The door of the engine room sits ajar. On the other side of it, in the lab, Stephen Greaves is moving around. With the lights off, invisible in the dark, Fournier watches him through the gap between door and frame. Greaves is working diligently with the contents of several containers taken from his sample kit. When he was in there earlier, he was with Samrina Khan. Fournier almost spoke to them, but speaking is one of the things he thinks might cause him to throw up. So he only sat and watched as Greaves mixed up some kind of home-made medicine and injected Khan with it.
They talked about the feral children, and about Dr. Khan’s baby. They talked about a cure. Most of it rolled over Dr. Fournier unheeded, but now he finds that some of what they said has lodged in his mind after all.
They were talking about a cure as something that could actually happen. Or … had happened? Fournier wonders belatedly what that medicine was, and what Greaves is working on so assiduously now. The supposed savant (Fournier has seen no compelling evidence of that!) mutters to himself as he works—two different voices, two sides of a conversation. Fournier can’t hear everything, but he gets the gist. Greaves is addressing someone as “Captain” and then answering his own questions in a deeper, exaggeratedly masculine tone.
“But it’s not going to be enough,” he says as himself. “It’s going to run out!”
“You work with what you’ve got, kid,” he answers in the other voice. “Can’t squeeze orange juice out of a stone.”
“I’ve got to save her!” Greaves’ usual voice again, trembling and petulant. “I’ve got to!”
“Fine. But you better count the cost before you get into paying it. There are lives at stake here. Not just hers, but the children’s, too. How far are you prepared to go?”
“But I’ve still got some spinal fluid here. That might be enough to … to make something that works. Not a suppressant. Something that works properly!”
Fournier has raised the whiskey bottle to his lips for another sip, a long time before, and it has stayed there ever since. He sets it down again now, carefully and quietly.
“It isn’t.” The deeper voice. “It isn’t enough.”
“It might be.”
“No.”
“You don’t know!” Greaves’ voice rises to a squeak of protest. “You don’t know, Captain.”
“Kid, I know the cells you’re working with are dead, and I know you need live ones. I know prion contamination has reached 14 per cent. How many batches would you be looking to grow? That pipette is probably enough for ten at best, so you’ve got a maximum of ten configurations that you can test for. And since that would use up all the spinal fluid you’ve got left, you wouldn’t be able to dose her up again—which means you’ve got to get positive results in the next three hours, before her current dose wears off. How is anything supposed to grow in three hours?”
Greaves has stopped dead in the course of this speech. His hands are frozen in the air, a pipette in one of them so he looks like a conductor about to give the orchestra their cue to start the symphony.
“You don’t know,” he says again, his voice barely a whisper.
He seems to collapse in slow motion, going down on one knee and then on both. His head bows down into his lap.
“I’ll have to tell,” he moans. “I’ll have to tell if they ask.”
That’s good to hear, Dr. Fournier thinks. Because he intends to ask.
54
The christening party is Foss’s idea, and she surprises herself.
She finds powdered egg and sugar, flour and a thin scraping of lard, and bakes up a kind of a sponge, with coffee and gelatin and a lot more sugar for icing. And she drags everyone into the crew quarters, whether they like it or not, to wet the baby’s head with the liquor of their choice. As long as that’s water or single malt, or single malt cut with a little water.
“What the hell is this about?” McQueen demands truculently when she hauls him down out of the turret.
Since he blew her off the day before, she hasn’t felt like she owes McQueen anything very much, and certainly not an explanation. But maybe she’s really explaining to herself.
“This time tomorrow we’re going to be back in Beacon,” she says. “And we’re going to go our separate ways. Some of us will bump into each other again, but we’ll never be this again. This crew.”
“Thank Christ for that,” McQueen mutters.
“Yeah, but it matters. We were part of something, and I hate to see that just fade away without … you know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Without doing something. All of us together, one last time. And after that, fuck it. We let it pass. But it’s wrong to let it pass without a proper goodbye. Call it superstition, if you want to. But where’s the harm in it? Come and have one last drink. Meet the rug-rat. Make your peace with the colonel.”
That last was a mistake. McQueen was looking half-persuaded but now he bridles and fixes her with a glare. “You don’t know fuck all about me and the colonel,” he says.
“No,” Foss admits. “And I don’t need to. It’s over, mate. That’s all I’m saying. It’s over and this is a good way to wave goodbye to it.”
He comes along at last. Everyone comes except for Dr. Fournier, who in a slightly slurred voice claims to have work to do. Well, he’s welcome to it, and out of all of them he’s the only one whose absence in Foss’s opinion will leave no hole.
So there are six of them, which is a bigger crowd than the crew quarters has hosted since Invercrae. Khan doesn’t seem all that into it at first, but she laughs weakly when Foss brings out the sponge. And then cries, which puts a bit of a damper on the proceedings.
Foss pours out tots of whiskey. McQueen winces and pushes his aside, but then on second thoughts he takes it back. Everyone else takes a glass except the Robot. Colonel Carlisle solemnly proposes a toast to the newest member of the human race and to his eminent parent. After a moment’s thought, he adds John Sealey’s name to the toast.
They knock back the booze and Foss tops them up. Khan is still in an odd mood that Foss can’t read, but she supposes that giving birth takes the edge off your game in all sorts of ways. “So you’re going with John,” Foss says. “John Khan.”
Khan shakes her head. “No,” she mutters. “I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”
“Well, if you want to give the little sausage a middle name, I think Foss has got a nice ring to it. Just saying. Jonathan Foss Khan. Someone with a name like that, they’d damn well get respect.”
It takes a little persuasion but Khan lets them all hold the baby. Or everyone who wants to, which (with hard passes from Sixsmith and McQueen) is Foss and then the colonel. And then Foss again. She is just full of surprises today. She hasn’t ever given a moment’s thought to having kids of her own, but this unnaturally quiet little bundle of joy puts her into an odd and not unpleasant reverie. It’s sort of a reassurance, she thinks, and sort of a promise. Things don’t end, after all. They only change, and you keep changing with them.
Impulsively she holds the baby out to McQueen. “Go ahead,” she says. “Meet the one member of the crew who’s got a smaller vocabulary than you do.”
McQueen shakes his head. “I’m good,” he says.
“Coward. It’s just a baby.”