My Brother's Keeper

by Charles Sheffield

  "Sometimes. Sometimes we talked. But he did not want his work here—he said this was his—`hideway'?"

  "Hideaway. A place where he could feel safe."

  "Hideaway. Where we could be close." She reached out and ran her fingers softly over my cheek and forehead. "He was safe here. He said that he could keep us all safe if he did not talk about his work. But sometimes, when he was tired or sad, he would talk."

  "That's good. I'm going to look through the papers that Chandra brought from the bank, and perhaps I'm going to ask you about things I find there. Not about the money—Chandra can tell me about that. Damnation!"

  Ameera smiled. "You sound the same as Leo-yo—he would say that. What is wrong?"

  "I might need to ask Chandra questions, and there's no telephone here."

  "But there is! There is a special one, down in the pantry. Lee-yo used it only two times. But you can use it when you want to."

  A hidden phone, used only in emergencies. When we were still in our early twenties, Leo and I had talked about setting up our own secret hideouts, places where we could say and do whatever we liked without anyone bothering us. To me that had been just dreaming, building our castles in Spain. But my brother had done it, from foundations to battlements.

  And what else had he done? I took the sheet of names and places from the packet of papers.

  Ameera snuggled closer, her breath warm against my cheek. "What does it say there, Lee-yo-nel?"

  I saw what Chandra's problem had been with the list. Leo had created a jumble of names, places and descriptions. But I believed I could see more than anyone else—Leo and I always thought the same way, and now we were in some sense one person. I ran my eye over them quickly. Promising. For example, there was a line about halfway down the first page. It stood out to my eye like a beacon. "B.P. Get from Cut. 026411, take with 0433 to Ri., contact 277 + double bl."

  It was the sort of entry that I expected from him. Leo would not keep elaborate notes—why should he, when we shared the same accurate memory? He would only bother with numbers and addresses, and maybe a couple of names when he wasn't sure of them. It was a reasonable bet that B.P. would be the Belur Package. But what about the rest of it? I needed help.

  "Ameera, did Leo mention somebody or somewhere that began with C-U-T? It is something in his notes here."

  "Yes." Was the expression in her voice relief? It certainly sounded like it. "I think he went to Cuttack, he had to do something there. I am sure of it. When he was last here in Calcutta, he went to Cuttack."

  "Where is that? Do you know how to get there?"

  "You can go there by the new railway. It is not far—two hours from here, on the coast in Orissa."

  "Do you know who he went to see there? Maybe a man called Belur?"

  "I do not know. Maybe."

  "How about something that begins with R-I? A place or a person."

  "I do not know." It seemed to me that there was now an evasiveness in her answer. "It could be Riang, or Riga in Assam. They are far away from here."

  I realized that I was being irrational, asking a blind fourteen-year-old girl for details of Indian geography. Ameera could help only if she recalled something particular that Leo had said or done.

  "Ameera, did Leo ever tell you about his work in America? Who he worked for, or what he was doing in India?"

  There were tears welling from the dark eyes. I felt ashamed at what I was doing to her.

  "No, Leo-yo-nel. If he told anyone, would it not be his own brother, when the brother was from one egg? Did he not tell you?"

  "No. He did not tell me."

  And that was the curse of it. Leo hadn't told me, and he was having trouble telling me now.

  "Ameera, I will go tomorrow to Cuttack. Do you know where the man lives that Leo went to see?"

  "Some company. A company that makes—what is the word?—computings? Things that are used for calculations." It seemed to me that there was definite relief in her voice. "Lee-yo-nel, if you go there, to Cuttack, can I come with you? I can speak the language—it is Oriya spoken there—and I want to help you. I cannot help you if I stay here in the house."

  It seemed to me that I could easily find somebody there to act as an interpreter—but even if I couldn't, I didn't want Ameera with me. I had no idea what we'd be finding.

  "No!" I spoke more loudly than I had intended. "I do not know what might happen there. Definitely not."

