Heaven's Fall (16 page)

Kaushal returned with not one but three doctors, all of them in white lab coats. “They will tell you everything they can,” Kaushal said. The five of them slipped into the team conference room.

No introductions were offered and, frankly, Rachel didn’t care. Her eye immediately went to the X-rays on the light board.

The obvious senior doctor, a tall, stooped Hindi with glasses and wavy gray hair, spoke. “The patient was unconscious upon arrival. Our initial diagnosis showed that his left frontal cranium had been struck by a heavy object.

“Fortunately, the object was largely flat—”

“Except for a few protruding switches,” the second doctor said. He was much younger and seemed to Rachel to be impatient.

“The flat surface resulted in a blunt-force injury that was spread over a considerable area. It was as if he had fallen onto a floor or street from a height of perhaps two meters.

“There was some lateralization; his left pupil was blown. The bones were fractured across the entire area.”

“Would I be right,” Rachel said, “in thinking that the front and left part of his head got mashed in?”

“Crudely.” The doctor seemed testy; obviously he was not used to interruptions. “But, yes, the skull was deformed. There was considerable brain swelling, which we alleviated by drilling these holes.” His pointer glided across three tiny dark spots.

“After twenty-four hours, the swelling has subsided, though the patient’s head still shows a great degree of trauma—“

Just listening to the cold, grim precision of the diagnosis made Rachel want to weep. Given what she had seen in the cockpit, she had suspected that Sanjay’s injury would be severe, but here was proof.

The senior surgeon continued, but Rachel could no longer understand his words. She finally blurted, “I want to see him.”

They took her around the corner to a hospital room, and there lay poor Sanjay, the left half of his head covered in thick bandages, the usual monitors recording a steady but slow heartbeat.

Rachel reached for his hand. To her dismay, it was cold and limp, like that of a corpse. Sanjay had been part of Jaidev’s group, spending his days constantly busy improving life in the habitat. Did he have a lover? He was old enough to have memories of Earth . . . were there family members or friends he wanted to see here? She remembered a brother—then cursed herself for her lack of knowledge. Some leader she was turning out to be! She finally asked, “What is the prognosis?”

“All we can say is that he’s stable.”

Stable! What a horrible state!

Rachel let go of Sanjay’s hand and walked out.

As a leader, as a wife, and especially as a mother, Rachel had developed several operating rules.

Rule number one: Face the bad news because it doesn’t get better with time.

She had accomplished that with the visit to Sanjay.

Now it was time to deal with Zeds. Focusing on the challenges of making the Sentry happy, or finding a way to give him useful work, kept her from wondering where Pav had gone and why he was leaving this to her. There was no one she could ask—as she slipped down the stairs from the second-floor ICU to the ground floor and its high-altitude chamber, she passed no one at all.

Once she was on the ground floor, she saw only a couple of medical people, and a single guard outside Zeds’s chamber. No Taj, no Tea, no Yahvi or Xavier.

Rachel almost regretted walking away from Kaushal and the surgeons so abruptly.

Of course, she could have diverted to the conference room to retrace her steps and find her missing husband and family members. But that would have forced her to ignore rule number one.

Sure enough, Zeds was chafing at the confinement. “We discussed this, did we not?” she said. She was working through Zeds’s mechanical translator, usually a smooth process, aided by the fact that Rachel knew some Sentry Sign, and Zeds had a lifetime of vocalized English and Hindi.

“Mental preparation is no substitute for the experience.”

“You hate it.” Here she used Sentry Sign.

“I don’t use that term,” her Sentry friend said, in his typically obtuse way. “I would simply prefer to be allowed out of this chamber.”

“You’ll have to wear an environment suit.”

“We discussed this, did we not?” Zeds was also fond of echoing human statements, usually with the exact tone and a pretty fair imitation of one’s voice. This made the Sentry fairly unpopular with most humans.

“And you said you would prefer to minimize those events, due to the discomfort—”

“My current feeling is that I would be more comfortable wrapped in the suit and walking around than unwrapped and confined here.” He was sitting, as Sentries do, in a kind of yoga posture, knees up, his arms wrapped around his body and legs, with zero eye contact. Which was understandable, since even sitting down he was as tall as Rachel.

“I will do what I can,” she said, “as soon as I can.” Then she added, “How are you finding the meals?” Zeds had spent enough time in the human habitat on Keanu to have sampled, and learned to like, certain human foods. His physiology allowed him to receive some nourishment from them, too.

But those foods were largely unique to Keanu; they were now in Bangalore, India, and while Pav had made heroic efforts to identify foods that were similar to those in the Sentry diet, it all seemed to have become seafood chowder. (The Yelahanka and ISRO authorities had insisted on equating “aquatic race” with a diet of shellfish.)

