The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (61 page)

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 Doctor 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.” Doctor 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 Doctor 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. Doctor 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,” Doctor 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
Doctor 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. Doctor Thompson claimed voice rec caused problems
with the infirmary’s patient monitors. Finally, after what seemed like for ever, 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. The thick liquid’s buoyancy 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?

Ivorene’s calls to the infirmary had all been answered by loops. Everyone was to remain calm. No contagious agents had been isolated. Infirmary beds were reserved for those
in serious condition, and most complaints could be dealt with on an outpatient basis, no appointments necessary, first come, first served. The main thing, really, was to remain calm …

Which was what Ivorene would do if it killed her. She would not leap from the tank and rush to the infirmary, streaming salt water along the City’s corridors. She would not embarrass her daughter with overprotectiveness,
with the same overreactions her own parents had fallen ridiculous prey to. At fifteen, Kressi was as independent and self-sufficient as Ivorene had been able to make her.

And what if she was sick? She was at the infirmary, right? What better place? Doctor Thompson and his crew would do what they could for her. Ivorene would stay here and find out what else was possible.

Uselessly, she strove
to still her thoughts. Then she stopped striving, and let a million details wash over her mind, the way the waters of the tank covered her body. This had happened before, in the early stages of her research, the sessions where she’d made first contact with Aunt Lona, and Uncle Hervey, the mechanic. She’d prepared for it. She’d stacked the deck, cramming for the last five hours, filling herself up
with facts and speculations, clues for her wayward will to follow in the search for Good Boy, Exu, Papa Legba, Ellegua … his names strung themselves out before her in a mocking procession. Grasp one, gain none. The names grew brilliant feathers and flew off with raucous cries, but they went only a short distance. How to catch them? Salt their tails? But no, Good Boy preferred sweet things.

Candy.
Visions of sugar plums danced in her head. Sticky and glistening, striped with pink and green. Ivorene concentrated on a hypnotic looking swirl of red and white, a gigantic lollypop with loads of projectability.

Sure enough, she was able to slow its swirling. The spinning disk resolved itself into a three-legged eye, then sped back up and streaked away.

Ivorene followed it. The disk’s thin edge
flickered as images imposed themselves over it at a rate too fast for her to perceive. She strove impatiently to focus beyond their interference. Suddenly, her perspective shifted and she was beside the disk – no, above it. The spinning spread, then slowed and stopped.

The disk’s three legs were now composed of art-nouveau curves of thin red plastic. Its eye was gone, and its center pierced by
a tall, silver pole. Legs and pole sat at the center of a papery circle of black and red, surrounded by a large, intricately grooved platter of thicker plastic, shiny black alternating with a duller, deep, dark grey.

She’d seen this sort of thing before. In an antique shop on Earth, during one of her expeditions to uncover portable cultural treasures. She’d decided against this particular one,
then changed her mind in its favor, only to find it gone on her return to the shop.

It was a record. On a record player. She raised her gaze to the stone face before her. Shell eyes squeezed half shut, a shell mouth pursed in an amused smile.

“Laroye, ago Elegba!” Stay cool, trickster, the Yoruban greeting ran in translation. Coolness having a very high value in equatorial Africa. Ivorene launched
into her prepared petition for Good Boy’s assistance in healing her godson Edde of his strange affliction. She stopped abruptly as the image before her faded and threatened to break apart. Hard to hold abstractions in her current state. She tightened down on her desire. Squeezed. The enormous face before her brightened, though it remained amorphous. Encouraged, she produced for him the lump
of her longing. It shone like a milky diamond, lustrous yet clear, then flew off toward him of its own accord. On impact, her prayer spread in ripples that seemed to sharpen and set the stone face, rather than disturb it.

Shell eyes twinkled. The great head moved. A nod yes? Or instruction, a wish to be imitated? Ivorene looked down again, reading the label on the record. Atlantic. Chic. “Good
Times.”

So what did that mean? So Good Boy would help her if she played a record she knew she didn’t have?

The spinning began again. Ivorene seemed now to stand on the record’s surface, swinging around the silver pole as a scratchy song rose from below. Beyond the pole, white walls with gigantic murals pursued a stately rotation. Mushroom-haired women with impossibly long legs raised shapely
brown hands against invisible enemies. Bald, athletic, young men in flowing furs saluted crowds of admiring children with casual waves of large, lethal-looking side-arms.

Actually, there were a lot of weapons.

“Boys will be boys,” a nasal voice advised her. “Better let them have their toys.”

Well, there weren’t any firearms on Renaissance. Explosives seemed like a pretty bad idea in a contained
and pressurized atmosphere. Maybe the miners … No. “No, sorry.” She shook her head firmly. “No guns.”

The world screeched backwards in its tracks, jerked violently forward with a wheezing shriek. Ivorene fell on her figurative ass as the process repeated itself. She clung to the record’s ridges, shooting back and forth around its axis without warning. An eery choir wailed in time to the wild
stops and starts.

The disturbance ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the world’s smooth spin resumed. A new number played, a steady march. “On guard! Defend yourself!” its singers admonished her.

No doubt.

A flash of brilliance at the pole’s tip drew her attention. It grew into a humming globe, an irregularly rayed ball of slowly coruscating light. Flickering arms of color drew her closer
– her prayer? So much bigger, now. So strong – it had to be more, more than she’d asked for. It had to be—

She resisted. But the pole loomed larger and larger. If she touched it – if she grasped it firmly, with both hands, she could call down that ball of lightning on her head. She could know Good Boy in her heart, as her personal savior. She could cure the colony of its mysterious non-epidemic
and get the respect she
deserved, the respect she’d already more than earned. She could fill herself with the power, the glory—

She could get herself possessed while she was alone, without anyone to help or protect her, or see to it that she ever came back to normal.

On guard. Defend yourself.