To the Stars

by Nathan Dodge

  I pulled myself up off the last of the rungs onto the wall’s top, overlooking the outside. Less a jungle here, I could see the mountain’s rocky heart from under the ever-present green, a pleasant pink-and-white marbling that reminded me of uncooked lamb. I trudged over to the tower’s light, a broad iris under an even broader hat, and unstrapped myself as I removed the battery. The battery casing was only a slightly more refined bit of sludge work with a crude door that unlocked with some difficulty, a rotating bar lock that I had to slam from the other side so hard I feared it would break before it finally gave. Inside, the block was almost exactly as I’d seen before, and I hummed to myself as I unplugged the old battery and put in the new, briefly testing its operation. A small cheer greeted the flashing light, and I grinned broadly and waved before I stooped again to strap on the old battery. I tottered down the old ladder only a little more slowly than I had come up it, and returned to the overseer below.

  “Need any others changed?” I asked, settling the old battery in a passing wheelbarrow heading back to Storage. She raised an eyebrow, and, after an appraising nod, motioned me to follow her.

  After some initial surprise—I had to explain myself more than once—I spent the rest of the day changing out batteries, moving ladders, and carrying heavy bags of fertilizer. I stopped only at mealtimes, rinsing not twice but three times in the hopes of reducing the sourness of my milk after such exercise, nursing Kel each time. The grandmothers had nodded appreciatively at my caution, and inside a new bottle of precious oil greeted me, which I slathered on gratefully; my hands were close to cracking again after so many washings, and here, any wound would reasonably render my outdoor status suspended.

  That night, a knock came on my door and Ekaterina entered, shoulders sloped, carrying an evening snack for Kel and me. It was not entirely unexpected. I had prepared for her, a little, although I hadn’t expected her quite so soon.

  Normally we ate with the community, but after my busy day I had opted for our last meal in my quarters. I trusted them not to short my food. Our bodies had swelled under the attentions of the grandmothers, and Kel had grown a full centimeter since our arrival and put on almost a kilogram, while I’d put on three full kilos myself, my breasts ballooning with milk. Somewhat against expectation, Kel had continued to nurse almost as much as he had at arrival, despite the increase in edible food supply. I suspected it was as much to ensure that he would be held by me regularly as anything else.

  So despite the requested room service, I had expected a grandmother attendant for the evening. Truthfully, I had begun to take for granted the consistent luxury of eating still-hot food with two hands. I stood there, face blank, as Ekaterina set the tray down hesitantly, looking at me with hopeful eyes from the doorway.

  “Yuri-sensei says that Kel should be well protected, even if I should carry contaminants,” she said respectfully. “I requested the full hygiene cleanse and complete evaluation this evening.” I almost winced; that included a cavity check, and a pretty thorough one at that. Certainly the rinse seemed true—the scent of strong vinegar trailed after her like a lonely pet. Despite my plans, my heart went out to her.

  “He likes to be held as you feed him,” I said, and her eyes lit up, arms outreaching.

  I went to bed that night with an easy conscience. Wise or not, the end of that feud was a weight off of me. The next week seemed to prove my choice correct: while Ekaterina did not precisely become a friend after that, she was solidly, silently there when needed. The following morning after she came to my room, after checking with Yuri for jobs, I headed to the gardens again. That whole day I found that whenever I was handling something just slightly heavier than I could bear, I would find her quickly at hand: a rottzben tree stump that needed digging up, or lumber transport, even garbage duty, though in this case it was merely a question of carefully maneuvering a mech into place when it fell over, upended by the uneven terrain. The locally printed ones never seemed to work as well as the imports.

  It didn’t hurt that this pleased the overseer, as much because of how much more quickly the heavier tasks went as by the fact that it was obvious the tension had been eased. The two parties had effectively dissolved at seeing Ekaterina and I together. Overseers were not fond of tensions, here or elsewhere, so the peace was another mark in my favor. All in all, a fair week’s work.

