By Other Means Read online

  “El, there’s something else.”

  Reuben’s tone had changed, seemed to have become even younger, and more uncertain, somehow. She looked back up at him.

  “Please, El; don’t stare at the kids. Not so much, or so long. It makes them—well, uncomfortable.”

  El looked away, felt her chest tighten, immediately forced that to stop—because if she didn’t, she feared she might cry. “I can’t help it, Reuben; they should’ve been mine.”

  “I know. But the youngest is five and...well, you scare them.”

  She wanted to ask: scare them? Why? But she knew: of course she scared them. Her face was framed by the strange and shocking streaks of silver grey hair that the first set of transient ischemic attacks had left behind. Since then, she had started hobbling along unevenly with the aid of a cane. There was an ever-altering array of intermittent facial and body tics. And of course, there was her riveted attention upon them whenever they came into view, yearning after what she had lost, and now could never have again. She lowered her head. “I’ll stay away.”

  Reuben almost whined his objection. “Look: you don’t have to stay away.”

  “Yes. I do. If I’m there, I’ll slip into fixating on them. Never had kids of my own, you know.” It had been an utterly meaningless addition: of course Reuben knew that.

  And the tone of his response indicated that he understood the statement for what it was: an unintentional plea for sympathy and understanding. “Yes, El— I know.” The silence that followed was not at all comfortable. “So, um...so maybe I should start explaining what’s in the package?”

  “Might as well,” Elnessa said, looking up. And what she saw made her smile.

  Reuben followed her steady stare over his own shoulder. The little boy with quiet eyes and shiny black hair was only two meters behind him. Waiting.

  “Hi,” Reuben said with a quick smile.

  “Hi,” the boy answered without looking at Reuben.

  He started to rise: “Waiting for me? I’ll be there in a—”

  “No, I’m waiting for her.”

  “Her?”

  Elnessa felt a hot pulse of annoyance: You don’t need to sound surprised that someone might actually want to talk to me, Reuben.

  Who asked the child, “Why her?”

  Oh, you’re just flattering me no end, now, Mr. Suave.

  Elnessa could see the boy laboring—mightily—to keep his face blank. Why? To conceal his dismay, possibly disgust, at Reuben’s thoughtlessly rude inquiry? “I’d like to talk to her. If you don’t mind.”

  “Well, she and I—”

  Elnessa jumped in. “We can finish this later, Reuben. Come by about 7, okay?”

  “Uh, yeah...7 o’clock. In private is better, anyway—for what we have to discuss, I mean.”

  Elnessa nodded tightly, amazed that Reuben’s idiot, injudicious utterances had not already undone him and the rest of the unofficial union.

  The boy with the big, watching eyes moved into the space Reuben vacated. “Hi,” he said again.

  “Hi,” Elnessa replied. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Vas.”

  “‘Vas?’”

  He smiled a little. “It’s short for Srinivasan. But most people can’t say that too well. Anyhow, I like Vas better. What’s your name?”

  “I’m El.”

  He cocked his head. “Just ‘El?’”

  “Well, my real name is ‘Elnessa’—but people have a hard time remembering that, too. They keep calling me Elaine or Ellen or Elise...or Bob.”

  Vas stared, then laughed. “You’re funny.”

  “I’m glad you think so, Vas. And I’m very glad to meet you.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, too. I’ve been wondering: what do you do? I mean, for a living?”

  “Well, I started out as an artist—but that was back before I came to settle in the Indis.”

  “‘But aren’t you still an artist—at least some of the time?”

  Elnessa started: “Why do you ask?”

  Vas looked down at her hands and pointed. “They’re stained a lot, almost every time I see you—or caked with dirt or clay, I can’t tell which. And you look at things very carefully, for a long time. Like you’re measuring them—or feeling them—with your eyes.”

  Clever boy: he sees far more than he mentions. He could teach Reuben a thing or two. Elnessa smiled. “You look at things a long time, too. I’ve noticed.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just because I’m really careful: I have to be.” Before Elnessa could ask him why he needed to be careful, Vas had pressed on: “What kind of artist are you?”

