by David Weber
“Thank you, Sir.” Alfred smiled back. “I'll bear that in mind. I'm not completely without military contacts here on Beowulf, either, though.”
“You're not?” Young raised an eyebrow.
“No, Sir. And to be honest, that little matter you've just reminded me about makes me wonder how much of a coincidence that really was.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a greeter at the landing pad. A fellow named Benton-Ramirez y Chou. He said he was a captain in the BSC.”
“Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou?” Young's eyes had narrowed again.
“Yes, Sir.” Alfred shrugged ever so slightly. As a mere junior-grade lieutenant and a medical officer with no access to sensitive information (aside from Clematis, a corner of his mind said coldly), he wasn't required to file the “contact reports” whenever he encountered a foreign national, thank God. That didn't mean it wasn't a good idea to go ahead and mention it when it happened, though. It came under the heading of dotting more of those “i”s and crossing more of those “t”s, he supposed. “He said it was a courtesy to help me get settled here at the University. And he mentioned his ‘connection' to the Beowulfan medical community.”
“Well, that's true enough!” Young's expression was thoughtful. “It's probably a good thing you mentioned it, Lieutenant, but I doubt there was anything . . . official behind it. Benton-Ramirez y Chou is a naturally inquisitive sort, and he's got a reputation as something of a social gadfly. He may have picked up a few rumors, but it's unlikely anybody on Beowulf would be actively digging. On the other hand, his family is not only prominent but quite active in Abolitionist circles, so don't take that for granted where he's concerned. If he ‘happens' to run into you again, let us know about it, right?”
“Yes, Sir. I will.”
“Good man.” Young smiled again. “And now, since I know you're due for orientation today, I'll let you go. Good luck, Lieutenant.”
* * *
“Watch where you're going!”
The voice was sharp, irritated, and carried a very familiar accent. Alfred turned toward the impact, looking for whoever had just run into him, and found himself looking at a fair-haired, slightly built young man, a good quarter meter shorter than him, who was probably about his own age, assuming they were both first-generation prolong. The other man was expensively and ultra-stylishly dressed. He also had an exquisitely coiffed civilian haircut, blue eyes, and an angry expression.
“I beg your pardon?” Alfred said. “Were you speaking to me?”
He deliberately emphasized his Sphinxian accent, although he knew he probably shouldn't be squirting any extra hydrogen into this particular fire. He couldn't help himself though. The stranger's upper-class, private-school, aristocratic Manticoran accent, coupled with that irritated expression, simply rubbed him the wrong way.
“There are other people in the hall, you know!” the stranger snapped.
“Why, I believe you're right!” Alfred marveled, looking around the crowded precincts of Benton Hall carefully before returning his attention to the other man. “Amazing. The place is so big I hadn't noticed. Thanks for pointing it out.”
The stranger seemed to swell with outrage. Alfred could see him almost literally quivering in anger, and he didn't really need any “hunches” to read the fury rolling off of the fellow in waves.
“Some of the people in this hall deserve to be here,” the other man said in a cutting, icy tone.
“Well I'm sure they won't mind your being here, too,” Alfred replied. “By the way, why are you here?”
“Listen, you—!”
Alfred raised his eyebrows and shifted his balance. It was a small thing, but deliberate, and the other man chopped himself off in midsentence as the tall, powerfully built Sphinxian leaned over him ever so slightly.
He glared up at Alfred for another moment or two, then made a disgusted sound, turned on his heel and stamped away. Alfred watched him go, wondering what his problem had been.
Obviously, his problem was you, Alfred, he told himself sardonically. And you didn't go out of your way to make it any better, did you? That's you all over again, isn't it?
He drew a deep breath, forcing himself to center, remembering a time—it seemed long, long ago—when he would simply have let the little pipsqueak's ire bounce off. He'd like to be that way again, but it wasn't going to happen. So he'd just have to learn to deal with it.
