Gregory Feeley - On the Ice Islands

When they came for her she coldly requested a shower, which was granted after an uneasy exchange of glances. She was escorted down the passageway by two colleagues while Chin stuck his head into the stall, presumably to confirm that none of the fixtures could be broken off and used as a weapon. Left alone, Yarrow soaped herself extravagantly, expending three times a day’s fair water ration. She guessed that no one would bring themselves to bang on the door.

Her judges were assembled in the common room, which had been stripped of amenities in order to accommodate their crowded numbers. Ling, Tsujimoto, Yarrow’s own superior Deng, a pilot who spent most of his time in space, and two Han-faced Slavs, probably lovers, who always kept the same shift, sat facing her in severe silence. Yarrow tried to remember whether six constituted a board of inquiry or a tribunal.

The male Slav (his name tag read “Vrdolyak”) lifted slightly the gavel that identified him as chair. Yarrow expected him to convene the meeting with an official declaration, but his only words—“Tell us what you say happened,” as he pointed at her—made clear that the session was long in progress. Panic fluttered up in her chest: she was to be told nothing.

Carefully she recounted her ordeal, which she had pondered and rehearsed in her days of confinement. At times she would allude to what her listeners must have determined from other evidence—“As the tape shows,” or “Which you will note from the antenna”—and look for a sign of acknowledgment in their eyes. At her mention of the Voice Ling looked faintly quizzical, Vrdolyak frowned. No one else’s expression told her anything.

When she finished, the six looked at her silently, not exchanging glances. After a few seconds Vrdolyak stirred slightly and said, “Thank you.” He touched the side of his chair, and the door opened behind her.

Yarrow stared. “You mean that’s it? You haven’t even told me what’s going on!” Her two escorts appeared on either side of her, one of them touching her elbow. She shook them loose furiously. “Is this a trial? I have the right to an advocate!”

“This is not a criminal proceeding,” said Vrdolyak. “The crew does not have the authority to convene such.” Tsujimoto murmured something, and he added, “Should criminal charges be brought, you will have access to an advocate and all your legal rights.”

“Charges for what? ” she shouted. “You haven’t told me what I’m being accused of!” Vrdolyak began to speak, but she overrode him. “And don’t tell me that you haven’t brought criminal charges: why am I under arrest? ”

Vrdolyak flushed brick red. “You are being held under emergency statutes,” he said curtly. “Constitutional civil liberties may be suspended during emergency conditions.”

They stared at each other.

“You mean that’s it?” she demanded, incredulous. “There’s an emergency, you don’t have to tell me what because it supersedes my right to know, and you can lock me up without telling me why on the same basis? You know that everything I said is supported by the tape.”

“Your suit tape was damaged by electrical discharge, and cannot be easily played,” said Deng heavily. “We are employing scanning techniques to reconstruct what we can.”

Yarrow leaped to her feet. “No!” she cried. Hands grabbed at her. “Can’t you see what you’re doing?” She was pulled backward as her escorts clumsily overpowered her. Shouting, she was dragged out the door as her judges stared impassively.

In her solitude, she considered how things must look. What would the “restored” tape show? Something baldly incriminating? She decided not; it would suffice if recovered portions of the tape contradicted the account she had given. She spent more time pondering what a team sent to the comet would find. An autopsy would disclose the order in which the injuries to George’s body had been inflicted, and which ones had occurred posthumously. Would Castor send a physician to study the body in situ, or would they ship it back first, or—she caught her breath at the thought—would they leave its examination to expert systems? She could not believe that the CP would conduct a murder investigation without having a human examine the victim.

She was drinking tea (delivered through a hatch no wider than the pot) when a door opened in the ceding and Ling floated through. Yarrow stared, not sure what to say, then gestured apologetically. “I only have one cup.”

“That’s all right, thank you.” Ling was embarrassed—no, her pinched expression bespoke something more: she was, Yarrow realized, frightened. Yarrow wondered whether she feared assault.

She pushed herself down to the wall that Yarrow was using as floor, and sat with her crossed ankles adhering to the clings trip. Yarrow looked at her questioningly.

“They asked me,” she began, “to tell you what they have decided.”

Her weakness lent Yarrow strength. “Verdict or sentence?” she asked caustically.

Ling flinched. “Neither,” she said. “You know they can’t do that.”

“I thought they could do anything during an emergency. This is an emergency, I gather.”

Ling hung her head in acknowledgment of others’ dereliction. “You should have been told everything. Perhaps they did not want you to realize how little we ourselves know. Transmissions from the Ship are… unreliable. There is little we truly know…”

“And you are not supposed to tell me that much. I see. So no one dares to hang me until they know which way the wind is blowing?”

“No!” Ling looked up, shocked. “We know too little to decide anything at all, and to disregard what we heard of you would be a vital decision. And after what happened on the comet, well—” She squared her shoulders, resolute at last. “So it was decided to do nothing; to put you on ice, as someone said.”

Yarrow lifted an eyebrow. “You’re going to keep me locked up indefinitely, in my own room with security measures? I’m surprised the Lotus can spare the resources.”

“We can’t.” Now Ling would not meet her eye. “You might try to escape, and we cannot maintain staff forever on standby against this possibility. So you are going to be Chilled, till the emergency is over.”

Yarrow stared, then flung herself at Ling with a scream. The technician threw up her arms in alarm, but there was no strength in Yarrow’s spring: her bunched legs unfolded like paper flowers blooming in water, and her hands reached out with dreamlike slowness. A hatch banged open behind her, and Yarrow was unable to look around before a sticky substance enveloped her.

“No!”

Ling was scuttling backward on all fours, eyes wide. The web tightened around Yarrow, binding her limbs to her sides, but strength fled her from within: blearily she realized that she had been drugged. “No,” she cried, horror rising about her like water. “Don’t let them—Ling! Don’t let them freeze me! No—! ”

There was no light in the icebox, yet Yarrow experienced not darkness but the vibrant non-color that bespoke “fingerpainting,” direct stimulation of the striatic cortex. The visual center offered the broadest gate to the city, open now to invaders she could neither see nor debar. Her calmness suggested that sedatives had already crossed the blood-brain barrier.

The neutral screen resolved into an empty landscape, pale sky above featureless ground. Yarrow suspected that she was projecting upon sensory deprivation: the line of the horizon seemed suspiciously arbitrary. The sky looked cold, about to snow; perhaps the cryopreservative was already entering her veins.

Rime etched itself across the sky, which took on depth: Yarrow was inside a snow crystal, watching interstices thicken about her like an involuting fractal. She knew that the Chills were not actually frozen, but cooled to a level beyond hibernation, where dreaming ceased and mental activity stalled to a vegetable muttering impossible to recall. A cocoon was being woven about her mind, packing material for the descent into inanimation.