The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  The celebration is the turn of the century, although there is some debate about that, because we are all preparing to celebrate the instant the clock hits midnight and a.d. 2200 begins, but some spoilsport scientists (or maybe they’re mathematicians) have told the press that the new century really begins a year later, when we enter 2201.

  Not that my charges know the difference, but I’m glad we’re celebrating it this year, because it means that we’ll decorate the place with bright colours – and if we like it, why, we’ll do it again in 2201.

  I have been married to Felicia for seventeen years, and I hardly ever regret it. She was a little bit pudgy when we met, and she has gotten pudgier over the years so that now she is honest-to-goodness fat and there is simply no other word for it. Her hair, which used to be brown, is streaked with grey now, and she’s lost whatever physical grace she once had. But she is a good life partner. Her taste in holos is similar to mine, so we almost never fight about what to watch after dinner, and of course we both love our work.

  As we eat dinner, the topic turns to our gardens, as always.

  “I’m worried about Rex,” she confides.

  Rex is Begonia rex, her hanging basket.

  “Oh?” I say. “What’s wrong with him?”

  She shakes her head in puzzlement. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve been letting him get too much sun. His leaves are yellowing, and his roots could be in better shape.”

  “Have you spoken to one of the botanists?”

  “No. They’re totally absorbed in cloning that new species of Aglaonema crispum.”

  “Still?”

  She shrugs. “They say it’s important.”

  “The damned plant’s been around for centuries,” I say. “I can’t see what’s so important about it.”

  “I told you: they engineered an exciting mutation. It actually glows in the dark, as if it’s been dusted with phosphorescent silver paint.”

  “It’s not going to put the energy company out of business.”

  “I know. But it’s important to them.”

  “It seems unfair,” I say for the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth, time. “They get all the fame and money for creating a new species, and you get paid the same old salary for keeping it alive.”

  “I don’t mind,” she replies. “I love my work. I don’t know what I’d do without my greenhouse.”

  “I know,” I say soothingly. “I feel the same way.”

  “So how is your Rex today?” she asks.

  It’s my turn to shrug. “About the same as usual.” Suddenly I laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” asks Felicia.

  “You think your Rex is getting too much sun. I decided my Rex wasn’t getting enough, so this afternoon I moved him closer to a window.”

  “Will it make a difference, do you think?” she asks.

  I sigh deeply. “Does it ever?”

  I walk up to the major and smile at him. “How are we today?” I ask.

  The major looks at me through unfocused eyes. There is a little drool running out the side of his mouth, and I wipe it off.

  “It’s a lovely morning,” I say. “It’s a pity you can’t be outside to enjoy it.” I pause, waiting for the reaction that never comes. “Still,” I continue, “you’ve seen more than your share of them, so missing a few won’t hurt.” I check the screen at his life station, find his birthdate, and dope it out. “Well, I’ll be damned! You’ve actually seen 60,573 mornings!”

  Of course, he’s been here for almost half of them: 29,882 to be exact. If he ever did count them, he stopped a long time ago.

  I clean and sterilize his feeding tubes and his medication tubes and his breathing tubes, examine him for bedsores, wash him, take his temperature and blood pressure, and check to make sure his cholesterol hasn’t gone above the 350 level. (They want it lower, of course, but he can’t exercise and they’ve been feeding him intravenously for more than half a century, so they won’t do anything about changing his diet. After all, it hasn’t killed him so far, and altering it just might do so.)

  I elevate his withered body just long enough to change the bedding, then gently lower him back down. (That used to take ten minutes, and at least one helper, before they developed the anti-grav beam. Now it’s just a matter of a few seconds, and I like to think it causes less discomfort, though of course the major is in no condition to tell me.)

  Then it’s on to Rex. Felicia has problems with her Rex, and I have problems with mine.

  “Good morning, Rex,” I say.

  He mumbles something incomprehensible at me.

  I look down at him. His right eye is bloodshot and tearing heavily.

  “Rex, what am I going to do with you?” I say. “You know you’re not supposed to stare at the sun.”

  He doesn’t really know it. I doubt that he even knows his name is Rex. But cleansing his eye and medicating it is going to put me behind schedule, and I have to blame someone. Rex doesn’t mind being blamed. He doesn’t mind burning out his retina. He doesn’t even mind lying motionless for decades. If there is anything he does mind, nobody’s found it yet.

  I spill some medication on him while fixing his eye, so I decide that rather than just change his diaper I might as well go all the way and give him a DryChem bath. I marvel, as always, at the sheer number of surgical scars that criss-cross his torso: the first new heart, the second, the new kidneys, the new spleen, the new left lung. There’s a tiny, ancient scar on his lower belly that I think was from the removal of a burst appendix, but I can’t find any record of it on the computer and he’s been past talking about it for almost a century.

  Then I move on to Mr Spinoza. He’s lying there, mouth agape, eyes open, head at an awkward angle. I can tell even before I reach him that he’s not breathing. My first inclination is to call Emergency, but I realize that his life station will have reported his condition already, and sure enough, just seconds later the Resurrection Team arrives and sets up a curtain around him (as if any of his roommates could see or care), and within ten minutes they’ve got the old gentleman going again.

