by M M Buckner
“They issued a euthanasia order,” she whispered. “They plan to euth” everyone here.”
“Ah.” I pursed my lips.
“Yeah, one of the kids found their vicious memo in the trash. They’re beasts. I hate them.”
“I thought these protes couldn’t read,” I said, stalling.
“Euthanasia, Nass.” Her eyes glittered darkly.
In the boardroom, drinking brandy with my colleagues, the decision had seemed easy to justify. But now and here? Too much Reel was clouding my judgment. Nothing seemed easy anymore. “Maybe they wanted to prevent an epidemic.”
“It’s grievous. I can’t believe it’s legal.”
“Well, it’s one more reason why we need to get away.” I took her hands. “The Agonists are waiting outside. I saw them.”
“Nass, you’re dreaming. C’mon, lift beau’s feet and help me.”
“His freaking name is not freaking beau!”
Blood rushed to my head, and I stomped away. Chit of sight around the curving corridor, I leaned against the wall to calm down. Sometimes, talking to Shee was like trying to breathe vacuum.
I rubbed my jaw, felt the loose, sagging skin and stretched my neck to take up the slack. And I pondered. My space suit and thruster lay right there within reach. The cylinders were low on air. Probably the batteries could stand a recharge. Those were mere details. The phone in my helmet was still roaming, searching for the Net. All I had to do was dive outside the communications blockade and place a call.
Sheeba’s arms circled my waist from behind, and she pressed her body against my back. I could feel the swell of her hard little belly. “Please, Nass. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. You know I love you.”
“You do?” Anger instantly drained from my limbs, leaving me slack and unsteady. When I turned to face her, my nose came level with her soft curving throat. She smelled of rich sweat.
“Of course, Nass. You’ve been like a father to me. I wouldn’t even be here if not for you.”
“Shee.” I drew her close and buried my face against her collarbone so she couldn’t see the puckers around my eyes. Like a father, she said. My lips crushed against her throat.
Gently, she loosened my grip. “Help me, okay? I can’t lift him by myself. I need you.”
“Okay,” I said, turning my ravaged face from the light. But my brain was not engaged. Like a father. I wrapped the words in cottony silence.
Vacantly, I helped her lift the juve off the floor. Like a father. Sheeba spoke in little gasps as we hauled her thug up the ladder well. She told me how they had disguised their voices on the gunship to impersonate Provendia guards and how they nearly got caught when they lingered too long in someone’s office browsing the Net. Beau had never seen the Net. She said Beau really liked it.
Like a father. I listened and moved and smiled at the right places. My brain drifted off to some distant exile where it couldn’t bother me. Father, a pair of syllables. In Three’s light gravity, we made fast progress, and by the time we got to Four, the chief of thugs weighed considerably less. We guided him into sick-ward and stretched him out on the mattress next to Kai-Kai. But I was nobody’s father.
Geraldine still sat in her lotus position, lightly snoring, but she snorted awake when Sheeba ripped a sheet to bind Liam’s ribs. The wench looked at her unconscious chief, then at Sheeba. Her eyes drooped with sleep. “Vlad?”
Sheeba shook her head. “We didn’t find him.”
Geraldine’s chocolate cheeks bunched in furious knots. Then just as quickly, her muscles relaxed, and all energy seemed to ebb out of her face. She rocked on her haunches. Back and forth, back and forth, like clockwork. Her wife Kai-Kai remained deeply quiet, though a slight movement of her upper lip showed she was still breathing. Sheeba felt for her pulse.
Then Geraldine rested a hand on Liam’s unconscious thigh. “Now there be two for the garden.”
“No one’s going into the garden.” Sheeba ripped the sheet with her teeth. “Do you hear me? Kai-Kai and the chief are both going to recover.” She spoke with force, but there was no pretense of a smile.
“Where’s Juani?” I said.
Geraldine pointed at the ceiling. She meant Deck Five. She seemed enervated. Maybe it was the stuffy sick-ward air that robbed her of motive force. Sheeba shook my ankle to get my attention.
“Nasir, go check on Juani, okay? I’m worried about him.”
“Okay,” I said. Like a father, her words echoed. You’ve been like a father to me.
“He’s probably tending his garden,” Shee said.
“Okay,” I said again. This time I moved.
