Sisters

by Laurence Dahners

  Seri had a sudden thought, Maybe I can move the amorphous stuff between the particles?

  Holding the coin back up against her forehead, he tried pushing the amorphous stuff.

  It flows! Like water!

  When she pushed the amorphous material through the coin, it swirled around behind to fill in where she’d taken it from. The way, she thought, water’d swirl around your hand if you pushed it around in a bucket.

  Seri found she could zoom back out and push larger quantities of the amorphous stuff through the material of the coin. But, when she zoomed back out far enough that she could try to push all the amorphous stuff from one side of the coin to another she met resistance. She could push it part way, but resistance built and built until she couldn’t move it any farther. If the amorphous stuff’s electricity, how in the world could the ancients force it to go through wires against this kind of resistance? she wondered.

  She was back looking at one of the books on basic physiology when she realized she kept seeing two words used together.

  “Electrical circuit.”

  She picked up her coin and pushed the amorphous stuff in circles around the edge of the coin—so it seemed to be making “circuits.” If the amorphous stuff was electricity, making it circuit the coin was interesting, but she didn’t think it was doing anything useful.

  I need wire, she thought.

  Chapter Nine

  Marissa looked around. Eva’d left the room about five minutes ago and she was all alone. Lying in bed was driving her crazy, so she scooted carefully to the edge, then started to sit up.

  Lancing pain shot through her low back. In agony, she fell whimpering back onto the bed. With chagrin, she thought, I guess Eva’s right about how weak my back is.

  Eva strode through the doorway, “What happened?!”

  Marissa tried to smooth the expression on her face as she turned toward her sister, wondering how Eva knew. “Nothing.”

  Eva got an irritated expression on her face, but, as she approached, it disappeared. “Oh! Your poor back!”

  Alarmed, Marissa asked, “What’d I do?”

  “Probably tried to sit up, you hardheaded… Sorry. Of course you did, lying in bed has to be driving you crazy…”

  “No, I meant, ‘What’d I do to my back?’”

  “Oh.” Eva leaned closer. “You crushed one of the bones in the upper part of your low back. The one where cancer destroyed so much bone it was fragile.” She gave Marissa a look, “The one we’ve been telling you to stay in bed for.”

  Torn between triumph at catching her sister in a lie about their powers and distress about what that meant, Marissa said, “I thought you’d treated all my cancer?”

  Eva had a focused look on her face as seemed to be staring into Marissa. “Um, no. Daussie and Hareh’ve removed all the really big ones, and Tarc—”

  Horrified, Marissa interrupted, “Hareh!?”

  Eva’s eyes calmly turned to Marissa’s, “Yes, Hareh. He’s a teleporter like Daussie. He’s nearly as strong as she is.” A moment passed, Marissa feeling too stunned to say anything in response, then Eva continued, “His dream of becoming a healer’s coming true. Who better to be his first patient than you?”

  “Me…! You… you…” Marissa stuttered, remembering Hareh sitting beside her for long periods just like Daussie had, and appalled by the thought of her son exploring his mother’s body with witchy powers. Then she thought, That’d only be if these abilities are real, wouldn’t it…? But I have to accept them as real, don’t I? If for no other reason, then because of what Daussie did to the potato and because of Tarc’s ability to heat things, and… and… Wait, what does Eva do besides sit around and talk? And I haven’t seen any evidence Hareh can actually do anything.

  Eva filled the silence that resulted when Marissa stopped to think. “So Daussie and Hareh have been removing large chunks of your tumors, but they haven’t removed the cancer from your L2 vertebral body—your low back—because that’d make the area even weaker. Even tumor’s stronger than nothing. Tarc’s heated it some, in order to slow down the cancer’s growth, but that’s all we’ve done there.”

  Torn between her innate disbelief—despite the proof they’d provided—and her desperate hope it was all true, Marissa said, “Wait. If Hareh and Daussie are ‘teleporters’ and Tarc’s a ‘telekinetic,’ what’re you?”

