The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  “—in the event the wine steward is busy, you may display the list, but during dinner do not take orders—”

  He grinned at her. “Who knows? It may not get past the UTM. Speaking of which, have you been practicing your quantum, just in case?”

  “Sure I have.” And she had, Gwenanda reassured herself, though not much since she took over care of Maris. Her heart wasn’t really in it, of course. Why should she make arguments in favor of the thing that was going to take Kriss away from her? Of course, it might not pass no matter what she did.

  But it also might. No matter what she did. She watched wistfully while Kriss leaned over to the little girl. “Kittens,” he said, “you’re not doing much with that sundae. Would you rather have something solid?” He turned on the table-top telly and caused it to display the roasts and stews and salads that made up the specials of the day. Maris gave it a horrified glance.

  “Oh, no,” she said faintly. Kriss, looking concerned, switched the telly over to news, and the paella on the screen was replaced by an index sheet.

  “Wow,” he said. “A hundred and twenty thousand sick!”

  That was a shocker—why, not even an hour ago it was only about eighty thousand. The city was plunging into the deep shit, all right, thought Gwenanda—

  “—knife to the left, sporks to the right, chopsticks across the top of the plate—”

  —and tardily she saw that Maris, looking distressed, had stopped eating entirely. Gwenanda licked her lips. “I’m sure glad you got Maris her shots,” she said; and Kriss, startled, stammered:

  “But I thought it was you—”

  That was how the nightmare began.

  For a long time afterward, whenever Gwenanda set a table she felt a cold wind strike at her heart; whenever she held the child on her knee, she remembered how shifting Maris from lap to lap had cost her her shots; every time she saw a mango split her stomach twitched as it had when Maris, without warning, threw up all over the table. When Gwenanda clutched her, the little girl’s forehead was burning.

  What was absent in Gwenanda’s later recollections was the memory of herself doing anything. As far as she could recall, she was a spectator, paralyzed. That couldn’t have been true, but it was Kriss who snatched up the child and hurried toward the door; it was Dorothy who stripped the next table—crash of crockery, rattle of silverware to the floor—for a cloth to wrap around Maris and napkins to clean her off as she followed. When they called Emergency Services (was it Gwenanda who had done that?), there was a two-hour wait for a van; “Downstairs!” yelled Kriss, heading for the elevator. When they got down to ground zero and Kriss, scouring the throughways, at last found a vacant three-wheeled cab, all four of them crowded into the two-person seat. When at last they approached the nearest E.S. clinic, it seemed that every vehicle in New York was there before them. For the last quarter-kilometer Kriss trotted with Maris in his arms—hours later, Gwenanda remembered to wonder if they had paid the driver.

  The waiting room was jammed. Never mind the emergency room itself; they couldn’t get through the wheezing, sneezing, groaning and sweating mob that overflowed to the van rank outside. “Stay here!” cried Kriss. “I’ll get somebody!”

  “I’ll help!” echoed Dorothy, and Gwenanda was left with the hot lump of sick child in her lap as they pushed and trotted away.

  The news reports had not kept pace with reality. Exponential growth was sweeping through a population that had never needed resistance to the virus. The reported sick were not a hundred and twenty thousand any more, they were a quarter of a million—and growing every minute—tens of thousands of new cases limping or being carried to report themselves sick as fast as they could get to a place to do so. A handful of E.S. medics were crawling through the crowd, spray-guns in each hand; they gave a shot, felt a forehead, once in a while took a temperature, felt a throat for lumps or peered into a mouth. But—beds? “Dog, chotz,” gasped the E.S. Kriss finally managed to drag over, “we haven’t had a bed all day!” She pressed the spray against Maris’s arm, pulled down an eyelid, held a hand against a cheek. “Needs bed care now,” she said. “Take um home! Check the telly for instructions, keep um warm, keep um quiet, keep um full of fluids.” And, as she was turning to the next case, “Oh, and check your loo numbers, because if you’re draftable you’re drafted!”

  One more damn thing! And, yes, when Kriss shouldered his way over to look at the big-character screen it was displaying emergency orders:

  “If you have an in-lieu-of-taxes obligation and your class number appears below, report at once for Emergency Services duty.”

