Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  The seven applicants, Felicia included, had dutifully bent themselves to all-but-forgotten open surgical approaches. Holes big enough to insert a pair of human hands. In weightlessness and low-g, human tissue repair might be slower, even with hormonal promoters, but there was greatly reduced tension on stitched, opposed edges. Wounds pulling apart were rarely a problem.

  The bot can't be used for this anyway, Pelle pointed out desperately, checking his watch. You have to make a hole big enough to pull her liver out in one piece. I'll take the blame if they find out. I'll tell them I offered to switch logins for you and then forgot. If anything else goes wrong, I'll take the blame for that, too. I trust you. You're a legend back home. Please!

  But it wasn't the pulling out of livers that Felicia was concerned with. It was the responsibility of operating on her best friend's brilliant young daughter.

  All it would take was one small slip. One damaged nerve, one tiny puncture of the diaphragm and Bridget would be eliminated from the Mission. If Pelle took the blame, he'd be sent to his home country in disgrace, which might make his wife secretly happy. But would he really wear it? Felicia thought she'd read loyalty and resolution behind his grateful puppy-face. She believed him when he said he'd shoulder any fallout. Most likely, he wouldn't even admit to having absconded.

  He'd tell the Director that he'd damaged the nerve, or punctured the diaphragm, himself.

  Then, with Bridget excluded, they'd have to send the second-best candidate to fill the surgeon's role on the Mars Settlement Mission.

  Me, Felicia thought. I was second-best. And I told them I'd do anything to be on that team.

  Anything.

  Her right hand, sheathed in its sterile, spray-on glove, trembled slightly above the surgical field.

  When the trembling stopped, she opened Bridget's abdomen decisively. There, the mechanisms that had sustained the girl over twenty-seven years of life waited to be made obsolete. Felicia would leave the long conduit of the oesophagus behind, lest the all-important integrity of the chest cavity be threatened, but the pale, muscular pouch of the stomach would go, no longer necessary for pounding and percolating other life forms to mush.

  Pink coils of intestine would be tied off where they entered the pelvic cavity, their function of digestion and absorption soon to be made as redundant as the pancreas and liver that supplied them with enzymes. Reproductive systems were slated for removal, as a hydrogen-powered body would not be suitable for bearing young.

  One kidney would be enough to regulate the body's water. The spleen would swim alone in a sea of abdominal fat, which would be seeded with a few pertinent hormone-synthesizing cells. That supply of lipid building blocks would be sufficient for several years of cell turnover. After her abdominal fat was gone, Bridget would receive the occasional phospholipid and essential fatty acid IV as well as patch infusions of the amino acids, minerals and other micronutrients that took up a minuscule amount of space on the craft when compared to actual food.

  Felicia took Bridget's liver gingerly in her left hand.

  "Oh my God," Maureen gasped, "I need a drink."

  "Look out, Maureen's liver," Felicia murmured as the child-locks came off the liquor cabinet and Maureen hunted on her knees for the bottle of Jameson she'd promised herself to celebrate the moment she finished breast-feeding.

  Baby Bridget, six months old, was finally sleeping in a corner of the dining room, squashed snugly into the electronic rocker with its piped-in sounds from the womb.

  So they had to keep the celebration quiet.

  "You want one?" Maureen whispered, cracking ice blocks from their berg-shaped moulds into a crystal glass. The bar was turned to a red ring by the single, overhanging lamp, its long corners lost in the gloom. Only Maureen's nose, lips, and chin were in the circle of light, and they looked oddly disembodied. Before Felicia could answer, she said, "Sorry, I forgot. You've got to keep in peak fitness, right?"

  "Right."

  Maureen took her first sip of whiskey and sighed blissfully.

  "I'm never giving you up again," she told the bottle, hugging it.

  Felicia's smile broadened and she measured the coffee granules into her cup. Black, no sugar. She needed the caffeine but not the extra weight. She kept her eye on the kettle. It was important to catch it before it whistled. Maureen was the only woman she knew with a whistling kettle. Its shrill screams apparently reminded her of childhood and family. They gave her the warm fuzzies.

