Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

“Nobody,” muttered Roic, “should die of old age at thirty-standard.” Certainly not such a blazing spirit as Taura’s had been.

M’lord looked meditative. “If the Duronas’ or anybody else’s anti-aging research ever succeeds, I wonder if death at three hundred or five hundred will come to seem as outrageous?”

“Or two thousand,” said Roic, trying to imagine it. Some few Betans and Cetagandans actually made it to almost two centuries, Roic had heard, but their healths had been genetically guaranteed before conception. For random folks alive and afoot already, not a help.

“Not two thousand, probably,” said m’lord. “Some actuarially-minded wag once calculated that if all the medical causes of death were removed, the average person would still only make it to about eight hundred-standard before encountering some fatal accident. I suppose that means that some would slab themselves at eighteen and some at eighteen hundred, but it would still be the same game in the end. Just set to a new equilibrium.”

“Makes you wonder about the Refusers.”

“Indeed. If the God they posit waited billions of years for them to be born, a few hundred extra years till they die should hardly make a difference to Him.” M’lord stared off into some sort of twisty m’lord mind-space. “All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we’d never have been missed.”

Since there didn’t seem an answer to this that didn’t make Roic’s head hurt trying to think about, he kept silent. They turned in past the sagging chain link gates of Madame Suze’s facility at last.

It took many hours to bring Lisa Sato’s core temperature up from deep-cryonic to just below freezing. Miles sent Johannes back to the consulate, and, as the night wore on, took turn-about with Roic napping in a makeshift bunk in a room opposite Raven’s cobbled-together revival lab, set up on the third floor of the old patron intake building. Raven and Medtech Tanaka, too, took the night watch in shifts. Dawn of the new day brought the start of the critical procedures: the flushing of the old cryo-fluid, the swift replacement with what to Miles seemed vats of new synthetic blood. The skin of the supine figure on the procedure table went from clay gray to an encouraging warm ivory with the transfusion. The cryo-fluid gurgled away down the drain.

If they’d had the time and equipment, not to mention a starter-sample from the patient, whole blood identical to the original’s could have been grown. The synthetic blood lacked the unique white cells the patient’s own body produced, so the revived person would have to be in isolation for an indeterminate time following, till her own marrow began to refill the immunity gaps. Miles had been kept asleep through that phase, Raven told him, but then, he’d had a lot more trauma, surgical and otherwise, to heal from. Ako had spent all last evening cleaning and readying the isolation booth.

Raven was maddeningly vague about how soon his patient might be questioned, and made it clear that her children had priority as her first visitors. Miles didn’t argue with that; he couldn’t think of anything better to motivate the woman to fight her way to her full faculties.

Miles was anxious to offer help, but as they approached the point of no return in the procedures, Raven sat him down at a distance on a stool with a face mask across his mouth. The memorystick around the edges molded to his skin in a flexible but efficient seal, and the electropores even filtered viruses. Still, Miles wasn’t entirely sure if it was only to block germs. So he bit his tongue rather than shrieking when Raven muttered, “Damn it… that’s not right.”

“What’s not right?” Miles asked, as Raven and the medtech busied themselves about the table and didn’t answer.

“There’s no electrical latency in the brain,” Raven said, just before Miles started to repeat his question, louder. “It should be coming up by now… Tanaka, let’s try a good old-fashioned shot of shock, here.”

Lisa Sato’s head bore something resembling a swimming cap, studded with electronics and sensors, tight to the dark hair plastered flat with cryo-gel. Raven did something to his control screen, and the cap made a snapping noise that made Miles jump and almost topple off his stool. Raven scowled at his readouts. His gloved hand went out, almost unconsciously it seemed to Miles, to massage his patient’s limp hand.

“Close that drain,” Raven said, abruptly and inexplicably, and the medtech hurried to comply. He stepped back a pace. “This isn’t working.”

The bottom fell out of Miles’s stomach in a sickening lurch. “Raven, you can’t stop.” My God, we can’t afford to botch this one. Those poor kids are waiting for us to deliver their mother back to them. I promised…

“Miles, I’ve done over seven thousand revivals. I don’t need to spend the next half hour jumping on this poor woman’s corpse to know she’s gone. Her brain is slush, on a micro-level.” Raven sighed and turned away from the table, peeling down his mask and drawing off his gloves. “I know a bad prep when I see one, and that was a bad prep. This wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could ever have done.” Raven was far too controlled a man to throw his gloves across the room and swear, but he hardly needed to; Miles could read his emotions in his set face, the more fierce for the sharp contrast with his usual easy-going cheer.

“Murdered… do you think?”

“Things can go wrong without someone intending them, you know. In fact, that’s the statistical norm. Though not around you, I suppose.”

“But not, I think, in this case.”

Raven’s lips flattened. “Yeah. I can do an autopsy, in a bit, here.” When he had recovered his tone of mind, presumably. “Find out exactly what kind of bad prep this was. There are a number of choices. I thought there was something odd about the viscosity of that return fluid…” He paused. “Let me rephrase that. I bloody insist on the autopsy. I want to know exactly how I was set up for this failure. Because I don’t like being set up like this .”

“Amen,” growled Miles. He slipped off his chair, jerked down his mask, and approached the table with its mute burden. The blood pump was still keeping the skin hopefully flushed, deceptive promise. Absently, Raven reached out and switched it off. The silence hurt.

How was he going to explain this to Jin and Mina? Because Miles knew that would have to be his next task. In his rush and his arrogance, he had taken away their hope… no, he’d only taken away their false hope. This ending was apparently inevitable, however and whenever it was arrived at, now or later, by his hand or another’s. The reflection didn’t console him much.

I will get you justice … no. He wasn’t in a position to make any such pledges to them. And I will try sounded too weak, mere preamble to another adult put-off. But guilt fueled his rage against his—their—unknown enemy as nothing else could. How odd, how suspect. How futile.

A sharp rap fell on the operating room door. Roic, awake again? He wasn’t going to greet the news of their fool’s errand with any joy, either. Miles stretched his back, grabbed his cane, walked to the door, and glanced through the narrow glass. And was immediately glad he hadn’t just yelled, Come in, Roic! Because standing outside was Consul Vorlynkin, looking harried, with Jin and Mina in tow, one tugging on each arm.

Miles slipped through the door and stood with his back pressed to it. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to wait at the consulate till I called.” As if he couldn’t tell, by the way Vorlynkin was being pulled about. He supposed it was a good thing the children seemed to have lost all fear of the man, but it would be better if he hadn’t turned to putty in their hands. Yeah, like I should talk .