A/N: I am so sorry, you guys. I never meant to leave you hanging that way after the last chapter, but life and writer's block and various other things got in the way, and before I knew it, it'd been ten months since my last update. Thank you to all the reviewers who took the time to say they're still interested in seeing the end, I hope this doesn't disappoint. Not to drag it out, but it's not quite the end yet – there's an epilogue coming after this (which I swear will be up by the end of the year).
I remembered pain. And the knowledge, absolutely certain this time, that this was it, I was going to die. Then there was nothing but blackness, and I thought that was death.
But if it was, then this had to be heaven, and that wasn't possible. For one thing, I still hurt. My head ached, and my chest, and my hand seemed to be caught in a vice. I felt faintly nauseous and utterly exhausted. But it couldn't be hell, either. I was lying somewhere almost comfortable, light filtered through my eyelids, and when I concentrated on the pain in my hand I realised that someone was squeezing it.
"Eugene?"
"Yes?"
"That hurts."
"Obviously. You spent the last four hours being hacked at with scalpels."
"I mean my hand."
"Ah." His grip loosened. "Sorry."
I forced my eyes open. I saw blurry white, and the outline of his face.
"Do you have my glasses?"
"They're at home. I'll pick them up next time I get a chance."
"Is this a hospital? I don't remember anything since I woke you."
"You wouldn't. You were unconscious."
"So I passed out," I said slowly. "I thought I was dead."
"You were for a couple of minutes. Technically."
The prediction was right, then. They always said I'd die at thirty, and a week after my birthday, here I was. The memory of the relief and hope I'd felt that night swept over me like a mockery. I felt my eyes start to burn, but struggled to keep myself in check. Eugene despised weakness. In himself most of all, but in me almost as much.
"Did you do it on purpose, to prove your point?" he asked. To my astonishment, his voice cracked on the next words. "It worked. There's not a chance in hell you're going to Oberon after today."
Then he was back to crushing my hand. I squeezed back (or tried to – there didn't seem to be any strength left in me) and we sat in silence, drawing comfort from the fact that, for now, we were both still here.
"Just a week after I turned thirty," I said eventually. "Those doctors must have known what they were talking about after all."
I meant it as a joke, sort of, but apparently Eugene didn't take it that way.
"No," he said, glaring at me. "They didn't. In case you haven't noticed, you're still alive – because they may have predicted when your heart would give out, but they forgot to take into account the fact that medical science has uses besides genetic engineering!"
"Always nice to meet someone outside my colleagues who appreciates that," said a voice from the doorway. "My predecessors were treating congenital valve defects long before anyone was engineered against them. But it's all about prevention these days, so they don't bother learning how to cure anymore."
I automatically turned to look at him, but could only make out that he was tall and grey-haired.
"Good morning, Mr Freeman. Glad to see you've woken up. I'm Timothy Harburg, the guy who put your heart back together for you just now." He pulled another chair over to the bed and sat down. "How are you feeling?"
"Groggy. And my chest is a little painful. But fine, apart from that."
"Do you feel up to having a talk about what went wrong with you and what we're doing about fixing it?"
"Yes."
"Well then. You experienced what we call a myocardial infarction –"
"Hang on," interrupted Eugene. "Aren't you going to ask me to leave?"
"The door's right there if you want to go."
"I don't – but –"
"Last time we were here we were told it's against policy for anyone to be present during consultations with doctors," I finished.
Harburg nodded. "Unless they're family."
"You haven't even asked who I am," Eugene pointed out after it became clear that the doctor thought that was sufficient explanation.
A sigh. "Look, I don't know who you've been talking to, but they obviously didn't have their facts straight. We have a very strict confidentiality policy, that's true – but I'm not going to ask who you are, because anyone who's worked here more than a month knows the patient's anonymous lookalike is considered next of kin. All right?" When neither of us protested, he continued. "Now, as I was saying. Myocardial infarction – a heart attack, in layman's terms, and I'm sure you've already figured out that's what happened to you. And that led to your heart stopping when it wasn't getting enough blood. But someone – I'm guessing it was you?" he said, turning to Eugene, who nodded. "Gave you CPR, and got it beating again. Cracked a couple of ribs in the process, I might add, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few bones."
