5. New Body Work
At Antigone Wells’s first visit with Dr. Catherine Bellows, the plastic surgeon had made a number of scans of her head and neck. These included computerized tomography to trace the underlying muscle and bone structures. With each of the slicing x-ray images taken on one-millimeter spacing, this scan functioned as a virtual three-dimensional composite that the doctor could manipulate along the x, y, and z axes. Other scans included a full-head hologram of Wells sitting still with her face forward, like Queen Nefertiti, and a full-motion capture of her in various poses and actions: smiling, frowning, grimacing, laughing, screaming, chatting, and whispering. It was like the motion captures made of actors wearing bodysuits with strategically placed ping-pong balls or tiny points of light, except this technique used tiny circles of fluorescent paint dabbed on her skin.
At her second visit, Wells and the doctor discussed her concerns and the available options. On a wall-sized display screen, Bellows called up these scans and used a wand to magically alter Wells’s face. By making incisions around her ears and pulling and removing excess skin, Bellows could tighten her cheeks, reduce the folds around her nose and mouth, and trim her jaw outline. An incision at her chin tightened the folds of her neck. One in her hairline lifted her forehead and repositioned her eyebrows. Others around her eyes reduced excess tissue and folding in her upper lids, removed the bags under her lower lids, and enhanced her cheekbones. With each virtual incision, the full-color hologram reacted to show a younger, smoother face—more like the face Wells had seen and touched and made up twenty or thirty years ago. Bellows then tested each of the cuts with results in the motion capture. It all seemed very real, very precise. And yet …
“I look rather—I don’t know—pinched. Like a skirt that’s been taken in.”
“The end result will look better than this,” Bellows assured her. “The computer image is a just suggestion and can’t entirely account for all the work I’ll be doing.”
“What kind of work? I thought cutting and pulling were what you did.”
“Well, I can also redistribute some of the fatty tissue, for a fuller look. Going deeper, I could reposition some of your muscles, especially along the jaw and over the cheekbones, and then redrape the skin on that new framework.”
“I don’t know. …” Wells didn’t like what she saw. The reworked hologram had a prickliness about it, a predatory cast, like a hawk eyeing a mouse at a distance. The new Wells was not a soft-skinned girl but a hard-edged—although still recognizable and beautiful—woman.
“How long do the results last?” Wells asked.
“That depends on you,” Bellows said. “If you keep out of the sun and wear solar protection, avoid alcohol and tobacco use, take care of your body—but I can see you already exercise regularly—and eat a healthy diet, your face should retain this youthful appearance for five to fifteen years.”
“That’s a long time. … I guess.”
“We all experience the burdens of time. This will still be the skin you were born with, just enhanced and repositioned. With advancing age, your skin is destined to become thinner, weaker, and lose its elasticity. Whatever I do, gravity is still not our friend.”
“I suppose there’s no other option. What about chemical peels, dermabrasion—things of that nature?”
“They’re good. They’ll extend your time by a few years. But mostly these are less invasive procedures, mostly used for surface blemishes, like scarring from acne.” Bellows paused. “There is another option, but it’s new and still somewhat risky. Have you heard of the work they’re doing with stem cells these days?”
“Have I heard?” Wells laughed. “Half of my brain and both my kidneys have been regrown from stem cells. Are you saying you can regrow my face?”
Bellows nodded. “It’s a mixture of cells—myosatellites to generate the underlying muscle, and epidermal stem cells to create new skin. The attachment points are complex, and we must reconnect the nerves for both sensation and motor control. It’s a long surgery under general anesthetic.”
“Have you done these stem-cell implants yourself?”
“A few times—three cases. All experienced good results.”
“It will be my own skin, all new? Not just old skin stretched out?”
“Chronologically, it won’t even be your skin. Early stem-cell procedures did not address the aging of the telomeres—the little bits of code on the ends of chromosomes that count down as your cells reproduce and copy the original DNA. In the old days, the donor cells were all just as old as your body, and they continued aging along with the rest of you. Today, we treat the stem cells with telomerase, an enzyme which adds the missing sequences back to the ends of the DNA. These will be, effectively, baby cells.”
