Keeping It Real Page 15
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lila looked around her into a muggy twilight, filled with the soft-falling cool rain that she remembered from the low hills of Lyrien, the second kingdom of Alfheim; a signature weather mark, like a trade-stamp. Her skin drank it greedily after the burning dryness of the phoenix and the scouring of the sands, and she felt Dar shudder in agony and heard the rasping gurgle as he took a breath. A short distance away a wooden shelter stood between two pines on a clearly elven-made area of elevated and flat dry ground. Massive trees of every type crowded the little clearing, covering all but the tiniest chinks of sky from view with their massive leaves. It was extremely quiet, and Lila realised this was because of the sudden loss of Otopia Tree, and all her network connections. There was no Incon now, no contact with Otopia at all, and in Alfheim, nobody listening or broadcasting a single thing; not in the electromagnetic spectrum anyway.
She switched off the engine and, enveloped in the sonic caress of falling water, dancing leaves and drinking roots, she lifted Dar off the machine and carried him towards the A-frame building. The door was only on a latch. Inside it was dry and quiet, big enough for up to eight, with cots and mattresses set out. She placed Dar on one of these. He was deathly pale and finding his pulse was mostly a matter of good imagination. Where Lila had felt his andalune hands guiding hers on the bike, she could find no trace of that body now. She ignored all thoughts of pursuing Zal and demanded only professionalism as she undid the tight strapping of ripped-up shirt that bound his arms across his chest, in the hope that this might help him breathe. It didn’t.
As she had suspected from the impact of the bar, both his upper arms were cleanly broken but these, although nasty, weren’t life-threatening injuries. His ribcage was another story. Lila didn’t bother searching out the elf first aid. She didn’t have any confidence that she’d apply it properly. But she could do a reasonable job herself, in spite of a small reservation that Dar would no doubt heavily object to what she was about to do.
Her Al-self had only the scantiest of information on the elf response to X-ray radiation, but she guessed that would be too dangerous to try. Lila quickly pulled her own field kit out of the inner compartments in her thighs and stripped the backing off an ECG sensor, opening Dar’s tunic and shirt to place it gently on the skin of his chest, over his heart. She tuned her Al-senses into the instruments and immediately the spike and sine of muscular electrical activity flowed into her sight—a blue line over the top of her ordinary vision. She didn’t know what was normal for elves but she could see that, if nothing else, it was regular. Far too regular for her liking. In humans and all Otopian mammals a signal like that meant death was very near,
“Shit!” She didn’t understand. Where was the great healing power of the wretched land now? Gwil had suggested simply being here in Alfheim was enough, but it clearly wasn’t.
Lila recalibrated the sensors in her left hand and opened a sachet of lubricant gel with her teeth. She spread this over her hand and Dar’s chest, where the dark marks of superficial bruising showed red and black. No sign of deeper damage had risen. That was another bad sign. She ran her hand across him, and switched her vision and hearing entirely into her hand.
Echocardiogram, then ultrasound.
It was now clear what crushing damage the bar had done. Dar’s sternum was broken and several ribs fractured more than once, creating what was medically known as a flail ribcage, where a whole section had become completely detached and ineffective, moved only by his slight breaths but not aiding breathing. There was serious bleeding around his lungs, and also into the pericardium surrounding his heart, hence its regularity and weakness. Lila blood-tested him as fast as she could but she wasn’t even sure she could wait or should wait for the gas analysis. She looked under his eyelids—almost white, becoming blueish. He was cyanotic. He needed more oxygen.
“Jesus Christ!” she said, several times, rather loudly, to nerve herself as she broke open sealed packs, hunting down the really big needles. On its prompt she allowed her Al-self to activate a cortical shunt that bypassed her emotional responses, leaving them as a minimal experience that could thoroughly inform but not hamper her physical precision. Now her Al-self could cue its surgical procedures and run them effectively. Although she’d never done what she was about to do, the hands of hundreds of expert surgeons informed the movement of her own fingers and thumbs.
She watched herself from a quiet meditative state as her left hand guided and her right hand punched the chest drain into the wall of Dar’s body between two ribs. Her hands could see what they were doing with their own intricate sensors. They positioned the needle tip in the cavity full of blood surrounding Dar’s heart and switched on one of the minor motors in Lila’s arm to power a small negative pressure pump at the other end of the drain tube. Dark, russet-coloured blood began to flow. Unfortunately, Lila had nowhere for it to go, so it began to spatter and pool on the pretty hardwood floor.
Moving with care she inserted another drain for his left lung and attached that to a secondary pump with a minor power line feeding from one of her weapon ports. And there they were, she thought, tied neatly to one another, blood trickling around them, rain falling outside in the quiet, quiet forest. The idea made her smile.
Mercifully, she saw the ECG readout begin to break its rhythm into the less distressing irregularity of tachycardia as his heart began to recover. She felt his pulse strengthen at the same time. The blood gas response came up finally—low ox, high carbon dioxide, high nitrogen . . . whatever. Anyway, she’d done the right thing and she sat back on her heels now to pick out a suitable painkiller with a sense of satisfaction. She administered several shots, placed as accurately as possible, so that there wouldn’t be any sedative effect when he came to. She needed him to tell her what to do next, since her human-med skills, involving metal as they did, possibly were not doing him an awful lot of good, although perhaps saving his life would smooth things over on that front.
