The Radio Magician and Other Stories (16 page)

Corey sat beside the old woman’s bed for an hour. Each life sign’s graph slid slowly down. The pulse barely twitched every couple of seconds, sounding its tiny tone. The pause between them was excruciating. Even Stella’s smell seemed stale, as if she’d already passed on and had gone bad.

Finally, after Stella’s dying sounds became a background noise, the door to the outer office opened, startling Corey out of her chair, but Stella didn’t move when Harlow came into the room, his hands jammed into his pockets, and his always careless hair waving across his forehead.

“Last call, isn’t it?” he said. “I’d better get those papers signed or we’ll be postmortem, and what a mess that would be.”

“I have to talk to you,” Corey said. “It’s important.”

He smiled. “I know you liked Stella, but she’s gone now. You’ll get a severance package and a good recommendation. Don’t worry.”

Corey blinked. For a second what he said didn’t make sense to her. The blood rose to her face, and for an instant it was if he was breathing on her again, warm and tense, a half beat from the end.

“No, it’s not that. I’m pregnant.”

Harlow moved to the other side of the bed. “I suppose we’ll have to return all this equipment. Do you know if it’s rented, or did Stella buy it?”

Corey’s hands rested on the back of the chair by the bed. She could feel the sweat on her neck. Harlow was looking at Stella’s interface box on the wall behind her head.

“I’m pregnant,” she said again.

“Bad timing, that,” said Harlow. “But you’ll come up with another job in no time. You could delay delivery if you want. All the better companies give you a few months either way. A buddy of mine and his wife didn’t take delivery for sixteen months because he got cold feet.”

“No, Harlow, you don’t understand. I’m pregnant. Me. I’m physically with child.” She pressed her hand against her stomach. “There’s a baby in here. Your baby.”

He blinked back at her, then his brow furrowed. “I didn’t order a baby. I haven’t even deposited anywhere.”

“In me, you did, the old-fashioned way. It’s not supposed to happen, but we’re going to be parents.”

Harlow didn’t speak.

“I thought you should know,” said Corey.

“You’re pregnant?”

The pen piped up in Corey’s ear. “I told you he was an idiot.”

“And he chews pencils,” said the pencil from the other room.

“It’s in you? Like a parasite?” Harlow’s nose wrinkled as if he’d smelled something distasteful. “What a bother.”

“My doctor wants me to make an appointment.” Corey’s hands covered her stomach that still felt flat and familiar. “Soon.” She felt as if she were playacting. A
real
pregnant woman wouldn’t feel so . . . so normal. Maybe she could just shake her head to wake up. Stella wouldn’t be dying. Harlow would wait for her at her desk for long talks, his lovely eyes locked on her own. She’d still know the long anticipation of his fingers on her top blouse button, toying, toying, toying, and always a second away from committing.

“It’s just a toss-away,” said Harlow. “Get a reset at the doctor’s office and start from scratch. Plus, you probably have a good malpractice lawsuit. Nobody gets pregnant nowadays.” He pushed away from Stella’s bed. “How about our lease? Are we committed to paying for the room until the end of the month, or do they prorate it?”

A muscle in the corner of Corey’s mouth twitched. Suddenly, she wanted to take a handful of his wavy hair and jerk it out by the roots. “I don’t know.” She moved next to the medical sensor. The device’s cool, smooth surface slid beneath her fingers. Stella’s heart beat quietly in the background.

“Lend me your pen,” he said. “I’ll sign these papers now.” He took it, then wrote on the documents, awkwardly across his knee. “There, she’s still alive, and I’ve taken care of this.” The pen clicked open and closed twice under his thumb. “The pen skips,” he said, flicking it into the trashcan as he left, where it clattered loudly.

The peace in the room after the door snapped shut lasted for only a second before the trashcan said to the pen, “Ahh, I knew you’d come back. They always come back.”

“The bastard,” said the pencil.

“Save me!” cried the pen.