  Ameera did not speak; but the tears that welled silently from those dark eyes were more persuasive than any words. I swore under my breath, and most of it was directed at the right half of my brain. But some of it went to the prurient fantasies that were conjured as I put an arm around Ameera to comfort her.

  "Hello? Operator, what in God's name is happening on this line? I can hear four other people speaking."

  "One moment more, sir, you will be connected."

  I stood in the dark of the pantry, sweating and swearing. For twenty minutes I had been struggling to get a connection through to Sir Westcott at the Queen's Hospital Annex in Reading. The lines were full of chattering monkeys and dolphin-like squeaks and chirps, and every few minutes the line went entirely dead.

  "Hello?"

  "Hello, hello?" I felt like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse short story. "Hello, hello, hello."

  "No need to shout like that—I'm not deaf. What do you want?"

  Thank God. It was the familiar grumbling voice. "Sir Westcott, this is Lionel Salkind. I'm calling because I'm having trouble—trouble inside my head."

  "What do you expect, if you go piddling off all over the globe? You ought to be back here, where we can keep an eye on you."

  He didn't seem at all worried. It was a huge relief just to hear that gruff complaint.

  "So what's your symptoms? Something new?"

  The line had that built-in quarter-second delay that indicated it was being sent via satellite transmission.

  "I think so. I've been getting bad headaches, and sometimes I don't seem to have the proper control over the things I'm doing."

  "Join the club. Look, is that all? 'Course you're getting bad headaches—didn't you read that stuff I gave you when you left? You're gettin' atrophy of the Schwann cells now they've done their stuff, an' the axons are beginning their main growth. That's what the Madrill treatment is all about. Read the bloody reports—why do you think I gave 'em to you?"

  I felt like an idiot—the papers he had given me were still sitting in my suitcase. In the excitement of leaving for India I hadn't given them a thought, and it had certainly not occurred to me that they might be useful to tell me what was going on inside my head.

  "D'yer read the papers out there?" Sir Westcott's voice had taken on a new tone. "I don't think this would be in 'em anyway. I hate to say it, but I owe you an apology. Remember you told me about somebody called Valnora Warren?"

  "What about her?"

  "She's dead. They fished her out of the Cherwell four days ago—dead a couple of weeks. An' she'd been beaten to death before she was put in the water. Can you hear me?"

  "I hear you. Do they know who did it?"

  "If they do, they're not telling." Sir Westcott sounded grim. "Watch your step out there—I've put in too much work on you to have it buggered up by some bunch of gangsters."

  "I'll be careful." I had just got the closest I would ever get to an expression of concern for my welfare from Sir Westcott.

  "Another thing while we're at it. Remember tellin' me that your thug friends thought you were carrying Nymphs?"

  "I'll never forget it."

  "Well, I did a bit more checking with the police here about where the drug is coming from. It gets to England from Athens, like I told Tess. But it's manufactured a lot further East—somewhere like India. An' Calcutta is one of the biggest centers for use of Nymphs. So keep your eyes peeled for that while you're there."

  I didn't say anything—it seemed to me I had more than enough problems, without throwing Nymphs into the act.


  "Anyway, are you ready to come on back home yet?" he went on. "Tess seems to have been worrying about you. Beats me why."

  "Tell her I'm fine." I drew in a deep breath. "I wanted to ask you another thing—not about me this time, and not about Nymphs either. There's somebody here with an eye problem, and I think it's caused by childhood ulcers that have scarred the cornea. Can it be operated on?"

  "If you're right about the cause of the problem, it should be easy enough. How old is the patient?"

  "A teenager. A girl."

  I don't think that I imagined the sniff over the phone. It was easy to visualize him, scowling into the set on his desk. He seemed to be a thought reader for my guilty conscience.