  Kriss’s number was there. “Ah, shit,” he groaned, and disappeared in search of a supervisor. Gwenanda sat on the edge of a stack of emergency folded cots—a teen-aged boy, breathing with horrible rasping gasps, was stretched out on top of it—and rocked Maris, the child’s head burning her breast through the thin dashiki. “Aw, baby, sleep,” she crooned, scared as she had never been in her life before. What did you do with a sick child? Get help, right? But there were fifty people just within sneezing distance that needed help as much as Maris, and help had run out. “Muddy’s here,” she whispered. “Sleep, sweet-cheeks, sleep…”

  Dorothy was the first one back. She didn’t bring a medic but something far more valuable, a paper cup of watered-down juice, held high with one unpracticed hand, somehow saved from spilling as she edged through the crowd. “Prop her head up,” she ordered. “I’ll see if I can get her to swallow some.” And while they were coaxing the last drops into the unresisting child Kriss appeared. He was towing a frazzled-looking woman, the two of them arguing all the way.

  “Gwenanda!” he cried. “E says I have to report to take care of sick. I said we’ve got a sick of our own and I want to take um home and take care of um. E said that’s not good enough, they can’t spare an able-bodied an for just one patient, and anyway what they need is beds. They’re requisitioning some underoccupied homes, and—”

  “My place!” cried Gwenanda. “Sure, pups! We’ll take um there and you can send up others! It’s a big apartment, there’s easily room for twenty or thir—for at least a dozen,” she corrected herself, dazzled with the first good news in what seemed like years. Sharing Maris’s care with Kriss! Who cared if there were a few others? And even while the supervisor was checking her facilities and making the arrangements for Kriss to transport beds and blankets and medications and bedpans, Gwenanda was selecting her guests. “That one,” she said, pointing to a young boy, “and that one, and—no, not that one, but the one next to um—” And led the way to the van, still scared, but more and more hopeful, even, almost, happy.

  The City of New York, in its half a millennium since the Dutch, had lived through pestilences. Not all of its citizens did. Yellow fever sometimes took one in ten, typhus one in five; in the last great influenza epidemic, right after the first of the World Wars, many thousands died and many more, decades later, suffered the twitches and speech problems of Parkinson’s syndrome as a consequence. But that was long ago. Medicine had honed its skills and multiplied its resources for more than a century since the last bad one. The therapies and remedies for almost every communicable disease were known, and they were effective. What they were not was readily available. Who could have guessed that they would be urgently needed?—when nearly every such disease organism was as extinct as the great blue whale? The resources were scattered all over the continent, in a hundred disease-research centers—really, they might almost better be called museums of antique ailments. The medicines could be brought to bear on the city’s sickness, but not in an instant.

  Meanwhile half a million New Yorkers were sweating and sneezing and tossing and turning in achey efforts to sleep. Gwenanda didn’t wind up with a dozen of them in her care, or even with twenty or thirty. At maximum there were fifty-one patients in her apartment. It wasn’t Kriss who shared their tending, either, because Kriss was kept busy all that day and most of the long night in staggering in with
loads of cots and supplies, and patients to fill them. Dorothy was Gwenanda’s only helper for most of that time. She was clumsy, all right—spilled one whole six-liter kettle of simmering chicken broth and had to spend an hour mopping it up, dropped things, fumbled things. But she was strong, stronger than Gwenanda when it came to lifting a fat old man off a stretcher. And as devoted to Maris’s care as Gwenanda herself. Between coaxing a child to swallow juice or spooning broth into a semiconscious face or wiping sweat from a fevered brow, they took turns to look in on that tiny but most important patient of all, asleep in Gwenanda’s own huge bed. They refused to let her share it, though every flat surface in the big apartment had a patient or two on it now—the beds, the couches, the chairs big enough to be pushed together; Kriss brought in camp cots for another twenty, and mattresses to spread on the floor for the rest.

