by Nathan Dodge
Around a corner, I nearly ran into an older woman carrying a laundry basket piled high with fresh, scented linens that filled my nose and awakened memories I could have sworn I’d lost.
“Gracious,” she said with a soft, strange accent I didn’t know, looking a little shocked, glancing back and forth between my son and me. “You are—visiting?”
“We’re new contracts,” I said. “From the mixed camp on south side, near the Golden River.” I paused hesitantly before adding, “We were just dropped off, and I have no directions on where to go. Could you direct us, overseer?” Overseer was a stretch, considering I saw no rank on her standard uniform, but it was always better to be cautious.
The woman stared a moment longer before nodding sharply. “The Lost Cause girl. Heard it, but didn’t believe it, I guess,” she said, failing to correct me about overseer, which was interesting. She tipped her head behind her, rotating her fairly prodigious self and her basket as well. I only barely prevented myself from laughing, only to hear Kel burble. I realized Kel was fixated on her, eyes wide, arms reaching.
“Oh, my,” the woman murmured, her face softening. “So many years since I’ve seen a little one.”
I was at a loss for his sudden interest, but after a moment with Kel straining to reach her, I said, “I could carry your basket, if you’d like to trade for our walk.” After a moment’s hesitation, she put down the linens. Taking up Kel, the woman transformed, babbling away to Kel. She was so distracted I worried at first she wouldn’t take us to the right place, though she moved quickly enough.
Kel listened raptly, but even more so, he patted her constantly, and I realized finally he was enraptured by her size. He had never seen, in all honesty, a fat woman, and she was positively rotund. Eventually, he plopped his head down on her soft chest, settling in like a little kitten on her ample breasts.
“Always had a way with children,” she said softly, initial iciness entirely vanished, patting his little behind, humming now. I realized I was starting to cry. I looked straight ahead, blinking quickly and wiping the tears very carefully on my shoulders when she got just a touch ahead of me, careful not to damage the linens.
Not a minute after, Kel and the woman were surrounded by a dozen other contracts, everyone crowding in with questions. Shortly my unfamiliar face also drew comment, and we were all but dragged to the kitchen, where a dozen other older women greeted us with delighted shouts. Kel was passed round and kissed and petted and adored. Their irrepressible enthusiasm would have been a certain recipe for disaster, only every second woman had something to tempt him: a miniature onigiri, a thin slice of mango, a delicious-smelling spoonful of miso soup. Kel tried everything, and was absolutely frantic at the fruit slice, to a chorus of oohs and ahhs, and I watched it all, too stunned to even speak or protest we’d already had our daily rations.
The heavy woman sat next to me, the one I had spoken to first, and she patted me gently as she seated herself. “It’s not like that outside, is it?” she said knowingly, and I nodded. “Been ten years, but I doubt it’s changed much since I last saw it,” she said. “Lost my whole family to the gray plague. Never been out of here since I came. Never wanted to.”
“Do you ever have food riots?” I blurted out.
“Heavens, no,” she said, shuddering. “Things can be tight at times, but we’ve never had any of that. We’ve never had a child here, though. Don’t know they’ll let him stay when he gets older—don’t mind now,” she said at my strangled sound, “that won’t be for a long time—but then again, none of us thought they’d really let you in. Maybe things are changing.”
“Changing how?”
“Well, till now, Madame’s been quite particular in her needs. It’s a happy community here. Little to fight over when there’s no men, no young folk, not too much work, and plenty of food and mechs.”
“I’m a widow. I assume that’s why I was accepted.”
“If anything, it’s your son. Gives everyone someone to fuss over. It’s one of the only complaints you’ll hear. We all miss the children.”
I nodded thoughtfully. As strange as it was to hear that men were unwelcome here—were they so flush as to enjoy a whole fleet of mechs for the heaviest manual labor?—it was reassuring to hear of our mascot status. I would have preferred Kel grew up one of many children, but there were worse positions to hold than community grandchild. So far as I could tell, my only fight would be getting to see him. Or was I only temporary? It was unlikely there were immediate plans to separate me, at least, or they’d have done so already. And if they tried later … I pushed the fear down. I could only worry about so many things at a time.
