I'm not sure what had woken me up.I'm not sure what had woken me up. A sound, maybe, or a smell. I don't usually come to full alertness like I had tonight, so I tried to figure out exactly what had alerted me. Then I heard a noise come from her bed. A shifting sound, like she was moving again. It wasn't convulsions, or Hal would have awoken me. Fitful sleep? Or was she coming around? We had been lucky; she hadn't drunk all that much bleach and we had gotten to her early. Between immediate medical attention and the new generation of blood-borne biomechanicals, she had healed almost completely before we'd even gone to sleep. And then I heard a whimper. A painful sound. I got out of bed slowly and walked over to where she lay on her side, tossing. I examined her in the almost dark of Medical; the only lights came from displays over her bed or scattered about the room. She was beautiful in ways I hadn't anticipated. I'd almost built the vulpin out of capitulation to a series of articles asking, out of all the species I could have worked with, why I hadn't worked with "man's best friend," namely, the dog? Because dogs are nearly impossible to work with. |