Reincarnations

by Harry Turtledove

  Setting a kindly hand upon my shoulder, my eldest said, "Let it be as you wish, then, Father. My concern is only for you; I would not have you-contaminated by some unclean bit of matter rightfully residing on the far side of the tomb."

  My own chief concern after receipt of the new tooth was not contamination but suppuration, the almost inevitable bout of pus and fever attendant upon such rude intrusions upon the oral cavity as the tooth-drawer is compelled to make. Having suffered several such bouts-having, indeed, lost a cousin at an untimely age as a result of one-I knew the signs, and awaited them with the apprehension to be expected from a man of such knowledge. Yet all remained well, and, in fact, I healed with a rapidity hardly less astonishing to me than the anodyne of chloroform itself. By the third day after the extraction, I was up and about and very largely my usual self once more.

  Fourteen days having passed, I repaired to the illustrious Vankirk’s so that he might examine the results of his ministrations upon me. "Good morning, Mr. Legrand," he said. "How fare you today?"

  "Exceeding well; monstrous well, you might even say," I replied. "Undo your wire, sir, and I shall be on my way."

  "If the socket be healed sufficiently, I shall do just as you say. In the meantime"-here gesturing towards the chair whence I had been fortunate enough to make my escape half a month before-"take a seat, if you would be so kind."

  "I am entirely at your service," I said, reflecting as I sat upon how great a prodigy it was that one such as I, with my fear both morbid and well-earned of those practicing the dentist’s art, should allow such a pronouncement to pass his lips as anything save the most macabre jest.

  A tiny, sharp-nosed pliers of shiny iron in his hand, Vankirk bent towards me-and I, I willingly opened my mouth. "Well, well," quoth he, commencing his work, "here is a thing most extraordinary."

  "What is it?" I enquired-indistinctly, I fear me, on account of the interference with my ejaculation arising from his hand and instrument.

  First removing the wire, as he had told me he would, he answered, "Why, how very well you have recovered from your ordeal, Mr. Legrand, and how perfectly the tooth I have transplanted into your jawbone has taken hold there. If I-if any man-could do such work with every patient, I would serve kings, and live as kings do; for kings are no less immune to the toothache than any other mortals."

  "You did better with me than I had dreamt possible, Mr. Vankirk, and should I again stand in need of the services of a tooth-drawer-which, given the way of all flesh, and of my sorry flesh in especial, strikes me as being altogether too probable-you may rest assured I shall hasten hither to your establishment as quickly as ever I may; for, rendered insensible by the miracle of chloroform, I shall at last be able-or rather, happily unable-to cry out, imitating the famous and goodly Paul long ago in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘O pincers, where is thy sting? O torment, where is thy victory?’ and knowing myself to have triumphed over the agonies that have tortured mankind forever and ever."

  Still holding the pliers, Vankirk cocked his head to one side, examining me with a keenness most disconcerting. After a moment, he shook his head, a quizzical expression playing across his countenance. "Extraordinary indeed," he murmured.

  "Why say you that, sir, when I-?"

  I had scarcely begun the question ere the tooth-drawer raised a hand, quelling my utterance before it could be well born. "Extraordinary in that you are, to all appearances, a changed man," he said.

  "Why, so I am-I am a man free from pain, for which I shall remain ever in your debt, figuratively if not financially," I said.

  "Our financial arrangements are satisfactory in the highest degree," Vankirk said. "By every account reaching my ear, you are and have always been a man of the nicest scrupulosity in respect to money, and in this you seem to have altered not by the smallest jot or tittle; not even by the proverbial iota, smaller than either. But your present style-how shall I say it?-differs somewhat from that which I observed in you a fortnight previously. And, as the illustrious Buffon (not to be confused with any of our present illustrious buffoons) so justly remarked, ‘Le style c’est l’homme mкme.’ I trust you would agree?"

  "How could any man disagree with such a sage observation?" I returned. "As an apologia, however, I must remind you that my faculties at the time of our last encounter were more than a little deranged by the pain of which you so skillfully relieved me."

