by James Morrow
“As you have all heard, Dr. Lostwax comes from Iztac Four, the original destination of Eden Two and our own Eden Three. He calls his planet Nearth. He is an entomologist. For our purposes, he is not an extraterrestrial but a human, not a Nearthling but a Quetzalian. The fact of his coming is not widely known beyond this hospital, and I am told that Governor Nazra and Vaxcala Coatl want it to stay that way. I realize that it is taxing to imagine a governor and a high priestess agreeing on anything, but for now we must keep this man’s identity a secret.” There was laughter. “If you have questions…”
A diffident hand went up. “May I ask the patient something?” The hand belonged to a sad-eyed young man.
As Tez approached, Francis saw a face that, by virtue of its size, might be called “cute,” yet “cute” was wholly unjust to her rubbery mouth, her genius eyes, her opulent terra-cotta hair. Mool had mentioned that Francis would find Tez competent and young. He had neglected to mention that Francis would fall in love with her at first sight.
“Will you answer a question?” Tez asked.
“All right,” said Francis, reveling in her husky voice. Just then he would have agreed to any Tez Yon proposal short of a suicide pact.
“Do you practice the Zolmec sacraments?” asked the sad-eyed man.
“Most of us are not religious,” Francis replied.
“What keeps you from hurting each other?”
Francis gave a recumbent shrug. “Nearthlings hurt each other all the time.”
“That’s what I thought,” the man said with a smugness that was somehow not annoying.
Tez circled the table, glancing every which way like an actor counting the house. She stopped directly behind Francis’s naked scalp. The house was silent.
“Since there are no further questions, we’ll start digging.”
The gnome sifted through the implements, found a small flute, and moved to the end of the table. Framed by Francis’s feet, he arched his fingers, blew gently. The melody was weird. Meanwhile, unseen, unfelt, Tez and the rangy one bent over Francis’s head, plying their trade.
“Does it trouble you that we don’t wear surgical masks?” Tez asked. “The fact is, Luta’s microorganisms are nonpathogenic to a fault.”
“Our sensorprobes said as much. Tell me about the music. Is it for my benefit?”
“Mine. Are you enjoying it?”
“I’d give anything to play like that.” It was a silly remark, but he treasured the whole idea of talking with this particular Quetzalian.
“I’d give the wart on my right arm.” Tez’s lowered tones did not reach the gallery. “My flutist is hardly a master by Quetzalian standards.”
“It’s not the sort of tune people play on Nearth.”
“I’d like to hear Nearth music sometime.”
“If Burne and I get our ship back, I’ll lend you our bachbox.”
“Yes, except that machines are forbidden here. By the way, we’ve cut through your scalp, doctor: skin, muscle, periosteum, galea, everything. I can see skull.”
How strange, Francis thought. I’m not afraid. “Is there much blood?”
“Enough to drown a rat, but my assistant is ladling on the proper coagulants and clipping the right vessels. Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing.”
“I trust you instinctively.”
There was a sudden grinding screech.
“What’s that?” His trust was beginning to evaporate.
“Metal on bone.”
“It’s horrible.”
“This is a craniotomy, Dr. Lostwax. We’re not popping pimples. First come the burr holes, right? Then we connect them with a saw. It’s not unlike the way my father gets blocks out of the eastern quarries.”
“Let’s discuss something else. Why are machines forbidden?”
“They are forbidden by Tolca, our god of peace.”
“I see,” he said with manifest lack of enthusiasm. Francis had always been ecumenical in his atheism. He was as prepared to disbelieve in this Tolca character as he was to disbelieve in Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, or any of the other words for what his father used to call “forcing yourself to misperceive the obvious.”
