Nova 1

by Anthology

  “I wouldn’t have bothered myself to take any trouble to type up an agitator like her! Anyway, even if she lives, this’ll stop her speaking at those meetings!”

  “We’ll keep her, all the same. I’m not having deaths in my ward. That mother of hers, well, there was something about her, there sure was, the way she went about it. Kind of cool. But the scar tissue’s going to twist that girl’s face.” The ward sister put down her cup and prepared to go back on duty. “Remember that woman we had in after the big Palladium fire? Shocking, wasn’t it? This’ll be worse. But mind, agitator or no agitator, she gets proper nursing!”

  The morphia was wearing off. Jaycie was whispering in halfsleep, arguing and refusing. Even like this, her voice kept much of its strange persuasive beauty. The ward sister was whispering to the house surgeon: “I know these skin grafts can’t take; you don’t have to tell me! They’ll slough off. If she doesn’t die first. Do more harm than good. Too late now for radiation or for XQ. But the mother—well, she’s kind of distinguished; I couldn’t very well say no, could I now? Besides she had some theory—oh, I can’t remember now—yes, yes, it’ll be worse for her when she sees her daughter’s face the way it’s bound to be. I know. But don’t you fuss now! Haven’t we all got our hands full these days!”

  After that there was rather less scope for fussing about any individual patient. The wards were jammed with temporary beds. Mary waited beside Jaycie as she gradually awoke into pain and mastered it. They were getting short of analgesics by now, and besides Jaycie had said quite firmly that she needed none. Mary did not ask for much herself; the pain, though at times severe, was bearable. On her own thighs the skinned strips were healing by first intention; all had been aseptic from the start, competently done. She helped the ward sister when she could. It kept her mind off what might be happening at home. For the usual channels of communication were no longer functioning. The military had taken over successfully. Or had they . . .? Perhaps not.

  Days and nights went by. In the third week the ward sister, still surprised that Jaycie went on living when so many had died, said to herself that now those skin grafts were lifting, would slough off like a dead scab, leaving everything worse. “They can’t do anything else,” she said. Then you’d begin to see the mess the scarring was bound to make of her face. And that wouldn’t be nice for the mother.

  But the new skin didn’t lift off, didn’t die. The edge of it visibly and redly lived and grew on to the damaged flesh in healthy granulations. The thin scar lines would be there, but not the hideous twisting and lumping of raw flesh. You took off the dressings and there was the undeniable fact: the skin grafts had taken. The area of damage, the hideous wounds were covered in. No wonder Jaycie lived.

  The ward sister shook her head. It shouldn’t have happened. But it had. In a way, however, Sister was rather pleased; the doctors were wrong again. Them and their theories that they were always having to change! And it just showed how, in spite of all the troubles and difficulties of overcrowding and medical shortages, good nursing—her pride, the thing she insisted on in her ward—had somehow done the trick.

  The house surgeon looked too. He wouldn’t commit himself and he hadn’t time just then to look it all up in the textbooks. Later on he’d mention the matter to his chief. But after a while, with Jaycie getting stronger every day, he and Sister decided on a few tactful questions. The odd thing was that Mary found it comparatively easy telling them. She didn’t mind what the effect on them might be of what she was telling. Indeed, she hardly noticed. She had plenty of other things to worry about. It was much less easy telling Joe.

  For he came at last, bless him, bringing all sorts of delicious things to eat. Yes, they were all rather hungry at the hospital; supplies had been cut off. There hadn’t been much news either. “Oh Joe,” she said, “dear, dear Joe, is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and my little Martha turned up trumps. We never guessed what a head that kid had! And I got Simon on long distance. Naturally he couldn’t say much, but he’s okay. Now, Mary, what’s all this story about skin grafts?”

  Mary said: “Jaycie had a very large area of skin torn and burned off. On purpose. Joe, they—they were so horrible to her. Some of her friends told me. They didn’t mean her to live. I didn’t realize people could be like that about politics in this country. Though I suppose they really are everywhere when it gets serious. You know, she was very nearly dead when I got here.” She stopped for a moment and dabbed her eyes. It came fleetingly through Joe’s mind that this might have been the best thing. For the world, for things as they are. For himself and Simon and Martha. Maybe for Mary herself in the long run. But he wasn’t going to let himself think that just now, not with his wife sobbing on to the edge of his waistcoat. He stroked her hair, a bit sticky and unwashed and the white collar of her dress all mucked up, poor sweet.

