The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  She’d never seen him cry before. “I’ll stay with you,” she promised, and woke.

  She rose, made coffee, and sat quietly in the studio. The coffee was bland, artificial—real coffee might stimulate too much gastric acid secretion, causing ulcers that would bleed. People without blood platelets cannot afford to bleed. Hence the boring food, the soft-edged furniture, the dull knives. Hence Madeline’s inability to sculpt.

  Internal bleeding—a bruise—stops by the action of clotting factors made in the liver. But cuts, scrapes, open wounds—bleeding from them stops due to platelets. And platelets come from the same stem cells which give rise to the white and red blood cells, the stem cells which had been diligently destroyed in almost all the inhabitants of Blues. The artificial clotting aids could not completely replace platelets. Thus there was no more chance of Madeline getting a sculpting tool than of her getting fresh fruit or a potted palm.

  She surveyed the studio. It was so different from their studio back home, with the north window facing the garden. Here the one small window faced another building, pastel blue. Paintings in every stage of completion—here the canvases were either blank or turned to face the wall. Her sculptures on every shelf—here were only photographs of her statues, too heavy to bring from Earth.

  “They don’t understand your work,” Henri had always said, “because they’re fools.”

  She looked at the shelf of paints and her one attempt at sculpture since arrival, a clay sphere with little tendrils reaching out—a sun sending out plumes of gas, or a macrophage ready to engulf. It was covered in the fine powder that passed for dust on Blues.

  She reached for it scornfully. Clay had no life, no soul, so unlike wood. Wood contained the sculpture already; she had only to find it and release it from its covering. But clay was like all of Blues, a bland mediocre world, as devoid of ugliness as it was of beauty. People, though—people were still the same….

  The sphere slipped from her fingers, pancaking on the floor.

  Henri entered, rubbing at his scalp to push back the mane that no longer existed. “What…”

  “Found art,” she said. “It’s an egg.”

  He adopted his nasal art-critic voice. “The egg, symbol of life and new beginnings.” When Madeline failed to laugh at the imitation, he picked up a canvas, stared at it, turned it back to face the wall again, and began pacing.

  Madeline sipped her coffee. “It was an awful party.”

  He paused, a strange smile on his face. “Your cousin doesn’t believe we’re living together. She says we don’t act like lovers. She says we act like an old married couple.” He laughed once, a staccato bark, and resumed pacing.

  —

  Madeline ran into Giselle in the line at the hospital cafeteria as the older woman tried to choose a meal. The plastic-looking food had many strikes against it. It was shipped from Earth fully processed. It was digestible by people lacking normal bowel flora and with their gastric acid secretion diminished by drugs. As if that were not enough, it was also hospital food.

  Madeline made some polite comments about Giselle’s party.

  “How do you like Blues?”

  “It’s—different. Hard to adjust to. My job is, too. I’m a medical technician. My specialties are bacteriology and hematology—not much demand for either. Now all I do is plate specimens; I haven’t seen a single rod or coccus to reward my efforts.”

  “Thank God,” Giselle said.

  “Well, at least I’m working with culture.” Giselle did not get the joke, so Madeline continued. “It’s worse for Henri. He’s a painter.”

  “An artist?” Giselle became enthusiastic. “Lord knows we need more art up here. What does he paint?”

  “He began in landscapes. But”—she caught herself from saying “we”—“he had to live in cities, to lecture and teach and such. Have you heard of the microlandscape school? Henri was one of the founders. It’s easy to find grandeur in the country, with the vistas of trees, mountains, sky….” She was falling back into her standard explanation, culled almost directly from the exhibit pamphlets she’d helped write.

  “Those are just concepts in textbooks,” Giselle said. “Maybe…is it like Out-there? Space is huge and black and wonderful. It just keeps going, with stars like spots of fire….” She pushed at the remnants of her sandwich, her mind somewhere else.

  “The Group decided to paint city landscapes,” Madeline continued dreamily. “A flower in the sidewalk, tree leaves against the sky…Beauty is ubiquitous in the country. The challenge is to find it in the city.” Like searching for bacteria in the pus of a sterile abscess.

