And then, without pausing to look back, she carried on.
She had come to accept that after every saving effort had been made, there was no callousness in viewing a patient’s death dispassionately. A mind might grasp, but a heart cannot hold, all the hurts of the world. Soon enough in a physician’s career an indispensable lesson is learned: Detachment shouldn’t be perceived as indifference. That the emotional distance a doctor must perfect not only provides perspective, it is an essential form of self-protection. Vision, she remembered a wiser colleague saying, is clearer when there are no tears welling in the eyes.
The last vestige of Mariana’s self-protection vanished when Carlos whispered that he dared not shut his eyes for fear of never opening them again. Sitting beside the bed where he lay incapacitated, she had turned her head away to make absolutely certain that he could not see her cry.
No one must see her cry. For the most caring of physicians, crying was a sign of capitulation.
With an unsteady hand she smeared the wetness over her cheek.
And turned back immediately.
“Carlos, I’m here,” she said. “I shall stay with you.”
On the many colonies she found herself stationed, personal attachments were scrupulously avoided. Here, within the confines of this neglected and isolated base, on a barren planet where it was said nothing could grow, emotions had been deliberately cultivated, blossoming into bonds that, for her, ran the gamut from a hard to comprehend fondness for a younger, difficult woman, to a hard to deny love for an older, easy man.
The comfort of a bedside chair and her own increasing weariness almost claimed her when Carlos reached for her hand, the gesture made more poignant by the feebleness of his normally strong grip. If their final hours were near, if the affection they had for each other meant their sorrow would be magnified, so too, would be the solace they could give and receive from each other. Personally, she would want it no other way.
She thought of how this applied to the Comandante. To assert that the intimate relationship he engaged in with Amanda was ill-advised was both accurate and now beside the point. In some strengthening sense, the emotional bonds created and broken were to be learned from and embraced. If encountering other life-forms had taught nothing else it was that we are not nearly as wise as we are complicated beings.
“What is happening to me, Mariana? To us?”
It wasn’t so much as a question from Carlos as a plaintive appeal, the words traveling into her semiconscious mind from an unfathomable distance. Unintentionally, she had drifted off.
With difficulty, she leaned forward, placing her mouth close to the young man’s ear so he could better hear. “Do you feel any discomfort, any pain?” she asked, freeing her hand to pat his arm gently. For the first time in her career she was compelled to be both physician and patient. With a tilt of the head, she placed her ear near his mouth, necessary because his voice was no more than a whisper and her own hearing was compromised.
“No. I feel… nothing.”
The response was expected and, in one meaningful way, regrettable. Pain, though she did not wish it on him, could be eliminated while its location, intensity, and type might have provided her with a valuable diagnostic clue.
The crew’s complete lack of pain—strange in itself—obviated the need for neuro-blockers. Similarly, the use of biostims to halt the progression from torpor to what appeared to be some form of coma had proven either ineffective or, at best, transitory. With no other options indicated or at her disposal, a lifetime of learning was reduced to the monitoring of vital signs. She had watched with trepidation and yes, fascination, as the young engineer’s resting heart rate of twenty-seven beats-per-minute, during the course of an hour, decreased by another three beats; as his depressed respiratory rate, body temperature, and blood pressure all sank further into the red zone. She would wager her medical license that his basal metabolic rate and electro-chem brain function had also declined, though she lacked the scanner necessary to substantiate such a conclusion.
Each member of the crew was caught in the same downward spiral. Carlos, easily the youngest of them, just happened to be the worst off.
Just happened to be. Another brilliant entry in her medical log.
He took a deep breath, chest expanding with air. She timed the interval to the next inhalation, almost leaving her seat (to do exactly what, she asked herself) when, after an excruciatingly long twenty seconds, his chest heaved once again.
It was as if a series of circuits were being prematurely switched off in response to the demands of an oxygen-poor environment. A clumsy analogy matched only by wild suppositions as to their affliction’s identity, each harder to believe than the next.
Starting with her own.
An entire planet. Murkor, a world so out of balance that natural phenomenon, both obvious and covert, had conspired with the effects of hypoxia to alter the psychological and physiological well-being of six human interlopers. An inconceivable group psychosis bringing about an even more inconceivable group psychosomatic illness.
What had Roya speculated? Oh, yes, that they were unwittingly harboring an entity of such subtlety and stealth that it was capable of eluding the advance team of astrobiologists and Nadir’s supposedly foolproof detection and sterilization safeguards.
Carlos had no desire to speculate. He was absolutely certain that Nadir’s concurrent and mystifying problems, the Nexus and their affliction, were of a pair. Coalition had developed a new class of cloaked nanoparticles and was using them to cause harm.
To her recollection, three crew members were reluctant to put forth opinions.
No, that was false. Gustavo’s mischievous words came to mind. He had labeled their affliction “the devil’s breath.” Presumably, he wasn’t being serious. She should not take him so except to the extent the metaphorical devil resides in us all.
These were the ideas that came to her. More were conjured, bizarre and half-formed, from the astronomical to the chimerical until she began to drift off, her head nodding forward, then whipping back as she resisted falling into the unnatural sleep that threatened to absorb her like a black hole.
