Chapter Seven

Time Yet for a Hundred Indecisions

Sunday, 12 November 2034

The only warm color in the room was the red-brown ribbon of blood that flowed through translucent plastic tubing from Stormie’s right arm to the scanner and back again.

The rest of the antiseptic room blazed cold under the fluorescent lights: the row of cabinets labeled with machine-like precision, the stainless steel table with its orderly array of implements, the ubiquitous anatomy poster. The IV drip into her left arm was clear as ice water. Even the scanning and filtration unit itself, squat and boxy in its cream-colored housing with sky blue faceplate, seemed unwarmed though her blood flowed through it.

Over-conditioned air bit through the hospital gown, and Stormie wished she had taken the thin blanket the nurse offered. At least the gown was a tri-fold—a wrap-around with three arm holes—even if it had to be the standard putrid green.

Nothing to be afraid of, she told herself. Nothing but a million microscopic hunter-killers coursing through your blood.

Stormie squirmed a little on the padded table, and the paper covering crackled loud as thunder. The tubing pulled against the tape that secured it to her arm. In places where the light hit the tubing just right, her blood looked as dark as her skin.

Dr. Nguyen’s smiling face appeared in the wire-crossed glass set in the door. He waved, then came in carrying the brushed aluminum clipboard with all the release forms she’d signed. She hadn’t read them, of course; she supposed no one did. Written in the most obscure dialect of legalese, their clauses and codicils were inaccessible to those uninitiated in the lawyerly arts, even people who were otherwise smart; if system administrators could erect electronic barriers as formidable as lawyers’ linguistic barriers, no computer firewall would ever be breached. The papers all boiled down to I-understand-the-risks-associated-with-this-procedure-and-accept-the-improbable-but-very-real-possibility-that-it-may-result-in-my-death-or-permanent-disability. She had signed them with barely a first thought.

Dr. Nguyen’s black, greasy hair stuck out above one ear, as if he’d just gotten up from a nap at his desk. “How are you doing?” he asked. He reached out his slender hand and Stormie shook it for the third time this morning. “Everything still okay? No irritation?” He bent toward her arm and examined the needle site.

“Seems okay,” Stormie said. “I’m cold, though.”

The door opened again and the same stout, blonde nurse who had witnessed the paperwork—Nurse Myracek—carried in a plastic transit case about the size of a six-pack cooler. The dark, almost hunter-green case contrasted with the room’s stark brightness. She set the case next to the equipment on the steel table as Dr. Nguyen asked her to bring Stormie a blanket. She gave Stormie an “I told you so” look, but smiled and nodded to make it a friendly comeuppance.

“You’ll want to lie back now,” Dr. Nguyen said.

Stormie complied, and the clean paper sheet scrunched against her back. Her empty stomach complained about the preparatory fast. In a moment, Nurse Myracek had her expertly swaddled under a soft, robin’s-egg-blue blanket and put a small pillow under her head.

Stormie remembered something in a poem about the night, lying on the table … something about anesthesia … she tried and failed to recall the line. It might be appropriate, somehow.

Dr. Nguyen snapped opened the clasps on the transit case. They clattered down one by one, then he took off the lid and lifted out a syringe about the size of a cigar. He started making notes on his clipboard.

“Just think,” Nurse Myracek said. “That came from outer space.”

Stormie smiled a little. The nurse made it sound as if the picophages in the syringe were alien creatures brought back to Earth by some survey team. They didn’t come from outer space per se, they were grown and processed in the high-vacuum, medium-orbit foundry that the Low-Gee Corporation developed from the space station nanocrystalline laboratory. “Pico-” was marketing hype: they were smaller than almost any other nanomachines, but not three orders of magnitude smaller. So far they were one of only two commercial products that seemed to require low-gravity manufacture, but on that shallow foundation Low-Gee had built a small technical empire. A greater hurdle than making the things in the first place had been figuring out how to prepare them for descent into the Earth’s gravity well; the shock-and-vibration-damping packaging was expensive, but still cheaper than sending people into orbit for treatment.

Stormie nodded. They came from outer space. And you’re going to put them in me.

“That’s what you and your husband are going to do, isn’t it?” the nurse asked. “You’re part of the Consortium, right? Like Dr. Nguyen? His wife’s on the Moon right now, you know.”

Stormie did know: Jovelyn Nguyen was on the setup crew that had landed just over two weeks before. “No, I’m not a ‘Consort,’” Stormie said. Dr. Nguyen didn’t react to her little jibe. “We’re independent contractors. We’ll be working on the air and water systems in the colony.”

