“It’s just a toss-away,” said Harlow. “Get a reset at the doctor’s office and start from scratch. Plus, you probably have a good malpractice lawsuit. Nobody gets pregnant nowadays.” He pushed away from Stella’s bed. “How about our lease? Are we committed to paying for the room until the end of the month, or do they prorate it?”
A muscle in the corner of Corey’s mouth twitched. Suddenly, she wanted to take a handful of his wavy hair and jerk it out by the roots. “I don’t know.” She moved next to the medical sensor. The device’s cool, smooth surface slid beneath her fingers. Stella’s heart beat quietly in the background.
“Lend me your pen,” he said. “I’ll sign these papers now.” He took it, then wrote on the documents, awkwardly across his knee. “There, she’s still alive, and I’ve taken care of this.” The pen clicked open and closed twice under his thumb. “The pen skips,” he said, flicking it into the trashcan as he left, where it clattered loudly.
The peace in the room after the door snapped shut lasted for only a second before the trashcan said to the pen, “Ahh, I knew you’d come back. They always come back.”
“The bastard,” said the pencil.
“Save me!” cried the pen.
Corey covered her face with her hands, “Oh, just shut up, all of you.” She leaned her backside against the medical sensor to keep from collapsing to the floor.
Several long sobs later, she shook her head as if she were trying to wake up, then wiped her hands hard on her pants legs. “I knew that would happen,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t care, Stella.”
Stella, or course, didn’t answer. Her lips were parted, her head, turned to one side; her eyelids, thin as parchment, didn’t move. She looked like the photograph of a woman rather than the woman herself. Corey sat in the chair next to the bed and touched the old woman’s fingers that dangled over the guard rail. No response, but Corey didn’t expect any. A few minutes later she realized Stella’s heartbeat wasn’t pinging from the medical sensor.
Silence consumed the room.
“Where’d you go?” said Corey, feeling so much like a ten-year-old that her adult voice surprised her.
Somewhere else, in a clattering chaos of shapes and sounds and rough currents, the question echoed. Stella heard it from a dozen directions, repeating and looping on itself until it became a refrain boiled down to “Go, go, go.” She reached out as best she could, but she had no hands to grab with. She could only follow, so she did. Drifting after the strongest sound, driving her forward, urging, “Go, go, go.” Stella didn’t know: was she lost or found? Was she still herself, or was she fragmenting, breaking into pieces in the sloppy overload of textures and odors? Still, she moved, because there was nothing else to do, and as she did, she thought she saw a place she recognized. Is this the afterlife? she thought. Is that my angel?
She tried so hard to see.
Corey let Stella’s cold fingers rest against her own. The room looked surreal to her in its stillness. The white cabinets. The refrigerator. The clean walls exactly the same as they’d been yesterday and the day before, but now as different as sleep from waking. She hesitated to move. It would break the spell. Stella would become just a dead and fading memory. For now, though, Stella’s touch was real. Corey stayed motionless, almost afraid to breathe, not really thinking. Then, she saw a tiny speck creeping along the baseboard beneath the bed, a beetle making its way across the room, and, soon, she heard a gentle scratching within the wall behind the cabinets, and she realized there must be a mouse there, fending for itself. She almost smiled at the thought when another movement caught her eye: the television mounted in the room’s corner had rotated slightly toward her.
Corey froze.
The television turned another half inch.
“Stella?” Corey said, almost choking on the sound. “Stella?”
The television’s speaker hissed.
Without willing herself to rise, Corey found herself under the television, straining to make out the breathy whisper. A voice murmured behind it. Corey said, “I can’t understand you, Stella.” Finally, a ghost of speech resolved itself into something almost audible. What it sounded like was, “I’m here, deary.” Then the hiss faded away.
“I’m still here,” said a louder voice.
Corey jumped. It was the pen.
“Leave him,” said the trashcan. “Mixed recyclable or not, when you’re done, you’re done.”
“No,” Corey said. She retrieved the pen from the trashcan’s bottom. “I need it to write a note.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said the pencil. “I don’t have another word in me, I’m afraid.”
Corey took a sheet of paper out of the desk and clicked the pen open. “Do you know a fancier phrase than ‘I am sorry?’”
The pen said, “I regret.”
“Or, ‘with regrets,’” suggested the pencil.
Corey wrote her note, thinking about frontier women riding west, their bellies full of babies, of little flesh quakes shaking within her. She thought of the pencil’s pathetic quest to stay alive. One, tiny, sentient voice among a million voices, like Stella’s voice somehow preserved in all the connections. The seat of her consciousness cut loose and free.
She thought of the tiny voice she hadn’t heard yet, like the speechless gray bird on the sidewalk, hopping from seed to seed.
LASHAWNDA AT THE END
We landed in steam. It billowed from where we touched down, then vanished into the dry, frigid air. From that first moment, the planet fascinated Lashawnda. She watched the landing tape over and over.
Lashawnda liked Papaver better than any of the rest us. She liked the gopher-rats that stood on their hind legs to look curiously until we got too close. She liked the smaller sun wavering in the not-quite-right blue sky, the lighter gravity, the blonde sand and gray rocks that reached to the horizon, but most of all, she liked the way the plants in the gullies leaned toward her when she walked through them, how the flat-leaved bushes turned toward her and stuck to her legs if she brushed against them. Wearing a full contamination suit despite the planet’s thin but perfectly breathable atmosphere didn’t bother her. Neither did the cold. By midday here on the equator the temperature might peak a few degrees above freezing, but the nights were incredibly chilly. Even Marvin and Beatitude’s ugly deaths the first days here didn’t affect her like it did everyone else. No, she was in heaven, cataloging the flora, wandering among the misshaped trees in the crooked ravines, coming up with names for each new species.
When we lost our water supply, and it looked like we might not last until the resupply ship came round, she was still happy.
Lashawnda was a research botanist; what else should I have expected? For me, a commercial applications biologist, Papaver represented a lifetime of work for teams of scientists, and I was only one guy. After less than two weeks on planet, I knew the best I got to do was to file a report that said, “Great possibilities for medicinal, scientific and industrial exploitation.” Every plant Lashawnda sent my way revealed a whole catalog of potential pharmaceuticals. The second wave of explorers would make all the money.
Lashawnda was dying, but was such a positive person that even in what she knew were her final days, she worked as if no deadly date was flapping its leaden wings toward her. That’s the problem in living with a technology that’s extended human life so welclass="underline" death is harder. It must have been easier when humans didn’t make it through their first century. People dropped dead left and right, so they couldn’t have feared it as much. It couldn’t have made them as mad as it made me. Her mortality clung to me like a pall, making everything dark and slow motion and sad.