I instinctively reached for Eugene's hand again. (He'd withdrawn it upon Harburg's arrival.) "Thanks," I said.
He gave a slight shrug. "Sorry about your ribs."
And that was that. I doubted that we'd ever mention it again. It's not that I wasn't grateful he'd saved me – of course I was. But there was so much gratitude between us already, for so many reasons, that there was no sense in keeping track anymore. The debt could never be paid, in any case, because there was nothing left that I could give him. We already shared a name, a life, our bodies, all our worldly possessions, and if he asked me for anything I'd do it in a heartbeat – but not because he'd saved my life or helped me reach the stars. Just because it was him.
"Do you want a minute?" asked Harburg gruffly. I got the impression that tact wasn't in his nature, just something he'd had to learn over the course of his career.
"No, we're done," Eugene answered for us both.
"You're men after my own heart, then. Most of my patients tend to get pretty emotional after a brush with death."
"We were being emotional."
"What caused the heart attack?" I asked. It seemed like an inane question, considering I'd known this was coming all my life, but I was hoping the doctor would provide me with a more concrete answer than 'fate'. "My defective valves?"
"Indirectly," Harburg answered. "That's what caused the huge blood clot that lodged itself in your coronary artery. And it should have been obvious to anyone with a medical degree that something of the sort was bound to happen before long. I've put you on anticoagulants to see if we can stop it happening again. You should have been on them years ago."
That last sentence was spoken very pointedly, as though implying it was my fault that I hadn't been. There may have been some truth to that, actually – I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a doctor as myself.
"Additionally, when you're sufficiently recovered, I think you could benefit from a valve transplant. We'll have check-ups over the next couple of months, I'll let you know when it's time."
"Will that be possible?" asked Eugene, leaning forward. "Dr Cowper was insistent that there are regulations about who's eligible for transplants, and that Invalids almost never are."
"There are ways around that," said Harburg, waving a hand dismissively. "Ingrid's a good doctor, but she won't be a great one until she stops trying to play by the rules. But in this case, it's not an issue. We're talking a couple of valves here, not the whole heart. We call it a transplant, but the truth is it'll be more like a prosthesis."
This blurred figure of Timothy Harburg was beginning to look like an angel to me. Could this really be all it took to prevent my heart problems – some medication and a few prosthetic valves? Why had no-one ever told me this before?
It's all about prevention these days, so they don't bother learning how to cure anymore.
"But I'm not making any guarantees," he warned. "This will help, but the rate of relapse for heart attacks is somewhere between one in five and one in ten. And in that spirit, there are some changes you'll need to make if you want to stop this from happening again. I understand you're working for Gattaca?"
"Yes."
"I've heard about their insistence on physical and mental excellence in their employees. Their PT program is legendary. I expect you to sit out for at least the next month."
"I can't just sit out," I protested automatically, though my body was telling me very clearly that I could hardly do anything else. "It's mandatory."
"I'll write you a note excusing you."
"You can't tell them -"
"Oh ye of little faith," said Harburg placidly. "I've been working in this field since before you were born, and I'm reasonably good at it. It so happens that I have a subtle, brilliant scheme to deal with that problem: we're going to lie. The note will say you're recovering from some other kind of surgery. I think … you had a tumour removed."
"Won't work," said Eugene. "He's there under my name, and I can't get cancer."
Harburg sighed. "Valids," he muttered. "This is what's wrong with you kids. You think your genes are perfect, so you must be invincible. You may not be genetically predisposed to cancer, but of course you can get it. Anyone can. Particularly astronauts, considering the amount of cosmic radiation they're exposed to every launch. And speaking of which, that's one excuse you can use for why you never go up again."
"What?" I said.
"You're never going up again," repeated Harburg. "And just so we're absolutely clear, everything else I've told you today has been my medical opinion. This, on the other hand, is a threat. I'll keep an eye on the upcoming launches, and as soon as I see your name attached to any of them you'll be outed you to your bosses and the police."
