Universe 14 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Let them clean me out like a rat in a lab, replace my blood with cream, send me to outer space? Never. If I must die, I shall do so with my family around me.”

  He’d done well for a while, then gone downhill with a vengeance. And so to the special hospital in America, where he’d suffered through six-drug chemotherapy, radiation, interferon, debulking operations. Madeline remembered him wasting away, shriveling, his final days a contest to see which would kill him first—the disease or the treatment, the pain of the invading lymphocytes or the pain of the poisons that fought the cells.

  She remembered Dr. Elbein, though she found it impossible to picture him without his entourage of fellows, residents, and medical students. He’d stood outside the door, unaware how his voice carried in the stillness. “This is a rare opportunity to relive medical history,” he’d said, his voice unexpectedly gentle from a face that sharp and sardonic. “We called them ‘hot leuks,’ though lymphoma’s really just ‘leuk equivalent.’ We’d drug them until the white count dropped into the basement, then hope it would crawl back up before they died of infection.”

  “Why ‘hot leuks’?” a student asked.

  “Because leukemics are hot. They look fine one minute and crump the next. Every night on call they’d spike and you’d have to do a complete fever workup—you kids can’t imagine how much time that ate up. And if they didn’t spike they’d need blood or platelets—and they never had any veins.

  “You think it’s awful with this guy, watching him puke and get septic and waste away?” He laughed. “We had wards full of them. Now we just shoot them into space, like atomic waste.”

  “Waste,” Madeline whispered, and tried to sleep.

  She dreamed of the hospital, air sweet with bouquets and bodily decay. Her husband seemed as pale as his sheets. Watching Henri sleep had always given her a feeling of security; she’d been safe from all harm with her lion beside her. Now she was watching him, anticipating every harsh breath, afraid that the next might not come.

  He woke screaming.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  He clutched her. “Don’t leave me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Never. I—I’m afraid. Don’t ever leave me.” And he began to cry.

  She’d never seen him cry before. “I’ll stay with you,” she promised, and woke.

  She rose, made coffee, and sat quietly in the studio. The coffee was bland, artificial—real coffee might stimulate too much gastric acid secretion, causing ulcers that would bleed. People without blood platelets cannot afford to bleed. Hence the boring food, the soft-edged furniture, the dull knives. Hence Madeline’s inability to sculpt.

  Internal bleeding—a bruise—stops by the action of clotting factors made in the liver. But cuts, scrapes, open wounds—bleeding from them stops due to platelets. And platelets come from the same stem cells which give rise to the white and red blood cells, the stem cells which had been diligently destroyed in almost all the inhabitants of Blues. The artificial clotting aids could not completely replace platelets. Thus there was no more chance of Madeline getting a sculpting tool than of her getting fresh fruit or a potted palm.

  She surveyed the studio. It was so different from their studio back home, with the north window facing the garden. Here the one small window faced another building, pastel blue. Paintings in every stage of completion—here the canvases were either blank or turned to face the wall. Her sculptures on every shelf—here were only photographs of her statues, too heavy to bring from Earth.

  “They don’t understand your work,” Henri had always said, “because they’re fools.”

  She looked at the shelf of paints and her one attempt at sculpture since arrival, a clay sphere with little tendrils reaching out—a sun sending out plumes of gas, or a macrophage ready to engulf. It was covered in the fine powder that passed for dust on Blues.

  She reached for it scornfully. Clay had no life, no soul, so unlike wood. Wood contained the sculpture already; she had only to find it and release it from its covering. But clay was like all of Blues, a bland mediocre world, as devoid of ugliness as it was of beauty. People, though— people were still the same . . .

  The sphere slipped from her fingers, pancaking on the floor.

  Henri entered, rubbing at his scalp to push back the mane that no longer existed. “What . . .”

  “Found art,” she said. “It’s an egg.”

  He adopted his nasal art-critic voice. “The egg, symbol of life and new beginnings.” When Madeline failed to laugh at the imitation, he picked up a canvas, stared at it, turned it back to face the wall again, and began pacing.

  Madeline sipped her coffee. “It was an awful party.”

  He paused, a strange smile on his face. “Your cousin doesn’t believe we’re living together. She says we don’t act like lovers. She says we act like an old married couple.” He laughed once, a staccato bark, and resumed pacing.

  * * * *

  Madeline ran into Giselle in the line at the hospital cafeteria as the older woman tried to choose a meal. The plastic-looking food had many strikes against it. It was shipped from Earth fully processed. It was digestible by people lacking normal bowel flora and with their gastric acid secretion diminished by drugs. As if that were not enough, it was also hospital food.

  Madeline made some polite comments about Giselle’s party.

  “How do you like Blues?”

  “It’s—different. Hard to adjust to. My job is, too. I’m a medical technician. My specialties are bacteriology and hematology—not much demand for either. Now all I do is plate specimens; I haven’t seen a single rod or coccus to reward my efforts.”

