Analog SFF, January-February 2009 Read online

  "I don't know. Or maybe I do. You found him on a planet? If I were him, I'd have used the spot where you found me as the reference point. Either that or the planet's center."

  "You foolishly assume he has unprecedented powers of spatial and temporal orientation. Please bide while I discuss this matter with my superiors."

  I expected Deal to go off to find these superiors, but he stood right there, clicking like a Geiger counter over plutonium. The Tsf way of speaking carried quite a distance because I couldn't see the Traders who began clicking back in return. The interpreting device ignored all this byplay, but Deal gave me a summary in his own sweet way.

  "Here is our plan: We will play back earlier recordings of this being, magnify the image of his moving hands, and deduce the bead arrangements of the counting frames he was visualizing, and the three continual sets of results.” He made it sound as though the idea was his. “Then we need only vary dimensional axes and numeration systems until his results become meaningful and consistent in relationship to a moving object. If one of the logical zero points such as galactic center proves correct, a few sets of solutions will allow us to plot his ship's course or orbit. If this is successful, we will then retrieve his spacecraft. Personally, I very much doubt any of this will succeed."

  I had to admit that the Traders had evidently caught my insight and run with it farther than I could, all the way to the goal posts if everything worked out. “I have another idea. Do you have or could you build anything resembling an abacus?"

  "Why?"

  "I'll have to show you."

  Deal hesitated. “The project seems unnecessary. But I have been ordered to obey your whims. Certainly we have wires and beads. Hang loose, this won't take long."

  Deal leaped away, leaving me alone with Best-offer and two grim shadows until the medicos finished their research and squeezed back into the passageway. Without waiting for me to ask, Trader-joe began rattling off—it sounded like rattling—test results, all expressed in human measurements but too fast for me to follow. I interrupted to ask some questions, but just then Deal returned, passed me an improvised abacus, and everyone who wasn't already silent became so and watched to see what would happen.

  I glanced at the toy in my hand. It had once been a Tsf translator, but the spokes had been ripped out, the frame bent rectangular and restrung with fifteen parallel wires. Each wire held fifteen hollow glass beads, all emerald green except for the black top two. Fast work, putting this together.

  I hoped my patient would see it and realize that we'd caught on, but first I had to catch his attention; he seemed to have withdrawn a light-year into himself. So I stood in front of him and waved the impromptu abacus like a madman. Slowly, his eyes focused on it. I flipped a few beads, and all his eyes popped open, colors instantly replacing what had resembled cataracts. I'd never seen such a rapid, spectacular transformation. In that instant, he jumped to his feet, all three of them, practically radiating joy and health. I could've sworn his hair was already growing back on his bare spots. He pointed to the abacus and Deal took it and pushed it through the isolation membrane into his hands. The simian held it so that we could see the emerald beads and hid three of them under a hand.

  Deal made an especially forceful click. “Base twelve, it seems,” he said, no pleasure in the tone. “Other possibilities exist, but this may save us time. Would you care to return to your stateroom now, Doctor?"

  "Oh. Sure. Guess I've been holding up your gravity therapy."

  "You think? But apparently the Masters have found a champion in you. Come, I will accompany you to lightness.” Deal's legs practically dragged as we moved along but his partner seemed to skip.

  "Doctor, you da man,” Best-offer click-whispered to me.

  * * * *

  My room hadn't changed, but I had. “Deal-of-ten-lifetimes,” I said, standing between Deal and the doorway, a joke if he wanted to leave. “You clearly have a problem with me, and I want to know what it is."

  "I will tell you, if you insist."

  Best-offer, who'd entered behind me, hopped onto my couch without asking my permission and rode it to its usual spot. I had the feeling he found this confrontation vastly entertaining.

  "Here's me,” I said, “insisting."

  "Very well. I chose to wager against your success, which required a large amount of exchange credit to show any significant profit."

  I stared at him for a second. “Let's see if I understand you. You made a bet that I'd fail and had to bet a pile because the local bookies were betting the same way."

  "In essence, yes."