Antigone Wells studied the images of her face on the screen—the blown-apart and excised x-ray scans, the pulled and tightened hologram. She made her decision.
“I want the new procedure,” she said. She had done it before for her body and her brain, why not once more for a boost to her ego?
“All right,” Bellows said. “I’ll schedule you for a stem-cell extraction.”
* * *
When word came from Houston that Richard Praxis had been murdered, Callie was called into a family meeting at the Praxis Engineering headquarters. Her father sat at his desk like a graven image, unmoving and unreadable. She could sense his anger and his grief but not see it in his face.
Her nephew Brandon, who came into the room after her, clearly had not heard the news, because the first thing he said was, “Hi! What’s up?”
Her father’s head and eyes shifted focus toward him slowly, almost blindly. “Your uncle is dead. Gunned down in a parking garage in Houston.”
“Oh,” the younger man said. “Oh, gosh! That’s too ba-aa—”
The elder Praxis erupted. “I thought we had an understanding!”
“We did! I did! I gave him your message. I never touched him.”
“What message?” Callie asked. “When did you arrange all this?”
John looked at her coldly. “I sent Brandon down to meet with Richard personally. Get him to change out that Stochastic Design software with a new copy. Then to leave us—leave you—leave the family alone. No more spying. No more contact of any kind.”
“And that’s what I told him,” Brandon said. “And he promised.”
“If you didn’t kill him, then who did?” John stared at Callie as he asked this.
“Maybe it was a simple mugging,” she said. “Some kind of street violence. It happens in Texas, after all, where everyone’s got a gun.” She took a breath to focus her thoughts. “And maybe he had other enemies. Richard was—you’ll have to forgive me, Dad—but he was a devious weasel. Maybe he was making a play for Tallyman this time, or some other client, and someone objected.”
“You are the one who wanted him dead,” her father said. “ ‘Make him stop breathing,’ you said.”
“That was my anger and confusion speaking,” she said. “I didn’t really mean it.”
But she did, of course. Every word. She just shouldn’t have said it aloud.
“And now it’s come true,” John said. “Now my own son is dead.”
“Do the police have any, well, leads?” Brandon asked.
Callie had read the newsfeed from the Houston Chronicle, as forwarded by Richard’s widow, Julia. “They say the killer used .22 caliber rounds, probably from a pistol, at close range. They were hollow points—”
“Ouch,” Brandon said.
“You know about this?” she asked.
“With the right load, it’s a devastating round. Cuts you up inside.”
“Well,” she went on, “he was shot once in the groin and once in the head.”
“Execution style,” Brandon said. “First put you down, then finish you off.”
“Could we please not talk about this?” John said.
“Sorry!” Callie and Brandon echoed at the same time.
“We have to go down for the funeral, of course,” her father said. “Comfort Julia, as well as Jeff and Jacquie.”
“I’ll go with you, Grandpa,” Brandon said.
“I appreciate that,” John replied. “Callie?”
She stared at her father. She could keep a straight face in a meeting like this. But … spend a week with her sister-in-law, her niece and nephew? Recalling all the good times, remembering and idolizing her brother? And never once let her bitterness come through? Never once say what she was thinking? That was not possible.
“Someone has to stay here and run the company,” she said. “You two go and give them my regrets. … And my condolences.”
* * *
The chest pains had started when John Praxis was in Houston for his son’s funeral. At first he felt a twinge, or more like a deep, internal twang, while he was sitting with the family after the ceremony. He was trying to assure them that, although Richard might be gone, and they all had not seen each other in a long time because of war and distance, Julia and the children—grown now, young adults almost Brandon’s age—were definitely still his family. They could call on him for any service, anything they needed. He and Callie and Brandon were there to help.
At the time, he thought the pains were a reaction to something he had eaten—heartburn or some variant of acid reflux. When they persisted for more than a night and a day, he considered briefly that the intermittent spasms and the continuing ache might be some aspect of his grief, manifesting itself psychosomatically. But after the agony he had felt on the golf course all those years ago—what? thirteen years? fifteen now?—he couldn’t fool himself. The pain was real. Something had gone wrong with his heart again.
