by M M Buckner
Ye gilded gods, death was an ugly thing. She wheezed as if a ton of rock were crushing her chest. Her eyes shimmered like dull chips, vacant and calm.
As I confronted her empty eyes, all my memories rushed back in crystalline clarity, even the ones I wanted to forget. The glass man irradiated me with repressed knowledge, and Heaven’s unabridged truth sheared through me like a laser. I remembered the malady.
Provendia’s scientists had taken weeks to piece the data together. Two months ago they finally confirmed what was killing Heaven’s inmates. That’s why we shut off the surveillance cameras. We didn’t want to watch anymore. The protes were committing suicide.
How stunned we were, sitting around the conference table with our brandy snifters in hand. The youngest director in the room was 157. Longevity obsessed us. The word, suicide, whispered from an alien world.
“You can’t mean they’re taking poison?” one of the directors said.
“It’s not poison,” said Robert Trencher. Oh yes, Trencher was there. He crossed one ankle over his knee and played with the genuine leather tassel on his loafer. “It’s something more subtle. They lose the will to keep themselves alive,” he said. “Mostly, they die of thirst.”
“Do they want higher wages?” I asked. “They haven’t made any demands.”
“We don’t know why they’re offing themselves,” Trencher said. “They call it ‘going to the garden.’ We call it severe clinical depression complicated by satellite affect disorder.” What a smug bastard.
Now I watched Kaioko’s slack lips flutter with each difficult breath. Suicide? Why did it have to take so long? Why did she have to suffer? And why did human beings have to die at all?
If ever clairvoyant forces had shaped the universe, why did they weave this depraved repeating loop of bereavement into our evolution? Why death? Why not life eternal? Couldn’t our race thrive much better with a small, select group of superior individuals living on year after year, collecting an ever-broader store of wisdom? Instead of the ugly painful onslaught of birth, struggle, reproduction and inevitable decay, why couldn’t we have endless healthy life for one small, well-chosen group of human kind? That seemed an excellent solution to me.
Geraldine drew a threadbare sheet up to Kaioko’s chin, but when she tried to embrace the girl, Kaioko’s body flopped like a loose-limbed manikin. Geraldine wept into the mattress, and I watched her burly shoulderblades tremble.
Can you understand now why I had behaved like such a base coward at every approach to sick-ward? Willing surrender to death, the idea unnerved me. It undercut my belief system. What if I caught the contagion? Injury, illness, even age—these could be corrected. Damaged tissues could be replaced. But how do you repair a damaged will?
Now that my memories had resurrected, I began at once to rationalize and edit them again. I stood erect and assured myself that Kaioko’s illness did not concern me. The deaths of my family and friends, of my beloved Prashka, those old griefs were long forgotten and healed over by time. Kaioko’s death meant nothing. She wasn’t even pretty. It was the sight of Geraldine’s powerful shoulders quivering helplessly under her ragged uniform that finally made me cover my face in my hands.
“Can’t you hook her to a food tube?” I murmured. “Give her an IV if she won’t drink water?’
Geraldine jerked around, startled. “Kai-Kai wouldn’t like that.”
“What does that matter if it keeps her alive?” I walked a few paces away. “Where are all your other patients? There ought to be sixty.”
“Sixty?” Geraldine’s mood shifted acutely, and her eyes filled with suspicion.
I bit my lip. No point revealing what I knew. Besides, it was time to face facts. The only survivors left in this orbiting mausoleum were this handful of juvenile ring leaders and the squirming horde of little toads. All the adults were dead.
On the floor beside Kai-Kai’s mattress lay a shrunken red sack, the remains of a blood transfusion. Clear plastic tubing hung from a hook above her pillow, still stained by a thin coating of scarlet. Inside the girl’s elbow, Shee had taped a small white bandage the same as mine, and three bright drops of blood spotted the sheet nearby.
Sheeba had given my blood to Kai-Kai?
Slowly I sank to the floor as the full weight of this hit me. I’d shared NEMs with an employee. This was worse than a capital crime, it was…moral depravity. Perverse. Obscene. Wicked. Worse than vile. No executive shared NEMs with a worker. It was wrong on so many levels. What if the little buggers spread like a virus through the prote population? Longevity epidemic. That would change everything.
