The being was almost into the corridor, and Midas touched Fleck’s elbow to indicate it was time to follow. As they started forward, a stabbing scream caused Fleck to look back toward the front of the sizable waiting area. That unseen infant again, shrieking like an inconsolable ghost child. How could it be that he, a veteran healer – and particularly in a place as full of crying children as the city called Punktown – had not become immune to such a sound?
As he was looking back, Fleck saw that the swimming pigs’ heads had floated off the VT’s screen and were circling the waiting area near the ceiling, even though the commercial had ended and a game show had come back on. They no longer sang, but smiled anthropomorphically. One of the heads drifted down toward a jittery man too nervous to be seated; Fleck guessed that he was overdosed on buttons or even purple vortex. The man’s eyes went wide and he scrambled backwards, bumping into people, turned to flee from the grinning head as it continued to follow him, swooping down very close. A gang kid clutching a scorched ray wound to his shoulder pushed at the addict angrily for bumping into him, and the man fell to the floor, yelping and babbling, “Meat! Meat! Meat!” as the disembodied head bobbed only inches from him. A nurse elbowed through the throng, and used a spray can to mist the man’s body. The spell was broken and the head rose like a released balloon. Another staff member pointed the VT’s remote and touched an ad-banishing button. All of the porcine holographic heads vanished.
“Fleck?” said Midas, waiting in the corridor’s threshold. He nodded at the river of blood. “Watch your step.”
* * *
“The Kalians and the Stems do stuff like this to their females, too,” said Dr. Midas, as he worked over the great drugged form that nearly filled Operating Room 17. It lay on a tarp on the floor. Steam rose from one of the wounds he had cleared the thick scabs from. “Deep,” he muttered, “deep.” He resumed what he’d been saying. “A Kalian woman might have acid thrown in her face...if she isn’t stoned to death first...”
“What did she do, doctor?” one of the nurses spoke up.
“Premarital sex, Wanda,” he said. Then he wagged a bloody probe at the nurse. “Let that be a lesson to you.”
“How did they make these wounds on her?” Fleck asked, staring into the well-like injury Midas hovered over. “Some sort of weapon?”
“With their mouths, my boy. Their mouths – like lampreys, with retractable teeth.”
“But who did it to her?” Wanda asked. “Clerics?”
“Her family, Wanda. It was their responsibility to punish her, so as to save face.”
“My God. But how did they feel about having to do that?”
“They must not have felt too badly,” Fleck murmured grimly. “They did it, didn’t they?”
“Were they trying to kill her, ultimately?” Wanda persisted.
“Nope,” Midas said. “Mutilate her, but leave her alive as a warning to all.”
“And her fiancé, who seduced her?” asked Fleck.
“Banished from the community. Disgraced, but intact. He’ll teleport back home, and have to find another community to take him in.”
A deep, rumbling gurgle resonated through the slumbering thing’s body. The vibration actually went through Fleck’s soles, startling him. Disturbingly, it had almost sounded to him like a string of bass tone words. “Is she sufficiently under anesthesia?”
“Don’t worry – just talking in her sleep,” Midas replied. A sizzling sound as he worked, both his hands sunk to their wrists in the wound. “Well, trying to talk. The females’ vocal cords are severed as children.”
“It’s appalling,” Fleck said as if to himself, looking over toward the head area, currently hidden under a cloth. “Unthinkable...”
Midas raised his head, helmeted like the others’. “Still not used to this, are you?”
Fleck felt somewhat embarrassed, kept his eyes from his friend’s as he grumbled, “I don’t ever want to be used to this.”
“Well, I didn’t say you should ever become unconcerned, my boy. But you have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay in Punktown.”
At twenty-eight, Fleck had up until now lived in a smallish Earth colony on a moon of the Tikkihottos’ home world. He had been to their planet for a year as an intern, and while there had seen some ugly sights in emergency wards, but nothing on the scale of Punktown, here on planet Oasis. He had thought the Tikkihottos’ world had been hellish, compared to the sedate colony he called home...but Punktown made that seem like a utopia.