When he and Brandon returned to San Francisco, he made an appointment with his internist, Virginia Mills. After taking the routine diagnostics of blood pressure, pulse, and blood oxygen, she listened to his chest and asked about his symptoms.
“Burning … aching,” he replied. “Kind of a heaviness.”
“Any soreness in your arms or neck?” she suggested.
“Sometimes, but mostly centered in the chest area.”
“Your chart shows you’ve had a heart implant …”
“I was one of the first,” he told her proudly. “Done right here in San Francisco. Within a year I was running marathons. I felt like I had the heart of a year-old baby.”
The doctor’s eyebrows came together. “Well, not exactly.”
“Are you telling me I didn’t get a new heart?”
“Oh, no. I’m sure you got a freshly grown organ. But with those early treatments, the doctors focused more on the basics of technique—culturing the stem cells, giving them the right chemical growth signals, constructing and loading the armature—and so they missed some of the subtleties. Any cell that came out of your body then had the exact chronological age of your body, which was what? Mid-sixties?”
“Sixty-four.”
“We’ve since learned to reset the chronological age of extracted stem cells by rebuilding the telomeres, effectively making them younger. The doctors did that with your more recent regenerative treatments. But back when you got your new heart, we didn’t understand the importance of those little bits of DNA. And early researchers into cellular regeneration were getting mixed signals from the cancer crowd, suggesting that telomerase—the enzyme that adds back those fragments—might cause the cells to become cancerous. We’ve learned a whole lot more now and can handle the enzyme without creating monsters.”
“But this heart?” he asked.
“Is aging naturally, along with the rest of your body. I can run some tests, but I think they’ll just show you’re getting the normal deterioration—muscle thickening, arterial dissection, plaque buildup—that comes with growing old.”
Praxis could hear angel wings fluttering in her voice, soft as clods of earth falling on his coffin lid. “Is there anything you can do?”
“Oh, sure! Grow a new heart—a better model this time—then crack you open and pop it in.”
“And how long will this new heart last?”
“Oh, years and years. It really will be a young heart now.”
“To go along with my gracefully aging body?”
Dr. Mills grinned. “Take care of yourself and you could go on for—oh, I don’t know—” She beamed at him without saying more.
“Indefinitely?” he suggested.
“Something like that.”
* * *
After his third date with Penny—real dates, not just business discussions as an excuse to have lunch: dinner and a movie, dinner and a dance club where the bouncer recognized her, Sunday brunch and a stroll in Golden Gate Park—Brandon Praxis knew it was time to make a declaration.
“You know, Penny—”
“What do you suppose that is?” she asked. They were walking through the Museum of Modern Art on Third Street. When he looked up, Penny was pointing at a pile of polished wooden blocks, oak or maple or some other light-colored wood, about three feet high on the black-tile floor ahead of them.
“I don’t know. There’s a card on the wall behind it.”
“Would it tell me anything I don’t already know?”
“The artist’s intentions, maybe,” he said, squinting at it.
“You take a guess,” she insisted, “without looking.”
“Well … children’s blocks? Something about interrupted childhood?”
“A really cool construction?” she offered. “A castle or a cathedral. And somebody just knocked it down?”
“A really cool piece of art—a big ceramic, maybe—that the blocks were holding up. And somebody just stole it?”
She turned to look at him. “Not bad, sir. Not bad at all.”
“Penny, look. Uh … You know I like you.”
“Whups!” she said. “Here it comes.”
“What?” He was confused.
“The dump speech.”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh, yeah.”
She took his hand and led him over to a bench, sat down herself, and pulled him down beside her. “You like me? Sure. And you’ve shown it how? Kind of a shoulder squeeze, once, after we cracked open that lying piece of shit software your uncle installed. One tentative good-night kiss—a nice kiss, but no follow-up—on our second date. And one hug in the daylight, the sort you’d give when you’re sending Aunt Maude off to Des Moines. … Brandon, are you gay?”
“No! Oh no! It’s just—what I’m feeling—it’s not just about sex.”
