Changeling

Chapter 12. A Journey Begins

If this was the afterlife, it was damned uncomfortable.

For one thing, it was wet. He could feel water dripping on his face and body.

For another, being dead hurt.

Derec’s ribs ached as if they’d been kicked repeatedly by an extraordinarily strong and stubborn mule. Most of his skin felt as if it had been scoured by a rough, rusty file, and what hadn’t been scraped raw was parboiled. His head pounded with the great-granddaddy of all headaches, and he was afraid to open his eyes or try to sit up.

If this was eternity, it wasn’t making a nice start.

But he couldn’t lie there forever. Besides, there was a certain curiosity…

There was definitely light beyond his eyelids. And beyond the dripping of water, he could hear a rushing, crackling noise like cellophane being crumpled.

Derec opened his eyes.

And, groaning, closed them again.

He was looking through a jagged hole in the ship’s hull into a dull gray, rain-streaming sky. Through the curtain of rain, he could see a muddy hillside scored by some giant, maniac plow and sown with bright pieces of metal. Despite the storm, there was a fire smoldering in the grass a hundred meters away where one of the ship’s drive engines lay half buried. A thick, greasy plume of black smoke was smeared across the sky under the racing clouds.

It didn’t look good. Being alive was threatening to be more uncomfortable than being dead. “Mandelbrot?” Derec’s voice was a hoarse croak. There was no answer.

“Mandelbrot?”

Still nothing. It looked as if he was going to have to get out by himself. He didn’t like the idea, not one bit. Derec moved to unbuckle his crash webbing. It was a mistake.

He screamed and promptly blacked out again.

It had stopped raining and the grass fire was out when he came back to consciousness again.

“Reality, part two,” he muttered to himself. There was still a throbbing ache in his left arm; his right seemed to be functioning, if badly bruised. He forced himself to look-yes, the left forearm was definitely fractured, the skin puffy and discolored, the arm canted at a slight and very wrong angle. The sight made him nauseous. Great. All you need is to be sick all over yourself. What if you ’ ve got broken ribs or internal injuries… …

Derec leaned his head back and took several deep breaths until his stomach settled again. Reaching over with his good hand, he tightened the left harness of the webbing until his shoulder was tight against the seat. Then he grasped his left arm at the wrist, took a deep breath, and held it.

And let it out again with a shout. He pulled, hard.

Bone grated against bone.

When Derec came to consciousness for the third time, he checked the arm. It was bruising nicely, but it looked straight now. He could wiggle his fingers, make a weak fist. The pain made him want to whimper, but there was nothing he could do about it for the moment.

“Okay,” he breathed. “You got to get out, find the first aid kit, get the painkillers and the quick-knit pills,” he told himself. “You can do it.” Using his right hand, he unbuckled himself-squirming for the right-hand buckle at his shoulder, the pain stabbed at his chest: broken ribs, too, if nothing worse. He was starting to sweat, coldly, and the periphery of his vision was getting dark.

Shock. Take it easy. Just breathe for a few seconds.

Gingerly, Derec tried his legs. His left ankle had been wrenched badly, but he thought he might be able to put weight on it, and his right thigh was bloody under the torn pants, but everything worked.

Fine. Let ’ s see if we can stand.

He pushed himself up with his one good arm, cradling the other. The movement coupled with the throbbing head made the ship swirl about him. For a moment, the world threatened to go away again. Derec fought to remain conscious. No, he pleaded. The last thing you want to do is fall. You might not make it up again.

After a minute, the landscape stopped its ponderous waltz around him, and he could stand. The cabin was a total loss. The flooring was buckled, gaping holes had been torn in the bulkheads, and everything was sitting at a slight downhill angle. Derec noticed Mandelbrot immediately. The pilot’s seat had been sheared off during impact and lay on its side at the “bottom” of the cabin slope. Mandelbrot was still in the seat, his body dented, dinged, and scratched.

“Mandelbrot?” Derec called again, but there was still no answer. First things first, he told himself. Where ’ s that kit?

