Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

He made a small sound of pain and grief deep in his throat. The bourbon was supposed to make him forget, not force him to remember. But now he did remember what had happened, what he had seen and heard and felt, the memory of the silky gray sheen over Jim Kirk’s open eyes .. .

He could hear the faint tones and harmonies of the life-support system in the intensive care quarantine unit outside his office. Unwillingly, he got unsteadily to his feet and went to look at the life-systems

displays.

The growth of the mechanical web had arrested itself; the molecular fibrils no longer writhed farther and farther into Jim’s brain. McCoy had repaired the severed artery and the punctured lung; he had even induced regeneration in the surgical wound so it would heal without a scar.

Yet the scanners gave an utterly misleading pattern. They showed strong breathing, but it was the respirator that forced the movement of air through Jim’s lungs; his body made no motion of its own accord. Jim’s heartbeat remained regular, but the absence of any signal in the parallel screen showed that the heart contracted because of the nature of the muscle itself, not in response to any nerve impulse. The nerves were destroyed. Even the sino-atrial node and the atrio-ventricular node had been infiltrated and crushed.

Blood chemistry appeared normal: it was an induced normalcy, readings completely level, never changing. pH and electrolytes, blood sugar and heme-carrier were all being stabilized by an extraordinarily sensitive piece of equipment. In a normal, healthy, living human being, the readings would be all over the scale, reacting to everything from breathing patterns and hunger to mood, observation, and fantasy.

McCoy tried to keep his gaze averted from the EEG. As long as he did not look at it he could continue to fool himself. His glass was still in his hand, half-full. He drained it and felt the flow of hope, the sudden certainty that if he looked this time, he would find some proof that Jim’s brain had survived and that he would live and recover.

He turned toward the last and most important screen.

All the brain-wave lines were flat, dead flat they had said in medical school, with the self-protective cynicism of young people not yet accustomed to death. Alpha, beta, delta, theta, and all the minor waves through to omega: every pattern that might indicate life showed that Jim Kirk was dead.

The web had completed itself and stopped forming of its own accord. Nothing McCoy or anyone else could do would have stopped it. That was how it was designed. Spiderweb was prohibited on every world in the Federation. No government, however belligerent, manufactured it. Aside from the disgust with which even allies would regard an entity that used it, the weapon could be as dangerous to those who carried it as to its intended victims.

Yet any half-educated moron could construct the stuff in a basement lab. It appeared during the rare outbreaks of terrorism that flared even in the Federation. Spiderweb was nothing but a terrorist weapon: it killed surely and certainly, and it caused a slow and ugly death.

Is any death prettier? McCoy wondered. Is death by phaser any less certain? It’s death all the same, whether you flash out of existence or slowly dissolve into the universal entropy despite all the resources of modern medicine.

The threads branched out exponentially along axons and dendrites, climbing up the spinal cord and into the brain. The neurophilic metallo-organic molecules concentrated in the cerebrum, and had such a particular affinity for the optic nerve that as they invaded and destroyed the retina they continued growing all around the eye, over the white and the iris, locking the eyelids open.

Jim Kirk stared upward, his dead eyes silk-gray.

McCoy went into his office and poured another drink. Tears running hot down his face, he slumped into his chair, and sat clutching his glass as if the coolness could give him some comfort over blind, screaming grief.

“Dr. McCoy—”

McCoy jerked himself upright, startled by Spock’s silent appearance in the doorway of his office. Bourbon sloshed out of his glass and onto his hand, chilling his skin as the alcohol evaporated. Defiantly, he tossed back the last finger of liquor and set the glass down hard.

“What d’you want, Spock?”

Spock looked at him impassively. “I believe you must realize why I have come.”

“No, I don’t. You’ll have to tell me.”

Spock left the office and stood, arms folded, before the quarantine unit. After a moment the doctor rose unwillingly and followed him.

“Dr. McCoy, the captain is dead.”

“That’s not what my machines say,” McCoy said sarcastically, and had a sudden flash of memory, of Jim Kirk laughing, asking, Bones, since when did you put any trust in machines?

“That is precisely what your machines say.”

McCoy’s shoulders slumped. “Spock, life is more than electrical signals. Maybe, somehow—”

“His brain is dead, Dr. McCoy.”

McCoy stiffened, unwilling to agree with what Spock was saying, however true he knew it to be. Somehow his alcohol-fogged consciousness insisted that as long as he believed Jim might recover, the possibility was as good as real.

“I was in his mind until the moment before his death,” Spock said. “Doctor, I felt him dying. Do you know how the web functions? Its tendrils coil along nerve fibers. When they tighten they sever the connections between brain cells. They cut the cells themselves.”

“I’ve studied military medicine, Spock. More than you. Even more than you.”

“The captain’s cerebrum has been crushed. There is no hope of recovery.”

“Spock—”

“The body that remains is a shell. It is no more alive than any anencephalic clone, waiting for its owner to butcher it for parts.”

McCoy flung himself around, swinging his first in a clumsy roundhouse punch.

“Damn you, Spock! Damn you, damn you—”

Spock grabbed his hand easily. McCoy kept on trying to hit him, flailing ineffectually against the science officer’s restraining strength.

“Dr. McCoy, you know that I am right.”

McCoy slumped, defeated.

“You cannot hold him any longer. You did your best to save him, but from the moment he was wounded he could not be saved. This failure holds no shame for you, unless you prolong a travesty of life. Let him go, doctor, I beg you. Let him go.”

The Vulcan spoke with penetrating intensity. McCoy looked up at him, and Spock pulled away, struggling to hide the powerful feelings of grief and despair that had come perilously close to overwhelming him.

“Yes, Mr. Spock,” McCoy said, “you are right.”

He opened the door of the quarantine chamber. Air sighed past him into the negative-pressure room, and he went inside. Spock followed. McCoy examined the EEG one last time, but he knew better than to hope for any change. The signal remained flat and colorless; all the tracings sounded the same dull tone.

McCoy brushed a lock of hair from Jim’s forehead. He could hardly bear to look at his friend’s face anymore, because of the eyes.

Precisely, deliberately, he went to work. Once he had made up his mind, his hands moved surely, unaffected by the liquor he had drunk. He withdrew the needles from Jim’s arm. The chemistry signals started changing their harmonies immediately. The oxygen tones fell, carbon dioxide rose; nothing filtered out the products of metabolic activity. The signal deteriorated from perfect harmony to minor chords, then to complete discord. McCoy removed the connections that would have restarted Jim’s heart when inevitably it failed. Finally, his teeth clenched hard, McCoy disconnected the respirator.

Jim Kirk’s heart kept on beating, because the heart will keep on beating even if it is cut out of the chest; the muscle will contract rhythmically till the individual cells fall out of sync, the heart slips into fibrillation, and the cells die one by one.