FIFTEEN
LITHE WITH LUCID EYES
C
EEBORN SQUEEZED HIMSELF up from an underground tunnel, slid aside a grate in the flooring above, and arrived into a new, wondrous world of light. The open world ahead was as different from where he came as water was from fire, and that was all built on hope. He pushed himself up from his belly to his knees and with the warmth of the tunnel air blowing up from behind, he rose to his feet on the ground. The farther he looked into the expanse of the wide valley that lay beneath a flattened sky, the more the details of his new world filled in. The ground was solid. He was anxious to explore. He was free.
He opened the gate around his tunnel exit and forged ahead into a garden of organic wonder. Ahead was the most extraordinary floral arrangement he had ever seen. A single yellow orchid pointed the way to a rainbow of life that grew across a holly-arched bridge. He bent down and sneaked across the bridge. He ran atop the round cobblestone tiles that led toward hedges of sweet-smelling lilac. Two bushes of red berries spiraled out from the path. He knelt and breathed the air. The great blue sky above stretched from one side of the valley to the other, its light diffused as if from a long fluorescent tube that ran down the length of the valley into the distance. There were no discernible shadows, but the sun definitely shone on this side of the world.
A small, blue-gray bird was startled out from an overhung branch and fell to the cobblestones. Its beak and legs were blue. It had trouble tucking its wings to its sides and a blackish “M” spread across its back from wingtip to wingtip.
Ceeborn was exposed in the open air garden, but there was no one around to see. He approached the bird as it struggled and hopped. It fluttered up into a whisk of air, then twisted and fell only a short distance ahead in a whitewashed adobe village.
But from far behind, the clatter of claw nails on stone grew louder as the rustle of a patrol broke the peace of the garden. Ceeborn knew exactly what the sounds meant. Though not one of his pursuers rose in height above the top of the shrubs, there were six sets of nails converging into a line and heading his way, relentlessly, like warrior ants, always scouting, tracking a lead. The robotic, networked patrols had caught up; they were Chokebots, and he was a threat to the security of their grid, a radical change that had entered their world.
The sound of children’s laughter filled the air from ahead in the village. It came from a school, a single story adobe on a low promontory hill. The school’s playground at its front was squared off and enclosed by a chest-high wall.
He ran up to the wall and peered through the bars of the gated front arch. The children on the swings were off in the front left corner, laughing and pulling their elbows front-wise through the chains of their swings, kicking through the ends of their arcs, and launching themselves high into the air. They landed back to the ground in a thud, and then returned for another go round.
But Meg was there, too, sitting beyond them in the far rear left corner. She was near Ceeborn in age, but alone on her own bench and lost in thought. She slouched with her back against an empty table. Her chin was seated into her palm, her elbow sunk deep in her waist. She circled the toe of her shoe into a swirl on the dirt.
The blue-gray bird hopped onto the raised end of a seesaw, clenched its feet onto worn splinters of wood, and rustled its wings. Meg searched a hand into her small bag on the table. She stepped forward, palm up, and offered it a crumb from her lightly pecked oddments of a lunch.
The bird took off in flight and landed on the front edge of the school’s flat roof beneath a vibrant blue sky. Clouds stretched and drifted from one end of the long valley to the other.
Meg’s glance came back down to the front of the yard, the gate, and the children oblivious in play. She sidestepped toward her side of the wall, and with a quick climb up, hopped over.
Ceeborn let go of the bars and ran along the front of the wall. By the time he turned its corner, Meg was already far ahead and moving fast toward the adobe brick village. She slipped through a green frond curtain and was gone.
He glanced back at the spiral garden and heard the Chokebot’s search pattern, the clatter of their claw nails on stone. His choice was easy. He ran after Meg and pushed his way through the sway of the green frond curtain.
Meg skipped into a hunched-over run through an alley. She passed through a courtyard of rounded cages, but no animals had been denned in there yet. “Wait up,” he called, but she didn’t turn back. She was tireless.
She leapt onto a wooden boardwalk that ran over fallen branches and tangled roots covered with moss. The boardwalk itself was darkened from the saturation of water, its handrails dripping with sweat. The path led to a grandiose cage twice the height of the school. She bunched aside the vertical netting that was strung for its door.
