In "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," we find yet another kind of slavery. The heroine Lynn is enslaved by a violent and apparently always fatal disease. Duryea-Gode disease is the side effect of a medicine called Hedeonco, which had been "the cure for a large percentage of the world's cancer and a number of serious viral diseases" ("The Morning and the Evening and the Night" 46). If this so-called "magic bullet" seems too good to be true, that is because it actually was. The problem was that the children of those treated with Hedeonco were born with DGD. From that point, the disease was always passed on genetically. Victims of the disease live healthy lives (with a regulated diet) until one day they begin to lose control and mutilate themselves and possibly those around them. Those who do not die from this experience live out their lives heavily drugged and restrained.

First published in Omni, May 1987.

Reprinted in:

• The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988)
• The Evening and the Morning and the Night (1991)
• Omni Visions One (1993)
• Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, ed. A. Susan Williams & Richard Glyn Jones, Viking UK 1995
• Bloodchild and Other Stories, Four Walls Eight Windows 1995