Finally, though, Pluummuluum arrived, carrying a bulb of stew steaming with heat. Her muscles felt weighted down with lead; the effort she made struggling to her knees actually threw her into a sweat. Reheved to find it hadn’t abandoned her, she vented her bitterness: “Are you trying to kill me? Normal human bodies get sick without dryness and warmth. And my body gets even sicker from being in isolation from you!” She looked at it as it held out the bulb to her and tried to find something in its eyes she could reach. What she wanted was for it to acknowledge her, one being to another. But she would settle for something less, if it were some kind of real contact, instead of the nothingness she had so far gotten from it.
The hand holding the bulb moved toward her face. Azia, not understanding, flinched away from it. But then the tentacle attached to that arm flicked out and slid over the stubble of her head—giving her a quick flash of a rush—then down to her forehead: sending her one of those fast, short dreams it used for conversation.
“No!” Azia said as she snapped back, in her distress forgetting the protocol. “No! You can’t do that to me! I will die if you do, it’s not something I can control, it’s in my brain!” As if it didn’t know that, she thought hysterically.
Azia got another flick of the tentacle, another flash of a dream. Snapping back, she pressed her hands to her cold, slick cheeks. She said, “How do you know that for sure?” She was already unbearably cold, but the thought of going into hypothermal stasis for the trip, of having her body temperature lowered to just about freezing, made her feel like giving up and dying of sheer misery. She could see that all it cared about was keeping the ship comfortable for itself and its crew. The ship wasn’t made for humans, it said. It wasn’t only the problem of making the atmosphere comfortable for her. If she were in hypothermal stasis, the ship could handle greater G-forces. It claimed her neural activity would be so minimal in hypothermal stasis that the bond wouldn’t matter. That she must resign herself to the fact that every time they traveled, she would have to go into hypothermal stasis. She must eat the stew and then submit to it.
This was how incompatible they were, Azia thought bleakly. What was comfortable for it was intolerable to her. Which probably meant that it was uncomfortable in circumstances she would not even notice. And yet her body craved, always, to be with it. A perverse situation, as her father would have said—meaning, someone had gone so far in the grammar of What Will Be as to make that grammar inaccessible to another or other persons.
No wonder, then, that as she ate the thick, overly salty stew and chewed the suspiciously sweet, stringy chunks of meat until her jaws ached, her doubts about surviving hypothermal stasis grew and grew. Even if it was correct that her body wouldn’t need its chemical presence, how could she be sure that it knew what it was doing, powering down her body like that? Maybe it had experience putting Corollians in hypostasis, but obviously the Corollian metabolism differed radically from human metabolism.
When she finished the stew, she said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and given that you have no experience putting humans in hypothermal stasis, I don’t want to do it.”
It took the empty bulb from her, then grasped firm hold of each of her elbows and pulled her to her feet. When it began frog-marching her to the door, she screamed and struggled in desperate panic. “No! I’ll die! I don’t want to die! Please! Don’t do this to me!” She begged; she pleaded; she fought. But it was strong, and she was exhausted. And in the end, it simply deprived her of consciousness, as it had done earlier, when it had wanted her to sleep.
13.
The return to normal body temperature was a horror of pain and disorientation. Except for the discomfort of being shifted around, she barely noticed being put in a dry shower—until the wrapping of her entire body in a heating blanket gave her hope and comfort. It seemed as though a bottomless bulb of hot fluid was kept pressed to her lips for hours without pause. She swallowed and swallowed, and gradually became aware of her surroundings—of herself netted to a rechner in turn attached to a surface of one of those dim, purple-lit cabins, and of Pluummuluum itself, netted beside her. Among the many discomforts, she finally distinguished a full bladder. Dodging the bulb it held, she struggled through a tight, sore throat to speak. “I have to urinate,” she repeated until she got a clear semblance of the words out. It showed her that the recliner had a vacuum elimination unit—a contraption she always hated to use because of the way it pulled on her urethra, but which in the circumstances was, she had to admit, convenient. Afterward, Pluummuluum gave her another bulb of hot liquid and, holding her feet in its cool, slimy hands and tentacles, gave them a delicious massage that sent the tingle of sexual excitement and the warmth of elation rippling over her. Suddenly Azia felt happy and loved, the way she had felt when she’d held the comforter, but exhilarated and excited, too, as she’d felt—so briefly and disastrously—after the negotiations. She slitted her eyes and watched it manipulating her feet, staring at the furry gray hands with two opposable thumbs, taking a good long look at exactly how the tentacles were formed, and saw that cilia on the latter—which she hadn’t previously noticed—were tipped with some slimy glop similar to the stuff growing on the surfaces of the cabin, only a creamy green rather than fervid purple.
The coddling was so wonderful it made all the ugly painful memories vanish. Calmly she contemplated a life of travel in hypothermal stasis. She understood now that it was right, it was the only way she could endure travel on its ship. It wouldn’t be bad, because it would take care of her. The way she was now, no one knew better how to take care of her body, even if it was, essentially, so entirely different from her.
14.
The negotiations at the next station they docked at were almost identical to those at the first station. Pluummuluum again offered only “feathers” to trade. Instead of the fifth strain of the Jasper Virus, it wanted the vaccine for a virus inimical to human bodies. Azia wondered just how great a cargo of “feathers” it had and why her bonder seemed so intent on acquiring lyric crystals. The one thing all the items so far traded had in common, she observed, was that they were extremely costly and took very little space.
Pluummuluum continued to make her feel good. It gave her basic access to the station’s Net and said that they would be staying four days, idling, before boarding the ship and leaving the system. It made her understand that it was doing this for her, to make their travel more bearable to her.
While Azia had been in stasis her hair had grown six centimeters. She knew that meant she had been under for three months or so. (She worried about keeping a record of her time in stasis, to keep track of her biological age.) She experimented with gel to see what she could make of her hair. She played VRRPGs and swam twice a day in the station’s heated pool. She avoided thinking about returning to the ship, because deep down she dreaded it.
When the time came, Pluummuluum made her insouciant. She went into the stasis tank under her own power, without a murmur. There was nothing to it, she thought—and judged her earlier resistance to it cowardice.
15.
And so unfolded the pattern of her existence: months of hypothermal stasis, followed by the slow horror of emergence softened by her bonder’s coddling, four days on a station for trading negotiations and entertainment, then back into stasis. She could not, however, bear to think of it as a pattern. Instead, she “lived in an oblivion of the moment,” as her mother had taught her to call the disconnection of moments, the decontextualization of the compartments so necessary for enduring the grammar of What Is. When the recognition of a pattern crossed her mind, she banished it quickly with the thought that nothing ever went on forever, that it was only for a little while.