“Well, that’s good, because it hasn’t been about sex, has it?”
“I was raised—that is, we go slower … Do you want sex?”
“You can’t ask me that! How do I know? Make your move.”
There was only one answer to that. He wrapped his arms around her, low below her elbows, pulled her closer, and kissed her. Hard. Then he released one hand, passed it under her thighs, lifted her onto his lap for a better angle, and kissed her again.
“Ahem!” The sound came from some distance away. “Ahem!”
Brandon and Penny both turned their heads, breaking the kiss, and looked up. One of the uniformed guards was staring at them from beyond the far end of the bench and wagging a finger.
They turned back to look at each other. He shrugged. She grinned. And he kissed her again, another long kiss that only ended by mutual consent. But still she made no attempt to pull away.
“Whew,” Penny whispered.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
The guard was starting toward them, so she slid off his lap, stood up, and straightened her skirt. He stood up beside her and took her hand when it drifted free.
“Shouldn’t we be making some kind of plans?” he suggested.
“You mean, ‘your place or mine?’ Moving in? Wedding bells?”
“Any of the above. All of the above. Anything you want.”
“My mother taught me to go slow, too, you know.”
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said.
“Your grandfather and aunt hate me.”
“No, they just don’t understand you.”
“Oh, we could be so much trouble together!”
“In and out of it,” he promised. “Constantly.”
“Do you really want to make plans about this?”
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
“That’s a famous quote, isn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s experience speaking,” he replied.
“Then let’s go to your place and test it.”
* * *
John Praxis was still only partway conscious when they took him out of recovery and wheeled him off to his hospital room. He recognized his fuddled state and knew it would last for a day or two, maybe a week, maybe longer. The mix of potent anesthetics and analgesics did that to him. As the bed-gurney-trolley thing whisked him feet-first down the corridors, with people obediently scattering out of his way, he recalled saying out loud, somewhat drunkenly, “I feel like pharaoh!”
Then he must have dozed off again.
The next thing he knew, he was sitting up in his hospital bed, with the head end angled at forty-five degrees, and it was evening outside the window. He looked around and found his daughter sitting off to one side.
“How long have you been here?” Praxis asked.
“Not long. Couple of minutes. How are you feeling?”
“Hungry—I think.” He looked down toward his feet and saw that the rolling table held a tray with empty plates and a glass, scattered flatware, a crumpled napkin. “Unless I’ve already eaten.”
“They were there when I came in,” Callie said.
“Messy of them. Leaving someone else’s dishes.”
He shifted on the bed, and that’s when the pain first made itself known. His chest ached—not the old ache, the heart thing, but a deep pain going all around his ribs and spine and right down the center of his breastbone. He lifted the front of his hospital gown and saw the familiar red scar crossed with exposed metal staples. Every other kind of surgery they could do these days with needles and tweezers, working through tiny holes in the body—“laparoscopy,” they called it. But taking out an old heart and putting in a new one still required them to crack his chest open and peel back his ribs, like filleting a steamed lobster.
“Ouch!” was all he could think to say.
“Do you want a pain pill?” she asked.
“No, I’m loaded up already. But it’s fun having the little Tagalog-speaking nurse, who only knows five words in English, show me her row of smiley faces with their frowns and tears so I can tell her how much it hurts.”
“Dad, you’re delirious.”
“Yeah, I know.” He waited three beats, four, then decided to ask the obvious question. “Antigone couldn’t come?”
“She had her own procedure yesterday. You remember that? She won’t go out until the bandages come off.”
“Oh. Yes. Right.” He paused. “But it was a success?”
“Yes, lovely. We’ll get you one for that double chin.”
“But not right away. I’m still sore from this heart thing. Thank the lord, I’ll never have to go through this again.”
“Yes, the doctor says this one’s a keeper.”
“At least it will see me out the door.”
“Dad, please don’t talk like that!”
“It’s nothing but the truth.”
* * *
A man could get anything he wanted in Italy with enough money, Brandon Praxis realized. Obtaining official-seeming documents for himself and his brother Paul as a pair of Albanian guest workers had been the easy part.
