by Stephen King
Corey fishes in my purse for my injector pen, which I suspect works by overriding the cough reflex with the need to scream regardless of what it injects. I hope he’s too distracted stabbing a dose of Demerol into my thigh to look at the passport that I use to get to the Earthside space elevator terminal. It is Asa’s; mine is in hundreds of pieces under the gladiolas. It should be decomposed before Asa will need to lift the bulbs for winter. I’ve left her instructions for the gardens.
The coughing subsides, and I puddle into Corey’s arms, drained of what energy I had.
“Do you want some help?” Corey asks.
“I think I can make it.”
I keep my eyes toward the floor, away from the woman frozen in the doorway, and try to get my own legs under me again. I know without looking that she’s giving me the same look every parent gives me. The look I started sneaking off to Earth-orbit to stop. I don’t want to carry the weight of everyone else’s lost possibilities. My own twenty-six, born of trying to shake everyone else’s thousands, are more than enough to bear.
My legs don’t want to push the weight of my torso against Earth-normal gravity. The lower gravity on the station is the only thing I look forward to on this trip. “Maybe I do need a little help getting up. Careful the left side.”
Corey scoops me up like a groom carrying his bride across the threshold. The spasms are getting worse, and the heavy unspoken secret between us—one of them, anyway—is that this is the last anniversary we get. Corey doesn’t know how much time after our celebration we don’t have. I can still feel the woman staring at me as we disappear around the curve of the elevator car corridor.
Twenty years ago, high on the endorphins of young love and outside the reach of Earth’s legal system and ethical quandaries, the deal I made with the researchers on the space station seemed like a much better idea. Ten years ago, it still seemed like a fine idea, because I was sure I’d be dead by now.
Corey sets me on the bed in our compartment. I reserved the one with the biggest observation window for both the ascent and descent. Neither Corey nor Asa have seen Earth dropping away or rushing up. I can reach the door from the bed, so I fumble to latch the door behind us. My fingers don’t work as well as they once did, and they’ve never worked as well as a healthy person’s. A doctor in Cuba is looking into the possibility that the condition could eventually affect fine motor control, but the doctors think everything is a symptom of advanced stages of Nas-Pit. I think I’m just naturally clumsy. With a cure, Asa can have faults that aren’t side effects. I’ve wondered what that would be like.
Corey slides his hand over mine and closes my fingers around the latch for me.
“I’ve told you, you should tell the parents what you’re doing,” Corey whispers, looking out across an expanse of the Pacific. “They should know how hard you’re working for them.”
“I doubt that talking about it will help.” In five days, he will not be nearly so eager for me to tell anyone what I’m doing. I regret that I finally have to tell him.
“Even if it doesn’t help, it can’t hurt.”
“I’m tired of being the public face of Nas-Pit research. I’d like to, just for a while, be a wife taking a nice vacation with her husband.”
Corey smiles and kisses me. “Deal. We’re just a normal couple sharing a new adventure together. You and me.”
You and me and twenty-six ghosts. I’ve never told anyone, not even Asa, of the clones who died before her. Died so that the doctors could discover the exact stage of embryonic development when the disorder became irreversible. Died so that the doctors might figure out how to reverse it before then. The ghosts are too much weight to ask anyone to carry. But I carry them. Someone needs to.
The elevator starts its ascent like an amusement park tower ride that just keeps going up. We watch out our compartment window as the ocean drops away. I’ve seen the horizon start to curve more times than I care to count—the twenty-six trips up for the clones were in addition to my obligations according to my arrangement with the doctors—so I watch the look of fascination and delight on Corey’s face more than the view out the window. I’ll miss blue sky, but I’ll miss Corey’s face more.
We climb into black sky in an hour, then the elevator picks up speed. I have five days left.
“It’s a shame to waste part of the trip sleeping,” Corey says as we tuck into the bed, careful of my broken rib. We’ve watched a full sweep of the stars in the black sky through our observation window as the Earth carries us around.
“It’s five days up to the spaceside terminal. We have to sleep sometime.” I don’t want to sleep either, but I’ll have what’s left of the rest of my life for space. I don’t want to waste any of the last four days I have with Corey. Even if he doesn’t storm out, I have to leave. That was the deal I made with the station doctors. They get my body when I’m dead, and that day is coming fast.
He’s been awake for a day and a half, so Corey’s breathing quickly falls into a regular rhythm of light snoring. I lay awake, cuddled under his arm, nursing my broken rib. I’ll miss him. He will have no reason to miss me. I made sure of that.
Eighteen years ago, on the twenty-seventh clone, the treatment took. Asa lived, then she kept living. Now that she’s old enough, she’ll keep living my life, the way it should have been. Corey won’t need to mourn me.
The intercom panel chimes and stirs Corey partly awake.
“Go back to sleep. It must be a mistake,” I whisper. By now, the instruction to leave me alone is part of the new employee orientation. Elevator attendants don’t know why, and if they want to keep their jobs, they don’t ask.
“Tem uma chamada de Asa Lowery,” the electronic voice announces.
Shit. Someone is getting fired for this.
