Woman Who Loved the Moon (14 page)

“Hey!” He shrank against a door. “Did you see a kid?”

A man’s voice answered, through the sound of rushing water: “What would a kid be doing in here?”

“I chased one down the hall,” said the woman. “Take a look around, will you? I’ll check the refectory.”

“Sure.” Illis, crouching very still, heard her open the door. He looked cautiously for the source of the other voice. There he was—losing down the floor. He doesn’t look in a hurry to find me, Illis thought. Where am I? Around him, above him, hanging from pegs on the wall, were pots, pans, knives, cleavers, spoons, and forks as big as brooms, or almost. I’m in a kitchen, he realized. That’s why it smells of fish. He listened again. The man was looking for him, not very hard, grumbling disbelief, rolling up the hose. The man wanted to get home. I wonder where the freezers are, Illis thought, one ear towards the grumbles. And the stoves. His legs felt cramped. He stood up to ease them. He heard the door open, and close. Wait’ll I tell mother I got inside a kitchen!

He found the freezers. They had dials and signs all over them, and even if he’d wanted to look inside, the handle was too far away for him to swing on it. He pictured fish from the farms in there, all frozen and silvery, like pieces of ice with eyes. He found a huge bin of dried kelp. He found the giant broilers; four of them, protected by steel-mesh gates.

I could climb over
these.

He measured the gates with his eyes. The broilers sat silent, empty, mouths shut, danger; when light flashes red, broiler is on! There were no flashing red lights. The broilers were off. I could even open the door, he thought. Easily, quietly, he climbed the fence. The broilers looked even bigger from close up. The button marked “Open Door” was sitting only centimeters above his head.

It was a freak of time, incalculable and unforeseen, that his finger on the button opened the broiler door just as that broiler— preset—began a self-cleaning cycle.

A red light flashed.

As the door gaped wider, the broiler shut itself off, and the door stopped moving—but not in time.

Illis’s clothes flamed.

* * *

They packed him round with ice before moving him to Medica.

“You’re a mess,” Lazlo, Senior Medic, told him. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” Two amber eyes looked up at him. Christ! What am I going to do for him? Lazlo thought.

“Well, you have to stop climbing for a while,” he said. “You got to stay in here and grow new skin.”
Damned if I know where it’s going to come from.
The boy had flung his left arm across his eyes. The skin round his eyes, his eyelids, his mouth and nose, a strip on his left cheek, and another strip on his left arm, remained untouched. Methodically he checked the IV tubing and the catheter. “Are you warm enough?” Already, under his light sterile gown, he was sweating.

“Yes.” Something—laughter?—touched the boy’s eyes. “That’s funny,” he murmured. Lazlo grinned at him with his eyes, over the top of his mask.

“Is it?” he said. “Good. You know how to call people if you want anything? Good. There’ll be people in and out of here all the time, and anyone you want to see, you tell us. You get to float in here, we call it the G-room, for a bit. Tomorrow we’ll take you to surgery and remove all the old burned skin that’s still sticking to you. You’ll be all peeled. After that we’ll take skin from your arm and your cheek and start growing it all over you.”

“Grafts,” Illis said, knowledgeably. He must know that word from Janna, Lazlo thought, with all her years of working here.

“Exactly. What you have to do now is, you have to move, and you have to eat.”

“It’s real easy to move in here,” Illis said, looking at the gold-painted walls, the white net bed holding him, and the piles of machines humming in the corners of the small room.

“That’s why you’re in here, and not in a regular bed, in a room with regular gravity. We can increase the gravity in here, slowly, so that your muscles don’t get weak. And you have to eat. Lots. Whatever you like, you tell us. You can have anything, anytime. You
must
eat.”

“I understand,” whispered the boy, staring at his raw, scorched flesh, from which fluid was leaking.

“I’ll be in to see you every day.”

A set of sealed doors with a tiny supply room between them kept Illis in strict reverse isolation. It was called the Lock. Lazlo inventoried the supplies as he went through it: sterile cloths, gowns, masks, gloves, bottles of fluids. The blood was in its freezer. For the thousandth time he praised the foresight of the first City generation, who had guessed how badly the city would need medical supplies. The hum of the air purifier filled the tiny room. He couldn’t put it off. He opened the outer door and stepped into the corridor. Janna was waiting for him there.

Bright polished tools swung from loops on her hips. Every City adult worked part of the year on Maintenance. The glare of the sun through the window gave her the cut-away carved look of a mahogany figurehead. She saw his face—”It’s bad,” she said, before he could say it. And glared at him as if he were an enemy. “I want to stay with him.”

“No,” he said. “You can visit him—”

“You’re an arbitrary absolutist son-of-a-bitch!” she said furiously. “Why?”

“It will upset him,” he said reasonably. “And it will break you. If he asks to see more of you, we’ll get Maintenance to set up a direct com-screen link, your room to G-room.”

“I want to be with him,” she repeated.

“What does he like to eat? Get me a list. Your pain will only distract him from healing. He
has
to eat, or he won’t live long enough to grow new skin.”

“I want to take care of him—”

“The City will take care of Illis. You want to help him—make me a list.”

“Damn you!” she cried at him. “No, don’t touch me! I’ll make you a list.”

* * *

Janna was shaking by the time she reached her rooms. It was not
fair
to keep her from her son. Obsessively, she had pictured Illis dead a hundred times since his birth, from any one of a hundred birth defects—but never hurting, wasting and hurting! She paced and raged.
I taught Illis to climb.
She twisted in anger and guilt.

It was not
fair...

His father had died of radiation poisoning. Had that been fair?

