“I fall asleep a lot,” Birgid said. “But I’m interested, so … I’ll proba …” The drug hit her, and her eyes fluttered. She tried to say something but ended up just smiling a beautiful, bashful smile.
It tore a hole in me, that smile. I loved her. I didn’t want to live if she couldn’t.
“Did anyone ever hear from Mitch?” I asked.
“He hasn’t picked up,” Dr. Prim said. “He missed football night.”
“You mean soccer,” I said.
“Football,” Dr. Prim insisted. “It is properly called football in the civilized world.” It was an old joke between us.
“Let me send at least one of my biots with you,” Donna insisted.
“You shouldn’t even have biots,” I said, not angry, just making the point that she had gone outside of protocol. So had I, but I was the boss.
I saw through my biot’s eyes. But all I had seen so far was the glass and plastic of the crèche.
“Intubate,” I told Prim.
Prim was the only one with the medical background to perform the procedure. It’s the kind of thing done in emergency rooms all the time, but I was still nervous. It involves using a laryngoscope, a tool specifically designed to guide a plastic tube through the mouth, down the throat and trachea, to the top of the lungs.
Birgid moved restlessly. Normally a person being intubated would be completely out, but that’s a riskier thing. We were not a hospital.
“Relax, sweetheart. Relax, let it happen. You’ve had it done before. Just relax into it.”
She calmed then, and I took her hand and squeezed it.
We secured the tube and began the transfer of my biot to a long flexible probe. We pushed the probe down as far as we dared. An inch is a long way for a biot.
“Can you see anything?” Donna asked me eagerly.
“Just the plastic wall around me.” There wasn’t much of interest in that. I managed the short hop from probe to the tube wall. “Okay, I’m clear.”
I kept my hold on Birgid’s hand as my intrepid biot began to walk toward the lung.
Her breathing was slowed, but it was still a powerful breeze. The biot is low to the ground so doesn’t provide much wind resistance, but still I worried that I’d be picked up like a kitten in a tornado. The wind would be in my “face.” Then it would pause and change direction. I learned to hold on tight when the wind was against me, then race along with it at my back.
I saw the opening ahead.
The very first thing that came to mind was Willy Wonka. I was stepping out of what felt to me like a huge, long tunnel, into an eerie wonderland. We had no color capacity in those early days, so everything I saw was in shades of gray or sepia. But still …
The cells were densely packed, both hairy cells—those with waving cilia like something you might see on a coral reef—and fat round secreting cells that oozed with mucus. There were strands of mucus stretched out like Silly String.
Trapped in the mucus were all manner of exotic particles: dust, pollen, and yes, bacteria, no bigger to my biot eyes than tennis balls.
It was stunning.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh … wow.” Not an original thing to say, but it was beyond words.
Yet I could take thousands and thousands of words to describe the bizarre, disturbing trip I took down the endless black canyons of Birgid’s lungs. The trip from entry point to the tumor was no more than four centimeters, yet it took hours. There were many blind alleys. There was much reversing of course as Donna and Marty carefully mapped my progress. We had realized from the start that getting back out could be a problem. The lung is like a sponge, a mass of air sacs, each expanding and shrinking as breath came and went.
But in truth I can barely summon up images of all the strange wonders. Because my memory is so filled with what happened next.
I found the tumor.
I felt it before I found it. I realize that sounds unscientific, there’s no explanation for the growing sense of menace that filled me with dread as I approached it.
The first sign was a single tendril reaching down one of the vents. It was like a fat, black slug pulsating beneath my feet.