Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  Plan on it, Mia thought grimly. She stored the data on the dying toddler’s matrilineage in her handheld.

  ~~~~~

  A week in base, and Mia could convince no one, not separately nor in a group. Medicians typically had tolerant psychological profiles, with higher-than-average acceptance of the unusual, divergent, and eccentric. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have joined the Corps.

  On the third day, to keep herself busy, Mia joined the junior medicians working on refining the cure for what was now verified as "limbic seizures with impaired sensory input causing Charles Bonnet syndrome." Over the next few weeks it became clear to Mia what Kenin had meant; this treatment, if they had to use it, would be brutally hard on the brain. What was that old ditty? "Cured last night of my disease, I died today of my physician." Well, it still happened enough in the Corps. Another reason behind the board’s decision.

  She felt a curious reluctance to go back to Esefeb. Or, as the words kept running through her mind, Mia ek etej Esefeb efef. God, it was a tongue twister. These people didn’t just need help with parasites, they needed an infusion of new consonants. It was a relief to be back at base, to be working with her mind, solving technical problems alongside rational scientists. Still, she couldn’t shake a feeling of being alone, being lonely: Mia eket.

  Or maybe the feeling was more like futility.

  "Lolimel’s back," Jamal said. He’d come up behind her as she sat at dusk on her favorite stone bench, facing the city. At this time of day the ruins looked romantic, infused with history. The sweet scents of that night-blooming flower, which Mia still hadn’t identified, wafted around her.

  "I think you should come now," Jamal said, and this time Mia heard his tone. She spun around. In the alien shadows Jamal’s face was set as ice.

  "He’s contracted it," Mia said, knowing beyond doubt that it was true. The virus wasn’t just fetally transmitted, it wasn’t a slow-acting retrovirus, and if Lolimel had slept with Esefeb...But he wouldn’t be that stupid. He was a medician, he’d been warned...

  "We don’t really know anything solid about the goddamn thing!" Jamal burst out.

  "We never do," Mia said, and the words cracked her dry lips like salt.

  ~~~~~

  Lolimel stood in the center of the ruined atrium, giggling at something only he could see. Kenin, who could have proceeded without Mia, nodded at her. Mia understood; Kenin acknowledged the special bond Mia had with the young medician. The cure was untested, probably brutal, no more really than dumping a selection of poisons in the right areas of the brain, in itself problematical with the blood-brain barrier.

  Mia made herself walk calmly up to Lolimel. "What’s so funny, Lolimel?"

  "All those sandwigs crawling in straight lines over the floor. I never saw blue ones before."

  Sandwigs. Lolimel, she remembered, had been born on New Carthage. Sandwigs were always red.

  Lolimel said, "But why is there a tree growing out of your head, Mia?"

  "Strong fertilizer," she said. "Lolimel, did you have sex with Esefeb?"

  He looked genuinely shocked. "No!"

  "All right." He might or might not be lying.

  Jamal whispered, "A chance to study the hallucinations in someone who can fully articulate—"

  "No," Kenin said. "Time matters with this..." Mia saw that she couldn’t bring herself to say "cure."

  Realization dawned on Lolimel’s face. "Me? You’re going to...me? There’s nothing wrong with me!"

  "Lolimel, dear heart..." Mia said.

  "I don’t have it!"

  "And the floor doesn’t have sandwigs. Lolimel—"

  "No!"

  The guards had been alerted. Lolimel didn’t make it out of the atrium. They held him, flailing and yelling, while Kenin deftly slapped on a tranq patch. In ten seconds he was out.

  "Tie him down securely," Kenin said, breathing hard. "Daniel, get the brain bore started as soon as he’s prepped. Everyone else, start packing up, and impose quarantine. We can’t risk this for anyone else here. I’m calling a Section Eleven."

  Section Eleven: If the MedCorps officer in charge deems the risk to Corps members to exceed the gain to colonists by a factor of three or more, the officer may pull the Corps off-planet.

