Free Cryoburn-ARC by Lois M. Bujold Page B

banks of cryo-drawers, and part living space, or so the unmade bedroll by one wall and the piles of personal junk suggested. Beyond, another door stood open on what might be some sort of repairs facility. Miles glimpsed workbenches and racks of tools in its shadows. There was only one station chair, by which Miles guessed this Tenbury was less sociable than Suze, but the custodian politely gestured his guest into it and leaned against a control console. Miles would have preferred it the other way around, so as not to risk a crick in his neck, nor the embarrassment of swinging his short legs above the floor. But he dared not impede the useful exchange he'd started, so he sat and half-smiled upward.
    Tenbury cocked his head, and echoed the cook's observation. "You look too young for us. You sick or something?"
    Miles repeated the reply that had seemed to work before: "I have an incurable seizure disorder."
    Tenbury winced in sympathy, but said, "You'd do better to go back to the docs. Off-planet, maybe."
    "I have. It was costly." Miles turned out his empty pockets as if to demonstrate.
    "That why you ended up here? Broke, are you?"
    "In a sense." It wasn't as if Miles was trying to beat a fast-penta interrogation through excessive literalism, yet he found himself oddly reluctant to lie outright to this man. "It's more complicated than that."
    "Yah, it always is.'
    "Can you show me what I might be getting into? If I stayed here, that is?"
    The hairy eyebrows jerked up. "You've nothing to worry about with my work. Come on, and you'll see."
    Tenbury led through his shop, which seemed half-engineeering-half-medical. Dismantled freezer parts lay strewn across a workbench. "I keep a portion of the chambers usable by cannibalizing the others," Tenbury explained.
    Miles encouraged the tech to expand upon the arcana of his craft with much the same noises he'd used on Yani, to better effect. When Miles had absorbed as much about how cryochambers were built as he could stand, he asked, "But won't you run out of parts?"
    "Not for a while yet. This facility was originally set up to serve twenty thousand patrons. In twenty years, we've only accumulated about a ten-percent occupancy. I admit we started much smaller, back when. We can go for decades yet. Till I'm gone, for sure."
    "And what then? Who are you relying on for your revivals?"
    "We don't need anyone to do the revivals, yet. Anyway, they're much trickier."
    Indeed . "Who does the cryoprep, then?"
    "Plant nurse. You'll meet her sooner or later. She's real good, and she has an apprentice, Ako, too. I need to get myself a couple of youngsters like that, I guess."
    Miles didn't marvel at this. Emergency cryoprep was a common enough medical procedure that even he had learned it, at least theoretically, as part of military field-aid. Under nonemergency conditions there were doubtless more refinements, resulting in less cryo-amnesia and other unwanted side-effects, after. Less trauma to start with left less trauma to recover from, but to choose to go down to that darkness in cold blood, so to speak, while still breathing . . . "It's still frightening to think about," he said honestly.
    "For most folks, it's a last choice, not a first one. We all come to it in time, though. No one wants to go of a coronary in the night and not-wake-up warm and rotting. Safer not to wait too long." Tenbury's lips twisted. "Although some of the corps are trying to increase market share these days by encouraging folks to freeze early. I'm not sure if the math works out."
    "It does seem an inelastic demand, yes," agreed Miles in fascination. "More customers now can only mean fewer later. A short-term strategy for such a long-term enterprise."
    "Yah, except maybe for those who'd miss their chance."
    It was Miles's turn to tilt his head in consideration. "I suppose they're not up to one-hundred-percent market saturation, even now. What about the religious types?"
    "Oh, yah, there are still a few