The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Night came, and all the visitors left and most of the TVs finally went off. Still I could not sleep. Neither could my roommate. We lay there taking turns coughing. His cough seemed much worse. He’d cough and cough, then gasp for air, then cough some more. He did not try to hide it now. He started moaning between coughs.

  “Do you need something?” I asked him through the curtain. “Do you want me to call a nurse?”

  “I just need to catch my breath,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  But he could not catch his breath, and his coughing fits lasted longer and longer. His coughing seemed to come from the depths of his lungs. After one long coughing fit, I heard him throwing up.

  I hit the “call nurse” button, but no one rushed in. No one came at all. Damn them, I thought. I unhooked my IV, took off my oxygen feed, and got out of bed. I pulled back the curtain, thinking I would at least hand him his plastic vomit bowl, but the sight of him shocked me. His vomit was bloody. It was all over his bed and had splashed onto the floor. He was choking for air.

  I headed out the door. “Mr. Schumberg needs help!” I called to a nurse in the hallway. “He’s choking in vomit.”

  That got attention. She ran into the room, and another nurse soon followed. I sat in a chair in the hallway while they worked on Mr. Schumberg. After a few minutes, his choking stopped, but he kept coughing.

  The elevators at the far end of the hall soon opened, and a short Mexican woman stepped out pulling a cleaning cart behind her. They hadn’t wasted any time calling housekeeping, I thought. I did not envy this woman’s job. She pulled on gloves, and the nurses asked her to mop the floor first so they could walk around in there. After that, she carried clean bedding in and came out with the soiled. She went back in to keep cleaning. I waited until one of the nurses had left before I walked back in.

  The smell of disinfectant was strong in the room. They had raised the back of Mr. Schumberg’s bed to a 90-degree angle, so he was sitting straight up. A nurse was increasing his oxygen flow. When she left, he sat there with his eyes closed, so I didn’t say anything. I was certain he did not feel like talking. I started to climb back into bed, but I saw blood on the floor between our beds. The woman from housekeeping was mopping around the sink. I stepped over to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s still blood between the beds.”

  “Ai!” she said. She went out to her cart for a different mop. After she had cleaned up the mess with that mop, she came back in with another mop dripping with disinfectant. She mopped vigorously under both beds.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  She smiled at my Spanish. “Nada,” she said.

  I got back into bed from the other side. She finished her work, then she pulled off her gloves, thew them in the trash, and washed at the sink. I saw that her nametag read “Maria.”

  I had the first of the odd, frenetic dreams that night. In it, everyone I knew rushed around carrying rocks and furniture and sandbags to a wall we were tying to construct around the downtown highrises. No one would tell me why we were doing it, just that we had to work faster and faster. All the buildings we were attempting to protect were lit from floor to ceiling, and that’s what I remembered most from the dream when I woke at 2:00 a.m.: the oddly lit buildings burning gloriously bright while the rest of the city was dark and apparently without electricity.

  I pulled the covers up around me. I could feel the fever hot inside me. The ice had melted in my pitcher, but the water was still cool. I poured another glass and drank it. The blinds were pulled over the window so I could not look out at the city lights in the valley, but I was sure they were there. It took a while for me to go back to sleep.

  The interns were very worried about the blood in Mr. Schumberg’s vomit, and I was certain the doctors would be, too. The head intern sent him for more x-rays before breakfast. When my doctor did her rounds, she ordered a follow-up x-ray of my lungs. When the nurse wheeled me back into the room, Mr. Schumberg was sitting on the side of his bed in conference with the three doctors. His breakfast lay untouched on his table. He had his feet over the side of his bed, and he was trying to sit up straight. He was entangled in IV lines and the oxygen feed to his nose. The doctors pulled the curtains around his bed while the nurse helped me back up into mine.

  “There are anomalous structures forming in the lower third of each of your lungs,” I heard one of the doctors say to him.

  “How do you mean ‘anomalous’?” he asked, and then he coughed.

  “They are right-angled or curved, not irregular as would be the case with cancer. We have to biopsy the structures to see what they are, then remove them if necessary.”

  “When?”

  “Now. Today. We have the biopsy scheduled for one o’clock. Don’t eat breakfast.”

  They were quiet while Mr. Schumberg signed the consent forms for the biopsy.

  “We also need you to sign this form allowing us to contact your employer. If the biopsy confirms our guess, we have to talk to them about what might be forming in your lungs and how best to proceed.”

  “Lungs are too wet for my projects,” Mr. Schumberg said. “Human tissue is too wet. They can’t be growing inside me. This is something else – probably a malfunctioning x-ray machine.”

  “We’re having that checked.”

