by R. Lee Smith
Not a vaccine. The Vaccine. And even Nicci, who obviously tried so hard to understand as little as she possibly could, knew what that was. Because before the Director had been the leader of a bunch of space-happy freaks, he’d been a doctor, and much as he would like to say that his greatest contribution to humanity was the ship that would carry the first colonists to another world (and he said that a lot), he would probably always be known best for the Vaccine, which worked itself all the way down into your DNA and made it so you could never get sick again. Here on Earth, people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to endure the agonizing year-long process while the Vaccine was introduced, but the Director was just giving them all away to his happy little colonists, who’d get them painlessly in their Sleepers, which was the perfect application process, according to the brochure. No more worrying about that niggling little 14% failure rate or the greatly exaggerated reports of the birth defects caused by genetic drift. They’d just wake up, secure in the knowledge that now they were cured for life of every possible virus—of the flu, of HIV, of whatever alien illness might be crawling around on Plymouth. Of everything.
Amber could see this sweeping, silent argument hammering away at Nicci’s defenses. Ever since the Ebola attack at the UN summit, there had been a dramatic end to the prohibitions on biological warfare. These days, it was fight fire with fire, and now it seemed every country was bragging about the bugs they could grow. Super-polio, rabies-13, dengue, hanta, yellowpox and God only knew what else. They lived in the city. They were a target. It could happen any day.
“Well…” Nicci ran her wet eyes over the papers on the table without seeming to really see any of them. “Can’t we go on the next ship? When we know it’s safe?”
“No.”
“There’s going to be more!” She reached tentatively for the Manifestor’s pamphlet, but withdrew her hand without touching it. “We can take the next one, okay?”
“No, Nicci. They only pay people to be colonists for the first ship, because it’s the first and everyone wants to wait and see what happens. After it gets there safe and sound, the Manifestors stop paying and start charging.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I do know that, actually, because I was there and I talked to them. I also know that the next three ships are already booked, so it’s this or nothing. Well,” she amended ruthlessly, “it’s this or go on the state or start whoring. I guess we do have options.”
Nicci sniffled and rubbed at her face.
Amber picked up the brochure on the ship and made herself read it. It took a lot of time and when she was done, she could not remember a thing she’d just read. She’d hoped it would settle her twisting stomach some, but if anything, the wait and the silence and the sound of Nicci sniffling made her feel even sicker. She folded up the brochure and put it down, talking like she’d never stopped, like she didn’t care, like she was sure. “The best part is, the five years I spend on the planet counts as improved education when I get back. Not as much as a degree would, but some. My salary cap will be raised and I’ll even be eligible for college credit, just like if I’d been in the army.”
She waited. Nicci kept sniffing and wiping.
“Fine,” said Amber, sweeping the papers together in a single stack. “You stay here and have fun with the whoring. I’ll miss you.”
Nicci didn’t call her back as Amber walked down the narrow hall to the room that the sisters had shared since Mary brought baby Nichole home from the insurance company’s birth clinic. Amber put the papers in the drawer with her shirts and socks, then changed out of her funeral clothes and into her work uniform. She went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink. She tried to be as quiet about that as possible and she didn’t feel a lot better when it was done. In the other room, she could hear her baby sister crying again. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and saw a big (fat) unsmiling (mean-eyed) stranger (bitch) who’d bullied her only living relative on the day of their mother’s funeral.
“It had to be said,” whispered Amber. She rinsed her mouth and washed her face and put her hair up. “Sometimes you just have to say the bad stuff.”
She went on out past weeping Nicci and off to work like it didn’t matter. In a way, it didn’t. They simply didn’t have any choice.
2
They called the ship the Pioneer, of course. The launch had originally been scheduled for August 3rd, but it had been pushed back three times and now was set for January 22nd, and, barring another sanction from the United Nations, set in stone. That gave the Bierces a little more than twelve weeks to prepare for the flight, but they only had Bo Peep’s apartment for four. The Manifestors provided housing, but required a signed contract before approval, which in turn required a certificate of medical clearance. They got their exams the third day after requesting one and Nicci passed hers easily. Amber hit an old, familiar snag.
Her tests were all negative, the medico assured her, as though Amber needed assurances. She did not. Her job at the factory took the weekly drug-and-disability tests allowed by law and Amber had seen too many people dismissed, often with a hefty fine for ‘misrepresentation of faculties,’ to ever be tempted by her mother’s stash. No, the problem was what the problem usually was: Her weight.
She wasn’t huge. She had more than one chin and she lost her breath easy when she had to take the stairs, but she got her clothes at the same store Nicci did, just on the lower shelves. So this was a setback, but it wasn’t unexpected and it couldn’t be insurmountable. She just wasn’t that big.
“How much would I have to lose?” Amber asked bluntly, interrupting the medico’s careful dance around the three-letter F-word.
“It isn’t a matter of, well, weight.”
“It isn’t?” she asked, surprised. “Is something wrong with me?”
“Not necessarily. Your blood pressure is, well, on the high end, but normal, and although you show some pre-diabetic conditions, your glucose levels are just fine.”
