“You are still the one with the stone and the sling,
Man of my time. You were in the cockpit,
With the malevolent wings. The meridians of death,
I have seen you – in the chariot of fire, at the gallows
At the wheels of torture. I have seen you: it was you
- Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968)
The doctor loved a lot of things, to make him dislike a thing of any sort was a feat unto itself.
Fortunate, then – perhaps, depending on how one saw it – that Shivaji was a city of overachievers and workaholics.
It was silent, sparse on commuters, a ghost city, almost. Unnerving was the word for it. The doctor didn’t like being unnerved, it was why he avoided watching horror movies. Unless Kieran was sitting next to him, then it could be enjoyable. Not fun, however; never fun.
That morning, the third morning that week – it was becoming something of a habit – he walked the empty streets with his eyes trained on the ground, lifting them only to greet the stray bicycle riders bold enough to brave everything that came with being Outside in Shivaji this year. A young woman – they were always young – rode out from the bend opposite him, then, head braced against the mid-morning wind. A dull green mask covered the bottom half of her face, sunglasses her eyes. Like a grinning mouth, a synthetic straw sunhat flapped its wide rims on her head, secured to her chin with a purple ribbon.
“Good morning,” he greeted, smiling. His own nose and mouth had been outwards replaced by a pattern of obnoxiously vibrant flowers, but it was the thought that counted, yes? His eyes would still crinkle at the edges.
She zoomed past him, as they tended to.
Chuckling to himself, he continued on, resumed whistling the half-baked tune he’d made up for his own amusement.
But something made his whistling stutter to a halt, made the stout, generously decorated houses tilt their empty laundry lines in attentive confusion. The woman had returned. Precisely, she’d slid in front of him and barred his way. The bike played its role of barricade spectacularly.
Without preamble, still perched on the bike, she said, “You’re the doctor.”
It was a statement, not a question. Judging by the calculated desperation clouding her face, his nod was entirely unnecessary.
“I am free until two thirty,” he specified gently, seeing her hesitance. “What has happened, exactly?”
He’d learned to ask that particular question four days ago, after a justified but misled assumption had put him in the only slightly qualified position of assisting a home birth. It was an experience he was not enthusiastic to repeat.
“Allergic reaction,” answered she. How banal it sounded in her mouth. Her posture shifted, the doctor imagined that, under the sunglasses, her eyes had narrowed, piercing him with the force of one hundred burning suns. “You were sent here for that.”
Dipping his head in consolation, the doctor ceded, waving his hand in encouragement, a tiny non-verbal ‘go on’.
A fraction of her collapsed in relief. Another fraction, like the second in a parallel pair of muscles, tightened in determination, “Please, Doctor. Get on.”
Lorenzo Guidice loved bikes. He had one at home.
They sped off into the murky fogs of quarter past nine in the morning.
><
The house the woman dropped him off at was the exact mixture of well-kept and shabby that had Lorenzo thinking of witches in cozy, village-side cottages. Not that he had ever met a witch before. Or a village-side cottage, for that matter… His life was depressingly city centric.
Having informed him that it would be better to wait outside, the woman sped off in a cloud of dust and loose paper bits that had fallen from the tattered placards on the walls – only in Shivaji. He listened and stayed dawdling daylight away on the wrong side of the threshold, admiring the stars and diamond-esque patterns drawn on the house’s sides in coloured chalk. Just as he’d begun thinking that it’d be more useful of him to knock on the door regardless, its upside swung open. A wide-eyed face framed by dark curls stared at him from within.
“Hello,” he offered, waving. “I’m the doctor.”
The downside joined the upside. A girl of no more than seventeen pulled an orange shawl up over her nose.
“As you are,” she greeted, bobbing her head. “Ira got you? Thank you for coming, it’s getting worse. Please don’t bother with shoes. Follow me.”
He didn’t have to follow her far, it turned out.
The house had four rooms, three branching out from the first; all he managed to learn in the few seconds she ushered him through was how high her father’s temperature was and what spices her eldest brother thinks caused the rashes.
“He hasn’t been able to keep anything down,” she said, nodding at the pale, sunken man knocked out on the bed. “We can’t get him to respond to anything but pain pills, and he’s building an immunity to those, now, too.”