“You should understand,” said Tez, sensing his objection, “that the gods of Zolmec are not gossamer promises of the kind who, as the historians tell it, enjoyed enormous popularity on Earth.” The screeching stopped. “They don’t refuse to show themselves. They’re down here, among us, in forms so tangible you could stub your toe. This knife…”
She dangled her scalpel before her patient’s eyes. Its obsidian blade glistened with fresh Francis Lostwax blood. Its handle swirled with delicately carved birds and fish. “This knife is not a knife, it’s the power and beauty of intellect. Scientists and artists designed it in partnership, so it would cut artfully into tissue, lay bare exquisite truths about spirit. The final fact, doctor, is that Quetzalia’s gods are not divinities at all, but whatever unguessed potentialities we find inside ourselves. What else is worth worshiping?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Francis evenly.
“Your cranium is off.”
“I’m frightened.”
“You had cuiclo this morning. If you feel yourself getting sleepy, don’t fight it. Just fall away and dream.”
“I wish this planet were a dream.”
“Have you ever seen a living human brain, Dr. Lostwax, all throbbing and coral with blood?”
Francis thought for a moment. Kappie’s brain was killed by the time it surfaced. “No.”
“Dr. Zoco says that learning about human brains from gray pickled specimens is like learning about human beings from corpses.”
“Try to leave everything just as you found it.”
Tez laughed aloud, pondered silently. Our Nearthling seems rational enough. Yet his friend was able to murder. The human race may not sort neatly into Quetzalians and monsters after all.
Again she played to the gallery. “As you can see: a modified radical scalp-incision, a transcephalic bone-door, and the great god cortex is before us. Now, the first danger is herniation when we open the dura. The second, of course, is functional deficit. To avoid the first danger, a standard number-two sterolthorn is pushed between the hemispheres, four millimeters short…of…the…corpus callosum. To…avoid…the…second…danger……it……is……necessary……to…”
For Francis the husky voice was softening, fading, was gone. Before drifting to sleep, he realized that the elegant woman presently working miracles inside his brain was going to be impossible to get out of his mind.
8
EVERY SO OFTEN you encounter an animal that does not know what it is.
Such specimens are wholly unlike the cat, who is an expert at being a cat, or the cod, who partakes authoritatively of codness, or even the unassuming earthworm, who at some level beyond our untuned perceptions understands what is expected of it. Planet Luta held cats, cod, and earthworms, descendants of Eden Three, and it also held a homegrown beast called the chitzal, a mammalian furball on reptilian feet, with two ordinary eyes plus a third that evolution, in a moment of frivolity, had located on a stalk atop the chitzal’s head, an all-seeing lollipop.
The chitzal did not know what it was. Surprisingly, the chitzal served a purpose.
Benched in the gardens immediately outside his hospital room, Francis stared toward the nearest tree and with growing aggravation beheld an adult male chitzal. It hung upside down by its claws, contemplating Francis with its lollipop. It breathed, blinked, and did nothing else discernible. If only it would behave in some way, Francis thought, I could be loyal to my calling and take notes. If only it wouldn’t just hang there like a wasp’s nest.
Five days had passed since his operation, five afternoons in the gardens, and Francis was numb with boredom. For all I know, his brooding went, Luta is bursting with undiscovered insects, gorgathon offshoots, perhaps, who came here inside meteorites and to this day retain their species’s uncanny
ability to shed tears at the death of a near relation. Yet here I sit, immobile lest my head fall off.
The one sunny moment of each afternoon occurred when Tez Yon made her rounds. She supervised his recuperation with an ardor that extended noticeably beyond duty. She brought gifts. Do I attract her because I am extraterrestrial, Francis wondered, or is there a more auspicious explanation?
Whatever fascination Tez felt, she suspected that it owed less to Lostwax the individual than to a kind of anthropological curiosity—do spacemen make good lovers? She was skeptical. Not that she thought romance and copulation weren’t first-rate. But no manfriend had ever absorbed her quite so much as a tantalizingly half-true article in the Chimec Hospital Journal. Tepecans were so fashionably public about their trysts that nothing seemed very erotic any more. She had heard that affairs were subtler in Aca, that they had something called the telepathic orgasm. Doubtful. Still, to love the only Nearthling in town was a novelty that might endure.
