Celestial Inventories (23 page)

Alec thrashed in bed. His muscles cramped. His right arm flapped and struck his chest. He had been dreaming that his wife’s tongue was scraping at his eyes, his sons fingers clawing his shoulders. So real that his night’s sweat was irritating the wounds.

His left fist tightened reflexively and made a painful knot under his lower back.

His body felt huge and unmanageable. It rocked and shook out of control.

His eyes sprang open and tried to focus. He coughed into his sheets and, terrified of choking, managed to turn his mouth to the side.

On Sunday mornings, he used to hide in bed until noon. His mother warned him about what happened to lazy boys who didn’t go to church.

His father used to toss him into the air, too high. He’d kept his arms rigid and immobile at his sides in fright. This one thing had frightened him, this one thing. He’d never flown before, and it had scared him. No logical power could hold him up. It was magic.

“Daddy! Stop!”

“Fly, Alec! Fly! I won’t drop you!”

Then one day his father did drop him. Alec had fallen slowly, trying to push his arms out to break the fall. But he had been immobile.

For just a few moments, he had been paralyzed.

Alec was fully awake now. The room was dark; heavy curtains covered most of the walls. “Light,” he whispered. Nothing. Someday, as the sclerosis increasingly affected his throat, the house’s computer would have to be reprogrammed to allow for a wider range in interpreting vocal commands. But this morning he knew it was just fatigue,

Just a lack of focus. He concentrated, and after a time again said, “Light.” Curtains pulled back; ceiling panels began to glow dimly. “Light light light,” he said, and the brightness increased almost to daytime intensity. He could feel Earth’s sun beyond the sheer yellow gauze that covered the windows, and soothing familiarity chased away the night’s last alien dreams.

Earth’s sun. He had to remind himself. He saw so little of the Outside world that he could have just as easily been on Bennett, sleeping in the corporate headquarters there.

His throat burned from getting the lights on. And there was always this additional strain, not knowing if it was going to work anymore, if he was going to be left whispering in the dark, his throat aching, a headache blossoming from his attempts. He could have used the timer and saved his voice, but he never did. Each morning he wanted to make sure his larynx still worked.

Rick should have been up by now. Alec hated waiting; it made him feel helpless. But if he complained, the man might quit, and Alec wasn’t up for another change.

The entire house could be equipped with personal care robotic handlers and controllers. It wouldn’t cost him much; a few technicians from one of his plants could install the whole works. But he wanted humans around him, touching him, not a house full of metal arms. And robotic amplification wasn’t anything like doing it on his own, anyway. At least he did have the choice. He was Alec Bennett. That name had control over people and things, even if the man behind the name did not.

Today, his wife and children were moving out of the house. He hadn’t had the power to hold them, the words to convince them to stay. Most of the arguments had stopped this past year—he’d felt relieved. He’d thought things were going to be okay now. But they’d all just been avoiding him, not saying what they felt, not wanting to provoke an argument. They were hiding from him.

The last big argument had been a year ago with his older son Gene, fifteen at the time. It had been typical—unproductive, frustrating. And frightening, because now Gene was old enough to really hurt him if the argument went too far, if the volatile teenager were to lose control. That had become the peak of Alec’s feelings of helplessness: to be frightened of his own son. It made him ashamed, and yet now he missed all the arguing—at least then his son was talking to him.

“You can’t tell me what to do!” Gene had looked almost crazy in his anger, and as the boy continued to shout, Alec found himself wondering at what terrible thing he had brought home to them all.

“The aide quit, Gene. And my tube’s popped. See, it runs down through the bedding and attaches to the pumps under the floor—”

“Jesus! You’re messin’ yourself, Dad!”

“Please, just get the tube back in.”

But his son had just backed away from him, looking at the body of his origin wasted by the disease. His son’s face was full of fear and loathing for the disease. Alec had spent hours explaining the nature of the disease, how no one was going to “catch” it. But now he could see that little of that must have sunk in. His son was seeing his own body lying there on the bed, spent and wasted.

“You’re always asking me to touch you like that, and there’s machines, Jesus. I mean, you can afford it.”