Up until Punktown, his skills as a reconstructive surgeon had been mostly honed by repairing hovercar and industrial injuries, congenital deformities, mutations. By reconfiguring the countenances and bodies of the vain. He had secretly, self-consciously thought of himself as an artist...and he did, in fact, like to paint, though he had seldom showed friends or family his work and displayed none of it openly, even in his own apartment. But here, in Punktown, there was little time for delicacy or finesse. He had had to step up his preferred pace...so as to move one patient out and bring in the next. Assembly line work...
“I hate this,” he said. “All of this. The gang killings. The serial killings. The killings without even a reason of insanity to explain them...”
“Your talents are best served here, Fleck,” Midas said. “This is where you’re needed...exactly because it’s so ugly.”
“How can you stand it, sometimes? Sometimes it must...it has to...horrify you.”
“Well...I worked for a time as an intern in a burn unit for children. We called them – away from the parents, of course – toasty tots.”
“What?”
“We had to, my boy.” Midas lowered his gaze to his patient. “We had to make jokes. We had to go in there every day, have a coffee, and get to work. We had to get past the burnt flesh of children...”
“But you can’t get past it. You can’t. It’s the very thing you’re working on...”
“Well, I guess you can’t get past the burnt flesh,” Midas amended. “It was that they were children, we had to get past.”
* * *
The next time they shared an operating room, it was Midas who observed while Fleck worked – rather self-consciously, as if he were at his easel. But Midas assured him, “You’re doing great, on her. Just great. I knew you’d be fine with it...”
The saddle-like tapestry was unbuckled, set aside. While he infused one of the patched-up but still shocking wounds with a solution to engender localized cloning, Fleck raised his eyes to the half-dozen shiny brown nodes along the back and said, “Too sexy, huh?”
“Ohhh, yeah. Please cover them up again, before I dampen my undies.”
“I’d like to see their mouths, that can inflict injuries like these,” Fleck groused, waving a gloved hand over the circular pit.
“No you wouldn’t. Ugly buggers. Small, though, not like our lady. Their mouths are like hers, except she doesn’t have the retractable teeth.”
“Born that way? Or pulled out?”
Midas smiled inside his helmet. “Which do you think?”
“Can’t bite back,” Fleck mumbled.
* * *
“I’m sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand sharply. “Please forgive me if I’m touching you in a way you find inappropriate.”
She occupied a room, Room 40, alone – both beds removed, gym mats placed on the floor for her. It was two days since he had labored over the somnolent monster, and Fleck was checking the progress of his work. Upon awakening the previous day, the alien had begun emitting her multiple hawk cries again until attendants realized it was because her tapestry saddle was removed; several female nurses had then rushed in to replace it. Presently, in running his hands over her glazed, translucent hide, Fleck had found himself stroking one of the wound sites – now only a slightly concave depression – as if to test its soundness. As he had done so, a low but weighty rumble had traveled through the turgid mass that was her body.
Still, she had not begun to
shriek again, and she had not thrashed or even flinched. Could she have found his touch...soothing? Gingerly, lightly, he laid his bare hands upon her again, feeling at other areas he had mended with his magic.
“I wish there were an easy way we could communicate. I know you can understand me, at least.” A translating chip on an adhesive disk was stuck to the back of the being’s head. “Do you know how to write any English?” Fleck asked, suddenly hopeful, but his patient made no rumbles in response.
His hands slid gently forward, to her head, and he felt at the skull that had been fractured with blows but fused whole again. The huge orifice was not an excised face, as he had feared in the ER; it was all she had for a visage. The inside of the deep crater was filled with cobweb-like strands that were ever blowing outward on a weak exhaust, a bit chilly and unsettling but at least without scent. He wanted to roll back the one tire-like thick lip, to see the gums from which her rows of lamprey fangs had been pulled, but he had not had to repair in there and felt awkward about examining her in that way.
