It had seemed so easy, before. If only she hadn't lost the billy…
You've got it now. It's right there on your leg. Helpher, for God's sake…
Breath caught in her throat.
You know what he does to her. You know. Help her…
She drew her knees to her chest and hugged them, but her shoulders wouldn't stop shaking. Her sobs sounded far too loud in the silver clearing.
From the shuttered, silent cabin there was no reaction at all.
Help her, you coward. You worthless piece of shit. Help her…
After a very long time she reached for her pack. Then she got to her feet and walked away.
Warhorse
For over a month Ken Lubin had been waiting to die. He'd never lived so fully as he had in that time.
Prevailing winds had carved the island's facets into intricate frescoes, full of spires and fossilized honeycomb. Gulls and cormorants roosted in alcoves of arched sandstone. There were no eggs to be had—evidently the birds didn't breed in autumn—but meat, at least, was plentiful. Fresh water was no problem; Lubin had only to slip into the ocean and awaken the desalinator in his chest. The diveskin was still functional, if a bit tattered. Its pores let distilled water past to sluice him clean, kept caustic salts at bay. While bathing he supplemented his diet with crustaceans and seaweeds. He was no biologist but his survival enhancements were cutting-edge; any natural toxin he couldn't taste, his employers had probably immunized him against.
He slept under a sky so full of stars they outblazed the light-haze leaking from the eastern horizon. The very wildlife glowed at night. He hadn't realized that at first; his eyecaps robbed him of darkness, turned night-time into colorless daylight. One night he'd grown tired of that relentless clarity, pulled the caps from his corneas, and seen dim blue light radiating from a colony of harbor seals on the shoreline below.
Most of the seals were festooned with tumors and abscesses. Lubin didn't know whether it was a natural condition or just another consequence of living too close to the effluent of the twenty-first century. He was pretty sure that sores weren't supposed to luminesce, though. These did. The growths oozed raw and red in daylight, but at night the ichor glowed like the photophores of deepwater fish. And more than the tumors; when the seals looked back at him, their very eyes shone sapphire.
A small part of Ken Lubin couldn't help but try and cobble together some sort of explanation: bioluminescent bacteria, freshly mutated. Lateral gene transfer from whatever microbes had lit St. Elmo's Fire, back before rampant ultraviolet had sent them packing. Molecules of luciferin, fluorescing with exposure to oxygen: that would account for the glow of open sores, the glow of eyes packed dense with capillaries.
A larger part of him simply marveled at the sheer absurdity of cancer made beautiful.
His body repaired itself faster than that of any normal man; tissues knitted and regrew almost like tumors themselves. Lubin gave thanks for cells forcibly overcrowded with mitochondria, for trimeric antibodies, for macrophage and lymphokine and fibroblast production cranked up to twice the mammalian norm. Sound returned to him within days, clear and beautiful at first, then fading as the proliferating cells of his eardrums—urged into overdrive by a dozen retroviral tweaks—just kept going. By the time they'd remembered to quit, Lubin's eardrums felt as though they'd been built of chipboard.
He didn't resent it. He could still hear, after a fashion, and even total deafness would have been a fair trade-off for a body made more resilient in other respects. Nature had even provided him with an example of the alternative, should he grow ungratefuclass="underline" a sea lion, an old bull, that showed up on the south end of the island about a week after Lubin himself came ashore. It was easily five times the size of the harbor seals that hauled out elsewhere, and it had led a life of greater violence; some recent battle had snapped its lower jaw off at the base. The jaw hung like a vicious swollen tongue, studded with teeth. Skin and muscle and ligaments were all that held it to the creature's head. Those tissues swelled and festered with each passing day; ruptures would open in the skin, ooze white and orange fluids, knit together again as utterly natural defenses struggled to seal the breach.
Three hundred kilograms of predator, doomed in the prime of life. Starvation or infection were its only options, and it didn't even have a choice over those. As far as Lubin knew, deliberate suicide was a strictly human endeavor.
Most of the time it just lay there, breathing. Every now and then the bull would return to the ocean for a few hours. Lubin wondered what it could possibly be doing there. Was it still trying to hunt? Didn't it know it was dead already, were its instincts so completely inflexible?
And yet, for some reason Lubin felt a sense of kinship with the dying animal. Sometimes both of them seemed to lose track of time. The sun steered cautiously around the island on its descent into the western sea, and two tired and broken creatures—watching each other with endless, fatalistic patience—barely noticed when night fell.
After a while he began to think he might live.
It had been a month, and his only obvious symptom had been intermittent diarrhea. He'd begun to find roundworms in his shit. Not a pleasant discovery, but not exactly life-threatening either. These days, some people even inflicted such infections on themselves deliberately. Something about exercising the immune response.
Perhaps his reinforced immune system had kept him free of whatever had scared the GA into hot-zone mode. Perhaps he'd simply been lucky. It was even remotely possible that his analysis of the whole situation was wrong. Thus far he'd been resigned to terminal exile, an uneasy balance between an instinct for survival and the belief that his employers wouldn't approve of Ken Lubin spreading infectious apocalypse throughout the world. But maybe there was no apocalypse, no infection. Maybe he was safe.
Maybe there was something else going on.
Maybe, he thought,I should find out what it is.
At night, looking east, he could sometimes see running lights twinkling near the horizon. The route they followed was predictable, as stereotypic as an animal pacing within a cage: kelp harvesters. Low-slung robots that mowed the ocean. No security to speak of, assuming you could get past those ventral rows of scissoring teeth. Vulnerable to any sufficiently motivated hitchhikers who might find themselves stranded over the Pacific conshelf.
Guilt Trip poked him half-heartedly in the belly. He was making assumptions, it whispered. One asymptomatic month hardly proved a clean bill of health. Countless maladies had longer incubation times.
And yet…
And yet there was no ironclad evidence of any infection here. There was only a mystery, and an assumption that those in control wanted him out of the picture. There'd been no orders, no directives. Lubin's gut could wonder at what his masters intended, but it could not know—and not knowing, it left him to his own decisions.
The first of these was a mercy killing.
He'd seen ribs emerging from the flanks as the sea lion wasted over time. He'd seen the fleshy hinge of the lower jaw seize up in tiny increments, swollen into position by massive infection and the chaotic regrowth of twisted bone. When he'd first laid eyes on the bull, its jaw had dangled. Now it merely protruded, stiff and immobile, from a twisted bole of gangrenous flesh. Lesions gaped along the body.
By now the old bull barely lifted its head from the shore; when it did, pain and exhaustion were evident in every movement. One dull milky eye watched Lubin approach from the landward side. There might have been recognition there, or merely indifference.