Hickory Dickory Dock
#24 of The world of the Spirit of '67
"The nurses, they, uh. They really don't get how serious this is, they're still joking around. Asking us if we know cartoon characters. And they think they can handle this like it's just normal TB. I don't know if Houston knows it's serious, either. He's teaching them the clock thing."
"Well at least he isn't panicking. Me and Fred are talking to the lawyers, seeing if they'll help us get medical files released pro bono but it doesn't look good." Monaco's voice was almost tinny through Troy's cheap phone. Just almost. He couldn't afford a new one. The phone was going to be okay, scuffs and smudging screen and all. It'd been second hand when he got it out of the bottom of an electronics bin at the recycling centre.
They'd gotten a bunch of them, actually, and Troy and his brothers had sat down at the tables at the bar Fred worked at, losing tiny screws in the rough wood's grain while they stripped down the phones that didn't work and used their parts to make ones that did. The phone company had given Troy and his brothers a big package deal. Twenty one accounts. They could have had two dozen for the same price, but they only took twenty one. Maybe if things hadn't been so bad, they could have used two dozen accounts, but that was hurtful to think about. Hurtful to think that soon they would only need twenty.
Troy hated that, and he hated the ads on the hospital walls and he hated the fucking club of admirers who had their noses and cameras smeared up against the hospital lobby's plate glass walls. And even if they weren't allowed in to stare, everybody who was legitimately sick or hurt did stare, because you didn't see a fucking giant black mouse every day, did you? Not in Japan, where there were a grand total of eleven furries.
It was going to be ten, soon.
A little girl stared at him, so Troy covered his face with his free hand and crushed his phone to his ear with the other. "Isn't there anything? Can't they find someone? Can't they... Can't anyone do anything?"
There was only a tired exhalation, from the other side of the world. From home. "I tried calling them."
"Them who?"
"Estian inc. They don't have anyone to answer their phones, it turns out the legal proceedings even took down their subsidiaries. I thought maybe if we found some of the doctors we could ask for help."
"Like Doctor Takahara?" Troy clutched the phone tight.
A moment's silence, filled by distant Japanese vowels echoing through the hospital corridors.
Monaco's voice was tight. "Or Doctor Hawes or Miss Betchett or Doctor Lewis or anybody."
Miss Betchett had a trick with drawers and fingers. It was cautery tools, for Doctor Lewis. They weren't nice people. Nice people didn't mass clone furries and use twenty-four of them as research animals.
"Maybe. I don't know if they'd want to." Troy twisted around in his chair, facing away from a couple who'd stopped arguing when they'd seen the others sitting outside intensive care doing nothing but stare. It turned out they wanted to stare too. He dragged the toe of his shoe against the glossy floors.
"Nobody else can help. The local medical centres say they might be able to do something if they had Houston here, but..."
Troy sucked down a breath, swallowed down on it while twisting his face up hard. He settled his head on his hand, hunching down and ducking his head 'til nobody could see, even while looking at him. "I know."
"Philly's gone to Yad Vashem. Trying to talk them into helping us, since, uhm. We're kind of like what happened to them, eugenics and all."
Troy dragged his palm against his forehead, eyes screwed shut. "What's Yad Vashem?"
"Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. They're not going to buy it, we're just a little mistake, not some kind of international disgrace, some tragedy to stain humanity's hands."
"Even if they did, how long would that take?"
"Weeks, probably."
A whine lodged in his throat. Troy swallowed down air, trying to keep from crying. "He doesn't have weeks." It didn't make the stinging in his eyes go away. "We need to get him home, now."
"I've been writing to charities all day. One of them's going to write back, I swear. They'll pay to get him home and-"
"They've run out of antibiotics, Monaco. There was a treatment that looked like it was going to work but, last month it fucked up his liver and they had to stop. We've been through their whole library of drugs, sometimes something will work for awhile but then Houston gets resistant or because of his liver they can't use it long." Troy shut his eyes and tilted his head back before opening them, looking safely up at the ceiling. Not the faces staring at him uncomprehendingly. It was normal to cry. A lot of people cried outside the intensive care units. "He's dying."
Monaco's phone clanked against a table-top. He clumped back and forth, back and forth, pacing with desperate stamps that echoed across the miles.
People were staring at him, and Troy couldn't help keeping his eyes from flicking to face to face before curling up on himself, lifting his feet from the hospital floor and tucking his heels up on the chair, whipping his tail up around his knees, head ducked between them, as if for shelter. He said it again. He hated the words, but he said them again.
