by Mike Resnick
After the aliens left the courtyard, Perganian let the diamond drop to the ground, declaring that no Antarean could be purchased for any price.
The diamond lay where it had fallen for three generations, becoming a holy symbol of Antarean dignity and independence. It finally vanished during a dust storm and was never seen again.
INTRODUCTION TO “HOTHOUSE FLOWERS”
Kay Kenyon
When does caring become a nightmare? Nominated for a 2000 Hugo, this 1999 story from Asimov’s is a Resnick cult classic. Why? Because with honeycombed satire it soothes us, pats away our fears, and then delivers a kick like a mule.
You gotta love that.
This story showcases the things I love most about a Mike Resnick short story: economy, humor, and emotion. And that’s to say nothing of his treatment of one of the most profound questions of our time: When do you throw out the begonias?
I don’t want to give away the surprises of “Hothouse Flowers.” Suffice it to say that the story’s characters are by turns ironic, sympathetic, ornery, and unreliable. They wrestle—those that can still think—with their dilemmas. But don’t bet on the outcome. That’s where the mule kick comes in.
A short story that makes me think is a fine treat. One that also makes me feel is a feast. There is a lot to chew on in this story. It’s not only the theme of human dignity, but the wider questions raised about medicine, selflessness—and the revolution in Canada. Added to these cerebral pleasures is the wonderful Mr. Goldmeier, the guy we can’t help but root for, although the author made him as annoying as possible.
Enjoy Hothouse Flowers for the first time, or again.
And fear the Resurrection Team. Fear them very much.
My father spent the last 18 months of his life in a full-care facility. Whenever I visited him I was very impressed by how hard the staff worked to keep their patients comfortable, happy, and (yes) alive. But it also got me to thinking. Our life expectancy when Social Security was passed was 64. Today it’s in the high 70s. The rule of thumb is that if you make it to 65, you’ll make it to 85. And it keeps getting extended.
The fact that we have extended the average human’s life, probably more than doubled in maybe three centuries, is remarkable. And there’s no question that medical science will keep extending it. But that does leave a question or two about the quality of those extended lifepans. I tried to answer them in “Hothouse Flowers,” which was a 2000 Hugo nominee for Best Short Story.
HOTHOUSE FLOWERS
I TEST THE TEMPERATURE. IT is 83 degrees, warm but not hot. Just right.
I spend the next hour puttering around, checking medications, adjusting the humidity, cleaning one of the life stations. Then Superintendent Bailey stops by on his way out to dinner.
“How are your charges doing?” he asks. “Any problems today?”
“No, sir, everything’s fine,” I answer.
“Good,” he says. “We wouldn’t want any problems, especially not with the celebration coming up.”
The celebration is the turn of the century, although there is some debate about that, because we are all preparing to celebrate the instant the clock hits midnight and 2200 A.D. begins, but some spoilsport scientists (or maybe they’re mathematicians) have told the press that the new century really begins a year later, when we enter 2201.
Not that my charges know the difference, but I’m glad we’re celebrating it this year, because it means that we’ll decorate the place with bright colors—and if we like it, why, we’ll do it again in 2201.
I have been married to Felicia for 17 years, and I hardly ever regret it. She was a little bit pudgy when we met, and she has gotten pudgier over the years so that now she is honest-to-goodness fat and there is simply no other word for it. Her hair, which used to be brown, is streaked with gray now, and she’s lost whatever physical grace she once had. But she is a good life partner. Her taste in holos is similar to mine, so we almost never fight about what to watch after dinner, and of course we both love our work.
As we eat dinner, the topic turns to our gardens, as always.
“I’m worried about Rex,” she confides.
Rex is Begonia rex, her hanging basket.
“Oh?” I say. “What’s wrong with him?”
She shakes her head in puzzlement. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve been letting him get too much sun. His leaves are yellowing, and his roots could be in better shape.”
“Have you spoken to one of the botonists?”
“No. They’re totally absorbed in cloning that new species of Aglaonema crispum.”
“Still?”
She shrugs. “They say it’s important.”
“The damned plant’s been around for centuries,” I say. “I can’t see what’s so important about it.”
“I told you: they engineered an exciting mutation. It actually glows in the dark, as if it’s been dusted with phosphorescent silver paint.”
“It’s not going to put the energy company out of business.”
“I know. But it’s important to them.”
“It seems unfair,” I say for the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth, time. “They get all the fame and money for creating a new species, and you get paid the same old salary for keeping it alive.”
“I don’t mind,” she replies. “I love my work. I don’t know what I’d do without my greenhouse.”
“I know,” I say soothingly. “I feel the same way.”
“So how is your Rex today?” she asks.
It’s my turn to shrug. “About the same as usual.” Suddenly I laugh.
“What’s so funny?” asks Felicia.
“You think your Rex is getting too much sun. I decided my Rex wasn’t getting enough, so this afternoon I moved him closer to a window.”
“Will it make a difference, do you think?” she asks.
I sigh deeply. “Does it ever?”
I walk up to the Major and smile at him. “How are we today?” I ask.