Heavy blooms of fungus filled the well segment leading to Five. I had to brush them off the ladder to find a grip. Just because I had hired Shee to massage my aching joints, that didn’t make me an old man. A father? The fungus felt stiff and rubbery. I held my flashlight between my teeth and ripped it loose by the handful. I was strong, passionate, open to new ideas.
Savagely, I ripped and tore, and the fibers cut my palms. Shee knew my age. I hadn’t concealed it. But had anyone ever caught me drooling in my soup or taking afternoon naps? No. At the safety hatch leading to Five, I scraped the lever free with my split fingernails. My body did not feel old. My muscles rippled with steroid vigor. My sexual organ performed faithfully. Damp crumbs of fungus rained down and got in my eyes.
Fungus grew so thick inside the airlock leading to Five that I had to scoop some out before I could climb in. The spores smelled of musk and sweet burnt caffeine. Father? I was nobody’s father. Slowly I hollowed out a cavity inside the lock. How long since Juani cycled through here? What kind of fungus could regenerate that fast?
I squeezed into the lock, inhaling the stuff through my teeth. Father, ha. Sheeba was deliberately mocking me. She’d fallen under the spell of that agitator, that’s what. He’d corrupted her. She was no longer the dear golden goddess I used to know. Father indeed.
When the upper hatch slid open, I leaped upward into the vast echoing chamber of Deck Five, where the centrifugal gravity was barely strong enough to settle me back to the floor. Deck Five held the food vats. This was the factory proper.
Picture if you will an enormous open cylinder crammed with an array of gleaming spherical vats, sheathed in white insulation and linked by interconnecting pipes. No ladder well pierces the core. No walls partition off wedge-shaped rooms. The factory lies open from end to end, and the sterile array of vats suggests a child’s Tinkertoy model of a molecule. Pristine ranks and files of white spheres reflect against the cylinder’s polished steel walls like clouds. The food vats fill Deck Five to capacity. Do you see the gentle steam wafting through their vents? Do you hear the soft gurgle of fermentation? This is the Provendia food factory you will browse in the corporate video. This is not what awaited me in Heaven.
Oh, the vats were there, barely visible between dense green layers of foliage. I’d arrived in a jungle. Leaves the size of rooms, vines thicker than my body, swelling red pulpy seedpods—I couldn’t keep track of the colors and shapes of the fruits. Exotic varieties that must have been genetically modified to grow in fractional gravity. Melons, squash, coconuts, avocados, ears of corn, luscious bunches of grapes. Also flowers, exquisite blossoms saturated with color, finer than any hothouse orchid I’d ever seen on Earth. And running through it all like a bass note were the fibrous black filigrees of fungus. Around the nearest spherical vat, they branched like veins. And tumbling, swinging, soaring among the vines in every direction were juveniles.
Toddlers. Teenagers. Kids of all ages. Three boys of about Juani’s size were picking fruit and rough-housing. An older girl cradled an infant against her breast and scolded the fruit pickers to get on with their work. A loose line of adolescents handed the full fruit baskets along to a young woman, who heaped them in a dangling hoist. Their pale bodies ranged in hue from ash white to deep caramel. A few were as dusky as Geraldine. As the youngest ones romped in the fractional gravity, their hair
streamed in every shade of gold, copper and jet. It was impossible to count the little demons because of the way they frolicked through the leaves.
Lensed portholes like the one in the solar plant perforated the cylinder’s Up side, and sunlight slanted through in pearly parallel rays. A tapestry of mirrors swiveled the rays through the garden, illuminating fruit, faces, vines and legs, backlighting the foliage in brilliant luminous green.
One vigorous bound took me up into the canopy, where a flock of inquisitive kids leaped among the branches and converged around me, shrilling their tinny voices. Then hundreds of misters clicked on and drenched the jungle in a downpour. Rainbows shot through the leaves in vaporous hues mat wavered and disappeared when the misters shut off. For an instant, droplets wobbled through the air in the surreal slow motion of reduced gravity. Then the water dripped like ringing bells, and raindrops wobbled in slow-motion off my old gray space suit. When the kids started chattering again, I leaped higher.
