Risa 'Doc' Kline

I suspect Risa Kline would have despised this entry.

She was not a woman who sought recognition. The engrams paint her as perpetually irritated, practical to the point of brutality, utterly uninterested in the dreams and delusions that drove men like Silas. She did not want to be remembered. She wanted the job done and her people alive at the end of it.

Fortunately for history—two thousand years of history—what she wanted is not my concern.

The Doctor

They called her "Doc," and the title carried weight beyond medicine. She managed her crew's health during the particular brutalities of deep-black travel—the drug cocktails that kept bodies functional under crushing g-forces, the chemical adjustments that brought minds back from acceleration-induced fog.

"I'm adjusting your cocktail. Adrenaline queued for recovery."

But her authority extended further. She was the one who "pulled Silas in" when his ambitions outpaced reality. She had known him "long enough to know when he was boasting"—which is to say, she had known him long enough.

When crew members expressed reluctance, it was Doc who reminded them of the shape of their world:

"When will you two understand that doesn't matter? You're Rems of the Caleedan clan. Once assigned, you're either in this crew or you're on the streets."

Harsh words. True words—for their time. The Edge of that era did not offer gentle options.

Her Burden

I have noted elsewhere that Doc watched over young Pax with particular intensity. Her warning to Harrow was not a suggestion:

"Whatever baggage you are carrying, Harrow—if you drag Pax down with you, I'll make sure you never see the other side of your next cryo sleep."

This was not an empty threat. Medical officers controlled the drugs that governed consciousness during interstellar travel. A crew member who slept too deep, whose cocktail went slightly wrong... these things happened in the black.

Whether her protectiveness stemmed from personal connection or professional principle, I cannot determine. The engrams do not explain love, only document its symptoms—symptoms that persist across two millennia of reconstruction.

What She Saw

Doc looked around The Afterburn—the bar where Harrow drank too much—and her subtle snarl gave away what she thought of the place.

She saw the waste. The slow erosion of potential into the bottom of a glass. She saw Harrow carrying burdens he refused to name, and she saw the danger that posed to those around him.

But she handed him coffee anyway. She kept him functional. She did the work.

"It'll cut through the booze."

The Temple has little use for figures like Doc Kline. She was not a Seer. She did not hear the Song. Her work was bodies and chemicals, the crude machinery of survival.

But I have come to believe that civilisation depended—and still depends—more on people like her than on all the Choirmasters who ever sang.

Someone had to keep the dreamers alive long enough to dream.

~ NV