“Are they closer to finding a cure for this, doctor?”
“Research is proceeding—slowly. But don’t give up hope. We’ll keep you around until they do.” The death’s head grin grew wider in what was meant to be a smile. Marisol wished he would stop. She closed her eyes.
“Thank you, doctor.”
* * *
“The Anul religion says all nonbelievers will be cast into the void,” Marisol said.
“All religions say that,” replied Jay, while munching a mouthful of native Choom salad. It was garnished with crunchy black beetles which Marisol had refused to sample.
“I’ve been reading about them on the net.”
“I’ve worked closely with Fald for a few years now. He’s been very good to me.”
“I’m not suggesting...” she let it trail off.
“Suggesting what?”
“That he wouldn’t be nice.”
Jay munched quietly some more, as if studying her. Marisol wondered if he was staring at her jaw, if he could see the little ball pushing against her skin now. She could swear it was bigger than it had been last week, on their first date. She resisted the impulse to reach her hand up to it.
Jay said, “Don’t tell me you read that urban legend on the net.”
“What urban legend?”
“You tell me. The one about the Anul...and the orb weavers?”
Marisol poked at her own Caesar salad, keeping her eyes averted from his. “I read something. It was an eyewitness report...”
“It’s just a rumor. Based on bigotry...xenophobia. I know which one you’re talking about. I knew you’d read it...”
Her huge eyes lifted, glowering darkly. “Don’t make fun of me, Jay. How do you know it’s not true?”
“I’m sorry, Mar, but it’s ridiculous. And I’ve read variations on it, differing only slightly...I get mass net-messages about it a couple times a year. It’s always something about this woman, or this man, who’s wealthy enough to go see this incredible specialist from Anul. The Anul is so skillful he can remove the tumor without killing the host; he can’t promise that a new one won’t grow back in its place, but he’s buying the victim a lot of time. When the patient wakes up after his operation and poisoning session, he’s all alone and he goes out into the doctor’s rooms to look for him or his assistant. He opens a door and sees a room like a morgue, with several dead bodies covered in sheets and one who’s uncovered. The dead woman, or man in some versions, has a hole in her where her tumor was removed. And there stands the Anul specialist—caught by surprise. In his hand is a good-sized tumor. The patient doesn’t know if this tumor is his own tumor, or if it came from the dead body, but one thing is for sure...the Anul doctor has bitten into the sphere, and is crunching up that mouthful between those big teeth of his with this awful...grating...grinding sound...” He chewed a little of his salad for emphasis.
“I told you, don’t mock me, Jay. This isn’t a funny matter. Maybe if you had a tumor you’d take things more seriously, like I do. Maybe you’d be more open-minded about where it comes from, how it can do what it does, how it can’t be filtered out by teleporters, how...”
Jay dropped his smile and reached across the restaurant table to take her small pale hand. “Marisol...I’m sorry. Believe me, I don’t take it as a joke. I don’t.”
“The Anul brought it. How do we know that they didn’t do it on purpose?”
“As a food source? I’m sorry but it wouldn’t make sense, Mar...they get this disease themselves. And we don’t know for certain they brought it...”
Marisol curled her own fingers around his. “Jay...you know this thing of mine is going to get worse, sooner or later. The poisoning only slows it, and it doesn’t even work every time. We don’t know how far from a cure we are.” She swallowed nervously. “How are you going to feel about me later on? When it grows? When it breaks the skin?”
He crushed her hand hard in his, as if desperate. “We’re going to fight it, Mar. Trust me. I’m going to protect you.”
“Protect me? How can you protect me? Dr. Fald?”
Jay let go of her hand, and lowered his own eyes as if now he couldn’t bring himself to face her. He scooped a beetle onto his fork but only rocked it there, did not lift it to his mouth. “Do you have a pen?” he whispered.
“A pen? Yeah...why?”
“And paper? Or I can use a napkin...”