Monaco's strangled wail was a tiny and fragile thing, reaching out from all the way in San Iadras across the oceans and into a hospital in Tokyo. Even so, it still knifed through Troy's heart.
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"Hickory, dickory." The nurse smiled almost forcefully, showing how enthusiastic she was. "Dock. Mice run up the clock. The clock struck four, and twenty escape with minor injury." She teased out the English words into long, thick syllables.
Troy stared at her in horror. "Where's Houston?"
Her face fell. "That's not right?"
"Three, not four." He couldn't breathe. "It's three. Because of our brothers, three, not four." He held up three fingers desperately.
Wincing, emoting far too heavily, like a child, the nurse gestured at the usual room. "I'm sorry. My English isn't so good. He sings it that way, it makes him happy."
Troy pushed past her and into the antiseptic little room with its false perspective window, showing blank white sand in a sunny Zen garden. Houston had his eyes shut, though, and the inside of his respirator was splattered with bloody mucus.
The bed was angled just a little, Houston was sitting up.
Troy sat down beside the bed. Houston didn't move, not even a flicker of his eyelids. His cheeks were hollow, his fur hung on him like a loose rug.
The door slammed, the nurse rushed in, holding out a surgical mask. "You forgot," she chided.
Troy slipped it on. It wasn't to protect Houston, but Troy. His fur felt frayed, every night when he left the hospital they made him scrub down and change his clothes. Clones could fall like dominoes to infections like this, if one of them got it, all of them could get it. Troy didn't really care.
He held Houston's hand and grasped only bone.
Houston started coughing and wheezing again.
The nurse only stared. That was all she could do. That and leave, which, finally, she did.
Carefully, using a facial tissue, Troy pulled off Houston's respirator and wiped the bloody spittle off his brother's face. Houston struggled, but all he managed to do was lift his arm a little and twitch his whiskers, ears flattening back against the pillows.
"Did the padre write?"
Troy cleaned off the inside of the respirator's shell before tucking it back over Houston's snout. "No, not yet. It's still pretty late back home. He probably will a bit later. Want me to call whoever's up?"
Wheezes mixed with the clean hiss of oxygen. Houston shook his head a little. Troy took his hand, and he curled his fingers around it. There wasn't any strength there.
"I tell you about the ladder thing?"
"Tell me about the ladder thing."
"As you accelerate a body, it starts to distort, shrinking in the direction of acceleration... it's relativity."
"Right."
"So you have this problem. You have a twelve foot long ladder, and a shed six feet long. Can't get your ladder into your shed, right?"
"Right."
"So what you do, is you accelerate your ladder up near light speed, and distort it so it's six feet long. Now it fits in the shed. Not for long, it's moving at light speed, but it fits in the shed, right?"
Troy bowed his head. "Right."
Houston's lips peeled back from his teeth, a feeble attempt at a smile. "But that's just from the shed's frame of reference. From the ladder's, the shed's even smaller. Can't fit inside, but it can. All at the same time."
"How about that."
Houston had been studying in Japan for about six months before he got sick. Physics. He was getting really good at it, too. Published two papers already.
Houston took a desperate breath. "Ain't that crazy? From the perspective of the ladder, the shed's only three feet long, but from the shed's the ladder's only-"
Houston's hand trembled with each racking cough. Eventually he eased.
"It's three, you know. You came up with it, you should know."
"Hm?"
"Hickory dickory dock, mice ran up the clock, clock struck three, twenty-one escaped with minor injury. It's not four." Troy gave Houston's hand a sullen squeeze.
"No, it's four. And twenty escaped with minor injury. I came up with it, I can change it if I want."
"Silly bastard. Four? It doesn't rhyme anymore."
Houston laughed. Choked on it, but he laughed. When he'd cleared his mouth he wheezed, "Well, now it does."
"It's got to stay at three. The clock isn't allowed to strike more than that."
Houston wheezed, smiling again, but only for a little while. "No, no, listen. You made it rhyme."
"It won't work that way."
"It does. Just listen. Hickory dickory dock."
Troy looked away, shutting his eyes while Houston rambled.
"The mice ran up the... the clock." Breathing was hard for him.
For the both of them, in different ways.
"The clock struck four..."
Houston kept on coughing.
Troy waited for him to finish the rhyme.
Troy waited for a long time.