Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  “Jesus, Lee,” he whispered. “I can see the whole damn spectrum below 100 angstroms. So can they. I banked on the cancer vampires being drawn to the stuff I’d irradiated just like the tumor slugs were. I came here last night—to the wards—to check on it. They do come, kiddo, but it doesn’t kill them. They flock around the irradiated stuff like moths to a flame, but it doesn’t kill them. Even the tumor slugs need high dosages if you’re going to get them all. I mean, I started in the millirem dosages—like the radiation therapy they use here—and found that it just didn’t get enough of them. To be sure, I had to get in the region of 300 to 400 roentgens. I mean, we’re talking Chernobyl here, kiddo.”

  Louis quit talking and walked quickly to the bathroom, lowering his head to the toilet to vomit as quietly as possible. Afterward he washed his face as best he could with the thick gloves on and returned to Lee’s bedside. She was frowning slightly in her drugged sleep. Louis remembered the times he had crept into her bedroom as a child to frighten her awake with garter snakes or squirt guns or spiders. “Fuck it,” he said and removed his gloves.

  His hands glowed like five-fingered, blue-white suns. As Louis watched in the mirrors snapped down on his hat brim, the light filled the room like cold fire. “It won’t hurt, kiddo,” he whispered as he unsnapped the first two buttons on Lee’s pajama tops. Her breasts were small, hardly larger than when he had peeked in on her emerging from the shower when she was fifteen. He smiled as he remembered the whipping he had received for that, and then he laid his right hand on her left breast.

  For a second nothing happened. Then the tumor slugs came out, antennae rising like pulpy periscopes from Lee’s flesh, their gray-green color bleached by the brilliance of Louis’s glowing hand.

  They slid into him through his palm, his wrist, the back of his hand. Louis gasped as he felt them slither through his flesh, the sensation faint but nauseating, like having a wire inserted in one’s veins while under a local anaesthetic.

  Louis counted six … eight of the things sliding from Lee’s breast into the blue-white flaring of his hand and arm. He held his palm flat for a full minute after the last slug entered, resisting the temptation to scream or pull his hand away as he saw the muscles of his forearm writhe as one of the things flowed upward, swimming through his flesh.

  As an extra precaution, Louis moved his palm across Lee’s chest, throat, and belly, feeling her stir in her sleep, fighting the sedatives in an unsuccessful battle to awaken. There was one more slug—hardly more than a centimeter long—which rose from the taut skin just below her sternum, but it flared and withered before coming in contact with his blue-white flesh, curling like a dried leaf too close to a hot fire.

  Louis rose and removed his thick layers of clothes, watching in the wide mirror opposite Lee’s bed. His entire body fluoresced, the brilliance fading from white to blue-white to violet and then sliding away into frequencies even he could not see. Again he thought of the bug lights one saw near patios and the blind-spot sense of frustration the eye conveyed as it strained at the fringes of perception. The mirrors hanging from the brim of his hat caught and scattered the light.

  Louis folded his clothes neatly, laid them on the chair near Lee, kissed her softly on the cheek, and walked from room to room, the brilliance from his body leaping ahead of him, filling the corridors with blue-white shadows and pinwheels of impossible colors.

  There was no one at the nurse’s station. The tile floor felt cool beneath Louis’s bare feet as he went from room to room, laying on his hands. Some of the patients slept on. Some watched him with wide eyes but neither moved nor cried out. Louis wondered at this but glanced down without his mirrors and realized that for the first time he could see the brilliance of his heavily irradiated flesh and bone with his own eyes. His body was a pulsing star in human form. Louis could easily hear the radio waves as a buzzing, crackling sound, like a great forest fire still some miles away.

  The tumor slugs flowed from their victims and into Louis. Not everyone on this floor had cancer, but in most rooms he had only to enter to see the frenzied response of green-gray or grub-white worms straining to get at him. Louis took them all. He felt his body swallow the things, sensed the maddened turmoil within. Only once more did he have to stop to vomit. His bowels shifted and roiled, but there was so much motion in him now that Louis ignored it.