Corey covered her face with her hands, “Oh, just shut up, all of you.” She leaned her backside against the medical sensor to keep from collapsing to the floor.

Several long sobs later, she shook her head as if she were trying to wake up, then wiped her hands hard on her pants legs. “I knew that would happen,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t care, Stella.”

Stella, or course, didn’t answer. Her lips were parted, her head, turned to one side; her eyelids, thin as parchment, didn’t move. She looked like the photograph of a woman rather than the woman herself. Corey sat in the chair next to the bed and touched the old woman’s fingers that dangled over the guard rail. No response, but Corey didn’t expect any. A few minutes later she realized Stella’s heartbeat wasn’t pinging from the medical sensor.

Silence consumed the room.

“Where’d you go?” said Corey, feeling so much like a ten-year-old that her adult voice surprised her.

Somewhere else, in a clattering chaos of shapes and sounds and rough currents, the question echoed. Stella heard it from a dozen directions, repeating and looping on itself until it became a refrain boiled down to “Go, go, go.” She reached out as best she could, but she had no hands to grab with. She could only follow, so she did. Drifting after the strongest sound, driving her forward, urging, “Go, go, go.” Stella didn’t know: was she lost or found? Was she still herself, or was she fragmenting, breaking into pieces in the sloppy overload of textures and odors? Still, she moved, because there was nothing else to do, and as she did, she thought she saw a place she recognized. Is this the afterlife? she thought. Is that my angel?

She tried so hard to see.

Corey let Stella’s cold fingers rest against her own. The room looked surreal to her in its stillness. The white cabinets. The refrigerator. The clean walls exactly the same as they’d been yesterday and the day before, but now as different as sleep from waking. She hesitated to move. It would break the spell. Stella would become just a dead and fading memory. For now, though, Stella’s touch was real. Corey stayed motionless, almost afraid to breathe, not really thinking. Then, she saw a tiny speck creeping along the baseboard beneath the bed, a beetle making its way across the room, and, soon, she heard a gentle scratching within the wall behind the cabinets, and she realized there must be a mouse there, fending for itself. She almost smiled at the thought when another movement caught her eye: the television mounted in the room’s corner had rotated slightly toward her.

Corey froze.

The television turned another half inch.

“Stella?” Corey said, almost choking on the sound. “Stella?”

The television’s speaker hissed.

Without willing herself to rise, Corey found herself under the television, straining to make out the breathy whisper. A voice murmured behind it. Corey said, “I can’t understand you, Stella.” Finally, a ghost of speech resolved itself into something almost audible. What it sounded like was, “I’m here, deary.” Then the hiss faded away.

“I’m still here,” said a louder voice.

Corey jumped. It was the pen.

“Leave him,” said the trashcan. “Mixed recyclable or not, when you’re done, you’re done.”

“No,” Corey said. She retrieved the pen from the trashcan’s bottom. “I need it to write a note.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” said the pencil. “I don’t have another word in me, I’m afraid.”

Corey took a sheet of paper out of the desk and clicked the pen open. “Do you know a fancier phrase than ‘I am sorry?’”

The pen said, “I regret.”

“Or, ‘with regrets,’” suggested the pencil.

Corey wrote her note, thinking about frontier women riding west, their bellies full of babies, of little flesh quakes shaking within her. She thought of the pencil’s pathetic quest to stay alive. One, tiny, sentient voice among a million voices, like Stella’s voice somehow preserved in all the connections. The seat of her consciousness cut loose and free.

She thought of the tiny voice she hadn’t heard yet, like the speechless gray bird on the sidewalk, hopping from seed to seed.

LASHAWNDA AT THE END

W
e landed in steam. It billowed from where we touched down, then vanished into the dry, frigid air. From that first moment, the planet fascinated Lashawnda. She watched the landing tape over and over.

