by Jerry
What had the process cost her?
Did they synthesize her real memories at the cost of forgetfulness? Had she known? Had Tanaka tricked her?
I took her tenement steps three at a time, the blaster out and ready.
But no one was on the staircase.
I ran upstairs, to her third floor door, and burst in.
She didn’t turn from the window this time.
My own breath came harsh and rasping.
“Julee,” I said.
She turned at the sound of my voice. Her eyes didn’t know me, though. They stared from her skull as vacant as a child’s.
I wanted to shout and scream at her. “We’re pledged! Damn it all, we have a life, remember? We planned a great deal of it on that little beach by the bay. And you’ve sold the memory!”
I held out the slim dart-like air poppers.
She stared at them with hunger in every feature. Her eyes suddenly came alive and her mouth twisted in a look of need. She reached out and clawed them from my hand—
Maybe I would have stopped her. Maybe not. But the hallway exploded with the sound of strong wood snapping. There was a deep curse, then Quarif s voice rang out.
“Wrong! Wrong is wrong!”
Then the not so subtle feel of sonics made my bones vibrate. Nerve endings stood up in my tissue and screamed.
Hunched over in pain, I moved to the door and out into the hallway.
Quarif stood four steps above the landing below. He shouted back down, and I leaned over to see who he was yelling at. Two Blues, their steel, beaked faces and their big eyes, stared up at him. The one on the right aimed his blaster and a bright flash lit the darkened hallway like summer lightning. Quarif half turned, then tumbled backwards, ripping out the railing. He lay on his side, legs twitching.
By then I was more than halfway down the stairs. I jumped the last two meters, and bent over him.
The Blues stood on the stairway behind me, very still, like animals in an old print my grandfather had of dogs, pointing.
I leaned over him.
His face contorted with pain. “Tell Julee I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell her I didn’t know what they were taking until it was too late.”
And he went very still.
The Blues hit me with their spotlight.
“Hold,” one said.
And I should have. No one fought with Tanaka’s Blues. But then, sometimes, things just happen. We follow some impulse stronger and maybe truer than good sense. I stood slowly, straight up, the blaster in front of me.
I heard them separate. I turned and hit the Blue in back with the first pulse. The Blue in front was confused, just for a second. Just a second too long. The second pulse burned through his birdlike face, below the great, searching eyes. The eyes seemed to go out, like bright lights all at once extinguished in the dark, and he fell at his partner’s feet.
“It’s going to be all right,” I told Quarif. Though I knew it was not. Quarif was dead, and so were the Blues, and so was Julee’s memory of me?
No.
I walked easily back up the stairs.
She sat on the floor, injecting her own memories.
“Julee.”
“Turk. Oh, thank Ri. Oh God, I’ve been . . . so lost.”
I lifted her to her feet.
“Pack your bag, the big one.”
“But—”
“Please.”
“There’s so much to tell you.”
“While we’re moving.”
“But where—?”
Anywhere, I thought, leading her down the stairs. The sight of the bodies made her lean in closer to me. “I was just trying to make some extra,” she said. “For our new ten. Quarif said he knew a way, said he knew someone who worked in Experimental. What did I do?”
I led us past the dead. Down the stairs and out into the alleyways of the Outlands.
“You almost sold a part of yourself fiat was us. You almost sold too much.”
She looked at me with terror in her eyes, as she clutched the air poppers in her free hand.
“Where are we going? Are we going to the new ten?”
I pulled her toward the south side of the Outlands, away from Crystal City. I’d never been out of the city before, but this was a big planet. A fairly new planet. There must be something more than a squalid square ten kilometers of tenements around the Tanaka Complex.
“Turk.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m scared.”
I tried to smile, but my mouth felt frozen.
“So am I, but we’ll find a way. Just don’t lose those poppers. I don’t want you forgetting who I am, again.”
She smiled, and I tightened my grip on her hand, and we walked from the city with the great red sun of Ri at our backs.
THE DISEASE
David J. Adams
Last night, ship’s time, I still had enough nerve to look in the mirror. When I woke up this morning, after I had gotten past the nausea and the pain which coursed through my body, I noticed that a few fingernails had fallen off. I struggled up into a sitting position only long enough to see that blood and pus spotted the bedsheets, and that clumps of hair had remained on my pillow. I gently laid back down and waited to die.
Actually, I waited only a minute or two, then I got mad enough to decide to get out of bed. I knew when I was selected to be aboard the Horizon that unknown hazards waited for all of us out here in space. Death was a possibility I understood well. But not this way, victims of THE DISEASE, as we called it, always saying it like it was all capital letters. It came into our ship’s small community and overwhelmed us so swiftly that we never bothered to name it officially, and when the first crew members died, THE DISEASE seemed appropriate—monstrous and vague.