  He signed the consent forms, and they left and the nurse left. I did not hear Mr. Schumberg settle back into bed. After a time, I could hear that he was crying. That surprised me. I wondered if this was the most serious diagnosis he had had to face. I remembered crying after they’d told me I was HIV positive all those years ago. I’d managed to wait until I’d made it to my car where I’d been alone. I’d known that nothing in my life would ever be the same. Maybe he was thinking similar thoughts.

  Listening to him cry made me teary, but that was just my shrinking brain. I wished that his wife were here to comfort him. I did not feel comfortable trying. Blubbering hospitalized AIDS patients can do a lot of things, but cheer up other patients is usually not one of them. I wondered what was going on.

  His wife came soon enough, but so did officials from his work. They grilled Mr. Schumberg about lapses in procedures I could not make sense of, and he claimed there had been none. His wife said again that “he is always very careful.” I started to wonder just how careful he had been or, if he were the careful man his wife claimed, whether his company had set up adequate procedures to protect him in the first place.

  One of the doctors came in to ask questions of the company officials. They all studied Mr. Schumberg’s lung x-rays. The company officials asked for copies and left quickly. Nurses arrived to take Mr. Schumberg away for the biopsy. His wife walked down to the waiting room, but soon she was back in the chair by his bed.

  “Do you mind if I turn on my husband’s television?” she asked. “The waiting room is so crowded and all anyone is watching is football. I’ll wait here for Bernie.”

  I told her to go right ahead. She turned on a cooking channel which she completely ignored. She called Ann to tell her about the biopsy and possible surgery, then she leafed through an issue of Good Housekeeping. After an hour or so of Northern Italian pastas that I at least watched, she walked back down to the waiting room.

  The room was oddly quiet after she left. I turned off the TV, but it was more than that, of course. Being around Mr. Schumberg and his family made me think, too much probably, about what my life lacked. Mr. Schumberg had other people in his life. The quiet hospital room would be like my quiet house when I was well enough to drive myself home again. It was time to make some changes, I thought. Time for some improvements. I knew that hospital resolutions were like New Year’s resolutions – seldom remembered after discharge. But I’d remember this one. There were people I could call, old friends who’d maybe want to see me again, new friends to make. I’d even leave here with pasta recipes to cook for them.

  My chest ached from all the coughing, and I could not stop. They gave me a liq
uid medicine to control the cough, and it seemed to help for about half an hour. My fever was higher, not lower – 103.5 now, and that in the daytime. I was chilled. I asked a nurse to bring me another blanket to wrap in.

  My doctor surprised me by coming back to my room around three o’clock, hours before evening rounds. She pulled on gloves before coming over to me, which she would never normally do.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Sick,” I said.

  “Lean forward,” she said. “I need to listen to your lungs.”

  I did as she asked, then she percussed my back and chest, asking whether any of the taps hurt. They all did.

  She excused herself and walked out to the nurses’ desk. I could see her through the doorway. One of Mr. Schumberg’s doctors walked over and talked to her. He opened a chart and showed her a series of x-rays. She held an x-ray she was carrying up to the light for him to look at, and he shook his head. The head intern walked over to look. I could see that my doctor was getting angrier by the minute, though I couldn’t hear what any of them was saying. A nurse at the desk hurried to hand her a form, and she walked back into my room with the head intern.

  “I’m getting you out of this room,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Where do I start? With the health-care system in this country? With free-enterprise capitalism that thinks it can chew up people and spit the ones it damages into hospitals unequipped to handle them?”

  She was filling out a form for the room transfer. I’d never seen my doctor this angry.

  “You might have picked up what Mr. Schumberg has,” the intern said.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes. “But they assured me he was noninfectious,” I said pointlessly.

  “They told me the same thing,” my doctor said. “They used to have an AIDS ward in this hospital. If they’d kept that going, as I’d advised them, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  “What does Mr. Schumberg have?” I asked.

  The intern looked at my doctor.

  “That’s the million dollar question,” my doctor said.

  When she was through with the form, she handed it to the intern and walked to the window. She held up an x-ray in the light. “These are of your lungs the day you were admitted,” she said. She pointed out the areas affected by the pneumonia. “Now here’s your x-ray from this morning. It came to me just half an hour ago.”

  She held the new one up in the light. There was a small dark rectangle in the lower portion of my right lung.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But apparently it’s not organic.”

  “What do you mean ‘not organic’?”

  “It’s metal.”

  “How did it get there?”

  “That’s what we need to find out. I’m heading down to see what the biopsy discovers in Schumberg’s lungs. In the meantime, you’re getting your own room and isolation.”

  She left in a hurry. The intern was leafing through Mr. Schumberg’s chart.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “How do you catch ‘metal rectangles’ in your lungs?”

  The intern shrugged. “We don’t know yet. Mr. Schumberg developed symptoms of pneumonia two weeks ago, but all standard treatments failed, first antibiotics at home, then in-hospital treatment. He apparently works for the research arm of a telecommunications company. Yesterday after each successive x-ray showed the anomalies in his lungs changing and growing we started wondering if something from his workplace could be causing his condition.”

