by Kris Schnee
"What are you saying?"
"I can't do my job properly. We need more power, more authority to centralize things and keep costs down."
Pierpont nearly forgot about his own problem. "Is the job that bad, son?"
A sigh. "No. Not always. Things feel out of control, and it scares me. I'm doing the best I can to keep people healthy."
"You've got a chance to help me, at least."
The young man stared at his hands. "We have to set limits. Allocate scarce resources and all that. There aren't enough hearts in the world."
Pierpont's own heart beat a little faster, using up time. "Are you saying I'm not covered after all?"
"There aren't enough donors and there are limits on the vat-grown type."
"I could pay a bounty."
"You can't buy and sell human organs. That's immoral. And people are too selfish to opt-in to the donation program."
Pierpont said, "I was mostly thinking of the mechanical ones anyway. They're good these days, right?" Artificial hearts had gone from fridge-sized torture devices to gleaming plastic implants that might be more enduring than the real thing.
"They're in short supply too. Can't goad the companies to make enough."
"How much is the NHS paying?"
"We don't pay, exactly. They're a bunch of lazy nonprofits, and they whine when we set production quotas."
"I'll pay out of pocket. Sell the hotel if I have to."
The son looked horrified. "But you've spent years on that place! You put, well, heart and soul into it."
"Giving up the hotel is better than dying."
"But selling it for money -- life shouldn't be about money. We can't let the quality of care hinge on that. How would you feel if you were poor and I had to turn you away?"
"Six of one, half a dozen of the other, it sounds like. Are you telling me I can't get treated?"
"I'll put you on the list. It's all I can do. But it's two years long." The son wouldn't look at him. "It's because the rules say a man of your age is considered a losing investment. The state has to allocate its resources where they'll do the most good; it's the only fair way. Health is a zero-sum game, and I'm starting to hate it."
Pierpont lurched forward in his chair. "So you'll let your father die!"
"Damn it, Dad, don't do this to me. If you were a Congressman you could cut through the red tape, but you haven't got that kind of pull."
"So it's 'pull' that determines who lives and dies, instead of cash? I'll get you money, and you can buy some pull for me."
The son slammed his fist onto the desk, knocking over the family picture. "No! I won't corrupt the system, even for you!"
The office door creaked open and a secretary appeared. "Is everything all right, sir?"
The son had tears in his eyes, but gave the secretary a grim nod. "Please show him the door."
* * *
So Pierpont was allocated aspirin and death. He wasn't worth saving, and he hated having to sob into Dottie's shoulder and rely on her strength. "It's like a judgment on my life," he said. "If it were that I couldn't afford it, I could understand, but to be told I'm not worth saving...!"
Dottie's breath was warm on his ear. "Jarvik Pierpont, snap out of it! You're not going to give up. I won't let you."
"What can I do? It's decided."
"We'll find another way."
Her voice was so certain, it gave him a little hope. They'd had this sort of conversation before, when their little hotel had seemed like a failure. "When?"
She held him tightly. "Later."
* * *
Their decision hurt. They gave up full ownership, to mortgage the business that they'd spent so many years building up from nothing. The long, low rows of tile-roofed buildings were physically unchanged, yet it seemed there was a pall over them from the mere act of signing. Suddenly the place felt foreign, not his own. Snow dusted the roofs and the cars in the parking lot. Pierpont spent long hours snuggled with Dottie beside the fireplace that the bank now controlled, talking of how they'd earn it all back when he was well again.
They flew to Brazil for the surgery, making a vacation of it. If you greased a few palms there, you could buy anything, and wonders were for sale. Pierpont looked long and hard at the array of alleged doctors before finding one he was pretty sure wouldn't kill him by ineptitude or a desire for easy money. He breathed the gas and sank into darkness.
He woke slowly, coming back in waves. Dottie smiled at him. When he realized where he was, he nearly leaped up but was too weak to do more than twitch. He licked his crud-covered lips and said, "Time to start again."