  Funnily enough, Bridget's screams didn't have the same effect, and Felicia didn't want to be responsible for waking the baby.

  "So," Maureen said. "You want to go with those crazies down to the bottom of the ocean. You, in charge of the health of a hundred people living on the sea floor for three years. Why, Lici?"

  "Because I can," Felicia said. "I'm the best person to do it. And if I can, and I'm the best person to do it, then I should do it, right? It should be me. I can take care of them."

  Maureen absorbed this for a moment before giving an abrupt guffaw.

  "I can't even take care of four people."

  The four people she meant were herself, her husband and the two children. The marriage was not faring well under the pressure of a single income. But Maureen's job had been to shoot wild horses from a helicopter. That was seasonal work, and there was no longer any suitable season for Maureen to stay out from dawn until dusk; nor was there likely to be even after the kids started school, and she refused to work at the cannery.

  "Yes, you can."

  "A hundred people. Sancta Maria mater Dei. You know, when I said you shouldn't work so hard, I meant you should cut back on your hours at the hospital, not switch to something even worse. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year for three years. Honestly. How are you ever going to find true love down there with the crazies?"

  Felicia flicked the kettle off the instant before it boiled, poured it over the granules and stirred.

  "Who says I'll find love up here? Who says there's even such a thing as true love that lasts forever?"

  The last came out of her mouth before she remembered the tensions dividing the house. She looked at Maureen askance, but Maureen stood with her whiskey glass beside the sleeping baby in the rocker, her smile forgiving.

  "Of course there's such a thing. It's so strong, Lici. Sometimes it hurts me to look at her. I love her so much. My beautiful little Bridget."

  Bridget's blood pressure dropped.

  Felicia put the liver into the tray and a trolley bot rushed it away; there was no sense wasting a good liver, just because Bridget would not need it where she was going. Some other life might be saved by it.

  Bridget's liver had held a lot of blood. Felicia nudged the robotic anesthetist with her toe, giving it permission to introduce a bolus of intravenous fluids. The readout on the bot's face said: Yes, Doctor Pelle. Then, Felicia waited for the patient's blood pressure to rise, because tugging on the stomach would trigger the vagus nerve and a second drop in pressure.

  Gazing at the electronic trace of the heart rate monitor, Felicia remembered the first, week-long isolation that had been part of the Agency's barrage of psych tests. The seven applicants, wearing their unwieldy suits, had stood in a cramped, near-lightless room, listening to the instructions of assessors who hid behind cameras and voice-altering software.

  Sit down, the hidden speakers instructed, and they'd scrabbled like children at musical chairs for the cold, hard folding camp stools lined up against the wall. Seven small monitors had flickered to life in front of them.

  Is that our own ECGs? Bridget had whispered. All of them were wired for their vital signs. She shook her head a moment later as an arrhythmia Felicia knew she did not have crossed the screen directly in front of her. At forty-two, Felicia was the oldest of the applicants, but still in prime condition. Not that any of the others would have heart defects, either.

  Your task, the toneless voice informed them, is to monitor your hypothetical patient for
as long as you feel able to do so free from error. Each time you observe an abnormality, you will tap your right foot on the floor as though approving the suggestion of an anaesthetic machine.

  Some of the applicants started tapping, but the voice was not finished with their instructions.

  Five days of water and food are provided by your suit, it went on. Consume and eliminate as you would during a surface crossing. This test will assess your ability to perform monotonous tasks over time. When you no longer feel able to perform the task competently, stand and exit the hallway to your right.

  Felicia felt a thrill go through her: Five days! Surely nobody could stay awake and fully functional that long. She did not dare turn her head to see Bridget's response.

  She had eyes only for the P-waves, QRS complexes, and T-waves indicating the atrial depolarization, ventricular depolarization and ventricular repolarization of the heart respectively, as well as for the regularity of the spaces between them.