  It was the first time Mia had ever seen Kenin make a unilateral decision.

  ~~~~~

  Twenty-four hours later, Mia sat beside Lolimel as dusk crept over the city. The shuttle had already carried up most personnel and equipment. Lolimel was in the last shift because, as Kenin did not need to say aloud, if he died, his body would be left behind. But Lolimel had not died. He had thrashed in unconscious seizures, had distorted his features in silent grimaces of pain until Mia would not have recognized him, had suffered malfunctions in alimentary, lymphatic, endocrine, and parasympathetic nervous systems, all recorded on the monitors. But he would live. The others didn’t know it, but Mia did.

  "We’re ready for him, Mia," the young tech said. "Are you on this shuttle, too?"

  "No, the last one. Move him carefully. We don’t know how much pain he’s actually feeling through the meds."

  She watched the gurney slide out of the room, its monitors looming over Lolimel like cliffs over a raging river. When he’d gone, Mia slipped into the next building, and then the next. Such beautiful buildings: spacious atria, beautifully proportioned rooms, one structure flowing into another.

  Eight buildings away, she picked up the pack she’d left there. It was heavy, even though it didn’t contain everything she had cached around the city. It was so easy to take things when a base was being hastily withdrawn. Everyone was preoccupied, everyone assumed anything not readily visible was already packed, inventories were neglected and the deebees not cross-checked. No time. Historically, war had always provided great opportunities for profiteers.

  Was that what she was? Yes, but not a profit measured in money. Measure it, rather, in lives saved, or restored to dignity, or enhanced. "Why did you first enter the Corps?" Because I’m a medician, Lolimel. Not an anthropologist.

  They would notice, of course, that Mia herself wasn’t aboard the last shuttle. But Kenin, at least, would realize that searching from her would be a waste of valuable resources when Mia didn’t want to be found. And Mia was so old. Surely the old should be allowed to make their own decisions.

  Although she would miss them, these Corps members who had been her family since the last assignment shuffle, eighteen months ago and decades go, depending on whose time you counted by. Especially she would miss Lolimel. But this was the right way to end her life, in service to these colonists’ health. She was a medician.

  ~~~~~

  It went better than Mia could have hoped. When the ship had gone—she’d seen it leave orbit, a fleeting stream of light—Mia went to Esefeb.

  "Mia etej efef," Esefeb said with her rosy smile. Mia come home. Mia walked toward her, hugged the girl, and slapped the tranq patch on her neck.

  For the next week, Mia barely slept. After the makeshift surgery, she tended Esefeb through the seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, pain. On the morning the girl woke up, herself again, Mia was there to bathe the feeble body, feed it, nurse Esefeb. She recovered very fast; the cure was violent on the body but not as debilitating as everyone had feared. And afterwards Esefeb was quieter, meeker, and surprisingly intelligent as Mia taught her the rudiments of water purification, sanitation, safe food storage, health care. By the time Mia moved on to Esefeb’s mother’s house, Esefeb was free of most parasites, and Mia was working on the rest. Esefeb never mentioned her former hallucinations. It was possible she didn’t remember them.

  "Esefeb ekebet," Mia said as she hefted her pack to leave. Esefeb be well.

  Esefeb nodded. She stood quietly as Mia trudged away, and when Mia turned to wave at her, Esefeb waved back.

  Mia shifted the pack on her shoulders. It seemed heavier than before. Or maybe Mia was just older. Two weeks older, merely, but two weeks could make a big difference. An enormous
difference.

