Dan Simmons - Metastasis

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Metastasis

by Dan Simmons

Introduction

It's odd to think that within the walls of concentration camps such as Auschwitz and

even in camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor where extermination of human be-ings

was the only official activity, wives of the comman-dants kept gardens, children of

the high-ranking German officers attended classes and competed at sports,

musi-cians played Mozart and Bach and Mahler at dinner par-ties, wives worried

about their figures while their husbands checked for receding hairlines ... all the banal

preoccupations which constitute the human condition that we share today.

While all around them, humans were being starved and beaten and gassed and fed to

the ovens. The ash that had been human flesh an hour before now lightly dusted the

roses in the gardens. Barbed wire separated the boys' soccer fields from the killing

fields. The music of Mozart carried to the barracks where former musicians and

com-posers and conductors lay shivering with the other human skeletons there.

In the commandant's comfortable home, the adminis-trator checked his hairline in the

mirror and the adminis-trator's wife looked in her mirror, pirouetted, pouted, and

decided that she would have one less torte for dessert that night.

Did the mirrors reflect human beings?

Of course they did. People can adapt to almost any-thing.

During the days of the Black Death in the 13th Century, when entire villages were

wiped out, when the death carts rumbled through the streets at night with the cry

"Bring out your dead!" until there was no one left to bury them, there was much

preoccupation with the macabre, many flirtations with death—skull-masked revelers

danced nightly in the burial catacombs of Paris—but overall, the small wheel of daily

life creaked along as usual.

Are we doing the same today?

I always flinch when I hear someone use the word decimate to mean "wipe out," as

in, "The Sioux deci-mated Custer's men."

The word actually comes from the Latin and the action it implies from the Romans.

When someone in an occu-pied province defied the Roman governor or killed a

Ro-man soldier, the Romans would hold a lottery and kill every tenth person. (

Decimate as in Decimat(us), past par-ticiple of decimare.)

The Jews weren't decimated in Poland and Europe; they were almost wiped out.

The people of 13th Century Europe weren't decimat-ed; a fourth to half of the entire

population was wiped out. And the plague returned—again and again. The people

could not see the plague bacillus so in a sense it did not exist for them. They saw

only the results piled high in the death carts each night, staring eyes and exposed

teeth illu-minated by the light of torches.

We're not being decimated by cancer in the latter part of the 20th Century—the odds

are worse than that. The lottery calls one in six. Or perhaps it's already one in five.

(It's been getting worse for a long time.)

Meanwhile, we grow our gardens, play our games, lis-ten to our music, and look in

our mirrors.

We just try not to see too much.

* * *

On the day Louis Steig received a call from his sister saying that their mother had

collapsed and been admitted to a Denver hospital with a diagnosis of cancer, he

promptly jumped into his Camaro, headed for Denver at high speed, hit a patch of

black ice on the Boulder Turn-pike, flipped his car seven times, and ended up in a

coma from a fractured skull and a severe concussion. He was unconscious for nine

days. When he awoke he was told that a minute sliver of bone had actually

penetrated the left frontal lobe of his brain. He remained hospitalized for eighteen

more days—not even in the same hospital as his mother—and when he left it was

with a headache worse than anything he had ever imagined, blurred vision, word

from the doctors that there was a serious chance that some brain damage had been

suffered, and news from his sister that their mother's cancer was terminal and in its

final stages.

The worst had not yet begun.

It was three more days before Louis was able to visit his mother. His headaches

remained and his vision re-tained a slightly blurred quality—as with a television

channel poorly tuned—but the bouts of blinding pain and uncontrolled vomiting had

passed. His sister Lee drove and his fiancee Debbie accompanied him on the twenty

mile ride from Boulder to Denver General Hospital.

"She sleeps most of the time but it's mostly the drugs," said Lee. "They keep her

heavily sedated. She probably won't recognize you even if she is awake."

"I understand," said Louis.

"The doctors say that she must have felt the lump ... understood what the pain meant

... for at least a year. If she had only ... It would have meant losing her breast even

then, probably both of them, but they might have been able to..." Lee took a deep

breath. "I was with her all morning. I just can't ... can't go back up there again today,

Louis. I hope you understand."

"Yes," said Louis.

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Dan Simmons - Metastasis

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