Not the same kind of work when we do it, no matter how useful we manage to be.
“Grape-sized cyst, and it has to come out.” Or the day you’re not feeling especially hale can turn fatally bad. Grue’s had me read through case studies, but do the statistical abstraction myself. Median survival time for this sort of thing, if the thorn ever starts winning, is about an hour. People have carried the tiny bit of thorn for forty years, too, and then just dropped without warning.
Visible care not to nod, I get the hand sign for yes. Grue’s being distant, reserved, I can feel the attention but there isn’t any worry.
“Can you feel that?”
Hand sign for no, good. Nap-time for nerves is easy to overdo, so underdoing’s a risk. Surface sterilization I’m not worried about. It’s the same basic inerting mechanism I learnt from Chloris, the application isn’t as simple as for a bucket of water but it’s not difficult.
The cyst slides out no problem, one whole thing with a subsidiary mystical identity, the wound closes and flesh knits and you couldn’t tell it was there. Technically, legally, it isn’t shapeshifting.
Cyst plunks into a specimen jar, someone has to make sure the thorn species is listed. Someone is going to be me, which isn’t a regular doctor thing, but emphatically a Grue’s student thing. The ghost of a grin shows up in my mind with some warm amusement.
The little ritual with the hand mirror and the wall mirror, the observation of the specimen jar, and some real surprise about not needing stitches.
“Advanced student,” Grue says, smiling. Grue’s been regrowing people’s missing limbs since coming to the Creeks. Teaching doctors how to do it, it’s not something that uses a lot of Power, it uses a lot of knowledge and it’s deeply fiddly, I don’t know if there’s anybody but Grue who can regrow eyes.
I’m cheating; I closed the incision using nothing to do with natural processes of growth, that was commanding someone else’s flesh. Legally permissible in a medical context, I went so far to ask a judge for a written opinion, but I still feel really odd about it.
The ninth patient, with a horribly dislocated thumb and badly wrenched wrist and sheepish expression, at least as much as anybody can manage to look sheepish with that much happyjuice in them, leaves me feeling better. The patient came to grief due to an adjustment lever and a rock being connected by the coulter of a potato-plow, and natural healing might not ever have let their hand recover.
Their driving partner is astonished; the patient isn’t, I’m really surprised they’re not drooling a bit, there’s that much happyjuice in them. So they get a bed and some water and their partner gets strict instructions to tell everybody, family and gean and thorpe, to leave them bide until tomorrow’s done, because they’ll be sure they’re fine and talking coherently long before there’s any judgement come back from wherever the happyjuice sends it.
Not something there’s another way to fix, not so far as I know.
Amputate and re-grow, Grue says. Perfectly possible to be skilled enough to reliably regrow hands and not strong enough to do what you’re doing.
I don’t manage to get the thought into words.
It’s not easier, that way, there’s more that can go wrong. But if someone’s got a bunch of crushed small bones, hand or foot, it’ll work. And most doctors would have to amputate anyway.
Rather than ask for memories of everything working, and return the flesh to that memory. Have to use the person’s own idea of themselves, sticking ideal hands on the injured isn’t going to make anyone pleased.
I’ll be an Independent, if I’m an Independent, long before I’m a medic, never mind a doctor. You can bend rules for Independent stuff, out of simple practicality — everyone recognizes that the Power is disdainful of our rules — and Halt’s big experiment has a strong majority faction of the Galdor-gesith’s clerks actively in favour. It helps. Nothing alters the medical rules, the Power speaking with its own voice wouldn’t do it. So it takes ten years to become a medic, the course work wouldn’t be a solid year, it’s not meant to be. You have to accumulate a history of not panicking when doing real work. I do have to be an Independent before I can do this without one of the teachers present, which will slow things down a little.
If I make it, an extra few years isn’t going to matter very much.
A child in a too-large sterile gown patters in, saying “Mama Grue!” in ringing tones. Dirce, the kid Grue rescued from wound-wedges by growing them a new body around their thankfully un-infected brain.
