Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  You, of course, know what the Midcentury Plagues were but for the eavesdroppers I shall elucidate: there were earlier plagues. Plagues of thought. Plagues of stance. These plagues drew on similar biochemical, neurological, and pheromonal roots. Drew on and played with us helpless humans as surely as malaria causes sweats and death.

  Tad and his mother feared this and rightly so. They feared inoculation as well but really had the willies. I could center them and I did, I had the precise inforam in my lab. It took about an hour to run the tests and customize it slightly and they inhaled it--Tad had been exposed, caught in the same storm though he had no symptoms as yet--and all was well. I did not cheat; I did not change their emotions or intelligence though I could have easily done so. Hell I could have inoculated the whole damned city within twenty-four hours but I believed in legality then and freedom of choice. I still do. You are free not to come if I give you the slightest sense of misgiving. I am lonely but that does not mean that you have to come, though it might save your life. I myself would rather die here with G.E. and Mildred the Water Buffalo and Granddad and Peter Johnson rather than have you show up against your will.

  Don came to my lab that afternoon. It got dark early that day; it was December. I had been in Columbus seven months. I was making notes on my computer. It was only my third case. I was pleased. I hoped that they would soon begin to trust me. I had only contracted to stay two years, but I had no intention of leaving, ever.

  Don startled me; I turned at his footsteps. Usually he knocked.

  "Tad is certainly thankful," he said, and I couldn't read his face in the darkness, about twenty feet away from me. He stood there.

  "Come on in," I said. "Sit down."

  He didn't move. "We're just an experiment for you, aren't we? We're not real people. We're some sort of artifact that you've come to study. You can't imagine independence from your whole crazy system."

  "For one thing, I didn't invent that system. And she signed the consent form, if that's what you're talking about."

  "You don't understand," he said.

  "Look," I said, and stood. "I've done nothing to impinge on your community. Nothing at all. I haven't even started my educational programs, at your request, and it looks as if I really ought to. Luckily I'm here now, but I can train you, or better yet, Mildred, to do this. It's really a med-tech's job. I took a bit of Mrs. S.'s blood--"

  "Mrs. Schneider."

  "But you--everyone else calls her--"

  "She was my first grade teacher," he said.

  I was quiet for a moment, then said, "It's very frightening, isn't it?"

  He said nothing.

  "I'm very glad I was here, that I was able to help her out," I said. I felt afraid suddenly, just a bit. He was blocking the door. "Why are you so angry, Don?"

  His voice dropped to a whisper. I barely heard it. I think he said, "Maybe because I couldn't help her myself." I think that's what he said. Then the doorway was empty.

  I can teach you, I thought. I stood amidst my jars, winking in the light of the computer screen. "Look," I said, speaking to my non-existent student. I walked over to my shelf, squinted in the faint light, and found it. I said, "Here's the stuff, here's B-7892, which cured Mrs. Schneider, your first-grade teacher. It's already half re-replicated; the active nans are green, see, Don; the growth medium is white. I replicated a barrel of growth medium the week after I arrived; it's over there in the corner. If you didn't hate me so you would know a million times more than this most simple fact."

  I went over to my screen. I touched a few bars; I ran the progress. "See? In my best estimation, this is extrapolated from her blood sample, she would have been barking like a dog in another ten hours. It's a classic. I can trace this back to Atlanta, 2014. One of the awful joke plagues. Tad said that she'd already gnawed a chair leg when he came upon her in the dining room, the front of her dress soaked with tears, her eyes wide with terror. See, that's what I wrote in my notes, just like he told me." I touched another bar and that's what the screen said, a bit more technically. "I know you don't really think that would be a good thing to happen to Mrs. Schneider. Do you, Don?"

  The room was very dark now, and I sat there by myself for quite awhile, doing nothing.

  #

  How about Don's mother? That did cross my mind. She killed Don's brother and had the gun pointed at Don, who was only three at the time, when a neighbor knocked at the door. Don's mother apparently carefully laid the gun on the kitchen table, stepped over the body of her dead son, and answered the door. Don start ed shrieking and ran outside once the door was open. The neigh bor glanced inside, bravely grabbed Don, and ran for it. She heard the shot which killed Don's mother about a minute later, from half a block away. Don's father had died two years earlier of some nanplague.

