Maximum Light

by Nancy Kress

  Then I’m up, panting, reeking like a sewer. There’s a knife on the counter. It’s wicked sharp. I try not to think what it was for, and I move with it toward the door.

  The door isn’t locked. On the other side is the hallway Jogerst brought me down hours ago, the hallway that leads past the lab with—

  I move down the hallway with my back to the wall, toward the dusty windowless room where the entrance is.

  I never reach it. Suddenly there’s an explosion. I hit the ground. People shout. And the hallway is filled with cops in full body armor and computerized weapons.

  Atuli. Went to Nick, who went for the cops. Atuli actually came through.

  “Freeze!” a cop yells at me, and I lie my cheek against the hard floor and thank my Irish luck that that rucky-fucky dancer had some balls after all.

  19

  NICK CLEMENTI

  It’s like a lion at the door;

  And when the door begins to crack,

  It’s like a stick across your back;

  And when your back begins to smart,

  It’s like a penknife in your heart;

  And when your heart begins to bleed,

  You’re dead, and dead, and dead, indeed.

  Only I wasn’t.

  “It’s so wonderful,” Maggie said, the nurses said, the French doctors leading the clinical trial said, proudly. “So wonderful.” And it was. I’d responded well to the French experimental drug. The mucormycosis organisms in my sinuses died obediently. The fibers grown into my brain and optic nerves ceased reproducing and became necrotic tissue, to be removed by phagocytes. The damage already done to my nerve tissue could not, of course, be repaired. My balance was slightly impaired; I would walk for the rest of my life with a cane. Vision was dimmed in both eyes. There had been some damage to my olfactory nerves, and smells had to be quite strong for me to detect them. But I was not going to die.

  It was wonderful. Everybody said so.

  Then why did I feel this pervasive sense of sadness, of futility? Day after day I sat in my cheery French hospital room, talked with Maggie, worked with the physical therapy computers, grew stronger and healthier. And all the while, the sadness and futility grew in my mind, as once the mucormycosis fibers had grown so relentlessly in my brain.

  Stress, the doctors said, with our century’s relentless eagerness to assign all things to neurotransmitters. Depression. In other words, I was depressed because I felt depression, stressed because I was under stress. No one seemed to consider this tautological.

  I wanted more.

  What more, for sweet pity’s sake? What more could a man ask than that he be handed back his life? There was no greater gift than that.

  Sallie called every day from Atlanta, and Laurie from Washington, and even, once, Alana from Mars. Old friends sent good wishes. And John called, his aggrieved sulkiness hidden under concern for me, but not hidden very well. “I got your message about the meeting with ‘Billy McCullough,’ about a—”

  “About something confidential,” I said quickly.

  “Yeah. Why didn’t you tell me you were doing … that?”

  “I was doing it for Laurie,” I said. I laid my head back on my pillows and closed my eyes, but John’s image on the vidscreen went on talking anyway.

  “You might have told me.”

  “Sorry. Did you go to the meeting with McCullough?”

  “No. I didn’t get the message in time. Why did you call your house instead of mine? That would have been the sensible thing to do.”

  “Because I was drugged.”

  “Oh. Is that why you spoke in French?”

  “I spoke to the nurse in French.…” But it was too much effort to explain. If John heard my own voice on the answering system, speaking in French, then it could only be because the nurse wore a recording device and had replayed it verbatim. That was common in terminal cases, to analyze speech patterns later and so deduce brain activity. It must have been how she got the phone number and house number accurately.

  “So what do I do now about this McCullough?” John said. “Dad, are you even listening to me?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m tired. Goodbye, son.” McCullough must have waited for me a while at the restaurant and then left. I would have to contact him again and start the process over when I got home, if I wanted to. I should, of course; every time Laurie called on vid I could see the white strain on her face, the unhappiness, the maternal longing she tried to hide. She’d lost even more weight; her cheek and collar bones protruded like chisels. I should send a message to Billy McCullough that I was still interested. But somehow, I couldn’t find the emotional energy.