  “I used to create all sorts of art—still did some pieces on the side when I first arrived on Kitts. Old style paintings, 3-D compgens, I even dabbled a little in holos.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged and looked down at her body. “A xenovirus.”

  “You mean a disease that was already here?”

  “Well, sort of. Not really a disease. It’s just that...well, most of the life on this planet—er, ‘moon’—just ignores life from Earth because it’s too dissimilar. Even though the life here is built from the same basic stuff—”

  Vas nodded. “Carbon. Water.”

  “—yes.” Damn, he’s sharp. “But sometimes, the local microbes go after our cells, anyway. Or sometimes, the weaker unicellar organisms from Kitts decide to use our bodies as hiding places from the stronger ones that eat them. It’s bad enough when those ‘hiding’ microorganisms build up in our system, but sometimes, while doing so, they block—or consume—the parts of us that they can make use of. And that’s not good for us.”

  Vas nodded solemnly. “Your xenovirus blocks parts of your nervous system, doesn’t it?”

  He is very, very sharp indeed. “How did you know that?”

  Vas shrugged. “Because you don’t act sick so much as—well, just not able to control yourself as well as other people. And if the microbes were really, uh, ‘consuming,’ your nerves, I just kind of guessed that you wouldn’t still...well, still be alive.”

  And how right all your guesses are, my bright little Srinivasan. Despite the concise recitation of her medical woes, Elnessa only felt joy when she was looking into the warm brown eyes of this child. “You know, Vas, I’ll bet you could be a doctor someday.”

  He shrugged, looked away, then back at her. “Will we get it too?” Seeing her momentary incomprehension, Vas added, “The disease, I mean.”

  She had been slow to understand his question because she assumed that everyone—even kids—were informed upon arrival that, thanks to the new preplanetfall vaccinations and six-month boosters, there hadn’t been any infections since the first wave of settlers. “No,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “You’re safe. It only got the first of us who settled here—and then, only some of us.”

  “Why did it only get some of you? And how did they cure it?”

  Elnessa took care to compose herself before she answered. “Well, you see, Vas, when the Indi Group got permission to settle Kitts, they started with a really diverse group of people. At first, it just seemed that they were taking whoever was willing to come here, probably because they couldn’t be picky. But it turned out that the ‘mix’ was actually a group made up of an equal number of persons from every major human genotype. When we asked why they had done that, the company explained that they wanted to create a truly ‘blended’ colony. We still thought they were just trying to make up a nice-sounding story, to cover up the fact that they were willing to sign on anyone. But in a very real sense, they were building a carefully mixed community—but not because they were trying to create social diversity.” She watched to see if Vas had understood all the terms she had used: his brows remained unfurrowed, signifying absolute surety of comprehension.

  Elnessa went on. “In fact, Vas, we were guinea pigs—and they had to have a reasonable sample size of every strain and subspecies of us guinea pigs.”

 
Now a frown bent Vas’ brow. “I don’t understand.”

  Elnessa had her mouth open to explain and then halted: he’s only a kid, El, even if he is a very, very smart one. Kids worry, have nightmares—particularly if you say something that makes them realize that the world is less safe than they think it is. I really don’t have the right—

  “Look,” Vas said very matter-of-factly, his eyes still calm but also resolute, “I grew up on Hard Nut, in the Lacaille 8760 system. Life is—hard—there. I lost my Mom, then my Dad, and my Tito Thabo, all in the last few years. So whatever they did, you can tell me. I can take it.”

  Elnessa blinked, then sighed and folded her hands. “Vas, the Indi Group wanted to discover if any given genotype of homo sapiens had a particular advantage or disadvantage in this environment. Not that there’s any evidence for it. But that’s the way they think: racial ‘groups’ have unique diseases; ethnic groups can carry ‘predominant genetic patterns’ for certain developmental abnormalities. So they decided it would be best to test people from each genetic hiring pool to see if any of them had special advantages or challenges in Kitts’ biosphere.”