  “Thank God,” Giselle said.

  “Well, at least I’m working with culture.” Giselle did not get the joke, so Madeline continued. “It’s worse for Henri. He’s a painter.”

  “An artist?” Giselle became enthusiastic. “Lord knows we need more art up here. What does he paint?”

  “He began in landscapes. But”—she caught herself from saying “we”—”he had to live in cities, to lecture and teach and such. Have you heard of the microlandscape school? Henri was one of the founders. It’s easy to find grandeur in the country, with the vistas of trees, mountains, sky ...” She was falling back into her standard explanation, culled almost directly from the exhibit pamphlets she’d helped write.

  “Those are just concepts in textbooks,” Giselle said. “Maybe ... is it like Out-there? Space is huge and black and wonderful. It just keeps going, with stars like spots of fire ...” She pushed at the remnants of her sandwich, her mind somewhere else.

  “The Group decided to paint city landscapes,” Madeline continued dreamily. “A flower in the sidewalk, tree leaves against the sky . . . Beauty is ubiquitous in the country. The challenge is to find it in the city.” Like searching for bacteria in the pus of a sterile abscess.

  “Unfortunately, there’s no sky here, no trees, no flowers. Henri is without inspiration. He can’t paint.”

  Giselle’s face lit up. “But there’s beauty in Blues.”

  “Ah, you were raised here.”

  “No, it’s there for everyone. The arc of a roof against a support strut, the glint of a house far overhead, the way the stars smear out underfoot in the observation deck . . .”

  Madeline was thoughtful. “Do you think you could get someone else to see this beauty? Henri?”

  “I can try.”

  * * * *

  They received a letter from Bertrand, a glorious collage of pictures and words that began, “Mon cher Henri, ma belle Madeline,” appellations that made Henri bristle.

  “He’s got something planned,” Henri muttered. “While the cat’s away the mice shall play.”

  Madeline put the letter on hold. “Bertrand’s not so bad.”

  “The man’s an upstart. The only thing that held him back was his inability to decide which he’d rather do— steal my school or seduce my wife.”

  Madeline shr
ugged, half smiling, and switched the letter back on. “The prices for your paintings have already skyrocketed, my dear Henri, to a height almost worthy of your present surroundings. Also, may I opine, to a degree undreamed of in your earthly days.”

  “The rodent.”

  “He’s just trying to be poetic.”

  “Even the sculptures of your lovely wife are coveted and much sought after.”

  “Vultures,” Henri growled.

  A new picture came on. “Our latest exhibit. Marcel’s Flowers in the Crosswalk I.” It was a good example of their school—austere brush work, unpretentious realism.

  “Flowers in the Crosswalk II. “ Now the flowers were buffeted in the airstream of rushing traffic. There was a cartoonlike simplicity to the art. Henri sat rigid.

  “Flowers in the Crosswalk III” The final item in the triptych blinked into being, the flowers transformed into metal, the trucks and motorbikes into elephants, typewriters, musical notes.

  “Surrealism!” Henri bellowed, banging his fist onto the console. Paintings began to flash by rapidly, each sillier than the last, each more of a parody of the circle’s previous work, of Henri’s life work.

  Henri rose and left the room, his massive shoulders slumped. Madeline stopped the letter at the last of the art and slowly read the title.

  “Dancing on My Grave Before I’m Even Dead.”

  * * * *

  Madeline had not seen much of Henri for the last few days. He set out early each morning, led by Giselle or one of her friends, returning each evening with an armful of charcoal roughs. The house began to fill with students, trying to convert their own crude sketches into full canvases. They painted into the night, falling asleep on the couch or rug, working and lying underfoot until Madeline would wake and send them to their own homes as she left for the lab.

  While Henri had found beauty in a tree thrusting out of pavement, Madeline had found it in the microscope. She’d given up her own art studies—one of them had to bring home a salary—but the aesthetics of a Wright’s-stained blood smear had eased her through the workaday world. The delicate lobulations of a PMN, no two cells alike. The frothy purple lacework of a platelet. The sweet blue of a lymphocyte’s cytoplasm. Even when she’d gone to the lab to see the slide that spelled Henri’s doom, even as she’d scanned field after field of leukemic myelocytes, she’d thought, How can they be bad? They’re too beautiful.

  “Why so quiet?”

  She looked around. Bob, the stranger from the party, was leaning against an incubator. A stethoscope peeked out of one pocket of his very loud suit.

  She put down her pipette. “You’ll think I’m crazy. I was remembering the beauty of a good peripheral blood smear.”

  “Not crazy—just a little weird. One of my path teachers was artsy. Wanted to be an architect, became a pathologist instead. He always said, The worst cancer looks gorgeous in hematoxylin and eosin.’ He’d show us a slide of, say, lung with its fine mesh of purple and pink, and he’d say, ‘Go on, show me anything in art nouveau that can beat this.’ Frankly, I didn’t think it was so hot. Not that it kept me from getting the top grade in the class.”

