Book Read Free

Walking on the Sea of Clouds

Page 7

by Gray Rinehart


  Dr. Nguyen pulled back on the plunger and a bit of Stormie’s blood colored the syringe. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Are you ever ready for something you know is going to hurt?

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Once more, for the record, while you are lucid. Are you absolutely sure you want to proceed?” He emphasized each syllable of “absolutely sure.”

  Stormie was as far from absolutely sure as she was from Mercator Crater, but she understood why Dr. Nguyen asked the question now. Once they began, the nurses would administer ketamine in her IV to help manage the pain; it was the only anesthetic that had proven effective with this treatment, but they couldn’t do a final, verbal verification with her under its influence. In a way she was more afraid of the ketamine than the picophages, because it was known to produce hallucinations. She feared that loss of control more than she feared the pain. Despite the doubt plaguing her, she said, “Yes.”

  Dr. Nguyen repeated his earlier descriptions as if he was trying to postpone the procedure. “As the fluid medium comes into your arm, you can expect it to sting a little. As it spreads out, you’ll feel a little flushed. You’ve never had a CT scan or an IVP with a dye contrast, correct?”

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “This would be similar, although reportedly it’s a bit more intense.”

  He pushed the plunger down, slowly.

  A knife stabbed into Stormie’s arm where the needle met her vein. Then it was a machete. Then a chain saw.

  Stormie grunted. A bit more intense?

  Warmth spread to her fingertips, up to her shoulder, and through her body, riding just ahead of a wave of pain. When the warmth and pain hit her chest, she believed her lungs would explode and her heart collapse. She struggled to breathe.

  The sensation intensified until her body was being blasted by a heat gun. Then the heat gun became a blowtorch. The blowtorch became a blast furnace.

  Oh, God, let them start those drugs already.

  She descended into Hell.

  She choked on a laugh at the irony, remembering her grandmother’s warnings of fiery doom if Stormie didn’t give up her pride and cast her cares on the Lord. “Who you gonna throw in the lake of fire?” Mother MacGinnis would sing. She would say this torment, this blazing pseudo-immolation, was the price of Stormie’s sin, her prideful arrogance—

  Stormie gasped. She tried to scream but her breath was gone.

  Nurse Myracek reached up to the IV bag as Stormie passed out.

  * * *

  She drifted in and out of consciousness. Thoughts struggled to break through barriers of agony, and when they finally emerged they seemed as broken and nebulous as dreams. She dreamed of pain, of a million needles piercing her body from the inside out, of acid-venomed wasps laying eggs beneath her skin, and occasionally Stormie reminded herself that the pain was only in her head: it couldn’t be real, with the ketamine. Still she dreamed, of humid Carolina summers, the dry Mojave Desert, the stifling wet sulfurous surface of Venus.

  She vaguely registered when they moved her from the examination room to a bed in the clinic. It seemed as if her skin sloughed off to the touch.

  Gradually she was awake more often. The heat and the hurt fell on her like repeated avalanches of coals, but either the ketamine began working or her tolerance and endurance grew. She wondered how much time had passed, but that wasn’t foremost in her mind.

  “How’s Frank doing?” she asked. She barely registered her own voice. “Is he okay?”

  “I’ll check on him,” Nurse Myracek said. Through barely slitted eyes Stormie tried to follow the nurse’s voice in the darkened room.

  They’d insisted on treating them in separate rooms. They told them the procedure was uncomfortable—and the ocean was just a little wet, as far as Stormie was concerned. The first patients’ experiences had ranged from embarrassing bodily releases to multi-sensory hallucinations to ravings that rivaled the worst Tourette’s outbursts. Now, in the midst of the treatment, Stormie wasn’t sure if shared suffering would’ve been better or worse.

  * * *

  Nurse Myracek returned after an indeterminate time. “Your husband is a character,” she said. Stormie was surprised the words didn’t hurt her ears, except that she barely registered them over the sound of her own rushing blood. “I love to hear him talk.”

