Further: Beyond the Threshold (18 page)

“I know, sir,” the silver eagle said. “I recognize your expression from my progenitor’s memories.”

“Wait, so you remember being my escort? Or rather, you remember your…ancestor’s memories of being my escort?”

“A more or less precise description, sir, yes.”

I shrugged. I’d seen stranger things since arriving in the Entelechy, and I was sure I’d see stranger still now that I was leaving it behind. “So how should I address you? My instinct is to call you ‘escort,’ but that can’t possibly be right.”

“As flattering as it would be,” the silver eagle answered, “no. You may refer to me as ‘
Further
,’ or simply as ‘ship,’ if you prefer.”

“
Further
?” I tried it on for size, nodding slowly. “Sounds good to me.”

“And now that introductions are out of the way, sir, can I interest you in a tour?”

It had been a busy week, to say the least. I had woken up from a slumber of twelve thousand years, toured a dozen worlds, found out that my crew were all dead, only then to discover that one of them had been brought back to life, and finally had been given command of a faster-than-light ship of exploration. Oh, and I’d been completely rejuvenated as well.

After agreeing to act as the Plenum’s agent on the
Further
, I’d finally consented to let Maruti work his magic on me.

I’m not sure what I’d anticipated—a surgical bay of laser scalpels and automated readouts, bodies floating in tubes of strangely colored gels, or just a mad scientist chimp with a bone saw—but medicine in the Entelechy was nothing like I might have expected.

Maruti simply came to the diamond house the morning after the
Further
fundraiser, instructed me to climb back into bed, and then gave me a vial full of gray goop to swallow. The gray stuff was like slightly watery oatmeal or a thick soup and tasted metallic and strange on my tongue. Maruti explained that the vial contained what he called medichines in a solution of water. These were tiny, nanoscopic assemblers, similar in principle to those that permeated a fabricator, but designed to work in situ instead.

And that was it. After I swallowed the medichines, Maruti’s only instructions to me were that I was to make myself comfortable and be patient. He had a cocktail fabricated, lit a cigar, propped up his feet, and started telling me lengthy and involved anecdotes about the colorful members of his extended family on Cercopes, the planet of the apes.

The procedure had taken the better part of a day, during which I marveled at the seemingly endless number of Maruti’s relatives and their unlikely habits and foibles. The only sign that anything at all was happening inside my body was that I shivered for hours with what felt to be a raging fever, but which Maruti insisted was only a momentary elevation in my body temperature as the medichines vented waste heat, after metabolizing my intestinal flora, cholesterol from my circulatory system, and some precancerous growths from my lungs, liver, and prostate. While they were at it, they removed the RFID universal chip from under the thumbnail of my right hand, which meant I’d never be able to buy groceries in the 22C again, but as that seemed unlikely to pose a problem, I didn’t raise any objection.

Occasionally, Maruti would pause, his eyes momentarily on the middle distance in an expression that I’d come to recognize as indicating subvocal interlink communication, and when his rambling anecdotes would continue, I’d interrupt, asking him for an update on my status.

Toward the evening, Maruti reported that, under his supervision, the medichines had repaired some chromosomal damage, no doubt caused by cosmic rays. The medichines had also cleared away all parasites, bacteria, and germs from my system, replacing the benign organisms like my intestinal flora with diagnostic medichines constructed of biologically inert materials. Now my body would be able to monitor its own health and make necessary minor repairs as needed, alerting me if more serious treatment was required.

By the early hours of the morning, Maruti reported that my age had been stabilized at thirty standard years. He keyed the ceiling to display a reflection of me, and I looked up to see the face and body I’d had before climbing into the coffin sleeper on
Wayfarer One
, but without the scars and scrapes I’d picked up in younger days. I’d lain down the day before an old man in his eighties and was now in better shape than I’d ever been before.

Finally, Maruti had instructed the remaining medichines to construct an interlink in situ using the raw materials they’d metabolized, just anterior of the pineal gland, in the groove between the two thalami. And then he’d spoken to me, without saying a word.

I still wasn’t used to that.

::MARUTI, GOOD TO SEE YOU.::

The chimpanzee winced, drawing back from me as I walked into his quarters on board the
Further
.

::Stop
shouting
,:: Maruti answered without moving his lips, his voice sounding clear as a bell in my head. ::If you exercise a bit more control, people will be
much
more eager to talk to you.::

::SORRY,:: I replied, and then paused to concentrate. ::Sorry.::

I knew how to subvocalize, of course. I’d used a throat pickup countless times when I’d been with the Orbital Patrol. But the technology we’d used in the 22C had been immeasurably cruder than that used in the Entelechy, and after Maruti had installed my interlink, I’d quickly discovered that I lacked all fine control. I was able to communicate without speaking out loud, but I always ended up “shouting,” like someone sending a text message in all caps or laced with unnecessary punctuation.