And here were clouds of gray-green moss, feather pillows of fern, massive knotted tree trunks wreathed in vines. Everything grew larger in the weak gravity. Overhead waved a tall swath of seeded grasses, and higher still, bean pods. Children raced and fought and squealed. They threw fruit at each other, screaming insults. They made me laugh.
And the aromas. Fruity sweet dark stinging bitter. Fanning through the air like music. Flute notes and deep sonorous drums. Every cell in my olfactory brain trembled to these perfume vibrations, brighter even than child song.
But how were these plants rooted? Did they spring to life in midair? I followed a tree trunk down to its source and found it fixed inside one of the spherical food vats. Its growth had pushed the vented hood askew. Other plants large and small sprouted from the tank as well, vying with the tree for space, and someone had wrapped layers of duct tape around and through the stems as if to tie them into the vat so they wouldn’t fall out. I tore away some tape and squeezed my arm down among the roots. Warm liquid washed over my hand, and a few globules rose sluggishly into the air, then splashed in a slow dance among the leaves. The liquid had the same smell as Juani’s veggie trays. Liquid nutrient. The Heavenians had “rehabbed” our food factory as a vast hydroponic rain forest.
“Blade, you some kinda tree frog.”
Juani’s eyelids were still puffy, but his tears had dried, and he’d rewoven his braid with colored wire. He swung hand over hand along a potato vine and landed in a crouch on the tank beside me. “This our garden. You ever see a sight like this on Earth?”
“No,” I answered. “Not even close.”
He picked up a little toad who’d just landed on the tank beside him, the girl with the red birthmark on her cheek. “Keesha girl,” he said fondly. Then he unwound a wire bracelet from his wrist and began braiding her hair into pigtails. “Everybody love the garden. Mostly, we keep the people down on One. Chief say gravitation help their bones. But they sneak up here anyway.”
“We play hide,” the girl said happily.
“It’s amazing,” I said breathlessly.
Juani finished arranging Keesha’s hair. Then he let her run off to play, and he climbed along a thick branch, motioning for me to follow. The branch dipped slightly with our weight, and its leafy end rested against a food vat crusted with green algae. Juani pulled the leaves aside and scrubbed at the algae with his fist. Soon a pattern emerged underneath. A picture was scraped into the vat’s white insulation. A portrait.
Wild, tangled hair framed the old man’s face. His beard forked like tree roots. Heavy lines crisscrossed his cheeks, and spots mottled his large nose. The artwork was primitive, but there was no mistaking the zeal in the man’s startling, green-stained eyes.
Juani slapped the side of the vat. “This Dr. Bashevitz. He here.”
“In spirit, you mean.”
Juani gave me an enigmatic grin. “This the last garden. ‘Xecs burned all the rest. They don’t like veggies growing in the G Ring. They say our garden pose a health risk.” He leaned across me and snapped off a prickly, brown pod from one of the plants, slit it open with his thumb and showed me the inside. Its inner husk gleamed like new satin, and, at the center, nestling in a wisp of downy silk, were dozens of round black seeds. Juani plucked out the seeds and rolled them between his palms.
“This our future, blade. This what we gotta save.”
21
JUSTMENT
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
-OSCAR WILDE
Juani and I returned to sick-ward and found Sheeba pumping Kaioko’s chest with both hands. The girl’s heart had stopped. Sweat gleamed on Sheeba’s forehead as she performed the CPR, counting under her breath, one-two-three-four-five. Near the foot of the mattress, Geraldine sat in a trance, quietly slicing the back of her arm with a small knife. Tiny bracelets of red beads brightened in the wake of her blade.
“Nass, help me,” Sheeba commanded. “When I tell you, blow two hard breaths in her mouth.”
“Right.”
I forgot all about hiding my puckered face. I knelt by the mattress and drew Kaioko’s chin up to clear her airway. On Sheeba’s signal, I puffed into her diminutive mouth and watched her narrow chest rise. War surfers train regularly in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It’s part of our safety drill. I had never kept it up two hours straight though, which is what we had to do to revive Kaioko.
Sheeba and I traded places every twenty minutes to ease our cramping muscles. Juani didn’t know how to give CPR, but he blotted sweat from our faces with a rag. He didn’t bother trying to rouse Geraldine. She looked scary, slumped in her lotus pose, slicing her arm.
