The Ooi resisted description. The infrared absorption results, like the Raman spectra, were variable and impossible to pin down. Ditto, crystallography, thermography, and CT. They couldn’t say one way or another if it had an aura, and therefore how many of the seven aural layers were functional, and if it had seven layers and not eight, or twenty-eight, and how they looked, and what they did, because they didn’t have an auralyzer. It hadn’t made the equipment cut.
Otherwise, the station was decked to the nines. If John and Jane Q could have a Doppler in their bedroom, a chemalyzer in their bathroom, and a MRI in their closet, a state-of-the-art lab, with state-of-the-art experts, and a state-of-the-art medical boutique in the works could hardly expect less.
The ultrasound alone provided a stable image. It showed a grayish, ground glass, nonspecific matrix broken here and there by chunky inclusions.
“What the hell is it?” Gunjita was intrigued. She couldn’t help but be. She also felt thwarted.
“A puzzle, that’s what.”
They were in their sleep mod, a double-wide. Venus, the Bringer of Peace, was playing. Cav was making an entry in his journal.
“I have an insane desire to charge in there and rip it off the rock,” she said.
“Please don’t.”
“I feel like it’s holding out on us. Like it might respond to more forceful measures.”
He gave her a look. “I just want to touch it. I think it might respond to touch.”
He was starting to get on her nerves. He sounded so tentative. So touchy-feely and irresolute. It had been two long days of testing and retesting. Hope and frustration. Talk and more talk.
“Let’s wrestle,” she said.
He was bigger than she was. Outweighed her by twenty kilos. This meant little to nothing in space. She was far superior to him in agility and reflexes.
She grabbed his wrists, stepped inside his leg, and pulled him toward her. He fell forward, she tucked herself into him, and the two of them somersaulted backward. They quickly struck a wall, and ping-ponged back to strike another. She was having fun, and clearly in charge.
His breath was coming in bursts.
“Give up?” she asked.
“Not on your life.”
She took him through another circuit. By the end of it he was gasping.
“Now? Ready to wave the white flag?”
He had a snappy rejoinder, but it died on his lips. He felt faint. His heart was skipping beats, like a drunk doing hopscotch. It was scary, and definitely not good.
“Cav? What’s the matter? Cav? Talk to me.”
He heard the worry in her voice, but it was distant. She was distant. A darkness was descending. The world was slipping away.
Then suddenly, sharply, it was back.
Gunjita was on full alert.
“I’m okay,” he assured her.
“Don’t lie.”
“No, really. I’m fine.”
She narrowed her eyes.
He drew a deep breath, exhaled. “I had a thought. Before I was ruthlessly assaulted. All these nonresults. Maybe it’s deliberate. Intentional.”
“What just happened? You looked like you were on the way out.”
He waved her off. “What if it is communicating? Communication by noncommunication. Silence by design.”
“Enough. Please. Stop.”
“There’s a pattern. There’s got to be a pattern.”
She slapped him, then pulled down his pants and grabbed his cock.
Stunned, he looked down. She was holding it like a bludgeon.
“Easy does it,” he said.
“Are you going to fuck me or not?”
Another shock. The old Gunjita made her desires known differently.
Turned out the old Gunjita had different desires. He felt stretched, like a hamstring. Not a bad experience.
Not bad at all.
Afterward, she floated above him, pupils wide, hair a thick black tangle, brain on fire.
“What if we made it a smell?”
“It being?”
“The catastrophe alarm. What if we linked the warning cascade with the olfactory system?”
He was also floating, on the proverbial post-fuck cloud. It was all he could do to reply. “What if?”
“Wouldn’t even have to be unpleasant. As long as it got your attention. A pheromone, say. A sex pheromone. What’s a bigger attention-getter than that?”
He had to agree. He was swimming in her scent. It—she—had taken him prisoner. Taken him by storm.
“Perfect.”
“You couldn’t care less.”
“Not true.”
“You’re not listening.”
“I’m intoxicated. I want to bottle you.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
“What could be better than that?”
“Let’s wrestle again.”
His eyes widened.
“No? Not up to it?”
“Give me a minute.”
“Poor baby. I wore you out.”
He couldn’t deny it. He was spent, and had never felt better. His dopey smile told the happy story, as his eyelids drifted closed.
All at once, she was alone. She felt restless and far from satisfied, far from done. She wanted more, but of what she wasn’t sure. Sex was fun, and she’d always loved his body. All her life she’d had an appetite for large men. Now, strangely, his size seemed excessive and faintly repulsive, an overindulgence, like an extra plate of food when she was already full.
She wasn’t full, but more of him wasn’t the answer. This came as a surprise to her, as did her budding discontent.
“You’ve only yourself to blame,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t you want to be young? Or do you, but not with me? Is that what this is?”
