“I don’t have all the answers,” Antoinette said. “I’m just pointing out the difficulties.”
“There must be something else we can do,” Cruz said. “Damn, we should have had contingencies in place for this.”
“Should haves don’t count,” Antoinette said. It was something her father had always told her. It had annoyed her intensely, and she was dismayed to hear the same words coming out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“Pellerin,” Blood said, “what about swimmer corps intervention? Ararat seems to be on our side, or it wouldn’t have made a channel for the boats to reach the ship. Anything you can offer?”
Pellerin shook her head. “Sorry. Not now. If the Jugglers show signs of returning to normal activity patterns, we might sanction an exploratory swim, but not before then. I’m not sending someone to their death, Blood, not when there’s so little chance of a useful outcome.”
“I understand,” the pig said.
“Wait,” Cruz said. “Let’s turn this around. If it’s going to be such a bad thing to be anywhere near the ship when it lifts, maybe we should be looking at ways to speed up the exodus.”
“We’re already moving ‘em out as fast as we can,” Blood said.
“Then cut back on the bureaucracy,” Antoinette said. “Just move them and worry about the details later. And don’t take all day doing it. We may not have that much time left. Shit, what I wouldn’t give for Storm Bird now.”
“Perhaps there is something you can do for us,” Cruz said, gazing straight at her.
Antoinette returned the one-eyed woman’s stare. “Name it.”
“Go back aboard the Infinity. Reason with the Captain. Tell him we need some breathing space.”
It was not what she wanted to hear. She had, if anything, become even more frightened of the Captain since their conversation; the thought of summoning him again filled her with renewed dread.
“He may not want to talk,” she said. “Even if he does, he may not want to hear anything I have to say.”
“You might still buy us time,” Cruz said. “In my book, that’s got to be better than nothing.”
“I guess,” Antoinette agreed, reluctantly.
“So you may as well try it,” Cruz said. “There’s no shortage of transport to the ship, either. With administration privileges, you could be aboard in half an hour.”
As if this was meant to encourage her.
Antoinette was staring at her fingers, lost in the metal intricacies of her home-made jewellery and hoping for some remission from this duty, when Vasko Malinin entered the room. He was flushed, his hair glistening with rain or sweat. Antoinette thought he looked terribly young to be sitting amongst these seniors; it seemed unfair to taint him with such matters. The young were still entitled to believe that the world’s problems always had clear solutions.
“Have a seat,” Blood said. “Anything I can get you—coffee, tea?”
“I had trouble collecting my orders from my duty station,” Vasko said. “The crowds are getting quite heavy. When they saw my uniform, they wouldn’t let me leave until I’d more or less promised them seats on one of those shuttles.”
The pig played with his knife. “You didn’t, I hope.”
“Of course not, but I hope everyone understands the severity of the problem.”
“We’ve got a rough idea, thanks,” Antoinette said. Then she stood up, pulling down the hem of her formal blouse.
“Where are you going?” Vasko asked.
“To have a chat with the Captain,” she said.
In another part of the High Conch, several floors below, a series of partially linked, scalloplike chambers had been opened out of the conch matter with laborious slowness and much expenditure of energy. The chambers now formed the wards of the main infirmary for First Camp, where the citizenry received what limited medical services the administration could provide.
The doctor’s two green servitors budged aside as Scorpio entered, their spindly jointed limbs clicking against each other. He pushed between them. The bed was positioned centrally, with an incubator set on a trolley next to it on one side and a chair on the other.
Valensin stood up from the chair, placing aside a compad he had been consulting.
“How is she?” Scorpio asked.
“Mother or daughter?”
“Don’t be clever, doc. I’m not in the mood.”
“Mother is fine—except, of course, for the obvious and predictable side effects of stress and fatigue.” Milky-grey daylight filtered into the room from one high slit of a window, which was actually a part of the conch material left unpainted; the light flared off the glass in Valensin’s rhomboid spectacles. “I do not believe she requires any particular care other than time and rest.”
“And Aura?”
“The child is as well as can be expected.”
Scorpio looked at the small thing in the incubator. It was surprisingly shrivelled and red. It twitched like some beached thing struggling for air.
“That doesn’t tell me much.”
“Then I’ll spell it out for you,” Valensin said. Highlights in the doctor’s slicked-back hair gleamed cobalt blue. “The child has already undergone four potentially traumatic procedures. The first was Remontoire’s insertion of the Conjoiner implants to permit communication with the child’s natural mother. Then the child was surgically kidnapped, removed from her mother’s womb. Then she was implanted inside Skade, perhaps following another period in an incubator. Finally, she was removed from Skade under less than optimal field surgical conditions.”
Scorpio assumed Valensin had heard the full story of what happened in the iceberg. “Take my word for it: there wasn’t a lot of choice.”
Valensin laced his fingers. “Well, she is resting. That’s good. And there do not appear to be any immediate and obvious complications. But in the long run? Who can tell? If what Khouri tells us is true, then it isn’t as if she was ever destined for a normal development.” Valensin lowered himself back down into the seat. His legs folded like long hinged stilts, the crease in his trousers razor-sharp. “On a related matter, Khouri had a request. I thought it best to refer it to you first.”
“Go on.”
“She wants the girl put back into her womb.”
Scorpio looked again at the incubator and the child within it. It was a larger, more sophisticated version of the portable unit they had taken to the iceberg. Incubators were amongst the most valued technological artefacts on Ararat, and great care was taken to keep them running.
“Could it be done?” he asked.
“Under ordinary circumstances, I would never contemplate such a thing.”
“These aren’t ordinary circumstances.”
“Putting a child back inside a mother isn’t like putting a loaf of bread back into an oven,” Valensin said. “It would require delicate microsurgery, hormonal readjustment… a host of complex procedures.”
Scorpio let the doctor’s condescension wash over him. “But it could be done?”
“Yes, if she wants it badly enough.”
“But it would be risky?”
Valensin nodded after a moment, as if until then he had considered only the technical hurdles, rather than the hazards. “Yes. To mother and child both.”
“Then it doesn’t happen,” Scorpio said.
“You seem rather certain.”
“That child cost the life of my friend. Now that we’ve got her back, I’m not planning on losing her.”