"What do I do?” I asked.
"You've got one option. Perform surgery on her."
"Me?"
"Whoever in your party has the most medical experience. Is there a nurse with you, a paramedic? Nurse's aid?"
I asked the tribe; a dozen heads shook in unison. Shit, half of them never learned how to read. Most of the rest had forgotten.
"There's got to be another way,” I said to the doctor. “What about a helicopter?"
He laughed. “Will that be cash or charge?"
"Oh god, oh god,” I said. I felt like I was separating from my body; I heard my voice saying “Oh god,” but it sounded far away, coming from someone else.
"Build a fire,” Dr Gabow said. “I'm going to do this for a hundred dollars federal, because you can't afford what I should be charging, and because I'm a nice guy."
"Thank you, doctor,” I said, and started to cry. “Somebody build a fire!” Who was that scared little boy who just yelled that? a calm sliver of my mind asked.
When the fire had been built, we heated water. I plunged my hands into the pot of scalding water and held them there as long as I could. Then Carla did the same—she was going to assist. Carla put my knife in the water, then held it over the flames before handing it to me. My hand was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the knife. The children had been moved out of hearing distance. Four people held Bird down, one for each arm and leg. The doctor suggested we put her in a stream to cool her and reduce the bleeding, but there were no streams around.
"Don't make the cut too deep,” the doctor said. I had activated the hands free element on the phone. “About a half inch down, two across. There's going to be a lot of blood, but don't worry about that. We'll handle that later."
Tears were pouring down Bird's cheeks as I held the knife over the spot we'd washed and doused with moonshine. The knife was shaking so hard it was blurry. I held it there a long time; twice I brought it down just short of her soft skin, and twice pulled it back up.
"Make the cut, Kilo,” the doctor said.
"I can't do this,” I said. “Somebody else, please. Somebody do this."
I'd been strutting around Savannah with all my street style, like I was this tough guy, but I was just a worm. I was all posture. I never shot or cut anyone in my life before I shot Allie Cohn. I couldn't even cut this girl to save her life.
"I don't want to die,” Bird whimpered. “Please Kilo, please. I don't want to die."
With a howl, I cut her. She screamed in agony, bucked violently, trying to break free of the people pinning her down. Like an animal. Blood welled up where I'd cut her, filling the incision and pouring out. “I can't do this, I can't do this,” I cried.
"How deep is the incision? What do you see inside?” the doctor said, so calm, so far away in his comfortable air-conditioned office.
"I don't know,” I pulled the skin apart to see how deep it was. “There's just red tissue, I can't see anything."
"You're still in muscle. You have to cut again, deeper."
"Oh, god. Not again.” Tears poured down my cheeks, and I was trembling all over, like I was freezing cold.
You suck, Kilo, Allie Cohn's voice said inside my head. I sobbed.
"Cut, god dammit. Cut her, do it now,” the doctor shouted.
I screamed, and kept screaming as I cut, wider and deeper. Bird thrashed, but the fight was bleeding out of her. She seemed to be only half-conscious, only the whites of her eyes visible.
"What do you see?” the doctor asked.
I pulled on the flap I'd made, and it tore a little wider, exposing something grey and puckered, a fat snake folding in on itself. It was an organ. Christ, it was her liver or gall bladder or something. I described it to the doctor.
"Good boy, Kilo, that's what you want. That's the colon. Fish around, find the bottom of it, where it meets the small intestine. You're looking for a small, tube-like appendage attached to the colon."
I poked around inside Bird, trying to ignore the moist squishing sound, the blood pouring down her side, dribbling onto the tan bamboo husks that littered the ground.
"I can't find it,” I said.
"Get your damned hand in there and move the colon around. This isn't some dainty parlor game. Get your hands bloody."
I dug deeper, squeezing my fingers between the tubes, pushing one section up with my finger. Behind it was something that looked like a swollen maggot, I described it to Dr Gabow.
"Cut it off and pitch it away, Kilo."