He turned back to the queue wending its way steadily forward and reminded himself to work on that.
* * *
“Sorry about that, Allison,” Franz Illescu said as he slid into the empty chair. He tried to make it come out ruefully, already regretting the anger he'd allowed himself to show. Not that the overgrown moron hadn't deserved it. But it had still been childish of him, and beneath his dignity, when it came down to it.
“What was that all about?” the beautiful young woman sitting across the table from him asked. “I was too far away to hear anything, but it didn't look as if the two of you were exactly bosom buddies!”
“Not hardly!” Iliescu snorted and spared one glance back over his shoulder at the towering figure in Royal Manticoran Navy uniform. The idiot had to flaunt it right here on campus, didn't he? “To be honest, it's the first time I've actually met him. And I didn't enjoy the experience any more than I'd expected to, either.”
“Really?” She tilted her head, considering him thoughtfully. “Personally, I've found that expectations have a way of turning into self-fulfilling prophecies sometimes.”
Illescu's face tightened for just a moment, but then he gave himself a shake and inhaled a deep, calming breath.
“You may have a point,” he acknowledged. His companion looked absurdly young for a graduate student, even in a prolong society, but that was probably because she'd received the second-generation therapies. They could be administered at a much earlier starting point, and he reminded himself that the person behind that youthful façade was within a T-year or two of his own age. “I have to admit I did let my . . . preconceptions, let's say, color my initial reaction. In this case, though, I think I can honestly say the two of us would never have cared very much for each other under any circumstances.”
“Maybe not.” She sipped delicately from her steaming cup of tea, then grimaced. The Benton Hall canteen didn't make the very best tea on Beowulf. She rather wished she hadn't agreed to meet Illescu here . . . and not just because of the quality of the beverage service. But since she had, she might as well make conversation before she could find a way to slip diplomatically away.
“Why did you have such low expectations to begin with?” she asked.
“Because he's a moron,” Iliescu said. “Look at him! Wearing that uniform at Registration! Doesn't he realize this is a civilian school? Just seeing him in it makes me feel embarrassed as a Manticoran.”
“You have something against uniforms?”
“No, not in their place,” he replied. “But this isn't the proper place for it. Oh, I realize somebody has to join the Navy or the Marines, and it's not as if there were anything shameful about it, I suppose. But ISU is supposed to be for people who are serious about helping other people—about healing other people—not for people who sign up to kill them in job lots! And I've heard stories about this guy. Ugly stories.”
“What kind of ‘ugly stories'?” Something dangerous glinted in her dark brown eyes, but Illescu seemed unaware of it.
“Not the kind that make good dinner conversation,” he said. “Nobody back home wanted to talk about it very much, which suggests a lot to me. Whatever it was, they hushed it up pretty quickly, but apparently he got a lot of people killed in the process of whatever it was. The Crown can't be too happy about whatever he did, anyway. Sure, the Queen pinned the medal on him, but the ceremony was all very hush-hush and family-only, and the citation's sealed. Obviously somebody didn't want the newsies getting hold of it!”
“Really?” She looked back across the enormous room as
the lieutenant in the black and gold uniform disappeared through a door on its other side.
“Really. And then he used the medal to get himself admitted to ISU,” Iliescu growled. He took a quick, angry sip from his own teacup. “He took advantage of the Navy's quota, that's how he got here. I hate that entire system. If you can't cut it on your own, then you shouldn't be here. And you sure as hell shouldn't be bouncing better students—people who're going to be doctors, not part of the business of killing other people—just because of a uniform with a piece of ribbon on the front. It's a damned entitlement system, just because they served in the damned military. Anybody could do that, and it's not like they didn't already have a benefits package better than any mere civilian's. Or that they didn't volunteer for the job in the first place, for that matter! No one made them do it, so why should that give them an edge over other people just because those other people don't want to butcher other human beings?”