  "I, on the other hands,” Best-offer volunteered, “wagered against the odds, risking little and earning much exchange. Deal-of-a-lifetime should've hedged his bet with a side wager."

  Deal shook a leg at his partner. “Thanks for nothing, friend of friends. Your advice is as tardy as it is obvious."

  I held up my hands. “Okay. We've cleared the air. So how about we stop bickering and make the best of things?"

  "I see no reason why we can't all just get along,” Deal said, his artificial voice expressing resignation. “I was only trying to ensure a positive outcome. For me, that is."

  "You weren't exactly encouraging."

  "Gave it my best shot. Now, my smug associate and I have duties and must leave you alone to enjoy your victory. I will not underestimate you again."

  The pair hurried off and I realized I was ravenous. So I unpacked some half-frozen krill-protein sandwiches on true whole-grain bread, and to wash them down, a chocolate soymilk drink—my couch's built-in refrigerator wasn't bothering to run. The stateroom pantry was stuffed with human snacks, but they were all high-glycemic-load items crammed with sugar and saturated fats. As biologists learned nearly a century ago, every meal counts. Since I was living on borrowed time and wanted to make it a long-term loan, I couldn't afford treats that would stimulate a cascade of inflammatory agents. But those damn chocolate-chip macadamia cookies in the pantry almost burned a hole in my will power.

  Frankly, I felt damn good. Not only had I taken a large step toward solving patient two's problem, I'd earned my first gold star from my hosts. Moreover, I had a new hope. Perhaps I didn't stand a chance of resolving alien neuroses, but what if one or both of my other patients had a more ... mechanical sort of difficulty, the sort of thing only a technological primitive such as yours truly could spot?

  Then I had to laugh at myself. From Doctor I-think-I-can't, I'd turned into a wild-eyed optimist when my success had really been the dumbest sort of luck. If I hadn't visited that school in Tokyo, I wouldn't have had a clue, and my chances for similar victories, realistically, were none to nil. But Deal's mention of magnifying the image of hands had given me a notion....

  I hadn't wanted anyone who was monitoring this room to think I was talking to myself, but I'd reached the point of needing someone to bounce ideas off of, someone without hidden agendas. That left me one choice.

  Putting my old DM into vocal-interaction mode had been fun because of a popular fantasy livewidget I'd downloaded and customized, ostensibly to entertain my son whose DM was, naturally, on my family-and-friends list. I'd say the codeword “Aladdin,” see and feel a lamp in my hands, rub the thing, and watch smoke rise up and congeal into Carl Jung. The system I now used had been designed originally for the military, and I doubted it would accept any fun control mods such as Aladdin or my wife's favorite, One Ring.

  But my NASA handlers had waxed enthusiastic about its having new “bells and whistles” and then, perhaps suspecting that psychiatrists don't recognize metaphors, they explained that they referred to improved cognition and pattern-comprehension rather than to any annoying musical accompaniment. Also, my unit came with a choice of four designer personalities: Diana, David, Dane, and Doris. I'd had two weeks to get to know them all and to learn the control procedures.

  "Diana, Diana, Diana,” I said quickly, the redundancy preventing accidental activation should some living Diana drop by.
Right now, I didn't want David's philosophical ramblings, or Dane's jokes, or Doris's constant concern for my well-being.

  "How can I help you, Al?” The alto voice, adjusted to my preference, sounded friendly but businesslike.

  "Last time I was in this room, I watched some videos that the Tsf had retrieved from an alien spaceship. As I understand it, you're recording everything happening around me, so I assume you recorded the recordings?"

  "If your rising inflection indicates a query, my answer is yes."

  "Great. When I say ‘go,’ please display random images of the aliens from those videos one at a time—just one image per second and on only half your screen, um, the left side. On the other half, show me the first patient I saw today, the one similar to the video aliens."

  "Do you wish to see your patient in real time or from my memory?"

  I blinked twice. “How could you display my patient in real time?"

  "I am receiving a feed from the parent ship."

  "Huh. Real time, then. Go."