Carlos had fallen asleep. If that’s what it was. He seemed peaceful enough.
Her concern turned to the four other members of the crew, not seen or heard from in the last hour. Were they in need of special attention? If she didn’t move, and soon, she would be incapable of climbing the stairs to L2.
Garcia had a similar worry as, sight unseen, he silently braced himself in the open doorway behind her. His heart sank upon seeing Carlos so deathly still, then rose again on a wave of immense relief when he saw the young man’s eyelids flutter in response to some hidden dream.
“Mariana,” Garcia said softly, unwilling to startle her. When she did not hear, he came up behind her, steadying himself with an affectionate hand on the shoulder—a hand which she recognized and promptly covered with her own.
“He doesn’t have much longer,” Mariana lamented. “The others?”
“On L2. Resting comfortably on three spare beds, unable to rise.”
“So this is how we’re going to end,” she sobbed, staring straight ahead. “One by one, falling into oblivion.” Her next words, almost inaudible for she didn’t want to say them, were filled with bitterness. “It is said that a person is born alone and dies alone. Could that be any more true than on this godforsaken planet?”
“No, it is not true!” Garcia cried, determined to prove it false. “A newborn child is intimately connected to the mother. When we pass from this life we carry inside us a lifetime of intimacies. It is from each other that we find comfort in an indifferent universe.”
Bbrrahhuffenzellfff-kapht-tzzing!
It wasn’t the first time that one of Murkor’s obnoxious fumaroles inserted itself in a conversation. The timing made Garcia take special note. “How shall I interpret that comment?” he said, coming around to coax a smile from Mariana. “Confirmation? Portent?”
>
“And, if portent, foreboding or auspicious?” Mariana wondered.
“I intend to get you and Carlos out of this room and up to L2,” Garcia said, adding, when Mariana shook her head in doubt, “Perhaps I’ll need a little assistance.”
“I have something—” Mariana said, reaching deep into the medical bag kept by her side to retrieve what Garcia recognized as two disposable stick-stim pads. “Worth a try.”
Stims were the size, shape, and color of a vanilla wafer. When adhered to the temple they tricked the brain into releasing its own natural neurotransmitters into trillions of synaptic gaps, effectively increasing the transmission of electric signals between neurons. It was the only weapon in her limited arsenal that produced discernible results, modest as they were—the effect on motor coordination and muscle contraction, although rapid, was fleeting. She had judiciously saved these last couple for an emergency.
More than anything she could imagine, Garcia’s desire to bring the crew together qualified. “If possible,” she urged, “we wake him first.”
Garcia, who was starting to totter, sat on the edge of Carlos’s bed. Placing his hands on the engineer’s shoulders, he gently shook. Unable to rouse him, he affected a stern voice and shouted, “Sargento! It’s Comandante Garcia! Sargento!”
A pair of dimming eyes opened. “Tired—” came back a response, low and confused.
“Drag your ass out of that bed!” Garcia persisted.
“Comandante?”
“I need to get to L2, Sargento! Can’t do it without your help!”
Looking on, Mariana gave Garcia an appreciative nod and handed him a stim.
“…bad with stairs,” Carlos responded, trying to prop himself up on two arms bent at the elbow. “Sorry… sorry… failing you—”
The apology hit Garcia hard. “You could never fail me. Never. It is I who have failed you—letting myself become distracted. By not making prudent decisions when time was our ally.” Seeing Carlos was marshaling the energy to object, Garcia fastened the adhesive stim to his temple, declaring, “My friend, I will always have faith in you. Who else kept Nadir from falling apart these last years? Now get your lazy ass out of bed. Mariana and I need your help.”
Realizing that she had to act fast, Mariana held the second stim close to Garcia’s face so he could plainly see both it and the implication in her expression. “Use it,” he demanded with a maniacal grin. “I’ll manage—if I have to crawl every centimeter of the way.”
She did not disagree. Not about the stim. “You’re wrong. You did what you could,” she protested. “No one foresaw.”
“And no one’s crawling,” Carlos said, less than an arm’s-length away, his eyes regaining focus. A moment later he discovered the will to sit up. Then, as a silently amazed Garcia moved out of the way, he managed to slide his legs over the side of the bed, placing himself in a position to stand.
“A bitch,” Garcia, watching the struggle, commented. Anything more than acknowledging the young man’s effort might undermine his confidence.
“Yeah, she is that,” Carlos agreed, his face contorting into an odd grimace as he stood erect.
Mariana also made it to her feet, aided by the stim’s jolt to her nervous system and a hand proffered from each of the men. “There’s no time to waste,” she said. “We’ve a mountain to climb.”
At the last, in an odd and haphazard manner of hindering and helping each other, the three crewmates found the means to scale the spiral stairs and join their colleagues on L2.
***
In gathering his crew, Garcia accomplished what he set out to do. The result, however, was bittersweet—the happiness and emotional security gained by being in each other’s company tempered by the realization that these were likely their final hours together. Those already present on L2 were unable to rise to welcome the three arrivals.