The next two hours sped by with a fitting for the house uniform, assignment to quarters and the laying away of our few possessions, and finally a late dinner accompanied by an admiring audience. For me, there was a hearty stew twice the size of my normal daily ration, with a rainbow of soft-whipped purees and an endlessly refilled cup of miso broth for Kel. Afterward, he was presented with another thin slice of mango, and his cries of glee echoed through the common room and were echoed back at him a hundredfold by its adoring occupants. He sat on my lap to eat, although everyone assured me, soon, when he became comfortable, everyone would be delighted—ecstatic!—to hold him while I ate.
Our retreat to our quarters was a relief. Kel was fast asleep on my shoulder, and I was equally, if less visibly, exhausted. However friendly the appearance of our surroundings, my heart had thundered through every moment. I wasn’t used to conversation anymore, not used to eating indoors, certainly not used to a belly that ached with fullness now. I opened the small window of our room and breathed deep. We faced a corner of the gardens, and the scent of jasmine crept in before I closed it again. A small bit of tension left my shoulders and I lay Kel down on our soft futon, already unrolled for us. A thick, luxurious comforter lay over it, and I curled it up around Kel. We would be warm tonight.
I spent a few minutes arranging things to my liking, but there was little to do. Finally, I propped our family picture up on the shelving unit, at the top so he could watch over us, and I watched my husband’s face in the fading light until I fell asleep.
* * *
“Gomen nasai?” I said. I was disoriented as my eyes opened to a young-looking Japanese face hanging over mine when I woke. Kel was whimpering, and without thinking I turned him to my breast, and then blinked again. “Ohayo gozaimasu,” I said politely, good morning, biting back my initial words about what she was doing in my quarters.
“Ohayo!” she tweeted gleefully, then took off in a rush of Japanese too fast for me to follow, walking around the room and placing a tray down for me. It was food: hot, sweet-smelling food. Even Kel paused in his nursing, sniffing the air. The woman leaned down, eyes crinkling delightfully—she was older than I first thought, with her petite frame and twinkling eyes—and Kel hesitantly reached out for her. She squealed with glee and picked him up, patting him and playing with his hair and taking him over to the tray immediately. It was all I could do not to snatch him back from her arms.
“Shower,” she said to me, after another string of Japanese that I failed to understand, and I stood, stupidly, wondering what she meant. “Shower,” she said again, wafting her hand in the Japanese way toward my sanitary cubicle. After a moment I went into it, and found to my shock a small waterspout at the top. Without the slightest bit of modesty I tore off my clothes, turning the water on as high as it would go and pulling the thin shower curtain closed, which would handily not prevent me from watching the two of them. Despite the minimalism of it, it was the first real shower I had had in two years, and I shivered with pleasure under it.
The rest of the day was strangely similar. Every time I was assigned some absurdly small task, immediately someone showed up to hold Kel. It was never the same person twice, and occasionally it was more than one person. They were never out of my sight, but the strangeness of it couldn’t be ignored. By midday my duties were declared ov
er, and I was invited to the grandroom where everyone rested between their duties and all pretense of keeping me working disappeared. I was flooded with requests to touch Kel, to ask about Kel, to know everything about Kel. My anxiety began to fade.
Only once was anything remotely less than perfect. Just before my duties were over, a very, very old woman approached me, her back bent, and she handed me a key. “For your room,” she said. German, according to her accent; one of the few.
“For what?” I asked. No contract was allowed a locked door; it had to be one of my duties. Perhaps I was to be moved to stocking? The thought was an exciting one: I was notably tall, the tallest woman in my old camp, and my frame was naturally muscular, albeit thinned by the past two years. I could be of use there, and I was anxious to prove my use, prove a reason to keep me around for my son.