No, no, no, I would never have agreed to this. Those NEMs were supposed to help my darling fend off the malady. They were for Sheeba. Who would have dreamed she’d give my transfusion to Kai-Kai?
And yet, the longer I stared at the ruby stain on Kai-Kai’s sheet, the less Shee’s act surprised me. It was just like her to defy conventional taboos. Stubborn child. I stared at the three red drops with a grim smile. Those tiny healing machines were designed to renew the human body for decades, and now they were doomed to a short, confusing life in synthetic fabric.
Geraldine tugged her thick legs into a lotus position beside Kaioko’s mattress. Her ankle was bruised and swollen where I’d hit her with the hammer, and tendrils of space fungus clumped between her bare toes. Fungal film covered the entire deck—except for one clean shiny spot under the blood sack. There, beneath the dripping tube, the steel deck gleamed almost as bright as a mirror. My blood was killing the fungus. How delightful. If somehow I managed to survive this zone, elude capital punishment, and live down my moral corruption, then I could sell my blood as floor cleaner.
Geraldine sneered. “Gimme back my space suit.”
The wench’s emotions shifted faster than spring tides. I never knew what to expect from her. She ogled the old gray suit but made no move to get it.
“Screw you,” I said.
The wench shrugged listlessly and smoothed Kai-Kai’s sheet. “She going to the garden soon. Juani there now.”
Going to the garden was their euphemism for death. Had Juani died while I slept? No, it couldn’t be. Heaven’s inmates were disappearing too fast. Solitude was closing in like a vault. “When did he die?” I said, shivering.
Geraldine pushed her hair back. “Juani raking out the dead leaves. He making things tidy for Kai-Kai.”
Ah, so he wasn’t dead, he was cultivating his plants. This news brought me an unexpected charge of comfort. But Kaioko was fading. There was no hiding from the truth. She’d fallen into a slumber so profound, it could only be called a coma.
“Where’s Sheeba?” I said.
“She and the Chief go sneak around that gunship,” Geraldine said. “Sooner later, they find Vlad.”
“Sh-Sheeba went to the gunship?”
Oh gods, what had I done?
20
FRUITY SWEET DARK
“It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world”
-HELEN KELLER
Sheeba Sheeba Sheeba, why did you go to that gunship? Feel my legs buckling. See me dropping with a thud to the sick-ward deck. “How long have they been gone?”
“Shoulda been back by now.”
“How long, Geraldine?”
“One orbit,” she said listlessly.
One flight around the Earth! The air supply in those suits wouldn’t last that long. They’d been captured—or shot I pushed up off the floor and careened toward the exit. The troops would have taken her prisoner, yes. She would be safe aboard the gunship. But she wore no signet, no executive ID. Would they bother to sample her DNA? No, they would leap to conclusions, and the dear naive child would not protest. I dashed through the anteroom and leaped into the ladder well. I broke fake nails, tearing open the safety hatch. Shee would hide her identity. Hadn’t I taught her that war-zone rule? She would surf the tide of adrenaline and pretend to be an agitator.
How slowly
the safety lock cycled. Liam was supposed to die, not Sheeba! I could see her standing shoulder to shoulder with that malevolent punk, squeezing his hand and beaming with misplaced ardor. How beautifully her dark golden face would glow as she joined him in the euthanasia stall.
Beloved Shee, don’t do it!
The syrup of gravity thickened around my limbs as I dropped through the ladder segments from Four to Three to Two. Why had I wasted so many precious minutes talking to Geraldine? The solar plant blazed with all its nuclear fierceness as I dodged among the turbines. Juani was kneeling by the airlock, pressing his ear to the steel.
“My fault, blade. They out there ‘cause of me.” Dribbles of vomit stained the front of the old gray surfsuit he wore. “I tried to reach them, but I weak. I weak.”
“No time,” I said, shoving the boy aside.
