Because artificial satellites in space will be totally planned environments, specifically designed to support human life, it follows that some of these could be further refined for particular kinds of human life . . . such as the medically designed colony in the following story. People who can no longer live in the uncontrolled environment of Earth—people who would have died if they didn’t have this colony as a refuge—make new lives in orbit around Earth.
But altered living conditions inevitably cause changes in people and society; and a new world whose physical environment is safe might be hostile to some people in other ways.
Sharon N. Farber is currently serving her internship in St. Louis, Missouri. Her stories have appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and elsewhere.
PASSING AS A FLOWER IN THE CITY OF THE DEAD
Henri hated parties; he was striding through the cocktail crowd, his massive head down, shoulders back. Watching her husband, Madeline wanted to laugh. This was “the pacing lion of the landscape”? What would that sycophantic art critic call him if she could see him now, skeletal after months of untreated leukemia, bald as a newborn from total body irradiation?
The stalking scarecrow, Madeline thought.
She lost sight of her husband as he pushed through into the house. Madeline put down her drink; it was adding to the steady-state nausea she’d felt from the aseptic food and from the sight of the colony ceiling far overhead. Her universe was a cylinder in space, the overhead view one of land and houses, while Earth and stars hid under her feet. Perhaps 180 degrees away another woman stood in another party and watched Madeline spin by. A treeless, grassless vista painted pastel blue.
“I’m Bob. How do you like Blues?” A man grinned at her. He had finely coiled gray hair, held a drink in each hand, and seemed more alive than anyone else at the party.
“It takes getting used to . .
“Of course,” he boomed, and Madeline noticed that his presence had cleared an even wider space. They were alone, haloed by emptiness like a colony of hemolytic streptococci on a blood agar plate.
“We’re pariahs, you ‘n’ I,” he said, setting down one empty paper cup, draping that hand about her shoulder, and steering her effortlessly to the refreshments table. “Moses parting the Red Sea,” he whispered, and Madeline laughed as the crowd melted away about them. He picked up a decanter, nestled in an arrangement of silk flowers, and poured full a pottery mug.
“Drink this. It’ll settle your stomach and curdle your brain,” he commanded. “The amnestic waters of the river Styx across which the dead must pass.” He looked about with exaggerated movements, then whispered sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ve had a classical education.”
“You aren’t afraid?” she asked.
“Afraid of what? Parsing verbs?”
She giggled. “No, of me. I’m a newcomer.” She ran one hand through her crew-cut-length hair. “Some bacterium may have snuck in with me.
“I’m a very dangerous woman,” she added in her best villainess voice.
Bob chortled. “Not too observant, are we? Look at me!”
Studying him, she realized why he had seemed so different, so alive. Of all those standing in the crowded patio, he alone lacked the pallor of the bloodless. He held his hand beside hers, allowing her to compare his rosy pink hue, the blue veins like ropes, with her own clear veins in cadaver flesh.
“None of that fluorocarbon-soup artificial blood for me,” he said. “I’m the last of the red-blooded men. At least on Blues.”
Madeline nodded. “Your immune system is intact. You can laugh in the face of any pathogen.”
“Right.” He grinned, downing his drink. “I’m going to feel awful in the morning—I’ve got all my blood. Red, white, blue, you name it.”
Madeline contrasted him to the others, to herself. A pale, bloodless lot. An O’Neill colony inhabited by those with leukemia, with autoimmune disease, with transplanted organs. They had all stood on the banks of the Styx, only to be saved by the killing of their every blood cell—the treacherous cells that multiplied erratically, or attacked their own organs, or fought the transplants. And the innocent blood cells had died as well, the cells that carried oxygen, fought invading microbes, stopped hemorrhages.
They were alive, locked in a hermetically sealed, sterile tin can rotating in space.
The man intruded on her thoughts. “Yes, I’m that fiend incarnate, that villain of stage and screen, the Outsider.”
“But why ...”
“Was I invited? Giselle works in my department. Even she isn’t rude enough not to invite me. She just never thought I’d be rude enough to come.” His grin widened. “I’ve seen you in the hospital. You’re in the lab? Come see me. Respiratory.” He put down his cup and left, swiveling at the gate to face the crowd. “I’m leaving. You can talk about me now,” he yelled.
“Obnoxious, isn’t he.” Giselle was at Madeline’s side, small and dainty, with brown hair to her waist. Hair was a status symbol on Blues. The longer the hair, the longer the head had been on Blues. The longer the survival from the terminal disease.
“Loud, but amusing.”
“You don’t have to work with him.”
The elderly man beside Giselle snarled. “Earthies. They come in, work their stint, and leave, acting like they’re so damn superior.”
He gazed suspiciously at Madeline as if, she thought, he were smelling pseudomonas. Or smelling anything. She was a woman without colonizing bacteria—her sweat, her breath, even her feces were almost odorless.
He suspects, she thought, panicking. No, he could not suspect. She was as much the Outsider as Bob, but she had the protective discoloration of the bloodless.
