McClendon's Syndrome (v1.1) Read online

  McLENDON’S

  SYNDROME

  ROBERT FREZZA

  A Del Rey Book

  BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  A Del Rey Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1993 by Robert A. Frezza

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limimted, Toronto.

  ISBN 0-345-37516-5

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For my father, whose Indian name means “Teller of Stories” and who invented Bucky Beaver; and for my mother, who died of cancer while I was writing my first book, in gratitude and with love.

  MCLENDON’S

  SYNDROME

  An Unexpected Party;

  or, Ill-Met in a Dank Bar

  A few tables away, Dinky the piano player was trying to learn “As Time Goes By.” He was making a hash of it.

  I whipped a Brazil nut out of a bowl and whacked it open with a sap borrowed for the occasion. The bowl was marked with the Prancing Pony Bar and Grill logo on one side and had “Squirrel Food” printed on the other.

  A glass of limewater slid across the table, spun around twice, and stopped artistically beside my right hand. “ ‘Lo, Harry,” I said without looking.

  Harry, the Prancing Pony’s proprietor, leaned across the table, which trembled slightly. He grinned. “Hello, Admiral.” Clad from head to toe in Lincoln green, Harry could have passed for the bottom half of a very large tree. Portions of his green suit were covered with leaflike tendrils, which enhanced the effect only slightly.

  I pitched the nut at him. “It’s Journeyman MacKay to you, O fat innkeeper who only remembers his name because people shout it at him all day.”

  For some reason, Harry loves this line and encourages me to use it. His face broke out in various interesting directions. “Roger that, Ken.” He eased himself into a chair. “How’re they cooking?”

  I sighed. “They’re cooking, Harry. They’re still cooking.” In three trips to Schuyler’s World, I’d spent a fair amount of time in Harry’s bar and figured out most of his more obvious peculiarities. I pointed my thumb toward the ceiling. “You know, Harry. About this ‘Admiral’ bit—the itinerant ship I have the misfortune to crew is far more likely to be mistaken for orbiting junk than a Navy vessel, and since neither my civilian career as a journeyman spacer nor my military career as a reservist seems to be sprouting jets...”

  Harry waited expectantly.

  I figuratively threw up my hands. “Oh, skip it.”

  Deep disappointment welled up in Harry’s eyes. Harry knows I’m an ensign in the inactive Navy reserve, which probably gives me more social cachet than most of Harry’s clientele. Harry likes all things military and enjoys bumping people he likes up a grade or so—in my case from ensign to admiral. Harry is a frustrated jet jockey.

  I softened the blow for him. “Tell you what, Harry, I’ll roll you double or nothing.”

  We used his dice, so two limewaters went on my tab. “You shouldn’t be so hard on the Scupper. She’s not so bad,” Harry said complacently.

  “She’s a cut above space debris,” I conceded.

  He shrugged. “I’m surprised to see you tonight. I thought you said you were heading out.”

  I waved my hands expressively. “Davie Lloyd Ironsides changed his mind for about the fourth time this week, so we’re staying here an extra day or so. Davie Lloyd the Iron-Ass is getting on my nerves a bit more than usual. I keep hoping he’ll jam his pipe in the wrong orifice or something to break the monotony.”

  “I’m glad you decided to drop by. I figured it was going to be a dull night. Nice of you,” he said, staring at one patron who suddenly decided that he didn’t need a drink right that minute.

  “The way I roll, you ought to pay me to stop in,” I told him. “By choice, I’d have been in Callahan’s Place, swilling your competitor’s brew, but Elaine O’Day preempted that watering hole by virtue of seniority, intending to cuddle anything that could walk, fly, or crawl.”

  “You know, Ken, I always thought torchship crews were supposed to cling like sand in cement,” Harry observed.

  I shuddered. “You must not remember Elaine. In any case, my shipmates avoid laying eyes on each other dirtside, and O’Day is not necessarily my first choice as a shift partner.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that. She may not even be your second choice,” Harry said, apparently recalling some of my pithier comments. “I brewed up a fresh batch of stew. Want some?”