"What?" I said more loudly.
"You heard."
"I thought you worked here because you wanted to help Invalids."
"I work in medicine because I want to help people," he shot back. "If you go back to space after what happened today, you're not just risking your own life – I'd be inclined to let you do that – you're risking the lives of your colleagues too. And that's not something I'm prepared to accept. You can keep your job if you must, chart courses and so on, but stay off the ships. I'm giving you a chance to be a man and step down gracefully, but if you don't, I'll stop you."
With that, he gave a curt nod and walked out. I watched him go in stunned silence. The angel who'd offered me salvation had picked up a fiery sword and barred me from Eden. I was alive. I was going to get treatment for my heart. That was good. But … what the hell was the point of any of it if I was right back where I was before, bound to the earth forever because people insisted that was all my body was fit for?
"He won't do it, you know," said Eugene. "He won't get a chance. If you try anything so stupid, I'll stop you before he even hears about it."
It wasn't just like before. It was worse. Now even Eugene was against me.
"I don't want you protecting me!" I growled, with what some dispassionate corner of my brain told me was more venom than he deserved.
"I don't want you dead. So I guess that makes us even."
He sounded just like my father – and my mother, my brother, my teachers, everyone who'd ever tried to keep me down 'for my own good'. And to make it worse, I knew there was nothing malicious about his change of attitude. He really was just trying to keep me alive. They all were. But that kind of concern didn't feel like love to me, it felt like an insult.
"Go away," I said thickly.
"Excuse me?"
He sounded taken aback, almost hurt, and the part of me that wasn't quietly bubbling with anger was sorry. I hadn't meant it to come out that way. I just needed privacy to come to terms with Harburg's ultimatum.
"Sorry," I said. I did my best to smile.
Eugene didn't smile back. He didn't go away either. "I know you don't like it. But you were unconscious – you didn't see – you nearly died this morning. You still look like death warmed up. You can't expect me not to feel protective."
"I know. Believe me, Eugene – I get it. I was talking about quitting anyway last night. But there's a difference between walking away from something and being dragged away, you know? I just need some time alone, to think."
After being forced to promise that I wouldn't change my mind and decide to prove Harburg wrong 'just like a child who only wants to play with a toy when you say he can't have it', I was finally left alone to contemplate my fate.
For most of my life, I didn't have much use for religion. I always knew, however, that I wouldn't be here without it – it was my mother's belief that all life is sacred and everything has a purpose which stopped her from taking the easy, sensible way out of the dilemma she found herself in thirty odd years ago. And recently, for the first time in my life, I'd begun to consider the possibility that her faith was more than an illusion. When the day of my foretold death approached, I thought of her, of her strings of rosary beads, murmured prayers and insistence that 'God child' was an accolade, not an insult. In the depths of my fear, I prayed to my mother's God. I said that I would give anything in exchange for my life.
Somehow, miraculously, it seemed to have worked. I'd survived, and now I was paying the price for that mercy. Now I could really understand the answer Eugene gave when I asked if his own brushes with death had made him think about God: No empty, mindless universe could have such a sick sense of humour. Part of my soul wanted to protest 'This isn't what I meant!', but the rational part of me knew that wasn't true. I'd promised anything, and meant it. If God had come to me in person that night and asked me to give up space travel forever, I would have willingly accepted the deal. I'd gotten everything I asked for – a second chance at life – and even if the terms were harsh, I wasn't stupid enough to throw that away.
I saw Harburg again a week later to negotiate my release. One of the things I like about the underground nature of this hospital is their willingness to accommodate requests like "get me the hell out of here as soon as medically possible" - but, unfortunately, I still had to listen to a very detailed list of what I was not to do.
"... and no exercise. In the interest of plugging loopholes, that means nothing that will raise your heartrate more than a short, gentle walk. At least, not unless you're being supervised by a doctor who is aware of your medical history. Understood?"
"Yes."
