Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (50 page)

Mrs. Garcia said, "And you wish to do this so that you can regain your confidence. So that you can again be an effective doctor for your community."

"Yes."

"This may be within our abilities. There are no written records of the error?"

"None."

"And no one else knows of it."

"No one."

Mrs. Garcia adjusted her vase of forget-me-nots. Diffidently she said, "You realize that our services are quite time consuming, and are correspondingly expensive?"

"Yes. I can afford it."

"Yet you are from an impoverished world, and make no salary to speak of. Your family is also poor, and you needed Indigo's scholarship in order to afford to attend medical school. How is it that you have sufficient money to pay for our services?"

"It was an inheritance," Samuel said. "It came out of the blue. When I was a resident on Topaz, I had an elderly patient, Aaron Lasalle. I came to know him quite well. We both enjoyed playing chess, and we often got together for games. Then I moved out to Indigo, and lost touch with him. Two months ago I learned that he had died, and had named me as his beneficiary. It turned out that he was wealthy. I'd had no idea."

"So you came, unexpectedly, into a fortune."

"Yes."

"And you wish to use it to purchase a memory removal."

"Yes," Samuel said. "I thought it was a sign. Fate. I was so desperate to forget, but I could never even afford to come to Earth, much less pay for the services. Yet then, suddenly, I could."

Mrs. Garcia examined her computer screen. "Indeed," she said. "I see that you can. And you wish to do this so that you can regain your confidence. So you can again be an effective doctor for your colony. Because you are the only doctor they have."

"Yes."

"I see." Mrs. Garcia removed her glasses, letting them hang from their chain, and directed her gaze on Samuel. "Who is tending your patients on Indigo, while you are here on Earth?"

Samuel swallowed. "I hired a doctor from Topaz. At the salary I was able to offer, she agreed to work there temporarily."

"Invested properly," Mrs. Garcia said, "your inheritance could provide a long term competitive salary. With this in mind, could you not convince your relief doctor to stay on Indigo?"

Samuel was silent for a long time. "I probably could," he said at last.

"Had you considered this option?"

"Yes!" Samuel cried out, anguished. "Yes, damn it, I considered it! I did the numbers. I could hire a good doctor and still have money left over. I know that."

Mrs. Garcia folded her arms on her desk. "Yet you are here."

"Yes," Samuel whispered. His brief moment of passion, of anger, was gone, and he felt lifeless, drained. "I'm here. What I told you before was true. I do want to get my confidence back, so that I can be a good doctor for my people again. I want that very much. But it is also true that I cannot bear to have this memory for even one more day."

"And you will not need to," Mrs. Garcia said, very gently. She rose to her feet and walked around the desk, blocking Samuel's view of the forget-me-nots. She held out a hand to him and said, "Come with me."

Back on Indigo, the summer days were long and peaceful, and Samuel went through his days well contented. The time spent in therapy on Earth had done him a world of good; he had regained balance and perspective in his life, and had come to terms with Jessica's death. He still thought of her wistfully, wishing she might have lived, but he no longer felt paralyzed by her death. He knew, with a certainty deep in his soul, that he had done all he could for her. An idiosyncratic reaction to medication was like a freak accident, unpredictable, uncontrollable. He had learned what he could from Jessica's death, and had moved on.

He was nervous, certainly, the next time he treated an ariel-bite victim. But the antitoxin treatment proceeded uneventfully, and the patient went home within days, fully recovered. After Samuel had successfully treated two more ariel-bite victims, his confidence returned totally, and the last bits of nagging tension left his mind. Samuel wrote a note to Dr. Garcia, who had been in charge of his therapy on Earth, and thanked her profusely for turning his life back around. He remembered how depressed he had become, how paralyzed he had been in his job, but he could scarcely conceive, any longer, why he had felt that way. He sent the thank-you note, a personal card on paper, out on the next ship.

A year passed, and it was summer again when Celeste Aragon was brought to the clinic with an ariel bite. Her young husband Juan came with her, clutching their three-month-old baby and looking very frightened. Celeste, by contrast, seemed more annoyed than anything else.