  In Debbie’s room, Louis pulled the sheet off her sleeping form, pulled up the short gown, and laid his cheek to the soft bulge of her belly. The tumor slugs flowed into his face and throat; he drank them in willingly.

  Louis rose, left his sleeping lover, and walked to the long, open ward where the majority of cancer patients lay waiting for death.

  The cancer vampires followed him. They flowed through walls and floors to follow him. He led them to the main ward, a blazing blue-white pied piper leading a chorus of dead children.

  There were at least a score of them by the time he stopped in the center of the ward, but he did not let them approach until he had gone from bed to bed, accepting the last of the tumor slugs into himself, seeing with his surreal vision as the eggs inside these victims hatched prematurely to give up their writhing treasure. Louis made sure the tumor slugs were with him before he moved to the center of the room, raised his arms, and let the cancer vampires come closer.

  Louis felt heavy, twice his normal weight, pregnant with death. He glanced at his blazing limbs and belly and saw the very surface of himself alive with the motion of maggots feeding on his light.

  Louis raised his arms wider, pulled his head far back, closed his eyes, and let the cancer vampires feed.

  The things were voracious, drawn by the X-ray beacon of Louis’s flesh and the silent beckoning of their larval offspring. They shouldered and shoved each other aside in their eagerness to feed. Louis grimaced as he felt a dozen sharp piercings, felt himself almost lifted off the floor by nightmare energies suddenly made tangible. He looked once, saw the terrible curve of the top of a dead-child’s head as the thing buried its face to the temples in Louis’s chest, and then he closed his eyes until they were done.

  Louis staggered, gripped the metal footboard of a bed to keep from falling. The score of cancer vampires in the room had finished feeding but Louis could feel his own body still weighted with slugs. He watched.

  The child-thing nearest to him seemed bloated, its body as distended as a white spider bursting with eggs. Through its translucent flesh, Louis could see glowing tumor slugs shifting frantically like electric silverfish.

  Even through his nausea and pain, Louis smiled. Whatever the reproductive-feeding cycle of these things had been, Louis now felt sure that he had disrupted it with the irradiated meal he had offered the tumor slugs.

  The cancer vampire in front of him staggered, leaned far forward, and looked even more spiderish as its impossibly long fingers stretched to keep it from falling.

  A blue-white gash appeared along the thing’s side and belly. Two bloated, thrashing slugs appeared in a rush of violent energy. The cancer vampire arched its back and raised its feeding mouth in a scream that was audible to Louis as someone scraping their teeth down ten feet of blackboard.

  The slugs ripped free of the vampire’s shredded belly, dumping themselves on the floor and writhing in a bath of ultraviolet blood, steaming and shriveling there like true slugs Louis had once seen sprinkled with salt. The cancer vampire spasmed, clutched at its gaping, eviscerated belly, and then thrashed several times and died, its bony limbs and long fingers slowly closing up like the legs of a crushed spider.

  There were screams, human and otherwise, but Louis paid no attention as he watched the death throes of the two dozen spectral forms in the room. His vision had altered permanently now and the beds and their human occupants were mere shadows in a great space blazing in ultraviolet and infrared but dominated by the blue-white corona which was his own body. He vomited once more, doubling over to retch up blood and two dying, glowing slugs, but this was a minor inconvenience
as long as his strength held out and at that second he felt that it would last forever.

  Louis looked down, through the floor, through five floors, seeing the hospital as levels of clear plastic interlaced with webs of energy from electrical wiring, lights, machines, and organisms. Many organisms. The healthy ones glowed a soft orange but he could see the pale yellow infections, the grayish corruptions, and the throbbing black pools of incipient death.

  Rising, Louis stepped over the dying corpses of cancer vampires and the acid-pools which had been thrashing slugs seconds before. Although he already could see beyond, he opened wide doors and stepped out onto the terrace. The night air was cool.