  “And you left me in here with him?”

  I was furious.

  “We weren’t putting together all the pieces. Until three hours ago, we still thought there might be something wrong with the x-ray equipment. But the technicians assure us it’s functioning perfectly.”

  I just sat there, stunned, not knowing what to do or expect with a metal rectangle of some kind growing in my left lung.

  “You might have a million dollar lawsuit on your hands,” the intern said.

  He seemed to think that would brighten things up for me.

  When you contract a disease like AIDS, you think that that is what is going to kill you. With AIDS, I had any of ten or fifteen opportunistic infections either singly or in combination lurking as my executioners and time to imagine facing them all. You never think that your end will come in some unexpected way like a bus hitting you in a crosswalk. That’s what I felt like alone in that room again. I felt as if I were standing in the headlights of a Greyhound bus.

  I unhooked myself from the IV and oxygen feed and packed the few things I had brought with me to the hospital so I’d be ready to move to the new room. Then I hooked everything back up and waited. After about twenty minutes, they wheeled Mr. Schumberg into the room. Mrs. Schumberg followed his bed in, and she had tears in her eyes. Mr. Schumberg did not look good. I just looked at all of them, wide-eyed. I knew room transfers could take a while, but I’d expected to be gone when they brought him back. They pulled the curtain while they moved him onto his own bed, but I could hear him wheezing and coughing and moaning. The two nurses who brought him in were coughing, too. Add my coughs, and it was a noisy room.

  Ann soon arrived. I was surprised to see her in the daytime since I knew she had a job. She stepped over for a chair from my section of the room. “They’re taking Dad into surgery as soon as possible,” she told me. “I took the afternoon off to come sit with Mother through this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I hope the surgery helps your dad get well.”

  It was the least I could say, even under the circumstances. Ann was pulling the chair past the end of my bed. I decided to try to get some answers. “What did your father do?” I asked Ann. “They think I might have picked up what he has.”

  She stopped and looked at me, then she sat in the chair. “What’s happened?” she asked.

  I told her about the x-rays of my lungs.

  “Dad designs ultrasensitive communications equipment,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How could that affect his lungs and now mine?”

  “Let’s ask him,” she said. She stood and pulled back the curtain. She explained the situation to her father. No one said anything for a moment. None of us even coughed for a time.

  “I design machines that build – ” Mr. Schumberg said, then he started coughing again. “That build themselves from the molecular structure up – nanotech. Our nanomachines carry the plans for communications devices. They process local materials and build our equipment in hours. We wanted them for emergency situations, military patrols. People could carry a telecom center in a matchbox.”

  I lay back and looked out the window. It was starting to make sense. Nanotechnology and the marvelous machines it would supposedly create had been in the news for years. His nanomachines had somehow escaped from the lab to the wider world – or at least to our lungs. I imagined microscopic nanomachines eager to build radios and handsets coughed out in a fine spray from Schumberg’s lungs hour after hour for the days that I had lain next to him.

  “What were your machines supposed to grow from?” I asked.

  “Dirt or sand. Start the process and my little machines fan out to find what they need in the local environment. Lungs – human tissue – were supposed to be too wet for them to grow in.”

  “Apparently they weren’t,” I said.

  He looked appalled. So did Ann and his wife.

  “How do you turn them off?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “High-dose radiation would do it. Extreme heat.” He looked back at me. “Basically, at this point, you don’t turn them off. We were still trying to design decent shut-off mechanisms.”

  Hence his rushed surgery and, I imagined, my own to follow shortly though how they would operate on lungs sick with pneumonia I didn’t know. At least I was finally able to make sense of what was going on. Apparently the wetness of a person�
�s lungs just slows down the nanomachines, and apparently each microscopic automaton carries the plans for the entire finished set of equipment. They are programmed to work together if they encounter others of their kind, but all you really need is one of them. It just takes longer if you start from such a small beginning. Still, at the rate things were going, Mr. Schumberg thought I could look forward to a satellite uplink and all the necessary receivers and transmitters in my own chest by Thursday noon unless they could cut the damn things out.

  I watched nurses set up a table with disposable plastic gowns and gloves and masks, just outside the door to our room. The head nurse soon walked in covered in protective gear. She asked Mrs. Schumberg and Ann to step out to gown, glove, and mask, too.

  “What’s the point now?” Mrs. Schumberg asked. “I’ve been with Bernie every day since he took sick.”

  “Gown and mask now or leave the room,” was all the nurse said. She stood in the middle of the room until Mrs. Schumberg and Ann had stepped out to do as she ordered.

  I stopped the nurse before she could leave. “Ma’am,” I said. “My doctor said I would be getting a different room.”

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Administration ordered us to quarantine those of you with this problem in as small an area as possible. You’ll be staying right where you are.”