“I’m told there’s a safe place in the Outback Colony where you’ll be taken in another few days. I’m glad to hear that. I don’t want you to be attacked again.” Still, no thundering noises to acknowledge his words. Uncomfortably, he prattled on, “It’s very tragic...what happened to you. I don’t understand it. How a person can injure anyone in that way...let alone a family member.” He thought better of expressing his personal opinions so candidly, and bit off his words as he concluded his visual inspection of his artistry. All he would say when he finished was, “There – beautiful again, eh?” Without thinking, he patted her flank as though she were a horse. He hoped she understood the smiling expression on his own face.
He was heading for the door, and off to check on the progress of a less exotic patient, when he heard a rolling boom at last behind him. He paused in the doorway to look back. The dormant volcano of a face gaped at him inscrutably, and the tiny brown forelimbs hung idle like the useless arms of a Tyrannosaurus. He waited a few beats, but nothing more.
“Have a good evening,” he told her. “Ring the nurse – that button there, you know – if you need anything...”
He had taken only a few steps down the corridor when his hand phone beeped, and he plucked it from his pocket. A woman on screen said, “Dr. Fleck, you have a call on line 12. Would you like it here or in your office?”
“Emergency?”
“No...well, it’s about your patient in Room 40.”
A newspaper? VT crew? There had been a little bit of media interest in the story; he had even rather proudly bought a copy of a paper that mentioned him and Midas, their work to restore the disfigured being after her harsh punishment.
“I’ll take it in my office, thanks. Be right there...”
* * *
When Fleck was seated at his desk and switched his comp on, a bright red logo for Fl’eye Communications instantly leapt off the screen and began to orbit his wrist like a bracelet. He muttered a curse under his breath, his right hand fumbling through a drawer of his desk for a can to spray himself with so as to repel the pesky thing. With his left, he tapped a key to bring up his call. But when he saw the face – or lack of a face – on his screen, he forgot about the parasitic logo.
“Dr. Fleck?” the creature on the screen said, its voice translated into English. The huge O of its mouth, of its entire countenance, did not move. Cobwebs stirred outwards from the thing’s continuous exhalation. Fleck found himself staring into the maw for the dim glimmer of teeth in overlapping rows, but didn’t see any. He almost wanted to hit a magnifying feature, to look more closely...
“Yes,” he replied numbly. He thought of what Nietzsche had said, about the abyss staring also into you...
“It has come to our attention that you are administering reconstructive processes to a female of our kind. A female of my family.”
“Your family...” Fleck echoed.
“We discourage you, in the strongest possible terms, from conducting these procedures.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Fleck said tightly, realizing that he had begun to tremble, “but the procedures are all but finished, and my patient has made a fine recovery considering the severity of the damage that she suffered.”
“Then...we are too late.”
“Yes. She is healed. Sorry, but that’s what we do here.”
“You must undo it, then.”
“What? We don’t undo the work we perform to save people’s lives and make them healthy again. Are you insane? You people...you people should be arrested for what you did.” The forcers were in fact looking for the particular family members who had tortured the female, though the punishment meted out to them might not be too great if they argued passionately enough that it was an important cultural or religious practice. Fleck thought he should trace this call, and surreptitiously fingered a few more keys. In a corner of the screen, the information came up. The being was wisely calling from a payphone at the Canberra Mall.
It stood there immobile, as if embalmed. Just the webs blowing. Judging from the thin neck and boney shoulders, it was somewhat humanoid in form, and almost skeletal...but the voice as translated was bold and strong. “You had no right to interfere in our judgment. You have undone an important ritual that we were bound by our traditions to perform. What you have done is akin to spitting on the steps of one of our temples.”
“I’d rather spit on a temple’s steps than bite huge holes out of a living person’s body!”
“Your arrogance is unforgivable.”