“I have paper. Hold on.” She pulled her bulky pocketbook into her lap.
After she produced the stylus and a notepad, and handed them to him, Jay leaned over the pad intensely and began writing rapidly in a crowded, tiny script. He shielded it from her gaze with his free hand like a little wall. While she waited, Marisol glanced around her at other tables. She caught a Tikkihotto woman staring at her, and again fought the urge to clap a hand over her jaw. The Tikkihotto woman was human in appearance except for the translucent, floating nests of tentacles that sprouted from both eye sockets. Did they enable her to see what others could as yet not discern?
Marisol felt Jay slide the pad against her hand. She took it, turned it around so that she could read from it. Jay Torrey had written:
“I can’t tell you anything aloud, because they make me wear a chip in my head. The chip can hear what I say, and they can listen to it. Stop taking the pills your PCP gave you. They’re either a placebo, or something designed to make the orb grow faster. I have pills you can take instead. They’re very effective in keeping the growth arrested. But you can’t tell anyone about any of this or we’ll both be in danger.”
Marisol tore off the sheet, pocketed it, and began to write in turn. She wrote:
“Who are you talking about? Who are you working with? Do you mean Fald?”
Jay read her questions, and answered by scribbling: “I can’t tell you. But it’s big. There’s a lot of money made by people for the treatments and medication they give. There are too many cures for other diseases—no one gets rich if no one is sick. This is an industry of death. Don’t ask any more about it. Just take the pills I’ll give you tomorrow...and throw those others out before the growth in you advances too fast. I can only hope that Fald’s session with you was real. I can only hope he didn’t make matters worse instead.”
Marisol read this last bit with her mouth gaping open, and snapped fearful, enraged eyes up to meet his wordlessly. But she wrote in a jagged hand: “You let them do this to others, and you don’t warn them like you’re warning me, do you?”
Jay wrote no reply to that note.
* * *
On the vidscreen of her home deskcomp, Marisol saw the face of Dr. Fald’s nurse, Miss Banal. She was an Anul as well, indistinguishable from him right down to the vast smile. She could easily imagine those teeth grinding up the ossified mass of an orb no matter what Jay might say.
“Would you like to reschedule your next appointment, then, Miss Nunez?”
“No. I’d like to cancel it.”
“But it’s six months away. May I ask why you wouldn’t want a follow up exam?”
“I expect to be away from Oasis by then. On Earth.”
“Ah. Well, Dr. Fald has an associate on Earth, named Dr. Olad. Where on Earth will you be?”
Marisol digested that for a moment. Earth too, then? “I’d rather not make a follow up appointment at this time. I’ll contact you if I change my mind.” Before the nurse could protest any further, Marisol broke their connection.
She tried calling Jay again. There was no answer, so she left another message. Then, she shook from a vial one of the pills he had given her to replace those her primary care physician had prescribed. It was pink, too.
For a few days after he had given her the new pills, Marisol had not wanted to see Jay. Yes, he had confided in her...placed his trust in her. Yes, he was trying to protect her. But she was disgusted with the idea that he would never have warned her, had she not accepted his offer of a date that day when she first met him. Disgusted that he had warned no one other
than her...
But she was still attracted to him. And anyway...these new pills wouldn’t last forever. If he was going to be motivated by selfishness, then so would she.
* * *
Marisol read, on the net newspaper she subscribed to, that a suspicious person had been seen lurking in the foyer of the apartment house where Jay Torrey had lived. This loiterer had been a Vlessi. The Vlessi were a related but separate race that lived on the same world the Anul did; little was known about them but they were rumored to be a race of vampires. When his roommate discovered his body, Jay Torrey had been drained of blood...besides having had his head lopped off, and placed like a centerpiece atop the counter of their kitchenette.
