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Aug. 10th, 2009 07:24 pmThis is the bit where Jamie starts to regret his choice to buy time to learn about the world by playing foreign. If he copped to knowing the language, he could talk to the doctor, crack a few jokes, get him to loosen up a bit; he doesn't seem a bad fellow, just tired.
(As an added benefit, the doctor could actually ask Jamie to move his arms around when he comes to examine him, instead of positioning them in place and saying "STAY!" like Jamie's a doll. Or a dog. Or a dog doll.)
But it's too late now - if he starts speaking in their language, they'll just ask why he didn't start before, and then he'll really be in the soup. He still has a decent chance of pulling off the lost little child bit. No military organization wants to feed a stray kid forever. Sooner or later, they'll give him a clean bill of health and send him out to some orphanage. Sooner or later, he'll figure out a way to get off this hollow metal rock and back to a proper world, with proper Bounds. Earth, for preference. Jamie's been to a million Earths, but aside from trips to Milliways he's never been off Earth before. He's thinking now that he could quite happily have gone all the hundreds and hundreds of years of his life without ever having changed that.
But that's all in the future. First, he has to convince them that he's not part of any kind of diabolical interplanetary scheme, that his arm's not about to fall off, that he's not going to give the rest of the population of this tiny space station some bizarre infectious disease - in short, that he's healthy enough and harmless enough to be let out of this white room that smells of chemicals.
And it's not like he hasn't been worse places than the white room. They feed him. There's a bed. There's even one of those cubes that shows pantomime stories. He's been plenty worse.
But it's been two months now, with only the doctor's thrice-weekly visits for company - and Jamie can't even talk properly to him, though you can do a bit to make friends through pantomime - and the fellow who comes every other day and interrogates him in Russian, and Jamie's too busy scrambling for plausible-sounding lies to do much chatting then. Jamie's used to being lonely, too, but this, he thinks, is a bit much.
He thinks to himself that he's never going to complain about the dullness of the cattle world again.
And then a few minutes later acknowledges that yes, that's a flat-out lie. But he'll complain about this more.
Just as soon as he gets out.
(As an added benefit, the doctor could actually ask Jamie to move his arms around when he comes to examine him, instead of positioning them in place and saying "STAY!" like Jamie's a doll. Or a dog. Or a dog doll.)
But it's too late now - if he starts speaking in their language, they'll just ask why he didn't start before, and then he'll really be in the soup. He still has a decent chance of pulling off the lost little child bit. No military organization wants to feed a stray kid forever. Sooner or later, they'll give him a clean bill of health and send him out to some orphanage. Sooner or later, he'll figure out a way to get off this hollow metal rock and back to a proper world, with proper Bounds. Earth, for preference. Jamie's been to a million Earths, but aside from trips to Milliways he's never been off Earth before. He's thinking now that he could quite happily have gone all the hundreds and hundreds of years of his life without ever having changed that.
But that's all in the future. First, he has to convince them that he's not part of any kind of diabolical interplanetary scheme, that his arm's not about to fall off, that he's not going to give the rest of the population of this tiny space station some bizarre infectious disease - in short, that he's healthy enough and harmless enough to be let out of this white room that smells of chemicals.
And it's not like he hasn't been worse places than the white room. They feed him. There's a bed. There's even one of those cubes that shows pantomime stories. He's been plenty worse.
But it's been two months now, with only the doctor's thrice-weekly visits for company - and Jamie can't even talk properly to him, though you can do a bit to make friends through pantomime - and the fellow who comes every other day and interrogates him in Russian, and Jamie's too busy scrambling for plausible-sounding lies to do much chatting then. Jamie's used to being lonely, too, but this, he thinks, is a bit much.
He thinks to himself that he's never going to complain about the dullness of the cattle world again.
And then a few minutes later acknowledges that yes, that's a flat-out lie. But he'll complain about this more.
Just as soon as he gets out.
