all goes well.”

“Fifty hours!” Matthew exclaimed.

“Sorry,” the doctor said. “That’s ship hours. Five days, in the old reckoning.”

Five days still sounded a trifle hurried to Matthew, although he knew that if he’d been kept aboard ship for an extended period he would soon have become impatient. It was difficult to believe the reassurance that he’d be back to his old self within five days when the effort of standing up seemed so extreme, and the prospect of taking a step almost impossible, but once he’d actually contrived a step and had found it merely uncomfortable, he buckled down to the serious business of reminding his body what human existence was like.

For the first couple of hours of relative freedom, Matthew and Vince Solari were too wrapped up in what was happening to them to pester their helpers with awkward questions about the situation aboard ship, but the easing of their concerted interrogative pressure didn’t seem to lighten the minds of their coy informants; everything either of them said or did seemed to touch slightly raw nerves.

Given that the ship’s spin was only simulating half Earth’s gravity, Matthew was not surprised to find that once his muscles had got the hang of working again they soon began to feel quite powerful. Unfortunately, learning to move about efficiently and economically in the unfamiliar gravity-regime was frustratingly difficult. His memories seemed to be virtually unaffected by their long storage, so the exercises and tricks he had learned as he passed from Earth to the moon, and then to remoter parts of the system, were still fresh in his mind. Unfortunately, his body had spent forty years adapting to Earth and a mere matter of months in variable low-gee. All the old expectations were still built in.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nita Brownell advised him, while she studied the manner of his blundering with a connoisseur’s eye. “It doesn’t matter if you’re awkward and clumsy up here—in fact, it’s better that you don’t have time to begin getting settled. The real task ahead of you is adaptation to the surface. That’s oh point ninety-two Earth-gravity, but you’ll find that oh point oh-eight makes more difference than you’d imagine.”

“If it’s oh point ninety-two Earth-normal down on the surface,” Matthew growled, “wouldn’t it make more sense to simulate oh point ninety-two up here?”

“Well, yes it would,” said Nita Brownell, cautiously—but she was immediately interrupted by Frans Leitz.

“This is crew territory,” Leitz said, brusquely. “It’s adapted to our requirements. It’s always been this way, and there’s no reason to change.”

“ Yourrequirements,” Matthew repeated. “ Yours, as opposed to ours. Since when did youand webecome opposed sides, with contrasted interests?”

He realized as he framed the words that it was a stupid question. Since when? Since the twenty-first century, obviously. The corpsicles’ yesterday, the crew’s ancient history. A lot could happen in 700 years, even in a mini-ecosphere set to maintain itself far more rigidly than Mama Gaea. The crew had obviously developed ideas of their own as to what their purpose and destiny ought to be. But how, exactly, had they brought them into conflict with the colonists whose needs they had been put aboard to serve? From what he had been told so far, it was the colonists, not the crew, who were having doubts about their role.

Nita Brownell had already reverted to what she obviously considered safer ground. “As soon as you go on to autopilot on the surface,” she was saying, “the old reflexes will come into play, and you’ll find that you’re just that little bit out of step. You’ll need to take the adaptation process seriously. Do your exercises. Play some ball games, if you can, and don’t get too frustrated by your initial inability to judge a catch or a throw. It’ll take weeks, at least, maybe months. Longer than you think, at any rate. The lingering impression of being in the wrong place will sink to a subliminal level, but someone of your age could easily be troubled for years. We think that’s one of the major reasons for …”

She paused, the momentum of her discourse having carried her away from the safe ground to which she had resolved to stick.

“For what?” Solari prompted.

She took up the sentence readily enough, if a trifle guardedly. “For the sense of unease and disorientation that seems to have taken near-permanent hold of many of the surface-dwellers,” she said.

“Near-permanent?” Matthew queried.

“We believe that it will wear off eventually,” she insisted, before hurling herself back into her work with a concentration that excluded further inquiry. Matthew wondered whether she really counted herself part of that particular we.

Dr. Brownell had seemed relentless in her pursuit of possible gaps in their memories and possible failings of intellectual ability, but that had not been her primary field of expertise. Now that she was checking on the efficiency of their organs and metabolic pathways she had stepped up another gear. She had been bare-headed before but she was wearing a tiara now with side-lenses placed at the edges of her peripheral vision, and her eyes were constantly flicking back and forth as they read the data transmitted to the tiny screens. Some of it was reportage of tests carried out elsewhere, on samples extracted from the newly defrosted bodies, but most was the result of “live” transmission from the cleverer elements of their Internal Technology as they put the various parts of their bodies through a battery of tests.

“There’s a certain amount of peripheral cell-failure in most of your tissues,” she told them both, when they collapsed back on to their beds, their tiredness transformed to utter exhaustion, “but you’ve both been lucky. Because the vitrification and cooling processes proceeded unevenly, and there was a similar unevenness in their undoing, there’s always a slight problem at every tissue-boundary, especially where the cells are unalike, but neither of you has suffered unusually heavy losses anywhere. Vincent’s worst problems are in the dermal layers, while Matthew’s are the shrouds of the long bones, but both deficits should be fully remedied in a matter of days.