To the logical mind, death at the hands of THE DISEASE was similar in many respects to colliding with an asteroid or having the ship’s engine blow, or even becoming the main course for some fanged alien. But this thing was insidious, maddening, avoiding all our attempts to contain it and identify it, much less cure it. We ran hundreds of tests, had almost all our ship systems down so our computers could work on it full time, and spent agonizing hours watching Doctor Nayden working in the lab, all with no real results. What we did know was that once infected which was immediately upon even remote contact with a carrier or anything they had contacted by touch or breath you had about three days. That might sound mercifully quick, but if you had it, you wouldn’t think so.
I knew I might have lingered longer had I remained in bed and saved my energy, but as I said, this thing had me angry. If it had some sort of physical form, I would have ripped it apart with my bare hands. But all I could do against THE DISEASE was stand up and move around, and that simply out of spite. I was on day two of the sickness. Tomorrow I wouldn’t have the strength to get out of bed even if I wanted to.
There were twelve crew members on the Horizon when it left Earth. It was one of a fleet of six ships built to explore space and collect scientific data. Now we were on our way back home with six dead and buried in the emptiness of space, four more that wouldn’t last another twelve hours, and Carl Burrell and myself, who would survive another thirty-six at best. We were due to drop out of hyperspace in a little over two hours, where a medical frigate would be waiting for us. We could only hope against hope that they could accomplish what our ship’s computer and now dead doctor couldn’t finding a cure.
I guess I should tell you my name is Mike Stenstrom, and that I’m the Ship’s Navigator on this journey. I’m thirty-two and single, probably because my first love has always been space. So here I am with my best girl, so to speak, and here I’ll likely die. Enough about me.
The simple act of walking took great effort. My head spun, my stomach churned, and my leg muscles cried out for relief, but it made me feel better mentally to know I could still move around. As I shambled down the corridor housing the crew quarters, touching the dull gray walls for balance when needed, I peeked in eac
h room only long enough to see some sign of life from the remaining crew. The head science officer, Nancy Jansen, managed to emit a soft moan when she heard the door open. The fact that she could still hear at all meant she might have nearly twelve full hours left. She tried to lift her head, the skin as gray as the ship’s walls where sores hadn’t eaten it away. Her flesh drooped like melting wax under the weak pull of the ship’s artificial gravity. Her eyes were glazed and fixed, and I could tell immediately that THE DISEASE had taken her sight. I had seen enough. She was alive and I could do nothing else for her. I stepped back so the door would close.
The others were still alive, but either too exhausted or too deaf to react when I opened their doors.
I was glad for that. I think they all looked worse than Nancy did. When we had jettisoned Mark Caulkin, his skin was just some gray covering, hardly attached to his body anymore. He was an unbearable sight, more so because by then we knew we’d all end up that way. I glanced once at my hands, light gray in color and the skin softer than when I was born, and wished I had some gloves.
Burrell wasn’t in his room or the galley, but when I got to the bridge, I heard the familiar grunt he made when he was hard at work. It took me a few seconds to spot his boots jutting out from under the main control console.
“Burrell, what are you doing?” I asked.
He pushed himself out from under the console and regarded me with angry, bloodshot eyes. His thin, peppered hair was all but gone, and blood trickled from one nostril and the corner of his mouth. He wiped both streaks away with the back of one graying hand. “What are you doing up and about?” he said with his usual sneer. “I thought you’d just die like a dog, like the others.”
Burrell had a way with people, and not a good one. Actually most of the crew hated him, his condescending attitude, and his gruff nature. He had been assigned as System’s Specialist because he knew the engine and ship design better than anyone else, not because of his winning personality. Generally, I kept my distance from him, and he never bothered me much, so we got along, I guess. I decided against having an argument over his insult to myself and the rest of the crew, used a shrug for an answer, and returned to my original question. “What are you working on?”
He looked me over once, assessing, I now assume, my physical condition. He waved the multitool he was using as he spoke. “I guess if I let you in on this, you won’t be able to stop me anyway.”
I waited without answering, making sure I didn’t seem concerned by the implied threat of violence, although he might have mistaken my unsteady legs as a sign of fear. But the way he fiercely held the multi-tool did make me wonder if THE DISEASE had driven him insane.
“I’m trying to override the Captain’s command codes. I want to change our flight path after we drop out of hyperspace.”
“Why? Has the medical ship sent word of a different rendezvous point?”
“I don’t want to rendezvous with them.”
“What?” I said, taking a half step in his direction. I stopped abruptly when he held the tool up in a striking position. “The medical ship is our last hope of survival.”
He laughed madly, then coughed. Blood spattered out with each hack. I would have thought he was further along than myself if it hadn’t been for my own bouts of vomiting blood on and off for the last several hours. “We have no hope of survival,” he said bitterly. “We’re all dead.”
I hesitated, because, while I had tried not to think about it too much, I agreed with him. “Even so, why avoid the medical frigate? Where would we go?”
“The sun.”
“But why?”
“To destroy everything, completely. This disease must be stopped. It’s the only way.”
“But the medical ship can analyze it, and maybe”
“Don’t be a fool, Stenstrom. You and I know better than anyone what will happen. Our biofilters are every bit as advanced as theirs. We were fully suited and protected when the shuttle came back with the others. What good did it do us?” He held out his arms to illustrate his point, the gray skin starting to hang loosely under the biceps, open sores plentiful on each arm.
