Carbide Tipped Pens Page 16

  “As individuals? They shouldn’t have known at all. Not beforehand, with enough time to tamper with my tattoo. That’s a patient confidentiality issue. I prosecuted a case against them for that.”

  “Oh, that thing with the senator?”

  She nodded. “But they sent me flowers, so they definitely know now. I also ran into Heather Gannon’s personal assistant in the pharmacy queue yesterday after my appointment. I wasn’t trying to hide my arm from her, but they shouldn’t have known ahead of time.”

  “Yeah but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.” Sian scowled. “OK. So then, what’s the likelihood that they’re trying to get revenge?”

  Indira frowned. “Low. They’re not stupid. Why would they have done this deliberately? This is their chance to get my sympathy, or public trust—maybe I’d drop out due to conflict of interest, or maybe they’d start a new ad campaign: ‘Even Indira Chang has one.’ So, why would they be hurting me instead of using me? They’d have to think I’d be high profile about it, if my tattoo was faulty.”

  “You wouldn’t go to the media, though.”

  “But they can’t know that.”

  Her friend gave her a wry look, dropping her gaze to the cup in her hands as if looking for answers in it. “Maybe they want you to cry wolf and discredit yourself? If you turn up with a boatload of symptoms unrelated to what your tattoo’s even for, and you go public and it’s disbelieved…” She shrugged. “No. That doesn’t make sense, either. Your doctor has records, right?”

  “Yes. I considered that. There’s no way it would work. And look at how it’s happening. It’s too obvious. These complications are popping up rapid-fire, in the same order as the cases I prosecuted against them. There’s no way that these conditions, in this order, can be random.”

  “But why? It’s like they’re jumping up and down shouting at you that they’re doing something incredibly illegal and unethical and easy to prove against them. Why?”

  Indira sighed, an angry breath hissing out between her lips. “I don’t know yet. But I will.”

  * * *

  As promised, she was back at her doctor’s office when the door opened the next morning. And it went as she knew it would. Dr. Haskins went from stunned to appalled to visibly angry. “If you were anyone else,” she said, her stylus jerking angrily on the screen, “I wouldn’t be writing old-fashioned prescriptions. I’d be recommending you get the treatments added to your tattoo. These are exactly the sort of things the tats are for.” She shook her head. “Treating, I mean, not causing.”

  Armed with yet another prescription for a condition she shouldn’t have, and a tight line of medical glue sealing the cut at her knee, Indira marched into work. She took Dan with her into the DA’s office and shut the door.

  An hour later, they emerged. The look on Dan’s face sent the staff scattering as he stormed into his office.

  * * *

  Heather Gannon laced her perfectly manicured fingers together, setting her hands on the polished conference table like a still-life of innocence and diamonds. Lucy Perez sat beside her, the couple flanked by their lawyers. Lucy was sharp and professional and probably pretty. It wasn’t something you noticed when her wife was in the room.

  “Miss Chang, I can’t tell you how appalled we are to hear of your recent difficulties,” Heather said. “Horrified for you. We will, of course, do everything we can to help.”

  “I certainly appreciate your concern, Ms. Gannon, but I’m not here in an official capacity this time. I’m just an observer.”

  “Nevertheless, you have my deepest sympathy.”

  “Heartbroken, I’m sure,” Dan rumbled under his breath.

  Indira threw him a look, then turned back to Heather and Lucy with a smile that was only half plastic. “Shall we get back to business?”

  Dan cleared his throat and passed a notarized page across the table. “So. Regarding the settlement of People and Gregory Armstrong v. Gannon and Perez…”

  Later, as they filed out of the room, Indira noticed that Heather put her hand to the small of Lucy’s back, but Lucy picked up her pace and it fell away.

  * * *

  Indira was in conferences all day. Her leg was still sore but she tried not to think about it. It was late afternoon before she had a chance to go to the washroom. When she pulled up her pant leg, her stomach rebelled at the sight of a swollen field of deep purplish-blue that climbed her thigh like a malevolent stain. It seemed that sealing the little cut with surgical glue had been a mistake.

  She didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s sympathy or outrage, so she drove herself to the emergency room. You knew you had it bad, she thought, when the ER took you in right away and didn’t make you wait. She was soon ensconced on an uncomfortable hospital gurney, with an IV, an injection, an elevated leg, and the murmur of doctors beyond the thin shield of the curtain.

  The clotting agent wasn’t working—the med-tat just kept pumping out more anticoagulant, fighting off the IV fluids, the injection, and the prescription pills. The cut was still bleeding, but with nowhere for the blood to go, it had backed up and turned into an internal hemorrhage. Looking at her leg sickened her, so she kept the blankets pulled up. Whenever a doctor or nurse came to inspect it, she looked away.

  They couldn’t just turn the anticoagulant action off in the tattoo, the attending doctor explained, because they couldn’t find it; because it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. The theory was that equal-and-opposite doses would cancel each other out, but it wasn’t working. However much antidote they pumped into her, her engineered cells just produced that much more, creating a standoff of Cold War proportions under her skin. It felt like her leg might swell up like a balloon and explode at any moment, spilling red along the pilled surface of the hospital blanket.