Eventually, I wouldn’t even have to subvocalize, Maruti insisted, and I’d just have to
think
of the correct words in order to stimulate the appropriate parts of the brain and transmit the message, but that kind of virtual telepathy was a long way off for me.

The
Further
’s avatar was perched on my shoulder, in the same position and pose its predecessor had adopted for days. It had led me through the winding corridors of the ship, many of which were in the final stages of construction. I’d been studying schematics of the ship for days and already had a rough idea what was where, but there was the added wrinkle that the ship was largely constructed of smart matter able to reconfigure itself at will so that rooms and corridors could be resculpted to suit the present needs of the crew. Since the interior volume of the ship’s main sphere was over four cubic kilometers to begin with, that meant a considerable degree of variation was possible.

In the interests of giving me some necessary grounding and context, the
Further
had directed me to the quarters of one of the crew with whom I was already familiar, the ship’s physician and resident exobiologist, Maruti Sun Ghekre IX.

The ship didn’t have a medical bay as such, since current-day medicine was almost all done in situ in the body itself and could be performed anywhere, but Maruti’s quarters had been outfitted with a large sitting area, complete with a wide variety of chairs and couches so that his patients could relax in comfort—or as much comfort as possible, at least, while the nanoscopic assemblers did their work.

The sitting room, like the rest of Maruti’s quarters, reflected the taste evident in the chimpanzee’s choice of attire. Sumptuous, hedonistic, and anachronistic. It resembled a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club, with deep upholstered chairs, dark wood paneling, low side tables topped with decanters and hardwood humidors, but with other touches that destroyed the illusion, like overstuffed beanbag chairs and stark industrial-styled lamps of brushed steel and white enamel.

I’d asked Maruti—while I shivered with my waste-heat fever in the diamond house—how he abused his body with alcohols and carcinogenic tobacco smoke when he was himself a physician and well aware of the damage he was doing to his body, and he’d looked at me as though I’d just sprouted horns and started singing obscene nursery rhymes. It had taken him a moment before he even understood the question.

“Why would I
let
anything damage my body?” he asked, completely perplexed. “My system’s medichines metabolize everything I consume or inhale, transforming it into the components my system needs. What could it possibly matter what the raw material was in the first place? So why not indulge my tastes?”

Those were questions for which I had no context, much less a ready response, no more than he’d had for mine. It was clear that notions of health had altered drastically since my time, and it was going to take some getting used to.

“Cigar?” Maruti said out loud, holding out a humidor to me, opening the lid to reveal rows of neatly arranged tubes of green, tan, blue, and brown.

I shook my head, mouthing thanks, and then thought a moment. “I don’t suppose you have any bidis, do you?”

The chimpanzee looked at me with a confused expression for a moment, his eyes glancing toward the middle distance, and then smiled. “No, but give me a moment.”

He closed the humidor, there was a faint ping, and then he opened it again, and in the place of the rows of different hued cigars was a small pile of bidi cigarettes.

“How…?” I asked as I reached out to pick one up, though I’d already guessed the answer before the word escaped my lips. “A fabricator, then?”

Maruti nodded. “There’s a small one built into the base that I’ve keyed specifically to manufacture tobacco, cannabis, and other inflammable herbs.”

I held the bidi up to my nose and inhaled deeply, the scent carrying me back to misspent days of my youth. Tobacco ground up and rolled in a brown tendu leaf, tied with a little bit of string, bidis were a staple of street-corner life in Bangalore when I was growing up. In a brief rebellious phase in my teenaged years I skipped a lot of school—which, considering I was the son of the professor of literature, pleased my father not a bit—and hung out in the market with a group of juvenile delinquents, daring each other to tether our skateboards to the backs of fast-moving trucks, trying unsuccessfully to catch the eyes of girls from the convent school, and smoking an endless number of bidis. I’d lost the habit almost as quickly as I’d lost an appetite for lawbreaking when a group of us ended up jailed for a weekend after a senseless prank went horribly wrong, but I still harbored fond memories of the hot smoke filling my cupped hands, the little bidi tucked between my ring and little fingers, the heady buzz and momentary disorientation that always followed the heavy nicotine hit.

“Light?” Maruti asked, holding up an ornamental brass lighter, in the shape of a cymbal-playing monkey.

“Maybe another time,” I said, carefully placing the bidi back into the humidor.

The chimpanzee shrugged. “Fair enough.” He dropped the humidor unceremoniously onto the seat of an overstuffed chair and bit down on his cigar. “So how much of the ship have you seen so far, Captain?”

“Not much,” I confessed. “I only boarded a short while ago, and your quarters are the first completed part of the ship I’ve seen.”

“Splendid!” Maruti clapped his hairy hands together, then snatched a red fez from a hook on the wall and plopped it on his head. “I’ll come along with you, and we’ll see the ship together. I’ve seen precious little besides the insides of these rooms, myself, having only arrived yesterday. Or was it the day before? No matter.” He paused a moment, adjusting the tassel on his fez. “That is, if you don’t mind the company.”