I couldn’t argue with what he was saying. Our respective duties deemed that Burrell and I waited aboard the Horizon while the rest of the crew took the ship’s shuttle down to a planet. It seems years ago now when they radioed back from a world never named, although it was our right to do so having found the first alien life. Simple spores of some sort, but life just the same. Before we even had a chance to begin celebrating, the first crewman fell ill. By the time the shuttle returned, Burrell and I were making sure we followed decontamination procedures to the letter. It hadn’t mattered.
“What do you think will happen,” he continued, “if we let the people from that medical ship on board?”
I knew the answer, but chose to avoid it, like we had all been doing since we called in our medical emergency. I shrugged stupidly.
Burrell waved a hand at me and let out a frustrated grunt. “They’ll die too, and you know it. But that won’t be all. They’ll head back to Earth, because, they’ll figure, the best medical attention can be had there.”
“They’d be right,” I said softly.
“Of course they would!
So they’d convince themselves to go back, and the biofilters and all the precautions in the world would do nothing. Nothing! Then what would happen?”
He said this last like he was speaking to a child, which was typical of how he discussed technical matters with other members of the crew, including, at times.
Captain Conlin. Part of me wished I was the one holding the maxi-tool. “Why didn’t you bring this up a few days ago, when everyone could have discussed it? You were standing right there when we signalled our situation back and arranged for the medical ship.”
“Everyone was still healthy enough then to try to hold on, to look for a solution. Now we’re past that. All that’s left is salvaging what we can, and that’s trying to protect everyone from us and this demon we’re carrying.”
I saw something in his eyes I hadn’t before—he was looking for my agreement despite himself, like it mattered to him. I mulled things over, and had to admit to myself that I really wasn’t holding out any hope of them curing us. There wouldn’t be enough time. At least this way, we could take THE DISEASE with us. Out of spite, like my decision to get out of bed and walk around, but when it’s all you can do . . .
I finally granted him a slow nod.
He seemed a bit relieved at this, but his expression fell well short of a smile. “I could use some help here, if you’re with me.”
“The sun,” I said, delaying commitment to his plan. “You think that’s the only solution?”
“We can’t just let the ship float in space. They’d board it eventually. A star is the only way to be sure, purification by destruction.” He must have noticed something peculiar about my expression. “What’s wrong?”
I smiled slightly, a bit embarrassed. “I’ve always been afraid of dying by fire. I just wish there was another way.”
“Look, it’ll be over quickly. It won’t be like being trapped in a burning building or anything.”
He surprised me with his tone, almost as if he wanted to ease my fears. “What can I do to help?”
We rearranged circuits and wires for some time, although I really had no idea what I was doing, but Burrell did and gave me a new task when each previous one was complete. Eventually, after a couple of failed tests, we found we could override the Captain’s command codes. I programmed in a new flight path, one that would take us directly from our reentry point in the solar system, just beyond Mars, straight into the all-consuming embrace of the sun. When the job was complete, we both remained where we sat, exhausted. I was glad then for the work, since it had taken my mind off the pain for a while.
“You think any of the others are gone yet?” I asked. My speech sounded a bit slurred, and I could feel the way my lips hung loosely. I was glad I could
n’t see my own face, even if I had to see Burrell’s, knowing as time passed it was more and more a mirror.
He shrugged. “Even if they are, we need to leave them on the ship now. Best they go into the sun with us. I just hope they don’t ever find the bodies we already left behind. They could still be deadly. I think the Captain’s quarantine message for the sector will hold, at least for a time. But if if doesn’t, what we’re doing will all be for nothing.”
I nodded tiredly. “What do you think it is?”
“What?”
“THE DISEASE.”
He thought for a time and then shook his head. “Whatever it is, it’s something humanity isn’t currently equipped to deal with. Other plagues in our past at least gave us time to act and test the victims before they were gone, and were passed on only through certain types of direct contact between infected and uninfected, be it insects, animals, or humans. But this. . . . There’s never been anything that was so deadly so fast, or anything passed so easily. Did you know Nayden’s computer told him it was at least 1200 times more contagious than the collection of germs we refer to as the common cold?”
I shook my head slowly. Everything I learned about this thing made me hate it and respect it even more.
“If only we could have slowed it down,” said Burrell, slapping a hand in frustration against his knee. “It just ate us up, like a ravenous pack of wolves set loose among the sheep. But I guess if we could have slowed it, it wouldn’t be THE DISEASE.”
As I looked at him, I thought I could see the same respect I felt for the invisible killer. The difference was I had never sensed Burrell to have respect for anyone or anything. Strange that THE DISEASE, the thing that would kill him, the thing he hated like the rest of us, might have also been the only thing he truly admired.
A single bell-tone from the ship’s computer told us we were dropping out of hyperspace. As soon as we had, we could hear the medical ship hail us. I looked at Burrell, who took in a deep breath, then struggled to his feet.