  “Telepath,” Eva said quietly. “Not a very strong one, but it’s still very useful.”

  “Telepath,” Marissa said, trying the strange word on her tongue. “And what’s that mean?”

  “I can hear and send thoughts.” She quirked a sad smile, “Though I’m not strong enough to do it from very far.

  Marissa blinked in confusion, “You can… what?”

  Eva sighed as if she knew this would be an unpleasant revelation. “I can hear thoughts, mostly just emotions unless I’m really close. Over any significant distance, I can’t hear anything unless you’re shouting.”

  “You know what I’m thinking?!”

  “Well,” Eva snorted, “right now I can tell you’re pissed. But, even without telepathy, I’d know that from the tone of your voice and the expression on your face.”

  “That’s ridiculous! What do you imagine I’m thinking right now?”

  Eva grinned, “That all these talents are ridiculous and probably only exist in my imagination.”

  It was Marissa’s turn to snort, “That wouldn’t be hard to figure out either.”

  Eva nodded, “You’re right, I guessed that without telepathy because I try not to read people without their permission.”

  Marissa gave her a look, “Yeah, right. Yet, you came running in here the moment my back hurt me. You’ve obviously been listening.”

  Eva lifted an eyebrow, “I thought you didn’t believe in our talents?”

  “Um…” Marissa stopped, once again recognizing her own internally conflicted thoughts and emotions.

  Eva laughed, “Don’t worry. I find it hard to believe and I’ve been living with it for decades. In answer to why I showed up right after your back hurt, your thoughts about the pain sounded as if you were screaming to someone like me. That kind of yowling’s almost impossible to ignore.”

  “Oh…” Marissa said thoughtfully.

  ***

  Rrica looked up when Kazy and Seri came in carrying bundles of stiff black rope-like things. “What’re those?” she asked.

  They started up the stairs. Sounding distracted, Kazy said, “Wires Tarc’s been salvaging.”

  Excited, Rrica got up and followed them. “Wires? Like the ancients used for electricity? Where’d Tarc find them?!”

  “Oh, our Tarc’s quite the salvager,” Kazy said, still sounding as if her focus was elsewhere.

  Rrica dashed into the kitchen. Nylin and Grace were just sitting and talking, evidently having finished prepping for the lunch rush. Rrica asked, “Nylin, can you cover the dining room for me? There’s no one in there and Kazy’s got a new project I’m dying to see.”

  Nylin rose, “Sure, Grace and I can sit on our butts in those comfy dining room chairs even better than we can do it here in the kitchen.”

  Rrica ran up the stairs and burst into the clinic. “What’re you going to do with wires?!”

  Kazy and Seri each had one end of a single meter-long piece of wire. Kazy was using her work knife on her end of it while Seri was bending the last few centimeters of her end back and forth with her fingers. Seri looked up, saying triumphantly, “Got it,”

  Kazy looked over at the coppery stuff coming out of Seri’s end of the wire. “So you do. You did that just by bending it back and forth?”

  Seri nodded, “The black covering’s brittle. It breaks if you bend it back and forth a few times. Then you can just pull it off the wire.” Looking curious, she leaned down close to the end of the wire. “I wonder if it’s always been brittle, or if it just got that way with age? Why do they even have this stuff around the copper anyway?”

  Rr
ica said, “It’s called ‘insulation.’ I think it kept the electricity from leaking out of the wires.”

  Kazy raised her eyes to stare at Rrica, “How do you know that?”

  Discomfited by the younger girl’s stare, Rrica shrugged and said diffidently, “One of the ancient books I read when I was younger was about electricity.”

  “I thought your master’s books were about healing.”

  “Yeah, but I had an old neighbor who had a few ancient books. I did chores for him and got to be his friend so he’d let me read them.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

  Rrica stared back at Kazy. “Because reading books by the ancients is a crime. I had to get to know you better before I admitted to it.”

  Kazy grinned, “And be sure we’re criminals too, right?”