  "Aye. A girl, you say? Well, a patient is a patient. If you bring her here, I'd see what we could do for her. But watch what you're playing at. No point in fixing up her eyes if the next thing you know Tess is scratching 'em out. Behave yourself out there—you know damn well Tess is too good for you. Don't you try—"

  The line chose that moment to die completely. I was left standing sweating in the cool of the dark pantry, cursing India in general and its telephone company in particular. Upstairs, the gong was sounding. Ahead lay another evening with Ameera, and whatever went with that thought.

  Damnation.

  I climbed slowly up the stairs. Leo had got me into all this, completely against my will. It seemed only fair that he ought to be doing a lot more to get me out of it, and I had no doubt at all that the secret of the Belur Package lay in the city of Cuttack. But although Leo's notes and Ameera's recollection both pointed in that direction, together with a deep instinctive feeling that perhaps came from my brother, I had no sensation of accomplishment or progress.

  What I felt, like a tightness in my gut, was powerful foreboding.

  - 11 -

  When the brain tissue is cut, as for example in the separation of the hemispheres via severing of the corpus callosum, the damaged nerve cells will not normally regenerate. Although the axons of each cell can produce new sprouts, which could in principle connect anew to the target cells, this sprouting is short-lived. It lasts for only a few days, and it does not produce the needed links to the neuron target cells.

  Instead, glial cells proliferate in the damaged region, producing a tangle that blocks neurons as they seek to regenerate axons. The solution to this problem, developed first by Madrill in his groundbreaking work at the turn of the century, is via the Schwann cells—the nonneuronal cells that are present and which can serve to direct axon regrowth in peripheral nerves.

  The Madrill treatment inhibits the growth of glial cells in the damaged area, and stimulates the growth of Schwann cells that normally will not be present in the brain. It is the later atrophy and disappearance of the Schwann cells that causes the patient considerable early discomfort, though later possible side effects of the tissue regeneration process are in fact far more serious in their potential consequences . . .

  I rubbed at my tired eyes and leaned back in my seat. This was supposed to be an air-conditioned first-class carriage, but I was sweltering, perspiration running down my forehead. The countryside outside was flying by at more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour, a dizzying blur of green in the long cutting; but the more substantial dizziness was inside my head.

  And what I was going through, if the paper in front of me was to be believed, was a mild foretaste of what I had coming in another week or two. That was a depressing thought. Already I seemed to be absorbing words from the page one at a time, poked into my head through a small hole using a rusty nail end. I forced myself to read on—hard going as it was, this was the first paper from Sir Westcott where I could understand even a fraction of what the author was trying to say.

  Following the full growth of the axons, and their attachment to the target cells within the brain, the final and most sensitive phase of the Madrill treatment begins. With the mechanical connection complete, it is now necessary for the brain to resume its information processing functions. Although these might appear to be routine, it has been observed that in over thirty percent of the cases where the Madrill treatment has been used, an unstable feedback in the regrown area leads to a variety of psychoses, many of them leading to terminal dysfunctions . . .

  Very nice. The bad bit was still to come, and there was a one in three chance that I wouldn't come out of the other side. "Terminal dysfunction"—pleasant medical double-talk for madness and death. The odds were a lot worse than Sir Westcott had led me to believe.

  So what could I do about it?

  Not a thing.

  I gave up my efforts to understand the next section of the paper, which was a long discussion of methods used with enzyme injections by the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Instead I looked across the carriage table.

  Ameera was painting her nails there, calmly and contentedly. The heat in the compartment didn't seem to trouble her at all. I couldn't see how she could fix her nails without being able to see what she was up to, but the purple-red lacquer went on steadily and smoothly. Her sense of the position of one hand relative to the other was almost beyond belief.

  Somehow—perhaps I moved in my seat—she knew that my eyes were on her.

  "How much longer, Lee-yo-nel?"

  "Half an hour, if the train is on time."

  She nodded happily. To Ameera, this whole trip was nothing but pleasure and excitement, an extended school picnic. For the tenth time in two days, I wondered just what sort of friend Chandra thought he was. Instead of agreeing with me that Ameera's presence in Cuttack would be a total disaster, he had sided with her from the beginning.