"I can't believe I didn't see the nest," she said. "It was right in front of me, and I steppe right into it. That's what comes of not paying attention."

"Well, you're hardly the first one to do it," Samuel said, picking up his computer to calculate Celeste's antitoxin dosage. "Nor the last, I'll wager."

"The treatment's safe, isn't it?" Juan blurted out nervously. "I mean, I was remembering that poor child, Jessica Miller. She died of the treatment, didn't she?"

"She had an idiosyncratic reaction," Samuel explained. "It's extraordinarily rare. I've consulted with the experts, and they say the chances are astronomical against such a thing ever happening again."

Juan looked doubtful. "But if there's any chance it could be dangerous. . . ." His tension was palpable, and the baby began to cry.

"Honestly," Celeste said. "Here, Juan, give her to me." She took the baby in her arms and rocked it gently. "Juan, dear, the ariel bite itself is far more dangerous than the treatment. Isn't that so, Dr. Marsh?" "Indeed it is. Without treatment, the ariel bite is usually fatal. With timely treatment, there is a nearly one hundred percent chance of complete recovery."

"See?" Celeste smiled up at Juan. "I think I prefer the odds that go along with treatment. I'm ready, Dr. Marsh."

Samuel gave the family a reassuring smile, reached for the antitoxin bottle, and drew up Celeste Aragon's dose. Juan took the baby, and Samuel gave Celeste the injection. Her eyes widened and she looked startled, as if the injection had burned, but Samuel did not think anything of it.

He put the bottle back on the shelf, hooked Celeste to the monitors, and cheerfully went off to see his next patient.

Edward M. Lerner

My chief of staff stood stiffly, clutching a leather folder. The single sheet of paper inside awaited my signature. Barbara said nothing, knowing the depth of my resolve, but her body language spoke volumes. By any conventional logic this was no way to begin a term of office.

I never wanted to go into politics. Sometimes we sacrifice our dreams for a greater cause.

I've been hooked on history since the third grade, when I heard about the Lost Colony. Paying for four years of college so I could teach American history in high school was the limit of my ambition—and a daunting challenge. Sometimes events demand more of us than we dare ask of ourselves.

More than twenty years later, I remember those events as though they happened yesterday. . . .

* * *

Sometime during the night the world had ended.

With no morning paper to confirm the obvious, my mother refused to believe. Instead, the lack of a
Gazette
had her full attention—that, and her inability to call anyone to complain. Dressed for work in her waitress uniform, she sat at our rickety dinette table, stymied in her morning ritual.

Our landline phone had no dial tone. The screen on my cell read: No service. Cable was out, too, and with it Internet access. At least the power remained on.

Well, Mom could complain to me, and did. I was of the wrong generation to understand getting news on dead trees; I couldn't have sympathized under the best of circumstances. These were hardly the best of circumstances. And fussing at me did nothing to deliver a paper.

Mom's coffee cup was nearly full. Filling a mug for myself and tasting it, I knew why. So much for the new coffeemaker she'd bought the day before. "Who knew Quick-E-Shoppe even sold them?" she'd said. "While I was getting gas, a promo came up on the pump display."

Pouring the bitter sludge into the kitchen sink got me the "Timothy Alan Anderson, we don't waste food in this household" lecture. Impulsive coffeepot buys apparently fell under different budgetary rules. I chalked up the all-three-names broadside to circumstances, still wondering just what those circumstances were.

I burrowed in my closet for rabbit ears and Mom in her closet for our disaster kit. She won. We listened to a scratchy AM radio station. ". . . Worst across the Carolinas and into southern Virginia. The extent of the outbreak remains . . ." The report dissolved into a staticky hiss. I cranked vigorously to recharge the radio. When I finished, the station had moved on to the weather.

"Outbreak?" Mom repeated. Her eyes darted to the open disaster kit on the kitchen counter. I was just barely old enough to remember when household disaster kits
didn't
include plastic sheets and duct tape.