“For safety,” she said, the last word a soft breath of air, before she shambled off around a corner.
Despite the apparently benevolent intent, my stomach turned to acid as I gnawed on her statement, and by Kel’s bedtime it seemed half the staff had come to me with some kind of stomach-soothing remedy until I was practically floating with broth and peppermint. In retrospect, I couldn’t help but be concerned by my supposed duties. In two days, I’d been shown a myriad of small tasks, but each one increasingly had seemed like some kind of afterthought, more what was at hand than any kind of planned training. Everyone here seemed to have an almost supernatural awareness of the camp organization, the result of long years working together. There were nearly two hundred fifty women, and the next newest contract had been here nearly four years. Considering the morbidity rate in other camps, I was floored.
I was en route to our private quarters, stomach still aching, when I was approached by one of the younger women wearing a formal, white medical form, as crisp as in the best hospital back home. My hands tightened around Kel, and for a moment I almost ran.
“Good day, medic,” I said formally, making a short bow. The woman simply laughed.
“Oh, we’re not so careful here,” she said, reaching out and tickling Kel under his chin. He giggled and buried his face in my shoulder, peering out shyly from that nook.
“Have there been assertions regarding my medical status?” I asked, my stomach twisting even further. What I was asking, of course, was if someone suggested I was medically unfit. They were the words every contract lived in fear of. The medically unfit had only two real options: to bribe their way back on the accepted lists, or to quietly walk into the jungle. If so, it would be a quick and clever way to steal Kel from me.
“It was just my stomach. It’s better now. I assure you I am almost never sick. I can bring you records. I will not be problematic—”
Kel started crying, and I realized I was all but crushing him. I relaxed my arms and apologized frantically, shushing and petting him, all the while looking at the medic in quiet terror. The woman seemed bewildered, and after a moment she just shook her head.
“If you wish to take the day off tomorrow, you may,” she said gently. “I was just coming for your immunizations. Yours and his, of course,” she said, nodding to Kel.
Stunned, I rocked Kel in my arms. Vaccines were almost impossible to come by here. Certainly they weren’t available for children, who required so many fine-tunings. On Ralia, any medical care was provided by your contractor, which generally meant bandages and some simple anti-fungals, at best.
“You have immunizations? For children? But you—there are no children here. Why would you have done any of the work? What do they cover?”
“So many questions. Sit; sit, and we’ll get this sorted.” The woman gestured to a bench in the hall, and we moved to it and sat. It occurred to me for the first time that this building—one of the few I’d seen in my two years—was built almost like a fortress, a miniature city within walls. The outer length of the block was almost a kilometer in length, if my senses served me correctly; this broad hall was one of its main thoroughfares. A city of widows and a single child.
She pulled up our histories on her reader, handing it to me for a Privacy signoff before she took the reader back, almost excitedly, reviewing the information quickly, even looking a little sorrowful over the description of my childbirth and resulting sterility, I assumed. I was touched by that; even if it was a show she put on for my sake, it had been a long time since anyone had tried to show me much kindness. She nodded along with it, drawing her finger in one spot, and turned the reader to me so I could see it.
“You have never had the gray plague?” she asked, pointing to the negative listing on my chart. I blinked. No one who had the gray plague survived. Unless you had a religious objection to termination, people inevitably took it. No one wanted to live out the two weeks it took to rot.
“Of course not,” I said slowly, shaking my head. I eyed the patches she held in her hand more suspiciously. “What are these immunizations for?”
“These are yours,” she said, holding up the ones she held in her hands. “I need bloodwork to tailor his, and we should check his vitamin levels and a few other things just in case. We don’t have any specialists here for pediatrics, but I’ve got some charts and guidelines, so I can at least give him some basic check-ups,” she added, and my heart soared. “As to the vaccines, it’s just about everything someone might bring from back home, plus the current influenza, a few types of rhinovirus, and an early vaccine against the polera cough. It is quite safe,” she added, misinterpreting the stillness on my face. “Every woman here has taken it, myself included.”