  The next six weeks became an even river of life, spotted, for the first time in Kel’s life, with real play and constant, adoring attention. I had a true day off each week, and despite my initial hesitancy to take advantage of it, I had embraced it. I had also, after some thought, requested Hana not schedule anyone on Sundays. Though grandmothers still came around, I liked that it was, for all intents and purposes, a truly free day. Though I refused all offers to care for Kel, I also did my best to be a good citizen, too: I joined almost every group there was, and ran about from an arts collective one day, to singers, to Tai Chi, Kel always in hand. Each group always screeched with delight at Kel’s arrival, so I stopped apologizing for my unexpected arrivals, and instead enjoyed myself.

  It was almost perfect. The only real issue was that the others outside suffered still. After a month, I hesitantly queried about bringing in Anna. I owed her still, and hoped bringing her here would absolve my debt. I wasn’t given a solid response, but her name was added to the list under consideration. But even with that knowledge, it was easy to fall blissfully into the happy pattern the camp had set. Oh, there were tussles—to my amusement, food preparation seemed to be an ongoing area of debate, cuisine being a hotly debated topic—but they were minor, almost laughable from my point of view.

  But everything changed in the fall.

  * * *

  Kel had been fussy much of the evening, and I had retired to my quarters for dinner. No one was surprised, least of all myself, as he had not one or two, but five teeth appearing in a roar of dental health, and he rubbed at them fiercely and frequently. We went to bed early, as I expected to be up much of the night with him.

  Around two, I woke to his whimpering and immediately turned on the light. There was something about the timbre of its sound that woke frightening memories. I checked his forehead, and he wasn’t hot, but I stripped him anyway. It was a silly, impossible fear that crept up in my gut and through my body, but I checked anyway, peeling off his layers of clothing one by one as he lay on the thick futon. A sharp wince on his face and a sudden movement toward his foot chilled me. I stared at his foot, frozen, too afraid to move for a moment. Slowly I reached out, fingers wrapping around the top of his sock, slowly peeling it downward.

  It was so small I almost didn’t see it: the merest speck of fuzzy black, that horrible fungus that infects, that gray plague. A horrible scream welled up in my throat, but I clamped it shut. My hands reached for my hair, and I ripped, mindless, for a moment, whole body trembling as Kel continued his miserable sounds. A horrible groan issued from me, low and deep, and the world went fuzzy.

  All this way. We had come all this way, to a safe place, far from the poisons of this planet. There was nowhere safer to be. How? How could this have possibly happened?

  The roaring in my ears began to fade, and finally I began to dress him. Still trembling—when had I begun trembling?—I picked him up and placed him in the carrier, throwing on my coat and moving out the door almost noiselessly. I took the far river corridor, empty of occupants at this time of night, too afraid to turn on a single light. I found Yuri’s apartment and knocked as quietly and insistently as I could. No one answered. Disturbed, I headed for the lab, where I found a gray-faced Yuri.

  “No,” she said, seeing the look on my face.

  “It’s on his foot,” I said. Yuri rocked, her hand reaching out to steady herself against the door, her eyes shut. When she opened them, there were tears in them. We stood there in silence a moment while he nestled down, searching and finding my breast again. I wondered, briefly, if it would kill me too, this way. I didn’t really care.

  “We
’ve had two other reports already,” Yuri explained. ”“Sit,” she added, after a moment, and I sat.

  For almost two hours I sat, doing nothing as Kel slept. Around four, a knock came at the door, and Yuri shuffled me off to a treatment room that was little more than a pantry, but hidden from view and with a hygiene shield in place. She returned a half-hour later.

  “There are four more cases,” she said. “They suspect a vent issue. I have informed the camp we are doing full-body checks and I am placing you and Kel in isolation for safety.”

  “Perhaps you should euthanize us together,” I said softly. “When it begins to be too much.” She looked at me in horror, and I shrugged softly. “I have accepted it.”

  She shook her head fiercely, but I ignored her. I was beginning to be tired. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to forget. I stood to return to my quarters, then remembered I was quarantined, too. “I want to go,” I said. “Where do I go?”

  Yuri thought a moment, worry revealing the lines around her eyes that I normally couldn’t see. “Follow me,” she finally said.

