Ben pointed to an irregular rectangle. “I'm pretty sure that's an amplifier. Next to it is a low pass filter. A pretty sophisticated filter from what I can tell. These circles are sensors of some kind."
Looking at the picture made her chest hurt. “What the hell have I got inside of me?"
"I don't know."
"Do you know how it happened?"
Ben nodded. “No. Whatever happened is impossible."
"Impossible?” She pointed at the pictures. “It's right there in front of me."
Ben nodded, smiled at her. “That it is."
"Pretty big stretch to be impossible."
"I know that."
Norma stared at him for a minute. “Okay. Explain it to me."
Ben pulled some more papers from his briefcase. “In my business, mites, tiny machines about the size of a cell, do all the work. We got a bad shipment of mites. Somehow they went ahead and did all the work the normal mites did and left some clusters in the tobacco that got through all of the quality control mechanisms, the heating, the cutting and packaging, the irradiation, until the finished cigarettes reached you. Then, they suddenly started working inside of you, not in some random destructive manner but in a controlled construction. I can guess what might have happened but, in point of fact, it's impossible."
Norma spoke slowly. “I have tiny machines in my lungs? Machines you built?"
"Close. I don't know what they're encoded to do. Nobody knows."
"How many ... clusters got out?"
"From what I can tell, only one."
"How do you know that?"
Ben spread his hands. “So far, you, and only you, have shown anything.” He pointed at Norma.
"Pretty long odds."
"Not as long as some."
"So what are your mites doing to me?"
"I'm not sure. My mites were contaminated with other mites with different natures. Mites are built to cooperate so I'm not sure what they are doing."
"What were they supposed to do?” asked Norma.
"All different things. One set built musical instruments,” said Ben, leaning on the table. “Oboes. Flutes. Tubas. Or, since they came from India, sitars or something. Some were designed to implement a communication system designed in Germany. There were banana preparation mites ordered from Malaysia. Others."
Norma remembered the singing of the fleshy bit.
"I have tiny machines making music in my lungs. Your tiny machines."
"As I said, they're not my mites. My mites died properly."
"Are you sure you're not a lawyer?"
"If I was a lawyer, I wouldn't be here."
"Why are you here?"
He stared at his hands and didn't speak for a few seconds. “To be present at the creation."
"What does that mean?"
Ben leaned toward her. “By any stretch of the imagination, the mites should have just consumed you, made you into some intermediate random product. My mites, acting out of my programming, would try to make you into tobacco product. Something that, to you, would be invariably gruesome and fatal. But that's not what the mites inside of you are doing. They're building something inside you. Something integrated—which I can see from the pictures, as well as noticing that you're still walking around."
"Walking right down to the clinic so Dr. Peabody can cut them out."
"That's why I'm here. To try to persuade you not to."
Norma stared at him. “Are you nuts?"
Ben smiled. “Maybe. Mites and humans are made up of much the same things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, some metals. If we come from the dust of the earth, then so do they. But we created them. Now, something unexpected and impossible has happened. A miracle."
"A miracle?"
"Yes."
"That's like saying cancer is a miracle."
Ben shook his head. “Not at all. Cancer is the emergent property of the accumulated errors in an ordered system. It's the consequences of random events."
Norma shook her head. The way he talked made her dizzy. “How's this any different?"
"Cancer in a system makes the system untenable. It doesn't do anything to make the system any better. It's not creative. This is going to make you something better."
"It's going to kill me. That's what it's going to do."
Ben shrugged. “There's a risk to everything. But we come from the earth. So do these mites. The earth speaks through us. They speak through the mites, too.” He pointed to the radiographs. “That low pass filter looks a lot like filters used to integrate circuits into nerve cells. I didn't design it. None of the programming in any of the contaminant mites had anything like it. They developed this on their own. This is no cancer."
"But like cancer it's going to kill me."
"You were going to let the cancer do that anyway, or you wouldn't have walked out of Peabody's office."
"That was different.” Norma thought for a moment. “The cancer was mine. It was my own body telling me it was time to go. These things are ... invading me."
"A cluster is made up of a few hundred mites. It's about the size of a mustard seed. It took root in you—not just anybody. It's making something in you—nobody else."
"You're saying these things chose me?"
"No. They can't choose anything. They're just little automatons. Like chromosomes or sperm. A baby is the emergent property of the genes but the genes didn't have any choice in the matter. Out of such automata comes you and me. The mites didn't choose you. The earth itself chose you."
"You are nuts. These things are still going to kill me."
"We can stack the odds.” He brought out an inhaler from his briefcase. “This is FTV. All mites are designed so they stop operation when FTV is present. FTV saturates the air in mite factories as a safety precaution. If you inhale this, it might at least slow down their progress."
"That goes against your plan, doesn't it?"
"No. Think of it as prenatal care. It gives the mites an opportunity to more thoroughly understand their environment."
Norma thought of the singing again.
"What if they escape? I don't want to destroy the world or something."
Ben brought a square instrument out of his briefcase. “This has been sampling the air for the whole time I've been here. Look for yourself. No mites."
"They could be waiting. Like fungus spores."
