The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” Bonvilian could not have put it better himself, he told himself.

  ‘Go on, darlin’,’ growled Squamous to those around him, for he shared 4285D’s appreciation of 2042M’s finer points, up to a point; ‘stick him with a rusty scalpel and twist. Grind him to de bone. Hold him down, girls, smother him with pillows till de black tongue loll. Not too quick, now, not too quick: let’s hear his moans, let’s see him kick.’ There were fractional nods of approval in the arrondissement Squamous; and Snot, awoken by a pressure in his bladder, raised the drawbridge of an eyelid, followed by his corpus into as much of a sitting position as it was capable of.

  Reaching for the urine bottle, Snot expressed himself therein, and looked blearily around. ‘“And for bonnie Annie Laurie,”’ he said, noticing 2042M, ‘“I’d lay me doun and dee.”’ He subsided and began snoring again.

  Sister Gloria couched the lance of her gaze from the roof, lowered her visor, and aventred her weapon, whereupon it pierced Bonvilian through shield and armour as keenly as if she had been walloping towards him at full tilt.

  Coming to a halt and fewtering her spear, dismounting, and removing her helm, she bent over his prostrate body.

  ‘Yes, Director. We are ready.’ There was a slight emphasis on the “are”.

  A thick medicinal bandage of 4285D’s senior assistants entered, stage left from the wings, to wrap his person, as they always did at this precise moment after his opening soliloquy. Encircled, Bonvilian’s figure disappeared from the Impatients’ view; for not only was he of middling height, but the medics were all tall, like the Ancient Roman soldiers of a praetorian guard, rather than the dagger-wielding senators surrounding Julius Caesar that Squamous would have preferred, as they committed the murder that prompted the first autopsy and post-mortem report in history.

  In addition to Sister 2042M and the two nurses, Bridget Clott 1473T and Ivana Pipette 5749T, there were now a registrar, a consultant surgeon, five doctors and housemen, a perfusionist, two scrub nurses armed with needles, and a couple of orderlies. There was no anaesthesiologist amongst these myrmidons, nor was there one to be found anywhere in the nineteenth-century former Greenwich Hospital building. Impatients were never sedated before being cut into. Instead they were tied down with leather straps and had a wooden block or rubber mould inserted between their teeth, also as in the good old days. This was typical of Bonvilian’s deliberately outdated methods; he also used old-fashioned instruments from the Victorian era: lancets, blunt scalpels, bleeding hammers, saws, and tourniquets, and used to joke that a carving knife and fork would have sufficed if nothing else were to hand.

  While it was the greatest paradox that the old Greenwich Hospital, which had been one of the world’s most Hippocratically-dedicated medical and teaching institutions, had been resurrected as the Exeat, the deadliest institution on the planet, as indifferent as Director 4285D was to the pain and suffering of others, he derived no pleasure from inflicting them; only insisted that such measures were necessary because even the mildest pre-surgical palliative would skew the results of his experiments, and this was the only way that the body’s natural reactions to whatever pharmacological treatments it was being subjected to could be accurately tested.

  For decades now, free-ranging diseases had been eradicated, leaving only those bacilli and viruses that Bonvilian kept freeze-dried and under controlled conditions in the Exeat Institute’s underground storage facilities, for the purpose of infecting Impatients with.

  In every person’s home there was a unit like a shower cubicle, called a Jiffy-Fix machine, which, as one sat on the folding bench seat and read a magazine, diagnosed pathogens, administered stem cell treatments, and cured everything from influenza—there had been only three small outbreaks of freakish strains in the last twenty years—to shingles, from erysipelas to toe fungus.

  Cancer was rare, thanks to preventative medication and physical and dietary care. The built-in defences and antibodies of the immune system had been stimulated to breed like yeast. When cancer was detected by the Jiffy-Fix’s machine’s latest version of the old X-ray and CAT-scan technology, one hooked oneself up to the Jiffy-Fix’s computer and ran an analysis, then followed diagrammatic instructions to receive a non-invasive cellular fix. For those who had trouble following the simple instructions, there was an audio-video Helpline.