If we ever get there.

She and Frank and Jim had formed Lunar Life Engineering, LLP, shortly after Jim’s water-skiing accident. Bidding and winning their three-year contract renewable to seven had taken long enough, and she intended to renegotiate and extend the contract indefinitely. But their waiting and preparation weren’t over, and she needed this procedure to work if they were to make the original timeline and hang out their shingle sometime next summer. If it didn’t work … she didn’t want to think about that.

“That’s amazing,” the nurse said. “I can’t imagine living on the Moon and looking down at the Earth. Or would it be looking up at the Earth? That’s so strange. How long does it take to get ready for something like that?”

“When I feel like I’m ready, I’ll let you know,” Stormie said. “Sometimes I think I’ll never be ready, sometimes it’s like I’ve been ready all my life. As long as I can remember, anyway.”

She sometimes questioned her fascination with space; it wasn’t as if she had any astronauts in her family, or had grown up with rockets launching nearby. But while her fellow environmental engineers had pictures of landscapes and glaciers on their cubicle walls, she had a copy of the Apollo-8 shot of Earth above the limb of the Moon. She and Frank would have to wait a little longer, and had to pass a few more tests yet, but if this worked they would finally get there—and they were going to stay.

Dr. Nguyen tugged a little on the tubing as he screwed the syringe onto the port.

“I thought it would have some color,” Stormie said. “Something exotic, like electric lemonade.”

Dr. Nguyen tilted his head to look at the syringe. “I don’t know what ‘electric lemonade’ looks like,” he said. “This has some color, but the fluorescent lights wash it out, I think. If we looked at it in the sunlight, it would be white, but very pale. More like very thin skim milk.” He tilted the syringe and the light played off of it. He looked closely at her face and added, “You can still back out of this, you know.”

“No,” Stormie said. Give up on her life’s ambition and go back to taking water samples from stagnant ponds or digging up square-foot patches of soil to separate for analysis? Go back to writing environmental impact statements and teaching truckers the rules for hazardous material hauling? Go back to looking at the full Moon and dreaming—and knowing she gave up her only chance because she was afraid? “Really, I can’t.”

Dr. Nguyen pulled back on the plunger and a bit of Stormie’s blood colored the syringe. “Are you ready?” he asked.

Are you ever ready for something you know is going to hurt?

“Yes,” she said.

“Once more, for the record, while you are lucid. Are you absolutely sure you want to proceed?” He emphasized each syllable of “absolutely sure.”

Stormie was as far from absolutely sure as she was from Mercator Crater, but she understood why Dr. Nguyen asked the question now. Once they began, the nurses would administer ketamine in her IV to help manage the pain; it was the only anesthetic that had proven effective with this treatment, but they couldn’t do a final, verbal verification with her under its influence. In a way she was more afraid of the ketamine than the picophages, because it was known to produce hallucinations. She feared that loss of control more than she feared the pain. Despite the doubt plaguing her, she said, “Yes.”

Dr. Nguyen repeated his earlier descriptions as if he was trying to postpone the procedure. “As the fluid medium comes into your arm, you can expect it to sting a little. As it spreads out, you’ll feel a little flushed. You’ve never had a CT scan or an IVP with a dye contrast, correct?”

“No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“This would be similar, although reportedly it’s a bit more intense.”

He pushed the plunger down, slowly.

A knife stabbed into Stormie’s arm where the needle met her vein. Then it was a machete. Then a chain saw.

Stormie grunted. A bit more intense?

Warmth spread to her fingertips, up to her shoulder, and through her body, riding just ahead of a wave of pain. When the warmth and pain hit her chest, she believed her lungs would explode and her heart collapse. She struggled to breathe.

The sensation intensified until her body was being blasted by a heat gun. Then the heat gun became a blowtorch. The blowtorch became a blast furnace.

Oh, God, let them start those drugs already.

She descended into Hell.

She choked on a laugh at the irony, remembering her grandmother’s warnings of fiery doom if Stormie didn’t give up her pride and cast her cares on the Lord. “Who you gonna throw in the lake of fire?” Mother MacGinnis would sing. She would say this torment, this blazing pseudo-immolation, was the price of Stormie’s sin, her prideful arrogance—

Stormie gasped. She tried to scream but her breath was gone.

Nurse Myracek reached up to the IV bag as Stormie passed out.