  Indira passed the time watching the reddened leaf where the new coagulant had been implanted. It shifted and shimmered its fall colors in the light; as if blowing on it might make it fall off her arm entirely and float away. Maybe there was some nice medication in that IV bag, too.

  Dr. Haskins stopped by on her evening rounds, looked at the injury with a concerned frown she couldn’t completely conceal, and patted Indira’s hand. “I’ve ordered a procedure to install a drain and relieve some of the pressure in your leg. You’ll also need a transfusion to replace the blood you’re losing. Ordinarily, that would just be a temporary measure, and then we’d queue up your tattoo to start creating extra red blood cells, but in your case…”

  Indira smiled wanly. “Yeah. Old school all the way, please.”

  * * *

  Indira was out of surgery and sitting up in bed when Heather Gannon appeared from around the corner and rapped three times on the frame of the open door. Impeccable as ever in an ice-blue suit with a white collar, she walked in with a modest bouquet of wildflowers and a card. She set the flowers on the end of Indira’s bed. They rested awkwardly against her foot.

  “I want you to know I am sorry, Miss Chang,” she said.

  Indira frowned at her. “For what?”

  Heather hesitated. It was the first time Indira had ever seen her look uncomfortable or uncertain. “Have you ever been angry at someone and pinned their photograph to a dartboard, or written an angry letter you knew you’d never send?”

  “What are you talking about?” Indira whispered. Even through the lingering haze of sedatives and pain medication, she was afraid she knew.

  “When you won those cases against us, I was angry. We filed those clients’ serum away so that it couldn’t be used ever again, and—not out of real, personal malice, you must believe me—I … I keyed them to your name. Just to relieve the anger, you understand.” The unflappable calm Indira had always admired and hated about the woman was tainted with a restless agitation that made it hard to see Heather Gannon in this woman at her bedside.

  “Wait. You were mad at me, so you … what, put my name on defective vials, for spite?” Fear fluttered behind Indira’s haze of me
dication and disbelief.

  Heather’s voice was crisp and clinical, and it trembled. She didn’t meet Indira’s eyes. “No one ever thought you’d get a med-tat. And when you did … The system is automated. It pulled everything with your name on it before I even knew you’d come to us. I know you won’t believe me, but we—I—didn’t do this to you on purpose. If I’d known this could happen, if I had any inkling, I’d have deleted it out at once.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Indira rasped, her voice thin with horror. “You think I won’t go after you for this?”

  Heather shook her head with a sad sigh. “I’m sure you would.”

  “Then—”

  Indira’s throat started to itch and the familiar shot of adrenaline hit her bloodstream like a kick in the head. Her heart thundered in her chest, her vision going red around the edges. Pain lanced through her head. She lifted a shaking hand to her nose and blood dripped into her palm, another droplet trickling down her lip. Clumsy with panic and too much adrenaline, she grasped for the call button to summon help, but a second rush hit and overwhelmed her. The adrenaline feedback loop, of course, and Indira realized that Heather knew it, too—she’d programmed it herself, into a tattoo she never expected Indira to get. Hit after hit of epinephrine flooded her system without regulation. She gasped for air, in great big gulps that weren’t enough. Her monitors started beeping insistently. Pulse and BP were erratic. She couldn’t catch her breath.

  “You…”

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Chang. Really I am.” She took Indira’s hand, and Indira was too weak to pull away. Disoriented, she thought she caught a whiff of the flowers at the end of the bed. Or perfume.

  “I heard you’d gotten the tattoo,” Heather continued, speaking a bit more quickly, as if she was trying to get her confession out before it was too late. “And I was frightened. I sent flowers. I arranged to have others keep an eye on you, to tell myself it had all gone OK, but I realized quickly enough that it hadn’t. I wanted to warn you earlier, but Lucy wouldn’t let me. It’s our company, you see? We started it together while we were still in med school. Before we were married, even. It’s us. It would kill her to see it brought down.”

  Indira lifted her head, studying Heather Gannon through blurred, pounding vision. Instead of ringing the call button for help, or asking what she could do for Indira, Heather’s priority was the unburdening of her own soul. It more than canceled out any sympathy Indira might have otherwise tried to summon for her.

  The world was going soft around the edges, the sounds muted and far away. Indira was vaguely aware of an ache in her chest, and barely noticed when her telemetry monitors started beeping wildly. Heather straightened, brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt with a last look at Indira that might have been compassion. Or pity. “Help! Someone!” she called into the corridor, with believable panic in her voice. The echo of her heels clicking down the hall receded in perfect meter with Indira’s too-rapid heartbeat, until neither could be heard anymore.

  LADY WITH FOX

  Gregory Benford

  * * *

  Michelangelo reputedly said that the raw slab of marble contains the statue within it, and it is the sculptor’s task to chip away at the stone until the statue inherent inside is finally revealed.

  Gregory Benford is a practicing research scientist, an astrophysicist, to be precise. And one of the most talented and insightful writers in the field of science fiction.

  In “Lady with Fox” Benford examines some of the possibilities of future research into human cognition: how this two-pound lump of cells in our craniums directs everything our bodies do, from drawing breath to writing equations.