Harder was learning enough Italian to get by, although Aunt Callie undertook to coach them while she and Brandon were formulating the rest of their plan. Hardest of all for the two brothers was picking up a repertoire of Albanian phrases, in a suitable dialect with appropriate accent, so they could respond when confronted with any Italian they didn’t know—before, that is, they could awkwardly switch into broken and accented English. Now, the only trick was staying away from any real Albanians who might want to carry on a conversation.
Knowing how and when to strike was not hard. Callie had intimate knowledge of the family, could sketch the layout of the Villa Nettuno from memory, and knew all the catering firms that supplied her uncle’s lavish parties. Getting the schedule of his upcoming social functions in advance and enlisting two presentable young Albanians as bartender and waiter through a temp agency were, again, merely a matter of money.
“You sure you can maneuver around a crowded party?” Brandon teased his brother. “That is, without knocking over any of the guests?”
“I’m a wizard at broken field running,” Paul replied. “The trick will be if the bodyguards strip us naked and ask why a poor boy from the Balkans is sporting a U.S. mil-spec prosthesis.”
“Then you just kick them in the head and run like hell.”
Knowing whom to strike was the easiest part of all. Callie opened her scrapbook and showed the brothers dozens of snapshots, formal and informal, in sunlight and in shadow, of both the target and his eldest son.
Finding the right agent was not that hard, either. They wanted something tasteless, odorless, colorless, and water soluble, with manageable dosing and delayed action that could easily be mistaken for natural causes. The obvious choice was thallium sulfate, a powder they could pick up in any pharmacy or hardware store, because in Europe it was still sold as rat poison. One gram could take down a grown man with a fifty-fifty probability of death, and a single teaspoon contained thirty-three grams of poison. At such high doses, death followed in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Thallium sulfate was easily countered by administering a chelating agent, ferric ferrocyanide, the inorganic pigment called “Prussian blue,” along with whole blood dialysis. But that would happen only if the doctor suspected poisoning and didn’t mistake the erratic pulse, vomiting, and diarrhea for food poisoning or the burning sensation in feet and fingers for some form of neuralgia.
The trick would be to administer the necessary dosage to just the two targets without killing off half of Turin’s social elite.
“I don’t care about them,” Callie protested. “Anyway, three-quarters of ’em are crooks. Meglio morti!”
“You may not care,” Brandon said. “But we do have consciences.”
“You see, Aunt Callie,” Paul added, “if you say these are bad guys—followed you to America over a debt, and will kill you to settle it—then we’ll do the necessary. But too much collateral damage is, well …”
“Unprofessional, is what it is,” Brandon concluded. “Besides, if too many people come down sick, that increases the odds of the medical folk testing for poison and applying the antidote in time. You don’t want that.”
In the end, they planned to use the power of their positions as snooty Italian waiters to control the poison’s distribution. If the caterer was supplying the wine glasses six to a tray, they would mix all six with lethal doses of thallium sulfate in the pantry. Then all they had to do was get close to the targets and offer them any of two glasses. In case other guests reached for a glass at any time—other than guests standing right beside the targets, of course—the brothers rehearsed the line “No, è tappato! È aspro!” meaning the bottle was corked, the wine was sour, and they were taking it back to the kitchen for disposal. If guests around the targets reached for those glasses … well, those were acceptable casualties.
At the point of action, however, they didn’t need such subterfuges.
The event was a gala dinner, held out on the patio overlooking the garden. Matteo di Rienzi and his son Carlo were seated at the head table. Brandon and Paul did not have to circulate among the guests and find ways to avoid poisoning any bystanders. They only had to be quick.
In the pantry, when he knew no one was looking, Brandon opened a bottle of the evening’s choice, a dry, light Barbera from the Piedmont, and tipped in most of his packet of their special ingredient. “Seven hundred and fifty milliliters in a bottle,” he whispered to himself, “that’s about four to six glasses. So two ounces of powder is … nine and a third grams per glass. But those are big glasses out there, so more like fourteen. Close enough!”
