Filter House (16 page)

Captain Yancey had a build like a gas tank. While not precisely cylindrical, she was tall, round-shouldered, and solid. Her floor-length robes, usually of dull silver, enhanced the illusion. She accepted Kressi’s respectful greeting as her due, with a nod. Edde pulled off his pillow case, opened his eyes, groaned, and closed them again.

“Young man!”

“Edde’s feeling real bad,” Kressi explained. “I’m taking him over to the infirmary.”

Captain Yancey’s jaw relaxed a bit. “Dr. Thompson just told me how his beds were starting to fill up.”

Kressi didn’t wonder why the infirmary’s Head should bother to inform Captain Yancey how things stood there. The infirmary wasn’t her responsibility, or any other Captain’s. But everyone told Captain Yancey everything.

“What are people getting sick from?” The planet Renaissance itself was supposed to be sterile, and the colonists had been well-screened and quarantined, then inoculated with benign “placeholder” microbes designed to discourage harmful ones that could cause diseases. Only 140 beds in the infirmary, and they’d never needed more than a fifth of them for the 3500-plus people. There was plenty of room for any who succumbed to illnesses caused by the placeholders’ genetic drift.

“I’m not sure
what’s
going on,” Captain Yancey complained. “Dr. Thompson said he didn’t have much time to talk. But as far as he could tell it wasn’t anything catching, more like an allergy. Though how thirty people came to be all of a sudden afflicted with the same allergy he didn’t bother to explain.”

“Maybe I’d be better off at my place,” Edde said in a worried voice.

“No, I’m bringing you back like we promised,” said Kressi. With a polite smile she steered to Captain Yancey’s right.

The Captain shifted so she still blocked Kressi’s way. “Young lady, your mother hasn’t been practicing any of her necromantic mumbo-jumbo on this poor boy, has she?”

Kressi’s hands gripped the cart’s handle tightly. Maybe she wasn’t so sure how legitimate her mother’s work was, but she didn’t have to listen to other people put it down. Not even Captain Yancey. “That’s not the way we prefer to think of it, Ma’am. Dr. Thompson referred Edde to us because he thought a psychological approach—”

“Call it what you want to, I say it’s a disgraceful set of superstitions we ought to have left behind us in Africa. I always thought that your mother was a bright enough researcher, but I fail to understand why she has to clutter up our brand new paradigm with that sort—”

The conversation ended abruptly as Edde succumbed to a fit of coughing (yet
another
symptom). Captain Yancey retreated back down her ramp, saying over her shoulder that she was sure it couldn’t be contagious, Dr. Thompson had sworn, but just to be on the safe side—

The ramp’s descending blind cut her off.

In Renaissance City’s core, the tunnel widened. Citizens sat in small, companionable groups on likelime benches outside ramp entrances.

Kressi greeted the people she knew by name, those from her Ship and several others. More knew her than vice versa. She’d been one of twenty kids on Ship Four. Twenty of 350 passengers. And the other nine Ships had carried even fewer children. Kressi and the rest were celebrities by simple virtue of their age. A seven-year gap, the length of the voyage, separated them from the generation born here on Renaissance.

Of course Kressi knew all her peers, from whichever Ship. Edde was more popular than she was, and as she wheeled him through the City’s center, they accumulated a small entourage.

Passela recognized him first. “Edde!” she crooned. “What’s
wrong
with him?” she asked Kressi accusingly.

“He’s sick.” Kressi didn’t like Passela much. She made too big a deal of her position as the oldest of the hundred-odd ship kids, and she had an irritating way of over-emphasizing every other word.

But Fanfan, Passela’s cousin, was cool. “Can I help you with that?” he asked. “You’re headed for the infirmary, right?” Kressi let him put one hand on the cart’s handle, though she could manage well enough on her own. They picked up speed. Passela and her sidekick Maryann stuck with them.

The infirmary lay on the far side of the core’s white tunnels. Here the likelime took on a bluish tinge, legacy of the coral species that had burgeoned in this area of the slowly evaporating sea. The wall outside the infirmary’s ramp housed the delicate remains of a huge, semi-shelled vertebrate. Kressi let Fanfan steer the cart down the ramp as she fondly stroked the fossil’s curving, polished case and lightly brushed her fingertips along the arching trail of its skeletal extension. How had it felt, dying in the drying mud? Had it called upon its ancestors to save it from the sky’s invading vacuum?

Kressi’s lingering communion with the fossil lasted long enough that by the time she got inside the infirmary, Passela had taken over Edde’s case. “He won’t be
any
trouble,
really,
he won’t;
I’ll
nurse him with my
own two hands,”
she told Ali, the staffer at the admitting console.

“Oh, good,” said Ali. “I was afraid you’d ask to borrow a spare pair.”

“What? Oh, you’re putting me
on,
we don’t grow limbs for
that
kind of stuff.”

“I can go home,” Edde offered. “I’m not so—” He interrupted his own protests with another painful-sounding coughing fit. That brought Dr. Thompson from behind the console’s screen.

“Who’s that? Edde Berkner? It’s about time you checked yourself back in here, young man. Seems you’ve started some sort of psychosomatic epidemic. Half the symptoms showing up here this shift are the same as yours. I want you under observation.”

“But, doctor, we don’t have the staff—” Ali protested.

“I’m bringing in some contingents. And Anna Sloan’s been malingering here long enough. Nothing much wrong with her.” Dr. Thompson reached out one-handed and tapped at the console with barely a glance at its screen. “There. I’m releasing her. Pack up a couple of cold/hot compresses. I’ll go break the news.”

He turned to Passela and smiled. “You come help me get Miz Sloan out of Cot Twenty so you can strip and change it.”

