On my status screen I watched as the error-checking routines started
turning up hits.
"Is the problem here?" I felt a knot twist suddenly inside me. "Or
there?" If our original scan checked out, then all Silloin would have to
do is send it to Gend again.
There was a long, infuriating silence. Silloin concentrated on part of
her board as if it showed her firstborn hatchling chipping out of its egg.
The respirator between her shoulders had ballooned to twice its normal
size. My screen showed that Kamala had been in the marble for four minutes
plus.
=It may be fortunate to recalibrate the scanner and begin over.=
"Shit." I slammed my hand against the wall, felt the pain tingle to my
elbow. "I thought you had it fixed." When error-checking turned up
problems, the solution was almost always to retransmit. "You're sure,
Silloin? Because this one was right on the edge when I tucked her in."
Silloin gave me a dismissive sneeze and slapped at the error readouts with
her bony little hand, as if to knock them back to normal. Like Linna and
the other dinos, she had little patience with what she regarded as our
weepy fears of migration. However, unlike Linna, she was convinced that
someday, after we had used Hanen technologies long enough, we would learn
to think like dinos. Maybe she's right. Maybe when we've been squirting
through wormholes for hundreds of years, we'll cheerfully discard our
redundant bodies. When the dinos and other sapients migrate, the
redundants zap themselves -- very harmonious. They tried it with humans
but it didn't always work. That's why I'm here. =The need is most
clear. It will prolong about thirty minutes,= she said.
Kamala had been alone in the dark for almost six minutes, longer than any
migrator I'd ever guided. "Let me hear what's going on in the marble."
The control room filled with the sound of Kamala screaming. It didn't
sound human to me -- more like the shriek of tires skidding toward a crash.
"We've got to get her out of there," I said.
=That is baby thinking, Michael.=
"So she's a baby, damn it." I knew that bringing migrators out the marble
was big trouble. I could have asked Silloin to turn the speakers off and
sat there while Kamala suffered. It was my decision.
"Don't open the marble until I get the gantry in place." I ran for the
door. "And keep the sound effects going."
At the first crack of light, she howled. The upper hemisphere seemed to
lift in slow motion; inside the marble she bucked against the nano. Just
when I was sure it impossible that she couldn't scream any louder, she did.
We had accomplished something extraordinary, Silloin and I; we had
stripped the brave biomaterials engineer away completely, leaving in her
place a terrified animal.
"Kamala, it's me. Michael."
Her frantic screams cohered into words. "Stop ... don't ... oh my god,
someone help!" If I could have, I would've jumped into the marble to
release her, but the sensor array is fragile and I wasn't going risk
causing any more problems with it. We both had to wait until the upper
hemisphere swung fully open and the scanning table offered poor Kamala to me.
"It's okay. Nothing's going to happen, all right? We're bringing you