* * *

She drifted in and out of consciousness. Thoughts struggled to break through barriers of agony, and when they finally emerged they seemed as broken and nebulous as dreams. She dreamed of pain, of a million needles piercing her body from the inside out, of acid-venomed wasps laying eggs beneath her skin, and occasionally Stormie reminded herself that the pain was only in her head: it couldn’t be real, with the ketamine. Still she dreamed, of humid Carolina summers, the dry Mojave Desert, the stifling wet sulfurous surface of Venus.

She vaguely registered when they moved her from the examination room to a bed in the clinic. It seemed as if her skin sloughed off to the touch.

Gradually she was awake more often. The heat and the hurt fell on her like repeated avalanches of coals, but either the ketamine began working or her tolerance and endurance grew. She wondered how much time had passed, but that wasn’t foremost in her mind.

“How’s Frank doing?” she asked. She barely registered her own voice. “Is he okay?”

“I’ll check on him,” Nurse Myracek said. Through barely slitted eyes Stormie tried to follow the nurse’s voice in the darkened room.

They’d insisted on treating them in separate rooms. They told them the procedure was uncomfortable—and the ocean was just a little wet, as far as Stormie was concerned. The first patients’ experiences had ranged from embarrassing bodily releases to multi-sensory hallucinations to ravings that rivaled the worst Tourette’s outbursts. Now, in the midst of the treatment, Stormie wasn’t sure if shared suffering would’ve been better or worse.

* * *

Nurse Myracek returned after an indeterminate time. “Your husband is a character,” she said. Stormie was surprised the words didn’t hurt her ears, except that she barely registered them over the sound of her own rushing blood. “I love to hear him talk.”

The nurse tried copying Frank’s accent. “‘Now I know how the English missionary felt when my ancestors cooked him,’ he says. Oh, he is a gem.” She laughed at her failure even to approximate the accent.

Stormie wanted to laugh. She tried, but managed only a weak croak.

“What is it, honey?”

After a moment she managed to say, “His father was a missionary in Kenya.”

Nurse Myracek chuckled as she wiped sweat from Stormie’s forehead. The cloth cut like coarse grit sandpaper. With a start Stormie realized that Frank shouldn’t be joking about pain. Was he dreaming the pain, the way she was, or had he refused the ketamine? Stormie closed her eyes; a single tear escaped and dribbled back toward her ear. It burned.

“Why does it still hurt?” she whispered.

“Oh, dear, I don’t think you’re feeling anything. I think we could tie your toes in knots and you’d try to dance pirouettes,” Nurse Myracek said.

“Why does it hurt at all?”

“Oh. You know about the tunneling nanotubes that your cells are always building: they pass genetic data around between cells, and viruses use them, too. The fluid suspension, from what I understand, stops your cells from making them. Or I may have it backward—maybe it forces them to make more. Apparently your nerve cells react by going into overdrive, but you should’ve only felt that for a short while.

“I’ve heard some of the doctors say it’s really some electromagnetic flux stimulating nerve cells that don’t normally register pain. I don’t think they actually know. You’re only the fifth person I’ve seen treated, and everybody seems to react differently. Most of them stay passed out, but you’ve been awake a good bit.

“If it’s any consolation, your husband doesn’t seem to be affected as strongly as you.”

“Thank you,” Stormie said.

Stormie shifted position a little, and the bedclothes tore at her skin. The hospital gown felt like a hair shirt, which she supposed would be appropriate from Mother MacGinnis’s point of view.

Stormie’s grandmother had been alternately kind and stern, a loving old woman whose hugs were solid as oak and soft as cotton but who was never shy about warning Stormie away from certain friends or pointing her toward her blessed Jesus. As each wave of … phantom? imagined? hallucinated? … pain and flame passed over and through her, Stormie struggled against the ghost of her grandmother who, no matter what Stormie did or said, no matter the admonishments she herself laid on Stormie, always—always—loved her.

Mother Mac, you may be right but I don’t think so. This isn’t the price of my pride. It’s the cost of my dreams.

* * *

The next time Stormie was lucid, the room was brighter. It held the common accoutrements: oxygen port, vacuum port, blank television bolted to the wall. The track from an old bed-curtain was attached to the dropped ceiling, but no curtain hung from it. Several ceiling tiles were stained where a water pipe or the roof must’ve leaked. The only unusual item was the scanner unit, still tethered to her arm by the winding plastic tube of blood.

A new nurse, one she hadn’t met, was checking the scanner unit.

“Blue,” Stormie said.