  “Uh, no thanks.” Harry’s son-of-a-bitch stew is made from the parts of a bull the bull can least do without. I took another nut out of the bowl. “Why do you give these things away?”

  Harry shrugged elaborately, which caused his foliage to ripple. “The bags to sell them in cost more than nuts do. I make it up on drinks.”

  “How’s business?”

  Harry shook his head. “Not even fair. None of the farmers are in town, and there’s only one ship in orbit besides yours, one of the Rodents’.”

  “Rodents?”

  “Two lights over. It’s listed as Dennison’s World. They have a few ships that touch here on their way out.” Harry pointed to two dark, fuzzy bowling pins sitting on the other side of the room. “The big one there is a wheel over at the consulate.”

  It seemed natural to have large furry things sitting around Harry’s bar. His hole in the wall looks more like a hole in the ground—he has fake tree roots dangling from the ceiling and mushrooms growing in hanging baskets. “He likes the place?” I commented.

  Harry leaned over. “He gets buzzed on honey,” he whispered.

  “And you charge him double when he does,” I replied, and bounced the nut off his chest.

  Harry winked and grinned. Harry is an even-tempered guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly—unless the fly really deserved it.

  “How’re things with you?” he asked, but his attention began to wander when a minor disturbance commenced involving a couple of barstools and a good-time girl on the other side of the room.

  As Dinky switched to something a little up-tempo, Harry pushed back his chair and reclaimed the sap I’d been using to crack nuts. “Ken, I’m my own bouncer tonight, I’ve got to run. Oh, there’s a woman, good-looking if you like them thin. She’s been asking about you. You must be popular.”

  “Oh? That’s news to me.”

  “Over there in the dark glasses,” he said. He scurried off, pausing on the way to gently swat one enterprising citizen who had absently begun playing mumblety-peg on the table.

  Harry keeps the place dark enough for the good-time girls to make a living, so it took me a few seconds to spot her. She was in the corner with a glass a few tables down from the two Rodents. Her hair was ash blond, shoulder-length. She was wearing a large silver butterfly pinned on a black bodysuit and large oval sunglasses, which looked strange even for the Prancing Pony. She was slim and wore black very well—her skin was fair and then some, pure alabaster. A long scar on her left hand made it look whiter by contrast.

  The shades were definitely out of place. She must have noticed me staring, because she grinned—lots of teeth, but better proportioned than Harry’s.

  I knocked back half my limewater and made a wide circuit around the riot, dropping coins in Dinky’s jar along the way. When I got to her table, I asked politely, “Hello, bright eyes. Is this seat taken?”

  She looked up. “Not at all, spacer.”

  “Ken,” said I, hoping to keep things on a first-name basis. As I parked, Dinky shifted to something
slow and romantic.

  “Catarina.” She had a solitaire layout spread on the table in front of her, and I noticed her butterfly was sprinkled with blue stones.

  I’m not real good with snappy pickup lines. She must have seen me hesitate, because she smiled. “Yes, I know I can put the black jack on the red queen, and no, please don’t tell me how dangerous it is to fly your ship into a black hole.”

  Black holes aren’t holes, nobody ever flies “into” one, and the procedure is about as dangerous as hopping the shuttle. The line is primarily known for its remarkable effect on vapid young things.

  I must have looked hurt, because her smile widened. “Now you’re remembering that Harry’s idea of a joke is to touch off three kilos of plastique in a commode somebody’s using.”

  I had to grin. “Uh, yeah. I was just thinking that if this blew up in my face I was going to use one of the light salvage demolition charges to repay Harry in kind.”

  She chuckled. “Let me buy you another drink.”

  “Uh, thanks. No.” I consider myself a friend of Harry’s, and his liquor is strictly for customers—Harry being perennially short of friends and unwilling to place the ones he has at risk.