It should have been on the near wall; it wasn’t. After a stumbling search through the nearby rubble, Derec finally located the white-and-red box. He fumbled open the catch and tore open a vial of EndPain. He stabbed the injector into his thigh with a hiss of the air jet; the medication felt cool, and he could feel it spreading. The pain began to fade, the headache to ease. After a few minutes, he was feeling vaguely human again.

He found the quick-knit tabs, read the instructions, and swallowed two. With the pain temporarily subdued, he rigged a splint from a piece of plastic and the cloth covering of one of the seats. The arm felt better secured and placed in a sling. He knotted it with his teeth.

Derec was begi

And if pigs had wings… .

Derec had to have Mandelbrot. Without the robot, this was going to be very, very touchy. The quick-knit tabs would heal his arm in a week or two - if hedidn’t refracture it rummaging through the wreckage; if there were no internal injuries that crippled him first; if there was nothing on this planet that decided he looked tasty…

If he was still alive in a week.

Derec made his slow way over the broken hull to the robot. The seat had pi

There were too many things that could have gone wrong with the robot that couldn’t possibly be fixed here. Derec could imagine every last one of them in his mind.

It didn’t look as bad as it might have. The trunk line from the main power source had pulled loose, though backup power to the brain was still intact: good, that meant there would be no memory loss. There was some structural damage, though Mandelbrot’s Avery-type arm looked perfectly fine. The optical circuits had taken quite a jarring; Derec wouldn’t be surprised if there were some problems there when he powered up the robot.

And it was going to be no fun working with one hand. “Only one way to find out…” he muttered, then shook his head. Who in space are you talking to?

It took an hour to find the toolbox; another to one-handedly splice the bad power cable and jury-rig the socket-he had to stop halfway through to hit the painkillers again; the headache was back and his ribs made every breath an agony. The soldering tip trembled in his hand as he made the last co

A status light blinked amber. One eye gleamed fitfully; the entire body shuddered. The head swiveled with a distressing squeal of grinding metal, and Mandelbrot looked in Derec’s general direction.

“Master Derec?”

“Mandelbrot.”

“You are very fuzzy in my optical circuits. It would appear that the landing was not all we had hoped for.”

“It would appear so.” Derec shrugged. “How are you?”

“Checking…” Mandelbrot’s voice trailed off; the eye dimmed. After several seconds it brightened once more. “Systems check program ru

“Save it for later.”

“Then I must ask how you are, Master Derec.” Mandelbrot rose to his feet, the left leg extended stiffly. “I note that your arm is splinted and there is blood on your clothing. You grimace when you move, as if your chest hurts you.”

“The arm’s broken; it’ll heal. I’m banged up but alive. I don’t think it’s anything serious. Considering the way we hit, we don’t have anything to complain about.”

“I was not complaining, Master Derec, simply trying to ascertain our status. Your health is of prime importance to me as you know. The First Law…”

Derec waved him silent. “We’ve done all we can do about that. Now we have to get ourselves out of here.”

Gears whined drily as Mandelbrot surveyed the wreckage. “This was not a good landing,” he said without inflection.

Derec laughed aloud despite the pain. After Robot City, he didn’t know what to expect from robots: Mandelbrot had either acquired a certain irony and deadpan humor or come up with a good approximation of it. A First Law response to make him feel more comfortable or not, it worked. Derec gri

“Actually, it was probably your best.” he said. “I’m surprised you got us down at all. What in the world happened?”

“I still am not sure, Master Derec. There was an alarm and then the impact. After that, I was too concerned with the ship to pursue the matter.”

“I can believe it,” Derec smiled. “Now let’s see what we can salvage out of this mess.”

It was a long, slow, and painful process. Most of the emergency food stores had been smashed or lost. Mandelbrot dredged up an inflatable survival tent and heater, rope, and a battery-powered lamp. On the down side, the communications gear was hopelessly ruined, as Derec found after an hour of trying to fit together pieces with the few spare parts on board.