I kept two fingers pressed against Kaioko’s carotid artery, hoping for some sign. Tears of fatigue leaked from
Sheeba’s eyes as she thrust downward, stiff-armed, against the girl’s sternum, again and again and again. “Wish I had a cardio-stim,” she muttered like a prayer.
At last, Kaioko’s artery jumped. A tiny twitch. Then another. “She has a pulse,” I said.
Sheeba crouched and pressed an ear to Kaioko’s chest. “Yeah.”
When her breams came steadily, we collapsed on the vacant mattresses. We were completely done in. Naturally, the chief slept through it all.
“I think Liam has a concussion.” Flat on her back, Sheeba spoke to the ceiling. Her voice sounded groggy and distant. “The gunfire knocked him against the hull.”
I was all set to curl on my mattress and snooze, but Sheeba sat up and fished through the medical tray till she found an unused needle. With the swift efficiency of surfer adrenaline, she prepared the girl’s vein and drew out a blood sample. Then, holding the crimson vial in her fist, she hurried to the anteroom.
I staggered after her, fighting fatigue. “Sheeba?”
Among the litter of parts from the eviscerated cyber-doc, she found a nanoscope. Then she swept everything else off the counter with her arm. Next she placed one bright red drop in the ‘scope, wiped her hands on the front of her uniform and stooped to peer through the eyepiece.
“I see a few NEMs. Not many.”
Exhaustion seamed her face, and sweat matted her short hair. Her skin was greasy from lack of bathing, and her fabulous water-colored eyes drooped at the comers. I wanted to take her in my arms forever.
“Nass, will you give more blood for Kaioko?”
I flinched.
“You did it before,” she said, coaxing.
“For you, Shee.” I leaned against the counter and watched her fluttering eyelids. Maybe Sheeba didn’t realize what she was asking. Execs her age had dewy ideas. Maybe sharing blood with a worker didn’t repulse her as it did me.
Sharing health? But when had that act changed to wickedness? And who decided those things? There was a time when I would have laughed at such a rule. Did morals come and go like fashion trends? Kaioko’s blood smeared anemically under the nanoscope. And I doubted. Over how many decades had my attitudes hardened and crusted over?
Abr
uptly, Sheeba’s eyes lost focus, and when she swayed, I caught her. The adrenaline charge wasn’t powerful enough to keep her going. She needed food and water and rest.
“Juani!” I yelled. “Those provisions we hauled up here, where are they?”
The boy stuck his head through the sick-ward door. “In the ‘pactor room.”
I didn’t ask what the ‘pactor room was. “Get me some. Get enough for everyone.”
Sheeba didn’t want to eat. She refused water, too, pleading with me to donate more blood for Kaioko. What could I do? My darling was ready to faint from thirst. And like she said, I’d already subverted the moral code once. My depravity was a fait accompli.
“Okay, take another liter.”
Sheeba smiled.
After drawing my vital fluid, she sat on the floor between her two patients, Liam and Kaioko, alternately checking their pulses and feeding herself spoonfuls of cold protein stew. Meanwhile, I rested on another mattress, feeling strangely lighter.
My illicit ruby sack hung from a peg on the wall and drained much too slowly into the girl’s vein through a makeshift rig of plastic tubing and clips. Sheeba didn’t complain about the light gravity or the primitive conditions of this sick-ward, but the deficiencies must have frustrated her. This clinic didn’t have basic heart monitors, much less medical amenities like cardio-stims. A dismal place to get sick.
Geraldine ignored her bowl of stew, but Juani and I gulped the food in big mouthfuls, and I emptied three water sacks. This second bloodletting also made me woozier and thirstier than the first. I couldn’t seem to get enough to drink, and forming complete thoughts proved a challenge. Let’s see, if my body held five liters, and Sheeba took two, what percentage was that? It sounded like a lot
When no one was looking, I peeked at my thumbscreen and clicked a few menus. Good news, my IBiS showed a steady production of new red and white cells to replace the lost ones. New plasma, too. My NEMs were working overtime to restore my vital sap. Thank the gilty gods, they hadn’t bothered to wait for doctors’ orders. I grabbed a water sack for another swallow, and as I leaned back to tip it into my mouth, zillions of pin-sized black spots obliterated my view of the ceiling.