  "How will you talk to people if you are alone there?" he asked. "Cuttack is not like Calcutta, where many people speak English."

  (As I later discovered, Chandra was not telling the truth—many people spoke English in each place. But he was being at his most Indian, helping Ameera to get her way from pure perversity.)

  I had argued the point with them, insisting that I would do much better to hire an interpreter when I needed one. Verbal persuasion by Chandra during the day, and more powerful arguments by Ameera at night, had beaten me. I sat and looked at her, at the gorgeous dusky skin and midnight hair, and wondered how I had held out for so long. The odds against me had been overwhelming.

  My original plan, to head for Cuttack the day I learned of its existence, had fallen apart as soon as I tried to act. I had made no allowance for the Indian sense of pace. Even the train tickets took twenty-four hours to arrive at the house.

  While Chandra and Chatterji made arrangements for our trip I spent long impatient hours in the little pantry, pitting my wits against the vagaries of the Indian telephone system.

  The telephone number that I was asking about for someone in Cuttack? No, sir. It did not exist. A difficult operator insisted that it could not exist, had never existed—perhaps I was reading it wrongly to him? An hour of argument and re-calling to Cuttack revealed the existence of a second exchange, in the same province but not within the town.

  I called the new exchange.

  Triumph! The number had been listed for a Mr. Belur. But it had been taken out of use four months ago, and there was no new listing for that Belur. Computer companies in the same area where Mr. Belur had lived? Of course, sir, they would try to check it for me, but I had to remember that this was not the way that the directory was organized . . . the chance of success was small . . . the difficulty was very great . . .

  I longed for an outstretched hand into which I could drop a little silver, but that time-tested method would have to wait until we got to Cuttack. All I could do from a distance was establish the names of half a dozen candidate companies that might possibly be connected with the vanished Belur. Unless they, like he, had disappeared in the past few months.

  Patience, Chandra told me. Patience is all in India.

  Patience. I had to learn my own limitations. When we finally reached Cuttack and could begin our search, I was forced to rev
ise my ideas about Ameera's usefulness. She could wheedle cooperation and information out of the least obliging public servants. I could get nothing from them at all.

  Cuttack was one of the Indian government's new development areas. In the past ten years there had been a huge effort to set up advanced technology there—fiber optics, microprocessors, vapor deposition methods, and hyper-bubble memories. The plants were scattered like white rectangular play-blocks over the brown and green hillocks that lay west of the main city.

  Taxis were hard to come by. Ameera snagged one at the railway station while a horde of noisy travellers shouted at the porters and each other, and we set off on our search. Since we looked at Leo's notes together I had been through every emotion, but now that we had reached Cuttack my spirits had plummeted. The chances of tracking down Belur had to be low. Only Ameera's bubbling enthusiasm kept me going.

  Computek was our first stop (all the companies we visited had shunned Indian names in favor of pseudo-American ones). The taxi waited while Ameera and I went in through the paint-peeling door.

  Nothing there—not even evidence of technology development. The staff were suspicious. Were we perhaps inspectors from the Government over in New Delhi? Ameera soothed their fears, but we gained no useful information. The pattern was repeated at Info-systems Design, Electro-mesh, 4-D Systems, Compu-controls, and Autodyne. I was ready to give up when we came to the shabby grey building on top of a hill eight miles outside the town, and I read the frayed wooden sign that announced the presence of Bio-Electronic Systems.

  "Belur?" said the man. He was all white teeth and cuffs, center-part hair, and oleaginous voice; the very model of a modern manager. "Rustum Belur?"

  Ameera squeezed my arm—she knew how despondent I had been getting. I nodded. "I think that would be him. But as I understand it, he is no longer with your company?"

  The man across the polished desk smiled and offered me an Indian cigarette. I had learned to refuse those on my first day in Calcutta. I shook my head.

  "No longer with us?"' He blew out a cloud of poisonous smoke. "That is certainly one way to put it, I suppose. He is not with anyone, eh? Not with anyone we can talk to."