Expendable - James Alan Gardner [63]
I found myself visualizing the microorganisms that coursed through my bloodstream. Specializing in exobiology had its benefits; I could imagine some great microorganisms.
My favorite ones looked like eggs.
Metabolisms
Oar lifted herself on one elbow and asked, “Are you awake, Festina?”
“Hard to tell. Do awake people lie around, picturing needle-shaped microbes perforating their capillaries?”
“Perhaps you should ask my ancestors,” she said. “You may have to tell them what a capillaries is, for they are not so wise as me.”
“I think I’m sick,” I said.
Oar put her hand on my forehead. “This is what my mother did when I was sick.” She waited a moment, watching me solemnly. Then she removed her hand and asked, “Do you feel better now, Festina? Or shall I touch you again?”
I smiled. “I’ll just lie here for a while.”
“Are you sure? Would you like some food or water? Do you want to go to the bathroom?”
Hmph. If her goal was to get me out of bed, her words had more effect than a hand on the forehead. Suddenly, I was aware of intense hunger, thirst, and the urge to urinate. For a few seconds, I tried to return to my former comfortably dazed dislocation; but no matter how sick or emotionally overloaded I might be, I hadn’t lost any basic bodily needs.
“Help me up,” I muttered. “Please.”
She rolled off the bed and held out a hand. As soon as I took it, she pulled me strongly to my feet, the water bed galumphing beneath me. Some part of me wanted to feel dizzy when I reached the vertical; but the clawing in my bladder focused my attention too effectively to allow light-headedness. “Show me the toilet,” I growled.
There was a small one in the building’s back room—a clear glass bowl with a conventionally-shaped seat. Oar entered the room with me and showed no sign of leaving…not that I’d have any privacy anyway, with walls of glass. I sat; I went; Oar wrinkled her nose. “It is yellow, Festina,” she said.
“I suppose yours is clear?” Then I answered my own question. “Of course it must be—otherwise, I’d see your bladder floating inside your body. You have one hell of an eerie metabolism if even your wastes are see-through.”
“I have a consistent metabolism,” she sniffed. “And if you are finished….”
As I got up, I wondered if she had talked this same way with Jelca, three years ago in this very room. I didn’t really want to know.
Three Days
When we were both finished in the bathroom, Oar volunteered to get food from the synthesizer. I warned I might be too sick to eat, but I knew it was a lie—I wasn’t sick, I was merely wrecked. Shipwrecked, soul-wrecked, brain-wrecked.
And I stayed that way for three days.
Why did it hit me then—in those minutes when Oar was getting food? Why not earlier or later? I suppose it was being alone for the first time since landing on Melaquin: truly alone with nothing to do. No one to help, no bodies to bury…no orders, no mission, no agenda. It was the first time in years nothing was dragging me into the future—I had no duties to keep my mind off what I’d done. I could almost feel things letting go inside me: not the pleasant easing of burdens, but a dismaying loss of cohesion, bits of myself slipping out of place.
Alone, alone, alone. Alone in a colorless village, all the inhabitants as good as dead except for one childlike woman who could never understand my ugliness, my pettiness, my pain….
Three days passed. I won’t describe them. I could say I don’t remember them, but that’s dodging the truth. Even if I can’t list what I did, I remember every hour deep in my bones: grieving, raging, raving. I can return to that darkness anytime I want; stand over the pit and look down, shivering with the same furies and regrets. Now and then I deliberately turn back to those days—lift the lid to reassure myself I have not forgotten. At other times the memory rises unbidden; I find myself blurting out, “I’m sorry!” in the silence of an empty room.
The taste is still bitter.
Oar took care of me in her way: alternating between earnest attempts to