  “Let’s go sit on the bench outside,” Maggie said, her sharp worried eyes on me. “There are some wonderful red flower-things in bloom.” Maggie was a gardener, but not a genetic botanist.

  “You go, sweetheart,” I said. “I think I need a nap.” And I would lie in bed, feigning sleep to avoid talk, despising myself for not appreciating what had been given back to me.

  What had been given back to me?

  I was old. That had not changed. The old must be prepared to die, and I had made my peace with death. And now there was no death, at least not yet. I had fought a battle within myself, and won peace, and now it turned out that my victory was only over an enemy who hadn’t been present on the battlefield in the first place.

  And eventually I would have to do it all over again.

  I wasn’t depressed. I was angry. I had accepted death, and death had not accepted me, and I didn’t know if I had the courage to again meet the enemy with dignity and grace. To do it all over again …

  And everyone went around saying, “Isn’t it wonderful!” and any rational mind had to agree that it was. Reprieved from a fatal disease. Snatched from the jaws of death.

  Only to have them snap down on me again, probably soon, because I was still old and I was still running out of time. But I couldn’t say that to anyone, not even Maggie. It was too ungrateful, too obvious, too whining. All I could do was lie with my eyes closed, or stare out the hospital window, and know that, with the perversity of human beings, I was now more afraid of dying than I had been when I thought I was actually doing it.

  * * *

  “Dr. Bourdeloue, je voudrais aller chez moi.”

  The doctor smiled, probably more at my accent than at my desire to return home. “Pourquoi?”

  “Parce que … seulement parce que.” Because.

  In his silence I heard disappointment. I was not properly uplifted by his miracle. But finally he said philosophically, “Oui. Ce n’est pas defendu. Allez-vous chez vous.”

  “I can leave,” I said to Maggie.

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “Why not?” Now that the doctor had agreed, I found it didn’t really matter to me. Like everything else.

  “Do you want to not leave?”

  “Why not?” I said, and tried to smile. She sat close enough to my bedside to see her expression; she didn’t smile back. Her dress was bright, screaming green, a color Maggie never wore. She must have bought new clothes in Paris, brighter clothes, so that I could more easily follow her movements. Her voice was steel.

  “Okay, Nick, let’s have this out.”

  “Maggie … don’t push.”

  “I haven’t been,” she said. “But I am now. What is wrong? There’s something you’re not telling me!”

  “No, I … no.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Nick! God, I almost lost you, and now I’ve got you back again, and don’t you dare push me away by lying to me! What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Sounds like there’s a lot he hasn’t told you yet,” a deep, rich voice said from the doorway.

  Vanderbilt Grant.

  Maggie blinked, but I found I wasn’t all that surprised. Maybe at some level I’d been expecting him. Or maybe surprise, like everything else, seemed pointless.

  “Hello, Maggie. Nick, I flew over especially to talk to you. Maggie,
you may as well stay. I know Nick will end up telling you everything anyway, sooner or later.”

  After that statement, dislodging Maggie would have been like moving Gibraltar. Her green dress jerked, then settled more firmly back into her chair, removing her expression beyond my vision. Nor could I see Van’s expression, but the outline of his big body seemed to have changed. He stooped, and his shoulders sagged. I wasn’t sure, but I thought his right hand trembled, a twitching blur. Stress? Disease? Or just old age?

  All I could think about was old age.

  Maggie said, “What hasn’t Nick told me so far, Van? And why not?”

  I said wearily, “He hasn’t told you that this clinical trial didn’t just happen to turn up when I just happened to be in extremis. Did it, Van? The timing was too coincidental.”

  Van said nothing. He moved closer to my bed.

  “As Commissioner of the FDA,” I said, “you knew perfectly well that this experimental drug was being tested in Paris. And you knew, because you made it your business to find out, that I was being treated for mucormycosis. But you didn’t arrange for me to come here until you wanted me out of the country.”

