Gardner Dozois - The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

She stuck a satellite photograph of Africa on the fridge. She showed me how to trace the circles of the Chaga through the clouds. Every week she updated it. Week by week, the circles merging. That was how I measured our life together, by the circles, merging. Week by week, her home was taken away.

Her parents and sister were down there, under those blue and white bars of cloud; week by week the circles were running them out of choices.

She never let herself forget she had failed them. She never let herself forget she was a refugee. That was what made her older, in ways, than me. That was what all her tidiness and orderliness around the house were about. She was only here for a little time. It could all be lifted at a moment’s notice.

She liked to cook for me on Sundays, though the kitchen smelled of it for a week afterward. I never told her her cooking gave me the shits. She was chopping something she had got from the Caribbean stores and singing to herself. I was watching from the hall, as I loved to watch her without being watched. I saw her bring the knife down, heard a Kalenjin curse, saw her lift her hand to her mouth. I was in like a shot.

“Shit shit shit shit,” she swore. It was a deep cut, and blood ran freely down her forefinger. I rushed her to the tap, stuck it under the cold, then went for the medical bag. I returned with gauze, plasters and a heal-the-world attitude.

“It’s okay,” she said, holding the finger up. “It’s better.”

The cut had vanished. No blood, no scab. All that remained was a slightly raised red weal. As I watched, even that faded.

“How?”

“I don’t know,” Ten said. “But it’s better.”

I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want there to be anything more difficult or complex in Ten’s life. I wanted what she had from her past to be enough, to be all. I knew this was something alien; no one healed like that. I thought that if I let it go, it would never trouble us again. I had not calculated on the bomb.

Some fucking Nazis or other had been blast-bombing gay bars. London, Edinburgh, Dublin so far, always a Friday afternoon, work over, weekend starting. Manchester was on the alert. So were the bombers. Tuesday, lunch time, half a kilo of semtex with nails and razor blades packed around it went off under a table outside a Canal Street bar. No one died, but a woman at the next table lost both legs from the knees down and there were over fifty casualties. Ten had been going in for the afternoon shift. She was twenty meters away when the bomb went off. I got the call from the hospital same time as the news broke on the radio.

“Get the fuck over there,” Willy the boss ordered. I didn’t need ordering. Manchester Royal Infirmary casualty was bedlam. I saw the doctors going around in a slow rush and the people looking up at everyone who came in, very very afraid and the police taking statements and the trolleys in the aisles and I thought: It must have been something like this in Nairobi, at the end. The receptionist showed me to a room where I was to wait for a doctor. I met her in the corridor, a small, harassed-looking Chinese girl.

“Ah, Mr. Giddens. You’re with Ms. Bi, that’s right?”

“That’s right, how is she?”

“Well, she was brought in with multiple lacerations, upper body, left side of face, left upper arm and shoulder…”

“Oh Jesus God. And now?”

“See for yourself.”

Ten walked down the corridor. If she had not been wearing a hospital robe, I would have sworn she was unchanged from how I had left her that morning.

“Shone.”

The weals were already fading from her face and hands. A terrible prescience came over me, so strong and cold I almost threw up.

“We want to keep her in for further tests, Mr. Giddens,” the doctor said. “As you can imagine, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”

“Shone, I’m fine, I want to go home.”

“Just to be sure, Mr. Giddens.”

When I brought Ten back a bag of stuff, the receptionist directed me to Intensive Care. I ran the six flights of stairs to ICU, burning with dread. Ten was in a sealed room full of white equipment. When she saw me, she ran from her bed to the window, pressed her hands against it.

“Shone!” Her words came through a speaker grille. “They won’t let me out!”

Another doctor led to me a side room. There were two policemen there, and a man in a suit.

“What the hell is this?”

“Mr. Giddens. Ms. Bi, she is a Kenyan refugee?”

“You fucking know that.”

“Easy, Mr. Giddens. We’ve been running some tests on Ms. Bi, and we’ve discovered the presence in her bloodstream of fullerene nanoprocessors.”

“Nanowhat?”

“What are commonly know as Chaga spores.”

Ten, Dust Girl, firing and firing and firing at the glider, the gun blossoming in her hand, the shanty town melting behind her as her clothes fell apart, her arm sticking through the shield wall as she shouted, I’m chipped, I’m chipped! The soldiers shaving her head, hosing her down. Those things she had carried inside her. All those runs for the Americans.

“Oh my God.”

There was a window in the little room. Through it I saw Ten sitting on a plastic chair by the bed, hands on her thighs, head bowed.

“Mr. Giddens.” The man in the suit flashed a little plastic wallet. “Robert McGlennon, Home Office Immigration. Your, ah…” He nodded at the window.

“Partner.”

“Partner. Mr. Giddens, I have to tell you, we cannot be certain that Ms. Bi’s continued presence is not a public health risk. Her refugee status is dependent on a number of conditions, one of which is that…”

“You’re fucking deporting her…”

The two policemen stirred. I realized then that they were not there for Ten. There were there for me.

“It’s a public health issue, Mr. Giddens. She should never have been allowed in in the first place. We have no idea of the possible environmental impact. You, of all people, should be aware what these things can do. Have done. Are still doing. I have to think of public safety.”

“Public safety, fuck!”

“Mr. Giddens…”

I went to the window. I beat my fists on the wired glass.

“Ten! Ten! They’re trying to deport you! They want to send you back!”

The policemen prised me away from the window. On the far side, Ten yelled silently.

“Look, I don’t like having to do this,” the man in the suit said.

“When?”

“Mr. Giddens.”

“When? Tell me, how long has she got?”

“Usually there’d be a detention period, with limited rights of appeal. But as this is a public health issue…”

“You’re going to do it right now.”

“The order is effective immediately, Mr. Giddens. I’m sorry. These officers will go with you back to your home. If you could gather up the rest of her things…”

“At least let me say goodbye, Jesus, you owe me that!”

“I can’t allow that, Mr. Giddens. There’s a contamination risk.”

“Contamination? I’ve only been fucking her for the past six months.”

As the cops marched me out, the doctor came up for a word.

“Mr. Giddens, these nanoprocessors in her bloodstream…”

“That are fucking getting her thrown out of the country.”

“The fullerenes…”

“She heals quick. I saw it.”

“They do much more than that, Mr. Giddens. She’ll probably never get sick again. And there’s some evidence that they prevent telomere depletion in cell division.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, she ages very much more slowly than we do. Her life expectancy may be, I don’t know, two, three hundred years.”

I stared. The policemen stared.

“There’s more. We observed unfamiliar structures in her brain; the best I can describe them is, the nanoprocessors seem to be re-engineering dead neurons into a complementary neural network.”