Independents can’t regularly adopt; the whole hospital sort of signed up, because with a thousand dead, no near relatives surviving, and all the Displaced, there weren’t many places that could take a child. Grue taught Dirce to read, and generally made sure they’d caught up from fourteen months stuck in a vat. Grue’s gone to a bunch of the school-meetings, for when school starts for Dirce next year. After the first one, people stopped being quite so nervous. There’s no convincing Dirce that Grue isn’t mama now. Not that anyone tries very hard.
The message Dirce has is that the doctor on admissions wants Grue right now.
I follow along; even this very understanding hospital won’t have me treating anybody unsupervised.
Dirce takes my hand, I’m Auntie Zora because I spent a lot of time with Dirce’s mind in the later half-year in the vat. Brains have to function, but you go crazy if you’re left with the sensory deprivation of the vat. So I got to amend an illusory, intangibly illusory, landscape and read a lot of stories. Tangibly, I get expected to provide illusory wings and other bits of decoration and read whatever book I’m handed, though lately it’s explaining the hard words more than reading.
Dirce believes Pelōŕios is obviously much, much more impressive than Romp, and keeps trying to find an appropriate angle of logic to give Pelōŕios small copper objects, no matter how carefully we explain that Pelōŕios is people and doesn’t eat like that.
Running messages is fine, but staying in an examining room isn’t allowed, and Dirce even understands why. So there’s no problem about going back to the break room and getting out of the gown and going back to reading practice. Child-minding is easier when the Power lets you see through walls, so you can be sure the just-a-kid’s where they’re supposed to be.
There are five people and both on-duty doctors down by admitting. All five people are from the same gean, none from the same collective, not collectives in the same part of town, reporting massive and abrupt muscle cramps. Two of them have avulsed tendons. They were all in very considerable pain before being administered happyjuice and muscle relaxants.
Whatever it is, I can’t find it. You can usually find something inimical just because it’s inimical, intent shows to the Power. This is just inexplicable horrible cramping.
Grue passes me a name and a full sense, which I’d really rather not have had. Glass mites. Tiny, tiny arthropods, that, in this life stage anyway, swim in your cerebrospinal fluid and have co-ordinated releases of neurotransmitters, chemically your neurotransmitters, in locally huge amounts. So you cramp. Easy enough to expunge, once you know about them, getting that full sense took more than forty years in the second century of the Peace, forty years and a lot of dissected spines and the idea of using ultraviolet light, because in visible light glass mites are transparent.
With the full sense, I can find them. Lots of them. Full-on infestation, not random accidental exposure.
The usual way to get glass mites is through food, and the usual way for the eggs to get into the food is the adults, which are still too small to see and transparent and generally difficult. Lean on one with your hand and it’ll probably get wedged far enough through your skin to lay eggs in you.
Four doctors with a wheelbarrow of equipment head off for that gean’s refectory, and probably other food storage. We’ve all been eating stuff that’s a little old, because food has been short. Better than the Folded Hills, but everyone’s been nudging the safe storage dates by months or season
s, then boiling extra or baking hot, and so far Westcreek Town had been getting away with it. This isn’t our gean, thankfully, I’d really hate to have to tell Eirene that the food storage had failed.
Everybody in town is going to get dosed for mites, testing for them takes drawing fluid from your spine. Going through even whole-town-many doses of mite-remover is much less expensive, and we’ve got them. It’ll be six months or a year before we’ve got so many doses again, but there’s no point having a good general vermifuge for central nervous system parasites if we can’t use it, needs must. Some of the food supply is contaminated, and that will be harder to find but, thankfully, there’s a charm for that. Having to say “incinerate that food” on no stronger basis than “I’m the sorcerer” is hard. Necessary, sometimes, but hard. Much better in every way if the doctors can find the mites.
