by Eric Brown
His hands were shaking. “Ella. Oh, Ella...”
There was a knock at the door. He ignored it, to absorbed in his private grief. The knocking became louder. Then the door opened and Sassoon burst in. “Sir?”
Hunter remained sitting in the darkness. “What is it, Mr Sassoon?”
“It’s Fekete and Elliott, sir.”
Fekete and Elliott? He picked up the remote control and turned on the lights. “What are they doing here, Mr-”
He was silenced by the look on Sassoon’s face. “They’re not here, sir. Fekete died in a flier accident this afternoon. Elliott was shot dead an hour ago.”
Hunter just stared at him. “That’s impossible! No-one could possibly know that we planned to use them...”
“But that’s three, sir—three out of six, dead.”
Hunter shook his head. “I don’t understand it, Sassoon. If the Organisation knew of our plans, then surely they’d hit us?”
“I don’t understand it either, sir. But the fact remains...”
Hunter looked up. “The others! Round up the others and get them to safety this minute!”
“Yes, sir.” Sassoon ran from the room and across to the lift, followed by Rossilini.
Hunter calmly climbed to his feet and closed the door. He crossed to the window and stared out, tears blurring his vision.
The day had started so well. How could it end so tragically?
From his pocket he pulled out the photographs of his daughter and sorted through them, lovingly.
* * * *
Chapter Fourteen
They hurried to the end of the avenue and Dan hailed an air-taxi. He bundled Mirren into the back and climbed in beside him. Mirren felt numb. He heard Dan give their destination as St Genevieve’s, then suffered a wave of nausea as the air-taxi lifted and accelerated. He seemed to have weakened appreciably in the last five minutes, since learning about Macready. He wondered how much of it was auto-suggestion; for most of the night he’d felt fine.
Dawn lacerated the horizon. They flew south over familiar suburbs. Dan said nothing. Mirren considered the incredible misfortune of mistaking the drunken Engineman for a KVI ghost. He should have let the bastard fry.
The air-taxi banked over the morning-silvered Seine and approached the ancient, mausoleum-like slab of the hospital caught in a loop of the river. They came down on the rooftop and, when the turbos cut out, the air rang with an explosion-of silence as absolute as death itself.
Dan paid the driver, took Mirren by the arm and hurried him to a downchute. They dropped three floors and stepped out into a crowded corridor. The sick and injured sat on benches on either side of the passage; others, too ill to sit, lay on blankets. They had a collective air about them of patient resignation, as if they had been waiting here for years. Mirren heard the occasional whimper and cry. A hundred pairs of eyes watched them as they made their way carefully along the corridor, stepping over the tightly-packed bodies. They arrived at a reception kiosk. Dan said, “I need to see Dr Sita Nahendra.”
The receptionist checked a register. “Do you have an appointment?”
“This is an emergency. I really need to see Dr Nahendra.”
“If you don’t have an appointment...”
Dan leaned over the counter and whispered something to the woman.
The receptionist looked up, saw his desperation and his infinity symbol, then glanced at Mirren.
“If you’d care to wait in that room...” She indicated a peeling door across the corridor, and then bent to a microphone.
They pushed their way through a crowd of patients standing by the kiosk, crossed the corridor and entered a white-walled room: one desk, two chairs, an old diagnostic device hanging from a loose boom on the ceiling. Mirren stood by the door like a spare player awaiting his lines.
Dan said, “Hell, Ralph. Things were going so well. I should have known...”
“What about the others?” Mirren said. “Hunter, Fekete, the Enginemen at the Church? If Heine’s is as contagious as they say...” He found a chair and collapsed into it, the sudden enormity of the situation burdening him like a physical weight. He stared at Dan. “You...”
Dan said, “We’ll see what the tests say, then I’ll contact the others.” He looked up at Mirren as if in sudden inspiration. “But there’s no reason why we can’t push the boat, Ralph! Go out in style!” He looked at his watch. “Where the hell is she?”
Mirren shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dan.”
The door opened and an Asian women in her thirties breezed in. She was jasmine scented and her white coat contrasted with her mocha complexion. “Dan! This is a surprise.” Then her expression changed. “What is it?”
“Sita—Ralph Mirren, a good friend of mine. You’ve heard me talk about him. Ralph, Sita...” He took a breath. “Ralph had contact with a Heine’s victim... what? Two nights ago? The guy’d slipped quarantine and died with Ralph. We didn’t find out until this morning.”
Dr Nahendra’s calm, oval face turned to Mirren. “I’ll have to take a blood and tissue sample from you and I’ll be back in... oh, about fifteen, twenty minutes. And cheer up, both of you. The virus is weakened in a carrier close to death.” She gave Mirren a smile so bright he didn’t want to disappoint her.
“I feel terrible, feverish...”
“Ever heard of psychosomatic symptoms? If you had only superficial contact with the carrier, then you’ve probably escaped infection-”
“I drank from the same bottle,” Mirren said.