  There. One of the P-waves had not been followed by a QRS complex. Felicia's foot tapped. It could be atrio-ventricular heart block. Is this a single patient, or a whole lot of them mixed up together?

  Even as the question formed in her thoughts, it was answered by a paroxysm of atrial tachycardia. Different patients, then, all jumbled together. That would be more interesting, and keep her more alert, than having to watch out for the same error over and over again. Her foot tapped.

  Twenty-four hours later, she no longer thought the word 'easy' could be brought to apply to any aspect of her situation. Two of the seven applicants were already gone. One had removed herself, prematurely as it turned out, for the voice had informed her that her performance had been error free. The second was informed, embarrassingly enough, that his performance level had fallen below the acceptable limit of two misses per hundred abnormalities and that he was to exit immediately.

  Of the remaining five, Felicia was able to glimpse two in the periphery of her helmet's wraparound internal screens. The man on her left sat stiffly, his tense shoulders bunched inside his suit and his gloved hands gripping the sides of the stool.

  Bridget, on her right, showed complete relaxation.

  She might even have been smiling behind her VR-augmented visor. Felicia could not turn her head to be sure.

  The broad blip of a ventricular premature complex marred her monitor. She tapped her foot. Took a sip of her water. Urinated into her suit.

  Wished she could rub her eyes.

  After seventy-two hours, Felicia and Bridget were alone. The other monitors were dark.

  Felicia felt like her foot was made of lead.

  But it won't be like this when we have to do it on Mars, she thought weirdly. It'll be easier to tap in low gravity.

  Some of the complexes were close together and some of them were far apart, and she couldn't be sure that it was a normal sinus arrhythmia.

  Was it? Wasn't it?

  She didn't know. She couldn't risk it. Bridget was still there. Bridget looked the same, happy and carefree. She was younger. She was smarter. She was going to take Felicia's place on the team, after everything Felicia had done to help her get into the program.

  Felicia hauled herself to her feet. She was older. She was more experienced. She knew herself inside and out. Her concentration was slipping and it was time to go.

  Felicia de Martino, the voice said, you have made one error. That is within the acceptable limit.

  Relief surged through her as she stumbled past the still-seated Bridget. She hadn't waited too long. Not like Bridget. Bridget was ridiculously stubborn. The voice would tell her to leave soon enough. Maybe even before Felicia moved out of earshot.

  But the voice didn't tell Bridget to leave.

  Not until she became dangerously dehydrated on the afternoon of the sixth day.

  You're a machine, Bridget, the others had said admiringly when their youngest member rejoined the group.

  Felicia had pretended to be sleeping, lodged tightly in her bag like a cocooned caterpillar fastened to the wall of the barracks. She couldn't crawl out until all her emotion had been properly suppressed, not when the constant closed-circuit monitoring might pick up something in her expression or tone of voice that said she wasn't fit to work with others.

  Solo surgeon was Felicia's natural arena, wasn't it? All the prestigious medical universities selected specifically for assertiveness, self-reliance and competitiveness. It was at odds with modern-day mission requirements, but they couldn't exactly go back in time twenty years and instruct that some gentle, lamb-like surgeons be promoted in case the Space Agency ever had need of them.

  She snapped back to the present. Bridget's blood pressure was back to normal.

  Felicia put her hands into the sand-blaster for glove removal. Her skin was scoured a second time before she received a fresh pair of spray-on gloves.

  She held them out in front of her, waiting for them to harden, before turning back to the table and easing them into the patient's open abdominal cavity. It was time to tie off Bridget's stomach. The younger woman had fasted in preparation for the surgery, so the organ was empty and a little shrunken.

  There's Italian blood in me, she'd said to Bridget over Maureen's dining room table, her laugh unconvincing in her own ears. I can't give up food. Think I'm crazy?

  The tests were conclusive. Felicia wasn't crazy. Then again, at the time the results had been released, she hadn't yet been passed over.

  She hadn't yet been betrayed by a girl she'd known since birth.