It took a while before he noticed the sensation of absence. Dottie saw him patting his sore, scarred chest and said, "Are you all right?"
"Ssh. Wait." Pierpont kept his hand over his new heart, then pressed his fingers to his wrist. "No pulse!"
"That's the design, remember? A rotary pump." The device had a continuous flow strong enough to open the natural valves in his blood vessels. Only one moving part, very low-maintenance. Better than the living kind, really.
He lay there listening, as though the thing in his chest would start beating any moment.
* * *
When they got back to the hotel he returned to work right away. He climbed stairs outside, needing to rest only a little with his hand on the cold railing. Everything felt empty when he looked across the parking lot and along the rows of identical doors. The place wasn't his anymore.
He kept thinking that way as the fall deepened into winter, until one day Dottie found him by the sealed pool, shivering, shirtless. "Dear, what are you doing?"
He felt pale and flabby, useless. The cold wind gave him goosebumps. "I wanted to feel something, anything."
She whipped off her coat and draped it over him, hugging him in the process. "You're starting to worry me."
He looked up at Dottie. "None of it's real. I'm not even alive."
"Of course you are. Is this about the heartbeat?"
"Yes." He sighed and thought for a while. "Not just that. I have no heart, I have no hotel. I have no son."
Dottie sat with him by the concrete hole of the pool. "The boy was trying to be honest. It's not his fault he had to tell you that."
"He would have let me die!"
She held onto him. "If you want to blame someone, blame the system."
"The 'system' is made of people," he said. "I thought it was in good hands, that I could trust him. But I had to leave my country, to lose my business and my heart. What's left?"
"I told you to stop moping. This isn't you."
"What am I, then? Everything has failed me. I thought I was safe."
She was in his face, shaking him by the shoulders. "Stop it! Get yourself together and work!"
He still had her, anyway, and could do his job even as an undead thing. He sat there ashamed, then stood to start vacuuming the carpets of the bank's hotel.
* * *
She left little reminders of their success lying around. His award from the Cornell hotel management program. Newspaper clippings from when he'd worked in Las Vegas and Redmond. A letter from an "apprentice" they'd had, a gal named Sonia, who'd gone on to run hotels herself. Notes on the strange guests they'd had, the fire they'd rescued people from, and the day they'd finally owned their own hotel free and clear. Dottie was trying to make him out as some kind of hero for doing an ordinary job.
But that was another life, before the new heart. His place in the world -- a healthy, hard-working man with his son protecting him and everyone else -- had been his identity. Now the heart whirred in his chest and he went through the motions of the job, feeling numb. He looked at Dottie and felt shame for letting her down. Now she was smiling and hugging him even more often, trying to rouse some kind of passion in him, but the world was cold and grey. He needed to be alone but she was constantly in the way, hounding him. Finally he locked himself in one of the rooms all morning, ignoring her pleading and staring blurrily into the te
levision. His resentment was like a fire in a cold room; it was something he could rely on, better than no feeling at all. It was vile of him to make Dottie sad and he threw the vileness and self-loathing on the fire too. It would warm him for a while.
The TV spoke to him. It said that somewhere, there was a place in the world where it was hot and dangerous, where a gang of American criminals were trying to live as farmers in the wilderness. There was a tiny concrete island ringed with nets floating in the ocean, where even tinier people swarmed about and lived lives of chaos and wickedness. The island glowing on the screen was the only light in the room. He crawled across the bed on his hands and knees to approach its brightness. It was there for only a minute before the light dimmed and went back to a news alert about the national Four-Year Plan. Pierpont slumped on the bed, prostrated before the idiotic box and wishing it would grant him another vision of that place where people were alive.
He shut the TV off and slumped again, wishing he could feel something but loss, or that someone would make his life meaningful again. He could go to Dottie; she would tell him what to do.