  Two weeks could start to save a civilization.

  ~~~~~

  Night fell. Esefeb sat on the stairs to her bed, clutching the blue-green sheet of plastic in both hands. She sobbed and shivered, her clean face contorted. Around her, the unpopulated shadows grew thicker and darker. Eventually, she wailed aloud to the empty night.

  "Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es...etej efef! O, etej efef!"

  (Back to TOC)

  You Don’t Know My Heart

  Spider Robinson

  Tried to fit, I tried to blend

  I learned young to pretend

  'cause if they knew, the world would end

  ~ from You Don't Know My Heart by Janis Ian

  I was onstage at Slim’s, halfway through my last set, when I saw the two hitters come in.

  It wasn’t hard to spot them, even in the poor light. They were both way too straight for Slim’s Elite Cafe. They were pretending to be a leather couple, even holding hands, but I didn’t buy it and doubted many others would. No gunfighter mustaches, no visible piercings, no jewelry, the leather was brand new, the tats were fake, and the stubble on their skulls and faces was two days old, tops. Either of them alone might have been exploring the darker corners of his sexuality on vacation, a Key West cliché; together, though, the only use they’d have for a queer was as a punching bag. They were not at all uneasy in a place where their kind was doubly outnumbered—about two dykes like me to every fag, a normal night—so I assumed they were armed. I didn’t panic. I know a way to get from the stage of Slim’s to elsewhere faster than most people can react, and since I’ve never had to use it I’m pretty sure it will work. I kept playing without missing a beat—okay, I fluffed a guitar fill, but it wasn’t a train wreck. An old Janis Ian song; she goes over well at Slim’s and I can sing in her key.

  All the broken promises

  all the shattered dreams

  all this aching loneliness

  will finally be set free

  I have waited for so long

  to remember what it’s like

  to feel somebody’s arms around my life

  After a minute or so, my adrenalin level dropped back to about performance-normal. I couldn’t decide whether they were Good Guys or Bad Guys, but either way they didn’t seem to be looking for me, so the question held little urgency. It was hard to tell who they were after. The whole room was basically a big poorly-lit box of suspicious characters, flight risks, and hopeful victims—disasters looking for the spot marked X. Or, of course, I could be mistaken: the pair could be off-duty, their real assignment elsewhere. Or, just possibly, they might be two men in their early thirties who’d suddenly realized they were leatherboys, and by great fortune had met out on the street five minutes ago.

  They had been chatting quietly together since they’d come in, ignoring those around them and, far more unforgivably, my music. But when I finished the song, the applause caused one of them, the uglier of the two, to glance up at the stage and see me. One look was all he felt he needed. Dyke, said his face, and he looked away, subtracting me from his landscape. No, they weren’t novice leatherboys—or even postulants.

  Well, when someone insults my sexuality while I’m on stage, out loud or silently, I have a stock response: I sing "You Don’t Know My Heart." It’s another Janis Ian song, actually—one of the best songs I know about being gay, because there isn’t a drop of anger in it anywhere that I can see. Just sadness. It sums up everything I’ve always wanted to say to dyke-hasslers and queer-bashers and minority-abusers of all stripes, all they really deserve to know, and all they should need to know, without the rage that always makes me choke if I do try and talk to them, and keeps them from listening if I succeed.

  We learn to stand in the shadows

  watch the way the wind blows

  thinking no one knows

  we’re one of a kind

  Shy glances at the neighboring team

  Romance is a dangerous dream

  never knowing if they’ll laugh or scream

  Living on a fault line

  Will you/won’t you be mine?

  Hoping it will change in time

  One of the two hitters got up to go to the can, leaving his friend at the table. To get there he had to pass in front of the stage. I caught his eye and pointedly aimed the chorus of the song at him as he approached, not quite pointing to him and singing straight at him, but almost.

  And if people say we chose this way

  to set ourselves apart—I say

  you don’t know my heart

  You don’t know my heart

  He got the message—as much of it as would penetrate—grimaced at me and glanced away.

  You don’t know my heart

  You don’t know my heart

  It was when he glanced away that he suddenly acquired his target. I saw his face change, followed his gaze, and realized they were after Dora Something-or-Other.

  It seemed ridiculous. Who sends a pair of pros after a drag queen?

  ~~~~~

  There are people in Key West who were born in Key West, but statistically you’re unlikely to meet one unless you make an effort.

  It’s a place most people pass through, and others end up. The lucky ones take a moment to recover, then regroup, make a plan and go somewhere else. Others sit for a long or a short time on the bottom, half-concealed in the ooze, until one vagrant current or another stirs them up and carries them back north into the stream of life. And some sink into the mud for keeps and begin growing barnacles and coral deposits of their own. Key West is Endsville. There’s just no further to run; you have to stop, steal a boat or start swimming.