  All it'll take will be one slip, one damaged nerve or tiny puncture of the diaphragm.

  Felicia eased the stomach into the surgical field. She could do it.

  She could do it now. There was the diaphragm.

  Felicia de Martino, a little voice said in her head, you have made one error. That is within the acceptable limit.

  Anything? she asked herself again. You told them you would do anything.

  She turned the stomach gently in her hands.

  Mars hung in the night sky.

  "That where you want to go?" Felicia's grandfather said, shaking his head, grinning gummily. "You going all the way there. My Lici's going so far away."

  The corn-on-a-cob cooking over his little outdoor brazier wasn't for him to eat, but for her. He held the peeled husks in one ancient, leathery hand, and turned the corn by its stalk with the other.

  "You're the one that first showed it to me," she said. "You told me Italians discovered the planets."

  "We did! Of course we did."

  The coals glowed. A cool wind kept the mosquitoes at bay. Felicia tried to fix the image of his wasted frame in her mind. This might be the last time she saw him. She was lucky to see him now. He could have died while she was with the undersea project. He could die at any time.

  "And your father showed it to you?" she prompted, wanting to hear the old story again. It never changed, a litany to a less enlightened age.

  "He took me hunting in the hills. Men only. My sisters were left behind. He showed it to me and he said God hung that red planet there like a beautiful lamp for us. The Moon, too, and the stars."

  "He was proud that Italians had discovered them, but he thought we weren't supposed to go there, right?"

  "There was only one television in our whole village. It belonged to my cousin who was an Army Chief. He let us come into his house to watch it, sometimes. When the Americans landed on the Moon, I ran to tell my father. My father couldn't read or write, but he was a pious man. He had a walking stick and he beat me with it. He said it was all lies. The Americans had not made footprints on the Moon. That was an insult to God, who created the Moon perfect as it was."

  He pulled the corn off the coals and sheathed it in the husks, handing it to her. They sat in silence while it cooled. After a few minutes Felicia scalded her mouth taking the first sweet, hot, crisp bite.

  "It's good?" her grandfather asked.

  "It's perfect."

  He was more tha
n a hundred years old and his stomach and bowels were riddled with cancer. Felicia had offered him a place in the second trial of a revolutionary new hydrogen-powered nanobot treatment, but he'd turned it down, saying he didn't want tiny metal beetles living on his insides, because it was an insult to God, who created man perfect as he was.

  Once the blood supply to the stomach was tied off, she had to work quickly to remove the entire length of Bridget's digestive tract.

  Speed was no problem for Felicia. In their second isolation, she'd broken the Agency's record for conserving the integrity of exploding cadavers in a simulation of traumatic de-pressurization and bombardment of the module.

  They'd put her in a diving suit and pushed her into the pool.

  It was dark except for the headlamp on her helmet. Shapes floated. Glinted, when the light caught them. Steel trolleys with bodies strapped to them.

  When the first one went off, Felicia gasped. The recycled air on her larynx was cold and dry. Half-swimming, half-walking along the tiled bottom of the pool, she fought her way through a cloud of blood and pushed down the floating frill of the omentum.

  It was a real dead person. Not the dead pig she'd been expecting. The saggy face with eyes like jelly in the turbulent, blood-browned water seemed to accuse her of disrespecting it. She felt fleetingly like throwing up, but those early days of responding viscerally were behind her.

  All the while, her hands pulled reams of gauze from the supply pockets of her suit, applying pressure to the chest, wrapping self-stick bandage around its many holes, setting the mask strapped to the trolley in place over the dead face, opening the tank and painting a fast-set, skin-tight space suit onto the corpse.

  Bubbles in the water showed where the oxygen was leaking from the mask. She hadn't tightened the neck seals properly. No, it wasn't that. There was a neck wound beneath the seal, and the gauze in the wound was allowing the gas to escape. Any tighter, and she'd cut off blood to the brain; she turned away from the body as two more trolleys exploded behind her.