His companion made a noncommittal sound, wondering if Illescu had been denied admission personally the first time he'd applied or if someone else had failed to gain it. At least she understood now why he'd started so thoroughly on the wrong foot with the enormous lieutenant.
Well, I suppose it's possible he really did use the quota system to get in, she reflected, but anyone who can make Franz that mad that quickly can't possibly be all bad!
* * *
“So, tell me, Lieutenant Harrington. What makes you want to specialize in neurosurgery?”
Dr. Penelope Mwo-chi leaned back in her chair behind her desk, considering Alfred across it. This interview was one hell of a lot more important than most, and Ignaz Semmelweis University had some quaint and interesting customs, including personal face-to-face interviews and meetings between students and their teachers. It didn't seem very efficient compared to electronic meetings, but Alfred wasn't going to argue with the system which had turned out the galaxy's premier doctors for rather longer than the Star Kingdom had existed. Besides, those “hunches” of his didn't work through an electronic interface, and it was evident to him that Dr. Mwo-chi's question was rather more serious and pointed than her tone might have suggested.
“I think it's a challenging field,” he said, after a moment, “and I like challenges. But I also think it's an important field, maybe even more important than ever now that prolong's becoming generally available. My primary interest isn't really in geriatrics or prophylactic care, but people are going to be living even longer, and we really don't know what a couple of centuries of additional life are going to do to neural pathways and synapses. Everything may work just as fine as the prolong therapists think it will, but it may not, too. I'm less sanguine than some people are about synthetic substitutes if it doesn't, although I do think it's a promising area to consider. For myself, though, I'm more interested in repair and reconstruction, especially after trauma, and I'm convinced we can improve prostheses to work better and interface more smoothly with the organic nervous system.”
“I see.” Mwo-chi tipped her chair a bit farther back, steepling her fingers under her chin. Despite her surname, she had blond hair and blue eyes, and now those eyes studied Alfred's expression very carefully. “That's a very satisfactory answer, Lieutenant. Why don't I think it's a complete answer?”
Alfred stiffened slightly in his own chair, looking back at her. There was something deep and important—to her, at least—behind that question. He could tell that much, but not why it was important. He considered prevaricating, but he didn't want to. He didn't want to give her her “complete answer,” either, but that was more because he didn't want to go there, not because there was anything shameful about it. Except that he did feel ashamed, not to mention guilty. Yet Mwo-chi was the real reason he'd wanted to attend ISU in the first place. There might be one neurosurgeon in the galaxy who was better qualified than she was, but he knew damned well there weren't two of them. And the results of this interview would determine whether or not she accepted him as one of her personal students.
“I've . . . seen the consequences of combat wounds, Doctor,” he said finally. “Some of them happened to people I . . . cared about.” He made himself look directly into her eyes. “That's one reason I'm interested in reconstruction and improving prostheses, working on the organic-electronic interface.”
“But those aren't the only things you're interested in, are they, Lieutenant?” she asked gently.
“No,” he admitted. He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked back at her. “I've seen what neural disruptors do, too,” he said very, very quietly.
Mwo-chi's nostrils flared and the muscles in her cheeks seemed to tense. Then she shook her head.
“Lieutenant,” she said almost compassionately, “neural disruptors don't leave us anything to repair. That's why they call them ‘disruptors.' The damage is at the cellular level, and I'm sure you already know how little that leaves us to work with. That's why the classic treatment for damaged limbs for the last seventy T-years has been amputation and regeneration. And for those who can't regen—or where we can't amputate and regrow—the only option is nerve transplants, for those who can accept them, or complete artifical nerve networks. We've made a lot of progress with nerve nets, especially in the last hundred years or so, and what we can do now is one hell of a lot better than what we used to be able to accomplish, but they're still a long, long way from replacing the organic originals. There's loss of function, whatever we do, and serious loss of sensation, as well, and some people simply never learn to adapt to them, however hard they try. But replacement is the only therapy we've been able to come up with, and given the amount of brain damage disruptors often inflict, assuming they don't simply crash the entire autonomous nervous system, even that's effective—or as effective as it can be, at any rate—in no more than twenty or thirty percent of all cases.”