  She looked up a little and said: “So it seemed to me that the best chance was a skin graft.”

  “But Mary,” he said, “a skin graft’s no good from someone else. Even I know that!”

  “It’s all right from someone identical: genetically the same.”

  “But Mary, you aren’t, you can’t be . . . Joe had an uncomfortable feeling, though he didn’t quite know why.

  “Because of the father. His genes make the child different from the mother. I know. Joe, I told you a long time ago that Jaycie had a father. Joe, dear, dear Joe, I only told you that because I thought it would upset you more to think she hadn’t a father. There now, you are upset—”

  “Mary darling, don’t worry about me. I just don’t understand.”

  “She didn’t have a father, Joe. I—I never had a lover. I was— well, I suppose there is nothing else for it, I was a virgin, Joe.”

  “But you had a baby. Sweet, you can’t have been.”

  “I was. You see, something started one of my ova developing. That’s all. Oh that’s all! It doesn’t sound too odd that way, does it?”

  “But what could start it? What’s the stimulus?”

  “It might be anything I expect. Some—metabolic change.”

  “What was it with you?”

  She did not answer. Even now she could not think quite calmly. It might have been imagination. It must have been. Lower than far thunder, higher than the bat’s squeak, the whispering of a million leaves. Sometimes the murmur of wind-shifted leaves in summer reminded her. It couldn’t possibly have been what she was certain it was. She took a breath: “Whatever the stimulus was, the ovum developed normally. The child had to be a female, an identical female. Without the y chromosome that comes from the male and goes to a male. I don’t know what happened in the process of chromosome division. Of course, there was the possibility—perhaps the probability—of a haploid. Of the chromosomes splitting unevenly. You see what I mean, Joe? But they didn’t.”

  “That—that was odd,” said Joe, looking away from his wife’s face. “There must have been—some kind of pattern-making machinery behind it—”

  “You could call it that,” said Mary; “yes, of course, Joe, you could call it that. But the way things worked out, Jaycie and I are genetically identical.”

  Joe swallowed: “Did you—did you know this from the start, Mary?”

  “Not for sure,” she said. “But—when she was a baby I started by taking the tiniest pinch-graft from her to me. That took. But it wasn’t certain. I mean, it was almost sure that my antibodies wouldn’t affect her graft. But it wasn’t sure the other way round. So, when she was a little older, I tried it that way too.”

  “But if you were genetically identical, Mary, you—you’d have been as alike as—identical twins.”

  “We are, physically. But there’s a big difference in nurture, Joe, as well as age. I’m going gray and wrinkled.”

  Gallantly he said, “No!” but she only smiled a little.

  “You see, my dearest, there’s a different best treatment for babies every generation. And then—we started t
hinking about different kinds of things. Using the same brain perhaps, but—”

  “I’d have thought I’d have noticed,” Joe muttered, “seeing you both all the time.”

  “You were used to me, Joe. And besides, by the time she was adult, you thought of her as herself. Though you’ve always thought she was like me. You were pleased she was like me and not—like someone else. Weren’t you? And I always had a different hairdo from hers. On purpose, Joe.”

  “And all that time, you never told me, Mary.”

  “I—I couldn’t. Not by then. The other thing—we’d got used to it, you and I—as a story. Oh, Joe, you wouldn’t have liked it!”

