Prostho Plus

by Piers Anthony

  "But he did mean well," the spokesman said. "The information about the aphasia is, er, valuable."

  Dillingham recognized the touch of the master. Trach had in one diplomatic motion converted the spokesman to the defence of the alien, while hinting at a profitable line of political attack. The League could allow the directive to stand as an extraordinary favour to the council, calling it an act of magnanimity instead of a humiliating reversal. The council would then be in debt to the league... an attractive prospect for the dentists, undoubtedly.

  "Your attitude is certainly generous," Trach said. "Still, as owner of his contract, I feel responsible. This alien has caused you unpardonable embarrassment, and the least I can do is sell him to the mines."

  Oh-oh.

  "The mines!" the spokesman exclaimed. "We can't have that. He has done us a favour, really. We should purchase his contract from you, rather than—"

  "But then you would have him on your hands, and he really shouldn't remain to—"

  The spokesman pondered. True. We would much prefer to take it from here ourselves. His presence would be inconvenient, at best."

  "And the mines of Ra offer a very good price for dentists, since there is a chronic shortage."

  Dillingham's knees wobbled again. Was Trach determined to do him in?

  The hubbub resumed. "Because they don't live very long!" the spokesman said. "No, it may be inconvenient, but we are not barbarians. We shall purchase his contract and abolish it, so he can go elsewhere."

  "He might not want to leave such a fair world as this," Trach remarked, and once again Dillingham wished he'd quit while he was ahead. "Though I suppose if you were to sponsor him for something time-consuming, such as further education—"

  "The very thing. We can select a very complicated programme such as—"

  "Such as the one at the Galactic University of Dentistry, School of Prosthodontistry," Trach finished neatly. "A most perceptive decision. I can, for a nominal fee, make the arrangements immediately."

  Dillingham almost fainted from surprise and relief. He had thought the friendly dinosaur had forgotten that conversation.

  "Excellent," the spokesman said, though it was evident that he had had a different programme in mind. "Now that we have solved that problem, we can mmph the council and set about scrutchulating the hornswoggle."

  Trach looked quickly at Dillingham and held one webbed finger to his lips. Together they beat an inconspicuous retreat.

  "But I'm not a dentist!" Judy told the muck-a-muck. "I'm just looking for Dr. Dillingham, so I can—assist him."

  "He departed last week," the whale-like ruler of water-world Gleep communicated. This was the first time she had conversed with an entity while standing inside him, but such was galactic existence.

  "Then I must follow him."

  "Do you realize that we paid a hundred pounds of premium-grade frumpstiggle for your contract? You were billed as an associate of Dr. Dillingham, the famous exodontist. Now the prince's molars are beginning to itch again, and only a practitioner of Dillingham's status can abate the condition."

  "If Dr. Dillingham made the restorations, those teeth should be giving no trouble," she said loyally. "Probably all your son needs now is some instruction in preventive maintenance. Teeth can't be ignored, you know; you have to take care of them."

  "That's exactly what he said! You are his associate!"

  She sighed. "In that respect, yes. But as for—"

  "Excellent! Provide him with expert instruction."

  "First we have to come to an understanding," she said. She was, by fits and starts, learning how to deal with galactics. "If I instruct the prince, you must agree to send me to the planet that Dr. Dillingham went to."

  "Gladly. He travelled hence with a free-lance diplomat from Trachos. Their destination was—let me look it up in my tertiary memory bank—Electrolus."

  "Fine. I'll go there." Then she reconsidered. "I came to Enen too late, and to Gleep too late. How can I be sure he'll still be at Electrolus, when...?"

  The communications tentacles of the huge Gleep creature's lung chamber waved, and the transcoder dutifully rendered this visual signal into English. "A perspicacious point. Suppose we send you to the diplomat's following client? That's—one moment, please—Ra. The radium exporter."

  She was dubious. "But what if Dr. Dillingham stays at Electrolus after all?"

  "Then at least you'll be in touch with Trach, the diplomat. He is an obliging fellow, and he has his own ship."

  She considered that, still not entirely satisfied. She had had experience with obliging fellows possessing their own transportation. Dillingham had been a pleasing contrast—so serious, so dedicated to his profession.

  But of course this was not Earth, and it did seem to be her best chance. "All right. Ra it is. Let's see the prince now."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He entered the booth when his turn came and waited somewhat apprehensively for it to perform. The panel behind shut him in and ground tight.

  The interior was dark and unbearably hot, making sweat break out and stream down his body. Then the temperature dropped so precipitously that the moisture crystallized upon his skin and flaked away with the violence of his shivering. The air grew thick and bitter, then gaspingly rare. Light blazed, then faded into impenetrable black. A complete sonic spectrum of noise smote him, followed by crashing silence. His nose reacted to a gamut of irritation. He sneezed.

  Abruptly it was spring on a clover hillside, waft of nectar and hum of bumble-bee. The air was refreshingly brisk. The booth had zeroed in on his metabolism.

  "Identity?" a deceptively feminine voice inquired from nowhere, and a sign flashed with the word printed in italics. English.

