In the medical euphemism, Orne was lingering.
He became a major conversation piece at the interns’ rest breaks: “That agent who was hurt on Sheleb, he’s still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us!… Yeah. I heard he only has about one-eighth of his insides—liver, kidneys, stomach, all gone… Lay you odds he doesn’t last out the month… Look at what old sure-thing Tavish wants to bet on!”
On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the crechepod, the day nurse entered Orne’s room for her first routine check. She lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression. She was just here to observe. The daily routine with the dying (or already dead) I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological unpreparedness for anything but closing out the records.
Any day now, poor guy, she thought.
Orne opened his only remaining eye and she gasped as he said in a low whisper: “Did they clobber those dames on Sheleb?”
“Yes, sir!” the day nurse blurted. “They really did, sir!”
“Another damn mess,” Orne said. He closed his eye. His breathing-simulation deepened and heart-demand increased.
The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.
Chapter Ten
Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.
For Orne, there had been an intermediate period in a blank fog, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a crechepod. He had to be. He could remember the sudden disrupter explosion on Sheleb… the explosion like a silent force thrusting at him—no sound, just an enveloping nothingness.
Good old crechepod. It made him feel safe, shielded from outside perils. Things still went on inside him, though. He could remember… dreams? He wasn’t sure they really were dreams. There was something about a hoe and handles. He tried to recall the elusive thought pattern. He sensed his linkage with the crechepod and, beyond that, a connection with some kind of merciless manipulative system, a mass effect reducing all existence to a base level.
Is it possible that Man invented war and was trapped by his own invention? Orne wondered. Who are we in the I-A to set ourselves up as a board of angels to mediate in the affairs of all sentient life we contact?
Is it possible we are influenced by our universe in ways we don’t readily recognize?
He sensed his brain/mind/awareness churning, visualized all of this activity as a bizarre tool for symbolizing the drives and energy desires of all life. Somewhere within himself, he felt there was an ancient function, a thing of archaic tendencies which remained constant despite the marks of the evolution through which it had passed.
Abruptly, he felt himself in the presence of an overwhelming thought/presence. The most misguided effort of sentience is the attempt to alter the past, to weed out discrepancies, to insist on fellow-happiness at any price. To refrain from harming others is one thing; to design and order happiness for others and to enforce delivery invites an equal-and-opposite reaction.
Orne drifted off to sleep with this convoluted thought winding and twisting in his awareness.
Chapter Eleven
The human operates out of complex superiority demands, self-affirming through ritual, insisting upon a rational need to learn, striving for self-imposed goals, manipulating his environment while he denies his own adaptive abilities, never fully satisfied.
Orne began to show small but steady signs of recovery. Within a month, the medics ventured an intestinal transplant which increased his response rate. Two months later, they placed him on an atlotl/gibiril regimen, forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers and eye, restore his scalp line and erase the other internal-external damage.
Through it all, Orne found himself wrestling with his soul. He felt strangled by the patterns he had once accepted, as though he had passed through profound change which had removed him from the body of his past. All of the assumptions of his former existence took on the character of shadows, passionless and contrary to the new flesh growing within him. He felt that he had been surprised by his own death, and had accepted the total denial of a life which had melted into a sandpile. Now, he was rebuilding, willfully accepting only a one part definition of existence.
I am one being, he thought. I exist. That is enough. I give life to myself.
The thought slipped into him like a fire which bore him forward out of an ancestral cave. The wheel of his life was turning, and he knew it would go full circle. He felt that he had gone down into the intestines of the universe to see how everything was made.
No more old taboos, he thought. I have been both alive and dead.
Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been picked up on Sheleb “as good as dead,” Orne walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, accompanied by an oddly silent Umbo Stetson.
Under the dark-blue I-A field cape, Orne’s coverall uniform fitted his once-muscular frame like a deflated bag. The pixie light had returned to his eyes, though—even to the new eye which had grown parallel with his new awareness. Except for the loss of weight, he appeared to be the old Lewis Orne. It was a close enough resemblance that most former acquaintances could have recognized him after only a moment’s hesitation. The internal differences did not show themselves to the casual eye.
Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak’s greenish sun. It was midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn, tugged fitfully at border plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital’s landing pad.
Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill air. “Beautiful day,” he said. His new kneecap felt strange, a better fit than the old one. He was acutely conscious of all his new parts and the regrowth syndrome which made all crechepod graduates share the unjoke label of “twice-born.”
Stetson reached out a hand to help Orne down the steps, hesitated, put the hand back in his pocket. Beneath the section chief’s look of weary superciliousness there was a note of anxiety. His big features remained set in a frown. The drooping eyelids failed to conceal a sharp, measuring stare.
Orne glanced at the sky to the southwest.
“Flitter ought to be here soon,” Stetson said.
A gust of wind tugged at Orne’s cape. He staggered, caught his balance. “I feel good,” he said.
“You look like something left over from a funeral,” Stetson growled.
“My funeral,” Orne said. He grinned. “Anyway, I was getting tired of that walkaround-style morgue they call a hospital. All of my nurses were married or otherwise paired.”
“I’d stake my life that I could trust you,” Stetson muttered.
Orne glanced at him, puzzled by the remark. “What?”
“Stake my life,” Stetson said.