Marisol did not attend the funeral, for fear that whoever might have learned of Jay’s betrayal would be there, waiting for her to show her face. Had Jay confessed anything before he was silenced? Marisol bought a telescoping stun wand that could be adjusted to a lethal setting from a teen age boy who lived several floors below her in the same apartment complex, whom she’d heard could supply stolen weapons. She took to carrying it with her, especially when she was crammed into a train with so many strangers on her way to or from work.
* * *
With what little money she had left over from her disability pay after she paid the rent on her new, tiny flat, Marisol printed flyers that she handed out every afternoon in the train station nearest her boarding house. The flyers were printed on pink paper. She would often see this pink paper, crushed into balls, lying carelessly on the floor around trash zapper units. Most people would not even accept the sheets when she thrust them at them. Most people shunned her, wouldn’t even befoul their eyes with her.
There were several different versions of the flyer, each more strident than the last. On the most recent, she had added a photo of Jay’s severed head, taken from a net site where crime scene photos were posted for the entertainment of the masses. A mother had scolded her harshly, once, for trying to hand one of these sheets to her young daughter.
When she was still beautiful—before the pills Jay had given her ran out—people might have stopped to listen to her. Her eyes were as large and dark as ever, if less lustrous. But people only saw the ball and chain she carried. The tumor, polished as a sphere of pink marble, that had erupted from the side of her jaw, weighing her head at a grotesque angle. Pushing down against her shoulder, throwing her entire carriage off so that she limped along crookedly. Her voice was a half-strangled rasp from her half-crushed throat. The ball was only too visible but the invisible chain was wound all throughout her system.
Taking a break from standing at the foot of the escalators leading up to street level, Marisol stuffed her stack of flyers into her backpack and shambled over to a concession stand to buy a bottle of water. She inadvertently bumped a man in line and the man’s girlfriend or wife drew him aside, hissing to him, “Tom, watch it—that might be contagious!”
A smile quivered at one corner of Marisol’s mouth. It made the corner of one eye quiver as well. How uninformed people were. Superstitious. It was not a plague. It was barely organic, except on the surface. It was a machine, she thought, a great hungry machine. She bought her water, but as she was unscrewing the cap, the sweating bottle slipped through her fingers. Numbly, Marisol stared down between her feet, watched the contents of the bottle gush out...mesmerized, making no move to stoop and retrieve it. The man and his girlfriend walked away briskly with their own purchases, perhaps afraid that if the puddle spread to their shoes, it might convey the plague to them like pus from a lanced bubo.
A hand lightly took hold of Marisol’s elbow and she flinched. Who was touching her? Didn’t they know she might be contagious? Slowly she twisted around to face the person, who stood close behind her, looming over her so that she had to tip her head back like a child.
“You need help,” a voice cooed gently. Marisol couldn’t tell if the being wore a translator, or if it were the chip in her head that deciphered the Anul’s words. She didn’t know if the being was a male or female. A doctor or not.
Vaguely she thought of something in her backpack that she should take out just then. Something that might help her. She slipped her hand into the bag, and her fingers hesitated only a moment on the tubular shape of the telescoped stun wand. Then, uncertainly, they crawled on to her stack of flyers, and she withdrew one of these...extended it to the Anul.
Accepting the flyer graciously, then grinning more broadly, the Anul went on, “Why don’t you come with me?”
Marisol did not protest. She did not speak or resist, as the pink-skinned creature led her away.
THE FLAYING SEASON
The flukes, as the great beasts were called, had skins of malachite, swirled green and black and smoothly sheened, which the Antse people flayed from the carcasses inside ceramic block garages or hangar-like structures with scrap metal roofs, and their watery yellow blood would run down the streets of the neighborhood into grates, and dry to a crust along the gutters when the season of flaying was over.