"Now who's nuts?"
She considered. “Could Peabody cut them out?"
Ben shook his head. “I don't think so. The mites are cooperating. If you cut out a chunk of the network, they'll just try to rebuild it and they'll have to relearn what they lost plus figure out the new topology resulting from the surgery. I think it would just make things worse."
"That's what you would say regardless, isn't it?"
Ben shrugged again and said nothing.
She had been ready to just die and be gone. At least, this way would make it more of an adventure.
She drew a ragged breath. She had no difficulty breathing yet. No more than usual.
"Okay,” she said. “I'm in."
Life seemed to settle back to normal. She didn't cough anything up anymore. Her voice cracked and quavered as she spoke. Which, she supposed, was a small price to pay for robots living in her lungs.
Reginald Cigarettes suddenly disappeared from the market. Ben had given Norma prior warning. She had a dozen cases packed carefully in the basement.
About a month after she'd first spoken with Ben, she woke up from a deep sleep jumpy and irritated. When Lenny came by for his morning visit she told him to go away. Her voice was breaking like a fifteen-year-old boy.
"Ma,” called Lenny. “Let me in."
She opened the door a crack. “What do you want?"
"Come on, Ma. Don't get crazy on me. Let me in. I'm your son, remember?"
"I know who you are.” She stood back to let him in.
"That was a pretty nice station you had on,” he said as he stepped in. “Who was singing?"
"Oh, come on!” She held up her hands in exasperation. “You have something to say. It's written all over your face. What is it?"
"Well, Ma. Your birthday is coming up and all—” He stopped and held out an envelope to her. “Happy birthday."
She opened the envelope and slipped on her reading glasses. They were tickets to Opera Southwest. Two of them. To see Don Giovanni.
"You always have music around,” Lenny said shyly. “I thought you might like to go."
Norma didn't say anything for a moment. “Nearly forty years I've known you,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “And you can still surprise me."
All the next week, she sang along with everything that came over the radio, tuneless or not. Belted it out with Patsy Cline. Harmonized with a Hunk of Burnin’ Love. She was a Werewolf in London Born in America seeing Paradise by the Dashboard Lights for the very first time.
Norma was so excited waiting for Lenny to pick her up she made herself pee three times. Just to be sure she wouldn't have to get up in the middle and go to the bathroom.
Lenny wore a tie for the occasion and looked so handsome that Norma decided she'd forgo cigarettes for the night. Just so he'd be happy. She left her pack of Reginalds in the dresser drawer just to make sure.
The drive downtown, the walk into the Hiland Theater, finding their seats in the middle just in front of the orchestra, passed in a happy, warm blur. She settled back in her chair when the lights dimmed and put one hand on Lenny's. The music came up.
I must have heard this a hundred times, she thought. But now, in front of her, sung by people no less flesh and blood than she, it came to life.
In the middle of the second act, where Elvira began her angry solo, Norma leaned forward. For a moment, she had an uncontrollable urge to cough. It subsided before she could do anything to stop it. Then, it came again. Stronger, this time. She was going have one of those hacking fits like when she coughed up the fleshy bit. She could feel it coming on. Norma had to get out of there.
She put one hand over her mouth, stood and walked quickly up the aisle. Lenny stared after her but she was outside in the lobby before he could react.
A bathroom. She couldn't find one. Instead, she walked outside onto Central Street, thinking to cough or throw up in the gutter.
When she filled her lungs, the pain eased and in her mind, she could still hear Elvira's rage, haunted by the Don and her own weakness. She opened her mouth, and it welled up and out of her like clear running water. The vibrating power of it shook her, made her heart pound and her lungs rejoice. Every day she had listened to the radio, the music had been captured and woven into her cells. Now, they were free.
She stopped when Elvira stopped. Lenny was standing in front of her.
"Ma?” he asked. “You okay?"
Norma nodded. She didn't want to speak.
"That was good,” he said softly. “Unnatural, of course. But good."
"You think so?"
"Yeah.” He nodded. “I do.” Lenny didn't say anything for a minute. “Tomorrow we go see Dr. Peabody."
"Hush.” She was smiling. Norma felt like a girl again and the world was bright with possibility. She was sixteen, sitting in an old Chevy, smoking and grinning and driving down a road straight as a runway and smooth as a glass table.
In 1711, for his first opera in London, George Handel advertised he would bring to the stage a chariot pulled across the stage by live horses, fireworks, a raft of tenors sailing through the storm in midair and not one, but two fire-breathing dragons. Consequently, opera, even opera in Albuquerque, was no stranger to novelty.
Ben told Norma she had two advantages going into the audition. One, she was old. It was hard to take a pretty, thirty-year-old diva and make her look seventy-five. Not only was it easier to do the same thing to Norma, she didn't mind and the diva usually did. The second was she had the pipes. Once the director was persuaded to hear her, she had a spot.
Not to say she got the front line roles. She was the old dowager, the mother-in-law, the comic innkeeper's wife, the ancient fortuneteller—in short, any role that suited her age and wasn't big enough to make the younger singers want it. This was fine with Norma. She was having a ball.