The dinette window was open, the gingham curtains billowing in the breeze. If a biological were loose nearby, we were toast. I must not have believed that, because thoughts of toast reminded me I had yet to eat breakfast. "Malware of some kind, I think. You know, like a computer virus. It could explain no cable or phone. I'll bet that's why there's no morning paper. Computers set the type and run the presses."

"That's not so bad," Mom decided. "If they fix it, I mean."

For a while the room was silent but for the ticking of the kitschy wall clock, a black cat that waggled its eyes and wagged its tail in synch. More car horns than usual, somehow more impatient than usual, intruded. Computers down meant traffic lights out. The morning commute would be bad.

Commuting—and school—after the end of the world seemed
so
unfair.

"I'd better go, Tim. I'll be late for work." Mom sighed. She made no move for the door until I stood. I had morning classes, the first at eight. As for after school . . .

Damn the injustice, the obliteration of every computer on the planet would not close Seth's Secondhand Books.

Theory had it that community college was preparing me for the university. According to plan, next year I'd put that theory to the test. That presumed I managed to set aside enough money for tuition. It was possible, I supposed. Mom and I
might
quit obsessing over daily meals.

I didn't blame Seth Miller for paying me minimum wage. A used-book store is a calling, not a business model. Every book he sold was a victory over countless no-overhead competitors on eBay. Only that day no one in town could reach eBay. I remember hoping we might see
two
customers.

Truthfully, I didn't understand how Seth afforded to pay me at all. I was too young, when he offered me a job in my sophomore year of high school, to imagine anyone lending a hand. Or to connect that offer with Dad's recent death in Afghanistan.

Seth was nowhere in evidence when I got to the store. I was late, traffic lights having all defaulted to flashing red or yellow. Phone service remained out; there hadn't been any way to say I'd be delayed.

"Hey, Marc," I said. Marc Kimball was Seth's other charity case. However lame I was, a college student (if just barely) stocking shelves with old graphic novels and recycled genre books—Marc was lamer. It never seemed to bother him.

Marc nodded and kept whistling. He couldn't carry a tune in a bushel basket. Despite the John Deere cap and the hair curling up at his collar, I had my doubts he would recognize a bushel basket. He was about twenty-five, and—obvious when he felt talkative—a city boy.

Seth paid Marc off the books, no pun intended, something I wasn't supposed to have noticed. I guessed that explained why Marc worked here. He had appeared about four months earlier. When I asked, making conversation, "So where are you from?" Marc's answer was, "Around." He was amiable enough, just private. Besides working at the bookstore he did freelance computer repair. Those were cash transactions, too.

Between customers, which was most of the time, we talked about movies and music and books. Marc spoke fast and flat like my cousins in inside-the-Beltway northern Virginia, for all intents and purposes a Yank. In rural South Carolina that made him a foreigner. The little old ladies who ran the tiny museum for our local Civil War skirmish site—battlefield was far too grandiose a term—still turned away vehicles with northern license plates, smiling sweetly as they claimed their parking lot was full: one more states' right. Within the museum, the late conflict between the states bore no aspect of civility and was labeled the War of Northern Aggression.

Still, I doubted even the Charleston office of Homeland Security considered Yanks illegal aliens. As harmless as Marc Kimball seemed, he was wanted for something, or guilty of something, if only tax evasion. That he was a movie buff was one of the few things Marc freely revealed. So maybe he knew this old movie, too. . . .

The Fugitive
was based on a TV series from well before my time. Movie and show alike were about a man on the lam, escaped from prison, desperate to prove his innocence. The hero's name was Dr. Richard Kimball. So was Kimball a too-cute alias or merely a coincidence? I'd never had the nerve to ask.

UPS had delivered a stack of boxes. I sighed, knowing the massive sorting task that lay ahead. Seth purchased whole libraries from estate sales, sight unseen, for pennies a book. At that price we usually overpaid. Still, we'd occasionally come across a gem, say, a rare first edition, worth more than the store grossed in a month.

"You're quiet today, Tim," Marc said suddenly. He was in the mystery section, shelving paperbacks with enthusiastic taps on their spines and a certain
je ne sais quoi
—only in hindsight, I
can
say
quoi
: scarcely contained exhilaration.