"All right. Now that's out of the way, you're free to go – but there's one thing we have to settle before you do. The bill."
He named an amount that made me wince, and Eugene made an inarticulate sound of disgust.
"I should have guessed. Everyone on the black market's a fucking mercenary, aren't they?"
I didn't exactly disagree. We weren't poor, even accounting for the percentage of my paycheque that went to German. But after we'd already paid for extensive burns treatment this year …
"Mercenary?" Harburg leaned forward, eyes narrowed, his voice gone low and almost ominous. "Forty years ago, my colleagues and I poured a small fortune into raising this hospital out of the ground. Some of us are here out of moral conviction, some are working off a debt, some have nowhere else to go – but every one of us is breaking the law by helping the ones respectable medical institutions won't touch. We're risking our medical licences – risking criminal charges – and forswearing any chance of making it big in this field. This is a charity. But the legitimate business we do here isn't enough to finance it, and if we tried to offer our services for free we'd be reduced to doling out aspirin in dark alleys. So I'm sorry for whatever financial problems you have, but you are going to pay." After waiting a few moments to see that what he'd said had sunk in, he continued "But there are forms of payment other than cash, if you'd prefer."
Now we were getting to the point. Heart surgeons aren't responsible for their patients' bills. He wouldn't be having this conversation with us unless he was after something in particular.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I want your body," he replied, looking straight at Eugene.
We exchanged brief looks of incredulity. No. He can't have meant that the way it sounded.
"Sorry, but I'm afraid not," said Eugene in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone. "Vincent has a prior claim."
"Since you'd be paying his debts, I don't think he'd have much ground to object."
It was becoming less and less likely that this was a misunderstanding. What kind of pervert would even want … the same thing I wanted. But that was different.
"Besides, I won't take anything from you until after you're dead. He'll probably be long gone by then anyway – no offence meant, of course."
Very different. What the hell?
He looked at me, puzzled, and I realised I'd said that aloud. "Remember the conversation we had about the ways of getting around transplant regulations? This is one of them. Leave your body to this hospital, and we'll consider the high quality organ donations more than enough payment for the surgery and subsequent care."
"Human organs as currency? That sounds awfully illegal to me," commented Eugene.
"Possibly. But somehow I doubt that will be a huge stumbling block for you."
"Not only illegal – it sounds unenforceable. No court would acknowledge that kind of deal, and I don't see what you could do about it if someone said yes then decided on their death bed that they'd rather be scattered over the ocean. Relying on an honour system isn't the best plan for dealing with criminals, which anyone who agreed to this very illegal -"
"He isn't threatening to let the cheque bounce," I interrupted. I hadn't thought I'd ever be able to speak to the doctor again without laughing hysterically or dying of embarrassment, but Eugene was forcing my hand. Harburg looked ready to strangle him. "He doesn't care what happens to his body. This is his idea of making conversation."
"I … see," said Haburg slowly. "Well, as you pointed out, we are criminals here. White collar criminals by preference, of course, but we can be flexible. And the nature of our work at this hospital gives us connections to the kind of people who tend to have even fewer scruples about legality than we do. Now, are you going to sign or does someone have to break your thumbs to convince you we know how this works?"
"I was just asking. Of course I'll do it, it's the easiest payment plan I've ever heard of."
There were five messages waiting for me when I got home.
The first was from Lamar. He calmly wished me well, and said that since I hadn't seemed quite myself when I told him he could say I was abducted by aliens for all I cared, he'd taken the liberty of dipping into my unused vacation time to explain my absence from work.
The next was from my supervisor, who wanted to make it clear that he did not take kindly to employees taking off on holiday without requesting permission in advance. The fact that I'd been his predecessor's golden boy did not put me above the rules, and he was seriously considering withdrawing my offer to join the Oberon mission.
German, saying that while of course the hospital wouldn't tell him anything, he'd be obliged if someone would let him know whether or not I was dead. He did have the decency to say he hoped I was not, though the effect was spoiled by his comment that he'd probably find out soon enough in any case, since my paycheque was due next week.