“I know the numbers, Doctor.”
Alfred's reply came out more harshly than he'd intended, but he'd been half afraid of that response. It was the main reason he hadn't been more forthcoming with the University interview board. What he wanted to accomplish was at best quixotic and at worst a colossal waste of time and effort. He'd been afraid the board would reject his application in favor of someone whose work might actually lead to positive, concrete results.
“I know the numbers,” he repeated in a voice that was closer to normal, “but I don't see any reason we ought to accept them as set in stone and unchangeable. Once upon a time, we didn't know how to vaccinate against cancer, either. Or how to create prolong. Or, if you go back far enough, how to prevent infection or childbed fever! Semmelweis ended up in an asylum, Doctor, because nobody believed what he was saying or that he could accomplish something so miraculous as preventing women from dying after childbirth just by washing his hands and his instruments. That didn't make him wrong, though.”
“I see you know some history,” Mwo-chi observed. She swung her chair gently from side to side, and the skin around her eyes crinkled in what might have been a smile. “But much as I admire the man this school's named for, you might also want to reflect upon the fact that Ignaz Semmelweis wasn't the least arrogant man ever to practice medicine. He didn't exactly endear himself to his colleagues by the way he went about presenting and implementing his conclusions. Or expressing his opinion of the colleagues in question, for that matter. He was right, and eventually the entire medical profession realized, but that didn't make him effective during his own lifetime. Not outside of the hospitals in which he himself worked, at any rate.”
“I don't want to change the universe, Doctor,” Alfred said. “I wouldn't object if that happened, you understand, but it's not what I want and not what I think is going to happen. I just want to be able to help. To undo some of the damage I've—” he changed his verb selection in midsentence “— seen. I'm not expecting any magic bullets, but it's something that's worth doing. Something worth trying.”
“And you're willing to risk wasting the next three T-years of your life by
investing them in something that almost certainly isn't going to work in the end?”
“It's my life,” he replied. “Do I want to ‘waste' it? Of course not! But no one who graduates from ISU's College of Neurosurgery is going to be a waste of time, Dr. Mwo-chi. Maybe I won't be able to find a way to repair disruptor damage, just like everybody keeps telling me I won't. That doesn't mean I can't change a lot of lives for the better anyway.”
“But what you really want to do is learn how to repair the jellied, useless tissue disruptors leave behind, isn't it?” she challenged.
He looked into her eyes, seeing the city of Hope again behind his own, hearing the screams, seeing the bodies go down, smelling the smoke. Penelope Mwo-chi accepted very few applicants as her personal students, and even fewer as her assistants. The fact that he'd gotten this far said a lot, and might owe more to that piece of ribbon on his chest than he wanted to admit, but she wasn't going to waste one of those handful of slots on someone who honestly thought he might be able to find a way to repair that “jellied” tissue she'd just described. He knew that, yet he couldn't lie, and there was something behind the challenge she'd just issued. Something that wasn't cut and dried, that hadn't rejected his application . . . yet, at least. And so he met her gaze steadily across her desk and nodded.
“Yes, Doctor,” he said. “It is.”
She looked back at him for another moment, then let her chair come back upright, laid her hands flat on her desk, and nodded sharply.
“Good,” she said softly. “Very good, Lieutenant Harrington.” His surprise must have shown, because she smiled. It was a slow smile, but a warm one, and he found himself smiling back. “You're probably a lunatic, Lieutenant,” she told him, “but medicine needs lunatics. And it needs dreams . . . and the lunatics who won't give up on them. I've been doing a little research of my own over the past decade or so, as it happens, and some of it relates directly to disruptor damage. I don't have any magical fixes or any breakthrough results, but I have made some progress, and if that's what you're really interested in, I think I have a research assistantship with your name written all over it.”