The Triple Goddess (112 page)

The only person that Bonvilian knew in such a category who, as in the variant on James Thomson’s
Rule, Britannia
poem, as a staunch Briton would never, never, never be a Slave, was the one who had enslaved him, but who to date had demonstrated no interest whatsoever in his body or body fluids, nor his mind: Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M.

S-Class-eligible individuals who were unregistered for call-up to active duty were extremely cunning in the means they employed to elude the authorities. Although so far there were still sufficient in the concentration camps to keep the beds filled on Ward One, concern was mounting that the supply might run out before the Project came to fruition. Those who had every incentive to remain at large formed sophisticated support groups, and demonstrated great survival skills, so that hunting each one down and bringing him in was like trying to catch a Yeti, or the Rudolph fugitive.

The nasal membranes of Central’s “Dog Catcher” squads, components of an army of bloodhounds whose handlers reported to Glenda Conklin 7203H, were active around the clock as, equipped with every device of detection and entrapment, thousands of sleuths and trackers, operating singly and in posses, combed the planet and the Inner Regions of Space in their attempts to corral and draft the S-Class dodgers.

The most notorious refugee was Abel “the Man in the Moon” Spickett. Spickett had eventually been run to ground in a lunar crater near the Sea of Tranquillity, where he was living on a diet of opencast-mined Sage Derby green-veined cheese. Bonvilian had named the man in the moon “Squit”, after he came down none too soon, under escort; and instead of giving him directions to Norwich, or allowing him to burn his mouth by supping cold pease porridge, per the traditional or nursery rhyme, had him turned into blood soup.

Other renegades outwitted Glenda Conklin 7203H’s olfactory ousters, not by hieing themselves to polar regions, forest, or desert, nor by going underground, or hiding in beaver lodges, nor by departing into the more proximate regions of space, but by remaining in the most obvious places where Glenda’s macho handlers in their Oakley sunglasses did not bother to look. One outlaw survived for years by posing as one of the dog catchers, and another as the resident otolaryngologist responsible for treating the dogs’ sinus infections and keeping their noses wet.

It was the pancreas of Spasm, as Spickett was renamed as a Slave, that Bonvilian 4285D used to illustrate a point one afternoon at Central, before a committee of A, B, and C mugwumps, panjandrums, and pooh-bahs. He had been summoned for a post-luncheon (the blood soup that Spasm later became did not furnish the first course, though it was tomato) vivisectional demonstration of where he was at in his investigations. For practical rather than merciful reasons, Spasm’s spinal cord had been severed, and his voice-box removed, to ensure that 4285D did not have to wrestle with his unshackled Slave, and that he might articulate the facts before his audience without having to compete with Spasm’s dissenting screams.

‘I am confident that somewhere in this six-inch lobulated racemose ductless gland, which is located in the back of the abdomen behind the stomach, and which discharges into the duodenum a digestive secretion, called pancreatic juice,’ said 4285D, as he separated Spasm from the object for scrutiny with a pencil-gripped #15 scalpel in a #7 handle, picked it up with a gloveless hand and tossed it in a kidney bowl, ‘is to be found a clue to tracing the key to the Garden of Eden from which the first man Adam was ejected. Let me hasten to add that I use discredited Creationist language only as a metaphorical means of illustrating my point.’

As Bonvilian held the endocrine exemplum up with a pair of forceps for inspection by his attentive audience, Gwladys Gormé 9162G, Central’s Head of Catering, who had stuck around in case anyone wanted more coffee or to compliment her on the meal, left the room. It was a coincidence that the main luncheon course today had been sweetbreads, or calves’ pancreas; which had gone down rather well, either because the alternative was liver or because Gwladys had assured everyone that pancreas tastes just like chicken.

A sound of retching from the hallway indicated that 9162G was nonetheless ruing her adventurous gastronomic selection, and wondering, not what miraculous power Bonvilian believed Spasm’s version of it to contain, but how to clean the luncheon portion that she had consumed in the kitchen off the hall carpet before everyone came out of the dining room.