In the meantime, there’s the regular litany of permissions with nervous and just-dosed-for-glass-mites colleagues, and relatives and friends answering for patients who have had too much happyjuice to answer for themselves. Grue and I between us get everyone repaired. I’ve never seen actually avulsed tendons before. It’s a trickier fix than detached, detached has snapped and you have to put it back together but it’s mostly a “this belongs there”; with avulsed, the bone’s moved under the attachment site and you’re balancing uncertain muscle stretch and bone re-arrangement as well as the tendon damage.
Then it’s back for the last four on the regular day treatment list. One concussion, which you can’t do anything for except watch for pressure buildup: trying to reset everything gets the brain chemistry and if you’re lucky nothing worse than amnesia happens.
Glass mites are rare.
Grue sends me a nod back.
Not previously known in the Creeks. If I haven’t missed a book I should have eaten.
No existing record. Grue sounds grim, no matter how believably Grue smiles at the last of today’s patients.
Chapter 27
Zora
It turns out that the agricultural style the lower Third Valley adopted, not the only one but the new one, the one out of old books and archaic mentions once the Displaced got there and nearly despaired, was to lay out a grid in swamp or marshy ground, and dig, putting in walls, so there were fifty-metre-wide channels and single-hectare squares between them. The spoil from the channels goes on the hectare-sized gardens, building them up out of the wet with fertile muck, and you grow water plants and fish in the channels. The raised dirt gets gardens, multiple complementary species, because they’re too small to plow and you’ve isolated them, some, and started clean, so weeding is possible despite complex plantings.
All the bridges have wheels, most of the gardens have cruciform walkways, you can pull the bridges through the walkways. If you put the thorpe’s dwellings on the four middle hectares you get something at least modestly defensible, the collectives who do habitation wards gave up a bit more than two years ago and asked Wake for help, inconsistent flowing water, fish, and living things all direly complicating the problem. Wake helped them. The wards were there, in their months of work, when we were walking out of the Third Valley.
People do orchards a little like that, something tall and something bushy planted together, but one plant to a field and being able to use machines saves a lot of labour, eight-crop gardens would be a terrible way to grow cereal grains.
The productivity, even per person instead of per hectare, is consistently spectacular. You get the garden, you get the fish, you get the five or six species of emergent water plant, there’s even a fibre crop, the water plant domesticates are getting better quickly, there aren’t as many water-plant weeds to worry about, and you can mostly stop them by being careful at the fish weirs.
So, two years ago, a thorpe on the West Wetcreek with more kids than shares did the paperwork to start a new thorpe in this style in a big chunk of unencumbered marshy land by the West Wetcreek, two hundred hectares of it to start and they’re thinking of eight hundred or a thousand eventually. They’re thinking of farming duck, too, or maybe I should say ranching. The initial test has been doing well, but they’d like someone to come look at the channel walls because they’re eroding in unexpected ways.
Wake’s entirely calm about the whole thing. You can’t, I know you can’t, get a stable abrupt transition of probabilities on that scale. Dove says the deepest interdigitation, way back where the timeline changes, is probably on the order of fifteen hundred years. The suture depth in the perceptible present’s somewhere around twelve years, as short as it could be without maybe missing someone in the Third Valley. No matter how careful you are the edge will ripple. So there was splash.
Of course there was splash Dove says, tone neither gentle nor amused, not anything more than conversational. It’s always been that way.
Badly integrated history shifts don’t splash. They have intensely awkward borders, worse than the rivers not lining up. People age years by stepping over the wrong rocks. All the ones we’ve studied have been the badly integrated kind, the usual, expected kind. The Tall Woods has a neat border, it’s not a hazard, but it’s also completely abrupt, a sharp-edged change in the history. Safe because no one was living there, acceptable because the land there was nearly barren, anywhere we haven’t been trying to improve it, there wasn’t a lot we could hurt.
Split Creek would take more planning Dove says, and means it. Split Creek had to have been a ritual, a truly huge one. Mass human sacrifice.
Constant smiles at me out of the otherworld and there’s a structure, construct, you could do it without any sacrifice of anything, pure elegance and planning. As theory.