  More than that, “Lady with Fox” is an exercise in minimalism, in chipping away more of the excess marble than most writers dare to try to do. With a rare economy of words, Benford brings before our minds’ eyes a world that is similar, yet different, from our own.

  What is not different is that, despite great gains in knowledge of how the brain works, we are still governed by our emotions.

  Which is why we can enjoy stories such as “Lady with Fox.”

  * * *

  There was an interesting new lady in town, I heard, somehow associated with the Biopolis crowd. She was said to be a “konn natural” as SanJi put it and to have some kind of spiff new pet.

  I put the stories out of my mind, since I had plenty of work to do. Konning was a hot topic because it was a pathway between minds when two people “konn-ected,” as the lingo went, using the new neural interface technology while sleeping. It gave new meaning to the old cliché of sleeping together.

  But then I saw her in the orchid garden, sitting on a far bench while listening to the horticulture lecture at a distance. Not a young woman, with a jawline and sharp nose like a sketch of a face seen from the side. She wore a sleek green dress that fit into the park perfectly, offset by all the orchids in their rich wealth of color around her. She sat quietly and her silver-outlined, turquoise earrings set off the curving grace of her neck. It was the kind of jewelry people buy during their vacations at AmerIndian reservations because that’s what you do, and then never wear, but the turquoise looked fine on her.

  I watched her sit there and pay close attention to the lecture, held in the open air for the public. It was about establishing standards on how much gene tinkering a proper orchid farmer could use. There were laws about that but they were not working, and the lecturer didn’t like that.

  Something stirred at her feet and I saw a small furry thing that sat looking intently at the lecturer, too, as if the mutated canine could follow it. Maybe it could, somehow; there was a lot of uplifting going on, most of it not within the law.

  SanJi had said she had a kind of depth in the konn but nothing more than that. It was the kind of thing hard to describe, SanJi said. I had heard that he was somehow involved with the woman. I saw she had a muscular grace as she rose, applauding politely at the end of the lecture. She turned away, not waiting for the question period, and I saw the canine was a bright maroon fox. She held it on a leash and it danced around showing a lot of white in its bright animated eyes.

  The clean, sure bone structure of her face showed well as she turned into the sun and sailed off with the cute foxy thing at her heels. It kept looking up at her as if to see if she was still there.

  I did nothing then because I like to take my time. I went about my usual research on neurological networks and at parties heard more about her being good at konn, unusually receptive. Konn was poorly understood but much discussed. Gossip is, in my experience, fast talk about what you don’t understand but want to. It is no deeper than that. Primate stuff, relieving mental pressures.

  No one knew where she was from or where she lived. She showed up at Institute talks and took notes but never asked a question. Some of the postdocs said she was in a subject trial with high constraints but nobody actually knew.

  I did recall though that just before she left the orchid garden she had turned and looked back at me, to see if I was still there and watching her.

  * * *

  She appeared in the cafés frequented by the biotech types eagerly in the land rush frenzy now running strong. Times were getting wild. Singapore had made so much from being the middle man for petro-chem industries, there was money galore to spare for research. And the elites in America and Asia weren’t getting any younger.

  There were real advancements in understanding human mortality, how it came from trade-offs evolution made between young success and reproduction versus older bad side effects that eventually killed you. It was all about how a species can’t pass on useful changes in the genes beyond the age of reproduction. Or for social species like humans, birthing ability plus some rearing time from uncles and aunts and so on.

  That antagonism of early birthing led to the unique human condition. We know we will die and watch as evolution gives us countless ways to make it happen.

  I worked on the neural side of this. I saw
the lady and her fox in the cafés with people I knew slightly. They seemed to hang on her every glance. There was a big Greek who sold carbon sequestration schemes and he was always at her side when she chose to let him. She avoided crowds and worked the men especially. There was always some man to take her to dinner, I noted.

  I ate out usually as I was single and between significant women as well. It was easy to stay in the Biopolis biotech community and not have to go through the difficulties of living in an Asian culture you didn’t understand. In this way I was lazy. I saw the Greek man and occasionally a couple with her at dinner. There was often another man hanging around, within view and trying to catch her eye. That didn’t work.

  I had something of the impulse those others did. When she sat alone except for the fox in an open-air café, usually with a mocha coffee confection in her glass, I would walk by her table. She kept her eyes on her coffee and her fox, which scampered around yipping whenever he was in the spotlight of her attention.

  If she had arched an eyebrow I would have stopped and said something but she did not.

  * * *

  I was having trouble with new ideas for my research agenda. My collaborators, assistants, and lab techs all worked well together, but the animating ideas for our mapping agenda had to come largely from me.

  I used a method to stimulate contact with my own wellspring of ideas. Every evening I reviewed my problems and promising avenues just before falling asleep. Upon waking I kept my eyes closed and recalled those thoughts. Perhaps a third of the time a notion would be there. They came like odd glancing flashes—a word, a glimpsed connection, sometimes an entire logical scheme.

  For free. All done by my unconscious. Most of what we are comes from that shadowy realm. Evolution has made us so that we cannot see where and how such work gets done. Which makes it more alluring.