Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (7 page)

The new face was beautiful—the smooth, glowing skin of a twenty-year-old. She turned her head to admire the firm planes of her cheeks, the fine sculpting of her cheekbones, the clean line of her jaw.

Wells smiled at herself, but the face in the mirror didn’t smile back. The lips retained their vague, upward curve. She tried again, but she could not make those lips move. Her eyes went wide and she blinked—so thank goodness her eyelids still worked. But she could not open her mouth except by working her jaw and pulling it down sharply, and then her lips parted with a dry pop.

“Xhu-at’s
this?
” she husked through immobile lips, unable to form the
W
sound.

“I—I don’t understand,” Bellows said. She turned Wells in the swivel chair and felt across her face, fingers probing the skin and muscles. “Can you feel that?” the doctor asked.

Wells could feel only the force pushing against her bones, the deep pressure against her skull. But the doctor’s fingertips, as they touched and brushed the skin under her eyes, might have been manipulating a mannequin. “Unh-uh,” she said. “Like xhy xhace is asleexh.” There went her
M
s,
F
s and
P
s, too. “Xhix this!” she commanded.

“I’m not sure what went wrong,” Bellows said. “It would appear the nerves did not connect properly during the attachment surgery. I’ve … I’ve never had that happen before.”

No, not in your vast experience of just three cases,
Wells noted silently.

“We did everything correctly,” the doctor went on. “Perhaps your neurons need time to adjust and learn to pass signals through the ligations in the axons. I expect the nerves will grow in with time. … That sometimes happens.”

“I can’t
lih
like this,” Wells husked, having lost her
V
s as well.

The import of what had happened rushed in on her. She would be an invalid. She couldn’t eat in public without embarrassment, because she would have to pry her lips open and seal them closed with her fingers while chewing. She couldn’t drink except by pouring liquid on the back of her tongue. She certainly couldn’t practice law if the jury thought she was trying out an unsuccessful ventriloquist’s act. She couldn’t be a mother if she was unable to sing lullabies to Alexander. She couldn’t be a lover if her kisses with John felt like two strips of cold liver.

But she certainly had a beautiful, if immobile, face. As she stared into the mirror, the statue of Nefertiti—the frozen image with the vague, half-dreaming smile from the hologram Bellows had taken on her first visit—stared back at her. Yes, she had gotten a younger, smoother face. But oh, at what cost!

“Shit!” That was the one word she could form without moving her lips.

* * *

John Praxis came home from the office a bit early, because he knew it was Antigone’s special day. He was glad and excited for her, almost as eager to see her new face as she was. Not that he had ever thought of Antigone as anything but beautiful. The minor lines and wrinkles she had acquired over the years were part of her life and her character. If it had been up to him, if she had asked him, he would have said the facial implant was totally unnecessary. But she never asked.

Still, for days she had been cocooned, blind, and threading her way around the apartment like Ariadne tracing a maze. The experience had left them both wanting to get the wrappings off and see what she had bought.

He opened the door and called out, “Antigone!”

The place was quiet, drapes drawn, dark.

He called to her again. “Hey, Tig?”

“In here, Dad,” his daughter answered from the living room.

He went in and found her alone. “Where’s Antigone?”

“Do you want a drink?” Callie asked. “It’s been a long day. Mind if I have one?”

“No, I don’t want a drink, and yes, suit yourself. Where’s my—” Girlfriend? Lover? Soul mate? In truth, he’d almost said wife. “—Antigone?”

“She’s not here,” Callie replied, drawing three fingers of scotch in a tumbler from the sideboard. “She’s gone. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not for a while, anyway.”

“Gone? Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Something to do with the implant. She’s beautiful, by the way. Young … radiant. But something went wrong with the nerves. Her face is … like a mask. Lips frozen in a ghastly smile. Cheeks and forehead as smooth and blank as plastic. Only the eyes move. And she speaks with something worse than a lisp. She slurs and dribbles and spits. … It’s terrible, really.”

“Oh,” was all he could offer, trying to absorb what Callie was saying. “Oh!”