  The nurse tried copying Frank’s accent. “‘Now I know how the English missionary felt when my ancestors cooked him,’ he says. Oh, he is a gem.” She laughed at her failure even to approximate the accent.

  Stormie wanted to laugh. She tried, but managed only a weak croak.

  “What is it, honey?”

  After a moment she managed to say, “His father was a missionary in Kenya.”

  Nurse Myracek chuckled as she wiped sweat from Stormie’s forehead. The cloth cut like coarse grit sandpaper. With a start Stormie realized that Frank shouldn’t be joking about pain. Was he dreaming the pain, the way she was, or had he refused the ketamine? Stormie closed her eyes; a single tear escaped and dribbled back toward her ear. It burned.

  “Why does it still hurt?” she whispered.

  “Oh, dear, I don’t think you’re feeling anything. I think we could tie your toes in knots and you’d try to dance pirouettes,” Nurse Myracek said.

  “Why does it hurt at all?”

  “Oh. You know about the tunneling nanotubes that your cells are always building: they pass genetic data around between cells, and viruses use them, too. The fluid suspension, from what I understand, stops your cells from making them. Or I may have it backward—maybe it forces them to make more. Apparently your nerve cells react by going into overdrive, but you should’ve only felt that for a short while.

  “I’ve heard some of the doctors say it’s really some electromagnetic flux stimulating nerve cells that don’t normally register pain. I don’t think they actually know. You’re only the fifth person I’ve seen treated, and everybody seems to react differently. Most of them stay passed out, but you’ve been awake a good bit.

  “If it’s any consolation, your husband doesn’t seem to be affected as strongly as you.”

  “Thank you,” Stormie said.

  Stormie shifted position a little, and the bedclothes tore at her skin. The hospital gown felt like a hair shirt, which she supposed would be appropriate from Mother MacGinnis’s point of view.

  Stormie’s grandmother had been alternately kind and stern, a loving old woman whose hugs were solid as oak and soft as cotton but who was never shy about warning Stormie away from certain friends or pointing her toward her blessed Jesus. As each wave of … phantom? imagined? hallucinated? … pain and flame passed over and through her, Stormie struggled against the ghost of her grandmother who, no matter what Stormie did or said, no matter the admonishments she herself laid on Stormie, always—always—loved her.

  Mother Mac, you may be right but I don’t think so. This isn’t the price of my pride. It’s the cost of my dreams.

  * * *

  The next time Stormie was lucid, the room was brighter. It held the common accoutrements: oxygen port, vacuum port, blank television bolted to the wall. The track from an old bed-curtain was attached to the dropped ceiling, but no curtain hung from it. Several ceiling tiles were stained where a water pipe or the roof must’ve leaked. The only unusual item was the scanner unit, still tethered to her arm by the winding plastic tube of blood.

  A new nurse, one she hadn’t met, was checking the scanner unit.

  “Blue,” Stormie said.

  “Pardon me?” the nurse asked.

  “Blue. Sky blue, electric blue.”

  “I don’t understand,” the woman said.

  “Electric lemonade,” Stormie said, “is sort of a neon blue color. Dr. Nguyen didn’t know that. You should tell him.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that.” Her tone was dismissive, maybe a little annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of whatever it was she was adjusting on the scan
ner.

  Stormie lay very still. She concentrated on breathing: slow breaths, not too shallow but not deep enough to expand her chest too much. To pass the time and keep her mind active, she tried doing calculations in her head.

  Her brain seemed sluggish. It took a long time to recall some factoids from a trivia game: about five liters of blood in her body, heart pumps about seventy milliliters or so with every beat. She tried to count her heartbeats, but the numbers jumbled together; she gave up and used seventy beats per minute for convenience. So if I’ve done it right, all the blood in my body goes through my heart in about a minute. Maybe less, with how fast my heart’s beating. So each blood cell goes through my body … some 1440 times a day.

  And now her blood was carrying tailored, machined picophages that were coursing through her body just as often, and presumably burrowing their way throughout her tissues to latch onto disease organisms. She wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been, but that wasn’t as important as how much more time it would take.