  Rrica grinned back as she nodded.

  Seri was peering closely at the wire. “This insulation’s got a lot of little cracks in it. I don’t see how it could keep the electricity from leaking out.”

  Rrica nodded, “I’m pretty sure the cracks weren’t always there. I think, as you said, the insulation’s brittle with age. I’m pretty sure it used to be more flexible and when it got brittle, that caused the cracks.”

  Seri turned to Kazy who she saw had picked up the two coppery ends of the wire and was holding them next to one another. “How are we going to join those ends together so we’ll have a ‘circuit?’”

  Kazy shrugged, “Damned if I know.”

  Rrica said, “That book by the ancients said you could just twist the copper ends together.”

  With a little snort, Kazy did so. “Doesn’t seem like much of a join to me,” she said, “seems like the electricity would just leak out everywhere except where the copper’s touching.”

  Rrica said, “Air’s a pretty good insulator too. So as long as you keep the wire from touching anything but air, the electricity stays in the copper.”

  Kazy rolled her eyes, “That just sounds ridiculous. We’re going to keep electricity from leaking out of the wire by holding it in with air?”

  Rrica shrugged, “Does it seem any sillier than pushing electricity through a solid copper wire?”

  Kazy lifted an eyebrow, “You’ve got me there.” She turned to Seri, “You ready to try pushing some electricity through this wire?”

  Rrica felt her own eyes widening. “You’ve got a battery?!”

  Seri turned to Rrica, looking excited. “You know about batteries?”

  Rrica gave a little nod, not at all sure she knew enough about batteries to justify Seri’s excitement. She said, “I know a little. They’re one of the things that used to power electrical devices.”

  Enthusiastically, Seri said, “I’ve been reading about electricity, hoping to figure out how to stop heart fibrillation. I forgot you already knew something about it. What I’ve been reading keeps talking about using a battery to send electricity through a wire into a muscle. The electricity’s supposed to ‘depolarize’ the muscle, and when the muscle depolarizes it twitches. The brain sends messages out through our nerves to depolarize our muscles when it wants to move us around. Depolarization makes the muscles contract and that’s what moves our arms and legs around. The shocks the ancients used when they restarted a fibrillating heart worked because they depolarized all of the heart at once. Then it would start all over, and when it did it often resumed a good rhythm.” She sighed, “I feel like I understand those parts, but what I’ve read never explains what the battery is that everything seems to depend on.”

  Not sure whether Seri was asking a question or not, Rrica ventured, “Um, batteries are devices containing chemicals. The chemicals react, emitting electrons that are forced out into a circuit on one side and taken in on the other…”

  Seri’s eyes widened, “Oh.” She frowned, “So, pushing electrons through a circuit… does what?”

  “The electrons, uh, go through other things in the circuit so they can do stuff. The books usually said the electricity—which was the moving electrons—it ‘powered’ the other devices.”

  “What kind of other devices?”

  “Lights, motors, computer chips…”

  “You know what those were?”

  “Not really. I think the lights they were talking about were the fancy ones of the ancients. Lights that didn’t need to burn oil. I’m pretty sure computers were machines that added and subtracted and did other math stuff. Motors…? I’m not sure about them. In the old days, there were a lot of other things batteries powered besides those three.”

  Seri’s shoulders slumped. “So, just making the electrons go around the circuit doesn’t do anything? I mean, without any of these other devices attached to the circuit?”

  Rrica shrugged. “You might be able to think of a person whose heart had stopped as if they were a device in the circuit of the defibrillator machines.”

  Eyes widening, Seri said, “Oh!” She frowned again, “Really?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly the same. Circuits just delivered the electrical energy to devices in the circuit so the devices could do whatever they were supposed to do. But, I’m pretty sure the defibrillator devices worked by delivering a whole lot of electrical energy to the heart. That energy shocked it into stopping so it had a chance to restart in the correct rhythm.”