After I cut it off, Sandra sewed the end of the colon closed while I held my knife over the flame, getting it good and hot. Then I pressed the flat end of it against the wound, to cauterize it and stop some of the bleeding. Bird didn't flinch as the knife hissed against her insides; she'd fainted somewhere along the way. I held the edges of the wound closed while Sandra sewed it. Dr Gabow explained that someone needed to get to the nearest town and buy antibiotics, or Bird would likely die of infection, and all my good work would go to waste.
People slapped my back as I stumbled out of the camp. I found myself a quiet copse and collapsed onto my back, staring up at the half moon through the narrow leaves. I felt ... strange. Calm. Like a buzzing had turned off in my brain for the first time in years. I held my hands up in front of my face, looked at the blood covering them, starting to dry and cake now.
I had done something. And now that I'd done it once, I thought I could do it again, and that next time my hand wouldn't shake, and I wouldn't cry.
A teenaged chick with tear stained eyes peered up through the open steel hatch, into my formerly secret Savannah hideaway. She held a crumpled T-shirt to her cheek; spots of blood had already seeped through it.
"Welcome,” I said, putting away the medical book I'd been reading. No books needed to figure this one out—this one was easy.
"Joey Plano told me you could fix me up. I got no cheese, but I could pay you later, or—"
I held up my hand. “Pay is optional. Maybe later you want to give me something, maybe not. No grief either way. Let me see."
She came over, sat in the plastic chair facing me, pulled away the T-shirt. A nasty gash; looked like a knife, or a bottle.
"Where'd you get it?” I said, turning to choose a needle and thread.
"My boyfriend.” She started crying. “The son of a bitch. My broth-er's gonna kill him, gonna cut his balls off and make him eat them."
"That'll serve him right, but right now I need you to stop talking and stop crying.” I flicked my lighter, ran the needle over the flame. She reminded me a little bit of Bird, with her mouth all scrunched from crying. I wondered if Bird and her band had made it far enough north to plant their little surprise yet. Hard to know.
"Now I need you to hold still for me. This is gonna hurt."
I sunk the needle into her cheek; she squealed, but held still.
Copyright © 2008 Will McIntosh
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THE IMITATION GAME—Rudy Rucker
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Rudy Rucker has worked as a mathematics professor, a software engineer, a computer science professor, an artist and a writer. He's published twenty-nine books, including a non-fiction book on the meaning of computers: The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. He has been known to say everything is made of gnarl. He publishes an online SF zine called Flurb. He's currently writing a cyberpunkish trilogy of novels in which nanotechnology changes everything. He's currently finishing the second of the series, Hylozoic. The first in the series, Postsingular, appeared from Tor in Fall, 2007, and is also available for free download on the web. See Rudy's portal, rudyrucker.com, for more info.
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It was a rainy Sunday night, June 6, 1954. Alan Turing was walking down the liquidly lamp-lit street to the Manchester train station, wearing a long raincoat with a furled umbrella concealed beneath. His Greek paramour Zeno was due on the 9pm coach, having taken a ferry from Calais. And, no, the name had no philoso
phical import, it was simply the boy's name. If all went well, Zeno and Alan would be spending the night together in the sepulchral Manchester Midland travelers’ hotel—Alan's own home nearby was watched. He'd booked the hotel room under a pseudonym.
Barring any intrusions from the morals squad, Alan and Zeno wouldsetoffbrightandearlytomorrowforalovelyweekoftramping across the hills of the Lake Country, free as rabbits, sleeping in serendipitous inns. Alan sent up a fervent prayer, if not to God, then to the deterministic universe's initial boundary condition.
"Let it be so."
Surely the cosmos bore no distinct animus towards homosexuals, and the world might yet grant some peace to the tormented, fretful gnat labeled Alan Turing. But it was by no means a given that the assignation with Zeno would click. Last spring, the suspicious auth-orities had deported Alan's Norwegian flame Kjell straight back to Bergen before Alan even saw him.
