George Martin - Busted flush

Waking up from the drug was like swimming up from the bottom of a very deep pool. His hospital room came slowly into focus. Drake rubbed his eyes. The good nurse was there. Gerald, that was his name, was friendly and would talk to Drake about video games.

"Hungry, buddy?"

Drake's senses were coming back online. His stomach was empty enough it hurt. "Is it breakfast or dinner time?"

"Foodwise, it's whatever time you want it to be," Gerald said with a smile. "But timewise we're talking late lunch. I can get you a sandwich or a burger with fries. Maybe some ice cream."

"Oh, snap. A burger and fries would be killer." Drake's mind was now firmly focused on food and wasn't turning loose until he was comfortably full.

Gerald gave him a high-five. "I'm on it. You may have a visitor before I get back, or so they tell me."

"Another doctor?" Drake asked.

Gerald laughed. "I expect so. There's not much of anyone else around here." He ducked out the door with a wave.

Drake was annoyed when the new doctor showed up before Gerald got back with his burger. Drake had been expecting a mad scientist type, mostly because this all seemed like a bad movie. Instead, the man was younger than Drake's dad, maybe in his mid-thirties, had all his hair, and didn't wear glasses. He did have a white coat and a clipboard, but that was standard issue for this place.

"Hello, Drake. I'm Dr. Fitzhugh." He extended a hand. Drake shook it warily. "I understand you've been having bad dreams."

"Yes. It's because they give me this stuff to make me sleep." He looked straight at the doctor. "Can you make them stop giving it to me?" Although Drake's first idea was to find his parents and go home, he was also sick of being put to sleep.

The doctor nodded and scribbled on his clipboard. "I see. That medication is a nonopiate, but it can turn loose the subconscious in an uncomfortable way. I'll make a note of it."

Drake smiled. "Okay. Can I go home soon?"

"I'm also recommending that you be transferred to another facility." He put a hand on Drake's shoulder. "I'm sorry, son, but we have to figure out exactly what happened to you, and we don't seem able to do that here."

"Will my folks be at this place?" "Just remember everyone is trying to help you. Have a good trip." The doctor stood and left the room with a rustle of his white coat and no further explanation.

Mom? I don't feel real good.

Niobe Winslow felt her oldest child dying, felt him melting away like so much ice cream dropped on a summer sidewalk. Soon there would be nothing left of Xerxes but memories. And another hole in her heart.

Through their bond she felt the warming lamps perched over his incubator; needles squirting filtered blood and synthetic proteins into his forearm; plush swaddling.

Hang in there, kiddo. Momma's coming.

Month-old Xerxes was the longest-lived of Niobe's seventy-six children. Xue-Ming had lived nineteen days, thirteen hours. Xander, eleven days and change. Xerxes's breakthrough longevity had slipped through her defenses, bolstered her with vain and foolish hopes.

He'd been so strong. So healthy.

Her chair clattered to the floor as she jumped to her feet. The joker to whom she'd been reading rocked back and forth on his bed. His head, a featureless extrusion of flesh and bone, knocked against a white-spackled patch on the wall. The orderlies had given up on repainting it.

She righted the chair with her tail as she yanked the door open. "Sorry, Mick. Gotta go. Back tomorrow."

Knock. Knock. Knock. Little flakes of plaster rained down on Mick's sheets. The door slammed behind her.

A bell chimed the hour. She ignored it.

I feel funny. My tummy hurts.

Almost there, kiddo. Just hang in there, 'kay?

She ran through the corridors of the Biological Isolation and Containment Center, a facility carved into the caverns of an old salt mine deep under southeastern New Mexico. The corridors glowed with light from fiber-optic skylights connected to an array of heliostats on the surface. The skylights shone brightly; one could forget that the desert was half a kilometer overhead.

As both a voluntary committal and a trusty, Niobe had the run of the place. It was the nation's foremost biological research center, where an army of doctors and scientists struggled to cure hundreds of patients of their afflictions. The facility resembled a wagon wheel tipped on its side: a central hub, with radial spokes connecting it to an outer ring. In places, the outer ring connected to the original warren of mine tunnels, some large enough to swallow a freight train. The pie sections of the wheel were color-coded, like a Trivial Pursuit piece.

Niobe ran around the rim of the wheel. This wing (minimum security, voluntary committals) was decorated in shades of green, complete with oil paintings of forests and verdant hillsides. The corridors turned orange and red as she approached one of the medical wings.

Her tail caught an orderly's medicine cart as she skidded around the corner toward the infirmary. The cart flipped. Hundreds of pills skittered along the floor.

Over her shoulder, she yelled, "Sorry!"

"Damn it, Genetrix…"

Half the staff thought that was her real name. Genetrix. The Brood Mother.

The connection to Xerxes strengthened when she entered the infirmary. But still their telepathic link felt staticky, like a radio tuned slightly off-station.

Niobe weaved through a maze of EEGs, EKGs, respirators, dialysis machines, and still other devices constructed specifically for her children. Doctors and nurses surrounded the oversized infant incubator where Xerxes lay, working frantically to keep him alive.

A tangle of tubes and wires snaked from Xerxes's body to the machines. His skin, smooth and rosy-pink just this morning, hung waxy and sallow from sunken cheeks. Rheumy cataracts leaked sour-milk tears down his face. Even the thick black head of hair he'd styled into a little Elvis pompadour to make her laugh was coming out in clumps.

She had promised to take him to Las Vegas.

Mom? I'm scared.

"I'm here now," she said. "Don't be scared, okay?"

"Mom…"

"Hush, kiddo."

A single thought, through a blizzard of psychic static: I love you, Mom.

And then Xerxes was gone. The blanket sagged, empty but for a slurry of organic molecules. The ammonia-and-hay odor of dead homunculus wafted out of the incubator. Niobe sobbed. One nurse hugged her tightly, patting her on the back and murmuring encouragements, while another collected the dead child's remains in a sample jar.

The chimes sounded again, louder this time. A low voice on the PA system. "Genetrix to therapy two. Genetrix to therapy two, please."

She didn't want to go. But Xerxes's death had slipped a knife into her gut, and every secret, selfish thought gave it a vicious twist. Regularity was crucial. Generations yet unborn-but cherished no less-would drop like mayflies, if not for BICC's rigid methodologies. And so she went, for the sake of her future family.

Therapy room two mimicked the layout of Niobe's own quarters, except for the larger bed (a California king-size mattress) and the curtains along one wall.

Christian was seated on the edge of the bed. He looked up when she walked in. "Where were you? They're going nuts in there." He gestured at the curtains with the long, knobby fingers that always felt warm and strong on her hips.

"With Xerxes." She wiped her eyes. "He passed. Just now."

He grunted, pulling the shirt of his BICC uniform over his head. The soft blond hair on his body didn't catch the lights, so his chest looked slick and bare.

"He was scared," she said, walking behind a bamboo privacy screen in the corner. Niobe had insisted on the screen. As she draped her sweatshirt over the top of the screen, she added, "He would have liked it if you visited."