I held out my arm mutely, realizing my luck as she wrapped the patches on me. No one knew this outside. The fortress was beginning to make sense. I knew women who’d cheerfully poison their own husbands just for the hope of getting on the waiting list. The polera cough wasn’t assuredly fatal, but it still claimed nearly a quarter of its victims. The hygiene shields at the edge of camps and miserable vinegar baths we regularly endured had cut down on the frequency and intensity of the epidemics, but it seemed that eventually everyone paid the price of the extraordinarily clean, but biologically fertile, air.
No new contracts in four years: it made sense now. No dangerous yūrei moss, no polera cough—no turnover rate, really. What was the point in bringing in more? And the isolation of the women aided in Madame’s safety, I realized. There was no reason to risk one’s status here to try to sneak in a relative. I suspected none of them had living children, or if they did, they were here, too.
Madame had a reputation for charity, but what she should have been known for was her business sense.
Stunned but excited, I sat there patiently, distracting Kel while she took a small blood sample from his heel. He cried for an instant before he was nestled to my breast again, where he greedily took in comfort.
“Why did you ask about the gray plague?” I asked as she folded up her reader and placed it in her medical kit along with Kel’s blood. A sad smile appeared on her face, and she shrugged.
“We keep hoping,” she said. “There might be a survivor, somewhere. We could learn so much from that. I haven’t been able to get a sample this whole year to study. I didn’t have the proper tools before.”
“Wouldn’t you have heard about a survivor?” I asked. She shrugged again.
“The coordinator insisted you had an unusual medical history, I suppose to tempt us into taking you. She must have . . . suspicions. I am glad of it,” she added quickly, though I said nothing in protest.
“I’m sorry I am of no help. I did have a true influenza many years ago,” I added. “Would you like my blood for analysis?”
The woman nodded thoughtfully and pulled out an additional vial. “We can never have too much information,” she said, and I held out my arm. I had entirely forgotten to wear my carrier today. I had already, somehow, become accustomed to the ready hands around me, and Kel squirmed unhelpfully as she drew the blood, though she finally managed. After putting away the sample, she held out her arms and took
Kel while I bandaged my own arm.
“Thank you,” I said. “Do you know when Kel’s will be ready? His vaccines, that is?”
“Just depends on how complicated the bloodwork is. A week, perhaps.”
I nodded tremulously, the entirety of it coming home to me. Even if they found some excuse to be rid of me, Kel would be in a facility with over two hundred anxious grandmothers, plentiful food, distance from the deadly ghost moss, and miraculously, true medical care. And he would never, ever suffer the polera cough. For a horrible moment, I was thankful for Kelly’s death. I had loved him—I had—but this was a gift worth everything. Kelly, I told myself, would have gladly paid the price. So would I, come to that.
“I am Yuri,” she said, hesitantly, holding out her hand.
“I am grateful,” I said, and she laughed.
* * *
I quickly learned that Yuri was not in favor with the grandmothers, as I now thought of them, despite her extraordinary work. The rarity of the medical support seemed unknown to them. In my hesitant inquiries, they seemed to think all camps were attempting the same, though of course other camps “couldn’t be expected to compare to Madame’s” as one calmly noted to me. They had no conception of the chaos that still reigned outside. Apparently an early batch of one of the attempted vaccines for the polera virus had resulted in a great deal of sickness and one death—a miniscule price, in my eyes, but one Yuri was held heavily accountable for in the camp.
As strange as their ingratitude was while thousands had died outside, this lack of support was almost as exciting as the medical aid itself. My biology background, rendered worthless in my previous camp, had value here. Once I had proven my trustworthiness and established myself in some way, there was some hope Yuri might take me on as an assistant, and the camp’s unfriendliness toward her and her work meant fewer rivals. In the meantime, I went about all but demanding work, and in my spare seconds looked for ways to put myself in Yuri’s favor.