  In the orphanage Don did himself proud; he was a smart kid and they needed docs. At that time, before the infamous Third Wave, the University was still intact and for better or for worse Don got his M.D. without ever having to leave his hometown. But, that was my story too, in a way.

  When Mildred told me about this one blindingly white morn ing when we were walking through drifts toward the hospital, I was thunderstruck.

  "What an awful story," I said.

  "Yes," she said, "it is."

  Of course, everyone in town thought he was the bee's knees (as one of Thurber's crazy great-aunts might say) medically speaking, Doctor Don, Superman. With his sidekick Med-Tech Mildred they would save the town. But their town was in an Area Of Need--not news to them, exactly, but a category which verged on the absurd as far as they were concerned. L.A. had a lot of Needs too, no? Ha ha they thought, imagine someone from those domes helping us. No no thought Don, we need no one here but Me, Superdoc! And faithful Mildred, although naturally there's very little I can't handle by myself, thought Don. I know this now, I didn't then.

  #

  All right. Concrete. I concur. I obey. Here:

  The snow was deep in Columbus, that winter, and I delighted in it. Snow was a fairy tale come true. I had never seen snow before, and it never disappeared after November.

  It was snowing as I walked down Front Street with my bundle of fresh-baked bread. Winter's end, an April storm; everyone else grumbling and depressed, but not me. Remember, You? I baked the bread myself. You laughed, did you not, asked if I did not extract nourishment solely from tubes or a food wall in Flower L.A. as if we had forsaken all that was important when we converted.

  Cold wet snow pointillated my face, the unbundled part. I still did not understand the fascination certain streets held for me. I thought the tall, leafless dark branches of the maples against the old-fashioned streetlights attracted me but really it was The Street Where He Lived--Thurber, that is. To tell the truth there was an all-night drug store on the spot but it actu ally closed whenever Jan Thatcher decided to call it a night. It only stayed open all night if she got very drunk and played loud music, and whoever came in knew to count out their own pills. Once it had been a place where writers could go for a time and work, the gone Thurber house, that is. But the mysterious attraction of Place was upon me strongly as if I were Thurber, in the throes of childhood, where all relatives are eccentric and exciting which is why, I supposed, I laughed so often. I don't imagine that Thurber did, really, laugh so much I mean, for people who can make us laugh are often dour grumblers in real life, but I don't know for sure. Perhaps he held it inside and intensified it, like the sperm which supposedly returns to the spiritual centers in tantra yoga. Maybe that's the secret of people who can make others laugh.

  I'm a font of information, no?

  My face was stinging from the raw wind when I hit the warm air inside your kitchen.

  I thought of you two as one, though even in your own minds this was not true, although I believe that you were just realiz ing it. And I was the unwitting bridge between then and this very strange now. What is now for you, I wonder? I am curious. Tell me.

  Mildred, you were unlike any
one I'd ever known in L.A. Earthy. Connected. Your eyes were blue and laughing, except when Don snapped at you. Then they darkened. Toward the end I often saw real rage, though you had no idea of how to express it.

  That evening the kitchen smelled of summer tomatoes and dill and basil released from their jars. A kettle of boiling water steamed the windows. Two bottles of homemade wine from a patient had been uncorked. "Jefferson Winery," I read; Mrs. Jefferson had decorated her label with an approximation of a grape vine, but the ink had run with condensation. Three rather large mon grel puppies draped their forelegs over the board which kept them in their corner; their mother was out for a run. Mildred had promised me one of them. I patted them all with my free hand and they wriggled and yipped with delight.

  I put down my bread, hung up my coat, and poured some of Mrs. Jefferson's finest into a coffee mug. You have no idea how happy I felt with the two of you. Maybe you were the parents I never had, who knows.

  "Tastes a bit like iron, don't you think?"

