John Barnes - Directive 51

Heather had made the appointment with Cameron specifically, rather than Graham, because stupid me, I thought if Cam just understood the other side, that would solve the problem. Now I see that’s what was causing it.

He was giving her his usual small, polite, meaningless smile, and he’d been nodding more and more as he listened to her. Finally, he said, “Heather, that’s just politics. The real world is complicated and contradictory, but policies have to be clear and monovalent to be carried out. If Graham wins the argument—and he might, he and Norcross talk a lot and get along well—then I will shrug, carry out the policy, and pray that Graham is right. You know it’s not personal with me and Graham. I like the man. I know he’s sincere, and respect his judgment. And Arnie is the cleverest guy in the world and absolutely indispensable, but every so often, his extreme cleverness overpowers his common sense, he starts sniffing up his own butt, he falls in, and he disappears up his own ass like a star falling into a black hole. And when that happens, I have to not follow Arnie up his own ass. So I say—”

There was a knock at the door, and before Cameron could say, “Come in,” Sherry stuck her head in. “Heather, note from Lenny—he said it was urgent—meet him over at the infirmary.”

“Go,” Cam said.

Heather hurried through the gray fall mist, her heart sinking.

It wasn’t fair.

They’d made the dangerous trip down here, lived through the constant danger of exposure in Washington, she’d carried him in her bare hands down through corridors and stairwells that must have been crawling with biotes, and she’d been so careful to scrub and clean him everywhere, brushing every bit of exposed plastic with alcohol and…

She knew it couldn’t make any difference, but she ran, anyway. Maybe he has something else, maybe it’s serious but it’s not that , maybe—

At the door to the infirmary, she made herself slow to a walk. If this is it, I’m going to do it right. Inside, they’d been watching for her, and she was guided down the corridor to the room where Lenny waited.

Give Army doctors credit, they don’t run off and let people face their troubles alone, Heather thought. The lady who stood there waiting for her was tall and dark, with close-cropped hair; she was as dignified, and implacable, as a mountain. “Ms. O’Grainne. I’m Dr. Lee. Dr. Plekhanov wanted you to be present while we discuss something very serious.”

“I came as quick as I could.” She was crouched beside Lenny; he hates to look up, don’t make him do that, she wanted to say to Dr. Lee, but then she saw that the doctor had squatted down on Lenny’s other side.

Lenny said, “Heather, babe. This is it. Dr. Lee just scraped four millimeters of decayed plastic goo off my kidney drain—”

“But—Lenny, there was nothing this morning—”

“Of course there wasn’t,” Lenny said.

Dr. Lee added, “We’ll never know how it got to him, and it wouldn’t help us if we did. It could have been floating on the air this morning while he was getting dressed. The stuff grows so fast, faster than yeast in bread dough or a virus in your sinuses, Ms. O’Grainne.”

“I just… he was safe when I left this morning.”

Lenny’s strong good hand reached out and took her by the back of the neck, turning her face to him, catching her eyes. “ I was safe. Time enough to talk about me like I’m not here when I’m not.”

She let him hold her while she cried, not for long, but enough to find her heart again. Wiping her eyes, she said, “Dr. Lee. You said there was a difficult decision to make.”

“Well, I’ve drilled out as much plastic as I dare, and refilled with surgical cement from a clean tube. Maybe I got it all. Maybe nothing will happen. The next few hours, a day at most, and we’ll know.

“In a way, the sensible, conservative thing to do would be to replace his kidney drain with one of the clean spare drains we sealed into glass jars right after Daybreak. None of those has any visible signs of decay. The problem with surgery is that we have nothing we can use inside the human body that reliably kills nanoswarm, and we might let that in, where it would destroy Dr. Plekhanov’s pacemaker, or his artificial kidney or spleen, or attack his aortal booster pumps. Between all of those he has six running electric motors, four microcomputers, and eight motion-driven generators in his body. Losing any of those could be fatal, and internal nanoswarm excreting strong acid would be a painful way to go.

“But I can tell you still think surgery and a replacement drain would be better. ”

“Even if I got the whole infection today, I’m not sure that my surgical cement plug will hold together. Dr. Plekhanov has to remove the accumulated fluid about every ten days, and I’m afraid my fix on that plug will break when he does; there were no specs to tell me if that surgical cement would work in that application, but it was all I had.”

“So that’s the choice,” Heather said numbly. “Replace the drain now, while the biotes are in check, and hope the nanoswarm don’t kill him; or wait and see if the drain starts to spoil again, and run the risk of an emergency surgery with even more danger.”

“That’s it,” Lenny agreed.

“Not much of a choice.”

“Oh, it’s a big choice. There’s just not much selection.” Lenny put his hand on her cheek; she pressed against it. His fingers are so strong, right now he’s still so healthy— “Dr. Lee says we can figure that surgical cement plug won’t last either; something will contaminate it even if it went in clean, and sooner or later it will start to decay. The new drain, if they put that in, will come down with decay sooner or later too; maybe in a week, maybe in ten years, but eventually. The longest they could keep me alive would probably be in an almost-sterile environment, where you could visit me and we could touch if every time you go through the kind of scrub that they gave us coming into Benning.

“And yet I’d still be doomed, Heather, we both know that. I’m a little chunk of the Big System, and Daybreak is going to kill the Big System. But here’s the thing. We don’t know if my drain getting infected was a once-in-ten-years fluke, or if it’s something that is bound to happen every three months. But we do know that drain has already been infected once, and despite Dr. Lee’s best efforts, it might not be clean now. And we do know that surgical cement isn’t going to be as durable as the original plastic. So I figure, if everything is perfect with the repair job she just did on me—I’ve got less than a year. Just too many things that are too close to certain to go wrong.

“But if I go in right away for the surgery… well, there are three possibilities. Opening me up is always dangerous; too many parts are broken already. Or I might get nanoswarm. Or—and I think it’s the most likely—they’ll get me back to where I was a day or so ago. And at that point… maybe getting a plastic infection is something that will happen every few weeks, and that’s all the life extension I’ll get. But maybe this really was a freak case, maybe it won’t happen again for ten or fifteen years. I might even live long enough for them to redevelop all the stuff that’s needed to keep me alive.

“So, basically, if I don’t go in for the surgery, it’s a near certainty I’ll die this year. If I do go in for surgery, odds are I’ll just die this year anyway, and there’s maybe an increased chance of dying tomorrow, but there’s a tiny little chance of living with you for years and years. So… hey.” He brushed her tears away with his hand again. “Do you need some time to get it back together?”