He followed her inside. Branches and high-slung perches formed a glorious, manicured world, an aviary waiting to be filled. He tilted his head back and breathed. Spindly vines had not yet fully grown through the roof. Rows of water misters triggered and hissed, keeping all the greens pure and glistening with rain. He drew in a cooled, moistened breath. His face was kissed by the touch of water and he loved it all.
Meg ran from the rear of the cage.
His three Chokebot pursuers clacked their way forward in their line. Each raised or lowered their rectangular body segments as they approached, searching roughshod over the habitat ground. Their six black legs connected to the sides of their body in a row of lockable joints. As they kept up their steady gait, their claws pierced and broke nutrient-rich stems into tears of milk. A monarch scattered to flight.
Out back of the cage, Ceeborn splashed through a puddle spilled from the end of a coiled hose. He climbed an embankment to its ridgeline and passed through a single line of trees to a courtyard below.
Meg was running, perfectly fit.
The courtyard was surrounded by gated stalls, each draped with fruits and flowers over bone-white walls. A dirt floor arena was trampled from hoofs and shoes, with each layer raked over, then paraded through again.
She exited at the other end of the courtyard and split to the right. She was headed for a domed building with a portico over its door. She looked back with a knowing grin, exhaled her breath, and entered the hospital of the empty zoo.
He kept low in the domed building’s antechamber. Ahead was a pass-through window, beneath which he could hide or rise for a peek into the dome’s main room. It was a lab and he was outside of Meg’s view, but in earshot. It was more like a classroom of sorts with three black tables aligned in rows and an exam table at the front of the room.
The ceiling was painted light blue, a calming contrast to the white adobe walls. A waist-high shelf wrapped around the room and had a single, traveling stool. Terrariums were spaced equidistant along the shelf and had desk space in between them for writing.
Meg turned herself around at the front exam table, steadied her palms to its edge, and hopped up to be seated. He ducked beneath the antechamber wall.
Robin entered through a rear door by the table and passed in front of Meg. She collected a stethoscope from the exam table’s drawer and draped it around her neck. Then she took out a handheld instrument. It looked like the two of them had done this before.
Robin fixed her handheld’s calibration on Meg’s outstretched arms before passing it back and forth over her chest. It registered as some kind of scanner and the colored walls and ceiling of the lab transformed with the live image projection of the inside of Meg’s body. Four distinct red rings glowed from within the center left of her chest.
He crept closer up at the pass-through to see. Her chest’s red rings projected and reflected all around the dome of the lab.
Robin retrieved a vial from a drawer of the table. She gave it a few shakes and uncapped it. She pressed her index and middle fingers atop its depressor, held her thumb beneath the vial for support, and placed it under Meg’s nose.
“You ready?” Robin asked.
“Okay, but turn off the show,” Meg said. Robin went ahead and pressed on the vial.
Meg reeled her head back and away as the nasal spray took its course. Robin held Meg’s hand as she squeezed. The projected show on the walls and ceiling pulsed with the glow of particles rushing through her bloodstream. It hurt. She must have been tougher than he knew.
She stayed seated as she recovered and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Mom, I told you—turn off the show.”
The four reddened rings over her heart shifted to a reassuring blue.
“Honey, there’s nobody here,” Robin said as she swiped a finger across the handheld scanner’s control.
The four distinct rings glowed beneath Meg’s shirt. She reached up and covered her chest with one palm, then the next to hide the embarrassment of a defect.
“Oh, stop. It’s just me,” Robin said as she pulled Meg’s hands away.
“Still, I hate it.”
“Hate what? A sharper mind or better circulation to your skin? Better complexion? What do you hate about the pump of oxygen through your blood?” Robin asked as she set the scanner on the table.
“I don’t need it anymore, I’m fine now,” Meg said. “I’m not even sick.”
Robin moved around to the rear of the table. He ducked. She lifted the back of Meg’s shirt and reached up with her stethoscope like a clinician with a project. “Excellent circulation already,” Robin said. “Even warm to the touch.”
Meg arched away from the cold contact of the stethoscope plate. “Mom, stop. Can I be done? I’m fine.”
Robin lowered the ear tubes of the headset to the back of her neck. “And that’s because you’ve got the strongest heart on the ship.”