  Maggie paled, half rose from her chair, sat down again. Van’s stooped form dropped heavily into a chair at the foot of my bed. I still couldn’t see his expression.

  “Try to understand, Nick,” his deep musical voice said. “The unusually high success rate of the mucormycosis drug wasn’t validated until just a few weeks ago. That part was a coincidence. You know what most clinical trials are. The new drugs are usually only marginally more effective than whatever was being used before. Until those results came in to my office, chances are you would have traveled a far distance, had a lot of extra pain, and probably died anyway. It wasn’t a choice between saving your life or letting you die. It was a choice between prolonging your dying or letting you slip away more quickly. Or so I thought.”

  “And you wanted me to ‘slip away’ more quickly. You wanted me in a coma as soon as possible. Why, Van?”

  I hadn’t expected him to answer. But he did, and I glimpsed again the huge contradictions in the man, the inner wars he must have fought all his complicated life.

  “I wanted you to go quickly because I didn’t want you investigating Shana Walders, or Cameron Atuli, or Billy McCullough.”

  For the first time, I realized that my hospital room door was closed. No nurses passed in and out. I was late for physical therapy, but no French orderly in cheerful red-and-blue had come to wheel me to the machines. Van had arranged for durable privacy. He must have considerable pull behind him to do that. And considerable motivation, to cross the ocean in his condition, whatever it was.

  I said slowly, “You know why I was going to Billy McCullough. You know because the FDA knows what the vivifacturers are doing. The chimps, the kidnappings … all of it. You know. You permit it.”

  “Not the kidnapping. Of course not that. And you have to understand, we don’t know about any of it, not officially. We never deal directly with those people. We subcontract with independent testing labs and—”

  “And they contract with the illegal vivifacturers. And when you discover it, you work hard at looking the other way. The government as a whole works hard at looking the other way. That’s why Shana Walders’s testimony about the chimps with Atuli’s face was buried in Committee in the first place … that’s why the FBI was so eager to let Atulihave the retrograde-induced amnesia.… My God.”

  “Nick—” Van’s voice said, and it was a plea.

  “But why? Why, Van? It can’t be that President Combes is tolerating all this just to—does Combes know? Does the Surgeon General? The CDC?”

  “I can’t answer any of those questions,” Van said. Maggie sat like stone, a motionless green blur.

  I said, “Of course they know. Unofficially. That’s why they were onto Sallie so fast and hard when she accessed Atuli’s name—”

  “We’ll fix that,” Van said. “Sallie can be reinstated. Somebody acted too precipitously.”

  Maggie choked out, “Do you know what you’re admitting to, Van?” and Van suddenly came to life, his old self. No—his young self. He raised his right hand, and its tremor had disappeared. His voice swelled with the oratory that had won him embattled streets, Harvard debates, courtroom victories, government deadlocks. He couldn’t help the oratory. Words were both his natural weapons and his natural shield.

  “Yes, Maggie—I know what I’m admitting to. The toleration of law-breaking. More—the toleration of evil. Nothing less than that. You see, I believe in evil. I’ve seen enough it in a life I sometimes think has seen too much, gone on too long. I admit to tolerating the illegal vivifacturers. I admit to looking the other way when they do evil. I admit to protecting them. I admit to doing everything in my not inconsiderable power to get my government to tolerate them, to look the other way when they do evil, and to even protect them. Yes—protect brutal criminals. And do you know why? Do you, Maggie?”

  Did he even know he was playing to her, not me? Wooing her, as if she were a TV camera, or a voting bloc? I didn’t think he knew. Impassioned, convoluted, manipulative, and utterly sincere—he just barreled ahead.

  “You’re asking yourself, Maggie, why would any head of the FDA let vivifacture violations go on and on? Why would Vanderbilt Grant? Why would all the people he’s persuaded? Not in order to give a few hundred childless couples chimpanzee or puppy babies with a ballet dancer’s face. Not to keep the press spotlight off aging society matrons who grow themselves fresh new facial skin from their relatively unwithered belly cells. Not to allow the black market in infants to operate unchecked, to get around the gene-pool regulations. Not for any of those reasons.”

