I pulled the door shut and ran into the woods.
“Meda!”
He stood black in yellow light at the cottage door.
“I’m sorry for being so caught up in my own troubles. I’ve been a bad host. Why don’t you – ?” I reached him in three steps and kissed him on the mouth. Just barely I tasted his thoughts, his arousal.
“Why don’t I what?” I said after a moment.
“Come back inside.”
I – they – were there to meet me the next morning as I walked back to the farm. I knew they would be. A part of me wanted to spend the rest of the day with my new lover, but another wanted nothing more than to confront myself, rub my nose in the scent that clung to me, and show me . . . I didn’t know what I wanted to prove. Perhaps that I didn’t need to be a composite to be happy. I didn’t need them, us, to be a whole person.
“You remember Veronica Proust,” Moira said, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, the rest of us behind her. Of course she would take the point when I was gone. Of course she would quote precedent.
“I remember,” I said, staying outside, beyond the pull of the pheromones. I could smell the anger, the fear. I had scared myself. Good, I thought.
“She was going to be a starship captain,” Moira said. We remembered Proust; she’d been two years ahead of us. Usually pods sundered in the crèche, with time to reform, but Veronica had broken into a pair and a quad. The pair had bonded, and the quad had transferred to engineering school, then dropped out.
“Not anymore,” I said. I pushed past them into the kitchen, and as I did so, I balled up the memory of fucking Malcolm and threw it at them like a rock.
They recoiled. I walked upstairs to our room and began packing my things. They didn’t bother coming upstairs, and that made me angrier. I threw my clothes into a bag, swept the bricabrac on the dresser aside. Something glinted in the pile, a geode that Strom had found one summer when we flew to the desert. He’d cut it in half and polished it by hand.
I picked it up, felt its smooth surface, bordering the jagged crystals of the center. Instead of packing it, I put it back on the dresser and zipped up my bag.
“Heading out?”
Mother Redd stood at the door, her face neutral.
“Did you call Dr. Khalid?” He was our physician, our psychologist, perhaps our father.
She shrugged. “And tell him what? You can’t force a pod to stay together.”
“I’m not breaking us up!” I said. Didn’t she understand? I was a person, by myself. I didn’t need to be part of a thing.
“You’re just going to go somewhere else by yourself. Yes, I understand.” Her sarcasm cut me, but she was gone before I could reply.
I rushed downstairs and out the front door so that I wouldn’t have to face the rest of me. I didn’t want them to taste my guilt. I ran the distance to Malcolm’s cottage. He was working in his garden and took me in his arms.
“Meda, Meda. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I whispered.
“Why did you go back there? We could have sent for your things.”
I said, “I want an interface.”
It was a simple procedure. He had the nanodermic and placed it on the back of my neck. My neck felt cold there, and the coldness spread to the base of my skull and down my spine. There was a prick and I felt my skin begin to crawl.
“I’m going to put you under for an hour,” Malcolm said. “It’s best.”
“Okay,” I said, already half asleep.
I dreamed that spiders were crawling down my optic nerve into my brain, that earwigs were sniffing around my lobes, that leeches were attached to all my fingers. But as they passed up my arms, into my brain, a door opened like the sun dawning, and I was somewhere else, somewhen else, and it all made sense with dreamlike logic. I understood why I was there, where the Community was, why they had left.
“Hello, Meda,” Malcolm said.
“I’m dreaming.”
“Not anymore,” his voice said. It seemed to be coming from a bright point in front of me. “I’ve hooked you up to the interface box. Everything went fine.”
My voice answered without my willing it to. “I was worried that my genetic mods would cause a problem.” I felt I was still in my dream. I didn’t want to say those things. “I didn’t mean to say that. I think I’m still dreaming.” I tried to stop speaking. “I can’t stop speaking.”
I felt Malcolm’s smile. “You’re not speaking. Let me show you what’s possible within the Community.”
He spent hours teaching me to manipulate the reality of the interface box, to reach out and grasp it like my hand was a shovel, a hammer, sandpaper, a cloth.
