Mia couldn’t stand it anymore. She left, walking as fast as she could back to Esefeb’s house, disgusted and frightened and … what?
Envious?
“Why did you first enter the Corps?” To serve humanity, to live purposefully, to find, as all men and women hope, happiness. And she had, sometimes, been happy.
But she had never known such joy as that.
Nonetheless, she argued with herself, the price was too high. These people were dying off because of their absorption in their rapturous phantoms. They lived isolated, degraded, sickly lives, which were undoubtedly shorter than necessary. It was obscene.
In her clenched hand was a greasy hair sample she’d unobtrusively cut from the toddler’s head as he sat on her lap. Hair, that dead tissue, was a person’s fossilized past. Mia intended a DNA scan.
Esefeb strolled in an hour later. She didn’t seem upset at Mia’s abrupt departure. With her was Lolimel.
“I met her on the path,” Lolimel said, although nothing as well-used as a path connected the huts. “She doesn’t seem to mind my coming here.”
“Or anything else,” Mia said. “What did you bring?” He had to have brought something tangible; Kenin would have used the wrister to convey information.
“Tentative prophylactic. We haven’t got a vaccine yet, and Kenin says it may be too difficult, better to go directly to a cure to hold in reserve in case any of us comes down with this.”
Mia caught the omission. “Any of us? What about them?”
Lolimel looked down at his feet. “It’s, um, a borderline case, Mia. The decision hasn’t been made yet.”
“‘Borderline’ how, Lolimel? It’s a virus infecting the brains of humans and degrading their functioning.”
He was embarrassed. “Section Six says that, um, some biological conditions, especially persistent ones, create cultural differences for which Corps policy is noninterference. Section Six mentions the religious dietary laws that grew out of inherited food intolerances on —”
“I know what Section Six says, Lolimel! But you don’t measure a culture’s degree of success by its degree of happiness!”
“I don’t think … that is, I don’t know … maybe ‘degree of success’ isn’t what Section Six means.” He looked away from her. The tips of his ears grew red.
Poor Lolimel. She and Kenin had as much as told him that out here regs didn’t matter. Except when they did. Mia stood. “You say the decision hasn’t been made yet?”
He looked surprised. “How could it be? You’re on the senior Corps board to make the decision.”
Of course she was. How could she forget … she forgot more things these days, momentary lapses symbolic of the greater lapses to come. No brain functioned forever.
“Mia, are you all —”
“I’m fine. And I’m glad you’re here. I want to go back to the city for a few days. You can stay with Esefeb and continue the surveillance. You can also extend to her neighbors the antibiotic, antiviral, and antiparasite protocols I’ve worked through with Esefeb. Here, I’ll show you.”
“But I —”
“That’s an order.”
She felt bad about it later, of course. But Lolimel would get over it.
At base, everything had the controlled frenzy of steady, unremitting work. Meek now, not a part of the working team, Mia ran a DNA scan on the baby’s hair. It showed what she expected. The child shared fifty percent DNA with Esefeb. He was her brother; the neighbor whom Esefeb clearly never saw, who had at first not recognized Esefeb, was her mother. For which there was still no word in the translator deebee.
“I think we’ve got it,” Kenin said, coming into Mia’s room. She collapsed on a stone bench, still beautiful after two and a half centuries. Kenin had the beatific serenity of a hard job well done.
“A cure?”
“Tentative. Radical. I wouldn’t want to use it on one of us unless we absolutely have to, but we can refine it more. At least it’s in reserve, so a part of the team can begin creating and disseminating medical help these people can actually use. Targeted microbials, an antiparasite protocol.”
“I’ve already started on that,” Mia said, her stomach tightening. “Kenin, the board needs to meet.”
“Not tonight. I’m soooo sleepy.” Theatrically she stretched both arms; words and gesture were unlike her.
“Tonight,” Mia said. While Kenin was feeling so accomplished. Let Kenin feel the full contrast to what she could do with what Esefeb could.