  “Business, then. You’re Kenneth MacKay, off Rustam’s Slipper.”

  I coughed.

  “Occasionally known as the Rusty Scupper,” she conceded. “You hit Schuyler’s World four days ago. Your middle name is Andrew. You have ten months’ seniority on a journeyman’s rate, a reserve Naval commission, and an identifying mark on your left knee.”

  I looked down at my knees and then over at the cheatsheet she had spread across hers. “Are my eyes really brown?”

  “You’ve seen Casablanca?”

  “All four versions, including the one set on the moons of Jupiter. I’ve seen several versions more than once, not including the one set on the moons of Jupiter.”

  She chuckled again, sweeping up her cards and tucking them away into a little belt purse.

  “MacKay am I, off in body and spirit, tonight. What brings you to this locale and sudden interest?” I replied cautiously. “Looking for a ship?”

  “Curiously, I am.” She was looking at me from behind those thick sunshades.

  “Oh, a ship. That lets out the Scupper.”

  She actually thought that was funny. Just then a body came hurtling by our table, closely followed by a flying bowl of stew for emphasis. “Is it like this all the time here?” she asked.

  I looked over to where Harry was escorting one citizen to the door and slightly beyond. “I understand around midnight the place gets lively,” I said, and added, “Please don’t feed me lines like that.”

  She clinked her glass against mine. “It’s a deal.”

  “What do you plan on shipping?” I asked. The dark glasses and the way the conversation was becoming unhinged were both bothering me.

  “How long do you plan on staying with the ship?” she asked, ignoring my question.

  “At least another two months, eleven days, and four hours, but who’s counting.” I lowered my voice. “I’m sure you’d look spectacular without the sunglasses.”

  I saw her hesitate. She started to say something, but I shook my head. She peeled them back and blinked her eyes. She wasn’t blind, she wasn’t albino, but I sure bring home weird ones. Still, she had a great deal more about her than any other patron of Harry’s, and I was about to cast my line when something struck me wrong.

  It took a few seconds for me to puzzle it out. I wouldn’t buy a suit in the light Harry keeps in his place, but I could see that the pupils of her eyes weren’t even dilated.

  I notice things like that. “Grandmother, what big eyes you have,” I said. Something was clicking, but I couldn’t put it together.

  “They’re very sensitive to light,” she said with care.

  “Grandmother, what fine, white, delicate skin you have.”

  She smiled wide. “Beauty cream and lots of sleep,” she said with utter insincerity.

  “Grandmother, what big teeth you have,” I said waiting for the thought to decrypt before I made too much of an ass of myself.

  She looked at me levelly for a long minute. “They’re still growing a little.”

  It all came together. “I get it. You’re a vamp!” I edged away delicately.

  She made a wry face. “McLendon’s Syndrome.”

  “Like I said, a vampire.” Tact is not my strong suit.

  She let it go. “ How much have you read about McLendon’s?”

  “Quite a bit, actually.” Crewing a torchship eight hours on with Elaine O’Day would induce an illiterate to finish War and Peace. “McLendon’s is a slow bacillus, like leprosy. For a disease, it’s more than slightly unusual. Normal people replace their cells completely for the last time before they hit puberty. McLendon’s germ encourages complete cell replacement at an age when people are old enough to know better.”

  “Close enough.”

  “After the tabloids played it up big, I got interested and read McLendon’s paper—I think it was in the New England Journal of Medicine. Bits and pieces of it stuck. He wrote the disease up as a veritable fountain of perpetual youth, with a few drawbacks: problems with porphyrins, hypersensitivity to sunlight up to and including skin sarcoids, allergies I wouldn’t wish on my ex-wife, a few other things.”

  She nodded.

  “Although you aren’t exactly Count Dracula, or even Vlad Tepes, the revelation does put our relationship in a new light. As I recall, McLendon’s bug affects different people to a different degree, and blood was about all some of his subjects could keep down. Reading through the footnotes, I got the impression that one or two of them hadn’t been too particular how they got it.”