“You do this well,” he said, a brightness in the gray green garden we had built in an ancient empty city. Ivy hung from the walls, and within the ivy, sleek animals scurried. The dirt exuded its musty smell, mingling with the dogwoods that bounded the edge of the garden.
I smiled, knowing he could see my emotion. He could see all of me, as if he were a member of my pod. I was disclosed, though he remained aloof.
“Soon,” he said, when I pried at his light, and then he took hold of me and we made love again in the garden, the grass tickling my back like a thousand tongues.
In the golden aftermath, Malcolm’s face emerged from within the ball of light, his eyes closed. As I examined his face, it expanded before me, I fell into his left nostril, into his skull, and all of him was laid open to me.
In the garden, next to the ivy-covered stone walls, I began to retch. Even within the virtual reality of the interface box, I tasted my bile. He’d lied to me.
I had no control of my body. The interface box sat on the couch beside me as it had when we’d started, but pseudoreality was gone. Malcolm was behind me – I could hear him packing a bag – but I couldn’t will my head to turn.
“We’ll head for the Belem elevator. Once we’re on the Ring, we’re safe. They can’t get to us. Then they’ll have to deal with me.”
There was a water stain on the wall, a blemish that I could not tear my eyes away from.
“We’ll recruit people from singleton enclaves. They may not recognize my claim, but they will recognize my power.”
My eyes began to tear, not from the strain. He’d used me, and I, silly girl, had fallen for him. He had seduced me, taken me as a pawn, as a valuable to bargain with.
“It may take a generation. I’d hoped it wouldn’t. There are cloning vats on the Ring. You have excellent stock, and if raised from birth, you will be much more malleable.”
If he had me, part of one of the starpods, he thought he’d be safe from the Overgovernment. But he didn’t know that our pod was sundered. He didn’t realize how useless this all was.
“All right, Meda. Time to go.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him insert the connection into his interface, and my legs lifted me up off the couch. My rage surged through me, and my neck erupted in pheromones.
“Jesus, what’s that smell?”
Pheromones! His interface controlled my body, my throat, my tongue, my cunt, but not my mods. He’d never thought of it. I screamed with all my might, scent exploding from my glands. Anger, fear, revulsion.
Malcolm opened the door, fanned it. His gun bulged at his waist. “We’ll pick up some perfume for you on the way.” He disappeared out the door with two bags, one mine, while I stood with the interface box in my outstretched arms.
Still I screamed, saturating the air with my words, until my glands were empty, spent, and my autonomous nervous system silenced me. I strained to hear something from outside. There was nothing.
Malcolm reappeared. “Let’s go.” My legs goose-stepped me from the cottage.
I tasted our thoughts as I passed the threshold. My pod was out there, too far for me to understand, but close.
With the last of my pheromones, I signaled, Help!
“Into the aircar,” Leto said.
Something yanked at my
neck, and my body spasmed as I collapsed. I caught sight of Manuel on the cottage roof, holding the interface box.
Leto pulled his gun and spun.
Something flew by me, and Leto cried out, dropping the pistol. I stood, wobbly, and ran into the woods, until someone caught me, and suddenly I was in our mesh.
As my face was buried in Strom’s chest and my palms squeezed against his, I watched with other eyes – Moira’s eyes! – as Leto scrambled into the aircar and started the turbines.
He’s not going far.
We played with his hydrogen regulator.
Also turned his beacon back on.
Thanks for coming. Sorry.
I felt dirty, empty. My words barely formed. I released all that had happened, all that I had done, all my foolish thoughts into them. I expected their anger, their rejection. I expected them to leave me there by the cottage.
Still a fool, Moira chided. Strom touched the tender interface jack on my neck.
All’s forgiven, Meda. The consensus was the juice of a ripe fruit, the light of distant stars.
All’s forgiven.
Hand in hand in hand, we returned to the farm, sharing all that had happened that day.