But, after all, he reasoned, this was a disaster that affected just the body. It was among the things of the flesh. If John Praxis had learned anything over the last couple of years, it was the malleability of all flesh. What had been done in one test tube or bioreactor could easily be corrected and made whole in another. What mattered above any of that was the animating force, the spirit,
the person.
And Antigone was still alive, still inside the botched flesh—no matter what they had done to her face.

“I still love her,” he said simply. “The face isn’t important.”

“I understand, Dad. That’s what you think you feel. But would you have fallen for that woman if she had been ugly—or even plain?”

“Yes,” he said stoutly. Still, he could see her point. It was Antigone’s face and bearing—her skin as much as her hauteur—that first drew his attention, even though at the time she was trying to take a big chunk out of his company with a lawsuit. But that was before he knew Antigone, the real Antigone, the person inside. And once he knew her, then the physical externals had come to matter less and less.

“Antigone doesn’t see it that way,” Callie went on. “Most women wouldn’t. We have to spend so much time on our looks, on our makeup, clothes, exercise, and diet, that we sometimes—most of the time, maybe—perhaps too often—think of our physical selves as the whole package. A woman’s face and body are her persona, her projection. She’s proud of them. Antigone is an extremely proud woman. And now she’s a freak.”

“We’ve got to call her back,” he said, “and convince her otherwise.”

“Dad! Let her go. At least for the time being. Antigone is ashamed of what’s happened. You would shame her further if you tried to make light of it.”

“But she can’t just go out in the cold like this.”

“Antigone has resources. She’ll survive. And besides, as we left the doctor’s office, she muttered something about the nerves growing back—how the doctor said it might happen, but she didn’t believe it. So maybe she will heal in time, and then she’ll probably want to return. But for now, let her do what she needs to do.”

“I can’t …” Praxis realized that with those words he was putting his needs first, which was not what a man was supposed to do. But then another thought occurred to him. “What about Alexander?”

“We’ll work something out with the nanny,” his daughter said. “Something more structured. Full-time care for Alexander.”

“But what about when he asks for his mother?”

“I don’t know, Dad. One day at a time.”

“We’ll bank her salary in her name.”

“I doubt she’s worried about that.”

“Well, no definite decisions—”

“Not until we hear,” she said.

“And keep a place for her.”

“Sure. That’s the spirit.”

* * *

Dr. Alfredo Giusto had six people in intensive care with what looked like a new and virulent strain of influenza. The worst cases were Matteo di Rienzi and his son Carlo. The younger man, in the bed next to which the doctor stood, was gravely ill, almost unconscious, and complaining of searing pain throughout his body. Across the aisle, the older man lay near death, pale, barely breathing. Matteo was still writhing feebly under the sheet where just hours before he had been thrashing, bellowing, and had required restraints.

But four others in another section of the ward were also gravely ill: the former mayor of Torino and his wife, as well as the city’s leading banker and his wife. As Dr. Giusto understood it, all of them had attended a party at the former shipping magnate’s villa across the river. Perhaps—no, likely—they were exposed to the disease there. Perhaps one of them was even the carrier.

Carlo raised his head. “Help me, Doctor, please,” he said softly.

“With an influenza like this, it is very difficult,” Dr. Giusto apologized. “You have a virus, you see, for which we have no antibiotics and few effective medications. We can treat symptoms only, not the underlying disease. So we can only watch and wait. Now if you had a bacterial infection—”

“You must help me,” Carlo whispered again.

Dr. Giusto had heard about this father and son before, of course. He had been hearing their names for twenty years and more—and not always in a good context, either. Sometimes they were connected with small crimes, corruption, and random acts of violence, sometimes with great swindles. And sometimes the newspaper editors connected them with the lawlessness that infected the southern parts of his country.

It occurred to the doctor that six people attending a party and all coming down with the same illness was problematic. It had been a large party, he knew, an annual affair for the di Rienzis. But then, with such a virulent strain set loose in such a large crowd, one would expect to see more cases than this. Where were the others? Surely dozens of people should have reported to this hospital and the nearby clinics. But he had heard and seen nothing.