  “Unfortunately, there’s no sky here, no trees, no flowers. Henri is without inspiration. He can’t paint.”

  Giselle’s face lit up. “But there’s beauty in Blues.”

  “Ah, you were raised here.”

  “No, it’s there for everyone. The arc of a roof against a support strut, the glint of a house far overhead, the way the stars smear out underfoot in the observation deck…”

  Madeline was thoughtful. “Do you think you could get someone else to see this beauty? Henri?”

  “I can try.”

  —

  They received a letter from Bertrand, a glorious collage of pictures and words that began, “Mon cher Henri, ma belle Madeline,” appellations that made Henri bristle.

  “He’s got something planned,” Henri muttered. “While the cat’s away the mice shall play.”

  Madeline put the letter on hold. “Bertrand’s not so bad.”

  “The man’s an upstart. The only thing that held him back was his inability to decide which he’d rather do—steal my school or seduce my wife.”

  Madeline shrugged, half smiling, and switched the letter back on. “The prices for your paintings have already skyrocketed, my dear Henri, to a height almost worthy of your present surroundings. Also, may I opine, to a degree undreamed of in your earthly days.”

  “The rodent.”

  “He’s just trying to be poetic.”

  “Even the sculptures of your lovely wife are coveted and much sought after.”

  “Vultures,” Henri growled.

  A new picture came on. “Our latest exhibit. Marcel’s Flowers in the Crosswalk I.” It was a good example of their school—austere brush work, unpretentious realism.

  “Flowers in the Crosswalk II.” Now the flowers were buffeted in the airstream of rushing traffic. There was a cartoonlike simplicity to the art. Henri sat rigid.

  “Flowers in the Crosswalk III.” The final item in the triptych blinked into being, the flowers transformed into metal, the trucks and motorbikes into elephants, typewriters, musical notes.

  “Surrealism!” Henri bellowed, banging his fist onto the console. Paintings began to flash by rapidly, each sillier than the last, each more of a parody of the circle’s previous work, of Henri’s lifework.

  Henri rose and left the room, his massive shoulders slumped. Madeline stopped the letter at the last of the art and slowly read the title.

  “Dancing on My Grave Before I’m Even Dead.”

  —

  Madeline had not seen much of Henri for the last few days. He set out early each morning, led by Giselle or one of her friends, returning each evening with an armful of charcoal roughs. The house began to fill with students, trying to convert their own crude sketches into full canvases. They painted into the night, falling asleep on the couch or rug, working and lying underfoot until Madeline would wake and send them to their own homes as she left for the lab.

  While Henri had found beauty in a tree thrusting out of pavement, Madeline had found it in the microscope. She’d given up her own art studies—one of them had to bring home a salary—but the aesthetics of a Wright’s-stained blood smear had eased her through the workaday world. The delicate lobulations of a PMN, no two cells alike. The frothy purple lacework of a platelet. The sweet blue of a lymphocyte’s cytoplasm. Even when she’d gone to the lab to see the slide that spelled He
nri’s doom, even as she’d scanned field after field of leukemic myelocytes, she’d thought, How can they be bad? They’re too beautiful.

  “Why so quiet?”

  She looked around. Bob, the stranger from the party, was leaning against an incubator. A stethoscope peeked out of one pocket of his very loud suit.

  She put down her pipette. “You’ll think I’m crazy. I was remembering the beauty of a good peripheral blood smear.”

  “Not crazy—just a little weird. One of my path teachers was artsy. Wanted to be an architect, became a pathologist instead. He always said, ‘The worst cancer looks gorgeous in hematoxylin and eosin.’ He’d show us a slide of, say, lung with its fine mesh of purple and pink, and he’d say, ‘Go on, show me anything in art nouveau that can beat this.’ Frankly, I didn’t think it was so hot. Not that it kept me from getting the top grade in the class.”

  “No,” Madeline said. “One does not need a sense of aesthetics to be successful.”