  Yuri led me to a new set of quarters in an almost-forgotten part of the camp. It was old and ugly, but it was also safe, she assured me. She had used these rooms herself before. She opened a safebox at the foot of the bed and pulled out a half-dozen sealed linens.

  Kel and I dozed through much of the early morning. Some hours after dawn, a knock came at the door. By the time I came and opened it the visitor was gone, but I found at the door a treasure trove of objects: toys and clothes and food, all smelling freshly of vinegar. Kel burbled delightedly on seeing his returning toys, and I laid them out around him.

  I had questions now—and, perhaps stupidly, hope. How often had other methods really been considered? Perhaps, if we acted quickly, we might save him. Transfusions, antibiotics, amputations, gut sterilizations—all hideous options, but worth the attempt. I was ready for all of them.

  By the time Yuri appeared in a white cleansuit, I was ready with questions, but she forestalled all of them. Almost as soon as she entered, she held up a hand and began to speak through her suit’s visor.

  “I have spoken with the others who are infected, and they have all sworn a vow of silence regarding Kel. I had to tell them to get their help,” she said quickly, at my look of horror. “They will refuse termination and allow me to—to experiment. We have a plan. I have a plan.”

  Over the next hour she explained her work in detail, unfolding a new protective suit to hand to me. “I’ll test you for the infection as well, but either way you wear the suit in the lab. I can’t risk contamination.”

  “You’ll have no arguments from me.”

  “Good. We have little time here. I have asked Madame for permission to announce within the camp that we are doing a study to find a preventative, or even cure, for the Greater and lesser plagues, and we are requesting blood and tissue donations. Madame has agreed, and all the exploring team is returning to contribute. I—I have not told her of Kel,” she said. My breath caught. “I will not be able to hide it when she returns. But we have a little time.”

  The rest of the day was a blur. Yuri confirmed that I was uninfected, but it seemed unimportant except for the cleansuit she provided me. The infected grandmothers showed up at my door, Hana among them, looking ashamed. “It was not your fault,” I said, before anything else, and she shook her head, looking at the floor. “It was not,” I said. I handed Kel to her, who seemed relieved to escape me. He was angry, confused at the suit that covered my skin and prevented his nursing, annoyed at the buzzing of the hygiene shield that separated us from Yuri. As they exited with him, she turned off the shield, and I began pulling the samples for Yuri’s review.

  I saw Kel little that day and the next, less than I ever had, strangely enough, though each morning and evening I crooned to him the little songs I always had, and every night I ministered to his increasingly feverish body. Two days and then three floated by in a haze of blood and tissue samples, DNA outlines and comparisons, and careful tweaking of test batches. I also began, subtly at first, and then pointedly, to demand that Yuri involve the other camps in tissue and blood sampling. We were not, I had learned, the only camp to suffer, and the multitude of infected was horrific. I couldn’t help myself, however: I looked on them with relief, and hope. A multitude of samples would be in Kel’s favor.

  Yuri, despite the workload, looked as neatly herself as she had before, though I knew she slept some six hours a night, seventeen of the other eighteen hours spent without pause in the lab, and only a few spare minutes snatched here and there to eat and decontaminate. Each morning I watched her comb back her long black hair, tying it before she began work.

  Yuri ran a dizzying array of tests on the grandmothers for fungal levels and minute examinations of their body’s defenses. This was all in addition to checking for any signs of rotting and injecting each of them with some new something that might possibly help. She asked them, that first day, if there was anything they objected to, if they were willing to try, perhaps, some of the more extreme measures she had under consideration. The eldest grandmother, the one who had brought me the key on my first day, had laughed like an old, creaking door.

  “We know what comes,” she said creakily. “Chop us, cook us, bleed us to your heart’s content. When we can take it no more, we’ll ask for termination. Until then, you do what you need.” The others had nodded grimly, Hana most fervently of all.