“How do you have a pre-diabetic condition? Isn’t every healthy person a pre-sick one?”
The medico’s lips pursed slightly.
Amber made herself shut up. She glanced at the nicely-tiled ceiling and then at the pleasant wall-mounted light meant to mimic a curtained window, since the actual view of rundown buildings and garbage-strewn alleys was so deplorable. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, I just really want to go.”
The medico softened slightly, even smiled. No doubt she saw before her an excited, if fat, young pioneeress on the threshold of a lifelong wish and she alone had the power to grant it. Amber let her think whatever she wanted. This was the last hurdle and if she could just get her fat ass over it, she and Nicci would be on their way.
“I have to do this,” said Amber. “So just tell me how much I have to lose.”
“I’m really not sure. The problem isn’t just a matter of weight, as I said. It’s a matter of risk. You have to realize that even though your tests all fall within the normal range right now, you’ll be contracted to the colony for five years as, well, as a potential mother. Obesity creates an increased risk for all pregnancies.”
They thought she was obese? Amber rubbed her stomach and scowled. “Okay. I’ll be back,” she said, and went out to the clinic’s waiting area to collect Nicci. She made herself a second appointment for the end of the month, the same day the apartment’s lease expired. She went home, saw a nervous Nicci out the door and on her way to work, then took half the money out of her bank account and got back on the bus.
* * *
Amber knew where he lived, but she went to 61st Street anyway because when Bo Peep moonlighted, which was almost every night these past few years, she did it on 61st and the Six-Ones might be feeling territorial. Sure enough, after standing out in the grey rain for a good half-hour, a kid sidled up and asked who she wanted. She asked for the Candyman. He had a lot of names, and Amber even knew a few, thanks to his long working relationsh
ip with her mother, but that was the one that could always find him. The kid went away and another ten minutes passed. Permission came in the form of a low, black car with tinted windows that rolled down just enough for some other kid to tell her where to find him.
The Candyman wasn’t much to look at—a scrawny, toothless man of indeterminate age and race, with a propensity for cheap suits and a swishy way of talking that should have made him a target on these streets. Instead, he was perhaps the one man who could walk freely from 14 East all the way up to Brewer Drive and get nothing but nods from the people he passed. It wasn’t just the drugs. Just what it was, Amber didn’t know, but the drugs made an easy sideline and he was good with them. He rarely met with anyone apart from his own crew and the leisure girls who did the things he liked in exchange for the glow only he could give them. But he met with Amber, perhaps just because he’d seen her before, hanging on Mama’s hand and wishing she was someplace else while Bo Peep begged in her pretty way for the sweet stuff, trying to pretend Mama really meant candy, like the lollipop he gave little Amber on the way out his door.
He admitted her past ten or twelve of his heavily-armed good friends to the squalor of his apartment as if to a royal audience, which she supposed it might be, in a way. He said a few solemn words on the passing of her mother, which was nice of him. And then he got down to business.
“Are you going on the state?” he asked in his mushy, sing-song way. “Candyman can talk around, you bet, find you a prime place to strut. No charge, even. Out of respect. Would you like a soda? Nickels, get Bo Peep’s little girl a soda.”
“No, thank you. I need to lose a lot of weight in the next four weeks,” said Amber. “A lot. And I need to pass a drug-and-disability at the end of it.”
“Mmm-hm.” Candyman leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. “That does limit our options. Let me think.”
He thought. And then he went into his dingy kitchen, rattled around, and came out with a crinkled paper lunchbag, well-used, but strong enough still to hold whatever it held. He folded the top down three times and pinched the crease sharp with his knobby, stained fingers. “You take one of these in the morning, sweets, when you get up. One twelve hours later, no more and no less. It make you hum around some, you bet,” he said, and tittered. “You say four weeks, uh-huh, you take this three weeks and let the last week go. If you like to tip the bottle, you best be setting it aside for a while or you find you lose all the weight, all at once, and go slithering off in just your soul.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“I like this girl. She all business,” Candyman remarked to one of his good friends and the good friend grunted. “Well, Miss Business, out of respect for your dear departed mama, I’ma give you this for just twenty a shot, mmm-hm. That’s twenty-one days, two shots a day…help me with the higher mathematics here, Snaps.”
“Eight-forty,” rumbled one of his men.
“Just so.” Candyman held out the bag.
Amber didn’t take it. Eight hundred and forty dollars was more than she had on her, but not more than she had. On the other hand, she still had twelve weeks to get through and she didn’t like spending so much of it at the beginning without knowing how it was all going to end. But then again, if she passed her medical exam, she’d be in the Manifestors’ care for most of that time, and after that, it didn’t matter. She meant to put whatever she hadn’t spent in one of the colonist’s accounts, so whatever she had when she left could sit in the Director’s bank growing by half a percent a quarter until she got back. Maybe by then it’d be up to four digits. And when she did come back with her colonist’s pay, eight hundred and forty dollars was going to be pretty small change.