  You might think a town full of losers, runaways, fugitives and failures would have a high crime rate, but in fact there’s almost none. Everyone seems to want to keep their heads down and chill; in many cases an over gaudy lifestyle was why they had to leave America and come here in the first place. There is zero organized crime, except for municipal government. Oh, I’m sure all the big chain hotels have their liquor, linen and garbage needs dealt with by the right firms out of Miami. Beyond that there simply isn’t anything on The Rock to interest the mob. It’s a beehive of small-time tourist hustles, hard to keep track of and beneath their dignity to tax. Circuit hookers can’t compete with the constantly changing parade of semi-pros, beginners, stupefied coeds and reckless secretaries on vacation. Consequently the gangsters have always treated the place as a neutral zone. No family claims it, and if you see somebody with bodyguards, you know he must be a civilian. In a town full of illegal immigrants and bail-jumpers, KWPD has fired more cops than it has shots.

  It’s a wonderful place to hide. That’s why most of us are there.

  Including, apparently, Dora Whatsername.

  ~~~~~

  What I wanted to do was catch Dora’s eye, hold it long enough to engage his attention, then gesture with my eyes and eyebrows toward the hitters. It would of course be good to do this without letting the hitters catch me at it. Now was the time, then, with one of them in the can. But the remaining one happened to be the last folk music fan left outside Key West, and was watching me perform.

  I had a rush of brains to the head, and began singing "You Don’t Know My Heart" directly to him, just as I had to his partner a moment ago.

  Tried to fit, I tried to blend

  I learned young to pretend

  ‘cause if they knew, the world would end

  Frightened of my family

  Where is anyone like me?

  When will I be free?

  Sure enough, the penny dropped. He started hearing the words. He too grimaced in disgust—a tragic waste of pussy—and looked away.

  Moments later I had eye contact with Dora. We didn’t know each other very well, and had never shared so much as a conversation—we played in different leagues—so he wasted several long seconds being surprised and puzzled. Fortunately, disgust outlasts confusion. By the time hitter numb
er two got over being grossed out and looked back my way, Dora was discreetly clocking the guy out of the corner of his eye.

  Unless specifically asked otherwise, I usually refer to drag queens as "she." I like to think it’s more from politeness than political correctness. But every so often you meet one like Dora, who’s so hopeless at it that "he" is the only pronoun you can bring yourself to use. I’d never quite been able to pin down what it was he got wrong. He didn’t have broad shoulders, muscular arms, thick wrists, deep voice, heavy beard or prominent Adam’s apple. He didn’t totter on heels or sit with his legs open. His face was kind of cute, in the right light, and he didn’t overdo the makeup or the camp more than a drag queen is supposed to. Yet somehow the overall effect was of a female impersonator.

  Which was fine with me. I have no business criticizing anybody else’s act: I sing folk. We moved in different circles, was all.

  At first I think Dora thought I was pointing out the leather boy as someone he might want to fan with his false eyelashes, and if so he must have thought I was nuts. Nearly at once, though, I saw him pick up on the fact that the guy was a phony—one with hard muscles and empty eyes. He glanced my way with one eyebrow raised, nodded his thanks, and went back to discreetly studying his watcher.

  Hitter number one got back to the table and rejoined his partner just as I was finishing the song. Because I was looking for it, I noticed that beneath his leather pants, his right ankle was thicker on the outside than his left. That’s where a right-handed man will hide a gun. So: not hitters, but shooters.

  There followed an amusing charade in which the shooters tried to discuss Dora without being caught at it, and Dora pretended not to clock the whole thing. It was a lot like the mating dances going on all around the room, except that this one, I was pretty sure, was intended to end with a literal bang. Dora looked unconcerned, but I didn’t see how he was going to get out of it. His pursuers looked fit enough to run up the side of Martello Tower; no way was he going to unrun them, not in those heels.

  So I flanged up my guitar a couple of notches, called out, "Anybody feel like dancing?" and launched into Jimmy Buffett’s "Fins."