  It was that same old woman, Nora, who first developed a rotten limb, the full of her right arm going suddenly gray and fuzzy and limp like a vegetable gone too long in a drawer. She sighed with relief when Yuri separated her from it. “Always hated my hands,” she said placidly, her voice as wheezing and rusty as I remembered, watching Yuri carry her arm away from her in a metal dispensary bin to the burning room. “Ugly old things. Too much work, too many wrinkles. Good riddance.” She’d cackled at that, then asked to hold Kel with her remaining arm. She did so, Hana quietly standing with arms under Kel’s precariously wiggling bottom while Nora crooned to him in an unexpectedly gentle contralto.

  The next day was worse. Two women developed similar, though less drastic symptoms. Another began vomiting, a red rash began racing over her skin, moving out from the injection sites so quickly you could almost see its progress as you watched. Yuri stopped her treatments, but she was still dead by the end of the day. I never even learned her name. Hana, at least, still seemed the same as ever.

  On the fourth day, Madame came home. I was still uninfected, and pumped every two hours first on Kel’s behalf, and then increasingly on that of the infected grandmothers. After the third or so lecture on the importance of doing so—I had been slow to the first day—I had, during pumping, wondered aloud if it would help the other women. Yuri had shrugged, but I had doubled my pumping sessions, and some of the milk was being used in testing, too. It made it feel a little less helpless, at least. I was in one of those sessions when Madame entered the lab.

  Though I was tucked away in what I had come to think of as the small pantry, it was impossible not to be aware of her entrance. Yuri jumped to her feet, and I heard distant cries of Madame through the doorway, scrambling feet accompanying it. I peered over the curtain and through the fuzzing of the shield, trying to see her.

  A white-haired figure stood there, not five feet high. She wore a blue silk trouser suit with tiny embroidery at the wrists and neck. I could not even begin a guess at her ancestry, with her intensely dark skin, straight hair, and slanted, light eyes. She moved regally, back stiffly straight as she examined the results, her fingers impatiently flicking through the slides.

  “Did you bring back the others?” Yuri asked as Madame searched.

  “No. They’re at a critical point. They will be back as soon as they can. And you? Any progress yet?”

  “No progress yet,” Yuri said softly. A little sigh escaped me. At my sound, Madame turned sharply toward me, and I ducked back, though pointlessly. Shortly she had push
ed the curtain aside, leaving me feeling stupidly naked, even behind the fuzzing field. Had I actually been simply naked, I would have felt less vulnerable, the chest apparatus leaving me feeling like little more than a field animal. I pulled down one of the paper uniforms and held it in front of me.

  “Madame,” I said stiffly.

  “The mother,” she said. “Your child is well?” It seemed like an offhand question; Madame being polite. My eyes flickered to Yuri, who shook her head no. The time for secrecy was past, I supposed.

  “My son is infected,” I said slowly, my chest growing tight. “I am uninfected.” I pointed to the pile of test strips beside me; with every nursing, my milk was tested, and a blood test was done each morning. Her eyebrows shot up, and she turned to Yuri for confirmation, who provided it mutely.

  “How very unfortunate,” she said, her mouth forming a grim line. “You must be sorry you ever came.”

  “To Ralia? Perhaps. To here, no.” Gratitude. Even now, in the back of my mind, something told me to play the game.

  “Is there any hope?” Madame asked, turning to Yuri. My breath hitched, but Yuri looked at her without evasion.

  “You know I’ve focused on the gray plague most of this year. I need more tissue samples, more blood. I’m hoping to find a variation with some kind of weakness I can exploit. I’ve lost hope on sterilizing immunity: I’ve identified some two dozen strains, and each of these carries a massive tendency towards polymorphism. But a neutralizing balance, a hold—I have hope.” Yuri’s voice grew firmer as she spoke. “We have an elderly woman here who was the first to become symptomatic, but we’ve seen no further decay. That is hopeful.”

  Madame nodded thoughtfully, tapping a little fan against her wrist. “You still believe we can sell it?”

  “They would give anything,” I said, interrupting them. “You must weigh the balance between riots and commerce. But they will pay well. Good God, for the clean meat alone they would pay dearly, much less vaccines. Haven’t you paid attention to the death tolls? The polera cough vaccine—there was no reason to wait.”