“Pardon me?” the nurse asked.

“Blue. Sky blue, electric blue.”

“I don’t understand,” the woman said.

“Electric lemonade,” Stormie said, “is sort of a neon blue color. Dr. Nguyen didn’t know that. You should tell him.”

“I’ll be sure to do that.” Her tone was dismissive, maybe a little annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of whatever it was she was adjusting on the scanner.

Stormie lay very still. She concentrated on breathing: slow breaths, not too shallow but not deep enough to expand her chest too much. To pass the time and keep her mind active, she tried doing calculations in her head.

Her brain seemed sluggish. It took a long time to recall some factoids from a trivia game: about five liters of blood in her body, heart pumps about seventy milliliters or so with every beat. She tried to count her heartbeats, but the numbers jumbled together; she gave up and used seventy beats per minute for convenience. So if I’ve done it right, all the blood in my body goes through my heart in about a minute. Maybe less, with how fast my heart’s beating. So each blood cell goes through my body … some 1440 times a day.

And now her blood was carrying tailored, machined picophages that were coursing through her body just as often, and presumably burrowing their way throughout her tissues to latch onto disease organisms. She wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been, but that wasn’t as important as how much more time it would take.

The nurse was headed toward the door. Stormie asked, “How much longer?”

“We’ll probably start the filtration sequence in a few hours,” the nurse said. The door closed automatically behind her.

* * *

Stormie’s consciousness peaked and ebbed. She dreamed of walking on hot coals, skiing down lava slopes into the caldera of a volcano, sunbathing on Mercury, but gradually her dreams ransacked her mind less and less. Her head, a supernova, calmed into a hot white star, dimmed further to a red dwarf.

Nurse Myracek was back.

“How are you, hon?” she asked. Stormie tried to smile, but her face hurt.

“My mouth is so dry,” she said, forming the words with a tongue like a cooling ingot of lead.

“I’ll get you something,” Nurse Myracek said. She was gone only a few minutes, and when she came back she spooned burning cold crystals into Stormie’s mouth. Stormie held the nuggets on her tongue and let the liquid, slowly cooling—warming?—to a tolerable level, soothe her throat. “There you go, hon,” the nurse said. “Ice chips worked wonders for me when I was going into labor. They wouldn’t let me have anything else, not until after the baby was out.”

Stormie changed the subject. She had wanted children—still wanted children—but she and Frank had decided they would not be the test case for extraterrestrial pregnancy.

“Is Frank still doing okay?”

Nurse Myracek spooned some more ice into Stormie’s mouth. “He’s doing fine. He’s not quite as far along as you are, since he’s bigger. We started filtering everything about twelve hours ago for you, and Dr. Nguyen just started filtering Mr. Pastorelli a little while ago.”

“How long has it been?”

The nurse appeared to study the cup of ice, as if it held the answer. She scooped out another spoonful and wiped the bowl of the white plastic spoon against the rim of the little white cup. She brought the spoon to Stormie’s lips.

“Four days,” she said. “We cut off the ketamine drip a few hours ago, and we’ll let you go see your husband after we take out your catheter.”

Stormie slept again, but only for a few hours. Her dreams calmed as the fires in her mind abated. The picophages were almost gone from her blood, though it would be another day before the treatment was complete—and another week to verify its success.

She reckoned herself a lava rock in the bottom of a gas grill, but she sat up and turned on CNN to see what she had missed. Not much; the world’s troubles were the same as they ever were, only made to sound much worse—or at least more dramatic. She called Jim to tell him that if this didn’t work she was going to host an old-style pig roast out at Gaviota State Park and he would be the main course.

Shortly after she put down the phone, Nurse Myracek brought her a thin sheaf of papers.

“What’s this?”

“You were mumbling something the first night you were in here, and I knew I recognized it but couldn’t remember from where. So I did a search and printed it out for you.”

Stormie read the first lines:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

“Evening, not night,” Stormie said. “I recited this? I’d been trying to remember it.”

“You said part of it. Once I found it on the Net, I remembered seeing it in school. I read the whole thing again, but I don’t understand it.”

“I’m not saying I do,” Stormie said. “I just thought the opening lines were appropriate to me lying on the table.”

Nurse Myracek chuckled. “If you say so, hon. I did like this part later on, though. I marked it.”

Stormie read,

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

The nurse said, “I think that means that no matter how much time we have, there’s always time to do more than we think.”

“I like that idea,” Stormie said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Now, what say we take you in to see your husband?”