“Give me a little time to put that together.” Amber turned around.
“Ooo, now I really like her. She don’t haggle, she don’t beg, she don’t cozy up other arrangements. She just gets things done,” said Candyman, and he must have gestured because two of his good friends stepped sideways in front of the door. Amber studied them, aware that this might be very bad, as behind her, the Candyman considered.
“How much you got in your pocket?” he asked at last.
Dumb question to answer in a room full of men with guns.
“Five hundred.”
“Mm-hm. Tell you what I’m going to do, because you’re Bo Peep’s little girl and because I like you, I’m going to take that five hundred right now and you gonna give me the rest plus another one-sixty—another even five, you hear me?—the day you take your last shot. You do this like an honest businessman, yeah? And we got no problems.”
She looked at him. “Is there a catch?”
“I do like her,” said Candyman to Snaps. And to Amber again, “Just another business arrangement, nothing bad. Good business. Repeat business, if you understand me, anytime you find yourself in the market. You just let Candyman take care of you, we gonna get along just fine.”
“I can agree to that,” said Amber, who had no intention of either buying his products or selling her body. She doubted he’d follow her offworld to complain about it.
Candyman smiled at her, but his eyes turned cold and somehow older—the eyes of a crocodile, half-sunk in swamp and too damned close to shore. “Whether or not you can is not what I’m waiting to hear, Miss Business.”
“Sorry,” said Amber, and unlike the nurse, the apology did not soften up the Candyman in the slightest. “I mean I will.” And she put out her hand for him to shake.
He looked at it. His friends looked at it. They all looked at each other. Some of them laughed, but it was good, honest laughter.
“Business all the way,” marveled Candyman. He shook with her. His hand was soft and bony at the same time, with too much skin for its little size, and abrasive calluses on the fingerpads. He did not release her right away. “You gonna find I’m a man of my word, despite what you might be thinking, and that can be good or bad depending on how you want to play this out.”
“I came to you for help,” said Amber. “That’s how I’m playing it.”
“Mm-hm.” He opened his hand and let hers go. “I knew your mama,” he said, giving her the lunchbag. “I knew her about as well as she let anyone know her, if you feel me, and if you don’t mind my saying, you not a whole lot like her.”
She knew. And she knew it probably wasn’t a compliment, but she took it as one.
* * *
She took her lunchbag home and put it in Mama’s room without looking at it. Then she cleaned house. Ice cream, frozen pizzas, peanut butter, all the nuke-and-eat dinners in the freezer and the just-add-hamburger boxes from the cupboard—opened or unopened, it all went into a garbage bag and straight out to the dump-bin behind the building. If it wasn’t here, she wouldn’t think about it; if it was, she’d probably eat it all, just to have something to do. It wasn’t until much later that night, after Nicci was in bed and Amber sat alone in Mama’s room that she opened up the thin, stained paper and had her first look at forty-one pre-loaded needles. She tried not to think about how many times they’d been used when she pushed the first one in.
She didn’t even have enough time to wonder when it was going to hit before it hit. She didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t sleep much at all for the next twenty-one days, but she hummed all right. Sometimes her heart raced hard enough that she made herself sit down with the telephone on her lap and her finger on the emergency-response button, just waiting for the last reason to push it, but she got through it.
She lost her job, but not for the shots. She wasn’t sure how they found out about Manifest Destiny, but they must have, because in spite of her ‘recent increase in enthusiasm and productivity’ at work, they felt that, regrettably, she had ceased to envision a future with the company. They didn’t offer to send her last paycheck and she didn’t ask. She considered herself lucky they hadn’t taken her to court for breach of occupational contract.
Jobless, she counted days by the mornings when she shot up and nights
the same way. Otherwise, there was no time, no sense of its passage, no sense of change in herself, only sleepless nights and blurry days and gradually loosening clothes.
She paid the Candyman his money the morning of her last injection. He told her she looked good, reminded her of their future business arrangements, said he’d see her around. She did, once or twice, but only at a distance.
She made her appointment at the clinic on time after sleeping nearly two days straight through. She looked and felt like home-brewed shit in her opinion, but she didn’t have the same medico and the new one didn’t remark on her appearance beyond voicing some concern that if the records were accurate, Amber appeared to have lost fifty-seven pounds since the last examination.
“Mistakes happen,” said Amber. “Do I pass?”
The medico took some measurements. He flipped through some papers. Then he excused himself. Amber waited for a few seconds, then eased the door latch silently down and opened it just a crack. She could hear her medico down at the nurses’ station, conferring with whoever else was there in low, urgent tones.
“—not sure what to tell her,” he was saying.
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-four, but she’s a big girl. I don’t think the—”
“She clean?”
“What? Yeah, she’s fine other than the—”
“Pass her.”
“Are you sure she’s going even going to fit in the Sleeper? They don’t exactly make those things in plus sizes.”
“Did you look at her home address? She’s asking for her clearance this early, it’s because she wants to move into the housing those nuts are offering. And she is not getting any bigger over there, I guarantee it.”
“I don’t know…”