Lashawnda liked Papaver better than any of the rest us. She liked the gopher-rats that stood on their hind legs to look curiously until we got too close. She liked the smaller sun wavering in the not-quite-right blue sky, the lighter gravity, the blonde sand and gray rocks that reached to the horizon, but most of all, she liked the way the plants in the gullies leaned toward her when she walked through them, how the flat-leaved bushes turned toward her and stuck to her legs if she brushed against them. Wearing a full contamination suit despite the planet’s thin but perfectly breathable atmosphere didn’t bother her. Neither did the cold. By midday here on the equator the temperature might peak a few degrees above freezing, but the nights were incredibly chilly. Even Marvin and Beatitude’s ugly deaths the first days here didn’t affect her like it did everyone else. No, she was in heaven, cataloging the flora, wandering among the misshaped trees in the crooked ravines, coming up with names for each new species.

When we lost our water supply, and it looked like we might not last until the resupply ship came round, she was still happy.

Lashawnda was a research botanist; what else should I have expected? For me, a commercial applications biologist, Papaver represented a lifetime of work for
teams
of scientists, and I was only one guy. After less than two weeks on planet, I knew the best I got to do was to file a report that said, “Great possibilities for medicinal, scientific and industrial exploitation.” Every plant Lashawnda sent my way revealed a whole catalog of potential pharmaceuticals. The
second
wave of explorers would make all the money.

Lashawnda was dying, but was such a positive person that even in what she knew were her final days, she worked as if no deadly date was flapping its leaden wings toward her. That’s the problem in living with a technology that’s extended human life so well: death is harder. It must have been easier when humans didn’t make it through their first century. People dropped dead left and right, so they couldn’t have feared it as much. It couldn’t have made them as mad as it made me. Her mortality clung to me like a pall, making everything dark and slow motion and sad.

Of course, the plants stole our water. We should have seen it coming. Every living creature we’d found spent most of its time finding, extracting and storing water.

Second Chair pounded on my door.

“Get into a suit, Spencer,” she yelled when I poked my head into the hallway. “Everyone outside!” A couple of engineers rushed by, faces flushed, half into their suits. “I’m systems control,” said one as he passed. “There’s no way I should risk a lung full of Papaver rot.”

When I made it out the airlock, the crisis was beyond help. Our water tanks stood twenty meters from the ship, their landing struts crunched beneath them just as they were designed to do. They’d landed on the planet months before we got here, both resting between deep, lichen-filled depressions in the rock. Then the machinery gathered the minuscule water from the air, drop by drop, until when we arrived the tanks were full. A year on Papaver was enough. Everyone surrounded the tanks, heads down. Even in the bulky suits I could see how glum they were, except Lashawnda, who was under the main tank. “It’s a fungus,” she said, breaking off a chip of metal from what should have been the smooth underside. Her hand rested in dark mud, but even as I watched, the color leached away. The ground sucked water like a sponge, and underneath the normally arid surface, a dozen plant species waited to store the rare substance. Even now the water would be spreading beneath my feet, pumped from one cell to the next. Ten years worth of moisture for this little valley delivered all at once.

She looked at me, smiling through the face shield. “I never checked the water tanks, but I’ll bet there was trace condensation on them in the mornings, enough for fungus to live on, and whatever they secreted as waste
ate
right through. Look at this, Spencer.” She yanked hard at the tank’s underside, snapping off another hunk of metal, then handed it to me. “It’s honeycombed.”

The metal covered my hand but didn’t weigh any more than a piece of balsa wood. Bits crumbled from the edge when I ran my gloved fingers over it.

“Isn’t that marvelous?” she said.

First Chair said, “It’s not all gone, is it? Not the other tank too?” He moved beside the next tank, rapped his knuckles on it, producing a resonant note. He was fifty, practically a child, and this was only his second expedition in command. “Damn.” He looked into the dry, bathtub-shaped pit in the rock beside the tank where the water undoubtedly drained when the bottom broke out.

Lashawnda checked the pipes connecting the tanks to the ship. “There’s more here, after only ten days. How remarkable.”

First Chair rapped the tank again thoughtfully. “What are our options?”

