SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The orderly was waiting when he came out, the freshly woven clothes in a neat pile in front of her. Standard issue included underclothes and shoes, Ean was glad to see. She handed him an outfit.

“Thank you. You don’t have to wait on me.”

“Of course not, sir. But there’s still the medic.” She pointed to a uniform placed apart. “That’s the dress uniform. You’ll be wearing that tonight if you’re dining with Lady Lyan and Commodore Galenos.

Commodore Galenos being the casually introduced Abram, Ean presumed. “Thank you,” and he smiled his appreciation. “I know nothing about uniforms, ranks, and what to wear.”

The orderly smiled back. “I didn’t think you did, sir.”

Ean was sure she didn’t mean it as an insult.

“The medic’s expecting you. To look at your voice and to check you over. He’s already called to see where you are.”

“Let me put these on first.” Ean took the clothes into the bedroom. He had a separate bedroom, which he was sure wasn’t standard military practice. He dressed quickly. His uniform was gray with the characteristic black piping. The only decoration was a tiny cloth badge woven into the pocket on his left chest and the name—LAMBERT—above it. Ean didn’t count the bars on the badge, but he knew there would be ten. It was a total contrast to the pocket of his companion, which was covered with badges.

He came out, and the orderly left at a fast walk. Ean followed. “Radko. That is your name?”

The orderly glanced back. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Ean wished she wouldn’t keep calling him sir. “Thank you for all this, Radko.”

“Just doing my job, sir.” But she smiled and somehow the atmosphere seemed lighter as they made their way through the corridors to a well-equipped hospital. It was worrying that a ship this size needed a hospital so equipped. What was this ship?

The medic was waiting for him. “At least you’ve cleaned up some,” he said, as he made Ean strip his freshly donned clothes and lie down under the analyzer. “I hear you stank when you came on board.” He held up a hand to stop any comment—not that Ean had been going to make one. “Nothing travels faster than shipboard gossip. Not even a ship passing through the void.”

“Even on a military ship like this?”

“Especially on a military ship like this.” Which confirmed, once and for all, what type of ship he was on. Ean wished he’d taken more notice of politics suddenly. He didn’t want to end up in the middle of a battle.

“What happened with the voice?” the medic asked.

“My own fault. Too much—” It sounded so lame. “I was singing.” He wondered how the other ship was going. It had probably moved on by now. Ships didn’t stay in port any longer than they had to.

“Hmm. Let me see you breathe.”

For the next ten minutes, he peered into Ean’s throat, X-rayed it and finally gave him a drink of something warm. It soothed as it went down.

“The miracles of modern medicine,” the medic said. “We can tailor your genes so that your voice is deep or high, but we still can’t fix a strained larynx. Although,” and he paused, “if it’s truly damaged I can replace it with a synthetic one.”

Ean shuddered.

“I thought not. If you continue to sing like that, maybe you should take some lessons on breathing and voice control. Have you been trained?”

Ean shook his head. Rigel had paid for lessons on how to speak with a faultless Standard accent, but there hadn’t been any voice training with it.

“So you won’t use your voice so badly that you strain it again, will you.” It was an order.

“No, sir,” Ean said meekly, and the medic let him go.

Radko escorted him back to his rooms and left him there.

He had two hours until dinner. Ean set the alarm on his comms—it wouldn’t do to be late—then kicked off his boots and lay down on the bed.

He couldn’t sleep. The off tone on line six buzzed into his brain and set his teeth on edge. After ten minutes he sat up, then stood properly—he wasn’t going to be able to do this sitting down—got himself a glass of warm water from the sink in the bathroom, took a deep breath, and started to sing.

The line responded immediately. This was one beautifully tuned engine. It didn’t take long. When it was done, Ean flopped back across the bed and didn’t hear anything more until the increasingly loud, persistent beep of the alarm dragged him out of heavy sleep a hundred minutes later.

Originally published in Strange Horizons, November 16, 2015

For twenty-seven thousand years—through kingdoms and republics, through prophets and messiahs, through decay and collapse and rebirth—the city and the medical school had grown around each other. The campus stretched across districts and neighborhoods, spanning parks and rivers, but few buildings belonged to it alone: an operating theater might once have been a workshop, a classroom a factory floor. The basement room where Mutende sat in a circle of his fellow basambilila was an ancient one and had been many things: office, boiler room, refrigerator, storage for diagnostic equipment. Remnants of all its uses were in the walls, the fixtures, and most of all, in memory.

The mukalamba—the professor—stood in the center of the room, on a platform that may once have held an operating table or a cutting-board for meat, and his projectors and anatomical models were arranged amid pipes and hooks. His robe was deep black, without the patterns that another man might wear; his face was a softer black and lined with age; his gray hair just visible under a flat cap. He waited for the circle of students to arrange itself, clapped his hands twice for silence, and made a brief invocation to the god of medicine.

"Today," he said as the prayer’s echoes faded, "we will discuss the ichiyawafu-fever."

Mutende was amused to see how many other students, high-born though they were, made signs to ward off evil. Less amusing was that he had to stop himself from doing the same. The ichiyawafu was the non-space through which people traveled between stars, but it was also the ancient name for the land of the dead, and the sickness that bore its name was a killer. He knew that now better than he’d ever wanted to know.

"There are many maladies that have been brought to us from across the ichiyawafu, of course," the professor was saying, "but this one carries its name because it returns from the dead. Years may pass between exposure and the first attack, but after that, it will attack again and again, more and more often, until the victim is wasted away. If you will open your books and give your attention, we will discuss the signs."

Mutende’s book was already open, and he followed as the professor explained how to recognize the fever and how to tell it from other diseases with similar symptoms. The book was still difficult to read even after nineteen months of study. Not only were medical terms a language in their own right, but like all medical texts, the Book of Maladies was written in the language that had been spoken before the Union fell fifteen hundred years before, and in some places the words and grammar were so archaic as to be foreign. It was easier for the other students—most were imwinamulende, minor aristocrats, and had learned the archaisms in school—but Mutende had gone to a mechanics' fostering at fifteen, and for him, medical study had meant learning two languages rather than one.

"You must always look for lesions here and here," the mukalamba said, pointing them out on his models and projecting a ghostly image of how they appeared in a long-ago case, "and for labored breathing, loss of weight, progressive wasting of muscles…" Mutende listened, but he knew them all. He saw them every time he visited his landlady, growing worse by the week and month.