Progress Report

She sat down on the edge of the gelatin slab that served him for a bed. With soft fingers she ran a slender hand through his hair, across his brow. “I would ask you how you are feeling,” she said. Meaning that the medical read-outs probably told her more about him than he knew himself. The implication was that she wanted to know when he would be well enough to be moved, presumably to a safer location, where they could talk freely.

Montrose let out a laugh. “I ain’t made of glass, missy!” and he started to climb free of the gell. It hardened around his limbs, and he thought he could calculate a system of muscular stresses to pull free. The gelatin was long-chain molecules that contracted or expanded under electrical current, and the computer switching system controlling the current was operating by a certain set of reflex patterns. All he had to do was…

Rania reached around his skull, and applied a tiny amount of pressure with her finger to one of the bruises on his skull. “Ow!” he complained.

“Not made of glass, but still fractured,” she said, raising an eyebrow, and giving him a coy little pout. “Now you keep still.” Or she would call the anesthesiologist and have him sedated. Montrose was disappointed that having a more integrated nervous system did not give him immunity to chemicals injected into his bloodstream.

He settled back down. “Ha! Give a gal a crown, a starship, a few armies, infinite wealth, and she starts thinking she can give orders.”
 

*   *   *   *   *

“Oh pox!” said Montrose, alarmed. “You were going to announce your engagement!” No wonder Del Azarchel had been mad. He looked at her suspiciously. "Del Azarchel is too smart to fool himself, unless you helped him—you led him on, didn’t you?"

She looked aloof, and her sea-green eyes seemed more stormy and mysterious than ever. “Do you think women were created just to watch men kill each other, and wear the widow’s veil,and weep beneath it? I will use what wiles nature gave me.”

He answered: “You mean what Del Azarchel gave you—he was one of your primary designers.”

Rania smiled cryptically, a smile not altogether pleasant. “Both Shelly’s Frankenstein and Shaw’s Pygmalion were in the ship’s library. Wasn’t that warning enough about infatuation with your own handiwork? If you are going to play at being God, divine love, rather than romantic love, might seem to be in order.”

 

Copyright (c) John C. Wright