I do not know how much of her death la Reine managed to record or broadcast, but I am sure that she ran into the limitations of paradoxicality far too soon to make any real impact on any of her distant listeners.
What I experienced was mine alone, once she herself was gone.
Fifty-Two
Life after Death
Asledgehammer fell out of the night-dark sky and smashed into my ribs. It was not the first time it had happened, nor was it to be the last. A gale blew from beyond the borders of the world, forcing an entry into my reluctant lungs. A trumpet blasted in my ears, the liquid notes expanding and reverberating for an improbably long time before coalescing into mere words.
I think, although I cannot be absolutely sure, that the words were: Breathe, you bastard! Breathe!
The gale turned tempestuous as something in me, operating quite independently of my conscious will, responded to the command. It was a very painful experience but I was not ungrateful for the simple, ordinary, commonplace pain. It was presumably that lack of ingratitude that allowed me to consent to be thumped again, and yet again.
I was not conscious of the moment when my heart resumed beating, although I suppose it must have coincided more or less with the surge of oxygenated blood that boosted my brain to full attentiveness, and the flood of adrenalin that thrilled my reluctant body from the core to the periphery.
My first word was probably Ow! It would have been a lot more aggressive if Id recovered command of my consonants a little sooner.
The light was dim, but there was enough of it to allow me to recognize the face of my persecutor.
I was not in the least surprised to find that the person who had been hitting me was Solantha Handsel. She obviously had an obsessive-compulsive personality. I felt a little queasy at the thought of taking her secondhand air into my lungs, so I tried not to think about it for more than an instant.
I tried to sit up, but was not immediately successful. I was glad I hadnt pushed harder when I realized that the gravity was very low indeed. Polaris, I remembered, was very tiny, and the people whod abandoned it after making a start on converting it to a microworld hadnt got around to spinning it.
Solantha Handsel stopped hitting me. She looked down at me with fierce and naked resentment.
If we get out of this alive, were even! she told me. Even, okay? You got that?
I must have contrived some feeble gesture of concession, because she accepted that I had, indeed, got it.
By the time I did manage to sit up, very carefully indeed, the bodyguard was no longer looming over me. She had already finished looking around for anyone else who might be in need of a thorough beating and had taken refuge close to a wall, where she had something to hang on to. Lowenthal was there too. He seemed to be busy. Everybody seemed to be busy, but it was difficult to count them because there was so much mess everywhere.
Whoever had filled this space with supplies had been in far too much of a hurry to do so in an orderly manner. The mess looked strangely familiar, but it took me a couple of minutes to work out that this was because I had seen most of it before, aboard Charity . The supplies that Eido and Alice Fleury had laid in for our support had been rescued or hijacked along with us.
That was a comforting thought. It meant that we probably had enough food and water to sustain us for quite a while. We also had light, albeit slightly gloomy light and we had tolerable heat, and a breathable atmosphere. The ambient temperature was comfortable, and the air now I could actually suck it into my own lungs seemed very adequately oxygenated.
Youd better put these on, said a voice from the shadows, informing me that I was naked. I looked down at my body. I found it unexpectedly difficult to be grateful for the fact that it was there at all, but I was relieved to observe that it was still in one piece. It looked awful, although the worst of the slime with which it was liberally covered was already turning to a flaky crust.
The dead clothes that fluttered around me as the low gravity discreetly brought them to rest looked exactly like the ones that I had been wearing when I woke up on Charity , having obviously been drawn from the same uniform stock. Not wishing to put them on while I was still so messy I let them lie where they fell and looked back at the wreckage of the cocoon from which I had recently been evicted.
It looked a great deal worse than I did, although there were no conspicuous signs of decay; the viruses that had destroyed la Reine had not traveled in a fashion that permitted them to bring organic companions. The cocoon was dead, but it hadnt killed me. If I had come closer to death than any of my companions, it was because of what Id seen, not because of any malfunction of my life-support cell.
Do you need any help, Madoc? The speaker Christine Caine emerged from the shadows, traveling very gingerly indeed in gravity far less than Excelsiors, perhaps no more than the moons. Even that, I deduced, must be faked by spin.