Kneeling by the bed, the doctor waited for the sombre-faced middle-aged woman preoccupied with changing the pillow beneath the man’s head to move hastily out of his way before checking his fingers, ears, wrists, and neck for any sort of reading device. A finger light touch on his shoulder interrupted his search – he paused.
A papery whisper, scratchy and melancholic. “Only Vihaan and Ira. He doesn’t have any.”
Nodding, he pressed the sensors he’d demanded be implanted into the tips of his fingers after the clusterfuck that was the 50’s famine on Luyten b to the man’s wrist, chest, and forehead, each time waiting for the information to register in the statistics of his overlays before moving on. Analytics started running before he was even done, running in smooth line and waves in his peripheries.
The algorithms had to be left to argue to produce anything of quality, so he used the time to whip out his stethoscope and hammer and check the man’s vitals in the good old-fashioned way, listening for any rattles in his breath, the pulsing and hitches of his heart, watching for the movement of his eyes behind his eyelids.
There was a soothing cream that he had with him, and he had the girl point to where the rashes had spread so he could apply it.
The sombre woman had left when he’d pulled out the stethoscope; she returned now with two rags and a bucket of water. She dabbed the sweat at the man’s brow away with one, carefully soaked the other and pressed it to his face, neck, chest, swiping at his arms. Lorenzo turned to check the data servers. He a finger to his left temple and blinked into the light that flooded his vision, waiting for his eyes to adjust before diving into analysis.
Beyond his sphere of vibrancy, the girl cast the doctor’s glazed eyes a curious look before giving her mother a pat on her slumped shoulders and disappearing through the curtained doorway. Her mother tilted her head a fraction of a centimetre to the side.
Inside his sphere of vibrancy, the doctor thanked the heavens, as he often found himself doing, for all those experiences that had left him feeling as incompetent as a lab rat in a weight lifting contest. For the practice they had given him in keeping his shit together, specifically.
In front of him, in countless little tabs, spread the documented life of Rahul Singh, from birth and education on Luyten b (yikes) to a hole in reality to a stable job as a haggling mediator in Shivaji’s trade docks right down to the suspension notice filed a week ago quoting “insufficient workplace security”. Lorenzo took a mental breather to calm himself down. Whatever had happened in Mr. Singh’s life to warrant the lack of papering was none of his business, and, quite frankly, he didn’t care to know. What tested his patience was that his family had been forced to wait until the last minute to call for professional help in fear of investigation.
Well, good riddance. He wasn’t planning on reporting any of it.
A vice grip on his wrist shocked him back to present reality. Mr. Singh was awake and staring at him, a fearful question in his watery eyes.
“Nice to meet you, sir. I am the doctor your daughter fetched for you,” said Lorenzo, pointedly ignoring how tense and still the air in the room had become. Aarunya (for he now knew that was her name) sat still as a statue by her husband’s side. Lorenzo smiled, “I’m afraid you’ve contracted a nasty case of combined immunobiological epigenetic incompatibility. A few spices that you came into contact with at the docks – or elsewhere, but the docks are more concentrated, yes? – happened to have triggered your immune system. You have no virus or bacterial infection, no fungus. Your body is fighting itself.”
A huff. “We thought as much,” Aarunya ceded. Unfreezing, she leaned forward, “Was it the Kepler ginger?”
“Yes. Along with Teegarden pepper, TOI chili, and… hm, no, that’s it.”
Rahul sighed, closing his eyes a moment, turning his head to stare tiredly at the blotchy ceiling.
“I see,” he whispered, almost unintelligible for how slurred and scratchy his voice came out.
Aarunya’s eyes sharpened. Grip on the bedframe tightening to a knuckle-white grip, she demanded, “Can you do anything about it? What can we do?”
“In the long term? Unless you get admitted into the hospital for more intensive and thorough care, there isn’t much to be done.” The mood in the room soured at the suggestion. Lifting his bag from the floor to the bedside table, Lorenzo added, “I can, however, give you a short-term solution to buy you time until you’re ready to make that decision.”
He met Rahul’s eyes in silent question. The dying man blinked and nodded.
><
All of Aarunya and Rahul’s children had arrived by the time he was done.