  "My name is Dillingham," he said clearly, remembering his instructions. "I am a male mammalian biped evolved on planet Earth. I am applying for admission to the School of Prosthodontics as an initiate of the appropriate level."

  After a pause the booth replied sweetly: "Misinformation. You are a quadruped."

  "Correction," Dillingham said quickly. "I am evolved from quadruped." He spread his hands and touched the wall. Technically tetrapod, anterior limbs no longer employed for locomotion. Digits posses sensitivity, dexterity—"

  "Noted." But before he could breathe relief, it had another objection: "Earth planet has not yet achieved galactic accreditation. Application invalid."

  "I have been sponsored by the Dental League of Electrolus," he said. He saw already how far he would have got without that potent endorsement.

  "Verified. Provisional application granted. Probability of acceptance after preliminary investigation: twenty-one per cent. Fee: Thirteen thousand, two hundred and five dollars, four cents, seven mills, payable immediately."

  "Agreed," he said, appalled at both the machine's efficiency in adapting to his language and conventions, and the cost of application. He knew that the fee covered only the seventy hour investigation of his credentials; if finally admitted as a student, he would have to pay another fee of as much as a hundred thousand dollars for the first term. If rejected, he would get no rebate.

  His sponsor, Electrolus, was paying for it, thanks to Trach's diplomatic footwork. If he failed to gain admission, there would be no consequence—except that his chance to really improve himself would be gone. He could never afford training at the University on his own, even if the sponsorship requirement should be waived.

  Even so, he hoped that what the University had to offer was worth it. Over thirteen thousand dollars had already been drained from the Electrolus account here by his verbal agreement—for a twenty-one per cent probability of acceptance!

  "Present your anterior limb, buccal surface forward."

  He put out his left hand again, deciding that "buccal" in this context equated with the back of the hand. He was nervous in spite of the assurance he had been given that this process was harmless. A mist appeared around it, puffed and vanished, leaving an iridescent band clasped around,
or perhaps bonded into, the skin of his wrist.

  The opposite side of the booth opened and he stepped into a lighted corridor. He held up his hand and saw that the left of it was bright while the right was dull. This remained constant even when he twisted his wrist, the glow being independent of his motion. He proceeded left.

  At the end of the passage was a row of elevators. Other creatures of diverse proportions moved towards these, guided by the glows on their appendages. His own led him to a particular unit. Its panel was open, and he entered.

  The door was closed as he took hold of the supportive bars. The unit moved, not up or down as he had expected, but backwards. He clung desperately to the support as the fierce acceleration hurled him at the door.

  There was something like a porthole in the side through which he could make out racing lights and darknesses. If these were stationary sources of contrast, his velocity was phenomenal. His stomach jumped as the vehicle dipped and tilted; then it plummeted down as though dropped from a cliff.

  Dillingham was reminded of an amusement park he had visited as a child on Earth. There had been a ride through the dark something like this. He was sure that the transport system of the university had not been designed for thrills, however; it merely reflected the fact that there was a long way to go and many others in line. The elevators would not function at all for any creature not wearing proper identification. Established galactics took such things in stride without even noticing.

  Finally the roller-coaster/elevator decelerated and stopped. The door opened and he stepped dizzily into his residence for the duration, suppressing incipient motion sickness.

  The apartment was attractive enough. The air was sweet, the light moderate, the temperature comfortable. Earth-like vines decorated the trellises, and couches fit for bipeds were placed against the walls. In the centre of the main room stood a handsome but mysterious device.

  Something emerged from an alcove. It was a creature resembling an oversized pincushion with legs, one of which sported the ubiquitous iridescent band. It honked.

  "Greetings, room-mate," a speaker from the central artifact said. Dillingham realized that it was a multiple-dialect translator.

  "How do you do," he said. The translator honked, and the pincushion came all the way into the room.

  "I am from no equivalent term," it said in tootles.

  Dillingham hesitated to comment, until he realized that the confusion lay in the translation. There was no name in English for Pincushion's planet, since Earth knew little of galactic geography and nothing of interspecies commerce. "Substitute "Pincushion" for the missing term," he advised the machine, "and make the same kind of adjustment for any terms that may not be renderable into Pincushion's dialect." He turned to the creature. "I am from Earth. I presume you are also here to make application for admittance to the School of Prosthodontics?"

  The translator honked, once. Dillingham waited, but that was all.

  Pincushion honked. "Yes, of course. I'm sure all beings assigned to this dormitory are 1.0 gravity, oxygen-imbibing ambulators applying as students. The administration is very careful to group compatible species."

  Apparently a single honk could convey a paragraph. Perhaps there were frequencies he couldn't hear. Then again, it might be the inefficiency of his own tongue. "I'm new to all this," he admitted. "I know very little of the ways of the galaxy, or what is expected of me here."

  "I'll be happy to show you around," Pincushion said. "My planet has been sending students here for, well, not a long time, but several centuries. We even have a couple of instructors here, at the lower levels." There was a note of pride in the rendition. "Maybe one of these millenia we'll manage to place a supervisor."