  "It could be," he replied, studying me with even greater keenness than before. "Yes, it could be. Yet the transformation seems too striking for that to be the sole fount wherefrom it arises."

  "I know none other, unless"-and I laughed; yes, laughed! fool that I was-"you would include in your calculations the tooth of which you made me a gift in exchange for my own dear, departed bicuspid. Tell me, if you would-what is the tooth’s true origin? Some source closer than a sanguinary field from the late war with Mexico? Am I correct in guessing you obtained it from some local-harvester, I believe the term is?"

  "Well-since from some source or another-"

  "My eldest son, whose particular friend is a doctor."

  "I see. Since you have learned the term from your son, then, I shall not deny the brute fact of the matter. Yes, you have a Baltimore tooth, not one from the Mexican War. But I insist, Mr. Legrand, that it is a tooth as sound as I declared it to be when first I showed it to you, the truth of which is demonstrated by the rapidity and thoroughness with which it has incorporated itself into the matrix of your dentition. That last you cannot possibly deny."

  "Nor would I attempt to do so," I replied, rising from the chair in which I had, on this occasion, neither suffered the tortures inflicted upon those condemned to the nether regions by the just judgement of the Almighty nor experienced the miracle of complete insensibility granted through the agency of the dentist’s chloroform, but merely undergone some tiny and transitory discomfort whilst Vankirk removed the wire tethering the transplanted tooth to its natural neighbor. "Truly, I have a better opinion of you after your frank and manly admission of the facts of the matter than I would have had as the result of some vain and pompous effort at dissembling."

  Vankirk scraped a match against the sole of his shoe to light a cigarillo; the sulfurous stink springing from the combustion of the match head warred briefly with the tobacco’s sweeter smoke before failing, just as the Opponent of all that is good, he who dwells in brimstone, shall surely fail at the end of days. Pausing after his first inhalation, he said, "Your style has indeed undergone an alteration; and what this portends, and whether it be for good or ill, I know not-and, I believe, only the sequential unfolding of the leaves of the Book of Time shall hold the answer."

  "I am but a man; a featherless biped, as the divine Plato put it; though not, I should hope, Voltaire the cynic’s plucked chicken; and, as a man, I can only agree that the future is unknowable until it shall have become first present and then past; while, as a man named William Legrand- -commonly called Bill-I can only assert that no change perceptible to me other than the relief of my distress through your art has eventuated in the time that is now the recent past, this time being as impalpable as the future but, unlike it, perceptible through memory, whatever sort of spiritual or physical phenomenon memory may one day prove to be."

  "God bless my soul," the tooth-drawer declared, and then, upon due reflection, "yes, and yours as well."

  "Yes," I said, "and mine as well."

  On leaving his place of business, I truly believed all would be well, or as well as it might be for one with my notorious dental difficulties. The only cloud appearing upon the horizon of my imagination was the fear-no, not really the fear; say rather, the concern-that the tooth transplanted to my maxilla, whencever it first came, would weaken and abandon its adopted home. This showed no sign of eventuating. Indeed, as day followed day that tooth became attached ever more firmly to my jaw. Would that my own had been so tenacious of adhesion to the jawbone from which they sprang.

  For some considerable whi
le, then, all seemed well. No-again I misstate the plain truth, which is that for some considerable while all was well. Not everything was perfect; we speak of a man’s life, after all, not an angel’s. But all went as I would have hoped, or near enough. The most that occurred of an unusual-certainly not uncanny, not yet- -nature was that one or two or perhaps even several individuals imitated Vankirk the tooth-drawer in remarking upon what they perceived as an alteration to my accustomed forms of speech.

  "Whatever can you mean?" I enquired of one of these, a newspaper man by the name of Thomas Bob. "I note no variation from my utterances of days gone by."

  "Whether it be perceptible to yourself or not, your prolixity, I must tell you, has increased to a remarkable degree," Thomas Bob replied. "Were that not so, would I remark upon it?" He laughed immoderately; such were the jests of which he was enamored.