Vihaan, their second son, only nineteen, joined his mother’s side and stood vigil by the doorway, watching Lorenzo bustle about with righteous suspicion etched into the stiff of his brow. The youngest daughter Pari and her sister Ira, the bike woman, greeted him in the living room as he set about leaving, nudging a cup of tea in his direction, nursing their own in cold hands. It had begun to rain outside – Lorenzo took his sweet time basking in the warmth. The eldest stopped him just outside the house’s threshold, under the small bit of roof that jutted out just enough that the rain couldn’t reach past spraying their knees with murky water once in a while.
A stout man, well built and tall, with a down to earth quality about the way he held himself, Ashwin Singh looked Lorenzo dead in the eyes. Lorenzo smiled back and adjusted the collar of his coat against the wind.
“How much time does he have?” came the question.
“A few months,” the doctor responded, then lifted his fingers demonstratively. “Three, if he takes medication properly.”
“He will.”
A nod. “I hope so. For his sake.”
“He can’t go to the hospital.”
“I know.” Seeing Ashwin’s brows furrow, Lorenzo added quickly, “I will not hide what I know of your father’s situation from you, Mr. Singh. And I assure you I don’t plan on reporting it. There are people at the city hospital – the one next to the river, you know – that wouldn’t, either.”
Fishing out a piece of plastic from his coat, Lorenzo pressed it into Ashwin’s hand. “If you do decide to go to the hospital, ask for Doctor Balachandra. You don’t have to tell her I sent you, but it couldn’t hurt. She might see you sooner, in any case.”
Ashwin considered the card for a few seconds before pocketing it and holding out a hand that Lorenzo promptly shook.
“Thank you,” he said. “Mother should be able to convince him.”
“As mothers tend to,” agreed Lorenzo. He bobbed his head, “Good day, Mr. Singh. You know where to find me.”
The click of the door swinging shut reached his ear only once he’d reached the street’s corner.
Amusing himself with the curiosities of having your address be a widely known fact to over five blocks of people – most of whom weren’t even sure what kind of doctor he was, exactly – he almost forgot to check the time. In fact, he only remembered to when he reached the Meghanada, Shivaji’s great river, and was reminded of the saying his grandmother used to repeat over and over like a mantra on those days that dragged on until it seemed that night would never come. Ah, however did it go?
Oh. Oh, dear. Quarter past two.
Well. It wasn’t like he was getting to the other side of the city in fifteen minutes, anyways.
Shrugging, Lorenzo Guidice shook off the dregs of panic that had begun creeping over him like sickly, thornless ivy vines, and turned down the street, keeping a steady pace behind the river. Its endless ripples raced endlessly ahead of him.
Humans were slow creatures, and Kieran would simply have to wait.
><
Kieran Cromwell sat alone in a cat café. Story of his life, his sister would say.
Not that it seemed too hard-knock a one, considering the long-haired Persian purring on his lap as his long fingers scratched under its ear. If Lorenzo giggled to himself at the sight before plopping down across from him, then that was between him and his secretive God.
“Asshole,” muttered Kieran, eyes still fixed on the cat. “Made me wait. Thirty-three minutes, five seconds, sixty-six milliseconds.”
Lifting the menu, Lorenzo scoffed. “You made that up.”
“I have a timer set from two thirty.”
“Pedant. I bet you were here half an hour early, either way.”
“There is nothing wrong with being on time,” announced Kieran, looking up at him for the first time since he’d sat down. “Contrary to what you believe.”
“On the other hand, there is a lot wrong with hogging a table for an hour, and only ordering a – what is that?”
Kieran rebuked defensively, “I made a reservation. It’s water.”
“Regardless.” Lorenz grabbed the spoon from Kieran’s mug of… water (who asks for water in a mug?), studied his reflection in one side, then the next. Putting it down, he sighed and began, “I had a patient this morning.”
Humming in affirmation, Kieran tried to go back to petting the cat. It dodged his incoming hand and hissed before bounding up the shelves and settling on the rafters, its fluffy backside turned towards them. Slightly butthurt and greatly disappointed, Kieran folded his hands awkwardly on his lap.
“Sorry,” he gave Lorenzo a little go-on bob of his head. “You were saying.”
