The three men looked at him expectantly, quaffing their steins while they waited.
He took a deep breath and launched in. “There’s this man in the village working in his shop when suddenly an angel appears before him. Naturally, the man is startled, but, being a devout person, he kneels before the angel and asks why he is so honored. The angel tells him, ‘Because you are such a good man, God has granted you a great favor. Unfortunately, there is good news and bad news.’ ‘Oh, please tell me the good news first,’ said the man. ‘God knows that when most people pass on from this life, they leave many tasks undone and many people to whom they did not say their last goodbyes. God has granted you to be told one year in advance that your time has come, and that is why I have appeared to you.’ ‘You mean it’s good news that I have a year to live?’ said the shocked man. ‘Well,’ said an embarrassed angel, ‘the bad news is that I’ve looked for you since a year ago today.’”
Yozef stopped, looked around at the three men, and waited to see the reaction. There were a few seconds of silence; Yozef could almost see the gears turning. Carnigan broke first. He had raised his stein at the punch line and was swallowing when it hit him. The mouthful of beer exited in a fine spray. Fortunately for Yozef, he sat next to Carnigan and the expellant centered on Filtin Fuller, sitting opposite. Carnigan choked for a second on beer that remained in his mouth, then swallowed and roared in laughter. He slammed his stein onto the table, further reducing the beer level within it, and pounded the table with his other hand. The table was sturdy enough to have held the weight of an elephant—which was fortunate. The sprayed-upon Filtin laughed as loudly, although Yozef couldn’t be sure whether it was because of the joke or Carnigan’s reaction. The third man seemed to lack a fine sense of humor, since he smiled but didn’t laugh.
Oh, well, you can’t win over everyone in an audience.
Yozef, inordinately pleased with himself, sipped his own stein and waited for Carnigan to regain control. When it happened, it almost cost Yozef serious injury, as the big man slapped him on his back, causing his diaphragm to impact the table edge. Once he could breathe again, he heard Carnigan.
“A good one, Yozef,” bellowed Carnigan. “Never heard that one before.”
Several neighboring tables had witnessed the explosion of mirth and beer, and two men leaned over and asked Filtin and the other drinking companion what was so amusing, possibly because none of the regular customers had ever seen such a display from Carnigan. Thus did the joke travel among the pub’s thirty or so customers within several minutes.
“Another one, Yozef, tell us another one!”
Hey, maybe I have a career here as a comedian. I wonder if there are gigs that pay coin?
By now, most of the customers either stood near their tables or turned at their seats to listen.
“One day I came here to the Snarling Graeko for beer. As I got to the door, there stood Sister Norla.” The referenced sister was the “nurse” who was the first person on Anyar Yozef had seen when he awoke at the abbey. The matronly middle-aged sister was an accomplished caregiver, although somewhat prim. On her bad days, and Yozef experienced several when he first arrived, he thought of her as Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He had also heard her comment several times on the evils of too much drinking.
“Naturally, I was surprised to see sister Norla outside of a pub. Then she spoke to me. ‘Yozef,’ she said, ‘beer is an evil that clouds men’s minds and strays them from doing better with their lives. At least in your case, you have no family to go without food and clothing when you spend your money in such dens, but both your money and time should be spent elsewhere.’
“‘Pardon me, Sister Norla,’ I said. ‘With all respect, have you ever tasted a beer?’
“‘No, never,’ the sister asserted.
“‘Then how can you know for sure it’s evil?’
“The sister thought for a moment, then said, ‘You’re right, my son. Just to satisfy you, I am willing to try a beer. Naturally, I can’t go into the pub myself, but if you would bring me out beer in a cup, I’m willing to try it.’
“So, I went into the pub and asked the owner, ‘Could I have a beer in a cup?’
“The owner shook his head in disgust. ‘Is Sister Norla still outside?’”