Kenin dropped her arms and looked at Mia. Her whole demeanor changed, relaxation into fortress. “Mia … I’ve already polled everyone privately. And run the computer sims. We’ll meet, but the decision is going to be to extend no cure. The phantoms are a biologically based cultural difference.”
“The hell they are! These people are dying out!”
“No, they’re not. If they were heading for extinction, it’d be a different situation. But the satellite imagery and population equations, based on data left by the generation that had the plague, show they’re increasing. Slowly, but a definite population gain significant to the point-oh-one level of confidence.”
“Kenin —”
“I’m exhausted, Mia. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”
Plan on it, Mia thought grimly. She stored the data on the dying toddler’s matri-lineage in her handheld.
A week in base, and Mia could convince no one, not separately nor in a group. Medicians typically had tolerant psychological profiles, with higher-than-average acceptance of the unusual, divergent, and eccentric. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have joined the Corps.
On the third day, to keep herself busy, Mia joined the junior medicians working on refining the cure for what was now verified as “limbic seizures with impaired sensory input causing Charles Bonnet Syndrome.” Over the next few weeks it became clear to Mia what Kenin had meant; this treatment, if they had to use it, would be brutally hard on the brain. What was that old ditty? “Cured last night of my disease, I died today of my physician.” Well, it still happened enough in the Corps. Another reason behind the board’s decision.
She felt a curious reluctance to go back to Esefeb. Or, as the words kept running through her mind, Mia ek etej Esefeb efef. God, it was a tongue twister. These people didn’t just need help with parasites, they needed an infusion of new consonants. It was a relief to be back at base, to be working with her mind, solving technical problems alongside rational scientists. Still, she couldn’t shake a feeling of being alone, being lonely: Mia eket.
Or maybe the feeling was more like futility.
“Lolimel’s back,” Jamal said. He’d come up behind her as she sat at dusk on her favorite stone bench, facing the city. At this time of day the ruins looked romantic, infused with history. The sweet scents of that night-blooming flower, which Mia still hadn’t identified, wafted around her.
“I think you should come now,” Jamal said, and this time Mia heard his tone. She spun around. In the alien shadows Jamal’s face was as set as ice.
“He’s contracted it,” Mia said, knowing beyond doubt that it was true. The virus wasn’t just fetally transmitted, it wasn’t a slow-acting retrovirus, and if Lolimel had slept with Esefeb … But he wouldn’t be that stupid. He was a medician, he’d been warned …
“We don’t really know anything solid about the goddamn thing!” Jamal burst out.
“We never do,” Mia said, and the words cracked her dry lips like salt.
Lolimel stood in the center of the ruined atrium, giggling at something only he could see. Kenin, who could have proceeded without Mia, nodded at her. Mia understood; Kenin acknowledged the special bond Mia had with the young medician. The cure was untested, probably brutal, no more really than dumping a selection of poisons in the right areas of the brain, in itself problematical with the blood-brain barrier.
Mia made herself walk calmly up to Lolimel. “What’s so funny, Lolimel?”
“All those sandwigs crawling in straight lines
over the floor. I never saw blue ones before.”
Sandwigs. Lolimel, she remembered, had been born on New Carthage. Sandwigs were always red.
Lolimel said, “But why is there a tree growing out of your head, Mia?”
“Strong fertilizer,” she said. “Lolimel, did you have sex with Esefeb?”
He looked genuinely shocked. “No!”
“All right.” He might or might not be lying.
Jamal whispered, “A chance to study the hallucinations in someone who can fully articulate —”
“No,” Kenin said. “Time matters with this …” Mia saw that she couldn’t bring herself to say “cure.”
Realization dawned on Lolimel’s face. “Me? You’re going to … me? There’s nothing wrong with me!”
“Lolimel, dear heart …” Mia said.
“I don’t have it!”
“And the floor doesn’t have sandwigs. Lolimel —”
“No!”
The guards had been alerted. Lolimel didn’t make it out of the atrium. They held him, flailing and yelling, while Kenin deftly slapped on a tranq patch. In ten seconds he was out.