ANOMALOUS
STRUCTURES
OF MY DREAMS
M. Shayne Bell
M. Shayne Bell first came to public attention in 1986, when he won first place in that year’s Writers of the Future contest. Since then, he has published a number of well-liked stories in Asimov’s – including a Hugo Finalist, “Mrs. Lincoln’s China,” and a loosely connected series of stories about life in a future Africa – as well as appearing in Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Pulphouse, Starlight 2, Vanishing Acts, and elsewhere. He has published a well-received first novel, Nicoji, and edited an anthology of stories by Utah writers, Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor. His most recent book is a collection, How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories. Bell has an M.A. in English from Brigham Young University, and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Here he gives the idea of picking up a “secondary infection” while in the hospital a whole new – and sinister – connotation, one with uneasy implications for the entire world . . .
Of COURSE IT WASN’T a private room. Medicare doesn’t pay for that. Never mind that next door was an empty room with two beds never slept in. I had to share a room. Never mind that when you’re sick enough to be hospitalized, the last thing you want is for a perfect stranger and usually the stranger’s family and friends to watch you be that sick. It was cheaper to keep two people in one room, end of discussion, throw up if you have to and let a roomful of strangers watch you do it.
I was admitted late in the day. The man in the bed next to mine lay there breathing raspily, watching them move me in. He never said a word. His frail little wife and, I assumed, daughter stood up to make room for the nurses and me. I nodded at my roommate, but that was all – what do you say when nurses are helping you into one of those ridiculously high hospital beds, putting a needle into the back of your wrist to start an IV drip, and injecting you with antibiotics?
“Can I get you anything?” one of the nurses asked me when she was through with her part in the little drama.
Yes, I thought, get me out of here. Get me well and get me out of here.
When my roommate’s visitors were gone and it was late and all the TVs were off, the two of us in that room still lay awake. He’d cough, trying not to make a lot of noise, then I’d do the same.
“What are you in for?” he asked me suddenly through the curtain separating our beds. His question made it sound as if we were criminals about to discuss our crimes.
“Pneumonia,” I said. “Noninfectious.” I did not go on to say that it was PCP pneumonia and that this AIDS-related opportunistic infection would kill me if my doctor didn’t find a way to kill it first. I did not have an immune system left to fight it with.
“I’ve got pneumonia, too,” he said, wheezing. He coughed hard.
No way! I thought. They’d put me in a room with somebody coughing up yet another strain of lung killer I couldn’t fight? “What kind?” I asked.
“They don’t know,” he said. “Something rare.”
In the night, when he was sleeping, I unhooked myself from the IV and oxygen feed and walked out to the nurses’ desk, hospital gown tied shut and held shut as well. I asked the head nurse about the condition of the man in the bed next to mine. I figured I had a right to know.
“It’s not to worry,” she said. “Mr. Schumberg can’t possibly be infectious. He should be getting better soon.”
“But if he has something different from me and I catch it – I can’t fight it. I could be in serious trouble.”
“Your physician approved your room assignment. You can talk to her about it in the morning, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
It was all she would say. Patient confidentiality rules forbade her from telling me anything specific about my roommate. I walked back to my bed and saw that the man next to me had an IV pentamadine drip just like mine. That fit serious pneumonia treatment. I wondered what strain he had.
Even I could see that by morning my roommate was not getting better. He was noticeably worse. All he could do was cough. Our nurse started his pentamadine drip, then she started mine. I felt the cold drug course through my veins and around to my heart and brain. I did not understand why the nurses couldn’t warm the drug first, why they couldn’t at least let it sit on a counter and come to room temperature. They always took it straight from the refrigerator and started it icy cold into my veins. I had asked them to warm it the last time I’d been admitted, but no one wanted special requests to remember or a patient fussing with hospital procedures. I didn’t say anything this time. I just gathered up the blankets around me.