The environmental engineer said, “We recycle, a
lot
. No more baths.”

“Yuck,” said someone.

He continued, “We can build dew traps, but there isn’t much water in the atmosphere. We’re not going to get a lot that way.”

“Can we make it?” said First Chair.

The engineer shrugged. “If nothing breaks down.”

“Check the ship. If this stuff eats at the engines, we won’t be going anywhere.”

They shuffled away, stirring dust with their feet. I stayed with Lashawnda. “A daily bleach wash would probably keep things clean,” she said. She crouched next to the pipes, her knees grinding into the dirt. I flinched, thinking about microscopic spores caught in her suit’s fabric. The spores had killed Marvin and Beatitude. On the third day they’d come in from setting a weather station atop a near hill, and they rushed the decontamination. Why would they worry? After all, the air tested breathable. We all knew that the chances of a bacteria from an alien planet being dangerous to our Earth-grown systems were remote, but we didn’t plan on water-hungry spores that didn’t care at all what kind of proteins we were made of. The spores only liked the water, and once they’d settled into the warm, moist ports of the two scientist’s lungs, they sprouted like crazy, sending tendrils through their systems, breaking down human cells to build their own structures. In an hour the two developed a cough. Six hours later, they were dead. Working remote arms through the quarantine area, I helped zip Beatitude into a body bag after the autopsy. Delicate looking orange leaves covered her cheeks, and her neck was bumpy with sprouts ready to break through.

At least they didn’t suffer. The spore’s toxins operated as a powerful opiate. Marvin spent the last hour babbling and laughing, weaker and weaker, until the last thing he said was, “It’s God at the end.”

A quick analysis of the spores revealed an enzyme they needed to sprout, and we were inoculated with an enzyme blocker, but everyone was more rigorous decontaminating now.

Lashawnda said, “Come on, Spencer. I want to show you something.”

We walked downhill toward the closest gully and its forest. She limped, the result of a deteriorating hip replacement. Like most people her vintage, she’d gone through numerous reconstructive procedures, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She’d stabilized her looks as a forty-year-old, almost a tenth her real age. Pixie-like features with character lines radiating from the mouth. Just below the ears blonde hair with hints of gray. Light blue eyes. Slender in the waist. Dancer’s legs. Economical in her movements whether she was sorting plant samples or washing her face. Four hundred years! I studied her when she wasn’t looking.

I picked thirty for myself. Physically it was a good place to be. I didn’t tire easily. My stockiness contrasted well to her slight build.

Lashawnda suffered from cascading cancers, each treatable eruption triggering the next until the body gives up. She’d told me she had a couple laps around the sun left at best. “Papaver will be my last stop,” she’d said during the long trip here. Of course, every expedition member says that in the claustrophobic confines of the ship. Once we’ve slept with everyone else (and all the possible combinations of three or four at the same time), and the novelty of inter-ship politicing has worn thin, we all say we’re done with planet hopping forever.

I suppose it was inevitable Lashawnda and I ended up together on the ship. I was the second oldest by a century, and she had one hundred and fifty years on me, plus she laughed often and liked to talk. We’d go to bed and converse for a couple hours before sleeping. I’d grown tired of energetic couplings with partners I had nothing to say to afterwards. My own two hundred fifty years hung like a heavy coat. What did I have to say to someone who’d only been kicking around for only sixty or ninety years?

I cared for her more than anyone in my memory, and she was dying.

When we reached the gully she said, “What’s amazing is that there are so many plants. Papaver should be like Mars. Same age. Lighter gravity and solar wind should have stripped its atmosphere. Unlike Mars, however, Papaver held onto its water, and the plants take care of the air.”

Except for the warped orange and brown and yellow “trees” in front of us, which looked more like twisted pipes than plants, we could have been in an arctic desert.

“Darn little water,” I said, thinking about our empty tanks.

“Darn little
free
water, but quite a bit locked into the biomass. Did you see the survey results I sent you yesterday?”