  For the first hours, both Dorothy and Gwenanda were running to the telly every few minutes to check nursing instructions on the emergency band. But the job was not that complicated. Every patient had already had a broad-spectrum shot of antibiotics and antivirals. It was just a matter of letting the medicine work, and meanwhile keep them warm, keep fluids in them, take temperatures, listen for choking, watch for convulsions, sponge them cool if the temperature got dangerous…it was Gwenanda and Dorothy all that day and all that night, doing it all. What neither of them did was sleep. A catnap now and then, sitting beside the bed jealously reserved for Maris—that was as much rest as any of them got, never more than a minute or two, and then up and at it again. It seemed to have no end.

  But at dawn a hastily drafted E.S. temporary appeared to share the labor, and a real, genuine nurse!! The work didn’t actually get easier then, though, because by that time the bedpan problem and the changing sweated sheets problem and the general cleaning up spills and stains problems were all beginning to get acute. It was the hardest work Gwenanda had ever done, and the dirtiest, and it seemed to go on the longest. It took her some time to realize that, if not ending, at least it had stopped getting worse. A trickle of new patients were still coming in, but some of the earliest and least sick were beginning to sit up, and sometimes fend for themselves, and even, a few of them, declare that they were able to be up and about and so weakly totter off home.

  At eleven that morning the nurse chased both Dorothy and Gwenanda, one after another, into the shower—not yet to sleep, but at least to do the next best thing. Slightly refreshed, Gwenanda sat for a minute, chewing cold, dry toast—made an hour before, but then the woman with the hacking cough had begun to strangle on her own mucus—and remembered her real job. Dog! Call the Court right away! When she did she found the Court was closed for the emergency. Two justices were out sick, plus any number of pages, clerks, lawyers, complainants, defendants—all cases were rescheduled for Monday morning.

  Gwenanda put the phone down. She wandered away from the forgotten toast, automatically heading for Maris’s bed. The child was sleeping easier now, but her temperature was still high. Sponging her down, Gwenanda wondered fretfully which of the justices had got it besides Mary Joan. Not one of the Tin Twins, of course. Pak? Myra? She reached with the damp cloth toward Maris’s brow—

  “Oh, please don’t!” sobbed the child, flinging herself away in terror from Gwenanda’s hand. “Please, muddy, don’t hit me again!”

  At the door, Dorothy almost dropped the bedpan she was carrying past. “Oh, what’s wrong?” she cried, hurrying in.

  “Don’t know,” Gwenanda moaned. She wanted desperately to touch the child. She didn’t dare, for Maris was straining away from her, searching her face with frightened, imploring eyes. “No more, please!” she begged; and then, the tension ebbing from her crouched limbs, in a different voice: “Oh, it’s you, Gwenanda.”

  And lifted her face to be kissed; and went peacefully back to sleep; and an hour later her temperature was down to normal.

  More tired than she had ever been, Gwenanda allowed herself at last to stretch out on the bed beside the child. Her sleep was snore-deep, but her face was smiling and her dreams were good.

  All the same, Gwenanda did not allow herself to sleep very long. When she woke, the temperature of the whole city was down. Doctors and medical supplies had poured in from Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore. There was a hundred per cent prophylaxis by now—with specific vaccines, located freeze-dried as soon as the specific virus had been identified, flown in, reconstituted, administered. It had taken an immense effort, but now the people who had not already come down with the flu never would, and the influx of new cases had ceased. The nurse—short, dark Palestinian from Omaha—had the situation under control and reported that he didn’t need sleep for an hour or so yet, so Gwenanda, after checking on Maris, allowed herself to remember she was starving.

  Dorothy was in the kitchen ahead of her, making heavy work out of trying to scramble eggs. But she refused Gwenanda’s help. “I have to learn to use the damn things,” she said, glaring at the pieces of shell her clumsy hands had allowed to fall in the bowl. “Might as well be now. I’ll put in a couple more for you, honey.”

  “Dog, yes! Please,” Gwenanda added, and sat down to allow herself the pleasure of watching somebody else work. “It’s been a tough night,” she sighed.

  Dorothy grinned. “It’s been two of them,” she said, “and two days, too. I guess we just weren’t watching the time.”