Hey, she thought to herself as she sprayed the inhaler down her throat. Look at me. I'm the Great Caruso.
The next two years passed quickly. Norma expected her voice to have a metal, inhuman quality, given its origin. Instead, it was an intensely human voice. “A dark warm revelry,” said one critic in Keystone. “Lustrous,” said another in Scottsdale. That was as far as she traveled. Opera Southwest had funding problems those years and their concert tours went only as far east as Amarillo and as far west as Needles.
She didn't care. The music never palled. The singing never lost its luster. But one day, she was listening to a recording of Rigoletto as she prepared for the role of Maddalena—being able to read music didn't come with the deal—when she looked up in the mirror. She looked the same. But what was going on inside of her? The quality of her singing seemed to get better over the last two years. She never coughed anymore. The only reminders she had were the daily dose of the inhaler and the two radiographs she had framed and mounted on her wall.
Norma stared at her image in the mirror. She was pushing eighty and could see it in her face. “What's going on in there?"
I should have died two years ago. I'm living on borrowed time.
Norma had a feeling deep inside that the mites were only waiting for her.
"Waiting for me to do what?” she asked Ben as she sipped her coffee. It was a warm March and they had come to an outdoor coffee shop near the theater. It was her birthday.
"What do you mean?” Ben leaned back in his chair, bemused. He was still thin by normal standards but in the last few years, he had filled out. Now, his eyes seemed properly proportioned and his mouth fit in his face. “Aren't you happy?"
"Of course I am."
"Then don't question it."
Norma snorted and stirred her coffee. “This was the miracle you wanted to be present at?"
Ben smiled back at her serenely. “I'm present enough."
"These mites went through a lot of effort to do this to me. Why? What do they have in mind? Why did they stop?"
"The FTV stopped them."
"I don't believe it. I don't think the FTV was much more than a suggestion. I think they chose to stop. For some reason."
"You're making them more intelligent than they are.” Ben closed his eyes in the spring sun.
"I'm not sure intelligence has anything to do with it.” Norma drummed her fingers on the table. “You don't need intelligence to have a purpose. They had a purpose. What was the word you used? My singing was an ... emergent property of their purpose."
"What do you think it is?"
"How should I know? Send messages to the moon? A voyage to Arcturus? A better subway?” Norma mulled it over in her mind. “I owe them for this."
"You don't owe them a thing. Think of it as a reward for a life well spent."
Norma chuckled. She had a clockwork sense of time passing. It was her choice. They had made sure of it. Well, she was eighty now. When should she choose? Once the mind and gums went, there wouldn't be much left. Why not now, when she still had it?
"Heck,” she muttered out loud. “I was ready to let lung cancer kill me. Why not these guys?"
Ben leaned forward, suddenly alert. “What are you talking about?"
Norma watched the way a bicyclist worked his way down the crowded street. “I quit using the inhaler."
"When?"
"Just now."
It didn't take long. The mites were ready. A month after she stopped using the inhaler she woke up in her bed, too weak to reach the phone. Lenny came by on his way to work to say hi and found her. The paramedics came into her room in slow motion. Their hands left trails in the air as they drifted over her; the instruments resting on her chest and face felt as light as down. It made her
smile as she drifted off.
She awoke in the hospital, a mask on her face, a crucified Jesus across the room from her. Jesus appeared to be an understanding sort—as understanding, she supposed, as one could be hanging in the air from iron nails driven through wrists and feet.
Norma must have been wired. A moment after she awoke a nurse came in the room and started examining her. Ten minutes later Dr. Peabody entered the room.
Dr. Peabody looked as if he'd been waiting for years to tell her she needed his and only his procedures and therapies. Only his surgery would save her.
Norma pulled the mask off her face. “When can I go home?” she wheezed.
Peabody stopped, his mouth open. It was worth the black spots in her vision to see his face. “Miss Carstairs—"
"Yes. I'm dying. I know. Prescribe a home health aide for me so I can get oxygen at home."
Peabody seemed to gasp for air.
"Is there anything else?” she asked sweetly.
Peabody fled.
Ben came in as Peabody left the room. “Let me guess. You didn't want to do what he said."
Norma nodded and lay back, spent. “Get me out of here. I'll die at home, thank you very much."
Lenny told her she was lucky. Norma's pneumonia wasn't difficult. The pain she expected from lung cancer never materialized. She was spared the emphysemic experience of drowning in her own fluids. There was only a deep and abiding weakness. The lifting of an arm or rolling over in bed became too much effort. Lucky? She thought so.
Lenny moved in. Ben visited daily. Every other day, a home health aide came in and helped bathe her and checked the oxygen.
Norma grew accustomed to the oxygen cannula. While it didn't alter the progress of things, it did make them pass more easily. She imagined the mites accepting the help as they worked.
"You said it was the earth,” she said to Ben, smiling. “The earth speaking through me."
"I changed my mind. This is stupidity given substance,” said Ben, exasperated. “It's not too late. We can use the FTV."
Lenny was behind him, an anguished look on his face. “Don't leave me, Mama,” he said softly.
"Everything leaves,” she said softly as she drifted off. “Me, too."
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection Page 70