Ahira's Hangar

This novel begins in the nightmare that is Romania after the fall of Communism. The nation is a human and industrial wasteland. Against this backdrop of true hell, a gifted American doctor who has come to work with desperately sick orphans decides to adopt one of her charges...a critically sick little boy who is only kept alive through blood transfusions...he turns out to have a very unique immune system...and his system shows promise of giving humanity the cure to all sorts of autoimmune disorders, and even AIDS, once he gets back to America and the doctors and scientists try to figure out what keeps him alive...

But he is the lost child of a dark legacy, and there are those who would commit any crime, any murder, and atrocity to regain him...
"What did you say to the Emperor about me?" "He wanted to know what I saw in you.I told him that you poured out honor like a fountain, all around you." "That's weird. I don't feel full of honor, or anything else, except maybe confusion." "Naturally not. Fountains keep nothing for themselves."<i>Edited by: Duchess of Malfi  at: 8/31/03 6:26 pm
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Only a few chapters into this book, and Simmons has already made me sob like a baby. In his scenes of Romainian orphanages just after the fall of Communism, he describes hell on earth. I wept in pity, sorrow, and rage over what has been done to the children... Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

The vampires are quite interesting. Simmons describes them as a result of a rare and unusual genetic trait, due to inbreeding...from a small and secretive former royal family...one that included Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) among its sons... Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

The desciptions of Romania alone could make this a horror bbok, even if you were to leave out the vampires ...if I have time this weekend I will try to get up a quote or two... Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

Quote:We arrived in Sebes before dawn and there was some minor official there to take us to the orphanage. No, orphanage is too kind a word. it was a warehouse, heated no better than the other kind of meat lockers we had been in so far, undecorated except for the grimy tile floors and flaking walls painted a vomitous green to eye height and a leprous gray above that. The main hall was at least a hundred meters across. It was filled with cribs. Again, the word is too generous. Not cribs, but low metal cages with no tops to them. In the cages were children. Children ranging in age from newborns to ten-year-olds. None seemed capable of walking. All were naked or dressed in filth-caked rags. Many were screaming or weeping silently, and the fog of their breath rose in the cold air. Stern-faced women in complicated nurse's caps stood smoking cigarettes on the periphery of this giant human stockyard, occasionally moving among the cages to brusqely hand a bottle to a child...sometimes a seven- or eight-year-old child...or more frequently to slap one into silence. Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>

In Sibiu the aid workers were able to visit their first AIDS ward in one of the hellhole orphanages...


Quote:The AIDS ward was behind four sets of locked doors. There were no nurses there, no doctors - no adults of any kind. Neither were there cribs; the infants and small children sat on the tile floor or competed to find space on one half a dozen bare and excrement-stained mattresses thrown against the far wall. They were naked and their heads had been shaved. The windowless room was illuminated by a few naked 40-watt bulbs set thirty or forty feet apart. Some children congregated there in the pools of murky light, raising swollen eyed to them as if to the sun, but most lay in the deep shadows. Older children scuttled on all fours to escape the light as we opened the steel doors. It was obvious that the floors were hosed down every few days - there were rivulets and streaks along the cracked tiles - and it was just as obvious that no other hygienic efforts had been made. Donna Wexler, Dr. Paxley, and Mr. Berry turned and fled from the stench. Dr. Aimslee cursed and pounded his fist against a stone wall. Father O'Rourke first stared, his Irish face mottling with rage, and then moved from infact to infant, touching their heads, whispering softly to them in a language they did not understand, lifting them. I had a distint impression as I watched that most of these children had never been held, never been touched...Father O'Rourke set down a child. The two-year-old's thin arms strained towards the priest as she made vague, imploring noises - a plea to be lifted again. He lifted her, laying her bald and scabrous head tight against his cheek... Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
****Tavern Wench of DOGMA, the Defenders of George Martin's Art****<i></i>