  “Aw, really? Then this is Saturday?” Gwenanda tried to remember why Saturday was important, but it wouldn’t come to her. She dismissed the thought completely when Dorothy said:

  “Maris was up for almost an hour while you were sleeping. Seemed pretty nearly fine, but I told her to try to get to sleep again. And she did, soon as she hit the pillow.”

  “Aw,” said Gwenanda, delighted at the report, disappointed that she had slept through the event—but a lot more delighted than disappointed, she decided. “I guess maybe the worst is over,” she offered.

  “It looks that way,” said Dorothy, carefully pouring the beaten eggs into a pan. “And, oh, wow, Gwenanda, it’s been kind of wonderful. Would you believe that?”

  “Believe what?” Gwenanda asked suspiciously.

  “I mean, everybody getting together like this—the whole city pitching in—even the whole country!”

  “Dog, Dorothy! Why wouldn’t they? We’re civilized people, you know, not like the damn animals where you came from!” And then, penitently, “Aw, my mouth’s too big. I didn’t mean anything, pups—”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Dorothy said comfortably, tipping the eggs into two plates and carrying them carefully over. “I know you pretty well by now, Gwenanda. You yell when you’re mad, and you hug when you’re feeling affectionate—you don’t have to apologize for that. Gwenanda? I like you, just the way you are. Now eat your eggs.”

  “Aw,” said Gwenanda, embarrassed, mouth full of eggs—delicious, too, and who cared if you bit into a tiny piece of shell now and then? “They’re fine, Dorothy.”

  “And another thing,” Dorothy said suddenly, “I like Kriss, too, but not the way you do. I mean, he’s a lot too young for me, wouldn’t you say? Even if he took an interest of that kind, which he doesn’t.”

  “Aw,” said Gwenanda again, again embarrassed at being so transparent, searching for the right way to repay sweetness with sweetness, finding only: “You’ve been a real big help this time, pups, do you know that?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Dorothy complacently. “And I bet you don’t know how good that feels to me. You know what my life was like? I had to be fed, I had to be dressed, I had to have somebody sit me on the damn toilet—every day—for forty-six years! You just can’t know how nice it is for me to be taking care of somebody else for a change!” And she grinned, and dove into her cooling eggs, and didn’t mind at all that now and then some of them spilled back onto the plate from her shaky fork.

  “I’ll do the cleanup,” said Gwenanda tenderly, “because now it’s your turn to get some sleep.”

&nbs
p; By that Saturday evening half of Gwenanda’s tenants had taken themselves home, and all of the rest were mending fast. They had not been the sickest, of course. The really hard-hit victims were still in intensive care and more than two thousand persons had actually died—irreversibly dead, some of them, though most had been quick-frozen for a better day, when the doctors decided that a spark remained but the immediate prognosis was bad. The crisis was over. The called-up E.S. people were beginning to get their releases. Kriss celebrated by tumbling into the bed in Maris’s room, just vacated by a recovering tourist couple from the island of Maui. Gwenanda, with the nurse from Omaha, labored to get the cots and mattresses stacked for pickup and the apartment somewhat tidied up, then stretched out beside Maris again and allowed herself once more to drift off into a nap.

  When she woke, Maris was standing beside the bed. She had bathed herself and changed her clothes and brushed her hair, and she held out a glass of juice to Gwenanda. “Drink it, muddy,” she commanded, “because you have to keep taking fooids.”

  “Aw, thanks, sweet-cheeks,” Gwenanda cooed, struggling to sit up on the edge of the bed. With one hand she reached for the glass, with the other pushed hair. “Pups! What are you doing out of bed? Are you feeling all right?”

  Maris supervised the swallowing of the juice before she answered. “The nurse said it was all right to get up, ’cause I feel fine. E said don’t eat too much, don’t get too tired, go back to bed early, drink a lot of fooids,” she recited, and then, “Gwenanda? Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure you can!” Gwenanda caught sight of herself in the mirror behind the little girl and shuddered.

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “Aw, you didn’t really yell.” Gwenanda pushed hopelessly at the disintegrated dreadlocks; dog, she looked like somebody had sat on her head!

  “If I did yell,” Maris said determinedly, “it was only because I was dreaming and I thought you were um. My other muddy, I mean. I thought e was going to hit me again.”