  “No,” said Joe, “no, I suppose I wouldn’t.” He looked across the crowded ward at the bed; one of Jaycie’s friends was sitting there with a notebook, questioning and taking down the answers. Jaycie’s friends were going about openly now. Beginning to take over here and there, to put Jaycie’s ideas into practice. Bad, bad. At least, that was what one had to suppose. The alternative— the military alternative—had not succeeded. There would be no trial for Jaycie. Instead, there were going to be changes. Changes he knew he was going to hate. Even if they were supposed to be going to be good in the end. A lot of people were sold on that, but not Joe. Changes—everything changed before it was done! His own whole life: set another way, not the way he wanted! But all the same, he thought, this was the baby he had accepted when he got Mary to say she would marry him all that long while back. She was a sweet baby right enough. Pretty. Those great eyes. There was always something about babies that got you. Maybe, he thought, I shall have to accept Jaycie’s changes and not say a word. Because of Mary.

  Mary went on: “Perhaps that’s why she’s always been a bit different. Why she’s been—single-hearted.” She wasn’t going to let Joe know—not ever—that she had told Jaycie before she told him. That would hurt him, and she couldn’t bear to hurt him any more. She was Joe’s Mary as much as she was Jaycie’s. Almost as much.

  “So you don’t know what the stimulus was,” Joe said half aloud. “You don’t know. It’s—yes, it’s a bit scaring, Mary.”

  “I know. That’s why I told you the other thing. The easy thing. And you were so sweet. Forgive me, Joe.”

  “That’s all right, Mary. Funny, I sometimes wondered what the other chap was like. Whether Jaycie took after him. Whether you ever thought about him. And now there isn’t another chap.”

  “No,” said Mary. “No.”

  “And you got the doctor here to take this skin graft—”

  “I took it myself,” said Mary. “There’s nothing to it if its done in good conditions.”

  “Didn’t it hurt?”

  “Just a bit afterward. But not nearly as much as thinking she was going to die. Goodness, Joe, any mother would do it for her child; jump at the chance of doing it if it was to be any use. But of course it wouldn’t be any use—normally.”

  “Yes,” said Joe. “Yes. But you’ve always liked normal things, haven’t you, Mary?”

  “For everything but this, Joe,” she said, and held on tight to his hand. Deliberately and with a slow effort he made the hand respond, warmly, gently, normally. For the hand left to itself had wanted to pull away, not to touch her. Not to touch.

  FADES & HANDS

  by James Sallis

  New Talent . . . science fiction appears to be happily blessed with more than its fair share of it. James Sallis is a lean man with the drooping moustache and far-seeing eyes of a Western outlaw caught in one of those early tintypes. He is quiet and listens far more than he speaks—perhaps because he has so much to say. When he speaks he speaks with words on paper and they are the words of a poet, as in this binary story. A glimpse of worlds, before and after a galactic war.

  Kettle of Stars

  Alot of Couriers are from academic backgrounds, everything from literature to energy mechanics, the idea being that intellectual hardening of the arteries is less likely to occur if you watch what you eat and keep the blood flowing. You have to stay flexible: one loose word, one unguarded reaction, and you’ve not only lost respect and a job, you’ve probably thrown an entire world out of sympathy with Earth. In those days a Courier was a kind of bargainlot diplomat/prime minister/officeboy, and we were playing most of it by air; we hadn’t been in Union long enough to set standards. So when they started the Service they took us out of the classrooms, out of the lines that stood waiting for diplomas—because we were supposed to know things like unity being the other side of a coin called variety. Knowledge, they assumed, breeds tolerance. Or at least caution.

  Dr. Desai (Comparative Cultural) used to lean out over the podium he carried between classrooms to proclaim: “All the institutions, the actions, the outrages and distinctions of an era find their equivalent in any other era.” He said it with all the conviction of a politician making the rounds before General Conscript, his small face bobbing up and down to emphasize every word. I took my degree at Arktech under Desai, and in my three years there I must have heard him say that a hundred times: everything else he—or any other instructor—said built back up to it like so many stairsteps. A zikkurat: climb any side, you get to the top. Some early member of the Service must have had Dr. Desai too. They had the same thing in mind.

  For me it was June, on a day like yellow crystal. I was sitting in an outdoor cafe across from the campus with my degree rolled up in a pocket, cup half full of punjil, myself brimful of insouciance. It was a quiet day, with the wind pushing about several low blue clouds. I was looking across at the towers and grass of the Academy, thinking about ambition—what was it like to have it? I had no desire to teach: I couldn’t get past Desai’s sentence. And for similar reasons I was reluctant to continue my studies. An object at rest stays at rest, and I was very much at rest.