  “And was there any difference between the groups?”

  “No. And when other megacorporations have run the same tests in other biospheres, they never find any differences there, either. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t biological dangers: here on Kitts, as elsewhere, it turned out that the local xenobugs were all equal-opportunity pathogens.”

  “ ‘Equal opportunity?’”

  “Yes. That’s just a silly way of saying that the nasty xenobugs didn’t care about our race, or color, or sex. And I was one of the twenty-four colonists that the xenovirus decided to infest—after the first xenobiot surveys declared the biosphere ‘safe,’ that is.”

  “So how did the surveys miss detecting these, uh...these xenobugs?”

  “Oh, Vas, to be fair, the real question should be, ‘how could the surveys be expected to find the bugs? Computer modeling, lab-testing on human-equivalents: those tools are crude and imperfect. And biosensors? A sensor only knows to look for something that has been identified for it already. The sad truth, Vas, is that you don’t really get a good, reliable assessment of what will happen to a human body in a new biosphere until a couple of hundred of those bodies have lived—and breathed—there for a while.”

  She tapped her chest. “So we were the canaries in this coal mine. And those of us who became sick were immediately sequestered for study—which is how they learned which genetic markers put humans at highest risk, and then, which vaccines or prophylaxes offered the best protection. And after that, my real ‘work’ here was done.”

  “But you still work.”

  “Oh, they give me make-work because it was part of my agreement. I can work as long as I like, and they’ll provide for me; that’s what they promised. But if I leave my employment here, I can’t afford the shift-ticket to another system. And they’ll also stop giving me the experimental xenoviral suppression cocktails, which are what have probably kept me alive this long. Since each new concoction eventually loses its efficacy, they’ve been willing to keep me around as a guinea pig, because I’m still a useful ‘research platform.’ But once they feel they’ve taken that research as far as they need to—”

  “I thought you said they made a commitment to provide for you as long as you were their employee. Doesn’t that include medical care?”

  “Yes, but ‘medical care’ does not mean that they have to keep a dead-end research program active just to give me the chance to live another year, and then another, and then another. If they stop, then they’ll be responsible for providing for my minimum needs. Until I no longer need anything at all.”

  As she ended her description, Elnessa was looking down at Vas, who was looking up at her with that same quiet, attentive expression that had been on his face the first time she saw him. But now there was the hint of some emotional battle going on behind it. It almost looked as if he might cry—

  —but then Vas leaned toward El and caught her in a firm, unyielding hug. El looked down at his crown of shiny hair, and then put her arms gently, carefully, around him.

  Elnessa resisted the urge to close her eyes as Wehns Shoniber, the big Micronesian leader of Simovic’s personal security detail, started rummaging about in her “road kit”: a carpenter’s tool box converted into an artist’s traveling studio.

  “Hey, El,” Wehns wondered, still staring down into the battered red box, “what’s this?”

  “Battery,” Elnessa said, trying very hard to keep her response from becoming a sharp, anxious chirp.

  “El, you know I can’t let you take that in.”

  “Well, then how am I going to power the lights in the high-relief panels?” she replied. “I got Mr. Simovic’s permission—before I started the project—that some of it could be illuminated.”

  “Well, I’m sure you did, El—but he didn’t authorize an independent power source. I’m sure of that: security protocols, you know.”

  El shrugged as if only mildly disturbed, thought: oh, I know, Wehns, I know. In fact, this was exactly what I was afraid would happen—as I told Reuben last night.

  Wehns continued riffling through the rest of her gear—inspecting each of the picks, carvers, and files, staring uncomprehending at an impress set for creating intaglio patterns—and asked, as he did every day, “Anything toxic, explosive, flammable, dangerous?”

  “Not unless you’re allergic to clay or acrylics.”

  Wehns smiled, scratched one of the clay bricks with a fingernail. “Sorry; gotta ask.”