  The virtual screen appeared, as did the images I'd requested. “Stay with this grouping,” I ordered after a minute. “Zoom in on the leftmost alien until it's the same size as the one on the right and put its actions on a ten-second loop."

  I'd chosen that particular tiger because its body posture matched my client's. I watched it reach out to adjust a complicated mechanism on a black stand and then watched the whole thing again three times. Damn. The two aliens had individual variations, plenty of them, but I saw no fundamental physical difference between my patient and, presumably, a healthy tiger-lizard. Yet I knew I was missing something.

  Suddenly, a big difference. My patient started her intensifying routine. Only this time, she kept it up so long and became so vivid that I half expected her to burst into flame. Tyger, tyger, burning bright...

  "Deal,” I shouted, “if you can hear me, I'm heading out to patient one. I think something's gone wrong with this one, too."

  I sprinted out my doorway, not thinking, and then the extra eighty-odd pounds hit me. I yelped from a horrible twinge in my right knee. That leg gave out and I slammed into the floor as if some steroid-bulked-up pro wrestler had thrown me down. I'd felt at least one rib crack and for far too long, I couldn't breathe. But I finally managed to gasp in a little air and struggled to my hands and knees, intending to crawl toward the hospital corridor if I couldn't stand. I was no longer proud of myself.

  The DM screen reformed before me; I'd forgotten to close it, but Diana had minimized it while I'd been moving. An instant later, my couch tapped me on the ass. Dr. Dignity here. I glanced at the screen and forgot everything else. The left-side tiger kept adjusting that same machine every ten seconds; but on the right, my patient's room contained one robot and no patient.

  To my far left, past the screen, Deal skidded into view, reached me in two giant bounds, and used four legs to set me on my feet. He'd only needed one, I'm sure, but the extras made the hoisting gentler on me. “Are you injured?” he asked, a bit late to earn his EMT merit badge, but it was strange to hear him express any concern for me. “We saw you fall."

  "I'm all right.” At least I could stand on my own. And breathe, sort of. “But look!” I pointed to the screen.

  Yes, the kind of fool that would dash from one gravity field into a much heavier one is just the sort to point at a virtual object only visible in his head.

  "Sorry,” I said. “You can't see what I'm seeing because—"

  "Au contraire. Your data management system and ours have linked. Mine is showing me what yours is showing you."

  "Oh."

  "Plus, the original feed is ours, so I already knew of your patient's absence.” Now his words were smugger than his tone.

  "Maybe she just ... thinned out to the point of invisibility?"

  I could've sworn the translator prefaced his response with a brief raspberry. “We scanned her room for life signs. We doubt she has ceased processing gasses, ceased making even the slightest sounds of organic involuntary activities, ceased radiating and absorbing anything on the practical electromagnetic spectrum, stopped—"

  Now that was the Deal I'd grown so fond of. “I get it. She's gone."

  "Also, we found ... traces of her elsewhere. You stand askew, are you certain your fall did not damage you?"

  I shrugged and the tiny motion hurt my ribs. “Maybe a little."

  "Then return to your stateroom and recuperate; there's naught you can do at the moment to aid in searching for the ding-a-ling."

  "Did you say ‘ding-a-ling'?” If that was obsolete slang for a mental case, it made no sense to me.

  "Yes. Perhaps this translator provided an inapt metonymy."

  "Let's just move on."

  "Done. If you need assistance in healing, our medical team trembles from readiness."

  I envisioned overeager “medicos” inserting their probes into me. “Thanks, but I'll be fine. Wait! Why should you have to search? Don't you have ... sensors or something that can locate her?"

  Deal brushed his gondola with a leg in a thoughtful, jaw-rubbing kind of way. “They have, many times. But when we arrive, she has already relocated."

  "Good God. Teleportation?"

  "We believe she becomes tenuous enough to pass through walls, explaining her escape."

  I just stared at him and after a moment he continued. “Frankly, we are surprised she can absorb our atmosphere. Yet she travels with great vigor."

  "Have you tried pinning her down with gravity?"