Yesterday Tez’s gift had been an assortment of solitaire strategy games that divided rather hopelessly into those Francis found boneheadedly easy and those he found grotesquely opaque. The day before that she had brought a basket of opos, a corpulent domestic fruit, its skin scaly, its pulp succulent. The day before that she had brought a hand-lettered copy of the national epic, The Divine Cocoon. Francis read how the human race was first a worm choking on the filth of a contaminated planet, then a pupa metamorphosing in a space ark, then a butterfly flourishing in a utopia. Poetry was not a usual pleasure for Francis, but he loved every word.
The day before that Tez had awakened Francis in his room. “Promise me you won’t cough,” she said, “and I’ll give you two pieces of good news.”
“I won’t cough.”
“It increases the intracranial pressure. Would you like to hear about your ablation first, or your beetle?”
“My beetle.”
“Mool sent me to the Library of Iztac, and everybody agreed that your friend Newman took it with him on his neurovore hunt. Nobody knows why.”
But Francis did, or thought so. “Good old Burne, he figured I might be too sick to care for Ollie.” Then he added, in his mind: And he also figured these quirky Quetzalians might throw it away. “Tell me about my ablation.”
“The chip is gone. Your thalamus is saved.”
“I won’t have to give up laughter?”
“No,” said Tez, “but you’ll have to give up freedom for a while—five days.” She brushed him gently on the instep and pointed to the open window. “Our gardens are therapeutic.”
“You’re a genius.”
“Merely an apprentice genius. The great god Mool gets all the credit around here.”
“I don’t like him either.”
“Mool was raised by a wire mother. But it’s not his manner that galls me. It’s the way he’s treating my father.”
“I would suspect Mool treats everybody badly.”
“Medical treatment.” Tez found herself telling about Teot Yon’s accident, about her conflict with Mool over the safety of coyo root as a therapy.
Francis strained to say the right thing. “I’m afraid herbology is out of my line.”
“I think it’s out of Mool’s line, too. At least you’re listening.”
The subject needed changing. “How did my mind appear, deep down? I must admit, I feel slightly raped.”
Tez brightened. “Clinical neurology is intimate, I suppose, but hardly carnal. Everybody’s brain looks pretty much the same.”
“Did you try any of that cortex-stimulation business? You know, pressing the soft spots so I experience my past and talk about it?”
“But of course,” Tez joked. “I know all your deepest secrets now. I know about those overdue library books, and the lady plumber with the trick knee. By the way, that cuff link you lost six years ago is on the wash-stand.”
“May I get up?” asked Francis.
“Slowly.”
Sliding out of bed, Francis realized that someone had dressed him in Quetzalian robes. He approached the painting that was a door. Before his eyes, millions of brush-thrusts congealed into mind-reeling designs.
“How nice of you,” he said aloud, “to decorate my room with so skillful a representation of my recent life.”
By “recent” he meant the last eight days, which had surely featured more improbabilities than all the Francis Lostwax life that had gone before. Last year at this time his principal worries were whether to drop by that cathouse down the block and whether to spend forty-five dancs on reprints of “The Spirituality of Beanlice.” Kid stuff, compared with watching two friends get eaten, having the top of your head sawed off, and falling in love with an extraterrestrial. It baffled him that he was still sane, baffled him even more that he felt entirely ready for further excitements.
Tez pulled a mirror from her robe and thrust it before Francis. He saw that, right above his original wound, his head had been spliced together like two pieces of kinepic film. The seam, a tacky yellow goo, ringed his scalp like a hatband. He fingered it.
“Gently,” she cautioned.
“No stitches?”
“Murm is better. Your incision will not heal in the conventional sense. It will solidify, like paraffin.”
“Murm.” Francis sang the word.
“It’s the miraculous stomach-lining of an otherwise useless animal called the chitzal. Nourishes your scalp just like blood, keeps your dura irrigated, and needs replenishing only once a year.”
“You mean the suture extends under the bone?”