The Major looks at me through unfocused eyes. There is a little drool running out the side of his mouth, and I wipe it off.
“It’s a lovely morning,” I say. “It’s a pity you can’t be outside to enjoy it.” I pause, waiting for the reaction that never comes. “Still,” I continue, “you’ve seen more than your share of them, so missing a few won’t hurt.” I check the screen at his life station, find his birthdate, and dope it out. “Well, I’ll be damned! You’ve actually seen 60,573 mornings!”
Of course, he’s been here for almost half of them: 29,882 to be exact. If he ever did count them, he stopped a long time ago.
I clean and sterilize his feeding tubes and his medication tubes and his breathing tubes, examine him for bedsores, wash him, take his temperature and blood pressure, and check to make sure his cholesterol hasn’t gone above the 350 level. (They want it lower, of course, but he can’t exercise and they’ve been feeding him intravenously for more than half a century, so they won’t do anything about changing his diet. After all, it hasn’t killed him so far, and altering it just might do so.)
I elevate his withered body just long enough to change the bedding, then gently lower him back down. (That used to take ten minutes, and at least one helper, before they developed the anti-grav beam. Now it’s just a matter of a few seconds, and I like to think it causes less discomfort, though of course the Major is in no condition to tell me.)
Then it’s on to Rex. Felicia has problems with her Rex, and I have problems with mine.
“Good morning, Rex,” I say.
He mumbles something incomprehensible at me.
I look down at him. His right eye is bloodshot and tearing heavily.
“Rex, what am I going to do with you?” I say. “You know you’re not supposed to stare at the sun.”
He doesn’t really know it. I doubt that he even knows his name is Rex. But cleansing his eye and medicating it is going to put me behind schedule, and I have to blame someone. Rex doesn’t mind being blamed. He doesn’t min
d burning out his retina. He doesn’t even mind lying motionless for decades. If there is anything he does mind, nobody’s found it yet.
I spill some medication on him while fixing his eye, so I decide that rather than just change his diaper I might as well go all the way and give him a DryChem bath. I marvel, as always, at the sheer number of surgical scars that crisscross his torso: the first new heart, the second, the new kidneys, the new spleen, the new left lung. There’s a tiny, ancient scar on his lower belly which I think was from the removal of a burst appendix, but I can’t find any record of it on the computer and he’s been past talking about it for almost a century.
Then I move on to Mr. Spinoza. He’s laying there, mouth agape, eyes open, head at an awkward angle. I can tell even before I reach him that he’s not breathing. My first inclination is to call Emergency, but I realize that his life station will have reported his condition already, and sure enough, just seconds later the Resurrection Team arrives and sets up a curtain around him (as if any of his roommates could see or care), and within ten minutes they’ve got the old gentleman going again.
This is the fifth time Mr. Spinoza has died this year. All this dying has to be hard on his system, and I worry that one of these days it’s going to be permanent.
* * *
“So how was your Major today?” asks Felicia at dinner.
“Same as usual,” I say. “How’s yours?”
Her Major is a Browallia speciosa majorus. “Ditto,” she says. “Old, but hanging on.” She frowns. “We may not get any blossoms this year, though. The roots are a little ropey.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“It happens.” She pauses. “How was the rest of your day?”
“We had some excitement,” I reply.
“Oh?”
“Mr. Spinoza died again.”
“That’s the fourth time, isn’t it?” she asks.
“The fifth,” I correct her. “The Resurrection Team revived him.”
“The Resuscitation Team,” she corrects me.
“You have your word for them, I have mine,” I say. “Mine’s better. Resurrection is what they do.”
“So you’ve only lost one this week,” says Felicia, if not changing the subject at least moving on a tangent away from it.
“Right. Mr. Lazlo. He was 193 years old.”
“193,” she muses, and then shrugs. “I guess he was entitled.”
“You mentioned that you lost one too,” I note.
“My cymbidium.”
“That’s an orchid, right?” I say. “The one they nicknamed Peter Pan?”
She nods.
“Silly name for an orchid,” I remark.
“It stayed young forever, or so it seemed,” she replies. “It had the most exquisite blooms. I’m really going to miss it. I’d had it for almost 20 years.” She smiles sadly, and a single tear begins to roll down her cheek. “I worked so hard over it, sometimes I felt like its mother.” She looks at me. “That sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?”
“Not at all,” I say, sincerely touched by her grief.
“It’s all right,” she says. Then she stares at my face. “Don’t be so concerned. It was just a flower.”
“It’s called empathy,” I answer, and she lets it drop…but I am troubled, and by the oddest thought: Shouldn’t I feel worse about losing a person than she feels about losing an orchid?
But I don’t.
I don’t know when it began. Probably with the first caveman who made a sling for a broken arm, or forced water out of a drowned companion’s lungs. But somewhere back in the dim and distant past man invented medicine. It had its good centuries and its bad centuries, but by the end of the last millennium it was curing so many diseases and extending so many lives that things got out of hand.
More than half the people who were alive in 2050 were still alive in 2150. And almost 90% of the people who were alive in 2100 will be alive in 2200. Medical science had doubled and then trebled man’s life span. Immortality was within our grasp. Life everlasting beckoned.