  “Why? Can’t the big, bad megacorporation afford a couple of chemical sniffers?”

  “No, not yet. But it’s just a matter of time, now that the big wigs are here to stay.”

  “‘Big wigs?’”

  “Sure,” Wehns nodded. Then in a lower voice, so his assistants couldn’t hear. “You know: Simovic and Hoon. He’s got an insane amount of autonomy—which came over with him when he promoted up out of the Colonial Development Corporation into his post here.”

  “And Hoon?”

  Wehns’ face went blank. “She’s as cutthroat as they come. Jumped from field rep to junior director in only six years.”

  “Don’t like her much?”

  “Don’t much care. She doesn’t notice me; I’m just muscle. And frankly, that’s the way I like it. Don’t want to be noticed; just want to do my job.”

  Elnessa looked down at Wehns’ broad back as he neared the completion of his daily search through her kit. Amiable Wehns Shoniber was proof that you couldn’t hate all the people who worked for a megacorporation: it was not the homogeneous conclave of demons and sociopaths that the worst anti-corporate radicals tried to claim. In reality, there were just a few of those truly misanthropic monsters—but most of them were in charge, leading a vast organization of average folks who only wanted to work, get ahead, and not worry too much in the process. She sighed: for evil to triumph, all that’s needed is for good men to stand by and do nothing. Or for people to be too lazy to care.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Wehns had produced something that looked like the guts of a remote-control handset.

  “IR receiver—so you can operate the frieze’s lights by remote control, from anywhere in the room.”

  “Aw, El,” Wehns muttered, shaking his head in regret, “I’m sorry, but that one’s off-limits, too.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because some nut-job might try to use it as a remote receiver for—something else. Or as a timer, because they all have internal time-chips.”

  Elnessa quirked an eyebrow. “A remote receiver or timer for what?”

  Wehns looked abashed. “You know. Something—dangerous.”

  “You mean, like a piece of art?” Elnessa didn’t think she’d be able to shame Wehns into looking the other way on this violation, but it was worth a try.

  If Wehns blushed, she couldn’t tell: his tropic-dark skin hid all su
ch emotional responses. But his voice sounded regretful, apologetic. “El, look, you’re okay— everyone knows that—”

  Because I’m a nice little cripple lady; yeah, sure...

  “—but rules are rules. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to hold these for you. You can get them back when you leave today.” And with a nod that punctuated the end of both his search and their discussion, Wehns carried the offending items away to his secure lock-box. As he withdrew, he caught the eye of his senior assistant and tilted his head toward Simovic’s office. The assistant turned, and with a smile that as was much a part of his equipment as his outdated taser, motioned that Elnessa was free to go into Simovic’s sanctum sanctorum.

  With a sigh, she followed his gesture and dragged her battered red box into the expansive Bauhaus-meets-Rococo-gauche opulence in which Simovic held court, limping as she went. With the power-supply and timer/actuator gone, Reuben’s plan for sending a loud—and destructive—after-hours message to their megacorporate masters was pretty much busted before it had begun. She began hobbling toward the raised walkway that ran the length of the frieze. Behind her, the door detail resumed their argument whether, it being New Year’s Day, 2120, that this year was the last of the ‘Teens’ decade, or the first of the Twenties.

  “Ms. Clare.” It was Simovic. Whom she had no desire to talk to. Or look at. Or share a common species with. And besides, she was supposed to be hard of hearing. So, without giving any sign that she had heard, Elnessa continued to make her slow, painful progress toward the work-ramp.

  Simovic’s voice was louder—so much louder, that she would have had to have been stone deaf to miss it. “Ms. Clare!”

  She turned, with what she hoped was a look of surprise and ingratiating eagerness: “Yes, Mr. Simovic?”

  “Your project—how is it coming?”

  “Should be finished tomorrow, Mr. Simovic. Although I hardly think of it as ‘my project.’”

  “Oh? Why not?”