Taking a deep breath, Lorenzo began, “Well, you see, I was taking my morning walk, as I always do…”
Kieran had an effect on Lorenzo, despite being socially clumsy at best, that made the doctor want to spill all his worries into his cup and let him take them systematically apart, as clinical as if he were identifying an issue with a splitz system; it was strangely calming. That afternoon in no way differed from other afternoons, not yet at least. Lorenzo started talking and didn’t stop until they’d gotten through two tea kettles, some semblance of lunch-dinner, and a generous slice of carrot cake.
It was dark outside, and they dawdled outside the café for a moment, admiring the constellations painted in the sky by little organic sunspots. Lorenzo compared a cluster of them to a Teegarden constellation that rose from the southern horizon, Ilcci, the cup bearer.
“They aren’t stars,” said Kieran.
“Look damn similar, though, don’t they,” wondered Lorenzo wistfully aloud.
“Hm.”
“What’s wrong with you, hm?” they’d started making their way through the winding streets and narrow alleyway shortcuts, and Lorenzo bumped his shoulder gently against Kieran’s upper arm. “I’ve been complaining all afternoon, but you seem just as disappointed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he deflected.
They walked in silence for a while, their shoes clapping against the street tiles, wreathed in the distant, muted sounds of people settling down for the evening. They sidestepped a nice, red slipper that had landed on the street with an anticlimactic plop after being thrown out of an open window. Lorenzo did not take it upon himself to fill the quiet.
Kieran sighed, “I am sad about the stars.”
Chuckling, Lorenzo responded, “Ah… I know they’re little animals, really.”
“Hm.”
“Not demented yet, you know. Give me a few more years.”
More amused this time, Kieran hummed again. And that was the end of that.
They turned a corner and began heading upstream, the Meghanada bubbling steadily down like a vein of ink, waving its thousand hands at them as they passed.
><
There was something to the late evenings and nights of the Lantern that made a person forget all the troubles plaguing their inner worlds. It was a flood, really, more than a time of day. A flood of navy blue and deep, deep purple, velvet curtains pushing against the solitary anglerfish lights shining by the doorways of still-open businesses, and those bouncing on lines hung between the roofs of houses on either sides of each wider street. Backlit, faint but ever-present, by the glowworms in the caves that lemmed its upside-down cities – those that reached down to kiss the upper anchor clouds with the tips of their delicate turrets – like moats.
Neither Lorenzo nor Kieran were immune to the floating island’s dark, invasive charm, and as such almost suffered mortal strokes when the warehouse squatting two streets away from them blew its roof into the air like a shattered blanket of metal, plastic, wood, and green dust. Before they could pull themselves together, it promptly burst into flames.
Alright, then.
Kieran recovered first, narrowing his eyes at the flaming building, zooming in. “Remind me, Lorenzo, is fire usually white?”
Peeking out from behind the collar of his coat, Lorenzo wiped at his brow, responding, “No. And dust isn’t usually green. Do you still remember the shortcut home?”
Nodding curtly, Kieran grabbed him by the hand and booked it through a side alley.
That, it turned out the next morning, had been a good decision. If Shivaji’s air was polluted before, braving the Great Outdoors (the streets) was an active biohazard now, and the city was on lockdown. No citizen was allowed into public spaces without a gas mask – the penalty for disobedience was financial debilitation. Most infuriating, for Lorenzo, was the quoted reason why.
“Precautionary measures, my ass,” he complained darkly over breakfast. Having eaten earlier as per force of habit, Kieran simply nodded at him from across the table. Lorenzo eyed him, and added, “At least you can’t keep running away at five in the morning.”
“Both of our masks are coming this afternoon,” Kieran provided helpfully, “And it’s healthy to wake up early.”
“It isn’t when you hit the bed at two. I don’t have to be a doctor to know that.”
They were quiet for a while, Lorenzo seething internally at the news, Kieran reading a page or ten into his book (Lorenzo wasn’t counting). A thought wouldn’t let him be, and after a while (five minutes) it became too much to handle.
“You know more about this than I do,” he said.
Raising his eyebrows, Kieran looked up from his book. “What?”
“What spices are people allowed to grow here, do you know?”
A hum. “Luyten, Gliese. The rest have to be imported.” He paused. “Where are you going with this?”
“That’s why immigration was handled the way it was, yes?”
A nod.
Lorenzo paused for a moment. Once he opened this topic there would be no way of banishing it from his mind until it was finished. “There’ve never been reactions like these here. Not ten years ago, not fifteen, not five.”