Instead of an explosion of laughter, this time it built like an ocean swell that starts low, then grew until it crashed on the beach. Some got the punch line immediately, while others had to think about it, and some had to have it explained. Like the wave, when it fully broke, the pub was fortunate to be constructed of strong timbers. Yozef had assumed Carnigan to be the loudest person in the pub, but his position was bumped down one slot by the pub owner himself, who had come over to hear why so much laughter centered on their table.
When the wave subsided, there were demands for another joke. Yozef obliged with a few more—none with quite the impact. He was thus grateful when other customers offered examples of humor. By the tenth joke of the impromptu comedy club, even old stale stories were hilarious.
Yozef finally finished his second stein and debated a third when the sounds of splintering wood, a loud thud, and a man’s scream cut through the noise of simultaneous voices. Yozef jerked his head toward whatever happened and could see a knot of men forming near a keg of beer resting on its side on the floor. The pub’s festive mood transformed into panicked voices, and the scream morphed into cries of agony.
Yozef followed his three drinking companions to the knot of men. A keg five feet long and two and a half in diameter lay next to a broken-wheeled cart that must have been transporting the keg. The source of the initial scream and now moans was an elderly man with one leg under the keg.
The pub owner shouted down the turmoil and ordered Carnigan and several of the larger men to help him get the keg off the man writhing on the floor. The keg being too heavy to lift outright, men placed a wooden block under one end of its curved side, and the men heaved on the other end to tilt the keg onto the block. As the men put everything they had into lifting the end of the keg, others pulled the man away. His pinned leg was gruesome. The keg had rolled onto the side of his lower leg, snapping both lower leg bones in several places, since it bent twice in different directions. Yozef could see two sharp ends of shattered bones protruding through the man’s pants.
Men shouted and milled about, until the pub owner yelled, “Willager! I saw your wagon down the street! Get it up here! We have to get him to the Abbey.” A man ran to and through the door—presumably Willager. “Carnigan. I’ll get a board, and you and your friend get him on it and out to the wagon.”
Friend? Is that me? I’m no medic!
The board appeared, and Carnigan barked at Yozef to help him get the injured man onto it. By then, the man was in shock and only groaned as they slid him onto the board. Carnigan gestured to one end of the board, which Yozef interpreted that he was volunteering as an EMT whether he wanted to or not. Outside was a flatbed wagon drawn by two nondescript horses. They laid him and his board on the bed, climbed on next to him, and the wagon owner, Willager, got the horses and wagon moving at a moderate pace to avoid more jarring than necessary.
Another pub customer rode ahead to alert the abbey, and an open main gate awaited them. They pulled up to the hospital and a waiting wooden gurney attended by two men and a woman. They gently but efficiently transferred the old man to the gurney and wheeled him inside. By this time another wagon arrived with a gray-haired woman who followed the gurney, crying and wringing her hands.
“His wife,” someone whispered.
Yozef and Carnigan followed them inside, not with any specific task in mind, but simply trailing behind the flow of people as the victim was moved into a receiving room. There, several medicants appeared in orchestrated movements, reminding Yozef of emergency rooms. By now, Medicant Dyllis had appeared.
“Get him on the table,” Dyllis ordered. The gurney crew sat the man on the edge of the table, then were shouldered o
ut of the way as Dyllis and a sister rotated the now unconscious man and laid him down on the wooden surface.
Cadwulf Beynom, the abbot and abbess’s older son, appeared at Yozef’s side and led him and Carnigan out of the room. “They will take care of him now,” he said.
“A nasty break,” said Yozef. “I hope they can fix his leg.”
Carnigan shook his head. “I would pray so, but from the looks of it, they’ll have to take it off. Too much damage. At least, it’s a low break, near the foot, so he’ll only lose the leg below the knee.”
Yozef shuddered. An amputation? What exact level of medicine did they have here? Such details had occurred to him previously, but “thinking” about and “seeing” were different. He found himself imagining needing serious medical care. Such as an amputation. Despite himself, the imagines of blades cutting through his own flesh and sawing bones rose unbidden in his mind.