Giselle clapped her hands. “Everybody!”
“Damn,” the man said. “Must you go through with this?”
“Father, stop acting like it’s indecent.”
“You just like to shock people. It must be your genetics. It certainly wasn’t your upbringing.” He stormed into the house.
Giselle shrugged at Madeline. “Father’s a bit traditional . . . Everybody! May I have your attention—you too, you wastrel ...” The revelers paused in their various pursuits and looked to their hostess. Henri, studying the flower bed with its plastic nasturtiums, glowered at Madeline.
“During the party, many of you have met our newcomers, Henri and Madeline. Madeline, it happens, is an actual relative of mine. A blood relative.”
The audience chuckled, to Madeline’s bewilderment. Henri merely looked as if he were trapped in an ethnographic film.
“She was my genetic mother’s second cousin on Earth. Let’s welcome these newcomers to Blues.”
The audience clapped politely, all the while scrutinizing the strangers like laboratory specimens. Then they returned to their interrupted pastimes. A young man with a braided beard began to flirt with Giselle. Madeline moved away, finding herself before the girl’s adoptive father.
“You don’t approve of me.”
He answered vehemently. “You had some nerve calling, introducing yourself.”
Madeline sighed. It’s true, she thought. Civilization diminishes proportionally to the distance from Paris. She decided to try again, smiling ingratiatingly.
“Giselle seems to have grown into a beautiful young lady—she looks just like her mother. Before I emigrated, Giselle’s mother begged me to find her, to see what sort of woman she’d become—”
“Her mother! The woman who bore her? What claim has she? Who spent six months in quarantine with her, risking their lives to care for her? We did. Who raised her, taught her? We did, Hilda and me. And the whole time we’re getting her through the traumas of growing up, especially growing up in this place—the whole time she keeps getting letters from that earthside bitch.”
Forcing down her anger, she replied, “It’s not easy for those who stay behind either. Giselle’s parents—”
“Hilda was her mother! I am her father!” He stopped, shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’re new, you don’t understand yet.
“To come to Blues is to die and be reborn. You get some awful disease—myeloma. You?”
She paused a moment. “Lupus.”
“You say good-bye to your family, write your will, dispose of all your belongings. You’re shot into space, to the quarantine station. Six months alone in tiny rooms, while radiation and chemicals kill every blood cell, every germ in your body. Then, when you’re positively bug free—because without our immune systems the common cold could wipe out the colony—when you’re safe, you enter Blues. Hairless, like a baby. Reincarnated into a new world.”
He grabbed her left hand, holding it up. “You wore a ring for many years. Where is your husband now?”
She barely choked back her answer.
He nodded. “He stayed on Earth. Do you still write him? Don’t. You can never return to Earth. Let go of the past. ‘Until death do us part.’ Blues is a city of the dead.”
Madeline asked hesitantly, “And if my husband had come with me?”
“Come with you?” His face would have flushed livid, had he had any blood. “Fidoes. Faithful spouses following their loved ones into hell. Virtuous little toads. Don’t let me near one. I’d show him a bit of hell.”
“I don’t understand. How can you hate someone so full of love for her husband—or wife—that she—they’d follow them here?”
He snarled and stalked away.
Giselle came up and put a hand on Madeline’s shoulder. Her other hand was resting loosely on Henri’s forearm. “God—what’s Father yelling about this time?”
“Fidoes.”
“Them again? Well, of course we all hate Fidoes.”
“Why.” Henri always stated his questions.
“Because they remind us of what we’ve lost. We’re under life sentences, unable to see Earth or relatives. (Not that I, personally, have any memories of either.) But we’re all unified in that respect. Then Fidoes come, like it’s a big joke, play the self-righteous martyr for a few years, then return to Earth. Father says the only way to survive here is to sever all ties with your past.”
Madeline said, “And that’s why you don’t write your mother?”
Giselle rolled her eyes at the mere thought.
“Don’t judge. Annette is a lovely woman,” Henri said.
Giselle pulled her hand away, regarding him with narrowed eyes. “How do you know? I thought you two met in quarantine.”
Madeline said hastily, “We knew each other before, in art school.” She felt her entire past slipping away, negated by words that blithely tossed out memories of marriage, career, friends, love— Anything to avoid the truth. She was a Fido.
“Henri and I, meeting again. It was quite a coincidence.”
“Quite,” Giselle agreed.
Henri slept with the corner of his mouth twitching, making an occasional soft moan. Madeline lay propped up on one arm. Despite the months, he still seemed alien to her, her now bald and thin husband merging in her mind’s eye with her grandfather. Even the venous catheter high on Henri’s chest, closed except during the bimonthly infusion of artificial blood, reminded her of Grandpere’s central-line venous access when his peripheral veins could no longer sustain an intravenous line.
Her grandfather had been only fifty-six when they diagnosed lymphoma, and he’d refused the standard treatment.
“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 shrugged, 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, they 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.”
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. Instead 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?”