Realisation brightened Kieran’s slate eyes. They darkened into scepticism immediately after. “Impossible.”
“Impossible?”
“Absolutely impossible,” he insisted. “Unless the vapours coming from the anchor levels of the Eye have changed, there would be no way.”
“And if someone set up an illegal greenhouse?”
“An illegal greenhouse in a warehouse like that wouldn’t cause such an obvious light show.”
But Lorenzo could see the new layer of suspicion that settled on his face, saw it slide into place as he closed his book and stood to make warm milk. Kieran drank like a psychopath. Since he believed it valid, however, if just marginally… Well, then Lorenzo had no reason to drop it.
><
A good thing, too. Not two days later, he found himself sitting on the sofa, frowning at an email draft, unsure how to phrase the words ‘I think you’re poisoning your citizenship for profit and have evidence to prove it’ in a way that wouldn’t end with him on the business end of a soon-to-be murder weapon. He rewrote it a couple more times, hesitated over the ending remark for what Han Suyin would call “much too long, Doctor, just send it already”, and mentally pressed the little blue arrow bouncing around before his eyes. Apologies, Han Suyin, but sending an official email with ‘Please Don’t Kill Me’ as the outro was not on his bucket list.
The email disappeared.
Nodding to himself, Lorenzo poured himself a glass of water, downed it, took out a bottle of whiskey, downed a smidge of that, and buried his head in the sofa pillows.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The empty apartment didn’t respond.
Since he’d been able to resume running around preventing sudden death by violent rash and trying to convince people that hospitals did not always have to be blood sucking horror houses that would swindle you out of your money, while sending a prayer to his Shivaji-dwelling medial acquaintances’ soon to be overfilled schedules, he’d kept score of what caused the issues of his patients. Before, there had been an intimidating variety of factors in almost every case. He’d gone home every day feeling as though the sheer brainpower he had been forced to exert in mitigating the damage had massacred half his working brain cells.
Now, the (terrifyingly numerous) cases were near homogenous, and the spice involved was famous in Proxima Centauri for its ability to create the brilliant white flash-bang effect of their New Year’s firework shows. Among gardeners, funnily enough, its renown stemmed from its pollen, which just so happened to be a freakishly soothing bottle green.
Interesting, yes?
Righting himself with a huff, his line of eyesight came into direct contact with the time flashing a digital red on the dishwasher screen. Fifteen-fifteen; three-fifteen afternoon. He touched his nose absentmindedly. Where was Kieran?
A meow tore him away from his thoughts and towards the window. A tomcat stood there, observing him with bright orange eyes, its golden-brown head butting against the glass. Mufasa, the reigning emperor of the fifth floor.
“No Cromwell today, sorry little fellow,” Lorenzo said, turning up the latch and swinging in the window.
Mufasa landed lightly on the wooden parquet, shook himself. He yawned wide and pink, showing his pointed teeth. Crossing to the fridge, Lorenzo pulled out the synthetic bowl marked ‘for Mufasa’ in blue, popped off the lid and set it down before him.
“Very welcome, Your Highness,” he muttered, amused, as his guest tore into the meat. “I’ll leave you to it.”
He poured some water into a shallow bowl and set that before Mufasa too, before making good on his word and migrating to the couch to take a nap. It was part of getting older, he mused murkily, staring at the strange shining red of the back of his eyelids. Everything eventually comes full circle, and that includes afternoon naps.
><
There was a fly buzzing by his ear when he jolted awake. The dishwasher read seventeen-thirty, Mufasa was gone, the open window dragged in a cold draft settled on every surface like a uselessly thin, holey blanket. He smacked at the fly, got up, latched the window shut. Behind him, someone coughed.
“Kieran?” he called, whipping around. “Where are you?”
“Corner,” muttered a lump of blankets next to the laundry bin.
Pressing his hand to his forehead, Lorenzo chuckled, “Good heavens, Kieran.”
From within his barricade of blankets, Kieran hummed, darting a glance at Lorenzo before returning to staring at nothing. “Work.”
“In the corner?”