  "My prolixity, say you? Why, am I not the same simple, straightforward fellow I always was, a man to call a spade a spade, and not, with Tacitus, an implement for digging trenches-you will, I pray, forgive my failing to append the original Latin, which unfortunately I cannot at the moment-"

  "Enough!" He committed the sin of interruption, sometimes merely a peccadillo of the most venial sort, but at others approaching the mortal. So I felt it to be now. This notwithstanding, my acquaintance continued, "Do you not see, Legrand, how for you have gone down the road towards proving my assertion?"

  "No," I said-only this and nothing more.

  Again, Thomas Bob gave forth with the heartiest expression of his mirth, which increased my liking for him, for a man who will laugh when the joke is on himself is more highly to be esteemed than one who either cannot imagine the possibility of such a thing or who at once is inspired to hatred on becoming the butt of another’s wit. We parted on the friendliest terms. I asked him to convey my regards to his son, who has lately attained to prominence as an editor of magazines.

  Several days after my meeting with this distinguished gentleman, I had a dream of such extraordinary clarity-indeed, of such verisimilitude-as to surpass any I had ever known before. Some of these, whether they spring from the lying gate of ivory or the true gate of horn to which Homer animadverts, are fonts of delight. Not so the one darkening my slumbers on the night I now describe.

  I was black, to begin with. Now, I will not speak to the issue of whether the negro should by rights be slave or free; that is a discussion for another time and another place, and one that, the Compromise of 1850 notwithstanding, seems to be as likely to be decided by shot and shell as by the quills and quillets of fussy barristers. Suffice to say, the Legrands have not, nor have we ever had, the faintest tincture of colored blood flowing in our veins.

  Yet I was black, black as soot, black as coal, black as ebony, black as India ink, black as midnight in a sky without stars or moon, black as Satan’s soul. And, when I first came to myself in this dream, I found I was high amongst the branches of a great tulip tree. Glancing down for even the briefest instant engendered terror which nearly sufficed to loose my grip upon the trunk and send me hurtling to my doom, as Lucifer hurtled from the heavens long, long ago.

  Quickly gathering myself, I managed to hang on, and to climb. The branch upon which I was at length compelled to crawl shuddered under my weight, not least on account of its rotten state. Whoever would send any man, even a worthless negro, on such a mission deserves, in my view, nothing less than horsewhipping. Yet I had no choice; I must go forward, or face a fate even worse than the likelihood of plunging, screaming death.

  Crawling on, I came upon a human skull spiked to the said branch (a skull with, as I noted enviously, teeth of an extraordinary whiteness and soundness; whatever had pained this mortal morsel, the dreaded toothache had kept apart from his door). I dropped through one of the skull’s gaping eye sockets a scarabaeus beetle of remarkable heft; it glinted of gold as it fell.

  And then, as is the way of dreams, I found myself on the ground once more, digging at a spot chosen by extending a line from the center of the trunk through the spot where the beetle fell. Imagine my delight upon discovering a wooden chest banded with iron, of the sort in which pirates were wont to bury treasure. Imagine my despair upon discovering it to be full of-teeth.

  Yes, teeth. Never had I seen such a marvelous profusion of dentality all gathered together at one and the same place. Incisors, eyeteeth, bicuspids, molars; so many, they might have been a flock of passenger pigeons turned to rooted enamel. Under the bright sun of my imagined sky, they shone almost as if they were the gold and jewels for which I had surely hoped.

  I reached down and ran my hand through them. The not unpleasing music they made striking one against another suggested something to me, something not merely musical but reminding me of- Of what I never learned, for I awoke then, and the answer, if answer there was, vanished and was lost forever, as is the way of dreams. Yet the dream itself remained perfect in my memory, suffering none of the usual distortion and diminution attendant upon these nocturnal visions in the clear light of morning.

  A few nights later, I dreamt once more; once more I found myself in a world seeming perfectly real, yet assuredly the product of a dreadful and disordered imagination. My enemies-vile ecclesiastics of some inquisitorial sect better left unnamed-had captured me and condemned me to a death of cruelty unparalleled, a death wherein the horror of anticipation only added to the innate terror of extinction lodged in the breast of brute beast and man alike.