As a chaotic pattern established itself in his heart Lila cautiously and somewhat cheekily took the chance to examine his physiology much more closely. If anyone asked her she would say it was for Otopia’s files. In spite of pleas to the contrary Alfheim had not divulged most of its medical knowledge to Otopia, nor the bulk of its magical expertise; all of these things were protected under weapons-class security restrictions. It was one of the features of that treaty Lila had gone in to witness as a diplomat years ago. But she wanted to know from genuine curiosity too. She wondered greatly, in her surgeon’s mind, what kind of medicine they had and how their bodies differed from those of humans. Not so much in some ways: she found all the organs to be just about the same in relative size and position though they were, with respect to the physiology of their muscles and tendons, superhuman.
But there was a significant difference. Elves had a lot more neural clusters surrounding their major organs and even in their muscles, as though their brain was distributed more fully throughout their bodies than human nervous systems, which had their secondary centres around the heart and gut alone. And she noticed, as she explored this with soundwaves, that the progress of her survey created a reaction in the ECG: Dar’s heart responded to the frequencies.
Working on intuition she placed four more sensors on his head and took a scan of his brain activity. That reacted too, even though he wasn’t conscious. The response was what she would generally consider not good. Under her exploration the signals of all of his various neural sites became dissonant. His heart juddered.
Lila stopped. She examined her information and then placed her hands back on Dar, this time transmitting electrical impulses targeting specific clusters, copying what she calculated to be their normal function frequencies, in the hope that she could induce a state of harmony. It worked beautifully, and she finally had a good reason to understand why elves were so susceptible to fluctuations in their surrounding electromagnetic fields, and to sound itself, as she restored Dar to a synchronous neural
state: everything working together. A few seconds later his eyes fluttered open.
Lila had seen people master pain with difficulty and also succumb to it without shame. Dar’s eyes flashed wide as it hit him, and then he paused, and in that pause Lila saw a change in his face moving instantly to self-possession. His andalune rose at the same moment and her sensors slid off him in a blurt of static as his skin rejected them. She waited, poised to hold him down if she had to, in order to prevent him yanking the drains out, but he didn’t try to move. He drew a breath through his teeth and one of his eyebrows moved up in surprise that it was so easy.
“Be still,” she said. “You’re not out of the woods yet.”
He almost smiled at her weak humour.
“Your arms are broken,” she told him. “But you probably knew that. Your heart and lungs were full of blood. I had to take it out. That’s what you can hear dripping on the floor. The hiss is the pumping system.” She didn’t say that he’d lost a great deal of blood, now mostly around her knees, and that she didn’t know how much more he could lose.
“The pain is not as bad,” Dar said quietly. “You must set my arms.”
“I did that when I put them down. Clean breaks. They’ll be all right. But they aren’t splinted yet. I can’t do that, because…” And she held up her right arm to show him that they were joined. “As soon as I can, I’ll take them out.”
Dar closed his eyes. He was quite different looking to Zal, although until recently all elves had had a kind of sameyness for Lila, mostly based on ears (pointy, long), hair (lots of it, long) and expression (aloof, controlled, pole-up-the-ass). There was also some stuff about decoration, manners and couture which had seemed almost indistinguishable from human gay culture, if less camp. Now she felt that her estimation of them revealed much more about her than it did about them, and that it did not present a flattering portrait of her at all.
She found also that, since Dar had been at her mercy, she no longer hated his face. It was an extreme face of a kind she considered ultra-elven, as though it had been stretched upwards from its strong, slightly squared chin and the tip of his nose, so that the lines of the cheekbones and the features were elongated and slanted: the kind of thing that might happen after one too many facelifts. It gave his mouth at rest a strange almost-smile, which is what she had always thought of as a smirk, but now saw was only the way his face was made. Zal’s face was less exaggerated, with flatter brows and a more squared appearance, although he had the same large eyes that Dar did and the same long, thick eyelashes, equally dark. You could see a species resemblance, but Dar had dark brown hair and his eyes were intense and nearly black. His skin also had a peculiar quality that Zal’s did not. Now that she looked closely he seemed much darker than she remembered, not tanned like a human but as if he stood in deep shadow. She didn’t think it was an effect of his condition.
Lila wondered if Zal were a bleach blond.
Dar opened his eyes again. “Maybe you would consider us even, now.”
“No, not nearly,” Lila told him amiably. “Hello: half my body missing for ever.”
“The new one seems to be working out for you,” he rasped. “And to my advantage. I am very impressed.”
“Ah, come on, make me not want to rip this out and leave you to rot,” she said, without any great anger, but some irritation that he could lie there half dead and still successfully bait her.
“Your honour is great,” he said. “I thank you.”
“Go me,” Lila said. “How do I get your lot to come over here and fix you better?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he whispered, trying to lift his head and then deciding quickly against it. “Also, we need to move soon.”