Kohl had once watched a team of Antse capture a fluke; she had never been able to watch more than once. The swollen, tadpole-like form had been called out of its dimension into this one, lured by means she didn’t understand, but the Antse themselves had settled in this Earth colony from that same place conterminous with this one. Before the whole of its body had even passed through, the Antse had hooks in its flanks, cords around it, had lodged barbed metal pikes in its various apertures, which fluttered and snorted in pain and distress as the rest of the body, thrashing back and forth in empty air ten feet off the street, was hauled out with a jarring thud. The huge creature had squirmed, flailed several cord-like forelimbs, but the Antse had quickly finished it without much marring its hide.
Now Kohl drew the shade when a fluke was caught in the street below, put on music to drown out the sounds of slaughter, some jangly fast-tempoed middle eastern music to distract her. But it was hard to avoid the spectacle of the flaying season altogether, in this neighborhood of Punktown that the Antse had congregated in. The Antse hung out vast sheets of malachite hide to dry like laundry, rustling in the night breeze, smelling like tar either naturally or due to some tanning process, beautifully translucent when the sun was behind them. And then, the Antse applied those skins to their own bodies, adhering them by some means Kohl had never witnessed nor comprehended, so that the normally smooth gray skins of these naked settlers were covered every inch by the tightly form-fitting leather of the flukes. The Antse would then resemble skeletons carved of malachite, for the next season, until for whatever reason—religious, she assumed, which she found explained most unexplainable behaviors—the flesh was peeled or shed pending the next flaying season.
To be fair, perhaps the skins kept them warm during a cold season in their own world, though the flaying season occurred in summer, here. But the effigies had to have a religious meaning. Even now, a cup of tea in hand, her music turned low, Kohl stood at the window gazing across at one of these fleshy mannikins swaying in an early evening breeze. It hung from a pole protruding from a second floor window, just over the heads of those who might pass below. There would be dozens throughout the neighborhood, now it was flaying time. It was a loosely anthropomorphic figure, hewn from the translucent white flesh beneath the lovely hide of some fluke. To be fair, the Antse ate this white meat. Though Kohl did not eat meat, or wear animal flesh, she knew that the customs were not by any means peculiar to the Antse. But the mannikins were more a mystery to her than the wearing of fluke flesh; the Antse were secretive about the meaning of their customs, if not shy about the products of their customs being seen. These suspended totems were filled with thick spikes and long thin nails, and bound in strings of something like barbed wire, so that they were like suffering saints carved from God’s own underbelly.
Birds would gingerly land among the forests of cruel thorns to pick at them. Stray dogs would find scraps of them fallen to the street. When they crumbled or smelled
too much they were replaced with new effigies, until the flaying season was over.
Kohl regarded the hanging figure opposite her window, and it seemed to regard her back, spikes for eyes.
* * *
The neighborhood was tightly packed buildings in every color of gray, their night flanks slick with rain but abruptly bleached with strobe lightning from the sparking of the old shunt lines on which carriages flashed to and from the Canberra Mall. Kohl had just returned to her neighborhood on one of those shunts; she worked at a coffee shop in the mall. Her clothing had smelled too strongly of coffee; she had never thought she would ever have too much of its scent. She had showered, made a cup of tea (she had never imagined she’d grow tired of the taste of coffee, either). Kohl could only just afford these four small rooms (bath included) in this neighborhood, but once had had a better job. She had been a net researcher for a large conglomerate, its head offices on Earth, and she had clear memories of the job. She did not, however, have memories of being raped in the parking lot of the company. That was all she knew of it: that she had been raped in the company parking lot. She had been traumatized by her rape. The men had never been caught. She had become so troubled, so afraid to venture from her apartment, to go out at night, even to go to work, that she had lost her job.
But that was for the best, the doctor she ultimately consulted assured her. She should start life anew, put all the nightmare behind her. And yet it was he who really put it from her mind. Her attack had been delicately, precisely burned from her memory. It had been burned from the entire record of thought that followed the incident itself, tracked stealthily by complex brain scan. Even her memories of her physical wounding were gone, so that she did not know what the men had done to injure her in the course of the rape itself.
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