  The nurse was headed toward the door. Stormie asked, “How much longer?”

  “We’ll probably start the filtration sequence in a few hours,” the nurse said. The door closed automatically behind her.

  * * *

  Stormie’s consciousness peaked and ebbed. She dreamed of walking on hot coals, skiing down lava slopes into the caldera of a volcano, sunbathing on Mercury, but gradually her dreams ransacked her mind less and less. Her head, a supernova, calmed into a hot white star, dimmed further to a red dwarf.

  Nurse Myracek was back.

  “How are you, hon?” she asked. Stormie tried to smile, but her face hurt.

  “My mouth is so dry,” she said, forming the words with a tongue like a cooling ingot of lead.

  “I’ll get you something,” Nurse Myracek said. She was gone only a few minutes, and when she came back she spooned burning cold crystals into Stormie’s mouth. Stormie held the nuggets on her tongue and let the liquid, slowly cooling—warming?—to a tolerable level, soothe her throat. “There you go, hon,” the nurse said. “Ice chips worked wonders for me when I was going into labor. They wouldn’t let me have anything else, not until after the baby was out.”

  Stormie changed the subject. She had wanted children—still wanted children—but she and Frank had decided they would not be the test case for extraterrestrial pregnancy.

  “Is Frank still doing okay?”

  Nurse Myracek spooned some more ice into Stormie’s mouth. “He’s doing fine. He’s not quite as far along as you are, since he’s bigger. We started filtering everything about twelve hours ago for you, and Dr. Nguyen just started filtering Mr. Pastorelli a little while ago.”

  “How long has it been?”

  The nurse appeared to study the cup of ice, as if it held the answer. She scooped out another spoonful and wiped the bowl of the white plastic spoon against the rim of the little white cup. She brought the spoon to Stormie’s lips.

  “Four days,” she said. “We cut off the ketamine drip a few hours ago, and we’ll let you go see your husband after we take out your catheter.”

  Stormie slept again, but only for a few hours. Her dreams calmed as the fires in her mind abated. The picophages were almost gone from her blood, though it would be another day before the treatment was complete—and another week to verify its success.

  She reckoned herself a lava rock in the bottom of a gas grill, but she sat up and turned on CNN to see what she had missed. Not much; the world’s troubles were the same as they ever were, only made to sound much worse—or at least more dramatic. She called Jim to tell him that if this didn’t work she was going to host an old-style pig roast out at Gaviota State Park and he would be the main course.

  Shortly after she put down the phone, Nurse Myracek brought her a thin sheaf of papers.

  “What’s this?”

  “You were mumbling something the first night you were in here, and I knew I recognized it but couldn’t remember from where. So I did a search and printed it out for you.”

  Stormie read the first lines:

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table;

  “Evening, not night,” Stormie said. “I recited this? I’d been trying to remember it.”

  “You said part of it. Once I found it on the Net, I remembered seeing it in school. I read the whole thing again, but I don’t understand it.”

  “I’m not saying I do,” Stormie said. “I just thought the opening lines were appropriate to me lying on the table.”

  Nurse Myracek chuckled. “If you say so, hon. I did like this part later on, though. I marked it.”

  Stormie read,

  Time for you and time for me,

  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

  And for a hundred visions and revisions,

  The nurse said, “I think that means that no matter how much time we have, there’s always time to do more than we think.”

  “I like that idea,” Stormie said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Now, what say we take you in to see your husband?”

  Chapter Eight

  Things Are Already Starting to Break

  Friday, 24 November 2034

  Lunar Setup Mission II, Day 24

  Van whistled a little of “The Minstrel Boy” as he pulled into his pressure suit. And he scratched.

  The worst thing about being in the suit for the next six hours was not being able to scratch very well. The few times he had worn hazardous chemical gear he had been dexterous enough to pull one arm at a time into the body of the suit if he really needed to dig, even though it left him cramped and was even harder to get unkinked and back into position. But the stiffeners, cross-weaved fabrics, and expandable safety baffles in a pressure suit made that kind of interior mobility impossible. So, he scratched everywhere he could reach as he got ready.

