My Brother

by Charles Sheffield

  As he spoke, I heard voices outside the study. A few seconds later Ameera moved to the doorway and stood there, turning her head from side to side. She clearly knew we were in the room but she was not sure where we were sitting. I stood up and moved to take her hand. As our fingers met I instinctively drew my thumb gently across her palm. She gasped, and I felt a tingle through my scalp. Somehow I knew it had been Leo’s gesture of greeting to her. I led Ameera across the room to settle in an armchair next to me.

  Chandra was frowning as he took a close look at her. Instead of his usual polite greeting he gabbled a quick question in Bengali. Ameera gave him a terse answer. He nodded and spoke again, and after a brief questioning frown she rose and left the room. I marvelled again at the easy way she navigated through the furniture, knowing precisely where each chair and table was placed.

  “Another little problem,” said Chandra as soon as Ameera had left. I winced. “She has gone to have tea served to us. I thought it better to talk without her here.”

  I looked at him warily. “What now?”

  “You seem to know little of Indian women. We are a race that matures early, and we marry young.” He smiled. “Think of me as the exception that proves the rule, all right? As soon as I saw Ameera I thought that she must be much younger than you realized, so I asked her age.”

  “Nineteen?” I said hopefully.

  “Fourteen.” Chandra leaned back in his chair. “Illegal, of course, but not at all uncommon. It does mean that an Indian court will take Ameera’s side should there be any argument as to rights. We must assume that your brother was sleeping with her, I suppose?”

  He was diplomatically looking away from me.

  “I suppose so.” My voice sounded hoarse and (to me, at any rate) full of guilt.

  “I will leave any discussion of that between the two of you.” Chandra stood up. “If there are financial matters that I can help you with, of course I’ll be happy to do my best. For the rest, I suspect that the arrangements in this house may be settled better without me.”

  “What about your tea?” I said stupidly.

  “Some other time.” Chandra grinned, and something in his look took me back five years, to the days when he was the biggest Romeo on the concert circuit — and that was saying something.

  “Cheer up, Lionel. Responsibilities sometimes have their compensations. The ladies of India are not without their charms. Do not forget that.”

  He left.

  Fourteen, I kept thinking. Fourteen.

  As Chandra left I wondered about the Indian penalties for statutory rape.

  * * *

  Chandra had left the package of papers on the chair. I picked it up and was sorting through it when Ameera came back with a young boy in tow. As he poured tea and then left, she came to sit on the arm of my chair.

  “Your friend has gone,” she said happily. (How did she know?) “Why did he ask for tea and then leave without drinking it? That is very impolite.”

  “He is a very busy man. His work called. I should not have asked for his help.”

  “But I am glad he has gone,” she went on illogically. “I prefer to be alone.” She snuggled closer to me on the chair arm.

  I cleared my throat and wriggled on the leather cushion. “Ameera, I really need your help. Did Leo ever talk to you about his business — about his work?”

  Ameera’s look of satisfaction and pleasure was replaced by a wary expression.

  “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.