“Only with you.”
“Then do it.”
He opened his eyes. “I already agreed.”
“Under duress. To shut me up.”
“As soon as we get back.”
“So you say.”
“I will. I promise. Consider it done.”
And if he didn’t? What then?
“It’ll be done when it’s done,” she said.
“Can we talk about something else for a minute?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“I want to try some provocative tests. Bright lights, loud noise, pressure variation. See if we can get our unknown visitor to respond.”
“Okay. Good. And then? If it doesn’t?”
“Take the next step.”
“We need a sample.”
“First I want to touch it. With my bare skin. I want to smell it.”
She knew he did. She did, too. “Big risk.”
“You don’t even believe it’s living.”
“I don’t. You’re right. But a tiny percentage of me isn’t sure. I have you to thank for that.”
“I’ll sterilize my hands. I’ll exhale into a tube. I’ll make sure not to sneeze.”
“You could still contaminate it.”
“I could. It’s true.”
“And the risk to you?”
This was the tricky part. He was willing to take the risk. He wasn’t afraid. But he wasn’t alone. If something did go wrong, if it did, Gunjita would be left holding the bag.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“You’re always thinking.”
“We can eliminate the risk.”
“How?”
He hesitated.
“Spit it out.”
It wasn’t easy, but he took a stab. Started with a preamble, then backtracked, preambling the preamble, laying the groundwork, which couldn’t be rushed, was occasionally hard to follow, and went on forever.
“You’re making me nervous,” she said.
This was plain to see, and the opposite of what he intended.
Then it hit her. “You can’t be serious.”
“You won’t have
a dead body on your hands.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Try to be open-minded.”
“Are you crazy? It should have never happened. It was wrong from the start. It was sick. Nothing’s changed.”
“We didn’t make them.”
“You didn’t.”
“You didn’t, either.”
“I set the stage.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“What does that mean? I accept responsibility for the role I played. That doesn’t mean I need to rub my face in it.”
“If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.”
“That’s enough.”
“It wasn’t you.”
“I said enough.”
“I have to smell it, Gunjita. I have to touch it. You of all people should understand.”
“I do understand. But my answer is no.”
“Please reconsider.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Just do.”
The air between them thickened.
A thought occurred to her, darkening her face. “Are you blackmailing me?”
He didn’t reply.
“You are, aren’t you?”
She was furious, though in a way she had herself to blame. She had opened the door to him, ushered him into the world of smell and all things related. A true believer, she had made him one, too.
“This is fucked,” she fumed.
“One other thing. I want to look underneath it. Peel it back if we can. If we can’t, I want to look inside.”
Finally. Some good news. It was what she’d been wanting from the start.
“You’re ready to cut into it?”
“Not me. Look at these hands.” They shook like a martini.
“You want me to do it? Fine.”
“You’re a researcher, Gunji.”
“You’ve noticed.”
“You’ve got great hands. Great hand-eye coordination. Great technique.”
“But?”
“Mice, rats, rabbits . . . there’s no one better. But I’m thinking someone with a slightly different take on things. Someone geared to preserving life. Not so accustomed to sacrifice as the end result.”
“You want a surgeon.”
“I do.”
Not the strangest request, considering that he’d once been one himself.
“Does Gleem know?”
“They do. I made the request.”
“Did they agree?”
“They did. Laura Gleem personally. Turns out she knows the surgeon I have in mind. The two of them have had dealings in the past.”
“What sort of dealings?”
“No idea.”
“Who is she?”
“He. An old colleague of mine. Yours, too.”
She felt a quickening inside. Touch of fire, flood of ice. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“He’s the best.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Who was this man lying next to her? What could he possibly be thinking? How could he be so dense?
The more important question, and the one that wormed its way into her brain: Why hadn’t he consulted her first?
1 From Naturalist, by E. O. Wilson.
–FOUR–
He hovered, and stayed still, striking on the crumbling columns of air . . . fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of sky . . . turned towards the ground and . . . for a thousand feet he fell . . . and another thousand feet . . . but now he fell sheer, shimmering down through dazzling sunlight, heart-shaped, like a heart in flames.1
The cliff was several hundred meters high, and from a distance appeared unclimbable. Dashaud knew from experience that this wasn’t necessarily true. From a distance the great Vatnajökull looked like a cozy white blanket, when in fact it was a minefield of crevasses, icefalls, and sudden, blinding storms.
There were small clumps of green and some stunted shrubs scattered on the cliff, meaning there was soil. Cracks and ledges to hold the soil, meaning potential hand-and footholds. A large colony of fulmars nested on the cliff, but they had bred, and were gone. He wouldn’t be disturbing them, or the other way around.