“If they have to amputate, do they have something for the pain?”
“Only to dull it. The rest he’ll have to bear with God’s mercy.”
Christ! I hope to God I never have an accident here!
“Nothing at all?” choked Yozef. He was pretty sure opiates had been available much earlier than this in Earth’s history.
“There are drugs from certain flowers, but those flowers won’t grow in Caedellium and need conditions available only in a few mainland realms. The Landolinians charge very high prices for it, but even that source has been cut off since the Narthani blocked all trade between the island and the rest of Anyar. The medicants will do what they can for him. There’s nothing we can do here, except pray for him.”
The Narthani again. Blocking trade? One more reason to pay more attention to whoever these people are and what they plan for Caedellium. As for growers of the poppies—it sounds like these Landolinians run a cartel. If it was opium poppies or something similar, there are always ways grow them. Maybe some kind of greenhouses.
Yozef went back to his room. Twenty minutes later, he heard the first screams. There was no doubt who they emanated from and why, and they were audible even in his room a hundred yards from the medical building. Though he tried not to visualize the scene in the operating room, his imagination again betrayed him, as he envisioned the medicants working as quickly as they could to at least make the agony as short as possible. The screams went on for only a minute or two, then abruptly stopped. Yozef froze in place with the first scream and now found himself soaked in cold sweat. More minutes of quiet passed before he could do more than sit on the side of his bed.
Chapter 15: Chemistry
A Proposal
The next day, Yozef stopped the medicant Brother Willer as they left the dining hall.
“Brother Willer, how is the injured man we brought in last night?”
The brother shook his head. “I’m afraid the medicants and our prayers weren’t enough. He died while they were taking the leg. Brother Bolwyn said his heart gave out. That’s always the danger when someone is older. A younger person might have survived the operation.” With that, Willer patted Yozef on the arm and walked away.
Yozef stood frozen in place. The plain but hearty meal lay a lump in his stomach. He walked outside into the cooling morning air and leaned his forehead against the cold stone wall to help keep from ejecting the meal.
It was another lesson to him not to forget where he was and to assume nothing. He’d taken for granted Harlie’s statement he’d never be sick again. Sickness didn’t cover accidents. What if he got injured? Whatever painkillers they had here were scarce or unavailable.
And did they understand about germs? On Earth, asepsis wasn’t accepted until around 1860–1870. Harlie had said he’d be immune, but was Harlie right? Or even telling the truth?
Later that night he lay in his bed. Thinking, unfortunately. Thoughts kept returning to unpleasant images. After he’d spent nearly an hour of staring at the dark ceiling, a different thread pushed itself to the front of his consciousness. There was no serious anesthetic. If he could get some of the plants or seeds of the poppy, he could figure out how to grow them in greenhouses. But that was well into the future, if possible at all. He assumed the Landolinians were serious about maintaining a monopoly.
What chemicals could be used? Ether, nitrous oxide, chloroform? Yozef’s heart beat faster. He clenched a fist and pounded into the other palm.
“You know . . . ,” he mumbled to himself, “I should be able to make all three, given materials and some help.”
The next day, instead of joining Carnigan for assigned tasks, Yozef went out to his log, stared through the overhead leaves, and thought serious chemistry for the first time since his arrival.
Of the three chemicals he remembered, nitrous oxide wouldn’t work. Production required ammonium nitrate, which had to be synthesized by reacting nitric acid and ammonia, a pretty volatile and dangerous step itself. Then the ammonium nitrate had to be purified and crystallized, then heated to decompose into nitrous oxide and water vapor. Other side products of the reaction had to be removed through various filtering and purifications, which required yet other chemicals likely not available.
The same for chloroform: he needed chlorine gas, which involved electrolysis of a sodium chloride solution, capturing the gasses and purifying the chlorine gas, which was then used to make calcium hypochlorite—bleach.
“Where the hell’s Walmart when you needed one?”
