Let them berate her for wasting oxygen. If that was a live astronaut, he probably wouldn't need the oxygen for long.
Somebody was standing between her and the closest untended casualty. Felicia brushed past the person, then snapped her head back to check that it wasn't a trick; a tethered upright corpse, or a dummy space-terrorist gunman.
It was Bridget.
Bridget with a look of absolute horror, with small flecks of vomit spattered on the inside of her helmet. In space, those flecks would float, getting in her eyes or in her lungs.
Felicia reached out and seized Bridget's limp arm. Dragged her over to the two trolleys. Pointed at one, and Bridget came to life, pulling out gauze of her own.
Felicia didn't slow again. Didn't look at Bridget again. For twenty-one hours, she sweated in her diving suit and was rewarded by a rocket back to the top of the applicant rankings.
Later, she wondered why she'd intervened.
Especially after what happened in the third isolation.
I don't owe Bridget anything.
I'm the one who should be going to Mars.
In the surgery, Felicia ligated the vessels leading to Bridget's pancreas with brisk efficiency. Then she got to work on the ovaries.
Have children on Mars? Bridget had laughed at Maureen over her last supper. That'll be for other people to do, after the settlement is properly established.
They floated in the sea.
Felicia's mother looked younger with her hair wet and salt in her lashes, energized by the waves and foam. Felicia preferred the lap pool, its constancy, the ability to measure her progress.
"So, my young doctor," her mother said girlishly as gulls swooped over their heads. "You'll be heading for the big city, then. My little Lici, top of her class, with a scholarship out of state. I'm so proud of you."
"I'm not a doctor yet," Felicia said, treading water. She could have put her feet down on the sandy bottom if she'd wanted, but this way she was getting some exercise, at least. "Call me that when I've earned it."
"I thought you might have picked the Air Force. You wanted to be a pilot, when you were little. Your brothers tried for pilots, never quite made it, but you could, if you wanted. You're so good at everything that you do."
Felicia made a face.
"Be a pilot for what, Mama? So I can drop bombs on people? I want to help them."
"You want to help me, Lici," Mama said, suddenly stern, reaching to brush Felicia's wet fringe out of her eyes. "But you can't. Nobody can. I just want to live long enough to see you having babies of your own."
"What makes you think I want babies of my own?"
But Mama had a dreamy look in her eye.
"I was so determined to have a water birth. It was calming, they said. Natural. My first pregnancy, I had the birthing suite booked, but the baby came before I'd even got in the car to go to the hospital. An impatient one, Tom was. My shortest labor. Only took two hours."
"You made it to hospital the second time, though, didn't you? I've seen the photos of you and baby Ben."
"The second time, I made it to hospital. I got in the bath and the contractions were nowhere near as bad. Then I got out, because I needed to pee. At least, I thought I needed to pee, but it was my waters breaking and I ended up having Ben on that tiled floor."
Felicia burst out laughing.
"So that explains what's wrong with him."
Her mother splashed her.
"Oh, hush."
"And me? Where did you have me?"
"Third time," Mama sighed. "Third time lucky. You were born into the water. You were my only baby born in zero gravity. The boys don't know it, but I've always had a feeling."
"What feeling?"
"A feeling that you're the one born to fly."
Practically the whole digestive system came out in one piece. Felicia stared at the almost empty body cavity in front of her.
For Bridget, there was no going back.
I would do anything, Felicia thought. I'm the one born to fly.
Before being woken from the anaesthetic, Bridget would be injected with nanobots that would penetrate every cell. They would replace mitochondria as the energy centers of the body, burning intravenously supplied hydrogen micro-beads instead of sugar, so that the body gained energy stored as ATP, with water as waste product in place of carbon dioxide.
Her exhaled air would not need to be cleaned by carbon scrubbers any more. Yet another highly desirable trait in a member of the Mars team.
I would do anything.
In the candidates' third isolation, they'd been given one another's resumes and test results, and told to work as a team to decide by consensus which one of them was most fit to be the successful candidate.
The cruelest test of all.
Felicia de Martino showed up for her first interview impeccably dressed and fifteen minutes early, Bridget read aloud from the smartpaper in front of her, despite attending her mother's funeral earlier that day.
And Bridget had laughed uproariously and wiped a tear from her eye.
If only they'd known you arranged that on purpose, Lici. You were trying to get out of the funeral, weren't you? Felicia doesn't get on with her older brothers. They're in the Air Force. What was it you said about the Air Force? Obeying like a dog was more important to them than saving money or lives? It's all about kissing the butts of inferior buffoons, isn't that what you said?
And the Team Leader of the Mars Settlement Mission had come directly from the Air Force.
Maybe Bridget hadn't known.
None of them were supposed to know who the other team members were, prior to the decision being made.
Maybe she didn't know.
Of course she knew.
There was only one kidney still to be removed. The pair of them looked lonely in there, exposed like the kidneys in a chicken carcass at Christmas after everyone had eaten the stuffing. Felicia took a deep breath and reached into Bridget's abdomen for the final time.