“Gene, the tube!”

But Gene had already left the room. Alec could hear him debating with his brother and sister about whose turn it was to help, and arguing over the personal care machinery again. They hated him, or maybe they hated the disease, not that there was much difference anymore. And Marie was off at some club meeting again, so she couldn’t talk to them.

“Get in here,
all
of you!” No one answered. He’d shouted for several minutes before giving it up. He’d lost them. He couldn’t even tell them to do something as simple as throwing an empty milk carton away, and be sure they’d do it.

A hand was rocking his shoulder. His eyes blurred. Sometimes it seemed that, when he wasn’t remembering the bad times, he couldn’t recall their faces at all. The hand touched him again. “Rick?” he whispered.

“Yes, Mr. Bennett. Want a bath today?”

Alec looked down. Rick’s arms were protected by membranous gloves, a little paler than white flesh, more the colour of cotton after it’s been boiled. He’d thought the man had finally gotten over the fear of infection. “Afraid of catching a cold?” Rick didn’t respond. “Talk to me, Rick.”

Rick busied himself with the covers. “Just trying to be sanitary, Mr. Bennett. Now, how about that bath?”

Actually, Rick was braver than most; money could buy a little courage now and then when he really needed it. But it was getting harder every year, and Alec wondered how long Rick was going to last. They all thought they were going to catch the disease, and he honestly couldn’t reassure them completely; no one knew enough about Bennett’s Sclerosis.

Sometimes Alec imagined tiny cracks appearing in his skin. Sometimes he could swear he could see them, and they would spread onto Rick’s arm, flaking the flesh away.

That first year after Alec came back from Bennett the media had been in a state of excitation that was almost sexual. The Bennett story had encompassed a number of topics sure to tantalize and entertain the public. The corporation-owned planet. The father’s questionable business deals. And the rich, pampered son who was the first and only known victim of an extraterrestrial disease. Payoffs to regulating agencies. Aggressive exploitation of the strange new landscape. Rumours of safety violations. Rumours of dragons.

An insistent touch at his shoulder. “Mr. Bennett? Your bath?”

“No,” he said, staring at the gloves covering Rick’s arms and hands. “No, no thanks.”

Rick didn’t seem surprised. In the best of times Alec had an intense fear of the water. Even taking a bath, Alec would picture himself sinking beneath the surface, unable, even unwilling, to raise his arms to save himself. Whenever he and his assistants drove or flew over rivers or lakes, he’d have to turn from the window.

“Messages this morning?”

Rick pulled the recorder out of his back pocket and pushed the red button. After a squawk of interference Alec could hear the voice of Malcolm, nominal head of Bennett Corp. “. . . everything’s ready. Not much chance of anybody catching on. Needless to say, I would still like to talk you out of this. We have an entire squadron of pilots ready to send up after this thing.”

“Shut it off,” Alec said.

“There’s more . . .”

“. . . don’t need any more.”

Alec looked at the wall. The polished mahogany beyond his feet stretched a good twenty feet left of his bed, another twenty feet right. Patterns of light and shade moved across the segments of bone that had been set into the wood planks.

The enormous skull had been taken apart; the three plates that had formed the cap of the skull had been spread and mounted here into a broad arch. A six-foot nasal ridge hung from the centre. Below these pieces, bolted to the wall a few inches from the floor, were the numerous broken sections of a long, thin jawbone. Alec could slice his hand open with just a careless touch along that bone, but he was far removed from that kind of danger.

Rick followed his gaze. “I don’t know how you can stand to look at that thing. Makes my skin crawl just to be in the room with it.”

“In fact, I don’t think it’s that skull making your skin crawl.” It was hardly a skull, more like a collection of armoured plate, what had been left once the skin had burned away. Alec could picture where the creature’s gas sacs had been—in both cheeks and temples, and suspended under the jaw. The eyes had been deeply set on either side of the nasal ridge. Dark red, glowing like the mahogany. The mouth so wide. That last time on Bennett he’d peered directly into that hunger, the jaws steadily expanding until he’d thought the mouth might swallow the ship whole.

