Plot: 5/9.
Henri, an excellent painter who unfortunately underwent total-body irradiation for his leukemia, and Madeline, Henri’s clandestine wife, attended a welcome party for them in a hermetically sealed and thoroughly disinfected space cylinder orbiting above the Earth—a facility intentionally designed for afflicted patients unable to survive in the normal environment. Madeline greeted Bob, the only red-blooded man at the party and conspicuously repellent to the other blue-blooded locals here.
Giselle, her relative who had suffered from immunodeficiency from birth and therefore adopted by inhabitants here at a young age, introduced the spouse to others. Madeline, in fact, faked lupus and blue blood to accompany her ailing husband in inhabiting here for his remaining life, a behaviour which was abhorred by the exclusive natives insomuch as all of this kind of companies eventually returned to Earth and left behind their patients.
Madeline consistently persuaded Giselle to read information sent by her natural mother regardless of the blues’ tradition of severing all ties with the past on Earth, which Giselle complied after hearing the death story of her brother and consequently found Madeline’s concealed marriage. Despite Giselle’s own fraud of her blue blood to blend in, she was so outraged by this revelation that she forced Henri to confess everything and bullied Madeline with others. Henri confessed that the reason why he fell in love with Giselle and then gave stab in the back to his loyal wife who abandoned totally her career to support Henri’s artistic pursuit in space was because he was irrevocably bound to this place till the end of his life.
The disheartened Madeline forsook her suicide thoughts and asked whether Bob came along with her, and Bob explicated that he was stuck here owing to the immunocompromised state resulting from the splenectomy in a car accident, though he didn’t bleach his blood like Giselle in a bid for public acceptance.
In the end, Madeline returned to the Earth alone and resumed her career as a sculptor, which was forbidden above for fear of cutting skins of feeble patients there, assuming a new identity as a widow.
Core: 6/9. The story, hinted by a marvelous metaphor in its title, was a breakup story set in a bizarre, depressing and closed environment from which Madeline finally fled.
It also prompted me to doubt whether most of the unflagging love portrayed in the romantic dramas is not literally often the case in the reality, where couples just parted as long as they were incompatible. Nevertheless I can not determine which kind of love is happier, healthier or better because people in the complicated world just value things differently.
Character: 4/9.
World and Others: 7/9. I highly appreciated Dyer’s brilliant demonstration of her knowledge on medicine within this work, particularly the elaboration of blood.
But still the details of this place remained fuzzy especially the reason why indigens disliked red-blooded people so intensely. Didn’t those weak patients, who could not even approach the knife, require the necessary labor and service of the red-blooded? How did they manage to make a decent living and enjoy the earthlings’ products in this limited, secluded and sterile tin with such nasty exclusivism?