by neetha Napew
“It’s medically impossible for every person here to be alive,” I said to Squilyp as we made our way back toward the entrance. Our Oenrallian pal was slumped down on the floor, his face buried against his arms. I took the weapon out of his limp hand. “Get up, Dhreen. Get up and explain this to me, right now.”
He raised his face, which was wet with tears. “You’re the doctor. You tell me.”
“These people should be dead. Why are they still alive?”
“They won’t die.”
I yanked him up on his feet and snarled, “Why won’t they die? What did your doctors do to them?”
“Nothing. They put something on them to stop them from bleeding. That’s all.” He swallowed, and wiped his face on his sleeve. “They never die.”
“You are not being clear,” Squilyp said. “They have to die. These people cannot survive these injuries.”
“They want to die.” Dhreen’s voice went soft. “We want them to die, but they don’t. They live. They live if they’re chopped into pieces or burned or lose their heads. They never stop living, no matter what happens to them.”
I let go of him as if I’d been scalded. “That’s why you call it this Eternity Row.”
He nodded. “We don’t die anymore, Doc. No one has died in over a hundred years. My people have become immortal.”
The operating room hadn’t been used in at least a hundred years, and prepping it to accommodate Qonja took time. Dhreen had retreated into silence, staring out at the ward, so Squilyp and I did the work.
“I don’t like the look of the exit wound.” The Omorr checked our sojourn packs, pulling out what we needed. “We must return to the ship.”
“We don’t have time to wait for another launch,” I said. “Even if we can find a way to signal them.”
Once we had established a reasonably sterile field and the instruments we needed for surgery, we transferred Qonja from the gurney to the procedure table. Squilyp scrubbed while I prepped the resident.
“Your pardon for this, Healer.” Qonja made a wry gesture. “I did not intend to make more work for you.”
“Thank you for shielding me from that blast.”
He reached up suddenly and seized my wrist. “The Captain is my Speaker. When he tells you-“
“Not going to happen. You just concentrate on staying alive.” I adjusted his infuser line, then initiated the anesthesia. “Go to sleep, pal.”
His hand went limp and slid away from my arm as Squilyp changed places with me. While I scrubbed, I wondered just what the Captain would say, if Qonja died on our table.
He’s not going to die.
Dhreen refused to leave, so I made him scrub and gown. After discovering the surgical unit’s power cells had died sometime in the last decade, I made do with the suture laser from my pack and some antiquated scalpels.
“You’re very good with those,” Squilyp commented.
“I had to use them on Terra.” I examined the instrument with mild disgust. “Give me a good laser rig any day.”
Once we opened his chest, things went from bad to worse. His liver, unlike Dhreen’s, had not survived the blast. Jorenian physiology ensured he’d live for another twenty-four hours, but beyond that was doubtful.
Playtime was over. “Dhreen, I have to get this man up to the ship. As soon as we close.”
“There is no way to leave now.”
I left the table and went at him, my gloves up, covered with Qonja’s blood. “He needs a liver transplant. And I can’t do that here. Signal the goddamn ship!”
“You can use this.” He produced a familiar container.
It was the Jorenian liver we’d brought down. He must have retrieved it from Mtulla’s vehicle.
“I’m not putting that into this patient!” I yanked down my mask. “It’s part of an experiment, not a viable transplant organ!”
“You’re not going back to the ship,” he said. “If anyone in the city finds you, they’ll turn you over to Mtulla or the Bartermen.”
“Dhreen, he’s going to die.”
“Then you’d better hurry up and use it.” He shoved the container in my hands.
Squilyp vetoed my idea of using our scalpels on Dhreen, and quietly performed a tissue match. Incredibly, the experimental liver was an acceptable replacement for Qonja’s ruined organ.
“He’ll need some antirejection therapy until we can clone another liver from his own cells, but it shouldn’t present a treatment problem.” The Omorr prepped the liver, then noticed my preoccupation. “What is it?”
“This.” I turned Qonja’s head to one side, and re-vealed what his hair had covered. A small HouseClan symbol, one shaped like a dagger.
“It is one of their birthmarks, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. But look.” I pointed to the mark on my own neck, which was shaped like the upswept wings of a bird. “This is the Torin symbol.”
“Well, that isn’t.” Squilyp shook his head. “Why would the crew pretend Qonja was a member of their HouseClan?”
“To cover up what he really is.” I checked the transplant site and changed my gloves. “Are we ready?”
“Yes.” He brought over the basin containing the liver. “Cherijo, whatever is happening, you can depend on me.”
“Good. Because I don’t know who else to trust.”
PART FOUR: Solutions
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Price for Everything
Some six hours after we entered Eternity Row, I closed Qonja’s chest with the last in a long vee of sutures, and stepped back from the table. “We’ll need to run a blood series every fifteen minutes, and watch for signs of rejection.” I saw Dhreen still standing against the entrance panel, watching us. “We’re done here. I need an isolated berth for him.”
“There are none. Leave him here.”
I stripped out of my gown and went to cleanse. “Fine. I want to see the other patients being kept here. Squilyp will stay with him.”