I tell them to take a message and, ignoring the intercostal pain, slap at the panel until I manage to put it in Do Not Disturb mode. That is supposed to go without saying.
Corey is looking at me, forehead furrowed. “When did you learn Spanish?”
“Portuguese. Go back to sleep, dear.”
I pull the blanket up over his chest, and his soft snoring starts up again.
I stare at the stubble on his chin that is just barely starting to show grays. I have four days. Four days to break Asa to Corey. Four days to figure out why she would be calling me.
The click of the compartment door closing wakes me up. The bed is empty. So is the rest of the compartment. The Earth below the elevator car is dark, broken by a thin line of lights along the Brazilian coast. We’re on a space elevator, I tell myself. He can’t be going far. He has nowhere to go, and three days until he will want to.
Three days for him to love me still.
He has left my inhaler and injector pen on the night table next to my head, right where they are supposed to be, never out of arm’s reach when I’m kitted out to be left alone. I close my fist around my inhaler, and the surge of adrenaline subsides.
I fumble with the latch on the compartment door. My fingers, perpetually cold, can’t work the latch. I try using my right hand to close my left hand around the latch, and it still slips from my grip.
The door opens, and Corey sets a tray with two plates of soft-boiled eggs and toast points on the night table.
“I got us some breakfast.”
“You didn’t have to go out. They deliver.”
“The cook was surprised you weren’t having room service.”
I grab the inhaler tight. I can’t panic. If I panic, I’ll start coughing, and I don’t have the strength for another battle with my lungs so soon. “What did you tell him?”
“That he must have you confused with someone else.”
I relax my grip and take a sip of tea.
“I arranged for dinner in the lounge. The view is incredible.”
“I like our view.” That is uncomfortably close to lying.
“You can see the other side.”
“I don’t want to run into that woman with t
he Nas-Pit baby.”
“Her name is Marna.”
“Huh?”
“Marna. I ran into her getting breakfast. She introduced herself and asked me to thank you.”
“Thank me?”
“It was even more strange than the cook. She said you were giving her a chance to have her baby back.”
“Yeah. Strange.”
“And she hoped to see you on Epsilon Station. Do you know what that is about?”
“Some of my doctors are on one of the stations.” That is true enough to not be a lie.
“So you’ve been here before.”
I should have three more days to break the news gently about the real reason for taking our last vacation together into space.
“Are you crazy? You know what kind of things they say go on up on the orbital medical stations.”
“That’s why I work with them. It’s not like what you hear.” Armchair ethicists and rumor-mongers lack imagination. There’s a freedom that comes with being declared the embodiment of society’s ills. On the platforms, they cross lines that people on the surface don’t even know exist.
“There’s a fine line between cutting-edge and morally reprehensible. Gene splicing, human cloning …”
“The human cloning was the easy part.” I realize after I hear it that I’ve said that out loud.
Corey perks up. “So they finally found a cure for you?”
I wish he hadn’t put it like that. For as long as we’ve been together, I’ve relied on a semantic loophole. They’re curing the disorder, but I’ve never been under a delusion that they were curing me. It’s a delusion I’ve carefully allowed Corey to keep, until now.
“It’s more of a prevention.”
“So how does that help you?”
“It doesn’t, but they can make sure babies don’t have the disorder.”
Corey looks at me, confused.
“They still can’t cure it once you’re born, but if they know that a baby is going to get Nas-Pit, they can short-circuit it beforehand.”
“So their solution is to …”
“Clone the babies, cure them, and let the babies live out their lives, healthy as little clams.”
It only sounds bad until it’s a person’s last desperate hope.
“And you never thought to tell me?”
“It never seemed like a good time to bring it up.”
“Why now, then?”
I launch into my prepared answer. “On Earth, it’s take, take, take. They take blood. They take cerebrospinal fluid. They take bone marrow. They take brain scans—”
“Brain scans? What would they need brain scans for with a lung disorder?”
“Some doctor in Cleveland had some crazy idea that the disease mechanism would also affect higher reasoning capability. Isn’t that just the craziest thing you’ve heard?”
Corey says nothing and stares at me.
I pick up the rehearsed speech where I left off. “I get the feeling he would have taken the brain if they could. I’m not sure how much lung I have left, but I swear they’ve taken at least a full lobe’s worth of tissue samples, not like I need it or anything. A person can only stare down so many biopsy needles before thinking maybe there should be some give with the take.”
“You’re compensated.”
True enough. Except for the chronic pain and having to take time away from Corey for doctors, not dying has turned out to be an easy way to make a decent living, after I got used to the needles.
“When the doctors on the platform contacted me about a possible treatment, they offered to give me something in return. Something more than money.”
“Like?”
“A future. Not exactly for me, but you two can have the future we should have had.”
“I would have taken a present with you, you know. Twenty years could have been a nice run if you’d been there.”
I kiss his lips, and feel nothing back.
I would take the ghosts that every one of those mothers carried, rather than this. The parents never look at me like I’m personally responsible for the lost possibilities. To them, I’m a ghost, not a thief.
I was supposed to have three more days.
GUMI-BEAR
ERINN L. KEMPER
The refrigerator kicked on with a pulsing hum. Mary blinked and tried to remember why she was there, in her nighty, shivering in front of the sparse offerings of half-eaten takeout, wilted lettuce and moss-green bread-ends.
