All My Sins Remembered (4 page)

“I’d still favor bismuth—or something similar, like antimony—if there was any way in hell they could get it. Ever since we learned how toxic and addictive it was, nobody’s been allowed to bring it onto the planet. Not even me, and I could use a few grams of the subgallate.”

“Any way they could be getting it from the mines?”

“No. All the bismuth in ten cubic meters of that lanthanide ore wouldn’t be enough to give a Bruuchian a slight buzz. I’ve come to think it’s just a red herring. Something else is causing the symptoms.”

“Any recent change in, well, their dietary habits, for instance? Human food?”

“No, they still live off the reptimammals; won’t even look at human food. I’ve run a continuing analysis on the flesh-pods they harvest. Nothing unusual. No bismuth, certainly.”

They sat for a moment in thoughtful silence. “Looks like this may be a bigger job than I’d anticipated. They sent me here, my publisher, to update the book for a new edition. I expected only to gather some new statistics and renew old friendships.” He knuckled both eyes. “Quite frankly, the prospect of footwork is appalling. I’m not a young man any more, and I weigh twenty kilos more than I did last time. Even then, I needed Gravitol to get around comfortably.”

“You don’t have any yet?”

“No, haven’t got around to it. Is Willy Norman still the Company doctor”

“Yeah. Here.” He unstuck a pocket and brought out a small vial. “Have a couple; I get them free.”

“Many thanks.” Crowell put two tablets on his tongue and washed them down with beer. A feeling of lightness and well-being pulsed through him. “Ah! Potent stuff.” He stood without difficulty for the first time since he had become Isaac Crowell. “Could I impose on you for a tour of your lab? Seems like a logical starting place.”

“Sure, I was going to stop by this afternoon anyway.” A jinrikisha rumbled by outside. “Maybe we can catch that one.” He went to the door and gave a piercing whistle.

The driver heard him and came to a halt in a shower of dust. He wheeled the cart around and rushed toward them as if his life depended on it. As they got on, he grunted one syllable: “Where?”

“Take-us-to-Mine-A-please.” The Bruuchian gave a disarmingly human nod and pulled away with a powerful surge.

Mine A was three kilometers away. The ride was dusty and not too terrifying.

The lab was a large silver dome beside the mine elevator. “Nice setup,” Crowell said as he beat dust from his clothes. “Dustpits?” The area between the road and the dome was clustered with roped-off circles.

“Yeah. No big ones.”

Most dustpits were a meter or less deep—but step into a big one and you were gone forever. The natives could see dustpits plainly, night or day, since their infrared eyeclusters were sensitive to the temperature differential between the pits and the ground. But to human eyes, everything was uniform: smooth brown talc.

Nearing the lab, Crowell heard the chugging of an air compressor. The dome wasn’t metal after all, but aluminized plastic, kept rigid by air pressure. They went through a flap door in the side.

The air inside was sweet and cool. “Compressor pushes cold air through a humidifier and a stack of dust filters. The Company gets a lot of free overtime for their investment.”

The lab was an interesting combination of rustic and ultramodern. Every piece of furniture was the familiar Bruuchian design, but Crowell recognized the crinkly gray box of an expensive general-purpose computer, a caloric oven, a large-screen electron microscope, and a lot of complicated glassware that had to have been imported. There were several arcane devices that he couldn’t identify.

“Impressive. How did you ever get the Company to finance all of this?”

Struckheimer shook his head. “They just paid for the building—hard enough to get that! The rest is a Confederación grant from the Public Health Commission.

“So I’m the Company’s veterinarian for six hours a day, and the rest of the time I do research on Bruuchian physiology. Or try to—it’s difficult, without cadavers and exploratory operations.”

“You can do X rays, though; neutron scans—”

“Sure I can.” He pulled on his sparse beard and glowered at the center of Crowell’s chest. “For whatever good it does. What do you know about Bruuchian anatomy?”

“Well…” Crowell hiked himself up onto a stool, which creaked. “The early studies were inconclusive, and I haven’t—”

“Inconclusive! I don’t know much more than that myself. They have several internal organs that seem not to have any function. Not all of them even have the same set of organs. And if they do, they aren’t necessarily in the same place in the body cavity.

“The only consistent results I get are from that thing.” He stabbed a thumb in the direction of a large structure that looked like a nineteenth-century diving bell. “Stokes chamber, for quantitative metabolic analysis. I hire them to sit in there and eat and excrete. They think it’s a big joke.”

He punched his palm with his fist. “If only I could get a cadaver! Did you hear about last month, the laser?”

“No, nothing.”

“They say it was an accident; I have my doubts. Anyhow, a native fell, or was pushed, in front of a mining laser. Sliced him in two.”

“God!”

“I was right up here; took me less than ten minutes to get down to where it happened. But relatives had already spirited the body away. Must have gone up on one elevator while I was going down on the other. I took an interpreter and got to the village as fast as I could. Found his hut.

“I—I told them I could sew him back together again, I could cure him. God, I wanted to get a look at that body!”

He kneaded his forehead with two fingers. “They believed me. And they apologized. But they said they had thought he was ready for stillness, and they had already ‘sent’ him.

“I asked if I could see his body and they said, sure, they were happy that I would want to join the celebration.”

“Surprised they’d let you,” Crowell said.

“They’ve eased up on that. Anyhow, you know that room, the family room, where they keep their ancestors’ mummies. I went in there; must have been fifty of them leaning against the walls, three and four deep, perfectly preserved.

“They pointed out the new arrival: he looked just like all the others, except for a hairless circle around his middle, where the laser had cut through. I looked at the ring of skin closely—they let me use a flashlight—and there was absolutely no seam, no scar! I checked the serial number on the foot, and it was the right one.

