Probably the antifungals did threaten it. They probably took it, in fact, because when she died her face was pink again, instead of the cadaver blue of oxygen starvation. But she was just as dead.
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel wasn’t the only one to die. Twenty-eight hundred of the colonists died in sixty days, just under half the population of Newmanhome, before the frantic biologists discovered—not a cure, no, but an antifungal agent that, sopped onto a gauze mask, killed the spores before they could get into the respiratory system. The agent smelled like rotting manure, but that was a small enough price to pay for the survival of human life on Newmanhome.
It wasn’t just human life that was at risk. All the carefully bred and preserved livestock—fish excepted, actually, but all the sheep, goats, cattle, dogs, horses, deer—had to be forcibly fitted with halters and masks of their own. They all fought it, but they survived—
All but the cats.
No one could make a cat leave a wet gauze mask in place over its mouth and nose. They maintained the cat tradition to the extinction of the species: the cat who has no master and acknowledges no law but its own, even if it dies for it. Die they did.
When Viktor got back to his parents’ home he pushed open the door and stopped.
The place reeked of stale beer and vomit. His father was sprawled beside the bed, snoring raggedly, impossible to wake. He had fouled himself, and there were stains of urine and vomit on bed and floor. He had taken his artificial leg off and lay with it clasped in his arms, like a beloved woman.
It was not the first time Viktor had seen his father drunk, but it was a long way the worst. Viktor would not have believed that he could have felt such hatred for the old man. He did not fear that his father was dying. He almost wished it were true. He set his kit bag down on the table, pushing aside empty bottles, and stood over the drunken man, listening objectively to the rattling, choking sounds of the snores.
You dirty old bastard, he thought.
A shadow from the doorway made him turn, and there was Billy Stockbridge peering in, his mother behind him.
Even at that moment Viktor felt a tingling shock in his groin at the sight of Marie-Claude. She had cut her hair short since the last time he had seen her, and there was a certain soft thickening of the flesh under her chin that he didn’t remember seeing before. She was wearing a short, thin dress that did nothing to flatter her—the kind housewives put on to clean their kitchens—and she was carrying a bucket and a mop.
Even with the hideous antifungal mask, she was very beautiful.
“Viktor,” she said, “I didn’t know you were here. I’m sorry about your mother.”
“But we’ve got to get your dad to the hospital,” Billy added.
“They’ve got more important things to do than looking after drunks,” Viktor said contemptuously—and was startled to see the quick flare of anger that twisted Billy Stockbridge’s face. But it was his mother who spoke, already by Pal Sorricaine’s side, lifting an eyelid with her thumb, feeling his sweating forehead.
“Viktor. Your father isn’t just drunk. He’s got acute alcohol poisoning. He could die. Help Billy get him to the hospital.”
What Viktor would not have done for his father he could not refuse Marie-Claude. He pulled a blanket off his parents’ bed and rolled the old man into it. Billy helped, glowering. The filth was already staining the blanket as Viktor picked Pal Sorricaine up and threw him over his shoulder. The filth didn’t matter. It was only one more insult added to the rancor that was already overflowing. “I’ll be back,” he said, and carried his father out the door, Billy Stockbridge trailing glowering behind.
When Viktor got back from getting his father admitted—only to a pallet on the ground, because all the beds were full of the dying—Marie-Claude had thrown open the windows, scrubbed up the worst of the filth, and cleared off the litter of bottles and dirty clothes. She had even made a pot of tea. She poured a cup for Viktor as he sat down.
She seemed pale, silent, drawn, abstracted. But all she said was, “Is your father going to be all right?”
Viktor shrugged. “They’re treating him, anyway.” Actually, even the doctor who finally came to see them had had no hesitation about admitting Pal Sorricaine, once he had felt his pulse. Lying on the ground and wholly unaware, the snoring man had been washed, bedded, and stuck with IVs to replenish his lost liquids and electrolytes before Viktor left. The doctor said it would be at least forty-eight hours before Pal would be able to go home. (Strange that even yet people said “forty-eight hours,” as though it were a natural unit of time.) “Billy wanted to stay with him a while,” Viktor added.
Marie-Claude nodded in that weary, absent way, as though she were thinking about something else entirely—though with the antifungal mask covering most of her face there wasn’t much he could tell about what she was thinking, anyway. “Billy is very fond of your father,” she mentioned.
Viktor gaped at her. “For God’s sake, why?”
She didn’t seem surprised at the question. “Why shouldn’t he be? Pal is a good man, Viktor. You’re too hard on him. He’s had trouble adjusting, and there’s his leg, and then your mother’s sickness . . .” She said it all flatly, like a comment on the weather. Her voice was as pallid as what he could see of her face.
There was something wrong with Marie-Claude. For a moment the natural fear flashed though his mind—the sickness?—but no, he reassured himself, it couldn’t be that. The sick ones were unmistakable, the gasping struggle for air, the cyanosed complexion. None of that applied to Marie-Claude. Still, Viktor looked at her with concern.
“Are you all right?” he demanded.
She looked at him questioningly and then seemed to shake herself. She poured more tea for him, thoughtfully. “Nobody’s all right now, are they? But I’ll be fine.” Then, without warning. she said. “Viktor. Why don’t you marry Theresa McGann?”
There was a swallow of tea halfway down Viktor’s throat. He gagged. “You talk like my mother,” he got out, strangling.
“Then your mother talks sense to you. I’ll speak for her, since she can’t anymore. You ought to have a real family, not just leave a puppy here and there. Marry Theresa. Or somebody. Why not?”
“Because,” he said—boldly, bitterly, “the only woman I want to marry will go to bed with anybody on Newmanhome, except me.”
She looked at him in puzzlement.
Then, for the first time, he saw a crinkling at the corners of the eyes, just visible above the mask. She was almost smiling. She put her hand on his. “Dear, dear Viktor,” she said with affection. “Do you have any idea how grand you’ve been for my morale, all these years?”
He snatched his hand away. “Damn you, don’t patronize me!” he grated.
“I don’t mean to,” she said apologetically. She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she closed her eyes, as though in resignation. When she opened them again she said, “Have you finished your tea? Then let’s close the windows and lock the door. I’m a lot too old to marry you, Viktor. I’m too old for an affair with you, too, I mean for any long time. But if you really want us to make love—once—well, why not?”
Viktor didn’t see Marie-Claude after that, not for a long time. For the whole next day he went around grinning to himself. He was just about the only person in the colony smiling that day. People looked at him with surprise and sometimes with anger. He was reliving every moment and touch of that wonderful copulation. Marie-Claude in bed was what he had been dreaming of since before even puberty, and the reality was not in any way a letdown. They had been careful with each other’s gauze masks, kissing through them, with all their foul smell and taste, and in every other way they had been wild. She had responded to him with gasped and choked cries, and at the end, when she sobbed and cried out, she had dissolved into shaking tears.
Viktor was startled and worried and did not, just then, know why.
She didn’t show up at the mass funerals when his mother, with forty-two others, was being put under the ground. (Even there Viktor could hardly help an invisible smile now and then, even while he cried.) That was just as well. There was a nasty—and completely unexpected—quarrel at the grave site. It concerned religion, of all things. The Moslems didn’t want to have their dead buried with the unbelievers, and once the Moslems made that clear, some of the other sects began muttering, too. It took all of Captain Bu’s bellowing to restore order. Then a rancorous emergency town meeting was called that night, people shouting at each other through tears and gauze masks, before it was decided that future burials could be segregated by religion.