He capped the opening with his thumb, gave the bottle a few shakes to stir the mixture, and whisked away any loose powder with a damp towel. He wiped his thumb carefully and would make sure to wash it thoroughly later, because the poison could also work through the skin. When the waiters came through to serve, he handed the bottle to Paul with a nod, and his brother moved fast—without appearing to hurry—to reach the head table before any of the others.
The smart thing, the intelligent thing, for Paul to do would have been to pour for Matteo and Carlo then manage to drop the bottle and destroy the evidence. He would certainly have been willing to trade a momentary rebuke for the safety of the other guests.
In the event, however, Matteo di Rienzi’s old-world hospitality doomed the whole table. From the open doorway, Brandon could see him wave the bottle away from his own glass and gesture for Paul to fill the others first. If either the tables or the glasses had been larger, the hosts might have escaped, because the bottle would empty out before it came back around to them. But six seemed to be the magic number this evening—cozy seating in life as in death. Brandon prayed Paul would skimp a bit with the guests and be generous with the hosts.
After tipping up the bottle over Matteo’s glass, Paul moved swiftly away. Back at the entrance to the pantry, as he passed Brandon, he nodded and shrugged. “Meglio morti!” he whispered. Better off dead!
It would have been suspicious if the two Albanians had suddenly disappeared. So Brandon could only hope no one would start vomiting and screaming before the evening ended.
* * *
Antigone Wells had waited six days for the bandages to come off. They had not been pleasant days, with her head, face, and neck bound up like a mummy. She had been forced to breathe, slowly and shallowly, through two straws stuck deep in her nostrils beneath the contours of her new nose. She could take in water and a liquid diet through a tube taped between her new lips, and without using her cheeks she could only suck on it by working her tongue and throat together. She was blind and guided herself around her and John’s apartment in a downtown high-rise by following ropes strung from bed to chair to bathroom. Her medical situation was not much different from that of a severe burn victim, except that she had chosen the procedure for herself, and it went much deeper than just the layers of skin.
On the day of the unveiling, as Dr. Catherine Bellows called it, Wells had asked Callista di Rienzi to accompany her to the doctor’s office but then wait outside. She wanted her first look at the new face, her burst of joy and acceptance, to be a private matter between herself and the doctor. And if she wasn’t entirely happy with the results, Wells wanted that to be private, too.
“Now I’m going to set you up with a mirror here,” Bellows said. “Right in front of you, about a foot and a half away.”
Wells touched it for reassurance. “Xhank you, Doctor,” she murmured around the mouth tube.
As Bellows removed clips, cut through tapes, and unwrapped the bandages, she explained what would happen. “You eyelids will be red and a bit puffy. That’s to be expected, because you haven’t opened them in nearly a week. And your lips will be dry at first, because you haven’t been able to lick them.” The woman continued to cut, unwrap, and peel away the cloth layers.
During the past week, Wells’s face had felt heavy and numb. She always assumed this was due to a residue of the anesthetic or the weight of her bandages and their pressure against her skin. But as the layers of bandage came off, the feeling did not return.
“One other thing you’ll notice,” Bellows went on, “is a tiny, almost invisible seam around your face and neck where the implant is attached to the rest of your skin. It will generate a small, keloid-type internal scar. At your age, such scars are largely composed of collagen. They are relatively inflexible and lack any kind of blood circulation. This one will present as a faint white line, hard to see in most lights, but difficult to eradicate surgically.”
“Xhat doesn’t sound xhery good,” Wells said around the tube.
“Don’t worry about it,” Bellows said. “It will hide easily with makeup.”
With a last few snips and turns, the doctor lifted the last bandages away. Her fingers plucked the straws from Wells’s nose and massaged it gently. Her touch felt distant and muted. She unwound the tape around the mouth tube, and Wells felt no pull as the sticky surface peeled away from her skin. Finally the doctor removed the tube and stood back so that Wells could see herself in the mirror.
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 Ms, Fs and Ps, 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 Vs 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?
Barnes didn’t have any predictions and no way to test them. All she could do was collect her data, watch and make notes, wonder … and pray.