We pushed through the first branches. Despite their brittle looks, the stems were as supple as rubber rods. They waved back into place after we passed. Broad, waxy leaves that covered the sun side of each branch bent to face us as we came close. I found their mobility unnerving. They were like blank eyes following our movements. In the shadow of the trees I found more green than orange and yellow.

“Yeah, I looked at it.” Except in a narrow band around the equator, Papaver appeared lifeless. But in the planet’s most temperate region, in every sheltering hole and crevice, small plants grew. And peculiar forests, like the one we were in now, filled the gullies. The remote survey, taking samples at even the coldest and deadest-looking areas, found life there too. Despite the punishing changes in temperature and the lack of rain, porous rock served as a fertile home for endolithic fungi and algae. Beneath them lived cyanobacterias.

“If the results are uniform over the rest of the surface, there’s enough water for a small ocean or two.” She wiggled between two large trunks, streaking her suit with greenish-orange residue. “Do you know why the leaves stick to our suits?”

“Transference of seeds?” I hadn’t had time to study the trees’ life cycle. Classifying the types had filled up most of my time, and I did that from within the ship. Lashawnda sent samples so fast, I’d had little chance to investigate much myself.

“Nope. Airborne spores and their root systems do that. What they’re really trying to do is to eat you.”

Obviously she knew where she was going. We’d worked our way far enough into the plants that I wasn’t sure what direction the ship lay. “Excuse me?” I said.

“You were wondering what preyed on the gopher-rats. They’re herbivores. You said they couldn’t be the top of the food chain, and they aren’t. They eat lichens, fungus and leaves, and the trees eat them.” She stopped at a clump of stems, like warped bamboo, and gently pushed the branches apart. “See,” she said.

Half a meter off the ground, a yellow and orange cocoon hung between the branches, like a football-sized hammock. I’d seen the lumps before. “So?”

She dropped to her knees and poked it with her finger. Something inside the shape quivered and wiggled, pushing aside several leaves. A gopher-rat stared out at me for a second, a net of tendrils over its eye.

I stepped back. For a second I thought of Beatitude, her face marked with the tiny, waxy leaves. “How long . . . when did it get caught?”

She laughed. “Yesterday. I startled him, and he jumped into the trees here. When he didn’t come out, I went looking.”

I knelt beside her. Up close I saw how the plant had grown
into
the gopher-rat. In the few uncovered spots, tufts of fur poked out. The biologist in me was fascinated, but for the rest, I found the image repugnant. “How come he didn’t escape? The leaves are a little sticky, but not
that
sticky.”

“Drugs. Tiny spines on the leaves inject some type of opiate. I ran the analysis this morning. Same stuff that kept Marvin and Beatitude from feeling pain.”

“A new data point to add to the ecology.” I rested my hands on my knees. The poor gopher-rat didn’t even get to live out its short life span. For a second I thought about burning down the entire forest for Marvin and Beatitude and the gopher-rat, who were dead and never coming back, except the gopher-rat wasn’t dead yet. I wondered if it knew what was happening.

“Don’t you see what’s interesting?” She pushed the plants back even farther. “This is important.”

“What am I missing?”

She smiled. Even through her faceplate I could tell that she found this exciting. “The gopher-rat should be dead. If the plants grabbed him just for his water, he’d be nothing but bones now, but he’s still living. Obviously something else is going on. There’s lumps like this one all through the forest. I dissected one. Without a thorough analysis, I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like the plant absorbs everything except the gopher-rat’s nervous system. It’s symbiotic.”

The leaves seemed to tighten a little around the gopher-rat. We stood in the middle of the forest. I couldn’t see anything but the trees’ tall stems and the sticky leaves that covered most of the ground. The sun had dropped lower in the sky so I couldn’t find it through the trees, although their tops glowed orange and yellow in the slanting light. Even through the suit, I could feel that it was growing cold. “It doesn’t look like an equal relationship to me.”

“Maybe not, but it’s an interesting direction for the ecology to take, don’t you think?”