Ascending (14 page)

“Okay,” I answered, using her own vernacular. Then, most bravely, I asked, “Do doctors hurt?”

“If he hurts you,” Festina said, “you have my permission to punch him in the nose.”

This made me very happy… but I still looked back with a lump in my throat as I went out the door.

Festina sat at the table, her eyes staring off into space as if she were thinking very great thoughts. I decided it would be pleasant to think great thoughts of my own; but the only thing in my mind was that I was walking away from my friend.

More Tiny Things Invading My Person

Sick bay did not hurt, but it tickled. I could not see what did the tickling, so I blamed Nimbus—I thought he was sending specks of himself to brush against me, making my nose itchy and causing awkward irritations all over my body. But the cloud man swore he had nothing to do with it; he claimed to be suffering personal disturbances of his own, because the air of the infirmary was filled with Analysis Nano.

I did not know what Analysis Nano was, but the navy physician was delighted to explain. He was, in fact, delighted about every conceivable aspect of existence: the opportunity to examine me was “fabulous”; my personal transparency was “amazing”; and the chance to carry out a task for Festina was “a great, great honor.” His name was Havel, a paunchy watery-eyed human who seemed to perceive more reasons to laugh than anyone else in the room. Dr. Havel was constantly chuckling or giggling or snickering over things that seemed quite ordinary indeed. He also displayed much hearty enthusiasm about anything that passed before his eyes…which meant when he said, “Ho, ho, you’re a stunner, the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen,” I was not so gratified as I might have wished.

Some men are too easy to impress. When they praise your ethereal crystalline beauty, you get the feeling they would be just as ecstatic over a glittery red pebble or a potato shaped like a fish.

On the other hand, Dr. Ha-Ha-Havel was a good person to approach for clarifications of important Scientific topics—he was so enchanted with the glories of the universe, he would gladly tell you whatever he could, and never suggest you were ignorant for not knowing. Therefore he explained that Analysis Nano was a swarm of millions and billions of tiny machines, so small they could not be seen. They buzzed around patients in sick bay, reading your pulse, your body temperature, and the composition of your sweat. At instructions from the physician, the little bugs could also delve beneath your skin, digging for blood samples or flying down your throat to examine the workings of your stomach.

I did not want tiny machines journeying through my digestive system; but Dr. Havel said a number of them had already gone down my esophagus, and it did not hurt a bit, did it?

He was correct. It did not hurt, so I could not punch him. But everything itched a great deal, as I have already said, and some of the nanos ventured into places they were not welcome. Though I wore my Explorer jacket, the coat did not seem sufficiently skilled at protecting the parts of me that needed safekeeping.

Myself Exposed

After five minutes of such indignities, Dr. Havel clapped his hands together with Anticipatory Zeal. “Well then, let’s see what my clever little helpers have discovered.”

He scurried to a table in the middle of the room: the sort of table one might lie upon when being examined by a
real
physician.
⁹
However, Dr. Havel never once asked me to lie down; and when I looked at the table, I saw why not.

The entire table-top was a viewing screen…and there on the screen, life-size, was the exposed anatomy of a woman who could only be me. I do not say I recognized myself—instead of a face, there was an opaque rendering of my skull, not to mention whitish versions of other bones in my body, laid over internal organs depicted in ugly unnatural colors—but the general outline matched my own, so who else could it be?

“I do not look like that,” I said. “My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent.”

Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. “Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum.”

He proudly waved his hand toward the image—which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm…but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.

If I held myself quiet, I could feel my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.

Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen—not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.

“Hmm!” Dr. Havel announced. “Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself.”

“This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation.”

“Oh,” said he, “you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me…and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t.”

“How can you tell?” Uclod asked.

The doctor must have been hoping for that question. “See here?” he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture of my ribs. The image expanded to show a magnified view, twice as big as before. Havel patted again and the picture expanded a second time; several more pats, and all you could see was one little patch of bone, blown up to fill the body-sized screen.

“All right,” the doctor said, “fourth rib, right side: look at this area here.” He circled his pudgy hand above the center of the picture, where there was an obvious line etched into the bone. “See this ridge running up the middle? And the bump at the top: one side of the ridge is a bit higher than the other. That’s a fracture site. The bone broke and didn’t quite knit cleanly. It’s only a microscopic discrepancy—whoever set the fracture did a fantastic job, better than any human surgeon. And the healing was more complete than anything I’ve seen in
Homo sapiens
. But magnify the image a few hundred times, and ta-da! The glitch is there, plain as day.”

I stared at the picture. I did not like thinking my rib had a flaw in it, no matter how small.

“And,” the doctor went on, “there are dozens of similar breaks throughout the skeletal system: the chest, the arms, the front of the face. Ms. Oar, you definitely suffered massive trauma at some point in the past—consistent with falling from a tall building, and your upper torso taking the brunt of the impact. Since I don’t know your species’ rate of recovery, I can’t tell how long ago the damage happened; but it’s safe to conclude you’re the same Oar who plummeted off the tower four years back.”

“I
know
that,” I told him. “I suffered Grievous Wounds and it took me time to heal.”

“You didn’t heal by yourself,” Havel said. “If the bones had knit on their own, the fracture sites would be a million times worse. A lot wouldn’t heal at all—the bone ends would be too apart to grow back together again. Someone damned good at orthopedics set each little break so it would fuse as good as new…and the surgery was performed within a few hours of the damage.

“On top of that,” the doctor continued, “here’s the real telltale sign you got high-class medical attention.” He pointed to a series of squiggles written in bright red on the table screen. They were not an alphabet I recognized; I assumed they were some hateful Scientific Notation describing tedious Chemicals.