  In the two and a half weeks since the laydown of what Grace called the “ice farm,” the schedule had been redrawn at least two dozen times. The Consortium work schedule they’d started with was still theoretically intact, but it had devolved into a never-ending, ever-changing task list. Thank you, Mr. Murphy.

  None of the other shelters they’d set up had been iced-in, so far, but problems seemed to multiply and mutate with every step in the setup plan. In one shelter, the straps came loose from an equipment stack and in the ensuing tumbles the crates broke lights, interior partitions, and even some of the ductwork; in another, a number ten can of tomatoes froze, split, and deposited a film of icy tomato juice that, thankfully, covered only a small volume.

  The real problem was the lunar terrain itself: as the laydown grid got closer to the wall of Mercator Crater, it took much more time to dig trenches for the prefabs even when blasting wasn’t needed. The next step, after all the prefabs were in place, would be to expand the colony infrastructure by tunneling into the crater wall—until they figured out the ins and outs of building domes.

  But that would be a job for another day. For now Van whistled, and scratched. Some places he scratched more than once.

  “Keep it in your cabin, will you, Van?” Jovelyn Nguyen said from across the corridor.

  “Corridor” was a generous term. At the moment it was still stacked with consumables and small equipment containers, mostly left strapped and netted so they wouldn’t fall if someone bumped against them. The stacks ballooned out of the compartments and left the passage not even a meter across—not that it would be much wider when it was eventually cleared. This prefab ran north from Grand Central, away from Mercator Crater, to the junction containing the main exit locks and the lock that connected to the garage.

  Jovelyn was already suited, holding her helmet in one hand and trying to look stern. It wasn’t in her nature, though, and after a second her smile lit up her brown face.

  “Sorry, Jovie, but I’ve got to scratch now or I won’t get the chance.” Even with the
scratching, which he did curtail a little, it took only a few more minutes for him to seal his suit. They started checking each other over.

  The hatch at the far end of the habitat opened and Henry Crafts stepped through from Grand Central. “Good, you two are still here,” he said. His voice echoed a little off the crates and cases that crammed the tunnel. He glided down the thin passageway, his slippers making gentle swishes across the floor.

  “What’s up?” Van asked. “You taking this shift?”

  “You wish. Change in your task list. Once you’re outside you’ll need to download the latest when you do your radio check.”

  “Why not just call us over the intercom?” Jovelyn asked. “We can jack in from here.”

  Henry waved off the question. “Telly’s got one of the comm panels open, jiggering with something. Meanwhile, no voice or data north of the Pimple. She should have it back up by the time you get done.”

  Van chuckled. “Just because you call the dome ‘the Pimple’ doesn’t mean Grace will let you get away with calling her ‘Telly.’”

  “Why not? She loves me.”

  “Yeah, you say that when the intercom’s down. Maybe I should ask her when we do our radio check.”

  Henry backed up a step and raised his hands in surrender. “That’s okay, no need to put her on the spot.”

  “Cut it out, you two,” Jovelyn said. “What’s the new gig?”

  Henry grinned. “Should be an easy enough survey. Our new celebrity here has to be fresh for his debut.”

  Damn bad luck of the draw. Van made a grab for him but Henry slid another step backward out of his reach.

  “Alright,” Van said, “let’s get it over with.”

  Van took a few deep, deep breaths as the airlock cycled; no sense in being all uptight and jittery as soon as he stepped outside. Somebody had to brief the new colony candidates on how the setup was going. The obvious choice would’ve been Shay, but Shay had decreed that everyone should have a chance and insisted they all draw straws. Of course, Oskar and Scooter were on another foray down south so they weren’t eligible. The rest drew straws—actually, cable ties—and Van drew short. He would give the would-be colonists the word from on high, as it were. Maybe, though, he could bribe one of the others to do it for him.

 

‹ Prev