“Tie him down securely,” Kenin said, breathing hard. “Daniel, get the brain bore started as soon as he’s prepped. Everyone else, start packing up, and impose quarantine. We can’t risk this for anyone else here. I’m calling a Section Eleven.”
Section Eleven: If the MedCorps officer in charge deems the risk to Corps members to exceed the gain to colonists by a factor of three or more, the officer may pull the Corps off-planet.
It was the first time Mia had ever seen Kenin make a unilateral decision.
Twenty-four hours later, Mia sat beside Lolimel as dusk crept over the city. The shuttle had already carried up most personnel and equipment. Lolimel was in the last shift because, as Kenin did not need to say aloud, if he died, his body would be left behind. But Lolimel had not died. He had thrashed in unconscious seizures, had distorted his features in silent grimaces of pain until Mia would not have recognized him, had suffered malfunctions in alimentary, lymphatic, endocrine, and parasympathetic nervous systems, all recorded on the monitors. But he would live. The others didn’t know it, but Mia did.
“We’re ready for him, Mia,” the young tech said. “Are you on this shuttle, too?”
“No, the last one. Move him carefully. We don’t know how much pain he’s actually feeling through the meds.”
She watched the gurney slide out of the room, its monitors looming over Lolimel like cliffs over a raging river. When he’d gone, Mia slipped into the next building, and then the next. Such beautiful buildings: spacious atria, beautifully proportioned rooms, one structure flowing into another.
Eight buildings away, she picked up the pack she’d left there. It was heavy, even though it didn’t contain everything she had cached around the city. It was so easy to take things when a base was being hastily withdrawn. Everyone was preoccupied, everyone assumed anything not readily visible was already packed, inventories were neglected and the deebees not cross-checked. No time. Historically, war had always provided great opportunities for profiteers.
Was that what she was? Yes, but not a profit measured in money. Measure it, rather, in lives saved, or restored to dignity, or enhanced. “Why did you first enter the Corps?” Because I’m a medician, Lolimel. Not an anthropologist.
They would notice, of course, that Mia herself wasn’t aboard the last shuttle. But Kenin, at least, would realize that searching for her would be a waste of valuable resources when Mia didn’t want to be found. And Mia was so old. Surely the old should be allowed to make their own decisions.
Although she would miss them, these Corps members who had been her family since the last assignment shuffle, eighteen months ago and decades ago, depending on whose time you counted by. Especially she would miss Lolimel. But this was the right way to end her life, in service to these colonists’ health. She was a medician.
It went better than Mia could have hoped. When the ship had gone—she’d seen it leave orbit, a fleeting stream of light—Mia went to Esefeb.
“Mia etej efef,” Esefeb said with her rosy smile. Mia come home. Mia walked toward her, hugged the girl, and slapped the tranq patch on her neck.
For the next week, Mia barely slept. After the makeshift surgery, she tended Esefeb through the seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, pain. On the morning the girl woke up, herself again, Mia was there to bathe the feeble body, feed it, nurse Esefeb. She recovered very fast; the cure was violent on the body but not as debilitating as everyone had feared. And afterward Esefeb was quieter, meeker, and surprisingly intelligent as Mia taught her the rudiments of water purification, sanitation, safe food storage, health care. By the time Mia moved on to Esefeb’s mother’s house, Esefeb was free of most parasites, and Mia was working on the rest. Esefeb never mentioned her former hallucinations. It was possible she didn’t remember them.
“Esefeb ekebet,” Mia said as she hefted her pack to leave. Esefeb be well.
Esefeb nodded. She stood quietly as Mia trudged away, and when Mia turned to wave at her, Esefeb waved back.
Mia shifted the pack on her shoulders. It seemed heavier than before. Or maybe Mia was just older. Two weeks older, merely, but two weeks could make a big difference. An enormous difference.
Two weeks could start to save a civilization.