  Distractedly, I had been watching a small man in Vegan clothes work his way down along the street, stopping to peer into each shop in turn. When finally he reached the cafe, he looked around, saw me in the comer and began smiling. I barely had time to stand before he was at the table, hand stuck out, briefcase already opening.

  Like Desai, he was a little man, forehead and chin jutting back from a protruding nose.

  “Hello, Lant,” he said. “I was told I could probably find you over here.” He sat down across from me. He had small, red eyes, like a rabbit’s. “Let me introduce myself: Golfanth Stein. S-t-e-i-n: stain. I wonder if you’ve heard the Council’s organizing a new branch.” I hadn’t. “Now that we’re in Union there’s a certain problem in representation, you know. Much to be done, embassies to establish, ambassador work. So we’re beginning the Courier Service. Your degree in anthropology, for instance . . .”

  He bought me a drink and I signed his papers.

  Ten years . . . Ten years out of school, ten years spent climbing the webwork of diplomatic service—and I found it all coming back to me there on Alsfort, as I sat in the wayroom of the Court.

  There was a strike in effect; some of you will remember it. A forced-landing had come down too hard, too fast, and the Wagon had snapped the padbrace like a twig, toppling a half-acre of leadsub over onto the firesquads. So the Court workers were striking for subsurface landings, for Pits. My inbound had been the last. They were being turned away to Flaghold now, the next-door (half a million miles away) neighbor, an emergency port.

  And if you sat in a Court and sweated at what was going on a Jump-week behind you on Earth and two ahead of you, on Altar; if you cursed and tried to bribe the crews; if you sent endless notes to both ends of the line you were knotted on; or if perhaps you are a history student specializing in the Wars . . . you’ll remember the strike. Otherwise, probably not. Alsfort isn’t exactly a backyard—more like an oasis.

  Two days, and I’d given up insisting, inquiring, begging. I’d even given up the notes.

  So I sat in the wayroom drinking the local (and distant) relative of beer. The pouch was locked into my coat pocket and I was keeping my left arm agai
nst it. I spent the first day there worrying what might happen on Altar without that pouch, then I gave it up the way I’d given up trying to surmount the strike, to curtail my immobility and its likely disastrous consequences. I just sat and drank “beer” and punjil and watched the people.

  There was a short, wiry man of Jewish blood, Earth or Vegan, who limped from a twisted back, as though all his life he’d been watching over his shoulder. He drank tea saturated with grape sugar at ten and four and took his meals as the clock instructed: noon, six. He wore skirts, and a corduroy skullcap he never removed.

  There was a couple, definitely Vegan. The woman was old (though only in profile), dressed in Outworld furs and wearing a single jewel against her emphatic and no doubt plastic bosom—a different jewel each time I saw them. Her companion was young, beautiful and asthenic, always precisely dressed in a fine tight suit, and quite often scribbling in a notebook he carried. They came irregularly and drank Earth brandy. By the third day too much sameness had taken its toll: she sat with her face screwed into jealousy as he smiled and wrote in his book. When she spoke, there were quiet, gulping rhythms in her voice, and her only answer was the boy’s beautiful smile and, once, a hand that held hers tightly—too tightly—on the table. He waited in the halls while she paid; she kept her face down, an older face now; they went away.

  A Glaucon, a man I knew from Leic, but his ruby robes signaled pilgrimage and forbade us to speak. I watched him at his evening coffees. A recent convert, he was not at all the craftsmanlike politician I had come to know in those months spent on his world, in his home. He had been quick, loud; now he plodded, and his voice followed softly in the distance, muttering at prayer.

  And there were others, many others . . .

  A Plethgan couple with a Vorsh baby, evidently returning home from the Agencies at Llarth. They came to the wayroom just once, to ask about Vorshgan for the child, and were told there was none. The mother was already pale with fear, the father raging and helpless; the baby screamed and was turning blue. They went out talking quiedy to themselves under the child’s cries. I never saw them again.