  —

  “What’s wrong,” Henri demanded, putting down his brush. The studio was now full of paintings by Henri and his new pupils. Views of stars, of houses, of women lying in artificial flowers or standing in the metallic sheen of the oxygen equipment. Works in progress lay propped everywhere and hung on the walls, covering the photos of Madeline’s sculptures. “You’ve been unhappy all evening.”

  “Don’t you know what today is?”

  “It’s our anniversary. Well, we can’t very well celebrate it, can we? They don’t even know we’re married.”

  “But we could—”

  “Let’s choose a new anniversary, Madeline, one appropriate to our life here. I know! We can have a party for the day when they told me I was dying.” Laughing bitterly, he turned back to the canvas.

  —

  As Henri was becoming engrossed in his painting and his teaching, Madeline was making friends at work. They gossiped as she plated a seemingly infinite number of specimens from people, places, things in the never-ending war to keep the colony germ-free. She joined a chess club. She went to a party to bid a temporary farewell to a coworker who had won the adoption lottery and was going on leave to help her new three-year-old immunosuppressed son through the terrors of quarantine.

  She occasionally met Giselle at lunch. They would begin by gossiping—had X sliced her finger on a broken window and bled to death by accident, or was it suicide or murder; did Y’s newly adopted daughter have brain damage; would Z wed yet again?

  But, perhaps because of her own lung damage from recurrent pneumonia as an infant, lunch with Giselle always ended up a bitter catalog of the disasters that walked into the Pulmonary Functions Lab—chronic lungers incapacitated by smoking, by radiation fibrosis, by bronchiectasis from infection.

  After yet another description of yet another pulmonary cripple, Giselle changed her subject. “I got another letter from your cousin today.”

  “Annette? How is she?”

  “I don’t know. I just erase them as they come through the computer.”

  “Giselle! How can you!”

  “That woman inundates me with her unwanted attention!”

  “You can hardly call a few letters a year an inundation.”

  “She gave me up to Blues—why can’t she give me up completely? I didn’t ask to be born. I don’t owe her—”

  Madeline had had enough dramatics. “Calm down, Giselle. Don’t you ever wonder about your family? You had an older brother. Antoine. The colds started at three months. Then pneumonia. Meningitis. Constant diarrhea. He didn’t respond to immunoglobulin replacement. He died before his first birthday.

  “The geneticists said there was only a one-in-four chance the next child would also have an immunodeficiency. Annette and Pierre wanted children, and they took the chance. They treated you as if you were made of jewels. Then at three months, when the maternal antibodies begin to disappear, you sneezed….

  “They didn’t have a third child. Don’t you see—allowing you to leave Earth, to live, was an act of love. Your mother loves you, Giselle, though she hasn’t seen you for twenty years.”

  The girl stared into her coffee cup.

  Madeline said softly, “Read the next letter you receive. Please.”

  “Well, hello, ladies.”

  Giselle groaned as Bob sat down. “Lucky women, lunching with the last of the red-blooded men. Who could ask for more?”

  Giselle rose. “I have to get back to work.”

  Bob waited until she was gone. “At last. We’re alone.” The other diners within range of his booming voice turned in astonishment.

  Madeline stifled a giggle. “At last.”

  “I brought you a gift.” He handed her a slide, folded in lens paper. Madeline unwrapped it, rotating it into the light.

  “Notice the perfect feather edge,” Bob said. “Haven’t done a smear in twenty years, but I haven’t lost my touch. Nothing’s beyond the last of the red-blooded men.”

  “But what—”

  “Blood. My own, of course, with just the right amount of Wright’s stain. A nostalgic voyage to a world where people have hot, pulsing red stuff in their arteries.”

  Smiling, she pocketed the slide. “Thank you, Bob. As I revel in each red cell, each delightful leukocyte, each marvelous monocyte, I’ll think of you.”

  He shuddered. “If you find anything strange on the diff—do me a favor. Don’t tell me.”

  —

  The great and near great of Blues were there. Administrators, store owners, journalists. They looked at the paintings, drank the bland wine, argued politics.

