To the Stars

by Nathan Dodge

  “Oh, there was reason,” Madame said, her voice self-satisfied as she said it, settling in on the lone laboratory chair. “I doubt Yuri told you of her failures.”

  “I do not care,” I said, though the plurality—failures—was unnerving. “If you lost a quarter of the camp in testing, I would call it fair. Generous, even. And it is safe now.”

  “Yuri believes it is safe now,” Madame said, still amused.

  “And how safe are they out there? How safe was my husband, Madame? How safe was yours?” Yuri actually yelped, clapping a hand over her mouth, but Madame looked thoughtful. I turned the pump machine off, extracting myself as quickly as I could.

  “How would you proceed?” she asked. It was a challenge, and I leaped at it as I dressed myself.

  “Announce the polera cough vaccine at a greatly reduced cost to anyone who will contribute blood and tissue samples,” I began. “Let them know there are no guarantees, and at least one death has occurred as a result.”

  “And they’ll still fight for it?”

  “Yes. That’s the only problem, preventing them fighting for it, when Yuri doesn’t have enough yet. But let them know it’s coming, focusing on the most vulnerable first. Or maybe keep the cost high, but with the initial purchasers treated as investors, and with a portion of their fees used to fund the treatment of the most vulnerable.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “You of all people know how important solidarity is.”

  “They will see how we live.”

  “I’ve thought of that. I think we can counteract any attempt at a takeover by allowing more applications. Let them know we’re losing people, too, and looking for strong contracts. Not bureaucrats, mind you. Workers.”

  “Take on a handful of people and the rest will wait peaceably?”

  “Hope is powerful.”

  “As, perhaps, are bribes,” Madame said dryly. I shrugged.

  “Better than rioting. Much better. We need only take in a small percentage to prove our word. Your women here—it was a good plan, Madame. But you’ve outgrown it, anyhow, you must know that.”

  “I had hoped the other camps would have managed some small form of civilization by now.”

  “The plagues keep them all on the edge of collapse,” I said. “You will be seen as their savior, Madame. So long as you’re careful with pricing.”

  “Pricing,” Madame purred. I opened my mouth, but she snapped her fingers, hand held up. “You leave the pricing to me, bold one,” she said. “You leave that to me.”

  * * *

  The next morning was madness. Women ran through the halls shrieking the news. I was not the only distrusting one, though I was amused at what they considered threats. I heard one old woman on the other side of my wall muttering about shoring up the warren for the rabbits. I half-considered shouting to her through the wall the real danger was having her own skull bashed in by some enterprising young contract, but kept my mouth shut.

  The chaos reigned, and I listened, ear at the outermost door, pressed inside my cleansuit to the window, for the bellowing loudspeaker announcing the polera vaccine’s sale and the request for gray plague samples. There were proper com messages sent, too, but Madame hadn’t trusted the camp leaders to tell everyone of the opportunity. This way, there was no hiding the knowledge. That forty-year-old rebellion, I suspected, would never be far from her mind.

  Kel’s sickness was kept quiet for the most part in the camp; Yuri had put it about that Kel would be quarantined, handled by only a few approved workers, with occasional check-ups from her personally. All of which was true, really, but for a reason entirely opposite from what was implied. Despite the excitement of the morning, as I rushed along the corridor to Yuri I already longed to return to Kel. Each day had grown more difficult; my skin ached for him. I wondered, sometimes, if he suffered at nights as much from the lack of real touch as he did from the plague. The whole of his foot now had turned a soft gray, though it lacked the hideous pulpiness Nora’s arm had developed before the amputation, to my relief. The hours sped by with filing and pumping and a vast influx of samples from the outside camps. How had they responded so quickly?

  “We have gotten so much more than we ever expected,” I said, sometime around lunch, pumping again in the tiny room. Kel had refused solid food that morning. It wasn’t a good sign, but he continued to drink the milk, at least, with something approaching a normal appetite. The grandmothers, those who were still healthy enough to care for him, sent me almost hourly updates on him, and I had stepped out to check on him every two hours or so.