“Your spinal fluid,” Havel said, “contains the residue of a nifty little drug called Webbalin: developed on the planet Troyen several decades back, when the Mandasars were the best medical researchers in our sector. Webbalin prevents cerebral degradation after your neurons stop getting fresh blood; without it, a human suffers irreversible brain damage within five to ten minutes of coronary arrest. Even if someone gets your heart pumping again later on, you won’t be the same person. Your old brain architecture has fallen apart—the trillions of linkages that make you unique get erased by neuron decay. Even if we grow you new neurons, they won’t link together in the same way. Without Webbalin to keep your original gray matter from rotting, your body might get brought back to life, but your memories and personality sure won’t.”

“And you found this Webbalin stuff in Oar’s spinal fluid?” Uclod asked.

“She obviously received a massive dose,” Havel replied. “Enough to leave traces four years after the fact.”

“Doctor,” Nimbus said, “how soon does Webbalin have to be administered after death? In order to be effective.”

“It’s usually given
before
death,” Havel answered. “If a trauma victim’s in danger of dying, you want Webbalin in the patient’s bloodstream as soon as possible. Get it circulating while the heart is still working; then when the crash comes, ha-ha, the brain will be safe for ten hours instead of ten minutes. Gives you a lot more leeway for patching up the poor bastard.”

“But suppose the patient has already died. Does that mean you only have ten minutes to inject the drug?”

“Worse than that,” Havel told him. “Ten minutes to get the drug saturating the brain. Which is damned difficult if you don’t have blood circulation. You can force-pump a dose inside the cranium and hope it soaks into the cells…but that’s just farting around to mollify the next-of-kin. It seldom works at all, and it never works completely. If you’re lucky, you salvage thirty percent of the brain, tops. That’s rarely enough to keep the patient alive, let alone, ha-ha, help him remember the password to his bank account—which is often the family’s prime concern.”

“So if Oar’s brain survived…” Nimbus said thoughtfully.

“It
did
survive,” I told him. “It survived
just fine
. I am quite as clever as I have ever been.”

“Maybe,” Uclod said, “that’s because you ain’t human, toots. Your brain cells might not rot as fast as the average
Homo sap
. Maybe that’s how you stayed intact till the Pollisand picked you up.”

“Or maybe,” Nimbus suggested, “the drug was injected ahead of time. While you were still alive.
Before
you took the fall.”

“No one injected me with drugs! I would know!”

But I was not so certain as I pretended. Only a short time before my fall, I had been lying unwatched in a state of unconsciousness. This was the result of being shot repeatedly with a whirring noise-gun, causing such horrendous damage that I blacked out. When I eventually awoke, I located the villain who shot me and plunged with him from the tower…but during the period I was insensate, there was no way to tell what someone might have done to me.

“It does seem far-fetched,” Dr. Havel said, “that the Pollisand injected Ms. Oar with Webbalin in advance. There’d be no reason to do that unless he knew she was going to take a swan-dive, ha-ha, onto bare cement. And the only way he could know that is by…”

“Foreseeing the future?” Nimbus said. “Isn’t that what the Pollisand is noted for? Being in exactly the right place when things go wrong?”

No one spoke for a moment. Then Uclod muttered, “Bloody hell.”

Unpruned Anomalies

A time passed without conversation…which is to say, Dr. Havel talked and nobody paid attention. What he talked about was me as a “specimen”—his first “marvelous chance” to examine an “alien life-form never before seen by medical science,” and he was “thrilled, absolutely thrilled” to have the opportunity.

But the foolish thing was, he did not examine me at all: he examined my picture on the table, while I stood bored at his elbow. And instead of praising my beauty or grace, he was forever blathering about
Chemicals:
substances with long complex names that my body contained, in lieu of
other
substances with long complex names that it did not. For example, it was apparently most remarkable that my blood did not include Hemogoblins (which I believe are little trolls that live in human veins); in place of those, I had Transparent Silicate Platelets (which, as the name suggests, are miniature plates that carry food from one cell to another).

Moreover, though I appeared visually similar to
Homo sapiens,
my composition was entirely different. I had numerous glands not found in humans; my basic internal organs (heart, lungs, and stomach) were arranged differently from Earthlings; even my bones were unique, and their attachments to various muscles deviated greatly from the Terran standard. I was, Havel said, a vastly different species from humans, structurally as well as chemically…but my nonhuman parts were assembled in such a way that I looked “morphologically human” on the outside. “Like a cat,” said the doctor, “who’s been engineered to resemble a dog. Except that cats and dogs have a lot more in common with each other than you do with humans—your body chemistry is utterly extraterrestrial.”

Finally, it seemed my brain had never undergone a process the doctor called
pruning
. He said this was something that happens to all known intelligent races by mid-adolescence: a large number of existing connections between mental neurons wither away in the interest of “efficiency.” The theory goes that during childhood, the brain has many surplus linkages between neighboring nerve cells, because there is no telling which will eventually prove necessary. By adolescence, however, a person’s day-to-day experiences have established which connections are actually used and which are superfluous fripperies—links that never get activated in everyday life. The brain therefore discontinues low-use links as a means of streamlining the most common thought processes…making sure that essential mental activity is not slowed by extraneous clutter.

The doctor claimed pruning is good and desirable: a pruned brain is more quickly decisive, less plagued by needless doubts and uncertainties. After pruning, your brain knows conclusively that objects always fall down instead of up, that it is a poor idea to stick your hand into fire, and that mere animals never really talk; indeed, a pruned brain is resistant to, and even threatened by, any notion it has come to regard as absurd. The “mature” mind shuts the door on the impossible, so it can concentrate on The Real.