Cesar's message seemed to be meant for Eugene. He simply said that while he assumed there wouldn't be a funeral, he'd send a wreath unless that would arouse suspicion among the neighbours. Optimistic as always.
Irene said that she was concerned. Her exact words. "Jerome … I mean, Vincent. This is Irene Cassini. I haven't seen you at work, and I'm concerned." Once, a lifetime ago, I would have found the odd formality of that message endearing. Now, however, the thought of answering her – or any of them, actually – made my head ache. I would have to do it, of course, and sooner rather than later. Just not now.
I pushed back from the desk. The idea of lying down during the day seemed somehow shameful; but they'd told me to rest, and I was exhausted. "I'm going to bed," I said finally, giving in.
Eugene nodded. "I'll go with you."
"The doctor was very specific," I reminded him. "Not for at least three weeks."
"That's not what I was talking about. Someone needs to make sure you don't wake up dead." He sighed, and added "Besides, the last time I got to touch you was when I was giving you CPR."
There was a faint bruise on my right hand that said otherwise, but I didn't argue the point. I did miss the kind of touch that didn't leave bruises, after all.
"Fine. Let's go."
When we got to the bedroom, I started to lift the hem of my shirt, then hesitated as the twinge in my ribs reminded me what lay underneath. "Could you look somewhere else?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Because – oh, for God's sake, never mind." I kicked off my shoes and lay down. Explaining why I suddenly didn't want him looking at my bare chest or letting him see the strapped ribs, fresh scar, patches of mottled purple bruises and clear signs of recent weight loss – I didn't know which would be worse. They'd both get me the same look of pity. I could sleep in my clothes.
He pulled himself up onto the bed beside me. "I mean it. Why? It's one scar. It can't be worse than the ones I was covered with when you first kissed me. If you didn't care about those, why would I care about this?"
All right, maybe I'd underestimated him a little. I closed my eyes wearily. "It's not just the scar."
"You look perfectly normal for someone just out of hospital."
"Exactly. I look weak, and ill – no-one looking at me now would ever believe I'm you."
Eugene was silent for a while. At last, he said "Do you have to be?"
That caught my interest. "Sorry?"
"Do you want to stay at Gattaca now there's no chance of going back up?"
I couldn't say I did. Gattaca itself had never been more than a means to an end. But after that end had been accomplished, I'd stayed there, because … where else would I go? This was the life I'd built for myself, and if nothing else, it was a hell of a lot better than what I'd left behind.
"Not particularly. But I'd still much rather be a navigator than a janitor."
"Obviously. I wasn't suggesting that."
"What do you suggest I do, then?"
"We could go travelling."
That phrase set off faint alarm bells, and I raised my head up to look at him.
He rolled his eyes. "It's not a euphemism. You've been to Titan, but never set foot outside the USA. You'd be surprised how many countries out there would welcome you even with your own profile – birth rates have been dropping since people stopped conceiving the old-fashioned way, and some places use immigration to make up the difference."
"Does 'some places' mean 'third world places'?"
"Not always. But there are things we could do here too – there are jobs that can be done online, where you never have to meet the person who hires you. No-one would ever know there were two of us. Or we could get more involved in the black market. There are always opportunities there, and if anyone understands the industry, we do."
Now that was an interesting idea.
"Jerome Morrow is still young," I said, thinking out loud. "He's already had very successful careers in two different fields. No-one would be surprised if a man like that decided to expand his horizons, branch off into a new area – and with that profile and that resume, who'd turn him down?"
"It shouldn't be too hard for us to find another angst ridden Invalid with dreams of glory," said Eugene. "If we do it right, we could more than make back the money German got out of us this time."
Becoming Jerome Morrow had given me a new life. Now that I didn't need the name to be happy anymore, it seemed only fitting to pass it on and give someone else the second chance they wanted so badly.
I found myself drifting off as Eugene talked about where we could look for candidates. My post-hospital exhaustion didn't bother me anymore, however. I might as well take the rest while I could get it – from what I remembered of the transition, we were going to have a lot on our plates when we found our man.