“What are you talking about? Gwil told me…”
“I do not trust Gwil, whatever she told you,” he said. “And I have no idea who in the Jayon Daga is with or against me.”
“You as in just you?” Lila asked.
“No, us as in just us.” He smiled a little. “But all the same, better they not come here and find you. Some of them may be my allies, but others will not be, and we can show no brotherhood to their faces, or else our efforts to mitigate their ill-notions will all be wasted in the discovery.”
Lila admired the fact that he could get a sentence like that out with only one functional lung. She didn’t know what he meant but it seemed to boil down to the fact that they weren’t going to get reinforcements. “So what, we’re going in against the big bad to save Zal from immortal torment with me carrying you on your deathbed?”
“No,” Dar said. He paused for a minute, to breathe. “You will help me get better more quickly.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lila objected. “You’re in serious trouble with your chest. Even if it’s all fine when I take these drains out you can’t go anywhere or do anything useful for months. Your bones are pretty much shattered.”
“Yes, I can hear that,” he said. “But this is not Otopia. And we have our own technologies for getting over things like this in a hurry, if we have to.”
“Teleport it on over then,” she said.
“I was rather thinking you could drag us both across to that cabinet where you will find our medical supplies.”
“Typical man,” Lila snorted. She was glad she had put him on the closest of the cots. “Hold on then. This is going to be unpleasant for you.”
“No doubt that will please you,” he said.
She frowned. “Actually it won’t. How about that for a turn-up for the books?” She pushed the bed and it skidded over the unpolished floor
1 with only a slight vibration and bump. Nonetheless Dar hissed horribly and almost immediately passed out. Warm blood splashed on her legs.
She adjusted the drain tubes so that she could move around and went to open the cabinet but the doors would not budge to her hands.
When he woke up for the second time she said, “I’m going to have to up your painkillers.”
“No,” he said. “There will be something better in there for me.”
She held up one hand, “Not for me though. How do you get in?”
“Take my hand and touch the door with it,” he suggested.
Lila didn’t argue or make any more suggestions. She took hold of his damaged upper arm in her left hand and fixed the bones in place with a power-assisted grip, so tight it made him cry out. Then she moved his arm with her right hand. As soon as his skin made contact with the door, it opened.
“It will be fine now,” he said as she replaced his arm on the bed.
“Hope so.” She began taking things out—bark boxes and other, manifestly unhygienic-looking containers. Although they were all remarkably similar, each was made from a variety of materials, with a different fold and unique ties. Dar told her to look for something in autumn beech leaves with a linen tie. Lila found and opened it. Inside were slender bamboo tubes, sealed with wax. She opened one and ultra-fine needles of crystal fell out into her hand. They were so delicate they could only have grown like that, over extreme lengths of time. “Acupuncture,” she said after a second’s thought.
“Yes,” Dar said. “It’s good you are familiar with the technique. The meridians…” He coughed and momentarily passed out, recovering a second or two later.
“I know where they are,” she said confidently. “I sneaked a peek while you weren’t looking.”
“With what?” he rasped.
“Ultrasound,” she said. “And I can look again to be sure.”
“That explains it,” he whispered, his voice bubbling slightly. Lila checked the drains. The heart had stabilised, but his lung trauma was still leaky. Drops of vivid scarlet thickened on the floor beside her knee and coloured his lips. She glanced up and saw Dar smile faintly.
“Explains what?”
“All elven aether is responsive to sound,” he said. “Do it again.”
Lila put her sticky hand over his abdomen and scanned his midsection. “So?”
“Human beings don’t feel anything with this.” She took her hand off, aware of her face reddening, and angry for that.
“No,” Dar said. “I imagine not. And I don’t feel it in my flesh body. I feel it in the aetheric. It is extremely pleasant. The chi pattern is most interesting. You may find other uses for that in the future while you are here.”
“Are you being filthy?” she asked, selecting a needle and tapping it down through his skin with a careful blow of her fingertip, her Al-self effective and detached.
“In the circumstances I have perhaps gone too far,” Dar admitted.
“I was going to use X-ray,” Lila informed him and her prompt was answered, after a moment or two and another needle.
“I am grateful you did not,” Dar rasped. “The wavelengths are extremely hostile to our aetheric selves.”
“So, two weapons from one med kit: X-rays and ultrasound,” she said. “Not bad. I’m liking it here already.” She moved along, placing needles through his skin carefully, concentrating on his forehead, ears and in his hands. After the sixth one he sighed and visibly relaxed. Colour started to return to his face and she put her hand briefly over his chest, picking up a heart trace. “That’s impressive,” she said.
“Now the pain has gone I am able to look and see what is wrong with me, except that your anaesthetic has dulled my ability somewhat. But we can proceed. I suppose you are not a human with magical skills?”
“You suppose correctly,” Lila said. “I didn’t even think there were any.”
“We must make a connection,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her. “Something that can unite us, briefly, in spirit.”
“I’m an atheist,” she informed him. “Machine and soulless. Thanatopia is only hearsay to me and until I get proof about it, I’m devoutly with the scientists. What you see is what you get.”