He further remembered you then had to react the bleach with methane (CH4) to get a mixture of the four possible chlorinated compounds (CH3Cl, CH2Cl2, CHCl3, and CCl4). Chloroform was the third product, the one with three chlorines attached to the carbon. It could be separated by distillation from the others, but Yozef didn’t want to get involved with the fourth product—carbon tetrachloride, which he remembered was dangerous, something about liver failure and cancer. The latter might not be a problem for him, assuming what Harlie had said about the nanomachines they’d injected into him was true, but what about his workers?
“Nope. Chloroform’s out, too.”
That left ether. Or, more precisely, diethyl ether. As with the other two chemicals, to his surprise, when he thought about the synthesis of ether he found himself envisioning whole pages of chemistry texts describing ether synthesis and purification.
That’s odd I can recall entire pages so clearly. Why couldn’t I do this when I took courses?
He could see it was a simple reaction of ethanol with sulfuric acid. Heated, but not too much. The reaction at 140oC, with alcohol being continuously added to keep it in excess to prevent the reverse reaction of ether back to ethanol. Not that it was all that easy. Nasty stuff, if you weren’t careful, he reminded himself. Above 160oC, ether could spontaneously ignite, and even in storage at lower temperatures ignition could occur, due to high vapor pressure.
Yozef could see the page of warnings as if it were right in front of him. The heating would be a bitch. Ether was extremely flammable. Then there was storage—airtight containers in the dark, in small quantities for safety, and add a piece of iron in the bottle to slow peroxide formation, which also had the nasty habit of exploding.
He continued thinking as he paced his room that evening and as he walked the grounds the next two days, trying to remember what he could of ether synthesis and crafting how he would broach the subject with the abbot. He had to be very careful. New ideas might be seen as threats to the existing order and attributed to demonic influences or heresy. He knew of consequences that even minor innovations could cause, especially among conservative religious and medical professions. His interview with the abbot had touched on the issue, but he hadn’t yet acted on the abbot’s advice to come to him first with new knowledge to introduce.
He’d been telling myself he needed to consider all of the ramifications of introducing new knowledge and take action at some point, but knowing himself, he’d likely procrastinate. If the accident at the pub didn’t prod him to jump on the potential of anesthetics as an ideal p
lace to start introducing new technology, then when and what would be?
He decided an initial approach to brother Fitham would be the safest test. If Fitham wasn’t fazed, then he would try the abbot. On Godsday, the brothers and the sisters were encouraged to mix freely with staff and visitors. The following Godsday evening, Yozef made sure he sat at a table for four with Fitham. The other three did most of the talking during the meal—Yozef waiting for his chance. When the other two finished and excused themselves, Brother Fitham looked across the table at Yozef.
“I noticed how quiet you’ve been this evening, Yozef. Is there something troubling you?”
Here goes nothing. “Brother Fitham, the man brought in several days ago with the badly injured leg. Something is troubling me, and I wonder if you could advise me.”
“Certainly, Yozef. Why don’t we walk around the grounds? It’ll be quiet this time of Godsday, and we’ll not be interrupted.”
They strolled behind the main buildings and were well into the garden, surrounded by shrubbery and flowers just in the middle of the late season bloom, the last twilight lighting up the few clouds in the sky.
“Brother Fitham—” Yozef said, and the older man placed a frail hand on his shoulder.
“Please, Yozef, call me Petros, or Brother Petros, if you must. I always feel it’s better than the ‘Brother Fitham’ title.”
“Thank you . . . Petros. I’m afraid I still don’t know what’s acceptable behavior and custom here.”
“I think you’re adjusting well, considering you were ripped from your home and family, all you knew, and thrown on a strange shore, probably never to see your home again. It would hardly be surprising that you’d have a difficult time adjusting, but from what I see, you’ve done well. The one thing I wonder is whether you have given serious thought to your future? If you’re here for the rest of your life, what is it you want and how can we help you find a place with us?”
Cast Under an Alien Sun (Destiny's Crucible) Page 15