“My arrogance? Mine? Look...who are you? Her brother, her cousin, what?”
“I am her father.”
“Her father? Her father...” He was wagging his head in dumbfounded disgust.
“Justice must be restored...”
“You stay away from her, you hear? Anyway...anyway...she’s already on her way to a place where you won’t find her. Ever. We sent her away yesterday,” he lied.
“Justice must be restored.”
“Bite me,” Fleck snapped, and hit a key, expelling the abyss-faced entity from his screen. Then he realized what he had said. Not so funny, taken in another light.
The eager icon circled round and round his wrist. With a surge of hatred, Fleck plunged his right hand back into the open drawer, located the can, and sprayed his arm as if it were insecticide with which to kill the glowing red parasite. The thing lost his scent, became oblivious to him, drifted up toward the ceiling where it might bob idly like a moth against a lampshade until it finally faded away, an hour or two later.
He placed a call to the hospital’s security office, and talked to the sergeant on duty, a heavy-jawed KeeZee with three impassive black eyes; as nonhuman as he looked, at least he had features. “I want a guard on Room 40 at all times, until whoever is coming to take her away gets here.”
“Yes, doctor.”
Fleck signed off. He discovered that he still held the can of ad repellant in his hand like a gun, his index finger poised upon its button.
* * *
After Fleck had reported the call that threatened further violence against his patient, the organization that would give her sanctuary in the Outback Colony, down south, flew two of its people up to Punktown earlier than planned. They arrived the day after the call...first meeting with the being, and then with Fleck. They were both soft-spoken but dedicated-looking Choom women, native to this planet, quite human if one discounted the long lips bridging one ear to the other. One of the women bunched up her cheeks as she raised her great mouth in the bow of a smile.
“She has a final request of you, doctor, but I don’t know if it can be granted before we fly her out tomorrow evening.”
“What is it?”
“The eight orbs along her back...she would like to have them removed by you.”
“Removed?” Fleck was genuinely surprised. And then, oddly pleased. “They’re nothing but scar tissue, really...I’ll have her in an operating room within two
hours. And while I’m at it?”
“Yes?”
“Ask her if she wants me to remove her tattoos and brands, too. Piece of cake, those.”
“We’ll do that, doctor. Thank you.”
“I only wish we had time for another surgeon, not me, to reconstruct her vocal organs.”
The Choom woman simply gave an elongated smile tight with regret, and nodded agreement.
* * *
As Operating Room 22 was being hastily prepped, Fleck went on to Room 40 to examine his patient with this last task in mind, the Choom women accompanying him. The human security guard on duty, dressed all in black like a forcer, nodded curtly as he admitted them entrance.
Fleck explained to the vast entity that he had agreed to perform the favor she asked, the disk adhering to the back of her skull turning his words into whatever configuration her brain could interpret. She gave a rumble that he took for assent, or understanding, or gratitude. He looked to the Choom women, as if they might translate this noise for him, but they only smiled at him politely. He asked them to be seated on the other side of a screen he pulled out of the wall to give himself and the creature privacy.
Slowly...carefully...reverently, he reached for the buckles to undo the embroidered cloth that cloaked the series of tumor-like growths upon one segment of her upper surface. He had to walk around her body for access to the catches on the other side. In pulling the garment away, he had to tug a bit to get the straps from beneath her, but he was relieved that she raised herself up slightly on her unseen lower limbs to make it easier. She gave a huge shudder that rippled her caterpillar segments – whether from the strain, or mortification, he couldn’t determine.
“There we are,” he said, trying to keep up a casual one-sided conversation, to ease the encounter for both of them.
He held a wand scanner and ran it around the shiny globes, but he also tentatively reached up and touched them with his bare fingertips. The being gave another shudder, and a choked half-rumble, but did not try to shake off his hand...even when he lay his palm upon one of the nodules, feeling its smooth surface under his palm, and palpated it lightly.
Thirteen Specimens Page 6