I would do anything.
During that disastrous third isolation, in her rage, she'd racked her brains for something scandalous in Bridget's life that she, Felicia, with her intimate knowledge of Maureen's family, could bring to light.
There was nothing. Bridget was squeaky clean.
She was helpless now, though, and there was her obdurator nerve. A chance for revenge. Felicia wouldn't be crippling her for life. The nerve would repair. Bridget would be part of the second wave. They would still want her. There was no doubt about that.
Felicia, on the other hand, could never grow younger. If she wasn't chosen now, she would never be chosen.
"But you told me my age was an advantage," Felicia told the Director.
He pursed his lips.
"Yes," he admitted. "I did say that."
"You said older candidates were preferred because we'd die naturally of old age before we could get cancer from the radiation."
"Yes, Ms. de Martino, that was the situation then. The situation now is that the nanobot procedure is far more likely to be successful in younger candidates. If it were performed on you, you might die before leaving Earth. Is that a risk you're willing to take?"
"Yes," she said without hesitation, but he was already turning away.
"Your scores are still only second-highest, Felicia—"
"Because you cancelled the rest of the tests! The parabolic flights—"
"Those aren't priorities now. You know why."
I know why, she thought, despairing. Nothing is more important than a drastically reduced mass.
"I'll undergo the procedure," she said. "I'll do it whether you choose me or not. I don't care if it kills me."
The Director pursed his lips again.
"You really would do anything for a chance to be part of the mission, wouldn't you."
"Yes. I would do anything."
He gazed at her for a long time.
"If Bridget's procedure is unsuccessful," he said, "then I'll give yo
u permission to try. Only if it is unsuccessful, Felicia. God knows we need dedicated physicians here on Earth. There's no point throwing your life away out of spite."
Distraught, she drove herself to the closest skeet-shooting range and fired over and over to calm her nerves. She missed so many of them that it made her cry, not because she cared about being good at shooting skeet, but because it brought back memories of skipping class with Maureen to shoot tin cans in the gully.
Maureen's marksmanship had always been scarily good. Felicia had been second-best, then and she was second-best, now. Why did it hurt now, but not before?
Through her tears she realized there were no clay shapes zipping through the sky and lowered her shotgun. The trap robot was flashing its Give permission for further credit? button at her, but she'd had enough.
She returned the hired shotgun and began the slow drive back to the Agency compound.
Her phone rang when she was half way. It was Bridget. Felicia pulled her car over to the side of the road, right beside a mechanic's workshop where illegal, petroleum-fuelled cars rusted on racks like neglected trophies.
"Hey Bridget," she said into the mouthpiece, too casually.
"Lici!" Bridget squeaked excitedly. "I'm in! It's me! I'm flying to Mum's place tonight to tell her the news. And to have one last meal before they—you know."
Felicia made herself laugh.
"I know."
"Can you come? I mean, you don't have to. If you're upset, you know."
She made herself laugh again, wondered why she was faking it. There were no cameras on her. Nobody to deduct points for impropriety. She could be angry, if she wanted. She could be petty.
"I'm not upset. I'll be there for sure. I might even see you at the megalo after your surgery. I've got some stuff to pick up from the office."
"Great. See you later!"
"Yeah. See you later."
After she hung up, she didn't start the car again. She sat in her seat with her belt on, thinking, If this was the crew cabin, I'd have to stay in this seat for nine months.
Nine months of weightlessness.
And then I'd be born. All over again. On a new planet.
The mechanic knocked on her window. She wound it down to speak to him. His stubbled, middle-aged face was concerned.
His eyes were blue.
"You in trouble?" he asked.
Mission control, we have a problem.
"Yes," she said. She got out of the car. Her legs were trembling.
"What's wrong?"
She told him everything.
Hours later, sitting in the long grass to one side of the workshop, she spotted Mars on the horizon and pointed it out to him.
"So close," she sighed.
"Looks far to me," the mechanic said. "Let me get this straight. People can go to Mars, but first they've got to turn into a kind of robot?"
"Not a robot." Subtleties are lost on men like this. Men like my stupid brothers, just following their instincts like cattle or horses. "Just using a different kind of fuel. So you don't need water or food. Or sex."
The mechanic gave a long, low whistle.
"No eating, no drinking, no sex? Why are you alive, then?"
Felicia blinked.
"To break boundaries," she said. "To forge a new destiny for the human race."
He laughed, a genuine laugh, not the imitation article that Felicia had given Bridget, and offered her a sip from a hip flask. It smelled like quality rum.
"It's wine, women, and song, isn't it?" he said. "Not weird women that don't eat, married to the stars."
"Actually, in Italian it's Bacco, tabacco e Venere, " Felicia said, picturing her grandfather, feeling teary. "Bacchus, tobacco, and Venus."
"So you've even got the planet wrong."
"Venus the Roman Goddess," she said, irritated. "Not the planet!"
"Hey, you're Italian?" he demanded, oblivious. "Me, too!"