We were so busy increasing the length of life that no one gave much thought to the quality of those extended lives.
And then we woke up one day to find that there were a lot more of them than there were of us.
His name is Bernard Goldmeier. They carry him in on an airsled, then transfer him to Mr. Lazlo’s old life station.
After I clean the Major’s tubes and change his bedding and medicate Rex’s eye, I call up Mr. Goldmeier’s medical history on the holoscreen at his life station.
“This place stinks!” rasps a dry voice.
I jump, startled, then turn to see who spoke. There is no one in the room except me and my charges.
“Who said that?” I demand.
“I did,” replies Mr. Goldmeier.
I look closely at him. The skin hangs loose and brown-spotted on his bald head. His cheeks are covered by miscolored flesh and his nose has oxygen tubes inserted into it—but his eyes, sunken deep in his head, are clear and he is staring at me.
“You really spoke!” I exclaim.
“You never heard an inmate speak before?”
“Not that I remember.”
Which is another unhappy truth. By age 100, one out of every two people has some form of senile dementia. By 125, it’s four out of five. By 150, it’s 99 out of 100. Mr. Goldmeier is 153 years old; the odds against his retaining anything close to normal mental capacities are better than 100 to one.
“I should add,” I say, “that the proper term is ‘charge,’ not ‘patient’ and certainly not ‘inmate.’”
“A zombie by any other name…”
I decide there is no sense arguing with him. “How do you feel?” I ask.
“Look at me,” he says disgustedly. “How would you feel?”
“If you’re in any discomfort…” I begin.
“I told you: this place stinks. It reeks of shit and urine.”
“Some of our charges are incontinent,” I explain. “We have to show them understanding and compassion.”
“Why?” he rasps. “What do they show us in exchange?”
“Try to be a little more tolerant,” I say.
“You try!” he snaps. “I’m busy!”
I can’t help but ask: “Busy doing what?”
“Hanging on to reality!”
I smile. “Is that so difficult?”
“Why don’t you ask some of your other inmates?” He sniffs the air and makes a face. “Goddamnit! Another one’s crapping all over himself! What the hell am I doing here anyway? I’m not a fucking vegetable yet!”
I check all the notations on the screen.
“You’re here, Mr. Goldmeier,” I say, not without some satisfaction at what I’m about to tell him, “because no other ward will have you. You’ve offended every attendant and orderly in the entire complex.”
“Where do I go when I offend you?”
“This is your last stop. You’re here for better or worse.”
Lucky me. I turn back to the holoscreen and begin punching in the standard questions.
“What are you doing now?” he demands. He tries to boost himself up on a scrawny, miscolored elbow to watch me, but he’s too weak.
“Checking to see if I’m to medicate you for any diseases,” I reply.
“I haven’t been out of bed in 40 years,” he rasps. “If I have a disease, I got it from one of you goons.”
I ignore his answer and continue staring at the screen. “You have a history of cancer.”
“Big deal,” he says. “As quick as I get it, you bastards cure it.” He pauses. “Seventeen cancers. You cut five out, burned three out, and drowned the other nine in your chemicals.”
I keep reading the screen. “I see you still have your original heart,” I note with some surprise. Most hearts are replaced by the time the patient is 120 years old, the lungs and kidneys even sooner.
“Are you offering me yours?” he says sarcastically.
<
br /> Okay, so he’s an arrogant, hostile bastard—but he’s also my only charge who’s capable of speech, so I force a smile and try again.
“You’re a lucky man,” I begin.
He glares at me. “You want to explain that?”
“You’ve retained your mental acuity. Very few manage that at your advanced age.”
“And you think that’s lucky, do you?”
“Certainly.”
“Then you’re a fool,” said Mr. Goldmeier.
I sigh. “I’m trying very hard to be your friend. You’re not making it easy.”
His emaciated face contracts in a look of disgust. “Why in hell should you want to be my friend?”
“I want to be friends with all my charges.”
“Them?” he says contemptuously, scanning the room. “You’d probably get more action from a bunch of potted plants.” It’s not dissimilar from what Felicia says on occasion.
“Look,” I say. “You’re going to be here for a very long time. So am I. Why don’t we at least try to cultivate the illusion of civility?”
“That’s a disgusting thought.”
“Being civil?” I ask, wondering what kind of creature they have delivered to my ward.
“That too,” he says. “But I meant being here for a very long time.” He exhales deeply, and I hear a rattling in his chest and make a mental note to tell the doctors about his congestion. Then he adds: “Being anywhere for a very long time.”
“What makes you so bitter?” I ask.
“I’ve seen terrible things, things no man should ever have to see.”
“We’ve had our share,” I agree. “The war with Brazil. The meteor that hit Mozambique. The revolution in Canada.”
“Fool!” he snaps. “Those were diversions.”
“Diversions?” I repeat incredulously. “Just what hellholes have you been to?”
“The worst,” he answers. “I’ve been to places where men begged for death, and slowly went mad when it didn’t come.”