Didn’t have time for theory Dove says, a little regretful. So your splendid landscape got best-effort integration into present history.
We all did a good job. I don’t want to complain about the integration, the integration is neat and consistent and isn’t jagged or dangerous anywhere, despite coming after an amount of malice that should have obliterated anything. An implausibly good job, Blossom’s report outright says we’ve used up all our good luck with landscape for a thousand years, the whole Second Commonweal’s, not just ours-as-a-team, ours.
I still went and changed something in the Creeks, and I wasn’t trying to do anything at all to the Creeks.
Information leaks, Dove says, grinning. Dove agrees with Blossom’s intent, we really shouldn’t do something like that again, but disagrees that the outcome was so nearly purely luck.
Then Wake has a pattern for us, and I get to start paying attention to the material world and help fix a single garden-hectare’s walls. It’s a little tricky, we don’t want to cook any of the plants, and this is supposed to be something the focus teams can do, so just picking the whole hectare up out of the walls while we fix them won’t do.
I can smell the flag lilies, purple ones, it’s a warm day even for almost-Festival and the scent rises. Not as much from the square kilometres of them in the marshy ground of the Third Valley, but exactly the same flower, it’s what I think of when I think of flag lilies.
It would be overly dramatic to say I nearly bobble my part of the working, I don’t, it’s not anywhere close to nearly, but I do have to concentrate on the mechanism, it’s not enough to stay mindful of the intent. Pelōŕios makes a whuffly noise of concern, and I can feel Wake’s attention, briefly and lightly.
The new Third Valley has been a thing, or luck, or the whole team in dire circumstances, and now I have a nose full of lilies and the inescapable thought I did that. The lower Third’s doing a better job of supporting its displaced inhabitants because I wanted it to, it had to be something after the malice and it’s my own personal idea of pretty and orderly and productive, hopefully in an order where pretty isn’t first.
Can’t even make any sarcastic illusions, we’re going to be doing a few more hectares and then watching if the focus-teams can do the same things.
Can’t scream, either.
I suppose it’s evidence I’m
not turning evil but I really have to think about more than today and tomorrow.
I find out two days later that my sister Mikka will be coming for Festival, and bringing the infant. I get the letter read and look up and Pelōŕios says “You are not as I thought you to be,” carefully voiced in the language of the Commonweal.
Can’t say “do go on,” in Unicorn, can’t imply it, admitting you don’t understand is the admission of terrible weakness, it’s a wonder any of them ever survive to reproductive age.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” is an easy thing to say in the language of the Commonweal.
There’s a long whistle, it hasn’t got any words in it. Pelōŕios folds up neatly, and instead of sitting on a stone bench outside our gean’s refectory reading my letters I’m sitting on a stone bench with a unicorn head in my lap. It’s about as much as it’s possible to do, in Unicorn, to communicate a lack of threatening intent. Actually rolling over’s sarcasm or insult, and harsh either way.
You trust.
Trust is the same word as mistake or error in Unicorn. Pelōŕios is being very careful with emphasis.
Not confident in Power. Pelōŕios doesn’t, intensely does not, understand why not. For more reasons than the Third Valley, I can feel the little tickling items of the list going by. I suppose I seem like I know what I’m doing.
That gets me a material snort. “I tell the tale that I heard told” answereth not for own witness.
That’s none of the other unicorns would believe me about any of this, I think. And, thinking, I find out I have it correct.
Own witness answereth not for Mulch, and there’s a sorrowful whistle. What might Mulch’s candor requite?
History was never my best subject. It didn’t, mostly, happen here, the Creeks were nigh-peaceful when Laurel showed up for whatever reasons Laurel had then, and then we sort of drifted into the Commonweal for reasons no one wrote down. There are three times as many of us now than there were then, better fed and safer, though that’s hardly going to convince Pelōŕios, you get more sheep with shepherds than you see in the wild.
Safely You Deliver Page 14