  Paraplegics walked, arteries were unclogged in seconds, and a single inhalation from a nasal jet spray dealt with diphtheria, meningitis...everything except the common cold. Faulty or worn-out organs could be repaired at clinics, or regrown by downloading cloning software using a mobile phone Subscriber Identity Module card and reader, available at news-stands and supermarket checkout counters, or via a home cable router connection.

  At the Exeat Institute there was no such equipment and not so much as an aspirin. For the Director was not concerned with eliminating physiological affliction, but, in a nutshell and simply put, distilling from the body the formulaic composition of the pre-Ptolemaic Primum Mobile...or “First Mover”, from the Arabic al-muharrik al-awwal. Having isolated this force, by tracking Mankind’s evolutionary and developmental steps from the beginning of the world, and harnessed it, 4285D would deconstruct Genesis, and the DNA of the universe, and gain possession of the key to the Garden of Eden; following which it would be bulldozed, re-landscaped as a private park for Central officers to a design by a descendant of Capability Brown, Larry Z. Cordwainer 6542I, and replaced with a new botanical garden planted with transgenic species developed and cultivated by the successor to the Royal Horticultural Society, the Triffidary, administered by Superintendent Q. “Garden” Spohr 7091C, whose scientific consulting Board of Directors would include one Hugo Bonvilian 4285…well, by then he would have been promoted again, moved to Central, and be rubbing shoulders with the As, Bs, and Cs.

  The task had been rendered unnecessarily difficult, before Bonvilian came on the scene, by what he disparaged as Mumbo Jumbo medicine. A cure for the future was what was needed, not the last ruddy virus. Everything about humankind’s vain and relentless Internet-fuelled tinkering and tampering with itself in the quest for perfection using suck-it-and-see pills, topical creams, potions, diets, and homeopathic treatments, was alien to 4285’s pristine ideological goals. The Jiffy-Fixes, of course, though he would never say so, were the ultimate nonsense. Decades of obsession with elective surgical reconstruction, restoration, enhancements, modifications, tweakings, and cosmetic applications had drastically reduced his ungenetically modified sources and choice of supply. Worldwide, corpses that were not certified Grade B+ Organic or higher could not be cremated because of their high plastic content. Instead they were sent to North America to be smelted, thermally depolymerized, or monomer recycled, at former Mafia waste disposal sites in New Jersey and Detroit, run by a released on his own recognizance Basso Profundo 6201K and his daughter Carmela Panicotta 2578O, and turned into domestic appliances, containers and bottles, and cheap tables and chairs, for worldwide distribution from warehouses in Boston, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New Orleans, under a pacific bi-partisan agreement with representatives of former Irish Mob families headed by Johnny Ikea 9652K and Patty O’Pherniture 1179K.

  As a result, 4285D’s entire stable of human laboratory specimens, selected from those who had neither inherited nor ever suffered from or been treated or operated on for any illness, disease, or ailment; nor received organic transplants; nor undergone cosmetic surgery; and who had never taken any drugs or medicines, was composed of the S-Class Impatients and alumni of Ward One of the Exeat Institute: Slave males whose essential health and unadulterated physical condition made them suitable candidates to donate their living bodies to science, Hugo Bonvilian’s science.

  The only person that Bonvilian knew in such a category who, as in the variant on James Thomson’s Rule, Britannia poem, as a staunch Briton would never, never, never be a Slave, was the one who had en
slaved him, but who to date had demonstrated no interest whatsoever in his body or body fluids, nor his mind: Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M.

  S-Class-eligible individuals who were unregistered for call-up to active duty were extremely cunning in the means they employed to elude the authorities. Although so far there were still sufficient in the concentration camps to keep the beds filled on Ward One, concern was mounting that the supply might run out before the Project came to fruition. Those who had every incentive to remain at large formed sophisticated support groups, and demonstrated great survival skills, so that hunting each one down and bringing him in was like trying to catch a Yeti, or the Rudolph fugitive.

  The nasal membranes of Central’s “Dog Catcher” squads, components of an army of bloodhounds whose handlers reported to Glenda Conklin 7203H, were active around the clock as, equipped with every device of detection and entrapment, thousands of sleuths and trackers, operating singly and in posses, combed the planet and the Inner Regions of Space in their attempts to corral and draft the S-Class dodgers.