Dhreen took me through the first ten wards on Eternity Row. Every ward was interconnected and crammed with Oenrallians who should have died of their injuries, but evidently couldn’t.
“How many more of them are there?” I asked, my voice tight after we’d walked through the fourth.
“I don’t know. There were hundreds of wards when I left. Now there may be thousands.”
As I continued my nightmare rounds, I saw living bodies in conditions that defied description. One ward had been stocked with rows and rows of open specimen containers, which held a gruesome collection of severed limbs and detached heads. Since they were no longer connected to their bodies, they couldn’t function, but the limbs reacted reflexively to any touch, and the decapitated heads watched us, their eyes following our every movement, their mouths forming soundless pleas.
Along the way, Dhreen kept his eyes averted from the inhabitants of the wards, and described what had happened a century before. “The first to come here were multiple amputees, involved in a transport crash-miracles, we thought-until it became apparent no one would ever die, no matter what happened to them.”
“The decapitations would have done it.” I felt a deep, aching sorrow creeping over me.
“When our doctors realized the head and body still functioned apart from each other, then we knew.” He cleared his throat. “Something terrible has happened to our people.”
“Why did you put them all here?”
He looked slightly defensive for a moment, then his shoulders slumped. “First they were given the finest care. When there was still hope. Years passed. They didn’t die. They didn’t even age-none of us do. No cure, no hope of finding one. There were so many of them, you see.”
“So you made this Eternity Row.”
“Our doctors gave up. Families couldn’t bear to see those they loved existing like this. Now no one comes here, unless it is to bring someone to stay.”
I looked through the door panel viewer, and saw the next crowded ward waiting on the other side
. “How many buildings are there?”
“Mtulla told me they cover three domains now.”
“How many people?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe ten thousand.”
With a population of two billion, more than that should have died in any given revolution. “And in the other cities? Is it the same? Are they warehousing the bodies, too?”
“It is the same everywhere on the planet.”
I did the math. If forty to eighty thousand people could have been expected to die each year, then the number reached into the millions.
“You’ve just been stacking them up here, year after year. This isn’t eternity, Dhreen. It’s Hell.”
“They are given Sensblok once per cycle. It is all the people can afford to do now.”
“Your people could stop taking the drugs themselves and use them to put these poor bastards out of their misery!” I shouted.
“We’ve tried.” Dhreen bowed his head. “Nothing kills them.”
I took the syrinpress Squilyp had put in my tunic and strode out to the ward, stopping at the bed of a mangled Oenrallian male who was literally encased in sealant. I broke the seal over an intact blood vessel and dialed up a fatal dose of narcotic that would kill him within ten seconds.
“It won’t work,” Dhreen said behind me.
My hand faltered as I pressed the instrument against the vessel. It’s not murder. Not like this. Something inside me snapped, and I administered the lethal dose.
Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. Then forty. The patient only stared at me with the one eye he had left, and made low, moaning sounds through the open gaping hole in his throat.
Shaking now, I infused him with a second dose. Then a third. I was dialing up the fourth when Squilyp appeared at my side and took the instrument from my hand.
“Give it back to me.” I swiped at it.
My boss held it out of my reach. “You’re wasting it, I’ve already tried it on another patient myself. He won’t die, Cherijo. Dhreen’s right. None of them will die.”
“They have to,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Oh, God, Squilyp, we can’t leave them like this. Not like this.”
“Now you know what I feel, Doc.” Dhreen joined us, and took the hand of the patient in his. The mangled man’s two remaining fingers curled around his. “This is Nojan. He and I grew up together on Traders Row. His glidecar malfunctioned and crashed into another. It took them hours to pull him out of the crushed alloy.” Gently, he lowered Nojan’s hand back down to the bed. “He deserves better than this. They all do.”
Something struck me. “This is why you kept denying Ilona’s pregnancy.”
“Yes. Even when I couldn’t remember they were mine, I knew I didn’t want them.”
“But it should have given you hope.”
“Hope? For my children to end like this?” He gazed steadily at me. “Could you bear to see Marel here? Strapped to some bed, suffering for eternity?”
“No.” I wiped the tears from my face. “We’re not letting these people suffer any longer, either. Let’s get started.”
Scanning the total inhabitants of Eternity Row was impossible, so we performed comprehensive exams on patients showing a variety of terminal conditions, due to injury, disease, or old age.
Initial scans revealed completely normal readings, with one major exception: None of the living dead showed any metabolic activity, which explained why their bodies no longer needed to be fed. It also created a new problem-if they didn’t require caloric intake, what was keeping them alive?
“It’s as if they’re in some kind of stasis,” I said to the Omorr as we finished with a young male who had been exposed to massive radiation. He’d been on Eternity Row for so long that his blistered body no longer contained any traces of the toxic heavy metals that should have killed him. “No digestion, no excretion. But they’re sustained by something.”
“How often do you go without eating?”
I scowled. “Not years, that’s for sure. And I still lose weight if I skip meal intervals.”
“But not as much as before. I’ve noticed that.” Squilyp hesitated, then added, “This could happen to you, couldn’t it?”
I started to deny it, but the potential was there. “I hope my friends would make sure it never did.”