  This is the fifth time Mr Spinoza has died this year. All this dying has to be hard on his system, and I worry that one of these days it’s going to be permanent.

  “So how was your major today?” asks Felicia at dinner.

  “Same as usual,” I say. “How’s yours?”

  Her major is the Browallia speciosa majorus. “Ditto,” she says. “Old, but hanging on.” She frowns. “We may not get any blossoms this year, though. The roots are a little ropey.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “It happens.” She pauses. “How was the rest of your day?”

  “We had some excitement,” I reply.

  “Oh?”

  “Mr Spinoza died again.”

  “That’s the fourth time, isn’t it?” she asks.

  “The fifth,” I correct her. “The Resurrection Team revived him.”

  “The Resuscitation Team,” she corrects me.

  “You have your word for them, I have mine,” I say. “Mine’s better. Resurrection is what they do.”

  “So you’ve only lost one this week,” says Felicia, if not changing the subject at least moving on a tangent away from it.

  “Right. Mr Lazlo. He was 193 years old.”

  “One hundred and ninety-three,” she muses, and then shrugs. “I guess he was entitled.”

  “You mentioned that you lost one too,” I note.

  “My cymbidium.”

  “That’s an orchid, right?” I say. “The one they nicknamed Peter Pan?”

  She nods.

  “Silly name for an orchid,” I remark.

  “It stayed young for ever, or so it seemed,” she replies. “It had the most exquisite blooms. I’m really going to miss it. I’d had it for almost twenty years.” She smiles sadly, and a single tear begins to roll down her cheek. “I worked so hard over it, sometimes I felt like its mother.” She looks at me. “That sounds ludi
crous, doesn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” I say, sincerely touched by her grief.

  “It’s all right,” she says. Then she stares at my face. “Don’t be so concerned. It was just a flower.”

  “It’s called empathy,” I answer, and she lets it drop . . . but I am troubled, and by the oddest thought: Shouldn’t I feel worse about losing a person than she feels about losing an orchid?

  But I don’t.

  I don’t know when it began. Probably with the first caveman who made a sling for a broken arm, or forced water out of a drowned companion’s lungs. But somewhere back in the dim and distant past man invented medicine. It had its good centuries and its bad centuries, but by the end of the last millennium it was curing so many diseases and extending so many lives that things got out of hand.

  More than half the people who were alive in 2050 were still alive in 2150. And almost 90 per cent of the people who were alive in 2100 will be alive in 2200. Medical science had doubled and then trebled man’s life span. Immortality was within our grasp. Life everlasting beckoned.

  We were so busy increasing the length of life that no one gave much thought to the quality of those extended lives.

  And then we woke up one day to find that there were a lot more of them than there were of us.

  His name is Bernard Goldmeier. They carry him in on an airsled, then transfer him to Mr Lazlo’s old life station.

  After I clean the major’s tubes and change his bedding and medicate Rex’s eye, I call up Mr Goldmeier’s medical history on the holoscreen at his life station.

  “This place stinks!” rasps a dry voice.

  I jump, startled, then turn to see who spoke. There is no one in the room except me and my charges.

  “Who said that?” I demanded.

  “I did,” replies Mr Goldmeier.

  I look closely at him. The skin hangs loose and brown-spotted on his bald head. His cheeks are covered by miscoloured flesh and his nose has oxygen tubes inserted into it – but his eyes, sunken deep in his head, are clear and he is staring at me.

  “You really spoke!” I exclaim.

  “You never heard an inmate speak before?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  Which is another unhappy truth. By age hundred, one out of every two people has some form of senile dementia. By one hundred and twenty-five, it’s four out of five. By one hundred and fifty, it’s ninety-nine out of one hundred. Mr Goldmeier is one hundred and fifty-three years old; the odds against his retaining anything close to normal mental capacities are better than a hundred to one.

  “I should add,” I say, “that the proper term is ‘charge’, not ‘patient’ and certainly not ‘inmate’.”

  “A zombie by any other name . . .”

  I decide there is no sense arguing with him. “How do you feel?” I ask.

  “Look at me,” he says disgustedly. “How would you feel?”

  “If you’re in any discomfort . . .” I begin.

  “I told you: this place stinks. It reeks of shit and urine.”

  “Some of our charges are incontinent,” I explain. “We have to show them understanding and compassion.”

  “Why?” he rasps. “What do they show us in exchange?”

  “Try to be a little more tolerant,” I say.

  “You try!” he snaps. “I’m busy!”

  I can’t help but ask: “Busy doing what?”

  “Hanging on to reality!”

  I smile. “Is that so difficult?”

  “Why don’t you ask some of your other inmates?” He sniffs the air and makes a face. “Goddamnit! Another one’s crapping all over himself! What the hell am I doing here anyway? I’m not a fucking vegetable yet!”

  I check all the notations on the screen.

  “You’re here, Mr Goldmeier,” I say, not without some satisfaction at what I’m about to tell him, “because no other ward will have you. You’ve offended every attendant and orderly in the entire complex.”