  Mildred took the cup from me, sipped.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Like water from a deep mineral well," I said, not at all displeased that wine should echo its distinctive elements, though it could have been that Mrs. Jefferson aged her wine in iron casks.

  "Always making fun of us aren't you, Little Miss City Doc?" said Don rather savagely, I thought, from the corner of the kitchen where he was chopping onions. He sniffed and blinked but doggedly continued chopping. Chop chop. Chop chop. A bottle of wine stood half-empty at his elbow.

  "I didn't mean--" I said, then let it drop. Mildred glanced at him, looking puzzled. She still didn't understand that he was often simply unkind because when he treated her that way she couldn't even tell.

  And I don't know why he chose that night to force me into the pantry, when Mildred ran onto the back porch to call her dog, five minutes later, and declare his undying passion for me and try to roughly kiss me.

  He put his arms around me and whispered in my ear "I didn't know you'd be a woman. I didn't know you'd be so beautiful." At this I laughed. He ignored me and continued. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I made the bed fall. Let me help you out. I can re verse everything. I know more than you think--about the sheets, anyway. Maybe you don't know, exactly; maybe you can't. Mildred and I--we'd been having problems and I was afraid that when the new doctor came--that's why I looked so surprised when I saw you, but it was Mildred's job to take you to the sheets and she didn't know I'd changed them to make you crazy and what could I say? I only looked later to see what it was that I gave you; I just pulled something out in a panic when we heard that your train actually survived. I hated you before you came. I thought that you'd take my place here, that they would all realize that they could do without me. I didn't know that you would be--you. Julia I'm so sorry, my love" and he squeezed me and that's when I heard your steps on the porch stairs and do you blame me, still, for being confused? Aside from the fact that I'd been intention ally, nanotechnologically, confused? Can you forgive me for saying nothing, and I mean nothing, I don't believe that I said two words during dinner did I, nor ate two bites. The sheets? The bed falling, the way I often heard it fall upstairs while my mother (Thurber's mother that is) shrieked that the bed must have fallen on Father at last? What the hell? How does he know? I remember that I stared at him as he pressed against me and speechless pushed him away and ran from the pantry as you came in with the dog, your hair brilliant with snow. Do you remember how I looked at you? Do you remember that Don said, "Well, let's eat!" and started throwing the nests of carrot pasta into the pot immediately? Do you remember that I left early? I remember how disappointed you looked and how he glared at me the whole meal, afraid of course of what I might say to you. I was angry, filled with rage, and he knew it. Surely he guessed that I could not go long without telling you. What we had, our easy camaraderie, had lasted only ten months or so. Yet it has given me a lifetime of memories, memories of what real humans are about, can be--so interesting, so amusing (I mean that in the most respectful way, I'll have you understand, for you have to really know someone, I think, to be truly amused by them. Maybe that's love, or at least a great part of it).

  Mildred, I cannot force this story into the proper channels. I thought, as I slipped along the dark snowy streets, now what would those sociologists say? Should I tell Mildred, and let them fight it out? Would she blame me, though I had done noth ing, as far as I could tell, to provoke such a confession? I realized at that moment how much I cared for you, Mildred, and how plain my life would be in Columbus without your brightness. I thought of the afternoon the previous fall when I held you as you sobbed, after an incident when Don was particularly mean and left the house, slamming the door behind him. I felt a surge of something--and was afraid and let my arms lose their tension. You drew back, looked at me so directly, and kissed me hard, then laughed, turned to the sink, and splashed water on your face. Then you poured us each glasses of wine in your grandmother's crystal and we walked out into the waning fall garden beneath glowing maples and sat in wire chairs, oddly at peace, happy, connected, complete.

  There are people whose very presence cheers. I hadn't met one before. After that afternoon every day I did not see you was not quite as bright, and though we never touched each other again it did not matter. I was not the only one who felt that way, I realized, as I watched you in your work with your beloved townsfolk, with children, with aged folk about to die. They all felt it.