The cliff had been a lifelong dream of his. It spoke to him in the language of dreams, larger than life, unreal, seductive, forbidding. He’d been wanting to climb it since boyhood, but one thing or another had gotten in the way. When he finally found the time, was finally ready, he couldn’t do it. He was old, and physically incapable of something so arduous and demanding. Now he was young again, and could do anything he wanted.
He crossed the road, then picked his way through a field of weathered basalt to the face. He saw a faint trail and took it. When it petered out, he blazed his own trail, which quickly steepened. He passed an abandoned fulmar nest made of grass. Then another in a shallow rock depression. An unseasonably late-to-migrate bird glided by, squawked at him, then disappeared.
The climb grew steeper and more difficult, but his arms and legs were strong, and his balance, a must, gymnastic. He had his father’s Nordic build, long limbed and wiry, and his mother’s sturdiness and endurance, and was halfway up the face before he had to stop to catch his breath.
Below him, stretching east as far as he could see, was a narrow strip of lush green farmland, bracketed between glacial moraines and the windswept sea. He could just make out the red-topped silo of his grandparents’ ancient horse and sheep farm, where he’d spent much of his youth. To the west was the Gray Lagoon, fed by melt from one of Vatnajökull’s once mighty tongues, now thinned and shrunken. The lagoon, by contrast, was vast, as large as it had ever been, home to an equally vast quantity and diversity of brackish life.
This pleased him, and he was already pleased: with the climb, with his fine new body, with his supple, firing-on-all-cylinders, ready-for-anything brain. The world was not just a beautiful place, it was a playground, or anything else a man with his gifts dared it to be.
He felt a mild breeze on his face. He wore gloves, not for warmth, but for protection. Since his recent enhancement he was careful to keep his hands covered at nearly all times. He’d added a second layer for the climb, and on a whim removed both.
His fingertips seemed to waken. They whispered to him of a hidden world, swarming and newly minted. The breeze was like a chorus of secrets. He noticed subtle variations in its pressure—peaks, lulls, eddies—that translated sometimes into words (swift, strong, retreating), sometimes sound (warble, bellow, screech), mostly neither, but rather the pleasant, informative, highly personal, and often electric feeling that came from being touched. Present previously, now so much richer and more complex.
He touched his lips, traced their faint corrugations, felt their turgor: firm but not too firm, pliant but not too much of that. He nudged a blade of grass, aware of its own pressure. He could feel it in the way it resisted and opposed his applied force, stubbornly but easily overwhelmed. A friendly, compliant blade, eminently floppy; a pushover, though not to a small ant that was climbing on one of its neighbors. To the ant the blade was strength itself, bending only the slightest amount, and springing quickly back to attention when the ant moved on.
The world was governed by touch, by feel, by push and push back, weight and counterweight, resistance and accommodation. He was aware of this as never before. There was a constant undercurrent of motion surrounding him, with a language all its own; a shifting, speechless tongue, perhaps the most ancient one of all. It was smooth, acrobatic, choppy, graceful, precarious, and it filled him with awe. His merkelized, piezo-powered fingertips understood it instinctively. They were his eyes, ears, nose, tongue, but he had to be careful. They could be damaged by overuse.
Any sense could be. Overstimulation sooner or later led to exhaustion. There was only so much information a body—and any part of a body—could absorb before shutting down and signing off. Recovery was the rule, but not always.
Hence the double pair of gloves, which blunted sensation and protected him. He was not about to squander his gift.
Not everyone was so prudent.
He’d once had a patient who, first juve, had his vision enhanced. Ponied up, took the risk. The result was beyond his wildest expectations. What he saw, in his words, was “unbelievable,” “indescribable,” “kaleidoscopic” . . . and “nonstop.” He couldn’t turn his eyeballs off. Closed his lids, and the film kept running: real images, synthetic images, phantom ones, his retina working ’round the clock. An embarrassment of riches, a bombardment, an enfilade, until at length he lost his sight. Couldn’t see a thing. Blinded by extravagance and overabundance.
Had no choice but to swap his retina out for a new one: standard issue, boilerplate, unenhanced. Solved half the problem. Sought out Dashaud to solve the other half, which rested not in his eyes but in the brain behind them—the optic nerve, geniculate bodies, and visual cortex—which had also been damaged by overuse. These were the source of the ghost and phantom images, the hallucinatory misinformation and random visual events. Their repair involved some extremely delicate surgery, which Dashaud happened to be doing at the time.
He no longer did this surgery. There was less and less brain surgery being done all the time. Less surgery all around. More bio interventions, letting cells and parts of cells do the repair and cleanup themselves.
Surgeons were a dying breed.
About time, some people said. Dinosaurs. Butchers.
Until you needed one.
The good ones still had work. Still had a place.
Dashaud Mikelson was a good one. And now better than ever.
But not if he blew out his sense of touch. Who would come to a surgeon whose fingers were numb?
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