Able Zeller made the interior circuit of Ceres in 17 minutes, one of his best runs. He was now in the inner sanctum, in the bowels of their lonely voyaging world. The bio-tech operations chamber opened into a cozy oblong space terminating in four domed pods. He raced directly for the bio-salvage pod. The air was moist with melancholy, and the sobbing would have echoed from the walls if they had not had absorbent membranes.

The pod was a singular site in the life of Ceres.

This was the scene of a death, their first death, and more.

It would have been among his tasks to extract relevant passages from the Baseline Ethics Protocol, for his seniors to utilize in the development of a ritual appropriate for a death—some observance or other that would help comfort these five pained minds. As his eyes rested on the twisted continence, ashen hue, and glassy blood-shot eyes of Max Herul Beta, he was saddened to discover that he did not become emotionally incapacitated like the two males and three females who stood over the body of their coordinator, laying in the consultant’s chair, a chair that Able had suggested be installed.

Two bio-techs stood over each of the other consulting chairs attending to the figure within. There were four chairs in all—one empty—which surrounded the feed matrix. The feed matrix was a 20-liter dish dome filled with a soft blue electrolyte solution and occupied by the three ancient brains Doctor Marx had obsessed over reviving and establishing communications with. Only one figure stood before the dish dome, where three unthinkably and unknowably ancient human brains waved at its bottom, raised on stalk-like hemafuses that provided each with its blood. They seemed like evil blunted creatures, grotesque swollen flowers waving in the dish dome, shrouded in Doctor Marx’s brainchild, the neuroshroud.

The female peering into this eerie pool of still life looked over her shoulder with a grimace of disapproval tinged with relief as he stopped jogging and eased up to her side. “Mildred?”

“Doctor. It has been some time. You can see how much we have progressed and at what terrible cost. We all knew you didn’t approve of resuscitation, but we made gains, opened contact through imaged symbols—Doctor Marx was thrilled.”

She began to sob. He ignored that and directed her attention to the brains. “Why so close? Why under the same neuroshroud?”

“The female brain, which was the most accessible—or, should I say responsive—has little plasticity remaining and has a damaged frontal lobe sustained at death, for there has been no compensating development of other centers.

“The large male brain is much younger, has a high level of plasticity, and has nothing in it! That fat boy has more capacity than these two smaller brains and used none of it. We are postulating that this might have been a medically generated brain used for modeling.

“The one we want to communicate with, the richly variegated one in the middle, has had its plasticity compromised—we believe due to its being older at death, stored longer, or perhaps oxygen-starved before preservation.”

Impatient, already, with her highly informed yet plodding mind he cut in. “You people are using the less desirable candidates for social intercourse to communicate with your target brain. The less desirable dead are being elevated only so far above their lonely place as to permit your communication with their better. And you people supposed they would not object?”

She was defensive already, “Doctor, we modeled the procedure for two years. Every indication—w”

“You did not bring in a moderator. I was not contacted, nor were my seniors. There should have been a consultant in the moderator’s chair—that is why I suggested its installation.”

She was sobbing again, flashing hurt, guilty eyes at him, admitting with a glance that she had not thought a moderator was necessary. These people all thought along the same line. So hers was most likely a shared guilt. He decided to ease her out of her threatened place.

“I am now interested in your project. Our first death should not be in vein. Secure Doctor Marx in the static chamber, please, while we move on.”

The bio-techs weeping and wringing their hands now had something useful to occupy their wounded time.

“Introduce me to the casualties. Perhaps I can help with their mental state.”

Mildred walked him over to the second consultant’s chair, where a female tech hugged herself with panicked intensity, even winding her legs around each other like two coiled strings. Blood dripped from a bitten tongue through the tightly scrunched lips. Her eyes were closed so tightly the lids seemed to quiver in pain. She was a pathetic sight.

“Her cradle was set to interact with the female brain?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“That was a gross miscalculation, not merely wrong, but diametrically counter to what I would have suggested.”

“We are removing her from the chair and will be consulting you on a course of therapy—”

“No, Mildred, you will cradle her back up and secure her vitals, now. Then you will route her through the moderator’s cradle.”

She wanted to slap him, he could tell. But she directed the other bio-techs to re-cradle the woman who had apparently suffered a psychotic break upon contacting the female brain through the neuroshroud. She then turned to him, seemingly wishing she could will the two neat tears away from her rounded cheeks. Able Zeller now understood Adlerode Sigma’s infatuation, though he declined to share it.

“I will be in the moderator’s chair, Mildred. There is no course but to push on. How is the male tech?”

Mildred walked him over around the dish dome to the scene of a fresh tragedy. The male tech had just stopped breathing, somehow resisting access to his lungs as the oxygen feed tried in vain to pump air down his throat. The techs were losing their clinical edge, finally giving up after 18 minutes of trying to force oxygen into unwilling lungs, and retracting the breather. Mildred looked up at him and he knew he had to take command of this situation before they lost the female tech, and—more importantly—before the connection was lost with the three ancient occupants of the feed matrix.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, and fairly snarled, “Mildred, get Adlerode Sigma down here now—I have a recent connection with him and he has the correct, mechanically inclined mind, to set to this task. Put him in this cradle—after your techs get the casualty to static—vectored to the female brain, and linked to my cradle. Link the female tech to my cradle. You take Marx’s chair and link up with me as well—move! Don’t stand there, make it happen, now!”

He then let go of her and scanned the pod, noticing that more bio-techs were approaching from the other three pods. He was shocked, elated, appalled and pleased, all in one sweltering emotion, with the commanding timbre of his voice. He experienced the best erection he had had in years, and now knew precisely who and what he was.

“We have a crux situation. Everybody get on station. Get the casualties to static and cradle the rest of us up. Have us three secured, linked and vitaled before the fourth consultant gets here. I want three techs to a chair and four on the feed matrix. Treat this as a hull breach. Move!”

Getting the associated bio-techs involved restarted the demoralized pod techs and transformed what had become a death watch into a deadly, unplanned dive into what might simply be insanity. He felt potent, proud—and guilty for using this traumatic event as an opportunity for seizing power from his betters and, at the same time, failing to consult his own seniors. He also felt exultant, deeply confirmed in the rightness of his actions.

As he was literally carried away and cradled by three techs, and Mildred, to her irritation, was similarly bundled into the process issuing from his call to action, Doctor Able Zeller Omega, giggled like he had as a boy when pranking a senior, thrilled, that on the very first day that he had wished he were younger, that he all of a sudden had stumbled upon what seemed to him now to be his one and only purpose for having been generated in Ceres. Knowing that his thrill must be reflected in his polar opposite as terror—and being an instigator of self-serving humorous exchanges—he permitted himself a quip aimed at his now unseen colleague.

“Mildred, so sorry you didn’t have time to pack your egress kit. See you at Footfall, on the other side!”

He could not hear her response as he was being cradled, but imagined that it was a furious pouting huff of disapproval.

This ends the online postings of The Consultant: Bart Davidson’s Damnation.

The three remaining chapters of this novelette are:

The consultant is the prequel to the novella Footfall.