Dr. Giusto tapped his index finger against the point of his chin.

It might also be a poisoning of some kind. But even then, with something getting into the food or drinks, or filtering into the water, more people should have been affected. This narrowness of scope—the sickness being limited to such a few, and those being the host and the most important guests—was very disturbing. With such a mystery, it would be appropriate to take more blood samples, to run a wider array of tests, beyond his previous bacterial and viral cultures. The pathologists should test for some of the more lethal inorganic chemicals as well.

He moved to the bed of the elder di Rienzi. The old man had stopped writhing. His eyes were open, his stare fixed on the ceiling—toward the heaven he had obviously hoped to enter. The doctor felt for a pulse and found nothing.

Dr. Giusto went back to Carlo’s bedside. “Your father has died,” he said sadly.

“Papa?” the young man whispered. He, too, was obviously near the very end.

The four others were more lively. Dr. Giusto would order the tests for them.

“Doctor,
help me!
” Carlo said with sudden strength. “And I will give you—”

“
Tranquillo,
” he said. “Save your energy. The virus will take its course.”

And if not a virus, then a death that had been coming for twenty years.

* * *

Dr. Gillian Barnes, senior geologist with the F.R. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, studied the webwall view that collected seismological data from around the West Coast.

Normally, the network recorded a couple of hundred small quakes every day up and down the state’s fault lines. By “small,” she meant magnitudes of 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 with the occasional 4.0. Little shakers and
temblors
that most people might not even feel. For comparison, at 6.7, the force of the North Ridge quake, down in the Los Angeles basin in the mid-nineties, had been more than a thousand times stronger than any magnitude 4.0. And at 7.1, the Loma Prieta up in the Bay Area a few years earlier was approximately ten thousand times stronger. But magnitude wasn’t everything, Barnes knew. For an effect on people’s lives, ground composition and quake duration counted for a lot more.

She zoomed in now on the Bay Area and called up an overlay of the global positioning sensors that the Geological Survey had scattered around the state. These tracked ground displacements in real time and offered snapshots and slices that she could dice six ways from Sunday. And the GPS data showed the same thing as the seismology. Or rather,
didn’t
show it.

Over the past two weeks, ground movements and tremors in the rest of the state had been down by about a third. Even the increasingly active Parkfield section of the San Andreas Fault had gone relatively quiet. But the fault lines in around the Bay Area—the northern part of the San Andreas Fault, which split the San Francisco Peninsula; the San Gregorio Fault to the west of that, running up through Monterey Bay; the Hayward and Calaveras faults in the East Bay; the Concord-Green Valley, Mount Diablo, and Greenville faults further to the east; and Rogers Creek up in the North Bay—every one of them had gone suspiciously quiet.

By all popular accounts, and by the Geological Survey’s own estimates, the Bay Area was overdue for a major earthquake. The last really big one, 1906 in San Francisco, at magnitude 7.8, had been a real bell-ringer. Of course, the devastation of that one had been helped along by a city built of solid masonry construction and still heating, cooking, and lighting mostly with coal and gas. The 1868 quake in Hayward, at 6.8 to 7.0, had been notable as well—just that, with fewer people around and less construction on the ground at the time, it didn’t do as much damage.

As the pressure built up along those Bay Area fault lines, leading to a major release, one would expect
more
small quakes in the area. But over the last couple of weeks the opposite seemed to be happening. The usual random sampling of little shakes and quakes had all but died out. The ground surface hadn’t moved in all that time. The Bay Area seemed to have frozen solid. Curiouser and curiouser.

Most people would cheer at that. “Ding-dong, the Great Bay Quake is dead!” “No more teachers, no more books, no more Great Quake’s evil looks!” Hooray!

But Gillian Barnes believed in trends and cycles. They reflected normality. Lots of little quakes were the reality, moving up and down the fault lines, collecting their energies in calculable cycles, keeping all that energy flowing. The planet was a living thing. Constant movement was the norm.

And when it stopped, or slowed so drastically without warning—what then?