Passela gaped at Dr. Thompson as if she were a fish on an empty seabed and he were a hurtling black meteor headed her way. Kressi stepped between them. “Well, actually—”

“Kressi?” The doctor appeared to notice her for the first time. “Of course. You show her what to do,” he said, dismissing both of them from his mind.

“And who are all these others? Patients? No? More volunteers? Train them or get them out of here, Ali.” With an apologetic shrug, Kressi wheeled Edde around the side of the console in Dr. Thompson’s wake. Passela made no move to follow them.

The infirmary was mostly one big, high-ceilinged ward, with honeycombed screens between the beds for a bit of privacy. Dr. Thompson had gone ahead of her to the cubicle containing Cot Twenty. A high, sharp voice cut through the honeycombing. “My feet, you haven’t done nothin about my feet—”

Kressi hesitated at the doorway of the small space. There was barely room for her in there, let alone the cart with Edde. Miz Sloan was someone she’d never met before, but that didn’t matter. “I know you,” declared the woman on the bed. “You’re that crazy Ivorene McKenna’s daughter. You turnin me out for a mental case, doctor?”

“My mom’s not crazy,” said Kressi. She felt an angry flush creep up her pale cheeks, felt it deepen in her embarrassment at being able to flush so visibly. “Miz Sloan,” she added, a tardy sign of respect for her elder.

Miz Sloan’s feet stuck out from the near end of Cot Twenty. They seemed normal, neither swollen nor discolored, the soles a fairly even pink, but she winced as she swung them around off the side of the bed and lowered them into the see-through slippers sitting on the floor.

“Kressi’s here to help you home, Anna,” Dr. Thompson told Miz Sloan.

Miz Sloan lived close in; still, by the time Kressi had delivered her to the rooms she shared with two sisters, a niece and nephew, and the half-brother of her ex-husband, and listened to a rambling explanation of how Ivorene was crazy, but not pure-D crazy, and everyone knew she meant no harm with her attempts at talking to spirits, going home seemed pointless.

The lobby had held only one patient when she left. Now three more sat beside the closed door to Dr. Thompson’s office, and another four leaned on the counter, talking earnestly to Ali.

Before she clocked in to help them, though, she had to call her mom. She squeezed past the waiting patients and scooted a wheeled stool in front of the screen. Her fingers drummed impatiently on the touchpad as her cursor swam through the city’s directory. Dr. Thompson claimed voice rec caused problems with the infirmary’s patient monitors. Finally, after what seemed like forever, she reached her home room.

Ivorene was logged on. Kressi got her to activate the live feed. Her mother sat in bed, propped up on pillows, working on a tray of food. She ate methodically, absent-mindedly. Her dark eyes, so different from her daughter’s hazel, shifted between the camera and two screens. Kressi could see text on one, but the resolution wouldn’t quite let her read it.

“I’m starting my shift early, I guess,” Kressi wrote.

“You guess?” Ivorene disliked sloppy statements.

“If it’s all right with you. There are so many patients. Lots of them as bad as Edde….”

“Fine. Will you be home on time?”

Kressi glanced at the line of incomers, managing not to catch anyone’s eye. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

The screen behind Ivorene showed what looked like an elongated brown bowling ball rotating in three dimensions. With each pass, a new three- or four-armed cross appeared on its oblong surface. “Get home as quickly as you can, sweetheart. I have lots more work for us to do.”

Kressi signed off, a little disturbed. It sounded like Ivorene wanted to go under again. If only she’d stick to more useful topics…. But Kressi had to put her personal concerns aside.

When her break came, Kressi did a few stretches and went right on working. Three days on, she’d had now, and the patient load heavier than ever. She wondered how she’d adjust to full adult status and the doubling of her hours requirement. One more year. She could hardly wait. She headed for the nearest blinking call light.

“To hold and display the accepted view of reality in all its detail and at the same time to program another state of consciousness is difficult; there just isn’t enough human brain circuitry to do both jobs in detail perfectly. Therefore special conditions give the best use of the whole computer for exploring, displaying, and fully experiencing new states of consciousness….”

Ivorene lowered herself slowly into her tank. Its refrigerator clicked on immediately. She’d been running a little hot lately—maybe coming down with Edde’s mysterious ailment, like a major portion of the colony seemed bent on doing.

The tank was small, but held her without cramping. She hooded herself and checked the breathing apparatus. Like most of the colony’s equipment, it was solidly put together, though based on dated technologies, “breakthroughs” discarded years before their departure.

She’d expected her daughter home almost an hour ago. The fail-safes were fine, but she wished Kressi had come back from her shift on schedule and helped her with this part.

Off with the hood for a moment so she could set the timer on the tank’s lid. How many hours? Three. Good Boy had an affinity for that number.

About to re-hood, she remembered to check the water’s salinity. A little on the low side. Shivering, she climbed out and grabbed a scoop of crystals from the bucket she kept beside the tank.

Salt was not a problem. Renaissance’s seas had left behind plenty of pans and flats. Water was a little more expensive, dug up frozen from deep crevices, melted, and purified. Power was cheaper, about as easily available as salt. The cloudless skies of Renaissance did little to dim the light of its yellow-white star, Horus. The McKenna’s unconventional surface dwelling gave them a great opportunity to convert that constant flood of photons to electricity.

She strapped on her hood again and let the blood-warm waters of the isolation tank lap over her, and the buoyant fluid lifted her and let her lose all connection with her physical surroundings. But her consciousness clung stubbornly to mundane concerns. Why was Kressi so late? Had she come down with this mysterious ailment, this Edde-Berkner-illness?