They danced to old music in the dark, disturbing the crickets in the long grass, and because there were no cameras and nobody to deduct points for impropriety, they made love while Mars inched further and further from the horizon, following their instincts like cattle or horses, and when Felicia finally made it back to her car, she had to ring Maureen and tell her she was going to be very late for dinner.
Felicia walked out of the surgery with blood on her hands.
But it was only a little bit, and no accidents had occurred which might preclude Bridget from joining the Mars Settlement Mission.
I wouldn't do anything, she thought in a daze, putting her hands into the scourer. She stripped off her hat, mask, gown, and boot-covers while Bridget was wheeled away to the next stage of the procedure to have her nanobots injected.
Felicia wandered down squeaky blue corridors until she came to an automated door and emerged into the sun.
She felt more weightless than she ever had before.
I wouldn't.
Her feet were still touching the pavement. They would never be free of Earth. She would never go to Mars.
Felicia still felt she had been born again.
I am a good person. God knows we need dedicated physicians here on Earth.
She took her first steps in a new world.
* * *
This Is as I Wish to be Restored
Christie Yant | 2106 words
Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love—I think it's love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won't sleep at all. I drink until there's no life left in me, until I'm able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what's at stake. Sometimes I hope that I'll dream of her. Sometimes I'm afraid that I will.
I have two things that belonged to her. The first is a photograph, taken at a party in what looks like a hotel. Her hair is dyed red—it doesn't quite suit her, so you know it isn't hers, like an unexpected note in a melody where you thought you knew where it was going and then it went sharp. She's holding a glass of something pink and bubbly. Maybe it's her birthday. If so, it's probably her twenty-eighth. She's laughing.
She was really young to be a client. Especially back then; most of the people who thought about life extension were retirees. Mortality was very much on their minds, and they'd had a lifetime to accumulate their savings—suspension was expensive. I wonder where she got the money. Her file doesn't say.
So in this picture she's laughing. She's seated, supporting herself with one hand braced against the carpeted floor. Her head is thrown back and her back is arched, and she's just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. There are other people around her, behind her, just smiling blurs holding drinks, but you get the feeling that she's the reason they're smiling. She's the star they're all in orbit around. Like me. I fell into her orbit years ago and can't break free.
The picture moves with me through my bleak basement apartment, from room to room—sometimes it turns up on top of the half-size refrigerator, sometimes absent-mindedly left on a shelf in the medicine cabinet where I discover it again later and take it with me to the bedroom. I've found it between the sofa cushions at least half-a-dozen times. She follows me, or I follow her—it's been a lifetime since she smiled that smile, and I'm still completely, utterly taken.
The one place it never goes is on the dewar in the corner. That would just be too macabre, considering.
This is the only photograph she left. I often wonder what it was about this moment, this time in her life, that she could have looked ahead and known that this was as good as it gets. In this picture the cancer's already killing her, she just doesn't know it.
She died less than a year later. Pancreatic cancer. It's in her file.
I was given her file four years after I started with the company, in a crumbling box of data that needed to be digitized.
Those poor bastards, they had no idea what would happen to them fifty or a hundred years on. I wondered at the time whether they might ha
ve changed their minds about being cryopreserved at all. Probably not—they were in the immortality business, like we are. They would have paid any price.
"All early conversion cases," my boss said. "We don't know what's really there anymore. The risk of fracturing was high in those days."
I've seen the results of fracturing. It's not pretty. The early full-body cases were bad, which was one of the reasons they went to neuro in the first place. The splits in the elbows, the back of the knees, the buttocks, the groin—anywhere there's a fatty fold, the frozen flesh split wide open. When they realized it was happening, and that there was almost no chance of a full-body patient getting out of it without severe damage, they were all converted to neuros. The procedure is executed with a power saw.
I flipped through the files, brittle and yellowed with age. The metal prongs that held the files together had rusted, and some of them snapped off when I tried to free the pages for scanning.
Her file was near the end. I scanned it and put it back in the box with the others to be destroyed. I didn't even really think about why I went back for it. I just wanted to see her smile again.
The other thing I have of hers is a note— hand-written, on a three-by-three-inch faded yellow square. The writing runs across it at a diagonal. She wrote it with a fountain pen; I can tell by the way the width varies in the strokes. They are bold strokes, no-nonsense strokes. The ink is a whimsical green. Was that important to her? This was her last message to anyone who mattered.
There is a small stain at the bottom of the paper now, a droplet of liquid that the ink bled into and spread like lichen. Brandy, if it was from five years ago; whiskey if it was more recent. I've had this file for a long time. I can't read it now, not really, not in the state I'm in. It swims in front of me through a bourbon haze. But I know what it says.
This is as I wish to be restored.
Her wishes were clear, written there in green ink, spattered and smeared from my ministrations, and that's what keeps me up at night, keeps me drinking. What would she want me to do? The note is all I have of her, aside from the picture, and the file, and the file says nothing.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014 Page 27