  “Kel is still drinking plenty of milk, yes?” Yuri asked absently. I didn’t think she’d heard me.

  “Yes. I think he misses his routine. It’s thrown him a little. He still acts quite healthy, doesn’t he?” I almost sounded cheerful as I ran the latest batch of tissue and blood profiles.

  “Mm,” Yuri said, and something about the way she said it put a tight fist around my heart. I looked up at her, but she was buried in her datasheets, poring through the new information.

  “He’s very strong,” I said, watching her, hands paused in their filing, clenching the latest samples, the waxed paper surrounding the vials crumpling under my suit-covered fingers. “For a little boy. He’s already outlasted one of the contracts.”

  “Of course,” she said, but this was even more desperate sounding. She turned to leave the room, murmuring something about needing a mech, but I came after her, grabbing her hand.

  “He’s doing okay, isn’t he? We’ll have time? He’s all right for now? I know not forever, but for right now?”

  Yuri looked desperate, and tried to pull herself from me as I began to frantically paw at her. She tried to escape, and I grabbed first one arm, then the other, my fingers pinching at her cleansuit.

  “He’s okay, right, isn’t he? Isn’t he?” I shouted.

  Two alarms went off on the walls, safety monitors suddenly shrieking. I heard surprised voices from down the hall, and I dropped her—I hadn’t realized I had lifted her—but still loomed over her as the alarms slowly descended.

  “Tell me he is okay,” I said at last.

  “The p-peri-fungi has invaded his lungs,” she finally said, her tongue tripping, her eyes still trying to find a home outside mine, searching for walls and cupboards and anything but my damning eyes. “It is affecting his oxygen. His fever will rise. Fungal pneumonia in an infant already fighting the gray plague . . . he will not last long.”

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “Run the samples,” she said.

  Somehow, I filed those samples, my hands mutely following Yuri’s orders, but I left not long after that, walking back to my quarters in a gray blur. I forgot to take the long way through the quarantine lines and grandmothers squealed at my appearance, waving and inquiring after Kel, but though I knew vaguely what they said, I could not entirely understand their words. I waved at them and kept walking, Kel the only word I said.

  When I reached our new-old quarters, I found Hana with him, coughing quietly. Her face had gone gray on one side. I suspected she would be banned shortly from touching him, lest she accelerate his progress. You never knew whose infection was more virulent. He lay curled in her arms, staring up at her with open adoration. Tears ran down her face, which she carefully dried with an antifungal wipe before placing it in the toxbin that had been thoughtfully settled in my room. I settled myself next to her, arm wrapping around her. She gently moved Kel to my arms. I wanted to say something comforting, but she simply shook her head and smiled and left, murmuring something in Japanese that I couldn’t quite catch.

  * * *

  After dinner, one of the other sick grandmothers came to see me. Hana, she explained, had been found hanging from the air vent in her room, a large part of her face missing. She’d left a note of apology for the extra work, including a suggestion for rotations to care for Kel.

  * * *

  The night was terrible, and no
t only because of Hana’s death. I ran Kel to the laboratory not once but three times, the first gasping for breath, the second when one of his toes gently fell off, like an overblown blossom. Each time Yuri furiously dove through her vials, pulling out powders and skin patches and long, thin, archaic-looking needles like some sorcerer of long ago. She placed him on oxygen and his breathing grew less ragged, but his fever still climbed. The third time I brought him in the carrier, over my cleansuit. I activated the hygiene shield between Yuri and me, effectively limiting her workspace to just a quarter of the lab. Yuri raised an eyebrow, but after a moment, nodded. She’d already moved a pallet next to her lab chair; she no longer bothered to leave. I stepped away only to see the sick grandmothers and let them know Kel would stay with me. He was too sick to move, so he was oddly easy now, cradled up against me.