“Mariana—Mariana,” Roya, said in greeting, the simple act of waking to utter her friend’s name enough to evoke a trove of nuanced sentiments: You tried, I’m scared, don’t be scared, lean on me—
“I know—I know,” came the tear-choked response, heartfelt confirmation of everything left unsaid.
The stim’s rapidly ebbing effect sent Carlos, guided by Garcia, collapsing onto one of the empty beds procured from storage. It was by design that it happened to be the bed closest to Amanda, who immediately seized the opportunity, making amends for her prior misbehavior.
“You did right,” she said loud enough for Carlos to hear.
He acknowledged with an understanding nod—leaving it to everyone other than Garcia to guess exactly what he was right about.
“Any word from Zenith?” Gustavo managed to ask.
“A status update,” Garcia said, referring to the periodic progress reports Ellis was transmitting. “‘Departure imminent. Baring setbacks, ETA prior to Murkorian nightfall.’”
“Enough time?” Gustavo asked, the crew’s survival implicit in the question.
Garcia looked to Mariana, who could only shake her head in despair. She had made a final check of everyone’s vital signs before her body forced her to relent. The readings confirmed what she already knew and what everyone else strongly suspected: Within hours they would be wholly insensate. Soon after, their hearts would cease beating. Death would overtake them before the arrival of help from Zenith.
Assuming they came at all.
And if they were to arrive in time, what could they do? Save them from a malady no one could identify, let alone cure? Immediately restore the ESS to operational when a week’s effort by their own engineer had failed? Ironically, the only contrarian news in a hopeless situation was that they were not struggling to breathe, even with oxygen levels below fifteen percent.
Studying Garcia’s careworn face as he knelt beside her, Mariana wondered if he had come to the same conclusion: The rescue party from Zenith would be embarking on a dangerous overland trek, jeopardizing their own lives. For what? An easy answer presented itself.
“They come only for the water?” Mariana wondered.
“I shall never believe it,” Garcia said, touching her check.
“Then I shall not either,” she responded, body sinking deeper in the bed she lay on, her words of faith nearly causing Garcia to break down when a feeble voice deflected his attention.
“Comandante.”
“Yes, Carlos.” Garcia balled his fists as if there were an enemy to strike.
“I must leave you.”
“Then rest, my dear friend,” Garcia said, bowing his head to close the distance between them. “Sleep. I shall join you soon. When we awaken it will be a brighter day.”
In the end, Garcia sadly watched as each of his crew drifted off into their final sleep. Too late, he noticed there was no bed for him. If fate had decided to begrudge him a little more time, so be it—the rescue party would find him where he should be.
With the last of his remaining strength, intent on finishing what he had begun earlier, he made it to the nearby mindstor station. Enlarging the screen font, he was able to read the body of what he had written, the words of condolence offered to the shuttle pilot’s widow.
I never met your husband. I confess to not knowing his name. What little of a personal nature he shared with me, a yearning to return to you, his family, was communicated through the vacuum of space.
And yet, despite our vast separation, he unhesitatingly risked everything to protect six souls, that of myself and of my crew. It is my deepest regret he forfeited his life in the attempt. No greater impression can be imparted by one human upon another. It is through his unselfish sacrifice that I have the honor of saying I know him well. He shall live on in memory as a good and brave man.
I cannot hope to take away your sorrow except to the small extent of addressing any burden you may bear responding to those who would question the wisdom of rushing to the aid of the Unión enemy. Be assured that your husband adamantly refused to be encumbered by such a divisive distinction. If we h
ad the pleasure of meeting aboard his vessel, he would have learned something tangible of us: That Mariana Perez is a most excellent and caring physician, declining safer assignments and advancement in rank to be in personal contact with her patients; that Carlos Alvarez is a brash and troubled young man carrying the emotional scars of the antipathy between our respective nations; that nothing is immune from Gustavo Ramirez’s humor or can prevent him from quoting his favorite author; that Roya Allawi devoted a year and a half of her life to missionary work in North Africa; that Amanda Cruz is beautiful, intelligent, and perhaps a bit self-absorbed.
As for me, I am boring. I would have too often repeated that awaiting my return to Earth is an elderly father who, disregarding my advancing years and “lofty” title, will forever greet me by the name Mi Osito—my little bear. I long to see him as you longed to see your devoted husband. Our sorrow is joined as neither shall come to pass.
For reasons he was not entirely sure of, he decided to remove the last sentence. He would trust in Ellis to add on a description of their fate. Instead, he finished the letter with the following:
These small testaments concerning the character of myself and crew are humbly offered as proof that although the risk your husband took in coming to our rescue was substantial it was eclipsed by what he somehow knew would be gained. It exposes to the doubters of the world what he understood deep in his heart: That we are first and foremost united by our virtues and our faults.
Together, let us pray that his sacrifice, his memory, will keep alive the hope that one day no barriers will come between us; that there will be a generation, perhaps your children’s, that will see so far and so clear as to see no borders.
If there is any solace whatsoever in these meager words, I devoutly wish it. If, in remembrance, they inspire tears I hope you find that in crying there is healing.
It can be no other way; learning as we age that life is fragile, yet our spirits are resilient.
The Symbionts of Murkor Page 22