Bonvilian ignored the interruption and resumed. ‘“The Fall”, I posit, was the prehistoric name for the genetic mutation that took place in Adam as a result of his, alleged, misdeed. And I maintain that the Garden, and the plentiful supply of uncorrupted seeds it contained, still exists. It is my intention to find it, to secure a quantity of those germens, and bring them back to be grown for ingestion by those whom Central may deem worthy of benefiting from their prelapsarian properties. Such a diet will reverse the process of degradation set in motion by Adam, and make Mankind forever Master of the Universe.’

4285D flicked a stray shred of Spasm’s spleen, the main of which he had put aside in a doggy-bag to take back himself to the Institute for stat. analysis, with the rest of his Impatient to follow in a body bag, took off his jacket, wiped his fingers on his tie, tucked the end between the middle buttons of his shirt, and invited the less whey-faced of the two waiters who had served lunch to approach and help him tuck Spasm’s intestines, which had not been treated to lunch, back into his abdomen.

Bonvilian had more to say to his audience; but as he picked up his scalpel and waved it to emphasize what he was about to say, he inadvertently nicked the duodenum, and the unpleasant smell that issued from it cleared the room so quickly that caterer Gwladys Gormé 9162G, who was on hands and knees outside the door with a bucket of warm water, a sponge, and a tin of deodorizing baking soda, scrubbing pancreas off the Axminster carpet, got trodden on.

Even had the meeting not ended prematurely, the Director had not intended to share with the Central nobs more than a few elementary details of his thesis of mortal salvation, which were of the type that the
Wikipedia
online encyclopaedia—that opium den for those in need of a quick fix of impressive-sounding information on something they know nothing about, and do not care to take the time to research in greater depth—would either state as requiring additional citations for verification, or delete.

Bonvilian, the Cynic, had read widely around his subject, in the hours that he devoted to late-night lucubration in his flat on the top floor of the Exeat Institute. He had traced Mankind’s progress from the Garden of Eden inhabited by the human prototypes, to the present day high plateau (think Denver the Mile-High City, Queen City of the Plains), and then imaginatively dotted-line projected it to a Doomsday cliff of an algebraic height. He studied the beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. He investigated Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. He noted how, as the body survived longer and longer, surrounded by more and more material possessions, people increasingly dispensed with priests, and their wafers of absolution, and blessings, and instead banged the drums of secular fundamentalism.

Religion had nothing left to offer in a we-take-it-for-granted environment of predictability, stability, and comfort. Falling back on Faith, before world hunger and poverty had been banished and eradicated, and when one’s ten children might die between childbirth and puberty...that was why one had so many babies in those days, in hopes that some might survive...and when the “Black Death” bubonic plague in the late 1340s killed twenty million people in five years, was understandable; but as a palliative quid pro quo, when generic human medicine that worked was so easily substituted for the spiritual trademarked brands, it was no longer relevant.

In ancient Egypt, Bonvilian learned, the earliest physician to be known by name was a priest with practical ideas called Imhotep. In the Indian sacred writings of the Vedas were detailed magical treatments for diseases, and expulsion of the demons that caused them. The Jews were great espousers of public health, and the Arabians could do wonders with senna, musk, and camphor.

In the sixth century BCE
, B
efore the Common Era, the philosopher Pythagoras weighed in on medical thought. Empedocles opined that the universe was composed of four elements…fire, air, earth, water…a concept that led to the doctrine of the four bodily humours…blood, choler or yellow bile, melancholy or black bile, and phlegm…a balanced combination of which was held to be essential to one’s well-being, with blood being supposed to be dominant in spring, yellow bile in summer, black bile in the autumn, and phlegm in winter. Later, Aristotle, pupil of Plato and the first great anatomist and biologist, further developed the theory of the four humours.