  Lying in my bed, I watched him, fascinated even though I couldn’t see him clearly. Van was up and pacing now, but “pacing” didn’t describe it. He was a geyser, barely contained in the little room.

  “Maggie, the FDA tolerates and protects those vivifacturers—Vanderbilt Grant tolerates and protects them—because they’re the only ones doing basic genetic research that might solve the sperm-count crisis at its root. They’re the only ones who can do that research. In our zeal to protect the American people, we’ve strangled all other DNA-level research with regulations, constraints, prohibitions—and then on top of that, we cut off the funding. We had to. There’s no money. There’s a spirit of caution in the citizens. ‘Don’t risk anything! We’ve lost too much already! Conserve and preserve! Don’t take chances!’ And all the while … all the while…”

  His words caught, broke off. Deliberately? He stopped pacing and stood still in front of Maggie’s chair, and in the treacherously beautiful voice I thought I heard genuine sadness.

  “All the while, Maggie, only the criminals have been engaged in the basic research that might yet save us. Into DNA-level cures for sperm count. Into counteragents for what the synthetic chemicals have done to our endocrine systems—you didn’t know that, did you, Nick? You thought you were the only one looking seriously at that data. But the illegal labs are. Out of greed, of course, in hopes of making a fortune … but they’re doing it. The criminals are the ones conducting the financially risky investigations. The ones committing the resources. The ones making the dangerous experiments biology needs to yield up answers. Only the criminals have dared.

  “The rest of us … the rest of us just want to play it safe. The rest of us are just too old.”

  Van finished. Maggie—not usually a pushover audience—leaned forward until her face again swam into my view. She gazed at Van in awe, in fury, in compassion. No one spoke.

  Then, finally, Van turned toward me. “Nick … I know what I did to you. To that National Service girl, Shana Walders. I know what was done to Cameron Atuli, that the government could have prosecuted for and instead covered up. But now you know why I did it, and now I have to ask your help.”

  He paused—for effect? But his right hand trembled again, and when I caught a spasm in his arm a
s well, I was sure. Savoye’s Disease, in its first stages. The myelin sheaths around Vanderbilt Grant’s nerve cells were rapidly degenerating. There was no cure. Nothing we’ve researched can regenerate nerve cells—at least, nothing we’ve researched legally.

  Savoye’s Disease is one of the neurological disorders triggered by synthetic endocrine disrupters.

  “It’s not easy keeping security on something like this,” Van said. “Not easy keeping the press away, not easy keeping smart scientists and politicians from asking questions—like you did, Nick. We’ve succeeded so far only because whenever anyone had evidence that the illegal labs were being protected, we’ve been able to bring them in with us. Scientists, independent testing labs, drug companies—it’s to their advantage to work with us. Nobody who could harm us couldn’t be persuaded.”

  “You mean ‘bought,’” I said, and he had the honesty to not deny it.

  “Possibly. If what one is buying is hope for the human race, perhaps salvation from our own folly that—”

  “No more rhetoric, please, Van,” Maggie said tartly, and I saw that she had recovered from his oratorical onslaught. “Now you think evidence has been uncovered by some people who can’t be bought. Or, if they are bought, couldn’t be trusted about the quality of their silence.”

  He said simply, “Yes.”

  She said, “Then why not just kill them?”

  “Maggie!” I gasped.

  “I’m making a point, Nick. Van says the government is screwing around with illegal vivifacture labs because it’s our only practical hope for a way to evade results of our endocrine disrupter carelessness. He says the government knows the illegal vivifacturers are criminal, even evil in some of what they do, and he’s willing to tolerate that for the rest of what they do. Then why not tolerate murder of witnesses as well? What’s the difference? You’re already allowing the illegal labs to murder. That’s what they’d have done to Cameron Atuli if the FBI hadn’t stepped in just in time, isn’t it?”