“The cadaver couldn’t have gotten there ten minutes before I did… that kind of scar suppression takes induced skin regeneration, weeks of convalescence, and you can’t do it on a dead organism.

“But try to find out how they do it—you might as well ask a person how he keeps his heart beating. I don’t think they really understand the question.”

Crowell nodded. “When I wrote my book, I had to be satisfied with a simple description of the phenomenon. All I could find out was that it involves some ritual using the oldest and youngest family members. And nobody teaches them what to do. They say it’s obvious. But they can’t explain, and they won’t let you watch.”

Struckheimer went to a big free-standing refrigerator and got two beers. “Stand another one?” Crowell nodded and Struckheimer uncorked both of them. “Make it myself—one of the native boys tends the brew for me. Going to lose him in a few months, though—he’s almost old enough for the mines.”

He handed Crowell a beer and sat down on a lower stool. “I suppose you know they don’t have anything like a study of medicine. No shamans or anything. If somebody gets sick, they just sit around and cheer him on, and if he recovers they offer him their condolences.”

“I know,” said Crowell. “How do you ever get them to come around for treatment… and, for that matter, how can you know what to do for them when they come in?”

“Well, my medical assistants—I’ve got four—inspect each of them when they go into the mine, and again after they’ve finished work. The Public Health Commission designed a remote diagnostic machine similar to the one a doctor uses. There are four of them all synched into my computer over there. It checks out their respiration rate, skin temperature, pulse, and such; if there’s any significant difference between two consecutive readings, they send the fellow over to me. By the time he gets here, the computer has filled me in on his medical history, and I can dope out some empirical remedy based on clinical experience and physiological experiments. I never have any idea whether the remedy is going to reduce the symptoms. A drug will work perfectly on one of them, and on the next the symptoms will just get worse and worse until he curls up and dies. And you know what they say about that.”

“Yeah—‘He was ready for stillness.’”

“Right—they tolerate the treatment only because it’s a condition for employment. They’d never come on their own.”

“Have the diagnostic machines given you any clue as to the reason they’re dying off so much younger than before?”

“Oh, sure…symptoms, in a statistical sense. For instance, the average respiration rate has increased more than ten per cent since we started taking readings. Average body temperature, up almost a degree. That supplements my clinical data; both together led to the original conclusion that it was cumulative poisoning. Bismuth would fit the data nicely, since I found in radioactive organ traces that it all accumulates in one organ and is never excreted.

“And it has to be something associated with the mines. You know, they keep careful demographic records; the families with the greatest number of recent additions to stillness have the most ‘political’ power. It turns out that the life expectancy of those who don’t work in the mines hasn’t changed a bit.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“The Company doesn’t like it spread around.”

They talked for another hour, Crowell mostly listening, Otto developing a plan.

4.

It was almost dark when Crowell trudged up the walk to the doctor’s office. The Gravitol had worn off and he was feeling miserable again.

The doctor’s office had the first modern furniture, a conservative chrome-and-plastic desk, and the first attractive woman Crowell had seen on the planet.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“Uh, no, ma’am. But I’m an old friend of the doctor’s…”

“Isaac—Isaac Crowell! Come on back and say hello!” The voice came from a little intercom on her desk.

“Last room down the corridor to your right, Mr. Crowell.”

Dr. Norman met him in the corridor and steered him to a different room, pumping his hand. “It’s been so long, Isaac—I heard you were back and frankly, I was surprised. This is no planet for oldsters like us.” The doctor was an affable giant; red-faced and white-haired. They went into his living quarters, a two-room apartment with a worn carpet and lots of old-fashioned books on the walls. When they entered, music started playing automatically; Crowell couldn’t identify it, but Otto knew: “Vivaldi,” he said without thinking.

The doctor looked surprised. “Finally getting an education in your old age, Isaac? I remember when you thought Bach was just a kind of beer.”

“I’m finding time for a lot of things now, Willy.” Crowell lowered his bulk into an overstuffed chair. “All of them sedentary.”

The doctor chuckled and strode into the kitchenette. He put ice in two glasses, measured brandy into each, and splashed soda into one, water into the other.

He handed the brandy and soda to Crowell. “Always remember a patient’s prescription,” he said.

“As a matter of fact, that’s one thing I dropped by for.” Crowell took a sip from his drink. “I need a month’s supply of Gravitol.”

The smile went off the doctor’s face and he sat down on the couch, putting his drink down without sampling it. “No, you don’t, Isaac. A week’s supply would be plenty. Then you’d be stone… cold… dead.”

“What?”

“Obesity is a contraindication; at any rate, I never advise it for people over fifty-five. I never take it myself anymore. It would put too much of a strain on the old ticker.”

My heart is thirty-two years old
, McGavin thought,
and it’s carrying around an extra fifty kilos. Think, think!

“Is there some less potent drug that’d help me get around in this gravity? I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“Hmm… yes, Pandroxin isn’t nearly as dangerous, but it should give you a measure of comfort.” He reached into a drawer and brought out a prescription pad. He scribbled a short note. “Here you go. But stay away from that Gravitol. It would be pure poison to your system.”

“Thanks. I’ll get it filled tomorrow.”

“Tonight, if you want. The pharmacy part of the Company store’s open all night now.

“So… what brings you back to this outlandish place, Isaac? Investigating the change in the Bruuchian death rate?”

“Not really, or not primarily. I just came to update my book for a new edition. But that
is
one of the things I’ll want to look into. What do you think of the bismuth theory?”

Willy waved a hand in the air. “Hogwash. I think it’s overwork, pure and simple. The little bastards work hard all day in the mines: then they go home and knock themselves out carving on that tough wood. You don’t have to look any farther than that.”