Stealing From Death

by Vincent L. Cleaver

There was someone in Calley's room when he woke up. He was more than a little surprised that he had woke up. Less surprised that a thief was stealing from a nearly dead man. Nothing much surprised him anymore.

It was an age of wonders, with aliens and starships, space habitats and elevators to the sky. It was five years after the end of the world as it had been, on that day of Dragons when seven billion humans had perished on Earth, blasted into the afterlife with enhanced antimatter bombs, burned alive in fire-storms, or dying by inches of radiation poisoning, hunger, thirst, disease, and strife.

The lucky ones got off-world to Geo, Geosynchronous Earth Orbit, or to Luna. The Lunatic Republics wisely but cruelly turned most of them back. The Clarkesville habitats in Geo were overwhelmed. Some of the refugees got as far as Venus. The habitats of The Verge, the Venus industrial region, had time and distance to prepare, but the refugees still very nearly overwhelmed them, turned some places into hellholes, like this one, Vee-berg, Venusberg.

Calley sat up in his bed and looked at the young girl of nine or ten. She was dressed in dirty rags, with frizzy hacked-off black hair and cool grey eyes. They looked over into his and showed him no fear. He grunted appreciatively. "A survivor, and that's a fact."

"Be quiet, or they will come." There was an implied threat to the shank in her left hand, a knife made out of rusty scrap, the handle wrapped with electrical tape. A habitat is a surprisingly damp and musty place, especially one that exceeded its designed population capacity. All those extra mouths breathed in oxygen and breathed out carbon dioxide and monoxide and moisture. All those empty mouths, that had to be fed, and bodies to be clothed and warehoused.

He was being warehoused in a hospice for the triaged, waiting to die, and she was warehoused, waiting to live.

"Sticking me for what I got would be redundant and pointless, kiddo. I got no money, or I'd have bought the drugs I need to stay alive."

"What have you got?" It was unclear if she meant coin or his disease. She just looked at him, waiting.

"I've got a reader and half a brick of dog biscuit, here by the bed-" They were gone. "But you've got them already. If you meant, what am I dying of, it's an auto-immune disorder, a left-handed gift from the Dragons. It isn't catching."

"How'd you get it, then?" She took his dog biscuit out of a sack, a half kilo of 'emergency ration', and broke off a little. She mouthed it disinterestedly, broke off more and offered him some. He took it, smiling. He wasn't hungry, but this could be his last meal.

"Thank you kindly. There's water- yes, thanky." The water was clean, at least. It smelled a little of chlorine, but it was cold. The glasses were cheap asteroid slag, interesting, heavy, run through with color like marbles. His was flawed with a partial crack. Hers had big bubbles that always made him think of some sort of skull. It had belonged to a shipmate who had since made the trip home, as the popular euphemism went.

"Kenners' is a bit of a cellular hiccup. One of the nanoparticles they outlawed back in the teens, when it became obvious that a few of us were susceptible. Can't get rid of them, and the body attacks the surrounding cells as if they're invaders. Didn't bother the Dragons, or we screwed up and reverse-engineered something wrong, I dunno. Somebody did find a better way, but this'll be with me till the day I die. Which, y'know, could be today. I've lived with it for almost fifty years."

She stopped chewing and said, "You're old."

"And you're rude- no, you are frank." Cally thought for a minute. "What's your name?"

The girls’ eyes narrowed. "Why?"

"My name is Frank Calley, and we can at least be civil. Human dignity is in short enough supply-"

"You talk a lot, and funny, too." She chewed for a bit, considering. "All right. My name is Tori."

"Pleased to meet you, Tori."

She studied him. "I think you actually mean that."

Frank didn't answer, just drank the rest of his water. He set it down, weakly. She took the glass, wary as a feral cat, and refilled it. Then she helped him to drink a little more.

"You're very hot."

"My immune system is trying to set things to rights. If it gets carried away, I'll die. If I catch something else, I'll die. Do you notice a pattern?"

Tori smiled, and this smile made it all the way to her eyes. "Death is your constant companion?"

"Morbid much, little Frankie?" Frank pointed at the sack. "There's all kinds of useless garbage on that reader, but somewhere in there is a file of quotes I've collected in the last three quarters of a century. One of them is 'Frankness is a Virtue', or something. Robert E. Lee, if you know who he was."

She shook her head.

"You can read, can't you?"

She gave him a look, like a real nine-year-old, not a rat on two legs. "Mother makes sure we all can read-"

She shut up.

"Your mother takes care of you?" Frank was a little surprised.

"He's not my- I call him that because he's always mothering us, and then the others started doing it, too."

"But Mother-Not takes care of you? Why?"

"I dunno. He just does." She puffed up with a little pride. "And I take care of him and all the rest of them-"

She gave him a dirty look as he laughed, and Frank stifled his chuckles, banking the fires of his mirth. Irony was the universe hard at work, making the world an interesting place to be.

"Sorry, it's just that you're Modesty Blaise's younger sister, aren't you?"

"Who?"

"She's a real character-" He laughed so hard that he had a coughing fit. Tori went from angry, to concerned, to interested, as he told her about his first love, in books.

They talked for hours, passing the reader back and forth. When he was tired, he dozed, while she read, and when he woke, they talked some more. The third time he slept, he didn't wake up again. Tori took away a little food, for the belly and for the mind. Frank Calley, teacher, asteroid miner and loyal shipmate, had lit another fire, and then had made the trip home.

###

“You must be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage…”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee

'A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.'

Other habitats in The Verge- Ishtar, Inarra, Aphrodite, Zoe, Sacajewea, Earhart?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modesty_Blaise