  The most notorious refugee was Abel “the Man in the Moon” Spickett. Spickett had eventually been run to ground in a lunar crater near the Sea of Tranquillity, where he was living on a diet of opencast-mined Sage Derby green-veined cheese. Bonvilian had named the man in the moon “Squit”, after he came down none too soon, under escort; and instead of giving him directions to Norwich, or allowing him to burn his mouth by supping cold pease porridge, per the traditional or nursery rhyme, had him turned into blood soup.

  Other renegades outwitted Glenda Conklin 7203H’s olfactory ousters, not by hieing themselves to polar regions, forest, or desert, nor by going underground, or hiding in beaver lodges, nor by departing into the more proximate regions of space, but by remaining in the most obvious places where Glenda’s macho handlers in their Oakley sunglasses did not bother to look. One outlaw survived for years by posing as one of the dog catchers, and another as the resident otolaryngologist responsible for treating the dogs’ sinus infections and keeping their noses wet.

  It was the pancreas of Spasm, as Spickett was renamed as a Slave, that Bonvilian 4285D used to illustrate a point one afternoon at Central, before a committee of A, B, and C mugwumps, panjandrums, and pooh-bahs. He had been summoned for a post-luncheon (the blood soup that Spasm later became did not furnish the first course, though it was tomato) vivisectional demonstration of where he was at in his investigations. For practical rather than merciful reasons, Spasm’s spinal cord had been severed, and his voice-box removed, to ensure that 4285D did not have to wrestle with his unshackled Slave, and that he might articulate the facts before his audience without having to compete with Spasm’s dissenting screams.

  ‘I am confident that somewhere in this six-inch lobulated racemose ductless gland, which is located in the back of the abdomen behind the stomach, and which discharges into the duodenum a digestive secretion, called pancreatic juice,’ said 4285D, as he separated Spasm from the object for scrutiny with a pencil-gripped #15 scalpel in a #7 handle, picked it up with a gloveless hand and tossed it in a kidney bowl, ‘is to be found a clue to tracing the key to the Garden of Eden from which the first man Adam was ejected. Let me hasten to add that I use discredited Creationist language only as a metaphorical means of illustrating my point.’

  As Bonvilian held the endocrine exemplum up with a pair of forceps for inspection by his attentive audience, Gwladys Gormé 9162G, Central’s Head of Catering, who had stuck around in case anyone wanted more coffee or to compliment her on the meal, left the room. It was a coincidence that the main luncheon course today had been sweetbreads, or calves’ pancreas; which had gone down rather well, either because the alternative was liver or because Gwladys had assured everyone that pancreas tastes just like chicken.

  A sound of retching from the hallway indicated that 9162G was nonetheless ruing her adventurous gastronomic selection, and wondering, not what miraculous power Bonvilian believed Spasm’s version of it to contain, but how to clean the luncheon portion that she had consumed in the kitchen off the hall carpet before everyone came out of the dining room.

  Bonvilian ignored the interruption and resumed. ‘“The Fall”, I posit, was the prehistoric name for the genetic mutation that took place in Adam as a result of his, alleged, misdeed. And I maintain that the Garden, and the plentiful supply of uncorrupted seeds it contained, still exists. It is my intention to find it, to secure a quantity of those germens, and bring them back to be grown for ingestion by those whom Central may deem worthy of benefiting from their prelapsarian properties. Such a diet will reverse the process of degradation set in motion by Adam, and make Mankind forever Master of the Universe.’

  4285D flicked a stray shred of Spasm’s spleen, the main of which he had put aside in a doggy-bag to take back himself to the Institute for stat. analysis, with the rest of his Impatient to follow in a body bag, took off his jacket, wiped his fingers on his tie, tucked the end between the middle buttons of his shirt, and invited the less whey-faced of the two waiters who had served lunch to approach and help him tuck Spasm’s intestines, which had not been treated to lunch, back into his abdomen.

  Bonvilian had more to say to his audience; but as he picked up his scalpel and waved it to emphasize what he was about to say, he inadvertently nicked the duodenum, and the unpleasant smell that issued from it cleared the room so quickly that caterer Gwladys Gormé 9162G, who was on hands and knees outside the door with a bucket of warm water, a sponge, and a tin of deodorizing baking soda, scrubbing pancreas off the Axminster carpet, got trodden on.