Night fell. Esefeb sat on the stairs to her bed, clutching the blue-green sheet of plastic in both hands. She sobbed and shivered, her clean face contorted. Around her, the unpopulated shadows grew thicker and darker. Eventually, she wailed aloud to the empty night.
“Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es … etej efef! O, etej efef!”
The Bellman
John Varley
John Varley appeared on the SF scene in 1974, and by the end of 1976, had produced as concentrated an outpouring of first-rate stories as the genre has ever seen, stories such as “Retrograde Summer,” “In the Bowl,” “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance,” “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” “Equinoctial,” “The Black Hole Passes,” “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” “The Phantom of Kansas,” and many other smart, bright, fresh, brash, audacious, and effortlessly imaginative stories. It’s hard to think of a group of short stories that has had a greater, more concentrated impact on the field, with the exception of Robert Heinlein’s early work for John W. Campbell’s Astounding, or perhaps Roger Zelazny’s early stories in the mid-60s. It was a meteoric rise to prominence even for a field known for meteoric rises.
Varley remained an important figure in the genre throughout the rest of the 70s and into the early 80s, with novels such as Ophiuchi Hotline, Titan, Wizard, Demon, and Millennium, and collections such as The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, Picnic on Nearside, and Blue Champagne, winning three Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for stories such as “Press Enter,” “The Persistence of Vision,” and “The Pusher.” By the middle 80s, though, Varley had moved away from the print world to develop a number of screenplays for Hollywood producers, most of which were never produced.
Disillusioned with Hollywood, Varley returned to print in 1992 with his novel Steel Beach, which Varley fanciers hoped would represent the start of a Varley renaissance, but then fell silent again for the rest of the decade. Here in the early years of a new century, though, there are encouraging signs that Varley may be coming back to stay, including novels such as The Golden Globes and, most recently, 2003’s Red Thunder, and a number of new short fiction sales. Coming up is his first new collection in years, The John Varley Reader.
Here he takes us to the Moon for a suspenseful and fast-paced murder mystery, where a resourceful cop must track a brutal serial killer through the warrens and gloomy underground passageways of a domed Lunar city, while the clock is running out in more ways than one …
The woman stumbled down the long corridor, too tired to run. She was tall, her feet were bare, and her clothes were torn. She was far advanced in pregnancy.
Through a
haze of pain, she saw a familiar blue light. Airlock. There was no place left to go. She opened the door and stepped inside, shut it behind her.
She faced the outer door, the one that led to vacuum. Quickly, she undogged the four levers that secured it. Overhead, a warning tone began to sound quietly, rhythmically. The outer door was now held shut by the air pressure inside the lock, and the inner door could not be opened until the outer latches were secured.
She heard noises from the corridor, but knew she was safe. Any attempt to force the outer door would set off enough alarms to bring the police and air department.
It was not until her ears popped that she realized her mistake. She started to scream, but it quickly died away with the last rush of air from her lungs. She continued to beat soundlessly on the metal walls for a time, until blood flowed from her mouth and nose. The blood bubbled.
As her eyes began to freeze, the outer door swung upward and she looked out on the lunar landscape. It was white and lovely in the sunlight, like the frost that soon coated her body.
Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach seated herself in the diagnostic chair, leaned back, and put her feet in the stirrups. Doctor Erikson began inserting things into her. She looked away, studying the people in the waiting room through the glass wall to her left. She couldn’t feel anything—which in itself was a disturbing sensation—but she didn’t like the thought of all that hardware so close to her child.
He turned on the scanner and she faced the screen on her other side. Even after so long, she was not used to the sight of the inner walls of her uterus, the placenta, and the fetus. Everything seemed to throb, engorged with blood. It made her feel heavy, as though her hands and feet were too massive to lift; a different sensation entirely from the familiar heaviness of her breasts and belly.
And the child. Incredible that it could be hers. It didn’t look like her at all. Just a standard squinch-faced, pink and puckered little ball. One tiny fist opened and shut. A leg kicked, and she felt the movement.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 26
