Accidental Creatures (13 page)

Everything with Ada seemed effortless, except for this; dying, losing herself to cells driven mad by growth, alone except for Chango and Mavi. Alone because all those people she’d won over, those vatdivers, people she risked her life for — they never came. Except for Benny. Benny came, standing in the doorway of the room as if coming any closer might put him at risk of catching it. Chango knew why they stayed away. It wasn’t because of the scandal. They didn’t want to see her. They were afraid of seeing themselves, five or ten or fifteen years from now. She was in the kitchen when the changes came. She heard Mavi’s call from the bedroom and nearly dropped the dish she was washing. She let it slide into the warm, murky water and turned, her hands still dripping as she walked down the hall with a feeling of dread and expectancy knotted in her heart like a fist.

Ada lay on the bed, muttering on and off in a strange, moaning, singsong voice. Her skin bubbled everywhere with new growths, blurring her features into a seething mass of changing tissue. Chango sat beside Mavi, and watched as moles and tumors formed and then disappeared beneath new growth, as if her sister were boiling away from inside. There was a pattern to it, she thought. If she could only bear to watch long enough she might see it.

But in the end there was no pattern, no rhyme or reason, just a lifeless, shapeless mass of flesh, no longer identifiable as a human being or anything else. Pure matter, anonymous and silent as a lump of dirt. oOo

Benny opened the door of the apartment he shared with Hugo and stood listening. No sound came from the bedroom. He took off his diving harness and set it beside the door. He walked about the untidy living room picking up empty beer bottles and spent blast cartridges. The olive green carpeting badly needed vacuuming, and the furniture was covered with a film of dust. Hugo was the clean one. Benny took the empties to the kitchen, set them on the counter amid dirty plates and pans, and got himself a fresh beer from the refrigerator.

He walked softly to the bedroom and peered inside. Hugo was in the bed, but not asleep. His eyes glittered faintly in the dim light as he looked at Benny. His brown skin was tinged with grey, and the bulge of a new tumor ruined the fine symmetry of his forehead.

“How you doing?” asked Benny, sitting on the bed beside him.

“Alright,” croaked Hugo, his lips parting in the ghost of a smile. “How was your day?”

“Long,” said Benny, taking a pull from his beer. “We decanted a thousand and fifty cubic meters of fiber today, and there’s another two thousand to do tomorrow.”

“I guess they miss me down there.”

“Yeah, you bet they do. You always were the best decanter. We lost about forty cubic meters to breakage. That never would have happened when you were on the team.”

“They get you a replacement yet?”

“Nope.”

Hugo closed his eyes and shook his head. “I’ve been gone for months now. How can they expect you to keep up with production? And you said the quotas are going up.”

“Don’t worry about work, Hugo.” Benny touched his shoulder — and felt beneath the sheet not skin but... scales? There was always something new. He never knew what he’d find when he came home or when he woke up in the morning. It fascinated him, sometimes, when he wasn’t just plain scared.

“You have something better for me to worry about?” said Hugo.

“No, I guess not. Hey,” he stood up and pulled the memory cube from his jeans pocket. “Chango gave me this for you. Toys.”

“Cool,” Hugo took it from him with hands pitted with tiny, vestigial fingernails. Vatsickness caused random cell division, mostly tumors of mixed tissue but every once while a cell would get itself together to divide into something specific. Hugo had a tooth on the back of his left heel. Benny dreamed of waking up to find himself sliced and half eaten by his lover’s voracious body.

“How’s Chango doing, anyway?”

“She’s got a new girlfriend,” said Benny.

“You mean there’s actually someone left in Vattown for Chango to be new with?”

“She’s new in town. A sport but she grew up in the GeneSys building.”

Hugo tried to whistle and failed. “What’s she doing down here then?” he asked.

“Good question, my dear. Good question.”

“You think she’s spying for them?”

Benny shrugged, “Probably not. Why would they need to spy on us now? Nothing’s going on; the movement’s been dead for years.”

“Maybe they know something we don’t.”

Benny nodded his head. “Maybe. Probably.”

“I hope not, for Chango’s sake. She should settle down already. Speaking of which, don’t you think it’s about time you found a new lover?”

“What?”

“C’mon man, you’ve been really cool to stick around this long.”

“Someone has to take care of you, Hugo. I want it to be me.”