It had been night, and his father had insisted that the pilot shield the exhaust so the creature’s infrared wouldn’t pick them up. His father had wanted to show Alec. He was always showing him things. The crash had been sudden, unexpected. An accident. No one had thought the dragon intended to attack. When the mouth had dropped open and they had stared at the night inside, it had seemed that the beast was showing surprise rather than hunger or rage.

Alec had been thrown out before the explosion. Soaked in the creature’s vital fluids, he’d escaped with just a broken leg and a few scrapes. Or so they had all thought.

Watching the shadowed mahogany for movement, for the faintest flicker of light, he heard Rick say, “So they think that’s the carrier. That
thing.”

The fire had been nightmarish in its speed and volume. With three to four percent more oxygen than Earth, the planet was a firetrap. The creature’s sacs had exploded. It had roared, its head blazing, wings shrinking in the heat.

Rick’s voice continued to intrude into Alec’s thoughts. “Why don’t you let them take care of it? You’ve got lots of pilots, and most of them better than you.”

Either he had been delirious or the creature had turned its burning skull his way, looked at him, before falling ponderously into the flames.

“You’re a rich man, but you’re
ill.”

Alec willed himself to move, but could not. He felt huge, impossibly heavy. He felt his skin burning, imagined catching the sheets on fire. Rick started to move toward him. “Don’t . . .”
Alec gasped. “Let it be.”

Rick stepped away from the bed and stared out the open window. “Just tell me when you’re ready, Mr. Bennett.” A tiredness was evident in the young healthy voice.

Standing by that window, Alec had first felt the symptoms of Bennett’s Sclerosis. He’d had his father buried on the planet.

Rick was pulling nervously at the arm coverings he wore, as if trying to protect a larger portion of his body. As if the sclerosis might reach out and penetrate his skin. As if Alec had brought back from Bennett something more than a viral disease—a native of that planet, an alien that thrived within the house of his body.

“My best people don’t think it’s contagious, Rick. I’ve told you that before.” That was true—his top researchers thought there had to be actual contact of body fluids—but all the same Alec felt like a liar.

Rick just stood there, his back to Alec, watching the sun through the window. “Just being careful, Mr. Bennett.” Rick scratched at his sleeves.

“I pay you enough, don’t I?”

“You do that. And I have a family to support. But that’s not the only reason I stay.” He said the last part almost angrily.

“I had a family . . .” Alec stopped, embarrassed.

Alec had been back on Earth a month when he had felt the first signs of his illness. He’d been standing in this bedroom he’d shared with Marie and watching nothing in particular, still feeling a little disoriented because Bennett’s sun was the same size and colour as Sol and because this time of year the climate was similar.

His arms and legs had begun to tingle, a low-grade burn deep under his skin that had made him think at first that he must have stepped onto an exposed wire. No matter where he had moved, the strange, vaguely disturbing sensation continued. He had begun to feel dizzy and had sat back down on the bed for a time.

When after an hour the sensation had passed, he had gone in to work. He’d thought it was odd, but since it went away, he’d chalked it up to a sleep disturbance, the flu, maybe something he’d eaten. Then a month later his vision had begun to blur. A month after that, he had lost control forever. The illness progressed like a brush fire.

The disease made him feel, simply,
older.
It resembled multiple sclerosis in many ways, but MS had been cured over fifty years before. And Bennett’s Sclerosis, as it was soon to be labeled, worked more quickly, scar tissue grew more rapidly—like a fungus, some said—and there appeared to be no periods of remission. People wouldn’t touch him, as if afraid something might burst through his skin.

It had been like a machine running down. The immune system backfiring. The alien virus replicating the body’s nerve tissue. So his body had become alien to itself, the body had become a dragon, attacking itself. It couldn’t help itself—the invader had to be repelled. Scavengers in the immune system ate away at the myelin. First, its layers were pried apart, then nerve transmission began to short circuit, then the myelin simply disappeared so that Alec became all exposed wires and loose electrical impulses. Scar tissue had crept over the nervous system the way ice sheathed the skeletal branches of a tree in winter.

His brain had been less seriously affected, his thoughts intact. Except sometimes thoughts arose that he did not recognize as his own.