Milk. That was it.
Something to help her sleep. Even if she didn’t have the desire to drink it, just the act of stirring the milk as it heated on the stove might help focus her whirling thoughts. It was impossible to sleep with Dan away, and since he was always away now she passed through the days and nights in a fog of baby-worry, and wondering when her husband would call.
A chilled, mushy hand patted Mary’s leg. She looked down and the Gumi-Bear, its gel-filled body pale blue, beckoned her to follow. She closed the fridge, sending the room into darkness. The bear switched on its night-light setting, the fiber-optic wires bright enough to keep her from tripping as she followed it—pudgy, toddler-high—down the hall.
“He has a fever again?” she asked.
The fact that the Gumi-Bear was set to cool-down, instead of cozy-blanket temperature made the question redundant, but she couldn’t help asking. She nodded when the Gumi-Bear made a fist and bobbed it up and down in the sign for ‘yes.’
The baby was too young to use sign language, but Mary disliked the Gumi-Bears with their cheery puppet-voice program, so she kept this one set to sign-speak.
In the darkened nursery, the bear gripped the bars of the crib with its hands and feet and climbed up and over. Stumpy legs sticking out in front, it settled on the mattress near the baby, and placed hand to forehead. The temperature popped up on the wall-monitor. 101. Not too hot.
“Wake me if it goes up.”
The Gumi-Bear signed ‘ok’ and lay down next to the baby. It placed a cooling hand gently on the back of the baby’s neck and sagged into monitor-mode. She stood for a moment, looking from baby to bear, then around the nursery. Shelves stacked with all the new toys, rocking chair with its special pillow and blanket, mobiles, and cartoon animals painted on the walls. Dan made sure they had everything.
Mary returned to her room and sat in bed, waiting for the bear to come and wake her in the morning.
“I can’t believe he’s left you alone with a sick baby, Sis.” Samantha, on the other end of the video-call at her own sun-streaked kitchen table, picked at her teeth with a fork. Behind her, the twins raced back and forth, bonking each other on the heads with long foam tubes while the TV screen flashed primary-colored cartoons.
“He’s got work to do.” Mary kept her voice flat, hands pressing into the table top, out of her sister’s view. “It’s not like his being here would make any difference. The baby would still be sick. Besides, he got us the bear.”
Mary resisted the impulse to look behind her. No way the Gumi-Bear was listening. It would be in the nursery with the baby, like it always was.
“That thing? Have they even finished testing them? Does he really think it could prevent what happened last time? Besides, isn’t it creepy—a little robot zipping around changing diapers and what-not?” Samantha studied the tines of the fork, then resumed her tooth-picking.
Mary shrugged. She didn’t want to admit to her sister that when the Gumi-Bear first moved in she’d shuddered at the sound of its feet slip-padding across the tile floor. She would stare for hours at the opaque sack that hung in its stomach, a balloon organ hiding the mystery of its inner workings. And the bear had stared back, it’s blank, half-formed features seemed set in judgement.
“It doesn’t change diapers. It’s not big enough for that. Besides, the experts say changing diapers is an essential component to the forming of the mother-child bond.”
“Yeah, right. Gagging at the stench of their shit? Getting pissed on by a fre
e willy? Which experts? The dads who don’t want to do the changing, that’s who.”
Mary shrugged again. “It’s not that bad.”
Samantha set down the fork and smirked, her nostrils dark tunnels that flared as she leaned close to the camera. “So, still bottle-feeding? Or did the baby finally figure out what a boob is for?”
“Oh, we’ve been at breast feeding for a week now.” Mary didn’t know why she lied, but her sister nodded and settled back in her chair. Mary knew she’d played this better than the diaper comment—avoided yet another lecture on the importance of breast feeding and imprinting and all that natural-mother baby guilt.
The truth was, she didn’t like breast feeding. The way the baby opened its mouth like a leech blindly straining towards the call of warm blood. The way her skin stretched and gathered around the baby’s mouth. The tugging on her nipple. Those small, damp hands, fingers flexing and clenching, the milk flooding in slow contractions down into the gurgling stomach.
“It’s such a beautiful thing.” Mary said.
Samantha’s expression softened and her gaze grew distant. “Ah, it was so much easier then. When they were babies.”
Mary considered asking her sister how she had dealt with the constant crying. With never, no matter how hard she tried, being able to do the right thing to make it stop.
One of the twins ran into the kitchen and whacked her mother with the foam tube, then beat on the table, a hollow smack that sent the monitor jiggling.
“Hey, go to your room with that. I’d better get these monsters fed before they start melting down.” Samantha reached out and the screen went blank.
The sudden quiet overwhelmed Mary. Her chair screeched as it skidded back across the tile. Sliding her hand along the cool white walls, she went to the starkly furnished living room. When they’d first moved in she’d loved this house with its clean simplicity. White walls, big windows, stainless kitchen and tile floors reflecting sunlight. She didn’t know she’d be spending so much time alone here. And with all the hard surfaces and sharp corners, it didn’t feel like a good place to raise a child.