Hugo’s gaze wandered across the ceiling. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I think it’s time I moved into Mavi’s pink room.”

“You can’t. It’s occupied right now.”

His eyes snapped back to Benny. “By who?”

“Helix, Chango’s girlfriend. She got mugged down in Greektown.”

“You met her today?”

“Yeah.” Benny nodded. “At the Eclectic.”

“Then she must be recovering, if she’s going out.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think she has any place to stay.”

“So what?” Hugo shrugged. “If she’s better, she can crash anywhere, and if she’s with Chango, there’ll be plenty of places for her. I’m sick. I need the room. And you — you need to get this monstrosity out of your bed.”

“Stop it!” Benny stood up, turning his back to Hugo.

“Aw come on, you’ve got to be relieved. Let Mavi help me now. She knows what to do.”

“I told you in the beginning. I want to see this thing through with you.”

“No you don’t Benny. Really, you don’t. And more importantly, I don’t want you to.”

“You don’t?” He turned around again. “Why? What did I do?”

Hugo shrugged and coughed. “Nothing, it’s just that... You’re too interested in it — my illness I mean. You don’t say anything, but you watch each new development with this fascinated horror. I just don’t want any spectators while I do this.”

“So you want to go to Mavi’s.”

“Yeah. I mean you can visit me and stuff, but that way you won’t be involved with the changes on a day-to-day basis. Maybe that’ll help.” Hugo started coughing again.

Benny went into the kitchen and got him a glass of water. He hated to admit it even to himself, but he was relieved. Because he hadn’t been there for Ada, he’d been determined to stick by Hugo until the end. But if Hugo really wanted to go to Mavi’s, then there was nothing he could do about it. Back in the bedroom he watched Hugo drink in long, painful swallows. His coughing subsided, and he managed a smile. ”Do you remember that summer after we graduated, Benny?”

“Yeah, sure I do.” They’d just shut down I-75, and it kept flooding. Hugo, Ada, April and he had gone swimming there all summer.

“We’d just gotten sterilized, and we were all fucking each other. Except for Ada. She always was a strict dyke. We used to call her the Vagitarian, remember?”

“Those were good times, Hugo.” Benny remembered diving into the cool water, surfacing and rolling over onto his back to see Hugo, Val and Coral standing on the overpass; his friends and lovers, all young and healthy, innocent of all that was to come. And Ada, poised to dive off the guardrail; a figure of pure potential, so bold and brave. Too brave for the world, but he hadn’t known that then, then she’d still been the golden girl, bright and untouchable as the sun.

The next morning Helix and Chango went out again after breakfast, but they didn’t go to Hyper’s or Pele’s or Hannah’s. They just walked around the neighborhood, pausing from time to time as Chango pointed out one of the many landmarks of her childhood.

“That’s where we used to play dodge ball,” she said, pointing to a long-disused parking lot overgrown with weeds. “Ada had a wicked throw. I used to just run like hell, but she’d always nail me, right between the shoulders.”

As they neared the vat yards, the pungent smell of growth medium intensified. Helix stopped at the fence, peering at the domed vat houses. Her fingers curled around the chain link, and she had a sudden urge to climb it.

“Come on,” said Chango up ahead. “Let’s go, it stinks around here.”

Helix looked at her, standing in the middle of the road. “Can we go in?”

“What? No! Why would we even want to?”

Helix shrugged. “To see what it looks like.”

Chango shook her head in exasperation and walked back to her. “You’re not still thinking of working there, are you?”

She opened her mouth to say yes. But she realized that Chango would only tell her once again all the reasons why she shouldn’t, so she settled for a noncommittal shrug.

It was another overcast day, the clouds overhead knotting together to scowl at the city. As they stood there, a first few drops of rain began to fall.

“Shit,” said Chango, wiping a drop from her face. “Let’s get out of here.” she pulled the hood of her jacked over her head and scurried for the cover of an awning over a party store. Helix lifted a hand to the quickening rain. It felt good on her skin, velvet-soft and warm, with a green growingness to it like nothing she’d ever felt before. She tilted her face up to greet it, drops spattering on her cheeks and nose.

“Are you crazy?” Chango shouted from under the awning. “This rain has growth medium in it. It’s bad for you!”