  Nora joined us in the lab around noon. Almost half of the survivors had become too sick to move from their beds, and were now tended in a room by a single, lonely garden mech, badly reprogrammed to deliver food and water and send small communications to us as it deemed appropriate. Even through the suit, I could smell the layers of antifungal spray on me.

  It pained me to think of how Kel must suffer that smell, though he gave no sign of noticing. He drifted in and out of sleep, feverish, sometimes shivering. The grayness on his leg grew. Around lunch he lost another toe, slopping to the floor like an exploded grub worm, only all the wrong color. I stared at it for a moment, lost, before I wiped it up. I placed a small streak of a sample on a slide for analysis for Yuri, then placed the rest in the neon incinerator before spraying down the floor. Yuri asked me if I wanted to go back to my room after that, and I looked at her, uncomprehending for a moment.

  “This is his only hope,” I said, after a minute, and she nodded.

  Yuri continued to inject Kel with a variety of antifungals, immune boosters, and strange cocktails of modified white blood cells. A few hours after noon, his breathing became labored, and she suggested I go walk him in the quarantine gardens. It was a small area at the end of the corridor where she had placed the sick. The after-rain air was moist, which might help his breathing. I supposed, after consideration, that he had little to fear. I nodded reluctantly.

  “I will join you shortly,” she said, and I nodded. I wondered what that meant. Perhaps she would offer termination? She hadn’t so far, but even I had begun to wonder how much longer I should make him suffer.

  I watched his face in the carrier, partly shrouded, through the hood of my cleansuit. “I failed you,” I whispered to Kel, stroking his dark, black-brown curls. He sighed and moved himself in more tightly against me, making one brief rooting gesture before abandoning the attempt. I hated the cleansuit more than I ever had in that moment. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  I opened the door to the garden with tears in my eyes, and the moisture hit the cleansuit visor and rendered me blind for a second. I wiped at the fog, surprised by the extent of it, before finding a cushioned bench and seating myself next to one of the remaining grandmothers. She smiled at Kel, though she didn’t reach out to pet him; everyone had been instructed to keep to themselves now. Grayness peaked out from under her uniform on her wrist and at her neck.

  “Are you going to ask for the termination?” she asked quietly. I wondered if I should be surprised.

  “I … I don’t think so,” I said. “At least not yet. Is that wrong of me? To hope?”

  “It is brave,” she said. “I think I may ask for it. I think my sides are giving out. I do not want to see that.”

  “That is understandable,” I said. She nodded, sad.

  “Hana was my friend,” she said.

  “Hana was wonderful,” I said. She nodded again, reaching out for Kel, then stopping, remembering, and putting her hands down. A bitter smile reflected between us.

  Yuri joined us then, two vials in hand and with Nora behind her, lumbering so slowly that Yuri managed a whole flurry of four or five emotions all while holding the door for her. Nora seated herself opposite us, and Yuri came to stand between us.

  “Termination?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said, nervously moving from one foot to another, like a child caught misbehaving. “I’ve come to offer you a choice. I hope you do not choose that.”

  “What is the other option?” the woman next to me asked. Toli, I thought her name was.

  “It is a preliminary vaccine based on Nora’s infection. I do not think it will heal you, exactly,” she added. “I need so much more time. But Nora’s infection, though initially severe, stalled. It seems … unique. I have created a live attenuated vaccine based on this.” I nodded, though Toli looked confused.

  “She beat up the peri-fungi and probably threw in something else to stimulate the immune system,” I explained. “It’s weak, and she wants to inject it in you to train your immune system.”

  “It might just worsen the infection,” Yuri said. “I haven’t even tested it on the rabbits yet.”

  “I am sorry,” Toli said after a moment. “I do not wish to suffer more.”

  “Fair enough. Give it to Kel,” I said. Toli looked at me in horror.

  “We don’t have time, do we?” I said. I put out his arm. “Go for it.”

  “I should explain—” Yuri began, but I just shook my head.

  “Do it. I will exonerate you in my contract officially as soon as I get back to my room. There will not be another situation.” Yuri’s shoulders sagged, and she shook her head gratefully even as a blush crawled up her neck.