He slumped and hid his face as I opened the airlock. I felt a qualm, treating him that way, but necessity drove me. Inside the lock, I clamped my gray helmet in place. No time to check the duct tape. No time.
I found Shee clinging to the hull among the shattered solar panels. In the blistering white heat of direct sunlight, she was gripping a broken support strut with one glove and clutching Liam’s belt with the other. The punk had lost consciousness. Laser burns pocked his white body armor, and his long legs rippled away from the fast-spinning hull like a flag in a cyclone.
I lunged toward Sheeba, gripping handholds and hiding my face from the fiery sun. Solar reflections glared off her visor, so I grasped her helmet and tilted her face toward me. Her lips were turning blue.
No time. I hooked an arm around her waist and scrabbled back toward the airlock, using my one free hand to pull us along and wedging my boots into any kind of crevice to keep us from flying away from the spinning tank. No thoughts, only long seconds and labored panting. Radiation flared up from the bright pitted steel, burning through my gloves and forcing me to squint. Go go go, I chanted. The war surfer’s mantra. With agonizing slowness, I grunted and slithered and hauled my precious Shee around Heaven’s circumference. Finally, we passed into frigid shadow, and there was the oval rim of airlock.
I drew Sheeba inside and discovered she was still gripping Liam’s belt. The three of us filled the narrow space like compacted debris, and when the compressor finished cycling, we fell through the inner hatch in a jumble. Juani lifted Liam while I twisted Sheeba’s helmet free. She wasn’t breathing. Though her hand continued to grip that cur’s belt, her own lungs failed to draw air. I dropped to my knees and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
How long did I blow air into her moist pink lips and watch her chest fill with my breath? When she started coughing, I sat back and wiped my spit from her blessed chin. Juani had removed Liam’s helmet. I half hoped the chief had suffocated, but no, that punk still bad plenty of air left. Sheeba had given him her reserve cylinder!
Oh beloved, what alternate dimension do you inhabit? Is there no point where our two separate realities overlap? I don’t understand you, Sheeba. Is it because you haven’t lived long enough, or because I’ve lived too long? Why would you sacrifice your very breath for that criminal?
“Rest, my love,” I said, stroking her cheek.
Sheeba rolled on her side, gasping and coughing. Her first clear act was to reach for the unconscious punk sprawled next to her. Side by side, white and golden dark, they curled into each other like a pair of commas—as if their bodies were made to fit. Dark and light, they were poles apart. Freaking diametric opposites! They didn’t belong together!
Even unconscious, Liam’s gaunt body clenched like a stubborn white root dug up and left in the sun to dry. He had no education, no sense of style. Ten to one, he could barely read. His straw beard stuck out in bristly whorls. And his nose, ye idols, a hawk’s beak. Whereas Sheeba, nubile olive-dark goddess, rounded and curved, see her flowing with liquid laughter and easy tears, as radiant as the starry ether of space. Feel the cool touch of her hands. Feel her maiden softness. There was no comparison between them.
“We—we couldn’t find Vlad,” Sheeba said and coughed.
“Don’t try to speak, dear.” I loosened the collar of her EVA suit.
“He wasn’t—on the ship.” She sat up despite my protests. Still coughing, she yanked off her gloves and checked her lover’s pulse. Then she tore frantically at his surfsuit. “We snuck in through the waste chute. We looked everywhere. Help me with this zipper.”
Underneath the suit, Liam wore a Provendia troop uniform with its familiar stylized logo, as meaningful as an alien rune. I helped Sheeba slip it off his shoulders.
“Why did you go there, Shee? You could’ve been killed.”
“She went in my place.” Juani lowered his head. His braid had come loose, and black hair spilled across his face. He supported the chief in his arms.
“No way. I wanted to go, Juani.” Sheeba worked the zipper open. “Those commies didn’t even know we were there till we tried to leave.”
With extraordinary gentleness, she peeled the uniform away from Liam’s chest. The laser beams had not penetrated his (my) body armor, but their impacts had raised tremendous red welts along his ribs.
Abruptly, Shee clenched her eyes shut, and her lovely features warped with heartbreaking despair. “I think Vlad’s dead. They must have killed him before we got mere. Oh Nass, why didn’t we listen to you sooner?”