That was enough. He stood, exposed.
Meg was startled at first, but then her smile came around—pure beauty upon blushed, warmed skin.
He entered.
“Two hearts,” Meg said. “I have two. The weak one I had from birth and another clamped onto it. But maybe not as tight as the patrol that will soon be onto you.”
Robin stepped around to the front of Meg’s table. Ceeborn moved closer along the periphery shelf, avoiding her stare by a sidelong inspection of the terrariums.
The reassuring blue light of the four rings faded in Meg’s chest, but the rose of her cheeks stayed.
“How could you have two hearts?” he asked.
“She was born with no valves or chambers in her heart,” Robin said. “Essentially, she was born without a heart. And with the graft, now she has two.”
“That’s right,” Meg said as she hopped down from the table. “I’m fixed now with two. Redundancy is better. No single point of failure.”
Robin’s lab was familiar, somehow calming.
“You know, I met you once when you were three,” Robin said. “Your father brought you here to the clinic. He was so proud of you, Cessini.”
He recoiled, unfamiliar. “It’s Ceeborn. I haven’t been called Cessini since I was little, and I hated it, with a C and an E, pronounced Cessini. And don’t say
was
, either, because he’s still so proud of me.”
“I know he is,” Robin said as he avoided her stare and explored the middle table of the three with its vials and compounds. “Your father’s happy there where you live. Dr. Luegner lets him work on whatever he wants. And he has you to help him.”
He saw something of interest on the shelf against the outer wall. A small terrarium looked like it had fine sand on one side, a shallow pool in the middle, and a dampened log to its right. He looked closer. A rivulus poked its head out of a hollow in the wood. He looked through the glass. “Where did you get this?”
“I found him in our fountain,” Meg said. She stood at his side and looked, too. “He was dying so I brought him here. Funny thing is, it turns out he also has two hearts. Like me.”
“Its primordium didn’t fuse,” Robin said, “so it developed two double-chambered hearts instead of one.”
“You should see it under the show,” Meg said, pointing up to the ceiling. “Put together, the two primordium look like the four-chambered heart of a human.”
Ceeborn reached in with one arm bent over the top of the tank, then looked at Meg for approval. She nodded and he cupped the thumb-sized rivulus into his hand.
“Do you want him?” she asked.
Robin opened a drawer at the end of the table, took out a small tan case, and handed it to Meg.
“He’ll like it in here,” Meg said as she set the case down next to a glass tank filled with aquatic plants. She tore a tuft of moss, dribbled water from a dropper to create a moist sponge, and tucked the bedding into the lining of the case. “Keep it moist. Look after him, okay?” She held the case and he tilted his fingers like a slide. The rivulus scurried in.
“I will,” he said and smiled at Meg. “He’s just like me. In and out of the water.”
Meg closed the case and returned his smile. The rose of her cheeks still stayed. He turned and confronted Robin. “Wait. You gave Meg a spray? What was it?”
“I gave her a natural activator. Nothing to do with the spray that’s making people sick outside,” Robin said.
“You think it’s the spray that’s making people sick?” he asked.
“Oh, I know so,” Robin said. She reached over the middle table and pulled closer a block of white adobe sitting on a cutting board. “I’ll show you. I pretreated this block with a catalyst so we can see the long-term effects of the spray speeded up.” She picked up a wire with wooden handles on either side and pressed it through the brick to carve off a slice. Tiny blue veins pulsed within the slice but didn’t bleed out from its surface.
“Periodic booster sprays were always enough,” Robin said as she quartered the slice and the veins replicated in each of the four smaller chips. Meg picked up a smaller chip between the pinch of two fingers.
“Boosters are designed to keep us healthy,” Robin said. “Without them—”
“Ever seen ashes float away from a fire?” Meg asked.
Robin drew a syringe from a brown bottle on the table. “But then Dr. Luegner introduced the fifth-generation spray. No more boosters; one dose is all you need.” She squeezed out a drop onto the chip in Meg’s hand. “But the fifth-generation spray is far too strong. And anyone with certain rare preexisting conditions gets a devastating compounded effect. My precondition was pre-natal. I had my spray before I had Meg. PluralVaXine5 destroyed her heart.”