  Don I suppose realized that too, in the aftermath, when he considered, that night, as he cleaned away my uneaten dish of carrot pasta and dumped out my glass of Mrs. Jefferson's wine. At least one would suppose that something along those lines ran through his mind. When I got home I was exhausted. I could not even think. I went to bed.

  The next morning I got up and still did not know what to do. I shared coffee with Keefer as he hacked away. I'm sure I seemed distracted. The snow was about six inches deep, but melting. I stared out the window, thinking. I saw Don walk past, carrying a large satchel. Nothing unusual--just on his way to the hospital.

  I wondered then, looking out through the white curtains, if he had perhaps contracted some sort of plague. That's what Mildred would say, I snorted to myself; she always had an excuse for darling Don. That's what Don would tell her too.

  "What?" said the old man.

  "Nothing," I said. "I didn't say anything." I got up to get ready to go to the hospital myself. I suddenly felt very protective about all my jars of crystals, about my computer.

  When I saw that my stores had been violated, what did I do? Nothing. Amusement held me, as if I were in one of Thurber's stories and was waiting to see what happened, so that I could retell it in a droll way and make everyone laugh. Not at all like my usual self. It was a sort of heaviness, a distance. They were good things, after all, jars and jars of good things put up against the raging winter of the plagues. In their pure form. If no one tampered with them, or mixed them.

  What luck for Don, my reaction. In the short run that is.

  I wasn't sure what to do after that, but the chill of Don's eyes that day, when we happened to meet in Mildred's office, frightened me. Truly frightened me. I thought about Thurber's demented Grandfather, who sometimes believed that he was still fighting the Civil War. Don is insane, I thought. Deluded. I think that was one very bad side effect of those Thurber sheets--it created convenient categories into which I could put people, based on minimal similarities.

  But in terms of the problem at hand I felt that we were really getting somewhere at last. More and more people were coming in to be immunized. Why, three in one week!

  What was the danger of the plagues? The danger was precise ly what I was experiencing: insanity. Mine was on a rather mild scale since I knew what was happening, really I did, I assured myself, and didn't have the time to actually search out what exactly the problem was--and I had enjoyed it, in a way, until that night. I guess you could say that it was a part of the excitement of being
undomed. Another way to say it was that I was too stupid to live. I should have confronted Don and Mildred and caught the next train home--they came by at six-month intervals, it is true, but still. One was due soon, if it hadn't been blown up. But although I understood in a way what had happened, that understanding lacked sharpness; that was part of the disease. It gave off its own chemicals which imitated the natural chemicals of happy enjoyment, endorphin or opiatelike in structure, as if I were constantly laughing deep inside.

  I think that Don, once he saw the possible efficacy of what I had brought with me, decided to study it, and when he had learned enough, to claim it for his own for his greater glory. The horrible part was that would have been just dandy with me. What did he think, that I planned to live and die in Columbus and become Mother Julia? Hell, no! I was going to put in my two years, satisfy my curiosity, maybe make a round of the other great domes--Toronto, Quebec, NY, D.C.--then head for home, unless I really took a chance and ventured bare out onto Cape Breton, which called me for some reason, the reason I know now: my home is, for reasons which I could not have predicted dome side, wilderness.

  I know, elsewhere I say I had decided never to leave. I guess I did feel like staying forever, before that unpleasant night.

  At any rate, it would certainly spoil Perfectpicture if I said anything to anyone. Don was too proud to ask me not to say anything, I'll give him that, but it seemed to me that Mildred ought to know--I certainly didn't think that it was anyone else's business. But he maneuvered to keep us apart for three days. While he set his plan in place, I see now. As for me, I was just mulling things over, trying to decide what to say and do. The only thing I was absolutely sure of was that he held not the least interest for me.

  I knew how much You loved Don. I knew how little he de served it. I knew how it might devastate you to hear about what had happened. And although there was no reason for it, I thought that it would be easier to blame me than him for it, and I did not want to be banished from your heart. I thought that perhaps I should plan to leave. But that annoyed me tremendously--I would leave my work unfinished! And I knew that you would miss me and be very puzzled, and wondered if I should ask you to come with me. I wondered all sorts of things as I went to work and said nothing.