She pointedly ignored the admission, her expression set. “Roll up your sleeve, Ralph.”
For the next ten minutes she took blood and skin samples from the two men, working quickly and efficiently and without a word. She smiled and hurried from the room with the same breezy confidence as when she had entered.
“Need she be so damned cheerful?” Mirren asked.
Dan forced a smile. “Maybe it’s how she keeps her sanity, Ralph. Who’d be a doctor in a place like this?”
Mirren stood and crossed the room to the window. A grey dawn was seeping steadily out of the east, chasing away the patches of darkness in the streets around the hospital and revealing detail: workers leaving their homes, birds both Terran and alien, wind-borne rubbish. Mirren opened the window and felt the breeze in his face, hot and laden with the stench of exhaust emissions and rotting vegetation.
He recalled what Dan had said earlier about still being able to push the ‘ship, but the threat of oblivion overwhelmed even the desire to flux again. Why crave ecstasy, when after it there would be no continuation of life against which to measure the experience?
A flier banked over the Seine and settled in front of the hospital, and only then did Mirren notice the ten storey drop to the parking lot below. He looked over his shoulder. Dan was slumped in the chair at the far end of the room, staring at the floor. So why not? He had nothing to lose. Rather instant death than weeks of agony and mental debilitation. He had considered taking his life before, in the years following the closure of the Lines, but always the thought of an eternity of oblivion, and the hope that things might get better—that by some miracle the Lines might be reinstated—had stopped him from going through with the act.
What he faced now was imminent oblivion, or painful weeks or months with the knowledge of his inevitable end...
Then, before he had time to steel himself, the door opened at the far end of the room. Dr Nahendra strode in. Dan was on his feet. Mirren started, and despite himself felt a surge of guilt.
Dan and the doctor seemed not to have noticed his discomfort. They spoke in lowered tones. Dan was nodding. Nahendra looked stern-faced. Mirren felt his stomach tighten.
Dr Nahendra smiled. “Ralph, please—take a seat.”
He fumblingly pulled a chair from beneath the table. The doctor sat across from him, consulting a small screen in her hand. Dan remained standing.
Nahendra looked up. “The news is both good and bad, Ralph. The bad first�
�I’m afraid it is Heine’s. The good news is that it’s Heine’s III, a mutated form of the disease, which means it can be treated.”
Mirren experienced a sudden sense of stomach-churning weightlessness, like the sensation of hitting an air-pocket in flight.
“Like they treated Macready?” he wanted to say.
He thought of the oldster he had watched dying.
Nahendra went on, “Heine’s is a strange virus, Ralph. In many cases it mutates in the carrier. You contracted Heine’s from Macready, but the Heine’s you have is not the same as the one which killed him. For one thing, it’s not contagious-”
“So Dan and the others-?” Mirren began.
“Dan’s fine, Ralph—as is everyone else you’ve had contact with over the past couple of days. Another ‘benefit’, if you like, of Heine’s III is that it responds to treatment, as I’ve said.” She paused, then continued, “It’s still a fatal disease, but with the drugs we have available nowadays it can be controlled.”
He felt sick. “How long have I got?”
Nahendra nodded, as if acknowledging his need to be told the truth. “In similar cases of Heine’s III, life expectancy is calculated at between four and five years.”
Mirren felt their eyes on him. He experienced an ambiguous reaction to the news. He had fully expected Nahendra to tell him that he would be dead in a month, and now he felt as though he had been granted a reprieve, a stay of execution.
Then, as her words sank in, that part of Mirren which considered himself immortal was rocked by the fact that in four years, certainly five, he would be dead. The enormity of the concept was too much to comprehend. Death was what happened to other people, never oneself, however inevitable he knew the fact to be. Intellectually he could grasp the abstract concept that one day he would die—one day in the not too distant future—but on a visceral level it was impossible for him to understand that within five years his viewpoint on existence would be shut down.
He reflected with sudden bitterness that he did not even have the benefit of belief to fall back on.
He felt dazed. He could think only of the obvious questions. “What about pain?” he asked. “How disabled will I be?”
“I can put you on a course of tablets immediately which will control the symptoms and ease the pain. There might be side-effects, but these will be negligible. You’ll be active right up to the last couple of weeks. But you never know, by that time, in a few years from now, there might be a comprehensive cure for all forms of Heine’s.”
Easy words. “There might be...” He could only stare blindly at the far wall, too numbed to respond.
“I’ll give you these for the time being,” Nahendra said. She passed him a bulb of tiny white capsules and a print-out of instructions. “They’re analgesics, temperature suppressants. If you can come back say... this time next week, then we can begin the real treatment.”
He wanted to ask what the ‘real’ treatment consisted of, how painful or prolonged it might be, but the coward in him shied from such questions.
Nahendra reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “People with Heine’s III are leading full and active lives, Ralph. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do the same.”