When the nurse left, my roommate turned on a football game rebroadcast on one of the sports channels, then he completely ignored it. He called his wife and asked her why she wasn’t here yet. I found myself wishing that I had someone to wait for, someone who could walk through the door at any moment and bring flowers or a newspaper and gossip about friends. I’d been too sick for too long to keep up many friendships. My closest current relationships were with my doctor and the staffs at the pharmacy and the food bank. My little sister lived in Minneapolis and she might call, I thought. If I let her know I was in here, she might call.
His wife arrived before any of our doctors made rounds. I heard her kiss her husband, and they murmured a few words. Then she stepped around the curtain and smiled a little nervously at me. She carried a small bouquet of lilacs arranged in a dill pickle bottle she had washed the label off. She set it on my dresser.
“Thank you so much,” I said, and the tears set in. AIDS was making my brain shrink, among other things, but the only effect I’d been able to notice so far besides the headaches was the constant crying. I could not control my emotions. I’d cry if I ran out of shampoo or if the electric bill arrived one day earlier than usual. I couldn’t help it. I sat there with tears in my eyes over this lady’s unexpected kindness, and I did not dare blink for fear the tears would run down my cheeks and she’d see.
“I hope you’re well soon,” she said, and she patted my knee and stepped back around the curtain to be with her husband.
I leaned back and wiped my eyes. I inhaled the fragrance of the lilacs mixed, oddly, with the lingering smell of dill which you can never quite wash out of a jar. I hadn’t been able to ask her name, and she had not asked mine.
My doctor made quick rounds. She prescribed a higher dose of Tylenol to bring down my fever, then she was off to her clinic. The resident interns on the floor made their rounds. About an hour later, Mr. Schumberg’s doctors arrived, three of them. We were in a teaching hospital so it was not unusual to see teams in a room – but these were all doctors. There were no interns among them as far as I could tell. They turned off his TV and pulled the curtain comple
tely around his bed. I lay back and closed my eyes.
I couldn’t help but overhear everything. After a while, I realized they weren’t asking him regular questions. It was all about his work, not his condition.
“I was in the research and development end,” he said. “Masked and gloved and in a damned hot bodysuit.”
“You couldn’t have breathed them in?”
“Through the biohazard glass and the steel shield between them and me? Through my suit? I don’t think so.” He stopped and coughed and coughed. “It wouldn’t have hurt me if I had,” he continued when he could talk again.
“My husband is always very careful,” his wife volunteered.
“He’s not responding to treatment, and we’re trying to determine whether something we’ve overlooked could be the reason why,” one of the doctors said.
“How did you work with them?” another asked.
“You suit up before you enter the research area, then you fit your hands into white, pressure-sensitive gloves that control the movement of robotic arms in a hermetically sealed room you never enter. Those robots do all the actual work for you. You strap on goggles that let you see what you’re doing. You never come into physical contact with the projects.”
He coughed again and again.
“Could you lean forward, please?”
They talked on like that while they listened to his lungs. I was too fevered and chilled from the cold IV to pay them much attention then.
They took sputum samples from both of us. They came back for another from him at noon, then another from him at four o’clock. They took him away in a wheelchair to x-ray his lungs. His daughter Ann came to sit with him in the evening and to spell her mother. Ann kept going to the sink to freshen cool washcloths that she put on her father’s forehead.
My fever spiked again in the evening, despite the increased Tylenol. I’d been trying to drink liquids all day on top of the saline drip to do what I could to help my body fight the pneumonia, but it wasn’t conquered yet. I’m impatient when I’m sick. I want whatever it is – cold, flu, PCP pneumonia – to be over now. Progress always seems slow. But it’s especially troublesome when all you have to do is lie in bed while your doctor and teams of nurses concentrate on your condition. It’s impossible not to focus on it yourself. All your little aches and pains seem magnified. You watch yourself for the slightest signs of improvement. If there aren’t any, you wonder why. You wonder what’s happening. You start worrying about what you’ve left undone and unsaid. Living with AIDS as long as I have, you’d think I’d have said it all and prepared everything long ago. Most people would think that someone like me would have had plenty of warning to get ready, but you never have plenty of warning. There’s never enough time. You always need more.
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