Dottie wasn't waiting for him, wasn't still peeking in through the curtain. Wind whipped past him as he went down to the main office, making him feel he was running instead of slinking along like an old man.
Her truck wasn't in the parking lot; her coat wasn't on the rack. But there was a scrawled note on the counter: "Gone to the lake."
Pierpont drove past the hotel, past the town where people knew them and respected them. Past his old house, as though going back in time to where they'd first met. The lake shined grey under a grey sky ringed with dead trees reaching up. The only boat on the water was theirs, with Dottie in it. On foot he stopped by the water's edge, reaching pathetically towards her. But he had to go on, to run ahead to where the boardwalk ended and he could wave and call out to her. The wind shouted over his voice and snaked through his coat. It felt pointless to be out here when the lake was so blank and he could have no power over it. Without anyone there to see the lake, it didn't mean anything.
The boat turned and motored towards him, so that Dottie drew close. "I know I've done wrong by you," he said when she could hear. "I need you to tell me what to do, where to go from here."
She watched him and said, "No. The man I married was strong."
"But everything's been stripped away. I'm not the same man anymore. Dottie, I'm sorry."
She said, "Is that supposed to make everything better?"
"I need to know you still love me, no matter what."
"No," said Dottie.
The air was sliced from his lungs, but his heart didn't react. "No?"
"Not 'no matter what'. Get a dog if you want unconditional love. You can kick and curse at a mutt and have it come back to lick your boots, so its affection doesn't mean anything. It doesn't prove you've got any worth. I married you because you were brave and honest and hard-working -- because you deserved it. If you're going to snivel, then you don't."
"But I can't be that person anymore!"
She said, "Why the hell not? What do you want? Why did you come here?"
"I want you to give me --" Pierpont said, then stopped. Advice, or time to himself, or her love in spite of his being a worm?
"I'm tired of giving and giving," said Dottie. "Don't apologize. Do something. Be somebody. I almost don't care what or who. But if you expect me to give you everything for nothing because I said some vows to a different man, then this boat is going right back out."
Pierpont wasn't the same man, because he'd let himself become so worthless and relied on her to take care of him. His resentment fed on him, made him weaker in the end, and he kept coming back to the thought that she should love him anyway for being who he was, which was nothing, which made him hate himself even more. "I don't want to be like this," he said.
"That's up to you," said Dottie.
What could he offer her anymore? He had wrinkled hands and a false heart. He didn't deserve her, and he didn't deserve to be given a new heart. He should have accepted his son's judgment and died. But he wanted to feel again. To do something meaningful. To be a man instead of an invalid. To own something, earn something, deserve pride in himself. "But I have so little to offer," he muttered. Dottie was watching him, sitting in the boat as his Lady of the Lake, and he knew that she deserved at least as good a husband as he had once been. Now, he wasn't good enough. But despite his dead heart and tired body, all his anger at himself flowed from the thought that things didn't have to be this way. That he could still fight but wasn't doing it, because he was too weak and stupid.
There was a place, he remembered, where people still fought. He said, "There's a way to start again." That fleeting vision gave him the strength to do something daring, to make one last effort at being worthwhile. "Run away to sea with me," he said.
Dottie said, "What?"
Pierpont got down on one stiff knee on the rough boards. "Dottie, I want you to be proud of me and I want to take care of you. Marry me again and we'll leave this place behind, and go far away. I'll give you --"
"Give me what?" she said, her hands tight on the boat's side.
"I'll earn your respect, with whatever time is left to me. We'll start over, and build the most amazing hotel in the world. We'll get filthy rich and, I don't know, match the machine in my chest with computers in our heads and diamonds in our teeth. We'll do everything."
"You want to give me all that?" she said.
"No!" said Pierpont, feeling a smile creep onto his face. "What will you trade for it?"
Dottie was quiet for a while. "If you'll stand up and be someone, I'll make your dreams come true."