  Already Dillingham could imagine the prestige that would carry.

  At that moment the elevator disgorged another passenger. This was a tall oak-like creature with small leaf-like tentacles fluttering at its side. The bright applicant-band circled the centre bark. It looked at the decorative vines of the apartment and spoke with the whistle of wind through dead branches: "Appalling captivity."

  The sound of the translations seemed to bring its attention to the other occupants. "May your probability of acceptance be better than mine," it said by way of greeting. "I am a humble modest branch from Treetrunk (the translator learned the naming convention quickly) and despite my formidable knowledge of prosthodontica my percentage is a mere sixty."

  Somewhere in there had been a honk, so Dillingham knew that simultaneous translations were being performed. This device made the little dual-track transcoders seem primitive.

  "You are more fortunate than I," Pincushion replied. "I stand at only forty-eight per cent."

  They both looked at Dillingham. Pincushion had knobby stalks that were probably eyes, and Treetrunk's apical discs vibrated like the greenery of a poplar sapling.

  Twenty-one per cent," Dillingham said sheepishly.

  There was an awkward silence. "Well these are only estimates based upon the past performances of your species," Pincushion said. "Perhaps your predecessors were not apt."

  "I don't think I have any predecessors," Dillingham said. "Earth isn't accredited yet." He hesitated to admit that Earth hadn't even achieved true space travel, by galactic definition.

  He had never been embarrassed for his planet before! But he had never had occasion to consider himself a planetary representative before, either.

  "Experience and competence count more than some machine's guess, I'm sure," Treetrunk said. "I've been practising on my world for six years. If you're—"

  "Well, I did practice for ten years on Earth."

  "You see—that will triple your probability when they find out," Pincushion said encouragingly. "They just gave you a low probability because no one from your planet has applied before."

  He hoped they were right, but his stomach didn't settle. He doubted that as sophisticated a set-up as the Galactic University would have to stoop to such crude approximation. The administration already knew quite a bit about him from the preliminary application, and his ignorance of galactic method was sure to count heavily against him. "Are there—references here?" he inquired. "Facilities? If I could look them over—"

  "Good idea!" Pincushion said. "Come—the operatory is this way, and there is a small museum of equipment."

  There was. The apartment had an annex equipped with an astonishing array of dental technology. There was enough for him to study for years before he could be certain of mastery. He decided to concentrate on the racked texts first, after learning that they could be fed into the translator for ready assimilation in animated projection.

  "Standard stuff," Treetrunk said, making a noise like chafing bark. "I believe I'll take an estimation."

  As Dillingham returned to the main room with an armful of the box-like texts, the elevator loosed another creature. This was a four-legged cylinder with a head tapered like that of an anteater, and peculiarly thin jointed arms terminating in a series of thorns.

  It seemed to him that such physical structure would be virtually ideal for dentistry. The thorns were probably animate rotary burrs, and the elongated snout might reach directly into the patient's mouth for inspection of close work without the imposition of a mirror. After the initial introductions he asked Anteater how his probability stood.

  "Ninety-eight per cent," the creature replied in an offhand manner. "Our kind seldom miss. We're specialized for this sort of thing."

  Specialization—there was the liability of the human form, Dillingham thought. Men were among the most generalized of Earth's denizens, except for their developed brains—and obviously these galactics had equivalent intellectual potential, and had been in space so long they had been able to adapt physically for something as narrow as dentistry. The outlook for him remained bleak, competitively.

  A robot-like individual and a native from Electrolus completed the apartment's complement. Dillingham hadn't known that his sponsor-planet was entering one of its own i
n the same curriculum, though this didn't affect him particularly.

  Six diverse creatures, counting himself—all dentists on their home worlds, all specializing in prosthodontics, all eager to pass the entrance examinations. All male, within reasonable definition—the university was very strict about the proprieties. This was only one apartment in a small city reserved for applicants. The university proper covered the rest of the planet.

  They learned all about it that evening at the indoctrination briefing, guided to the lecture-hall by a blue glow manifested on each identification band. The hall was monstrous; only the oxygen-breathers attended this session, but they numbered almost fifty thousand. Other halls catered to differing life-forms simultaneously.

  The university graduated over a million highly skilled dentists every term, and had a constant enrollment of twenty million. Dillingham didn't know how many terms it took to graduate—the programmes might be variable—but the incidence of depletion seemed high. Even the total figure represented a very minor proportion of the dentistry in the galaxy. This fraction was extremely important, however, since mere admission as a freshman student here was equivalent to graduation elsewhere.

  There were generally only a handful of DU graduates on any civilized planet. These were automatically granted life tenures as instructors at the foremost planetary colleges, or established as consultants for the most challenging cases available. Even the drop-outs had healthy futures.

  Instructors for the U itself were drawn from its own most gifted graduates. The top one hundred, approximately—of each class of a million—were siphoned off for special training and retained, and a great number were recruited from the lower ranking body of graduates: individuals who demonstrated superior qualifications in subsequent galactic practice. A few instructors were even recruited from non-graduates, when their specialities were so restricted and their skills so great that such exceptions seemed warranted.