It was as if Alan's persecutors supposed him likely to be teaching his men top-secret code-breaking algorithms, rather than sensually savoring his rare hours of private joy. Although, yes, Alan did relish playing the tutor, and it was in fact conceivable that he might feel the urge to discuss those topics upon which he'd worked during the war years. After all, it was no one but he, Alan Turing, who'd been the brains of the British cryptography team at Bletchley Park, cracking the Nazi Enigma code and shortening the War by several years—little thanks that he'd ever gotten for that.
The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart. Alan's work on universal machines and compu-tational morphogenesis had convinced him that the world is both deterministic and overflowing with endless surprise. His proof of the unsolvability of the Halting Problem had established, at least to Alan's satisfaction, that there could never be any shortcuts for predicting the figures of Nature's stately dance.
Few but Alan had as yet grasped the new order. The prating philo-sophers still supposed, for instance, that there must be some element of randomness at play in order that each human face be slightly diff-erent. Far from it. The differences were simply the computation-amplified results of disparities among the embryos and their wombs—with these disparities stemming in turn from the cosmic compu-tation's orderly exfoliation of the universe's initial conditions.
Of late Alan had been testing his ideas with experiments involving the massed cellular computations by which a living organism transforms egg to embryo to adult. Input acorn; output oak. He'd already published his results involving the dappling of a brindle cow, but his latest experiments were so close to magic that he was holding them secret, wanting to refine the work in the alchemical privacy of his starkly under-furnished home. Should all go well, a Nobel prize might grace the burgeoning field of computational morpho-genesis. This time Alan didn't want a droning gas-bag like Alonzo Church to steal his thunder—as had happened with the Hilbert Entscheidungsproblem.
Alan glanced at his watch. Only three minutes till the coach arrived. His heart was pounding. Soon he'd be committing lewd and lascivious acts (luscious phrase) with a man in England. To avoid a stint in jail, he'd sworn to abjure this practice—but he'd found wiggle room for his conscience. Given that Zeno was a visiting Greek national, he wasn't, strictly speaking, a ‘man in England', assuming that ‘in’ was construed to mean ‘who is a member citizen of'. Chop the logic and let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.
It had been nearly a year since Alan had enjoyed manly love—last summer on the island of Corfu with none other than Zeno, who'd taken Alan for a memorable row in his dory. Alan had just been coming off his court-ordered estrogen treatments, and thanks to the lingering effects of the libido-reducing hormones, the sex had been less intense than one might wish. This coming week would be different. Alan felt randy as a hat rack; his whole being was on the surface of his skin.
Approaching the train station, he glanced back over his shoulder—reluctantly playing the socially assigned role of furtive perv—and sure enough, a weedy whey-faced fellow was mooching along half a block behind, a man with a little round mouth like a lamprey eel's. Officer Harold Jenkins. Devil take the beastly prig!
Alan twitched his eyes forward again, pretending not to have seen the detective. What with the growing trans-Atlantic hysteria over homosexuals and atomic secrets, the security minders grew ever more officious. In these darkening times, Alan sometimes mused that the United States had been colonized by the lowest dregs of British society: sexually obsessed zealots, degenerate criminals, and murderous slave masters.
On the elevated tracks, Zeno's train was pulling in. What to do? Surely Detective Jenkins didn't realize that Alan was meeting this particular train. Alan's incoming mail was vetted by the censors—he estimated that by now Her Majesty was employing the equivalent of two point seven workers full time to torment that disgraced boffin, Professor A.M. Turing. But—score one for Prof Turing—his written communications with Zeno had been encrypted via a sheaf of one-time pads he'd left in Corfu with his golden-eyed Greek god, bringing a matching sheaf home. Alan had made the pads from clipped-out sections of identical newspapers; he'd also built Zeno a cardboard cipher wheel to simplify the look-ups.
No, no, in all likelihood, Jenkins was in this louche district on a routine patrol, although now, having spotted Turing, he would of course dog his steps. The arches beneath the elevated tracks were the precise spot where, two years ago, Alan had connected with a sweet-faced boy whose dishonesty had led to Alan's conviction for acts of gross indecency. Alan's arrest had been to some extent his own doing; he'd been foolish enough to call the police when one of the boy's friends burglarized his house. “Silly ass,” Alan's big brother had said. Remembering the phrase made Alan wince and snicker. A silly ass in a dunce's cap, with donkey ears. A suffering human being nonetheless.