Kieran Cromwell didn’t deign to answer, and, seeing his blank, hundred-mile stare, Lorenzo judged he wouldn’t be blessing him with friendly conversation any time soon. Breathing out a long-suffering sigh, he crossed to the counter and took out the French press. There were some things worth being fancy about – nobody would romanticise his life for him, after all. Perhaps people like that could exist, he thought, an addition to the job market, like those friends for hire that had never quite gone out of fashion in Teegarden. Some people needed that little bit of extra affirmation. Was it a mark of a rotting society? Maybe. But critics had claimed the same in the 5th century, the 17th century, the 21st century, and lo and behold, humanity was still around.
People made too big a deal out of small, comfortable things.
He got the notification just as the French press began to whistle. The sudden brightness of the overlay made his head pulse, so he lowered the light intensity.
The sender was marked as KC_Basement. “What is this?”
“Open it,” said Kieran. He took a sip out of a mug with COFFEE printed across it in bright red.
“Oh, finally. I thought I’d never get you to try the stuff.”
“This is water.”
Lorenzo frowned at him. “It’s smoking.”
“I boiled it.”
“What is wrong with you.”
“Open the document.”
“Is it a formal statement from your psychiatrist?” grumbled Lorenzo. Peeved though he was – not necessarily about the boiled water, but it was easier to focus on that (it’s never about the bread) – he did as he was told. A bunch of numbers assaulted his synapses. He turned to Kieran, deeply confused, “You know, if you want help with your engineering stuff, I’m really not the person to go to.”
A sigh. “The notes, Lorenzo.”
Raising a sceptical eyebrow, Lorenzo opened the notes. Five minutes later, massaging his temples to ward off the dangerous tension that had begun to form beneath his forehead, he closed them.
“Good Heavens.”
Next to him, now, stirring a pot of rice as it boiled, Kieran nodded. “You were right. And now we all might die. Pass the salt? I forgot to put it in.”
><
“Where did you find it?” asked Marya’s distorted voice through the hardline. The ancient physical lines had been revived by the Department of Communications and Technology after the fall of their virtual offspring had – along with distorting heaps of important documents and bankrupting small businesses – made it impossible to share information through the overlay with anyone not in a fifty-metre radius of the sender.
Through the hardline, Marya sounded like a seventy-year-old chain smoker, which, while rather funny, was not ideal for gouging her sincere willingness to jump headfirst into whatever it was that they had happened upon.
“Kieran said traders and old shipment data.”
“And theft?” guessed Marya.
“I really couldn’t tell you.”
There was a crackle of white noise as Marya sighed. “Did you try the authorities?”
“Two weeks ago. I think they may have ghosted me.”
Another, more enthusiastic crackle that might’ve been a laugh. Or a very excited cough. “Same here.” There was a slight pause as Lorenzo waited for Marya to find words to elaborate. “Your guess was right. They’re changing the ecosystem to embezzle funds. Birds and stuff… I don’t know. That’s doing something to the vapours, probably.”
Lorenzo shrugged, forgetting, for a moment, that Marya couldn’t see him. “It’s the only explanation.”
“Fuck.” She sighed again. “What now?”
“Kieran said we should find someone in Undersea. We can’t complete our case unless we have full documentation.”
“Undersea? Wasn’t Han Suyin headed there?”
“Yes! Yes, yes, she was.” said Lorenzo, watching as a leaf got stuck between the glass pane and the window frame. It flapped helplessly in the wind. “What do you say, field trip? You, me, Kieran?”
For a long moment, Marya didn’t respond. Lorenzo got the distinct impression she was reevaluating her life choices. Then, finally, “Meet me in two days. Tiếnvan airport. Gate forty-six. Yes?”
“Absolutely. Thank you.”
“Yep,” she said, and hung up.
A door clicked open as Kieran left the bathroom; Lorenzo turned to give him a thumbs up.
“We got her,” he announced.
“When?”
“Sunday.”
Kieran acknowledged the information with a tilt of his head before pulling out the remainders of a slab of meat and chopping it into little blocks. Mufasa’s bowl sat on the counter, and, ah, Lorenzo had conveniently forgotten about that part. They’d have to say goodbye. Pushing down the feeling that it was a more finite farewell than any of them were yet aware off, Lorenzo turned back to his candle carving.
The light outside had sunk to a lazy purple red, the lamp on the wall buzzed with power. Cats yowled in the street, and still the living room pulsed with quiet as they sat there:
He and Kieran. Cromwell and he.
This story has not been rated yet. Login to review this story.