  “We’re nothing but a company store, existing on Earth’s sufferance.”

  “Look, they won’t run something this expensive if it isn’t worth their while. Why shouldn’t we tend the satellites and factories. We aren’t invalids….”

  Madeline moved along making sure everyone had a glass of wine, a piece of cheese. She felt almost at home. She’d had years of practice running art shows.

  A man grabbed her arm as she passed. “Do you play cello?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Damn. We’ve almost got an entire orchestra. All we need is another cellist.”

  She bit back the temptation to suggest he hire one. She knew how the few hired personnel from Earth were ostracized, despised. Instead, she smiled devilishly. “Sooner or later some cellist down there will need a kidney transplant. You just have to be patient.”

  As she wandered, she looked at the paintings—a few starscapes, but mostly scenes of the station itself. Henri’s contributions easily stood out, with their mastery of perspective, their confident brush strokes. The students’ contributions were remarkable only for their odd viewpoints. The school had drawn from Giselle’s peers, Earth children uprooted by disease and raised on Blues. One student—the boy with the braided beard—showed promise. His paintings were a tangle of intersecting levels that gave Madeline vertigo, the same feeling she got whenever she looked above her at the other side of the colony.

  She paused before a final picture, a sentimental still life of silken flowers. Giselle’s. It was the most amateurish of all, and Madeline resented its presence.

  She heard Giselle’s laughter. The girl was entertaining some journalist, translating Henri’s dour phrases into an artistic manifesto. That had always been Madeline’s job back home. But here—Madeline was deluding herself. If anyone was the hostess of the art show, it was Giselle.

  One of the daring young artists accepted a refill of his glass, then pointed to Giselle. “Isn’t she grand tonight?”

  “She appears to be in her element.” She noticed Giselle’s father buttonholing people and forcing them to confront his daughter’s still life.

  “I was an artist,” she said.

  “You?”

  The boy obviously thought of her as a drudge who existed only to support Henri. The juvenile form of the PMN is called a stab, Madeline thought. How appropriate.

  “Me. I gave up my career to supp
ort—my husband. But I still sculpted, even showed.”

  “Sculpture. You mean, pottery and plastic and stuff?”

  “Wood. I miss it. The feel of a good knife, the search for the right pattern in the grain…”

  “Well, miss away,” he said. “I’d like to see you find a knife on Blues. They’d have a fit.”

  “Would they?” She watched him move deeper into the room of harsh design but rounded edges, an environment to minimize trauma.

  “Ah, for a knife as sharp as a child’s tongue.”

  Hearing applause, Madeline watched the young artist with the braided beard present Giselle with a bouquet. His ringlets of hair reminded her of a cluster of staphylococci. She shook her head and looked away, turning back at the shriek.

  Giselle had dropped the plastic flowers and was clutching her hand. Clear liquid, like viscous water, ran from her hand and onto the floor.

  “Oh no I’m sorry I’m sorry, I don’t know how…,” the man babbled. The others stood, horrified. Giselle’s father began to berate the young man. “You’ve killed her,” he screamed.

  Madeline felt like a character out of Alice in Wonderland. She pushed through the crowd to Giselle, grabbing her hand, feeling the slippery fluid. She raised Giselle’s hand high, holding pressure over the artery in the upper arm.

  Giselle was wide-eyed and shaking. She would have been pale were she not already the sickly yellow of the bloodless. “It’s going to be all right,” Madeline said, and from the corner of her eye noticed Henri.

  He was as wide-eyed as Giselle. He stared at the younger woman, looking almost ready to faint.

  Madeline’s heart missed a beat.

  “Call an ambulance,” she said.

  —

  “It’s ludicrous; everyone is overreacting. You’d think she was Camille, coughing out her lungs. Not a cut finger.” Madeline gazed in the window of the emergency room cubicle. Giselle had a liter of artificial blood hung in her central line. Henri clutched her free hand as a doctor sutured up the other.

  Bob, who had heard the commotion and come to the emergency room to offer advice, said, “People bleed to death frequently here. Well, ‘bleed’ isn’t the best description.”