He nodded, and hopped away.
Squilyp’s comment haunted me for the rest of the day. As I went from bed to bed, I thought about my own dilemma. My creator had engineered my body to withstand any biological assault, and repair itself so perfectly that I never even scarred. I’d been subjected to repeated severe trauma, so I knew something of my own physical limits.
As far as I knew, I had none.
Whatever Joseph Grey Veil had done to me, the process was also getting faster. Right after I left Terra, a wound I sustained might take several days to heal. Now I could almost watch any injury I received knit itself back together within an hour or two.
“Help me,” a woman’s voice begged.
I went over to the next bed, and found an elderly female covered with cancerous tumors. “Here, let me take a look.”
“Doc.” Dhreen came over, then quickly turned around. His voice choked as he asked, “Anything you need?”
“More of this sealant.” I peeled back a layer to scan the surface of an enormous malignant tumor that had erupted through the dermis over the old woman’s torso. The voracious mass was spreading over her entire body, but seemed to be growing on top of her rather than consuming her own cells.
“I’ll go get it for you.”
“Has Squilyp gone to check on Qonja?” When he nodded, I straightened and shut off my scanner. “I also need to know what’s happened to Duncan and Xonea.”
Dhreen had the grace to look slightly ashamed as he brought me the topical sealant applicator. “They will be taken to the slave pens, and prepared for auction.”
“We need to get them back, Dhreen.” I glanced at him. “Can you find out exactly where they are?”
“I will.” He left.
I moved to the next patient, a small girl whose bones had been pulverized after a terrible fall from the top of her row house. My hand shook as I drew back the linens, and saw the sealant gleaming over the jagged edges of the bones sticking through her flesh.
Someone had been caring for her, judging by the clean condition of her linens. A small vase of fresh flowers sat on a table where the child could see them. Her hair had been carefully brushed, and her face washed.
Amber eyes met mine, and what I saw in them made me swallow, hard. “Hi, I’m Dr. Cherijo. What’s your name?”
“Gerala.” She didn’t grab at me, but lay quiet as I scanned her. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No, honey, I’m going to help if I can.”
That was when she latched on to me, crying as her broken hands grasped my arm. “Can you give me the medicine to make me sleep? I’ve been trying to wait for my mother, but it’s been so long.”
I had already tried different compounds on other patients, desperate to find something to ease their pain. Nothing had worked. Then something my first-year Medtech instructor had lectured on came back to me. “Sweetie, I have a very powerful medicine here. If I give it to you, I have to be careful. It’s a hundred times more powerful than Sensblok.”
“Please.” Her shattered fingers dug into my arm. “Please, may I have some?”
“All right. As soon as I infuse it, you’re going to feel very tired. Then you’ll sleep and you won’t wake up for a long, long time.” I brushed her hair back from her face. “Ready?”
She nodded, and I injected her. Squilyp came over to observe, and went still as my medicine began to work.
“I feel it,” Gerala said, her ruined voice in awe.
“It makes the pain go away very fast, doesn’t it?” I watched as her eyelids drooped and she yawned. ‘There you go. Don’t fight it, just let the medicine work. That’s my girl. Go to sleep now.” I pulled the linens up over her, moti
oned to Squilyp, and returned to the research unit.
He shut the doors and secured them. “You infused that child with saline solution.”
“I know.” I went to the storage cabinet and began sorting through it. “There are some other syrinpresses in here. They’re old, but I think we can make them work.”
“Cherijo!” Squilyp jerked me around. “You injected that child with salt water!”
“I said I know.” I pushed a syrinpress in his mem-brane. “You’re going to help me do the same thing to all of them.”
“This is sheer insanity.”
“No, it’s a placebo. Look.” I took out my scanner and switched it to display Gerala’s brain imaging. “Watch her chemoreceptors-they reacted immediately to the infusion. The salt makes it sting, like a real drug would. As long as the patient believes what I’m giving them will stop the pain, the brain reacts accordingly.”
“But not in all cases. Placebos have only be shown to be effective in less than seventy percent of most hu-manoids.”
“That’s better than nothing.”
Squilyp listened as I coached him on how to “talk” the patients into accepting the lie, then we went back out to start treating the patients. An hour later, we had nearly everyone in the ward sleeping.
“Better than ninety percent,” I said as we went to recharge the synrinpresses. “And all it takes is ten cc’s of saline.”
“Doc.” Dhreen appeared. “I’ve got a line on where they’re holding Duncan and Xonea. How did you do that?” He waved back at the silent ward.
Squilyp answered for me. “It is a highly technical procedure that will take too long to explain. We must retrieve the others and return to the ship as soon as possible.”
“But you have to stay, and help the others,” Dhreen said. “I’ll find a way to get Duncan and Xonea back to the Sunlace.”
“We cannot help them without an analysis of our scans, and the equipment here no longer functions. Will the Bartermen allow us access to the medical database?”
“Not without turning us over to slavers.” Dhreen made a face. “They want their credits pretty bad.”
“Then either return us to the ship”-the Omorr hopped over to Dhreen, and smacked him in the chest with a scanner-“or figure out what to do yourself.”