The train screeched to a stop, puffing out steam. The doors of the carriages slammed open. Alan would have loved to sashay up there like Snow White on the palace steps. But how to shed Jenkins?
Not to worry; he'd prepared a plan. He darted into the men's public lavatory, inwardly chuckling at the vile, voyeuristic thrill that disk-mouthed Jenkins must feel to see his quarry going to earth. The echoing stony chamber was redolent with the rich scent of putrefying urine, the airborne biochemical signature of an immortal colony of microorganisms indigenous to the standing waters of the train station pissoir. It put Alan in mind of his latest Petri-dish experiments at home. He'd learned to grow stripes, spots and spirals in the flat mediums, and then he'd moved into the third dimension. He'd grown tentacles, hairs, and, just yesterday, a congelation of tis-sue very like a human ear.
Like a thieves’ treasure cave, the wonderful bathroom ran straight through to the other side of the elevated track—with an exit on the far side. Striding through the room's length, Alan drew out his umbrella, folded his mackintosh into a small bundle tucked beneath one arm, and hiked up the over-long pants of his dark suit to display the prominent red tartan spats that he'd worn, the spats a joking gift from a Cambridge friend. Exiting the jakes on the other side of the tracks, Alan opened his high-domed umbrella and pulled it low over his head. With the spats and dark suit replacing the beige mac and ground-dragging cuffs, he looked quite the different man from before.
Not risking a backward glance, he clattered up the stairs to the platform. And there was Zeno, his handsome, bearded face alight. Zeno was tall for a Greek, with much the same build as Alan's. As planned, Alan paused briefly by Zeno as if asking a question, privily passing him a little map and a key to their room at the Midland Hotel. And then Alan was off down the street, singing in the rain, leading the way.
Alan didn't notice Detective Jenkins following him in an un-marked car. Once Jenkins had determined where Alan and Zeno were bound, he put in a call to the security office at MI5. The matter was out of his hands now.
The sex was even more enjoyable than Alan had hoped. He and Zeno slept till mid-morning, Zeno's leg heavy across his
, the two of them spooned together in one of the room's twin beds. Alan awoke to a knocking on the door, followed by a rattling of keys.
He sprang across the carpet and leaned against the door. “We're still asleep,” he said, striving for an authoritative tone.
"The dining room's about to close,” whined a woman's voice. “Might I bring the gentlemen their breakfast in the room?"
"Indeed,” said Alan through the door. “A British breakfast for two. We have a train to catch rather soon.” Earlier this week, he'd had his housekeeper send his bag ahead to Cumbria in the Lake District.
"Very good, sir. Full breakfast for two."
"Wash,” said Zeno, sticking his head out of the bathroom. At the sound of the maid, he'd darted right in there and started the tub. He looked happy. “Hot water."
Alan joined Zeno in the bath for a minute, and the dear boy brought him right off. But then Alan grew anxious about the return of the maid. He donned his clothes and rucked up the second bed so it would look slept in. Now Zeno emerged from his bath, utterly lovely in his nudity. Anxious Alan shooed him into his clothes. Fin-ally the maid appeared with the platters of food, really quite a nice-looking breakfast, with kippers, sausages, fried eggs, toast, honey, marmalade, cream and a lovely great pot of tea, steaming hot.
Seeing the maid face to face, Alan realized they knew each other; she was the cousin of his housekeeper. Although the bent little woman feigned not to recognize him, he could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what he and Zeno were doing here. And there was a sense that she knew something more. She gave him a particularly odd look when she poured out the two mugs of tea. Wanting to be shot of her, Alan handed her a coin and she withdrew.
"Milk tea,” said Zeno, tipping half his mug back into the pot and topping it up with cream. He raised the mug as if in a toast, then slurped most of it down. Alan's tea was still too hot for his lips, so he simply waved his mug and smiled.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215 Page 15