“I’d rather you didn’t disturb Jackson,” Vicki said sweetly from the doorway of Jackson’s bedroom.
Cazie turned slowly. Her honey-colored skin paled, making the flecks in her eyes more brilliantly green.
“Jackson needs his sleep.” Vicki continued in that same voice of sweet reason. “So it might be better if you left now.”
Cazie had recovered herself, always a dangerous mood. “I don’t think so… Diana, isn’t it? Or Victoria? True, Jack looks pretty well done in—you must have given him quite a workout. I’m sure he enjoyed it. But we have grown-up items to discuss now, so if you’ve already been paid, the building system can call you a go-’bot. Now, Jack, if you like, I’ll wait in your study while you shower.”
Vicki only smiled.
Suddenly Jackson was sick of them both. He heaved himself off the bed. “Don’t be so stupid, Cazie. Theresa is sick. I don’t have time to think about Kelvin-Castner until she’s out of danger.”
Cazie’s face changed. “Sick? Seriously? With what? Jackson, a Change syringe—”
“Not this time. It’s radiation sickness.” He pushed past her and strode to Theresa’s room. Cazie ran after him.
His sister lay quietly asleep; no change in her monitor readings. Cazie saw Theresa and gasped. “What… Jack!”
“She was in range of the nuclear explosion that took out La Solana.” By now it must be on all the newsgrids. Cazie always watched newsgrids.
“Tess? Went to New Mexico? That’s impossible!”
“I would have said so.”
“Oh, my God, Jack… I’ll stay here and help you nurse her.”
This was Cazie at her most genuine, Cazie at her most lovable. She gazed at Theresa with affection and pain. Jackson said, “Vicki’s nursing her just fine,” and was immediately too wretched to relish his own cruelty.
“All right,” Cazie said humbly. She laid one tentative hand on the very edge of Theresa’s bed.
Jackson closed his eyes. “Tell me what you want to do about Kelvin-Castner.”
“It can wait,” Cazie said in a low voice.
“No, it can’t. And there’s nothing I can do for Theresa this minute anyway. Tell me.”
“If you… all right. I want to commit five hundred million dollars initially, more on a rolling schedule with go/ no-go achievement targets. I sent you the proposed target schedule. We own fifteen percent of gross profits on this project only, with roughly standard liabilities and exposure. The ROI and long-term interlocks—”
“No, not those things. Don’t tell me those things. What is K-C going to do?”
“Race to get a patentable delivery molecule based on the Liver tissue samples and brain alterations. The first computer models are already running. There are hundreds of possibilities to check on, of course, maybe thousands. But if we get the patentable model, we can use it as the basis of an incredible number of Cleaner-resistant pharmaceuticals. The preliminary applications team has already started brainstorming.”
Cleaner-resistant. Jackson had never heard the term before. Maybe the “preliminary applications team” had just brainstormed it.
He took a last look at Theresa’s readings and then led Cazie out of Theresa’s room. The nursing ’bot floated closer to the bed.
In the hallway, Jackson said, “I’ll vote to invest the funding, and commit Theresa’s votes, too, on one condition. The first line of research—the first, Cazie, with majority allocation of talent and resources—goes to a counteragent for the original neuropharm that affected the Livers. A reverser that will restore their cerebral biochemistry to previous functioning. Without the stranger anxiety and the inhibition toward novelty and all the fucking fear. Is that agreed?”
Cazie hesitated only a moment. “Agreed.”
“You can get Alex Castner to agree?”
“Yes.” She sounded confident. Jackson wondered suddenly if she was sleeping with Castner. Or with Thurmond Rogers.
He said, “Get it in a contract and send it to me. And I’ll want constant recorded progress reports on the counteragent, plus lab records.”
“No problem.”
“And put in the contract that I’m officially informed the very minute there’s any breakthroughs, of any significant kind at all, on any aspect of the entire project.”
“You got it. The contract will be at your apartment tomorrow morning. We can record the voting commitment right now. Yours in person, Theresa’s by proxy. But, Jack—” Her voice trembled. “How bad is Tessie? Will she… will she…”
“She won’t die.” Jackson looked at Cazie. Her eyes, raised to his from her shorter height, filled with sudden tears. “Tess will recover. It’ll take a long time, but she’ll recover.”
“Long term…?”
“Long term, she’s going to have to take the Change syringe. It’s the only thing that’ll keep her from eventual cancers.”
“But there aren’t any more syringes. Unless you—”
“Of course I have one for Theresa. In my father’s private safe. I’ve always kept one for Theresa.”
Cazie’s face showed sudden understanding. Of what it had cost him as a doctor to do that, as the public health crisis grew—to watch babies dying and know he could save one more of them. She stepped forward and put her arms around him, and he let her. Her full breasts were soft against his chest. The top of her head fit familiarly under his chin. He was so tired.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Vicki disappear around the corner of the hallway.
Theresa developed oozing sores over her skull, face, and body. Her tissues swelled until, if she hadn’t been on heavy painkillers, the pressure of the soft bed would have been agony. Her firm small breasts turned into ulcerated bags with cracked and bleeding nipples.
She couldn’t talk. Her mouth, her tongue, her gums, became as much a mass of ulcers as her radiation-burned body. Sometimes, rising briefly to consciousness, she tried to mumble around the endotracheal tube. Her swollen eyes looked urgently into Jackson’s. “Ennh… de-de-” He always sedated her. He couldn’t stand it.
“Patient’s progress within normal limits,” the nursing ’bot said pleasantly several times a day. “Do you wish for detailed readings?”
“For God’s sake, Jackson, get some sleep,” Vicki said, equally often. “You look like something Miranda Sharifi’s lab team threw away.”
“M-M-M-M… de… de,” Theresa tried. He increased the sedative.
Twice a day, as per contract, lab records arrived from Kelvin-Castner, reams of raw data. Jackson read only the summaries, hastily spoken by Thurmond Rogers. “Jack, we’ve developed computer models of the most likely protein foldings for the initial molecule, based on most-probable receptor-site responses. Unfortunately, there are six hundred forty-three level-A possible foldings, so the testing is going to take some time and we thought of—”
“That’s enough, Caroline,” Jackson told his system. “File the reports by date, speaker, and… whatever else fits best-retrieval protocol.” And leave me alone.
“Yes, Dr. Aranow,” Caroline said.
“Jack, how is Tess?” Cazie’s image said daily, more than daily, he didn’t know how often because he never linked with her calls. Once he heard Cazie’s voice in another room, talking with Vicki. With Vicki? Conflict, sparring, dueling? He didn’t go in.
Theresa lost flesh she couldn’t afford to lose. Her already thin body grew skeletal, arms and legs like wire clothes hangers, knees and elbows chisel-sharp. Her sores oozed and wept.