She had done it before. She knew the routine. She could sit with him, coax him to eat, change his dressings, regulate his fluids.... Maintenance would let her go. The beeper on her belt screeched at her. She fumed at it. Hadn’t they heard, Illis was hurt? She was supposed to be in the soil lab, working on some defective wiring—but every adult in the City could use pliers! They could find someone to take her place.

You taught him to climb.

She had had six miscarriages before Illis. She was thirty-five, and likely not to have another child. If Illis died—the light on the com-screen was flashing. A neighbor, maybe, calling to console, to patter platitudes into her ears. I will have a seventh ghost face, she thought, to add to the six that anguish my dreams...

Don’t give up hope—we will survive, Vancouver will survive—
I don’t give a damn,
Janna thought. I don’t care about the City—but my son is hurting—why? For what?

* * *

Floating in the isolation of his room, Illis slept and ate, slept and ate more, replenishing the nourishment leaking from his flesh. He developed pneumonia, and recovered from it. He exercised, painfully. But at the end of two months he weighed twenty-nine kilos.

“His body’s rejecting the secondary grafts,” Lazlo said, in staff conference. “We expected it. Skin from the freezer or from donors doesn’t last very long. It’s a temporary protection. But he seems to be rejecting it with uncommon swiftness—and there’s too little of his own skin. It just isn’t growing fast enough.” Dressed in her Maintenance jumpsuit, jangling with tools, Janna sat at the table, making notes. Lazlo did not look at her as he talked.

“How about plastics?” someone asked.

Mitra, from Research, answered. “We’ve been using a laminated nylon dressing,” she said. “And we are working now on an adaptive protein paint, to be used in all kinds of wound cases. But it’s still experimental. Our supply of plastic is very limited, and anyway, the dressing lasts no longer than the secondary grafts. There’s no substitute for skin.”

Someone else asked: “What happens now?”

“We keep on,” Lazlo said. “The boy’s very tough. He may yet make it. We keep on.”

After the others cleared out, Lazlo walked around to where Janna was sitting. “How are you?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” She would not give an inch. Illis’ condition has become a battleground on which we maneuver, he thought. “I am coming to work in the labs tomorrow,” she said. “Perhaps they will find me something on which I can work off my obsession.”

“Are you eating?” he persisted. “You look thinner.”

“I!” She glared at him. Then she relented. Lazlo spent an hour every day in the G-room, talking with Illis, playing games to make him move, checking the too-few patches of new skin, changing the bio-adherent dressings.
Doing the things he will not let me do.
“I’m all right, Lazlo. Thank you.” She touched his hand. Then her spine straightened. She picked up her notes. “Maybe I will see you tomorrow.” she said to him. “Tell me when I may be permitted to spend more time with my son.”

* * *

In the morning, Mitra took Janna to a table with a shelf and a bank of machines. The shelf had her name on it; as if, Janna thought, I had never been away. “You work here,” Mitra said. She pointed at a stack of papers. “The problem’s there. Read.”

Janna ate dinner in the refectory in Medica that evening. Lazlo came to sit with her. “How’re you doing?” he asked.

She grinned at him. “I’m eating.”

It made him smile, and emboldened him. “I see you’re dressed in whites,” he said. “What are you working on? Something good?”

Her eyes gleamed out of her dark face, a look fierce as a predator’s. “Skin,” she said. “I’m working on skin.”

* * *

Somewhere amid the piles of the printouts on her shelf was a fact or formula that would help Illis.

Working with epithelial cells grown in culture media, she sorted through a dozen experiments designed to stimulate or regenerate damaged tissue. She haunted her desk late at night; she dreamed about the helical collagen molecule. She plunged into the library to scour the pre-Change records on immunosuppressive nutrient solutions, a way to counteract the rejector mechanisms that kept Illis from using her skin, Lazlo’s skin, anybody’s skin. Mitra, at her desk nearby, was working on her own project, the all-purpose protein paint. She wanted a substance—like synthetic insulin—which the City’s bioengineers could make. Janna listened to her grumbles, in between her own.
Skin. I’m working on skin.

Lazlo came from a late visit to the wards, one night, and saw her in silhouette against a western window. Summer sunset had left streaks of red and lavender across the sky. He went to her. “It’s getting late.”

Her voice was heavy with fatigue. “Yes.”

“Illis gained weight this week,” he said.

She turned around. “How much?”

“Almost two kilos.”

“That’s good.”

“Two grafts on his left arm seem to be taking.”

“That’s good.”

“Have you stopped at all today?” he demanded. “You’re punchy! Come on, you’re getting out of here. I’ll help you close up.” He went around the lab for her, turning off the lights. She leaned on him as they left. “Fool woman!” he said. Her shoulder blades winged sharply under his fingers, and there were dark hollows under her eyes. “Don’t you
dare
get sick! How would I tell Illis?”

He took her to the refectory. She ate in absent-minded gulps, not looking at the food, fork and fingers moving like the claw of an automaton.

“What keeps you up so late?” Lazlo asked.

“New skin for Illis.”

“You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t sleep at night.”

She looked directly at him. “I used to have nightmares when I slept,” she said. “I dreamed about Illis, a dark little ghost face crying, going away from me, going to join the others. I hated to sleep alone.”

“You don’t have to sleep alone,” Lazlo said.

“I don’t dream that anymore. I don’t dream at all anymore. I am a dream, Laz, a dream that the City is dreaming.”

“I think you need to go to bed,” Lazlo said.

She let him take her there.

* * *

Janna woke in the night.

Her pillow smelled of Lazlo. The room smelled of sex and of growing things; some of her plants were blossoming. She had just dreamed, and the memory of pain had awakened her. She had dreamed that Illis had turned into a bright silver fish, and she had swallowed him. He swam into her womb, and all over again, she gave birth to him. She passed her hands across her belly. It was flat and muscular, smooth—of course.