  I lay on my back, strapped to a low wooden platform by the securest of leather lashings, at the bottom of a deep and but dimly lighted chamber. And above me-as yet some distance above me, but slowly and inexorably lowering towards my helpless and recumbent frame-swung an immense pendulum, hissing through the air at its every passage. The heavy metal ball weighting it would have sufficed-would far more than have sufficed-to crush the life from me when its arc should at last have met my yielding flesh, but that, apparently, was not the doom ordained for me.

  For, you see, affixed to the bottom of the weighty ball was an enormous tooth, sharpened by patient and cunning art until its cutting edge glittered with a keenness to which the patient swordsmiths who shaped blades from finest Damascus steel might only have aspired. And when that tooth-I do not say fang, for it came from no lion or serpent or grotesque antediluvian beast, but was in form a man’s tooth, somehow monstrously magnified-began to bite into me, I should without fail have been sliced thinner than a sausage at a lunch counter.

  Closer and closer, over what seemed hours, descended the pendulum and that supernally terrifying instrument of destruction at which I could but gaze in dread, almost mesmerized fascination. Already I could feel the sinister wind of its passage with each swing. Soon, soon- Soon, how much more I would feel!

  From far above, a soft but clear voice called, "Will you not return that which you have stolen?"

  "Stolen?" I said, and my own voice held a new terror, for I pride myself, and with justice, on being an honest man. "I have stolen nothing-nothing, do you hear me?"

  "I hear lies; naught save lies." The inquisitor, I thought, spoke more in sorrow than in anger. "Even now, that which you purloined remains with you to embellish your person and salve your vanity."

  "Lies! You are the one who lies!" I cried, my desperation rising as the pendulum, the terrible pendulum, perceptibly descended.

  "Having granted you the opportunity to repent of your crimes, I now give you the punishment you have earned both for your sin and for your failure of repentance," the inquisitor declared. "I wash my hands of you, Legrand, and may God have mercy upon your immortal soul."

  Again the pendulum lowered, and lowered, and, Lord help me, lowered once more. Its next stroke sliced through some of the lashings binding me to that sacrificial platform. The one following that would surely slice through me. My eyes arced with the inexorable motion of the ball and its appended cutting tooth. I watched it reach the high point of its trajectory, and then, moaning with fear at what was to come, I wa
tched it commence its surely fatal descent. I screamed-

  And I awoke with Helen beside me, warm in my own bed and altogether unbisected.

  After these two most vivid dreams, I trust you will understand why from that time forward I feared and shunned slumber no less than a hydrophobic hound fights shy of water. The hound in due course expires of his distemper. Not being diseased in any normal sense, I did not perish, and the natural weakness of my mortal flesh did cause me occasionally to yield to the allurements of Morpheus despite my fear of what might come to pass if I did.

  One night, asleep despite all wishes and efforts to remain awake, I fancied myself-indeed, in my mind, I was-guilty of some heinous crime. I had done it, and I had concealed it, concealed it so perfectly no human agency could have hoped to discover my guilt. Yes, officers of the police had come, but purely pro forma. That the crime had been committed at all was even, in their minds, a question; that I was in any way connected to it had never once occurred to them.

  We sat down to confer together in the very chamber where the nefarious deed was done. I was, at first, charming and witty. But something then began to vex me, something at first so slight as to be all but imperceptible-certainly so to the minions of the law with whom I was engaged. And yet it grew and grew and grew within the confines of my mind to proportions Brobdingnagian. It was a low, dull pain-much such a pain as a tooth makes when commencing to ache. I gasped for breath-and yet the officers, lucky souls, felt it not.

  I grew nervous, agitated, distrait, for the pounding in my mouth grew worse and worse. Soon I felt I must cry out or perish. It hurt more and more and more!-and at last, unable to suffer such anguish for another instant, I cried, "I admit the deed! Tear out the tooth!"- -and I pointed to the one in question. "Here, here!-it is the paroxysm of this hideous bicuspid!"