“Out.” Ruslan made repeated gestures in the direction of his mouth. “I need to get out.”
An anxious Kel’les confronted him. “Out of your suit?”
“No.” The human was looking around wildly. “Out of here. Out of this mountain. Away from this place.”
San’dwil looked concerned. “You are feeling uncomfortable at the prospect of work continuing here?”
It was only one of many things he could not run away from: the Myssari proclivity for understatement. He did not even bother to respond directly to San’dwil’s question.
“Out, now.”
Wincing at the volume the human was projecting, Kel’les helped him toward the portal through which they had entered the operating theater. Ruslan looked back and searched the assembled Myssari until his gaze once more settled on the site’s senior scientist. “If you don’t think you can bring any of them back, I’d prefer you didn’t do anything else with them.”
Wol’daeen glanced at San’dwil, who neither said nor gestured a response, then turned back toward the human. “I of course do not have the final say in such matters, but I believe that given the expense and difficulty involved in the carrying out of scientific work on this world, such a request will be denied by those who are in charge of the Combine’s scientific fieldwork.”
“I know,” Ruslan muttered disconsolately. He and Kel’les were nearly to the exit where the first of three hermetically sealed barriers was preparing to open and let them pass through. “But I felt it had to be said. If you can’t bring back the dead, respect them.”
Wol’daeen called after him. “I would think that being able to contribute to the advancement of science would be as virtuous a sign of respect as any intelligent being could wish for. I know for certain that I would feel that way.”
The portal was open and Kel’les was trying to help him through. There was time for Ruslan to offer only a few final parting words.
“So would I. But you and I are in a position to make such a choice.” He nodded in the direction of the two mindless bodies lying on the gleaming platform, who continued to breathe uselessly. “Not so either of them.”
The first barrier closed tightly behind them. Air was exhausted, to be treated elsewhere and swiftly replaced. The second doorway parted, the process of cleansing was repeated, and then they were out in the brightly lit prep room. A trio of technicians who were preparing to enter the restoration chamber eyed the live human curiously in passing.
Slumping onto an awkward and uncomfortable Myssari seat, Ruslan let Kel’les begin the process of extricating him from his visitor’s sterile suit. He paid little attention, not caring and not helping. Having returned to the excavation site in hopes of encountering revived fellow humans, he had instead been confronted with living but empty bodies. He had no doubt that the dedicated if diffident Wol’daeen and her colleagues would try their utmost to successfully revive some of the other cold-stored humans. It would be a scientific triumph for them if they could do so. But having seen what he had seen and heard what he had heard, he was not sanguine.
As for Cor’rin’s comment, he couldn’t halt the Myssari in their efforts any more than his parting words would prevent the senior scientist and her counterparts from digging into more and more bodies in hopes of finding the means necessary to revive conscious human beings. Failing that, they would seek to extract the means necessary to create new ones. Artificial insemination into an artificial womb would be simple enough. All the Myssari needed was the necessary raw material.
He could at least refuse to help with that. He had agreed to cooperate in a process of cloning; nothing else. The thought of what might be asked of him if Wol’daeen and her team succeeded in extracting viable human eggs from one or more of the frozen non-revivable bodies left him feeling queasier than when he had asked to leave the chamber. He wouldn’t do it. They could force him to cooperate, but he doubted it would come to that. Desirous as they might be of attempting such a procedure, he did not think they would compel his participation. Given his age, any such effort might well fail anyway.
Cloning. Impersonal and distant. Let them stick with that if they insisted on restoring humankind. If they did try to force him to assist with any other procedure, he’d… he’d kill himself.
No, you won’t, he thought tiredly. The drive to survive was more powerful than any abstract sense of ethical outrage. He might resist, but in the end he would probably comply.
He knew himself well enough to know that he was too much of a coward to do otherwise.
6
One did not need to possess Kel’les’s level of expertise and experience in dealing with a live human to see how depressed Ruslan was on the return journey to base. At Cor’rin’s suggestion the driftec detoured to pay a visit to a newly discovered geological phenomenon. The presence of scattered human ruins near the base of the thousand-meter-high waterfall was proof that the spectacular sight had long been appreciated by Treth’s inhabitants. Now the vertiginous panorama was the sole province of a small group of Myssari scientists. Even its undeniable magnificence, however, failed to rouse the disconsolate Ruslan from his bereavement.
The pool of depression in which he felt himself foundering was his own fault, he knew. It had been wrong of him to raise such expectations. To imagine that the Myssari were any more adept than humankind in reviving the long preserved. Such techniques had been little more than theory in his own time. But desperation leads people to take desperate measures. It was difficult to imagine anything more desperate than having oneself voluntarily committed to cryostorage, knowing that the technology for revivification did not exist at the time the process was carried out, and might never.
The exhibition of failure he had just witnessed was proof that never was still now and might well be forever. Better to try to store human personality and memories in a fluxbox than in the fragile, fleshy form in which they originated. Possibly somewhere, on some unknown human-settled world, desperate citizens had tried to do just that. Given his age, he was unlikely to learn whether anyone had ever been successful in such an attempt. Even if they had been, any such effort could only be considered a partial success. The resultant revived individuals might be capable of speech, and remembrance, and conversation. But they would not necessarily be truly human. The warmth that was likely to be missing would be more than physical.
While he appreciated the effort on the part of his Myssari friends to distract and revitalize him, he was glad when they reached the base and he could isolate himself in the small cubby he had been allotted. Alone with his thoughts, he was more attuned to his kind than when in the presence of multiple Myssari, however considerate they might be. Kel’les, for one, could not understand how Ruslan could handle so much solitude. In such a situation a lone Myssari would become mentally unbalanced far more rapidly than any human.
“I talk to myself,” he had once explained to his minder. “I have conversations with myself. I debate with myself.” He remembered smiling. “Sometimes I even win the arguments.”
They did not understand.
The door chimed softly for his attention. Responding to his query, it went transparent on the inside so that he could identify his visitor. A sigh of resignation escaped his lips. It was Kel’les again. That much he expected. Seeing to the human’s health and happiness was the intermet’s responsibility. Despite that, Ruslan would have sent the minder away except that s’he was accompanied by another. Cor’rin was with him. The xenologist had been particularly struck by the human’s despondency. Further flinging his depression in her face would be impolite. Not that he much cared. Not at this point. If he died leaving the Myssari thinking his frequent cynicism and disdain were typical of all humans, so be it. But he liked the young scientist. So he directed the door to admit them.