Dan walked Mirren from the surgery and into the upchute. As he left the building in a daze, and crossed the roof to the air-taxi rank, he felt Dan’s hand on his shoulder. “Ralph, I can stay with you for a while if you like. If you want to talk...”
Mirren tried to smile. “I’ll be fine... I’ll call if I need anything.”
They boarded the air-taxi. Mirren sat in the back seat and stared through the window as the flier rose and banked away from the hospital. Five minutes later, before Mirren realised where they were, the taxi landed on the rooftop of his apartment. He climbed out, waved abstractedly at Dan and took the downchute to his rooms. He unlocked the front door and switched on the hall light, and then stopped.
Bobby was in the hall, leaving his room. Within two seconds of the light going on, he halted and turned to the door. He cocked his head to one side, his face expressionless. His ultra-sensitive skin had detected the heat of the light.
“Ralph?” he said, slurring the word like a recording played at too slow a speed.
The sight of his brother, his slight body made childlike by the dimensions of the hall, filled him with the urge to reach out and hold Bobby to him, to confess, tell him everything.
Bobby wore his old radiation silvers—not those of the Javelin Line with whom he’d last worked, but of the Satori Line, with its distinctive Bo tree emblem embroidered on the chest. The torso of the suit was regulation silver, the arms and leggings saffron orange.
“Ralph?” he asked again, his face twitching with concern.
His oversized eyes looked straight at Mirren, then moved on around the hallway. The size of his eyes gave his thin, hollowed face a starved, emaciated look, and his unkempt shock of black hair emphasised the pallor of his cheeks.
Bobby turned and moved to the kitchen, walking with the air of calm circumspection characteristic of the blind. Mirren remained by the door, watching his brother.
In the kitchen, Bobby opened the door of the cooler and took out a plastic container of mineral water. Mirren watched as Bobby seated himself carefully and drank, then moved to place the container on the table beside him.
His hand struck the beer bottle that Mirren had left there by mistake yesterday. “Damn!” his brother said. He patted the table-top until he located the upturned bottle, then picked it up and placed it in the wastechute.
Bobby sat very still, taking the occasional mouthful of water. His features remained inert, relatively composed, though etched with basic lines of angst which made his expression, even in repose, seem tortured. Over the years Mirren had come to realise that his brother’s physical appearance was no indication of his psychological state. Inwardly, Bobby had come to accept his situation—more, to feel contentment -which one came to understand only in conversation. Outwardly, he forever gave the impression, to strangers and sometimes to Mirren himself, that he was a soul in despair: both the strange nature of his affliction, and his belief, made him dismissive of his appearance and its effect on others.
Bobby replaced the water in the cooler and left the kitchen, his head held upright, staring forward. As he passed beneath the light he stopped, held up his hand to the source of the radiation, and frowned. He reached for the switch and turned it off, clearly troubled by the suspicion that the light had been turned on in his presence. He entered his room and closed the door.
Mirren released a breath and moved to the kitchen. He sat at the seat his brother had vacated and pulled a carton of fruit juice from the cooler. He washed down a couple of the pills Dr Nahendra had given him and considered the events of the night, and then Bobby.
He recalled the day sixteen years ago when he’d learned that his younger brother had graduated from the training college on Mars. He’d felt pride that Bobby would be following in his footsteps, and over the years watched him gain promotion from Gamma to Alpha. There had always been a certain friendly rivalry between them. At home in Australia they had competed evenly at swimming and surfing, skyball and para-gliding: their careers as Enginemen followed a similar course. They had seen each other rarely while Bobby pushed for the Satori Line, then fifteen years ago Bobby transferred to the Paris-based Javelin Line, and when their leaves had coincided they spent a lot of time together—Ralph finding in the company of his Engineman brother a degree of understanding that was lacking in his civilian acquaintances.
Mirren had been working at Orly spaceport nearly ten years ago when he received a call from the Javelin Line. Bobby, on the very last push before the Line closed down, had contracted Black’s Syndrome. He was the sixth Engineman to go down with the neurological disorder, and not one of the others had survived. Bobby pulled through, but at the end of the process Mirren wondered if for Bobby’s sake he should have died. Later, when Bobby moved in with him, and
when Mirren came to some acceptance of his brother’s situation, he realised that even the circumscribed life Bobby now led was preferable to no life at all.
Mirren finished the juice, tossed the carton down the chute and sat absorbed in thought. At last he stood and crossed the hall to Bobby’s room. He raised his hand to knock—after all these years he still made the same mistake—realised the stupidity of the gesture and opened the door. Bobby was sitting in his large armchair, his eyes closed. Music played, a classical piece Mirren could not place. It was almost nine o’clock. He thought back a day and recalled hearing the Tibetan mantra,
Bobby laid his head against the rest, his expression as contented as Mirren had ever seen it. His right hand tapped a beat—not in time to the concerto that filled the room now, but to the mantra of yesterday.