  Even had the meeting not ended prematurely, the Director had not intended to share with the Central nobs more than a few elementary details of his thesis of mortal salvation, which were of the type that the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia—that opium den for those in need of a quick fix of impressive-sounding information on something they know nothing about, and do not care to take the time to research in greater depth—would either state as requiring additional citations for verification, or delete.

  Bonvilian, the Cynic, had read widely around his subject, in the hours that he devoted to late-night lucubration in his flat on the top floor of the Exeat Institute. He had traced Mankind’s progress from the Garden of Eden inhabited by the human prototypes, to the present day high plateau (think Denver the Mile-High City, Queen City of the Plains), and then imaginatively dotted-line projected it to a Doomsday cliff of an algebraic height. He studied the beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. He investigated Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. He noted how, as the body survived longer and longer, surrounded by more and more material possessions, people increasingly dispensed with priests, and their wafers of absolution, and blessings, and instead banged the drums of secular fundamentalism.

  Religion had nothing left to offer in a we-take-it-for-granted environment of predictability, stability, and comfort. Falling back on Faith, before world hunger and poverty had been banished and eradicated, and when one’s ten children might die between childbirth and puberty...that was why one had so many babies in those days, in hopes that some might survive...and when the “Black Death” bubonic plague in the late 1340s killed twenty million people in five years, was understandable; but as a palliative quid pro quo, when generic human medicine that worked was so easily substituted for the spiritual trademarked brands, it was no longer relevant.

  In ancient Egypt, Bonvilian learned, the earliest physician to be known by name was a priest with practical ideas called Imhotep. In the Indian sacred writings of the Vedas were detailed magical treatments for diseases, and expulsion of the demons that caused them. The Jews were great espousers of public health, and the Arabians could do wonders with senna, musk, and camphor.

  In the sixth century BCE, Before the Common Era, the philosopher Pythagoras weighed in on medical thought. Empedocles opined that the universe was composed of four elements…fire, air, earth, water…a concept that led to the doctrine of the fo
ur bodily humours…blood, choler or yellow bile, melancholy or black bile, and phlegm…a balanced combination of which was held to be essential to one’s well-being, with blood being supposed to be dominant in spring, yellow bile in summer, black bile in the autumn, and phlegm in winter. Later, Aristotle, pupil of Plato and the first great anatomist and biologist, further developed the theory of the four humours.

  Bringing the wheel full circle, the Greeks, bless their leather sandals, had recognized similarities between Egyptian Imhotep, vide supra, and Asclepius, their god of medicine, adherence to whose cult involved ritual sacrifices, bathing, and sleeping in the courtyard. (Maybe, thought Bonvilian, on a warm summer night he might take a futon into the Exeat Institute’s quadrangle.) Although religion and practical healing coexisted in the earliest days of civilization—no self-respecting Hindu surgeon practised his art with fewer than twenty sharp, and one hundred and one blunt, instruments—the medicine baby grew up an infidel.

  It was with the Greek Hippocrates of Cos, the acknowledged Father of Medicine, in the fifth to fourth century BCE, that the enquiring mind took over forever from the old supernatural beliefs and intuitive practices, and Mankind set itself to studying the causes instead of the symptoms of disease. Hippocrates—whose bag was prognosis rather than diagnosis—held the belief that the body must be treated as a whole and not just in a series of parts. He was also the first physician to maintain that thoughts, ideas, and feelings come from the brain and not the heart.

  In Alexandria, a medical school was established around 300 BCE.

  During the early centuries of the Common Era, Rome was filled with Greek doctors. Aelius Galenus, or Galen, the celebrated second century physician who was born at Pergamon in Asia Minor, began practising there in 161 ce. Taking on board Hippocrates’ notions of the humours and pathology, and the anatomical knowledge of noted Alexandrians such as Herophilus of Chalcedon, Galen was a supporter of observation and reasoning. As one of the first experimental physiologists, who researched the function of the kidneys and the spinal cord in controlled experiments, Galen’s theories endured until 1628, the year that William Harvey published his treatise entitled De motu cordis, in which he established that blood circulates with the heart acting as a pump.