Bringing the wheel full circle, the Greeks, bless their leather sandals, had recognized similarities between Egyptian Imhotep,
vide supra
, and Asclepius, their god of medicine, adherence to whose cult involved ritual sacrifices, bathing, and sleeping in the courtyard. (Maybe, thought Bonvilian, on a warm summer night he might take a futon into the Exeat Institute’s quadrangle.) Although religion and practical healing coexisted in the earliest days of civilization—no self-respecting Hindu surgeon practised his art with fewer than twenty sharp, and one hundred and one blunt, instruments—the medicine baby grew up an infidel.

It was with the Greek Hippocrates of Cos, the acknowledged Father of Medicine, in the fifth to fourth century BCE
,
that the enquiring mind took over forever from the old supernatural beliefs and intuitive practices, and Mankind set itself to studying the causes instead of the symptoms of disease. Hippocrates—whose bag was prognosis rather than diagnosis—
held the belief that the body must be treated as a whole and not just in a series of parts. He was also the first physician to maintain that thoughts, ideas, and feelings come from the brain and not the heart.

In Alexandria, a medical school was established around 300 BCE.

During the early centuries of the Common Era, Rome was filled with Greek doctors. Aelius Galenus, or Galen, the celebrated
second century physician who was born at Pergamon in Asia Minor, began practising there in 161
ce
. Taking on board Hippocrates’ notions of the humours and pathology, and the anatomical knowledge of noted Alexandrians such as Herophilus of Chalcedon, Galen was a supporter of observation and reasoning. As one of the first experimental physiologists, who researched the function of the kidneys and the spinal cord in controlled experiments,
Galen’s theories endured until 1628, the year that William Harvey published his treatise entitled
De motu cordis
, in which he established that blood circulates with the heart acting as a pump.

Acknowledging his debt to Hippocrates, Galen adopted
pneuma
, or breath, as the foundation of life, which is what led some to connect his teachings with the principle of the soul. He believed in the purposeful creation of the world through
phusis
, or Nature, which was what made it possible for both Christians and Muslims to accept his views—not that Aelius Galenus gave a rat’s arse what they thought as he wrote, at the rate of one line a day,
On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Human Body
, and made advances in therapeutics that influenced European medicine for a thousand years until the Renaissance.

In the hospitals of Damascus and Cairo, doctors for each part of the body (Bonvilian permitted himself an unprofessional chuckle) skipped their lunch breaks and devised some eight hundred medical procedures and remedies, six hundred drugs, and a vast array of surgical tools. In Baghdad there was a hospital by 850, and from 931 doctors there were required to pass medical examinations. Avicenna the Persian, “The Prince of Physicians”, compiled his
Book of Healing
and
Canon of Medicine
.

In the East only the Chinese, being isolated from the rest of the world, stuck with their original concepts based on the flow of energy and Yin and Yang: the opposition of cool, nocturnal and passive emotions with those of hot, daytime extroversion; and the techniques of acupuncture and moxibustion. In the West, a rebellious sixteenth century physician,
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim
—Paracelsus—physician, alchemist, botanist, astrologer, occultist, Hermetic homilist, and general medical heretic, publicly burned the works of Galen and Avicenna, advocated the calculated use of toxins in healing, and, stressing the essential linkage between the Human Microcosm and Universal Man, the Macrocosm, researched means of restoring youth and prolonging life.

Meanwhile the oblivious Celtic Druids in their Welsh sacred oak and mistletoe groves continued to dish out simples of mugwort, vervain, valerian, and selago, et cetera, tear prescriptions off their birch-bark paper pads by the dozen, and send their patients toddling off, with a complimentary miniature bottle of mead as a tonic to speed the journey home, to have their remedies made up by Pritchard the Pill in the valley.

But that was all then. Now, Exeat Institute Director Hugo Bonvilian 4285D had been authorized to wipe the slate clean, go back to the beginning of everything and, using data he generated and collated himself, prepare to diary the day when he would, looking as modest as possible, be anointed as the saviour of Mankind.