  “And?” she asked, planting her elbow on the table and leaning her chin on her hand.

  “Ah, yeah. I suspect it’s my public duty to turn you over to the health authorities,” I said, trying to sound composed.

  My tablemate tilted her head complacently. “I suspect they’d quarantine me forever and you for at least six months.”

  “Ah, right. This is Schuyler’s World, isn’t it?” There were places I could think of where I’d rather spend six months.

  Having heaved an evening’s worth of bodies into the street, Harry waltzed by to fill a slight void in the discussion. “How are you two lovebirds doing?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” I observed.

  Harry winked. “She’s good people, Ken. I told her all about you.”

  “All?” I commented.

  Harry nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “That I’m beginning to believe. Later, then?”

  “Sure, sure,” Harry said, wandering off with a wave of his hand.

  “Harry know you’re a vamp?” I asked Catarina thoughtfully.

  “No. To be truthful, you’re the first person to spot it.”

  “Okay. Well. It was swell talking to you, but I’m allergic to the sight of blood, especially my own, and I think I feel this attack of amnesia coming on. Also, my mother taught me never to talk to people I pick up in bars,” I said, beginning to rise.

  “You really shouldn’t be worried,” she said seriously. “Less than three percent of the population has a genetic predisposition for the disease.”

  “Well, yeah, but McLendon never said which three percent, and I’m not real interested in finding out just how lucky I am.”

  She took me gently by the wrist with long, slender ringers. “Oh, sit down! I won’t bite.”

  I sat, no tribute to my common sense. “Promise?”

  “Promise. Cross my heart and hope to put a stake in it.” She tilted her head again. “Tell me about the Scupper.”

  How many vampires have good legs and a sense of humour? I sat. I told. “What would you like to know? The Scupper is Kobold class, eleven hundred meters and five holds. She came out of the Blotun und Voss shipyard at Luna nineteen years ago and reached her present exalted state by a process of
steady decline. Her skipper, Davie Lloyd Ironsides, picked her up at auction when the Star Lines went spectacularly bankrupt four years ago. Since then, she’s been affectionately described as both a hazard to navigation and a bucket of bolts travelling in close formation. We haul general freight nobody wants to places where people might not realise this fact immediately.”

  Catarina nodded.

  I shrugged. “She’s competitive on rinky-dink gravity wells like Schuyler’s. This particular landrail, we unloaded a few tons of Thai gimcrack appliances to barter for guano and other sophisticated local manufactures.”

  “Where’s the profit margin in that?” she asked innocently.

  “Truth is, there’s not much of one. I make more on straight salary as a journeyman than Davie Lloyd takes out of the ship. After we service the loan, we might clear ten dollars a ton,”

  She smiled very slightly. “Don’t the transshipment costs eat you up?”

  I shook my head. “To handle low-density bulk cargo, all Schuyler’s needs is a platform in stationary orbit, a which, a pump, and thirty kilometres of frictionless four-centimetre vacuum tubing. With the price of a secondhand chute, it actually costs us more to float our appliances down than it did to suck up a return cargo.”

  “Of manure?”

  I shrugged again. “It’s an even exchange. We knew what we were getting was fertiliser. If the inhabitants of Schuyler’s didn’t, they’ll figure it out quick—which is why I had expected Davie Lloyd Ironsides to have departed here yesterday, if not sooner.”

  “What about Davie Lloyd Ironsides?”

  “Iron-Ass. Iron-Ass is a pain even when trying to be polite, which is seldom. Davie Lloyd is one of those people who remind you of the flaws in the theory that all men are created equal. The fact that a torchship can pretty well fly herself makes his skill at mismanaging people his most noticeable deficiency. I often elaborate on his shortcomings, mental and moral, for Harry’s benefit, which Harry enjoys because he learns new words with which to insult his customers.”