Tez nodded. “Don’t worry, your skullcap and dura are permanently separated. If a lover pulls your hair too hard, your brain might get exposed, but there’ll be no ruptured arteries.”
Francis gasped. Is this science? he wondered. Then what do they do around here for witchcraft?
“You implied that my hair will grow back.”
“Thicker than ever, and just when you’re sick of seeing that ugly scar every time you shave.”
Tez grasped the door thong, then stopped, turned, her smile failing to mask her blush. “I know this experience has been completely outrageous, but someday, Francis Lostwax, you may find uses for your chitzal scar that you never dared dream about.”
She was gone before Francis could even ask.
THAT AFTERNOON, Tolcaday by what Mool had called a flawless calendar, Tez brought neither mirrors, epics, opos, nor games, but a beefy man familiar to Francis. It was Zamanta, the one whose children Burne had saved from unequivocal death at the paws of neurovores. Zamanta’s wife, frail in build but assertive in carriage, with wild eyes and chaotic yellow hair, stood smiling by his side.
“We had to express our gratitude,” said Zamanta, “Momictla and I.”
“It’s really Burne you should go see,” said Francis. “Not that I don’t applaud what he did.” He felt no geniality toward this man who had almost sacrificed two children without a fight.
“We don’t applaud what he did,” said Zamanta. “Only the result.”
“Yes, well, I don’t consider myself violent either, but given the chance I’d disembowel all those savages. They slaughtered two of my”—he was going to say “colleagues,” felt a sudden hollowness in his soul—“best friends.”
“You think I’m a coward, don’t you?” asked Zamanta.
Saying nothing, Francis stared toward the terraced pyramid that was the Hospital of Chimec. Faced with solid gold, a sunstruck temple blinked down from the summit.
Momictla touched Tez’s sleeve. “He’s cured, isn’t he?”
Tez nodded. “We discharge him tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Francis injected phlegmatically. All around, postoperative patients sought out each other for talk, games, commiseration. No doubt they would flock over in a minute should someone give the word that Francis was the famous visitor from outer space.
“Remember,” said Momictla, “any favor we can ever do for you—just ask.”
&n
bsp; “I’ll remember.” His voice was still dead. Not far away, a spry child with a bandage over one eye was making life miserable for the local chitzal. She chased it down a tree, across a footbridge, around a bench. The chitzal ran like a cheesy broken toy.
Zamanta said, “We understand you brought a rare and beautiful insect into our country.”
Suddenly Francis realized he was smiling—beaming—outside as well as in. Coward or not, Zamanta knew how to win you over. “It’s a Cortexclavus areteus,” said Francis. “The larval form is probably a—”
What he noticed was enough to distract him even from thoughts of Ollie. The one-eyed girl and her quarry were on a collision course for a well-advanced chess game. The chitzal tilted the table, the girl finished the job. Castled kings, pushed pawns, and a dozen other tactics took to the air like startled pigeons as the girl toppled unharmed into the grass.
White had been a muscular teen-age boy with a linen bandage around his forehead. Black had been a plump middle-aged woman with one arm in a sling. On both faces shock faded into a blank serenity that admitted of no obvious interpretation. Already Black had started for the sprawled girl. White was rising.
Francis quaked. The crime in the glass room flooded back with chill clarity.
“What’s the matter?” asked Momictla.
“They’re going to kill her,” he said hoarsely, leaping off his bench.
But Black was asking, “Are you all right, friend?”
“I ruined your game,” the girl replied, contrite but not gushy. Black’s good hand grasped the girl’s extended one, and the latter regained her feet.
“That’s no problem,” said White, arriving. “I was losing.”
“I’m not usually clumsy. It’s this silly eye-patch.”
White picked a leaf out of the girl’s hair. “You were just having fun.”
“I’ve never been enthralled by the Nimzo-Indian defense”—Black winked at her partner—“even though I had a clear mate in seventeen moves.”
“I’ll help you set up,” said the girl, extracting Black’s queen from the grass. The three of them hunted amiably for the remaining pieces.