  "You betcha. With no success. Don't assess her capacities by measuring yours. Before I rejoin the search for our rolling stone..."

  He paused until I caught on and said, “That one works."

  "...may I assist you to your room?"

  We all need someone we can lean on.

  * * * *

  My body hurt less the instant I entered my cabin. Deal galloped away, and I lay down on my couch, which as usual had tailed me in. The screen automatically reformed directly over my head because of my supine position, but I barely glanced at it.

  How, I wondered, did the Tsf even recognize an alien distress signal? Was some kind of super-science aetheric siren the usual ploy? And on reflection, it seemed implausible that the Tsf had located three unknown, stranded aliens within a short period of time—Deal had claimed they'd all been recovered recently. He'd also referred to this triple play as a “unique happenstance,” but wasn't it far more likely that all the victims had been involved in a single accident? Perhaps they weren't unknown to each other and had been meeting to arrange a trade deal and something had gone wrong. Or gone sour.

  Three travelers. One, judging by the strange star maps, from a distance even the Tsf couldn't reach; one capable of complex three-part running calculations; one who could drift through walls. All three appearing to surpass the usual three-dimensional limitations. A possible connection?

  A spasm of honesty made me admit that all this speculation was largely my attempt to forget there was a crazed tiger-lizard wandering the ship. Get a grip, Al, I warned myself. You may be on to something, but it has nothing to do with why you were hired.

  But if a trade deal had melted down like the standard TV drug deal, maybe patient one was seeking the others, and not to cheer them up. I sat up too fast and my ribs let me know. After a second, the screen reappeared but it showed nothing new.

  "Diana, Diana, Diana. Can you communicate with Deal-of-a-lifetime through the ship's DM?"

  "Yes. What do you desire to communicate?"

  "Tell him patients two and three may be in danger from the first one."

  Deal's audio response came almost instantly. “Doctor, we already guard them. Rest yourself! Over and out."

  And a Roger Wilco to you too.

  With that urgency off my mind, I thought of another kind of distraction, but a potentially useful one: studying Diana's video of patient three, the squeaky wheel who moved too slowly to squeak. “Diane, close all current images and show me
what you've got on that flat alien with all those hook things."

  And there it was in all its repulsive glory. Its body design didn't seem functional. How could it possibly use those twisted, almost two-dimensional protrusions as limbs? For the first time, I noticed how it ... ambulated: by slowly rocking forward on its lowest protrusions rather like someone in a potato-sack race determined to lose.

  "My problem,” I said, complaining out loud, “is that this thing is too alien. I've got nothing to relate it to, let alone compare it to. So how am I supposed—"

  The question was rhetorical but Diana interrupted. “Physically, it relates well to tardigrades."

  That stopped me in mid rant. “What the hell is a tardigrade?"

  "An animal. Tiny, segmented and invertebrate. Phylum Tardigrada."

  "From what planet?” Maybe the Tsf had supplied this information to human xenobiologists.

  Something in her programming made Diana sound a tad disapproving. “From Earth, discovered in 1773. People trained in biological sciences should be aware of them.” Make that disapproving plus snooty. “Under conditions lethal for virtually all other species including hard vacuum, drought, and temperatures near absolute zero, tardigrades can survive by entering an extreme state of suspended animation called a tun. In this condition, they are nearly indestructible."

  "Huh. You learn something new every decade. Detailed pictures, please, with more info below in a fast crawl."

  I watched a parade of these weird little guys, most resembling a cross between a caterpillar and the contents of a tackle box, and the crawl mentioned that they were nicknamed “water bears,” and “moss piglets,” which didn't quite convince me the things were adorable and cuddly. When I read details about the tun state, I felt my eyes widen. Then I burst out laughing and couldn't stop despite the rib pain. If patient three's resemblance to tardigrades was more than skin-deep, and I had the strongest hunch it was, the Traders had made an incredible blunder. Admittedly, I was basing a lot on appearances. But what struck my funny bone so hard was how easily I could perform a second miracle “cure” if I was right. Hell, I could do it with both hands tied behind my back.