Universe 14 - [Anthology] Read online

  As she wandered, she looked at the paintings—a few starscapes, but mostly scenes of the station itself. Henri’s contributions easily stood out, with their mastery of perspective, their confident brush strokes. The students’ contributions were remarkable only for their odd viewpoints. The school had drawn from Giselle’s peers, Earth children uprooted by disease and raised on Blues. One student—the boy with the braided beard—showed promise. His paintings were a tangle of intersecting levels that gave Madeline vertigo, the same feeling she got whenever she looked above her at the other side of the colony.

  She paused before a final picture, a sentimental still life of silken flowers. Giselle’s. It was the most amateurish of all, and Madeline resented its presence.

  She heard Giselle’s laughter. The girl was entertaining some journalist, translating Henri’s dour phrases into an artistic manifesto. That had always been Madeline’s job back home. But here—Madeline was deluding herself. If anyone was the hostess of the art show, it was Giselle.

  One of the daring young artists accepted a refill of his glass, then pointed to Giselle. “Isn’t she grand tonight?”

  “She appears to be in her element.” She noticed Giselle’s father buttonholing people and forcing them to confront his daughter’s still life.

  “I was an artist,” she said.

  “You?”

  The boy obviously thought of her as a drudge who existed only to support Henri. The juvenile form of the PMN is called a stab, Madeline thought. How appropriate.

  “Me. I gave up my career to support—my husband. But I still sculpted, even showed.”

  “Sculpture. You mean, pottery and plastic and stuff?”

  “Wood. I miss it. The feel of a good knife, the search for the right pattern in the grain ...”

  “Well, miss away,” he said. “I’d like to see you find a knife on Blues. They’d have a fit.”

  “Would they?” She watched him move deeper into the room of harsh design but rounded edges, an environment to minimize trauma.

  “Ah, for a knife as sharp as a child’s tongue.”

  Hearing applause, Madeline watched the young artist with the braided beard present Giselle with a bouquet. His ringlets of hair reminded her of a cluster of staphylococci. She shook her head and looked away, turning back at the shriek.

  Giselle had dropped the plastic flowers and was clutching her hand. Clear liquid, like viscous water, ran from her hand and onto the floor.

  “Oh no I’m sorry I’m sorry, I don’t know how . . .” the man babbled. The others stood, horrified. Giselle’s father began to berate the young man. “You’ve killed her,” he screamed.

  Madeline felt like a character out of Alice in Wonderland. She pushed through the crowd to Giselle, grabbing her hand, feeling the slippery fluid. She raised Giselle’s hand high, holding pressure over the artery in the upper arm.

  Giselle was wide-eyed and shaking. She would have been pale were she not already the sickly yellow of the bloodless. “It’s going to be all right,” Madeline said, and from the corner of her eye noticed Henri.

  He was as wide-eyed as Giselle. He stared at the younger woman, looking almost ready to faint.

  Madeline’s heart missed a beat.

  “Call an ambulance,” she said.

  * * * *

  “It’s ludicrous; everyone is overreacting. You’d think she was Camille, coughing out her lungs. Not a cut finger.” Madeline gazed in the window of the emergency room cubicle. Giselle had a liter of artificial blood hung in her central line. Henri clutched her free hand as a doctor sutured up the other.

  Bob, who had heard the commotion and come to the emergency room to offer advice, said, “People bleed to death frequently here. Well, bleed isn’t the best description.”

  “As good as ‘blood relative,’ “ Madeline said.

  “Who’s the wimp cutting off her circulation?”

  “The man I live with.” So easily was Henri relegated to a bloodless description.

  “Oh.” Bob put an arm about Madeline’s shoulder, ushered her upstairs to his office, and materialized two cups of coffee. They nursed the coffee in silence. She stared at the decorations on the wall, the diplomas and certificates, the framed portraits. In one, a dozen men and women in formal attire faced the camera; Bob wore blue jeans. In another, he was the one beard in a sea of cleanshaven faces.

  Bob said finally, “My place is pretty nice. Lots of posters of trees and all. The bed is big, too.”

  She said, “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “No commitments or anything. I can’t get caught; it would leave too many broken hearts from Boise to Mars. Just temporary quarters, you know?”

  She nodded. “We wouldn’t want to upset your girlfriends.”

  “Right. God, I love the French. You understand things so well.”

  “You’re a good man, Bob.”

  “Hey, what do you expect from the last of the red-blooded men? Are you going to fight for him?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Then keep this in mind about Giselle. She has a combined immunodeficiency.”

  “So?”

  “So that means that only her lymphocytes were useless. She still had stem cells that became perfectly good red cells and platelets and polys.”

  Madeline put down her coffee. “You mean—”

  “Yeah. Giselle grew up as rosy and healthy as me. She looked like an Outsider, an Earthie. She took elective chemo, wiped out her stem cells voluntarily. Just to look ‘normal.’ “

  Standing, he kissed Madeline’s hand. “Be careful. Giselle is a very determined young lady.”

