Saul’s smile dropped when he saw Marguerite’s patient—a younger woman in a gray ship’s suit—who edged past the Walloon physician and hurried away toward the exit holding a cloth to one side of her face. Even turning her head away, she could not completely hide a shimmering, pink rash.
“Lani!” Saul whispered in dismay.
He had hoped that Marguerite’s diagnosis might turn out to be wrong, but there was no mistaking the symptoms of Zipper Pox.
“Lani?” he said, but she hurried by without looking up. These in both lines edged away as she passed.
Oh, Lani.
It was one of those diseases that seemed impervious, so far, to any of the tricks to come out of the lab. Even with his recent string of incredible luck.
It was ironic. While others were fighting to get back into the slots, Lani had begged to stay awake. But the decision was made. Her cooling had already been scheduled for day after tomorrow.
Carl has been a real rat to her, Saul thought. If he isn’t there for Lani’s slotting, I’m going to punch him in the nose.
“Dr. Lintz!”
Keoki Anuenue, the med-tech handling the shorter Percell line, stood up as Saul crossed the waiting room. The Hawaiian momentarily left the side of a dull-eyed man whose ears were packed with cotton, who slapped the side of his head every few minutes as in vain effort to stop the sound of bells.
Anuenue was exceptional even for a Hawaiian—one of the rare Orthos who seemed completely oblivious to both sickness and despair. He seemed never to sleep. Whenever Saul came in, Keoki was already on duty.
He grinned broadly, gesturing down at the vial in Saul’s hand, anticipation in his voice as he asked, “Is that the latest cyanute varietal, Dr. Lintz?”
He thinks I can do anything. So does Virginia. Saul shrugged. And after the luck I’ve been having, who am I to disagree? It was a sardonic thought. He knew something mysterious was going on, and it had little to do with skill.
He held out the vial.
“Here you are, Keoki. Find volunteers the usual way. Only desperate cases, at first. These ought to be useful against the Node Lodes, as well as Sinus Whinus and the Red Clap.”
Anuenue eagerly took the flask. He started to speak, then somebody in the line along the left wall cut loose in a loud, sudden sneeze.
All around the room, people looked up accusingly. It wasn’t me, this time, Saul felt like disclaiming.
As if it were a trigger, more sneezes erupted from the Ortho side of the chamber. The line lengthened as people put more room between themselves and the miscreants.
Saul glanced at the genetically enhanced group. Percells hardly ever sneezed.
They caught the same diseases as everyone else. Saul had tried to explain this over and over to resentful Orthos. If a viroid or other comet microbe was going to kill outfight, it didn’t matter much which group you belonged to.
But Percells’ bodies did not overreact. Their lymph nodes and membranes might swell while the body’s immune system waged war on invaders, but the process was self-limiting. They didn’t balloon up and die of their own overeager defenses.
Simon, he thought. This was the gift of which you were proudest, even though it mystified you, too… that every child you worked on somehow benefited from the same augmentation, whatever genetic disease you had started out working on.
It had surprised everyone, back in Berkeley. They had used DNA strip-readers and molecular surgery to edit harmful genes from sperm and ova of couples desperate to have children. But few had expected the babies who came forth out of those microrepaired cells to emerge so enhanced.
It’s a gift we gave them. A gift with the terrible price of making them different.
“Saul!”
A voice from across sick bay—he looked up and saw Akio Matsudo waving at him from his office door.
Saul glanced at Keoki Anuenue, who grinned. “Go on, Doctor. I’ll find those volunteers, and I’ll let you know before the tests begin.”
Saul nodded, concealing deep within the dread of what he knew had to come, sooner or later. Eventually, his bizarre string of luck would run out. One of his tailor-made symbionts would kill, rather than save its host. And then, no matter how much good he had done before, they would turn on him. All of them.
As they had turned on Simon Percell.
As the mob had burned a university on a mountaintop, so long ago and so very far away.
“Mai kii aku i kauka hupo,” he told Keoki.
Don’t get an ignorant doctor.
The big Hawaiian blinked in surprise, then rocked back laughing. The sound was so rich, so infectious, that several of those standing in line smiled without quite knowing why.
“Coming, ’Kio,” he called to Matsudo. “I’ll be right there.”
The snow-covered slopes of Mount Asahi were as symmetrical as the green pines blanketing its lower flanks. Clouds, like rice-paper boats, floated past on an invisible layer of either air or magic, setting forth toward a setting sun and a dark blue western sea.
Saul was content to watch Akio Matsudo’s weather wall, perhaps the finest in all the colony. Indeed. until Virginia came off shift in two hours, this was just about the best thing he could think of to do with his time.
It beats working, he thought tiredly. For once his mind was not awhirl with ideas, the next experiment to try, the next clue to trace. He sat, zazen fashion, thinking as little as possible.
Something we Westerners have learned from the East… that beauty can be found in the smallest things.
The earthy brown clay tea set had been brought all the way from the shores of the Inland Sea. Its rough surfaces reflected the mute colors of the late afternoon light in a way that could not be described, only admired. The shaping marks on the cup in front of Saul seemed to have been formed on the same wheel as that which turned Creation. It was contemporary with the planets, with the sun.
Entranced, Saul glanced up when Akio Matsudo spoke.
“The wait will be worth it, Saul. Be patient.”
Waiting? Saul thought. Was that what I was doing?
Highlights in the Japanese physician’s glossy black hair shone like Mount Asahi’s glaciers as he fussed over the tea, commenting on the difficulty of boiling water properly in low gravity, what with weakened convection and all. To Saul, the man’s voice was one with the rustling pines.
“I will now pour,” Akio intoned, and lifted the cups delicately.
Saul was not in a hurry to get to business. When the ceremony was finished, and the tea poured, they gossiped over inconsequential matters—the latest fashion in mathematical philosophy on Earth, and the strange propositions being put forward by the Marxist theologians of Kiev. The journals had been full of it, and they both wondered aloud what Nicholas Malenkov would have made of it all.
Akio seemed in much better health now. He had been one of Saul’s first volunteers to take an early version of the retailored cyanutes. It was that or lose him permanently to the infection tearing away at his liver. Now the sickly yellow pallor was gone. He had regained weight. Soon he would even quit using the mechanical endocrine rebalancer that had been keeping him alive.
Saul was very pleased to see his friend healthy and spry again.
I was able to help Virginia, and Marguerite, and Akio. Maybe, later, we can do something for Lani and Betty Oakes, and so many others.