How could that be? How could something that felt so good be bad for her? Besides, the growth medium was in the vats where they made the biopolymer, not in the rain falling ever harder, grown now to a full downpour.

“Helix, get under here!” Chango called, but she didn’t pay her any mind. The water felt wonderful. Everywhere it touched her skin it soothed the itching that was as much a part of her daily life as breathing. She threw off Hector’s raincoat, lifting her four arms to the weeping sky, letting the fabric of her body suit soak up the rain and hold it close to her skin. And she whirled, whirled and twirled, her feet splashing in puddles like an echo to her own laughter.

oOo

Chango stood under the awning of the G&P Party Store, watching Helix dance in the rain. Her total disregard for her own safety, her inexplicable and obvious joy, filled Chango with awe and horror. She realized that she really didn’t know Helix much at all. She had no reference point for this odd behavior. Maybe she just liked the rain. Maybe she didn’t understand that this rain contained chemicals that would irritate her skin. Maybe, when she woke up with rashes all over her body tomorrow morning, she’d learn her lesson. There wasn’t enough grow med in the rain to actually give her vatsickness, unless she stayed out here for hours, which, Chango realized, was possible.

Taking a deep breath and tugging the hood of her jacket further over her head, she plunged out into the rain to haul her friend, bodily if need be, out of the downpour.

Helix didn’t see her coming. She grunted with surprise as Chango wrapped her arms around her waist and pulled. “What are you doing?” she said mildly, looking down at her.

“What am I doing? What am I doing? What are you doing?” Chango sputtered. “This stuff is going to give you such a rash. You have no idea.” As she spoke, she hauled persistently at Helix’s waist, drawing her at last, with much staggering and splashing, to the shelter of the awning.

“Oh,” Chango said with dismay, looking at her. Helix was drenched head to toe in rainwater. “Let’s get inside. Maybe they have a towel or something we can use to dry you off.”

“I don’t want to dry off,” Helix said, but Chango ignored her, and taking her damp lower right hand in hers, dragged her inside the party store.

The woman behind the counter — a Mandy somebody she knew only vaguely — looked up in startlement at the two of them. “So its raining,” she said, “It’s been threatening to all day.”

Chango nodded. “Do you have a towel or a rag or something we can use to dry her off?” she asked, tilting her head towards Helix, who had detached herself from her grasp and was wandering up one of the aisles.

Mandy somebody nodded, ducked under the counter for a moment and then tossed her a ragged towel. When Chango caught up with her, Helix was staring at a rack of replacement valves for air tanks. “What are these?” she asked as Chango unceremoniously began toweling her off.

“They’re pressure valves, for the divers’ tanks,” she said, rubbing the towel vigorously over Helix’s arms and legs. “We’re going to have to get you out of this body suit as soon as we get home, and you should take a shower.” Chango pulled at her shoulder. “Bend down, so I can get your head.”

The shop door jingled as it opened. Chango, struggling to dry the squirming Helix, couldn’t turn around to see who came in, but judging from the footsteps, there were more than one of them.

“Oh look, the sports are giving themselves a bath in the party store,” said a high pitched voice, Coral’s. Chango gave up trying to dry Helix off and turned to see her standing at the head of the aisle with Monkey, Oli and Katrice. All four of them wore voluminous grey rain ponchos which drained puddles at their booted feet.

“It’s a nice day for a shower,” Chango said, grinning back at their smirking faces. “But then, you guys prefer to soak in it, don’t you?”

Coral’s smirk wavered. “We know how to protect ourselves. What about your friend there?” she nodded at Helix who was running her fingers through her damp hair, and smearing them over her face.

“She trying to get more of it? Doesn’t she think she looks weird enough yet?”

Helix stopped rubbing her face and stared at Coral, her arms at her sides. “What did you come here for?

Was it one of these?” She plucked a pressure valve from the rack and started walking towards the vatdivers. “Or one of these?” She took a box of cereal from the opposite shelf and waved it at them. “Or did you just come in here to bother us?”

Coral stared at her in amazement, and Monkey and Oli whispered to one another. “What’s the matter with her?” Katrina muttered.

“Nothing that you can’t fix,” yelled Helix.. “Get out of here!” She threw the valve and the box of cereal at them. The valve landed behind Monkey with a clatter. The box hit Coral on the shoulder, bounced and broke open on the floor, spraying pellets of hearty grain goodness everywhere.