  * * * *

  Henri haunted the hospital, sleeping in the lounge, pacing catlike through the halls, until Giselle went home. Then he moved to the couch in his studio. Whenever Madeline passed the open door he would jump before a canvas, holding the brush poised as if in decision. But the painting never progressed.

  And finally, one morning when Madeline went in to work, her friends did not speak to her. When she sat down to lunch, her neighbors moved to another table. Returning to the lab, she found her white coat shredded, her locker opened, and its contents smashed.

  “Why are you doing this?” she screamed. The others kept to their tasks, plating samples, staring into microscopes. She grabbed a co-worker and spun him around. “Why!”

  “Fido,” he said, wrenching loose. “Bow wow.” The others in the lab took up the barking call.

  She fled to the transport, running the final quarter kilometer home. The front door was unlocked, Henri’s studio vacant. The painting had progressed since morning.

  She went to the bedroom and flung open the door. Henri looked at her guiltily. Giselle sat up, long hair ebony against her yellow-ivory skin, and smiled. “Woof woof.”

  “You told them!”

  “It was your cousin’s latest letter. I’m glad you persuaded me to read it. She hoped we’d be good friends, you and I, and talked about your long, idyllic marriage to a famous painter. Henri confirmed it. Can’t keep a secret, can you, my angel?” She leaned over and kissed him, then looked back at Madeline. Henri’s expression was as blank as unsculpted marble.

  “You would stoop so low ...”

  Giselle said, “You have no rights here. Outsider.”

  “Henri!”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Henri—you as well? All right, she’s young and pretty and amusing, but Henri, it’s empty glamour. It’s the sparkle of a castle in a fishbowl.”

  He spoke at last. “They have your marrow frozen in the lab. You can return to Earth. I—I’m the fish; I can’t leave the fishbowl. So I’ll settle for the castle.”

  She fled.

  * * * *

  She clung to the spoke, in the still center without gravity. Near her a father and daughter played with fighting kites. She could see the entirety of the O’Neill module below her, curving up and above her. With ponds, forests, meadows, it might have been beautiful. Ins
tead it was all shiny metal and muted pastels.

  “Get me,” the father urged. “That’s it,” and they giggled.

  Madeline remembered the oncologist, a large-boned woman with eyes that crinkled when she smiled. She had not been smiling then. “Don’t do it,” she’d said.

  “Henri’s afraid to go alone.”

  “I’m begging you—stay on Earth.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  The doctor had shrugged. “All right; you won’t be the first. But you’ll do it our way. You’ll need a cover story to fit in—lupus. We haven’t used that before. We’ll say your mother died from SLE. When you developed it you decided to emigrate early, before the steroid side effects. You’ll undergo the same treatments your husband does— we’ll kill every blood cell in your body. But there’ll be one difference. We’ll keep some of your marrow, for when you change your mind and decide to come home. It will be in the freezer, waiting for you.”

  “Then it will wait forever.”

  “Forever,” Madeline repeated now. She could push off from the tower, glide slowly to her doom. And when she landed—there would be no telltale red spot on the pavement.

  She looked down at the colony, people visible only as abstractions. She’d thought of it as a colony, like a colony of bacteria growing on an artificial medium, but from this height it seemed more like a body. A cylinder full of life, in pieces so small the individual components were meaningless. And herself? The Outsider. The infective particle.

  The people without individual immune systems had formed a larger, more potent immune system to reject her. What could she do? Stay, like Bob, and become an abscess walled off by hate? Or let them win. The short flight downward . . .

  The body cannot tolerate an invader. One or the other must die.

  * * * *

  She left everything for Henri and Giselle, taking only the old brandy—Napoleon fleeing the winter. She knocked and entered, carrying the bottle. Bob, wearing only a pair of jeans, stood staring into a hologram of a redwood forest.

  “For you,” she said, and put down the bottle.

  He spoke to the wall. “A going away present?”

  She took one step forward, then stopped. “Bob, come with me. Choose life. Why stay and be destroyed?”

  Laughing, he turned to face her. She saw the large, hasty scar of an emergency laparotomy bisecting his abdomen.

  He grinned. “Drunk driver. My spleen looked like hamburger.”

  “After the splenectomy—”

  “Yeah. Recurrent pneumococcal infections.”

  “Antibiotics—”

  He cut her off. “I’m allergic to sulfa and the beta-lactams. The others were too toxic for long-term prophylaxis.”

  “Then—you’re immunocompromised; Earth would kill you. You belong on Blues.”

  He laughed again. “Belong? I’m the last of the red-blooded men. I never belong.”

  * * * *

  The art show was the expected babble of voices, clink of glasses. She left the paintings and let the crowd drift her toward the sculptures in the center. She paused before the crenulated sphere engulfing the small rod, both carved out of heart of cedar. She’d become very fond of hues of red.