"Then we'll do it!" said Pierpont, getting up to take her hand before he knew what he was doing. "It doesn't matter what we are now. We'll be something better."
Dottie looked at him with worried eyes as the snow began to fall again. "Starting over, though? Are you serious?"
"I am." It felt good to say. "I can be alive again." He climbed carefully into the boat, feeling younger at heart.
18. Garrett
Rafters came.
Garrett found them when he went on watch one morning. A barge with a straw canopy had anchored beyond the farm, and a slim craft ill-suited to the sea approached from land. He called for Zephyr, then confronted the Pilgrim who'd been on watch. "How did you not notice these?"
"Sorry, sir. Wasn't looking in the right direction."
"'Wasn't looking'? Your standard video game guard is more observant."
"I wouldn't know, sir."
"Dismissed." Garrett sighed; he'd deal with the lookout problem later. He opened a radio channel and challenged the strangers.
One boat said, "Good morning from Sea Venture, here to party!" The other didn't answer.
Garrett lifted his binoculars again. The smaller boat was a fishing craft with three women in it, no life vests, and not even a radio antenna. The thatch-roofed one had a guy smiling and waving, and several dozen people milling around.
"Castor Station here. Define 'party'."
Someone different came on the line, like the fine print on an advertisement. "We're a tour boat looking to dock for the morning."
Garrett scratched his head. "Uh... I get ten percent of whatever you're charging."
"Deal," the man said too quickly.
Zephyr tapped Garrett's shoulder. "I've suggested that people start the lockdown plan, and our lab is set."
"Good. Get the security folks on duty."
The station's loudspeaker simply echoed his words. "Okay," said Zephyr.
The women's boat drew close enough for them to be seen waving. It was rolling alarmingly. Garrett pointed at the dock, wanting them to get out of the pathetic hull before it killed them.
That one docked first, nearly wrecking itself and the nearest farm panels. Garrett was there with two Pilgrims to get the boat secured and greet the underdressed women: "What are you doing, taking a craft like that out of harbor?"
The oldest of the three said, "Hi to you too, guy. How much for a room?"
Garrett eyed them. He knew why they were here, and if he let them stay he'd be knowingly profiting from crime. Or something that was a crime pretty much everywhere. It was one thing to say "let's let people live how they want" in theory, but another to actually allow it.
He named a price. "Checkout is noon, services are extra, and there's a cleaning deposit."
One of the women laughed. "Any barter for those 'services'?"
Garrett felt queasy but helped the businesswomen aboard. "No, thanks."
Then the partygoers flooded onto the station, and Castor was overwhelmed. The platform's population had suddenly and dramatically risen, and there were men and women in grey glaring at the colorful tourists while Garrett went ragged patrolling the place and trying to keep people from falling off the topdeck. Phillip glared at him, saying, "How long?"
"A few hours."
Noah called. "Captain, they're setting up poker tables in Dockside."
"Cool."
Then Tess came running up. "They're playing with my birds."
"So charge them." Garrett was glad for the bustle, scary as it was to have people wandering around outside his command. He turned on the PA system and said, "Everyone, relax."
* * *
Later, he saw two of the prostitutes drinking with the tourists. All these visitors were making him uptight. Things came to a head at noon, in the makeshift bar and casino Dockside had become. He was sipping soda and trying to be a good host while keeping an eye on the place. A cheer went up from a wooden craps table, making him smile even though a drunk was nearly leaning on him.
"You gotta take me diving, man. I've gone waterskiing with my buddies, and we were fine. Can't be any harder to swim with an air tank."
"Sorry, no. And you're leaving soon. Come back another day."
The guy leaned close enough to put beer breath in Garrett's face. Garrett wondered if he'd ever done that to someone himself. "Truth is, I don't wanna leave. Don't wanna face the old lady again, y'know?"
Garrett sighed. "We have rooms for rent, and you can buy a ride back."