  “Where do I go when I offend you?”

  “This is your last stop. You’re here for better or worse.”

  Lucky me. I turn back to the holoscreen and begin punching in the standard questions.

  “What are you doing now?” he demands. He tries to boost himself up on a scrawny, miscoloured elbow to watch me, but he’s too weak.

  “Checking to see if I’m to medicate you for any diseases,” I reply.

  ‘I haven’t been out of bed in forty years,” he rasps. “If I have a disease, I got it from one of you goons.”

  I ignore his answer and continue staring at the screen. “You have a history of cancer.”

  “Big deal,” he says. “As quick as I get it, you bastards cure it.” He pauses. “Seventeen cancers. You cut five out, burned three out, and drowned the other nine in your chemicals.”

  I keep reading the screen. “I see you still have your original heart,” I note with some surprise. Most hearts are replaced by the time the patient is 120 years old, the lungs and kidneys even sooner.

  “Are you offering me yours?” he says sarcastically.

  Okay, so he’s an arrogant, hostile bastard – but he’s also my only charge who’s capable of speech, so I force a smile and try again.

  “You’re a lucky man,” I begin.

  He glares at me. “You want to explain that?”

  “You’ve retained your mental acuity. Very few manage that at your advanced age.”

  “And you think that’s lucky, do you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” said Mr Goldmeier.

  I sigh. “I’m trying very hard to be your friend. You’re not making it easy.”

  His emaciated face contracts in a look of disgust. “Why in hell should you want to be my friend?”

  “I want to be friends with all my charges.”

  “Them?” he says contemptuously, scanning the room. “You’d probably get more reaction from a bunch of potted plants.” It’s not dissimilar from what Felicia says on occasion.

  “Look,” I say. “You’re going to be here for a very long time. So am I. Why don’t we at least try to cultivate the illusion of civility?”

  “That’s a disgusting thought.”

  “Being civil?” I ask, wondering what kind of creature they have delivered to my ward.

  “That too,” he says. “But I meant being here for a very long time.” He exhales deeply, and I hear a rattling in his chest and make a mental note to tell the doctors about his congestion. Then he adds: “Being anywhere for a very long time.”

  “What makes you so bitter?” I ask.

  “I’ve seen terrible things, things no man should ever have to see.”

  “We’ve had our share,” I agree. “The war with Brazil. The meteor that hit Mozambique. The revolution in Canada.”

  “Fool!” he snaps. “Those were diversions.”

  “Diversions?” I repeat incredulously. “Just what hellholes have you been to?”

  “The worst,” he answers. “I’ve been to places where men begged for death, and slowly went mad when it didn’t come.”

  “I don’t remember reading or hearing about anything like that,” I say. “Where was this?”

  He stares unblinking at me for a long moment before he answers. “Right here, in the wards.”

  Felicia looks up from her plate. “His name’s Bernard Goldmeier?” she says.

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t have any Bernards,” she says. “It’s not the kind of name they give to flowers.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Suddenly her face brightens. “I do have a gold flower, though – a Mesembryanthemum criniflorum. I can call it Goldie, or even Goldmeier.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “But it is,” she insists. “For years it’s been how we compare our days.” She smiles. “It makes me feel closer to you, caring for flowers with the same names.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Call it what
ever you want.”

  “You seem” – she searches for the word – “upset.”

  “He troubles me.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “I love my work,” I begin.

  “I know you do.”

  “And it’s meaningful work,” I continue, trying to keep the resentment from my voice. “Maybe I’m not a doctor, but I stand guard over them and hold Death at bay. That’s important, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” she says soothingly.

  “He belittles it.”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing,” says Felicia, reaching across the table and taking my hand. “You know how they get when they’re that old.”

  Yes, I know how they get. But he’s not like them. He sounds – I don’t know – normal, like me; that’s the upsetting part.

  “He doesn’t seem irrational,” I say aloud. “Just bitter.”

  “Enough bitterness will make anyone irrational.”

  “I know,” I say. “But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it’s going to sound juvenile and selfish . . .”

  “You’re the least selfish man I know,” says Felicia. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “It’s just that . . . well, I always thought that if my charges could speak to me, they’d tell me how grateful they were, how much my efforts meant to them.” I pause and think about it. “Does that make me selfish?”

  “Certainly not,” she replies. “I think they ought to be grateful.” She pats my hand. “A lot of people in that place are just earning salaries; you’re there because you care.”

  “Anyway, here I’ve finally got someone who could thank me, could tell me that I’m appreciated, and instead he’s furious because I’m going to do everything within my power to keep him alive.”

  She coos and purrs and makes soothing noises, but she doesn’t actually say anything, and finally I change the subject and ask her about her garden. A moment later she is rapturously describing the new buds on the Aphelandra squarrosa, and telling me that she thinks she will have to divide the Scilla sibirica, and I listen gratefully and do not think about Mr Goldmeier, lying motionless in his bed and cursing the darkness, until I arrive at work in the morning.

  “Are you feeling any better today?” I ask as I approach Mr Goldmeier’s life station.