  A ruddy-faced young man was studying the piece carefully. “Looks real symbolic,” he said.

  “It’s a macrophage, phagocytosing a salmonella.”

  The man chuckled. “Come on. It’s obviously some sort of Jungian allegory about the female swallowing the male or something. I’m a photographer; I can’t understand anything more symbolic than a traffic sign. What do you do?”

  “I sculpt,” she said and pointed to her name on the stand.

  He barely blushed, then examined her name and looked pointedly at her unadorned fingers.

  “Weren’t you married?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a widow. More wine?”

  <>

  * * * *

  Science fiction is about change, or so goes one of the many definitions of this genre. Here’s a story about a radical change that comes over the world—not a new ice age or the disappearance of the ozone layer, but something basic, something important.

  Damon Knight, critic, teacher, and editor of science fiction, has always had a gift for the logic of the absurd, as those who have read “To Serve Man,” “The Great Cow Pat Boom,” and “Forever,” among other Damonic stories, will recall.

  O

  DAMON KNIGHT

  One day everybody in the world whose name began with the letter o abruptly disappeared. Marina Oswald, who was then living in Chevy Chase, went away and never came back; so did Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Otto, of Binghamton, New York, and all their children; so did Barry Outka and Lynn Overall, both of Austin, Texas; so did Aram Ouzounian of the Armenian SSR and Jean-Luc Ouellette of France and Tetsu Okuma of Japan. All the O’Haras, O’Gradys, OTlahertys, and O’Keefes vanished like smoke, along with the Owens, the Ortegas, and the Oppenheims.

  A good deal of real estate came on the market, especially in Ireland. Suddenly there was elbowroom in cities that had been overcrowded. The tempo of life relaxed; people had time to smile at each other on the street.

  The next thing that happened was that all animals, birds, fish, and reptiles whose names began with the lettero disappeared—ocelots, octopuses, okapis, opossums, orangutans, orioles, ostriches, otters, owls, and oxen, together with whole orders and suborders such as the Ophidia, the Orthoptera, and the Ostracoda. As a general thing, nobody missed them.

  Oak trees, oats, okra, olives, oranges, and other plants also vanished, but there were lots of substitutes—barley, for instance, pickles, and tangerines.

  So far, so good; but when whole cities, states, and other geographical features turned up missing, there was widespread unease. Ohio, Oklahoma, and Oregon were gone, no one knew where; so were Omaha, Omsk, Ontario, Osaka, Oshkosh, Oslo, and Oxford, along with a host of lesser-known places such as Oconomowoc, Odendaalsrus, Opa-locka, Opp, and Ouagadougou. The United Nations appointed a Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearance of Inhabited Places, but it bogged down because nobody could remember the names of the towns they were looking for.

  On the whole, most people thought the changes were improvements. There was nothing between Toronto and Rochester but a large grassy plain suitable for agriculture or grazing. The main island of Hawaii was gone, but it had been all built up in condominiums anyway. The space between Indiana and Pennsylvania had closed up somehow, and Kansas was now bounded on the south by Texas.

  A curious result was that people began to feel superstitious about using words that began with the missing letter. “Ah, hell,” they said, and “Unlatch the door.” Children, when they wanted to write something dirty on a wall, simply drew circles. Custodians went around behind them changing the circles into s.

  Mathematicians began to use the symbol Z for a zero, thus: “The national debt amounts to $156,ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZZ.” Multiples of one thousand became known as “zizzes,” as in “We’ve got to come up with a megazizz in new funding by the end of January.”

  In dictianaries and in camman usage, the letter a ar e was used as a substitute far the missing and naw unspeakable letter. Ane spake ef gaing ta “the men’s rum,” ar “the tailet.” The ultimate insult was “yeu asshale.”

  Manufacturers had ta change many ef their brand names, at great expense and sametimes with unfartunate results. Marlbara and Xerex were all right, but Caca-Cala suffered a nasedive in papularity.

  The publishing industry was burning, and sign painters had mare wark than they cauld handle. In spite ef the glut ef hausing, canstructian warkers were busy tu, tearing dawn traffic circles and turning them inta squares. Eyeglasses were square, and sa were cups and saucers, drinking glasses, and battles, resulting in great ecanamies in shipping and starage. A labaratary in Califarnia perfected a chicken that laid square eggs. A few peaple tuk the wheels aff their cars, replacing them with skids ar runners, but mast falks were cantent ta caver the wheels with r
uffled skirts.

  As the new century dawned, peaple surveyed their warld and faund it gud. From pale ta pale, the square-shauldered Earth was cavered with the rectilinear warks ef man—square buildings, square intersecting streets, square traffic exchanges, square lakes, and square mauntains. Even peaple’s faces were becaming square. Set free ef ail their circularity and canfusian, faursquare to the sunrise, the peaple ef the warld cauld well say, with the paet Alexander Pape,