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muscular before the trip. At every briefing and meeting he had worn
a suit that was not too flashy, but not too conservative either.
His hair had always been groomed and close-cut, and he had always
looked freshly shaven, even after hours of meetings. He was
clean-shaven even here, but his hair seemed thicker and a little
bushier than on Earth. He had what looked like a small scar across
the left side of his cheek. At most angles, before they had boarded
the Paracelsus, the scar looked like a worry line, but here, after
too many years in stasis, the pallid hue of Tanner’s skin and his
more gaunt face made the scar very clear—memories came back slow,
and in waves, but once they came back, they stayed.
    “The nanocytes that rebuilt your muscles are
still working to reacclimatize your body to movement. Once you
reach static equilibrium again, you’ll hit the sleep chamber,
they’ll dissolve in your sleep, and you’ll wake up feeling like a
million Uni creds,” Dr. Tanner reassured.
    Another twitching attack sent Cyrus’s face
into a violent contortion that made it look like he was about to
vomit out of the left corner of his mouth. “They never said it
would be like this in the briefing. I feel like the last leper in
hell.”
    “You look like you’ve lost about thirty
pounds in the Hyposoma, plus your brain has been frozen in place
for almost two hundred years. I’d say you’re doing well considering
most people can’t even remember how to talk until the fourth day
out of the Apparatus. And then they have to learn to walk all over
again.” Cyrus felt around his abdomen, admiring the absence of the
gut he had been forming since his fourth year of marriage. His
belly was soft but flat. As he rubbed his fingers across, he could
feel the minute vibrations caused by the nanocytes exercising his
stomach muscles. “Is all this really necessary?”
    “Come on, you should know better than that,”
Dr. Tanner chided.
    “I’m an astrophysicist, not a physician Dr.
Tanner.”
    “Touché. Hyposoma is as close to death as a
human body can come without actually being dead. After more than
190 years of it, you’d come out looking like Stephen Hawking
without the nanocytes.”
    “Who the heck is Stephen Hawking?”
    A smile spread across Dr. Tanner’s face, but
quickly turned into a wince. “Either you’re trying to get me to
catch a cramp or the Hyposoma had your brain stem in a serious
choke hold.”
    “Well, I’m not exactly the fastest ship in
the fleet right now. It took me two full minutes to remember my own
son’s name when I first got out of the Apparatus.”
    “That is pretty bad. You couldn’t stop
talking about him before we left Eros. Darius is his name, right?
He’s following us on the Damocles with your wife is he not?”
    Cyrus’s body lurched feebly over the sink. He
looked as if he was about to vomit, but nothing came out. After his
attack, he turned back to Dr. Tanner. “You seem sharp as a laser
bit, and stable too. How’d you fare so well through this whole
wretched ordeal?”
    “I had a two-day head start out of stasis
with Dr. Fordham because I was a veteran Hyposomatic. In the
downtime before the rest of you guys hatched, I made a point of
brushing up on everyone else’s dossier. But as far as stability
goes, you should have seen me on the first day. I looked like a lab
monkey on galvacet I had the twitches so bad. The Shipmate had to
tie me to the gurney.”
    “Now you’re trying to get me to catch a
cramp.” What looked like a weak attempt at laughter proved to be
another involuntary lurch. “But yes, Darius is due on the Damocles,
but I don’t know if Feralynn is going to make it. Hopefully my best
friend Earth-side will still get Dari on the ship if she
doesn’t.”
    “I don’t understand. Maybe I missed something
in the dossier. Why wouldn’t she make it?”
    The effort required for Cyrus to stand and
hold his head up to face Dr. Tanner forced out rivulets of