I bit my lip and watched a tear trickle down her cheek, yearning to comfort her with the truth. Vlad was never on the gunship. Our friends had captured him, and they were not killers. But after the lies I’d told before, I didn’t dare confess.
“They probably incinerated him.” She fussed with Liam’s wrist gaskets. “He would’ve wanted to go to the garden.”
“Be calm, Sheeba Zee.” Juani touched her shoulder. “Wherever Vlad is, he’ll recycle.”
Sheeba nodded, wiping her nose.
I helped her strip the chief to his miserable ragged underwear. I hated Liam’s twentysomething body. Dead pale, hairy, as smooth and muscular as only a young body could be. I kept thinking, what a handsome corpse you’ll make. Soon, thug, you will be dead dead dead. And then Sheeba will be mine again.
“Juani, these are minor wounds.” Sheeba gave the boy her cheeriest smile. “Chief’s gonna be fine. Will you please go to sick-ward and get a bed ready?”
“Yes, Sheeba Zee.” Juani sprinted away.
When he was gone, Sheeba’s smile vanished. She’d been faking the optimism. I didn’t realize what a clever actress she could be. But now the planes of her exquisite face drained of color. As she fussed over her sleeping hero, her voice shook. “Poor Juani came out to meet us in that awful old suit, and then he threw up in his helmet and had to go back. I didn’t think we were going to make it, Nass. I thought—I really thought—”
Dear girl. I tried to caress her, but she was too keyed up. Zone hyper. She searched the punk’s body for hidden wounds. “God, his neck’s bruised.”
“What about you, Shee? Are you okay? You didn’t take my NEMs. That blood I gave was meant for you.”
“His vertebrae don’t feel broken. Oh god, I’m not sure.” Her fingers searched the back of his neck
‘Take my NEMs now, dear. I’ll give another liter. You need them.”
“We’ll make a collar to stabilize his spine.”
She rifled through the contents of the nearby utility closet and found some rags, which she rolled together and knotted around Liam’s neck. All the while, she told me about the gunship. She said it was easy to sneak through the waste chute. That Provendia captain must have been molto smug not to set out a security perimeter. He didn’t even post guards. What an ass. I couldn’t imagine Provendia hiring such a dunderhead. In any case, his overconfidence allowed Liam and Shee to steal uniforms and search the ship without detection. But they didn’t find a trace of their medic. They’d arrived too late, she said, as she grimly rebraided the punk’s yellow hair.
The Provendia troops finally notic
ed them when they tried to leave. They wanted to space-dive home under cover of darkness, when Heaven and the gunship passed behind Earth’s shadow. But they mistimed their exit and came out in the light. That’s when the gunship started firing.
“Darling. Ye graven gods.” I accidentally leaned all my weight on the punk’s knee and took pleasure in his unconscious groan.
“Nass, I was so scared, my fingers shook. I almost couldn’t steer the thruster.” Sheeba blinked at her empty hands, remembering, and her marvelous skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. Then she lifted the punk’s shoulders. “Grab beau’s feet. We’ll move him up to sick-ward.”
Instead of doing that, I put on his (my) white helmet to check the clock. Then I slowly drew it off. “Sheeba, do you realize we’ve been in this satellite for over eight Earth days.”
“I haven’t been counting, Nass. Help me carry him.”
“Darling, wait. We don’t belong here. We have our space suits and a working thruster. Let’s leave now.”
“And desert these people?” Sheeba’s eyebrows furrowed. “You don’t mean that. Besides, the minute you step outside, the gunship will start firing. See what they did to beau.”
I clenched my teeth and struggled to hold steady. She kept calling that thug by my name.
Sheeba leaned and rested her chin on my shoulder. “You want to protect me too much, Nass. I’m a grown woman. You have to let me run my own risks.” Then her voice dropped to a whisper. “Liam told me something heinous about Provendia.Com.”
From her tone, I knew what was coming. “Sheeba, that punk has hidden motives. You can’t believe everything he says.”