“Put me on New Egypt now.”
Chapter Six: Naomi
Amos—or the thing that had been Amos—smiled and waited for the autodoc to finish its run. Naomi, braced at a handhold, watched the values and scans as they spooled out. Red and amber and occasionally green, they were the medical equivalent of a shrug. The machine thought he was a basket full of different kinds of strange. Some was the strange he’d been ever since returning from Laconia. Some was new strange that deviated from previous measures. Whether any of it was significant was anybody’s guess. There was no comparison data for an animal like him, no others of his kind apart from the pair that Elvi Okoye had. There was no context.
Naomi felt that way a lot these days.
“I’m feeling fine,” he said.
“That’s good. You should stay here for a while anyway. In case it happens again.”
The pure black eyes shifted. It was hard to tell if he was focusing on her or something else in the room. Without iris or pupil, he could appear all-seeing and blind at the same moment.
“I don’t think I’ll be getting the wigglies again anytime soon,” he said.
“You’ve been pretty shaken up. Not just this. All of it. Better that we get an idea what’s going on with you now so you don’t have another seizure while you’re doing something dangerous.”
“I get that. But it’s not going to happen again.”
“You can’t know that unless we know why it happened.”
“Yeah.”
They were quiet for a moment. Only the hum of the air recyclers and the muttering of the autodoc. “Do you?”
“Do I what, Boss?”
“Do you know why the seizure happened?”
Amos lifted a wide, grayish hand in a gesture that said maybe, maybe not. The little widening of his smile was exactly the one he’d have used before, but half a second later than he would have used it. “I got a feeling. There’s stuff running in the background with the new head. There was a hiccup. Don’t think it’ll happen again.”
She tried to smile back, but it felt forced. “That’s not as reassuring as you think.”
“You don’t think I’m him, do you?”
She noted the pronoun. Him. Not You don’t think I’m me. “I don’t even know what that question means.”
“It’s all right. I get it. I went away like I used to be. I come back with these eyes and this blood. And my brain doing things it didn’t use to do. If you weren’t at least wondering, that would be weird.”
“Are you?”
“Am I?”
“Are you still human?”
His smile could have meant anything. “Not sure I ever was, really. But I know I’m still me.”
“That’ll do then,” she said, and made herself lean over and kiss his wide smooth scalp the way she might have if she hadn’t had doubts. If it was true, and he was Amos, then it was the right thing. If it wasn’t, and he wasn’t, better that whoever he was believe she accepted him. “Still, wait an hour before you get back to work?”
He sighed. “If you say so.”
She squeezed his shoulder, and it was solid. Had it felt like that before? Amos had always been strong. He’d spent as much time in the ship gym as Bobbie, and Bobbie had damn near lived there. Naomi couldn’t tell if this was a change or just her mind looking for discrepancies. Building them whether they were there or not.
“I’ll check on you,” she said, because it wasn’t a lie, no matter what she meant by it.
The ring space wasn’t somewhere to relax. There had been a time when it had been the hub of humanity’s great spread to the stars. It had seemed safe then, or relatively so. Anything that found its way to the edge of the sphere defined by the ring gates vanished and was lost, but nothing reached back.
Until it did. And then it had been annihilating. Now most ships moved through it fast and hot, setting the angle of their transit before they came in and getting out the farther gate as quickly as they could. It was exactly the wrong thing to keep from going dutchman, but it minimized the time spent in the uncanny space.
Other ships passed in and out of the rings, the traffic of more than a thousand systems, all of them relying on trade to one degree or another. All of the ships on their own errands with no particular interest in or awareness of Naomi and her burdens. The Roci stayed there, on the float. Every hour courted the danger that reality itself would start boiling again and everything in the ring space would be killed. But before they could go anywhere, they needed a place to go and a plan that was more fleshed out than Don’t die.