  Drawn by the extraordinary light, they waited. Hundreds of yellow eyes turned upwards to stare from blue-black pits set in dead faces. Mouths pulsed. Hundreds more of the things converged as Louis watched.

  Louis raised his own eyes, seeing more stars than anyone had ever seen as the night sky throbbed with uncountable X-ray sources and infinite tendrils of unnamed colors. He looked down to where they continued to gather, by the thousands now, their pale faces glowing like candles in a procession. Louis prayed for a single miracle. He prayed that he could feed them all. “Tonight, Death,” he whispered, the sound too soft for even him to hear, “you shall die.”

  Louis stepped to the railing, raised his arms, and went down to join those who waited.

  Introduction to “The Offering”

  Just recently, as I write this in the early autumn of 1989, I optioned my novel Carrion Comfort to a film and TV production group. As is the case with many would-be Ben Hechts, I wanted first crack at the screenplay.

  All right, said the production group, but first let’s see what you can do with a half-hour TV script.

  I’ve never written a teleplay or screenplay before, but being a child of the second half of the Twentieth Century, I feel like I’ve lived in the movies for most of my life. As a writer, I’ve heard all of the horror stories about doing work-for-hire in this particular collaborative medium: the senseless rewrite demands, the producer’s girlfriend suggesting a “great idea” that guts your script, the contempt so much of the industry has for writers (“Didja hear the one about the Polish starlet visiting Hollywood? To get ahead she slept with all the writers!”), the endless compromises of quality in the face of budget or perceived market demands or whim or … you name it. The list of aggravations seems infinite.

  That’s why it was interesting to me that my first attempt at script writing was a lot of fun. The rewrite suggestions not only were minimal but definitely improved the product. The people I dealt with were professionals, and I always enjoy working with people who know their business—whether it’s in carpentry or filmmaking. Of course, my agent says that it was a fluke … that studio was OK but the next will drive me to drink and beyond. My agent is a gentleman and a friend … he humors me … but I know that in his heart he thinks that I should quit while I’m ahead.

  Well, maybe. Maybe after one more TV show. Then perhaps a movie. Just a little movie … and then, just maybe, a twenty-hour mini-series. And then …

  Meanwhile, I thought you might be interested in how I decided to adapt “Metastasis” to teleplay form. Reading scripts is not the easiest or most enjoyable literary pursuit, so if you skip over this entry it’s understandable.

  But if you do bear on, it might interest you to know some of the demands and restrictions a low-budget syndicated TV series makes on the writer who’s adapting a story.

  First, the thing has to run about 22 or 23 pages to fit its half-hour format, averaging about a minute per page, since the rest of the time is taken up by the fershtugginer commercials that keep so many of us from watching these syndicated shows.

  Second, as I’m sure you know, the “exciting parts” come right before the commercial cluster breaks. (They don’t really give a damn what happens the last few minutes of the show … they don’t need to get you back after that break.)

  Third, budget restrictions on this show allowed only three or four characters, or at least only that many characters who could speak. No exterior shots (but the director wanted the “windshield” shots in the opening). Only two interior sets and those easy to construct. Limited special effects—one or two optical processes, a few seconds of simple animation, and a guy in a monster suit and/or mask.

  Fourth, they wanted a new title. “Metastasis” was out. They were afraid the audience would flip channels rather than watch something with such an ominous, disease-ridden sound to it.

  Fifth, one of the top people thought I should also throw out the idea of “cancer vampires”—but, hey, I had to draw the line somewhere. I pointed out that this was the concept for which they had bought the story. I reasoned with them. I used logic. Then I held my breath until I turned blue, pounded my heels on the linoleum, and threatened to fax them six bales of junk mail if they didn’t let me keep my cancer vampire. They relented.

  There’s more, but I think you get the idea. The question I faced was—could I adapt “Metastasis” so that the essence of the short story survived even while I tossed out major plot elements, characters, settings, and structure for the reasons listed above?