  “Wait,” Toli said. She fumbled at her side, pulling up her uniform to expose her gray, sagging left side. “I have changed my mind. Give it to me. I will be the tester. You should wait to see if it kills me,” Toli said as Yuri pulled out the vial.

  “I would, if there was any guarantee you would react the same,” I said. “It’s time to take chances.”

  “It is less likely to succeed with someone so young, already so weakened,” Yuri said gently.

  I shrugged, though my chest seized up, and the words were gruff and thick when they came out. “Better give it to him before he gets any weaker, then.”

  Toli still insisted on receiving the vaccine, however, and Yuri did in fact give it to her first—hoping, it seemed, to dissuade me. After a few more objections, I finally forcibly took the vial from her and administered the vaccine myself. Toli and Yuri both seemed to hold their breath as I did. Kel thrashed for a second or so, but stopped almost immediately after, with only a small mewling; my breasts were aching terribly. I had forgotten to pump all day, I realized. Stupid, but how could I separate myself from him now to spend that time with a machine?

  “Yuri?” I asked hesitantly, studying Kel’s eyes. “Would it help to have a healthy person test the vaccine?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “We should ask for volunteers.”

  “Would it help if the person were related to an infected person?” I asked. She nodded, thoughtfully. “We should have requested family profiles. We could—”

  Toli gasped as I released my cleansuit, a soft hissing filling the air. I pulled the chest flap down, releasing my breasts to the open air. I sighed with relief as I pulled off the visor, and Kel crowed with delight as he settled in to nurse, his rotting leg rubbing against my flesh.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said, for them; they were too kind to say it. “I know. I’m sorry, Yuri.”

  “We all have to make our own choices,” she said, and pulled out another vial of the serum from her pocket—waiting for me, apparently. I laughed, and she smiled sadly.

  “You guessed my decision correctly,” I said.

  * * *

  Toli’s belly ruptured internally an hour later, but Yuri held her together and somehow the medical mech managed to get there in time. Yuri knew as little about surgery as I did, so we both sat vigil next to her over the next two hours as the modified mech sedated her, cut her even further open, and pieced back together the parts that were not yet putrid
. Interestingly, the area closest to the injection site seemed pinker, less flaccid. Yuri and I ran cleanup around the bot, clearing up the blood spurts and emptying the horrible bins into the incinerator. It seemed impossible such a small woman could have so much to cut out. Afterward, the mech pumped her full of healing agents: additional white blood cells, rapid heal cells, and glucose to steady her blood sugar. She survived the surgery, and we placed her in a proper cleanroom and hoped.

  As soon as Toli’s survival was assured, Yuri began bleeding and scraping me all over, testing every bit of me, and an hour later she did it all again, swearing softly at the processor as it tried to quickly aggregate and articulate the differences between our responses to the vaccine.

  She made no move to examine Kel, and I suspected I knew why—she was just waiting for something else to fall off. I tried not to hate her for it, and took Kel back out to the garden again, where I found Nora still. She had fallen asleep. Unable to help myself, I snuck as close to her as I dared, peering into her uniform from every angle I possibly could at her amputation, trying to tell the state of her decay. The light was wrong, however, and she was too much under the little arbor, in shadow. I gave up and walked Kel in circles for a while before turning back in.

  Three hours later, Yuri was sleeping and Kel had lost another toe, which I dealt with as before. The whole of his leg was deep gray now, and I pondered the utility of an amputation. I reviewed the last lung analysis. My studies were in microbiology, so the pictures did me little good. I had the computer walk me through the information, explaining every miserable fistula.

  I sat and watched the results as they streamed in on the analyses: the DNA charts, the progression statistics, the charting of symptoms from the grandmothers. An alert came in then. One of the grandmothers was requesting termination. I went to rouse Yuri, and she left after only a moment, two vials—two choices—in hand. She returned with the mech carrying the woman.