Based on the amount still left in the one bowl Rachel could see, the Indian shellfish remained untouched. No doubt this contributed to Zeds’s testiness.

“I have been subsisting on my emergency rations.”

“I will work on that, too. And promptly.”

Few Sentries, out of the hundreds in their Keanu population, wanted anything to do with humans. But Zeds not only tolerated humans, he sought them out, integrating himself into Rachel’s world to the extent he could. (He had to wear, at minimum, breathing support gear, and often more than that.) Rachel was never sure exactly why.

Zeds was a connate of DSA, herself a connate of Dash, the Sentry who had been part of Rachel’s father’s final “journey” across Keanu twenty years ago. Perhaps there was some genetic disposition to reaching out to “aliens” . . . maybe he was just curious.

For all that Rachel liked Zeds, she had resisted the idea of bringing him on this trip for exactly these reasons; he complicated everything.

But she knew, instinctively, that he would be useful.

And what the hell . . .
Adventure
belonged to his people. And it was one of Rachel’s other rules . . . when in doubt, be fair.

Pav met her before she reached the conference room, and he seemed upset. “I’ve been looking for you for an hour.”

“You couldn’t have looked very hard,” she said. “This is a big building, but how many places would I be?”

“Good point,” he said. One thing she loved about him was his ability—rare in men, in her experience—to accept correction or pushback without feeling wounded.

Or, at least, not showing it.

“Actually, I had contact.” That explained it; that throbbing in one’s head would make anyone look pale and shaken.

Pav’s conversation with Keanu turned out to be longer than Rachel’s. He had told them about the missile attack on
Adventure
and learned that there had been major progress on the backup plan led by Zhao.

She asked him if Harley or Sasha had discussed Dale Scott. “Yes!” Pav said. “Why the hell did he return to the living?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I can’t take that as a good sign.”

Pav smiled. “Good things rarely follow Dale.”

Then Rachel yawned. She realized that she wanted only to sit down, or better yet, lie down.

Pav saw this and took her into his arms. “We’ve got a huge day tomorrow—the agent meeting. . . .”

“And figuring out just what the hell our real next step is.”

“Let’s just go to bed.”

Kilroy was here

Kilroy was there

Kilroy was everywhere

GRAFFITO SCRIBBLED BY DALE SCOTT
AT MANY PLACES INSIDE KEANU’S FACTORY

They hadn’t had to drag him; the guards just casually marched Dale to a small hut—one of several occupying a patch of ground behind the Temple, halfway to the “north” wall. “Is this your jail?” he said.

“We don’t have a jail,” the young man snapped, clearly insulted. But the woman was more forthcoming. “Occasionally people need a time-out. Sometimes they just want to get some mental or physical space.”

“Ah, so these are meditation cells.”

That effectively ended the conversation.

The hut was exactly that: four walls with a cot. No entertainment devices, not that Dale had seen any such items in twenty years.

But also no sink, faucet, or toilet. As he stood in the dark space—it was probably three meters across in both directions, lit only by two slit windows near the top—he spread his hands and said, “Suppose I need to urinate.”

“Yell and you’ll be escorted,” the man said. Then he closed the door, locking it.

So much for meditation, Dale thought.

Within moments he was alone again . . . as he had been for most of the past two decades.

But now he was confined.

And hungry.

Food was one of the reasons he had had problems with the HBs.

On his earliest walkabouts, before he removed himself entirely from the human habitat, he had been able to take some food with him.

In his first months in the Factory, he had grown quite adept at theft. But that was ultimately unsatisfying; the fields and supplies most accessible to him were limited in their menu.

And he had had an unpleasant encounter with Xavier Toutant, the self-proclaimed King of Food. Seeing Dale heading toward the passageway early one morning (like poachers throughout human history, Dale had found that he was most effective when the “farmers” were asleep), the fat young man had shown surprising speed in intercepting him.

“You know, you could just
ask
, you asshole. Nobody needs to go hungry here.”

“Then who cares? You’ll just make more, anyway.”

“It’s just good manners.”

“I gave them up for Lent.”

He had brushed past Xavier, who had waited until seconds before Dale disappeared into a cleft in the rocks to throw a rock at him!

Dale had continued to poach, but less often. He had turned his attention to finding a proteus station inside the Factory. He believed that he would recognize one, since he had spent hours with the unit in the human habitat Temple.

The search was a bit like locating a particular distillery in a town the size of Dublin, but with no map.

So he had searched, systematically, starting from one of the giant dishlike pools of Substance K that dotted the Factory.

Dale had been lucky; within a few weeks he had located not just one likely proteus printer, but a building filled with them . . . and other buildings next to that one. The section reminded him of server farms in formerly distressed areas of downtown Los Angeles. He dubbed this area the Nanotech Quarter.