  Kazy dropped the meter-long piece of wire onto the table. She’d twisted the copper ends together to make it into a circle. “Here’s a circuit. Try pushing electrons around it. See what happens.”

  Seconds later the two girls were leaning their heads down over the wire. Rrica assumed they were sending their ghirits in, but wasn’t sure exactly what they hoped to do. “Are you trying to see what the wires are like inside?”

  Kazy snorted, “Way down deep inside. Usually, with patients, we’re just trying to understand what’s different about their anatomy in the hopes of figuring out what’s wrong. But Tarc figured out we can send our ghirits way down small inside to see really tiny things. The little bitty particles that stuff’s made of.”

  “Atoms?” Rrica breathed reverently.

  Kazy shrugged, “We don’t know if we’re getting that small. Little tiny things though. They vibrate in solids and move around in liquids. The way some of the books say atoms do. Telekinetics can heat solids up by making the particles vibrate faster or cool them down by holding them still.”

  “Can you do that Seri?” Rrica asked eagerly. She desperately wished she had a talent.

  “I guess,” Seri said uncertainly. “If I push the particles in this wire,” she paused for a moment and the wire shifted about a centimeter across the tabletop without her touching it, “the whole wire moves. But there’s fuzzy stuff around the particles and I can make it move around the particles and through the wire. The fuzzy stuff acts kind of like a liquid.”

  “Electrons!” Rrica said breathlessly. “In the book I had, electrons were shown as points in diagrams of the atom. But the text said they sometimes acted like particles and sometimes acted like waves. It said their locations were ‘indeterminate,’ which sounds kind of fuzzy to me. Like what you’re saying you sense with your ghirits?”

  Sounding perplexed, Seri said, “Maybe. It feels like I’m pushing the fuzzy stuff through the wire. When I push it away to the right, more fuzzy stuff flows in from the left end of the wire… as if it’s making a circuit.”

  Kazy said, “When you do it I can see the fuzzy stuff flowing by from left to right over on this side of the circle of wire. I think it’s making a circuit all right. But I don’t know what good that does us.”

  Musingly, Rrica said, “If another person came in with a heart attack we could try to restart his heart.”

  Snorting, Kazy said, “I can do without another one of those, thanks.”

  “I… I don’t think we should fool with anyone’s heart until we’ve tried it on some other muscle,” Seri said. “I was trying to make the muscles in my leg twitch the other day. That’s when I started thinking we nee
ded wire.”

  Rrica tilted her head curiously, “Are you thinking a piece of pork? Or a chicken leg? They’re mostly muscle.”

  Seri stared at her, “You think it’d work even after the animal’s dead?”

  “Well, maybe not if it’d been dead for a long time. I was thinking someone could go over to the butcher and get a freshly killed chicken.”

  Seri frowned, “I was thinking we’d try it in some of our own muscles.”

  Kazy drew back, looking as if she were in more consternation than Rrica thought she really was. “You’re not sticking a piece of that wire into the muscles of my leg.”

  Seri turned to Rrica, “When the ancients used one of their machines to stop fibrillation, did they stick a wire into the chest and down to the heart?”

  Before Rrica could answer, Kazy interjected, “Sorry. I think you’re right. From what I read, they put big sticky pads on the skin of the chest. The electricity went through them, then I guess it went through the skin, the bones, and the muscles. It passed through the heart on the way to another pad on the other side of the chest.” She gave them a wry look, “Unfortunately, we don’t have any big sticky electrical pads and don’t know how they were made.”

  Seri chewed her lip for a moment, then said, “One of the books mentioned using ‘paddles’ that looked like metal plates on handles. It also said when the chest was open during surgery they used smaller paddles right on the heart and a low powered defibrillator machine.”

  “I don’t think we’d better be opening any chests,” Rrica said. “Even if people didn’t think we were crazy, we’d probably cause horrible infections.”

  Kazy stood up, “We still have a little time before we have to get ready for the lunch rush. Let’s go to the butcher’s and get a freshly killed chicken.”