  I found the challenge rather enjoyable. As I write this, the studio is just finishing the filming (actually taping) of “The Offering” and I have no idea when I’ll see it. I don’t know which actors were chosen. I can only guess what changes were made in the script during the actual production. (For those of you interested, the program will be aired on a syndicated series called MONSTERS, scheduled somewhere between 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. in most local markets. God knows where and when it will be by the time you read this.)

  I’d be curious to know what you think of this adaptation.

  The Offering

  ACT I

  FADE IN:

  1. EXT. A CAR. NIGHT.

  We open with a montage of images: E.C.U. of rain on a windshield, the blur of a windshield wiper; we close on LOUIS—a handsome young man but agitated now, unshaven, intense, blinking in the glare of oncoming lights and obviously upset about something—a sudden flash of light too bright to be a passing car, brakes squealing, metal tearing … from Louis’s P.O.V. we see everything spinning and the glare expanding, the sound of impact, filling the universe with rising noise and moving light …

  DISSOLVE TO:

  2. INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. DAY.

  The moving light blurs, comes into focus, and we see that it is a penlight held by DR. HUBBARD, an avuncular, older man wearing a white hospital coat over his suit.

  DR. HUBBARD

  Louis? Louis, can you hear me? Louis?

  Louis tries to lift his head but is restrained by the doctor.

  DR. HUBBARD

  Easy, Louis. Easy. Just lie still for a moment. Do you know where you are?

  Louis’s head is heavily bandaged. He groans again, tries to lift both hands to his head, but stops—staring at his hospital ID bracelet, the IV in his left arm, his hospital gown—looking around in surprise. He moves his head slowly, obviously in great pain, and squints up at the doctor.

  LOUIS

  Dr. Hubbard? Yeah, I know where I am … the hospital … but why? What happened?

  The doctor smiles, plays with his unlit pipe.

  DR. HUBBARD

  We’ve been worried about you, Louis. You had quite a serious concussion. You’ve been unconscious for almost seventy-two hours. Do you remember the accident?

  LOUIS

  Accident? Uh-uh, I don’t remember any … Wait, I remember you calling me … telling me that Mom had been admitted to Mt. Sinai … that you had to operate … Oh, God, I remember … cancer! She has cancer! Like Dad.

  Louis starts to sit up but the pain is so intense that he almost passes out. Dr. Hubbard takes him firmly by the shoulders, sets him gently back on the pillows.

  DR. HUBBARD

  (attempting to make his voice light)

  Louis, I told you to come to the hospital, not put yourself
in it. Do you remember anything about the accident?

  Louis’s eyes are still closed as he fights the pain, concentrates. Finally he shakes his head … he can’t quite remember.

  DR. HUBBARD

  After I told you about your mother’s illness, you drove across town like a madman. Evidently your car hit some black ice on the Youngman Expressway … rolled four or five times, the patrolman said … Well, you’ve always been a bit reckless, Louis. Or at least since …

  Dr. Hubbard removes the pipe, frowns at it as if just discovering it is unlit, and shakes his head.

  LOUIS

  (voice thick)

  Was anyone else hurt?

  DR. HUBBARD

  No … no one else. And you were lucky, my boy. The pressure on the left frontal lobe of your brain was … well, it could have been very serious. As it is, you’ll have quite a headache for a week or two … possibly some double vision …

  Louis opens his eyes and it is obvious by the intensity ol his gaze that he is not worried about his own well-being.

  LOUIS

  Dr. Hubbard, how’s Mom? You said on the phone that she had to go into surgery right away. Did you operate? Did you get all the cancer? Or is it … like Dad’s cancer when I was a kid. Is it too late?

  Dr. Hubbard removes his pipe again, turns it over and over in his hands and stares at it.

  DR. HUBBARD

  This is a filthy habit, Louis. I gave it up a year ago, but still carry the pipe around … can’t get used to not having the thing with me …

  Louis sits up in spite of the pain, grips the doctor’s white coat and pulls him closer.

  LOUIS

  Tell me, damn it. How is she? How serious is the cancer? Is Mom going to be all right?