  “No,” Madeline said. “One does not need a sense of aesthetics to be successful.”

  * * * *

  “What’s wrong,” Henri demanded, putting down his brush. The studio was now full of paintings by Henri and his new pupils. Views of stars, of houses, of women lying in artificial flowers or standing in the metallic sheen of the oxygen equipment. Works in progress lay propped everywhere and hung on the walls, covering the photos of Madeline’s sculptures. “You’ve been unhappy all evening.”

  “Don’t you know what today is?”

  “It’s our anniversary. Well, we can’t very well celebrate it, can we. They don’t even know we’re married.”

  “But we could . . .”

  “Let’s choose a new anniversary, Madeline, one appropriate to our life here. I know! We can have a party for the day when they told me I was dying.” Laughing bitterly, he turned back to the canvas.

  * * * *

  As Henri was becoming engrossed in his painting and his teaching, Madeline was making friends at work. They gossiped as she plated a seemingly infinite number of specimens from people, places, things in the never-ending war to keep the colony germ-free. She joined a chess club. She went to a party to bid a temporary farewell to a co-worker who had won the adoption lottery and was going on leave to help her new three-year-old immunosuppressed son through the terrors of quarantine.

  She occasionally met Giselle at lunch. They would begin by gossiping—had X sliced her finger on a broken window and bled to death by accident, or was it suicide or murder; did Y’s newly adopted daughter have brain damage; would Z wed yet again?

  But, perhaps because of her own lung damage from recurrent pneumonia as an infant, lunch with Giselle always ended up a bitter catalog of the disasters that walked into the Pulmonary Functions Lab—chronic lungers incapacitated by smoking, by radiation fibrosis, by bronchiectasis from infection.

  After yet another description of yet another pulmonary cripple, Giselle changed her subject. “I got another letter from your cousin today.”

  “Annette? How is she?”

  “I don’t know. I just erase them as they come through the computer.”

  “Giselle! How can you!”

  “That woman inundates me with her unwanted attention!”

  “You can hardly call a few letters a year an inundation.”

  “She gave me up to Blues—why can’t she give me up completely? I didn’t ask to be born. I don’t owe her—”

  Madeline had had enough dramatics. “Calm down, Giselle. Don’t you ever wonder about your family? You had an older brother. Antoine. The colds started at three months. Then pneumonia. Meningitis. Constant diarrhea. He didn’t respond to immunoglobulin replacement. He died before his first birthday.

  “The geneticists said there was only a one-in-four chance the next child would also have an immunodeficiency. Annette and Pierre wanted children, and they took the chance. They treated you as if you were made of jewels. Then at three months, when the maternal antibodies begin to disappear, you sneezed . . .

  “They didn’t have a third child. Don’t you see—allowing you to leave Earth, to live, was an act of love. Your mother loves you, Giselle, though she hasn’t seen you for twenty years.”

  The girl stared into her coffee cup.

  Madeline said softly, “Read the next letter you receive. Please.”

  “Well, hello ladies.”

  Giselle groaned as Bob sat down. “Lucky women, lunching with the last of the red-blooded men. Who could ask for more?”

  Giselle rose. “I have to get back to work.”

  Bob waited until she was gone. “At last. We’re alone.” The other diners within range of his booming voice turned in astonishment.

  Madeline stifled a giggle. “At last.”

  “I brought you a gift.” He handed her a slide, folded in lens paper. Madeline unwrapped it, rotating it into the light.

  “Notice the perfect feather edge,” Bob said. “Haven’t done a smear in twenty years, but I haven’t lost my touch. Nothing’s beyond the last of the red-blooded men.”

  “But what . . .”

  “Blood. My own, of course, with just the right amount of Wright’s stain. A nostalgic voyage to a world where people have hot, pulsing red stuff in their arteries.”

  Smiling, she pocketed the slide. “Thank you, Bob. As I revel in each red cell, each delightful leukocyte, each marvelous monocyte, I’ll think of you.”

  He shuddered, “If you find anything strange on the diff—do me a favor. Don’t tell me.”

  * * * *

  The great and near great of Blues were there. Administrators, store owners, journalists. They looked at the paintings, drank the bland wine, argued politics.

  “We’re nothing but a company store, existing on Earth’s sufferance.”

  “Look, the
y won’t run something this expensive if it isn’t worth their while. Why shouldn’t we tend the satellites and factories. We aren’t invalids ...”

  Madeline moved along making sure everyone had a glass of wine, a piece of cheese. She felt almost at home. She’d had years of practice running art shows.

  A man grabbed her arm as she passed. “Do you play cello?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Damn. We’ve almost got an entire orchestra. All we need is another cellist.”

  She bit back the temptation to suggest he hire one. She knew how the few hired personnel from Earth were ostracized, despised. Instead, she smiled devilishly. “Sooner or later some cellist down there will need a kidney transplant. You just have to be patient.”